Oracle revenues miss analyst expectations

A sign with Oracle's logo on it outside some offices
Oracle HQ (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Oracle shares fell by 5% on Tuesday after the cloud giant reported mixed fourth-quarter results.

The company reported that revenues were down 6% from a year ago, missing analysts estimates, due to the impact of COVID-19.

"Our overall business did remarkably well considering the pandemic, but our results would have been even better except for customers in the hardest-hit industries that we serve such as hospitality, retail, and transportation postponing some of their purchases," said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz.

"Still, for the third year in a row, we delivered double-digit constant currency earnings per share growth in FY20."

Oracle had previously suggested in March that it was expecting flat revenue for the quarter. Its largest category, cloud services and license support delivered $6.85 billion in revenue, with revenue from cloud and on-premises licenses coming in at $1.96 billion.

Oracle also recently announced new cloud business from video communications firms Zoom and 8x8, which has helped to keep the firm in double figures for the quarter and also get one over its fiercest rival.

"8x8 was very surprised by the extent of their performance gains by moving out of AWS, moving part of their system out of AWS and into OCI [Oracle cloud infrastructure]," Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, said, according to CNBC.

Ellison then added that, given the cost savings from the initial move, 8x8 then decided to move the entirety of its business over to Oracle - 8x8 told IT Pro that it is still an AWS partner, though.

While the tech industry has done better than most during the pandemic, it hasn't managed to entirely avoid some financial impact from COVID-19. Last week, the top five firms - Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook - lost a combined $260 billion in value.

Four of those firms had a combined value of over $5 trillion before the outbreak. Bellow them, the likes of IBM and Cisco all lost significant value with drops in share price.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognize him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.