Oracle Corporation Q1 2014 Operations and Financials

Financials:

Safra A. Catz, President and Chief Financial Officer said, ‘We are committed to returning the value to our shareholders through earnings growth, share repurchases, and dividend’.

Currency in Q1 gave Oracle a 2% headwind for new software license and total revenue which was more than Safra’s guidance last quarter. Q1 for Oracle was really solid overall and quite strong in the Americas.

Software results were outstanding as total software revenues were 6.1 billion up 8% from last year. Software update and product support revenues were more than half of the total revenue at nearly 4.4 billion, up 8% from last year. Attach rate and renewal rate remain at their usual high level and software update and product support continue to power earnings and cash flow. New software license revenues were 1.7 billion, up 6% from last year.

Looking at GAAP results by region. Oracle saw excellent results in the Americas with growth of 15%; Asia-Pac saw solid growth of 5% while EMEA declined 5%. Expedited software was up over 15%, GoldenGate in-memory software was up 30%; BI Technology and Foundation Suite were up around 10%; also strong was retailing, CRM sales and applications in North America generally. The quarter wasn't dependent on any one large deal, anything like that, it was just a very solid quarter. Hardware systems product revenue was $669 million, as older products like the older M-series and Netra saw significant declines.

Storage was more a mixed story with TAPE down a bit, SAN down significantly, while network attached storage was up. The engineered systems customer base continues to expand nicely Exadata booking was very good revenues from Exalytics SuperCluster and the Oracle database appliance all grew over 100%. So the company total revenue for the quarter was 8.4 billion up 4% from last year. Oracle’s non-GAAP operating income was 3.7 billion, which was 6% higher than last year and operating margin expanded to 45%.

Oracle still believes there remains ample leverage in the business model. The non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 21.8%; EPS for the quarter grew 12% in U.S. dollars to $0.59 on a non-GAAP basis; the GAAP tax rate was 17.7 which were lower than Safra’s guidance for last quarter due to some one-time events and the mix of earnings. On a GAAP basis, EPS for the quarter was U.S $0.47 in U.S. dollars, which was up 14%.

Free cash flow increased to a record 14.2 billion over the last four quarters and to an all-time high of 6.1 billion for Q1, up 11% from last year. Oracle is now on the verge of generating more free cash flow than IBM and now has over $39 billion in cash and marketable securities.

Oracle repurchased 92.8 million shares for a total of $3 billion. Over the last 12 months, Oracle repurchased nearly 335 million shares for a total of $10.9 billion paid out dividend of nearly 1.7 billion for total nearly 90% of their free cash flow. And the Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share.

Check Out: OracleCorporation Q2 Guidance & Oracle OpenWorld Highlights

Operations:

Database continues to be very strong, double-digit growth again this quarter. Now, while customer activity on 12c was excellent, it really is the traditional products; Database Options, Enterprise Manager that drove this double-digit growth.

Cloud right now had a strong quarter. It's really started to hit stride, with great wins at A&A, LinkedIn, SIRIUS XM Radio, Telus, Barclays Bank, and Oracle is also really excited about their Sales Automation Release 7.

In HCM, Oracle’s Taleo product had a very strong quarter with key wins at Honeywell, Emerson, Humana, Xilinx and DIRECTV. Oracle announced the deal with Microsoft enabling customers to run Java in the Oracle Database on the user cloud and they would also be partnering with NetSuite on HCM. And lastly, Oracle also announced a comprehensive partnership with Salesforce where they've chosen to power their cloud with the Oracle 12c database and Exadata amongst other Oracle products.

Moving to Engineered Systems, Oracle had great wins at Eton, Telecom Italia, China Mobile, SunGard, Ingersoll Rand and Hitachi. In the last two quarters, they have shipped almost 2,000 systems. And this quarter, Oracle saw great unit growth north of 60% as they shipped nearly 800 systems. Nearly 40% of Exadata Systems were sold to new customers, and Oracle expects to grow their business with these customers overtime. Oracle is gaining a material amount of unit market share. Exalytics, SPARC SuperCluster, the Oracle Database Appliance all had growth in excess of 100%.