Oracle: Quarterly earnings disappoint. The share price falls in after hours
The company reported sales of USD 16.06 billion. The consensus expected 16.2 billion.
The Oracle has had its say on the quarterly figures. Put differently: the company founded by Larry Ellison, which has become central to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - at least that made in the USA - has published its numbers for the second quarter 2025-2026.
Data below expectations
Expectation was high and, at least for now, the group disappointed. Oracle's total revenue came in at 16.06 billion, compared to analysts' average estimate of 16.21 billion, according to LSEG. Not only that. Cloud sales increased by 34 per cent to USD 7.98 billion, but the market expected more. As higher was the consensus regarding the infrastructure division - one of the most closely monitored by analysts - which generated 4.08 billion in sales. Of course, in the face of such a performance, investors started selling on the stock, which fell in the after hours.
Adjusted quarterly profit, for its part, was $2.26 per share. But the profit included a one-off pre-tax gain of $2.7 billion from the sale of the stake in chip designer Ampere Computing. A transaction, with respect to which Ellison explained that he chose to sell the stake to SoftBank - which bought it for $6.5 billion last March - because 'it is no longer strategic to continue to design, manufacture and use our chips in cloud data centres'.
The ambitious project
In general, it should be remembered, the company has outlined a particularly ambitious expansion path. In a presentation released in October, the company indicated that the area dedicated to cloud infrastructure could generate up to USD 166 billion in revenue by 2030, while total group revenue, in the same scenario, could reach USD 225 billion, with adjusted earnings per share around USD 21. These targets assume much faster growth than at present and accelerating demand for Ia services.
Among the more constructive observers, the idea prevailed that the quarterly report could represent a moment of discontinuity. A confirmation that the demand for Artificial Intelligence solutions comes from a wide range of customers, and not only from big names like OpenAI, would have reinforced the narrative of structural rather than episodic growth. This, at least according to the immediate analysis of the results, was not the case.
