Fusion-io Growing Fast but Still Looking for Profits

According to an IDC report, the solid state drive (SSD) market is expected to see strong growth in the coming years. Worldwide SSD shipments are projected to grow at an annual rate of 51.5% over the period 2010 to 2015. Gartner expects the enterprise flash market to be worth $4.5 billion by 2015.  Memory player Fusion-io has seen a year go by since it went public on the NYSE despite economic conditions.

Fusion-io’s Financials
Fusion-io’s (NYSE:FIO) Q4 revenues grew 49% over the year to $106.6 million, ahead of the market’s target of $95.8 million. EPS of $0.09 was also ahead of the Street’s projected earnings of $0.03 per share.

Fusion closed the year with revenues increasing 82% over the year to $359.3 million. However, the company was not profitable and ended the year with a net loss of $0.06 per share.

At the end of the year, Fusion reported a presence in 59 countries. The number of customers served has grown from 1,500 a year ago to nearly 3,500. The company’s customer list now includes more than half of the Fortune 100 list. But Apple and Facebook remain the dominant customers. At the end of the quarter, Apple and Facebook combined brought in 53% of revenues. That is down from 55% a quarter ago and 65% a year ago.

For the current year, Fusion expects revenues of $521 million-$539 million. Non-GAAP operating margins are projected at 12% for the year. The market projects revenues of $512 million for the year.

Partnerhsips with Princeton and Cisco
As part of its product expansion drive, Fusion-io announced the launch of its new ION Data Accelerator software to help transform customers’ server platforms into shared ioMemory application acceleration appliances.

Besides product development, Fusion is also partnering with several industry leaders to help drive market expansion. Earlier last month, it announced a tie-up with storage industry leader NetApp, which will enable Fusion-io to provide solutions using server-side flash and caching software products that integrate with the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier.

To drive R&D, it partnered with Princeton University to work on a design of a susbsystem, Extended Memory. Extended Memory will offer more affordable solutions to organizations to expand the company’s in-memory data sets with a software solution that features data tiers between available DRAM in the system and the persistent NAND flash tier.

It also expanded its OEM relationship with Cisco so that Fusion ioMemory will be inbuilt in the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Server to amplify in-server performance in all UCS B-series blade servers.

Fusion-io’sstock is trading at $27.91 with a market capitalization of $2.64 billion. Since listing, the stock touched a high of $41.74 in November 2011.