Oracle Corp. shares hit as high as 9 percent in New York on Thursday setting a record of $46.94, as it signaled the growing demand for its Cloud-based services, giving competition to Amazon.in and Salesforce.Inc.
Oracle reported that the business revenue rose to 62 percent in the third-quarter, while Oracle’s traditional on-premise software licenses declined to 16 percent. Beating analysts’ estimates, the company reported adjusted profit and sales of its quarter.
After continued revenue declines since last few years, the report marked three straight quarters of revenue gains.
Ellison said, “We are now in position to help our hundreds of thousands of databases customers move millions of Oracle databases to our infrastructure-as-a-service cloud,” Ellison said. “And before long, infrastructure-as-a-service will become Oracle’s largest cloud business.”
Rodney Nelson, a Morningstar analyst, via email said, “These results show a nice upward inflection in the overall business as new cloud revenues are more than offsetting the declines in software license sales.” He also added that performance and Larry’s comments may be fueling some additional optimism around the transition.
Oracle reported a rise to $2.24 billion from 4.5 percent in the recent quarter. Quarterly cash dividend rose from 15 cents to 19 cents per share. Average estimate of items rose to 69 cents from 62 cents. Adjusted sales rose to $9.27 billion in the period that ended Feb. 28, from 2.9 percent. Analysts predicted $9.26 billion on an average, as per the data compiled by Bloomberg.
CEO Safra Catz, predicted an increase from 25 percent to 29 percent in the current quarter on an adjusted basis and constant currency scenario. She also predicted 69 percent to 73 percent growth in the company’s HR and finance sections.
Overall, she expects adjusted sale of fourth quarter to range from a decline of 1 percent to a gain of 2 percent, keeping currency constant. Adjusted earnings are predicted to grow from 78 cents to 82 cents a share.
