Restructuring Costs Affect Exabyte's 1997 Figures
As expected, Exabyte (Boulder, CO, Nasdaq: EXBT) swallowed over $21 million in special charges on its way to posting a $30.8 million net loss for fiscal 1997. The charges stem from Exabyte's efforts to exit its low-end business plans, and focus on the mid-range Windows NT and UNIX applications server storage markets. The charges consist of reductions in workforce, consolidation of facilities, write-off of inventories and termination of certain development programs and product lines. Also cut is the company's Eagle division, which produced Exabyte's Travan, NS and DigaMax product lines. For Q4 '97, Exabyte reports revenue of $74.641 million and a net loss of $17.593 million, compared with Q4 '96 revenue and net loss of $85.868 million and $2.042 million, respectively. Exabyte has repurchased 77,000 shares of its common stock through the open market, as part of a plan to repurchase up to 1 million shares of its stock. During the quarter Exabyte signed an OEM agreement with Computer Network Technology (CNT, Minneapolis) to connect CNT's UltraNet Storage Multiplexer SCSI-to-SCSI connectivity products to Exabyte's line of storage automation libraries.