Symantec: Fiscal 1Q15 Financial Results

Symantec Corp. reported the results of its first quarter of fiscal year 2015, ended July 4, 2014.

Michael A. Brown, Symantec interim president and CEO, said: “We are making steady progress against the five priorities outlined last quarter including: optimizing certain businesses for margin, improving efficiencies, attracting top talent, returning significant cash to shareholders and focusing our investments for growth in our enterprise business. These investments are focused in backup appliances, mobile, advanced threat protection, managed security services and data loss prevention.”

“Separation of the sales force into new business and renewals teams has led to improved performance, especially in North America. In particular, our federal and renewals teams both delivered one of their best quarters ever,” Brown continued. “Our backup appliances, Trust Services and data loss prevention businesses also generated robust revenue growth. In the last two quarters, we’ve introduced nearly two dozen new or improved products and we’re on track to release almost two dozen more by fiscal year end.”

Thomas Seifert, EVP and CFO, said: “We’re pleased with the solid results in the quarter, which were driven by productivity improvements in both our new business and renewals teams. We have eight revenue and efficiency initiatives in place that we expect will help us continue to build momentum into next year. We’ve identified three efficiency initiatives that we believe will ramp during the second half of the fiscal year: optimizing our Norton business, streamlining product support, and reducing our global footprint.”

Guidance assumes an exchange rate of $1.36 per Euro for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015 versus the actual weighted average rate of $1.33 and an end of period rate of $1.35 per Euro for the second quarter of fiscal year 2014 and $1.38 per Euro for fiscal year 2015. Guidance assumes an effective tax rate of 27.5% for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015 and 27.8% for the remaining quarters in fiscal year 2015, and a common stock equivalents total for the quarter and fiscal year of 696 million shares.

Symantec’s board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per common share to be paid on September 17, 2014 to all shareholders of record as of the close of business on August 27, 2014. The ex-dividend date will be August 25, 2014.