Billion Dollar Unicorns: Smartsheet Delivers High Growth, But No Profits -

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Smartsheet Delivers High Growth, But No Profits

Oct 09, 2018Jeremy ParkinsonFinance0

Billion Dollar Unicorn Smartsheet (NYSE: SMAR), went public in April this year. Analysts have big expectations from the company given that it has a modest 1% penetration in the cloud-based work management market, that some estimate, is more than a $20 billion opportunity. The company’s recently reported results show strong revenue growth, but profits have remained elusive. Smartsheet hopes to change that with the product upgrades launched recently.

Smartsheet’s Financials

Smartsheet was founded in 2005 to deliver an easy-to-use application for work management. It is “a hybrid of multiple concepts” that integrates multiple solutions such as spreadsheets to track numbers, SharePoint to store files, and Access or Google Forms to capture information, into one single application. Smartsheet allows users to collect unstructured data in a format that is easy to track and report and acts as a single source of truth across work processes to become a leading cloud-based platform for work execution.

Smartsheet recently announced its second quarter results. For the quarter, Smartsheet’s revenues grew 59% to $42.4 million and were ahead of the market’s forecast of $39.1 million. It continues to report losses and ended the quarter with a net loss of $12.3 million or $0.12 per share. On an adjusted basis, it reported a loss of $0.08 per share compared with the Street’s forecast of a loss of $0.14 per share.

Smartsheet operates on a subscription-based model. Subscription revenues for the quarter grew 57% to $37.5 million and professional services revenues growing 71% to $4.9 million.

Among key operating metrics, it ended the quarter with 76,693 domain-based customers. The number of all customers with annualized contract values (ACV) of $50,000 or more grew nearly 150% to 298. Average ACV per domain-based customer increased 49% to $2,002.

For the current quarter, it expects revenues of $43.5-$44.5 million with non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.16-$0.14. It forecast revenues of $167-$169 million for the year with a non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.56-$0.52. Analysts were expecting the company to end fiscal 2019 with revenues of $161 million and a net loss of $0.57 per share.