Oracle Corporation (ORCL, Financial)
As part of their ongoing restructuring, Oracle has continued to shift more of their business to their cloud services and license support unit which now accounts for 71% of their revenue. While they are operating on a smaller scale than market leaders Amazon and Microsoft, they recently announced an initiative to allow their software to work with Microsoft’s in order to compete better against Amazon. Oracle is leading the field in autonomous databases and that fast-growing unit could provide a revenue tailwind in the future. Management has expressed interest in small acquisitions to improve their services, however, in a high market environment they have attempted to avoid overpaying for acquisitions and have instead spent their cash on stock buybacks. In 2019 they had a buyback yield of 14.77%.
From Jeff Auxier (Trades, Portfolio)'s Auxier Asset Management fourth-quarter commentary.
