Sun Microsystems Inc. has reported a $147 million loss for the April-June quarter. This is likely the last quarter that the company will have before being absorbed by Oracle. Oracle agreed to buy out Sun for $7.4 billion back in April, but the deal is pending approval from European antitrust regulators.
The numbers were reported on a regulatory filing but there wasn’t a news release or conference call. Sun Microsystems invented the JAVA programming language which is a key component for the web, PC applications, and mobile applications.
About a year ago during the same quarter, Sun had a profit of $88 million. Revenues for this past quarter was $2.63 billion. The year before, sales were $3.78 billion. Thomson Reuters analysts expected revenues to be $2.37 billion for the quarter.
SUN is often mentioned as the inventor of Java, which is true, but primarily SUN is a hardware company; Unix- and x86-servers comprise about 90% of total revenues.
This dependance on hardware is the primary reason behind the current fall in revenues. And probably this also was a main reason for SUN to put itself up for sale. Still, the main reason is probably the receeding popularity of UNIX, and UNIX servers. This downward UNIX-trend is undermining SUNs core business.