Oracle Trades Down Slightly in Earnings Reaction (1)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 18, 4:32PM EST

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Oracle (ORCL) met $0.22 EPS expectations, although as noted they have beat in each of the last 3 quarters and some were hoping for more. Revenues were $4.16 Billion instead of the $4.15 Billion estimate. Here is the break down (in new orders):

-software revenues were up 23% to $3.2B;
-database and middleware revenues up 9%;
-applications revenues up 28%;
-services revenues were up 41%.

Oracle President and CFO, Safra Catz: "We are now halfway through our five year plan targeting EPS growth at 20% per year. For the first two-and-a-half years we are comfortably ahead of that target."

He also noted that they are taking share from SAP in applications, from BEA in middleware, and from IBM in database. Its reference to BEA Suystems (BEAS) and the fact that they expect to take more from them and pass them later in the year doesn’t really telegraph a buyout is in the company’s mind. Ellison himself has pledged to only do buyouts that would actually assist the company meet its 20% bottomline growth.

We’ll have to see what the guidance is for the company before giving this a thumbs up or thumbs down. Shares are down 1.15% at $17.70 in after-hours trading, although shares were initially down about 2% after the report.

Jon C. Ogg
December 18, 2006

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.