Oracle shares jump 13% on earnings and revenue beat

While Oracle becomes more competitive in cloud infrastructure, it is also ensuring that competitors can offer its widely used database to their clients. Read more...

Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle shares rose 13% Tuesday and are on pace to close at a record after the database software vendor reported fiscal first-quarter results that topped Wall Street estimates.

Here is how the company did compared to LSEG consensus:

Earnings per share: $1.39 adjusted vs. $1.32 expected
Revenue: $13.31 billion vs. $13.23 billion expected

Oracle’s revenue increased 8% from $12.45 billion a year ago, according to a statement. Net income rose to $2.93 billion, or $1.03 per share, from $2.42 billion, or 86 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.

The stock’s highest close to date was $145.03 in July. Prior to the report, Oracle was up about 34% so far this year, compared to the S&P 500’s 15% gain.

For the current quarter, Oracle expects revenue growth of 8 to 10%, CEO Safra Catz said on the earnings call. Analysts were expecting growth of close to 9%, according to LSEG. The company sees adjusted earnings per share for the fiscal second quarter of 1.45 to $1.49. Analysts were looking for earnings of $1.47 per share.

The company said its cloud services and license support business generated $10.52 billion in revenue. That was up 10% from a year earlier and higher than the StreetAccount consensus of $10.47 billion.

Oracle’s cloud and on-premises license segment had $870 million in revenue, up 7%, and more than StreetAccount’s $757.6 billion consensus.

Revenue from cloud infrastructure came to $2.2 billion, up 45%. That is an acceleration from the prior quarter, during which revenue went up 42%.

“I will say that demand is still outstripping supply. But I can live with that,” Catz said on the call.

Oracle is currently designing a data center that will use over a gigawatt of power, and it will rely on three modular nuclear reactors, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer, said on the call.

Over time, Oracle might operate 2,000 data centers, up from 162 today, Ellison said. But not all of them require massive amounts of power.

“The smallest are about 150 kilowatts,” Ellison said. “And we’re going to get down to 50 kilowatts.”

During the quarter, Oracle announced the opening of a second cloud region in Saudi Arabia and said its database software will be available through Google’s public cloud.

In a separate statement on Monday, Oracle said it would partner with cloud infrastructure market leader Amazon Web Services to enable its database services on dedicated hardware.