Oracle Q3 Profit Beats Street - Update

(RTTNews) - Business software giant Oracle Corp. (ORCL), Thursday reported a profit for the third quarter that trumped Wall Street estimates, reflecting growth in cloud services revenues as revenues surpassed expectations.

Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle reported third-quarter profit of $2.75 billion or $0.76 per share, compared to last year's loss of $4.05 billion or $0.98 per share.

Adjusted earnings for the quarter increased to $0.87 per share from $0.81 per share last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $0.84 per share.

Revenues for the quarter were down 1 percent to $9.61 billion compared to last year's $9.68 billion. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $9.59 billion.

Oracle's cloud services and license support revenues climbed 1 percent to $6.62 billion, while cloud license and On-Premise license revenues dropped 4 percent to $1.25 billion. Hardware revenues declined 8 percent to $915 million, while Services revenues dropped to 1 percent to $786 million.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, "Our overall operating margin improved to 44% as our lower margin hardware business continued to get smaller while our higher margin cloud business continued to get bigger. With year-to-date non-GAAP EPS growth rate now at 16% in constant currency, we will comfortably deliver another year of double-digit EPS growth."

"Our Fusion HCM, ERP, Supply Chain and Manufacturing Cloud applications revenue in total grew 32% in Q3," said Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd. "Our NetSuite ERP Cloud applications also delivered strong results with a revenue growth rate of 30%."

Further, the company declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.24 per share, up 26 percent.

ORCL closed Monday's trading at $53.05, down $0.01 or 0.02%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further dropped $0.14 or 0.26% in the after-hours trade.