How Oracle Won Big on Mixed Earnings

[cnxvideo id=”655426″ placement=”ros”]Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) reported fiscal third-quarter financial results after markets closed on Wednesday. The company posted $0.69 in earnings per share (EPS) and $9.21 billion in revenue, compared with consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters that called for $0.62 in EPS and $9.26 billion in revenue. The same period from last year had $0.64 in EPS and $9.01 billion in revenue.

Short-term deferred revenues were $7.4 billion, up 7% in U.S. dollars and constant currency compared with last year.

Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $1.0 billion, up 73% in U.S. dollars and up 74% in constant currency. Also, total Cloud Revenues, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), were $1.2 billion, up 62% in U.S. dollars and up 63% in constant currency. Total Cloud and On-Premise Software Revenues were $7.4 billion, up 4% in U.S. dollars and up 5% in constant currency.

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Also during the quarter, the board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.19 per share of outstanding common stock, reflecting a 27% increase over the current quarterly dividend of $0.15. This increased dividend will be paid to stockholders of record as of the close of business on April 12, 2017, with a payment date of April 26, 2017.

Safra Catz, Oracle CEO, commented:

The hyper-growth we continue to experience in the cloud has rapidly driven both our SaaS and PaaS businesses to scale. On an annualized non-GAAP basis, our total cloud business has reached the $5 billion mark, and our SaaS and PaaS businesses grew at the astonishing rate of 85% in Q3. That growth and the resulting scale enabled our SaaS and PaaS businesses to increase non-GAAP gross margins to 65%.  Our new, large, fast growing, high-margin cloud businesses are driving Oracle’s total revenue and earnings up and improving nearly every important non-GAAP business metric you care to inspect; total revenue is up, margins are up, operating income is up, net income is up, EPS is up. Take a look. Q3 was a very strong quarter.

Shares of Oracle closed Wednesday at $42.91, with a consensus analyst price target of $44.36 and a 52-week trading range of $37.62 to $43.26. Following the release of the earnings report the stock was up 3.1% at $44.35 in the after-hours trading session.

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