Oracle saw its stock price dip 5% the day after it posted its latest quarterly results that came in under expectations. Investors were also turned off by guidance that was very dependent on how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic proceeds.

For the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, Oracle’s revenues dropped 6% compared to the same quarter last year to $10.4 billion. Most of that decrease was on the back of Oracle’s cloud licensing business, which dropped 22% year over year, and offset a slight revenue increase in its larger “cloud services and license support” business.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz pinned some of that drop on customers that were impacted by COVID-19.

“As the quarter progressed, we saw a drop-off in deals, especially in the industries most affected by the pandemic,” Catz told analysts during Oracle’s quarterly conference call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “As countries begin reopening their economies, many of these discussions have already resumed. Since these were not losses to competitors, we believe that most of this business will ultimately be booked. And while some customers have deferred projects, we're also rapidly building new pipeline with customers that are moving their on-premise workloads to the cloud.”

Catz also said that some customers delayed payments to Oracle during the quarter due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though it “worked with those customers and we expect that these payments will be collected in full over the course of this fiscal year.”

Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison used most of his time on the call to tout the company’s customer wins, including a quarter noteworthy deal with Zoom. He also repeatedly noted Oracle’s cost benefits compared to long-time rival Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We have a lot of customers. We've got to get them in. We've got to get them looking. We've got to get them trying our cloud and comparing that to the results of AWS, and we think we're going to get the lion's share of our installed base, our database installed base moving to our cloud,” Ellison said.

Analysts were more cautious on the revenue drop, noting that it was counter to what had been a consistent 2% quarterly increase in revenues over the past seven quarters for Oracle. In fact, Oracle’s most recent Q3 housed its strongest quarterly growth in two years.

“Management’s narrative is that underlying trends are more favorable than reported results, though we believe management has a mixed track record on predicting improving results,” wrote BMO Capital Markets’ Keith Bachman in a research note.

Oracle’s net income for the quarter dipped a more substantial 17% year over year, as deeper cuts in operating expenses were not enough to offset a surge in income tax provisions.

For the full fiscal year, revenues were down 1% to $39.1 billion. Oracle’s cloud services and license support business, which is its biggest revenue driver, was the only unit to post a full-year gain. And similar to its Q4 results, full-year net income was down 9% mostly due to a provision for income tax that wiped out a reduction in operating expenses.

Oracle’s Q3 was somewhat immune to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, though it did end just as governments began to implement shelter-in-place orders around the globe.

Oracle is also one of the few high-tech firms to provide near-term guidance despite the ongoing economic uncertainty. Catz said the company expects revenues to stay relatively flat depending on currency fluctuations for its current quarter. She did note that Oracle was holding off on providing full fiscal-year 2021 guidance due to the pandemic, though she added that “I have a high level of confidence that our revenue will accelerate as we move on past COVID-19.”

Ellison also said that Oracle was set to expand its core Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to 14 new regions.