Fujitsu’s latest results point to a tough quarter for the Japanese giant. The company is also revising down its full-year outlook by 50bn yen (£415m at current exchange rates) or 1.1% of total revenues.
Total Q3 revenues at Fujitsu were down 1.5%. Home territory Japan was up 3.8%, but rest of world revenue fell by 5% on a constant currency basis. Total operating income was just 3.1bn yen (£26m), a fall of 18.1bn yen compared to Q3 of last year.
The floods in Thailand clearly had an impact on device sales and sales of components to go into other company’s devices. But “weak demand” has been a factor too, and in some areas like in-car navigation that is likely to be much more than a temporary dip (see TomTom on the road to nowhere). That said, Fujitsu continues to benefit from the explosion in mobility and mobile data driven by smartphones, as it sells a wide range of networking kit, base stations and the like. This helps explain the growth in Japan.
As usual there isn’t much detail in the corporate results about the IT services elements of Fujitsu. But there's enough for us to see that it was a tough quarter. The company says that “sales of infrastructure services and server-related sales declined, primarily in the US and Europe”. And overall, Technology Solutions (the largest of Fujitsu’s three sub-divisions and the one that covers IT services, among other things) saw y-on-y revenue down 4.5% overall, with a 6% constant currency decline outside Japan. All of which no doubt reflects the persistent and widely-experienced softness in corporate IT spend. But it still looks to be on the low side of average for the quarter, even compared to the modest growth of some of Fujitsu's peers (see, for example, IBM's Q4 results here).