Despite the odd pessimistic report about the outlook for the Mountain View, California phenomenon, the explosive growth of Sun Microsystems shows little sign of waning: last week, the company announced its results for the second quarter and first six months of fiscal 1989 to December 30, 1988, showing net profit more than doubled to $29.5m on turnover up 91% at $448.3m (CI No 1,099). According to Sun’s president and chief executive Scott McNealy, the shortage of memory chips somewhat abated towards the end of the quarter, allowing an increase in production rates, but still leaving Sun with the largest quarter-end backlog in Sun’s history. The company has begun site work on its new European manufacturing plant at Linlithgow in Scotland, and this year established a new manufacturing centre for the Sun386i near Boston, Massachusetts: the 80386-based workstation now accounts for around 10% of overall sales, way ahead of Sun’s expectations. Revenues from the Sun-4 range made up 25% of the whole, according to McNealy, who said that he expected volume production of the Sparc to expand dramatically in 1989.
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