‘Strong organic growth’ delivers more records for Autonomy in 1H08; beats street concensus
Autonomy Corporation plc (AU.L), market leading specialists in infrastructure software, reported a 66% increase in revenues to $230.7m for the six months ended June 30, 2008, while gross profit increased 64% to $207.8m compared to the same period in 2007.
Both were records for the Cambridge-HQed group. The share market applauded, marking its shares up 3.4% to 1,042p, taking its market capitalisation to around £2.23 billion, and securing its position as the largest tech company headquartered in the region known as Silicon Fen.
The results beat analyst expectations.
CEO Mike Lynch said: "Our performance has been driven by strong organic growth across all areas of our business, and have been achieved without recognizing significant revenues from our recently announced large banking deals.
"Once again we have shown the operational gearing in our business model with operating margins hitting a new record of 40%.
"Desspite our conservative approach due to the current macro uncertainty, the fact that our fundamental market dynamics and our pipeline going into the second half remain strong leads us to be comfortable with a positive upgrade with respect to the outlook for the second half of the year."
1H08 net profit grew to $57.1m, or $0.26 per diluted share, compared to $32.1m, or $0.17 per share in 1H07.
The company said it had no net debt and that it had $121.4m in cash at end June.
Autonomy said its technology has been adopted by enterprises to process information across all internal and external data formats and sources. During 2Q08, major customer wins included: KPMG, Societe Generale, Shanghai Patent Office, Huron, St Jude, Nationwide Insurance, eBay, Fox Media Group, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Qualcomm, Ford, Toyota, GE Healthcare, Wells Fargo, the British Museum and TNT.
Q208 business also included new and repeat licenses with multiple government, defence and intelligence agencies around the globe including in the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, NATO and Brazil. Repeat business from existing customers accounted for approximately 50% of revenue for the quarter.
Autonomy's OEM Program continued to grow during Q208. Agreements were signed with eleven customers during the quarter, including new and extended agreements with Nortel, Talisma, Verdasys and Yahoo!. Autonomy was selected as its preferred global partner for enterprise search and high end information processing by Logica.
