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Strategies & Market Trends : Guidance II -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (13)	7/2/2001 8:01:01 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2077

Overseas softness hurts EPNY's($9) second quarter (Recasts, adds company and analyst comments, details throughout, byline, previous SAN MATEO) By Lisa Baertlein PALO ALTO, Calif., July 2 (Reuters) - Software maker E.piphany Inc. <EPNY.O> on Monday warned it would have a larger-than-anticipated second-quarter loss after a slowdown in international sales overshadowed the positive impact of more stable U.S. business. The company's shares tumbled about 15 percent to $9 on Instinet after it joined software makers Rational Software Corp. <RATL.O>, Informatica Corp. <INFA.O> and about two dozen other technology companies to issue after-hours earnings warnings. E.piphany -- a former Wall Street darling that once traded above $200 -- had finished Monday's regular session 35 cents higher at $10.51 on Nasdaq. "We had great hopes for international until the last day of the quarter ... Clearly there is more caution in spending on the international front," Roger Siboni, E.piphany's president and chief executive, said during a conference call with analysts. International sales account for about one-fifth of E.piphany's business and company executives said some of those deals fell apart in the final push to close the quarter on Friday. The overseas drop-off was not as dramatic as that seen in the U.S. during the final days of the first quarter, they said. Nonetheless, it was enough to overwhelm stabilizing domestic business and cause the company to fall short of Wall Street's consensus estimate for a loss of 27 cents on sales of $37.9 million. *********** GLOBAL SLOWDOWN San Mateo, California-based E.piphany sells software that helps companies personalize marketing and other communications with customers and partners. Its offerings also include contact center software, which runs customer service centers that handle e-mail and instant messages as well as telephone calls. While the company has good technology, it operates in a relatively new market, Banc of America Securities analyst Greg Vogel told Reuters. In a tight spending environment, he said, "people don't want to spend money on an experiment." E.piphany now expects to report a quarterly loss of 29 to 30 cents a share, excluding the amortization of goodwill and stock-based compensation, on revenue of approximately $31 million. In the year-ago quarter, the company posted $24.5 million in revenue and a net loss of 8 cents per share. E.piphany executives reiterated their goal to reach profitability in the fourth quarter of 2001. They also said the company had $343 million in cash, that cost-cutting efforts were paying off and that they had made inroads against sales and customer service software giant Siebel Systems Inc. <SEBL.O> On the flip-side, they said sales now are taking nine months to close and deferred revenue was down slightly in the second quarter. "The fact that that's down doesn't give you a strong feeling that September is going to be a strong quarter," Vogel said. "It's probably going to be a long year. Fortunately the company has a lot of cash," he said. ((-- Palo Alto bureau 1 650-461-3401 or lisa.baertlein@reuters.com)) REUTERS * end of story **