Jul. 5--There may be no economic turnaround in sight when Lawson Software reports year-end earnings this week, but there probably won't be any erosion of earnings, either -- a situation analysts attribute to good management and aggressive cost-cutting.

These are tough times for companies such as St. Paul-based Lawson that market big-ticket corporate software systems for what is sometimes called Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP. Lawson has bigger competitors, such as Oracle and the German firm SAP, but all have been hurt by the recession because their customers' information technology budgets are down 10 to 15 percent, analysts said.

But profits at Lawson look stable despite an undeniable decline in revenue. Although the company signaled to analysts in April that they were $20 million too high on fourth quarter revenue -- causing Wall Street's consensus to drop from $197 million to about $177 million -- there's been no change in the consensus on earnings: 10 cents a share.

The reason is good management and a business model that accommodates cost-cutting, analysts said. The consensus recommendation on the stock last week was "buy."

"Lawson is a well-run company," said analyst Peter Goldmacher of Cowen and Co. in San Francisco. "You can't save your way to prosperity -- you want both revenue growth and profit margin expansion. But if there's no revenue growth, you take the margin expansion."

In addition, the chief cost in the software business is people, and trimming people is easier than closing plants or assembly lines, he said.

"Fixed costs are more easily manipulated in a software company because you can keep trimming headcount to a point where the profit margin stays relatively stable," Goldmacher said. In May, Lawson said it would eliminate 150 jobs, or 4 percent of its global workforce. The majority of cuts would come in Europe, it said. Lawson said it expected to take a $6 million pre-tax charge for severance and related benefits.

Like the stocks of other tech companies, its shares have outperformed the S&P 500 in the past several months, suggesting it might be a harbinger of good economic news. It hit a 2009 high closing price of $5.87 a share in May, although that was well below its 2008 high closing price of $9.94 a share in January 2008. In between, the stock hit a 2008 low closing price of $2.82 in November. It closed Thursday at $5.43.

But analysts say the stock performance is more likely the result of tech companies bottoming out from a sharp decline earlier this year.