Oracle's $8.05 guide is called 18% growth against a base its reported results do not show
Oracle will report first-quarter fiscal 2027 results after the close on Thursday, Sept. 10, the company confirmed in a scheduling release, with a conference call and webcast at 4:00 p.m. Central Time. The results have not been published, and nothing about the quarter is known outside the company as of Wednesday morning.
The most instructive number heading into it is one Oracle already published in June, and it requires arithmetic to read correctly. In its fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2026 release on June 10, the company said: "For fiscal year 2027, we confirm our prior revenue guidance of $90 billion total revenue and raise our non-GAAP EPS guidance to $8.05, which is growth of 18% after adjusting for the one-time events of selling our Ampere chip business and Bloom Energy warrants in fiscal year 2026."
Set that against what Oracle reported for the year just ended. The same release states that fiscal 2026 "GAAP earnings per share increased to $5.83, up 34%, while non-GAAP earnings per share climbed to $7.631, up 27%." A guide of $8.05 measured against a reported $7.631 is growth of 5.5%, not 18%.
The gap is resolved by the final clause of that same sentence. The 18% is measured not against the non-GAAP EPS Oracle reported for fiscal 2026, but against that figure with the Ampere and Bloom Energy disposals stripped out of it.
Working backwards from the stated growth rate, $8.05 divided by 1.18 implies a starting point of roughly $6.82 a share. That puts approximately $0.81 of fiscal 2026 non-GAAP earnings per share, more than a tenth of the reported total, in the category of items Oracle itself does not expect to repeat. An investor comparing the fiscal 2027 target to the headline fiscal 2026 result without that adjustment will materially overstate the implied improvement.
For the quarter specifically, Oracle guided total revenues to grow 27% to 29% in both constant currency and US dollars, and total cloud revenue to grow 57% to 63% in constant currency and 58% to 64% in dollars. On earnings it guided non-GAAP EPS to grow 16% to 19% and land between $1.71 and $1.75 in constant currency, and to grow 17% to 20% and land between $1.72 and $1.76 in dollars. The per-share figures Oracle set out in that section are non-GAAP measures.
In a Sept. 6 preview, Money.it put consensus at $1.74 a share on revenue of $19.14 billion, placing analyst expectations inside the company's own dollar-denominated band rather than above it.
The distance between Oracle's GAAP and non-GAAP results is wide enough to matter to how the print reads. For fiscal 2026 as a whole, non-GAAP EPS of $7.631 sat $1.80 above GAAP EPS of $5.83, or 30.9% higher. In the fourth quarter alone the spread was proportionally larger still: $2.111 non-GAAP against $1.45 GAAP, a difference of $0.66 and a non-GAAP figure 45.6% above the GAAP one.
The same divergence shows in margins. Oracle reported a fourth-quarter GAAP operating margin of 32%, on operating income of $6.133 billion, against a non-GAAP operating margin of 45% on operating income of $8.590 billion, a difference of 13 percentage points and roughly $2.46 billion. Full-year GAAP operating income was $20.6 billion on revenue of $67.4 billion, up 17%.
The backlog is the number that has driven the story. Oracle put remaining performance obligations at $638 billion at the end of the fourth quarter, up from $553 billion at the end of the third, an $85 billion sequential increase and a 363% rise year over year. The company noted that $75 billion of that total comprises prepaid or customer-supplied hardware associated with artificial intelligence contracts, a component that does not behave like ordinary contracted software revenue.
Concentration is the accompanying question. Money.it reported in its Sept. 6 preview that roughly $300 billion of the backlog traces to a single multiyear agreement with OpenAI, and framed the central issue for Thursday as whether demand is broadening beyond that customer. It also noted that Wall Street will be watching whether the RPO figure approaches $700 billion.
Funding the buildout is the other pressure point, and it is where the GAAP line will eventually register. Oracle's cash flow statement put fiscal 2026 capital expenditures at $55.663 billion. Sherwood News, reporting on the June results, said the company projected total fiscal 2027 capex of $90 billion to $95 billion and about $70 billion net of customer prepayments, against analyst expectations it put at $61.5 billion. The difference between the two figures implies $20 billion to $25 billion of prepayments, a split the report does not itself break out.
Free cash flow for fiscal 2026 was negative $23.7 billion, a figure that appears in Oracle's own release and that Sherwood highlighted. Oracle raised $43 billion in debt financing and $5 billion in equity financing during the year, and has said it plans to raise approximately $40 billion more through a combination of debt and equity in fiscal 2027. Capital spending on that scale converts into depreciation, and depreciation lands on the GAAP line rather than the adjusted one.
Market positioning going in has been cautious rather than exuberant. Money.it noted on Sept. 6 that Oracle shares were down roughly 25% year to date despite the backlog, and Sherwood reported the stock fell 5% in after-hours trading following the June report on the capex disclosure. On Tuesday, the last completed session, US equities closed lower across the board, with the S&P 500 down 0.58% at 7,673 and the Nasdaq Composite down 0.32% at 26,421, according to Investrade's market review; the 10-year Treasury yield finished at 4.796%.
The reporting items worth isolating on Thursday, then, are three. Whether RPO growth continues at anything like the fourth quarter's pace and how much of any increase is attributable to new customers rather than one. Whether the reported non-GAAP EPS falls inside the $1.72 to $1.76 dollar band, and what the corresponding GAAP figure is. And whether the fiscal 2027 full-year non-GAAP EPS target moves off $8.05, a number that, however Oracle frames its growth rate, still needs to be read against the $7.631 the company actually booked.
