Quick Heal doubles net profit in Q3 amid flat revenue growth

Quick Heal Technologies, a homegrown software solutions company, doubled its net profit in the third quarter of the current fiscal compared to the corresponding period of the previous financial year.

The Pune-headquartered company said in a statement that its net profit had risen to Rs 16.09 crore for the three months ended December 2018, up from Rs 7.97 crore during the same period in 2017-2018.

The firm’s total revenue, however, rose only 3.64% to Rs 65.90 crore for the quarter.

Quick Heal offers security solutions to individuals, businesses and the government. The retail segment contributes 80% to its earnings while its enterprise & government offerings account for the rest.

“There has been a sustained momentum in the business with overall revenue growth of 15% in our YTD (year-to-date) operating performance,” said Kailash Katkar, managing director of Quick Heal Technologies.

“During the year, we made conscious efforts to offer highly customised endpoint security, network security, and data protection solutions to our enterprise customers and enhance engagement with the channel ecosystem,” he added. 

He acknowledged that the 7% growth in the enterprise & government segment for the nine months of the current fiscal was lower than expected.

Last September, two top executives at QuickHeal told TechCircle that the security provider was lining up a major push into the enterprise market, riding on new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

According to joint managing director and technology chief Sanjay Katkar, the company has close to 30,000 enterprise customers -- most of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). 

Quick Heal Technologies offers endpoint security, network security, enterprise mobility management and data protection solutions to enterprise customers through its brand Seqrite. The company counts Trend Micro, Kaspersky, McAfee and Symantec among its rivals.

Market research firm Gartner had estimated that the total spending on IT security services in India was likely to reach $1.7 billion by the end of 2018, an increase of 12.5% from 2017.