CrowdStrike Beats on Earnings Despite Cyber Industry Headwinds

Andrew Martin, Bloomberg News

The Crowdstrike booth during the 2023 RSA Conference in San Francisco.

, Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. delivered first-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations, despite a pullback in spending that has challenged its cybersecurity rivals.

Revenue totaled $921 million in the first quarter, far surpassing the average of analysts’ estimates. The company posted adjusted earnings of 93 cents per share, above a 90-cent projection. Shares of the Austin, Texas-based company were trading at $320.41 at 10:08 a.m. in New York on Wednesday after closing at $305.58 on Tuesday.

Expectations were high heading into the company’s earnings release. The company’s shares had roughly doubled over the past year, handing it a valuation that makes it more expensive than nearly all of its rivals. That’s despite a string of disappointing earnings results from software peers rocked by a pullback in enterprise spending.

Just last month, rival Palo Alto Networks Inc. slid after giving a downbeat forecast for the current period, renewing concerns about a slowdown in cybersecurity demand. The cyber solutions provider Fortinet Inc. also posted a miss in first-quarter billings, citing weakness in Europe.

CrowdStrike, however, has said its single-platform strategy has allowed the company to continue to gain market share.

The company’s consolidated platform “creates a wide competitive moat,” George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive officer, said in the company’s statement Tuesday.

CrowdStrike has often sought to distinguish itself from Microsoft Corp. and its cyber offerings. During the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, Kurtz raised a recent US government report that criticized Microsoft’s security culture, saying it resulted in an “outpouring of requests” from the market.

“There’s a widespread crisis of confidence among security and IT teams within the Microsoft security customer base,” he said.

CrowdStrike’s recently expanded partnership with Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, was expected to be a focus on the company’s earnings call Tuesday. As part of the pact, AWS dropped other security products in favor of CrowdStrike’s cyber threat protection and response offerings.

(Updates with share price after market open, additional quotes in seventh paragraph)