(Reuters) ? Technology giant Oracle Corp's profit and sales missed Wall Street forecasts, sending its shares plunging 9 percent and raising concerns that a global economic slowdown will hurt tech spending.
The company also posted an unexpected sequential decline in the revenue it gets for providing maintenance on its software products -- one of the most lucrative parts of its business.
That hasn't happened to Oracle since the fall of 2008 when the financial crisis began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, said Cowen & Co analyst Peter Goldmacher.
"Tech spending is more under pressure than people thought," Goldmacher said. "IT budgets have been relatively flat; when you have issues like you do in Europe, people naturally pull back."
Oracle, the world's No. 3 software maker, reported profit, excluding items, of 54 cents per share in its second quarter ended November 30, missing the average analyst forecast of 57 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
"Every technology company is going to get hit. This is just the start," said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.
New software sales rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $2 billion during the quarter. Analysts, on average, were expecting new software sales of $2.2 billion, according to StreetAccount.
Oracle also reported that hardware product sales fell 14 percent to $953 million, below the average Street account forecast of $1.06 billion.
Its software maintenance revenue fell to $3.99 billion during the second quarter from $4.02 billion in the first quarter.
Oracle's shares fell to $26.55 in extended trade after closing on Nasdaq close at $29.17.
(Additional reporting by Nicola Leske in New York and Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/software/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111220/bs_nm/us_oracle
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