Sun: Whole lotta nothing
December 6, 2001: 6:36 p.m. ET
If there's good news to support Sun Micro's monster stock-price gains, the company didn't let on in its most recent update.
By Adam Lashinsky
money.cnn.com
SAN FRANCISCO (CNN/Money) - Never have two executives said so little in so many words as the president and the CFO of Sun Microsystems did Thursday. If there's good news at Sun, you'd be hard pressed to hear it from Edward Zander, the president, or Michael Lehman, the finance guy, both of whom gave a mid-quarter update after the bell.
My conclusion: It's way too soon to pronounce Sun, which put the dot in dot-com (and then paid the price for it) fully recovered. (And that's a sad conclusion, given that the stock has risen some 80 percent since September.)
Upholding a recent tradition, Sun declined to guess what its revenues would be, other than to say they'd be "up" sequentially from the September quarter. To wit, revenues last quarter were a bit below $2.9 billion, so it isn't even clear that Sun will hit Wall Street's unenthusiastic December-quarter revenue assumption of $3.1 billion. Lehman did affirm that Sun intends to become profitable again by the middle of the next year, but that's an old assertion. |
