Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) shares surged more than 6 percent in after-hours trading Thursday to a 52-week high after earnings beat Street expectations. Revenue fell short a bit short of estimates. And its earnings forecast is mixed. A strong dollar cut significantly into Red Hat’s performance. But investors like what they heard.
Shares hit $83.89, up 6.4 percent, topping the previous 52-week high of $83.
A big culprit in keeping the results even better is the strong U.S. dollar.
While quarterly total revenue of $524 million, up 15 percent year-over-year, the dollars would have been 21 percent higher in constant currency, according to the Raleigh-based company.
The dollar also drove down Red Hat’s big revenue source – subscriptions – by 6 percent to $457 million. That’s still a 16 percent increase from last year.
Red Hat reported earnings of 48 cents per share, beating estimates by one cent.
Revenue was some $740,000 under expectations, according to financial news website SeekingAlpha.
Looking ahead, Red Hat forecast revenues of between $535 million and $539 million. The Street had expected $534.4 million, based on a consensus of forecasts as cited by SeekingAlpha.
The Hatters also said earnings would be 47 cents, a penny under projections.
Red Hat also reported that deferred revenue grew 14 percent year-over-year to $1.49 billion.
“Our investments in technologies and partnerships continued to generate strong results as customers transform their IT infrastructure through the increasing adoption of open source technologies and cloud computing,” CEO Jim Whitehurst, said in a statement.
“During the third quarter, we strengthened our leadership position in the open hybrid cloud by introducing new technologies and launching a strategic partnership with Microsoft and its Azure Cloud. Our initiatives are focused on enabling our customers to build, deploy and manage their applications across multiple environments and infrastructures.”
For the full report, read:
http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=947515
