Teaser:
Netscape Earnings Results Reflect Their Enterprise Focus
April 1997
Teasers: Snippets we write ourselves about items we plan to write about more fully in the next few issues. Think about it as our early thinking about the industry buzz.
Netscape’s rosy earnings (revenues reached $120.2 million for the last quarter, a 114% increase from a year ago), gives them a run rate of nearly half a billion dollars. This means they’re getting into the serious range – as if that market cap didn’t make us take them seriously.
Interestingly, the market reaction was mixed, with some analysts pleased to see Netscape outperform estimates and others warning that competing in the enterprise space would be much harder than the browser market.
Netscape now gets 37% of its sales in the server market and only 38% of its sales in the browser market (vs. 51% a year ago). That’s good, because Microsoft’s share of the browser market is likely to increase and Netscape’s decision to churn the browser/client market with multiple product announcements this year is likely to muddy the waters – we’d suspect many large purchasers may simply wait to see what happens.
The browser space is where the enterprise action will occur - there, and with the sale of solutions and services. Netscape has expanded in this space, but will need to go further, through growth or partnerships, to compete against formidable big players like IBM/Lotus and Microsoft/HP.
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Entire contents © 1997 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.