Earnings Sentiment

Sentiment Analysis of the earnings transcript to help figure out if there are any bullish or bearish sentiments that could be gathered from it. We're doing ML and AI based analysis on the earnings call to get some more insights.

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Sentiment Distribution

   

Earnings Call Transcript Word Cloud

     

Bullish Statements during Earnings call

Statement
And I would also point out, too, we've been very efficient in terms of operating margin expansion and free cash flow
In Q4, we had a good bookings quarter
But the only new solution or relatively new solution and part of the guidance is Snowpark, right? And Snowpark had a really nice year of acceleration, expected to be 3 percentage points of overall revenues in the forward year
So, I think, especially with the rapid progress that companies like Mistral with whom we have a partnership are doing and their ability to expand on that, I think we're in a pretty good place when it comes to that
And they do very well in the data science persona because they have a very good notebook that people like
So, we feel pretty good about just like how competitive the product offering is in a number of cases
This is one of like the most amazing qualities that the Snowflake team has in product design
And having said that, I think there is enormous opportunity in product innovation, in being able to provide additional depth with our existing customers, but also significantly wrap-up new kinds of customers, new kinds of use cases
It is also the mentality of people like Mike, like Frank, like Benoit, to think forward four steps ahead and invest in things like a platform ecosystem that makes this opportunity really, really exciting for me
And so I think like we offer excellent performance for both structured as well as unstructured data
But I think it is that feedback loop of great products, getting more customers, getting adjacent use cases, being able to expand and then a nascent, but vibrant partner strategy of people building on top of Snowflake, those are all the force multipliers that I feel very excited about being able to exploit at Snowflake
So, it's all of these things that I think gave the Board confidence that I would take all of the great quality of Snowflake, the drive that Frank exemplified, the customer obsession that our founder, Benoit, exemplifies, the collaborative culture that all of the Exec staff exemplifies, and add on that element of an increased sense of urgency, much more competitive paranoia and just the desire to get things done fast
And we sort of have our work cut out in my mind for, say, the next quarter or two, that really it's about taking the slew of things that we have in public preview, whether it is transactional tables or interoperable storage or an application platform, all the things that we have announced in AI, getting them into GA, getting them into the hands of our customers, that is going to drive momentum for this year
So, from the investor perspective, when Snowflake IPO-ed, or when Frank and Mike joined Snowflake, the thought process was this is an innovative company with a good cloud solution, addressing a really big market
But we ship that as part of the core SQL libraries that we ship, so that one of our big customers, one that spends like multiple tens of millions of dollars a year with us, they're super excited because they go, wait, I have thousands of analysts
I was the lead of the ads and commerce team for over five years, helped grow that business from the $1.5 billion that it was when I joined to over $120 billion when I left
I would almost say the success of Snowpark so far, which we're going to take as a lesson going forward, is that it is like that efficient sales enabled
So, net-net, we think it's going to be a positive, but I'm not forecasting that to be positive this year
But Snowflake stood out in terms of a technology company that had the ability to create enormous value today with the products that we have with customers
There's also price performance improvement in the overall platform that we have to think about in terms of compressing consumption a little bit
Just to complete the competition landscape, so Databricks claim they have better products for the unstructured data
The spending environment is actually pretty good with our customers
And we're also in a pretty unique moment in technology with the rise of AI and the disruptive power that it is going to bring
I think that tight integration with the core product is a huge strength of Snowflake
And I think there is incredible potential starting with the fundamental observation of what does it mean to be a cloud that has data at its center
I'm very pleased to have with us from Snowflake, both newly appointed CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy; and CFO, Mike Scarpelli, a longtime CFO
So, there's new products that are coming into general availability that are potential upside to the guidance
But now coming to Snowflake, I'm incredibly excited about Snowflake because I think a cloud that puts data at the center is just a very, very different way of looking at the problem of how do we provide an amazing data platform for enterprise
Yes, consumption trends are good right now
And again, I have long and deep experience in this from like the biggest machine learning systems ever built on the planet, circa 2006, where we built these prediction systems for ad click-through that were instrumental in making that into a truly efficient sort of platform, fast-forward all the way to building the first AI search engine at Neeva, my startup, which I spoke about here last year
       

Bearish Statements during earnings call

Statement
But to be honest, we still fell short of expectations on the revenue side from what we thought internally
And we had our share of pain at Google trying to convince a team that sold search, which like honestly sells itself, to selling YouTube, which was just a vastly more difficult sort of endeavor
In the FY 2025 guidance, it came in below kind of what consensus expectations we're looking for
It's one of the most difficult problems that there is
So, you had early on a lot of customers that I would say were oversold because customers didn't care
That was a little bit more prolonged than we were expecting
On the other hand, if it comes out negative, then the win rate is far, far slower
We saw things stopped, getting worse and then maybe getting a little bit better
Mike Scarpelli If I could add, too, Keith, there's this perception of many investors that Sridhar is a technologist
Miss out on scintillating conversations, like it's more the earnings season side of the equation that wears on us, which is a segue into talking about Q4 earnings
As we all know, like replicating GPT-4, which nobody has done, just felt that much harder
And over time, I think you will see less and less of like pure model affinity as things go from there's infinite dollars in everything in the world of AI to, oh, maybe demand is actually somewhat limited
If we think about the perhaps less confidence in that long-term target, was it more on the P side of the equation or the Q side of the equation that's come under a little bit more caution, if you will? Mike Scarpelli What I would say, and everyone, we talked about this at Investor Day, I said to hit that $10 billion target, we need to see consumption trends improve in the second half of the year last year and they never did to the extent to get back to that pre-2024 level
But what happened, and this is the one thing we did not do, we had a small spiff for landing new customers
It was really the holiday, the prolonged effects of the holiday this year
This was not a surprise to the sales force
And our sales team said, well, that won't work
There's a lot of companies that I know a lot of our customers are working on funding rounds right now and they're not happy with valuations right now, and I think you're going to see more of that
Hard to forecast what that's going to be
   

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