Chief financial officer for Autodesk Inc Eric Herr admitted, responding to rumours circulating in financial market, that the company’s AutoCad Release 13 is being accepted by the marketplace more slowly than expected but added that this was not causing Autodesk to change its guidance to analysts on financial results for the first quarter ended April 30: AutoCad 13 is Autodesk’s largest product, written for 32-bit hardware, and Herr said the market had not quite moved to 32-bit hardware; Herr told the Hambrecht & Quist conference that a second reason for Release 13’s slow acceptance was that it is written in object-oriented format it takes longer to develop in object format; But certainly there is no reason for us to change our guidance, Herr said adding that turnover for the quarter just ended will exceed Autodesk’s long-term goal of low 20% growth and operating earnings will exceed a 25% growth goal; Autodesk also expects to report sequential gains in turnover and operating earnings from the most recent quarter but fluctuations in foreign exchange rates may have an unquantified impact on the company’s bottom line because a lot of its business is overseas.
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Acclaim Entertainment Inc sent its chief financial officer Anthony Williams to the Hambrecht & Quist technology conference and between sessions, he told Reuter’s man on the spot that he was comfortable with Wall Street analysts’ estimate of $1.12 per share for fiscal 1995 earnings: this is a lowered estimate based on projections that the 16-bit video-game market will shrink significantly as next-generation game players, including 32-bit CD-based systems, and multimedia personal computers gain dominance; Williams said sales of Acclaim’s mainstay 16-bit software titles will shrink as a percentage of turnover from about 80% in fiscal 1995 to 50% the following year.
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Radius Inc, one of the first companies to license Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh operating system, says it will ship its first Macintosh clone – high-end 110MHz boxes for desktop publishing – in limited quantities next month and will begin volume shipments by September.
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Western Digital Corp’s chief executive, Chuck Haggerty, said analysts’ predictions that the firm’s gross margins in the current June fourth quarter would be higher than the March quarter’s 17% were right but the figure would not be much higher: asked to comment on Hambrecht & Quist’s $2,100m estimate for turnover for 1995, Haggerty told Reuters, That sounds reasonable; 1994 turnover was $1,500m,
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Sun Microsystems Inc believes that its turnover for fiscal 1995 and 1996 could exceed Wall Street analysts’ estimates of $5,900m for 1995 and $7,000m in 1996, the company’s chief financial officer, Michael Lehman, told the conference: last year Sun recorded sales of $4,700m; Lehman added that international sales will represent around 60% percent of turnover in three to four years’ time, from the 50% figure that it currently stands at.
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Apple Computer Inc chief financial officer Joseph Graziano took time out that the conference to assure reporters bluntly that We are not for sale: he told the conference that the company expects total unit shipments will grow by more than 20% in calendar 1995; in his speech, Graziano said the financial impact of licensing its Macintosh operating system to companies that can make Mac clones will be modest this year – We believe total revenues and profits (from licensing) will be relatively modest through 1995, he said, noting that the clones won’t reach volume production until the second half of the calendar year – and anyway, only a handful of small ones are declared.
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Dell Computer Corp chief financial officer Tom Meredith reckons that Pentium-based products could grow to represent up to 80% of the company’s business this year in revenue terms, compared with an average of about 44% in Dell’s fiscal fourth quarter to January: noting that Intel Corp has said 70
% to 80% of its business will be Pentium-generated by year-end, Meredith said If that’s what Intel says, we’d better be there as well; Dell is expected to deliver a steady stream of new Pentium machines this year, including the Optiplex and the Dimension, as well as new notebooks – notebooks as a percentage of companywide sales grew to about 14% at the end of its fiscal 1995 from zero a year earlier, Meredith said, and We should be well north of that this year, he said; he also expects industry-wide sales of personal computers sold through the direct channel – which still accounts for the bulk of Dell’s business after an unhappy foray into other channels – to rise to 30% of the total market within four years, from the 20% they represent now.
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Informix Corp has been growing at a startling rate, but Oracle Corp is still far ahead and it wants to get the leader in its sights: its chief executive Phillip White said it will continue growing revenues at a pace at least matching 1994’s 54% rate, and faster than its competition and the enterprise database software market in general: Informix’s philosophy is to develop products internally, not through acquisitions; 1994’s turnover was $469m and Hambrecht & Quist forecast looks for some $692m for 1995.
