UPDATED 20:05 EST / DECEMBER 17 2018

CLOUD

Impending IBM acquisition overshadows Red Hat’s earnings

Open-source software company Red Hat Inc.’s stock remained flat today after posting its first earnings call since IBM Corp. announced it intends to buy the firm for $34 billion.

Once that deal is completed, likely in the latter half of next year, Red Hat will no longer be a publicly traded entity, which perhaps explains the apparent lack of interest today from shareholders. The stock remained unmoved despite Red Hat beating Wall Street’s forecast on earnings.

In its fiscal third-quarter results, Red Hat posted earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 96 cents per share, well above the analyst consensus of 87 cents per share. Net income came to $94.5 million for the quarter, but Red Hat missed Wall Street’s expectations on revenue. The company reported sales of $846.8 million, which was below analysts’ forecast of $853.6 million.

Red Hat’s earnings report was fairly scant on details, with executives declining to host a conference call as is normal because of the pending acquisition by IBM. It also refused to update its guidance for the same reason. However, it did at least have positive news about its subscription revenue, which makes up 87 percent of its total and came in at $741 million, up 13 percent from a year ago.

“Adoption of Red Hat’s technologies that enable customers to build and deploy applications more securely and consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments continued to drive our growth in Q3,” Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “For instance, our Certified Cloud and Service Providers program reached the $300 million annualized run-rate milestone in Q3 with 25% year-over-year growth of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-demand in the public clouds. In addition, we continue to experience strong customer growth in Red Hat OpenShift, our enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Red Hat Ansible Automation, both of which added more than 100 customers in Q3.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the quarter, although overshadowed by the pending acquisition, did at least show that the company was executing well across all of its major portfolios.

“The many billion questions for Red Hat have always been, can its new application, development and platform-as-a-service businesses grow fast enough to make up for its slowing hardware and Linux businesses?” Mueller said. “We will never know this now as it will all be bundled inside the big IBM machine.”

The successful quarter and the continued growth of Red Hat’s cloud businesses do at least bode well for IBM, which is widely believed to have bought the company in order to boost its own presence across both private and public clouds.

Image: Chan Mya Soe/Flickr

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