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Oracle Stock: This Is An Uphill Task For Oracle Corporation…

By Mukta Samtani BMS, MBA, PhD. Published : December 16, 2016

ORCL StockOracle Corporation (ORCL Stock) In Tough Race With The Rivals

Oracle Corp (NYSE:ORCL) announced its second quarter earnings after hours Thursday. The company has been in news since Oracle CEO Safra Catz  attended the tech meet with Donald Trump together with other technology leaders on Wednesday. The lower than expected revenue growth seems to have dampened ORCL stock which is down by over 2% in after hours trade.

However, the company wants to get ahead of its two strong rivals, salesforce.com inc (NYSE:CRM) and Amazon Web Services by Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) which looks like a difficult task.

The company posted fiscal second-quarter adjusted earnings of $0.61 per share on revenue of $9.07 billion. The growth in revenue turned out to be short of expectations. In the earnings call, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said that in this quarter, the effects of currency movement were more than she had included in her guidance. This was mostly due to strengthening U.S. Dollar after recent elections in U.S. and Europe, resulting in currency headwind of 1 percent in total revenue.

The cloud business posted impressive growth. Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $878 million, up 81% in U.S. Dollars and up 89% in constant currency. Total Cloud Revenues, including Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), were $1.1 billion, up 62% in U.S. Dollars and up 64% in constant currency. (Source: Press Release, Oracle Corporation, December 15, 2016).

The Oracle CEO also said that the Cloud SaaS & PaaS revenue growth rate has increased for four consecutive quarters. She added that when salesforce.com had crossed the billion dollar milestone, their SaaS and PaaS subscription growth rate had slowed down to 36%, even after including all their acquisitions.

The company has been investing heavily in its cloud business and also acquired NetSuite this year. Oracle stock has returned about 9% over the past one year as compared to 13% gains posted by S&P 500.

“Oracle has now passed salesforce.com and become number one in SaaS cloud applications sales to customers with over 1,000 employees according to the latest IDC report,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. He further emphasized that with the acquisition of NetSuite, the company plans on being the #1 cloud applications service provider for companies with less than 1,000 employees as well.

The company is also trying to catch up with Amazon Web Services. In Oracle OpenWorld conference in September this year, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison had demonstrated that Amazon databases were 20 years behind the latest release of the Oracle Database in the Cloud. (Source: Press Release, Oracle Corporation, September 20, 2016). However, AWS is a clear leader at the moment.

The next year holds more promise for the business software company as it transitions from its core database business to the high growth areas and this shall lift the ORCL stock.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz To Advise Donald Trump

As the company gets ready to prove its mettle in the cloud in next year, the focus would also be on Oracle CEO Safra Catz as she joins the executive committee of the president-elect’s transition team. She is optimistic that Donald Trump will reform the tax code and loosen regulations. This is likely to benefit the technology sector.

However, Oracle has a lot of catching up to do and the huge investments shall take some time to bear fruit. Oracle stock is likely to remain under pressure for a while.


Editor’s Note: Hi, Mukta Samtani here. If you enjoyed this article, you can get more of my opinions and commentaries in our popular daily tech letter, Profit Confidential. Published daily, it’s FREE! Join us when you click here now.


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