Oracle Q3 Earnings: 5 Things To Know

Navigating The Economic Downturn

At least two investment firms had positive comments on Oracle’s performance.

A Friday report from KeyBanc noted Oracle’s “strong” 28 percent organic revenue growth year over year for cloud and “steady” database growth of 3 percent year over year.

“We continue to view Oracle as an attractive defensive name in an uncertain macro with strong growth in backoffice SaaS, high growth in OCI off a small base with potentially large and increasingly strategic wins, and steady DB growth,” read a Friday report by KeyBanc Capital Markets.

A Friday report from AllianceBernstein called Oracle’s quarter “one of the best we’ve seen from software recently, in line with our thesis that it should be the top pick for a recession.”

“Oracle beat where it matters most (cloud and margins) and guided to a strong Q4 (especially in Cloud) while many of its peers have recently come out with conservative guides in the face of macro,” according to AllianceBernstein. “The strength of the quarter and the guidance continues to prove how well positioned Oracle is to weather the economic turbulence successfully.”

AllianceBernstein notably downgraded Oracle rival Salesforce in January to “underperform.”

“With the tailwinds from M&A no longer enough, core markets approaching cloud saturation, competition increasing, and macro issues hitting growth, management is aggressively pivoting to driving margins,” AllianceBernstein said in January. “But the cuts are going to negatively impact efficiency, growth, and customer/employee satisfaction. Margin improvement will be less than expected in our view, and will appear over multiple years.”

After Salesforce’s latest quarterly earnings report this month, the investment firm issued a report praising Salesforce results, but pointing out that “this was delivered in conjunction with about 50 percent decrease in the revenue growth rate for FY24 and after numerous news articles of unhappy employees.”