Make it three-for-three for Apptio, as it has beaten Wall Street expectations for the third quarter in a row after going public last year.
For the first quarter of 2017, the Bellevue, Wash. company that makes software to help CIOs better understand spending in IT departments posted non-GAAP losses of 8 cents per share on $43.9 million in total revenue. Analysts surveyed in advance by Yahoo Finance expected Apptio to post losses of 11 cents per share on $43.4 million in revenue.
Apptio stock is down slightly on the news of its earnings results.
“Our first quarter was highlighted by subscription revenue growth of 20%, as we saw solid demand from both our strategic and enterprise segments,” Sunny Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Apptio said in a statement. “We are pleased by our free cash flow of over $10 million, our continued innovation, and our high competitive win rates.”
Since Apptio was not a public company a year ago, its first few earnings reports give a snapshot of its finances in the final quarters before the IPO. Its revenue grew 19 percent over this time last year, and its non-GAAP net loss in the first quarter dropped from $3.9 million a year ago to $2.9 million today.
Going forward, Apptio expects in the second quarter to report total revenue between $43.5 million and $44 million and an operating loss between $4.5 million and $5 million.
Becoming profitable is one of Apptio’s goals, and in a conversation with GeekWire shortly after the IPO, Apptio co-founder and Chief Financial Officer Kurt Shintaffer said that will come as the business grows.
First and foremost we think about growth. We think about building a really meaningful company with thousands of customers and serving them all over the world. But we also understand that we do need to generate cash flows from our operations, and we are really excited about our ability to do that in the near term. It primarily comes with scaling our business, that’s the primary driver for a business like Apptio to achieve cash flows, and so our strategy of acquiring customers and building great products so they want to continue to work with us really is the strategy to become cash flow positive.
Shintaffer said on the company’s quarterly earnings call that Apptio expects to hit the cash flow break even point in 2017.
After setting a price of $16 for its initial public offering in late September Apptio stock soared more than 40 percent on its first day, and the company raised $99.1 million. But the stock came down to earth the following week and hovered between $19 and $20 per share for the rest of 2016. But this year, Apptio’s stock price has dropped about 31 percent, and it has been below IPO price for the last few months.
