... There is still ``a lot of opportunity'' in the industry for business-management software, where Oracle competes with larger competitor SAP of Germany, Henley ...
By Jack Davis
Mercury News
So far this year, Jeff Henley, former Oracle chief financial officer and current chairman of its board, has been selling the company's shares like it's 1999. That would be the last full year in which he sold shares worth more than the ones he sold during the first four months of 2006.
From March 2 through April 19 Henley exercised his right to buy nearly 5 million Oracle shares at prices ranging from $3.69 to $4.61 each, for a total of $19.7 million. He immediately sold the shares on the open market for $68.1 million, at prices ranging from $12.74 to $14.02, for a profit of more than $48 million.
The shares were sold pursuant to two different stock trading plans Henley has set up under Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b5-1, intended to help inoculate company insiders from charges of trading on the basis of non-public information by setting out a strategy for automatically selling shares according to pre-arranged formulas.
Under a plan he set up at the end of July, Henley said he would sell up to 2.6 million shares over six months. Under that plan he sold 200,000 Jan. 6 and 300,000 on March 2.
On Jan. 31, he set up another plan under which he may sell up to 5 million shares over a period of about a year. These shares were to be acquired through the exercise of employee stock options, which are scheduled to expire at various times over the life of the current plan. The plan includes a series of unspecified ``laddered'' price triggers for the sale of the shares.
That same day he reported owning 34,516 shares of Oracle and holding options to purchase 13.3 million shares under 10 different grants.
About a half-million of the options he held at the end of January were set to expire this year. An additional 4.5 million options were set to expire in 2007.
Under the newest plan, Henley has already exercised and sold blocks of 2 million Oracle shares in both March and April.
Oracle, the Redwood City software maker that spent $18 billion on acquisitions last year, is considering more purchases of smaller technology companies to expand its business-software and database divisions.
Earlier this month Henley told Bloomberg News, ``It's fair to say we'll make some additional acquisitions.'' Targeted companies are likely to be smaller than $1 billion in sales and will be in ``industry-specific areas,'' he said.
There is still ``a lot of opportunity'' in the industry for business-management software, where Oracle competes with larger competitor SAP of Germany, Henley said. SAP, identified in the past by Oracle as the company's ``Enemy No. 1,'' has been a ``good competitor for a long time,'' Henley told Bloomberg.
SAP shares have produced a return of more than 115 percent for shareholders over the past three years, compared with Oracle's 15 percent return for the same period. Oracle touched a 52-week high of $15.21 Thursday and closed the week at $14.59, up 20 percent so far this year.
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