Net income for the second quarter of 2006 was $24,7m or $0,13 per diluted share, down by 41% from $41,9m or $0,21 per diluted share in the second quarter of 2005, and up by 70% from $14,5m or $0,07 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2006.

"The second quarter's performance continued to reflect strong demand across geographies and major operating segments and extended our double digit year-over-year revenue growth streak to twelve consecutive quarters. Sequentially, top line growth that outpaced spending growth coupled with gross margin improvement resulted in operating income more than doubling in the second quarter versus the first quarter 2006," says Rodger B. Dowdell, Jr., APC's president and CEO.

"Through the streamlining of operations, supply chain initiatives and pricing actions, we are taking steps to improve our gross margin, while maintaining investments in innovation, sales and marketing programs to drive awareness and adoption of APC's network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) solutions globally. Despite continued progress in our operations and supply chain initiatives, the year-over-year trends remain unfavourable although less so than previous quarters. Additionally, year-over-year margins were also negatively impacted in the quarter by segment and product mix as well as pricing," continues Dowdell.

For the second quarter of 2006, revenue in APC's Large Systems segment, consisting primarily of 3-phase uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), APC Global Services, precision cooling and ancillary products for data centres, facilities and communication applications, increased by 33% year-over-year to $139,5m. Continued year-over-year growth in InfraStruXure solutions, including Symmetra three-phase UPSs, fuelled the top line performance of the segment.

"In 2002, APC first set out to educate customers about the benefits of a modular, scalable NCPI solution," states Dowdell. "We talked to customers about lowering their total cost of ownership and adapting to rapidly changing IT demands while maintaining high levels of availability. These are simple themes for very complex problems. Turning the clock ahead to 2006, experts now predict that powering and cooling the data centre will soon become more expensive than purchasing the IT equipment to populate it."