Oracle Corporation (NYSE: NYSE:ORCL)
Oracle, the software behemoth and tech giant, reported their fiscal second quarter earnings for 2018 on Thursday December 14th, 2017 after the market closed for trading. As soon as the news came out shares began to fall on heavy volume.
In the much-anticipated earnings release, even though Oracle beat on the top and bottom line, it was their cloud-related sales figures which missed estimates that sent the shares heading lower in the aftermarket session.
Shares which closed the day at $50.19, wound up closing down 6.63% or $3.33 at $46.86. The chart below illustrates how it now will have broken some key levels of support when it opens for trading in the morning.
The Numbers
Oracle reported earnings of $0.70 a share which beat the analysts estimates of 0.68 cents per share. They also blew out revenues estimates coming in at $9.62 billion vs$ 9.57 billion estimated by analysts.
One silver lining to the reaction and sell off of the shares in the after market, is that the company does pay a decent dividend of 1.57% annually.
Analysts Comments
Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian Write wrote in a Monday note:
“We believe the new innovations announced at Oracle OpenWorld in early October can take Oracle’s cloud portfolio to a whole new level, and we believe the stock can continue to move in an upward trajectory over the next year,”.
Patrick Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities had this to say:
“They’re late to that whole cloud battle. A lot of people already have a solution they are happy with. The question is what does Oracle bring the table?”
Oracle Charts
The above price chart shows the 5-minute action during the intra-day on the left and the aftermarket session on the right. It is clear to see on the right when the earnings announcement came out, how shares sold off hard, tried to form a price base and then sold off again.
The above price chart shows the daily action going back a few months. The red oval area is where shares will likely open in the morning and that area is well below most recent support levels.
Company Profile
Oracle Corporation develops, manufactures, markets, sells, hosts, and supports application, platform, and infrastructure technologies for information technology (IT) environments worldwide. It provides services in three primary layers of the cloud: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service.
The company licenses its Oracle Database software, which enables storage, retrieval, and manipulation of data; and Oracle Fusion Middleware software to build, deploy, secure, access, and integrate business applications, as well as automate their business processes.
It also provides software for mobile computing to address the development needs of businesses; Java, a software development language; and big data solutions. In addition, the company offers human capital and talent management, enterprise resource planning, customer experience and customer relationship management, procurement, project portfolio management, supply chain management, business analytics and enterprise performance management, and industry-specific application software, as well as financial management and governance, risk, and compliance applications.
Further, it provides Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage, industry-specific hardware, management software, and hardware support products, as well as operating systems, and virtualization and other hardware-related software.
Additionally, the company offers customers software license updates and product support contracts; database, middleware, and development software, as well as cloud-based platform and infrastructure; and IT strategy alignment, enterprise architecture planning and design, initial software implementation and integration, application development and integration, security assessments, and ongoing software enhancements and upgrade, as well as customer support and education services. The company was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California.