Ellison attacks PeopleSoft 'decline'

Oracle published its financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2003 yesterday, at the same time taking a swipe at its takeover target PeopleSoft.

The software giant said that net income increased four per cent to $2.31bn, or $0.43 per share, compared with net income of $2.22bn, or $0.39 per share, in fiscal 2002.

Total revenues declined two per cent to $9.5bn on annual operating margins of 36 per cent.

"Many of our major competitors showed significant licence revenue decline in their most recently reported quarter," said Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle.

"For instance, in PeopleSoft's most recent quarter their applications' new licence revenues decreased 39 per cent to $80m."

PeopleSoft's board yesterday rejected Oracle's $5.1bn cash offer for the firm.

Ellison said: "We believe that our growth and PeopleSoft's decline resulted in part from an increase in our competitive win rate over PeopleSoft, and the fact that we are beginning to replace PeopleSoft at a number of major accounts."

For Q4 this year Oracle's net income increased 31 per cent to $858m, compared to $656m for the same period last year.

Revenues increased two per cent to $2.83bn. Of this, software licence and other revenues rose one per cent to $1.2bn, software licence updates and product support increased 12 per cent to $1.1bn, and services declined 11 per cent to $580m.

Operating margin in the quarter reached a record 45 per cent, eclipsing the previous record of 44 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2002.

"This has been a very strong quarter for us, even with the war in Iraq and the Sars concerns right in the middle of it," said Jeff Henley, chief financial officer at Oracle.

"In light of the continuing tight IT spending environment, we are particularly pleased that we executed well enough to deliver some top line growth in our business while improving both profits and margins."