The video conferencing company was a prime beneficiary of the Covid-19 pandemic as many workers and students stayed at home.
2 min
Zoom Video Communications posted better-than-expected results for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Jan. 31, and stronger-than-expected guidance, driving the stock sharply higher in after-hours trading.
The video conferencing company, a prime beneficiary of the Covid-19 pandemic as many workers and students stayed at home for the last year, reported revenue for the quarter of US$882.5 million, up 369% from a year earlier, with adjusted profits of US$365.4 million, or $1.22 a share. Under generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP, the company earned US$256.1 million, or 87 cents a share.
Zoom shares, which had rallied 9.7% to $409.66 in Monday’s regular session, gained another 9% in late trading to $446.63.
For the full year, Zoom had revenue of $2.65 billion, up 326%, with non-GAAP profits of $995.7 million, or $3.34 a share. The company finished the year with $4.2 billion in cash and short-term investments.
Zoom had projected revenue for the quarter of $806 million to $811 million, with non-GAAP profits of 77 to 79 cents a share. Management has predicted full-year revenue of between $2.575 billion and $2.58 billion, with non-GAAP profits of $2.85 to $2.87 a share.
The consensus call on Wall Street was for January quarter revenue of $811.8 million, with non-GAAP profits of 79 cents a share.
The company said it had 467,000 customers with more than 10 employees, up 33,400 from a year ago. Enterprise customers, those with annual revenue above $100,000, rose 355 to 1,644. Zoom Phone customers increased 269% year-over-year to 10,700.
The company’s financial guidance was higher than Wall Street expected, but still underlines the fact that growth will slow considerably from here as the world begins to get past the pandemic.
For the April quarter, Zoom is projecting revenue of $900 million to $905 million, with non-GAAP profits of 95 to 97 cents a share. The Street had been projecting revenue of $804.8 billion and profits of 72 cents a share.
For the full year ending in January 2022, the company expects revenue of $3.76 billion to $3.78 billion, up 42% from the previous year at the midpoint of the range, with non-GAAP profits of $3.59 to $3.65 a share.
The Street previously had been projecting fiscal year January 2022 revenue of $3.52 billion with non-GAAP profits of $2.96 a share.
“The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to an unprecedented year for Zoom,” CEO and founder Eric Yuan said in a statement. “As we enter [fiscal year] 2022, we believe we are well-positioned for strong growth with our innovative video communications platform, on which our customers can build, run, and grow their businesses; our globally recognized brand; and a team ever focused on delivering happiness to our customers.”
Piper Sandler analyst James Fish noted in a brief research note published Monday after earnings that results came in above expectation on all metrics and that the full-year guidance suggested “the market dynamics remain strong” in cloud-based communications.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
The Australian leather house has opened an immersive four-day pop-up in Manhattan, unveiling its Bloom Collection and redefining what a product launch can look like.
Following the successful launch of its Palais Collection, MAISON de SABRÉ has unveiled a new modular handbag system offering more than 720 styling combinations.
Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.
3 min
Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.
When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.
The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.
But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.
Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.
After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.
“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”
The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.
Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.
In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.
Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.
“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”
Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.
“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.
The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.
The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.
In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.
Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.
