After hitting about $21 in mid-July, the stock price of enterprise software developer Progress Software (NASDAQ:PRGS) has been making a nice move, reaching $27. But yesterday, investors disappointed with the company's earnings report caused the stock price to fall 6% to $24.76. While Progress is a solid company, growth is not likely to resume until next year.
In the third quarter, revenues increased 12% to $111.4 million. In another encouraging move, software license revenues increased 11% to $42.3 million.
Because of the ongoing investigation of its stock option programs, management did not disclose its net income or earnings per share. Of course, this has become common for dozens of high-tech companies.
In the case of Progress, the company indicated in late August that it would restate past financial results. The non-cash charges range from $20 million to $30 million.
Progress develops tools that help companies create, deploy, and manage business applications. The software is quite versatile and allows companies like Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), IBM (NYSE:IBM), and Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) to build applications to manage inventory, target customers, and improve the supply chain.
Unfortunately, management lowered its outlook for fiscal 2006. Revenues are expected to range from $440 million to $443 million, which is down from the prior guidance of $442 million to $448 million.
True, Progress has to contend with fierce competition from IBM, Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). Over the past few years, these companies have been bulking up their product offerings through acquisitions and may now be showing results, especially in light of Oracle's recent quarterly results.
But there is something else dragging down the business; that is, the company is transitioning to a new product line. In the meantime, it looks like customers are holding off on new software purchases.
Unfortunately, Progress' new products will not hit the markets until the first part of next year. So, while it may get a boost from Wall Street's overall interest in the software space, the company is likely to be laggard in terms of growth for the rest of the year.
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Fool contributor Tom Taulli does not own shares of any companies mentioned in this article.
