Oracle’s dynamic year hit a snag this week after the company released a second-quarter earnings report that underwhelmed investors.
In the period, the firm posted revenue of $9.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.70, both of which met analyst expectations. But results were less positive in its cloud division, which is growing at a slower clip than earlier forecasts had projected.
Even with that disappointing news, the software giant’s cloud unit is undoubtedly flourishing. Cloud revenues reached $1.5 billion in the quarter, Oracle reported, an increase of 44% over the prior year.
Investors were not satisfied with that growth, prompting shares to fall nearly 4%, to $48.30, between the close of markets on Thursday and 4 pm Eastern Time on Friday.
That drop was especially bad news for Larry Ellison, a cofounder of Oracle and its former CEO, who owns roughly a quarter of the company’s outstanding shares. His net worth dropped $2 billion in the 24 hours through Friday afternoon.
He is now worth an estimated $59 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time rankings of the world’s richest people. He remains the 8th wealthiest person on the planet.
A college dropout, Ellison cofounded Oracle in 1977. The business went public on the NASDAQ nine years later, and by the turn of the millennium its share price had risen more than six-hundred fold.
The stock subsequently collapsed alongside much of the tech industry as the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and 2001. Ellison did not regain that lost wealth until earlier this year, when Oracle’s stock hit a record high.
Ellison, 73, currently serves as the company’s chairman and chief technology officer. He stepped down as CEO in September 2014, when he handed the reins to Mark Hurd and Safra Catz. Since then, the firm has aggressively pushed into cloud computing, underscored by its 2016 purchase of cloud-software firm Netsuite for $9.3 billion.
That transition has gone well overall, despite this week’s hiccup. Oracle’s stock is up nearly 25% so far this year and is trading just a few dollars below its all-time high.
