Oracle’s Q3 Guidance

From Seeking Alpha:

We remain committed to returning value to our shareholders through technical innovation, strategic acquisitions, stock repurchases and prudent use of debt and dividends. This quarter, we repurchased 33 million — 33.1 million shares for a total of $1 billion. We have received an additional $5 billion in authorization for our stock buyback program, and the board again declared a dividend of $0.06 per share.

Now to guidance. As you remember, we had an absolutely stunning third quarter last year, with new license up 29% and non-GAAP EPS up 40% and GAAP EPS up 75%. Regardless, the fundamentals of the business remained strong, with pipelines growing significantly.

Now I do read the daily financial news, so I’m going to take that into account for this quarter’s guidance. With currency bouncing around, I’m going to give you constant currency guidance, and as a convenience for you, I’ll give what our U.S. dollar rates from the past few days. That currently amounts to about a negative 2% currency effect on license growth rates and on total revenue growth rates, but rates remained very volatile.

Our guidance for Q3 is as follows: new software license revenue growth is expected to range from 2% to plus 12%, so that’s from positive 2% to positive 12% in constant currency and 0% to 10% in U.S. dollars. Hardware product revenue growth rate — growth is expected to range from negative 4% to negative 14% in constant currency or negative 5% to negative 15% in U.S. dollars, and that does not include the hardware support revenue.

Total revenue growth on a non-GAAP basis is expected to range from 3% to 7% in constant currency and 1% to 5% in U.S. dollars. On a GAAP basis, we expect total revenue growth from 4% to 7% in constant currency and 2% to 5% in U.S. dollars.

Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.56 to $0.59 in constant currency and $0.55 to $0.58 in U.S. dollars, up from $0.54 last year. GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.44 to $0.47 in constant currency and $0.43 to $0.46 in U.S. dollars, up from $0.41 last year. This guidance assumes a GAAP tax rate of 26% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 26.5%. Of course, it may end up being different.

Posted by on December 21st, 2011 at 1:52 pm


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