Qlik beats Q4 2014 estimates, guides lower on FX headwinds
- Summary:
- Qlik is the latest to report Q4 2014 earnings beating forecasts but guides lower for 2015. How does it stack up against competition?
Another day, another earnings call as Qlik Technologies, which provides data discovery and visualization software that competes with Tableau (earnings report) and others, showed better than expected revenue and earnings for Q4 2014, but offered soft guidance for 2015, attributing that to significant foreign exchange headwinds. From the statement:
- Fourth quarter total revenue of $182.8 million increases 13% year-over-year; 20% in constant currency
- Fourth quarter license revenue of $112.6 million increases 9% year-over-year; 17% in constant currency
Analysts had forecast revenue of $179.5 million. The forward looking guidance is in the range $615-625 million for the 2015 year. Analysts had been expecting a number around $636 million. Qlik derives 64% of its revenues from non-US customers and attributes the softness to the impact of the relative strength of the US dollar. During the earnings call Tim McCormick, CFO said:
...the total impact of the currency headwind for the fourth quarter as a result of the relative strengthening of the U.S. Dollar during the second half of 2014 was $9.3 million.
Qlik ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $244 million up from $227 million in 2013. Deferred revenue stood at $127.5 million, an increase of 29% over the previous year.
During the earnings call, analysts pressed the company about traction for the relatively new Qlik Sense - a self service data discovery and visualization tool that is offered on a try before you buy basis. While the company would not be drawn on specifics, it stressed that the first half of 2015 will see Qlik continuing to ramp pipeline for that product rather than it having a significant impact on the top line. The company says that the bulk of its revenue in 2015 will be derived from Qlik View, its flagship discovery solution.
Inevitably, thoughts turn to the competitive landscape and below I have created a chart that compares Tableau and Qlik revenue since 2009 including their guidance for 2015.
Each will argue that they play in slightly different spaces but the reality is that Qlik has not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation Tableau claims and that is reflected in the revenue numbers. Tableau is less exposed to currency headwinds since it has a smaller proportion of its business outside the US. But even so, that is not enough to explain the disparity between the two companies.
My sense is that Tableau's leadership has done a better job of marketing its wares and is able to speak more fluently to market demand. It is perhaps telling that both companies reported some 1,500 attendees at their respective world conferences during 2014 but that it was only Qlik's first such foray whereas Tableau has been doing this for some years.
In another data point, during a Tweetstream centering on SAP's efforts with Lumira, one person is reported to have asked if they were looking at Tableau!
@nstevenlucas @vijayasankarv @ekolsky @dahowlett Ha - and i thought you jumped up and down when a colleague took Lumira for Tableau...
— Holger Mueller (@holgermu) February 13, 2015
Tableau's marketing doesn't get much better than that. The question now is what can Qlik do to accelerate beyond its modest forecasts for 2015?
Disclosure: SAP is a premier partner at time of writing.