Autonomy reports strong sales, profit growth for 2009
Silicon Fen's largest publicly listed company, Autonomy Corporation plc, a global leader in infrastructure software, has reported a 47% jump in revenues to $740m for the year ended December 2009 and 55% growth in pretax profit to $323m.
The Group's share price rose 27p (1.7%) in early trading. Autonomy's market capitalisation is now over £3.8 billion, comfortably confirming it also as the largest UK software company.
CEO Mike Lynch said: "Over the last five years, we have seen a five year adjusted EPS CAGR of 73% and Autonomy has grown to become one of Europe's largest software companies.
"Looking back on 2009, despite an economic environment that can be described at best as difficult, and an unhelpful FX headwind, Autonomy produced outstanding results with adjusted profit from operations growing by 59% at a time when most of our software peers have seen small or negative growth.
"We delivered this strong growth on top of an exceptionally strong performance in Q4 2008."
He said that during 2009 Autonomy did a lot of work to prepare for a possible upturn in 2010, including significant new IDOL product developments, launches and expansion of IDOL hosted capabilities.
"After this exceptional expenditure we are now seeing our cost base return to its traditional model with an operating margin of 50% in the fourth quarter," he said.
"The driver for our business is the need for computers to understand and process human friendly information automatically. We believe this driver will continue to accelerate, and as customers find discretionary budgets again we expect to see good growth in the Meaning Based Marketing applications of our technology alongside our resilient information governance applications. On the larger theme of Meaning Based Computing, we have extended our technologies from the unstructured world to the structured, with validation of this endeavour with the first IDOL SPE customers signed and first showcase events.
"We continue to see our strongest growth in the new models of the software industry such as OEM and cloud computing. Whilst it may still take a little time for people to understand how these models differ from traditional software businesses, we believe the momentum in these areas is accelerating.
"We begin 2010 with the strongest Meaning Based Computing portfolio in the industry and an ever-expanding understanding in the market of the challenges associated with unstructured information," he said.
Dr Lynch said that at the end of 4Q2009 Autonomy began to see indicators of an initial improvement in the macro environment, which gives it confidence in the outlook for 2010.
