Cloud Stocks: Twilio Hits 52-Week High Amidst COVID Crisis

The global pandemic has provided cloud-based enterprise services providers a big boost in their revenues. Communications PaaS player Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) is one such player that has seen record revenues amidst the recent COVID-19 crisis. Earlier this month, the company announced its first quarter results that outpaced all market expectations and sent the stock soaring to 52-week high levels.

Twilio’s Financials

Twilio’s first quarter revenues grew an impressive 57% to $364.9 million, surging ahead of the market’s forecast of $331 million. GAAP net loss was $94.8 million, or $0.68 a share, compared with a loss of $36.5 million, or $0.31 a share a year ago. Adjusted net income grew 30% to $8.4 million or $0.06 per share, again shattering the market’s expectations of a loss of $0.11 per share.

Among key metrics, its active customer accounts grew 23% to 190,000. The company ended the quarter with 3,060 employees. Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, which is calculated using total revenue, was 143% compared to 142% reported a year ago.

Twilio did not provide any outlook for the year and withdrew its earlier outlook of revenues of $1.475-$1.49 billion for the year. It expects to end the current quarter with revenues of $365-$370 million, which was also significantly ahead of the Street’s forecast of $323 million.

Twilio’s Verticalized Offerings

Twilio boasts of its product being able to deliver on three key requirements amidst the current crisis – digital engagement, software agility, and cloud scale. By providing and accelerating the provision of messaging, email, voice, and video, Twilio has enabled organizations to continue working successfully. Twilio did face headwinds in certain verticals – such as hospitality and travel. But these movements were offset by increases in demand for food delivery, curbside pickup, and retail logistics.

It is focusing on some of these key verticals to drive the next level of growth. For instance, several of its products are now HIPAA eligible, so that healthcare customers can fully utilize its voice, video, SMS, and SIP products to develop communication workflows that are compliant within the industry. The HIPAA milestone also reaffirms Twilio’s data privacy and security focus.

Within the healthcare industry, as virtual care became the go-to-option for doctors and patients, it expanded its relationship with Epic to build its telehealth platform that is powered by Twilio’s programmable video. The new solution allows providers to launch a video visit with a patient, review patient history, and update clinical documentation directly within Epic.

It released Flex Dialpad to Public Beta to enable outbound calling from Flex Instances and also announced Flex Boost, which provides technical, operational, and financial resources for contact centers affected by COVID-19. Recently, it also launched Video Boost that provides qualified prospects three free months of its video APIs.

For ISP and TV service providers such as Comcast, Twilio developed an offering that integrated Twilio Voice into Comcast’s in-house customer database to allow technicians and customer care to contact customers for service requests remotely. It is also leveraging video capabilities for Comcast to allow customers to use the camera on their phone to show a Comcast technician their setup so that the technician can walk the customer through a self-diagnosis and repair without visiting their home.

Twilio’s platform is a success story. The company is using its video services such as Twilio TV and Twilio Quest to keep connected with the developer community. Recent statistics are not available, but a year ago, Twilio had more than five million developer accounts working on building thousands of apps on the platform. Use cases of Twilio apps include apps to help combat forest fires, viral marketing campaigns for superstars, call handling solutions for retail giants, and urgent IT alerts to name a few.

Its stock is currently trading at $179.69 with a market cap of $26.1 billion. The stock had climbed to a 52-week high of $189.97 earlier this week. It has recovered from the 52-week low of $68.06 that it had fallen to in March this year amidst all the market turbulence.

Photo credit: Ken Yeung/Flickr.com.

This segment is a part in the series : Cloud Stocks