Oracle shares fell nearly 3% in extended trading Thursday after the enterprise software giant reported another quarterly revenue miss despite strong growth in its Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses.
For the second quarter, Oracle earned an adjusted 90 cents per share, up from 80 cents a year earlier, as revenue increased 0.5% to $9.61 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of 89 cents per share on revenue of $9.65 billion.
It was the sixth consecutive quarter that Oracle’s sales have either declined or grown by less than 0.5% from the year before.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz praised the performance of its Fusion and NetSuite enterprise resource planning software, which showed revenue growth of 37% and 29%, respectively.
Total cloud services and license support revenue rose 3% to $6.8 billion while cloud license and on-premise license revenue dropped 7.4% to $1.1 billion.
“This consistent rapid growth in the now multibillion dollar ERP segment of our cloud applications business has enabled Oracle to deliver a double-digit EPS growth rate year-after-year,” Catz said in a news release. “I fully expect we will do that again this year.”
But in the after-hours session Thursday, Oracle shares dropped 2.9% to $54.81 on news of the second-quarter results. “After weaker 1Q results … the company needs to pick up the pace for the remainder of the year,” Wedbush analysts Steve Koenig and Ahmad Khalil wrote in a client note before Thursday’s earnings release.
As Investor’s Business Daily reports, Oracle has been transitioning from “an antiquated business of on-premise database software licensing and maintenance to a subscription-based software model that taps the benefits of cloud computing.”
On an earnings call, Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said Oracle’s autonomous database and ERP products would “determine Oracle’s future in the cloud” and are already helping the growth of application and infrastructure products in adjacent market segments such as human capital management.
Rival SAP’s “customer base is up for grabs,” he said. “They didn’t reroute their applications for the cloud. That has created an enormous opportunity for Oracle.”
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