Demand for Windows operating-system software has fallen with sales of the personal computers that use it.
Photo:
STEVE MARCUS/REUTERS
Microsoft’s
MSFT -0.22%
latest results are like a blast from the past—and not in a good way.
The software titan has come a long way from the days when it depended on its ubiquitous Windows operating system. But it is still a lucrative business—enough so that a slump in personal computer sales can weigh on Microsoft’s financial results. And a slump this is; IDC reported earlier this month that PC unit sales slid 28% year over year during the December quarter—the biggest drop tracked by the market research firm’s numbers going at least back to 2015.
Not surprisingly then, Microsoft said Tuesday in its fiscal second quarter results report that Windows revenue slid 27% year over year to about $4.9 billion for the same period. That is less than 10% of the company’s revenue now, but it is a profitable contributor given that much comes from PC makers simply paying Microsoft to bundle Windows onto their machines. Hence, operating profits in Microsoft’s More Personal Computing segment that includes the Windows business slid 48% year over year. That played a big part in the company’s total operating profit for the quarter coming about 3% shy of Wall Street’s forecasts, at $20.4 billion.
Investors have largely learned to look past Windows these days in favor of Microsoft’s far more important cloud business. But as Microsoft’s last report three months ago proved, even that isn’t immune to the slumping global economy. Azure, the cloud computing service that competes squarely with
Amazon
‘s AWS, grew revenue by 31% year over year. That slightly exceeded Wall Street’s forecasts, but it was still a record-low pace for the business. Things also aren’t looking like they will get much better anytime soon. Chief Financial Officer
Amy Hood
noted that cloud growth moderated, “particularly in December,” and projected revenue growth of 14% to 15% year over year for the company’s Intelligent Cloud segment during the March quarter—a deceleration of 11 percentage points from the same period last year.
Investors were at least better-prepared for bad news this time. Microsoft’s share price slipped 1% in after-hours trading following the results and forecast compared with the 8% drop sparked by its previous quarterly report. As the first major tech player to post results for the December quarter, Microsoft also casts a large shadow. It has a highly diversified business that spans corporate and consumer software, cloud services, videogame systems and even online advertising. The company even noted that the recent spate of big tech layoffs will hurt its LinkedIn business, which is a major corporate recruiting tool in the tech sector. Those layoffs include 10,000 positions to be cut from Microsoft’s own payroll–another sign that even a cloud titan can’t keep floating above the economy.
recorded its slowest sales growth in more than six years last quarter as demand for its software and cloud services cooled on concerns about the health of the global economy.
The Redmond, Wash., company’s revenue expanded 2% in the three months through Dec. 31 from a year earlier to $52.7 billion. Its net income fell 12% to $16.4 billion. That is the company’s lowest revenue growth since the quarter that ended in June 2016.
“Organizations are exercising caution given the macroeconomic uncertainty,” Microsoft Chief Executive
Satya Nadella
said on an earnings call Tuesday.
Newsletter Sign-up
Technology
A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ’s Personal Tech gurus.
The software company is the first of the tech titans to announce earnings for the quarter. It and others have recently announced layoffs of thousands of people to reflect a sudden lowering of expectations about future demand. Last week Microsoft announced plans to eliminate 10,000 jobs in response to the global economic slowdown, the company’s largest layoffs in more than eight years.
Microsoft said it expects around $51 billion in revenue this quarter, a 3% increase from the same quarter last year. Its shares, which had initially risen on the results in after-hours trading, gave up their gains after the company announced its guidance.
Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud business, which includes its Azure cloud-computing business, grew 18% to $21.51 billion. Azure grew 31%, which was slightly above some analysts’ expectations.
Microsoft is one of the top companies in cloud-computing services that have boomed during the pandemic. In the middle of the health crisis, Microsoft reported several quarters in a row of 50% or more year-over-year sales growth for its cloud-computing platform, the world’s No. 2 behind
Amazon.com Inc.’s
cloud. While Azure and Microsoft’s other cloud services remain the main engine for the company’s growth, demand isn’t what it was even a year ago as customers try to manage their cloud computing costs.
The company has been betting the next wave of demand for cloud services could come from more companies and people using artificial intelligence. It has been deepening its relationship with the AI startup OpenAI, the company behind the image generator Dall-E 2 and the technology behind ChatGPT, which can answer questions and write essays and poems.
“The age of AI is upon us and Microsoft is powering it,” Mr. Nadella said Tuesday.
Microsoft had been sheltered from much of the recent downturn because it gets most of its sales from companies rather than advertising and consumer spending. However, it isn’t immune to the end of pandemic trends that turbocharged demand, hiring and investment as well as economic headwinds such as high interest rates.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What is your outlook for Microsoft? Join the conversation below.
Demand for Windows operating-system software has fallen with sales of the personal computers that use it. Households, companies and governments that bought computers during the pandemic are scaling back.
That was reflected in Microsoft’s personal computing segment revenue, which fell 19% to $14.24 billion. Sales related to its Windows operating system declined 39% and sales of devices like its Surface tablets fell 39%.
Worldwide PC shipments were down 29% in the fourth quarter last year compared with the previous year, according to preliminary data from the research firm Gartner Inc. Financial analysts don’t expect that trend to improve until 2024.
Photos: Tech Layoffs Across the Industry
Microsoft said its videogaming revenue fell 12% during the quarter. Videogames and Microsoft’s Xbox videogame consoles are increasingly important businesses for the company. The videogaming industry is going through a slowdown as pandemic-related restrictions ease and people spend less time at home.
The company made a huge bet on the sector a year ago with its $75 billion plan to acquire videogame giant
Activision Blizzard Inc.
Last month the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the acquisition, saying the deal would give Microsoft the ability to control how consumers beyond users of its own Xbox consoles and subscription services access Activision’s games. Microsoft then filed a rebuttal saying the deal won’t hurt competition in the videogaming industry. It could take months before it is decided in the U.S. and elsewhere whether the deal can go through.
After the close of regular stock trading on Tuesday, Microsoft shares had slipped around 18% over the previous year, broadly in line with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it is moving quickly to incorporate artificial-intelligence tools from OpenAI into its products and services. This includes OpenAI’s chatbot called ChatGPT, which launched just over a month ago and has skyrocketed in popularity as users have flocked to the tool, which spits out conversational answers to queries and—much to the chagrin of educators everywhere—can also pen full essays and even poems.
Newsletter Sign-up
Alert
Heard on the Street
The first word on what Wall Street is talking about, delivered to you via email notification.
Chief Executive
Satya Nadella
told a Wall Street Journal panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that “every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product.”
Microsoft already invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is reportedly looking to put even more into the startup, so its interest in making use of the technology is unsurprising. But the news was also another unwelcome development for Google, whose core search business could be threatened by the question-answering function of technologies such as ChatGPT.
The New York Times reported last month that ChatGPT’s launch Nov. 30 triggered Google’s management to declare a “code red” internally. Microsoft is Google’s largest rival in web search, though its Bing search engine still only accounts for a low single-digit percentage of the global market.
Shares of Google-parent
Alphabet
GOOG 0.92%
slipped nearly 1% on Tuesday and have fallen nearly 10% since the ChatGPT launch—the worst performance of the big techs and triple the percentage loss of the Nasdaq during that time. Microsoft’s shares rose Tuesday by a fraction while Nvidia, which specializes in artificial-intelligence chips used in data centers by both companies, jumped nearly 5%.
“We see ChatGPT’s prowess and traction with consumers as a near-term threat to Alphabet’s multiple and a boost for Microsoft and Nvidia,” UBS analysts wrote in a recent report.
ChatGPT indeed seems more than a flash in the pan. Data from Similarweb shows daily visits to the tool’s home page recently surpassed 20 million—nearly double the daily hits the site was generating two weeks after its launch.
But investors might be getting ahead of themselves as far as the impact on Google goes. Not all web queries are created equal—especially ones that will generate revenue through advertising links. ChatGPT specializes in natural-language queries that generate humanlike answers.
Not all of those answers contain correct information, however, and tracing the source of that information is difficult. In a recent report, Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik said there is “an ocean of difference between a general information search query and a monetizable one,” adding that ChatGPT’s shortcomings on the latter were “glaringly obvious.”
Google also has the deeply ingrained behavior of the masses to fall back on. The company has powered more than 90% of global internet searches since at least 2009, according to StatCounter. Even Microsoft’s launch of Bing in the middle of that year didn’t really dent Google’s share.
Ultimately, incorporating AI tools such as ChatGPT could be costly for both companies given the computing horsepower required.
Brian Nowak
of Morgan Stanley estimates that ChatGPT’s cost per query is about seven times as much as the cost to Google for a traditional search query.
That multiple could drop to four times if OpenAI is able to access the lowest price tiers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, Mr. Nowak estimates. But that is still quite a gap, and one that is reflective of the costs Microsoft might bear as it works ChatGPT and other OpenAI tools deeper into its products.
Such pressure would be untimely. Investors are placing greater focus on both companies’ profits as revenue growth is projected to slow considerably this year. Alphabet’s operating margins are expected to come in at 27% this year—down from 2022 but still about 5 percentage points above what it averaged in the three years before the pandemic. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to keep its own margins above the 40% line for the third consecutive year—a feat not managed since 1999.
That may explain why Microsoft finally elected to follow other major techs in reducing its headcount. The company said Wednesday morning that it plans to lay off about 10,000 employees, or less than 5% of its workforce. Many expect Google’s parent to make a similar move soon.
How to spend more when investors want to see less going out the door is a question even ChatGPT wouldn’t be able to answer.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new artificially intelligent chatbot, can write essays on complex topics. Joanna Stern went back to high school AP Literature for a day to see if she could pass the class using just AI. Photo illustration: Elena Scotti
Cloud gaming is an emerging technology that allows people to stream videogames to nearly any internet-connected device, similar to how movies and shows are viewed on
Netflix,
Hulu and other streaming platforms.
The business model being developed alongside cloud gaming is a subscription service, where consumers get to play a catalog of games for a flat monthly or annual fee. With cloud gaming, players can avoid downloading games to their devices, which takes up memory, and they don’t need to invest in hardware such as a console or high-end computer.
The FTC and videogame industry participants anticipate cloud gaming will become a much larger part of the market in years to come. With its lawsuit, the FTC says it is protecting the videogame-distribution market—as it is today and how it is expected to evolve—from being dominated by a few companies.
Newsletter Sign-up
Technology
A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ’s Personal Tech gurus.
Microsoft is an early leader in cloud gaming with its Xbox Game Pass subscription service. The company’s $75 billion deal forActivision would bolster its content library, adding several blockbuster franchises including “Call of Duty,” “World of Warcraft” and “Candy Crush Saga.”
Microsoft, which has pledged to fight the FTC’s suit, has said it is an underdog in the existing console market, with Xbox’s position trailing
Sony Group Corp.’s
PlayStation and
Nintendo Co.
’s Switch. The company doesn’t disclose Xbox sales by volume.
Shoppers are seeing more out-of-stock messages than ever, but inventory tracking websites like HotStock and Zoolert are giving people a better chance of finding the hot-ticket products they’re looking for. Here’s how those websites work. Illustration: Sebastian Vega
The technology giant has also said that it has no meaningful presence in mobile, the biggest corner of the overall videogame industry by revenue.
Apple Inc.
and
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google, makers of the predominant smartphone operating systems, play a critical role in how people access mobile games, and they take a cut of developers’ in-app and subscription sales.
Xbox Game Pass, which Microsoft launched in 2017, offers a library of hundreds of games for subscribers to play starting at $9.99 a month. The basic plan allows subscribers to download individual games on their Xbox or PC to play whenever they want. For $14.99 a month, subscribers can play some of thosegames via the cloud, all part of Microsoft’s ambitions to build a “Netflix of gaming.” The company in January said Game Pass had 25 million subscribers.
Global consumer spending on cloud-gaming services and games streamed via the cloud will reach a combined $2.4 billion by the end of this year, according to an estimate from Newzoo BV. That is a tiny fraction—1.4%—of the $184.4 billion in overall spending on videogame software.
Sony, which has aggressively lobbied governments around the world to oppose the Microsoft-Activision tie-up, and others have attempted to grow their own cloud-gaming subscription services. Microsoft, for now, is the dominant player, accounting for 60% of the overall cloud-gaming business last year, according to an estimate from research firm Omdia.
Microsoft is an early leader in cloud gaming with its Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
Photo:
etienne laurent/Shutterstock
The FTC appears concerned that it “can’t see the unintended consequences even just a few years down the road for an acquisition like this,” said
Paul Swanson,
a Denver-based antitrust lawyer at Holland & Hart LLP. “What they’re saying here is we’re going to err on the side of preserving as many independent competitors as we can.”
Over the past decade, Microsoft has poured billions into its cloud operations primarily for selling software and infrastructure for enterprise customers. It is now building out a separate cloud infrastructure to power its videogaming ambitions, which have been under development since it launched its first Xbox console in 2001.
Cloud gaming hasn’t been an easy business to navigate. The technology is difficult for companies to execute smoothly because games need to support multiple players with minimal delay regardless of where players are located. Earlier this year, Google shut down its game-streaming service, Stadia, after struggling to gain traction with users.
Microsoft remains heavily invested in its Xbox hardware, but cloud gaming gives it an opportunity to reach more gamers. It wants to build its own mobile app store, a move it says would create more competition in mobile videogames, not less. The Redmond, Wash., company has argued that Apple and Google’s app marketplaces have policies that pose technical and financial barriers to its goals.
Representatives for Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment. Apple has said that it doesn’t prevent cloud-gaming apps from appearing in the App Store and that it isn’t trying to block their emergence.
Industry researcher and academic
Joost van Dreunen
said Microsoft’s mobile move would likely benefit the videogame ecosystem by diminishing Apple and Google’s grip.
Microsoft has said it is an underdog in the console market, with Xbox trailing consoles such as Nintendo’s Switch.
Photo:
Guillaume Payen/Zuma Press
“It breaks down the so-called walled-garden strategy that has dominated the game industry for 20 years,” he said.
Since Microsoft announced its deal for Activision, which it values at nearly $69 billion after adjusting for the developers’ net cash, some videogame players have been concerned about what it means for industry competition.
Steve Schweitzer of State College, Pa., is worried that Microsoft will raise the price of Game Pass over time. He said that it is affordable now but that in a few years, if Microsoft becomes more dominant, it could bump up the price and start cutting back on quality. Mr. Schweitzer, 55 years old, said he remembers back in the 1990s when Microsoft was able to use its market power to capture market share in the browser wars. “I’ve seen this game before,” he said.
Before its lawsuit, the FTC had been reviewing the deal for months. Regulators in other jurisdictions, including the European Union and the United Kingdom, are doing the same. The company has gained approval for the deal in smaller markets such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia.
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com and Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com
The cloud boom has finally reached a resting altitude, but Wall Street is doing anything but resting.
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
-4.06%,
the original pioneer in cloud computing, confirmed Thursday what rivals Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
-1.98%
and Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
-2.85%
GOOG,
-2.34%
suggested with their earnings reports earlier in the week: Cloud-computing growth has finally reached a plateau, as companies around the world cut costs to address the slowing economy. Amazon Web Services, the backbone of Amazon’s profit, saw revenue hit its slowest growth on record, and executives said that it will slow down even more.
“The back end of the quarter, we were more in the mid-20% growth range, so carry that forecast to the fourth quarter — we are not sure how it’s going to play out, but that’s generally our assumption,” Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told analysts after reporting quarterly growth of 27.5%.
It was a jarring slowdown for AWS, which recorded 33% growth in the second quarter, 37% growth in the first, 37% in the fourth quarter of 2021 and 39% growth a year ago. It shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, though: Smaller rivals reported similar slowdowns earlier in the week.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud business grew 35% in its fiscal first quarter, down from 40% in the previous quarter and 50% the year before, and executives predicted another five-percentage-point fall this quarter. Alphabet’s Google Cloud is also slowing, even though it was the bright spot of double-digit growth in the disappointing quarter for the internet ad and search giant. Google’s Cloud Services grew 37.6% in the third quarter, up from 35.6% growth in the second quarter, but down from 43.8% in the first quarter, and 44.6% in the fourth quarter.
Regular readers of this column should also not be surprised, as we predicted three months ago (perhaps just a tad early) that a slowdown was coming. It probably should have happened in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused a rush of companies to boost their cloud services, as remote work suddenly made a move to the cloud essential for many businesses.
More recently, though, the largest businesses with the most complex workloads are shutting down or putting off major projects, and cutting their spending on the cloud-computing power they would have needed to support hem.
“There are three parts to the cloud slowdown,” said Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at Lopez Research, who joined MarketWatch in predicting a cloud-spending slowdown earlier this year. “One is related to reigning in and rationalizing the Wild West of spending that companies did during COVID to keep the lights on,” which is leading to the cutbacks we see now. Second, recent waves of cloud workloads by the industries that are still slow-rolling their move to the cloud — such as government, healthcare and education — “are the most complex, time consuming and challenging to move to the cloud quickly.” Lastly, is a general fear related to the macroeconomic environment, leading to cuts anywhere executives can find them.
Read also: The cloud boom is coming back to earth.
Wall Street has reacted swiftly and strongly, ripping more than $300 billion in market cap away from just Microsoft and Amazon this week, if Amazon’s steep decline in Thursday’s after-hours session persists. But this is where it helps to think about a longer-term view: Just because cloud growth is declining does not mean that the technology is still not core to the future.
Microsoft and Amazon will continue to develop and sell their cloud-computing offerings, and they will see healthy margins on them. Google is continuing to invest in its cloud business, adding 2,000 new employees via its acquisition of Mandiant last quarter, and executives said this week that businesses and governments are still in the early days of public cloud adoption.
“We’re pleased with the momentum in Cloud and do continue to be excited about the long-term opportunity,” Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat told analysts this week.
Many analysts agree. Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said this week in a note about Microsoft that “the shift to cloud is still less than 50% penetrated.” Growth is slowing as inflation continues and the strong dollar outside the U.S. hits the revenue lines of many tech giants, causing many companies to pause in their spending, but that is a short-term problem.
Moving to a cloud provider is not for the faint of heart, and it is a transition that in some cases takes longer than expected. The same will hold true for investing in the cloud for the long term, even as there is some pain now. It’s still a massive and important part of the tech sector, an essential business that enabled companies to keep operating around the world during the pandemic. Whatever the future growth rate, the cloud appears here to stay.
This may surprise you: Wall Street analysts expect earnings for the S&P 500 to increase 8% during 2023, despite all the buzz about a possible recession as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy to quell inflation.
Ken Laudan, a portfolio manager at Kornitzer Capital Management in Mission, Kan., isn’t buying it. He expects an “earnings recession” for the S&P 500
SPX,
+2.69%
— that is, a decline in profits of around 10%. But he also expects that decline to set up a bottom for the stock market.
Laudan’s predictions for the S&P 500 ‘earnings recession’ and bottom
Laudan, who manages the $83 million Buffalo Large Cap Fund
BUFEX,
-2.86%
and co-manages the $905 million Buffalo Discovery Fund
BUFTX,
-2.82%,
said during an interview: “It is not unusual to see a 20% hit [to earnings] in a modest recession. Margins have peaked.”
The consensus among analysts polled by FactSet is for weighted aggregate earnings for the S&P 500 to total $238.23 a share in 2023, which would be an 8% increase from the current 2022 EPS estimate of $220.63.
Laudan said his base case for 2023 is for earnings of about $195 to $200 a share and for that decline in earnings (about 9% to 12% from the current consensus estimate for 2022) to be “coupled with an economic recession of some sort.”
He expects the Wall Street estimates to come down, and said that “once Street estimates get to $205 or $210, I think stocks will take off.”
He went further, saying “things get really interesting at 3200 or 3300 on the S&P.” The S&P 500 closed at 3583.07 on Oct. 14, a decline of 24.8% for 2022, excluding dividends.
Laudan said the Buffalo Large Cap Fund was about 7% in cash, as he was keeping some powder dry for stock purchases at lower prices, adding that he has been “fairly defensive” since October 2021 and was continuing to focus on “steady dividend-paying companies with strong balance sheets.”
Leaders for the stock market’s recovery
After the market hits bottom, Laudan expects a recovery for stocks to begin next year, as “valuations will discount and respond more quickly than the earnings will.”
He expects “long-duration technology growth stocks” to lead the rally, because “they got hit first.” When asked if Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
+5.93%
and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
+3.77%
were good examples, in light of the broad decline for semiconductor stocks and because both are held by the Buffalo Large Cap Fund, Laudan said: “They led us down and they will bounce first.”
Laudan said his “largest tech holding” is ASML Holding N.V.
ASML,
+3.60%,
which provides equipment and systems used to fabricate computer chips.
Among the largest tech-oriented companies, the Buffalo Large Cap fund also holds shares of Apple Inc.
AAPL,
+3.13%,
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+3.85%,
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
+6.28%
and Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
+4.05%
GOOGL,
+3.86%.
Laudan also said he had been “overweight’ in UnitedHealth Group Inc.
UNH,
+1.31%,
Danaher Corp.
DHR,
+2.60%
and Linde PLC
LIN,
+2.30%
recently and had taken advantage of the decline in Adobe Inc.’s
ADBE,
+1.97%
price following the announcement of its $20 billion acquisition of Figma, by scooping up more shares.
Summarizing the declines
To illustrate what a brutal year it has been for semiconductor stocks, the iShares Semiconductor ETF
SOXX,
+2.02%,
which tracks the PHLX Semiconductor Index
SOX,
+2.22%
of 30 U.S.-listed chip makers and related equipment manufacturers, has dropped 44% this year. Then again, SOXX had risen 38% over the past three years and 81% for five years, underlining the importance of long-term thinking for stock investors, even during this terrible bear market for this particular tech space.
Here’s a summary of changes in stock prices (again, excluding dividends) and forward price-to-forward-earnings valuations during 2022 through Oct. 14 for every stock mentioned in this article. The stocks are sorted alphabetically:
Company
Ticker
2022 price change
Forward P/E
Forward P/E as of Dec. 31, 2021
Apple Inc.
AAPL,
+3.13%
-22%
22.2
30.2
Adobe Inc.
ADBE,
+1.97%
-49%
19.4
40.5
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
+6.28%
-36%
62.1
64.9
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
+3.77%
-61%
14.7
43.1
ASML Holding N.V. ADR
ASML,
+3.60%
-52%
22.7
41.2
Danaher Corp.
DHR,
+2.60%
-23%
24.3
32.1
Alphabet Inc. Class C
GOOG,
+4.05%
-33%
17.5
25.3
Linde PLC
LIN,
+2.30%
-21%
22.2
29.6
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+3.85%
-32%
22.5
34.0
Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
+5.93%
-62%
28.9
58.0
UnitedHealth Group Inc.
UNH,
+1.31%
2%
21.5
23.2
Source: FactSet
You can click on the tickers for more about each company. Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available free on the MarketWatch quote page.
The forward P/E ratio for the S&P 500 declined to 16.9 as of the close on Oct. 14 from 24.5 at the end of 2021, while the forward P/E for SOXX declined to 13.2 from 27.1.
Don’t miss: This is how high interest rates might rise, and what could scare the Federal Reserve into a policy pivot
Adobe beat revenue and profit expectations, and on the same day announced it would acquire a smaller but faster-growing rival in online design-collaboration tools. The stock market rewarded the company by pushing down its shares
ADBE,
-3.12%
to the lowest level in almost three years.
Investors punished the company not for its earnings report, released Thursday, but for their disdain of the Figma deal. Specifically, the deal’s price.
Read: Nervous investors are slamming tech deals. Just look at Adobe.
In a $20 billion half-cash, half-stock transaction, Figma became the highest-multiple cloud-scale SaaS deal ever done. An estimated $400 million in revenue for all of 2022 marks this deal at around 50 times this year’s revenue in what I believe to be the second-largest software as a service deal in history.
In this market, where growth is persona non grata, the market deemed this deal a bridge too far. However, in this case, the market may have gotten this wrong.
Figma is among the fastest-growing companies
If you aren’t familiar with Figma, it’s a red-hot, venture-backed (before Thursday) company that makes collaboration tools used for digital experiences. While Figma was founded in 2011, the first five years were spent trying to get to product. The company printed its first dollar in revenue in 2017 and will hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2022.
For those who aren’t familiar with SaaS economics, hitting $400 million in recurring revenue in just over 10 years is remarkable. However, doing so five years from the first dollar of revenue is even more impressive.
For reference, the average cloud-scale SaaS company books $10 million in revenue after about 4.5 years, according to Kimchi Hill. In the same study, assessing more than 72 SaaS companies that reached $100 million, only eight did so in less than five years from the first dollar — and that was precisely $100 million. Most take five to 10 years to hit $100 million, and well-known names like DocuSign
DOCU,
-6.14%,
Coupa
COUP,
-4.28%,
RingCentral
RNG,
-5.34%
and Five9
FIVN,
-4.22%
took 10 to 15 years.
Beyond its speedy growth, the company is also performing in a way that should have been lauded by at least the savviest of investors. Its 150% net customer retention rate, 90% gross margins, high organic growth and positive operating cash flow make it more of what investors want in a company today. Adobe already grows in the double digits, plays in attractive markets, compounds ARR and, at this point, has seen its multiple come way down off its highs.
It is also worth considering how Figma may benefit from Adobe’s strong market position, known product portfolio and defined channels, and go-to-market strategies to speed its growth in this space with a total addressable market of about $16.5 billion.
Rare companies are still rare
Perhaps it sounds as if I’m gushing over this deal. I want to be clear that I am not. At least not yet.
However, the hive mind of the market can be quite perplexing at times, and there is a data-driven story here that justifies Adobe’s decision to buy Figma at such a lofty price. Unfortunately, we won’t know with any certainty for five or even 10 years. Investors may not like that, but Adobe’s longevity depends on operating with the longer term in mind.
Tough economy or not, rare companies are still rare, and Figma is traversing market conditions and delivering growth in a large market, drawing Adobe in at an unprecedented price. Perhaps higher than it should have, or could have, paid.
However, based on its rapid revenue growth, strong net dollar retention, 100% growth rate in 2022, massive margins and apparent synergies across the Adobe portfolio, it may be Adobe that has the last laugh on this one.
Daniel Newman is the principal analyst at Futurum Research, which provides or has provided research, analysis, advising or consulting to Adobe, Five9 and dozens of other technology companies. Neither he nor his firm holds any equity positions in companies cited. Follow him on Twitter @danielnewmanUV.
fell 20% Friday, wiping out the stock’s pandemic-era gains, after the e-signature software maker released softer-than-expected guidance for its fiscal 2023.
The company said Thursday evening that it expects full-year revenue to be between $2.47 billion to $2.48 billion, lower than the $2.61 billion that analysts surveyed by FactSet had been expecting.
The company also said it expects subscription revenue growth to slow, forecasting a range of $2.39 billion to $2.41 billion.
Billings, which reflect new-customer sales, subscription renewals and add-on sales for existing customers, are expected to come in between $2.71 billion and $2.73 billion, also a substantial slowdown from 2021.
The company warned in December that its growth would likely be hampered as people returned to more normalized working and buying patterns as the pandemic faded. The company said at the time that it would invest in increasing its sales efforts, increase marketing spending and spend more on product innovation.
DocuSign fits into a category of companies that made working from home easier to manage and benefitted as businesses adapted to remote and paperless environments. But its business has taken a hit as the pandemic fades and more offices begin calling their employees back to in-person work.
Its share price tripled in 2020, but fell almost 32% last year. Shares closed Friday at $75.01 and are down 51% so far this year.
DocuSign CEO Dan Springer discussed the e-signature company in March 2019.
Photo:
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
Despite the forecasted slowdown, Chief Executive Officer
Dan Springer
said the company’s digital-signature business will continue to grow.
“As people begin to return to the office, they are not returning to paper,” Mr. Springer said. “eSignature and the broader Agreement Cloud will only continue to gain prominence in the evolving Anywhere Economy.”
The worse-than-expected guidance came even as DocuSign topped analysts’ expectations for revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter. The company reported adjusted earnings of 48 cents a share on revenue of $580.8 million. Analysts were expecting adjusted earnings of 48 cents a share on revenue of $562 million.
DocuSign also said its board has authorized it to buy back $200 million worth of shares. At the same time, the company said Chief Revenue Officer Loren Alhadeff intends to resign.
Still, analysts at Oppenheimer on Friday removed their $250 price target on the stock and downgraded DocuSign to perform from outperform.
“The guidance shows that the challenges seen then with respect to sales execution and resetting post-Covid consumption patterns remain near- to medium-term headwinds,” the analysts wrote.
aims to shake up the game industry by expanding the software giant’s library of blockbuster videogames and bolstering its efforts to entice consumers to its cloud-gaming service.
The planned $75 billion deal would be Microsoft’s biggest ever and its most ambitious investment yet in its plan to turn its Game Pass subscription service into the
Netflix
of gaming. Once the acquisition closes, Microsoft said it would be the world’s third-largest game company by sales, with 30 game studios under its belt, including the developers of popular franchises Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush.
Around a decade ago, Microsoft shifted to bringing its corporate clients to subscription-based cloud services. The move has helped lift its market value to $2 trillion and maintain its status as one of the world’s top tech companies. The Activision acquisition positions Microsoft to use the same tactic on consumers by persuading gamers to abandon their expensive hardware and play on the cloud.
“Together with Activision Blizzard, we have an incredible opportunity to invest and innovate, to create the best content, community and cloud for gamers to build substantial new value for our shareholders,” said Microsoft Chief Executive
Satya Nadella
on an investor and media call Tuesday.
With more gamers playing on smartphones rather than pricey game consoles and computers, companies around the world are racing to develop services for streaming high-end games to all kinds of devices the same way movies and TV shows are streamed.
Amazon.com Inc.,
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google,
Sony Group Corp.
and a host of smaller players are trying, but Microsoft has taken a large early lead in the emerging cloud-game space by spending billions of dollars on acquisitions and infrastructure, analysts said.
“Microsoft has big aspirations in gaming,” said
Mark Moerdler,
a Bernstein Research analyst. “Microsoft has been buying a number of studios because of what they’re trying to build with Game Pass and subscription gaming.”
If the company can convert some of Activision’s nearly 400 million monthly active users into subscribers, it could significantly bolster its cloud-game business, Mr. Moerdler said.
Subscribers to Microsoft’s Game Pass have increased 39% in the past year to 25 million, the company said. A billboard in New York pitching Activision’s ’Call of Duty: Vanguard.’
Photo:
Richard B. Levine/Zuma Press
Cloud gaming is an emerging technology that allows people to stream games using nearly any internet-connected device with a screen, much as they stream videos on Netflix, Hulu and other platforms. Streaming games is more challenging, though, because games are interactive and require a lot more data to run smoothly. While Netflix moved into mobile games last year, it has so far offered only a handful of games that subscribers must download to an Android or iOS device—not games that can be streamed via the cloud.
Consumer spending on cloud-game services reached $3.7 billion last year, with Microsoft’s Game Pass accounting for 60%, according to research firm Omdia, which forecasts total cloud-game revenue will hit $12 billion by 2026.
Along with announcing its planned acquisition, Microsoft said Tuesday that subscribers to Game Pass—which includes cloud gaming, online multiplayer support and access to a large, rotating library of games—have increased 39% in the past year to 25 million.
Mr. Nadella said Microsoft plans to bring as many Activision games as it can to Game Pass. As it has done with games from developers it has acquired previously, Microsoft could make future games from Activision exclusive on Game Pass and Xbox consoles, analysts said.
“We do think our investment in cloud creates a unique capability for triple-A content to reach any screen on any device,” Microsoft game chief
Phil Spencer
said after the Activision deal was announced.
Growing its cloud-game business will help Microsoft diversify further into consumer-facing businesses. That could narrow the leads Sony’s PlayStation has on Microsoft in game hardware and Amazon’s in cloud services. Mr. Nadella’s broader strategy for Microsoft puts cloud computing at the center of a collection of disparate businesses, from corporate software and enterprise data storage to social media and digital advertising.
Microsoft’s commitments to gaming and the cloud have been years in the making. Since taking over in 2014, Mr. Nadella has leaned heavily on offering the company’s enterprise customers cloud-computing services to power their businesses. This strategy has been the primary driver behind Microsoft’s ascent to become the world’s second-most-valuable company behind
Apple Inc.,
with a market valuation of nearly $2.3 trillion.
Ms. Wu, a target of the GamerGate scandal, says Activision Blizzard’s CEO led a culture of non-accountability, during an interview at WSJ’s Women In: The Tech Industry event.
For years, gaming took a back seat at Microsoft, where consumer-facing businesses got less attention, former and current employees said. The Xbox team was slotted under the Windows operating system and didn’t directly report to the CEO, as Mr. Nadella focused on selling the Office 365 business-software suite and developing the cloud-computing business. The Xbox group struggled to find its place in this structure, the employees said, as the unit was always competing with Windows priorities for investments, typically without success, they said.
“Under Windows, we had to make trade-offs between investing in big gaming initiatives and features for Windows enterprise customers,” said
Richard Irving,
who spent 12 years working on Xbox before leaving Microsoft in 2016. “That was the challenge of being in the Windows division.”
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the company’s previous management of its game business.
A few years ago, Microsoft decided to become more aggressive about expanding its cloud usage to gaming, its main touch point with consumers. Internally, there has been concern that Microsoft is too dependent on enterprise for growth, said people familiar with company strategy. The decision to do more in gaming came after Microsoft looked at the possibility of buying consumer-facing businesses including TikTok,
Pinterest
and Discord, the people said.
It started snapping up game makers, spending more than $10 billion to buy game studios and build a vast library. The company has added popular titles such as the Doom franchise, acquired last year.
Microsoft isn’t alone. The global videogame industry has been riding a wave of consolidation and investing in recent years. Spending on mergers and acquisitions nearly tripled to $26.2 billion in 2021 from $8.9 billion in 2020, data from PitchBook show. And venture-capital deals nearly doubled to a record $11.2 billion from $6.4 billion, according to the private-market-data firm.
Write to Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com and Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
Nvidia Corp. shares rallied Thursday as more than half the analysts who cover the chip maker hiked their price targets following the company’s record quarter and forecast for more new highs based on data-center gains.
Nvidia
NVDA,
+6.13%
shares rallied more than 7% in morning trading to hit an intraday high of $204.95, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index
SOX,
+1.20%
gained more than 1%, and the S&P 500 index
SPX,
+0.32%
gained 0.4%. Nvidia shares last closed at a split-adjusted record high of $206.99 back on July 6, and are up 68% over the past 12 months.
For more on today’s market action, see Market Snapshot
Nvidia forecast revenue of $6.66 billion to $6.94 billion Wednesday, above Wall Street estimates at the time, and said that the “lion’s share” of the $500 million increase will come from data-center sales. That follows new records for total, gaming and data-center revenues that Nvidia reported for the quarter.
What many analysts picked up on is that demand for graphics processing units (GPUs) for cryptocurrency mining didn’t factor that much into the outlook. That came as a relief to analysts, who noted a lower crypto risk compared with 2018 when a fall in cryptocurrency values prompted many miners to sell their gaming card-powered rigs, flooding the market with second-hand cards.
Full earnings coverage: Nvidia reports record data-center and gaming revenue, but supply constraints still a concern
Nvidia broke out sales of its Cryptocurrency Mining Processors, or CMPs, which are intended to divert mining demand away from GPUs made for gamers and not expected to be material in revenue gains.
Data-center sales took up much more of the attention from analysts, however. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon, who has an outperform rating on the stock and raised his price target to a $230 from $180, said that while “the company is having absolutely no trouble continuing to crush gaming,” Nvidia’s data-center story “still feels like it has some room to run.”
“The data-center story is really coming into its own now, with a sizable inflection in the near term and with prospect for the segment to equal, and potentially exceed, gaming in the not-too-distant future,” Rasgon said.
For more: Nvidia’s ARM acquisition is stalled, and there’s a deadline with more than a billion dollars at stake
Evercore ISI analyst C.J. Muse, who has an outperform rating and a $250 price target, called data-center sales a “key for the stock.”
“Data Center revenues were guided to accelerate in 3Q off a very strong comp based on strength across hyperscale and vertical customers, training and inference applications, and compute and networking technologies – the democratization of AI workloads continues to be a front and center theme here, and one we see Nvidia driving and benefiting from over for the foreseeable future,” Muse said.
Cowen analyst Matthew Ramsay, who has an outperform rating and raised his price target to $220.00 from $176.25, said that the data-center acceleration was “the most important takeaway” from the earnings call.
“We expect sustainable data-center and gaming product cycles that should drive >50%+ organic growth for the company in F’2022,” Ramsay said.
Jefferies analyst Mark Lipacis, who has a buy rating and raised his price target to $223 from $214, addressed the lower risk of another crypto-mining debacle.
Read: Crypto is reshaping the world economy, 50 years after Nixon ended the dollar’s peg to gold. Here’s how some are playing it
“We think crypto-miners are 1/10th the gaming GPU sales vs 2018,” Lipacis said. “We continue to believe the risk of a crypto-driven gaming bust is low, and expect Nvidia’s ecosystem moat and increasing software revenues to lead to additional upside surprises.”
Of the 41 analysts who cover Nvidia, 34 have buy ratings, five have hold ratings, and two have sell ratings. Of those, at least 24 analysts hiked their price targets in response to the earnings and one lowered their target, according to FactSet. That resulted in an average price target of $219.23, up from a previous $204.24.
