Oracle earnings show another cloud miss, stock falls

Oracle Corp. shares dropped in the extended session Monday after the enterprise software giant topped Wall Street earnings estimates but fell short on revenue, driven by weaker-than-expected cloud-services sales.

Oracle ORCL, -0.14%  shares, which had been down as much as 5% after hours, were last down 3.6%. That follows a 0.1% decline to close the regular session at $49.19. At Monday’s close, Oracle shares were up 4% for the year, compared with a 5.4% gain on the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.35% an 8.1% advance on the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.56%  , and a 14.4% rise on the Nasdaq Composite COMP, -1.43%  

For the fiscal first quarter, Oracle reported revenue of $9.19 billion, up from $9.1 billion in the year-ago period, but Wall Street had expected revenue of $9.24 billion from Oracle.

That $50 million revenue miss was driven by a shortfall in cloud services and license support revenue. Oracle reported cloud services and license support revenue of $6.61 billion for the quarter, when analysts surveyed by FactSet estimated total cloud services and license support revenue of $6.68 billion.

Of that, analysts were calling for Software-as-a-Service revenue of $1.31 billion, but Oracle did not break out that level of detail in its earnings report. Last quarter, the company surprised investors when it did not publish more granular results from its cloud business.

On the conference call, co-Chief Executive Safra Catz forecast adjusted fiscal second-quarter earnings of 78 cents to 80 cents a share, while analysts surveyed by FactSet expect 79 cents a share.

The company reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $2.27 billion, or 57 cents a share, compared with $2.14 billion, or 50 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings were 71 cents a share. Oracle, on average, was expected to post adjusted earnings of 68 cents a share.

Just after the fiscal first quarter ended in September, Thomas Kurian, who led Oracle’s cloud business, said he was taking “extended time off”. While some speculated that this might be a permanent move, Co-Chief Executive Mark Hurd brushed off those rumors Monday.

“He’s taking a break and we expect him back,” Hurd said of Kurian during the conference call.

Monday’s results are the last earnings report before Oracle rolls out it annual OpenWorld User Conference, which runs from Oct. 22 to Oct. 25, in San Francisco.