By
Tom Taulli
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October 10, 2007
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It's been a good year for Lawson (Nasdaq: LWSN ) . The company -- which develops software to help companies with HR and payroll -- has integrated a $425 million acquisition and has combated rivals like SAP (NYSE: SAP ) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL ) .
Lawson's revenue increased 16% to $187.4 million. It helped that the company snagged 294 customer contracts, up 29% over the past year. It's also encouraging that license fee revenues spiked 52% to $25.5 million in Q1. Such revenue leads to ongoing service and maintenance fees.
What's more, Lawson is getting traction on the bottom line, with Q1 net income of $5.6 million, or $0.03 per share. This is up from a net loss of $15.8 million, or $0.08 per share, in the same period a year ago.
With its major acquisition for Intentia, Lawson is continuing to find cost savings. For example, over the past quarter, the margins on services went from 11% to 15%. This is critical, as the company has leveraged services to improve its competitive position.
Another boost has come from global sourcing in Europe as well as the Philippines. After all, the low-cost strategy has worked for companies like Accenture (NYSE: ACN ) and IBM (NYSE: IBM ) . Why not Lawson too?
And according to the conference call, management says the customer pipeline looks strong and there are no signs of an industry slowdown. This appears to be fairly widespread across the industry, as seen with the recent tech rally. So all in all, it still looks like the growth story remains intact at Lawson.
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