Snowflake Inc.: Is ❄️ melting away or growing into an iceberg?

Company profile

Snowflake Inc. is a pioneer in cloud computing, specializing in data warehousing and analytics. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, the company offers a cloud-native platform that enables organizations to efficiently store, process and analyze data - all from a single source.

Historical development

Since its foundation $SNOW (+2,25 %) has undergone a remarkable development. With its IPO in 2020, the company achieved the largest software IPO in history to date and consolidated its position as a leading provider of cloud-based data solutions. In the years that followed, Snowflake continued its dynamic growth and established itself as one of the key players in cloud data warehousing.

Business model

Snowflake pursues a usage-based business model that focuses on flexibility and cost efficiency. The revenue streams are divided into the following main categories:

Subscriptions to the Cloud Data Platform

Professional Services

Marketplaces

Snowpark (a developer platform)

Strategic partnerships

This model enables customers to pay only for the resources they actually use and helps them to manage their costs effectively.

Core competencies

Snowflake has several key strengths:

Scalability: Thanks to its cloud-native architecture, the platform can scale compute and storage resources seamlessly and on demand.

Performance: Snowflake offers outstanding performance for complex queries and real-time analytics, clearly setting it apart from competitors.

Data integration: The platform facilitates the efficient integration of data from a wide variety of sources and systems.

Security: Snowflake sets high standards for data security and compliance and meets comprehensive data protection requirements.

Ease of use: The platform is designed for both technical and non-technical users, ensuring ease of use.

Future prospects and strategic initiatives

In the face of growing challenges, Snowflake looks forward to an exciting future:

Product innovation: The company is continually investing in the development of new features and services to secure and expand its market position.

Market expansion: Expansion into new sectors and geographical markets is the focus of strategic planning.

Partnerships: Snowflake is further expanding its ecosystem through targeted partnerships and strengthening its market position.

Focus on AI and machine learning: With the increasing integration of AI capabilities, Snowflake aims to meet the growing demand for advanced analytics.

Cost optimization: In the face of rising marketing and personnel costs, the company is rigorously pursuing a strategy to control costs and increase efficiency.

Market position and competition

Snowflake operates in a highly competitive market and competes directly with cloud giants such as $AMZN (+1,14 %) , $MSFT (+1,09 %) and $GOOGL (+0,99 %) , who each offer their own data warehousing solutions as integral parts of their comprehensive cloud ecosystems.

A particularly relevant competitor is Databricks, which - like Snowflake - focuses on modern, cloud-native data processing solutions. Although $DBRX not currently listed on the stock exchange, the company is considered a strong candidate for a future IPO and is attracting increasing attention in the industry.

Overall, the market for cloud data warehousing and analytics is extremely dynamic and highly competitive, characterized by a mix of listed tech giants, specialized companies and up-and-coming private firms. In this environment, Snowflake must assert itself through continuous innovation, differentiated product offerings and effective market strategies.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Snowflake's Total Addressable Market (TAM) is expected to more than double from USD 152 billion in 2023 to USD 342 billion in 2028. This development reflects the expected dynamic expansion of the market for data and cloud services in the coming years. The forecasts are based on the growing importance of data management and analysis in an increasingly data-driven economy and the ongoing migration of companies to the cloud.

Share Performance

Snowflake made its stock market debut on September 16, 2020 at an initial price of USD 120 per share. The share price rose sharply on the very first day of trading and opened at USD 245, almost double the issue price. Since then, however, Snowflake's share price has been extremely volatile. From its high, it has recorded an overall performance of -57.58% to date.

In summary, it can be said that after the initial hype and rapid price gains, the share has undergone a significant correction.

The Consumption Model

Snowflake relies on a consumption-based model in which the majority of revenue is recognized to the extent that customers use the platform. This model offers various advantages, but also some aspects that need to be considered:

Revenue generation

• Pros: Revenue grows faster as it is closely linked to actual customer consumption.
• To consider: Revenue is variable and depends heavily on customer usage behavior.

Pricing model based on consumption

• Pros: The model is aligned with customers' value-based costs as they only pay for actual usage.
• To consider: Improvements in platform performance may reduce customers' costs, which could impact revenue.

Contract terms for billing

• Typically in advance: Most contracts include upfront payments.
• Pros: This practice encourages faster growth.
• Pro: Bookings reflect a contractual minimum.
• Pro: A variable consumption model can provide additional revenue during the renewal cycle.
• To consider: Payment terms are dynamic and can evolve.

Further considerations

• Pros: Customers don't have to pay for unused software (known as "shelfware").
• To consider: Since the model is based on a usage-based approach, there is a possibility that revenue will fluctuate depending on customer usage.

Customers

The number of customers is continuously growing, and with it the revenue generated by Snowflake - even if it often takes some time for customers to fully migrate to the platform. This sustained increase shows that Snowflake is able to retain its customers in the long term and continuously expand the potential for future revenue growth, despite the initially long implementation times.

Developments

Snowflake's sales are growing, but not as fast as originally hoped. This is due to strong competition, some necessary adjustments and the fact that it takes some time for customers to migrate to the platform. Getting started is often slow, but once customers are fully integrated, their spending on the platform skyrockets.

The Net Revenue Retention Rate (NRR) remains well above 100%, which is an exceptionally positive figure. Despite a slight decline, this figure shows that existing customers are generating disproportionately more revenue over time. However, earnings per share (EPS) remain negative, which is primarily due to the high share-based payments.

Here, too, it is clear that the costs, particularly for Sales & Marketing (S&M), are very high - actually too high in relation to turnover. However, these expenses are necessary in order to achieve the targeted growth and further expand the market position. It is also striking that stock-based compensation is growing even faster than turnover. Overall, costs therefore remain at a high level. On the positive side, however, Snowflake is investing considerable sums in research and development (R&D) in order to continuously improve its platform and remain competitive.

The majority of its revenue comes from the US, which is also positive, as a significant proportion of this revenue is generated from product sales. This underlines the strong demand for Snowflake's core offerings and the successful monetization of the platform.

The FCF has been positive for some time and buybacks do indeed occur from time to time. However, not yet net positive.

Net debt is negative and the net debt to EBITDA ratio is also getting closer and closer to the interesting value below 3.

Snowflake's margins still leave a lot to be desired. Although they are gradually improving, they remain negative and lag well behind those of competitors.

There is no need to talk about the usual KPIs; they are actually completely repulsive.

And the shareholder yield is currently around 5%.

Opinion/conclusion

Now that we have only heard negative things, the question arises as to why we should think about the share at all. Let me give you a few reasons:

What was positive for the company and previous investors now makes the share price look completely crashed. The share was simply floated far too high and was completely overhyped. But the long-term trend is still behind the share.

With more and more data and the increasing migration to cloud services, Snowflake will continue to grow, especially internally. This means that sales will continue to rise steadily, and the only thing that really matters is customer migration. Proof of this is that if you take out S&G and still get revenue growth through the internal growth rate, you would immediately value the company positively. So you pay accordingly for future sales.

There are many competitors, but as is so often the case, you don't want to be dependent on the usual players. If you look at it this way, only Databricks and Snowflake remain as the main players.

The ratio of R&D to sales is just under 50%, which shows that Snowflake is determined to remain one of the market leaders and increasingly wants to offer more for its customers. The sales shortfall that this is currently creating will disappear later. Snowflake also believes in this: "We have so many new product feature capabilities that we need to ensure the salespeople are equipped to be able to sell that. And a lot of that is sales enablement and training, and he's really deriving a lot of that. And it's very positive what I'm seeing coming out" (IR at the last meeting) or "And until we see revenue, we're not going to spend more on the COGS side. And we have a fixed amount in R&D, and that will not change. Got it. Got it. And I think Sreedhar has talked about seeing significant contribution from some of these emerging products maybe as early as next year. I mean, how should we sort of think about the pace in which these ramp up? Because on one hand, I mean, 2,500 customers is, I think, 30-40% of your install base or somewhat, which is a pretty good start considering these products are only out for a couple of quarters. Yep. So, you know, obviously, we wouldn't have built these products if we didn't think they could have a meaningful impact. And it's I'm not going to guide to it now. It's still too early to tell, but we'll definitely be talking about that in Q4 when we finish the year. Yeah. I think that's when we'll have more of an impact. Remember, a lot of these things with Cortex, there's 2 components to it. There's the GPU component to generate things, but then actually running the query is also driving a lot of data warehousing revenue as well, too, that has the higher margin. Right. And I think there's no contribution expected from these new products embedded in that. We don't have anything embedded in our guide for this year."

So we are dealing here with a fast-growing tech company that is investing heavily in the product and staff and is mainly being held back by the share price, as there is a revenue gap, an IPO that is too high and its competitor Databricks is doing very well. However, Snowflake has by no means lost touch.

I cannot predict whether the share price will continue to fall, but apart from a few minor issues, the company is doing very well and I will continue to hold on to it. This could be particularly interesting for savings plan shareholders, as you get more and more shares as the share price falls until the gaps disappear and you can concentrate on profitability.