Oracle’s Q4 Guidance: 92 to 99 Cents Per Share

From Oracle‘s ($ORCL) conference call.

As we said before, we are committed to returning value to our shareholders through earnings growth, stock repurchases and a dividend. This quarter we repurchased 55.4 million shares for a total of $2 billion.

Over the last 12 months we have repurchased nearly 360 million shares for a total of $10.7 billion and reducing our — reduced our share count by 5%. We also paid out more than $1.6 billion in dividends this fiscal year so far.

Stock repurchases and dividends have totaled more than 85% of free cash flow over the last 12 months and the Board of Directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share.

Now to the guidance and if currency were to stay where it is today than the impact of currency would be minimal, of course, this could change quickly. New software license and cloud subscription revenue growth is expected to range from zero to 10%. Hardware product revenue growth is expected to range from zero to 10%.

As a result, total revenue growth on both GAAP and non-GAAP basis is expected to range from 3% to 7% in reported dollars. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be somewhere between $0.92 and $0.99 in constant dollars and in reported dollars. GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.79 to $0.86.

Now I want to remind you the last year we recognized an acquisition-related benefit of $269 million in connection with the Pillar Data Systems earn-out, excluding that benefit GAAP EPS last Q4 would have been $0.74.

This guidance assumes a GAAP tax rate of 21.5% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 23.5%, and of course it may end up being different.

Wall Street had been expecting 96 cents per share.

Posted by on March 18th, 2014 at 11:14 pm


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