(Bloomberg) — Oracle Corp. fell after reporting sales that weren’t enough to exceed robust investor expectations for the company’s cloud-computing business.
The world’s second-largest software maker said revenue increased 7.5% to $11.2 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter. Analysts polled by Bloomberg projected $11 billion, on average. Profit, excluding some items, was $1.54 a share, the Austin, Texas-based company said Tuesday in a statement. Analysts, on average, estimated $1.31.
Investors have bid up Oracle stock on enthusiasm for cloud computing as Executive Chairman Larry Ellison and Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz have tried to boost revenue by focusing on that area. But the company lags far behind market leader Amazon.com Inc. and rivals Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google in sales of cloud infrastructure. Oracle’s sales growth fell in the quarter short of what some shareholders hoped to see.
Revenue from cloud services and license support increased 8% to $7.4 billion, just topping analysts’ estimates of $7.3 billion. That metric includes sales from hosting customers’ data in the cloud, but a large portion is generated by maintenance fees for traditional software kept on clients’ corporate servers.
“They’re getting better in cloud. But they lumped it all together and call everything cloud,” Dan Morgan, senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Co., said before the results were released. “So we can’t even hang our hat on, ‘OK the cloud business is growing at a faster rate even if database growth is like 3%.”
Shares declined about 2.5% in extended trading after closing at $81.64 in New York. Oracle’s stock has gained 26% this year, almost double the increase in the S&P 500 Index.
Oracle said sales of its Fusion application for managing corporate finances rose 46% in the period — compared with 30% growth reported in the fiscal third quarter. Revenue from NetSuite’s financial software, targeted to small- and mid-sized businesses, rose 26%, after a 24% gain in the previous period.
The results marked the fourth straight quarter of year-over-year revenue growth after two consecutive fiscal years of declining sales.
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