Oracle reports earnings and revenue beat for Q4

Computer technology company Oracle (ORCL), whose stock has remained almost flat year-over-year with not much to cheer for the short-term investors, despite beating estimates for the last three quarters, again reported results that beat consensus estimates for both top and bottom line in its final quarter of fiscal 2018. Revenue grew 3% to $11.25 billion, while profit increased 5.4% to $3.40 billion. On a per share basis, reported earnings climbed 8% to $0.82, while on an adjusted basis, earnings grew 11% to $0.99 per share.

“Last year, I forecast double-digit non-GAAP earnings per share growth for FY18 and we delivered 14% growth this year, largely driven by strong growth in our cloud businesses. Looking ahead to FY19, I expect revenue growth will enable us to deliver double-digit non-GAAP earnings per share growth once again,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz.

For the quarter, the database giant saw its total revenue grow more than $200 million above its constant currency expectation. Supporting this, Oracle’s strategic Fusion ERP and HCM SaaS cloud applications suite revenues grew over 50% in the quarter, and the company expects Fusion SaaS suites to grow at the same pace throughout FY19.

As the investors are expecting a rough transition of Oracle’s businesses to the cloud, Oracle played a spoilsport mixing its cloud and traditional businesses, reporting a sale of $2.4 billion, which declined 5% year-over-year. The company also combined its cloud service with traditional software support reporting revenue of $6.7 billion, an increase of 8%. Oracle was expected to report cloud revenue growth of 25%, with traditional software licensing declining 9% for the quarter.

The stock was marginally down by 0.5% when the market closed today. After Oracle announced the results, its shares edged up but lost the momentum and dropped about 2% during the after-market hours.