REDWOOD SHORES (dpa-AFX) - Oracle Corp. (ORCL) said Wednesday after the markets closed that its fourth quarter profit fell 24% from last year, hurt significantly by a stronger U.S. dollar.
The company's quarterly earnings per share, excluding items, also came in below analysts' expectations as did its quarterly revenue.
'We sold an astonishing $426 million of new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud subscription revenue in Q4,' said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. 'We expect our rapidly increasing cloud sales to quickly translate into significantly more revenue and profits for Oracle Corporation. For example, SaaS and PaaS revenues grew at a 34% constant currency rate in our just completed Q4, but we expect that revenue growth rate to jump to around 60% in constant currency this new fiscal year.'
The company also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share, payable on July 29 to shareholders of record on July 8.
Oracle shares are currently losing 6.15% in after hours trading after closing the day's regular trading trading session at $44.91, up 27 cents. The shares trade in a 52-week range of $35.82 to $46.71.
Oracle has adopted an acquisition-led growth strategy. The company has acquired more than 73 companies since 2005. Of late, Oracle has set its eyes on cloud-based software firms.
However, Oracle' revenue growth has slowed down in the last few quarters, raising investor concern about the company's ability to transition from its traditional approach of licensing software to the so call cloud computing method.
Oracle shuffled its top management in September last year. Company founder Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO after 37 years and became Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer. Both Mark Hurd and Safra Catz were promoted to the position of CEO.
Oracle's total software and cloud revenues for the fourth quarter fell 6% year-over-year to $8.4 billion, with new software licenses revenues down 17% at $3.1 billion. Cloud software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service surged 29% to $416 million in the fourth quarter.
Fourth quarter software license updates and product support revenues remained essentially flat with last year at $4.7 billion. Services revenues for the quarter fell 4% from last year at $899 million.
Hardware systems revenues for the quarter fell 4% to $1.4 billion, with hardware systems products revenue down 6% and hardware systems support revenue down 1%.
For the fourth quarter ended May 31, 2015, Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle reported net income of $2.8 billion or $0.62 per share, compared to $3.6 billion or $0.80 per share for the year-ago quarter.
Excluding items, adjusted net income for the fourth quarter was $3.5 billion or $0.78 per share, compared to $4.2 billion or $0.92 per share in the prior year quarter.
On average, 35 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to earn $0.87 per share for the fourth quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.
Total revenue for the fourth quarter fell 5% to $10.71 billion from $11.32 billion a year earlier, while adjusted revenue also fell 5% to $10.71 billion from $11.33 billion last year. Thirty-three analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $10.95 billion for the fourth quarter.
Without the impact of the stronger U.S. dollar, Oracle said its earnings per share would have been down 12% and total revenues would have been up 3%.
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