Global Courant
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer, speaks at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on September 16, 2019.
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Oracle Shares rose as much as 5% in extended trading on Monday after the software vendor announced fourth-quarter fiscal results and quarterly revenue expectations that beat Wall Street’s expectations.
Here’s how the company did it:
Earnings: $1.67 per share, adjusted, vs. $1.58 per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv. Revenue: $13.84 billion, vs. $13.74 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Oracle’s revenue grew 17% year over year in the quarter ended May 31, according to a rack. Net income was $3.32 billion, or $1.19 per share, compared to $3.19 billion, or $1.16 per share, in the same quarter last year.
CEO Safra Catz said on a conference call that she expects adjusted earnings of $1.12 to $1.16 per share and revenue growth of 8% to 10% for the fiscal first quarter. Analysts polled by Refinitiv had expected adjusted earnings per share of $1.14 on revenue of $12.34 billion, representing growth of 7.8%.
The company’s top source of revenue, cloud services and licensing support, rose 23% to $9.37 billion. But cloud licensing and on-premises revenues fell 15% to $2.15 billion.
Cloud infrastructure revenue totaled $1.4 billion, up 76%, an acceleration from the prior quarter’s 55% growth. That part of Oracle is expanding faster than Microsoft And Google but it is still much smaller than that of their rivals. Oracle’s gross margin in the unit will continue to grow, Catz said on the call.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and technology chief, said the company will introduce a generative artificial intelligence cloud service tied to a partnership with startup Cohere, which has agreed to use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Microsoft, which has partnered with startup OpenAI, offers the Azure OpenAI service, which enables organizations to deploy large language models to absorb human input and generate human-like responses.
“This new service protects the privacy of our enterprise customers’ training data, allowing those customers to securely use their own private data to train their own private specialized large language models,” said Ellison. Oracle has started using the tool internally, he said.
During the quarter, Oracle said more of its cloud services had received approval for use by US defense and intelligence agencies.
Excluding the after-hours move, shares of Oracle are up nearly 43% so far this year, while the S&P 500 index is up about 13%.
The stock rose 6% in regular trading, its best day in a year, after analysts at Wolfe Research upgraded the stock to the equivalent of a buy from a hold based on improving financials and the company’s position in AI .
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