UPDATED 21:41 EDT / MAY 07 2020

SECURITY

Cloudflare stock tumbles on bigger loss despite strong early gains

Network security firm Cloudflare Inc. saw its stock tumble in after-hours trading Thursday, wiping out some impressive gains it made earlier in the day.

The fall came after it posted a wider loss in the quarter compared with the same period one year ago, even though it topped Wall Street’s estimates. Cloudflare’s shares were down almost 12%, following an 18% surge in the regular session.

The San Francisco-based company, which sells tools that help websites deal with security, video streaming and traffic management issues, reported a net loss in the first quarter of $32.7 million, or 11 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $17.1 million, or 20 cents a share, one year ago.

Cloudflare’s adjusted loss came to 4 cents a share on revenue of $91 million, up 48% from a year ago. Analysts had forecast an adjusted loss of 6 cents a share on revenue of $87 million.

Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince (pictured) said in a statement that he and his team are helping to build a better internet. “Our scalable global network is solving digital transformation needs for our customers in hours or minutes, faster than hardware could even ship to vacant offices,” he said.

Prince briefly became a billionaire on paper earlier in the day after Cloudflare’s stock jumped ahead of its quarterly results.

Analysts speculated the early surge likely stemmed from investors’ expectations of a much stronger quarterly performance amid to the coronavirus pandemic. Many technology companies have benefited from the COVID-19 crisis, with security firms such as Zix Inc., Fastly inc. and Fortinet Inc. all seeing their stock rise Wednesday after posting better-than-expected quarterly earnings.

Writing in Motley Fool, analyst Anders Bylund said security companies were benefiting from COVID-19 because remote work connections need to be protected from malicious network attacks, and that’s exactly what those companies do. He said the market had failed to spot those earlier robust earnings reports coming in, hence the speculation on Cloudflare.

But the bigger loss seems to have taken those investors by surprise, leading to the after-hours selloff.

For the second quarter, Cloudflare is forecasting an adjusted loss of 6 cents per share on sales of $94.5 million. Wall Street had earlier forecast a loss of 5 cents per share on revenue of $92 million for the second quarter.

The company reaffirmed its full-year guidance of as much as $393 million in revenue, matching the top of Wall Street’s forecast of $389 million to $393 million in revenue.

Photo: New America/Flickr

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