Oracle revenues miss analyst expectations


Bobby Hellard

17 Jun, 2020

Oracle shares fell by 5% on Tuesday after the cloud giant reported mixed fourth-quarter results. 

The company reported that revenues were down 6% from a year ago, missing analysts estimates, due to the impact of COVID-19

“Our overall business did remarkably well considering the pandemic, but our results would have been even better except for customers in the hardest-hit industries that we serve such as hospitality, retail, and transportation postponing some of their purchases,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. 

“Still, for the third year in a row, we delivered double-digit constant currency earnings per share growth in FY20.”

Oracle had previously suggested in March that it was expecting flat revenue for the quarter. Its largest category, cloud services and license support delivered $6.85 billion in revenue, with revenue from cloud and on-premises licenses coming in at $1.96 billion.

Oracle also recently announced new cloud business from video communications firms Zoom and 8×8, which has helped to keep the firm in double figures for the quarter and also get one over its fiercest rival. 

“8×8 was very surprised by the extent of their performance gains by moving out of AWS, moving part of their system out of AWS and into OCI [Oracle cloud infrastructure],” Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, said, according to CNBC

“They were so surprised by the performance gains they achieved and the cost savings they achieved that they decided to move all of their services out of AWS and into Oracle.”

While the tech industry has done better than most during the pandemic, it hasn’t managed to entirely avoid some financial impact from COVID-19. Last week, the top five firms – Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook – lost a combined $260 billion in value.

Four of those firms had a combined value of over $5 trillion before the outbreak. Bellow them, the likes of IBM and Cisco all lost significant value with drops in share price.