UNITED STATES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20549
FORM
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ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF |
THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
For the fiscal year ended
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TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF |
THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
For the transition period from to
Commission File Number:
(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)
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(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization) |
(I.R.S. Employer Identification No.) |
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(Address of principal executive offices) |
(Zip Code) |
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(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)
Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:
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Name of each exchange on which registered |
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Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:
None
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. YES ☒ NO ☐
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. YES ☐ NO ☒
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. YES ☒ NO ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). YES ☒ NO ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.
Large accelerated filer ☒ |
Accelerated filer ☐ |
Non-accelerated filer ☐ |
Smaller reporting company |
Emerging growth company |
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If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). YES
The aggregate market value of the voting stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant was $
Number of shares of common stock outstanding as of June 16, 2020:
Documents Incorporated by Reference:
Portions of the registrant's definitive proxy statement relating to its 2020 annual stockholders' meeting are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K where indicated.
ORACLE CORPORATION
FISCAL YEAR 2020
FORM 10-K
ANNUAL REPORT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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PART I. |
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Item 1. |
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3 |
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Item 1A. |
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17 |
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Item 1B. |
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33 |
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Item 2. |
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33 |
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Item 3. |
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33 |
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Item 4. |
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PART II. |
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Item 5. |
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Item 6. |
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Item 7. |
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Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations |
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Item 7A. |
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59 |
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Item 8. |
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61 |
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Item 9. |
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Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure |
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Item 9A. |
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61 |
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Item 9B. |
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63 |
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PART III. |
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Item 10. |
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64 |
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Item 11. |
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Item 12. |
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Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters |
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Item 13. |
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Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence |
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Item 14. |
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64 |
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PART IV. |
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Item 15. |
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65 |
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Item 16. |
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117 |
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123 |
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Cautionary Note on Forward-Looking Statements
For purposes of this Annual Report, the terms “Oracle,” “we,” “us” and “our” refer to Oracle Corporation and its consolidated subsidiaries. This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains statements that are not historical in nature, are predictive in nature, or that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions or otherwise contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include, among other things, statements regarding:
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our expectations regarding the impacts on our business as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic; |
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our expectation that we may acquire companies, products, services and technologies to further our corporate strategy as compelling opportunities become available; |
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our belief that our acquisitions enhance the products and services that we can offer to customers, expand our customer base, provide greater scale to accelerate innovation, grow our revenues and earnings, and increase stockholder value; |
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our expectation that, on a constant currency basis, our total cloud and license revenues generally will continue to increase due to expected growth in our cloud services and our license support offerings, and continued demand for our cloud license and on-premise license offerings; |
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our belief that our Oracle Cloud Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS and IaaS, respectively, and collectively, Oracle Cloud Services) offerings are opportunities for us to expand our cloud and license business, and that demand for our Oracle Cloud Services will continue to increase; |
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our belief that we can market and sell our SaaS and IaaS offerings together to help customers migrate their extensive installed base of on-premise applications and infrastructure technologies to the Oracle Cloud while at the same time reaching a broader ecosystem of developers and partners; |
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our belief that we can market our SaaS and IaaS services to small and medium-sized businesses and non-IT lines of business purchasers; |
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our expectation that substantially all of our customers will renew their license support contracts annually; |
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our belief that Oracle ERP Cloud is a strategic suite of applications that is foundational to facilitate and extract more business value out of the adoption of other Oracle SaaS offerings as our customers realize value of a common data model that spans across core business applications; |
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our expectations regarding the performance of our Oracle Autonomous Database, including its ability to reduce customer downtime and cost; |
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our expectation that our hardware business will have lower operating margins as a percentage of revenues than our cloud and license business; |
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our expectation that we will continue to make significant investments in research and development, and our belief that research and development efforts are essential to maintaining our competitive position; |
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our expectation that our international operations will continue to provide a significant portion of our total revenues and expenses; |
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the sufficiency of our sources of funding for working capital, capital expenditures, contractual obligations, acquisitions, dividends, stock repurchases, debt repayments and other matters; |
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our belief that we have adequately provided under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles for outcomes related to our tax audits and that the final outcome of our tax related examinations, |
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agreements or judicial proceedings will not have a material effect on our results of operations, and our belief that our net deferred tax assets will be realized in the foreseeable future; |
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our belief that the outcome of certain legal proceedings and claims to which we are a party will not, individually or in the aggregate, result in losses that are materially in excess of amounts already recognized, if any; |
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the possibility that certain legal proceedings to which we are a party could have a material impact on our future cash flows and results of operations; |
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the timing and amount of expenses we expect to incur and the cost savings we expect to realize pursuant to our Fiscal 2019 Oracle Restructuring Plan; |
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the timing and amount of future cash dividend payments and stock repurchases, including our expectation that the levels of our future stock repurchase activity may be modified in comparison to past periods in order to use available cash for other purposes; |
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our expectations regarding the impact of recent accounting pronouncements on our consolidated financial statements; |
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our expectation that, to the extent customers renew support contracts or cloud SaaS and IaaS contracts from companies that we have acquired, we will recognize revenues for the full contracts’ values over the respective renewal periods; |
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our ability to predict quarterly hardware revenues; |
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the percentage of remaining performance obligations that we expect to recognize as revenues over the next twelve months; |
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our expectations regarding our ability to collect delayed customer payments; |
as well as other statements regarding our future operations, financial condition and prospects, and business strategies. Forward-looking statements may be preceded by, followed by or include the words “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “seeks,” “strives,” “endeavors,” “estimates,” “will,” “should,” “is designed to” and similar expressions. We claim the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statements contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for all forward-looking statements. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations and projections about future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions about our business that could affect our future results and could cause those results or other outcomes to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in “Risk Factors” included elsewhere in this Annual Report and as may be updated in filings we make from time to time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), including our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q to be filed by us in our fiscal year 2021, which runs from June 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021.
We have no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or risks, except to the extent required by applicable securities laws. If we do update one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that we will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements. New information, future events or risks could cause the forward-looking events we discuss in this Annual Report not to occur. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our expectations only as of the date of this Annual Report.
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PART I
Item 1. |
Business |
Oracle provides products and services that address enterprise information technology (IT) environments. Our products and services include applications and infrastructure offerings that are delivered worldwide through a variety of flexible and interoperable IT deployment models. These models include on-premise deployments, cloud-based deployments, and hybrid deployments (an approach that combines both on-premise and cloud-based deployment) such as our Oracle Cloud at Customer offering (an instance of Oracle Cloud in a customer’s own data center). Accordingly, we offer choice and flexibility to our customers and facilitate the product, service and deployment combinations that best suit our customers’ needs. Our customers include businesses of many sizes, government agencies, educational institutions and resellers that we market and sell to directly through our worldwide sales force and indirectly through the Oracle Partner Network.
Oracle Cloud Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS and IaaS, respectively, and collectively, Oracle Cloud Services) offerings provide a comprehensive and integrated stack of applications and infrastructure services delivered via a cloud-based deployment model. Oracle Cloud Services integrate the software, hardware and services on a customer’s behalf in a cloud-based IT environment that Oracle deploys, upgrades, supports and manages for the customer. Oracle Cloud Services are designed to be rapidly deployable to enable customers shorter time to innovation; intuitive for casual and experienced users; easily maintainable to reduce upgrade, integration and testing work; connectable among differing deployment models to enable interchangeability and extendibility between IT environments; compatible to easily move workloads between the Oracle Cloud and other IT environments; cost-effective by requiring lower upfront customer investment; and secure, standards-based and reliable.
Oracle cloud license and on-premise license deployment offerings include Oracle Applications, Oracle Database and Oracle Middleware software offerings, among others, which customers deploy using IT infrastructure from the Oracle Cloud or their own cloud-based or on-premise IT environments. Substantially all customers, at their option, purchase license support contracts when they purchase an Oracle license.
Oracle hardware product offerings include Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage and industry-specific products, among others. Customers generally opt to purchase hardware support contracts when they purchase Oracle hardware.
Oracle also offers services to assist our customers and partners to maximize the performance of their Oracle purchases.
Providing choice and flexibility to Oracle customers as to when and how they deploy Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies is an important element of our corporate strategy. We believe that offering customers broad, comprehensive, flexible and interoperable deployment models for Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies is important to our growth strategy and better addresses customer needs relative to our competitors, many of whom provide fewer offerings, more restrictive deployment models and less flexibility for a customer’s transition to cloud-based IT environments.
Our investments in, and innovation with respect to, Oracle products and services that we offer through our cloud and license, hardware and services businesses (described further below) are another important element of our corporate strategy. In fiscal 2020, 2019 and 2018, we invested $6.1 billion, $6.0 billion and $6.1 billion, respectively, in research and development to enhance our existing portfolio of offerings and products and to develop new technologies and services. We have a deep understanding as to how applications and infrastructure technologies interact and function with one another. We focus our development efforts on improving the performance, security, operation, integration and cost-effectiveness of our offerings relative to our competitors; making it easier for organizations to deploy, use, manage and maintain our offerings; and incorporating emerging technologies within our offerings to enable leaner business processes, automation and innovation. For example, the Oracle Autonomous Database is designed to deliver transformational infrastructure through an Oracle Cloud IaaS offering that utilizes Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure’s machine learning capabilities. After an initial purchase of Oracle products and services, our customers can continue to benefit from our research and development efforts and deep IT expertise by electing to purchase and renew Oracle support offerings for their
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license and hardware deployments, which may include product enhancements that we periodically deliver to our products, and by renewing their Oracle Cloud Services contracts with us.
Our selective and active acquisition program is another important element of our corporate strategy. We believe that our acquisitions enhance the products and services that we can offer to customers, expand our customer base, provide greater scale to accelerate innovation, grow our revenues and earnings, and increase stockholder value. We have invested billions of dollars over time to acquire a number of companies, products, services and technologies that add to, are complementary to, or have otherwise enhanced our existing offerings. We expect to continue to acquire companies, products, services and technologies to further our corporate strategy.
We have three businesses:
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our cloud and license business, which is comprised of a single operating segment and includes our Oracle Cloud Services offerings, cloud license and on-premise license offerings, and license support offerings, represented 83% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2020 and 2019, and 81% of our total revenues in fiscal 2018; |
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our hardware business, which is comprised of a single operating segment and includes our hardware products and related hardware support services offerings, represented 9% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2020 and 2019, and 10% of our total revenues in fiscal 2018; and |
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our services business, which is comprised of a single operating segment, represented 8% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2020 and 2019, and 9% of our total revenues in fiscal 2018. |
Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and Note 15 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements, both included elsewhere in this Annual Report, provide additional information related to our businesses and operating segments.
Oracle Corporation was incorporated in 2005 as a Delaware corporation and is the successor to operations originally begun in June 1977.
Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Oracle’s Business
Oracle is committed to the health, safety and welfare of our employees, customers, suppliers, communities, stockholders and other stakeholders. While the world continues to navigate the risks and uncertainties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are committed to providing critical technologies, programs and support to individuals and organizations to navigate, adjust and continue their operations in light of the unique demands and constraints imposed by the pandemic. For decades, we have developed, delivered and supported products and services that enable telecommunication companies to keep people connected; retailers to provide food and other necessities; researchers to identify solutions; hospitals to provide care; airlines to ensure travel; banks to help people access funds; insurers to provide benefits; governments to keep people safe and informed; utilities to supply power and water; and many other critical functions.
We have proactively sought, supported, donated to, partnered and engaged with organizations globally that provide critical medicines, research, goods and services to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, including:
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medical research organizations, which power COVID-19 simulation and modeling projects using Oracle Cloud IaaS; |
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the U.S. federal government, which received an Oracle system to collect and distribute information as to how COVID-19 patients respond to potential therapies; |
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hospitals, which have utilized Oracle infrastructure technologies to rapidly develop and deploy applications that collect, analyze and manage characteristics of COVID-19 patients; |
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enterprises, which have the ability to complimentarily access Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud options for employee health and safety programs in order to proactively manage and respond to COVID-19 implications on their workforces; |
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state and local government agencies, which have utilized Oracle Cloud SaaS solutions to develop and target constituent outreach related to COVID-19, and to assess, research and respond to COVID-19 incident management on a unified platform; and |
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pharmaceutical companies, which power their research and clinical trials using Oracle Health Sciences solutions; |
among dozens of other specific use cases, programs and partnerships that Oracle has donated to, partnered with, developed and supported in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies are critical to the business operations of our customers, which number in the hundreds of thousands across a broad geographic and industry base. We are profitable and generate a large amount of positive cash flow from our operations and we do not believe the COVID-19 pandemic will jeopardize either of these characteristics of our business. Other impacts due to COVID-19 on our business are currently unknown.
For additional details regarding the impacts and risks to our business from the COVID-19 pandemic, refer to Item 1A Risk Factors and Item 7 Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Applications and Infrastructure Technologies
Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of applications and infrastructure technologies is designed to address an organization’s IT environment needs including business process, infrastructure and applications development requirements, among others. Oracle technologies are based upon industry standards and are designed to be enterprise-grade, reliable, scalable and secure. Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies including database and middleware software as well as enterprise applications, virtualization, clustering, large-scale systems management and related infrastructure products and services are the building blocks of Oracle Cloud Services, our partners’ cloud services, and our customers’ cloud IT environments. Oracle applications and infrastructure offerings are marketed and sold through our cloud and license, hardware, and services businesses and are delivered through the Oracle Cloud, or through other IT deployment models including cloud-based, hybrid and on-premise deployments. We believe Oracle applications and infrastructure offerings enable flexibility, interoperability and choice to best meet customer IT needs.
We believe that our Oracle Cloud Services offerings are opportunities for us to expand our cloud and license business. We believe that our customers increasingly recognize the value of access to cloud-based applications and infrastructure capabilities via a lower cost, rapidly deployable, flexible and interoperable services model that Oracle manages, upgrades and maintains on the customer’s behalf. We believe that we can market and sell our SaaS and IaaS offerings together to help customers migrate their extensive installed base of on-premise applications and infrastructure technologies to the Oracle Cloud while at the same time reaching a broader ecosystem of developers and partners. We also believe we can market our SaaS and IaaS services to small and medium-sized businesses and non-IT lines of business purchasers due to the highly available, intuitive design, low touch and low cost characteristics of the Oracle Cloud.
In recent periods, customer demand for our applications and infrastructure technologies delivered through our Oracle Cloud Services deployment models has increased. To address customer demand and enable customer choice, we have introduced certain programs for customers to pivot their applications and infrastructure licenses and license support contracts to the Oracle Cloud for new deployments and to migrate to and expand with the Oracle Cloud for their existing workloads. We expect these trends to continue.
Applications Technologies
Oracle applications technologies are marketed, sold, delivered and supported through our cloud and license business. Our applications cloud services and license support revenues represented 40%, 40% and 38% of our total cloud services and license support revenues during fiscal 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. Oracle applications technologies include our Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings, which are available for customers as a subscription, and
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Oracle Applications license offerings, which are available for customers to purchase for use within the Oracle Cloud, and other cloud-based and on-premise IT environments, with the option to purchase related license support. Regardless of the deployment model selected, our applications technologies are designed to reduce the risk, cost and complexity of our customers’ IT infrastructures, while supporting customer choice with flexible deployment models that readily enable performance, agility, compatibility and extendibility. Our applications technologies are generally designed using industry standard architectures to manage and automate core business functions across the enterprise, as well as to help customers differentiate and innovate in those processes unique to their industries or organizations. We offer applications that are deployable to meet a number of business automation requirements across a broad range of industries. We also offer industry-specific applications, which provide solutions to customers in the communications, construction and engineering, financial services, health sciences, hospitality, manufacturing, public sector, retail and utilities industries, among others.
Oracle Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)
Oracle’s broad spectrum of Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings provides customers a choice of software applications that are delivered via a cloud-based IT environment that we host, manage, upgrade and support, and that customers purchase by entering into a subscription agreement with us for a stated period. Customers access Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings utilizing common web browsers via a broad spectrum of devices. Our SaaS offerings are built upon open industry standards such as SQL, Java and HTML5 for easier application accessibility, integration and development. Our SaaS offerings represent an industry leading business innovation platform, leveraging our Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure, and include a broad suite of modular, next generation cloud software applications spanning all core business functions including, among others:
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Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, which is designed to be a complete, global and integrated ERP solution to help organizations improve decision making and workforce productivity, and to optimize back-office operations by utilizing a single data and security model with a common user interface; |
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Oracle Enterprise and Performance Management (EPM) Cloud, which is designed to analyze financial performance, drive accurate and agile financial plans, optimize the financial close and consolidation process, streamline account reconciliation and satisfy an organization’s reporting requirements; |
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Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, which is designed to help organizations create, optimize and digitize their supply chains and innovate products quickly; |
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Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, which is designed to help organizations find, develop and retain their talent, enable collaboration, provide complete workforce insights, improve business process efficiency, and enable users to connect to an integrated suite of HCM applications from any device; |
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Oracle Customer Experience Cloud including Sales, Service, Marketing and Data Cloud, which is designed to be a complete and integrated solution to help organizations deliver consistent and personalized customer experiences across their customer channels, touch points and interactions. It also enables organizations to leverage their own data and consumer data to inform and measure marketing strategies and programs; and |
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NetSuite Application Suite, which is a cloud-based ERP solution that is generally marketed to small to medium-sized organizations and is designed to run back-office operations and financial processes, and includes financial management, revenue management and billing, inventory, supply chain and warehouse management capabilities, among others. |
We also offer a number of cloud-based industry solutions to address specific customer needs within certain industries.
We believe that the comprehensiveness and breadth of our SaaS offerings as a business innovation platform differentiate us from many of our competitors that offer more limited or specialized applications. Our SaaS
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offerings are designed to support connected business processes in the cloud and are centered on an intuitive interface, a responsive and flexible business core, and a common data model. We believe Oracle ERP Cloud is a strategic suite of applications that is foundational to facilitate and extract more business value out of the adoption of other Oracle SaaS offerings, such as Oracle HCM Cloud and Oracle EPM Cloud, as customers realize the value of a common data model that spans across core business applications. Our SaaS offerings are designed to deliver a secure data isolation architecture and flexible upgrades; self-service access controls for users; a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA); built-in social, mobile and business insight capabilities (analytics); and a high performance, high availability infrastructure based on our infrastructure technologies, including Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure. These SaaS capabilities are designed to simplify IT environments, reduce time to implementation and risk, provide an intuitive user experience for casual and experienced users, and enable customers to focus resources on business growth opportunities. Our SaaS offerings are also designed to natively incorporate emerging technologies such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, digital assistants and advances in the “human interface” and how users interact with Oracle Cloud SaaS offerings within a business context or to augment human capabilities to enhance productivity.
Oracle Applications Licenses
Customers have the ability to license Oracle Applications for use within the Oracle Cloud or within their own cloud-based or on-premise IT environments. Oracle Applications are designed to manage and automate core business functions across the enterprise, including HCM; ERP; financial management and governance, risk and compliance; procurement; project portfolio management; SCM; business analytics and enterprise performance management; Oracle Customer Experience Cloud and customer relationship management; and industry-specific applications, among others.
As described below, we provide customers the option to purchase license support contracts in connection with the purchase of Oracle Applications licenses.
Oracle License Support
Oracle license support offerings are marketed and sold as a part of our cloud and license business. Substantially all of our customers opt to purchase license support contracts when they purchase Oracle applications and infrastructure licenses to run within the Oracle Cloud or other cloud-based and on-premise IT environments. We believe our license support offerings protect and enhance our customers’ investments in Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies because they provide proactive and personalized support services including Oracle Lifetime Support and unspecified license enhancements and upgrades during the term of the support period. Substantially all license support customers renew their support contracts with us upon expiration in order to continue to benefit from technical support services and the periodic issuance of unspecified updates and enhancements, which current license support customers are entitled to receive. Our license support contracts are generally priced as a percentage of the net fees paid by the customer to access the license and are typically one year in duration.
Infrastructure Technologies
Oracle infrastructure technologies are marketed, sold and delivered through our cloud and license business and through our hardware business. Our infrastructure technologies are designed to be flexible, cost-effective, standards-based and high-performance in order to facilitate the development, running, integration, management and extension across an organization’s cloud-based, on-premise and hybrid IT environments.
Our cloud and license business’ infrastructure technologies include the Oracle Database, which is the world’s most popular enterprise database; Java, which is the computer industry’s most widely-used software development language; and middleware including development tools, among others. These technologies are available through a subscription to our Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings or through the purchase of a license and related license support, at the customer’s option, to run within the Oracle Cloud or other IT environments. Our cloud and license business’ infrastructure technologies also include cloud-based compute, storage and networking capabilities through our
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Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings. Our infrastructure offerings also include new and innovative services such as the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service, Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Cloud Service and emerging technologies such as IoT, digital assistant, and Blockchain.
Our hardware business’ infrastructure technologies consist of hardware products and certain unique hardware-related software offerings including Oracle Engineered Systems, enterprise servers, storage solutions, industry-specific hardware, virtualization software, operating systems, management software, and related hardware services, including hardware support at the customer’s option.
We design our infrastructure technologies to work in customer environments that may include other Oracle or non-Oracle hardware or software components. Our flexible and open approach provides Oracle customers a choice as to how they can utilize and deploy Oracle infrastructure technologies: through the use of Oracle Cloud offerings; on-premise in our customers’ data centers; or a hybrid combination of these two deployment models, such as in the Oracle Cloud at Customer deployment model (described further below). We focus on the operation and integration of Oracle infrastructure technologies to make them easier to deploy, extend, interconnect, manage and maintain for our customers and to improve computing performance relative to our competitors’ offerings. For example, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine integrates multiple Oracle technology components to work together to deliver improved performance, availability, security and operational efficiency of Oracle Database workloads relative to our competitors’ products.
Oracle Infrastructure Technologies – Cloud and License Business Offerings
Oracle infrastructure technologies are marketed, sold and delivered through our cloud and license business. Our infrastructure cloud services and license support revenues represented 60% of our total cloud services and license support revenues during each of fiscal 2020 and 2019 and 62% in fiscal 2018.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Oracle Cloud IaaS is based upon Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure technology and is designed to deliver platform, compute, storage and networking services, among others, that Oracle runs, manages, upgrades and supports on behalf of the customer for a fee for a stated time period, or for certain of our IaaS services, on a “pay-as-you-go” basis at a specified rate for services consumed. By utilizing Oracle Cloud IaaS, customers leverage the Oracle Cloud for enterprise-grade, scalable, cost-effective and secure infrastructure technologies that are designed to be rapidly deployable while reducing the amount of time and resources normally consumed by IT processes within on-premise environments. Oracle Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure technology is designed to be differentiated from other cloud vendors to provide better security by separating control code from customer data on separate computers with a different architecture. Customers use Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings to build and operate new cloud-native applications, to run new workloads and to move their existing Oracle or non-Oracle workloads to the Oracle Cloud from their on-premise data centers or from other cloud-based IT environments, among other uses. We continue to invest in Oracle Cloud IaaS to improve features and performance; to expand the catalog of cloud-based infrastructure tools and services we provide; to simplify the processes for migrating workloads to the Oracle Cloud; and to provide customers with the ability to run workloads across different IT environments and the Oracle Cloud in a hybrid deployment model.
Oracle customers and partners utilize Oracle’s open, standards-based IaaS offerings for platform related services that are based upon the Oracle Database, Java and Oracle Middleware including open source and other tools for a variety of use cases across data management, applications development, integration, content and experience, business analytics, IT operations management, security, and emerging technologies.
Oracle customers and partners also utilize Oracle Cloud IaaS for enterprise-grade compute, storage and networking services. Our Oracle Cloud IaaS offerings’ cloud-based compute services range from virtual machines to graphics processing unit-based offerings to bare metal servers and include options for dense I/O workloads and high performance computing. Oracle Cloud IaaS also includes a range of cloud-based storage offerings including block, object and archive storage services. In addition, Oracle Cloud IaaS offers networking, connectivity, and edge
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services that help connect customer datacenters and third-party clouds such as Microsoft Azure with Oracle Cloud Services.
Oracle Cloud at Customer offerings are a direct response to restrictions imposed upon cloud-based IT environment adoption by businesses that operate within certain regulated industries or jurisdictions and enable customer choice in deployment models. Oracle Cloud at Customer enables customers to access certain IaaS capabilities of the Oracle Cloud in their own data centers behind their firewalls while having the services managed by Oracle. Oracle Cloud at Customer offerings allow customers to take advantage of the agility, innovation and subscription-based pricing of Oracle Cloud Services while meeting data sovereignty, data residency, data protection and regulatory business policy requirements.
Oracle also offers Oracle Managed Cloud Services, which are designed to provide comprehensive software and hardware hosting, management, maintenance and security services for an organization’s cloud-based, hybrid or other infrastructure for a fee for a stated term.
Oracle Database Licenses
The Oracle Database is the world’s most popular enterprise database and is designed to enable reliable and secure storage, retrieval and manipulation of all forms of data. The Oracle Database is licensed throughout the world by businesses and organizations of different sizes for a multitude of purposes, including, among others: for use within the Oracle Cloud to deliver our Cloud SaaS and Cloud IaaS offerings; for use by a number of cloud-based vendors in offering their cloud services; for packaged and custom applications for transaction processing; and for data warehousing and business intelligence. The Oracle Database may be deployed in various IT environments including Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud at Customer environments, other cloud-based IT environments, and on-premise data centers, among others. As described above, customers may elect to purchase license support for Oracle Database licenses.
Oracle Database Enterprise Edition is available with a number of optional add-on products to address specific customer requirements. In addition to the Oracle Database, we offer a portfolio of specialized database products to address particular customer requirements including MySQL, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, Oracle Berkeley DB and Oracle NoSQL Database.
Oracle Autonomous Database
Oracle Autonomous Database offerings are designed to deliver performance and scale with automated database operations and policy-driven optimization by combining certain Oracle infrastructure technologies including the Oracle Database, Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure, and native machine learning capabilities, among others. Oracle Autonomous Database offerings are designed to lower labor costs and reduce human error for routine database administration tasks including maintenance, tuning, patching, security and backup. Oracle Autonomous Database offerings use self-driving diagnostics for fault prediction and error handling. We believe the Oracle Autonomous Database offerings deliver rapid insights and innovation by enabling organizations to quickly provision a data warehouse that automatically and elastically scales to millions of transactions per second while enabling a flexible payment model for only the capacity used. Oracle Autonomous Database offerings include:
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Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service (ADW), which is designed to be a fully managed, high-performance and elastic service optimized for data warehouse workloads. ADW’s self-patching and self-tuning capabilities are designed to enable upgrades while the database is running, eliminating human error. Oracle ADW automates manual IT tasks such as storing, securing, scaling and backing-up data. In addition, the machine learning based technology of ADW is designed to enable customers to deploy new or move existing data marts and data warehouses to the cloud; and |
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Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Cloud Service (ATP), which is designed to enable businesses to safely run a complex mix of high-performance transactions, reporting and batch processing using instant, elastic compute and storage through an Oracle Database running on an Oracle Exadata cloud-based instance. Oracle ATP is designed to enable organizations to conduct real-time transactional data analysis |
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for faster results and lower administration costs, and to eliminate cyber-attacks on unpatched or unencrypted databases. Oracle ATP is designed to be simple and agile to develop and deploy new applications because complex management and tuning is not required. The integration of Oracle ATP with other Oracle Cloud Services, such as Java Cloud and Oracle APEX, and the open interfaces and integrations of Oracle ATP provide developers with a modern, open platform to develop new and innovative applications. |
Oracle ADW and Oracle ATP both offer the following options, among others:
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Shared Exadata Infrastructure, which is a simple and elastic deployment choice Oracle autonomously operates all aspects of the database lifecycle, including database placement, backup and updates; and |
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Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure, which is designed to provide the characteristics of a private cloud in a public cloud deployment, including dedicated compute, storage, network and database service for a single tenant. Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure deployment is also designed to provide high levels of security isolation and governance with customizable operational policies for autonomous operations for workload placement, workload optimization, schedule updating, availability, over-provisioning and peak usage. |
Oracle Big Data and Analytics
Big data generally refers to a massive amount of unstructured, streaming and structured data that is so large that it is difficult to process using traditional IT techniques. We offer big data and analytics solutions to complement and extend our applications and infrastructure technologies. We believe that most businesses view big data as a potentially high-value source of analytics that can be used to gain new insights into their customers’ behaviors, to anticipate future demand more accurately, to align workforce deployment with business activity forecasts and to accelerate the pace of operations, among other benefits. We offer a broad portfolio of offerings to address an organization’s big data requirements including, among others, cloud-based services for data integration, data management, data science, analytics and integrated machine learning.
Oracle Middleware Licenses
We license our Oracle Middleware, which is a broad family of integrated application infrastructure software, for use in the Oracle Cloud, other cloud-based environments, on-premise data centers and related IT environments. Oracle Middleware is designed to enable customers to design and integrate Oracle and non-Oracle business applications, automate business processes, scale applications to meet customer demand, simplify security and compliance, manage lifecycles of documents and get actionable, targeted business intelligence. Built with Oracle’s Java technology platform, Oracle Middleware products are designed to be flexible across different deployment environments—cloud, on-premise or hybrid—as a foundation for custom, packaged and composite applications, thereby simplifying and reducing time to deployment. Oracle Middleware is designed to protect customers’ IT investments and work with both Oracle and non-Oracle database, middleware and applications software through an open architecture and adherence to industry standards. In addition, Oracle Middleware supports multiple development languages and tools, which enables developers to flexibly build and deploy web services, websites, portals and web-based applications globally across different IT environments.
Among our other middleware license offerings, we license a wide range of development tools, such as Oracle WebLogic Server for Java application development and Oracle Mobile Hub, which is designed to address the needs of businesses that are increasingly focused on delivering mobile device applications to their customers. Customers may elect to purchase license support, as described above, for Oracle Middleware licenses at their option. We also offer certain of our middleware capabilities as a cloud service.
Java Licenses
Java is the computer industry’s most widely-used software development language and is viewed as a global standard. We believe the Java programming language and platform together represent one of the most popular and powerful development environments in the world, one that is used by millions of developers globally to develop embedded applications, web content, enterprise software and games. Oracle Middleware software
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products and certain of our Oracle Applications are built using the Oracle Java technology platform, which we believe is a key advantage for our business. Customers may license the use of Java or access Java Enterprise Edition through Oracle WebLogic Cloud.
Java is designed to enable developers to write software on a single platform and run it on many other different platforms, independent of operating system and hardware architecture. Java has been adopted by both independent software vendors (ISVs) that have built their products on Java and by enterprise organizations building custom applications or consuming Java-based ISV products.
Oracle Infrastructure Technologies – Hardware Business Offerings
Oracle infrastructure technologies are also marketed, sold and delivered through our hardware business, including a broad selection of hardware products and related hardware support services for cloud-based IT environments, data centers and related IT environments.
Oracle Engineered Systems
Oracle Engineered Systems are core to our cloud-based and on-premise data center infrastructure offerings. Oracle Engineered Systems are pre-integrated products, combining multiple unique Oracle technology components, including database, storage, operating system or middleware software with server, storage and networking hardware and other technologies. Oracle Engineered Systems are designed to work together to deliver improved performance, scalability, availability, security and operational efficiency relative to our competitors’ products; to be upgraded effectively and efficiently; and to simplify maintenance cycles by providing a single solution for software patching. For example, Oracle Exadata Database Machine is a computing platform that is designed to be optimized for running Oracle Database to achieve higher performance and availability at a lower cost by combining Oracle Database, storage and operating system software with Oracle server, storage and networking hardware. We offer certain of our Oracle Engineered Systems, including the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, among others, through flexible deployment options, including on-premise, as an infrastructure cloud service, and as a cloud at customer service.
Servers
We offer a wide range of server products that are designed for mission-critical enterprise environments and that are key components of our engineered systems offerings and cloud offerings. We have two families of server products: those based on the Oracle SPARC microprocessor, which are designed to be differentiated by their reliability, security and scalability for UNIX environments; and those using microprocessors from Intel Corporation. By offering a range of server sizes and microprocessors, customers are offered the flexibility to choose the types of servers that they believe will be most appropriate and valuable for their particular IT environments. We believe the combination of Oracle server systems with Oracle software enhances our customers’ ability to shift data and workloads between data center and cloud deployments based on an organization’s business requirements.
Storage
Oracle storage products are engineered for the cloud and designed to securely store, manage, protect and archive customers’ mission-critical data assets generated by any database or application. Oracle storage products combine flash, disk, tape and server technologies with optimized software and unique integrations with the Oracle Database and are designed to offer greater performance and efficiency, and lower total cost relative to our competitors’ storage products. Certain of our storage products are also offered as Oracle Cloud Services for backup and archiving. Our storage offerings include, among others, Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance that provides unique, recovery-focused data protection for the Oracle Database; Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, a unified storage system that combines network attached storage, storage area network and object storage capabilities; and Oracle’s StorageTek tape storage and automation product line, which includes tape drives, tape libraries, media and software packages that provide lifecycle data management and security for enterprise backup and archive requirements.
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Industry-Specific Hardware Offerings
We offer hardware products and services designed for certain specific industries including, among others, our point-of-sale terminals and related hardware that are designed for managing businesses within the food and beverage, hotel and retail industries; and hardware products and services for communications networks including network signaling, policy control and subscriber data management solutions, and session border control technology.
Operating Systems, Virtualization, Management and Other Hardware-Related Software
We offer a portfolio of operating systems, including Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris, virtualization software including Oracle VM, and other hardware-related software including development, management and file systems tools that are designed to optimize the performance, efficiency, and security of hardware products while providing customers with high levels of flexibility, reliability and availability. We also offer a range of management technologies and products, including Oracle Enterprise Manager, designed to help customers efficiently operate complex IT environments, including both end users’ and service providers’ cloud environments.
Hardware Support
Our hardware support offerings provide customers with unspecified software updates for software components that are essential to the functionality of our hardware products and associated software products such as Oracle Solaris. These offerings can also include product repairs, maintenance services and technical support services. We continue to evolve hardware support processes that are intended to proactively identify and solve quality issues and to increase the amount of new and renewed hardware support contracts sold in connection with the sales of our hardware products. Hardware support contracts are generally priced as a percentage of the net hardware products fees.
Services
We offer services to help customers and partners maximize the performance of their investments in Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies. We believe that our services are differentiated based on our focus on Oracle technologies, extensive experience and broad sets of intellectual property and best practices. Our services offerings include, among others:
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consulting services, which are designed to help our customers and global system integrator partners more successfully architect and deploy our cloud and license offerings, including IT strategy alignment, enterprise architecture planning and design, implementation, integration, application development, security assessments and ongoing software enhancements and upgrades. We utilize a global, blended delivery model to optimize value for our customers and partners, consisting of consultants from local geographies, industry specialists and consultants from our global delivery and solution centers; |
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advanced customer services, which are support services provided by Oracle to a customer on-site or remote to enable increased performance and higher availability of a customer’s Oracle products and services; and |
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education services for Oracle’s cloud and license offerings, including training and certification programs that are offered to customers, partners and employees through a variety of formats including instructor-led classes, live virtual training, in-application guided learning, video-based training on demand, online learning subscriptions, private events and custom training. |
Oracle Cloud Operations
Oracle Cloud Operations deliver our Oracle Cloud Services to customers through a secure, reliable, scalable, enterprise grade cloud infrastructure platform managed by Oracle employees within a global network of data centers, which we refer to as the Oracle Cloud. The Oracle Cloud enables secure and isolated cloud-based instances for each of our customers to access the functionality of Oracle Cloud Services via a broad spectrum of
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devices. Oracle Cloud Operations leverage automated software tools to enable the rapid delivery of the latest cloud technology capabilities to the Oracle Cloud as they become available, providing Oracle customers access to the latest Oracle technologies generally on a quarterly cadence.
Manufacturing
To produce our hardware products that we market and sell to third-party customers and that Oracle Cloud Operations utilize internally to deliver Oracle Cloud Services, we rely on both our internal manufacturing operations as well as third-party manufacturing partners. Our internal manufacturing operations consist primarily of materials procurement, assembly, testing and quality control of our Oracle Engineered Systems and certain of our enterprise and data center servers and storage products. For all other manufacturing, we generally rely on third-party manufacturing partners to produce our hardware-related components and hardware products and we may involve our internal manufacturing operations in the final assembly, testing and quality control processes for these components and products. We distribute most of our hardware products from either our facilities or partner facilities. Our manufacturing processes are substantially based on standardization of components across product types, centralization of assembly and distribution centers and a “build-to-order” methodology in which products generally are built only after customers have placed firm orders. Production of our hardware products requires that we purchase materials, supplies, product subassemblies and full assemblies from a number of vendors. For most of our hardware products, we have existing alternate sources of supply or such sources are readily available. However, we do rely on sole sources for certain of our hardware products. As a result, we monitor and evaluate potential risks of disruption to our supply chain operations. Refer to “Risk Factors” included in Item 1A within this Annual Report for additional discussion of the challenges we encounter with respect to the sources and availability of supplies for our products and the related risks to our business.
Sales and Marketing
We directly market and sell our cloud, license, hardware, support and services offerings to businesses of many sizes and in many industries, government agencies and educational institutions. We also market and sell our offerings through indirect channels. No single customer accounted for 10% or more of our total revenues in fiscal 2020, 2019 or 2018.
In the United States (U.S.), our sales and services employees are based in our headquarters and in field offices throughout the country. Outside the U.S., our international subsidiaries sell, support and service our offerings in their local countries as well as within other foreign countries where we do not operate through a direct sales subsidiary. Our geographic coverage allows us to draw on business and technical expertise from a global workforce, provides stability to our operations and revenue streams to offset geography specific economic trends, and offers us an opportunity to take advantage of new markets for our offerings. Our international operations subject us to certain risks, which are more fully described in “Risk Factors” included in Item 1A of this Annual Report. A summary of our domestic and international revenues and long-lived assets is set forth in Note 15 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.
We also market our product offerings worldwide through indirect channels. The companies that comprise our indirect channel network are members of the Oracle Partner Network. The Oracle Partner Network is a global program that manages our business relationships with a large, broad-based network of companies, including independent software and hardware vendors, system integrators and resellers that deliver innovative solutions and services based upon our product offerings. By offering our partners access to our product offerings, educational information, technical services, marketing and sales support, the Oracle Partner Network program extends our market reach by providing our partners with the resources they need to be successful in delivering solutions to customers globally. The majority of our hardware products are sold through indirect channels including independent distributors and value-added resellers.
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Research and Development
We develop the substantial majority of our product offerings internally. In addition, we have extended our product offerings and intellectual property through acquisitions of businesses and technologies. We also purchase or license intellectual property rights in certain circumstances. Internal development allows us to maintain technical control over the design and development of our products. We have a number of U.S. and foreign patents and pending applications that relate to various aspects of our products and technology. While we believe that our patents have value, no single patent is essential to us or to any of our principal businesses. Rapid technological advances in cloud, software and hardware development, evolving standards in computer hardware and software technology, changing customer needs and frequent new product introductions, offerings and enhancements characterize the markets in which we compete. We plan to continue to dedicate a significant amount of resources to research and development efforts to maintain and improve our current products and services offerings.
Employees
As of May 31, 2020, we employed approximately 135,000 full-time employees, including approximately 36,000 in sales and marketing, approximately 19,000 in our cloud services and license support operations, approximately 3,000 in hardware, approximately 25,000 in services, approximately 39,000 in research and development and approximately 13,000 in general and administrative positions. Of these employees, approximately 47,000 were employed in the U.S. and approximately 88,000 were employed internationally. None of our employees in the U.S. is represented by a labor union; however, in certain foreign subsidiaries, labor unions or workers’ councils represent some of our employees.
Seasonality and Cyclicality
Our quarterly revenues have historically been affected by a variety of seasonal factors, including the structure of our sales force incentive compensation plans, which are common in the technology industry. In each fiscal year, our total revenues and operating margins are typically highest in our fourth fiscal quarter and lowest in our first fiscal quarter. The operating margins of our businesses (in particular, our cloud and license business and hardware business) are generally affected by seasonal factors in a similar manner as our revenues because certain expenses within our cost structure are relatively fixed in the short term. See “Cloud and License Business” and “Selected Quarterly Financial Data” in Item 7 of this Annual Report for more information regarding the seasonality and cyclicality of our revenues, expenses and margins.
Competition
We face intense competition in all aspects of our business. The nature of the IT industry creates a competitive landscape that is constantly evolving as firms emerge, expand or are acquired, as technology evolves and as customer demands and competitive pressures otherwise change.
Our customers are demanding less complexity and lower total cost in the implementation, sourcing, integration and ongoing maintenance of their IT environments. Our enterprise cloud, license and hardware offerings compete directly with certain offerings from some of the largest and most competitive companies in the world, including Amazon.com, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Adobe Systems Incorporated, Alphabet Inc. and SAP SE, as well as other companies like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, salesforce.com, inc. and Workday, Inc. In addition, due to the low barriers to entry in many of our market segments, new technologies and new and growing competitors frequently emerge to challenge our offerings. Our competitors range from companies offering broad IT solutions across many of our lines of business to vendors providing point solutions, or offerings focused on a specific functionality, product area or industry. In addition, as we expand into new market segments, we face increased competition as we compete with existing competitors, as well as firms that may be partners in other areas of our business and other firms with whom we have not previously competed. Moreover, we or our competitors may take certain strategic actions—including acquisitions, partnerships and joint ventures, or repositioning of product lines—which invite even greater competition in one or more product offering categories.
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Key competitive factors in each of the segments in which we currently compete and may compete in the future include: total cost of ownership, performance, scalability, reliability, security, functionality, efficiency, ease of use, speed to production and quality of technical support. Our product and service sales (and the relative strength of our products and services versus those of our competitors) are also directly and indirectly affected by the following, among other factors:
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market adoption of cloud-based IT offerings including SaaS and IaaS offerings; |
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the ease of deployment, use, transacting for and maintenance of our products and services offerings; |
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compatibility between Oracle products and services deployed within local IT environments and public cloud IT environments, including our Oracle Cloud environments; |
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the adoption of commodity servers and microprocessors; |
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the broader “platform” competition between our industry standard Java technology platform and the .NET programming environment of Microsoft; |
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operating system competition among our Oracle Solaris and Linux operating systems, with alternatives including Microsoft’s Windows Server, and other UNIX and Linux operating systems; |
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the adoption of open source alternatives to commercial software by enterprise software customers; |
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products, features and functionality developed internally by customers and their IT staff; |
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products, features and functionality customized and implemented for customers by consultants, systems integrators or other third parties; and |
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the attractiveness of offerings from business processing outsourcers. |
For more information about the competitive risks we face, refer to Item 1A “Risk Factors” included elsewhere in this Annual Report.
Available Information
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available, free of charge, on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and our Investor Relations website at www.oracle.com/investor as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such materials with, or furnish it to, the SEC. We use our Investor Relations website as a means of disclosing material non-public information. Accordingly, investors should monitor our Investor Relations website, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts. In addition, information regarding our environmental policy and global sustainability initiatives and solutions are also available on our website www.oracle.com/corporate/citizenship. The information posted on or accessible through our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report.
Information about our Executive Officers
Our executive officers are listed below.
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Lawrence J. Ellison |
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Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Technology Officer |
Safra A. Catz |
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Chief Executive Officer and Director |
Jeffrey O. Henley |
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Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors |
Edward Screven |
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Executive Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect |
Dorian E. Daley |
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Executive Vice President and General Counsel |
William Corey West |
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Executive Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer |
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Mr. Ellison, 75, has been our Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer since September 2014. He served as our Chief Executive Officer from June 1977, when he founded Oracle, until September 2014. He has served as a Director since June 1977. He previously served as our Chairman of the Board from May 1995 to January 2004. He currently serves as a director of Tesla, Inc.
Ms. Catz, 58, has been our Chief Executive Officer since September 2014. She served as our President from January 2004 to September 2014, our Chief Financial Officer most recently from April 2011 until September 2014 and a Director since October 2001. She was previously our Chief Financial Officer from November 2005 until September 2008 and our Interim Chief Financial Officer from April 2005 until July 2005. Prior to being named our President, she held various other positions with us since joining Oracle in 1999. She currently serves as a director of The Walt Disney Company and she previously served as a director of HSBC Holdings plc.
Mr. Henley, 75, has served as our Vice Chairman of the Board since September 2014. He previously served as our Chairman of the Board from January 2004 to September 2014 and has served as a Director since June 1995. He served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer from March 1991 to July 2004.
Mr. Screven, 55, has been Executive Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect since May 2015. He served as our Senior Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect from November 2006 to April 2015 and as Vice President, Chief Corporate Architect from January 2003 to November 2006. He held various other positions with us since joining Oracle in 1986.
Ms. Daley, 61, has been our Executive Vice President and General Counsel since April 2015. She served as our Secretary from October 2007 until October 2017 and she was our Senior Vice President, General Counsel from October 2007 to April 2015. She served as our Vice President, Legal, Associate General Counsel and Assistant Secretary from June 2004 to October 2007, as Associate General Counsel and Assistant Secretary from October 2001 to June 2004 and as Associate General Counsel from February 2001 to October 2001. She held various other positions with us since joining Oracle’s Legal Department in 1992.
Mr. West, 58, has been our Executive Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer since April 2015. He served as our Senior Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer from February 2008 to April 2015 and served as our Vice President, Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer from April 2007 to February 2008. His previous experience includes 14 years with Arthur Andersen LLP, most recently as a partner.
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Item 1A. |
Risk Factors |
We operate in rapidly changing economic and technological environments that present numerous risks, many of which are driven by factors that we cannot control or predict. The following discussion, as well as our “Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates” discussion in Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations (Item 7), highlights some of these risks. The risks described below are not exhaustive and you should carefully consider these risks and uncertainties before investing in our securities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected how we and our customers are operating our respective businesses, and the duration and extent to which this will impact our future results of operations and our overall financial performance remains uncertain. A novel strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) was first identified in late calendar year 2019 and subsequently declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. The long-term impacts, if any, of the global COVID-19 pandemic on our business are currently unknown. We are conducting business as usual with modifications to employee travel, employee work locations, and cancellation of certain marketing events, among other modifications. We will continue to actively monitor the situation and may take further actions that alter our business operations as may be required by federal, state or local authorities or that we determine are in the best interests of our employees, customers, partners, suppliers and stockholders. It is not clear what the potential long-term effects of any such alterations or modifications may have on our business, including the effects on our customers and prospects.
We have observed other companies, including customers and partners, taking precautionary and preemptive actions to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Such companies may take further actions that alter their normal business operations if there are future spikes of COVID-19 infections resulting in additional government mandated shutdowns. The conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have adversely affected our customers’ willingness to purchase our products and delayed prospective customers’ purchasing decisions. The impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the broader global economy have been swift, dramatic and unpredictable. The latency and duration of these impacts are diverse across geographies and jurisdictions in which we market, sell and develop our offerings. The depth and duration of the current economic declines attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, and any potential economic recoveries, are not currently known. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 we experienced revenue declines compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019 and delayed payments from customers. The effect of the pandemic for fiscal 2021 and future periods is unknown. If we are not able to respond to and manage the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic effectively, our business will be harmed.
Our success depends upon our ability to develop new products and services, integrate acquired products and services and enhance our existing products and services. Rapid technological advances, intense competition, changing delivery models and evolving standards in computer hardware and software development and communications infrastructure, changing and increasingly sophisticated customer needs and frequent new product introductions and enhancements characterize the industries in which we compete. If we are unable to develop new or sufficiently differentiated products and services, enhance and improve our product offerings and support services in a timely manner or position and price our products and services to meet demand, customers may not purchase or subscribe to our license, hardware or cloud offerings or renew license support, hardware support or cloud subscriptions contracts. Renewals of these contracts are important to the growth of our business. In addition, we cannot provide any assurance that the standards on which we choose to develop new products will allow us to compete effectively for business opportunities in emerging areas.
We have continued to refresh and release new offerings of our cloud products and services. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are increasingly driving innovations in technology but if they fail to operate as anticipated or our other products do not perform as promised, our business and reputation may be harmed.
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In addition, our business may be adversely affected if:
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we do not continue to develop and release new or enhanced products and services within the anticipated time frames; |
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infrastructure costs to deliver new or enhanced products and services take longer or result in greater costs than anticipated; |
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there is a delay in market acceptance of and difficulty in transitioning new and existing customers to new, enhanced or acquired product lines or services; |
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there are changes in information technology (IT) trends that we do not adequately anticipate or address with our product development efforts; |
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we do not optimize complementary product lines and services in a timely manner; or |
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we fail to adequately integrate, support or enhance acquired product lines or services. |
Our Oracle Cloud strategy, including our Oracle Cloud Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS and IaaS, respectively, and collectively, Oracle Cloud Services) offerings, may adversely affect our revenues and profitability. We provide our cloud and other offerings to customers worldwide via deployment models that best suit their needs, including via our cloud-based SaaS and IaaS offerings. As these business models continue to evolve, we may not be able to compete effectively, generate significant revenues or maintain the profitability of our cloud offerings. Additionally, the increasing prevalence of cloud and SaaS delivery models offered by us and our competitors may unfavorably impact the pricing of our cloud and license offerings. If we do not successfully execute our cloud computing strategy or anticipate the cloud computing needs of our customers, our reputation as a cloud services provider could be harmed and our revenues and profitability could decline.
As customer demand for our cloud offerings increases, we experience volatility in our reported revenues and operating results due to the differences in timing of revenue recognition between our cloud license and on-premise license, and hardware product arrangements relative to our cloud offering arrangements. Customers generally purchase our cloud offerings on a subscription basis and revenues from these offerings are generally recognized ratably over the terms of the subscriptions. Consequently, any deterioration in sales activity associated with our cloud offerings may not be immediately observable in our consolidated statement of operations. This is in contrast to revenues associated with our license and hardware product arrangements, which are generally recognized in full at the time of delivery of the related licenses and hardware products. In addition, we may not be able to accurately anticipate customer transition from or be able to sufficiently backfill reduced customer demand for our license, hardware and support offerings relative to the expected increase in customer adoption of and demand for our Oracle Cloud Services, which could adversely affect our revenues and profitability.
We might experience significant coding, manufacturing or configuration errors in our cloud, license and hardware offerings. Despite testing prior to the release and throughout the lifecycle of a product or service, our cloud, license and hardware offerings sometimes contain coding, manufacturing or configuration errors that can impact their function, performance and security, and result in other negative consequences. The detection and correction of any errors in released cloud, license or hardware offerings can be time consuming and costly. Errors in our cloud, license or hardware offerings could affect their ability to properly function, integrate or operate with other cloud, license or hardware offerings, could delay the development or release of new products or services or new versions of products or services, could create security vulnerabilities in our products or services, and could adversely affect market acceptance of our products or services. This includes third-party software products or services incorporated into our own. If we experience errors or delays in releasing our cloud, license or hardware offerings or new versions of these offerings, our sales could be affected and revenues could decline. In addition, we run Oracle’s business operations as well as cloud and other services that we offer to our customers on our products and networks. Therefore, any flaws could affect our and our customers’ abilities to conduct business operations and to ensure accuracy in financial processes and reporting, and may result in unanticipated costs. Enterprise customers rely on our cloud, license and hardware offerings and related services to run their businesses and errors in our cloud, license and hardware offerings and related services could expose us to product liability,
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performance and warranty claims as well as significant harm to our brand and reputation, which could impact our future sales.
If our security measures for our products and services are compromised and as a result, our data, our customers’ data or our IT systems are accessed improperly, made unavailable, or improperly modified, our products and services may be perceived as vulnerable, our brand and reputation could be damaged, the IT services we provide to our customers could be disrupted, and customers may stop using our products and services, all of which could reduce our revenue and earnings, increase our expenses and expose us to legal claims and regulatory actions. We are in the IT business, and our products and services, including our Oracle Cloud Services, store, retrieve, manipulate and manage our customers’ information and data, external data, as well as our own data. We have a reputation for secure and reliable product offerings and related services, and we have invested a great deal of time and resources in protecting the integrity and security of our products, services and the internal and external data that we manage. At times, we encounter attempts by third parties (which may include individuals or groups of hackers and sophisticated organizations, such as state-sponsored organizations, nation states and individuals sponsored by them) to identify and exploit product and service vulnerabilities, penetrate or bypass our security measures, and gain unauthorized access to our or our customers’, partners’ and suppliers’ software, hardware and cloud offerings, networks and systems, any of which could lead to the compromise of personal information or the confidential information or data of Oracle or our customers. Computer hackers and others may be able to develop and deploy IT related viruses, worms, and other malicious software programs that could attack our networks, systems, products and services, exploit potential security vulnerabilities of our networks, systems, products and services, create system disruptions and cause shutdowns or denials of service. This is also true for third-party data, products or services incorporated into our own. Our products and services, including our Oracle Cloud Services, may also be accessed or modified improperly as a result of customer, partner, employee or supplier error or malfeasance and third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce customers, partners, employees or suppliers into disclosing sensitive information such as user names, passwords or other information in order to gain access to our data, our customers’, suppliers’ or partners’ data or the IT systems of Oracle, our customers, suppliers or partners.
Security industry experts and government officials have warned about the risks of hackers and cyber-attacks targeting IT products and businesses. Although this is an industry-wide problem that affects software and hardware companies generally, it affects Oracle in particular because computer hackers tend to focus their efforts on the most prominent IT companies, and they may focus on Oracle because of our reputation for, and marketing efforts associated with, having secure products and services. These risks will increase as we continue to grow our cloud offerings and store and process increasingly large amounts of data, including personal information and our customers’ confidential information and data, and host or manage parts of our customers’ businesses in cloud-based IT environments, especially in customer sectors involving particularly sensitive data such as health sciences, financial services, retail, hospitality and the government. We also have an active acquisition program and have acquired a number of companies, products, services and technologies over the years. While we make significant efforts to address any IT security issues with respect to our acquired companies, we may still inherit such risks when we integrate these companies within Oracle.
Because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access to, or sabotage IT systems change frequently, grow more complex over time, and often are not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate or implement adequate measures to prevent such techniques. Our internal IT systems continue to evolve and we are often early adopters of new technologies. However, our business policies and internal security controls may not keep pace with these changes as new threats emerge. In addition, we often experience increased activity of this nature during times of instability, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, when our operations may be more susceptible to malfeasance due to operational changes instituted to comply with safety, health and regulatory requirements, among others. We may not discover any security breach and loss of information for a significant period of time after the security breach.
We could suffer significant damage to our brand and reputation if a cyber-attack or other security incident were to allow unauthorized access to or modification of our customers’ or suppliers’ data, other external data, or our own data or our IT systems or if the services we provide to our customers were disrupted, or if our products or services are reported to have or are perceived as having security vulnerabilities. Customers could lose confidence in the security and reliability of our products and services, including our cloud offerings, and perceive them to not be
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secure. This could lead to fewer customers using our products and services and result in reduced revenues and earnings. The costs we would incur to address and fix these security incidents would increase our expenses. These types of security incidents could also lead to loss or destruction of information, inappropriate use of proprietary and sensitive data, lawsuits, indemnity obligations, regulatory investigations and financial penalties, and claims and increased legal liability, including in some cases contractual costs related to customer notification and fraud monitoring.
Our products operate in conjunction with and are dependent on products and components across a broad ecosystem. If there is a security vulnerability in one of these components, and if there is a security exploit targeting it, we could face increased costs, liability claims, customer dissatisfaction, reduced revenue, or harm to our reputation or competitive position.
Our business practices with respect to data could give rise to operational interruption, liabilities or reputational harm as a result of governmental regulation, legal requirements or industry standards relating to privacy and data protection. As regulatory focus on privacy issues continues to increase and worldwide laws and regulations concerning the handling of personal information expand and become more complex, potential risks related to data collection and use within our business will intensify. In addition, U.S. and foreign governments have enacted or are considering enacting legislation or regulations, or may in the near future interpret existing legislation or regulations, in a manner that could significantly impact our ability, as well as the ability of our customers, partners and data providers, to collect, augment, analyze, use, transfer and share personal and other information that is integral to certain services we provide.
In the wake of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the rate of global consideration and adoption of privacy laws has increased, giving rise to more global jurisdictions in which regulatory inquiries and audits may be requested of Oracle, and if we are not deemed to be in compliance, could result in enforcement actions and/or fines. This is true in the U.S., where the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) became effective in January 2020, the U.S. Congress is considering several privacy bills at the federal level, and other state legislatures are considering privacy laws. Regulators globally are also imposing greater monetary fines for privacy violations. The GDPR, which became effective in May 2018, provides for monetary penalties of up to 4% of an organization’s worldwide revenue. These penalties can be significant. For example, one European data protection regulator has fined a major U.S. technology company EUR 50 million for its data handling practices. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission continues to fine companies on a regular basis for unfair and deceptive data protection practices, and these fines may increase in size. The CCPA provides for statutory damages on a per violation basis that could be very large in the event of a significant data security breach or other CCPA violation. Taken together, the changes in laws or regulations associated with the enhanced protection of personal and other types of data could greatly increase the size of potential fines related to data protection, and our cost of providing our products and services could result in changes to our business practices or even prevent us from offering certain services in jurisdictions in which we operate. Although we have implemented contracts, policies and procedures designed to ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations, there can be no assurance that our employees, contractors, partners, data providers or agents will not violate such laws and regulations or our contracts, policies and procedures. Additionally, public perception and standards related to the privacy of personal information can shift rapidly, in ways that may affect our reputation or influence regulators to enact regulations and laws that may limit our ability to provide certain products and services.
We make statements about our use and disclosure of personal information through our privacy policy, information provided on our website and press statements. Any failure, or perceived failure, by us to comply with these public statements or with U.S. federal, state, or foreign laws and regulations, including laws and regulations regulating privacy, data security, or consumer protection, public perception, standards, self-regulatory requirements or legal obligations, could result in lost or restricted business, proceedings, actions or fines brought against us or levied by governmental entities or others, or could adversely affect our business and harm our reputation.
Economic, political and market conditions can adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition, including our revenue growth and profitability, which in turn could adversely affect our stock price. Our business is influenced by a range of factors that are beyond our control and that we have no comparative advantage in forecasting. These include:
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general economic and business conditions; |
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overall demand for enterprise cloud, license and hardware products and services; |
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governmental budgetary constraints or shifts in government spending priorities; and |
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general legal, regulatory and political developments. |
Macroeconomic developments like the United Kingdom leaving the EU (Brexit), evolving trade policies between the U.S. and international trade partners, or the occurrence of similar events in other countries that lead to uncertainty or instability in economic, political or market conditions could negatively affect our business, operating results, financial condition and outlook, which, in turn, could adversely affect our stock price. Any general weakening of, and related declining corporate confidence in, the global economy or the curtailment of government or corporate spending could cause current or potential customers to reduce or eliminate their IT budgets and spending, which could cause customers to delay, decrease or cancel purchases of our products and services or cause customers not to pay us or to delay paying us for previously purchased products and services.
In addition, international, regional or domestic political unrest and the related potential impact on global stability, terrorist attacks and the potential for other hostilities in various parts of the world, public health crises such as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, and natural disasters continue to contribute to a climate of economic and political uncertainty that could adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition, including our revenue growth and profitability. These factors generally have the strongest effect on our sales of cloud license and on-premise license, hardware and related services and, to a lesser extent, also may affect our renewal rates for license support and our subscription-based cloud offerings.
If we are unable to compete effectively, the results of operations and prospects for our business could be harmed. We face intense competition in all aspects of our business. The nature of the IT industry creates a competitive landscape that is constantly evolving as firms emerge, expand or are acquired, as technology evolves and as delivery models change. Many vendors spend amounts in excess of what Oracle spends to develop and market applications and infrastructure technologies including databases, middleware products, application development tools, business applications, collaboration products and business intelligence, compute, storage and networking products, among others, which compete with Oracle applications and infrastructure offerings. Use of our competitors’ technologies influences a customer’s purchasing decision or creates an environment that makes it less efficient to utilize or migrate to Oracle products and services. Our competitors may also adopt business practices that provide customers access to competing products and services at a risk profile that we may not generally find acceptable, which may convince customers to purchase competitor products and services. We could lose customers if our competitors introduce new competitive products, add new functionality, acquire competitive products, reduce prices, better execute on their sales and marketing strategies, offer more flexible business practices or form strategic alliances with other companies. We may also face increasing competition from open source software initiatives in which competitors may provide software and intellectual property for free. Existing or new competitors could gain sales opportunities or customers at our expense.
We may need to change our pricing models to compete successfully. The intense competition we face in the sales of our products and services and general economic and business conditions can put pressure on us to change our prices. If our competitors offer deep discounts on certain products or services or develop products that the marketplace considers more valuable, we may need to lower prices, introduce pricing models and offerings that are less favorable to us, or offer other favorable terms in order to compete successfully. Any such changes may reduce revenues and margins and could adversely affect operating results. Additionally, the increasing prevalence of cloud delivery models offered by us and our competitors may unfavorably impact the pricing of our other cloud and license, hardware and services offerings, and we may also incur increased cloud delivery expenses as we expand our cloud operations and update our infrastructure, all of which could reduce our revenues and/or profitability. Our license support fees and hardware support fees are generally priced as a percentage of our net license fees and net new hardware products fees, respectively. Our competitors may offer lower pricing on their support offerings, which could put pressure on us to further discount our offerings.
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We introduced Oracle Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and Universal Credit Pricing to simplify the way customers purchase and consume our cloud services. Oracle BYOL enables customers to maintain their existing software licenses for Oracle Infrastructure while expanding their IaaS footprint at a discounted price. Oracle Universal Credit Pricing provides a flexible model for customers to access Oracle Infrastructure services on demand via a single contract. Any future changes to our prices and pricing policies could cause our revenues to decline or be delayed as our sales force implements and our customers adjust to the new pricing policies. Some of our competitors may bundle products for promotional purposes or as a long-term pricing strategy, commit to large customer deployments at prices that are unprofitable, or provide guarantees of prices and product implementations. These practices could, over time, significantly constrain the prices that we can charge for certain of our products. If we do not adapt our pricing models to reflect changes in customer use of our products or changes in customer demand, our revenues could decrease. The increase in open source software distribution may also cause us to change our pricing models.
Our international sales and operations subject us to additional risks that can adversely affect our operating results. We derive a substantial portion of our revenues from, and have significant operations, outside of the U.S. Our international operations include cloud operations, cloud, software and hardware development, manufacturing, assembly, sales, customer support, consulting and other services and shared administrative service centers.
Compliance with international and U.S. laws and regulations that apply to our international operations increases our cost of doing business in foreign jurisdictions. These laws and regulations include U.S. laws and local laws which include data privacy requirements, labor relations laws, tax laws, foreign currency-related regulations, anti-competition regulations, anti-bribery laws and other laws prohibiting payments to governmental officials such as the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), market access regulations, tariffs, and import, export and general trade regulations, including but not limited to economic sanctions and embargos. Violations of these laws and regulations could result in fines and penalties, criminal sanctions against us, our officers or our employees, and prohibitions on the conduct of our business, including the loss of trade privileges. Any such violations could result in prohibitions on our ability to offer our products and services in one or more countries, could delay or prevent potential acquisitions and could also materially damage our reputation, our brand, our international expansion efforts, our ability to attract and retain employees, our business and our operating results. Compliance with these laws requires a significant amount of management attention and effort, which may divert management’s attention from running our business operations and could harm our ability to grow our business, or may increase our expenses as we engage specialized or other additional resources to assist us with our compliance efforts. Our success depends, in part, on our ability to anticipate these risks and manage these difficulties. We monitor our operations and investigate allegations of improprieties relating to transactions and the way in which such transactions are recorded. Where circumstances warrant, we provide information and report our findings to government authorities, and in some circumstances such authorities conduct their own investigations and we respond to their requests or demands for information. No assurance can be given that action will not be taken by such authorities or that our compliance program will prove effective.
We are also subject to a variety of other risks and challenges in managing an organization operating globally, including those related to:
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general economic conditions, including the latency in economic impacts and associated economic recoveries, if any, in each country or region; |
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public health risks, social risks and supporting infrastructure stability risks, particularly in areas in which we have significant operations; |
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fluctuations in currency exchange rates and related impacts on customer demand and our operating results; |
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difficulties in transferring funds from or converting currencies in certain countries that could lead to a devaluation of our net assets, in particular our cash assets, in that country’s currency; |
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regulatory changes, including government austerity measures in certain countries that we may not be able to sufficiently plan for or avoid that may unexpectedly impair bank deposits or other cash assets that we hold in these countries or that impose additional taxes that we may be required to pay in these countries; |
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political unrest, terrorism and the potential for other hostilities; |
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common local business behaviors that are in direct conflict with our business ethics, practices and conduct policies; |
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natural disasters; |
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the effects of climate change (such as sea level rise, drought, flooding, wildfires and increased storm sensitivity); |
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longer payment cycles and difficulties in collecting accounts receivable; |
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overlapping tax regimes; and |
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reduced protection for intellectual property rights in some countries. |
The variety of risks and challenges listed above could also disrupt or otherwise negatively impact the supply chain operations for our hardware business and the sales of our products and services in affected countries or regions.
As the majority shareholder of Oracle Financial Services Software Limited, a publicly traded company in India, and Oracle Corporation Japan, a publicly traded company in Japan, we are faced with several additional risks, including being subject to local securities regulations and being unable to exert full control that we would otherwise have if these entities were wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Any failure to offer high-quality technical support services may adversely affect our relationships with our customers and our financial results. Our customers depend on our support organization to resolve technical issues relating to our applications and infrastructure offerings. We may be unable to respond quickly enough to accommodate short-term increases in customer demand for support services or may be inefficient in our resolution of customer support issues. Increased customer demand for these services, without corresponding revenues, could increase costs and adversely affect our operating results. Any failure to maintain high-quality technical support, or a market perception that we do not maintain high-quality technical support, could adversely affect our reputation, our ability to sell our applications and infrastructure offerings to existing and prospective customers, and our business, operating results, and financial position.
We may fail to achieve our financial forecasts due to inaccurate sales forecasts or other factors. Our revenues, particularly certain of our cloud license and on-premise license revenues and hardware revenues, can be difficult to forecast. As a result, our quarterly operating results can fluctuate.
For our Oracle Cloud Services, our actual conversion or renewal rates may differ from those used in our forecasts because this business is continuing to evolve and such rates may be unpredictable which could have an adverse effect on our long-term results. For our license business, we use a “pipeline” system, a common industry practice, to forecast sales and trends in that business. Our sales personnel monitor the status of all proposals and estimate when a customer will make a purchase decision and the dollar amount of the sale. These estimates are aggregated periodically to generate a sales pipeline. Our pipeline estimates can be unreliable both in a particular quarter and over a longer period of time, in part because the conversion rate or closure rate of the pipeline into contracts can be very difficult to estimate. A reduction in the conversion rates, renewal rates, or in the pipeline itself, could adversely affect our business or results of operations. In particular, sudden shifts in regional or global economic activity such as those being experienced with the COVID-19 pandemic, a slowdown in IT spending or economic conditions generally can unexpectedly reduce the conversion rates and renewal rates in particular periods as purchasing decisions are delayed, reduced in amount or cancelled. The conversion rates can also be affected by the tendency of some of our customers to wait until the end of a fiscal period in the hope of obtaining more favorable terms, which can also impede our ability to negotiate, execute and deliver upon these contracts in a timely manner. In addition, for newly acquired companies, we have limited ability to predict how their pipelines
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will convert into sales or revenues for a number of quarters following the acquisition. Conversion rates and renewal rates post-acquisition may be quite different from the acquired companies’ historical conversion rates. Differences in conversion rates and renewal rates can also be affected by changes in business practices that we implement in our newly acquired companies. These changes may negatively affect customer behavior.
A substantial portion of the revenue value of our cloud license and on-premise license, and hardware contracts is completed in the latter part of a quarter and a significant percentage of these are larger value orders. Because a significant portion of our cost structure is largely fixed in the short term, sales and revenue shortfalls tend to have a disproportionately negative impact on our profitability. The number of large license transactions and, to a lesser extent, hardware products transactions increases the risk of fluctuations in our quarterly results because a delay in even a small number of these transactions could cause our quarterly sales, revenues and profitability to fall significantly short of our predictions.
We may experience foreign currency gains and losses. Changes in currency exchange rates can adversely affect customer demand and our revenue and profitability. We conduct a significant number of transactions and hold cash in currencies other than the U.S. Dollar. Changes in the values of major foreign currencies, particularly the Euro, Japanese Yen and British Pound, relative to the U.S. Dollar can significantly affect our total assets, revenues, operating results and cash flows, which are reported in U.S. Dollars. In particular, the economic uncertainties relating to Brexit, and European sovereign and other debt obligations may cause the value of the British Pound and Euro to fluctuate relative to the U.S. Dollar. Fluctuations in foreign currency rates, including the strengthening of the U.S. Dollar against the Euro and most other major international currencies, adversely affects our revenue growth in terms of the amounts that we report in U.S. Dollars after converting our foreign currency results into U.S. Dollars and in terms of actual demand for our products and services as certain of these products may become relatively more expensive for foreign currency-based enterprises to purchase. In addition, currency variations can adversely affect margins on sales of our products in countries outside of the U.S. Generally, our reported revenues and operating results are adversely affected when the dollar strengthens relative to other currencies and are positively affected when the dollar weakens. In addition, our reported assets generally are adversely affected when the dollar strengthens relative to other currencies as a portion of our consolidated cash and bank deposits, among other assets, are held in foreign currencies and reported in U.S. Dollars.
In addition, we incur foreign currency transaction gains and losses, primarily related to sublicense fees and other intercompany agreements among us and our subsidiaries that we expect to cash settle in the near term, which are charged to earnings in the period incurred. We have a program which primarily utilizes foreign currency forward contracts designed to offset the risks associated with certain foreign currency exposures. We may suspend the program from time to time. As part of this program, we enter into foreign currency forward contracts so that increases or decreases in our foreign currency exposures are offset at least in part by gains or losses on the foreign currency forward contracts in an effort to mitigate the risks and volatility associated with our foreign currency transaction gains or losses. A large portion of our consolidated operations are international, and we expect that we will continue to realize gains or losses with respect to our foreign currency exposures, net of gains or losses from our foreign currency forward contracts. For example, we will experience foreign currency gains and losses in certain instances if it is not possible or cost-effective to hedge our foreign currency exposures, if our hedging efforts are ineffective, or should we suspend our foreign currency forward contract program. Our ultimate realized loss or gain with respect to currency fluctuations will generally depend on the size and type of cross-currency exposures that we enter into, the currency exchange rates associated with these exposures and changes in those rates, whether we have entered into foreign currency forward contracts to offset these exposures and other factors. All of these factors could materially impact our results of operations, financial position and cash flows.
We have incurred foreign currency losses associated with the devaluation of currencies in certain highly inflationary economies relative to the U.S. Dollar. We could incur future losses in emerging market countries where we do business should their currencies become designated as highly inflationary.
Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations can be disruptive. We are currently restructuring our workforce and in the past we have restructured or made other adjustments to our workforce in response to management changes, product changes, performance issues, change in strategies, acquisitions and other internal
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and external considerations. These types of restructurings have resulted in increased restructuring costs and temporary reduced productivity while the employees adjusted to their new roles and responsibilities. In addition, we may not achieve or sustain the expected growth, resource redeployment or cost savings benefits of these restructurings, or may not do so within the expected timeframe. These effects could recur in connection with future acquisitions and other restructurings and our revenues and other results of operations could be negatively affected.
We may lose key employees or may be unable to hire enough qualified employees. We rely on hiring qualified employees and the continued service of our senior management, including our Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chief Technology Officer and founder; our Chief Executive Officer; other members of our executive team; and other key employees. In the technology industry, there is substantial and continuous competition for highly skilled business, product development, technical and other personnel. We may also experience increased compensation costs that are not offset by either improved productivity or higher sales. We may not be successful in recruiting new personnel and in retaining and motivating existing personnel. With rare exceptions, we do not have long-term employment or non-competition agreements with our employees. Members of our senior management team have left Oracle over the years for a variety of reasons, and we cannot guarantee that there will not be additional departures, which may be disruptive to our operations.
We continually focus on improving our cost structure by hiring personnel in countries where advanced technical expertise and other expertise are available at lower costs. When we make adjustments to our workforce, we may incur expenses associated with workforce reductions that delay the benefit of a more efficient workforce structure. We may also experience increased competition for employees in these countries as the trend toward globalization continues, which may affect our employee retention efforts and increase our expenses in an effort to offer a competitive compensation program. In addition, changes to immigration and labor law policies may adversely impact our access to technical and professional talent.
Our general compensation program includes restricted stock units and performance-based equity, which are important tools in attracting and retaining employees in our industry. If our stock price performs poorly, it may adversely affect our ability to retain or attract employees. We continually evaluate our compensation practices and consider changes from time to time, such as reducing the number of employees granted equity awards or the number of equity awards granted per employee and granting alternative forms of stock-based compensation, which may have an impact on our ability to retain employees and the amount of stock-based compensation expense that we record. Any changes in our compensation practices or those of our competitors could affect our ability to retain and motivate existing personnel and recruit new personnel.
Our sales to government clients expose us to business volatility and risks, including government budgeting cycles and appropriations, procurement regulations, governmental policy shifts, early termination of contracts, audits, investigations, sanctions and penalties. We derive revenues from contracts with the U.S. government, state and local governments, and foreign governments and are subject to procurement laws and regulations relating to the award, administration and performance of those contracts.
Governmental entities are variously pursuing policies that affect our ability to sell our products and services. Changes in government procurement policy, priorities, regulations, technology initiatives and requirements, and/or contract award criteria may negatively impact our potential for growth in the government sector. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has issued cybersecurity requirements for contractors’ internal systems through a mandatory cybersecurity contract clause referred to as “DFARS 7012” and will be implementing a new third-party accreditation program known as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). The DFARS 7012 and CMMC requirements may impact our lines of business in the U.S. federal government market. Compliance with these cybersecurity requirements is complex and costly, and failure to meet the required security controls could limit our ability to sell products and services, directly or indirectly, to the DoD and other federal government entities that implement similar cybersecurity requirements.
We are also subject to early termination of our contracts. Many governmental entities have the right to terminate contracts at any time, without cause. For example, the U.S. federal government may terminate any of our government contracts and subcontracts at its convenience, or for default based on our performance.
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U.S. federal contracts are subject to the congressional approval of appropriations to fund the expenditures under these contracts. Similarly, our contracts with U.S. state and local governments, foreign governments and their agencies are generally subject to government funding authorizations. Contracts may be terminated based upon a lack of appropriated funds.
There is increased pressure on governments and their agencies, both domestically and internationally, to reduce spending as governments continue to face significant deficit reduction pressures. This may adversely impact spending on government programs.
Government contracts laws and regulations impose certain risks, and contracts are generally subject to audits and investigations. If violations of law are found, they could result in civil and criminal penalties and administrative sanctions, including termination of contracts, refund of a portion of fees received, forfeiture of profits, suspension of payments, fines and suspensions or debarment from future government business.
Acquisitions present many risks and we may not achieve the financial and strategic goals that were contemplated at the time of a transaction. We continue to review and consider strategic acquisitions of companies, products, services and technologies. We have a selective and active acquisition program and we expect to continue to make acquisitions in the future because acquisitions are an important element of our overall corporate strategy. Risks we may face in connection with our acquisition program include:
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our ongoing business may be disrupted and our management’s attention may be diverted by acquisition, transition or integration activities; |
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we may have difficulties (1) managing an acquired company’s technologies or lines of business; (2) entering new markets where we have no, or limited, direct prior experience or where competitors may have stronger market positions; or (3) retaining key personnel from the acquired companies; |
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an acquisition may not further our business strategy as we expected, we may not integrate an acquired company or technology as successfully as we expected, we may impose our business practices or alter go-to-market strategies that adversely impact the acquired business or we may overpay for, or otherwise not realize the expected return on our investments, which could adversely affect our business or operating results and potentially cause impairment to assets that we recorded as a part of an acquisition including intangible assets and goodwill; |
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our operating results or financial condition may be adversely impacted by (1) claims or liabilities that we assume from an acquired company or technology or that are otherwise related to an acquisition, including, among others, claims from government agencies, terminated employees, current or former customers, former stockholders or other third parties; (2) pre-existing contractual relationships that we assume from an acquired company that we would not have otherwise entered into, the termination or modification of which may be costly or disruptive to our business; (3) unfavorable revenue recognition or other accounting treatment as a result of an acquired company’s practices; and (4) intellectual property claims or disputes; |
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we may fail to identify or assess the magnitude of certain liabilities, shortcomings or other circumstances prior to acquiring a company or technology, which could result in (1) unexpected litigation or regulatory exposure, (2) unfavorable accounting treatment, (3) unexpected increases in taxes due or the loss of anticipated tax benefits or (4) other adverse effects on our business, operating results or financial condition; |
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we may not realize any anticipated increase in our revenues from an acquisition for a number of reasons, including (1) if a larger than predicted number of customers decline to renew cloud-based subscription contracts or license support or hardware support contracts, (2) if we are unable to sell the acquired products or service offerings to our customer base, (3) if acquired customers do not elect to purchase our technologies due to differing business practices or (4) if contract models utilized by an acquired company do not allow us to recognize revenues on a timely basis; |
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we may have difficulty incorporating acquired technologies, products, services and their related supply chain operations with our existing lines of business and supply chain infrastructure and maintaining uniform standards, architecture, controls, procedures and policies; |
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we may have multiple product lines or services offerings as a result of our acquisitions that are offered, priced, delivered and supported differently, which could cause customer confusion and delays; |
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we may incur higher than anticipated costs (1) to support, develop and deliver acquired products or services, (2) for general and administrative functions that support new business models, or (3) to comply with regulations applicable to an acquired business that are more complicated than we had anticipated; |
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we may be unable to obtain timely approvals from, or may otherwise have certain limitations, restrictions, penalties or other sanctions imposed on us by worker councils or similar bodies under applicable employment laws as a result of an acquisition, which could adversely affect our integration plans in certain jurisdictions and potentially increase our integration and restructuring expenses; |
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we may be unable to obtain required approvals from governmental authorities under competition and antitrust laws on a timely basis, if at all, which could, among other things, (1) delay or prevent us from completing a transaction, (2) adversely affect our integration plans in certain jurisdictions, (3) restrict our ability to realize the expected financial or strategic goals of an acquisition, or (4) have other adverse effects on our current business and operations; |
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our use of cash to pay for acquisitions may limit other potential uses of our cash, including (1) stock repurchases, (2) dividend payments and (3) retirement of outstanding indebtedness, among others; |
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we may significantly increase our interest expense, leverage and debt service requirements if we incur additional debt to pay for an acquisition and we may have to delay or not proceed with a substantial acquisition if we cannot obtain the necessary funding to complete the acquisition in a timely manner or on favorable terms; |
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to the extent that we issue a significant amount of equity securities in connection with future acquisitions, existing stockholders may be diluted and earnings per share may decrease; and |
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we may experience additional or unexpected changes in how we are required to account for our acquisitions pursuant to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, including arrangements that we may assume in an acquisition. |
The occurrence of any of these risks could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows, particularly in the case of a larger acquisition or several concurrent acquisitions.
Our hardware revenues and profitability have declined and could continue to decline. Our hardware business may adversely affect our total revenues and overall profitability and related growth rates. We may not achieve our estimated revenue, profit or other financial projections with respect to our hardware business in a timely manner or at all due to a number of factors, including:
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our changes in hardware offerings, technologies and strategies, including shifting factory locations, which could adversely affect supply and demand for our hardware products; |
|
• |
our hardware business has higher expenses as a percentage of revenues, and thus has been less profitable, than our cloud and license business; |
|
• |
our focus on certain of our more profitable Oracle Engineered Systems and certain other hardware products we consider strategic and the de-emphasis of certain of our lower profit margin commodity hardware products could adversely affect our hardware revenues; |
|
• |
changes in strategies and frequency for the development and introduction of new versions or next generations of our hardware products could adversely affect our hardware revenues; |
27
|
• |
general supply chain material shortages worldwide prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, which we expect will be further exacerbated globally as a result of the virus pandemic; |
|
• |
a greater risk of material charges that could adversely affect our operating results, such as potential write-downs and impairments of our inventories; higher warranty expenses than what we experience in our cloud and license and services businesses; and amortization and potential impairment of intangible assets associated with our hardware business; |
|
• |
decreased customer demand for related hardware support as hardware products approach the end of their useful lives, which could adversely affect our hardware revenues; and |
|
• |
we may acquire hardware companies that are strategically important to us but (1) operate in hardware businesses with historically lower operating margins than our own; (2) have different legacy business practices and go-to-market strategies than our own that we may alter as a part of our integration efforts, which may significantly impact our estimated revenues and profits from the acquired company; (3) leverage different platforms or competing technologies that we may encounter difficulties in integrating; or (4) utilize unique manufacturing processes that affect our ability to scale these acquired products within our own manufacturing operations. |
Our hardware offerings are complex products, and if we cannot successfully manage this complexity, the results of our hardware business will suffer. We depend on suppliers to develop, manufacture and deliver on a timely basis the necessary technologies and components for our hardware products, and there are some technologies and components that can only be purchased from a single vendor due to price, quality, technology, availability or other business constraints. As a result, our supply chain operations could be disrupted or negatively impacted by industry consolidation and component constraints or shortages, natural disasters, political unrest, public health crises such as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, changes to trade policies, port stoppages or other transportation disruptions or slowdowns, or other factors affecting the countries or regions where these single source component vendors are located or where the products are being shipped. We may be unable to purchase these items from the respective single vendors on acceptable terms or may experience significant shortages, delays or quality issues in the delivery of necessary technologies, parts or components from a particular vendor. If one or more of the risks described above occurs, our hardware business and related operating results could be materially and adversely affected.
We are susceptible to third-party manufacturing and logistics delays, which could result in the loss of sales and customers. We outsource the manufacturing, assembly, delivery and technology or component design of certain of our hardware products to a variety of companies, many of which are located outside the U.S. From time to time, these partners experience production problems or delays or cannot meet our demand for products. To reduce this risk, we continue to explore additional third-party manufacturing partners to drive supply chain continuity, but finding additional manufacturing sources in a timely and cost-effective manner is difficult. Third-party manufacturing and logistics delays attributable to the effects of COVID-19 caused a loss of sales during our fourth quarter of fiscal 2020. Ongoing or future delays in manufacturing could cause the loss of additional sales, delayed revenue recognition or an increase in our hardware products expenses, all of which could adversely affect the margins of our hardware business. These challenges and risks also exist when we acquire companies with hardware products and related supply chain operations and could arise if we alter our manufacturing strategies, suppliers or locations. In some cases, we may be dependent, at least initially, on these acquired companies’ supply chain operations or other manufacturing operations that we are less familiar with and thus we may be slower to adjust or react to these challenges and risks.
Our cloud and license, and hardware indirect sales channels could affect our future operating results. Our cloud and license, and hardware indirect channel network is comprised primarily of resellers, system integrators/implementers, consultants, education providers, internet service providers, network integrators and independent software vendors. Our relationships with these channel participants are important elements of our cloud, software and hardware marketing and sales efforts. Our financial results could be adversely affected if our contracts with channel participants were terminated, if our relationships with channel participants were to deteriorate, if any of our competitors enter into strategic relationships with or acquire a significant channel
28
participant, if the financial condition or operations of our channel participants were to weaken or if the level of demand for our channel participants’ products and services were to decrease. There can be no assurance that we will be successful in maintaining, expanding or developing our relationships with channel participants. If we are not successful, we may lose sales opportunities, customers and revenues.
We may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights. We rely on copyright, trademark, patent and trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures, controls and contractual commitments to protect our intellectual property rights. Despite our efforts, these protections may be limited. Unauthorized third parties may try to copy or reverse engineer portions of our products or otherwise obtain and use our intellectual property. Any patents owned by us may be invalidated, circumvented or challenged. Any of our pending or future patent applications, whether or not being currently challenged, may not be issued with the scope of the claims we seek, if at all. In addition, the laws of some countries do not provide the same level of protection of our intellectual property rights as do the laws and courts of the U.S. If we cannot protect our intellectual property rights against unauthorized copying or use, or other misappropriation, we may not remain competitive.
Third parties have claimed, and in the future may claim, infringement or misuse of intellectual property rights and/or breach of license agreement provisions. We periodically receive notices from, or have lawsuits filed against us by, others claiming infringement or other misuse of their intellectual property rights and/or breach of our agreements with them. These third parties include entities that do not have the capabilities to design, manufacture, or distribute products or services or that acquire intellectual property like patents for the sole purpose of monetizing their acquired intellectual property through asserting claims of infringement and misuse. We expect to continue to receive such claims as:
|
• |
we continue to expand into new businesses and acquire companies; |
|
• |
the number of products and competitors in our industry segments grows; |
|
• |
the use and support of third-party code (including open source code) becomes more prevalent in the industry; |
|
• |
the volume of issued patents continues to increase; and |
|
• |
non-practicing entities continue to assert intellectual property infringement in our industry segments. |
Responding to any such claim, regardless of its validity, could:
|
• |
be time consuming, costly and result in litigation; |
|
• |
divert management’s time and attention from developing our business; |
|
• |
require us to pay monetary damages or enter into royalty and licensing agreements that we would not normally find acceptable; |
|
• |
require us to stop selling or to redesign certain of our products; |
|
• |
require us to release source code to third parties, possibly under open source license terms; |
|
• |
require us to satisfy indemnification obligations to our customers; or |
|
• |
otherwise adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows. |
We may not receive significant revenues from our current research and development efforts for several years, if at all. Developing our various product offerings is expensive and the investment in the development of these offerings often involves a long return on investment cycle. An important element of our corporate strategy is to continue to dedicate a significant amount of resources to research and development and related product and service opportunities both through internal investments and the acquisition of intellectual property from companies that we have acquired. Accelerated product and service introductions and short lifecycles require high levels of expenditures for research and development that could adversely affect our operating results if not offset by revenue increases. We believe that we must continue to dedicate a significant amount of resources to our
29
research and development efforts to maintain our competitive position. However, we do not expect to receive significant revenues from these investments for several years, if at all.
Business disruptions could adversely affect our operating results. A significant portion of our critical business operations are concentrated in a few geographic areas, some of which include emerging market international locations that may be less stable relative to running such business operations solely within the U.S. We are a highly automated business and a disruption or failure of our systems, supply chains and processes could cause delays in completing sales, providing services, including some of our cloud offerings, and enabling a seamless customer experience with respect to our customer facing back office processes. A major earthquake or fire, political, social or other disruption to infrastructure that supports our operations or other catastrophic event or the effects of climate change (such as increased storm severity, drought and pandemics) that results in the destruction or disruption of any of our critical business, supply chains or IT systems could severely affect our ability to conduct normal business operations and, as a result, our future operating results could be materially and adversely affected.
Adverse litigation results could affect our business. We are subject to various legal proceedings. Litigation can be lengthy, expensive and disruptive to our operations, and can divert our management’s attention away from running our core business. The results of our litigation also cannot be predicted with certainty. An adverse decision could result in monetary damages or injunctive relief that could affect our business, operating results or financial condition. Additional information regarding certain of the lawsuits we are involved in is discussed under Note 17 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.
We may have exposure to additional tax liabilities. As a multinational corporation, we are subject to income taxes as well as non-income based taxes, in both the U.S. and various foreign jurisdictions. Significant uncertainties exist with respect to the amount of our tax liabilities, including those arising from potential changes in laws in the countries in which we do business and the possibility of adverse determinations with respect to the application of existing laws. Many judgments are required in determining our worldwide provision for income taxes and other tax liabilities, and we are regularly under audit by tax authorities, which often do not agree with positions taken by us on our tax returns. Any unfavorable resolution of these uncertainties may have a significant adverse impact on our tax rate.
Increasingly, countries around the world are actively considering or have enacted changes in relevant tax, accounting and other laws, regulations and interpretations. In particular, the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (the Tax Act) significantly changed how corporations are taxed in the U.S., which has an ongoing impact on our provision for income taxes. The U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and other standards-setting bodies are continuing to issue guidance on how the provisions of the Tax Act will be applied and it is possible that the guidance may differ from our interpretation of the legislation. The Tax Act requires complex computations not previously required or produced, and necessitates that we make significant judgments and assumptions in the interpretation of the law where there is a lack of guidance.
Such uncertainty in the application of the Tax Act to our ongoing operations as well as possible adverse future law changes attributable to changes in the U.S. political landscape create the potential for added volatility in our quarterly provision for income taxes and could have an adverse impact on our future tax rate. Various Democratic proposals would partially or wholly reverse beneficial features of the Tax Act, such as by raising the U.S. corporate tax rate and increasing the tax on non-U.S. income. A change in party control of the White House and U.S. Senate thus could lead to dramatic changes in the tax law and result in an increase in our provision for income taxes. Increased federal and state fiscal spending to fund COVID-19 relief measures, coupled with a drop in tax revenue from pandemic-related reductions in economic activity, will add to the pressure to raise more tax revenue from federal and state corporate income and other taxes or to enact new types of taxes on businesses and their customers.
Other countries also continue to consider enacting changes to their tax laws that could adversely affect us by increasing taxes imposed on our revenue streams and foreign subsidiaries, including changes in withholding tax regimes and the imposition of taxes targeted at certain technology businesses. More fundamentally, longstanding international tax principles that determine each country’s right to tax cross-border transactions are being
30
reconsidered, creating significant uncertainty as to the future level of corporate income tax on our international operations. This re-examination is driven by a perceived need to provide greater taxing rights to market jurisdictions where customers or users are located. Various measures are being discussed, including adjustments to transfer pricing rules, limitations on deductions, and imposition of additional withholding taxes. The foregoing changes brought about by the Tax Act in combination with the uncertain international tax environment have upended expectations and the predictability and reliability of the global tax system, leading to the ongoing re-evaluation of our global legal and tax operating structure. The resulting potential modifications to our structure could adversely impact our provision for income taxes.
Inherent in our global business operations and legal entity structure are many intercompany transactions and calculations made in the ordinary course of business where the ultimate tax determination is uncertain. Our intercompany transfer pricing has been and is currently being reviewed by the IRS and by foreign tax jurisdictions and will likely be subject to additional audits in the future. Although we have negotiated a number of agreements with certain taxing jurisdictions, these agreements do not cover substantial elements of our transfer pricing. In recent periods, transfer pricing audits in many foreign jurisdictions have become increasingly contentious. Similarly, certain jurisdictions are increasingly raising concerns about certain withholding tax matters under current law. In addition, our provision for income taxes could be adversely affected by shifts of earnings from jurisdictions or regimes that have relatively lower statutory tax rates to those in which the rates are relatively higher.
We are also subject to non-income based taxes, such as payroll, sales, use, value-added, net worth, property and goods and services taxes, in both the U.S. and various foreign jurisdictions that have uncertain applicability to the businesses in which we are engaged. Although we believe that our income and non-income based tax estimates are reasonable, there is no assurance that the final determination of tax audits or tax disputes will not be different from what is reflected in our historical income tax provisions and accruals.
There are risks associated with our outstanding and future indebtedness. As of May 31, 2020, we had an aggregate of $71.6 billion of outstanding indebtedness that will mature between calendar year 2020 and calendar year 2060, and we may incur additional indebtedness in the future. Our ability to pay interest and repay the principal for our indebtedness is dependent upon our ability to manage our business operations, generate sufficient cash flows to service such debt and the other factors discussed in this section. There can be no assurance that we will be able to manage any of these risks successfully.
We may also need to refinance a portion of our outstanding debt as it matures. There is a risk that we may not be able to refinance existing debt or that the terms of any refinancing may not be as favorable as the terms of our existing debt. Furthermore, if prevailing interest rates or other factors at the time of refinancing result in higher interest rates upon refinancing, then the interest expense relating to that refinanced indebtedness would increase.
Should we incur future increases in interest expense, our ability to utilize certain of our foreign tax credits to reduce our U.S. federal income tax could be limited, which could unfavorably affect our provision for income taxes and effective tax rate. In addition, changes by any rating agency to our outlook or credit rating could negatively affect the value of both our debt and equity securities and increase the interest amounts we pay on certain outstanding or future debt. These risks could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.
Environmental and other related laws and regulations subject us to a number of risks and could result in significant liabilities and costs. Some of our cloud and hardware operations are subject to state, federal and international laws governing protection of the environment, proper handling and disposal of materials used for these products, human health and safety, the use of certain chemical substances and the labor practices of suppliers, as well as local testing and labelling requirements. Compliance with these ever-changing environmental and other laws in a timely manner could increase our product design, development, procurement, manufacturing, delivery, cloud operations and administration costs, limit our ability to manage excess and obsolete non-compliant inventory, change our sales activities, or otherwise impact future financial results of our cloud and hardware businesses. Any violation of these laws can subject us to significant liability, including fines, penalties and possible prohibition of sales of our products and services into one or more states or countries and result in a material adverse effect on the financial condition or results of operations of our cloud and hardware businesses.
31
Regulatory, market, and competitive pressures regarding the greenhouse gas emissions and energy mix for our data center operations may also grow.
The SEC has adopted disclosure requirements for companies that use certain “conflict minerals” (tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold) in their products. Our supply chain is multi-tiered, global and highly complex. As a provider of hardware end-products, we are several steps removed from the mining and smelting or refining of any conflict minerals in our supply chain. Accordingly, our ability to determine with certainty the origin and chain of custody of conflict minerals is limited. Our relationships with customers and suppliers could suffer if we are unable to describe our products as “conflict-free.” We may also face increased costs in complying with conflict minerals disclosure requirements.
A significant portion of our hardware revenues come from international sales. Environmental legislation, such as the EU Directive on Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive) and China’s regulation on Management Methods for Controlling Pollution Caused by Electronic Information Products, may increase our cost of doing business internationally and impact our hardware revenues from the EU, China and other countries with similar environmental legislation as we endeavor to comply with and implement these requirements. The UK Government has announced a procurement policy that includes environmental, social and economic sustainability measures.
Our stock price could become more volatile and your investment could lose value. All of the factors discussed in this section could affect our stock price. The timing of announcements in the public market by us or by our competitors regarding new products, product enhancements, technological advances, acquisitions or major transactions could also affect our stock price. Changes in the amounts and frequency of share repurchases or dividends could affect our stock price. Our stock price could also be affected by factors, some of which are beyond our control, including, among others: speculation in the press and the analyst community, changes in recommendations or earnings estimates by financial analysts, changes in investors’ or analysts’ valuation measures for our stock, negative analyst surveys or channel check surveys, earnings announcements where our financial results differ from our guidance or investors’ expectations, our credit ratings and market trends unrelated to our performance. A significant drop in our stock price could also expose us to the risk of securities class action lawsuits, which could result in substantial costs and divert management’s attention and resources, which could adversely affect our business.
We cannot guarantee that our stock repurchase program will be fully implemented or that it will enhance long-term stockholder value. In fiscal 2020, our Board of Directors approved expansions of our stock repurchase program totaling $30.0 billion. The repurchase program does not have an expiration date and we are not obligated to repurchase a specified number or dollar value of shares. Our repurchase program may be suspended or terminated at any time and, even if fully implemented, may not enhance long-term stockholder value.
Charges to earnings resulting from acquisitions may adversely affect our operating results. Under business combination accounting standards pursuant to Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 805, Business Combinations, we recognize the identifiable assets acquired, the liabilities assumed and any non-controlling interests in acquired companies generally at their acquisition date fair values and, in each case, separately from goodwill. Goodwill as of the acquisition date is measured as the excess amount of consideration transferred, which is also generally measured at fair value, and the net of the acquisition date amounts of the identifiable assets acquired and the liabilities assumed. Our estimates of fair value are based upon assumptions believed to be reasonable but which are inherently uncertain. After we complete an acquisition, the following factors could result in material charges and adversely affect our operating results and may adversely affect our cash flows:
|
• |
costs incurred to combine the operations of companies we acquire, such as transitional employee expenses and employee retention, redeployment or relocation expenses; |
|
• |
impairment of goodwill or impairment of intangible assets; |
|
• |
amortization of intangible assets acquired; |
|
• |
a reduction in the useful lives of intangible assets acquired; |
32
|
• |
identification of, or changes to, assumed contingent liabilities, both income tax and non-income tax related, after our final determination of the amounts for these contingencies or the conclusion of the measurement period (generally up to one year from the acquisition date), whichever comes first; |
|
• |
charges to our operating results to maintain certain duplicative pre-merger activities for an extended period of time or to maintain these activities for a period of time that is longer than we had anticipated, charges to eliminate certain duplicative pre-merger activities, and charges to restructure our operations or to reduce our cost structure; |
|
• |
charges to our operating results due to expenses incurred to effect the acquisition; and |
|
• |
charges to our operating results due to the expensing of certain stock awards assumed in an acquisition. |
Substantially all of these costs will be accounted for as expenses that will adversely impact our operating results for the periods in which those costs are incurred. Charges to our operating results in any given period could differ substantially from other periods based on the timing and size of our future acquisitions and the extent of integration activities. A more detailed discussion of our accounting for business combinations and other items is presented in the “Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates” section of Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations (Item 7) included elsewhere in this Annual Report.
Item 1B. |
Unresolved Staff Comments |
None.
Item 2. |
Properties |
Our properties consist of owned and leased office facilities for sales, support, research and development, services, manufacturing, cloud operations and administrative and other functions. Our headquarters facility consists of approximately 2.1 million square feet in Redwood City, California, substantially all of which we own. We also own or lease other facilities for current use consisting of approximately 25.4 million square feet in various other locations in the U.S. and abroad. Approximately 2.8 million square feet, or 10%, of our total owned and leased space is sublet or is being actively marketed for sublease or disposition. We lease our principal internal manufacturing facility for our hardware products in Hillsboro, Oregon. Our cloud operations deliver our Oracle Cloud Services through the use of global data centers including those that we own and operate and those that we utilize through colocation suppliers. We believe that our facilities are in good condition and suitable for the conduct of our business.
Item 3. |
Legal Proceedings |
The material set forth in Note 14 (pertaining to information regarding contingencies related to our income taxes) and Note 17 (pertaining to information regarding legal contingencies) of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements in Item 15 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K is incorporated herein by reference.
Item 4. |
Mine Safety Disclosures |
Not applicable.
33
PART II
Item 5. |
Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities |
Our common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “ORCL.” According to the records of our transfer agent, we had 8,511 stockholders of record as of May 31, 2020.
For equity compensation plan information, please refer to Item 12 in Part III of this Annual Report.
Stock Repurchase Program
Our Board of Directors has approved a program for us to repurchase shares of our common stock. On September 11, 2019 and March 12, 2020, we announced that our Board of Directors approved expansions of our stock repurchase program totaling $30.0 billion. As of May 31, 2020, approximately $16.6 billion remained available for stock repurchases pursuant to our stock repurchase program.
Our stock repurchase authorization does not have an expiration date and the pace of our repurchase activity will depend on factors such as our working capital needs, our cash requirements for acquisitions and dividend payments, our debt repayment obligations or repurchases of our debt, our stock price, and economic and market conditions. Our stock repurchases may be effected from time to time through open market purchases or pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 plan. Our stock repurchase program may be accelerated, suspended, delayed or discontinued at any time.
The following table summarizes the stock repurchase activity for the three months ended May 31, 2020 and the approximate dollar value of shares that may yet be purchased pursuant to our stock repurchase program:
(in millions, except per share amounts) |
|
Total Number of Shares Purchased |
|
|
Average Price Paid per Share |
|
|
Total Number of Shares Purchased as Part of Publicly Announced Program |
|
|
Approximate Dollar Value of Shares that May Yet Be Purchased Under the Program |
|
||||
March 1, 2020—March 31, 2020 |
|
|
67.9 |
|
|
$ |
47.15 |
|
|
|
67.9 |
|
|
$ |
18,648.4 |
|
April 1, 2020—April 30, 2020 |
|
|
38.7 |
|
|
$ |
51.68 |
|
|
|
38.7 |
|
|
$ |
16,648.4 |
|
May 1, 2020—May 31, 2020 |
|
|
— |
|
|
$ |
— |
|
|
|
— |
|
|
$ |
16,648.4 |
|
Total |
|
|
106.6 |
|
|
$ |
48.80 |
|
|
|
106.6 |
|
|
|
|
|
34
Stock Performance Graph and Cumulative Total Return
The graph below compares the cumulative total stockholder return on our common stock with the cumulative total return of the S&P 500 Index and the S&P Information Technology Index for each of the last five fiscal years ended May 31, 2020, assuming an investment of $100 at the beginning of such period and the reinvestment of any dividends. The comparisons in the graphs below are based upon historical data and are not indicative of, nor intended to forecast, future performance of our common stock.
*$100 INVESTED ON MAY 31, 2015 IN STOCK OR
INDEX-INCLUDING REINVESTMENT OF DIVIDENDS
|
|
5/15 |
|
|
5/16 |
|
|
5/17 |
|
|
5/18 |
|
|
5/19 |
|
|
5/20 |
|
||||||
Oracle Corporation |
|
|
100.0 |
|
|
|
93.9 |
|
|
|
107.7 |
|
|
|
112.6 |
|
|
|
123.9 |
|
|
|
134.0 |
|
S&P 500 Index |
|
|
100.0 |
|
|
|
101.7 |
|
|
|
119.5 |
|
|
|
136.7 |
|
|
|
141.8 |
|
|
|
160.1 |
|
S&P Information Technology Index |
|
|
100.0 |
|
|
|
103.1 |
|
|
|
138.0 |
|
|
|
176.9 |
|
|
|
184.7 |
|
|
|
255.6 |
|
35
Item 6. |
Selected Financial Data |
The following table sets forth selected financial data as of and for our last five fiscal years. This selected financial data should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and related notes included in Item 15 of this Annual Report. Over our last five fiscal years, we have acquired a number of companies, including NetSuite Inc. (NetSuite) in fiscal 2017. The results of our acquired companies have been included in our consolidated financial statements since their respective dates of acquisition and have contributed to our revenues, income, earnings per share and total assets.
|
|
As of and for the Year Ended May 31, |
|
|||||||||||||||||
(in millions, except per share amounts) |
|
2020 |
|
|
2019 |
|
|
2018 |
|
|
2017 |
|
|
2016(4) |
|
|||||
Consolidated Statements of Operations Data: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Total revenues |
|
$ |
39,068 |
|
|
$ |
39,506 |
|
|
$ |
39,383 |
|
|
$ |
37,792 |
|
|
$ |
37,047 |
|
Operating income |
|
$ |
13,896 |
|
|
$ |
13,535 |
|
|
$ |
13,264 |
|
|
$ |
12,913 |
|
|
$ |
12,604 |
|
Net income(1) |
|
$ |
10,135 |
|
|
$ |
11,083 |
|
|
$ |
3,587 |
|
|
$ |
9,452 |
|
|
$ |
8,901 |
|
Earnings per share—diluted(1) |
|
$ |
3.08 |
|
|
$ |
2.97 |
|
|
$ |
0.85 |
|
|
$ |
2.24 |
|
|
$ |
2.07 |
|
Diluted weighted average common shares outstanding |
|
|
3,294 |
|
|
|
3,732 |
|
|
|
4,238 |
|
|
|
4,217 |
|
|
|
4,305 |
|
Cash dividends declared per common share |
|
$ |
0.96 |
|
|
$ |
0.81 |
|
|
$ |
0.76 |
|
|
$ |
0.64 |
|
|
$ |
0.60 |
|
Consolidated Balance Sheets Data: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Working capital(2) |
|
$ |
34,940 |
|
|
$ |
27,756 |
|
|
$ |
57,035 |
|
|
$ |
50,995 |
|
|
$ |
47,105 |
|
Total assets(2) |
|
$ |
115,438 |
|
|
$ |
108,709 |
|
|
$ |
137,851 |
|
|
$ |
136,003 |
|
|
$ |
112,180 |
|
Notes payable and other borrowings(3) |
|
$ |
71,597 |
|
|
$ |
56,167 |
|
|
$ |
60,619 |
|
|
$ |
57,909 |
|
|
$ |
43,855 |
|
(1) |
Our net income and diluted earnings per share were impacted in fiscal 2019 and 2018 by the effects of our adoption of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (the Tax Act). The more significant provisions of the Tax Act as applicable to us are described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2019. |
(2) |
Working capital and total assets increased in fiscal 2020 primarily due to the favorable impacts to our net current assets resulting from our fiscal 2020 net income and the issuance of $20.0 billion of long-term senior notes in fiscal 2020, partially offset by cash used for repurchases of our common stock and dividend payments in fiscal 2020. Working capital and total assets decreased in fiscal 2019 primarily due to $36.1 billion of cash used for repurchases of our common stock during fiscal 2019 and also due to dividend payments, partially offset by the favorable impacts to our net current assets resulting from our fiscal 2019 net income. Working capital and total assets sequentially increased in the fiscal 2016 to 2018 periods presented primarily due to the favorable impacts to our net current assets resulting from our net income generated during the periods presented and the issuance of long-term senior notes of $10.0 billion in fiscal 2018 and $14.0 billion in fiscal 2017. These working capital and total assets increases were partially offset by cash used for acquisitions, repurchases of our common stock and dividend payments in the fiscal 2016 to 2018 periods presented. In addition, our total assets were also affected in all periods presented by the repayments of notes payable and other borrowings as discussed further below. |
(3) |
Our notes payable and other borrowings, which represented the summation of our notes payable, current, and notes payable and other borrowings, non-current, as reported per our consolidated balance sheets as of the dates listed in the table above, increased during fiscal 2020 primarily due to the issuance of $20.0 billion of long-term senior notes. Notes payable and other borrowings decreased during fiscal 2019 primarily due to repayments of certain short-term borrowings and senior notes. Notes payable and other borrowings increased between fiscal 2016 and 2018 primarily due to the fiscal 2018 issuance of long-term senior notes of $10.0 billion and short-term borrowings of $2.5 billion, the fiscal 2017 issuance of long-term senior notes of $14.0 billion and short-term borrowings of $3.8 billion, and fiscal 2016 short-term borrowings of $3.8 billion. See Note 7 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report for additional information regarding our notes payable and other borrowings. |
(4) |
The summary consolidated financial data for the fiscal year ended and as of May 31, 2016 have not been updated to reflect the adoption of ASC 606, Revenue from Contracts with Customers (ASC 606) or ASU 2017-07, Improving the Presentation of Net Periodic Pension Costs and Net Periodic Postretirement Benefit Costs (ASU 2017-07). Refer to our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2019 for additional discussion regarding Oracle’s adoption of these accounting pronouncements. |
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Item 7. |
Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations |
We begin Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations with an overview of our businesses and significant trends. This overview is followed by a summary of our critical accounting policies and estimates that we believe are important to understanding the assumptions and judgments incorporated in our reported financial results. We then provide a more detailed analysis of our results of operations and financial condition.
Business Overview
Oracle provides products and services that address enterprise information technology (IT) environments. Our products and services include applications and infrastructure offerings that are delivered worldwide through a variety of flexible and interoperable IT deployment models. These models include on‑premise deployments, cloud‑based deployments, and hybrid deployments (an approach that combines both on-premise and cloud‑based deployment) such as our Oracle Cloud at Customer offering (an instance of Oracle Cloud in a customer’s own data center). Accordingly, we offer choice and flexibility to our customers and facilitate the product, service and deployment combinations that best suit our customers’ needs. Through our worldwide sales force and Oracle Partner Network, we sell to customers all over the world including businesses of many sizes, government agencies, educational institutions and resellers.
We have three businesses: cloud and license; hardware; and services; each of which comprises a single operating segment. The descriptions set forth below as a part of Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and the information contained within Note 15 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report provide additional information related to our businesses and operating segments and align to how our chief operating decision makers (CODMs), which include our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, view our operating results and allocate resources.
Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Oracle’s Business
For a discussion of the impacts on and risks to our business from COVID-19, please refer to “Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Oracle’s Business” included in Item 1 Business in this Annual Report, the risks included in Item 1A Risk Factors in this Annual Report and the information presented below in Results of Operations in this Item 7.
Cloud and License Business
Our cloud and license line of business, which represented 83% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2020 and 2019, markets, sells and delivers a broad spectrum of applications and infrastructure technologies through our cloud and license offerings.
Cloud services and license support revenues include:
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license support revenues, which are earned by providing Oracle license support services to customers that have elected to purchase support services in connection with the purchase of Oracle applications and infrastructure software licenses for use in cloud, on-premise and other IT environments. Substantially all license support customers renew their support contracts with us upon expiration in order to continue to benefit from technical support services and the periodic issuance of unspecified updates and enhancements, which current license support customers are entitled to receive. License support contracts are generally priced as a percentage of the net fees paid by the customer to purchase a cloud license and/or on-premise license; are generally billed in advance of the support services being performed; are generally renewed at the customer’s option; and are generally recognized as revenues ratably over the contractual period that the support services are provided, which is generally one year; and |
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cloud services revenues, which provide customers access to Oracle Cloud applications and infrastructure technologies via cloud-based deployment models that Oracle develops, provides unspecified updates and enhancements for, hosts, manages and supports and that customers access by entering into a subscription agreement with us for a stated period. The majority of our Oracle Cloud Services |
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arrangements are generally billed in advance of the cloud services being performed; have durations of one to three years; are generally renewed at the customer’s option; and are generally recognized as revenues ratably over the contractual period of the cloud contract or, in the case of usage model contracts, as the cloud services are consumed over time. |
Cloud license and on-premise license revenues include revenues from the licensing of our software products including Oracle Applications, Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware and Java, among others, which our customers deploy within cloud‑based, on‑premise and other IT environments. Our cloud license and on‑premise license transactions are generally perpetual in nature and are generally recognized up front at the point in time when the software is made available to the customer to download and use. Revenues from usage‑based royalty arrangements for distinct cloud licenses and on-premise licenses are recognized at the point in time when the software end user usage occurs. The timing of a few large license transactions can substantially affect our quarterly license revenues due to the point in time nature of revenue recognition for license transactions, which is different than the typical revenue recognition pattern for our cloud services and license support revenues in which revenues are generally recognized ratably over the contractual terms. Cloud license and on-premise license customers have the option to purchase and renew license support contracts as described above.
Providing choice and flexibility to our customers as to when and how they deploy our applications and infrastructure technologies are important elements of our corporate strategy. In recent periods, customer demand for our applications and infrastructure technologies delivered through our Oracle Cloud Services has increased. To address customer demand and enable customer choice, we have introduced certain programs for customers to pivot their applications and infrastructure licenses and the related license support to the Oracle Cloud for new deployments and to migrate to and expand with the Oracle Cloud for their existing workloads. We expect these trends to continue.
Our cloud and license business’ revenue growth is affected by many factors, including the strength of general economic and business conditions; governmental budgetary constraints; the strategy for and competitive position of our offerings; the continued renewal of our cloud services and license support customer contracts by the customer contract base; substantially all customers continuing to purchase license support contracts in connection with their license purchases; the pricing of license support contracts sold in connection with the sales of licenses; the pricing, amounts and volumes of licenses and cloud services sold; and foreign currency rate fluctuations.
On a constant currency basis, we expect that our total cloud and license revenues generally will continue to increase due to:
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expected growth in our cloud services and license support offerings; and |
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continued demand for our cloud license and on-premise license offerings. |
We believe these factors should contribute to future growth in our cloud and license business’ revenues, which should enable us to continue to make investments in research and development to develop and improve our cloud and license products and services.
Our cloud and license business’ margin has historically trended upward over the course of the four quarters within a particular fiscal year due to the historical upward trend of our cloud and license business’ revenues over those quarterly periods and because the majority of our costs for this business are generally fixed in the short term. The historical upward trend of our cloud and license business’ revenues over the course of the four quarters within a particular fiscal year is primarily due to the addition of new cloud services and license support contracts to the customer contract base that we generally recognize as revenues ratably; the renewal of existing customers’ cloud services and license support contracts over the course of each fiscal year that we generally recognize as revenues ratably; and the historical upward trend of our cloud license and on-premise license revenues, which we generally recognize at a point in time upon delivery; in each case over those four quarterly periods.
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Hardware Business
Our hardware business, which represented 9% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2020 and 2019, provides a broad selection of hardware products and hardware-related software products including Oracle Engineered Systems, servers, storage, industry-specific hardware offerings, operating systems, virtualization, management and other hardware-related software, and related hardware support. Each hardware product and its related software, such as an operating system or firmware, are highly interdependent and interrelated and are accounted for as a combined performance obligation. The revenues for this combined performance obligation are generally recognized at the point in time that the hardware product and its related software are delivered to the customer and ownership is transferred to the customer. We expect to make investments in research and development to improve existing hardware products and services and to develop new hardware products and services. The majority of our hardware products are sold through indirect channels, including independent distributors and value-added resellers. Our hardware support offerings provide customers with unspecified software updates for software components that are essential to the functionality of our hardware products and associated software products such as Oracle Solaris. Our hardware support offerings can also include product repairs, maintenance services and technical support services. Hardware support contracts are entered into and renewed at the option of the customer, are generally priced as a percentage of the net hardware products fees and are generally recognized as revenues ratably as the hardware support services are delivered over the contractual terms.
We generally expect our hardware business to have lower operating margins as a percentage of revenues than our cloud and license business due to the incremental costs we incur to produce and distribute these products and to provide support services, including direct materials and labor costs.
Our quarterly hardware revenues are difficult to predict. Our hardware revenues, cost of hardware and hardware operating margins that we report are affected by many factors, including our ability to timely manufacture or deliver a few large hardware transactions; our strategy for and the position of our hardware products relative to competitor offerings; customer demand for competing offerings, including cloud infrastructure offerings; the strength of general economic and business conditions; governmental budgetary constraints; whether customers decide to purchase hardware support contracts at or in close proximity to the time of hardware product sale; the percentage of our hardware support contract customer base that renews its support contracts and the close association between hardware products, which have a finite life, and customer demand for related hardware support as hardware products age; customer decisions to either maintain or upgrade their existing hardware infrastructure to newly developed technologies that are available; and foreign currency rate fluctuations.
Services Business
Our services business, which represented 8% of our total revenues in each of fiscal 2020 and 2019, helps customers and partners maximize the performance of their investments in Oracle applications and infrastructure technologies. We believe that our services are differentiated based on our focus on Oracle technologies, extensive experience, broad sets of intellectual property and best practices. Our services offerings include consulting services, advanced customer services and education services. Our services business has lower margins than our cloud and license and hardware businesses. Our services revenues are affected by many factors including, our strategy for, and the competitive position of, our services; customer demand for our cloud and license and hardware offerings and the associated services for these offerings; general economic conditions; governmental budgetary constraints; personnel reductions in our customers’ IT departments; and tighter controls over customer discretionary spending.
Acquisitions
Our selective and active acquisition program is another important element of our corporate strategy. Historically, we have invested billions of dollars to acquire a number of complementary companies, products, services and technologies. The pace of our acquisitions has slowed recently, but as compelling opportunities become available, we may acquire companies, products, services and technologies in furtherance of our corporate strategy. Note 2 of
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Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report provides additional information related to our recent acquisitions.
We believe that we can fund our future acquisitions with our internally available cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, cash generated from operations, additional borrowings or from the issuance of additional securities. We estimate the financial impact of any potential acquisition with regard to earnings, operating margin, cash flows and return on invested capital targets before deciding to move forward with an acquisition.
Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates
Our consolidated financial statements are prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) as set forth in the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) Accounting Standards Codification (ASC), and we consider the various staff accounting bulletins and other applicable guidance issued by the SEC. GAAP, as set forth within the ASC, requires us to make certain estimates, judgments and assumptions. We believe that the estimates, judgments and assumptions upon which we rely are reasonable based upon information available to us at the time that these estimates, judgments and assumptions are made. These estimates, judgments and assumptions can affect the reported amounts of assets and liabilities as of the date of the financial statements as well as the reported amounts of revenues and expenses during the periods presented. To the extent that there are differences between these estimates, judgments or assumptions and actual results, our financial statements will be affected. The accounting policies that reflect our more significant estimates, judgments and assumptions and which we believe are the most critical to aid in fully understanding and evaluating our reported financial results include:
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Revenue Recognition; |
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Business Combinations; |
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Goodwill and Intangible Assets—Impairment Assessments; |
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Accounting for Income Taxes; and |
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Legal and Other Contingencies. |
Our senior management has reviewed our critical accounting policies and related disclosures with the Finance and Audit Committee of the Board of Directors. Note 1 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report includes additional information about our critical and other accounting policies.
Revenue Recognition
The most critical judgments required in applying Topic 606 and our revenue recognition policy relate to the determination of distinct performance obligations and the evaluation of the standalone selling price (SSP) for each performance obligation.
Many of our customer contracts include multiple performance obligations. Judgment is required in determining whether each performance obligation within a customer contract is distinct. Oracle products and services generally do not require a significant amount of integration or interdependency. Therefore, multiple products and services contained within a customer contract are generally considered to be distinct and are not combined for revenue recognition purposes. We allocate the transaction price for each customer contract to each performance obligation based on the relative SSP (the determination of SSP is discussed below) for each performance obligation within each contract. We recognize the amount of transaction price allocated to each performance obligation within a customer contract as revenue as each performance obligation is delivered.
We use historical sales transaction data and judgment, among other factors, in determining the SSP for products and services. For substantially all performance obligations except cloud licenses and on-premise licenses, we are able to establish the SSP based on the observable prices of products or services sold separately in comparable circumstances to similar customers. We typically establish an SSP range for our products and services, which is reassessed on a periodic basis or when facts and circumstances change. SSP for our products and services can
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evolve over time due to changes in our pricing practices that are influenced by intense competition, changes in demand for our products and services, and economic factors, among others. Our cloud licenses and on-premise licenses have not historically been sold on a standalone basis, as substantially all customers elect to purchase license support contracts at the time of a license purchase. License support contracts are generally priced as a percentage of the net fees paid by the customer to access the license. We are unable to establish the SSP for our cloud licenses and on-premise licenses based on observable prices given the same products are sold for a broad range of amounts (that is, the selling price is highly variable) and a representative SSP is not discernible from past transactions or other observable evidence. As a result, the SSP for a cloud license and an on-premise license included in a contract with multiple performance obligations is determined by applying a residual approach whereby all other performance obligations within a contract are first allocated a portion of the transaction price based upon their respective SSPs, with any residual amount of transaction price allocated to cloud license and on-premise license revenues.
Business Combinations
We apply the provisions of ASC 805, Business Combinations, in accounting for our acquisitions. ASC 805 requires that we evaluate whether a transaction pertains to an acquisition of assets, or to an acquisition of a business. A business is defined as an integrated set of assets and activities that is capable of being conducted and managed for the purpose of providing a return to investors. Asset acquisitions are accounted for by allocating the cost of the acquisition to the individual assets and liabilities assumed on a relative fair value basis; whereas the acquisition of a business requires us to recognize separately from goodwill the assets acquired and the liabilities assumed at the acquisition date fair values. Goodwill as of the acquisition date is measured as the excess of consideration transferred over the net of the acquisition date fair values of the assets acquired and the liabilities assumed. While we use our best estimates and assumptions to accurately value assets acquired and liabilities assumed at the acquisition date as well as any contingent consideration, where applicable, our estimates are inherently uncertain and subject to refinement. As a result, during the measurement period, which may be up to one year from the business acquisition date, we record adjustments to the assets acquired and liabilities assumed with the corresponding offset to goodwill. Upon the conclusion of a business acquisition’s measurement period or final determination of the values of assets acquired or liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments are recorded to our consolidated statements of operations.
Accounting for business combinations requires our management to make significant estimates and assumptions, especially at the acquisition date, including our estimates for intangible assets, contractual obligations assumed, pre-acquisition contingencies and any contingent consideration, where applicable. Although we believe that the assumptions and estimates we have made in the past have been reasonable and appropriate, they are based in part on historical experience and information obtained from the management of the acquired companies and are inherently uncertain. Unanticipated events and circumstances may occur that may affect the accuracy or validity of such assumptions, estimates or actual results.
For a given business acquisition, we may identify certain pre-acquisition contingencies as of the acquisition date and may extend our review and evaluation of these pre-acquisition contingencies throughout the