Austin A ten-year-old legal dispute gave the software company Oracle a quarter in the deep red. The SAP competitor posted a loss of around 1.25 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros) in the second fiscal quarter that ended at the end of November. Meanwhile, sales increased by six percent year-on-year to $ 10.4 billion, as Oracle announced after the US market closed on Thursday.
The legal battle, which cost Oracle 4.7 billion dollars in the past quarter, went back to the controversy surrounding the obligation of the former CEO Mark Hurd. Oracle brought Hurd into the management ranks after the computer giant Hewlett-Packard ousted him from the position of chief. This was followed by an HP lawsuit alleging that with Hurd, business secrets had also reached the competitor.
This dispute was settled, but then there was a new conflict: Oracle discontinued support for the Itanium server platform from HP. The computer group went to court in 2011 with allegations that this violated the agreement in the settlement of the lawsuit on Hurd’s obligation. That year, Oracle lost in an appeals court. Hurd died in 2019 after suffering from cancer.
In ongoing business, Oracle benefited from growth in cloud offerings in the past quarter, while hardware revenues declined again. Oracle exceeded analysts’ expectations for revenue and earnings per share. The share rose at times by more than six percent in after-hours trading.
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