UPDATED 23:41 EDT / JUNE 03 2021

CLOUD

Go team: Shares in Asana surge while Slack sags as both report strong earnings

In a tale of two team collaboration companies, shares in Asana Inc. surged in after-hours trading while shares in Slack Technologies Inc. fell slightly after both companies delivered strong quarterly earnings reports today.

For the quarter ended April 30, Asana reported revenue jumped 61% from a year ago, to $76.7 million. The company lost $23.7 million, or 21 cents a share, before costs such as stock compensation, down from an adjusted loss of 31 cents a share a year ago.

The figures were ahead of analyst predictions on earnings and revenue. StreetInsider reported that analysts had been predicting revenue of $70.18 million and an adjusted loss of 27 cents per share.

Asana’s highlights in the quarter included the availability of a service called Universal Reporting that is said to give leaders real-time visibility into work across their organization. The company also reported that it ended the quarter with over 100,000 paying customers for the first time.

“Whether teams are fully remote and working from home, or in offices coordinating work across departments and geographies, clarity on who is doing what by when is essential,” Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and chief executive officer of Asana, said in a statement. “More and more customers are turning to Asana and the Asana Work Graph to provide a scalable, cross-functional, and easy-to-adopt solution.”

Investors liked the numbers, and shares of Asana rose nearly 10% in after-hours trading.

Slack, which to some is the poster child of the shift to online working and team collaboration amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, also had positive results.

For the April quarter, possibly its last public earnings report before it becomes part of Salesforce Inc. per a $27.7 billion acquisition deal announced in December, reported a profit of of $273.4 million, up 36% year-over-year.

Billings in the quarter came in at $278.6 million, up 35% year-over-year, while operating income adjusted for costs such as stock compensation was $10.8 million, or eight cents per share. In the same quarter last year, Slack reported an adjusted loss of $16.6 million. Greenwich Time noted that the result exceeded Wall Street expectations.

Highlights in the quarter included an increase of paying customers to over 169,000, up 39% from the same quarter last year, with a 122% net dollar retention rate. Slack reported that it now has 1,285 paid customers with greater than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue and 113 customers pumping more than $1 million a year into the company.

“Companies globally are racing toward a digital-first way of working to attract talent and to win,” Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, said in a statement. “Slack is not just embracing this trend, we are enabling it.”

Shares in Slack were down about a half-point in after-hours trading. The flat share price is not necessarily a reflection so much of the company’s results than that the company’s share price floats roughly around what Salesforce agreed to pay in its takeover.

Photo: Slack

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