NEW YORK, March 3 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Snowflake’s (SNOW.N) melting market capitalization reflects investors’ overly lofty expectations. Its share price fell by nearly a fifth on Thursday even though the $65 billion data warehouse firm said fourth-quarter revenue doubled.
A solid business, with cash from operations easily covering capital expenditures, means slight missteps present a valuation conundrum, not an existential threat.
Fast growing firms are hard to value, but the market’s ardor read more is cooling. Snowflake thinks revenue will rise by two-thirds next year, to $1.9 billion.
Now assume sales grow 50% annually for five years and the company will enjoy a net margin of 35%, like Microsoft (MSFT.O). On the same earnings multiple, the company would eventually be worth around $140 billion.
That’s exuberant, but Snowflake was worth about this much in December. If growth is 20%, it will eventually be worth only a third as much on the same multiples.
Snowflake will continue to thrive. The same might not be true of other highfliers, such as electric-car makers like Lucid (LCID.O), which are burning cash. Without highly valued stock to issue, missteps could prove deadlier. (By Robert Cyran)
Snowflake Inc. is a cloud computing-based data warehousing company based in Bozeman, Montana. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode. The company's name was chosen as a tribute to the founders' love of winter sports.
The firm offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data warehouse-as-a-service". It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software. It runs on Amazon S3 since 2014, on Microsoft Azure since 2018 and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019. The company is credited with reviving the data warehouse industry by building and perfecting a cloud-based data platform. It was able to separate computer data storage from computing before Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
The company was ranked first on the Forbes Cloud 100 in 2019.
HistorySnowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California by three data warehousing experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Żukowski was a co-founder of the Dutch start-up Vectorwise. The company's first CEO was Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures.In June 2014, the company appointed former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO. In October 2014, it raised $26 million and came out of stealth mode, with 80 organizations using it at that time. In June 2015, the company raised an additional $45 million and launched its first product, its cloud data warehouse, to the public. It raised another $100 million in April 2017. In January 2018, the company announced a $263 million financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it a unicorn. In October 2018, it raised another $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, raising its valuation to $3.5 billion.In May 2019, Frank Slootman, the retired former CEO of ServiceNow, joined Snowflake as its CEO and Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of ServiceNow joined the company as CFO. In June 2019, the company launched Snowflake Data Exchange.In September 2019, it was ranked first on LinkedIn's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups. On February 7, 2020 it raised another $479 million. At that time, it had 3,400 active customers.On September 16, 2020, Snowflake became a public company via an initial public offering raising $3.4 billion, the largest software IPO and the largest IPO to date to double on its first day of trading.On May 26, 2021, the company announced that it would become headquarterless[citation needed], with a principal executive office located in Bozeman, Montana. SOURCE: Wikipedia
