Friday, October 11, 2013

Delphi revenue up again in the third quarter of 2013

Embarcadero attributes the continued growth to interest in their mobile support.

http://www.embarcadero.com/press-releases/rad-studio-xe5-demand-doubles

5 comments:

alcalde said...

Bruce, we keep trying to explain this to you: you have to be skeptical of the numbers (and everything else put out by Embarcadero). They put out no other information other than the claim - they didn't "show their work". Do they mean third quarter to date or just third quarter? They had two releases in 2013 vs. one in 2012 - that would by definition produce higher year-over-year revenue!

This press release is very vaguely worded, doesn't address actual units sold, or anything else. As usual, there's very little we can actually glean from it. Revenue can always be up from cutting costs or raising prices as well as increasing sales.

If they want to convince us of something, let's see some firm numbers and hard answers. And then we have the mysterious lack of any press releases at times, which suggests that if things are bad they're not going to tell us. In that case, we have to parse what they say as they would likely try to spin bad news as good by burying details. Television networks do this all the time: "Up 10% in the W18-39 demo!" without mentioning the show is down 20% overall, etc.

alcalde said...

Dang Bruce, I forgot the other thing. Q3 2012 was XE3. Embarcadero Insider said sales plunged on XE3 because XE2 was so crappy. We also don't have a press release that gives us an idea how XE3 did. So if they're just comparing 3rd quarters and comparing XE5 to XE3, being up wouldn't be a shock as it's widely accepted that XE3 sales were low. So in the end, we still don't have a good "big picture" view of things.

Bill said...

It's simple: Any statement of revenue, profitability, etc., from a privately held firm is simply not subject to verification. So it's not cause for excitement. It may be true; it may not. It's PR.

Bruce McGee said...

@alcalde: If Embarcadero continues to report increased revenues, you can continue to explain how that's a bad thing.

Bruce McGee said...

@Bill: Increased revenue should absolutely be considered good news.

Increased revenue for every year since Delphi was acquired (with the exception of 2012) and the first three quarters of 2013 might be considered a positive trend.

Especially with the numbers that Embarcadero has reported.