There's minimal need to understand their $40 billion in sales. Do they have growth or not, and what is the quality of the growth in producing profit. It's that

There's minimal need to understand their $40 billion in sales. Do they have growth or not, and what is the quality of the growth in producing profit. It's that simple ultimately. Sales 2014: $38.2 billion; sales 2018: $39.8 billion No growth beyond inflation. Net income hasn't climbed (roughly stuck at $9-$10 billion for the last five years). Annual debt interest costs have more than doubled to $2 billion as they've made a mess of their balance sheet. In two years AWS will be as large as their entire business. In the five years Oracle has seen zero growth, Salesforce has gone from $4b to $10.5b in sales. It's likely that over the next five years Oracle will again see near zero growth and Salesforce will double in size. Here's what a successful cloud transition with growth actually looks like: Adobe's business was stagnant for years. Then.... Sales 2014: $4.1b; 2015: $4.8b; 2016: $5.8b; 2017: $7.3b; 2018: $9b. Their profit skyrocketed from $268m in 2014, to $2.6b for 2018. They earned as much last quarter as they did for all of 2015. The stock has gone from $60 to $250 / share. You can tell exactly how well Oracle's cloud transition is going by the fact that everybody around them is eating their lunch and seeing growth, from AWS, to Microsoft, to Salesforce, to dozens of other enterprise software companies. Microsoft had watched its top line stagnate for several years as they struggled to find new growth. And then suddenly a big jump: $96b in sales, to $110b in sales, over the prior year. Another example of cloud transition growth in action.