The Santa Clara-based company said Thursday that it lost $34 million, or 4 cents per share, in the three months ended March 30. That’s down from a profit of $67 million, or 7 cents per share, during the year-ago period.
The results for the latest quarter include costs of 4 cents per share from Sun’s $1 billion acquisition of open-source software company MySQL AB, a purchase that gives Sun a foothold in the rapidly expanding market for database software for Web-based companies.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were expecting Sun to earn 18 cents per share, so the miss spooked investors who sent Sun’s shares down 9 percent in after-hours trading.
The stock was trading down $1.48 cents at $14.85 after the results were reported following the stock market’s close. It had closed up 67 cents, or 4.3 percent, at $16.33 during the regular session.
Sun’s sales of $3.27 billion also came in below analyst expectations. Wall Street was predicting Sun would have $3.38 billion in sales, a miss of more than $100 million.
Sun’s chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, said in an interview that some of the weakness during the third quarter flowed from small businesses and other smaller companies in the U.S. clamping down on spending.
“Smaller companies that could make discretionary decisions about (information technology) spending made discretionary decisions — they definitely tapped the brakes,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz added that slower-than-expected sales to government agencies also dragged down the results.
Despite the credit and housing crunch that is ravaging the financial community, Schwartz said the financial services sector actually came in ahead of the company’s internal projections, indicating that banks and other financial institutions appear to be “using technology to drive down costs elsewhere.”
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