Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Red Hat Announces Solid 1Q08 Results - Stock down?!

June 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Red Hat Announces Solid 1Q08 Results - Stock down?!

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Red Hat announced results for its Fiscal 1Q08 quarter ended May 31, 2007. Pretty solid results.

Revenue rose 41% to $118.9 million from $84.0 million. The analyst consensus was $117.12 million.

GAAP net income rose 17% to $16.2 million, or 8 cents a share, from $13.8 million, or 7 cents a share, a year earlier. The analyst consensus was 6 cents a share.

But the stock is down in after hours trading, so here's the (funny) explanation:

The company reported $52.25 million in non-GAAP cash-flow from operations. Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert said that fell short of her forecast of about $55.5 million.

In addition to the shortfall, investor may have been spooked by the fact that the results were otherwise just about in line with expectations, she said.

Red Hat shares have climbed 13 percent since the beginning of May amid hopes it would post strong quarterly earnings.

"The business is healthy. But you just get the sense that there is nothing exciting here," Egbert said. "There is no explosive metric you can point to. It is boring."

To add some balance to this post, don't forget that Oracle grew revenue by 20% in their fourth quarter. We're talking about growing from a multi-billion base ($4.85B). Not to take anything away from Red Hat's 41% growth, but as Oracle's results indicate, Traditional software is doing alright, thank you very much.

PS: My friends in the DB2 side of the business would strongly dispute Ellison's comments about "taking share from DB2", especially since the IBM Information Management software division grew 20% in the most recent quarter (1Q07), but hey, who's counting?

Posted by Savio Rodrigues on June 27, 2007 07:31 PM

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