Oracle Corporation Extends Losses, Down Nearly 4% After Earnings

Oracle Corporation ORCL shares have extended their losses from the open of trading after the software giant reported earnings last night after the bell. The company reported earnings that beat Wall Street estimates and guidance was better than expected, but hardware sales were softer than expected, leading to the near 4% decline today. Hardware sales came in at $1.2 billion, down 6% compared with the same quarter from a year ago. "In Q4, we achieved a 19% new software license growth rate with almost no help from acquisitions," said Oracle President and CFO, Safra Catz. "This strong organic growth combined with continuously improving operational efficiencies enabled us to deliver a 48% operating margin in the quarter. As our results reflect, we clearly exceeded even our own high expectations for Sun's business." "In addition to record setting software sales, our Exadata and Exalogic systems also made a strong contribution to our growth in Q4," said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. "Today there are more than 1,000 Exadata machines installed worldwide. Our goal is to triple that number in FY12." "In FY11 Oracle's database business experienced its fastest growth in a decade," said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. "Over the past few years we added features to the Oracle database for both cloud computing and in-memory databases that led to increased database sales this past year. Lately we've been focused on the big business opportunity presented by Big Data." The company reported fourth quarter earnings of 75 cents per share on $10.8 billion in revenues. Wall Street had been expecting 71 cents per share on $10.75 billion in revenues. Guidance for Q1 2012 is expected at 45 to 48 cents per share, versus 46 cents on Wall Street. At last check, shares of Oracle were off $1.24 to $31.22, a loss of 3.82%‎ on 47 million shares.