Despite its age and prominence, the company is on the move, and investors are pleased about that.
Investors gazing into their crystal balls this morning would have seen Oracle (ORCL 2.67%) stock rising by almost 3% across Thursday’s trading session. The busy database specialist held a meeting with financial analysts that morning in which it discussed a host of news items, and clearly those prognosticators liked what they heard. One went so far as to publish a fresh research note on the company reiterating his bullish stance.
A restless and busy company
That analyst was Bernstein SocGen Group’s Mark Moerdler, who wrote that he attended the event and participated in discussions with management and employees. Subsequent to it, he reiterated his outperform (i.e., buy) recommendation on Oracle, at a price target of $175 per share. That figure is 8% above its most recent closing price on the market.
The bullish Moerdler is particularly impressed with Oracle’s zeal to keep developing its business, especially in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service cloud computing segments.
He wrote in a fresh research note that “There really is a lot of innovation going on at Oracle and the company is surprisingly well positioned in numerous ways to capture market share in the IaaS/PaaS market, drive sustained Cloud enterprise resource planning/human capital management growth and finally move the Oracle database aggressively to the Cloud.”
Opportunities abound
By following this path, Moerdler believes, Oracle can post snowballing revenue growth and at least maintain its traditionally very healthy profit margins.
This view is entirely plausible, as Oracle has been the dominant database specialist for many years, and has always been a restless operator hunting for fresh opportunities. In a world that keeps requiring ever more sophisticated ways of arranging, sorting, and disseminating data, such a company stands in front of many growth opportunities.
Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Oracle. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
