Red Hat’s been busy today, dominating hashtag streams related to the OpenStack Summit, an annual event taking place in Portland this week.  Most recently, the company’s board of directors authorized $300 million in common stock repurchases “from time to time on the open market or in privately negotiated transaction”. This new program replaces the previous $300 million fund, which was completed on February 28 at an average price of $49.15 per share for a total of 3.6 million shares.  That adds up to $179 million.
“Over the last 13 months  we have repurchased $300 million or 5.9 million shares of Red Hat common stock under the current program, equivalent to 3% of our shares outstanding as of February 28, 2013,” stated Charlie Peters the executive vice president and CFO of Red Hat.
“Our management team and Board of Directors have a strong conviction in our long-term growth prospects and our ability to generate profits and cash flow. We believe that stock repurchases demonstrate our commitment to building shareholder value as well as confidence in achieving long-term growth.”
As of February, Red Hat had about 193.0 million shares of common stock. The company’s working capital of $1.3 billion will be used to fund the renewed repurchase program.
Red Hat reported its fourth quarter results late last month. The company, known for being one of the first vendors to “get” open-source enterprise software right, saw revenue increase by 17 percent to $348 million. Subscription revenue accounted for $303 million of that, up 19 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012. Red Hat’s full year revenue was $1.33 billion, $1.15 billion of which was generated from subscription sales.

Red Hat’s growth can be credited to the company’s ability to spot opportunities in the open-source community. The vendor is listed as a contributor to the recently announced OpenDaylight  project, and yesterday it launched its very ownfree OpenStack distribution.