Team software maker Atlassian beats earnings forecast, but not by enough

Team collaboration is one of the hottest areas for enterprise software, and investors have become accustomed to seeing sales from suppliers exceed their expectations.

Atlassian Corp. Plc managed to do just that for its second fiscal quarter ending in December, but it was not enough yet. After increasing 1.3% in the regular trade today, the share of the team management and project management software manufacturer fell by more than 4% in after-hours trading. Update: Shares fell about 4.6% Friday.

This is despite Atlassian's slightly beating projections on the second quarter results and a new revenue forecast for the third quarter. The company's earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation jumped 44% over last year, to 13 cents a share, from a 43% increase in revenue, to $ 212.6 million.

That exceeded analysts' expectations of a profit of 12 cents on a turnover of 204.5 million dollars. On a net basis, the company lost $ 65.2 million, including $ 47.3 million, excluding impairment charges on its deferred tax assets as a result of the new US corporate tax rate reduction plan.

The only shortfall came in Atlassian's third-quarter earnings forecast, with the company forecasting an 8-cent adjusted profit to analysts' expectations of 11 cents. That's what scared investors.

Atlassian, which provides about a dozen team-related services such as HipChat, Jira, Confluence, and Trello, said its cloud, server, and data center products have all shown good results. He also called his Atlassian Marketplace application store, which he said spent $ 350 million in cumulative sales since opening in 2012.

The company has built its business in recent years with a series of collaborative software acquisitions, the most recent of which was Trello Inc., a $ 425 million task management service provider a year ago.

Last September, she launched Stride, a unified team communications service designed to consolidate text-based discussion forums, voice and video meetings, and collaboration tools such as screen sharing into one place. In June, he also announced Atlassian Stack, a suite that puts all of its core products under one subscription instead of requiring companies to license each tool separately.

Atlassian has released a new forecast for the third quarter of an adjusted loss of 8 cents and a net loss of 8 cents, on revenues of $ 217 million to $ 219 million. Analysts expected a profit of 11 cents on a turnover of 215.2 million dollars.

However, Chief Financial Officer Murray Demo said in the earnings conference call that the estimate incorporates tax rate changes and is more volatile than the full year estimate. For the year, the company calculated adjusted earnings of 47 to 48 cents or a net loss of 47 to 48 cents on revenues between $ 853 million and $ 857 million.

However, Anil Doradla, an analyst with William Blair, quoted by Barron's, said that although the results of the second quarter were impressive, the largest loss adjusted in the third quarter could be the result of higher pay increases and higher payroll taxes. .