Bull is not listed on any of the American stock exchanges, which means that they have different rules about what news they have to share with investors. In particular I could not find the words “profit” or “loss” in their earnings release, and the company does not appear to be making available the kinds of quarterly financial statements that would reveal insight into whether they lost or made money.
What they want you to care about, it seems, is how effective they are being in their target segments, of which HPC is a major factor. And, according to them, they are doing well here. From their earnings release
The growth of Bull’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) offering, the dynamism of the open servers solutions and, to a lesser extent, the new secure storage solutions integration offerings explain the extremely good performance of this business segment, both in terms of order intake (up by 33%) and revenue (€74.7 million; up by 28.7%).
…High-Performance Computing: Bull strengthens its position as a reference in Europe Computer simulation offers companies the capacity to develop new products extremely rapidly, with the immediate benefit of improving time-to-market. Bull’s dynamic growth in HPC continued during the quarter of 2009, with the aim of achieving revenue of €100 million by the end of 2009. The Jülich Research Center (Forschungzentrum Jülich) in Germany chose Bull to provide it with a second supercomputer. The new 100 Teraflops machine is destined to host applications from the European Union’s Fusion project. Along with the Bull JuRoPA supercomputer ordered in 2008, it will constitute a computing platform capable of delivering over 300 Teraflops of power; placing it among the leading group of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.
The company is dominated by business from Europe, and that business is dominated by France. This picture actually got a little worse during this quarter due to the sale of the Group’s Medicaid-related business in the USA, which took place in Q4 2008, according to the company.
