Shares of Snowflake Inc. fell in after-hours trading today after the cloud data warehouse darling posted a wider-than-expected loss in the three months just gone.

The company reported a fiscal first-quarter loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 70 cents per share on revenue of $228.9 million, up 110% from a year ago.

The results were a mixed bag, though, with Wall Street looking for a smaller loss of 51 cents per share on lower revenue of $214 million.

Nonetheless, Snowflake Chief Executive Frank Slootman (pictured) was upbeat, saying that the company’s “strong results” were a reflection of “strength in customer consumption.”

The company sells software that enterprises use to run a data warehouse that can sit on any public cloud platform. It pays public cloud infrastructure firms such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC to run its workloads in their data centers, and also competes with their similar offerings.

Its software is primarily seen as an alternative to data warehouses that unify data and execute queries using on-premises hardware and software. Customers pay for Snowflake’s data warehouse according to how much they use it, as opposed to a flat subscription fee.

Slootman said that Snowflake’s remaining performance obligations, which are a measure of backlog, jumped 206% year-over-year, to $1.4 billion, indicating “strength in sales across the board.”

In a conference call with analysts, Snowflake Chief Financial Officer Mike Scarpelli said the company implemented a storage compression change that will widen its margins going forward. He also revealed the company is working on new chip technologies that should enable some big performance gains, though he said that probably won’t be seen until next year.

Snowflake’s stock was down more than 8% in the after-hours trading session at one point, but it recovered some ground and was down just over 3% later.

Pund-IT Inc. analyst Charles King told SiliconANGLE that Snowflake posted decent results and that investors were likely concerned that its business still can’t turn a profit. It reported a net loss of $203,220 for the quarter.

“Snowflake is in an odd situation,” King said. “Many times when companies go public the expectation is that they’re on their way to conventional performance. Snowflake’s leadership is deeply talented and experienced, and its performance is improving. But investors may be wondering when or how the company will become profitable.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller praised Snowflake, saying its rare to see a software company grow its revenue in triple digits after hitting the $100 million barrier.

“But Snowflake did just this, and it’s a testament to the need for enterprises to run their analytics in the cloud,” Mueller said. “Unfortunately everything doubled more or less. With its revenue increasing so did its costs and its overall loss, which was not necessarily what investors expected.”

Looking ahead, Snowflake said it’s expecting product revenue of $235 million to $240 million in the second quarter. Product revenue accounts for the bulk of the company’s sales, delivering 93% of its total during the first quarter. Wall Street analysts had forecast product revenue for the quarter of $235.4 million.

Regarding its full-year guidance, Snowflake said it’s shooting for product revenue of $1.02 billion to $1.035 billion, which implies growth of 86% and is above its previous range of $1 billion to $1.02 billion. Wall Street is modeling full-year product revenue of $1.02 billion.

Photo: SiliconANGLE