A Case Study:
Oracle Systems Corporation
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In 1977, Lawrence J. Ellison founded System Development Laboratories to sell a database management system he had developed in a CIA project. It was only in 1982 that the company was renamed to Oracle Systems Corporation, to reflect the success of their first product, Oracle Database. Oracle used the C programming language to create its products, which was a big part of its success since this allowed Oracle software to run on various platforms and eventually became the industry standard.
Oracle achieved highly impressive growth throughout its early years, almost always doubling their
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Along with these, it is also evident that the company must fix its processes involving bad debt accounting and revenue recognition. They should also attend to their accounts receivable to come up with better terms that would make collections faster and more efficient.
ANALYSIS
Days in Accounts Receivables: 137 days (assuming 365 days)
Computation: = 365 / (970,844 / ((261,989 + 468,071) / 2))
Conclusion: Higher than the industry average at 62 days
Please see the next page for more analysis.
Table 1.1 A table comparing Oracle’s financial ratios with the industry average.
It’s noticeable how the company’s operations have been deteriorating as they are having a more difficult time translating sales into cash. Their A/R turnover is not where it needs to be, and in line with that, their liabilities are increasing as well. The company has also been inefficient with the use of their assets as their current activity ratios are not up to par with the industry standards.
RECOMMENDATIONS After analysing Oracle’s historical data and financial statements as well as identifying key points for the company to consider, the group proposes the following recommendations in order to improve their current financial standing:
1. Currently, the collection period of Oracle is at 137 days which is higher than the industry average of 62 days. The company must reduce credit terms implementing tighter credit control activities
The company’s debt ratios are 54.5% in 1988, 58.69% in 1989, 62.7% in 1990, and 67.37% in 1991. What this means is that the company is increasing its financial risk by taking on more leverage. The company has been taking an extensive amount of purchasing over the past couple of years, which could be the reason as to why net income has not grown much beyond several thousands of dollars. One could argue that the company is trying to expand its inventory to help accumulate future sales. But another problem is that the company’s
- Section 203 – Which deals with the auditors and any possible conflict of interest if they had worked with Phar-Mor in the last calendar year they would have not been able to be the same auditors doing final audits of the company.
The average collection period of Macy’s increased 20% from 5 days to 6. This is due to an 8.9% increase in accounts receivable and despite a 5.6% increase in sales. At 6 days, Macy’s average collection period is 500% worse than the industry average of 1 day but 14% better than the RMA worst of 7 days. It is worse this average despite the fact that accounts receivables is just 1.7% and is 22.7% lower than the 2.2% of the common size RMA. Therefore, Macy’s has less credit sales but takes a longer time to collect them.
The company’s day-to-day operations did not change significantly over the last few years. Average collection period, inventory turnover, accounts payable, accounts receivable as well as cash conversion cycle all went up and down over the last four years but mainly stayed in the same range. So, there is no any significant change in operations. Mr. Cartwright has a very sound control over operations of the firm. Therefore, I believe, the company needs few more years to recover from the debts
The Table 3.2 illustrates the financial information of Vipshop Company from 2012 to 2014. Both the ROA of 2014 and 2013 have reach the 5%, while this e-commerce company are under deficit in 2012. This results in an invalid ROA in 2012, which are deleted from the dataset. This paper only calculates the average figures of the rest of two years.
The following report was compiled after interviewing Kevin Vice, the facilities manager at Oracle America, Denver branch. Oracle America Inc. is a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, which is a multinational computer technology corporation that designs, manufactures, markets and services network computing infrastructure solutions. The company is based in Redwood City California, with branch offices around the globe serving customers in 145 countries. The Colorado branch office has three locations, Denver, Broomfield and Colorado Springs.
The company has shown through its ratios that it is stable. It has not been increasing nor decreasing, but has remained the same. However, in the past three years it is perceived that the company is declining. In the year 2015 the company made nearly $1.5 million in revenue and $64,575 in net income. Going by the previous two years, 2013 and 2014, it looks like the company is declining but looking at revenue and net income from 2010, it is noticeable that the company has come a long way. In 2010, Glatfelter reported 1.4 million in revenue and only $54,434 in net income. Going as far back as a decade ago revenue was only $579,121 and net income was 38,609. This only demonstrates that the company is growing significantly and has come a long way. In fact, the company has shown outstanding business performance over the last ten years. Financial
The financial performance of the company over the years six t thirteen is shown in table no 7. The data includes Revenue generated over the years, Earning per share, Return on Investment and Stock Prices. Chart 5 shows that there has been a decline in the revenues generated. Charts 6 to 8 all show a decline in Earnings per Share, Return on Equity and Stock Prices suggesting a poor financial performance by the company.
Interests include those who have a stake in an issue and the organizations they form. It can also include special interest, activity and advocacy group. All the interests mentioned in this section will cover the various issues mentioned in the above sections. Some of those interests are their customers, pension fund executives and managers, Oracle media representatives, employees, Oracle community (blog, users and user communities), United States Air Force, database administrators, database developers, vendors, Oracle technology writer/analyst/commenter specializing in enterprise software, etc. Also included are, other similar technology corporations watching Oracle`s next steps, the Attorney General, government officials,
Although the company seems to be profitable, it has faced shortage of cash. It happened due to increase in Accounts Receivable as well as Inventories. On the other hand, Accounts Payable does not increase that rapidly and difficulties regarding cash collection become evident. Furthermore, the cash collection cycle becomes larger (59 days in year 2003, while more than 70 in year 2006).
In 2010, the Oracle Corporation finalized an acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. for 7.3 billion dollars by way of a merger through a wholly owned subsidiary adjacent to Sun. At the commencement of this acquisition, Oracle corporation established an integration of certain hardware systems, of which 2 operating systems emerged: system products and system support. The Hardware System Product operating system emphasizes the physical use of storage products and computer server tactics where as the Hardware Systems support acted as a supplement to customers through ambiguous software updates to functionally essential software components. The establishment of these hardware systems, both Hardware Systems Product systems and Hardware Systems Support further placated one of Oracle’s intentional goals that prompted the acquisition of Sun; the optimization of database software performance.
Inspired by the possibility of creating an RDBMS system that could be sold commercially, Bob Miner, Ed Oates, and Larry Ellison pooled their collective knowledge to create Software Development Laboratories in 1977, which became Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982. Fueled by successes within the governmental sector and the foresight to write much of the code in the then-revolutionary C programming language, Oracle was able to create database software that could easily connect with almost any available system. This launched their commercial popularity, and has given them the freedom to pursue innovative technologies, such as Siebel CRM, that have consistently kept them among the top five software companies in the world.
With over 50% drop in share price, the company need to re-visualise their aim and understand how to make amends with these figures as they have caused a significant impact on profits and revenues.
Account receivable turnover ratio, accounts payable turnover ratio and working capital turnover ratio have decreased over the time. This may indicate, inefficiency in collection and more investment in debtors than required, that the creditors are not paid in time or have increased credit period,
The company specializes in developing and marketing computer hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly its own brands of database management systems.