Snowflake Wraps Up Fiscal Year With Triple-Digit Q4 Growth

But investor expectations apparently remain very high for the data cloud company, which went public in September, because Snowflake’s stock price dropped nearly 9 percent by the close of trading Wednesday.

Data cloud service provider Snowflake wrapped up its first fiscal year as a public company with triple-digit growth in both product sales and overall revenue in its fiscal 2021 fourth quarter, the company said Wednesday.

Snowflake’s total customer base reached 4,139 in the quarter – including 77 customers with trailing 12-month product revenue greater than $1 million. And the company’s outlook for fiscal 2022 calls for product revenue to reach or just surpass $1 billion.

“With the onslaught of digital transformation, data operations become the beating heart of the modern enterprise,” said Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman (pictured), discussing the company’s growth drivers on a conference call with financial analysts Wednesday. “Customers realize that to survive and thrive, they need to step up their data game, given what is now possible with technology.”

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But the company’s performance numbers apparently failed to impress some investors: The price of Snowflake’s stock tumbled $23.57 per share or nearly 9 percent to $247.03 by the close of trading Wednesday.

The stock price decline pushed the company’s market cap to just below $70 billion, closing at $69.93 billion. That’s a little below where it stood on Sept. 16 when the company went public in one of the IT industry’s biggest IPOs of 2020.

The price of Snowflake’s shares has been volatile, swinging from a low of $217.39 on Sept. 23, just one week after the IPO, to a high of $390.00 on December 8. Since the start of 2021 the stock price has generally hovered between $270 and $300 before Wednesday’s decline.

For the fourth quarter (ended Jan. 31) of fiscal 2021 Snowflake reported revenue of $190.5 million, up 117 percent from $87.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020. The company’s net loss for the quarter was $198.9 million compared to a net loss of $83.3 million one year earlier.

For all of fiscal 2021 the company reported revenue of $592.0 million, up nearly 124 percent from $264.7 million in fiscal 2020. The net loss for the fiscal year was $539.1 million compared to the $348.5 million net loss in fiscal 2020.

Migration of legacy data warehouse systems to the cloud is often the start of customer engagements, Slootman said. Snowflake’s global systems integration partners are seeing their backlog of such projects “multiply,” he said, “and are rushing to staff, train and provision their resources to meet the demand head-on.”

“Our strategy is to rely on our implementation partners for much of this work,” Slootman said. In the fourth quarter Snowflake added global systems integrator Infosys to its partner roster at the Elite partner level.

Slootman said that in addition to growth in demand for Snowflake’s data services, the company is seeing rapid adoption of the Snowflake Data Marketplace where third-party providers offer data for data science, machine learning and business intelligence tasks, especially in vertical industries such as retail, insurance, media and entertainment, life sciences and the public sector.

“Our continued push to campaign to the largest enterprises in the world is proving to be successful,” Slootman said, noting that 19 Fortune 500 companies became customers in the fourth quarter including Mastercard, Genuine Parts Company and Northern Trust Corp.