By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Oracle stock (NYSE:ORCL) surged 11% in Friday’s premarket trading after the company posted strong second-quarter results on the back of higher demand for its bread-and-butter ERP packages as well as its new focus, Cloud services.
A top-up of $10 billion in the company's ongoing program of share repurchases was also feeding the gains.
Total revenue rose 6% to $10.4 billion in the second quarter as customers like German chemical giant Bayer (OTC:BAYRY) and Croatian supermarket chain Plodine sought Cloud infrastructure and hybrid solutions in a fast-digitizing world.
Sales of Fusion and NetSuite – Oracle’s two enterprise resource planning products – rose 35% and 29%, respectively – significant for the company as it attempts to transition its clients to its Cloud offering to better compete with the likes of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL). The company said that target is making a headway as more companies are willing to shift to public Cloud from on-premise management.
Total Cloud revenue was up 22% at $2.7 Billion.
Payments to settle a 10-year-old dispute surrounding former CEO Mark Hurd's employment hurt the firm’s earnings and the company reported a net loss of $1.24 billion against a profit of $2.44 billion in the same period last year.
On an adjusted basis, the company reported a profit per share of $1.21 and beat estimates.
For the ongoing quarter, the company expects EPS to come in at $1.16 billion on revenue of $10.8 billion at center of the guidance.