Entrust Technologies Inc, the Richardson, Texas-based public key infrastructure (PKI) software company came in with fourth quarter results right on the money as far as Wall Street was concerned in its first complete quarter as a independent publicly-traded company. Entrust was formed by telephone equipment manufacturer Northern Telecom Ltd in 1994 and spun off in January 1997. It went public with its own IPO in August 1998. It provides the keys, manages them, verifies them and supports 11 different encryption algorithms. The firm came in with fourth quarter net losses of two cents per share, compared with a net profit of one cent per share for the fourth quarter of 1997. That coincides with First Call’s round-up of analysts’ estimates for the company. In real money that expands to net losses of $805,000, against profits of $201,000 last time, on revenues that rose 87.0.0% to $15.0. Of those, some $11.0m were license revenues and $3.9m service and maintenance revenues. During the quarter the company added 150 enterprise customers, bringing its total to around 780, a 62% growth in the year as a whole. It also launched new version of its SET and secure email software and got its first presence in Asia-Pacific, forming Entrust Japan with 17 partners. For the year to December 31 Entrust recorded net losses of $23.8m, including a $20.6m charge for acquired in-process R&D from its acquisition of r3 Security Engineering AG in June, against profits in 21997 of $514,000. Revenues for the year rose 95.9% to $49.0m. Analysts expect Entrust to return to profitability in the second quarter of this year.
