earnings

Corrected at 3:45 p.m. PST: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Adobe announced it will miss both its revenue and profit forecasts for the first quarter. The company said it will miss its previous revenue forecast.

Faced with growing weakness in it business, Adobe Systems announced Wednesday it will miss its previous revenue forecast. But, the software maker said it expects to meet its profit forecast thanks to cost-cutting measures.

On Wednesday, Adobe shares were up nearly 9 percent in after-hours trading to $17.75. During the regular trading session, Adobe closed up 2 percent … Read more

Palm may have wowed the public with the demonstration of the Pre, but unfortunately for the company, no one can buy it yet.

The company announced Tuesday that its third fiscal quarter will be dismal, as had been expected. But it will be even worse than Wall Street had thought: Palm expects to record between $85 million and $90 million in revenue for the quarter that ended last week. Analysts had been expecting Palm would take in $157 million during the quarter.

It's a simple story for Palm: although it debuted to rave reviews, the Pre isn't ready, … Read more

Novell's $340 million lifeline from Microsoft appears to be losing its potency.

Although Microsoft originally gifted Novell $240 million to help fight Red Hat, and later added another $100 million to the pile, it doesn't seem to be enough to revive Novell's fortunes, as the company reported disappointing first-quarter earnings and a slide even in its Linux business, which had been growing fairly well.

"The pipe fell apart," declared Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, as The Register reports. That's an intriguing statement, as other open-source companies with which I work have seen their pipelines grow … Read more

This was originally published in ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Novell's fiscal first-quarter results were a mixed bag, and Linux invoices fell sharply as the company failed to sign big deals.

For the first quarter, ended Jan. 31, Novell reported non-GAAP earnings of $24 million, or 7 cents a share, on revenue of $215 million. Those results were a penny better than Wall Street estimates. Net income for the first quarter was $11 million, or 3 cents a share.

On the surface, Novell's quarter told a familiar tale. Open platform sales, which are dominated by Linux offerings, were $… Read more

Updated at 1:50 p.m. PST with comments from CFO Brian Gladden.

Dell's profit sank drastically during the final quarter of 2008.

The PC maker reported fourth-quarter revenue of $13.4 billion Thursday, a 16 percent drop from $15.9 billion reported the same quarter a year ago. Dell's profit for the quarter totaled $351 million, or 18 cents per share, compared to $671 million and 31 cents per share the year before. That's nearly a 48 percent drop in profit. Analysts had been anticipating earnings per share of 26 cents.

Dell had reported last month … Read more

Salesforce.com showed Wednesday that cloud computing can produce serious money--but also that it's not immune from the current unpleasant economic climate.

For its fiscal 2009, which ended January 31, the San Francisco-based company reported revenue of $1.08 billion, a 44 percent increase. But for fiscal 2010, it lowered its forecast to a range of $1.3 billion to $1.33 billion.

In November, the company had forecast $1.35 billion to $1.36 billion, and analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect on average $1.325 billion for the year.

"We've slightly lowered the guidance range. … Read more

Updated at 4:55 p.m. PT to correct when employees first received the memo.

Though Hewlett-Packard briefly mentioned during its earnings call Wednesday that it would be reducing compensation across the board, employees got an explanation from management in a detailed memo starting that same afternoon.

Chief executive Mark Hurd sent a long memo to his employees Thursday morning detailing his decision to cut salaries and reduce benefits in order to avoid further layoffs in this recession-battered economy.

Hurd frames his decision as "pretty straightforward." He will take a 20-percent pay cut, executive council members will take … Read more

UPDATE at 5:17 a.m. PST: Comments added from the company's conference call.

There was good news and bad news in Sprint Nextel's fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday. But mostly it was bad.

First, the good news: Sprint narrowed its losses considerably, compared with a year earlier. For the fourth quarter, Sprint lost $1.62 billion, or 57 cents a share. This is certainly better than the $29.45 billion, or a whopping $10.36 a share, it lost during the fourth quarter of 2007. The previous year's losses were due to some large write-downs the … Read more

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PST with details from the conference call.

Hewlett-Packard is facing the reality of the recession, and finally slipped up on its earnings.

For the fiscal first quarter, the PC maker earned a profit of $1.9 billion, or 75 cents per share. That's down 9.5 percent from a profit of $2.1 billion, or 80 cents per share, the same quarter a year ago. It recorded a 1 percent uptick in revenue from a year ago, at $28.8 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $31.9 billion, and earnings of 93 … Read more