Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, provided some details on Mozilla's 2005 financial metrics on her blog last week in anticipation of the data becoming publicly available per U.S. tax filings.
I'm a big fan of the Firefox browser (as are millions of others obviously), but must admit to some naivety as it relates to Mozilla's sterling financials:
In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.
The combined expenses of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation were approximately $8.2M in 2005, of which approximately $3M was associated with the Foundation. By far the biggest portion of these expenses went to support the large and growing group of people dedicated to creating and promoting Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla open source products and technologies. The rate of expenses increased over the year as new employees came on board. The unspent revenue provides a reserve fund that allows the Mozilla Foundation flexibility and long term stability.
*** Emphasis is mine
84% operating margins is an astounding accomplishment, unique circumstances or not. 
It hardly seems a leap to think Mozilla didn't grow its operating income in 2006, even on a moderated revenue growth ramp. What would the public markets pay for an open source, productivity software vendor with $50mm+ in 2006 operating income growing revenues in the high double digits?
To quote Larry David...those numbers are pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Related Articles:
mozilla mitchell baker financials open source innovation woodrow
Comments