Snowflake's stock gains after-hours despite mixed earnings report

Snowflake Inc.’s stock gained in extended trading today as it raised its full-year product revenue outlook following a mixed second-quarter earnings report.

The company reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 64 cents per share on revenue of $272.2 million, up 103% from a year ago, which shows its business is still growing fast. That compared with Wall Street’s forecast of a 64-cent loss on lower revenue of $256 million.

Snowflake Chief Executive Frank Slootman (pictured) said the company saw “continued momentum” during the quarter, highlighting its triple-digit product revenue growth and “strength in customer consumption.”

“While increasing net revenue retention rate to 169%, we also boosted gross margin and operating margin efficiency while our adjusted free cash flow was positive for the third quarter in a row,” he added.

Snowflake sells database software that allows enterprises to run a data warehouse that can sit on any public cloud computing platform. Its offering is an alternative to traditional on-premises data warehouses that unify data and execute queries using on-premises hardware and software. Customers pay for Snowflake’s data warehouse according to how much they use it, as opposed to a flat subscription fee.

Snowflake’s revenue total included product sales of $255.6 million, also up 103% from a year ago and well ahead of the company’s own forecast of $235 million to $240 million.

The company reported remaining performance obligations, a measure of backlog, of $1.5 billion, up 122% from a year ago. Snowflake’s total number of customer jumped from 3,117 one year ago to 4,990 now, with 116 of those spending more than $1 million with the company in the last 12 months.

Snowflake had a fairly busy quarter expanding its product lineup as it possibly looks to edge into new markets such as security. For instance in June it announced new data programmability and governance features as well as an expanded third-party data marketplace.

Then in July, it announced a key new alliance with Securonix Inc., maker of a cloud-native security information and event management system. Omer Singer, head of cybersecurity strategy at Snowflake, said the alliance is part of a thrust by Snowflake to court organizations that are moving their SIEM processing to the cloud.

For the next three month period Snowflake said it’s looking for product revenue of $280 million to $285 million, well above the consensus of $272 million.

For the full year, Snowflake raised its product revenue forecast to a range of $1.06 billion to $1.07 billion, up from an earlier range of $1.02 billion to $1.035 billion. Analysts are still holding to their forecast of $1.018 billion in annual product revenue.

Snowflake’s stock rose more than 4% on the report.

Photo: SiliconANGLE