Oracle beats quarterly results estimates on cloud services demand, shares rise
(Reuters) -Oracle beat Wall Street estimates for fourth-quarter results on Wednesday, boosted by growing demand for its cloud offerings from companies deploying artificial intelligence, sending its shares up 7% after the bell.
The company's growth is largely nurtured by its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) solution and support for AI workloads. Analysts see the company becoming more of a cloud service provider that relies less on software growth.
"We expect our total cloud growth rate — applications plus infrastructure — will increase from 24% in fiscal year 2025 to over 40% in fiscal year 2026," said CEO Safra Catz.
Revenue for the quarter ended May 31 stood at $15.90 billion, compared with the analysts' average estimate of $15.59 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Quarterly revenue at Oracle's largest unit, cloud services and license support, grew 14% to $11.70 billion from last year.
Oracle has also been introducing AI assistants, advisers and agents. Its AI Agent Studio, announced in March, is designed to help customers and partners build their own customized AI agents.
Excluding items, the company earned $1.70 per share in the fourth quarter, compared with estimates of $1.64 apiece.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
ADM sets off 'frenzy' in US soybean market ahead of new biofuel blend rule
By Tom Polansek and Karl Plume CHICAGO (Reuters) -Archer-Daniels-Midland, a major U.S. soybean crusher and biofuel producer, slashed its bids to buy the oilseed this week ahead of an expected Trump administration announcement on biofuel blending requirements, a primary driver of demand for soybean oil. Processors such as Chicago-based ADM have been waiting for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision on blending requirements for months as they grapple with slumping crush margins and abundant soybean stocks. Reuters reported on Thursday that the EPA is expected to propose blending requirements below industry recommendations on Friday, leading to lower-than-expected demand for soyoil to be used in biofuels. ADM said in an emailed statement to Reuters on Thursday that it does not have insight around the pending blending announcement beyond publicly available information and that it independently sets its basis bids, which is the difference between futures and a local cash price to take possession of the grain immediately. The company on Wednesday rolled its cash basis bid at its flagship Decatur, Illinois, facility to 20 cents below the Chicago Board of Trade November soybean futures price from 22 cents over July futures. The roll to November futures, which closed at a 15-cent discount to July on Thursday, lowered the local cash price by about 60 cents a bushel, representing an unusually sharp 6.5% drop in the price offered to farmers. ADM also rolled basis bids at its other crushing facilities, and some rival processors, including Cargill, followed ADM on Thursday. Other processors kept their basis bids against the July futures contract, but lowered basis values by up to 15 cents. "ADM Decatur put the bean market in a frenzy," agriculture trading company John Stewart and Associates said in a note. Falling basis values reflect expectations for a large autumn harvest and weak demand that has eroded processing margins for companies that crush beans into soymeal livestock feed and soyoil used for cooking and producing biofuels. Crush margins have struggled as a recent jump in U.S. processing capacity has swelled available supplies of meal and oil and pressured prices for the soy products. Tariff worries and unclear U.S. biofuels policies have stoked further unease among crushers and biofuel makers, and some biodiesel producers have scaled back or idled plants. ADM said in April it would permanently close a South Carolina soybean processing plant to cut costs. "Cash crush margins stink, and there is a bunch of downtime scheduled for July," said Charlie Sernatinger, executive vice president for Marex Capital Markets. Diana Klemme, vice president of Grain Service Corp in Atlanta, which serves agricultural hedgers in the futures markets, sent an alert to customers after seeing ADM's bid adjustments. She said that she had never seen a move to new-crop basis levels in June in more than 50 years in the grain business. "I said check your markets carefully because ADM just dropped all their bids 40-75 cents a bushel and went to new-crop values," Klemme said. The November futures contract represents the autumn harvest price, or the new crop. Farmers have been reluctant to sell crops to processors because they want higher prices, while processors avoided raising bids to protect their thin margins.

Associated Press
24 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Wall Street ticks closer to its record after Oracle rallies
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stock indexes ticked higher on Thursday following another encouraging update on inflation across the country. The S&P 500 rose 0.4% to pull back with 1.6% of its record. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 101 points, or 0.2%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 0.2%. Oracle pushed upward on the market after jumping 13.3%. The tech giant delivered stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected, and CEO Safra Catz said it expects revenue growth 'will be dramatically higher' in its upcoming fiscal year. That helped offset a 4.8% loss for Boeing after Air India said a London-bound flight crashed shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad airport Thursday with 242 passengers and crew onboard. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a residential area near the airport five minutes after taking off. The cause of the crash wasn't immediately known. Stocks broadly got some help from easing Treasury yields in the bond market following the latest update on inflation. Thursday's said inflation at the wholesale level wasn't as bad last month as economists expected, and it followed a report on Wednesday saying something similar about the inflation that U.S. consumers are feeling . Wall Street took it as a signal that the Federal Reserve will have more leeway to cut interest rates later this year in order to give the economy a boost. The Federal Reserve has been hesitant to lower interest rates , and it's been on hold this year after cutting at the end of last year, because it's waiting to see how much President Donald Trump's tariffs will hurt the economy and raise inflation. While lower rates can goose the economy by encouraging businesses and households to borrow, they can also accelerate inflation. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.35% from 4.41% late Wednesday and from roughly 4.80% early this year. Besides the inflation data, a separate report on jobless claims also helped to weigh on Treasury yields. It said slightly more U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week than economists expected, and the total number remained at the highest level in eight months. That could be an indication of a rise in layoffs across the country. 'We believe that were it not for the uncertainty caused by the tariffs, the combined information coming from the inflation and labor-market data would have compelled the Fed to have resumed cutting its policy rate by now,' according to Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie. The Fed's next meeting on interest rates is scheduled for next week, but the nearly unanimous expectation on Wall Street is that it will stand pat again. Traders are betting it's likely to begin cutting in September, according to data from CME Group. Trump's on-and-off tariffs have raised worries about higher inflation and a possible recession, which had sent the S&P 500 roughly 20% below its record a couple months ago. But stocks have since rallied nearly all the way back on hopes that Trump will lower his tariffs after reaching trade deals with other countries. Many of Trump's tariffs are on hold at the moment to give time for negotiations, but Trump added to the uncertainty late Wednesday when he suggested the United States could send letters to other countries at some point 'saying this is the deal. You can take it or you can leave it.' On Wall Street, Chime Financial jumped 37.4% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq. The technology company is trying to be the main financial hub for customers, connecting them with its bank partners. GameStop dropped 22.5% after saying it plans to raise $1.75 billion by borrowing at zero interest rates, though the lenders could choose to be repaid in the video-game retailer's stock instead of cash. All told, the S&P 500 rose 23.02 points to 6,045.26. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 101.85 to 42,967.62, and the Nasdaq composite gained 46.61 to 19,662.48. In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia amid mostly modest movements. Hong Kong's Hang Seng was an outlier, and it tumbled 1.4% to give back some of its strong recent gains. Hong Kong's index is still up nearly 20% for the year so far, towering over the U.S. stock market's gain of less than 3%. ___ AP Writers Matt Ott, Elaine Kurtenbach and Seung Min Kim contributed.
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump to attend AI and energy summit in Pittsburgh
By Kanishka Singh WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump and executives from the tech and energy sectors will appear at an artificial intelligence and energy summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 15, the office of the state's U.S. Senator Dave McCormick said on Thursday. McCormick's inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit will be held at Carnegie Mellon University, his office said in a statement. Axios reported that tech executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai were on the summit's guest list. Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods, Shell CEO Wael Sawan and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth were also on that list, according to Axios. White House AI czar David Sacks, who is also expected to attend the summit, expressed concern earlier this week that regulating U.S. AI too tightly could stifle growth and cede the critical market to China. The comments indicated the Republican president's approach to AI could be centered on expanding markets abroad for U.S. AI chips and models. Democratic former President Joe Biden had emphasized policies that countered risks the chips could be diverted to China and used to bolster Beijing's military. A group of 40 state attorneys general, including Republicans from Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, Utah and Virginia and other states, have pushed back against Republican attempts to block states from regulating AI, saying states should develop and enforce common-sense regulation to protect consumers.