By Sabela Ojea
Oracle's revenue rose in its fiscal third quarter and the company expects further growth as it doubles its data center capacity, with customer demand at record levels.
Shares rise 4.8% to $155.87 in post-market trading. Through Monday's close, the stock has jumped 30% over the past 12 months.
The Austin, Texas-based, cloud-software provider on Monday posted a net profit for the three-months ended Feb. 28 of $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, compared with $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, for the same period a year earlier.
Stripping out one-time items, the company's earnings per share came in at $1.47. Analysts polled by FactSet had forecast adjusted earnings of $1.49 per share.
Revenue rose 6.4% to $14.13 billion after its core cloud services unit offset declines across its cloud license, hardware and services segments. Wall Street had forecast higher revenue of $14.38 billion, according to FactSet.
Overall, Oracle signed sales contracts worth more than $48 billion, Chief Executive Safra Catz added.
"We are seeing enormous demand for AI inferencing on our customers' private data," Chairman Larry Ellison said, adding that graphics processing unit consumption for AI surged 244% in the past 12 months.
Regarding its outlook, Catz said Oracle expects its $130 billion sales backlog to help drive a 15% increase in Oracle's overall revenue in its next fiscal year beginning this June.
For fiscal 2026, analysts expect revenue growth of around 13%, according to FactSet.
Write to Sabela Ojea at sabela.ojea@wsj.com; @sabelaojeaguix
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
03-10-25 1648ET
