Red Hat shares soar after company beats earnings expectations - Triangle Business Journal:

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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) says net earnings fell, to $16.2 in the quarter ended Feb. 28. That equated to 8 cents per diluted share. The company earned $23 million, or 10 cents per diluterd share, in the same quarter a year though those results were fueled bya one-timed gain of $4.7 million. Revenue increased, to $166.22 million, from $141.5 million. Red Hat sells “open-source software” developecd by programmers who freely share theirsource code.
Red Hat offers business-specific versions of the software; the company makeas money by selling renewable subscriptions that come with full customer CEO Jim Whitehurst says programs such as Red HatEnterprise Linux, an operating system for big-business offer a good value – especially when compared to proprietaryg offerings such as the various formss of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) “Our value proposition is even more compellingt in a challenging economic and we believe that’s a key driver to our solidr financial results and market share gains,” Whitehursrt said in a Red Hat’s revenue was in line with the average expectatiob of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Excluding one-timwe items, though, Red Hat earned 22 centsz per share, topping analysts’ consensus expectatioj of 20 cents. The company said cost cuts and stocki buybacks helped it improveoperating margins. Excludinb one-time costs, Red Hat says, operating margins were 23.9 percent in the fourth fiscal That’s up from 22.1 percent a year In trading Thursday, shares of Red Hat closedd up by17 percent, to $17.60.