A light revenue forecast for the coming quarter and full year weighed heavily on MongoDB Inc.’s stock in extended trading today, overshadowing what was a strong fourth-quarter earnings and revenue beat.

The database company reported earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 57 cents per share on revenue of $361.3 million, up 36% from a year earlier. That was much better than the analyst consensus estimate of seven cents per share on revenue of $339.3 million. MongoDB also reported a net loss of $64.4 million for the quarter, down from a loss of $84.4 million a year ago.

Revenue from subscriptions was the biggest source of MongoDB’s sales during the quarter, coming in at $348.2 million, up by 35% from a year ago. Services made up the rest of its revenue at $13.1 million.

For the full year fiscal 2023, MongoDB reported total revenue rose 47% from fiscal 2022, to $1.28 billion.

MongoDB is the creator of a document-oriented database, also called MongoDB, which works for a wide range of data-intensive applications. As well as the on-premises database, the company sells a cloud-native version called MongoDB Atlas, which now accounts for 65% of its total revenue, plus a mobile offering known as MongoDB Realm. All three offerings have become popular with developers, because the software is simple to use and can store data in many different kinds of formats.

MongoDB President and Chief Executive Dev Ittycheria (pictured) praised the company’s “strong finish to fiscal 2023,” saying that its business momentum is being driven by new enterprise customers looking to standardize on its developer data platform. “As we enter fiscal 2024, we are incredibly optimistic about the opportunity ahead for MongoDB as we continue to disrupt one of the largest markets in software,” Ittycheria said. “We remain focused on acquiring new customers and workloads while driving greater efficiency across the business.”

Unfortunately for investors, the CEO’s optimism was not reflected in the company’s guidance. For the first quarter, MongoDB forecast earnings of between 17 and 20 cents per share on revenue of $344 million to $348 million. Wall Street is looking for earnings of 14 cents per share on higher sales of $354.7 million.

For the full year, MongoDB sees earnings of between 96 cents and $1.10 per share on revenue of $1.48 billion to $1.51 billion. That compares with the analyst consensus estimate of 64 cents per share in earnings and $1.59 billion in sales. Clearly, investors were hoping MongoDB would be able to grow its revenue much faster than what it’s forecasting, as its stock fell more than 9% in extended trading, wiping out a 2% gain earlier in the day.

MongoDB said it ended the quarter with almost 41,000 new customers, up from just 33,000 one year earlier.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said MongoDB’s growth is due to the fact that multicloud is the reality for most enterprises today, and multicloud database offerings is what it provides. “Proof of this is its stellar growth, with revenue rising by over 40% for the year,” Mueller said. “With further innovation to be expected in 2023, that will help MongoDB continue growing, but Dev Ittycheria and team will need to rein in the company’s costs, because profits matter more than ever in a down economy.”

The company also announced a major expansion of its existing partnership with Google Cloud today, saying that it will double the scope of Google Cloud’s infrastructure required to support the accelerating adoption of MongoDB Atlas.

In addition to using more of Google’s resources, MongoDB said it will launch new integrations to improve connectivity with services such as BigQuery and enrich its data with Google’s cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning services. The companies also plan to expand their go-to-market initiatives and launch a new program that’s aimed at supporting startups that need help getting MongoDB Atlas running on Google Cloud.

Photo: MongoDB