Oracle shares head for worst day of 2024 after Q2 earnings miss

Oracle shares dropped almost 7%, their steepest decline in a year, following the database software vendor’s disappointing earnings report.

The stock’s worst day of 2024 had been a 5.4% decline in May. The shares are still up about 69% for the year, which would be the best annual performance since the dot-com boom of 1999.

After the close Monday, Oracle reported adjusted earnings per share for the fiscal second quarter of $1.47, trailing analysts’ average estimate by a penny, according to LSEG. Revenue rose 9% from a year earlier to $14.06 billion, missing the $14.1 billion average estimate.

Net income increased 26% to $3.15 billion, or $1.10 a share, from $2.5 billion, or 89 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 12% from a year earlier to $10.81 billion, accounting for 77% of total revenue.

“A bit of a stumble here for a stock that’s created some lofty expectations for itself,” wrote analysts at KeyBank Capital Markets in a note after the report on Monday. They still recommend buying the stock and said “we still like oracle heading into 2025.”

For the current quarter, Oracle expects revenue growth of 7% to 9%. At the midpoint of that range, revenue would be about $14.3 billion. Analysts were expecting sales of $14.65 billion, according to LSEG. The company said it expects adjusted earnings of $1.50 to $1.54 per share. Analysts were calling for earnings per share of $1.57.

Oracle’s biggest growth engine has been cloud infrastructure, where it is competing with Amazon, Microsoft and Google as businesses move workloads out of their own data centers.

The business is booming due to soaring demand for computing power that can handle artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit surged 52% from a year earlier to $2.4 billion.

Oracle said it just signed an agreement with Meta, allowing the social media company to use its infrastructure to help with various projects related to the Llama family of large language models.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trains several of the world’s most important generative AI models because we are faster and less expensive than other clouds,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said in a statement.

Analysts at Piper Sandler raised their price target on the stock to $210 from $185 “based on continued cloud momentum.” They cited Oracle’s cRPO (current remaining performance obligations) growth of 20%. That figures points to contracted revenue that has yet to be booked.