Downturn takes a bite out of PeopleSoft

Record run ends as analysts downgrade...

By Kate Hanaghan, 10 October 2001 11:19

NEWS Ahead of financial results due out late next week, enterprise software company PeopleSoft has reiterated its long-term plans for profitable growth. For five consecutive quarters the company has enjoyed record figures. However, analysts have revised their expectations for the company's third quarter, reducing revenues and earnings per share. Financial experts now predict licence revenues to be around the $150m mark, down from $166m last quarter. Like so many other tech companies, the downturn has sunk its teeth into Peoplesoft. But despite this, the company's expectations for growth and profitability in the long term have not changed, according to Kevin T Parker, the company's CFO. The company currently has $1.4bn cash in the bank and intends to "focus on profitability rather than raw growth". Parker explained that if the company were to balloon to the size of arch-rival Oracle, it wouldn't want to share a similar reputation. At the company's user conference in Nice, Parker told silicon.com that his vision of users as "an angry mob with a rope waiting outside Ellison's office" is a million miles from PeopleSoft's intention to be known as a nice company. PeopleSoft 8, released last summer, is a suite of products with CRM and Enterprise Services Automation components, which uses a web browser and doesn't support Windows.

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