Oracle on Thursday saw its stock fall by almost 5 percent after reporting better-than-expected earnings for the second quarter of its 2018 fiscal year, which ended on Nov. 30. The company will hold a conference call with analysts at 5 p.m. Eastern time.

• EPS: Excluding certain items, 70 cents in earnings per share vs. 68 cents expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters.
• Revenue: $9.62 billion vs. $9.57 billion expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters.

Revenue rose 6 percent year over year, the company said in a statement. On-premises software brings in more revenue than anything else at Oracle, and in this quarter it generated $6.3 billion, which was up 3 percent. But within that category, new software license revenue of $1.35 billion was flat.

Oracle said it brought in $1.52 billion in cloud revenue for the quarter, which was below the $1.56 billion FactSet consensus of analyst estimates, according to StreetAccount. Oracle has become more focused on growing its cloud computing revenue amid falling software license revenue.

The company picks up cloud revenue from applications, platforms and infrastructure. At the infrastructure level, Oracle is competing with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and at the end of the quarter Amazon cloud chief Andy Jassy took several jabs at Oracle in particular. Those comments came after CEO Mark Hurd said he wasn’t too worried too much about Amazon’s cloud, despite that it’s the biggest one running.

Oracle’s public cloud infrastructure and platform revenue for the quarter was $396 million, which was up 21 percent from the year before but below the FactSet consensus, according to StreetAccount. Hardware and services revenue were both below FactSet analysts’ estimates as well, StreetAccount said.

Also in the quarter, Oracle announced a slew of updates across its product portfolio at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Among the announcements was “autonomous” database software technology that updates itself automatically.

“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,” Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian Write wrote in a Monday note.

Oracle noted in its statement that its board has increased the authorization of share repurchases by $12 billion.

Oracle stock is up 30 percent since the beginning of 2017.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

Source: Tech CNBC
Oracle falls despite earnings beat