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Sun Revenues Drop 25%

The market is leery of buying Sun products until it knows what Oracle is going to do with them if it gets them

Poor beaten-up Sun Microsystems confided the financial results of its September quarter to the SEC on Friday and they weren't pretty.

Sun was supposed to be part of Oracle by now and not washing its linen in public anymore but the European Commission hasn't sanctioned the union, and isn't expected to now unless Oracle does something about Sun property MySQL. What the EC wants exactly isn't clear.

The market is leery of buying Sun products until it knows what Oracle is going to do with them if it gets them.

Anyway, Sun blamed the EC's delay coupled with economy-induced IT budgets cuts, especially in the financial sector, the consolidation of its customer base and increased competition for its nasty 25% year-over-year drop in revenues in the September quarter. Sequentially they were down 14.5%.

Sun lost $120 million in the quarter, or 16 cents a share, on revenues of $2.24 billion. Its losses weren't as bad as they might have been since operating expenses were down 62% year-over-year, 16% sequentially.

Sun expects to cut another 3,000 people in the next 12 months, a necessity it blames on the EC. A year ago it said it would lay off 5,000.

Product revenues were down 32% year-over-year in the quarter to $1.19 billion, 20% sequentially. Servers were down 31% to $862 million, storage was off almost 36% to $325 million, and service came in at around $1 billion, down close to 14%.

North America was off 19%, Europe 29%, Asia-Pacific 23%, and emerging markets 33%.

Wall Street was expecting Sun to earn 25 cents on revenues of $2.31 billion. Silly Wall Street.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said recently that Sun is losing $100 million a month to the EC.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

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