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Sun last week announced a surprise $7.4 billion deal to be acquired by Oracle Corp., whose bid was favored over an offer from International Business Machines Corp., people familiar with the matter say. Takeover discussions with IBM were reported last month by the Wall Street Journal.
Sun said Tuesday its net loss for the period ended March 29 was $201 million, or 27 cents a share, including a $46 million restructuring charge. In the year-earlier period, Sun reported a net loss of $34 million, or four cents a share. Revenue declined to $2.61 billion from $3.27 billion.
The numbers were worse than analysts expected, which some of them see as a sign that uncertainty about Sun's future may have led customers to stop buying in the closing days of the quarter. "There is certainly potential for that," said Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones.
Following announcement of the Oracle deal -- expected to close in the summer -- Sun said it wouldn't hold a conference call in connection with its results. The company declined further comment.
One problem for Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., is that many of its customers come from the hard-hit financial services industry. Another is that it still leans heavily on a proprietary chip line called Sparc at a time when many customers prefer chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., known by the designation x86.
Sun disclosed Tuesday that billings of high-end systems based on its Sparc chips -- the company's largest product category -- declined 28%. Billings for a category described as "other systems," which is believed to be dominated by low-end Sparc-based machines, declined 70%. Even Sun's line of x86 systems, which had been growing lately, declined 22%, the company disclosed. Billings refers to the amounts the company says it is owed for goods sold but not yet booked as revenue.
Oracle, though it says it plans to keep Sun's hardware businesses, has been most enthusiastic about software such as the Java programming technology. Sun disclosed that billings from Java rose 27% during the quarter. The most impressive growth came from a unit that includes infrastructure software and the MySQL database, whose billings increased 101%.
-----------------------------BY DON CLARK
Source：THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
Copyright ©2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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