By Sabela Ojea
Oracle results missed Wall Street expectations in the latest quarter, but the company offered an upbeat sales outlook as it aims to double its data center capacity this year.
The cloud-services company's fiscal third-quarter revenue rose 6.4% to $14.13 billion thanks to growth in its cloud-services unit, which offset declines in its cloud license and hardware businesses. Wall Street had forecast higher revenue of $14.38 billion, according to analysts polled by FactSet.
"As we bring more capacity online, our revenues will clearly accelerate," Chief Executive Safra Catz said on an earnings call, adding that the component delays that have slowed cloud capacity expansion this year should ease in the first quarter of fiscal 2026.
The company posted a profit of $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, for the three months ended Feb. 28, compared with $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, for the year-ago quarter.
Stripping out one-time items, the company's earnings per share were $1.47, shy of the $1.49 analysts expected.
For the fourth quarter, Catz said Oracle expects revenue to grow 9% to 11%, with total cloud revenue jumping between 24% and 28%.
The Austin, Texas-based company also said it expects to report revenue growth for fiscal 2026, helped by its $130 billion sales backlog, and to end the next fiscal year with a growth rate of around 20%.
"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.
For fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027, analysts expect revenue growth of around 13% and 14%, respectively, according to FactSet.
The company's board of directors also declared a 25% increase in its quarterly cash dividend to 50 cents a share.
Write to Sabela Ojea at sabela.ojea@wsj.com; @sabelaojeaguix
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
03-10-25 1835ET
