Oracle Wins Big in Q4

Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) reported fiscal fourth-quarter financial results after markets closed Wednesday. The company said that it had $0.89 in earnings per share (EPS) and $10.94 billion in revenue, compared with consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters that called for $0.78 in EPS and $10.45 billion in revenue. The same period from last year had $0.81 in EPS and $10.6 billion in revenue.

Short-term deferred revenues were up 8% to $8.2 billion compared with a year ago. The company sold $855 million of new annually recurring cloud revenue (ARR) in this quarter, putting Oracle over its $2 billion ARR bookings goal for the 2017 fiscal year.

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In terms of its segments the company reported:

• Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) revenues grew 67% to $964 million from last year.
• Cloud Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) grew 40% to $397 million.
• New software licenses revenues fell 5% to $2.63 billion.
• Software license updates and product support revenues increased 2% to $4.90 billion.
• Hardware revenues fell 13% to $1.11 billion.
• Services revenues grew 3% to $894 million.

Operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was up 3% to $14.1 billion. On the books, cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaled $66.1 billion at the end of the quarter, versus $56.1 billion at the end of the same period last year.

Safra Catz, Oracle CEO, commented:

Our fourth quarter results were very strong as revenue growth and earnings per share both substantially exceeded the high end of guidance. We continue to experience rapid adoption of the Oracle Cloud led by the 75% growth in our SaaS business in Q4. This cloud hyper-growth is expanding our operating margins, and we expect earnings per share growth to accelerate in fiscal 2018.

Shares of Oracle closed Wednesday up 1.1% at $46.34, with a consensus analyst price target of $48.64 and a 52-week range of $37.62 to $46.99. Following the release of the earnings report the stock was initially up 8.6% at $50.13 in the after-hours trading session.

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