CRWD Q4 forecast

skudrun -

Good writeup. I agree 100% with the trends you point out.

I am personally putting a minimum expectation on CRWD of a $387M in revenue 6% beat

Unfortunately, I’m not as optimistic about your 6% beat though I’d love to see it. Below is CRWD’s entire guide and beat history (1Q20 is so low because it was a preliminary estimate given just before IPO with much more insight behind it):

Est: top end guide
Act: actual result
+/-: raw $ beat
Beat: % beat
Seq: sequential revenue add
QoQ: QoQ growth


	Est	Act	+/-	Beat	Seq	QoQ
4Q19		$80.46			$14.08	21.2%
1Q20	$95.70	$96.08	$0.38	0.4%	$15.62	19.4%
2Q20	$104.00	$108.11	$4.11	4.0%	$12.03	12.5%
3Q20	$119.50	$125.12	$5.62	4.7%	$17.01	15.7%
4Q20	$138.60	$152.11	$13.51	9.7%	$26.99	21.6%
1Q21	$167.60	$178.08	$10.48	6.3%	$25.97	17.1%
2Q21	$190.30	$198.97	$8.67	4.6%	$20.89	11.7%
3Q21	$215.00	$232.46	$17.46	8.1%	$33.49	16.8%
4Q21	$250.50	$264.93	$14.43	5.8%	$32.47	14.0%
1Q22	$292.10	$302.84	$10.74	3.7%	$37.91	14.3%
2Q22	$324.40	$337.69	$13.29	4.1%	$34.85	11.5%
3Q22	$365.30	$380.00	$14.70	4.0%	$42.31	12.5%

As you can see, I’m anticipating $380 and a 4% beat of the top end $365.3M guide. That would also mean more than $42M in sequential dollars added, which would be CRWD’s best ever by a considerable amount. That’s one of the difficulties in maintaining growth at this scale.

In my opinion, a 6% beat wouldn’t qualify as an expectation but rather an upside surprise. Management’s guiding history just doesn’t support it. I would guess the market feels similarly. I also think we’d see a decent rise with a 6% beat since it would likely lead to a higher than expected guide as well (I’m looking for something around $410M).

I hope you’re right.

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