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Oracle's Revenue Climbs 7% As Cloud Push Brings In Billions

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Oracle reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Thursday, once again helped by its growing cloud business.

During the fiscal first quarter, net income climbed to $2.2 billion, or 52 cents per share, from $1.8 billion, or 43 cents per share, a year earlier. Adjusted for certain items, earnings came in at 62 cents per share, topping the 60 cents that Wall Street analysts were looking for.

Revenue rose 7% to $9.19 billion, beating analyst estimates of $9.03 billion.

Oracle has been aggressively scaling its cloud business and effectively playing catch-up with competitors like Salesforce and Amazon. Overall cloud revenue climbed 51% to $1.5 billion during the quarter. Its software-as-a-service business recorded revenue growth of 62% to $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, its platform-as-a-service and infrastructure revenue rose 28% to $400 million.

"The sustained hyper-growth in our multi-billion dollar cloud business continues to drive Oracle's overall revenue and earnings higher and higher," said CEO Safra Catz. "Oracle is off to a very, very strong start in FY18."

At the same time, Oracle's legacy software licensing business has been in a slow decline. Revenue rose 2% during the quarter, however, and still brings in some two thirds of the company's revenue. Oracle's hardware business saw revenue slide 5%.

Oracle also delivered a disappointing outlook, sparking concerns about growth. The company is forecasting second quarter per-share earnings of 64 to 68 cents on revenue growth between just 2% and 4%. Analysts had been looking for earnings of 68 cents and revenue growth at 4.7%.

Shares of Oracle, which have climbed 37% this year, initially rose in after-hours trading. However, on Friday morning, they had dropped 4%.