Irvine , CA (May 05, 2010) – Sage North America, part of the Sage Group plc (LSE: SGE), announced today that total revenue for the half year ended March 31, 2010, was $US 428.7 million, a decrease of 6%* over the same prior year period. Overall North America EBITA margin was 22% (H1 2009: 18%**) as the company effectively managed costs to increase efficiency. Excluding restructuring charges, the prior H1 margin was 20%**.
UK-based The Sage Group plc reported global revenues of $US 1.14 billion for the half year ended March 31, 2010, a decrease of 3%* over the same prior year period (at constant exchange rates). EBITA** was $289.2 million, or 25% margin, compared with 23%* in H1 2009. Excluding restructuring charges, the prior H1 margin was 24%*. The company added 127,000 customers worldwide during the year, bringing its total to 6.2 million businesses globally, excluding ACT! customers. The business added 48,000 customers in North America.
“Sage’s broad software and services portfolio and personal touch with customers continues to help small and midsized businesses to improve efficiency and productivity every day, helping Sage North America to achieve competitive revenue and profitability in the first half,” said Sage North America President and CEO, Sue Swenson. “We continue to increase our cross-sell revenue, especially through improved integration of our payments services business. We have continued to expand our customer base and gain their trust in the value of Sage solutions to help them manage both for today and for their growth tomorrow.”
In the first half of 2010, Sage North America demonstrated its commitment to helping small and midsized customers through innovative products and services, including the introduction of several connected business solutions that provide online services integrated with existing Sage solutions. Among these is an eMarketing service for ACT! by Sage to help businesses increase sales, and a new ePhilanthropy service, Sage Fund Raising Online, that enables nonprofits to manage campaigns and accept online donations from their own website. The company also introduced a number of new product releases including new versions of its Sage ERP family of mid-market solutions.
For its healthcare customers, Sage delivered a Meaningful Use Guarantee, providing physicians with the assurance they need to confidently deploy electronic health records for improved patient care and qualify for government incentives. In addition, Sage is helping these customers get paid faster through improved claims processing and revenue cycle management. The company also delivered a new version of Sage Practice Analytics software, enabling physicians to instantly analyze both clinical and practice data to deliver improved patient care and practice efficiency. For its long standing Sage Medical Manager customers, substantial improvements were delivered on the Linux platform providing customers with increased functionality; subsequent releases on other platforms are to be released soon.
In January, Sage North America CEO Sue Swenson solidified the company’s executive team with the addition of Betty Otter-Nickerson as President of Sage Healthcare Division. Ms. Otter-Nickerson, was formerly COO of the LIVESTRONG Foundation where she provided executive leadership for the development and growth of the LIVESTRONG Survivorship Center of Excellence Network, and was previously Vice President of Operations for Product Management and Development focused on worldwide operations for BMC’s enterprise management solutions.
*Results are in USD using an annual average exchange rate of 1.59 USD per GBP.
**Earnings before interest, tax and amortization, which excludes the effects of amortization of acquired intangible assets and the net amortization or capitalization of software development expenditure.
Source: Sage