Product sales from recent buys boost Oracle profit
Oracle, the world's third-largest software maker, reported on Tuesday higher quarterly profit as sales of products it acquired over the past year helped boost earnings.
The business software provider reported fiscal fourth-quarter net income of $1.6 billion, or 31 cents per share, compared with $1.3 billion, or 24 cents, a year earlier.
Excluding items, Oracle made a per-share profit of 37 cents. Analysts were expecting a per-share profit excluding items of 35 cents, the average forecast based on Reuters Estimates.
Revenue rose to $5.83 billion from $4.85 billion.
The results were buoyed by sales of products that were not in the product lineup a year ago. Oracle added them when it bought Hyperion Solutions, Stellent, MetaSolv and several other software makers over the past year.
Oracle trades at about 17 times the average forecast for next year's earnings per share, in line with the future price-to-earnings ratio for Microsoft also 17.
Technology services company IBM, the No. 2 software maker, trades at 14 times. Oracle is the leader in databases, ahead of IBM, and No. 2 in business applications behind Germany's SAP, which trades at 20 times estimated 2008 earnings.
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