Symantec sales up, but profits drop
Norton suite secures revenue
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Symantec's profits for its first fiscal quarter slumped 5.3 per cent, but the company managed to beat analyst expectations with increased sales of its Norton security software.
The company's income dropped to $95.2m, compared to $100.5m a year earlier. Symantec said the results were impacted by a $19m restructuring charge related to job cuts announced earlier this year.
Meanwhile, sales rose 11 per cent to 1.4bn in the first quarter, which ended June 30. During the same period last year, sales were at 1.26bn. Analysts had expected Q1 earnings to be around $1.32bn.
According to Symantec CFO James Beer, consumer revenue generated $434m during the quarter, increasing 11 per cent year-over-year. Norton Internet Security revenue grew 31 per cent, and remains the single largest product contributer in their consumer category — generating about 63 per cent of customer revenue.
Symantec's enterprise Security and Data Management wing earned the company $423.2m in sales, increasing 4 per cent over last year. The Data Center Management group produced $399.2m in revenue, increasing 5 per cent year-over-year.
CEO John Thompson also attributes the company's growth to the recent $830m acquisition of Altiris.
The Altiris business unit generated $89m in revenue, which consisted of three Symantec products producing $32m and Altiris products contributing the remaining $53m.
“Performance for the quarter was driven by strong demand in many of our core and emerging technology solutions, as well as solid execution by our services, consumer and Altiris teams,” said Thompson. “We’re off to a good start to our fiscal year.”
The Cupetino-based company estimates fiscal Q2 revenue will be between $1.35bn and $1.38bn. ®
COMMENTS
If only...
...the darn thing actually worked!
I've just de-infected a NewMediaCodecInstaller trojan from a friends PC using ONLY security forums, blogs and free software. (thank you HijackThis!)
Norton wouldquite happily scan everytime and have you think your pc was fine despite your desktop being flooded with browser windows and and invitations to other installers being sent out.
Most of their sales must come from the fact that they get bundled with new pc's so the unitiated think they are actually getting some protection from the offset. How many of those sales are from resubscriptions I wonder after everyone moves to AVG or somesuch during their first year of ownership?
They should try putting some effort back in to what used to be a respectable name.
Great marketing...
Yet again it proved that great marketing can sell crap products. Norton's Internet Security Suite is by far one of the worst on the market, slow as hell and not even that effective at protecting a PC, but by pumping millions into advertising (plus the ones from PCWorld), it can increase sales like no others.
I just repaired a virus infected notebook, dual core with 1GB of memory on XP, slow as hell even after removing all virus and spywares, so I decided to remove Norton 360, it refused, on the third attempt it removed at last, restart the notebook, and the difference in speed is like chalk and cheese, it loads XP fast as it should, and everything else just flys. Its not the first case of removing Norton (or sometime Mcafee) that speeds up a computer, I wouldnt mind so much if the decrease of speed actually help the PC by providing maximum protection, but it cant even do that,
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