UPDATE: Societe Generale Reiterates Hold Rating, Lowers PT on Oracle Corporation on Multiple Challenges Ahead

In a report published Thursday, Societe Generale analyst Richard Nguyen reiterated a Hold rating on Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL), but lowered the price target from $36.50 to $35.00.In the report, Societe Generale noted, “We think Oracle may continue to struggle in H2 13 due to company-specific issues: 1) execution issues that have been already flagged repeatedly over the last three quarters; this impacts negatively its deal close rate despite a healthy pipeline; 2) product momentum: a) the revenue ramp-up of the new 12c database should be relatively gradual (SGe database >50% group revenue) despite recently announced partnerships (Microsoft, salesforce.com,) and added in-memory option; b) the recent partnerships with SaaS vendors (NetSuite, salesforce.com) may further curb the pace of customer adoption of Fusion Apps (FA) as they need to know how these alliances might impact FA; c) hardware products (8% group revenue) are still struggling to return to growth. Impact on SGe estimates: for FY14e, we nudge down our revenue forecasts by 1% to $38.2bn, with a 3% reduction in new licenses/cloud sales to $10.6bn and 5% in hardware product revenue to $2.7bn. As a result, we trim our non-GAAP EPS by 3% to $2.83. For FY15e, we lower our revenue and non-GAAP EPS estimates respectively by 2% and 4%.”Oracle Corporation closed on Wednesday at $33.90.