Storage titan EMC endured a drop in both revenue and profit during a testing third quarter, but still topped its own – and Wall Street's – expectations.

The company turned over $3.52bn (£2.1bn) during Q3, down five per cent annually but eight per cent up on Q2. EMC indicated it had anticipated no more than five per cent sequential growth.

Third quarter GAAP net profit stood at $298.2m, a 24 per cent decrease on Q3 2008 but a 45 per cent increase on the preceding quarter.

Third quarter product and services revenue from content management and archiving, information storage and RSA Security was $3.03bn. The remainder of the total figure came from virtualisation vendor VMware, which is EMC majority owned. Geographically, the US contributed 54 per cent of total sales.

EMC expects fourth quarter revenue of $4bn, more or less flat on the corresponding period last year. Full-year sales are projected to be $13.9bn, about $1bn less than 2008. The vendor also claims it will generate $500m more in cost savings next year than it did in 2008.

EMC chief executive Joe Tucci described his firm's Q3 results as a "solid financial performance in a challenging economic climate".

"We have positioned EMC to capitalise on four of the higher-growth, multi-billion-dollar market opportunities around fully virtualised data centers, cloud computing, virtualised desktops and clients and next-generation backup and recovery," he added.