If Sun hadn’t done that one-for-four reverse stock split in November and turned its $5 stock into a $20 stock, it would now be a $2 stock. Instead, it’s a $9 stock, down more than 50%.

And things don’t look like they’re gonna get much better. So it’s going to peel off another billion of that fortune it’s still got in the bank and buy back more stock.

The company came in Friday with June earnings down 73.3% year-over-year to $88 million, or 11 cents a share, and the news that it expected another difficult six months, bad enough that it’ll lose money this quarter on falling sales, ending its brief flirtation with profitability after hemorrhaging more than $5 billion since the dot.com bust.

It was not what the Wall Street pundits were expecting and they took the stock down another peg.

Sun said it would lose money this quarter because of a $100 million restructuring charge.

It blames weak US spending and fewer high-end Sparc servers going out the door for its current dilemma.

IBM claims to be beating Sun’s brains out at the high end; Sun says Niagara billings were up 60% year-over-year for revenues $1.1 billion in fiscal ’08 but slowed in the quarter.

Sun says it’s more dependent on the US than its rivals and CEO Jonathan Schwartz told the Wall Street Journal. “We have yet to see any confirmation from the financial services customers that they are going back to spending.” He isn’t expecting much improvement in his US sales even in the first half of calendar ‘09.

Sun had its eggs in the wrong basket when the dot.com bubble fizzled too.

Sun’s revenues in the June quarter were down 1.4% year-over-year to $3.78 billion and sales in the US, 38% of the total, were down 9%.

MySQL billings in the quarter were up 44% year-over-year. Sun continues to hew to its open source strategy as its lifeline.

In the year ending in June Sun made $403 million in $13.9 billion in sales.

For its 2009 fiscal year Sun is guiding to low single-digit revenue growth. It’s abandoned its dearly held notion of a 10% operating margin next year and now says 5%-7% is more likely.