For over a decade, high-growth technology stocks have been lucrative investments. However, a shift in investor preference from growth to value stocks, increasing interest rates to counter the rising inflation, and recessionary pressures seem to have taken a toll on the share prices of several such companies.
Some of these stocks, such as Confluent (CFLT 2.98%) and MongoDB (MDB 4.83%), are making a major comeback in 2023, thanks to their robust fundamentals and noteworthy competitive edges. Here's why these stocks seem well poised for significant gains in the coming years.
1. Confluent
Shares of data streaming platform provider Confluent surged by nearly 16% in a single day after the company reported its second-quarter earnings performance, with revenues and adjusted earnings surpassing analyst estimates and its own financial guidance. The company ended the second quarter with 4,830 customers, up 17% year over year.
The number of customers who spent over $1 million annually on the company's offerings grew by 48% year over year to 147, while those spending over $100,000 annually rose by 33% year over year to 1,144. The company also posted a healthy net revenue retention rate of over 130%, highlighting its success in cross-selling and upselling to existing customers.
Confluent's success in a tough macroeconomic environment highlights the extreme importance of data for contemporary businesses. In older times, businesses would collect data and analyze it at a later date. However, with the increasing adoption of digitization, businesses are increasingly depending on real-time data processing and analysis for business strategies and optimal daily operations.
In fact, International Data Corporation expects 90% of the world's largest 1,000 companies to opt for data streaming technology for real-time data processing by 2025. As the industry frontrunner, Confluent is well primed to harness this trend. The company offers an upgraded commercial version of the open-source distributed streaming platform Apache Kafka -- the paid advanced features simplify the deployment of Apache Kafka, help reduce associated costs, and improve efficiencies.
Thanks to the company's solid value proposition, robust operational metrics, and resilience in a difficult macroeconomic environment, Wall Street's investment giants -- such as Millenium Management and Tudor Investment Corporation -- seem to be showing significant interest in the company. Most of the 24 Wall Street analysts covering Confluent are bullish -- 14 are giving the company a buy rating, 9 recommend holding, and none advise selling.
The average price target of $39.72 represents a 37% upside, but one firm forecasts 56% upside to $45 per share. Given this backdrop and Confluent having barely scratched the surface of its vast $60 billion addressable market (trailing-12-month revenues of only $684 million), the company seems like an attractive pick now.
2. MongoDB
MongoDB stock has rallied by nearly 80% so far this year, mainly buoyed by the artificial intelligence (AI) led stock rally in several major technology stocks. The company is a frontrunner in the NoSQL document-based databases, which is the preferred choice for cloud computing and AI workloads. Diverging from traditional relational databases (storing data in rows and columns), these NoSQL databases are better suited in terms of flexibility and scalability for high-volume and complex workloads.
MongoDB is working to position itself as indispensable in the unfolding generative AI era. The company is seeing several new businesses opting to construct applications atop its robust software platform.
This preference has translated into solid customer acquisition trends for the company in recent times, with the platform acquiring over 45,000 customers at the end of the second quarter (ended July 31, 2023). The client base is impressively diverse, comprising small, medium, and large enterprises across industries such as technology, healthcare, and retail.
MongoDB's second-quarter performance has been quite impressive, with revenues and adjusted earnings surpassing consensus estimates. Atlas, a fully managed cloud-based database-as-a-service offering, saw revenues jump by 38% year over year and now account for 63% of the total revenues. This subscription service has helped build a sticky customer base for the company. MongoDB also reported improvement in free cash flow and ended the quarter with $1.9 billion total cash on its balance sheet.
Management also expects AI to be a major tailwind for the company in the long run (three to five years). Since code generation and code-assist AI-based tools will help boost developer productivity, it will help them build more applications faster.
In turn, this will enable them to build increasingly more applications faster -- which translates to increasing demand for databases and data platforms. The increasing adoption of generative AI will also boost demand for data platforms capable of processing, analyzing, and searching through huge troves of data and metadata. Being a leader in NoSQL databases, MongoDB's platform seems well positioned to harness this trend.
MongoDB expects revenues to grow potentially by 20% to 21% on a year-over-year basis in the third quarter. While lower than the second-quarter revenue performance, this is also a healthy pace for top-line growth. Coupled with the company's robust long-term growth potential and resilience, even in a tough macroeconomic environment, investors can remain optimistic and consider buying at least a small position in this stock.
