EMC, the world's largest maker of data storage gear, has posted a 46 per cent rise in quarterly earnings, but concerns over parts shortages and profit margins hurt its stock.
Fourth-quarter net income rose to $321 million, or 13 cents per share, compared with $220 million, or 9 cents per share, including a 1 cent a share gain, in the year-earlier quarter.
Revenue rose 27 percent to $2.36 billion.
EMC, which employs over 1,200 people in Ireland between facilities in Dublin and Cork, is seeing strong growth from operations that reflects market share gains it has made in recent quarters at the expense of rivals IBM and Hitachi Data Systems, which have recently upgraded older product lines.
But as rival products begin to ship in volume, analysts said EMC is contending with an industry shortage of some disk drive components that may cap any higher-than-anticipated growth over the next six months according to EMC executives.
"t seems like supply constraints are going to put a downward pressure on overall margins for the next couple of quarters," said Kaushik Roy, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group.
EMC said it believes it can sustain margins at recent high levels of 52 per cent of sales as it gears up to refresh its own line of storage equipment sometime between now and August.
Core storage revenue, which excludes revenue related to EMC's Dantz, Documentum, Legato and VMware software acquisitions, grew 19 per cent from a year earlier. Sales of systems grew 15 per cent. Software license revenue grew 43 per cent.