Atlassian shares dropped more than seven percent in trading late last week, despite the Australian-based company reporting Q2 results that topped analysts’ estimates and issuing an optimistic forecast. The shares shed nearly five percent on Thursday and a further 2.5 percent on Friday.
The company had reported a dramatically deeper loss of US$65 million for its second quarter after taking a major hit from Donald Trump’s US tax reforms.
In the same quarter last year Atlassian recorded a loss of just $1 million – but that was before introduction of Trump’s new tax measures.
Atlassian, whose team-related services include HipChat, Jira, Confluence and Trello, said its cloud, server and datacentre products all showed strong results. It also drew attention to its Marketplace app store, which it said had passed US$350 million in sales since it opened in 2012.
The latest loss included a one-off US$47 million (A$59 million) writedown of Atlassian’s deferred tax assets. However co-CEO Scott Farquhar, pictured,was looking on the bright side, talking up the company’s growing customer base.
“We finished calendar year 2017 with another great quarter,” he said. “Our cloud, server and datacentre products delivered strong results, and the Atlassian marketplace, which plays an important role in our continued growth, passed US$350 million in lifetime sales.”
He also told Australian media: “The things that get our staff engaged and get me and (co-CEO) Mike Cannon-Brookes excited (are) often around usage and size of the customer base.”
“We now have more than 112,000 customers in total and [booked] 4825 new customers during the quarter. This is the most net new customers we have ever added in a single quarter.”