MongoDB Inc. reported strong fourth-quarter financial results Tuesday, but its stock fell sharply after the database company warned of the negative impact the coronavirus outbreak is likely to have on its future earnings.

The company, which sells a document-oriented database of the same name that’s used to power big-data applications and other intensive workloads, reported a loss after certain costs such as stock compensation of 25 cents per share on revenue of $123.5 million, up 44% from a year ago.

The results were better than expected, Wall Street having forecast a wider loss of 28 cents per share on revenue of just $110.57 million.

MongoDB also reported subscription revenue for the quarter jumped 45%, of $117.8 million, while its services revenue rose 17%, to $5.7 million.

The company’s global cloud database Atlas, a fully managed cloud version of its popular NoSQL database that’s easier for companies to get up and running, achieved a $200 million annualized revenue run rate in the quarter.

All in all it was a great quarter for MongoDB, but as with every other tech company these days, the real news is what’s happening outside, and executives warned that the company is unlikely to be able to emerge from the coronavirus outbreak unscathed.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2021, the company is forecasting revenue of $119 million to $121 million, which includes a $1 million to $2 million hit from the coronavirus impact. The outbreak will also hurt MongoDB’s full-year earnings. Executives forecast revenue of $510 million to $530 million for the whole of 2021, including a $15 million to $25 million negative impact from the coronavirus.

The company’s stock promptly fell by more than 9% in after-hours trading as shareholders digested the news.

“The situation regarding COVID-19 is uncertain and is changing rapidly and MongoDB will continue to evaluate its potential impact on its business,” the company said in a statement.

The stock drop was to be expected as it seems no company will be able to emerge from the current crisis unscathed, but analysts told SiliconANGLE that MongoDB otherwise had a great year, and a very promising future ahead of it.

“Despite the systemic uncertainties impacting companies and markets of every sort, the company seems well-positioned to continue growing and evolving as database use cases shift to the cloud,” said Charles King of Pund-IT Inc.

Constellation Research Inc.’s Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that he too was encouraged by the company’s growth over the past year.

“MongoDB keeps firing on all cylinders in the sweet spot of fast growth beyond the traditional transactional database, which is relevant for almost any next-generation application use case,” Mueller said. “The cross cloud capabilities of MongoDB have served customers and vendors well, as they avoid the lock-in associated to traditional cloud native databases. Overall the only thing for MongoDB executives to address at the moment is a path toward profitability.”

In other news, the company announced that co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Eliot Horowitz will step down from his roles, effective July 10. He will continue to act as a “technical adviser” for the company.

“I want to thank Eliot for his technical vision, leadership and immense contributions since co-founding the company,” said Dev Ittycheria (pictured), chief executive officer of MongoDB. “Eliot, together with the other founders of MongoDB, realized 13 years ago that the incumbent database technology was ill suited for the needs of developers building modern applications. Their insight and hard work resulted in the document model, a fundamentally different way to persist data that addresses the rigidity and scalability limitations of relational databases.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE