Oracle Profit Tops View, But Shares Fall After Revenue Misses

(RTTNews) - Business software giant Oracle Corp. (ORCL), Monday reported an increase in profit for the first quarter, as revenues grew reflecting strong growth in cloud services revenues. Earnings for the quarter trumped Wall Street estimates, but revenues fell short of expectations, sending the company's shares by about 5 percent in extended session.

Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle's first-quarter profit rose to $2.27 billion or $0.57 per share from $2.14 billion or $0.50 per share last year.

Adjusted earnings for the quarter increased to $0.71 per share from $0.61 per share last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $0.69 per share.

Revenues for the quarter rose 1 percent to $9.19 billion from $9.10 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $9.31 billion.

Oracle's cloud services and license support revenues climbed 3 percent to $6.61 billion, while On-Premise revenues declined 3 percent to $867 million.

"We are off to an excellent start with Q1 non-GAAP earnings per share growing 19% in constant currency," said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. "That strong earnings per share growth rate increases my confidence that we will deliver on another fiscal year of double-digit non-GAAP earnings per share growth."

"The vast majority of ERP applications running in the cloud are either Oracle Fusion or Oracle NetSuite systems," said Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd. "In the first quarter, we increased our market share as customers continued to buy Oracle Fusion ERP to replace their existing SAP and Workday ERP systems. The Oracle Fusion ERP customer count is now nearly 5,500, while the NetSuite ERP customer count is over 15,000. Virtually every analyst ranks Oracle as the market leader in cloud ERP."

Further, the company increased the authorization for share repurchases by $12.0 billion. The board also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.19 per share, payable on October 30 to shareholders as of October 16.

ORCL closed Monday's trading at $49.18, down $0.07 or 0.14%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further slipped $2.39 or 4.86% in the after-hours trade.