What happened
Shares of GoDaddy (GDDY 0.51%) rose as much as 16.7% on Thursday following the release of a strong third-quarter report. By 1 p.m. EST, the stock had cooled down to a still-impressive 15.1% gain.
So what
Wall Street consensus had been pointing to earnings near $0.21 per share on revenue in the vicinity of $761.4 million. The provider of domain name services and cloud-based tools used to run small to medium businesses fell a rounding error short of the sales target, landing at $760.5 million. At the same time, GoDaddy completely crushed analysts' earnings projections with an adjusted net profit of $0.42 per diluted share.
Image source: GoDaddy.
Now what
Apart from crushing Wall Street's bottom-line target, these results represented 12% year-over-year sales growth and more than a fivefold expansion of the bottom-line figure. GoDaddy is both expanding its user base and raising the average revenue collected from each customer, which adds up to a firm growth trend.
GoDaddy's results have been hit or miss in recent quarters, but this was a good one. Importantly, the third-quarter results were paired with solid signs of continued growth as the unbilled order volumes grew faster than top-line revenue.
It's no surprise to see GoDaddy's shares soar on the back of this muscular earnings report. That's kind of how it's supposed to work, after all.
