Enterprise tech giant Oracle has reported fiscal 2021 Q2 revenue of $9.8bn, up 2% year on year and slightly above Wall Street expectations.
Growth was largely driven by its cloud services and support segment, which grew by 4% to sales of $7.1bn.
For the three months ended November 30, operating income stood at $3.59bn. Net income grew by 6% year on year to $2.44bn.
This translated to diluted earnings per share of $0.80, up 16% on the same period a year ago.
Oracle’s Q2 results mark a consecutive quarter of revenue growth after the coronavirus pandemic caused sales to slump in the first half of 2020.
The California-based firm saw strong growth in its Fusion and NetSuite Cloud ERP applications, with revenue growing 33% and 21% respectively.
“Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure is adding customers and growing revenue at a rate well in excess of 100% per year,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison.
“Demand for our Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure is exceeding our plan and we are opening new data centres as fast as we can.”
This year Oracle has been pursuing an aggressive cloud expansion plan in a bid to unseat rival Amazon Web Services.
To this effect, Oracle has opened an additional 13 regional data centres in 2020, bringing its total to 29 worldwide. It plans to have 28 cloud regions live by mid-2021.
Disappointing hardware sales
Away from Oracle’s core cloud business, the results were more mixed. Hardware sales were down 3% to $844m, while services were down 7% to $752m.
Oracle’s cloud license and on-prem license segment saw revenues slump 3% to $1.1bn.
“This was a mixed quarter in our view,” said Logan Purk, senior research analyst at Edward Jones.
“While the company is making strides within its cloud services and license support, the on-premise business and smaller hardware and services businesses continue to offset this growth.
“Oracle continues to drive a majority of its earnings growth through share repurchases. We note sales growth has not been above 2% since Q3′ 18.
He added that despite Oracle’s “dominant position in database software”, there are “more attractive growth opportunities within technology”.
For Q3, Oracle forecast revenue to rise by 2% to 4%.
Earlier this year Oracle was in talks to acquire TikTok’s global business following a forced divestiture by the Trump administration. However, this deal now appears to be in limbo.
Sourced from Verdict - written by Robert Scammell