Chief executive Larry Ellison denied on Wednesday that Oracle planned to lay off any of its 42,000 employees or that competitors were eroding the company's market share.
Oracle's profit margins were being maintained at a spectacular 35 per cent, he said in a speech at the opening of OracleWorld Beijing. He contested a recent Gartner Dataquest report indicating that IBM had overtaken Oracle in overall database market share.
Mr Ellison attacked Gartner for not revealing its methodology and referred to a Goldman Sachs study showing that 60 per cent of new databases were being built on Oracle and 3 per cent on IBM's DB2.
When a reporter asked about rivals eating into his company's market share, Mr Ellison replied: 'If IBM is eating, they're on a diet. In fact, they're on a low-cal diet, they're on a starvation diet. IBM has to explain how the number three is larger than the number 60.'
On the subject of layoffs, Mr Ellison said Oracle recently cut 200 staff, while 'IBM is laying off thousands and thousands of people'. Using a stage manner that some people have called bombastic, Mr Ellison added: 'You know why? Because they're gaining market share.'
The opening day of the week-long conference had a heavy emphasis on Oracle's plans for the China market. The company said it planned to release its software in Chinese on the Web for developers to work with. Up to now, the 65,000 Chinese developers registered with the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) site have had access to software written in English only. Oracle said it aimed to quadruple the number of Chinese OTN members in six months.