Oracle Corp. projected stagnant revenue in the current quarter, signaling the company may not see a revival of new license sales after clients in the hospitality and retail industries delayed software purchases amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Sales will be in a range of a 1 percent gain to a 1 percent decline year-over-year in the period ending in August, Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said Tuesday in a conference call. The midpoint of no revenue growth matched analysts’ estimates, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Excluding some items, profit will be 84 cents to 88 cents a share, with the midpoint again in line with analysts’ projections.
Catz and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison have sought to renew growth at Oracle, the world’s second-biggest software-maker, which has expanded to cloud applications, servers and public cloud services. The shift to internet-based computing caught the 43-year-old tech giant off guard and it’s still struggling to switch existing database customers to cloud-based offerings and better compete against Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. In the fiscal fourth quarter, revenue declined 6.3 percent to $10.4 billion, missing analysts’ estimates of $10.7 billion.