Justin Sullivan
Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) was in focus on Thursday as investment firm Argus raised its earnings estimates and upgraded the IT tech giant after it reported fiscal third-quarter results.
Shares were flat in late Thursday trading.
Argus said it now sees fiscal 2024 earnings per share at $5.61, up from a previous view of $5.59 per share. It also increased its forecast for fiscal 2025 to $6.18 per share, up from a prior view of $6.03 per share.
The upgrade comes after Oracle earned $1.41 per share on $13.28B in revenue for the period ending Feb. 29, as cloud services and support revenue rose 12% to $9.96B. Cloud license and on-premise license, hardware and services revenue came in at $1.25B, $754M and $1.3B, respectively.
Short-term deferred revenues came in at $8.9B during the period.
Oracle also said it had signed a number of big cloud contracts spurred by artificial intelligence demand not yet in its remaining performance obligations, suggesting the impact of AI is far bigger than investors have come to realize.
Analysts are largely bullish on Oracle (ORCL). It has a HOLD rating from Seeking Alpha authors, while Wall Street analysts rate it a BUY. Conversely, Seeking Alpha’s quant system, which consistently beats the market, rates ORCL a HOLD.
