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Sun delivers solid quarter

Sun Microsystems on Monday reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings of $329 million, or 9 cents a share, on revenue of $3.83 billion.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Sun Microsystems on Monday reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings of $329 million, or 9 cents a share, on revenue of $3.83 billion.

According to Thomson Financial, Wall Street was expecting earnings of 5 cents a share on revenue of $3.8 billion.

For the year, Sun reported net income of $473 million, or 13 cents a share, on revenue of $13.87 billion, up 6 percent from a year ago.

In a statement, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said the quarter gets the company closer to its goal of "at least 10 percent operating margin for the full fiscal year 2009. "

On his blog, Schwartz added:

We grew revenue, expanded gross margins, streamlined our operating expenses - and closed the year with an 8% operating profit in Q4, more than double what some thought to be an aggressive target a year ago.

We did this while driving significant product transitions, going after new markets and product areas, and best of all, while aggressively moving the whole company to open source software (leading me to hope we can officially put to rest the question, "how will you make money?").

And we're not done - not by any stretch of the imagination. We have more streamlining to do, more commitments to meet, more customers to serve and developers to attract. But it's evident we've got the right foundation for growing Sun.

Among other items:

  • Sun's fourth quarter product revenue was $2.49 billion, down from $2.52 billion a year earlier. Services revenue was up slightly to $1.34 billion. Overall fourth quarter revenue growth was flat for the year.
  • Operating margin was 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter.
  • Research and development spending for fiscal 2007 was $2 billion, down from $2.04 billion in 2006.
  • Selling, general and administrative costs fell in the fourth quarter to $958 million, down from $1.13 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.
  • Sun ended fiscal 2007 with cash and marketable debt securities of $5.9 billion.

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