Can Oracle Outperform Against Economic Headwinds?

With shares of Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) trading around $33.76, is ORCL an OUTPERFORM, a WAIT AND SEE, or a STAY AWAY? Let’s analyze the stock with the relevant sections of our CHEAT SHEET investing framework:

C = Catalysts for the Stock’s Movement are Positive

On December 18, Oracle released strong fiscal-year 2013 second-quarter earnings. The company reported a 3 percent year-over-year increase in total revenues to $9.1 billion. Excluding items, earnings per share grew 18.5 percent to $0.64, ahead of analyst expectations of $0.61.

Shares closed the regular session up 1.73 percent, and climbed nearly 1 percent in after-hours trading. Commenting in the earnings release, Oracle President Mark Hurd indicated where the company will see growth in the future.

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“Our cloud offering of HCM, CRM and ERP applications plus the Oracle database and Java platform services is the strongest and most complete in the industry. Already approaching a one billion dollar run rate, our Cloud business will become much bigger over time,” he said.

Looking to settle some lingering uncertainty about the 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison commented: “Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business. I believe that products like Exadata and the SPARC SuperCluster will not only continue to drive improved profitability in our hardware business, but by the end of this fiscal year, they will also drive growth in our hardware business.”