Oracle is on course to make Larry Ellison the world’s third-richest man
AT 78 LARRY ELLISON, the co-founder and chairman of Oracle, a business-software firm, is still brimming with energy. During the company’s latest quarterly earnings call on June 12th the septuagenarian rhapsodised youthfully 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 nearly $150bn, according to Forbes, a magazine that tracks such things, on the back of Oracle’s soaring share price. On June 13th Mr Ellison briefly passed Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, as the world’s third-richest man.
Like Mr Ellison, Oracle might be seen 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, the business has ceded market share in recent years 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 looks to be turning a corner. To catch-up with rivals, it 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. They 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
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