Oracle’s Winning TikTok Hand: The Information’s Tech Briefing

The drama over TikTok is far from resolved but right now it looks like Oracle may be one of the big winners from the saga. Its stock price rose 4% today on news that the ageing enterprise software giant would be a “trusted technology provider” to TikTok—in a deal the details of which remain murky. But simply being a tech partner is enough to give Oracle something of a new look with investors. As one close observer of the company said today: "People have talked more about Oracle in the last week than in the last six months."

Oracle shareholders will be thinking it’s about time. Oracle shares have been a poor performer, to put it charitably, for several years now. Over the past five years, Oracle stock underperformed the broad stock market as measured by the S&P 500 which, particularly for a tech stock, is saying something. Over the same period, by comparison, Microsoft is up five times the increase in the S&P.