Qualtrics Posts Revenue, Subscription Rise After Leaving SAP's Bosom

Former SAP biz Qualtrics has beat expectations by posting a substantial revenue and subscriptions rise amongst three bits of upbeat tech-stock news that indicate fair winds for the market, putting smug smiles on the faces of investors.

The survey-Monkey-with-knobs-on company has posted total revenue of $238.6m for calendar Q1, up 36 per cent year-on-year. Subscriptions were up to 20,370 from 13,716.

Qualtrics, which was founded in 2002 with a vision for “experience management”, made an operating loss of $196.5m in the quarter, compared with a loss of £36.9m a year earlier, chalking most of that up to the cash settlement of the stock-based payment liabilities.

In July last year, German software giant SAP decided to float Qualtrics, less than two years after convincing the firm not to list itself.

SAP, which is still a majority shareholder, saw shares in Qualtrics climb 6 per cent on extended trading, following the financial announcement.

Desktop robo-botherer UiPath also benefited from headwinds when its IPO launched yesterday. The Romania-founded software firm, which has been among a gang of companies convincing customer and investors that robotic process automation is a thing, saw its shares rise 23 per cent yesterday, valuing the company at $35.8bn.

The RPA market has intensified in the last couple of years, with new market entrants, and the big applications vendors showing an increasing interest in building automation directly into their platforms.

Lastly, we come to Teradata, the previously earth-bound data warehouse stalwart which has had a wobbly couple of years but seems to have found its place in the cloud.

In December 2019, the company fired former CEO Oliver Ratzesberger, who was only in the job a year, after disappointing results in calendar Q3 2019, when revenue dropped 11 per cent year-on-year to $459m.

Through 2020, the company struggled to increase its topline as on-prem licences for its appliance systems fell away. Of late it has been at pains to re-enforce its credentials as a subscription-based cloud data warehousing and analytics platform, although actual technology updates have been a little thin on the ground.

Yesterday, the value of the San Diego-based outfit increased 29 per cent in after-hours trading following a 2.9 per cent rise in the regular session.

The reason for investor excitement? Preliminary guidance for GAAP earnings per share [PDF] for the first quarter of 2021 was $0.45 to $0.47, up from the earlier guidance of $0.11 to $0.13.

Meanwhile, public cloud annual recurring revenue from the end of fiscal 2020 was approximately $16m to $18m, up from the guidance of $10m to $15m, which equates to an increase of between $1m and $8m. It is possible that that tech industry CEOs have flushed a higher value of cocaine down the toilet, but if that is the reason for a boost in company value by a third, so be it. ®