Oracle's revenue growth falls short of analysts' expectations

REUTERS - Business software maker Oracle Corp's adjusted revenue missed analysts' estimates for the seventh time in the last eight quarters, showing that its shift to cloud-based offerings is taking longer than Wall Street expected.

Oracle, which gets little more than half of its revenue from outside the United States, said revenue in the latest second quarter was hurt by the dollar's gains, especially since the U.S. election, and an unforeseen Egyptian currency exchange loss.

The company's shares were down 2.4 percent in extended trading on Wednesday, despite an upbeat revenue forecast for the current quarter.

As its core business of selling software licenses continues to shrink, Oracle has been beefing up its cloud business, most recently though the $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite, to take on nimbler rivals such as Workday Inc and Salesforce.com Inc.

Revenue from Oracle's cloud software- and platform-as-a-service surged 81 percent to $878 million, slightly less than expected. Its total cloud business revenue jumped 62 percent to top $1 billion in quarterly sales for the first time.

"Oracle has now passed salesforce.com and become number one in SaaS cloud applications sales to customers with over 1,000 employees," Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said in a statement, citing market research firm IDC.

Still, Oracles' cloud revenue was about one-ninth of total revenue. Its higher-margin traditional software business continued to suffer, with revenue falling a bigger-than-expected 19.7 percent to $1.35 billion in the quarter. Hardware revenue fell 10 percent to about $1 billion.

The Redwood City, California-based company's total adjusted revenue inched up 0.8 percent to $9.07 billion. On a constant currency basis revenue growth would have been 2 percent.

Its profit fell 8 percent to $2.03 billion. Excluding items, it earned 61 cents per share.

Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $9.12 billion and a profit of 60 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Oracle said its adjusted profit per share would have been 2 cents higher if it were not for the strong dollar and the Egyptian currency exchange loss.

The company forecast current-quarter adjusted earnings of 61-64 cents per share and revenue growth of between 3-5 percent, compared with analysts' estimates of a profit of 64 cents and revenue growth of 2.6 percent.

"As we get bigger in the cloud, we grow faster in the cloud," said CEO Safra Catz, who will join U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's transition team. She will remain at Oracle.

(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)