Highlights From Oracle's (ORCL) Q4 Conference Call, Experienced 25% EPS Growth

Oracle Corp (NASDAQ: ORCL) reported Q4 EPS of $0.75, $0.04 better than the analyst estimate of $0.71. Revenue for the quarter came in at $10.8 billion versus the consensus estimate of $10.75 billion.

Highlights from Oracles Q4 conference:

• For the year, we achieved 25% new license growth in Q1, 21% in Q2, 29% in Q3, and including this quarter, we delivered 23% new license growth for the full fiscal year. Our software business is now even bigger than IBM's software business.
• For the year, we delivered 38% EPS growth in Q1, 33% in Q2, 40% in Q3, and including 25% this quarter, we delivered 33% EPS growth for the year, once again way ahead of the 20% growth we promised. Our non-GAAP earnings per share for the year were $2.22.
  
• Q4 was the company's first $10 billion quarter.New software license revenue was up 19%, to $3.6 billion, accelerating from 14% in Q4 of last year.
• Geographically, the quarter was strong and balanced, with new license growing 16% in the Americas, 24% in APAC, and 22% in EMEA.
• For the year, our operating income grew 27%.
• The non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 23.3% due to several favorable nonrecurring items.
• The company now has $29 billion in cash and marketable securities, and operating cash flow increased to a record $11.2 billion for the year, while free cash flow increased to $10.8 billion.
• Database business grew 28% in Q4 and 26% for the year, twice as fast as any year this past decade.
• Sequential growth was more than 50%.
  
• For the full year, we repurchased 40.4 million shares, for a total of approximately $1.2 billion, and the board again declared a dividend of $0.06.
• New software license revenue growth is expected to range from 10% to 20%. Hardware product revenue growth is expected to range from negative 5% to positive 5%, and of course, that does not include the hardware support revenue.
• Total revenue on a non-GAAP basis is expected to range from 9% to 12%. On a GAAP basis, we expect total revenue growth from 10% to 13%. Non-GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.45 to $0.48. GAAP EPS is expected to be $0.33 to $0.36. Now, this guidance assumes a GAAP tax rate of 29%, and non-GAAP tax rate of 28.5%, which is nearly 4 points higher than our tax rate in the previous year. Now, of course, this may end up being different.
• The company has 300,000 database customers running Oracle database workloads.
• Focused on selling hardware systems. We're now selling fewer systems at a higher price, that are of more value to the customer, that stay installed longer. These are – and also, we're doing that at higher margins.
• Added 800 people to the sales organization this quarter.
• I think with Exalogic, you've got an opportunity now that you go to Java-based applications and get, in some cases, 2x, 3x, 4x better performance than what you had before.
  

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