Oracle ($ORCL) is at the heart of one of the largest federal anti-discrimination cases. The company is also being sued for some other stuff involving ex-employees and there's also a suit with Google that gets into copyright infringement. But, the lawsuit that will potentially have an enormous impact on the bottom line is the allegation that minorities and women were paid so much less than white men.
A distant fourth option to the cloud offerings hosted by Amazon ($AMZN), Google ($GOOG), and Microsoft ($MSFT), Oracle has a lot of ground to cover if it wants to be thought of as a leader in the cloud space. And being sued left right and center certainly will not help its image.
Oh, also, they have an earnings call coming up today! According to Zacks Investment Research, based on analysts' forecasts, the consensus EPS forecast for the quarter is $0.78.
Here you can see both the number of employees and the stock go up at roughly the same pace. Obviously we don't know where in that data minorities and women were being paid less by the hundred of millions (allegedly).
The job openings bounce around every year, but is down overall since we started tracking the data by 20% and 7% from September. Still, it's always quite a heavy number of people, and only recently did we learn if you wanted to be hired at Oracle there was a good chance you were being underpaid because of your minority status or gender! Allegedly. We have to say that.
See those big spikes? This is Facebook's 'Talking About' count, and the word of mouth during the summer could be from any number of these stories which are all about lawsuits. There are so many to choose from. From May until August and even now, the internet and the courts are chock-full of Oracle lawsuits. Take your pick.
Finally, in September of 2018, Oracle hit 3 million Facebook likes. Since then, that number has dropped 2.3%, which means there are slight ramifications to your actions. Just people clicking 'unfollow' on Facebook after they read the newspaper. That's about it, until the cases are finalized and a verdict is rendered.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
Further Reading:
- Adobe's year-end job listings cut is steeper than ever
- Apple job postings soar to an all-time high
- Has Chewy stock hit a bottom? Data reflects improving engagement