Enterprise

Oracle shares jump as much as 9 percent after earnings top estimates

Key Points
  • Oracle beat estimates for earnings and revenue.
  • The company's infrastructure as a service revenue was up 23 percent.
Oracle beats on top line
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Oracle beats on top line

Oracle shares jumped as much as 9 percent in extended trading on Wednesday after the company beat earnings estimates for the fiscal fourth quarter.

  • EPS: 89 cents vs. 78 cents as expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters. This was excluding certain items.
  • Revenue: $10.9 billion vs. $10.5 billion expected by analysts.

Revenue for the quarter rose 3 percent. Subscription software reached more than $1 billion for the first time.

Oracle has been pushing hard in public cloud, aiming to compete with market leader Web Services (AWS). In May Oracle said would move thousands of databases to its cloud.

However, the second-generation cloud infrastructure that Oracle announced in September is "currently a bare-bones 'minimum viable product,'" Gartner said in a major industry report last week. This marked the first year Oracle was included in the report.

In the fourth quarter, Oracle produced $208 million in cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenue, up 23 percent from the prior year. (Last quarter CEO Safra Catz predicted IaaS revenue would increase by 25 percent to 29 percent.)

Revenue at AWS jumped 42 percent to $3.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter.

With respect to guidance, Oracle is predicting that it will deliver 59 to 61 cents in non-GAAP earnings per share and 4-6 percent revenue growth in the first quarter of its 2018 fiscal year. Analysts expected an average of 59 cents in earnings per share and 3.9 percent revenue growth for guidance, according to Thomson Reuters.