Oracle Profit Rises On Cloud Revenues - Update

(RTTNews) - Business software giant Oracle Corp. (ORCL), Wednesday reported an increase in profit for the third quarter, as revenues grew 3 percent reflecting strong growth in cloud revenues. Earnings for the quarter trumped Wall Street estimates, while revenues fell short of expectations.

Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle's third-quarter profit rose to $2.24 billion or $0.53 per share from $2.14 billion or $0.50 per share last year.

Adjusted earnings for the quarter increased to $0.69 per share from $0.64 per share last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $0.62 per share.

Revenues for the quarter rose 3 percent to $9.21 billion from $9.01 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $9.26 billion.

Oracle's total cloud and On-Premise software revenues rose 5 percent to $7.37 billion, while hardware revenues slipped 9 percent to $1.03 billion. Total services revenues gained 3 percent to $812 million.

"Over the last year, we sold more new SaaS and PaaS than Salesforce.com, and we're growing more than 3 times faster," said Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd. "If these trends continue, where we are selling more SaaS and PaaS in absolute dollars and growing dramatically faster, it's just a matter of when we catch and pass Salesforce.com in total cloud revenue."

In the quarter, cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $1.0 billion, up 74 percent.

Further, the company boosted its quarterly to $0.19 per share, from $0.15.

ORCL closed Wednesday's trading at $43.05, up $0.26 or 0.61%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further gained $1.55 or 3.60% in the after-hours trade.