Headlines:
Unisys Cites Charges in 55% Profit Slide
Unisys Corp., which continues to focus on increasing its services business, reported a 55% drop in third-quarter earnings, to $25.2 million.
Revenues were unchanged from a year earlier, at $1.45 billion, the Blue Bell, Pa., technology outsourcer said Thursday.
A pretax pension expense of $23.5 million and a pretax charge of $82 million related to job cuts contributed to the profit drop, Unisys said.
It also reported strong order growth. Its services operations landed outsourcing and infrastructure contracts during the quarter and posted revenue growth of 2%. Revenue from equipment sales fell 8%.
Earnings per share of 7 cents beat the Thomson First Call average estimate by a penny. Unisys expects to report full-year earnings of 68 to 72 cents a share, excluding pension accounting expenses.
Unisys also said this week that its Unisys Payment Services Ltd. had received a five-year extension of its check-processing and image-archiving agreement with BankWest of Perth, Australia.
The unit operates Australia's largest check archive. It handles 37% of the country's check volume.
Wachovia Queues Up SunGard Software
Wachovia Corp. will soon start using software from SunGard Data Systems Inc. to handle exception processing and transaction research.
The Charlotte company bought SunGard products for exception processing (intelliTRACS) and transaction research (intelliTRAN) at the end of last year and expects to have them up and running this quarter.
Wachovia first turned to SunGard in early 2000, when it decided to replace its 30-year-old tracking system, but at that time the Wayne, Pa., vendor did not have what Wachovia wanted, said Dan O'Malley, a senior vice president with the bank's wholesale unit. Two years later SunGard had developed intelliTRACS and intelliTRAN, which work together to provide the features Wachovia wanted, he said.
Mr. O'Malley's unit has used SunGard's intelliMATCH reconciliation software since 1998 and is now the largest user of that application, he said.
Though the new software was not custom-designed for Wachovia, "I do think that that discussion that we had in 2000" made a difference in the finished products, he said. Wachovia needed them because its old tracking methods generated "a large amount of work for our folks in trying to handle the kinks."
Mr. O'Malley said Wachovia would install the software in Philadelphia and New York first, then in other countries.
