Oracle narrowly beats on earnings, falls short on revenue

Tech firm Oracle reported its fiscal second-quarter results on Thursday, with shares dropping 2% after narrowly beating expectations for its earnings per share, but falling short on revenue for the period.

Earnings per share were at 61 cents, off the back of revenue of $9.07bn, with analysts having projected earnings of 60 cents on average for revenue of $9.12bn.

For the corresponding period in 2015, Oracle had earnings per share of 63 cents with revenue of $9bn.

It was also announced by the board that it was handing out a quarterly cash dividend of 15 cents per share.

Currency headwinds caused by a variety of geopolitical factors, including Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are likely to continue as the company heads into its third quarter, with earnings expected to be between 61 and 64 cents.

Chief executive Mark Hurd was very upbeat about the recently finished period, and says that the current quarter may actually be its "best ever".

"Oracle has now passed Salesforce.com and become number one in SaaS cloud applications sales to customers with over 1,000 employees, according to the latest IDC report," Hurd said in a statement. "In other words, this year we are selling more enterprise SaaS than any cloud services provider in the world."

Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison was equally optimistic about the company's near-term prospects.

"More surprises coming," Ellison said. "I think we're going to do even better with IaaS and the Oracledatabase in the cloud."