The Sun success story continues, and president and chief executive Scott McNealy has been telling Dow Jones that the Mountain View company’s net profit for the year to June 30 is likely to be about $1.60 a share, a 44% increase over the figure for fiscal 1987. McNealy, who says that shortages of memory chips held back shipment of $100m of Sun Microsystems’ backlog for workstations during fiscal 1988, believes that sales for the year still will exceed $1 billion against $537.5m. We’re going to do better than we thought at the beginning of the quarter, says McNealy, who reckons that shortages of memory chips were exacerbated earlier this year by frequent spot market purchases by IBM, and he says that Sun has already detected some loosening of demand for memory chips in the wake of IBM’s announcement earlier this month that it was now close to manufacturing all the memory chips it needed for its PS/2 family of personal computers. But the current quarter has seen Sun’s shipment lead times stretch out to 65 to 70 days from the 45 day target, mainly on account of the chip famine. On the new 386i workstation, McNealy says ships of the $10,000 boxes will be in four figures during the current quarter. At the top end, he says that the Sparc based Sun-4 workstations will account for 20% of business for the fiscal year. On the IBM-DEC-Hewlett Open Systems Foundation, McNealy is contemptuous, describing it as a $90m smokebomb designed to distract Unix users from the efforts of AT&T and Sun to streamline and improve Unix and make it more consistent, and he thinks it could well backfire. Anyway We’re ecstatic Unix is getting all this attention, he says cheerfully.
