News

posted on 04 May 2008 17:40

QLogic reported record Q4fy08 revenues of $159.7 million, up 9 percent from Q4fy07. But full year net income was down 8.7 percent.

The company reported Q4fy08 net income of $22.8 million ($0.17/share), up 23.9 percent from Q4fy07's $18.4 million ($0.12/share); a terrific performance.

For the full fiscal 2008 year QLogic earned a record $597.9 million, up 1.9 percent for fiscal 2007's $586.7 million. The relative flatness of that was emphasised by fy08's net income being $96.2 million ($0.67/share) compared to fy07's higher $105.4 million ($0.66/share). The fall was attributed to stock-based compensation expense, acquisition-related costs and some other items.

H. K. Desai, QLogic's CEO, said: "QLogic reported record revenue for both the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2008. Our record revenue for fiscal 2008 was driven by a 7 percent increase in revenue from Host Products and a 15 percent increase in revenue from Network Products from last year. As we exit fiscal 2008 with favorable second half performance, we believe we have positive momentum heading into fiscal 2009."

QLogic sells host products: Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI host bus adapters (HBAs); and InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCAs). Revenue from them in Q4fy98 was $100 million, up 5 percent from the year-ago quarter. The next main component of its revenues are network products; FC and InfiniBand switches, which earned $27.5 million, up 6 percent from the year ago quarter.

QLogic HBA competitor Emulex has recently reported its results which also showed low growth.

The background is that the Fibre Channel HBA and switch market is mature, and the InfiniBand HCA and switch market is also seemingly mature or not breaking out in any significant way from its high-performance computing (HPC) niche.

A mid-term/long-term threat is that high-rate Ethernet, 10GbitE and above, could wipe out the FC market via FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and provide 'good-enough' performance that confines InfiniBand inside its HPC niche. Another threat to QLogic is that Brocade is marketing its own HBAs.

QLogic is actively developing its own FCoE Converged network adapters (CNAs) as is Emulex.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}