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Earnings Calls: 
Sun Microsystems Third Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Albena Toncheva
123jump.com
Last Update: 8:29 PM EDT May 05 2008


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The leading information technology company reported revenue of $3.266 billion, down 0.5% from $3.283 billion in the prior year, on 2.8% decline in product revenue. During Q3, the GAAP net loss was $34 million versus net income of $67 million in the prior year quarter. The R&D and SG&A expenses decreased by $25 million over last year to $1.446 billion, due to continued savings from real estate consolidations, reduction of certain incentive payments and a variety of other factors.


Investors Question and Answers

 
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In terms of the mix, many of the customers that we were tracking in our pipeline are the types of customers that were buying the high-end systems and tape platforms. We do expect that a number of those and many of those deals are pause and deferral as opposed to the fact that they went away. We expect that we will see a rebound in the mix. We typically see a rebound in the mix in the fourth quarter as well, so some of its historical, but a lot of it is based upon the deals that we are tracking.

Lou Miscioscia (Cowen & Company): It has been five quarters now where the high-end has not built up to your expectation. You have these APL servers out there, but do you have to accelerate bringing Rock in and until you get to that, is it going to be reentering? Do you have to do something to get outside of the install base to sell some of your more high-end other accounts to really get the revenues growing again?

Jonathan Schwartz: In Q1 2008, the high-end was up 24% year-over-year, Q2 they were up 8% and this year they were down, so it tends to be a lumpy business. But we are pleased with the performance, and again, the fact that we have such a large Solaris community to draw helps to drive the competitive into the platform. We feel good about the high-end and our high-ends are only improving as we speak. Now simultaneous to that, we are definitely building our Solaris business outside of our hardware business. Intel signed on as a Solaris OEM, DELL signed on as a Solaris OEM and IBM is also now a Solaris OEM. We recently signed another system''s vendor as an OEM, and we continue to work with a customers and partners across the world to bring Solaris to every platform on which they run. Broadly-speaking, we are happy with the adoption of the operating system on and off Sun. In terms of high-end opportunities those are not going away. Typically horizontally scaled system tend to scale vertically, which is a polite way of saying when you end up with 500 servers sometimes they end up with 500 two ways and 500 four ways and then they end up thinking maybe SMPs were a good idea. We are comfortable.

Tony Sacconaghi (Stanford Bernstein): How do we think about your now fiscal year 2009 guidance of 8% operating margin? Is that also predicated on certain conditions, and what kind of confidence can we have on those conditions?

Michael Lehman: It is a fair to say that we are disappointed that we are not able to go after the operating income targets that we set a couple of years ago. We do believe that is largely driven by the US economy, and what is going on in the economy. We are not the only company affected by that. We believe that is a fairly significant impact, and it would be damaging to the long-term health of the company to take arbitrary action to hit that number. We believe that in those circumstances in which the macro economic factors went against us, that might cause us to revisit this area. That is in fact what has happened. While we are disappointed, we believe it is more prudent to take this action than set new goals for next year, so that people have a sense of how we are looking at the business.

Bill Fearnley (FTN Midwest): On the restructuring, how much is outside the US? Does that delay the timing of the actions and the progress? If the economy does improve, would the cutbacks get smaller here over the next couple of quarters if you saw a recovery?

Michael Lehman: As we look at the areas that we are investing and disinvesting, when we make an announcement like this we intend to make the disinvestments. Certain of the people affected are outside the US. We will know better about that early next quarter at the highest level there is a good better than a majority that are in areas, and that is why we said we are record the majority of the restructuring charge in Q4.

David Wong (Wachovia): You said services were in line with expectations but hardware was a bit short for the quarter. Is there a different customer mix or at least to these results? Or it is the same people that are finding they need services but less hardware?

Jonathan Schwartz: Typically what happens is you services tends to be a recurring revenue stream, which is on the one hand sensitive to unit volumes going out the door because people have the opportunity to buy services on new systems, but also there is curtail to that business, because they have an existing installed base of systems and they do not want to let them fall out of service, or keep in current. This was what we expected when we began to see the decline, which was that the services business would be more predictable, and less bumpy than the sale of new systems.

David Bailey (Goldman Sachs): Your internal inventory was up quite a bit sequentially. Could you discuss the composition, whether you will be able to work that down in the fourth quarter?

Michael Lehman: Yes. It was up a bit sequentially and we had a revenue shortfall. We were building inventory for that revenue. We expect we will be able to work through that revenue in the fourth quarter with no noticeable impact.

Bill Fearnley (FTN Midwest): In the past, you talked about customers replacing existing systems with larger systems during projects like virtualization. Is that still true? What did you see for the trend on the quarter just past, and what do you see here for the near-term trend as well?

Jonathan Schwartz: That is still very much true. We saw outstanding growth on our blade business. We saw a very good growth on more richly configured Niagara 2 systems. Those were highly in demand, and so in some ways it comes down to your definition of what is a big system? With the evolution of blades, you can get 48 blades in one rack. We still see that trend toward higher value systems and more richly configured system as continuing unabated. I do not think that frankly at this point is ever going to slow down, so we see ample opportunity not only on the systems front and the storage front, but again, the good news with working in the OpenSolaris community is the kernel at the heart of Solaris knows that it''s scaled to the tallest mountains and biggest systems, so we can provide an operating system for laptops, for the storage platforms, for the systems platform, for small systems and big systems alike.
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