UPDATED 16:47 EDT / OCTOBER 19 2017

APPS

Atlassian stock jumps on better-than-expected earnings

Australian enterprise collaboration software maker Atlassian Corp. Plc beat earnings expectations today, sending shares up about 12 percent to what will be a new record high if it holds Friday.

Atlassian, whose enterprise softwares includes the JIRA Service Desk offering, team chat tools HipChat and Stride, workflow platform Confluence and task management software Trello, posted a first-quarter net loss of $14 million, or 6 cents a share, on a 42 percent jump in revenue from a year ago, to $193.8 million. After adjusting for stock compensation and certain other expenses, Atlassian earned a profit of 12 cents a share, up from a dime a year ago.

On average, analysts had expected adjusted earnings of 9 cents a share on revenue of $185.8 million, according to a poll by FactSet. Shares had already been trading at record highs, up about 66 percent on the year, standing at more than twice its initial public offering valuation in December 2015. But the after-hours buying elevated the stock to nearly $44 a share. That followed a 1 percent gain in regular trading today.

What’s more, the company issued bullish forecasts for the second quarter and the 2018 fiscal year. For the current quarter, it expects to earn an adjusted profit of 12 cents a share on revenues of $203 million to $205 million.

For the fiscal year, it forecasting an adjusted profit of between 46 cents and 47 cents a share on revenue of $841 million to $847 million. That’s higher than its previous forecast of $826 million to $834 million, as well as the $831 million consensus estimate.

Among the highlights of the quarter was, once again, customer growth, as the company added 4,246 net new customers for a total of 107,746. During the quarter, Atlassian also debuted a new, unified team communication service called Stride that is aimed at least in part at countering a raft of competitors, such as Slack Inc. to Microsoft Corp.’s Teams, Facebook Inc.’s Workplace, Cisco Systems Inc.’s WebEx and others.

But during the earnings call, executives indicated few issues with the seemingly higher level of competition, even with price hikes implemented recently. “We remain very confident in our competitive position,” Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-chief executive “We haven’t seen any change in market momentum in any way.”

Photo: Atlassian/Facebook

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