Teradata Corp’s stock price took a tumble after it reported disappointing first quarter earnings numbers yesterday.

The Big Data analytics firm saw its first quarter revenues slip by seven percent to $582 million, compared to $628 million in the previous year. Also, net income for the quarter fell to $22 million, compared to $59 million in Q1 2014.

Teradata’s numbers can certainly be described as disappointing, but to keep investors happy the company has repurchased 63 million shares for around $273 million, in addition to authorizing an extra $300 million for stock repurchases. The company has also boosted its debt facility to $1 billion.

The move seems to have worked. Late on Thursday morning Teradata’s shares were down $4.59 a share, roughly 10.2 percent, to just $40.35 a share. However, the stock rebounded by the end of yesterday afternoon, trading at $41.71 per share, a fall of 7.2 percent.

So what did Teradata have to say about its poor performance? Well, the company was quick to point to the strength of the U.S. dollar as one mitigating factor (a favorite excuse for most poorly performing companies these days), and it also said it had increased its investments in R&D and demand creation.

That may be so, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that data and analytics products sales fell from $577 million one year ago to just $536 in the latest quarter, a drop of about seven percent. Meanwhile, Teradata’s marketing applications also saw revenue slip from $51 million the year before to $46 million now.

Nevertheless, CEO Mike Kohler chose to look on the bright side, saying that the company was already seeing progress in quarter two, and expects to see even more in the second half of the year.

He could be right, because data warehousing purchases don’t come cheap, and so ups and downs are not unexpected.

“We have been investing to go broader in the market and to strengthen our position with our data warehousing, big data analytics, and marketing applications solutions – both in the cloud and on-premises – to generate higher revenue growth longer term,” Kohler continued.

No doubt Kohler will take confidence from the fact the Big Data market is still relatively nascent, and that customers are still wary of splashing too much cash until they can see a return. While we don’t expect to see Teradata’s revenues sky rocket anytime soon, a return to slow and steady growth is more than achieveable.

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