UPDATED 00:33 EDT / MAY 09 2018

INFRA

Twilio tops earnings estimates as existing customers spend more

Cloud communications company Twilio Inc. gave its investors reason to be cheerful with a strong first-quarter earnings report that outperformed Wall Street’s expectations.

The company posted a first-quarter loss after certain costs such as stock compensation of 4 cents per share on revenue of $129.1 million, up 49 percent from the same period a year ago. Wall Street analysts were expecting the company to post an adjusted loss of 7 cents per share on revenue of $116.5 million.

Twilio posted a net loss for the quarter of $24.3 million, or 25 cents per share. Investors cheered the better-than-expected performance, pushing its stock price up 4 percent in after-hours trading.

Twilio sells software in the form of application programming interfaces that are used to facilitate real-time communications. Developers use its APIs to power text messages, voice calls and other forms of communications within the apps they build.

“Our first-quarter results exhibited broad-based strength across multiple areas of our business, especially with continued expansion with existing customers,” said Twilio Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson (pictured).

Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., agreed with Lawson’s assessment of the company’s strengths, saying Twilio has effectively become the “go-to” communication platform for applications that need to “connect with the real world.”

“When enterprises need to build next-generation applications, they turn to Twilio to ‘make the phones ring,’ and Twilio does much more than that today,” Mueller told SiliconANGLE. “As long as humans pick up phones and do business over the phones, and for as long as enterprises need to connect their apps with phones for next-generation apps, Twilio will do well.”

A quick look at the company’s guidance suggests Mueller could well be right, at least in the short term. For the current quarter, Twilio said it expects revenue of between $129 million and $131 million and an adjusted loss per share of 5 to 6 cents. Wall Street had projected a second-quarter loss of 6 cents per share on revenue of $123.2 million.

Image: Web Summit/Flickr

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