While there are long-term debates around Oracle's stock, analysts say the company looks poised to benefit from upbeat pricing trends and more when it reports results next week
Oracle is due to report quarterly earnings on Sept. 10.
Oracle's stock has been volatile following recent earnings reports, but analysts think the company's upcoming results could garner a strongly positive reaction.
A big concern for Oracle (ORCL) investors this year has been the company's high capital expenditures, or spending allocated toward things like data centers. The company has also had to take on debt to finance its artificial-intelligence efforts.
Yet Morgan Stanley analyst Sanjit Singh sees a "good setup" for the company heading into next week's earnings report - for several reasons.
He sees scope for the company to report cloud revenue growth of 63% relative to a year earlier. That would land toward the upper end of the 58% to 65% range that management forecast for the August quarter. He believes that could be driven by the company's GPU-as-a-service business, whereby it rents out computing power from graphics processing units and offers this as a cloud service.
Another good sign for Oracle is that CoreWeave (CRWV) and Nebius Group (NBIS) both recently gave upbeat commentary on pricing for AI infrastructure, Singh noted. Their results indicate that Oracle could also benefit from a market in which high demand for computing power is leading to higher pricing.
Singh also noted that Oracle's growth in deferred revenue, or money the company receives in advance of delivering on services, outpaced growth in reported revenue in the cloud applications segment for two consecutive quarters. Therefore, the company could have a backlog of revenue in the pipeline.
If such a scenario plays out, that could lead to a "modest upward revision" to the company's revenue and earnings forecast for the current fiscal year, which ends in May, and this could drive a positive stock reaction, he wrote.
Singh wrote of an "attractive tactical setup" going into earnings, even though he rates the stock at the equivalent of neutral and sees "a long road ahead."
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In a note on Friday, Piper Sandler analyst Billy Fitzsimmons also cited concerns related to Oracle's funding of the AI infrastructure build-out. However, he too believes there could be "modest upside" to revenue for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and potential upside for the company's software-as-a-service business as well.
Bookings for NetSuite, the company's enterprise resource-planning software, accelerated at the end of the fourth quarter, and Cerner, Oracle's system for electronic health records, is "returning to growth," he wrote.
That said, he believes a key ongoing debate is the timing around when Oracle's AI infrastructure spending will translate to revenue for the company. Potential data-center delays are another challenge Oracle could face, he noted.
Shares of Oracle were up 2% on Friday. The company's August-quarter report is due out after the closing bell on Sept. 10.
-Hannah Pedone
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