Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Who cares what cash minus long term debt is...? You pay off debt with ongoing revenue, not current assets. The board obviously sees the stock as a bargain. Are they wrong? Time will tell.

Well it's the game of "follow what's the competition do, or die".

Just read that Delta Airlines is suspending its stock buyback program, because it's going through cost cutting measures to cope with Covid-19 related business slowdown.

I think everyone does it.

It was a bad strategy for Oracle. They should have stopped lying to the investors and put the money into something real to stabilize the company. Instead they threw the money away. Horrible decision.

Well it's the game of "follow what's the competition do, or die".
If Oracle doesn't do like Apple, Amazon, Nvidia and co, they would be kicked out of the game: algorithmic trading buys what goes up only, which is a fulfilling prophecy... but you need to give it a good kickwith buybacks, especially when you're late in the game like Oracle, and then it takes some more stock buyback to sustain it afterwards.
It's ugly, nobody but shareholders likes that game, but there's no much choice if you want to stay "in the race".

Wall St will tolerate share buyback to a point. It signals to the market that senior executives have run out of growth ideas.

If a share buyback improves EPS for a couple of quarters and the company pays dividends, Wall St turns a blind eye.

As it happens, $4 has been shaved off the share price since the cuts / lack of growth / and terrible Q4 outlook hit the market. This will fuel more cuts, hopefully an executive / leadership clear out too.

FWIW, Wall St. encourages buy backs. And since the recent tax reform was enacted a lot of firms repatriated foreign profits expressly to fund buy backs. Apple spent $80B.

Wall St. analysts want to see meteoric growth with minimal investment. Spend too much on R&D and you will get punished. Wall St. was rewarding Boeing's penny pinching until the 737 MAX fiasco. What did Boeing spend it's record profits on? A replacement for the 737? Nope, they spent it on buybacks.

This is rampant. It's not just O.

It is indeed absurd that you go 17B$ in the negative only to increase EPS. Oracle should have used the 41B$ to work on the real reasons behind their decline. Read https://www.thelayoff.com/t/13Qqwhtc
Now they are continuying down the road of becoming the next Nokia of the IT sector.