Cloudera Shares Plummet as Company Gives Weak Guidance

Enterprise data cloud firm Cloudera saw its shares drop this week after the company reported first quarter results and a weak outlook going forward.

The company beat on its fiscal Q1 forecasts, but issued lower-than-expected guidance for the current quarter and full fiscal year.

For the first quarter ending April 30th, Cloudera posted $210.5 million in revenue. This represented a growth of 12% and higher than an analyst consensus of $204.9 million. Its non-GAAP earnings were 5 cents per share. This too was higher than a consensus of 0 cents.

“We executed extremely well in Q1, particularly as the pandemic was in full effect for more than half of our fiscal quarter,” said Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden.

“We believe that remote working environments have placed heightened importance on data, data analysis and data security, which has increased the value of data architecture design and the criticality of hybrid cloud solutions. In addition, CDP Public Cloud is accomplishing exactly what we had hoped in that it has enabled a hybrid multi-cloud architecture for our customers and enhanced our value proposition with customers who plan to take advantage of public cloud infrastructure for certain types of workloads,” he added.

For the first quarter, Cloudera’s subscription revenue was $187.1 million, representing an increase of 21% year over year, while annualized recurring revenue grew 11%.

Looking ahead, the company forecasts for the full fiscal year ending January 2021, revenue between $825 million and $845 million. This was lower than its original full-year forecast of between $860 million to $880 million. Analysts polled by FactSet were modeling sales of $862.3 million on average.

Shares were falling nearly 13% in after-hours trading on Thursday.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Cloudera Inc. (NYSE: CLDR) and have not been compensated for this article.