Scalper1 News
Leading Linux software provider Red Hat ( RHT ) late Tuesday reported fiscal Q4 earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations and helped ease fears of tech spending softening, but its EPS outlook for the current quarter merely met views. Shares were down 4% in after-hours trading, after the earnings release. In Tuesday’s regular session, Red Hat stock rose 1.1% to 75.71. Shares had touched a 15-month low below 60 last month after hitting a 16-year high above 84 in December. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company posted earnings per share minus items of 52 cents, up 21% from the year-earlier quarter. Sales for the quarter that ended Feb. 29 rose 17% to $544 million. Both numbers beat the consensus estimate. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters on average had expected the cloud vendor to report EPS ex items of 47 cents on revenue of $537 million. For its fiscal Q1, Red Hat guided EPS ex items at 50 cents on revenue of $558 million to $566 million, vs. 44 cents and $481 million in the year-earlier quarter. Analysts had modeled 50 cents and $554.6 million, so while the sales outlook beat, the EPS outlook merely met. Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian White called Q4 “another strong quarter” with a “strong revenue outlook” in a research note after the earnings release. Red Hat revenue comes from subscriptions that customers pay for support, training and integration services in using the open-source version of its Linux operating system. The platform includes applications, middleware, desktop domains and an operating system. Red Hat was founded 23 years ago. “The fourth quarter marked our 56 th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, contributing to Red Hat’s first fiscal year crossing $2 billion in total revenue,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said in the company’s earnings release. “The fourth quarter was a strong close to the year as our results exceeded our guidance. “We maintained a high level of execution throughout the fiscal year, which contributed to greater than 20% constant currency revenue growth in each quarter.” Red Hat Reports Record Year-End Backlog Of $2.13 Billion Red Hat said that it had ended the year with a record backlog of $2.13 billion, up 15% year over year. The company has made a strategic shift to cloud computing, a fast-growing tech field dominated by Amazon.com ( AMZN ), Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Alphabet ( GOOGL ). Red Hat has been able to carve out a share of the pie. It focuses on hybrid cloud services, which partly use the low-cost public cloud and partly provide the privacy of private cloud services. “Investors have asked whether the public cloud is a positive driver for Red Hat,” Whitehurst said on the company’s earnings conference call. “We firmly believe that it will be a hybrid cloud world where applications will run across all four footprints — physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud. “We are providing technologies that enable choice and consistency across all four environments, and we enhance this value with application development technologies, storage and management.” In November, Red Hat announced a partnership with Microsoft, which made the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. As part of the deal, Red Hat will provide Microsoft with its enterprise version of Linux for use as the “preferred choice” on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. Microsoft, formerly a rival, has been rolling out other Red Hat products, including its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Gluster Storage and platform-as-a-service product OpenShift. In a research note Monday, Drexel analyst White said that the movement toward open-source software and the momentum to cloud computing “will provide enough of a tailwind to offset any macro softening.” White rates Red Hat stock a buy, with a price target of 98. “We believe Linux will continue to gain market share in 2016 as next-generation applications are developed on RHEL, while we look forward to development of the Microsoft partnership,” White wrote. In a research note last week, Deutsche Bank analyst Karl Keirstead raised the issue about competition from Amazon, which offers a free Linux open-source operating system and support via its cloud-based Amazon Web Services platform. He concluded that the number of migrations from RHEL to Amazon Linux remains quite modest and mostly confined to small enterprise customers. “Larger RHEL-centric customers have only a small mix of workloads on Amazon Web Services, they value operating system consistency across their hybrid infrastructures, they prefer support from Red Hat and/or view the cost savings of a switch as being too modest to be worth the hassle,” Keirstead wrote. He reiterated a buy rating on Red Hat stock, with a 95 price target. Image provided by Shutterstock . Scalper1 News
Scalper1 News