SAS South Africa ahead of global annual revenue growth streak

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, recently announced financial results for 2002, reporting overall revenue of $1.18 billion. This represented a 4.4% increase in revenue and marked the 26th consecutive year of revenue growth for SAS.

SAS's South African operations also experienced continued profitable growth with close to 50% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in revenues.

"We are thrilled to report another record year locally," says Bill Hoggarth, managing director, SAS Institute SA. "This can be attributed to greater customer commitments as more and more companies see the benefits and potential of business intelligence (BI) solutions, particularly from SAS Institute."

Jim Goodnight, SAS president and CEO says: "In a difficult economic climate, SAS continued to grow. At a time when many of our competitors lost revenue and others relied on services to drive revenue growth, our software licence revenue grew by 4%, making us the largest independent enterprise software company worldwide by software licence revenue.

"In addition to increasing revenue from our existing customer base, we signed 1 100 new customers. These strong results are the outcome of our efforts over the last two years to package the application of our market-leading predictive analytics to specific business needs, ensure data and applications integration through support for open standards and direct access to an unrivalled number of data sources, maintain strong relationships with our existing customer base and increase awareness of SAS through more aggressive marketing activities."

"This international trend is echoed in SA," says Hoggarth. "And it is coupled with an expansion of business partners in the country as well as significant alliances with international major players."

"While most software vendors were slashing budgets and reducing their investment in R&D, we increased staff by 6% worldwide and invested 25% of revenues into research and development - nearly twice the average investment of large software companies - to support new development initiatives and prepare for the rebound in the economy. I believe we'll start to see the results of that investment in 2003," Hoggarth adds.

"SAS South Africa has also experienced a growth in staff numbers. This increase has had a positive impact on the contribution we have made to our customers' success."

Globally, SAS's growth was strong across all geographies, with 49% of revenue coming from the Americas, 42% from Europe/Middle East/Africa, and 9% from the Asia/Pacific region. Growth in 2002 revenue by industry mapped closely to SAS's focus on specific industries, with the most significant growth in financial services/banking at 25% and insurance at 7%.