CrowdStrike Scores With Fourth Quarter Results, Outlook And Market Expanding Acquisition

On Tuesday, CrowdStrike Holdings Inc CRWD surpassed both top and bottom-line estimates with its fourth quarter results. The shares of the cybersecurity company surged more than 20% during after-hours trading as CrowdStrike also issued a better-than-expected outlook for both the current quarter and fiscal year ahead. 

Fourth Quarter Highlights

For the quarter ended on January 31st, CrowdStrike reported revenue expanded 33% YoY to $845 million, surpassing estimates of $839 million. An essential part of its business is subscription revenue that solely grew also 44% YoY to $795.9 million. CrowdStrike also made a turnaround from last year’s comparable quarter when it reported a $48 million loss to now reporting a net income of $54 million, or 22 cents per share. CFO Burt Podbere noted that CrowdStrike has been reporting a GAAP net income over the past four quarters, 

Fiscal First Quarter Outlook

CrowdStrike guided for revenue between $902 million and $906 million, surpassing the consensus estimate of $899 million, and providing the earnings per share outlook in the range between 89 cents and 90 cents, also topping the consensus estimate of 82 cents.

Over the recent months, CrowdStrike has been stepping up its M&A game.

CrowdStrike is doing a great job at navigating the competitive environment as it targets the cloud as its next major growth area, with CEO George Kurtz acknowledging that Microsoft Corporation MSFT will always be a competitive threat. After all, Microsoft is trusted by the world’s biggest enterprises in part due to its promise of security. However, even Microsoft has had a few rough years of cybersecurity incidents. Fortunately, as technology continues to evolve, there can never be enough of cybersecurity so being a Microsoft customer does not exclude also being a CrowdStrike customer. Besides Microsoft Azure, there’s also Cisco CSCO who ended 2023 by revealing its new AI security assistant. With this major milestone, Cisco is aiming to redefine cybersecurity defense with powerful AI capabilities. Claiming to have unmatched visibility across the network, Cisco trained its AI assistant on one of the largest security-focused data set. Cisco revealed its AI Assistant analyzes more than 550 billion security events each day. Therefore, with the AI Assistant, Cisco aims to tip the scales in favor of defenders by helping organizations make informed decisions. As cyber-attacks continue to evolve, defenses must do the same and therefore, CrowdStrike is set to benefit from its M&A activities. With the release, CrowdStrike also announced its acquisition of Flow which will expand its reach in cloud security.

Moreover, Podbere reiterated the company’s goal of achieving $10 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of the decade, having now reached $3.4 billion for the year that ended this January.

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