Canonical Pulled In $110 Million, Down To ~440 Employees During Their Last Fiscal Year

For Canonical's fiscal year ending 31 March 2018, the company behind Ubuntu just filed their latest financial documents in the UK on Thursday. These documents with UK's Companies House offer a first look at the financial performance of Canonical since their 2017 shift to focus on profitability and doing away with Unity 8 and mobile/convergence work while laying off a sizable portion of their staff in the process.

The documents made public on 3 January include the following highlights:

- Canonical had $110 million USD in revenue for their year ending 31 March 2018. That's actually down from $126 million USD for the year prior. While down from last year, it's higher than the $106M and $95.7M they had in the years prior.

- Canonical's operating profit did rise from $2.0 million in 2017 to $6.2 million for their 2018 fiscal year. Their profit and total comprehensive income for the year came in at $11.1 million compared to a loss of 8.8 million the 2017 year.

- The average headcount dropped from 566 down to 443. The shedding of more than 120 employees was from dropping Unity 8 development and other areas to focus on the more profitable cloud/server interests. Due to the lower employee count, their employee costs were lower by sixteen million for the year.

- This was also the first year where Neil French replaced Jane Silber as the long-time director of Canonical. His compensation came in at just $224k compared to $730k for Jane's final year at the company.

These numbers continue moving in the right direction for the long-term profitability and sustainability of Canonical and thereby Ubuntu. It's worth pointing out that earlier in 2018, Canonical announced they would re-align their fiscal year from ending on 31 March to now 31 December, so they did just wrap up their shortened 2019 fiscal year this week albeit those numbers won't be available for some months. As these numbers aren't a breakthrough change for Canonical, presumably things are still looking like any IPO won't happen until at least 2020.