The collaboration and messaging app Slack saw its stock slide 12% on Wednesday after it announced its first quarterly earnings as a public company.
Its share price plunged to $26 after the bell — the same price at which Slack originally priced its shares when it went public in June. The cause may at least in part be that Slack is now projecting losses for the next quarter of $0.08 to $0.09 a share, a bit higher than the $0.07 projected by Wall Street.
Its revenue in the second quarter grew 58% from the same period last year, up to $145 million. It posted a net loss of $359.6 million, however, including $8.2 million in credits it spent related to service disruptions in the quarter — in other words, credits given to customers to make up for outages and other interruptions to its service.
In July, Slack was down for about an hour, affecting its business customers around the world.
Slack's CEO and cofounder, Stewart Butterfield, said on the earnings call that the company had been investing in monitoring for these types of service interruptions. He said that while Slack's technology might seem simple from the outside, there's a lot of complexity under the hood that made the task trickier.
"The bottom line is, there are investments on an ongoing basis," Stewart said. "With our biggest customers, it's not just hundreds of millions of messages going on and every day, it's the other little changes, like people going online, offline, creating a new channel, or changing their status."
Here's what Slack reported:
- Revenue: $145 million. Analysts were expecting $140.72 million.
- Net loss per share: $0.14. Wall Street was looking for $0.18.
- Revenue (next quarter): $154 million to $156 million. Analysts had predicted $153.19 million.
- Net loss per share (next quarter): $0.08 to $0.09. Wall Street was forecasting $0.07.
Slack ended the quarter with more than 100,000 paid customers, rising 37% year-over-year.
