China's software industry sees revenue rise more than 20 percent
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China's software industry saw an increase in revenue of more than 20 percent last year, boosted by particularly swift growth in income from services, state media reported Tuesday.
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TechWeb - The combined revenue of Microsoft's client, business, and server and tools divisions grew by more than 20%, the company said.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP reported anÂ 8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses. Net income for the quarter was â¬449 million ($605 million as of June 30, the last day of the period being reported), up from â¬415 million in the second quarter last year. That was equal to earnings of â¬0.37 per share, up from â¬0.34 per share a year earlier. Revenue from new software licenses climbed 18 percent to â¬715 million, from â¬604 million last year. Total revenue, including maintenance fees, support and other services, climbed 10 percent to â¬2.4 billion, up from â¬2.2 billion in the second quarter of 2006. The results were better than some analysts expected and showed that SAP is continuing to add new customers even while its main rival, Oracle, grows its applications business throughÂ acquisitions. For the comparable period, its financial quarter ending May 31,Â Oracle increased revenueÂ from new applications licenses by 13 percent, to $641 million. In SAP's biggest market -- Europe, the Middle East, and Africa -- total revenue was up by 12 percent, to â¬1.27 billion. Growth in the Americas, dragged down by the strong euro against the U.S. dollar, was just 6 percent, to give revenue of â¬853 million. SAP continues to grow fastest in Asia, where revenue climbed 20 percent to â¬304 million. CEO Henning Kagermann called it "an excellent quarter." SAP will continue to invest heavily in new products for the midmarket, he said in a statement. The company is spending â¬300 million to â¬400 million over two years to develop a new suite of on-demand applications, intended to offset slower growth from large enterprises. The results come as SAP continues toÂ battle Oracle in U.S. courtÂ for alleged corporate theft. Oracle charged that SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary hacked into Oracle's customer support Web site and downloaded software fixes and support materials for Oracle's PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications. SAP planned to use the materials to offer cut-rate services to Oracle customers, according to Oracle's lawsuit. In its response last month, SAP admitted that TomorrowNow employees had made someÂ "inappropriate" downloadsÂ of Oracle materials. But it played down the extent of the transgressions and said SAP itself did not have access to the materials. A case management conference is set for September. Â
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Asian governments are pivotal to Red Hat&#39;s goal of earning 60 percent of its revenue from outside the U.S. by the end of 2009, said Matthew Szulik, the company&#39;s chairman, chief executive officer, and president, in a conference call on Thursday.Governments in the region are beginning to see open source as a boost for their economies and a way to increase technological innovation in the region, Szulik said. The governments of South Korea, Japan, Australia, and China have been &quot;positive spokespeople&quot; for the growing adoption of Linux and open source software in the region, he added.Most of the business for Red Hat in the region, as in the rest of the world, is in the transition from Unix and legacy systems to the Linux operating system. Customers are typically in the financial services, telecommunications, technology and the government sector, Szulik said.At the end of August, Red Hat&#39;s revenue for the first six months of its fiscal year was $246 million, up 34 percent from the previous year. About 85 percent of its revenue came from software subscriptions with the balance coming from services like consulting and training. The company does not break out revenue by regions.Red Hat also had $33 million in operating income for the six months period, up 48 percent from the same period in the previous year. The company has over $1.3 billion in cash on its balance sheet, said Charlie Peters, Red Hat&#39;s chief financial officer.Apart from continuing opportunities in the market for replacement of the Unix operating system with Linux, Red Hat is also seeing revenue coming in from middleware, Peters said. The company&#160;acquired JBoss, a vendor of open-source middleware, in June 2006.Red Hat plans to roll out new technologies in the coming months that will help customers build global virtualized computing infrastructure, Szulik said. The company introduced server, storage, and desktop virtualization as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 earlier this year.An increase in availability of third-party applications around Linux helped boost demand, as Linux has been expanding its share of servers&#160;based on Intel&#39;s x86 architecture and&#160;IBM&#39;s mainframe&#160;and server environments, Szulik said. In addition, there has been an increase of technically trained staff with Linux and open-source skills, he added.
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China's global trade surplus in January rose 22.7 percent compared with the year-earlier period to $19.5 billion, a state news agency reported Friday.
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(InfoWorld) - Indiaâs business providing software and services to companies outside its borders will grow a healthy 26 to 29 percent this year, the country's main trade association for that sector said Monday. Revenue from exports of software, services and business process outsourcing (BPO) will reach about $40 billion for the fiscal year that ends next March 31, according to data released Monday by the National Association of Software and Services Company (NASSCOM). Export revenue from these sectorsÂ grew 33 percent to $31.3 billionÂ in the fiscal year to March 31,Â according to data released by the trade body. The strong growth in software and services exports is coming from an improvement in India's competitiveness, and the addition of new services, such as remote infrastructure management, by Indian service providers, Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM told reporters in Bangalore on Monday. The revenue figure also includes exports to their parent companies and clients by Indian subsidiaries of multinational companies such as IBM, Oracle, and Accenture, that are expanding fast in India. Indiaâs overall IT industry grew by 30.7 percent in the year to March 31 to earn revenue of $39.6 billion, with the domestic market also growing by 22 percent to $8.2 billion, NASSCOM said. Many multinational companies including Hewlett-Packard and IBM have bagged outsourcing contracts from Indian companies. The Indian IT industry employed about 1.6 million staff as of March 31, besides about 6 million indirect staff employed in supporting the large offshore software development and BPO operations in India, Karnik said. About 1.2 million people are employed in developing software and running back office processes and call centers for customers abroad. The U.S. continues to be the largest market for Indian exports, accounting for 66 percent of revenue, Karnik said. Indiaâs IT industry is facing high staff attrition and salary increases, but that will not slow down growth, Karnik said. In the short term, NASSCOM, of Delhi, is helping set up finishing schools that will make more Indian graduates employable by the IT and the BPO industry, he said. In the long-term, though, NASSCOM is counting on more investments by government and industry in the education sector, he added. The IT industry in India is also grappling with the strengthening of the Indian Rupee against the US dollar, which pushes down realization in Rupees of revenue earned abroad by Indian companies. In the year to March 31, exports of IT services grew by 35.5 percent to $18 billion, while exports of BPO services grew 33.5 percent to $8.4 billion. Revenue from exports of engineering services, a classification that deals with non-electronic design services, grew by 23 percent to $4.9 billion.
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Oracle Corp. reported revenue and earnings growth in its first fiscal quarter, with its revenue from new software licenses rising 7 percent, to $563 million.
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Oracle Corp. reported revenue and earnings growth in its first fiscal quarter, with its revenue from new software licenses rising 7 percent, to US$563 million.
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Booming sales of server and mobile-computing microprocessors push third-quarter revenue and net income beyond earlier guidance. By Darrell Dunn.
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The number of Internet users in China soared past 200 million in 2007, a new report from the country&#39;s quasi-government Internet overseer said Thursday.China&#39;s Internet population&#160;stood at 210 million at the end of last year, up 53 percent from the same time in 2006 when there were 137 million, the China Internet Network Information Centre said in its semi-annual report on Internet use here.That figure puts China just 5 million users away from becoming the world&#39;s largest wired nation -- and with only about 16 percent of the population online. At its current growth rate, China will become the world&#39;s top Internet market sometime in the next few months.The greatest growth came from users under 18 and over 30, CNNIC said. One of the most surprising statistics from the new report indicates that about 40 percent of users added over the last year, over 29 million, came from rural areas. Even in the January 2007 report, the vast majority of Chinese Netizens were based in major urban areas such as Beijing and Shanghai.Also surprising among the new results is that China&#39;s most popular Internet application is online music, used by 86.6 percent of those surveyed, followed by instant messaging with 81 percent. E-mail placed only fifth, with 56.5 percent using it.CNNIC&#39;s survey provides the most reliable information about Internet use in China, although its methodology is translucent at best. It does not reveal its sample size, nor does it reveal what consists of an Internet user except that the person used the Internet at least once in the month prior to when the survey was taken.While the new statistics may seem impressive, it highlights how Internet usage in the country still lags behind mobile phone use, and how even greater usage could be spurred by more access through wireless devices. &quot;China&#39;s admittedly impressive user statistics hide an important fact: only a fraction of those users have regular access to a PC,&quot; said David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based technology consultancy.Despite limited PC access for some users, Chinese Internet users have embraced the Internet as a means of expression. &quot;In addition to an increase in overall numbers, you also see a rise in the number of Netizens creating content on BBS and blogs, making Chinese Netizens some of the most active participants in the Web 2.0 phenomena in the world,&quot; said Sam Flemming, founder and CEO of CIC, an Internet word of mouth monitoring firm based in Shanghai.
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(InfoWorld) - New software licensing revenue growth -- the highest inÂ 10 years for the company -- helped boost Oracle's first-quarter financials. New software licensing revenue grew 35 percent to $1.1 billion, the strongest growth of any quarter in the past decade, the company reported on Thursday. Revenue for the period ending Aug. 31 was up 26 percent to$4.5 billion and net income grew by 25 percent to $840 million compared to the same quarter last year, based on generally accepted accounting principles. Earnings per share grew 28 percent to $0.16. Applications' new license revenues helped drive growth, increasing by 65 percent over the corresponding period last year. Database and middleware new license revenue was up 23 percent, the highest growth rate in seven years for Oracle, the company reported. Oracle released a major upgrade to its database software during the quarter, helping to drive that increase. The company had 35,000 downloads of the software during the first month it was available. Oracle's results significantly beat some analyst expectations, including those of Citi Investment Research. Citi expected 20 percent growth in overall new software licensing, 15 percent growth in database and middleware license revenue, and just 33 percent in applications. While database software is the historical focus for Oracle, the company is now hoping to become a dominant player in its two other lines of business: applications and middleware. Oracle figures it is number three in the middleware market, behind Microsoft and IBM. If Oracle and IBM continue to grow at their current rates, Oracle could pass IBM at the end of this year or early next year, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, said during a conference call to discuss the earnings. In applications, Oracle is behind market leader SAP. The companies have different strategies for growth with Oracle trying to sell to its existing large company customers and SAP chasing small businesses, he said. "While we think the small business market is interesting because it's large; we just haven't figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market," he said. Oracle would have to build a new sales force, products, marketing, and advertising efforts in order to address the market, which doesn't promise strong revenue, he said. Oracle's applications business, with its continued focus on existing customers, has the potential for huge growth in the future, he said. "We're just at the very beginning in terms of penetrating this market," Ellison said. The business includes products that Oracle sells to companies like telecommunications operators. Those companies typically use custom software, some of which they may have installed as long as ten years ago, said Charles Phillips, president of Oracle. So part of Oracle's challenge is to convince these companies that off-the-shelf software from Oracle can work, he said. For the current quarter, Oracle expects new software license revenue to grow 15 percent to 25 percent from a year earlier and total revenue to grow 19 percent to 21 percent. Earnings per share this quarter should be $0.20 to $0.21, up from $0.18 for the corresponding period last year, Oracle said. This story was updated on September 20, 2007
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China Telecom Corp., the listed arm of the nation&#39;s biggest fixed-line operator, said first-half profit rose 28 percent after it added networks and secured more users for a service that competes with mobile-phone companies.
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China's 500 top businesses saw their combined profits rise 23 percent in 2005, with strong earnings in the petrochemicals, banking and metals industries contributing a large share of the growth, according to a study published Monday.
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China&#39;s online game market is seen  growing 35 percent to hit $1.3 billion this year, according to  Credit Suisse, amid strong growth in Internet users, launches  of high-quality games and appreciation of the yuan currency.
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(InfoWorld) - China's software and IT services sector is on track to catch and exceed the U.K.'s output in as little as five years, according to a new report. China's strength comes from robust software engineering programs for students, according to Developing the Future 2007, a series of essays and reports on the U.K.'s IT industry. The country is also proving to be aÂ cheaper location than India, as software development costs in India are rising 15 to 20 percent, wrote Sally Ernst, chief executive of Sinocode International, an IT software outsourcing company, in the report. "All evidence points to ChinaÂ developing its own national software industryÂ even faster than was the case in India," Ernst wrote. About 40 percent of the U.K.'s gross domestic product is dependent on "knowledge-based" services, a terms encompassing financial and IT services. The report concludes that the U.K. will need to invest more in education and skills or face falling behind. China's 35 national training schools are graduating 800,000 software engineers annually from a population of 1.3 billion. By comparison, the U.K., with a population of about 60 million, turned out around 27,000 graduates with IT-related degrees in 2001, but that figure dropped to 14,700 in 2005. Adjusted for population, China still produces more than twice as many software engineers than the U.K. a year. The problem is that while software engineers have well-paid careers, U.K. "students see this world as filled with problematic stereotypes, career dead ends, and dull office work," wrote Peter McOwan, an academic at the University of London. However, much of the future prosperity of the U.K. depends upon the health and growth of the IT sector, the report said. The report was cosponsored by Microsoft, the British Computer Society, City University London, and Intellect, a U.K. high-tech trade group. Â
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that is, in other countries such as China and India. According to an IDC study, China&#39;s IT growth is expected to be 15% annually and India&#39;s about 20%.
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MICROSOFT said first revenues were up by 12 per cent as the software company benefited from stronger-than-expected computer and server shipments.