All right. So I think we're ready to go here. So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Jeff Henley, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors, and it's my pleasure to welcome you. In accordance with the notice of the meeting, I call to order the 40th Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Oracle Corporation.
Each stockholder was given an agenda for today's meeting. We will first conduct the formal portion of the stockholders' meeting in accordance with this agenda. Following the adjournment of the formal portion, there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion. Before proceeding to the business of the meeting, I'd like to make introductions. First, let me introduce myself and the other directors who are standing for election.
So as I mentioned, my name is Jeff Henley. I've been a Director since 1995 and Vice Chairman since 2014. Previous to that, I served as Chairman. I was also previously Oracle's Chief Financial Officer from 1991 to 2004. Larry Ellison was appointed Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer Safra Katz has been a Director since 2000 and Safra Katz has been a Director since 2000 and 1 and was appointed CEO of Oracle in 2014.
Prior to that, Ms. Katz served as President and Chief Financial Officer. Mark Herd has been Director since 2010, was appointed CEO of Oracle in 2014. Previously, Mr. Herd served as President of Oracle.
And before joining Oracle, he was the Chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard Company. Boskin is the Tully M. Friedman Professor of Economics and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow at Stanford University. Jeff Berg has been a Director since 1997. He is Chairman of Northside Services, a talent and literary agency.
Mr. Berg was formerly Chairman and CEO of International Creative Management Inc. Hector Garcia Molina has been a Director since 2,001. He is the Leonard Bacek and Sandra Lerner Professor in Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Naomi Seligman has been a Director since 2005.
She is a senior partner at Ostracker Van Simpson, a technology research firm that chairs the CIO Strategy Exchange. George Konradis has been a Director since 2008. He is Chairman of Akamai Technologies and previously served as Akamai's CEO. Bruce Chizen has been a Director since 2,008. He is an independent consultant and serves as Senior Advisor to Permara Advisors and a venture partner at Voyager Capital.
He previously served as CEO of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Secretary Leon Panetta has been a Director since 2015. Secretary Panetta previously served as the U. S. Secretary of Defense and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He is the Co Founder and Chairman of the Panetta Institute For Public Policy. Renee James has been Director since 2015. She is the CEO of a newly formed company focused on data center server processors, and she is an operating executive at the Carlyle Group. She recently concluded a 28 year career with Intel Corporation, where she most recently served as President. Seated next to me is Dorian Daly, Oracle's General Counsel and Secretary.
Also present today are Kevin Asher, Krish Anger and Andrew Cavan from Ernst and Young LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm. Prior to this meeting, we asked if ENY wish to make any statements at today's meeting. ENY indicated that while they will not make a formal presentation, they would be glad to respond to any questions during the question and answer period. Finally, we are assisted today by Chris Hall, a representative of American Stock Transfer and Trust Company LLC, our Inspector of Elections in the tabulation of proxies and ballots. The minutes of last year's annual meeting are available.
And any stockholder wishing to inspect the minutes should contact our corporate secretary. So now let's move to the formal portion of the meeting. Dorian Daly will report on the mailing of the notice of this meeting.
Thank you. This meeting is held pursuant to a notice dated September 28, 2017, on or about September 28, 2017. Each stockholder of record as of the close of business on September 18, 2017, was sent either a notification of Internet availability of proxy materials or the notice itself. All documents concerning notice of the meeting will be filed with the records of the meeting and proof of mailing and the list of stockholders entitled to vote are both available for inspection by any
stockholder. So Dorian will now advise whether a quorum is present at the meeting and canvas the stockholders present. Those stockholders who have returned proxies have authorized the persons identified in the proxies to vote on the proposals coming before the meeting.
On the record date, there were 4,173,000,000,486,289 shares of Oracle's common stock issued, outstanding and entitled to vote at this meeting. A majority of these shares is present in person or by proxy, and therefore, a quorum necessary to transact business is present. If you have a proxy to be voted at this meeting that has not been delivered to the Inspector of Elections, you should register your name with the monitors and show them the proxy. If you have submitted a proxy, but now wish to withdraw the proxy and submit a new proxy or vote in person, you should register with the monitors if you have not already done so. If you have not submitted a proxy and you wish to vote in person, you should now register with the monitors if you have not already done so.
The polls are now open. Please raise your hand if you need to register your name with the monitors or if you require any assistance with your ballot or your proxy. Polls will close.
Sorry, Dorian.
Could someone turn these lights down? Someone's got these lights blasting at us and all you can look at this dude, look straight down.
Further down. Way down.
I know some of them are there are 3 that are okay. There's one right in the middle that's terrible lighting.
The polls will close at the conclusion of the formal portion of the meeting. So please register with the monitors and hand in your ballot or proxy prior to the end of the formal portion of this meeting.
Okay. Thank you. I hereby declare a quorum is present at this meeting. On behalf of Oracle's Board, I would like to express my appreciation to all stockholders who returned their proxies or submitted ballots. There are 8 items of business on the agenda for this year's meeting, 5 management proposals and 3 stockholder proposals.
All voting results announced today are preliminary. Final votes the vote totals for each of the proposals voted upon today will be made publicly available within the next few days. So the first is the election of directors. We will start with this first of the management proposals. The first matter of business is the election of the 12 directors to serve until the next Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
The nominees recommended by the Board of Directors are Lawrence Ellison, Jeff Henley, Safra Katz, Mark Hurd, Michael Boskin, Jeffrey Berg, Hector Garcia Molina, Naomi Seligman, George Conratis, Bruce Chizen, Leon Panetta and Renee James. Additional information about each of the nominees can be found on Pages 7 through 10 of Oracle's proxy statement. Will the secretary now announce the results of the vote?
Each nominee for election to the Board of Directors has received the affirmative vote of a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
So I hereby declare that all the nominees for Director have been duly elected. The next item of business is the non binding advisory vote by stockholders on the compensation paid to Oracle's named executive officers as disclosed in Oracle's proxy statement filed in connection with this meeting. This is commonly referred to as say on pay vote. Will the Secretary please indicate the results of the voting?
Based on preliminary voting results, we believe that this proposal did not receive the affirmative vote of a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
Thank you. The nonbinding advisory vote on Oracle's compensation program for executive officers is hereby noted. The next item of business is the
The frequency.
Advisory versus the frequency. There's 2, I would say. Okay. The next I thought I had the same page again. The next item of business is the non binding advisory vote by stockholders on the frequency of future say unpaid votes.
Stockholders were given the option of selecting a frequency of 1 year, 2 years, 3 years or abstaining. The Board of Directors recommended a frequency of 1 year. Will the secretary please indicate the results of the voting?
A majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting voted for a frequency of 1 year.
Thank you. The nonbinding advisory vote on the frequency of future say on pay votes is hereby noted. The next item of business is the approval of the amendment and restatement of the Oracle Corporation amended and restated 2000 Long Term Equity Incentive Plan. The material terms of the plan are described in our proxy statement. The Board of Directors has recommended that stockholders approve the plan.
Will the secretary now announce the results of the vote?
This proposal will receive the affirmative vote of a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
I hereby declare that the amendment and restatement of the Oracle Corporation amended and restated 2000 long term equity incentive plan has been approved and adopted. The next matter is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst and Young LLP as Oracle's independent registered public accounting firm by the Finance and Audit Committee of the Oracle Board of Directors. The Board of Directors recommends the ratification of the appointment of Ernst and Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2018. Will the secretary now announce the results of the vote?
This proposal received the affirmative vote of a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
So the appointment of Ernst and Young as Oracle's independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2018 has been duly ratified. The next item of business relates to the first of these several stockholder proposals. So it is a proposal submitted by the New York State Common Retirement Fund, a stockholder of Oracle. The proposal, which appears on Page 69 of Oracle's proxy statement, requests that the company provide a public report disclosing certain information regarding political contributions. We understand that Heather Smith will represent the New York State Common Retirement Fund at this meeting.
Is Heather Smith present? Okay. So pursuant to the rules of conduct for the meeting, you will have up to 5 minutes to present the proposal and move for its adoption.
Great. Thank you, Mr. Vice Chairman. Once again, my name is Heather Smith, and I am here today on behalf of the New York State Common Retirement Fund to present the Fund's resolution calling on Oracle to fully report on its political spending and its process and procedures for making political contributions with corporate funds. As long term shareholders of Oracle, the fund supports policies that apply transparency and accountability to corporate political giving.
In its view, such disclosure is fully consistent with public policy in regard to public company disclosures. Company executives exercise wide discretion over the use of corporate resources for political purposes and relying only on the limited data available from the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service can give shareholders an incomplete picture of the company's political spending. The New York State Fund believes that a complete holder of 10,104,257 Oracle holder of 10,104,257 Oracle shares, I submit the resolution on political disclosure found in your proxy materials. Thank you.
Thank you. The Board opposes the adoption of this proposal for the reasons described on Page 70 of Oracle's proxy statement. Will the Secretary now announce the results of the vote?
This stockholder proposal was defeated by a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
Okay. I hereby declare that the stockholder proposal regarding a political contributions report has been defeated. The next item of business is the proposal submitted by PAX World Mutual Funds, a stockholder of Oracle. The proposal, which appears on Page 71 of Oracle's proxy statement, requests that the company provide a report disclosing certain information regarding pay equity. We understand that Heather Smith will also represent PACS World Mutual Funds at this meeting.
So pursuant again to the rules of conduct for the meeting, you will have up to 5 minutes to present the proposal and move for its adoption.
Great.
Thank you again. I am here today to present proposal number 7 on behalf of Paxroll Mutual Funds, a leader in the field of sustainable investing. Taxroll's proposal requests that Oracle issue a report identifying whether a gender pay gap exists among its employees, and if so, outline the steps being taken to reduce the gap. Oracle does not provide any public reporting on gender pay equity. We believe that pay equity is a key issue for technology companies and is particularly relevant at Oracle given recent lawsuits concerning the company's pay practices.
There is a longstanding gender and racial pay gap in the U. S, and a 20 16 Glassdoor study found an unexplained gender pay gap for women in the information technology industry of 5.9%. Mercer reports that women continue to be significantly underrepresented in the technology sector and their representation falls as they move through the pipeline. Oracle's current workforce composition reflects this as women comprise 29% of the company's employees, but just 23% of its leadership. Ensuring equal pay for equal work is one way to help address this gap.
Research has found that active management of pay equity is a crucial driver of gender diversity in organizations, and greater gender diversity has been correlated with improved company financial performance, increased innovation, better problem solving, simulated group performance enhanced company reputation. Conversely, studies also show that pay and equity can impair management collaboration, particularly at technologically intensive companies. By failing to comprehensively address pay equity issues, Oracle may be placing itself at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to talent recruitment, retention and employee productivity. Other technology companies have already published information on their gender pay equity practices and performance, including Apple, Amazon, Cisco Systems, eBay, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP among others. Beyond Oracle's peers, non discrimination in pay practices is a widely accepted principle.
A 2017 survey by Just Capital which PAX World
commends, but it does not
provide specific metrics, which PAX World commends, but it does not provide specific metrics, policies or goals with respect to the gender pay gap. As an S and P 100 company with 138,000 employees worldwide, we believe that Oracle can and should do more. For these reasons, we believe that both Oracle and its stakeholders would be well served by greater transparency around its pay equity policies and practices. Doing so would assure investors that Oracle is proactively managing this issue as part of its overall diversity and inclusion strategy, position the company to achieve greater diversity and reduce regulatory and reputational risks. Thank you for the opportunity to present this proposal.
Okay. Thank you. The Board opposes the adoption of this proposal for the reasons described on Page 72 of Oracle's proxy statement. Will the secretary now announce the results of the vote?
This stockholder proposal was defeated by a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
I hereby declare that the stockholder proposal regarding a pay equity report has been defeated. The next item of business is the proposal submitted by Kenneth Steiner, a stockholder of Oracle. The proposal, which appears on Page 73 of Oracle's proxy statement, requests that the Board make certain amendments to Oracle's proxy access by law. We understand that Jing Zhao will represent Kenneth Steiner at this meeting. Is Jing Zhao present?
Good morning.
Can I
just remind you, pursuant to the rules of conduct for the meeting, you have up to 5 minutes to present the proposal and move for its adoption?
Thank you very much. This proposal is sponsored by Kenneth Stein at Green Lake New York Resort. Shareholders ask the Board of Directors to amend its proxy access by laws primarily found in Section 1.12 of our by laws and any other associate by law sections and other documents to include the foreign change for the purpose of decreasing the average amount of company common stock. The average member of the our nominating group would have to hold for 3 years to satisfy the aggregate ownership requirement to form a nominating group and increasing the potential nominees. One, no limitation shall be placed on the number of stockholders that can aggregate their common shares to achieve the 3% required shares to become an eligible stockholder to nominate proxy access nominees.
2, the number of proxy access nominees eligible to appear in proxy material shall be 1 quarter of the directors than serving over 2, whichever is greater. Even if the 20 largest public pension funds were able to aggregate their shares, they would not meet the 3% criteria for continuous 3 years at most companies examined by the Council of Institutional Investors. Additionally, many of the largest investors of major companies are routinely positive investors who would be unlikely to be part of the proxy access shareholders' aggregation process. Our current limit of 20 shareholders also excludes most retail shareholders from having any rule. Also, shareholders can benefit from more meaningful number of director positions available for proxy access via this proposal.
These features were combined to give shareholders a more meaningful shareholder proxy access structure. Of course, this proposal cannot address all the shortcomings in our corporate governance. However, recent shortcomings should be at least be an added incentive to vote in favor of this one step forward. Globers of corporate governance shortcomings include this information published in 2016, 7 directors over age 70, 6 directors with over 15 years longer, 2 directors with an active vote higher than 40%, George Konark and Naomi Cilleman, plus 4 inside directors. So return to the core topics of this proposal, please vote to increase shareholder participation.
Please vote shareholder proxy access reform. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The Board opposes adoption of this proposal for reasons described on Pages 74 through 75 of Oracle's proxy statement. Will the Secretary now announce the results of the vote?
This stakeholder proposal was defeated by a majority of Oracle's outstanding shares of common stock present and entitled to vote at this meeting.
I hereby declare that the stockholder proposal regarding a proxy access by law amendment has been defeated. So this concludes the formal part of the meeting. I hereby declare that the formal part of the annual meeting is adjourned, and the polls are now closed. So we are now at the part of the meeting providing for general questions
and
holder or a proxy for a stockholder and proceed with your question. Please limit your questions or comments to 2 minutes. We will answer as many questions as possible until we run out of time. Please note that our answers to stockholder questions may include expectations, predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward looking. While these forward looking statements represent our current judgment on the future, where they're subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.
You should review our most recent Form 10 ks and Form 10 Q for a discussion of risks that may affect our future results or the market price of our stock. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of today. Please keep in mind that we're not obligating ourselves to update these forward looking statements in light of new information or future events. So I'll now turn the mic over to our Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Larry Ellison.
Gentleman over here.
Yes. My name is Anthony Fisher. I'm a stockholder. I have a question of Mr. Ellison.
Can you tell us the 3, let's say, 3 significant areas that Oracle is involved in as far as generating revenue. What do you project for each of those 3 significant areas as far as growth going in the future? And the last question is, how are you doing in competition against Amazon?
Okay. So, 3 areas our 3 biggest areas in business are our technology business, where we deliver primarily a database. We deliver that database on premise, where you can run-in a data center that you own or we can deliver that database in the public cloud where we compete with Amazon. We also sell applications. We sell applications on premise.
Though that business is actually getting smaller because our application business where we deliver the applications in the public cloud is growing very, very, very rapidly and really subsuming, taking over our application business. So we started our transition from on premise to cloud application some time ago. And Our technology business on premise is still larger. Our technology business on premise is still larger, but we have aggressively begun the transition to the cloud where we compete with Amazon with a new product called the Autonomous Database. The Autonomous Database, which we demonstrated at Oracle Open World, short while ago, we showed there where that runs approximately in a data warehousing application, approximately 15 times faster than Amazon's similar offering called Redshift.
And if you want to run that Redshift database, not only do you run 15 times slower, you have to pay 10 times more. So we think we are years, years ahead of Amazon in terms of database technology. And our challenge is to move that database franchise from simply an on premise business to a combination of on premise and cloud business. But we think we have a big technology advantage over Amazon in that area. Then we have all the associated the 3rd business are all the associated services.
We're in the hardware business. We're in the consulting business. We're in a variety of other businesses. But our 2 primary businesses are selling applications, selling technology, database technology. We sell them both on premise and in the cloud.
We expect the bulk of our business going forward and the bulk of our growth will be driven by our public cloud business. Type
of percentage increase do you feel in those three areas going forward in the near term that you're hoping for? Well, our applications business
has been growing. Our SaaS applications business has been growing in excess of 50%. It's been growing very, very, very rapidly. Our where our overall application business, the combination of on premise and cloud application business has been growing in double digits. So that business is extremely healthy, taking in the aggregate on premise and in the cloud.
And the cloud business, which is the primary driver, is growing again in excess of 50%. So you're going to see our overall applications growth rate actually increase. Our applications growth rate will increase, while we scale the business, which is very, very unusual. In technology, these are the early days of us moving our technology franchise from on premise and into the cloud. We don't expect that our technology business on premise will decline.
We think that will be flattish, but we think we're going to have very, very rapid growth in technology in the cloud. So, then there are some other businesses that are somewhat they're smaller. Our consulting business is now growing, being driven by demand in the cloud, while our hardware business is declining, because people are spending less money buying hardware and installing in their data center. Instead, they're choosing to move to the cloud and rent the hardware in the cloud rather than purchase it for their own data center. So our hardware business, we expect to continue to decline, albeit more slowly.
Our consulting business is increasing, being driven by the cloud. And I've already commented on our 2 primary technology businesses, applications and database.
My name is Daniel. I'm a stockholder. I have two questions. The first one is the cloud computing business cannibalizing the legacy business?
Well, actually, I have to answer separately for the applications business and the technology business. In the applications business, we built all new applications for the cloud. We completely rewrote our applications ground up for the cloud. And we've been encouraging people to move from what we used to call the e business suite, our on premise suite of applications to something called our Fusion suite, our Cloud suite. And that really is a migration from an older technology to a more modern technology.
It's not simply moving from your data center into the cloud. It's a whole new suite of more modern applications. So there, it is cannibalizing our business and we intended for it to cannibalize our business. And the good news is we get approximately 3 times more from a customer who's using our cloud system than an on premise system. So, there is more revenue associated with the cloud business.
There is more profit associated with the cloud business because we're providing much more benefit to the customer. We're providing, again, the computers and the network and the power and the data center and
the services and all of these other things, not just giving them a
piece of software to run. And all of these other things, not just giving them a piece of software to run. So that cannibalization is actually part of the plan and it's going very, very well. In the technology business, there is no cannibalization because what you do is you continue to buy software licenses and you can then choose to buy those software licenses either in your data center or in the cloud. So we continue to sell the software licenses.
And then we if you choose to run those database licenses in our cloud, that's a new business for us. So we're not trying to cannibalize our technology business because the database that you run on premise is pretty much identical to the database that you run-in the Cloud. So it's a matter of move simply running the things on in your data center that makes sense to run-in your data center, running the things in the public cloud that are more efficiently and economically run-in the public cloud. You balance that out. We continue to sell software licenses and we sell cloud services together.
No cannibalization intended nor is any occurring.
My second question is in The Wall Street Journal, I frequently see ads for CRM, where Oracle is a distant second to Salesforce. And I was wondering what could be done to narrow the gap?
Well, we're in a lot of different businesses. They're in the CRM business. We're in the database business. We are in the ERP business. We are in the HCM business.
We are also we actually ran let me encourage you to look at a different ad, which looks at which prompted the Salesforce ad, where we showed that we sell more cloud applications every year than Salesforce does. So in fact, we're selling about twice as many. If you look at last year, we sold about twice as much revenue for cloud, just applications, forget database, forget the other stuff, just cloud applications, SaaS applications. We sold about twice as much as Salesforce did. And we are the largest provider of applications in the cloud on the planet Earth.
Now Salesforce would like to ask a slightly different question. Well, if you don't count Oracle's ERP and if you don't count Oracle's HCM or all this other stuff or clinical trials, all this other stuff Oracle has, but if you just narrow in on one application, sales automation, look how much better we're doing than they are. And that's the Salesforce ad. So that's part of the answer. We're already bigger than in applications than they are, but not in that specific application.
Having said that, we are aggressively moving and competing with Salesforce. We are their number one competitor in sales automation. We've recently converted a couple of big Salesforce customers where they've thrown out Salesforce and then put in Oracle sales instead. Again, these are the early days, but our intention is to compete aggressively with Salesforce in their strongest market and we're seeing some success. We're their number one probably combination of Oracle and Microsoft are their 2 primary competitors in sales automation to be fair.
Microsoft also has a strong offering there. But our intention, Microsoft is more in the low end of the market. We're more in the high end of sales force automation market. But our intention is to continue to improve our product, to compete aggressively in that space against their strongest product, which is sales automation. And we're seeing some success already and we'll continue to compete this year and next year and the year after.
Jim Trezow, shareholder. Given Oracle's move to the cloud, What my concerns are with cybersecurity attacks being what they are, is this going to be a safe place to do business? What Oracle is going to do to mitigate that and if any government help is required to help industry?
Okay. Well, I mean, I think that's a great question. And I think cybersecurity is going to become a bigger and bigger issue. And the good news for Oracle is we have been sensitive to this issue from day 1. Oracle's first customer, I guess it is no big secret, was the Central Intelligence Agency.
Oracle's second customer was the Defense Intelligence Agency. Oracle's third was the National Security Agency. Even though that agency didn't really exist at the time, it was the name couldn't use the name. So we paid a lot of attention to security and always built our database products and our other products with security being a very important consideration in everything we do. I mentioned earlier, we just announced the autonomous database at Oracle Open World.
And I mentioned that it's 1 tenth the cost of Amazon and runs 15 times faster. Maybe more importantly, maybe more importantly, this database when it detects a vulnerability, automatically fixes itself with no human intervention. So one of the big problems with cyber attacks is one you have to detect the attack, but once the attacks been detected and vulnerability has been detected, you have to patch the systems that are vulnerable. You have to repair them. And one of the great things about the autonomous database is once a vulnerability is detected, the system automatically fixes itself, immediately fixes itself without any human intervention.
No one else has anything like that. Amazon has nothing remotely like that, nor does Microsoft, nor does IBM or anybody else. So we take security very seriously. We think it's a competitive advantage. We think, for example, putting your data in an Oracle Cloud for most customers, maybe not every customer, for most customers, putting your data in an Oracle Cloud is much safer from cyber attacks than putting it in your own data center.
I mean there are a few exceptions where we in the intelligence community where that's not true because they simply keep their data off the public Internet period. That's pretty safe. You keep it in a vault. But in most cases, we do a better job of detecting threats and remediating threats than most government agencies and most commercial entities. So we think as this threat becomes more real, this threat becomes more important.
That's another very good reason for picking Oracle over Amazon or Microsoft or anybody else.
Hi, my name is Bruce Whitson. I'm a stockholder. I'd be interested in knowing your successes or your in the vertical markets and how things are going. So you've mentioned the government as being certainly the origin of Oracle. How is that as a vertical performing today?
And are they are there specific is there any aspects of that, that can use the software as a service? Or are they still on premise primarily? And other verticals, be interested to know what your success rates in those verticals are?
Probably the best person to address the verticals is Mark Hurd and maybe Safra can talk about the government verticals.
Sure. The biggest vertical in IT is financial services. So it's the broadest vertical in the world. Historically, one of our competitors, IBM, has been in fact, I think IBM at one point, probably 30% of their business just in financial services. The last couple of years, we've taken over the leading market share position in many of the big banks, just in this country as an example.
So this year in one of the big four banks, we became their biggest supplier. We're actually really close in 2 of the others to becoming their biggest supplier as well. So great success in Financial Services. Oracle has historically had a very strong position in retail, for example, which is about the 3rd biggest industry. Telecommunications would be the 2nd.
So those 3 industries outside of government, which Safra will talk about, the 3 biggest industries and frankly, our 3 strongest positions for the company.
Regarding the U. S. Government, there's both state and local and there's the federal government. State and local, by the way, has been extremely fast and very interested in adopting the cloud because they can benefit from the massive economies of scale. And as a general matter, they have a very hard time hiring technical capable folks to work in states or localities.
So their move to the cloud and their interest in it is extremely high. In the federal government, there are, of course, many different levels. And many are trying and are moving to the cloud when they can. Some of these organizations have very special requirements. And many of our products are already certified for use, whether they're applications or technology.
Since the United States government, well, and state and local use a lot of Oracle technology. As a general matter, there's been a very open push and interest in moving to the cloud.
I'm a stockholder, and my name is Mrs. Larry. And I don't know all this stuff you're talking about. My telephone came over with a Mayflower. So I don't know all this stuff.
But the thing I look at the most is, of course, the money. So I just want to say, are you making some good things up at Oracle so that you'll give a little oomph to the stock price?
Yes. I don't know much about the money, but they're above. But these guys do, so I'll let them answer.
And I have one other thing. I just want to say something to Mr. Ellison. I don't know if you remember me, but a few years ago, let's say a long years ago, I was bought stock and I was telling you that I was trying to get some money from Oracle to buy a little boat. And I finally got my dividends.
So I bought my little boat. So I want to thank that. That
makes me very happy.
Oh, by
the way, I did exactly the same thing.
I know. But my boat isn't like your boat. I finally got to buy a motor for my boat. So now what I'm looking forward to is the gas for the boat. So I'm just wondering if
We'll talk to him about the gas.
Okay. Let's see what's going to happen so I
can get to Hawaii. Or either
of them can handle the question on the gas.
Well, we have, many stakeholders. And really, the most important stakeholders are our owners, our shareholders, and that includes you. The way that we can be successful for you is to make our customers very successful and excited about our products. We invest over $5,000,000,000 a year in R and D alone, imagine, to make those customers successful. And of course, our employees are the ones that make it all possible.
And I'm sure you've noticed that not only are our revenues increasing and our earnings increasing, but in fact, our stock price has been going up. And well, at any particular moment, we cannot take care of the market. But the part we focus on is making sure our earnings continue to go up. And if we've got happy employees, happy customers, we should have happy shareholders.
Yes. Just very recently, we hit an all time high for our stock price.
Well, as the old saying goes, I can't afford to buy green bananas. So that's why I'm just asking.
Well, we'll get you some bananas, I think. And but the way I would think about it and the way we think about it is we don't focus specifically on the stock price. The stock price is a result. The stock price is a result of us performing, us performing in context of growing our revenue, growing our cash flow, growing earnings per share. The decision we took, which is probably a decade long now, but really we activated 3 years ago was this huge transformation of the cloud.
And frankly, what you see in that stock price is escalation from 2010 to 2013, 2014 of about 60%, 70% improvement in the stock price, $20 to probably mid-30s. At that point, we made a bunch of financial decisions to invest in this transformation that Larry has spent a long time talking about, building data centers around the planet that cost us money, Increasing our R and D almost over $1,000,000,000 per year. We went from like $3,700,000,000 $3,800,000,000 to 5,200,000,000 Why? Because we built all of these new applications, all of the new technologies that Larry was talking about. We've also increased the size of our sales force.
That caused a 3 year period of our stock price and our earnings and our cash flow being relatively flat. In the last year, the last 14, 15 months, that has now changed. We're on a string of 4 quarters or so of roughly double digit earnings per share growth. That is showing up because our revenue is now growing as we've made this transition from the business that was primarily on premise to now a business with our growth being driven out of the cloud. And to Larry's point earlier, he knows the numbers far better than he's describing with his statement.
This is the beginning of that. I mean, some of the numbers that Larry described shouldn't be gone over lightly. Our applications business is growing double digits in a market that's probably growing 2% or 3%. Last quarter, our applications business grew 18%. Our database business, the hallmark of the company, that market is growing 3% or so.
We grew over the last trailing 12 months roughly 5%. So these things are the things you want to focus on, are those performance indicators. I predict for you, if we get those right and continue to do better, you will then get bananas.
I hope I can see a lot of yellow beautiful bananas. Thank you, gentlemen. Hello.
My name is Marcia Wells Lawson. And I am a shareholder. This is the 1st shareholder meeting I've been to here. It's kind of fun. And all I want to do, I don't have any questions, I just want to say thank you for doing such a wonderful job and for always thinking way ahead of everyone else.
And Larry is right about 2 things. One, I can vouch for this as a former employee. It really does make him happy when his shareholders make money. And 2, if you think about it, I've held my shares for 37 years, some of them, some I've sold. And Oracle hasn't lost me a penny because it's at an all time high.
So good job.
Thank you.
Thank you, Marcia. Nice to see you.
Hi. My name is Deepak Kumar. Actually, I'm the long time stockholder. And first of all, I would like to thank you for creating 1,000 of jobs in the whole world. And the whole IT and the business is like dependent on you, your progress and so everybody's eyes on you.
And like she was mentioning about the stock, so I would like to say, I'm holding the stock like last 20 plus year, 5 year, when actually the whole market went down. But I have a faith on you saying that, hey, this stock is definitely is going to be steady. It's not like going like Amazon, like $1,000 and then going down. So like you have steady maintained in the market and everybody is so happy. So thank you so much.
And another thing like I would like to mention like because I was in the open world and I was asking about some like you are talking about Amazon. So I said, how do you feel about that? So people are like very happy, say, hey, Larry is always top in the market and going forward, And he is like going into the cloud, which is basically the whole world is going. So he is like always up in the market. So we always like with Larry.
So thank you so much.
Thank you. And I think we're done. Thank you very much.