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For IT and Silicon Valley, the early part of the financial nosedive hasn’t been so much a crash as a dent.
The following is a quick look at the some of the key IT companies and their financial results reported in the third quarter.
Good
VMware: Revenue growth climbed 32 percent from the third quarter of last year to $472 million. Of course, it wasn’t too long ago that VMware’s revenue was rising at an 80 percent-per-year clip and that CEO/co-founder Diane Greene was let go after she warned that revenue would “only” be going up 50 percent this next year.
Google: Third-quarter profit rose 26 percent to $1.35 billion from the year-ago period. The company just keeps sailing along, apparently unaffected.
Apple: Apple posted revenue of $7.9 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.14 billion, compared with revenue of $6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million in the year-ago quarter.
IBM: The company had a solid quarter, with revenue up 5 percent and profits up 20 percent over the same period a year ago.
Symantec: Symantec posted a comfortable increase. While Symantec’s bread-and-butter security and compliance business grew only 1 percent when compared with the same quarter last fiscal year, the Veritas storage business grew by 12 percent, and its services business increased 16 percent.
EMC: Total consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2008 was $3.7 billion, an increase of 13 percent over the $3.3 billion reported for the third quarter of 2007.
Microsoft: The Big Software Kahuna announced revenue of $15.06 billion for the quarter, a 9 percent increase over the same period in 2007.
Cisco Systems: It isn’t reporting its quarterly numbers until Nov. 5, but they will be good. CEO John Chambers has already announced the company will increase its IT budget by at least 10 percent in 2009.
Bad
AMD posted a net loss for the quarter of $67 million. But there is some perspective needed here: The company posted a loss of $396 million in the same quarter a year ago. So, it was much better news than most analysts had anticipated.
Ugly
Yahoo: The company said it would slash 1,400 jobs in the wake of a 64 percent profit drop. Yahoo, which is trying to keep its search engine and other Internet properties afloat, says income for the third quarter tumbled to $54.3 million from $151 million in the same period a year ago.