Claris posts record sales

Claris Corp., Apple's wholly owned software subsidiary, today said it racked up $91.1 million in sales for the fourth fiscal quarter. The company also said it had record revenue for the quarter and for the year.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Claris said sales in its fourth quarter, which ended Sept. 26, were up 61 percent from revenue of $56.6 million for the same quarter in 1996.

Claris President Dominique Philippe Goupil credited the release of Mac OS 8 for the heady results. He said the company has sold more than 2 million copies since the U.S. release in late July; Claris only recently shipped the OS upgrade in Europe and Japan.

"The great financials speak for themselves," Goupil said. "Thanks to Mac OS 8, we had a record quarter and year."

The upgrade also sparked sales of third-party and Claris applications in the retail channel, Goupil said, and he looked forward to the next release in the upgrade cycle. "We're bullish on Mac OS 9," he said.

Goupil said the company's fiscal 1997 sales totaled $281.7 million, a climb of 19 percent over the previous fiscal year. Claris said in a statement that sales of Windows versions were 52 percent higher than the previous year.

Meanwhile, Goupil offered some tidbits of forthcoming products, including Claris Home Page 3.0, which is due in December. The new version of the HTML editor will be optimized for the recently released FileMaker Pro 4.0 database application (see 09.15.97, Page 1) and let users more easily create sites with database content.

In addition, Goupil said the company was on track to ship a Rhapsody version of FileMaker Pro next May (see 05.19.97, Page 8).