Oracle Earns 69 Cents per Share

After the closing bell, Oracle ($ORCL) reported fiscal Q2 earnings of 69 cents per share. That was a penny better than the Street.

The shares jumped more than 5% in the after-hours market, and that comes on top of a 1.3% gain during the day session. This was the first earnings report without Larry Ellison as CEO. Three months ago, the company gave us a range of 66 to 70 cents per share. Revenues came in at $9.6 billion which was more than the forecast $9.51 billion.

Combined sales in Oracle’s cloud software, platform and infrastructure businesses were $516 million, up 45 percent from a year earlier. The company started disclosing cloud revenue two quarters ago.

“The stock is trading on that cloud growth,” Morgan said.

Analysts and money managers are looking at the performance of Oracle’s cloud products to gauge the company’s ability to change its core businesses to compete with Salesforce, Workday Inc., Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s Web services unit and other cloud-computing providers. Oracle spent more than $50 billion to acquire about 100 companies in the past decade to bolster its core businesses of database, hardware and business-applications, and help it gain share in the cloud.

Oracle is on track to sell more than $1 billion of new cloud subscriptions next fiscal year, Ellison said on a conference call. The company is also catching up to Salesforce in new cloud subscriptions, said Ellison, who is now Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer.

“Stay tuned, it’s going to be close,” Ellison said. “We’re catching up to them, and catching up very quickly.”

For Q3, Oracle expects revenue growth of 4% to 8%, earnings to range between 69 and 74 cents per share. The company added the forex could ping them for four cents per share this quarter. Wall Street had been expecting earnings of 73 cents per share.

Posted by on December 17th, 2014 at 11:57 pm


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