Sun Microsystems Posts Appalling Financial Results for FQ4

As the Oracle acquisition deal draws closer to completion, Sun Microsystems posts one of its worst quarters yet with a net loss of $147 million, or 20 cents per share, an appalling result after last year's $88 million in profits coming in at 11 cents per share. Despite the very poor results, they could have been even worse, considering Sun's 31 percent drop in revenue in its fourth financial quarter of 2009 ending on June 30 down to $2.63 billion, still above expectations, which put it at $2.37 billion.

Earlier this year, Oracle announced that it would acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion and the deal has been undergoing the necessary steps up to this point.

The transaction was approved, although reluctantly, by Sun's shareholders and has recently been given the approval of the US Department of Justice. It is still under scrutiny in Europe but most believe that it should face no difficulties on the old continent as well.

Perhaps telling of how bad the results were, Sun didn't make any comments on the announcement with no press release or conference call, just the raw numbers, but it has to do with the pending approval of the European Union's Competition Commission. Still, the numbers weren't unexpected and are in line with Sun's previous announcement ahead of the shareholders' approval vote when the company warned that sales took a deep dive in Q4.

Sun's worst performer was also the company's biggest revenue earner, its hardware division having seen big drops in sales almost throughout the whole range. Shipments were down across all architectures by 34 percent and overall revenue for its hardware offerings was down 42 percent year-over-year to a little over $1 billion. This comes to further serve speculation that Oracle will spin-off the hardware division, speculation, which, in fact, mostly accounted for the poor sales in the first place.