Compaq Q4 up 23 per cent

Although the company expressed some concern about Asia, officials said they are looking for a "strong 1998."

"We're confident Compaq will be well positioned to continue to accelerate market-share gains and improve profitability," CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer said in a release.

Net income for the quarter was $667 million, or 84 cents per share, up from $487 million, or 63 cents per share, in the previous year. The figure was slightly higher than analysts had expected.

For the year, the company, based in Houston, recorded a total of $24.6 billion in revenue, up from $20 billion the year before. Net income for the year was $2.1 billion, excluding a $252 million charge for acquisitions. In comparison, net income in 1996 was $1.3 billion.

Compaq officials did not go into detail about the quarter's finances, but they did say that the company's enterprise computing business -- which includes servers, workstations, clustering technology storage products and massive parallel fault-tolerant systems -- accounted for 37 per cent of the total business in the fourth quarter.