SNOW's valuation

‘All else being equal’, SNOW deserves a higher valuation than other SaaS / SaaS like companies.

Below is a table I assembled from quickly looking through SNOW’s featured customer stories on their website and customers listed in their S1, as well as a few customers from some recent news articles I recalled from the past year.

I only listed the publicly known customers that were at least above $1 billion in revenue in the last year (the “large sized” enterprises; companies below $1 billion in annual sales are considered small/mid sized)

This list isn’t intended to bring any new facts to light about SNOW, but I think the table is a great visualization of how SNOW could potentially ramp up large spend in the next several years. It hammers home the opportunity that lies ahead.
Just look at how enormous some of these enterprises are, with above $10B, $20B…$50B…$100B…$200B in yearly sales, and then think about how massive their IT budgets will eventually be geared towards the cloud, and now think about the giant companies NOT listed here that ARE existing SNOW customers, and then think about the other great companies that will eventually sign onto SNOW in the future…

Company that uses Snowflake Revenue above $1B (USD) in 2021
McKesson 264
AT&T 168.9
Uniper 164
Allianz 148.5
Kroger 137.9
Elevance Health 137
Walgreens Boots Alliance 132.5
JPMorgan Chase 121.65
Comcast 116
Axa 100
SK Group 84.7
Pfizer 81.3
Sony 80
Pepsico 79.5
Siemens 74.4
Citigroup 71.9
Albertson’s 69.7
Disney 67.4
HP 63
AbbVie 57.35
Novartis 51.6
Caterpillar 51
Cisco 49.8
Sainsbury’s 41
Coca Cola 41
CapitalOne 30.4
US Foods 29
Micron 27.7
Kraft Heinz 26
Flex 26
Fidelity Investments 24
Michelin 23.8
Paccar 23.5
Blackstone 22.6
Aflac 22.1
Komatsu 20.6
Blackrock 19.2
Genuine Parts Company 18.87
St James Place 18
Square 17.66
ADP 16.5
Fiserv 16.2
Emirates Group 16.1
Canadian Tire 16
Adobe 15.8
Vattenfall 15.8
Rakuten 15.3
Cemex 14.6
IQVIA 13.87
Pacific Life 13.7
Pizza Hut 13
Devon Energy 12.2
State Street 12
Booking .com 10.95
Elsevier 9.9
Office Depot 8.465
S&P Global 8.3
Spectrum Health 8.29
Ally Financial 8.2
Chipotle 7.55
Intercontinental Exchange 7.2
EA 6.99
Yum! Brands 6.58
Experian 6.267
Petco 5.8
Under Armour 5.7
Athenahealth 5.7
JetBlue 5.61
Logitech 5.48
CUNA Mutual Group 5.4
Lear 5.4
Warner Music 5.3
Prisma health 5.3
AMN Healthcare 5.22
Western Union 5.1
RR Donnelly 4.96
Petrol Group 4.96
Equifax 4.92
DoorDash 4.8
Autodesk 4.39
Domino’s 4.35
Urban Outfitters 4.3
Penguin Random House 4
Pitney Bowes 3.67
Lionsgate 3.6
Akamai 3.5
2K Games 3.5
Valmet 3.5
CBOE 3.5
Nielsen 3.5
Scripps Health 3.4
Flexport 3.3
Pennymac 3.2
Asics 3
EQT 3
Twilio 2.84
Overstock 2.7
Pinterest 2.58
Deliveroo 2.5
Yamaha 2.5
Portland General Electric 2.33
1-800-Flowers.com 2.21
Dropbox 2.16
DocuSign 2.1
Sonos 1.72
FactSet 1.59
Instacart 1.5
TripAdvisor 1.45
Okta 1.3
HubSpot 1.3
The Trade Desk 1.2
Netgear 1.17

Now to pull from recent earnings calls/conferences, there is nothing new that hadn’t been pointed out on this board in the past, but I’m highlighting it all again as it really reinforces how incredible SNOW is growing at this scale and will continue to do so in the long run - because of these big spenders.

Q2 2023: Advertising, media and entertainment, and technology verticals grew in line with the overall company. Driving this growth is our continual move upmarket. In the quarter, we added 12 new Global 2000 customers. Our average trailing 12-month product revenue from these customers grew 14% quarter over quarter to $1.2 million.

I would go back and read that again. These are the large companies, the 510 customers in the Global 2000 last quarter that used SNOW, and the product revenue from these customers grew 14% QUARTER over QUARTER.

Q2 2023: …We believe these accounts will grow to become our largest customers. A Global 2000 technology company is now a top 10 product revenue customer less than two years after signing their initial deal.

That’s crazy. Some of these big traditional companies that are new SNOW customers can ramp up insanely quickly.
Not only that, but think also about the older customers, such as Capital One, where in a recent conference it was said that they initially thought the company was saturated 2 years ago, BUT instead they had gone from 29M to 49M annual spending run rate since then - and still growing as of today!

Q3 2022: …The other thing that I would say is that, you know, we shouldn’t sort of view things in the historical way that, you know, the money is [only] going to come from Fortune 500 companies. This is absolutely not the case. I mean, you’ll be stumped if you look at the number of customers that we – who are not Fortune 500 and how high their revenue contribution is.
And that’s because these are newer enterprises, they are born in the cloud, and digital, direct-to-consumer-oriented, and they have a very different culture toward data and a very different orientation. They will definitely feature very, very prominently in our business mix. It doesn’t mean that Fortune 500 isn’t important, you know, it obviously is. But, you know, their adoption as traditional enterprises is often not as fast as the newer entities that we’re dealing with, you know?

Q3 2022: The 10 largest consumers in Q3 include four Fortune 500 companies, four companies less than 10 years old, and the Powered By Snowflake program partner.

Let that sink in…
…the top 10 largest customers had FOUR of them being companies LESS THAN 10 years old. These are the newer, fast growing software/data driven companies out there, that may not have yet reached $1B in annualized sales…
Think about the Brazes and Amplitudes, Canvas and Figmas of the world that use Snowflake (yes, all four of these I just mentioned, are actually powered by SNOW). These are the companies that I could not even list onto the table above because their company sales had not exceeded $1B in 2021, and yet, many of these types of companies are already contributing huge chunks of revenue to SNOW!

I think what sets SNOW apart from the other companies discussed on the board is its very large customers, and very large and ever growing addressable (serviceable) TAM. There should be a premium towards these companies where a single customer can contribute immense amounts of spend.

@PaulWBryant 's had sort of said this recently about MNDY’s TAM, with valid skepticism of Monday’s hypergrowth in the long run.

Let’s say for example, Capital One magically became MNDY’s customer overnight and rolled out its product to every employee.
Does anyone think Capital One can ever spend $49 million dollars on Monday.com’s collaborative software? And grow that spend each year?

Let’s do the math: they have 51985 employees, and suppose they pay $32 per person (Monday’s website pricing for the highest “Pro” is $16/seat/month, and to be generous I am assuming $32 per person per month for an “enterprise”). This becomes $19.96M in annual spend. So the answer is NO.

Again, this is assuming a lot of unrealism here: that they can price double that of their highest Pro tier, that every single employee of Capital One will be on Monday’s software. And keep in mind, that this is the MAXIMUM spend they could ever reach (Capital One probably isn’t going to increase headcount 14% QoQ).
Meanwhile SNOW is still growing the spend of Capital One over time, above and beyond $49M.

Obviously that 19M figure is not going to be close to attainable for Monday.
This all speaks to the value of the underlying product. If SNOW can drive a customer to spend 49M and continue to grow that spend each year, then clearly SNOW is more critical and beneficial to the enterprise than Monday’s software product. There are also many more use cases to be found over time with Snowflake, than a collaborative software tool.

If we look to other companies like CRWD. I think once again, SNOW deserves a premium over them too.
SNOW doing product revenue of 466M (1Q ago) on 6808 total customers at 83% YoY growth, speaks greater volumes than CRWD (2Q ago) having 460M subscription revenue on 17945 customers at 64% YoY.

Let us suppose both companies suddenly cannot grow their customer counts anymore in their respective moments in time; SNOW will be superior in its terminal end valuation, as each customer spend will ramp much, much, much higher than CRWD ever will (CRWD doesn’t give out 1M customer figures for a reason); this also including my belief that SNOW will have similar or better operating margins in the long run.

The way I see it, SNOW’s products help customers save money and make more money. CRWD’s primary products only help customers possibly not lose money to attacks.
The greater value proposition for SNOW means a greater chance of hypergrowth for a longer run.

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Well written, Jon, and I agree.

I like to track the average revenue per customer for all the SaaS companies in my portfolio and Snowflake is a standout in this regard. I think this highlights what you wrote above - Snowflake’s customers are much larger than any other company that we discuss and it is not even close. Here is the data below, I think it captures this point well. I pulled the earliest quarter I have for each company compared to their most recent figure.

Crowdstrike - 18 quarters; decrease of 14%

  • Q1 2019 - $31,716
  • Q2 2023 - $27,184

Datadog - 15 quarters; increase of 139%

  • Q4 2018 - $8,026
  • Q2 2022 - $19,156

Cloudflare - 14 quarters; increase of 84%

  • Q1 2019 - $839
  • Q2 2022 - $1,545

SentinelOne - 9 quarters; increase of 73%

  • Q2 2021 - $6,891
  • Q2 2023 - $11,919

Snowflake - 12 quarters; increase of 91%

  • Q3 2020 - $35,787
  • Q2 2023 - $68,488

Pretty remarkable. The revenue contribution per customer for the other four companies is not even in same stratosphere. The closest one, Crowdstrike, has actually seen the revenue contribution per customer drop as they’ve moved down market!

Additionally, as evidenced by their NRR, Snowflake is expanding their revenue per customer faster than the others aside from Datadog despite beginning with a much larger base. In actuality, they are increasing spend per customer at about the same rate as Datadog but my data is three quarters behind.

To me, this means Snowflake’s ceiling is way higher than any other company listed as there is no telling where this number could end up. These large customers, coupled with their absurd NRR should allow them to maintain hypergrowth far longer than any other business I am aware of.

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Thanks Jon, that was an excellent post. I’ll add some thoughts of my own about the things that struck me the most about Snowflake’s quarter:

NRR is staying at nosebleed levels at 171%, although two quarters ago they told us it couldn’t stay in the 170’s.

Revenue growth accelerated to up 18% sequentially. That’s a lot, and it was up from sequential growth of 10% in the Apr quarter, and from 15% in the Jan quarter (two quarters back). So here we are in a “recession” and they accelerated to grow at 18% from one quarter to the next. By the way, 18% quarter over quarter multiplies out to 94% growth for a year.

Dollars added sequentially this quarter were $75 million, up from just $38 million added in the Apr quarter. YoY rev growth is only gradually descending from 85% to 83% sequentially, and part of that descent was from their increased computing speed without increasing price.

Million dollar-customers exploded to 246, up by 40 or up 19.4% sequentially, from 206. The 246 million-dollar customers is up 112% from just 116 a year ago (more than doubling).

Adj FCF was “only” $59 million with a 12% margin, but they are guiding to 17% for the year, so we can assume that they are underguiding and will finish with over 17% FCF for the year. They are churning out money, even while growing like this.

Best, and thanks again.

Saul

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SNOW’s products help customers save money and make more money. CRWD’s primary products only help customers possibly not lose money to attacks.

@jonwayne235
Thanks for your take on SNOW’s valuations. However, I think the comparison of SNOW to CRWD ignores a) the difference in pricing models and b) the documented benefits of XDR and AI in saving substantial costs should a data breach occur.

  • Crowdstrike (CRWD), according to it’s Press Release, uses subscription-based pricing (total revenue for the first 6 months of 2022: subscriptions $966,021 plus a tiny sum of $56,966 for professional services) whereas SNOW’s pricing model is usage-based, see my answer to @MajorFool20.

  • And yes, cybersecurity companies, including CRWD, DO help customers save money, especially if they have incorporated AI into their hunt for threats–as does CRWD. The average cost per data breach varies by industry, so do the savings. The number, frequency, and cost of data breaches also vary by country with the US being on top. Here are average global numbers of data breach cost and savings according to the Ponemon institute:

    • average cost of a single data breach - USD 4.35 million.
    • average cost savings per data breach - USD 3.05 million with fully deployed security AI and automation.
  • Cyber threats and data breaches over the last couple of years have increased dramatically and are projected to do so in future, so all our cybersecurity companies including CRWD should benefit from this trend. I am not sure who will profit most. Based on currently available data on threat visibility, detection, and response for several of the best cybersecurity companies, I’d estimate that SentinelOne will profit the most and I have allocated my money accordingly. But I might be wrong.

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The revenue contribution per customer for the other four companies is not even in same stratosphere.

as evidenced by their NRR, Snowflake is expanding their revenue per customer faster than the others aside from Datadog

@MajorFool20, @Saul
Thanks for your comparisons of several SaaS companies. Comparing these companies has a few problems:

  • First, the companies you list fall into two distinct business pricing models: 1) Usage-Based Pricing (UBP) or consumption-based pricing, associated with a higher NRR and usually with higher but often fluctuating earnings (SNOW, DDOG) and 2) subscription-based pricing (SentinelOne, Crowdstrike, and Cloudflare), typically with lower NRRs and often more predictable, stable and usually lower revenue. And then there are companies that may use both pricing models.

    • The subscription model has been around since the 1600 since the rise of newsprint, according to Investopedia. I like Oracle Netsuite’s article, 5 Subscription-Based Pricing Models, and How to Choose the Right One. It goes into detail, especially on subscription tiers and includes information on usage-based pricing as well as a video.

    • The Usage-based pricing has gained more ground recently according to the article Five pros and four cons of usage-based pricing by Bessemer:

    • Seven out of the nine SaaS IPOs that had the best net retention in the last few years used usage-based pricing models, including companies like Snowflake and Datadog. What’s more, companies that implement usage-based pricing have an average of 137% net dollar retention.

    • Bessemer notes that

      Usage-based pricing [is] a founder’s secret weapon for net dollar retention north of 100%.

    • m3ter agrees, see their Usage-based pricing is the Best Way to Drive Revenue Retention. It has tables illuminating their points. In another article, Usage-Based Pricing in Software - A Primer, m3ter points out that

      SaaS businesses with UBP have experienced 29.9% year-on-year revenue growth compared to 21.7% for the wider SaaS ecosystem, along with net revenue retention (NRR) of over 120% compared to 110% across the rest of the industry.

    • It includes a graph the system won’t allow me to add (get error code on MacOS). The graph shows that the Net Dollar Retention Rate (NDR) for the top quartile of companies employing Largely usage-based pricing, NDR is highest at 122%; Usage-based subscription tiers (both subscription- as well as usage-based pricing) is 110%; for No usage-based pricing it is 109%. So when comparing companies NRR we need to keep their pricing structure in mind.

  • Second, there are differences within each pricing model, whether subscription- or consumption-based as each pricing model allows for various strategies. See @FinallyFoolin’s post where he compares the differences in consumption-based models for SNOW, DDOG and MDB. He also pointed out that many analysts are not even aware of it.

  • Third, when looking at NRRs we need to be aware that companies’ definition of NRR may vary quite a bit, see A. Clayton’s list of NDR definitions from the IPO quarter of several of our high growth SaaS companies, remember Alteryx? And a company could could change that definition over time as they move to add consumption-based options.

  • Yes, SNOW has impressive numbers but comparing them to CRWD, S, NET that have a different pricing model may be comparing apples to oranges and won’t help me decide which companies to own, however minuscule that portion may be. SNOW is listed in second place on Meritech’s list of SaaS companies’ ranked by NDR or Dollar-based Net Retention (DBNR) with an LTM revenue growth >50%. SNOW’s NDR is 179 as of October 10, 2022.
    But that, of course is only part of the story.

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