Do you think that the almost 50% share price drop and apparent fall in revenue at Microfocus will have a knock on affect at openSUSE?
It shouldn’t. Specially since SUSE is doing OK. But hey, we’ve met this before, when Novell sort of collapsed. If SUSE would go down, we’d have a problem, yes. But even then, we’ve got too much to just shove aside. Other projects are using our software ( OBS, openQA ) and we have a big community of active contributors, we’ll survive one way or another.
On Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:26:01 +0000, peteh100 wrote:
> Do you think that the almost 50% share price drop and apparent fall in
> revenue at Microfocus will have a knock on affect at openSUSE?
Nope.
The beauty of open source software is that company share prices don’t
dictate participation in the project.
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
Not worried but I was glad to read this!
A company’s public stock price generally has little to do with its capitalization, unless the company owns significant amounts of its own shares. This means that major movements in the stock price typically have little to do with its ongoing operations. Companies use stock markets to raise money typically by making stock offerings.
If you read the Micro Focus Investor Relations statement that follows, they blame not hitting company profit/loss targets(2% miss) largely on transitory, not fundamental issues. Although such a statement probably isn’t legally penalized if untrue, such statements are usually reliable “to best of knowledge” to ensure a trusted relationship with its investors.
http://otp.investis.com/clients/uk/microfocus/rns/regulatory-story.aspx?cid=108&newsid=989846
Also to be noted, although no numbers were offered, the statement suggests that problems are largely of business flow and internal processes… and working capital is not affected so ongoing operations might suffer a tiny temporary delay but nothing is in jeopardy.
My interpretation of the Micro Focus statement…
TSU
That was mine too, but I thought I’d see if others had opinions.
Thanks.
Found it: Micro Focus Interim Results to 31 October 2017: Pages 12 to 44: for the entire Micro Focus Group, including HPE:
-
Six months
ended 31 October 2017 (not annual figures … ): Total assets: US $17.6 billion.
Total liabilities: US $9.98 billion.
Revenue: US $1.2 billion.
Operating costs: US $1 billion.
Operating profit: US $520.2 million.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITA) US $530 million.
Contractual cash obligations: US $6.5 billion.
So, looking at the numbers:
- The liabilities are more than 50% of the assets.
- The contractual cash obligations (debt) is considerable but, if one looks at the short-term debt versus the long-term debt, the current revenue covers at least the short-term liabilities.
The $65 question is, once they’ve got their post spin-merge bookkeeping sorted out, will the future look rosier or not?
Very interesting. I must admit I didn’t take the time to look at that much detail. The bit that really caught my attention (after the initial share price fall) was the fall in revenue.
But I suppose they can always move us on somewhere else (again!) if they don’t want to keep us.
I suspect that you mean, they can always move SUSE GmbH on somewhere else … We, the openSUSE community, have, AFAICS, no shareholder value and are therefore not really part of the financial implications which Micro Focus may be facing. But, I suspect that, if, for what ever reason, SUSE GmbH is moved off somewhere else, we the openSUSE community will be part of that move …
On the other hand, it may well be that, the openSUSE community is perceived to contribute intangible (non-monetary) value to SUSE GmbH and therefore has value which appears neither in the balance sheets nor in the financial reports … >:)
Oops,>:(. Good point!