Oracle is making Larry Ellison the world’s third-richest man
AT 78 LARRY ELLISON, co-founder and chairman of Oracle, is still brimming with energy. During the business-software firm’s latest quarterly earnings call on June 12th the septuagenarian rhapsodised about artificial intelligence (AI) and the latest cloud-computing technology. He has good reason to be in high spirits. Over the past year Mr Ellison’s wealth has rocketed to more than $150bn, according to Forbes, a magazine that tracks such things, on the back of Oracle’s soaring share price. Mr Ellison has now edged past Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as the world’s third-richest man.
Like Mr Ellison, Oracle might be regarded as a dinosaur of American tech. It began life in 1977 as a database-software business, later expanding into applications for business functions such as finance, sales and supply-chain management. As a latecomer to the cloud, however, Oracle has in recent years ceded market share in its core enterprise products to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, three cloud giants that have aggressively expanded their business-software offerings. Oracle’s slice of the database-software market, which remains its bread and butter, fell from 43% in 2012 to 19% in 2022, according to Gartner, a research firm.
Now the business seems to be turning a corner. To catch up with rivals, Oracle has been investing heavily in cloud computing. Capital expenditures in the past 12 months added up to $8.7bn, or 17% of sales, up from just 5% two years ago. Last year it acquired Cerner, a cloud-based health-records business, for $28bn. The upshot has been significant growth in sales of its cloud-based products, which were up by 33% year on year in the most recent quarter, or 55% after including the Cerner acquisition. These sales have grown much faster than the cloud divisions of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Oracle also outwitted them to snatch the cloud contract to host the American operations of TikTok, a…
2023-06-13 15:44:23
Article from www.economist.com
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