Red Hat posts fall in profits despite higher revenue

LINUX VENDOR Red Hat announced a 15 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $322.6m, though it reported a 12.5 percent decline in profits to $35m.

Red Hat, which last year became the first Linux vendor to hit $1bn in revenues in a fiscal year, has revealed revenue figures that once again show it can repeat that performance in 2013. The firm announced that its second fiscal quarter revenues were up by 15 percent from the same quarter a year previously to $322.6m, however its profits fell by 12.5 percent from last year to $35m.

Charlie Peters, EVP and CEO of Red Hat said the firm's earnings per share would have been higher if the firm had not made two large purchases. Peters said, "This quarter marked a significant ramp-up in investments in our nascent storage business, with the launch in late June of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Furthermore, we announced two small technology acquisitions in the middleware space to further round out our offerings, which decreased the quarter's EPS by approximately $0.01 per share due to one-time closing costs."

Red Hat's $1bn fiscal year was seen as a watershed moment for the commercial viability of Linux, as it showed that the open source company could compete with large, established competitors such as Microsoft and Oracle and still make a considerable amount of cash.

The firm is facing increased competition in the commercial Linux market from Canonical, however its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and free distributions based on it such as CentOS and Scientific Linux are extremely popular with businesses and are seen as the benchmarks for enterprise Linux. µ