Oracle, DoJ seek June 21 date for antitrust trial
Oracle, DoJ seek June 21 date for antitrust trial
Both Oracle and the U.S. Department of Justice have requested a June 21st starting date for the trial in which Oracle will contest the lawsuit issued by the DoJ to block the enterprise software maker's US$9.4 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft.
Should the presiding judge agree to date, which seems likely, Oracle will extend its US$26 per share offer for PeopleSoft for what would be the ninth time, as the current offer is due to expire on June 25th and should the trial start on June 21st, it would certainly exceed this date, given the timetable submitted by both sides would likely take around a month to get through.
Oracle argued in the wake of the DoJ's decision to block Oracle's move for its enterprise software rival that the Department had been too narrow in its assessment of the market, particularly in discounting Microsoft as a potential competitor. Oracle believes the software maker - which is currently operating in the lower end of the enterprise CRM space – will make a move into the higher end, occupied by Oracle, PeopleSoft and market leader SAP; a claim which Microsoft refutes.
Meanwhile, PeopleSoft has revealed for the first time how much the license fee revenues from recently-acquired J.D. Edwards contributed to its 2003 revenues.
Previously, the figures were lumped together with PeopleSoft's, but the breakdown reveals that PeopleSoft's standalone revenues dropped more sharply than its rivals.
While SAP and Oracle showed declining returns compared with 2002, with SAP down six percent and Oracle down by 11 percent, PeopleSoft's earnings dipped by a significantly more – around 20 percent.
Interestingly though, Oracle's figures for the last six months of the year - after it launched its bid for PeopleSoft in June – showed an increase of 11 percent on the same period in 2002, which seems to suggest that it captured a number of potential PeopleSoft customers who were scared away from investing in PeopleSoft applications owing to the uncertainty surrounding the company's future ownership.
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