How Macro Headwinds Are Holding Back Oracle

Revenue fell 5% from $11.33 billion in the same period of the previous year, but they would have been up 3% without the strengthening dollar.

Larry Ellison, Chairman and CTO of Oracle, gave the company’s outlook for the coming year:

We expect to book between $1.5 and $2.0 billion of new SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) business this fiscal year. That means Oracle would sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than salesforce.com plans to sell in their current fiscal year — the only remaining question is how much more. Oracle’s planned SaaS and PaaS revenue growth rate is around 60% in constant currency; salesforce.com has a planned growth rate of around 20%. When you contrast those growth rates it becomes clear that Oracle is on its way to becoming the world’s largest enterprise cloud company.

In terms of its segments Oracle reported the following results (note that comparisons are sequential):

• Software and Cloud Revenues were $8.4 billion, down 6%, but up 2% in constant currency
• Cloud SaaS and PaaS revenues were $416 million, growing 29%, and up 35% in constant currency
• Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues were $160 million, increasing 25%, and up 31% in constant currency
• Hardware Systems Revenues were $1.4 billion, down 4%, but up 5% in constant currency

The board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share on outstanding common stock.

Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, commented on the earnings:

Coming into Q4, we forecast selling $300 million of new SaaS and PaaS annual recurring revenue. We dramatically beat that forecast by selling a cloud industry all-time-record amount of $426 million of new SaaS and PaaS business. That is a year-over-year bookings growth rate of over 200%. As our multi-billion dollar cloud business gets bigger, our SaaS and PaaS revenue growth rates are on their way up to 60% in constant currency. Compare this to our primary cloud competitors’ whose own revenue growth forecasts are on their way down to 44% and 22%.

At the end of the quarter Oracle recorded $54.4 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short term investments. At the same time in the previous year, the company had $38.8 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short term investments.

Shares of Oracle closed Wednesday up 0.6% at $44.91 on a 52-week trading range of $35.82 to $46.71. Following the release of earnings, shares were down 6.6% at $41.93 in the after-hours trading session. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $46.50.