CrowdStrike released fiscal third-quarter 2020 results Thursday, and it beat on both the top and bottom lines. The stock fluctuated in after-hours trading on Thursday. It was up as much as 3.5% late in the afternoon.
Here’s how the company did versus expectations:
- Loss per share: 7 cents vs. 11 cents expected, per Refinitiv estimates
- Revenue: $125.1 million vs. $118.8 million, per Refinitiv
CrowdStrike raised its guidance for fiscal 2020 and now expects to report revenue between $465.2 million and $468 million. The company also projects a loss per share between 9 cents and 8 cents for the full year.
Burt Podbere, CrowdStrike’s CFO, cited the company’s “strong performance and growing momentum in the market” as catalysts behind the upbeat outlook. Podbere added that he expects the company to be free cash flow positive in fiscal 2021 and to break even in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021.
CrowdStrike, which went public in June, provides cloud-based cybersecurity software and consulting services to companies.
While it had a strong start on the public markets, CrowdStrike’s stock has been under pressure recently, with shares down about 39% over the past three months. The decline is in line with a broader pullback among software stocks, as trade tensions have cooled and investors appear to be shifting their attention to other sectors.
The earnings report comes just a few days before CrowdStrike’s IPO lockup agreement is set to expire on Dec. 9. JMP Securities analyst Eric Suppiger said he expects some volatility to occur as a result of the lockup but that ultimately the “stock will trend higher,” according to a note to clients issued on Tuesday.
Crowdstrike has been in the news lately for another very strange reason: In an attempt to deflect from President Donald Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian government, which are at the heart of the House’s impeachment investigation, Trump and others have alluded to an unproven conspiracy theory saying that some of Hillary Clinton’s stolen campaign emails were stored on computers hosted in Ukraine. At times, Trump and others have incorrectly suggested that Crowdstrike, which provided security consulting services to the Democratic National Committee after its email servers were hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, is based in Ukraine or owned by Ukrainians. In fact, the company is American and was founded by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, neither of whom is Ukrainian.