Annual Report: Sitecore continues rapid growth

December 2nd, 2008 by Janus Boye | annual report, cms, sitecore | 7 Comments

Yesterday Danish CMS vendor Sitecore – winners of this year’s Web Idol 2008 – released their annual report which documented that the company is continuing their rapid growth. Revenue was up 86% to DKK 56 million and profits are up 216% to DKK 20 million. Sitecore now has 120 employees globally.

On the face of it these figures seem impressive; particularly considering the current rocky and stormy climate. However, a closer look at the annual report threw up a few interesting findings:

A significant part of Sitecore is owned by a company called Company Factory, which also owns Sitecore integrator Pentia and another company called Sitecore Foundry. This is documented in Danish on the Pentia site. Company Factory is a holding company and does not have a website with further information. Sitecore Foundry is also the name for a Sitecore solution aimed at making it easy for enterprises to manage microsites.
Sitecore announced “that revenues have grown by over 100% over the prior fiscal year 2007-2008″ in a press release on Nov 4, but the numbers in the annual report tell a different story. Why exaggerate the good numbers? Perhaps the numbers changed in the audit process? If not, I must be reading or interpreting the numbers wrongly. (CORRECTION – Dec 2: Please see comment below from Sitecore CIO with clarfication)
Sitecore owns 49% of their subsidiary in Ukraine and 30% of Sitecore UK. I don’t know who owns the remaining parts.

NB: If you want to learn more about Sitecore and exchange experiences with other practitioners you can join the J. Boye groups for web and intranet professionals

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When Brother, Nordea, Red Bull, Statoil or WHO need help managing their websites or intranet, they turn to Janus Boye. Janus is mostly working on fixing large, global, complex and often failed web projects. He’s worked with customers to change their system integrator in the middle of a project, he has reduced costs dramatically and he has helped hire replacements for the customer team.

Kim Elsass December 2nd, 2008 7:43

Hi Janus

Thanks for the review of our annual report.
We’re incredibly pleased and proud to be able to post attractive growth numbers, and we’re confident that we’ll continue to grow profitably.

I noticed one comment on the numbers relating to our press release of November 4, which I’d like to make a note on. By writing “why exaggerate the good numbers?” you imply that we might be trying to look even better than we are by stating that revenues grew by over 100%. However, apparently you didn’t read The Management Report. In that you’ll see that the Global Consolidated Sitecore Revenue amounted to DKK 89,761 million for FY 07/08 as opposed to DKK 41,727million for FY 06/07. This growth amounts to 115%, so we were actually rather modest in our press release of November 4.

The reason for these numbers not being included in the numbers for Sitecore A/S is that some of the sales offices are not majority held by Sitecore A/S. Like you, I’m no financial analyst, but I believe that it’s an interesting fact that Sitecore Revenue grew more than 100% in one year.

Thanks again for mentioning our Annual Report in your blog, and if you have questions to material we send out, please feel free to contact us at Sitecore, so that we can clarify.

Best regards

Kim Elsass
CIO
Sitecore Corporation
Read more about Sitecore here from Erhvervsbladet (in Danish):
http://www.erhvervsbladet.dk/article/20081202/news04/81202113/
J. Boye » Blog Archive » Annual Report: Dynamicweb barely breaks even December 7th, 2008 7:43

[...] up 19 % compared to the previous fiscal year, which is not that much in this market. To compare, local competitor Sitecore recently reported almost DKK 90 million in fiscal year revenue and more than 100 % revenue growth. Remember that while the revenue number [...]
Janus Boye December 8th, 2008 7:43

Congrats to Sitecore on the impressive growth and remarkable profit. Thanks also for the quick response on this blog to clear things up.

It would be very interesting if Sitecore would also provide a breakdown of revenue between Sitecore CMS (the original product for websites) and Sitecore Intranet Portal.

From talking to customers, Sitecore CMS seems to be the main revenue driver, while behind the firewall of the Intranet Portal product adoption has been significant slower.

The very positive Danish article in Erhvervsbladet mentioned that 95 % of revenue is from software sales. I’m guessing that included in those 95 % must be the annual support revenue, but it is unclear to me how large a share this represents.
J. Boye » Blog Archive » Don’t expect CMS consolidation in 2009 December 17th, 2008 7:43

[...] CMS products. Having recently studied the annual reports of Danish vendors such as Dynamicweb and Sitecore, both seem very capable of surviving 2009 and beyond. The same goes for the larger European vendors [...]
» Day Software returns to profitability - J. Boye » Blog July 31st, 2009 7:43

[...] Based on software revenue, Day is a slightly smaller than Sitecore, which has experienced rapid growth [...]
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