|
By Mel Duvall
There were more signs Thursday that the economy was stabilizing as storage giant EMC posted results that beat forecasts and said customer's IT spending budgets were firming. It also upped its outlook for the remainder of the year.
The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company recorded a second quarter profit of $205.2 million, or 10 cents per share, down 11% from a year ago. Excluding employee stock compensation and one-time items, the profit was 18 cents per share, beating Wall Street expectations of 16 cents. Sales in the quarter slid 11% to $3.26 billion, but that also beat analysts' expectations of $3.2 billion.
In a statement announcing the results, EMC Chairman and Chief Executive Joe Tucci, said the company believes it has ridden through the worst of the downturn and is now poised to take advantage of a return to growth.
"We are focused on four of the hottest and fastest-growing areas of IT spending - next generation fully virtualized data centers; cloud computing; virtualized desktops and clients; and next generation backup, recovery and archive solutions," Tucci said. "When IT markets resume to more normal spending rates, we expect EMC will return to generating double-digit revenue growth."
EMC now expects revenues to come in at about $13.8 billion for 2009, down from the $14.9 billion in sales it achieved in 2008, but better than the $13.5 billion Wall Street had expected. The company says it feels more confident about its projections, because for the most part customers have stopped slashing IT spending and budgets have stabilized.
On a product category basis, most areas experienced declines from a year ago, with the exception of security which seemed to hold up well. Here are the comparisons:
- Information storage products and services. Q1 2009 - $2.4 billion; Q2 2009 - $2.5 billion; Q2 2008 - $2.9 billion
- Content management and archiving products and services. Q1 2009 - $174 million; Q2 2009 - $180 million; Q2 2008 - $204 million
- Security products and services. Q1 2009 - $143 million ; Q2 2009 - $147 million ; Q2 2008 - $144 million
- VMWare (EMC is the majority owner of VMWare). Q1 2009 - $470 million; Q2 2009 - $455 million. Q2 2008 - $453 million.
In one other highlight from the report, EMC said it would close its $2.2 billion acquisition of data deduplication specialist Data Domain today.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
