Investing.com – Shares of Oracle closed 6% higher on Thursday, as the tech giant delivered better than expected fiscal third quarter earnings after the U.S. close on Wednesday.
Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) posted earnings of 69 cents per share on revenue of $9.21 billion against expectations of earnings of 62 cents per share on revenue of $9.255 billion while the company also hiked its quarterly dividend by $0.04 per share to $0.19.
Sales from Oracle’s cloud-computing offering rose roughly 62% to $1.19 billion while its software licensing business fell nearly 16%, as the tech giant seeks to transition from selling on-premise software and hardware to selling cloud based products.
"The growth in revenue from our cloud business has overtaken new software license declines on an annual basis," Safra Catz, Oracle chief executive said during the earnings call on Wednesday.
Oracle made a string of acquisitions over the past year as part of its strategy to grow in the cloud. These acquisitions included Dyn, NetSuite, LogFire, Opower, Textura, Palerra, Ravello Systems, and AddThis.
The $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite helped the company compete with rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc (NYSE:CRM) and Workday Inc (NYSE:WDAY).
The Redwood City, Californian-based company provided its forward guidance for current quarter earnings of 78 cents to 82 cents per share, in line with expectations, while its revenue of negative 1% to 2% was below analysts’ expectations.
At its closing price of $45.73, Oracle is up almost 19% year-to-date.