UPDATED 11:33 EDT / MARCH 02 2017

Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen INFRA

Pure Storage sees 52 percent sales jump, but forecast raises doubts

Flash memory storage is growing as fast as ever if Pure Storage Inc.’s latest earnings report is any indication.

The array maker on Wednesday announced that its fourth-fiscal quarter revenues rose 52 percent from a year ago, to $228 million, slightly better than what Wall Street expected. Full-year sales jumped a 65 percent, to $728 million. Pure said it believes that it’s now on track to pass the $1 billion mark by the end of 2017.

Shareholders, however, are more worried about the near term. The company’s stock price plunged 11 percent in after-hours trading following the earnings call after it issues a revenue forecast for the current quarter of $171 million to $179 million, well below the average analyst estimate of $201.6 million. Pure’s shares were down more than 10 percent in late trading Thursday. Analysts from Barclays Capital Inc. said in a note to clients that they expect that shares of the array maker will continue on a “downward trending” route in the near-term.

Pure’s disappointing quarterly outlook comes in a time of major change for the flash market. One of the most important trends is the transition to NVME, a technology for moving data to and from solid-state memory that can drastically improve access speeds. At the same time, array makers are also facing intensified competition from the public cloud, which is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to on-premises hardware. Amazon Web Services Inc. last week launched a new series of instances featuring NVME-based flash that cost as little as 15 cents an hour.

Nonetheless, Pure Chief Executive Scott Dietzen (pictured) sounded an optimistic note in a Wednesday blog post. He reaffirmed his company’s goal of reaching $1 billion in revenue by the end of the year and highlighted how it’s steadily moving closer toward becoming profitable. Its operating profit margin before certain costs such as stock compensation stood at negative 2 percent in the fourth quarter, a 12 percent improvement over the same period a year earlier.

The company’s net loss, meanwhile, slid to $42.9 million from $44.3 million a year ago. During the earnings call, Pure President David Hatfield said that one of the way the company plans to maintain its momentum is by adding “enhanced cloud integration for data protection and hybrid cloud use cases.”


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