• silicon.com
• Technology
• Hardware

By Joey Gardiner, 18 January 2002 16:00

NEWS Sun has issued second quarter results which beat analysts' expectations, but gave those hoping for signs of a recovery little to cheer about. However, the hardware giant said it was gaining market share on rivals - particularly IBM and EMC - and was signing up new customers. CEO Scott McNealy was in unapologetic mood for how hard the burst of the high-tech bubble hit the company last year. He said: "Our company built on the bubble big time. So shoot us. We managed the upswing and managed the downswing better than anyone else in the market. Now we're re-sized and re-focused, and we're making less mistakes." Sun was last year criticised for selling to dot-com companies in the boom time that subsequently went bust and were unable to pay them. Sun reported revenues up nine per cent on the equivalent period last year to $3.1bn - the first time it has been able to report a rise in revenues for a year. It made a loss of $99m or three cents per share excluding restructuring charges and bad investments. Analysts had expected it would lose between four and six cents per share. This time last year it made a profit of over $400m. Despite the above expectations performance, Sun CFO Michael Lehman said this was no sign things had got better: "There are significant risks limiting any significant growth in IT spending in the next three to six months." The company was still on course to profit by June, he said. Scott McNealy said the quarter was proof Sun could make its numbers without the huge customer wins it saw in the boom time: "We're not getting the big $50m, $100m contracts from the telcos that we used to. But we're getting more customer wins than I can remember - but they're all smaller. "We're taking market share from IBM and we're starting to play in traditional markets like government and retail now."