HubSpot (HUBS +1.72%), a cloud-based sales and marketing platform specialist, released its first-quarter results on May 7. Sales and adjusted earnings both exceeded the company's guidance for the quarter.
Sales increased by 33% year over year to $151.8 million. That beat management's expected range of $146.5 million to $147.5 million.
Non-GAAP diluted earnings came in at $0.36 per share, outpacing the company's guidance of $0.24 per share at the midpoint. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter reached $16.2 million, which was a massive increase from $6.4 million in the first quarter of 2018.
Image source: HubSpot.
HubSpot: The raw numbers
|
Metric |
Q1 2019 |
Q1 2018 |
Year-Over-Year Change |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Sales |
$151.8 million |
$114.6 million |
33% |
|
GAAP net income |
($11.1 million) |
($15.4 million) |
N/A |
|
GAAP earnings per share |
($0.27) |
($0.41) |
N/A |
Data source: HubSpot.
What happened with HubSpot this quarter?
- Sales in the first quarter jumped 33% year over year to $151.8 million.
- Subscription revenue was $144.2 million, up 33% from the year-ago quarter.
- Professional services and other revenue increased by 27% from the prior-year period to $7.6 million.
- Total average subscription revenue per customer was $9,811, down 2% year over year.
- International revenue grew 42% year over year and made up 39% of total sales.
- Non-GAAP operating margin of 8.6% was up from 4.9% in Q1 2018.
- Non-GAAP operating income was $13 million, compared to $5.6 million in the year-ago quarter.
- HubSpot customers increased by 35% in the quarter to 60,814.
- Research and development spending increased by 33% to $35.2 million.
- Free cash flow jumped by 71% to $30.6 million.
- HubSpot ended the quarter with $983.7 million in cash and cash equivalents.
What management had to say
HubSpot's chief financial officer, Kathryn Bueker, talked on the company's earnings call about HubSpot's year-over-year customer growth, noting that total customers were up 35% from the year-ago quarter.
Bueker pointed out that HubSpot's subscription revenue per customer fell 2% in the quarter and addressed the drop by saying, "We continue to expect this metric to bounce around depending on product mix and the amount of new versus installed base selling in any quarter."
HubSpot's co-founder and CEO, Brian Halligan, also took some time during the call to address an outage the company (and some of its customers) experienced at the end of March:
I have talked to a lot of our customers who were hit by it. And if any of those customers are listening on the call, I just would apologize for it. It was disruptive for you, it was disruptive for us, and that was a long day on HubSpot. So we're kind of disappointed in ourselves frankly about that outage.
Halligan noted that HubSpot built a new reliability team in the weeks following the one-day outage and that the company was changing some of its processes to help prevent similar interruptions.
Looking ahead
HubSpot's management expects revenue in the second quarter to be in the range of $156.5 million to $157.5 million. Non-GAAP EPS guidance is $0.24 to $0.26.
The midpoint of HubSpot's second-quarter guidance would be a 28% year-over-year increase in sales and a 39% jump in non-GAAP earnings.
Bueker said on the call that "2019 is off to a strong start. I'm pleased with the growth in revenue, free cash flow, and non-GAAP operating profit we delivered in Q1."
