In 2014, the supercomputer vendor, Cray, ‘had a great year, highlighted by company records in both revenue and new contract awards,’ according to Peter Ungaro, the company’s president and CEO.
In 2014, Cray had a total revenue of $561.6 million, some $30 million higher than the $525.7 million recorded in 2013. Net profit for 2014 was nearly double that of 2013 at $62.3 million, compared to $32.2 million. However, these results were affected by a $52.6 million tax benefit. Once the figures are adjusted for unusual and non-cash items, such as the tax allowance, the profit was $24.3 million, which is lower than the $30.3 million in 2013.
Overall gross profit margin for 2014 was 33 per cent, compared to 35 per cent for 2013. The change was driven primarily by product mix.
Mr Ungaro pointed to ‘significant wins in the UK, Korea, Saudi Arabia and the US. We refreshed our entire product line in the second half of the year across supercomputing, storage, and analytics. As we look to the future, I’m excited about our prospects to continue to grow and drive increased profitability in 2015 and beyond.’
The company expects revenue for 2015 to be in the range of $715 million, with about $80 million in the first quarter and roughly 40-45 per cent of the total year in the fourth quarter. The last quarter of 2014 also brought in a lot of contract completions and wins. In December, the US Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program awarded Cray an additional contract for $30 million to provide it with two Cray XC40 supercomputers and two Cray Sonexion storage systems. The systems will be installed at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi in 2015. Also in December, the University of Hawaii (UH) had put a Cray CS cluster supercomputer into production. The new Cray system was the University’s first centralised high performance computing system, located on the UH Manoa Campus in a new state-of-the-art data centre.
In November, Cray was awarded a contract to provide the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia with several systems that span the company’s line of compute, storage, and analytics products. The contract with KAUST marks Cray’s return to the Middle East for the first time in nearly 20 years. The same month it announced the pre-integration of Cloudera Enterprise into Cray’s new big data analytics appliance, the Cray Urika-XA system and it launched the Sonexion 2000 system -- the latest addition to its line of scale-out storage solutions.
