Shares in IP telephony market leader Net2Phone Inc. jumped a whopping 28 percent this morning on news that strong sales and record revenues had trimmed the company’s fiscal first quarter losses.
In today’s early going, Net2Phone stock was trading up $2.68, or 28 percent, to $12.43. During intraday trading Tuesday, the stock had lost 12 percent, hitting a new year-low of $9.75.
Citing strong sales and a record 135 percent jump in quarterly revenues, Net2Phone said it lost 25 cents per share in the fiscal first quarter, compared with a year-ago loss of 11 cents a share. The losses beat projections by analysts that the company would post a loss of 30 cents per share.
The company said the net losses did not account for non-cash compensation expense for issuance of stock options, amortization related to the acquisition of Aplio, and other income for the first quarter of 2001. Net loss including other income and charges for the quarter was $5.2 million or 9 cents pe share, Net2Phone reported after markets closed last night.
In a statement, Net2Phone CFO Ilan Slasky boasted that “with approximately $480 million in cash, equivalents, marketable securities, and no debt, we have more than sufficient resources to continue to aggressively fund our network expansion plans as well as continue to grow the company.”
The company also said that gross margins in the quarter were 39 percent, compared to 41 percent in the previous quarter and 48 percent in the same quarter during 1999.
Net2Phone, which builds software to allow Web users to make telephone calls and send and receive faxes from PCs, said its total paid minutes of use grew to 214 million minutes for the quarter, a 151 percent jump over 85.3 million minutes for the same quarter year-ago.
“As of October 31, 2000, Net2Phone had over 1.8 million active customers (not including customers using Net2Phone via MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger services) who had used Net2Phone’s services during the past three months,” the earnings statement said.
Having latched on to the instant messenger applicatons of MSN’s Hotmail, America Online’s ICQ and Yahoo!’s Messenger, Net2Phone said its PC-based Vo-IP services were “more widely distributed than ever before.”
