News

Sun's Yearly Revenue Flat, Despite Growth Abroad

• By Herb Torrens
• August 8, 2008

Santa Clara-based Sun Microsystems reported relatively flat revenue results in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2008. Year-over-year, revenue was up 0.1 percent. However, the company's fourth-quarter result showed a 1.4 percent loss compared with the previous year's fourth quarter, despite increased sales abroad.

Total fiscal-year revenue was $13.9 billion. CEO Jonathan Schwartz attributed the waning growth curve to slowing performance in the U.S. market. Meanwhile, he stated in a press release that the company had double-digit growth internationally in India, Russia, Brazil and Greater China.

The company prides itself on open source innovation and plans to continue on that path."Looking forward, we remain confident in open source innovation as the accelerant to our growth strategy,"Schwartz stated in the press release. He described Sun Microsystems' open source offerings as the foundation of the company's future growth in revenues -- "from the Open Solaris operating system and the MySQL database to the Lustre and ZFS storage systems."

On the upside, Schwartz pointed to improvements in key operating metrics, including gross margins, non-GAAP net income per share and operations cash flow, as explained here.

The leading Sun Microsystems products for the fiscal year included the Solaris-based Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) system, which showed 61 percent growth compared with last year. MySQL billings were up 44 percent. ZFS Open Storage product line and the Sun Fire x4500 server also gained adoption in the global market, according to Schwartz.

On Aug. 1, Sun Microsystems announced it would repurchase up to $1 billion shares of its common stock. The ongoing repurchase program was originally announced last year when the company repurchased 35.7 million shares of its common stock. More detailed information on the repurchase program can be found here.