Q2 Supplemental Financial info: https://ir.crowdstrike.com/static-files/6532bc31-92e3-4a7b-b…
PR: https://ir.crowdstrike.com/news-releases/news-release-detail…
Prezzo: https://ir.crowdstrike.com/static-files/547e5c92-3594-4eef-9…
KEY NUMBERS
Revenue was up to $337.7m, up 12% qoq, which was exactly the same qoq growth as last year and the year before. It was also up 70% yoy, the same as last Q. So steady, but not going faster, which is what many of us were hoping for.
Customers
2021 6261 7230 8416 9896
2022 11420 13080
QoQ
2021 15% 15% 16% 18%
2022 15% 15%
YoY
2021 105% 91% 85% 82%
2022 82% 81%
So customer growth was great - steady as a rock and more than revenue growth. The same qoq growth rate as a year ago and a quarter ago.
RPO was up to $1,677m - up 14% qoq vs 13% in the same Q last year, and 8% last Q. So RPO accelerated. But why? The CFO didn’t want to answer this question in the Q&A, but I think that this is simply due to contract extention. Because ARR did not accelerate and customer adds were driven by the SMB market, the likely reason for RPO increasing is simply longer contracts, so not a harbinger of bigger things to come imo. In the 10-Q they usually give the current portion of RPO, so we could validate this, but this is not yet available. So to validate, I looked at deferred revenue.
Current deferred revenue was $883m - up 12% qoq and 71% yoy, so almost exactly in line with revenue growth, however
2021 466 515 580 702
2022 787 **883**
Non-current deferred revenue was $281m - up 20% qoq and 61% yoy vs 12% qoq in Q1 and 3% qoq last year Q2. So a clear acceleration of non-current deferred revenue:
2021 170 175 183 210
2022 235 **281**
Because non-current deferred revenue accelerated vs current, it likely means we’ll see the same with RPO - i.e. the increase in RPO was likely driven primarily by contract extention and not new customer acquisition (not so great).
Margins were steady - Gross margin at 78%, same as a year ago and down 1%pt vs Q1; operating margin at 10%, same as Q1 and up from 4% a year ago.
NRR above 120%
ARR
2021 686 791 907 1050
2022 1194 1344
QoQ:
2021 14% 15% 15% 16%
2022 14% **13%**
YoY:
2021 88% 87% 81% 75%
2022 74% **70%**
So ARR disappointed a bit, and tbh going into earnings that was the one thing that nagged at me from their prior quarter’s comments about what to expect.
Last Q they said:
”While we do not specifically guide to ending or net new ARR, we expect seasonality in net new ARR to be less pronounced relative to prior years as we move from Q1 into Q2, given the outstanding outperformance in Q1. Additionally, recall that in Q2 of last year, net new ARR included the second largest deal in the Company’s history, which contributed low 8 figures to ARR.”
So last quarter they cautioned not to expect blow-out ARR in Q2, and they were true to that - it was not a blow-out.
And this quarter they are doing the same, again indicating some caution on ARR in the prepared remarks:
“While we do not specifically guide to ending or net new ARR, we expect seasonality in net new ARR to be less pronounced relative to prior years as we move from Q2 into Q3, given our steady climb at a much higher scale in recent quarters. Additionally, please recall that our net new ARR in Q3 of last year included approximately $6.8 million in acquired net new ARR.”
What I dislike slightly about this is that in both quarters they implicitly point to something a year ago in the coming comparative quarter which we need to “exclude” in order to make the comparison. So in Q2 it was that they signed a very big deal in Q2 last year. It feels like they are already setting us up for a bit of disappointment in Q3 by saying that we must remember that in Q3 last year they had $8m ARR which was acquired (i.e. won’t be repeated this Q and boosted last year), and there will be less “seasonality”. Only thing is, there wasn’t that much seasonality last year from Q2 to Q3 - both Q’s had qoq ARR increases of 15%. Nor was there much seasonality From Q1 to Q2 in prior years for that matter - qoq ARR increases went from 14% to 15% in 2021 and from 17% to 16% (the other way) in 2020.
So the transparency is good, but it also sounds just a little bit like they are making an excuse in advance of Q3 for slightly disappointing ARR, same as they did in Q2.
Q&A
The first two analyst questions were around market share and large customer wins.
George Kurtz answered that large wins continue, but then he pointed to strength in SMB rather than giving more colour on large customer wins.
The third and fourth questions were around growth drivers for the next 18 months and asking specifically about international and XDR.
Kurtz did not answer the international question but pointed to broad strength in all areas, specifically around Zero trust identity and displacing legacy vendors; legacy vendors have 100,000 customers and they are still at 13k.
About XDR and Humio he sounded really excited and about the integration of Humio into the platform, as it currently was still standalone judging by his answer. So one to watch.
Question about traction in Government and Falcon Complete for GovCloud was answered by Kurtz basically saying that it’s a focus area, they are doing well, it’s still early innings and that certification is progressing. But that it’s a segment that takes a lot of time and effort and Govt doesn’t move that fast. So I take it that there is lot of effort and they are well positioned but not a huge acceleration from that yet.
There was a question about SentinelOne vs Cloudflare - specifically that S1 is competing on price. Kurz said that theye routinely win at a higher price point. Low cost options “you get what you pay for”. Pricing pressure? Always, but they are winning at higher price points and they sell value.
Burt Podbere answered a question around their new customers in the SMB space and dynamics around that by saying that their acceleration in new logo’s came from that space - i.e. from SMB wins.
“So we saw acceleration in new logos and a lot of that is coming from down market.”
and
“We’ve done really well overall and we continue to win our unfair share in that segment.”
So basically the new customer adds were fuelled by SMB adds, which can come on board quickly and not so much from large enterprise wins.
He also spoke to deal sizes saying that deal sizes have increased in all segments because they are landing with more modules, and customers are increasingly buying the integrated platform (vs individual modules). This is great for stickiness.
A question about why international was growing slower at 64% yoy & 28% of total revenue vs US was answered by Kurtz & Podbere basically saying the partner market is not yet as mature and they have scope to take more market share and will invest in that. I personally think that this is a nice opportunity and partnerships like the one with Telefonica certainly seems to fit the narrative of maturing the partner network.
Talking to Falcon Complete adoption Kurtz mentioned that it was built for SMB’s but that what surprised them was that it was being adopted by the full spectrum of customers - from SMB to large enterprise. This is fantastic imo as it is a full-service suite of protection, so must be extremely sticky. It grew 2.5x.
There was a specific question about multi-year deals - “how is the percent of multiyear deals improving as shown by the strong RPO metrics?” which the CFO did not answer at all.
What I found encouraging was Kurtz’s answer to a question about where in the cycle antivirus replacement was - he saw it as still very early on and again compared CRWD’s 13k customers with the multiples more that McAfee and Symantec has - and then he added that the SMB/mid-market adds many many more. So this bodes well for the bread-and butter replacement of legacy AV products.
SO?
The ER left me slightly disappointed, which I guess is a bit crazy given the unbelievable numbers they reported. But I was looking for something like what we saw with ZoomInfo, Datadog, Upstart, and last quarter Docusign and actually all of my other holdings: acceleration. They seem to have a groundswell of macro forces behind them, they are still small relative to the incumbents by their own reckoning and they are so well positioned to capitalise on the opportunity. But they don’t seem to be gaining momentum. They are maintaining momentum at a very high level. Which is still great, but less than what I was expecting.
So today I trimmed quite a bit. It is still one of my top positions, but not the #1 anymore.
Hope that’s helpful.
-WSM.