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Investing.com -- Shares in Akamai Technologies Inc (O:AKAM) surged more than 15% in after-hours trading, in spite of sliding fourth quarter profits, after the top content delivery network and cloud-services provider unveiled major changes with its organizational structure aimed at accelerating its productivity and growth opportunities in the near future.
For the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015, Akamai reported net profits of $88.4 million or 0.49 per share, slightly below earnings of $97.1 million or 0.54 during the same period in 2014. The earnings also fell below the company's own expectations of earnings per share of 0.60 to 0.64 on the quarter. Akamai also finished with revenues of $579.2 million for the three-month period, up by 8% on a year-over-year basis. The company expected to end the quarter with sales in between $557 and $577 million.
"Akamai's solid fourth quarter performance capped off an excellent year on both the top and bottom lines," said Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai. "Revenue achievement in the quarter was driven by a robust online holiday shopping season, as well as continued rapid growth of our Cloud Security Solutions."
Investors, though, were more focused on the evolutionary changes the company intends to make with its structure, which it expects to put into place as early as the start of the second quarter. At that time, Akamai will break its marketing teams and its channels and global sales divisions into two separate divisions in order to focus more intently on the company's media and web customers. The new structure is aimed at creating more effective integration between customer requirements and product innovation, the company said in a statement.
"This is a natural evolution of our company structure intended to help us better serve our customers and further accelerate growth. We've made great strides in diversifying our product portfolio in recent years, delivering record sales and profitability," Leighton added.
"As we close out another excellent year, I believe our Media and Web businesses are now at the scale where a transition to this type of customer- and solutions-centric organization makes sense."
Shares in Akamai jumped 6.16 or 15.57% to 45.73 in after-hours trading.