[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial
       Results
        
       Author : ve55
       Score  : 97 points
       Date   : 2021-02-11 21:22 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cloudflare.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cloudflare.net)
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | Not bad financials. Healthy margins, relatively small (in my
       | mind) losses and revenue growing well. At this rate they should
       | be profitable in a year? 2 maybe?
        
         | weeboid wrote:
         | For growth stocks, doesn't this signal stagnation?
        
       | dreaminvm wrote:
       | Solid results with exceptional margins and a healthy FY21
       | outlook. I wonder if markets just have unrealistic expectations
       | (from the craziness of GME/AMC and cannbis stocks) or people are
       | just taking profits on a ~400% run up since IPO.
        
         | subsaharancoder wrote:
         | the latter, people booking unrealized gains pre-earnings, then
         | post earnings it finds a comfortable price point, then more
         | people buy and we rinse and repeat..
        
         | cma wrote:
         | Cloudflare is still up 10% for the month.
        
       | de6u99er wrote:
       | My issue with Cloudflare is, that they don't do any content
       | checks.
       | 
       | I remember a friend of a friend who knows someone who
       | participated in various Anonymous missions, that CloudFlare is
       | protecting islamic terrorist forums, and recently I learned fom
       | another friend of a friend that they are also protecting QAnon's
       | and Trump's online forum where rrcent insurrection was allegedly
       | planned and coordinated.
       | 
       | There's tons if alternatives for those who don't want to do
       | business with such a company.
       | 
       | E.g.:
       | https://www.g2.com/products/cloudflare/competitors/alternati...
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | That sounds to me like a good thing. I don't want to trust a
         | company with my critical infrastructure if they have a habit of
         | moderating their customers' content.
        
         | Archio wrote:
         | Genuine question. If you found out that your water utility was
         | servicing an Islamist group's house, would you cancel your
         | service because you don't want to do business with them?
        
       | nickysielicki wrote:
       | Down 6% after hours, for reasons that I don't understand.
       | 
       | Personally, I'm more-sure that Cloudflare will be around in 25
       | years than I am that Facebook will be around in 25 years. Their
       | customers are real-valuable customers paying for a real-valuable
       | service, and that's not going away anytime soon. Meanwhile, their
       | serverless stuff is very cool and unique. I think their durable
       | objects are going to go mainstream someday. They work on
       | hard/interesting/real technology, that's _gotta_ be worth
       | something.
       | 
       | I predict that one day, we'll see a C somewhere in "FAANGM".
        
         | Uehreka wrote:
         | I don't get why people still say FAANG, even. Netflix is doing
         | great and has some great tech, but these days it seems like
         | they're way more of a TV megastudio with a really great
         | engineering dept than a tech giant like Apple, Amazon, Facebook
         | and Google.
         | 
         | Sure, they're no slouches, but it feels like any acronym that
         | includes Netflix needs to also include Microsoft for sure. In
         | fact, by the time you get to Netflix I feel like you'd have to
         | have included Salesforce, Tesla, maybe even Twitter, and
         | probably half a dozen names that aren't coming to me right now.
        
           | catmanjan wrote:
           | Most times I see faang it's in the context of tech jobs, and
           | Netflix is notorious for its wages - just my perspective as
           | an outsider in Australia...
        
             | nostrademons wrote:
             | Much of that's historical reputation, though. Netflix
             | actually underpays compares to some of its peers in the
             | valley now. As of early 2020 my perception (somewhat based
             | on levels.fyi data, as well as personal & friends' salary
             | data) is that the ordering is roughly FaceBook > Snap >
             | AirBnB > Google > Lyft > Stripe > Uber > Netflix >
             | Microsoft > Apple > Amazon > (old-line tech like IBM,
             | Oracle, HP, Juniper, Cisco). This was pre-COVID and tends
             | to move around a lot with stock prices though.
        
           | nostrademons wrote:
           | I'm fond of "MAGA" for "Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon".
           | That's the 4 largest tech companies on the market, and
           | they're the ones really making America great again.
        
             | daveevad wrote:
             | that is quite the synchronicity.
             | 
             | that rebrand may be daunting but i support it.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | tayo42 wrote:
           | I haven't really thought about it much, Netflix engineering
           | hype seems to have died down? Or maybe I'm just oblivious.
           | They seem more regular than they used to be? All their open
           | source was hyped up, I even got stuck using some of it
           | because of people following fads.
           | 
           | And yeah agree Twitter always seems to be missing from
           | engineering hype. I guess their open source and engineering
           | out in the open is a shell of what is was.
           | 
           | Tesla pays low, software isn't the main focus. Salesforce is
           | a b2b company, that i don't think most people actually like?
           | Do they pay like other companies or have unusual or
           | interesting software engineering problems?
        
         | m12k wrote:
         | > Down 6% after hours, for reasons that I don't understand.
         | 
         | A stock doesn't go up or down based on whether it does well or
         | poorly, it does so based on how it performs relative to the
         | expectations that were already priced into it. If it does well,
         | but not as well as the market was expecting, then it will still
         | go down.
        
           | NationalPark wrote:
           | It's also after hours, which means volume is lower, and also
           | means nobody has traded options since the report.
        
         | xwdv wrote:
         | Three. Day. Rule.
        
         | prewett wrote:
         | Cloudflare seems like a promising stock, but the dual-class
         | shares really put me off. It doesn't even look like Class B is
         | even traded; at least for, say, Google, you can buy their Class
         | B stock.
        
           | selectodude wrote:
           | You can't buy class B google stock. It's owned solely by
           | Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and a handful by Eric Schmidt and
           | others. They're not traded on public markets and give Page
           | and Brin alone 51 percent of all voting rights. Furthermore,
           | if any class B shares are sold, they're converted to class A
           | and lose their 10x voting power.
        
           | quickthrowman wrote:
           | Class A shares (GOOGL) have one vote, Class C shares (GOOG)
           | have 0 votes
        
         | Thaxll wrote:
         | Worth $28B and only have revenues of $450M a year, that should
         | explain, this compagny is overevaluated.
        
           | ksec wrote:
           | I could see Cloudflare grow at least another 4X in the next
           | 4-5 years without any other product. That put it at ~2B
           | Revenue.
           | 
           | That isn't too bad. And considering they are still innovating
           | and working on products that directly competes with AWS and
           | EC2, all of a sudden $28B valuation isn't so crazy. AWS is
           | $40B revenue alone and still growing 33% YoY. The whole Cloud
           | industry still have room to grow with no ceiling in sight.
           | 
           | While the whole stock market is definitely bubbling at the
           | moment. I wouldn't say Cloudflare is overvalued on its growth
           | factor.
        
           | thefounder wrote:
           | The whole market is overvalued. It has become a kind of
           | bitcoin. Fundamentals don't matter anymore. It's positioning
           | and volume.
        
             | MuffinFlavored wrote:
             | > The whole market is overvalued.
             | 
             | This is actually fake news and I'll tell you why.
             | 
             | Bond yields have never been this low. No other alternatives
             | to park capital if you are seeking yield/return.
             | 
             | The market is actually correctly valued if you take M2
             | money circulation/supply into account as well. Something
             | like that. I read it on r/investing. You have to sift
             | through the weed/penny stock posts to find the good
             | information.
        
               | thefounder wrote:
               | >> No other alternatives to park capital if you are
               | seeking yield/return.
               | 
               | So you park it into bitcoin and stocks that grow... even
               | if there is no reason for them to grow. I believe my
               | assertion still stands that price is set by positioning
               | and volume not by fundamentals. I wouldn't say that that
               | companies are overvalued...the valuation for most of them
               | has little to do with the reality. For example investing
               | in bitcoin or Tesla becomes more and more the same thing.
        
               | khyryk wrote:
               | I've been thinking about this for a while. Let's say that
               | the USD is indeed 40% devalued and the market melted up
               | significantly as a result of this -- does this not make
               | "value" stocks a massive bargain? That is, if something
               | was at a PE of 10 before the money printing, has
               | maintained reasonable fundamentals, and remains at a PE
               | of 10, isn't it stunningly undervalued if the same money
               | printing is used to justify "growth" stock rallies?
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | reducesuffering wrote:
           | *Current revenues of $450M a year. However, $28B for revenues
           | of $5b a year, 10 years out? Undervalued with ZIRP.
        
         | dmead wrote:
         | cloudflare has been talked about on WSB and /r/stocks for
         | months. it's probably pumped a good bit already and this was a
         | reality check.
        
           | notyourwork wrote:
           | To be concerned with any noise associated with WSB or others
           | is dependent on your time horizon. If Im buying Cloudflare
           | because I plan to own it in 5-10 years, that is likely moot.
           | If you want to get rich quick, its a bet like any other.
        
         | Traster wrote:
         | >I predict that one day, we'll see a C somewhere in "FAANGM".
         | 
         | Honestly, this is such a stupid game. The original acronym was
         | FANG. It included Netflix which at the time it was coined was
         | orders of magnitude smaller than Apple, the acronym didn't
         | include Apple, and now it has about 10 different deriviations
         | which does and does not include Netflix (whose core business
         | has been invaded by not only Apple and Amazon but also Disney
         | and HBO), but does include Microsoft - which isn't whilst very
         | successful, isn't dominant anywhere.
         | 
         | The whole value of FANG was that it spelt out the word fang -
         | beyond that, it was completely devoid of meaningful value. It
         | works in the same way that a big red button Jim Cramers' desk
         | works. It doesn't.
        
           | pbiggar wrote:
           | FAANG was originally about companies that paid massive
           | engineering salaries, which is why Netflix was included and
           | Microsoft wasn't.
        
             | reducesuffering wrote:
             | No it wasn't. Cramer coined it due to just FANG (not apple)
             | being totally dominant in their markets and having meteoric
             | rises in stock prices at that time.[0]
             | 
             | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG
        
         | ptero wrote:
         | > Down 6% after hours, for reasons that I don't understand
         | 
         | "Buy on the rumors, sell on the news". Sell on the news part I
         | think
        
         | gsich wrote:
         | Better find a way to add the C In "GMAFIA".
        
         | jvanderbot wrote:
         | The stock market is not about buying ownership in long-term
         | stable, profitable companies, unless you zoom wwaaaaaaaaaaay
         | out on the charts.
         | 
         | Day to day it's about riding hype up and jumping off before
         | anyone else.
         | 
         | CISCO was a great example of this back in the day.
         | https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/12/27/2020-incredible-st...
        
         | BitwiseFool wrote:
         | CAMFANG?
        
           | alex_young wrote:
           | FC'G A MAN
        
         | whoisburbansky wrote:
         | > Down 6% after hours, for reasons that I don't understand.
         | 
         | Not trying to be snarky, but this is how I feel about pretty
         | much all AH movement after earnings, for any company. Do you
         | usually not feel this way?
        
           | edmundsauto wrote:
           | I think this is the most accurate way to feel about market
           | movement. People who give you explanations might be right,
           | but how would they even know? Stock narratives are post hoc
           | divination a without much exploration of alternative
           | explanations.
           | 
           | I tell myself that any explanation might be a neat story, but
           | what evidence is there that isn't just someone's opinion?
           | (Not much, usually.)
        
           | darkwizard42 wrote:
           | It pretty much comes down to how expected or unexpected the
           | guidance and exceeds/misses are on the metrics of interest.
           | 
           | If you know that FB, GOOG, PINS are all having amazing
           | quarters, you might see SNAPs price rise in advance of their
           | earnings because if some other big ad/social network giants
           | are doing well, surely SNAP will too!
           | 
           | Then there are truly amazing beats or misses by companies and
           | the street tracks those as well.
           | 
           | A more recent example might be Lyft & Uber. Lyft actually
           | came in at the top end of QoQ rev growth and cut losses well.
           | Uber's options market and stock immediately reflected Lyft's
           | earnings report even though Uber was still 24 hours away from
           | reporting. Uber's report was good not great but the stock had
           | already gained in the day prior and thus not much left to
           | squeeze up.
           | 
           | Just my 2 cents on how some of these things happen
        
         | blantonl wrote:
         | The stock has had a 25% run up to earnings in the past month.
         | It's a classic buy the rumor sell the news.
         | 
         | Here's your opportunity to buy the dip.
        
           | vmception wrote:
           | and if it was up you would have said "new information that
           | the market was not able to price in" or "the forward guidance
           | was good" or just congratulate the leadership
        
             | djrogers wrote:
             | And it would still likely be correct. The market reacts to
             | news - not met expectations.
        
         | jedberg wrote:
         | > Down 6% after hours, for reasons that I don't understand.
         | 
         | I think the street was hoping for a rosier outlook on
         | profitability next quarter.
        
         | rvz wrote:
         | > Down 6% after hours, for reasons that I don't understand.
         | 
         | Well time to buy some on Friday near market close then before
         | it reaches >$100.
        
         | subsaharancoder wrote:
         | this is typical behavior of stocks, even with stellar earnings
         | many of them go down after hours, go checkout Corsair
        
         | mathattack wrote:
         | The valuation is based on hyper-aggressive growth expectations
         | that compound over time. If you shave even a few percent off
         | the growth projections stock takes a hit.
         | 
         | It's hard to switch your CDN provider in the short term, but
         | it's feasible that Amazon, MSFT or Google could bump them out
         | of every large enterprise in the long term.
        
           | acdha wrote:
           | > It's hard to switch your CDN provider in the short term,
           | but it's feasible that Amazon, MSFT or Google could bump them
           | out of every large enterprise in the long term.
           | 
           | That's what I'd worry about, too: for a large company,
           | there's a fairly large cost to dealing with each new vendor.
           | Once Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. has a CDN which is
           | competitive for your needs someone is going to ask whether
           | the extra benefits are greater than the cost of managing a
           | contract, security, training, etc.
        
         | llboston wrote:
         | Revenue is $125m this quarter, about 50% over last year. P/S is
         | around 60, which might be too high to many people and therefore
         | the correction.
        
           | quickthrowman wrote:
           | Before 0% interest and euphoria, 20-40x was a good SaaS
           | NTM/Revenue multiplier. SNOW is upwards of 200x at this point
           | I believe
        
         | tootie wrote:
         | It's a mantra of stock trading to buy on rumor and sell on
         | news. This report was likely already priced in based on
         | estimates.
        
         | dcolkitt wrote:
         | Does Cloudflare have any defensible moat? If Google or
         | Microsoft decided to muscle Cloudflare out of business
         | tomorrow, what's to stop them? In comparison, we already know
         | that Google can't take out Facebook.
        
           | tidepod12 wrote:
           | The major Cloudflare products (namely the CDN, WAF, DDoS
           | protection, DNS management, and even serverless workers) are
           | already replicated in AWS, GCP, and Azure. AFAIK the main
           | thing that draws people to Cloudflare instead is "it's easier
           | to use than bloated AWS/etc." And while that might be a
           | completely valid value proposition, I'm not sure if it's a
           | long term winner, especially as more and more companies
           | migrate to the big 3 cloud providers.
           | 
           | It reminds me a lot of Dropbox and the situation where for
           | years Dropbox's value proposition was "yea OneDrive and
           | iCloud provide the same service, but people like Dropbox
           | because it is independent, unbloated, and simpler to use".
           | But over time that's become less true, and as more and more
           | companies move to using O365, they end up getting OneDrive as
           | part of the deal anyway. And once you're already working in
           | an environment with OneDrive, why continue using Dropbox?
        
             | rusteh1 wrote:
             | I wouldn't call Cloudfront bloated. It is under featured if
             | anything, the product has seen little change in the past
             | few years.
        
         | DamnYuppie wrote:
         | My feeling is that the price had risen expecting a more stellar
         | result or bullish guidance. When the street didn't get that
         | they took their profits and ran.
         | 
         | You can watch the same thing happen to CRM and ZM now in the
         | days leading up to their next earnings call.
        
           | spoonjim wrote:
           | What does it mean "the street took their profits and ran"?
           | Who did they sell the stock to?
        
             | aaomidi wrote:
             | To buyers who had placed orders way lower than what the
             | stock was worth.
        
             | nostrademons wrote:
             | Folks like the OP who believe CloudFlare is a good long-
             | term buy but weren't paying attention before the earning's
             | announcement.
             | 
             | There's usually some subsegment of investors that believe
             | that earnings are going to be really good, bid up the price
             | beforehand, and figure they'll sell after earnings. If that
             | group is smaller than the folks who see the earnings and
             | figure it actually _is_ a really good buy that they want to
             | own, you get a stock pop after earnings. If the former
             | group is larger than the latter, you get a stock drop. This
             | cycle the former was bigger than the latter for CloudFlare.
             | It 's gone the other way both other cycles for CloudFlare
             | and this cycle for other stocks. (Google and Disney, for
             | example, got large after-hours pops after earnings.)
        
       | BasedInfra wrote:
       | I mean this absolutely no thesis and it's money I can lose but
       | been invest in companies that have solid, quality documentation.
       | 
       | As one of them cloudflare's done me a solid so far.
        
       | xorx wrote:
       | Maybe I'm too old, and stuck in the mud with the pre-ICANN
       | intention of the original TLDs, but does it seem odd to anyone
       | else that they host their network services on .com and their
       | corporate information on .net?
        
         | judge2020 wrote:
         | I think the joke here is that their stock symbol is NET.
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | Surprised they could get that after all the net related
           | terminology in the early 2000s.
        
       | byhemechi wrote:
       | Cloudflare is one of those things that if I'm asked about it I'll
       | sound more positive than astroturfing. Their API's a re great,
       | I've had to contact support _once_ and my experience was good and
       | their rates are certainly reasonable for the scale of projects I
       | 've used them on.
        
       | buckybadger14 wrote:
       | What is the market for cloudflare? Do you think every company who
       | has a website will use some of their products? Understanding
       | TAM...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-02-11 23:00 UTC)