Canonical Has Been Weathering The Pandemic Well: Turned A Profit, Back Above 500 Employees

Thanks to Canonical's distributed workforce with most of their employees working from home even pre-pandemic and the booming Linux ecosystem, the Ubuntu maker performed very well over 2020 and even grew its headcount back above 500 employees and managed to swing from a loss in 2019 to a profit in 2020.

Canonical Group Limited recently filed their financial report for their year-end 31 December 2020. While the directors acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic remains a concern, they did perform well during 2020.

Canonical Holdings Limited saw revenue grow from $119M in 2019 to $138M in 2020. While Canonical Holdings was at an operating loss of $2M in 2019, during 2020 that turned around and they ended with an operating profit of $20M. The average employee headcount also rose from 473 in 2019 to 505 in 2020. Granted, that's still down from their 700+ employees years ago when pursuing Ubuntu Touch and their other ambitions before laying off staff and focusing more on the enterprise, IoT, and cloud commercial operations.

Amid the pandemic Canonical not only made a profit but also expanded operations. On the Canonical Group limited side their operating profit went from $0.4M to $5.3M USD.

Canonical does have going concern though over the pandemic disrupting some of their customers and in turn may lead to lower new sales. Among their forecasts though indicate they could see an approximate up to 50% reduction in sales can be "comfortably sustained" before they would need to enact new cost-cutting measures. But fortunately they don't believe they will face such conditions and specifically mention the public cloud operators as in helping to provide them economic stability during this challenging pandemic.

Those curious about Canonical's financial performance during the past year can be found via UK Companies House.