Oracle: What slowdown?

Posted Dec 20th 2007 12:12PM by Tom Taulli
Filed under: Earnings Reports, Oracle Corp (ORCL)

It's going to be a nice Christmas for Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL). He's the majority owner of NetSuite, which had a nice IPO today. (It will start trading on Thursday under the ticker N.)

And, of course, Oracle posted a stellar fiscal Q2. Revenues spiked 28% to $5.31 billion and earnings came in at $1.3 billion, up 35%. In fact, this was the strongest growth spurt in a decade.

A big positive was license revenues, which were up 38% to $1.67 billion. Then again, it helps that Oracle has cobbled together a variety of acquisitions, boosting the product offerings as well as the customer footprint. Because of the diversification, Oracle is not seeing a drag from recent problems in the financial services space. The heft has also been helpful in combating fierce competitors, such as IBM (NYSE: IBM), SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

Oh, and as for the possibility of a buyout of BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS)? Well, Ellison played some hardball and then indicated that a friendly deal can't be done. But, in light of all the success, does Oracle really need BEA anyway?

In trading this morning, Oracle's stock is up about 7% to $22.28.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Tags: Earnings, NetSuite, Oracle Corp., OracleCorp., ORCL