inspiration Shares rose as much as 5% in extended trading Monday after the software vendor reported fiscal fourth-quarter results and quarterly revenue guidance that beat Wall Street expectations.
Here’s how the company did:
- Earnings: $1.67 per share, adjusted, versus $1.58 per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
- he won: $13.84 billion, compared to $13.74 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Oracle revenue grew 17% year-over-year in the quarter ended May 31, according to a statement. Net income was $3.32 billion, or $1.19 per share, compared to $3.19 billion, or $1.16 per share, in the year-ago quarter.
CEO Safra Katz said on a conference call that she expects fiscal first-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.12 to $1.16 per share and 8% to 10% revenue growth. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv had expected $1.14 in adjusted earnings per share on $12.34 billion in revenue, which would mean growth of 7.8%.
The company’s largest source of revenue, cloud services and licensing support, jumped 23% to $9.37 billion. But revenue from cloud and on-premises licenses fell 15% to $2.15 billion.
Revenue from cloud infrastructure totaled $1.4 billion, up 76%, accelerating from the 55% growth in the prior quarter. This part of Oracle is expanding faster than ever Microsoft And Google But it’s still much smaller than its competitors. On the call, Cutts said Oracle’s gross margin in the unit will continue to expand.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s president and chief technology officer, said the company will provide a cloud-generated artificial intelligence service associated with a partnership with Cohere, which has agreed to use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Microsoft, which has a partnership with startup OpenAI, offers the Azure OpenAI service, allowing organizations to deploy large language models to take human input and generate human-like responses.
“This new service protects the privacy of our enterprise customers’ training data, enabling those customers to securely use their private data to train their own large-language, specialized models,” Ellison said. He said that Oracle has started to use the tool internally.
During the quarter, Oracle said more of its cloud services were approved for use by US defense and intelligence agencies.
Excluding the after-hours move, Oracle shares are up nearly 43% this year, while the S&P 500 is up about 13%.
The stock rose 6% in regular trading, its best day in a year, after Wolfe Research analysts upgraded the stock to the equivalent of a buy from a contract based on improving financial conditions along with the company’s position in artificial intelligence.
He watches: Oracle was named a Top Pick at Jefferies
