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J.D. Edwards beats Street's expectations

The business management software maker reports fourth quarter financial results that beat Wall Street expectations and buoy the stock in after-hours trading.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
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J.D. Edwards today reported fourth quarter financial results that beat Wall Street expectations and buoyed the stock in after-hours trading.

The business management software maker's shares jumped more than 2 points in after-hours trading after the software company posted a profit, according to Reuters.

The company, which competes with SAP, Oracle, Baan and PeopleSoft, posted fourth quarter revenue of $257.6 million, compared to $307.1 million in the year ago quarter.

Net income for the quarter, excluding transactions related to the company's recent acquisitions, was $3.8 million, or 3 cents per diluted share, compared with net income of $37.7 million, or 34 cents per diluted share, in the same period last year. Wall Street had expected the company to post a loss of a penny per share for the quarter, according to First Call estimates.

J.D. Edwards said license fee revenues for the quarter also increased 35 percent.

Though the company's results were better than expected, J.D. Edwards and its rivals have suffered in recent quarters as a result of the overall downturn in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software market. ERP companies in recent months have been scrambling to reposition their offerings for the Internet as their profits have sagged.

SAP, for one, in October reported pretax profit declined 64 percent to $85.14 million, while operating profit fell 59 percent to $8.37 million. Meanwhile, Dutch business software firm Baan in October reported a larger than expected third-quarter loss as sales of new software dropped sharply, sending its shares down more than 10 percent. Oracle, with a core database business, is one of the few ERP software makers to evade large losses.

Including acquisition-related financials, J.D. Edwards posted a $130,000 profit, or nothing per diluted share, for the quarter. Over the past year, J.D. Edwards acquired Premisys and Numetrix.

For the year-ended October 31, the company reported revenue of $944.2 million, up slightly from revenue of $934 million in 1998. Its net loss totaled $7.9 million, or 7 cents a share, compared to a profit of $74.5 million or 68 cents a share a year ago.

Including acquisition costs, the company lost $39.2 million or 37 cents a share for the year.