2. Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 84
Decline in Share Price Over Past Month: 32.63%
Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) owns and runs a cloud-based data platform. On March 3, Cowen analyst Derrick Wood kept an Outperform rating on the stock with a price target of $390, noting that the recent pullback in share price of the firm was a buying opportunity because the fundamentals of the firm were intact despite recent underperformance.
Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) is one of the favorite cloud stocks in the finance world. Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, Boston-based investment firm Altimeter Capital Management is a leading shareholder in Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) with 17 million shares worth more than $5.7 billion.
Here is what RiverPark Funds has to say about Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“We also established a position in Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) during the quarter. Snowflake offers cloud-based data storage and analytics, generally termed “data warehouse-as-a-service.” The data warehousing market—created by the massive, growing amount of user, customer, and account data and the need to search and analyze it—has historically stored its data on physical servers located on-premises. The cloud data platform market—storing data off-premises on cloud servers—is a relatively new $70 billion+ market. Significantly, incremental warehouse data capacity and renewals are expected to be driven by and to the cloud, with more than 75% of databases in the cloud by 2022.
Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) requires absolutely no infrastructure management from its users, is fully scalable for each customer, runs on Amazon, Microsoft, or Google cloud platforms, and most critically, Snowflake helps companies analyze their data. The company also has a unique, customer-aligned billing model based on usage. All of which has led to Snowflake being among the leaders of this highly fragmented market, posting 124% revenue growth last year. SNOW’s growth comes from the combination of more customers—which grew 73% last year—and customers buying more services—the company boasts an amazing 150%+ net customer retention. The company’s growing scale has also led to increasing gross margin and operating leverage, up 1,100 basis points and 8,200 basis points, respectively, over the past two years. The company has guided to FCF break-even this year, and with the company’s capital expenditure-light model—Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) uses the public cloud for hosting—we expect FCF to grow much faster than revenue growth, which we forecast to grow comfortably more than 50% per year for the next several years. Additionally, we have great confidence in Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) management team, which previously had an enormously successful run guiding one of our other core Cloud software holdings ServiceNow.”
