Guest valueInv Posted December 21, 2013 Share Posted December 21, 2013 Apple makes a perfect product and never holds back features? Can I have what you're smoking? They are far more perfectionist than any other company. As far as holding back goes - every company has a roadmap that stretches years. Every release includes the features that they have the resources to implement and other features are slated for future releases. If you held an operating role at a tech company, you would know that. Apparently, what I am smoking is not as strong as what you are smoking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted December 21, 2013 Share Posted December 21, 2013 Counterexample- Apple. We talk about this one in 10 years again. ;D Why ? Because you predicted Apple's current success 10 years ago? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VAL9000 Posted December 21, 2013 Share Posted December 21, 2013 FWIW having gone through a few oracle implementations in the day job, the process is incredibly painful, disruptive, and distracting to a business. But nonetheless CFO's for large companies seem unlikely to consider alternative platforms. Maybe this changes as a younger crop of finance leaders mature, but I've rarely seen such an entrenched company...switching costs are enormous! I observed that its not very profitable to give customers perfect solutions. The ones who do this earn no money over longer timeframes and built no long term customer relationships. Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are very good at exploiting this tactic for good results. When Windows is perfect nobody needs updates and nobody upgrades to the next Windows, etc. What's really happening here is that each implementation of enterprise software is completely customized - that's why the implementations are so painful. The nature of the business world is akin to an ecosystem, but unlike a real ecosystem every living being ("corporation") is unique. Businesses refuse to change their internal processes to match the default capabilities any newly purchased software package, and instead invest multiple millions in configuring the base package to their specific needs. This isn't a case of nefariously exploiting every other company's desire for automation in order to boost profits. It's just that people who buy software and solutions are grossly underqualified to do so. As a group these buyers simply don't understand the cost and complexity of enterprise implementations. The people in the position to know are doing the selling, so they don't really give the customer the full picture. That said, most software projects are jointly agreed to without enough due diligence on both sides, and generally rosy aspirations on both sides. So everybody hates each other by the end of the project, but people keep buying. Primarily because the alternative is so much worse. Customers can complain about Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and others' software solutions until they are blue in the face, but without those solutions, costs would be much higher, and they would lose their whole business to a competitor who has the vision and the grit to digest a large-scale software deployment. I disagree with the view that it's bad on purpose. In fact, it is the case that enterprise software vendors are actively trying to reduce the complexity of their software so that they reduce service fees and therefore increase sales. Software only works really well if more and more people buy the software. The greater the services need, the lower the software sales volume. Since software variable costs are effectively zero, this should be pretty obvious. So when you think about it that way, owners of ORCL and IBM (MSFT to a lesser degree) should have greater appreciation for companies like SalesForce.com. Their implementations and upgrades are very easy when compared to other CRM software competitors - meaning services fees are low. This gives great insight into why "the street" is so in love with this company. While SalesForce.com isn't profitable in the way that something like Microsoft is, they have all the underpinnings of great profits, and they are earning that by offering less-broken software than their competitors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TeddyLampert Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 There hasn't been much action on this ORCL thread so I'm not sure if there's any more interest. ORCL is trading below 9x fwd EV / Ebit which caught my eye. It's also got a history of buying back shares opportunistically. I've noticed that Lou Simpson has been adding to his position consistently for the last couple years. If there's anyone who has long followed ORCL, what is your view on the earnings miss? Stock is down 6%. Is this par for the course when you own ORCL? I looked at this some more and just compared past earnings announcements with the share price reaction following it. What I found was the same yarn ("4q is seasonally the strongest quarter, but there was top line miss and an earnings miss, etc... it shows how ORCL is struggling to compete with nimble cloud competitors...etc"). Seriously, you could take the 4Q 2013 Bloomberg news report and repeat it verbatim and you'd have this quarter's earnings announcement! Another reason why all sell-side analysts should be round up and shot. The stock rebounded from that miss over the next 6 mos and 2Q 14 earnings came in with a positive surprise and increased earnings guidance. Roll out asinine sell side commentary: "while it has been a bumpy transition, ORCL's cloud strategy is beginning to bear fruit...etc". I guess it's a reminder that the world overreacts in the short term to an earnings blip, but a moated company eventually can right its ship Does anyone have time-series market share data that is relevant for where ORCL makes it's money? I just want to understand if market share is growing, steady or declining for signs of competition. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TeddyLampert Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 VIC write up posted 2 days ago FYI Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 I bought in about a year ago and it's been a great ride for me. It gets rough around earnings periods (like today) but your comments about valuation are spot on. It always amazes me how much a stock will move based upon an earnings miss or beat. The company "missed" earnings estimates and grew less than expected but they still grew revenues (and earnings if you exclude last year's one off gain). I'm happy owning the stock with zero growth and expect none. This is never going to double over a year but the cash flow returns and shareholder friendly actions of management mean it doesn't have to grow the business to be a great investment - any growth is just gravy at these levels. I love the stat in every earning release that shows Free Cash Flow has consistently exceeded 125% of earnings. I'm sure many will argue that the business is being eaten away by competition and they are a dinosaur and the move to the cloud will be their undoing but I'm happy to sit her and roll around in all that free cash flow and share buybacks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peter1234 Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 Agreed. Bears might put it in the dinosaur category with something like an IBM. I think thesis is similar in that it is really really entrenched in companies' infrastructure. Plus you have the CEO founder creating value for himself and the other shareholders. Have not seen much substance or evidence to Oracle becoming less relevant. Whether Sun was a good buy or not is debatable. I personally much prefer SW over HW. You see Oracle in a lot of value portfolios. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TeddyLampert Posted June 20, 2014 Share Posted June 20, 2014 It would be great to hear from a real bear to "kill" the stock, to borrow a Berkowitz phrase. In particular, hard evidence of a permanent decline in ORCL's earnings power due to competition is what I am looking for: evidence of market share loss in the relevant business line where ORCL "makes money" shown on a yearly or quarterly basis (time series, not just a single period's comparison). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted June 23, 2014 Share Posted June 23, 2014 It would be great to hear from a real bear to "kill" the stock, to borrow a Berkowitz phrase. In particular, hard evidence of a permanent decline in ORCL's earnings power due to competition is what I am looking for: evidence of market share loss in the relevant business line where ORCL "makes money" shown on a yearly or quarterly basis (time series, not just a single period's comparison). The company I work for runs on Oracle. This means that the complete manufacturing operation is mirrored in Oracle transactions. Oracle is simply the financial cardiac system of the companies that use it. It is almost impossible to remove/replace this without leaving the companies operations in chaos. The same is true for SAP implementations. The issue is that smaller/upcoming companies shying away from these ERP applications and often choosing cloud based solutions, even though those tend to be more "insular", because they are easier and cheaper to implement. I don't see SAP/Oracle loosing customers as much as not gaining many new ones. FWIW, IBM applications are nowhere near as ingrained as Oracle or SAP ERP software. I own a few Oracle shares purchased a year ago around 30$. I think it is a way more straightforward value proposition than IBM stock, even at current prices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phaceliacapital Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 BN) Oracle Jumps Most in 5 Years as Results Show Cloud Shift Pa yoff +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Oracle Jumps Most in 5 Years as Results Show Cloud Shift Payoff 2014-12-18 15:17:21.357 GMT By Niamh Ring (Bloomberg) -- Oracle Corp. shares rose the most in more than five years as efforts to push deeper into Web-based cloud computing helped fuel fiscal second-quarter profit and sales that surpassed analysts’ estimates. The software-maker’s shares soared 8.8 percent to $44.78 at 10:12 a.m., after the company’s earnings report yesterday. Earlier they traded at $44.98 for the biggest intraday jump since June 2009 and the highest price in more than a decade. Before today, Oracle had added 7.6 percent this year, compared with a 8.9 percent rise for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Profit before certain costs was 69 cents a share in the period that ended Nov. 30 on revenue of $9.6 billion, the Redwood City, California-based company said in a statement yesterday. On average, analysts projected profit of 68 cents and $9.5 billion in sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The quarter was the first with Mark Hurd and Safra Catz as chief executive officers, after they took over from founder Larry Ellison three months ago. Oracle has introduced new software delivered over the Internet and acquired companies to win corporate customers, seeking to boost revenue after 13 straight quarters of sales growth of less than 5 percent. Like Adobe Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp., Oracle is seeking to replace one-time sales of software with ongoing subscriptions. “If there’s any hiccup or hint of slippage in operating margin relating to this transition, then the red flag is going to go up” said Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Securities Inc., which owns 1.4 million Oracle shares. Second-quarter net income fell 2 percent to $2.5 billion, or 56 cents a share, from $2.55 billion, or 56 cents, a year earlier. Revenue Outlook For the fiscal third quarter that ends in February, Catz said on a conference call that unusually high volatility in foreign exchange rates could adversely impact revenue by 4 percent and per-share earnings by 4 cents. Based on this, Oracle issued a profit forecast of 65 cents to 70 cents for the current quarter and sales that will be flat to 4 percent higher from a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Analysts, on average, are predicting profit of 73 cents and sales rising 4 percent to $9.68 billion in the fiscal third quarter. In the prior period, new software license sales, an indicator of future revenue, fell 3.6 percent to $2.05 billion, Oracle said. “I think folks will look past that if they see meaningful traction on the cloud initiatives,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. who has a buy rating on the stock. In the hardware division, which bolsters Oracle’s software and support sales, revenue was rose slightly at $1.33 billion. Cloud Business Combined sales in Oracle’s cloud software, platform and infrastructure businesses were $516 million, up 45 percent from a year earlier. The company started disclosing cloud revenue two quarters ago. “The stock is trading on that cloud growth,” Morgan said. Analysts and money managers are looking at the performance of Oracle’s cloud products to gauge the company’s ability to change its core businesses to compete with Salesforce, Workday Inc., Amazon.com Inc.’s Web services unit and other cloud- computing providers. Oracle spent more than $50 billion to acquire about 100 companies in the past decade to bolster its core businesses of database, hardware and business-applications, and help it gain share in the cloud. Oracle is on track to sell more than $1 billion of new cloud subscriptions next fiscal year, Ellison said on a conference call. The company is also catching up to Salesforce in new cloud subscriptions, said Ellison, who is now Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer. “Stay tuned, it’s going to be close,” Ellison said. “We’re catching up to them, and catching up very quickly.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dabuff Posted May 26, 2015 Share Posted May 26, 2015 There's been a lot of recent guru selling on this one - Lou Simpson sold out 8.7% of his stake last quarter. Any other bears care to comment? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 1, 2018 Share Posted August 1, 2018 https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-oracle-software-by-early-2020.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oddballstocks Posted August 1, 2018 Share Posted August 1, 2018 There's been a lot of recent guru selling on this one - Lou Simpson sold out 8.7% of his stake last quarter. Any other bears care to comment? Every company that can get away from Oracle is trying to figure out a way to leave. Bullish is their extortion of Java coming up next year... they'll milk that until the language is dead. If you use Java for any business reason you're supposed to license every CPU and core in your computer at $5k per CPU. Expect more litigation on that as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vince Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 It would be great to hear from a real bear to "kill" the stock, to borrow a Berkowitz phrase. In particular, hard evidence of a permanent decline in ORCL's earnings power due to competition is what I am looking for: evidence of market share loss in the relevant business line where ORCL "makes money" shown on a yearly or quarterly basis (time series, not just a single period's comparison). The company I work for runs on Oracle. This means that the complete manufacturing operation is mirrored in Oracle transactions. Oracle is simply the financial cardiac system of the companies that use it. It is almost impossible to remove/replace this without leaving the companies operations in chaos. The same is true for SAP implementations. The issue is that smaller/upcoming companies shying away from these ERP applications and often choosing cloud based solutions, even though those tend to be more "insular", because they are easier and cheaper to implement. I don't see SAP/Oracle loosing customers as much as not gaining many new ones. FWIW, IBM applications are nowhere near as ingrained as Oracle or SAP ERP software. I own a few Oracle shares purchased a year ago around 30$. I think it is a way more straightforward value proposition than IBM stock, even at current prices. I'm a few years behind in my reply, was just trying to read some older posts on oracle......but just wanted to say that this is an excellent post, and maybe some oracle experts will resume posting about them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LC Posted September 2, 2019 Share Posted September 2, 2019 I am only speaking to the digital marketing side here: Oracle is losing on the fringes. Their ODC/OMC is a substandard suite compared to Adobe's or Salesforce. Look at the share price movement between Oracle and Adobe over the past 2+ years and you can see where the value has been created. Now, I am not saying you can't make money with Oracle or can't lose money with Adobe, I am just saying the product suite for the marginal digital marketer is far superior with Adobe. Oracle's ODC/OMC is mismanaged and if you think Uncle Larry is sitting in the board room diving into detail on this, you are wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 Everybody wants a piece of Tik tok. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-18/oracle-in-talks-to-buy-tiktok-s-u-s-business-ft-reports?srnd=premium Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 Why? Just...why? Must be a stalking horse to keep Microsoft honest on price. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 Why? Just...why? Must be a stalking horse to keep Microsoft honest on price. I think Larry sees a chance to get the loot because of his political connections. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 Why? Just...why? Must be a stalking horse to keep Microsoft honest on price. I think Larry sees a chance to get the loot because of his political connections. Yeah, it's probably Bytedance and the VCs trying to get a better price out of MSFT. Or maybe if Oracle gets it, they'll flip it around later, because they certainly wouldn't know what to do with it longer term. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 20, 2020 Share Posted August 20, 2020 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-tiktok-suitors-microsoft-oracle-wield-power-in-washington President Trump on Tuesday called Oracle a “great company” and said he would support its purchase of TikTok. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted August 27, 2020 Share Posted August 27, 2020 https://www.thewrap.com/oracle-nears-20-billion-tiktok-deal-with-white-house-support-exclusive/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted September 13, 2020 Share Posted September 13, 2020 Bytedance rejected Microsoft's bid, now in exclusive talks with Oracle: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/microsoft-bid-for-tiktoks-us-operations-rejected-by-bytedance.html https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/13/microsoft-statement-on-tiktok/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted September 15, 2020 Share Posted September 15, 2020 TikTok set to become a standalone US company to satisfy White House https://www.ft.com/content/58eb7c26-2154-477f-af19-19157ae29261 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tiktok/tiktok-to-become-standalone-u-s-company-ft-idUSKBN26632S Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted September 19, 2020 Share Posted September 19, 2020 Trump has agreed to deal in which TikTok will partner with Oracle and Walmart https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/trump-says-he-has-approved-tiktok-oracle-deal-in-concept.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted September 20, 2020 Share Posted September 20, 2020 How does this resolve the security issues? Trump's buddies at Oracle and Walmart with minority ownership positions that they flip in an IPO next year. And no discussion anywhere of price. Is this what draining the swamp looks like? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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