Snowflake reported earnings this week and the results look to be more than double year after year. However, the company’s fourth-quarter earnings rose 117% to $190.5 million, clearly not well enough for investors, who sent blankets to the company’s stock after Bell reported Wednesday. This was similar to the response from sales clerks on Wall Street after the announcement of the positive earnings report. Snowflake’s stock closed about 4% today, it was about 12% off when it’s a recovery compared to its midday low.
Why decline? The response to Wall Street’s earnings may be more prone to what the next agency will do than any recent results. However, Snowflake’s direction for the quarter was strong, with forecasts ranging from $195 million to $200 million in numbers, according to analysts’ expectations. Sounds good, does not it? Apparently consistent with analyst expectations is not good enough for investors in certain firms. You see, it did not exceed the expectations described, so the results must be bad. I am not sure exactly how much the meeting expectations missed, but you are there. It is certainly worth noting that tech stocks are still beating in 2021 and as my colleague Alex Wilhelm reported this morning, the trend only got worse this week. Consider that technology-heavy Nasdaq has fallen 11.4% from its 52-week high, so investors are probably whipping everyone and Snowflake is only caught getting punished.
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman noted in an earnings call this week that Snowflake is in a good position, proving that its company has removed data limitations on on-prem infrastructure. The beauty of the cloud is the unlimited resources and an evolution that works. “The big change in the paradigm is that historically in on-prime data centers, people have to manage power. Now they no longer manage power, but need to manage their costs and that is a new thing – not for everyone, for most people – and in the public cloud. Obviously I’ve become accustomed to the concept of the customer because it applies equally to the infrastructure cloud,” Slootman said in a call to income.
Snowflake has to manage expectations, it pays $5 million or more back on a 12-month basis to a dozen that have translated the customer. This is a beautiful part of any measurement change. It is even clearer that while there is a clear risk towards the cloud, the amount of information that has moved still has a small percentage of the overall enterprise workload, which means there is a lot of growth potential for snowflakes. What’s more, Snowflake officials mentioned that customers have time to make an important ramp-up for customers when transferring data Snowflake Data Lake, before they press the use button. This means that customers will pay more over time until they transfer data to Snowflake’s platform, even if it takes time for new clients to start.
