CrowdStrike shares jump after guidances tops estimates

Investing.com -- CrowdStrike Holdings (NASDAQ:CRWD) delivered strong current-quarter guidance and better-than-anticipated fourth-quarter results, sending shares in the cybersecurity group higher in premarket trading on Wednesday. 

The Texas-based firm expects first-quarter adjusted earnings per share (EPS) to be in a range of $0.89 to $0.90 on revenue of $902.2 million to 905.8M, topping Wall Street estimates for $0.82 on revenue of $899.5M.

For the three months ended Jan. 31, Crowdstrike reported adjusted EPS of $0.95 a share and revenue of $845.3M, beating estimates of $0.82 and $839.1M, respectively. Analysts at Bernstein said CrowdStrike demonstrated "increasing momentum," driven in particularly by the success of its "Falcon" data protection platform.

Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, jumped 34% year-over-year to $3.44B, which analysts at Guggenheim said demonstrated resilience to a recent pullback in IT spending by many customers wary of high inflation and elevated interest rates.

Looking ahead to fiscal 2025, CrowdStrike projected adjusted earnings per share of $3.77 to $3.97 on revenue of $3.92 billion to $4.00B. In a note, analysts at Citi said it had "delivered" against "lofty expectations and souring cyber-spending investor temperament."

CrowdStrike also said it had agreed to acquire cloud data start-up Flow Security. The company said the purchase, which is expected to close in its fiscal first quarter, aims to boost its cloud security with the ability to "secure data in all states, both at rest and in motion."

"Management called out Flow’s focus not only on discovery and classification of data in all states, but the company’s ability to analyze data pre- and postdecryption, enabling precise and instant results with a live view into data risk and [large language model]-powered policies," the Guggenheim analysts said in a note to clients.

Yasin Ebrahim contributed to this report.