Data analytics software provider Alteryx Inc. posted fourth-quarter financial results that beat Wall Street’s expectations today, but its stock fell sharply in after-hours trading following guidance for the current quarter and full year that came up well short of analysts’ forecasts.

The company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 62 cents per share on revenue of $160.5 million, up 2.6% from the same quarter one year ago. Wall Street had forecast a profit of 31 cents per share on revenue of $154 million.

Alteryx sells Extract, Transform and Load or ETL tools that are used to prepare companies’ data for analysis. Its platform offers baked-in connectivity to business intelligence tools such as Experian and Tableau, and features specialized capabilities such as data mining, data cleansing and geospatial analytics.

For the full year, Alteryx posted revenue of $495.3 million, up 19% from the year before. But the revenue growth failed to prevent a net loss of $3.9 million for the year, compared with a profit of $38 million in 2019.

“We expect 2021 will be a year of transformation for Alteryx,” said Alteryx Chief Executive Mark Anderson (pictured), who replaced the previous CEO Dean Stoecker in October. “As our customers continue their transformation initiatives, we intend to scale our product, operations, and customer focus and deliver significant business value through the power of analytics and automation.”

What Anderson didn’t say was that 2021 is also going to be a rather bumpy year ahead with regard to its bottom line. For the current quarter, the company provided some rather alarming guidance, saying it’s expecting a loss of 22 to 25 cents per share on revenue of $104 million to $107 million.

Wall Street was anticipating much more, with analysts modeling break-even earnings on revenue of $119 million.

The full-year picture doesn’t get much better either. Alteryx forecast a wide range between a loss of seven cents a share to a profit of seven cents a share on total revenue of $555 million to $565 million. Analysts were expecting a healthy profit of 73 cents per share on revenue of $567 million.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that Alteryx is clearly encountering headwinds for its offerings, and that its management hasn’t been able to control costs, thus the loss.

“Something must have gone wrong in execution in Q4, either on the revenue or cost side,” Mueller said. “Now we will have to see if the management will undertake cost actions or outgrow its current cost base to turn back to a profit this year. At its core the Alteryx offering is an attractive one for enterprises, but the problem is that many data analytics and business intelligence-related projects have been put on the back burner due to COVID-19.”

Not surprisingly, the lower guidance prompted a quick sell-off, with Alteryx’s stock down more than 9% in after-hours trading.

Photo: NCI Agency