Net income was $1.12 billion, or 22 cents a share, compared with $1.08 billion, or 21 cents, a year earlier. Including revenue from acquired companies, sales dropped 6.6 percent to $5.06 billion, Oracle Executive Vice President and CFO Jeff Epstein said.Oracle, deep in the pre-integration process of acquiring Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion transaction,
reported Sept. 16 that its fiscal first-quarter profit improved 4.4
percent thanks to higher margins, negating a second consecutive quarter
of declining sales revenue.
The common stock price tumbled about 4 percent to $21.44 in
after-hours trading, as new license revenue -- a key indicator of
future software sales growth -- fell 14 percent.
Net income was $1.12 billion, or 22 cents a share, compared with
$1.08 billion, or 21 cents, a year earlier. Including revenue from
acquired companies, sales dropped 6.6 percent to $5.06 billion, Oracle
Executive Vice President and CFO Jeff Epstein said in a conference call
with analysts and journalists.
"Software license updates and product support revenues grew 11
percent, to $3.1 billion, for the quarter when adjusted for the change
in the U.S. dollar since last year," Epstein said.
This growth, along with the company's "disciplined expense
management, was key to our ability to generate a record $8.5 billion in
free cash flow over the last 12 months," Epstein said.
Oracle's enterprise database business grew faster than its No. 1
competitor, Germany's SAP, in every region around the world --
including Europe, where Oracle grew 3 percent versus negative 39
percent for SAP's most recent quarter, said company President Charles
Phillips.
"Our applications team also executed especially well in North
America, where our applications business grew 8 percent versus negative
50 percent for SAP," Phillips said.
Founder and CEO Larry Ellison said his company has come a long way
in its competition with IBM in the enterprise middleware space, and
that it will continue to gain market share.
"It used to be for years that we were fifth, sixth, seventh in line
behind IBM in middleware market share," Ellison said. "We're now the
leader in that sector, and we expect to grow much faster, because we
have a much better product than IBM. I expect us to continue to grow as
enterprises move off mainframes and onto open systems.
"We're well-positioned to compete effectively against our biggest competitor, IBM."