Shares of Oracle have surged 42% since the company's previous earnings call in March. Can the software giant and hyperscaler keep the momentum as it reports fiscal fourth-quarter results on Wednesday?
That will depend on Oracle's $(ORCL)$ artificial-intelligence progress, capital expenditure levels and margins, analysts say. Wednesday's earnings call will also mark the first appearance by new CFO Hilary Maxson, who was appointed in April.
According to a Monday note from Jefferies analyst Brent Thill, key fourth-quarter numbers for Oracle will be 90% growth in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a 43% operating margin and around $36 billion in incremental net remaining performance obligations.
Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet are expecting $19.1 billion in sales and $1.96 in earnings per share for the May quarter. Remaining performance obligations, or signed contracts not yet converted to revenue, are expected to be $601.1 billion.
Wall Street anticipates Oracle's operating margins to compress by about 3 percentage points as the company's business mix shifts toward OCI, a more capital-intensive part of the business. But, Thill said, the impact may not be as severe as the consensus models, due to cost efficiencies and workforce reductions.
In March, reports suggested that Oracle was conducting mass layoffs. While the company did not comment on the matter, TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 employees, or 6% to 9% of the workforce, were affected.
Oracle's shares have surged higher in recent weeks on the back of "strong investor appetite to be long compute names," Wood wrote. In April, Oracle expanded its partnership with Bloom Energy $(BE)$ to secure up to 2.8 gigawatts of fuel-cell capacity for its AI initiatives. And last week, Oracle Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said that construction of Stargate, Oracle's joint venture with OpenAI, is on schedule.
Wood sees a "favorable setup" for Oracle, given that its capacity of graphics processing units is increasing and operating expenses are coming down. The added GPU capacity could help fuel an OCI acceleration, he noted, while reiterating his buy rating and raising his price target to $300 from $250.
BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski wrote in a note last week that he expects Oracle to continue to lean in to its "Bring Your Own Chip" model that it introduced last quarter. To mitigate heavy capital expenditures, Oracle will let customers use their own hardware in its data centers.
However, Slowinski believes capital expenditures could continue increasing going forward as Oracle ramps up various Stargate facilities in the second half of 2026 and early 2027.
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