Cloud business pushes Citrix's first-quarter performance growth

Citrix BAE's acquisition strategy over the past decade has been remarkably fruitful, and the company has once again transformed itself from virtualization, networking and application acceleration to the cloud infrastructure sector and has gained a strong source of revenue.

In the first quarter of March, Citrix's revenue reached $589.5 million trillion, an increase of 20.1% per cent year-on-year. Product and software license sales increased by 18.7% to $178.4 million, and related license updates and maintenance services earned 264.5 million dollars. Sales revenue for service-oriented software (SaaS) products grew by 21% to $120.7 million, and professional services earned 25.9 million dollars, up 32.8% per cent year-on-year.

As Citrix's new product features and acquisitions have increased, spending has increased in all areas, so its first-quarter net profit fell by 6.9%, only 68.3 million dollars.

But Wall Street analysts did not seem to worry about the issue in a conference call with David Henshall, the chief financial officer of Citrix, and chief Executive Officer Marktanriton (Mark Templeton).

Like Citrix Management, they focus on 2012-year performance and seem more concerned about Citrix's increased revenue and profit expectations for the year. Citrix now expects full-year revenues to be between $2.53 billion and $2.56 billion, slightly higher than expected at the end of 2011, which now expects earnings per share to be between 2.75 and 2.79 dollars a year, up 5 cents compared with previous forecasts. The results are expected to rebound in the second quarter, with revenues likely to be between $605 million trillion and $615 million trillion, or between 58 and 59 cents per share of U.S. GAAP.

Henchel in a conference call to report on the performance of various parts of Citrix, claiming that the desktop Solutions Group's revenue for the first quarter was 338 million U.S. dollars, an increase of 17%. The software license sales revenue is the same as the service revenue growth of the desktop Solutions Group. The latter mainly sells XenApp and xendesktop applications as well as desktop virtualization tools.

Henchel said that this part of Citrix's business in the first quarter signed more than 3,000 orders, completed more than 100 more than 1000 PCs xendesktop virtual Desktop infrastructure transactions, of which 26 transactions for 5000 computers above the order. Citrix's desktop virtualization products, which have 19 transactions in the first quarter, are worth more than 1 million dollars, and its products have been used by more than 1600 cloud service providers.

The data center and cloud sector primarily sells cloudstack cloud structures, business support and plug-in products for XenServer server virtualization management programs, and NetScaler network acceleration equipment, which has a revenue of 100 million U.S. dollars and an increase of 28% in the first quarter.

Software license revenues for data centers and the cloud have increased 22%,netscaler sales revenue, and software license revenue for physical and virtual devices has increased by 46%. In fact, there are 400 transactions involving NetScaler components in the XenDesktop transaction. NetScaler VPX virtual devices added 600 customers in the first quarter. Henchel said that Citrix's high-end NetScaler SDX multi-tenant Network accelerator developed for service providers grew by 20% in the first quarter, accounting for 20% of revenue in the NetScaler sector.

In the service-oriented software sector, revenue grew by 21% to $120.7 million. Which, collaboration tools first-quarter revenue accounted for more than half of the revenue from the service-oriented software sector, up 29% per cent year-on-year. Interestingly, Citrix's service-oriented software tools began to gain attention outside the North American market, with revenue from the international market rising by 50%, accounting for 15% of the revenue from the service software sector.

Citrix's deferred income at the end of the first quarter was $983 million and bank deposits were 1.6 billion dollars.

All this makes Citrix an attractive takeover target, which now has a market capitalisation of $13.8 billion trillion.

Apple, Google, Microsoft or Cisco all have the power to buy Citrix, but the price seems hard to determine, and Wall Street seems to think that Citrix's current market capitalisation is within a reasonable range, and that the market value of Citrix may be lower, given the cash dividends and certain profits that shareholders and investment banks should share. Citrix's market capitalisation is too high to be bought, which may be good news for Citrix customers, as Citrix continues to evolve.

(Editor: Liu Fen)