Earnings Preview: Will Oracle Live Up to Cautious Optimism?

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Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) is scheduled to report its fiscal fourth-quarter financial results on Monday. Analysts expect to see $1.58 in earnings per share (EPS) on $13.73 billion in revenue. That earnings estimate is the same as 60 days ago. The same period of last year had EPS of $1.54 and $11.84 billion in revenue. The company posted modest earnings surprises in the prior two quarters.

Over the past 52 weeks, the stock is up roughly 48%. However, it is up only closer to 31.5% year to date.

Despite a strong run, this top software stock is still offering a good entry point. Oracle develops, manufactures, markets, sells, hosts and supports database and middleware software, application software, cloud infrastructure, hardware systems and related services worldwide.

The company licenses its Oracle Database software to customers, which is designed to enable reliable and secure storage, retrieval and manipulation of various forms of data. Its Oracle Fusion Middleware software aims to build, deploy, secure, access and integrate business applications, as well as automate their business processes.

Last year, Oracle and Cerner closed an agreement for the former to acquire the latter through an all-cash tender offer for $95 per share, or approximately $28.3 billion in equity value. Cerner is a leading provider of digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems to enable medical professionals to deliver better health care to individual patients and communities.

A few analysts recently came out in favor of the stock:

  • Barclays maintained a Buy rating and raised its price target to $113 from $85 on June 7.
  • Jefferies maintained a Buy rating and raised its $105 price target to $125 on June 5.
  • KeyCorp maintained an Overweight rating and raised its $98 price target to $105 on April 20.
  • UBS maintained a Neutral rating but raised its price target to $90 from $87 on March 24.

The company currently offers a dividend of roughly 1.5%, or $1.60. It has a market cap of $290.2 billion.

Friday morning, shares of Oracle were trading up 2% at $109.67, in a 52-week range of $60.78 to $110.14. The consensus price target is $100.62, which implies downside of 6.4% from the most recent closing price of $107.48.

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