Red Hat revenue jumps to $37M in Q4

IDG News Service - Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. saw its quarterly revenue jump by 43% year over year, reaching $37 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2004, the company reported yesterday.
Net income amounted to $5 million, or 3 cents per share, for the quarter, up from a loss of $273,000 for the same quarter in 2003.
Revenue for the fiscal year, which ended Feb. 29, amounted to $126.1 million, up from $90.9 million for 2003.
The company said it gained 4,000 new customers and sold 87,000 subscriptions for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux software during the quarter. Of those, 61,000 subscriptions were sold into the enterprise IT market and 26,000 were sold into the high-performance computing and Web hosting market.
International sales for the Raleigh, N.C., company grew by 107% and amounted to 32% of Red Hat's income, CEO Matthew Szulik said in a telephone news conference. "International has been an area of investment throughout the fiscal year," he noted.
Although much attention is being directed toward the role of Linux in China, both Germany and India are proving to be important markets for Red Hat, Szulik said.
He downplayed the effects of claims by The SCO Group Inc. that the Linux operating system violates SCO's intellectual property and copyrights. "Now, after almost one year in which the infringing code -- or the supposed infringing code -- has not been publicly revealed, the marketplace for Linux and open-source software continues to grow, and our legal bills continue to add up," Szulik said.
In August, Red Hat sued SCO over the matter. Red Hat is seeking a declaratory judgment that would rule that SCO's copyright infringement claims are untrue.