To all:
Be careful, long or short there's lots of room in either direction. however, four important points of clarification:
1) Asia was what Oracle blamed. The reality is the company had poor performance accross the board. License growth which is the key driver for long term growth was less than 3% year over year. Services grew nicely, but that can't be sustained without license growth. Even in apps, apps revenues were up only marginally year over year.
2) The "Y2K" stimulus is happening now and will start to slow significantly by the middle of next year. It takes 12 to 20 months to deploy high end oracle apps. The business benefit from y2k has a finite life and will end soon.
3) Without the acceptance of a new concept like the NC which has pros and cons but could take 3 to 5 years to build momentum, you could see the undrerlying growth rate of oracle decline to under 15%. (You could even see flat revenues in 2000 versus 1999.)
4) I know oracle has been a high flier, but keep in mind that of the top ten technology market cap names in technology in 1985, only one is there today - IBM (and you didn't want to be an IBM owner over the last 12 years) Trees don't grow to the sky, growth doesn't last forever.
I've had some bearish posts on this one in the past, I was long for a trade, obviously a mistake, but i don't think the worst is over for Oracle or any of the high end enterprise vendors.
best of luck,
TD |
