Oracle suffers 'significant impact' from US dollar in Q3

But Larry Ellison bullish on cloud performance over rival Salesforce.com

The rising value of the US dollar had a "significant impact" on Oracle's Q3 results but its chairman Larry Ellison once again boasted of the company's cloud sales over its rivals.

For the three months to 29 February, Oracle's net profit was $2.1bn (£1.5bn), down 14 per cent year on year in dollar terms. This was on sales of $9bn, which were largely flat, falling three per cent from the same quarter last year.

But the results were dampened by the dollar's strength, and its sales would have been up one per cent year on year, in constant currencies.

Ignoring currency headwinds, cloud plus on-premise software sales were up three per cent at $7.1bn.

The majority of this revenue was generated through on-premise software sales, which were at $6.3bn. But its overall cloud sales showed fast growth last quarter, and were up 44 per cent in constant currencies.

Safra Catz, Oracle's CEO, hailed this cloud growth, claiming this business is now in "hyper-growth".

"Our cloud SaaS and PaaS revenue growth rate accelerated to 61 per cent in constant currency in Q3," she said. "This dramatic revenue increase drove our non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS gross margins up to 51 per cent in Q3 as compared with 43 per cent in Q2.

"Our cloud business is now in a hyper-growth phase. Our gross margins are climbing towards our target of 80 per cent. These two factors will ignite substantial EPS (earnings per share) and cashflow growth over Oracle's next few quarters."

And the markets reacted well to the latest results, with Oracle's share price rising nearly five per cent since they were released.

Ellison (pictured) said the latest financials show how Oracle is outstripping its competition.

"In absolute dollar terms, Oracle is already selling more enterprise SaaS and PaaS new cloud revenue than any other company in the world - including Salesforce.com," he said. "We are growing much faster than Salesforce.com.

"We also have many more SaaS products than Salesforce.com. In some of our most important SaaS markets, such as ERP, HCM (human capital management), supply chain and manufacturing, Salesforce.com does not participate at all. By successfully competing in all these markets, Oracle has the ability to sustain its high growth over a long period of time. That should make it easy for us to pass Salesforce.com and become the largest SaaS and PaaS cloud company in the world."