Sun Microsystems profit shine to add to Oracle’s earnings

June 2010

Oracle with its new star Sun Microsystems, delivered a better-than-expected fourth quarter thanks to strong hardware sales–notably an operating profit at Sun Microsystems and strong sales of Exadata DBA systems.

Oracle / Sun reported earnings of $2.4 billion, or 46 cents a share, on revenue of $9.5 billion.  60 cents a share were the Non-GAAP earnings, well ahead of the 54 cents a share expected by Wall Street. Sales were in line with expectations, but Oracle’s profit got a boost from better-than-expected hardware sales.

Sun contributed about $400 million in non-GAAP operating income. You could call the performance Oracle’s Sun miracle. In a statement, Oracle CFO Jeff Epstein said Sun had $1.2 billion in systems revenue. Oracle president Safra Catz said in a statement:

Now that Sun is profitable, we have increased confidence that we will meet or exceed our goal of Sun contributing $1.5 billion to non-GAAP operating income in FY2011, and $2.0 billion in FY2012.  We are expecting increasing market share, the future looks bright for Sun Microsystems