Why Oracle Earnings Are So Great

By Chris Lange Updated Jan 12, 8:09AM EST · Published Sep 14, 4:25PM EDT

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Why Oracle Earnings Are So Great — © Wikimedia Commons

Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) released fiscal first-quarter financial results after markets closed Thursday. The software giant said that it had $0.62 in earnings per share (EPS) and $9.2 billion in revenue, compared with consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters that called for $0.60 in EPS and $9.03 billion in revenue. The same period from last year had $0.55 in EPS and $8.61 billion in revenue.

Short-term deferred revenues were up 9% year over year to $10.3 billion.

Cloud plus On-Premise Software Revenues were up 9% to $7.4 billion.

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Total Cloud Revenues were up 51% to $1.5 billion, compared to last year. Total Cloud revenues consisted of Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) revenues which were up 62% to $1.1 billion and Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) plus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) revenues which were also up 28% to $400 million.

Hardware revenues totaled $943 million, a decrease of 5% from last year. Services revenues grew 6% to $860 million.

On the books, cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities totaled $66.9 billion at the end of the quarter, compared with $66.1 billion at the end of the previous fiscal year.

Safra Catz, Oracle CEO, commented:

The sustained hyper-growth in our multi-billion dollar cloud business continues to drive Oracle’s overall revenue and earnings higher and higher. In Q1, total revenues were up 7%, GAAP EPS was up 19%, and non-GAAP EPS was up 12%. Oracle is off to a very, very strong start in FY18.

Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO, added:

With SaaS revenue up 62%, our cloud applications business continues to grow more than twice as fast as Salesforce.com. ERP is our largest and most important cloud applications business. We now have about 5,000 Fusion ERP customers plus 12,000 NetSuite ERP customers in the Oracle Cloud. That’s 30 times more ERP customers than Workday.

Shares of Oracle closed Thursday at $52.84, with a consensus analyst price target of $55.03 and a 52-week range of $37.62 to $53.14. Following the release of the earnings report, the stock was up 1.5% at $53.60 in the after-hours trading session.

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About the Author Chris Lange →

Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics.

Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications.

A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.