Oracle Edges Forecasts, Helped by Acquisitions
Oracle, the world's third-largest software maker, reported a 25% rise in quarterly profit on Thursday, boosted by higher-than-expected sales of new software.
The company's revenue and earnings per share excluding items beat average Wall Street expectations. Shares rose more than 4% in heavy trading on Friday.
"We continue to take applications market share from SAP," Oracle President Charles Phillips said in a statement.
Oracle is the leader in database software, ahead of IBM, and is No. 2 in business applications, behind Germany's SAP.
Net income jumped to $840 million, or 16 cents per share, for the first quarter ended August 31, from $670 million, or 13 cents, a year earlier.
Revenue rose 26% to $4.53 billion, beating the average analyst target of $4.36 billion, according to analysts' estimates.
Earnings, excluding items such as stock-based compensation expenses and acquisition-related charges, were 22 cents per share, a penny above the average Wall Street expectation, according to Reuters Estimates.
The results were buoyed by sales of products that were not in their lineup a year ago. Oracle added them after buying Hyperion Solutions, Stellent, MetaSolv and several other software makers over the past year.
Revenue from new software licenses rose 35% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion. Three months ago, it had told investors it expected new software licenses to rise between 20% and 30% from the year-earlier period.
Shares of Oracle trade at about 16 times the average outlook for next year's earnings per share, and slightly above the future price-to-earnings ratio for Microsoft, which is 16.
