Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) shares were up 0.20% to $40.86 on Friday even after the company was recently ordered to pay HP $3 billion in damages associated with the latter’s Itanium servers. Shares of Oracle are trading in a 52-week range of $33.13 to $42.00.
The long court battle between HP and Oracle ended in a victory for the former. HP claimed that Oracle backed out of a deal to support Itanium servers, and the court ruled that Oracle did violate the contract but the company says that they plan on appealing the verdict as chipmaker Intel itself has decided to stop supporting Itanium.
If Oracle Corporation loses this appeal, it might be a large blow to the company’s profitability and outlook, marking the second largest defeat for the software provider. This would be next to Oracle’s loss to Alphabet when the latter was allowed to use Java and not charged of violating copyright laws.
Still, Oracle has a market cap of $168.17 billion so a $3 billion fine would not make such a huge dent on its coffers. Keep in mind that analysts have recently upped their forecasts for the stock, citing strong operations and a large amount of cash reserves.
The company’s latest earnings report was also mostly stronger than expected, with earnings per share at $0.81, higher than the previous period’s $0.78 per share. Revenue for the quarter came in at $10.59 billion versus the $10.71 billion revenue in the same period a year ago. In addition, the company added 1,600 new software-as-a-service customers and more than 2,000 new platform-as-a-service customers in the quarter.
Oracle Corporation is a provider of enterprise software and computer hardware products, and services. Its offerings include Oracle database and middleware software, application software, cloud infrastructure, hardware systems including computer server, storage and networking products, and related services. The company operates through various segments, including new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions.
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