An Interview With Mark Hurd

"How Shifting Demographics
Drives Technology Solutions"

Mark R. Anderson: Let's do a little bit of a walk on the tech side first, and then we'll go somewhere else. Your people have come out with demographics, and how demographics affects your business. I'm really interested in that, because we use demographics in understanding what's going to happen to countries, and companies. What do you see in demographics that moves your needle, in terms of how Oracle should change, or what technologies ought to be adopted next?

Mark Hurd: I always look at economies overall, so really I'm not a demographer; I only care about demography in the context of how it affects GDP and, eventually, IT spending; they are usually pretty closely aligned.

Demographics have changed, obviously. They don't change all that often, because it's hard to invent 15-year-olds, and hard to invent 18-year-olds, but certainly demography in the US is pretty good. There are as many people entering the workforce in the West as departing, so the US demography and economy both look good.

Europe is really tough; you see this across Europe in terms of their GDP. The only way I know how to grow economies is to have more people, to make them more productive, and to have capital to invest.

MRA: You have a million refugees; that might change things.

MH: I'm not here to tell you how you get them, but more people times their productivity, times capital invested, equals growth of an economy. So Europe looks tough. They have a shortage of people, productivity is rising, but against a lower population base, and capital has been constrained. And so you see those demographics in Europe.

Now, I don't necessarily always follow that model in terms of how Oracle should invest. There are some geographies that many times, the traditional thought in our business is that when economies decline, that you should withdraw from those economies, and so sometimes there's a lot of market share to be gained by keeping a presence when other people exit.