More Bad News From Steve Wozniak's Fusion-IO: A Crummy Outlook And The CFO Is Leaving
APWe've been documenting the implosion of Fusion-IO, a 2011 IPO darling and the employer of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
On Wednesday, the company reported a loss for the quarter and said its CFO, Dennis Wolf, was leaving.
For the quarter that ended on Sept. 30, Fusion-io reported a loss of $27.9 million, or 28 cents a share. A year ago, it reported a 4 cents per share profit ($3.9 million). On a non-GaaP basis, it reported a loss of 7 cents per share. Analysts were expecting a loss of 11 cents.
Revenue was down 27% to $86.3 million, slightly beating expectations for $84.73 million, a drop of 28%.
Fusion-io significantly will miss expectations for the current quarter, however, saying it expected only slightly higher revenue, while analysts were counting on a rise of more than 30% to $113.8 million.
Stock is down almost 13% in after hours trading.
Fusion-IO, which makes flash storage systems for enterprises was one of the most anticipated tech IPOs in 2011. Fusion IO raised $233 million in the IPO by selling shares for $19 each and the shares jumped to as high as $39.60 in its first five months.
But in early 2013, Fusion-io admitted that it was relying heavily on just two customers: Facebook and Apple. They accounted for about 50% of revenues, and both companies said they had plenty of flash storage and would buy less in the future. Plus there's a ton of new competition in this market, including Violin Memory, which finally went public last month after years of hinting about an IPO. The IPO didn't go well.
In 2013, it's been a revolving door among Fusion-IO executives. The company hired former HP executive Shane Robison and, a couple of weeks later, the two cofounders David Flynn (CEO) and Rick White (CMO) suddenly left.
Robison was previously Chief Strategy Officer at Hewlett Packard. He left HP in 2011 and a year later, HP CEO Meg Whitman publicly blamed him for HP's disastrous acquisition of Autonomy.
Wolf left Fusion-IO to become CFO at DataStax, a startup that makes a NoSQL database and has a number of big enterprise customers.
In the meantime, Fusion-IO stock is down more than 40% since the start of the year and the outlook isn't good.