Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) is scheduled to release its fiscal fourth-quarter financial results after the markets close on Wednesday. The consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters are calling for $0.78 in earnings per share (EPS) and $10.45 billion in revenue. The same period of last year reportedly had EPS of $0.81 and $10.6 billion in revenue.
In its most recent earnings report, management noted that its hyper-growth in the cloud has rapidly driven both Oracle’s SaaS and PaaS businesses to scale. On an annualized non-GAAP basis, its total cloud business has reached the $5 billion mark, and the SaaS and PaaS businesses grew at the astonishing rate of 85% in the fiscal third quarter.
This growth and the resulting scale enabled its SaaS and PaaS businesses to increase gross margins to 65%. Its new, large, fast growing, high-margin cloud businesses are driving Oracle’s third-quarter total revenue and earnings up and improving nearly every important non-GAAP business metric: total revenue was up, margins were up, operating income was up, net income was up, EPS were up.
A few analysts weighed in on Oracle ahead of earnings:
- Jefferies has a Buy rating with a $52 price target.
- Sanford Bernstein has an Outperform rating with a $54 price target.
- Wedbush has a Neutral rating with a $43 price target.
- Goldman Sachs has a Buy rating with a $49 price target.
- Canaccord Genuity has a Buy rating with a $49 price target.
- Societe Generale has a Hold rating with a $50 price target.
Excluding Wednesday’s move, the stock has outperformed the broad markets with a gain of about 19% year to date. Over the past 52 weeks, the stock is up only 15%.
Shares of Oracle were last seen up 1.1% at $46.34 on Wednesday, with a consensus analyst price target of $48.64 and a 52-week range of $37.62 to $46.99.
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