Symantec: Fiscal 3Q15 Financial Results

(in $ million)	3Q14	3Q15	9 mo. 14	9 mo. 15
Revenues	1,705	1,638	5,051	4,990
*Growth*		-4%		*-1%*
Net income (loss)	283	222	681	702

Information management only

(in $ million)	3Q14	3Q15
Revenue	660	668
*Growth*		1%
Operating margin	27%	25%

Symantec Corp. reported the results of its third quarter of fiscal year 2015, ended January 2, 2015.

Mike Brown, president and CEO, said: “Cyberattacks continue to dominate the headlines with more than 70% of these still occurring at the endpoint. By harnessing Symantec’s vast threat telemetry to deliver actionable insight, we continue to prevent attacks at hundreds of millions of enterprise and consumer endpoints.”

“As the market leader in endpoint security, our enterprise endpoint protection revenue grew 5% year-over-year in constant currency. Over the next few quarters, we will deliver more powerful advanced threat protection capabilities that will better detect and remediate attacks. Our information management business, recently rebranded as Veritas, is experiencing accelerating growth, driven by double-digit revenue growth for both our NetBackup appliances and NetBackup software.“

Thomas Seifert, EVP and CFO, said: “Driving operational efficiencies across the company has allowed us to achieve our 30% operating margin target. We saw implied billings growth for three consecutive quarters on a constant currency basis, in addition to a 21% increase in large deals, underlining that the momentum in our businesses is strong.”

Symantec’s board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per common share to be paid on March 18, 2015 to all shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 26, 2015. The ex-dividend date will be February 24, 2015.

Comments

Mike Brown, president and CEO:
"Revenue growth in our Information Management segment accelerated to 5% year-over-year from 3% in the September quarter, driven by double-digit revenue growth in NetBackup software, NetBackup Appliances and Enterprise Vault.cloud.
"The need for Information Management solutions continues to accelerate with growth in unstructured data projected to increase at 42% per year. This trend is underpinning the growth we are seeing in this business. We continue to outpace the market, with 15% year-over-year revenue growth in NetBackup software. Our NetBackup Appliances grew 22% year-over-year, driven by the October launch of our NetBackup 5330 appliance, which delivers twice the performance and capacity of prior models."

Thomas Seifert, CFO:
"The number of large deals greater than $300,000 grew 21%, with strength in financial services, insurance and information technology.
"License revenue continued its improving trend from last quarter, growing 20% year-over-year and 35% on a sequential basis. Strength in license revenue was driven by enterprise backup and appliances.
" (..) we expect fiscal year '15 revenue to be between $6.515 billion and $6.575 billion.
" (..) we expect March quarter revenue between $1.525 billion to $1.585 billion."