Comshare Reports Second Quarter Earnings
ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 20, 2000--Comshare Inc.
(Nasdaq:CSRE) announced today net income of $0.1 million, or $0.01 per
share for the quarter ended December 31, 1999, which compares to net
income of $0.1 million, or $0.01 per share, in the same period one
year ago.
License fees in the second quarter were $5.6 million, compared to
license fees of $6.1 million in the same quarter a year ago. Total
revenue was $15 million, compared to $16.7 million for the same
quarter a year ago, reflecting revenue on a consistent basis from the
Company's German operation, which was converted to a distributorship
as of December 1, 1998.
License fees of BudgetPLUS grew 19% worldwide in the second
quarter, and BudgetPLUS software revenue grew 36%, driven by the
growing maintenance base. The percentage of BudgetPLUS license fees on
the new relational platforms continued to increase, and represented
74% of total BudgetPLUS license fees. License fees of FDC increased
66% worldwide, driven by the new management reporting and analysis
capability added late last fiscal year.
License fees in Comshare's direct operations in North America and
United Kingdom increased 16% in the second quarter compared to the
same quarter a year ago. The increase was driven by sales of
BudgetPLUS and FDC that grew 71% and 117%, respectively, in the direct
territories. License fees in the distributor operations decreased 30%,
reflecting an unusually high quarter a year ago and relatively low
sales of BudgetPLUS.
"We were pleased by the results in our direct operations this
quarter, and believe it reflects management's activities to reduce
turnover and increase the experience of the sales force," said Dennis
Ganster, Comshare CEO and President. "The strong license fee growth of
BudgetPLUS and FDC reflect the strategic focus on our management
planning and control applications."
"The change of focus to management planning and control
applications has been a significant change for Comshare," continued
Ganster. "Our direct operations are well along in making the
transition. Predictably, the shift by some of our distributors is
lagging behind our direct efforts; however, we believe that there is
ample market opportunity for both BudgetPLUS and FDC in our
distributor territories. We have already seen evidence of successful
implementations achieved by the distributors who are making the shift
and believe others will make the same move to selling this application
set."
"We continue to work toward strengthening our relationships with
our partners," said Ganster. "Comshare is participating in Microsoft's
Universal Business Intelligence Campaign, also called JumpStart, which
is a sales and marketing initiative coordinated at the local level. As
a participant, our field personnel are working on seminars and joint
sales calls with their Microsoft counterparts to sell BudgetPLUS and
DecisionWeb on Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. We are also participating in
two IBM partner events in January. Now that we have released the IBM
DB2 version of BudgetPLUS, we have both BudgetPLUS and DecisionWeb
available on the IBM platform. While these efforts are in the early
stages, we believe that working with partners such as Microsoft and
IBM will ultimately strengthen Comshare's market position."
"Our performance in the second quarter included other important
milestones," Ganster added. "BudgetPLUS, our flagship product,
continued its string of growth quarters, and we released new versions
of BudgetPLUS and FDC. We also announced Comshare Planning, a new
module for our management planning and control suite, targeted for
strategic and top-down planning, that we expect to be available in our
third fiscal quarter. Work is underway to release a new product in the
management planning and control suite, Comshare Management Reporting
and Analysis, that is a Web-based product to help organizations
broadly deploy management information. This new product draws on the
technology used in DecisionWeb and the relational versions of
BudgetPLUS," Ganster continued.
Companies around the world and in many industries purchased
Comshare's applications in the second quarter, including American
International Group Data Center Inc., Baker & Taylor Inc., Bethlehem
Steel Corp., Blue Cross/Blue Shield of South Carolina, BMW
Manufacturing, CHEP Americas, Cicor International, Cypress
Semiconductor, Ingram Micro, HON Industries Inc., MasterCard
International Incorporated, Ralston Purina Corp., Scottish Courage
Limited, Sunoco Retail, Washington Mutual Inc., and Water Pik
Technologies.
"With Y2K concerns over, we expect new market opportunities for
Comshare because we offer best-of-breed, e-business solutions for
management planning and control," said Ganster. "Over the past few
years, companies directed a significant percentage of their IT
resources toward eradicating the Y2K bug and installing enterprise
planning systems. The result, we believe, is pent-up demand for
analytic applications like ours that can help organizations manage
their business more effectively. Therefore, we expect to see
industry-wide changes in IT spending priorities that could positively
affect Comshare's business," Ganster concluded.
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