Oracle Corp. expects to generate about $65 billion in annual revenue by fiscal year 2026, an outlook executives first provided a year ago, in a lukewarm message to investors disappointed by the software maker’s most-recent quarterly results.
Executive Vice President Doug Kehring, speaking Thursday at Oracle’s annual conference for financial analysts, said he is confident the company will reach its revenue target as well as earlier forecasts for a 45% operating margin by fiscal year 2026 and annual growth in earnings per share of more than 10%.
Oracle is focused on increasing its business of renting cloud-computing power and storage after long lagging behind Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Investors have grown more optimistic that Oracle’s cloud offering can rapidly expand and take advantage of demanding computing needs for artificial intelligence products.
“We’ve got Google clearly in our sights at the moment,” Kehring said of the company’s cloud infrastructure business, which generated $5 billion in the fiscal year ending in May 2023, only about 10% of total company revenue.
Some investor enthusiasm was dashed last week when Oracle reported that cloud sales in the quarter had increased 30% compared with a 54% jump in the previous period. The shares fell almost 14%, the most in a single day in 21 years, slipping from an all-time high.
Many analysts wrote ahead of Thursday’s event that they expected Oracle to maintain its outlook. The company needs to average about 9% annual sales growth over the next three fiscal years to reach its goal.
With a slowdown in electronic health records division Cerner, which Oracle acquired last year, and the ongoing shift to the cloud, “we think that is a tough task,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana.
The shares declined 2.8% to $109.65 at 3:13 p.m. Thursday in New York. The stock had gained 38% this year through Wednesday’s close despite last week’s plunge.
