ChargePoint (CHPT +6.75%) stock ran ahead 11% through 11:40 a.m. ET on Thursday despite reporting disappointing earnings (losses, actually) last night, and a big miss on sales to boot.
Now, heading into fiscal Q3 2024, analysts had forecast that the provider of charging services for electric cars would lose $0.22 per share on sales of $122.4 million -- so Wall Street already wasn't feeling particularly optimistic about the quarter. And yet ChargePoint still managed to disappoint, reporting losses last night nearly twice as big as feared ($0.43 per share), as well as sales of only $110.3 million.
NYSE: CHPT
Key Data Points
ChargePoint's Q3 earnings news
Those sales fell 10% year over year, by the way -- moving in the opposite direction from what you'd expect from a growth stock. Similarly, gross profit margins got worse, declining four full percentage points from a year ago, to -22%.
Really, about the only thing "growing" at ChargePoint, I fear, was losses. The $158.2 million in net losses on the bottom line was nearly twice as bad as the $84.5 million the company lost in fiscal Q3 2023.
If that's the case, though -- if the quarter was so lousy -- then it's worth asking why investors are buying ChargePoint stock today instead of selling it.
ChargePoint's Q4 guidance
The usual answer when a company reports lousy earnings but its stock goes up anyway is that the company must have given strong guidance for the coming quarter -- and that's true for ChargePoint today (sort of).
After laying out the bad news on Q3, CEO Rick Wilmer told investors he hopes to do considerably better in Q4, saying ChargePoint is "firmly committed to delivering positive non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2024." If investors are taking this statement at face value, and interpreting "firm commitment" as a promise to turn around the business and deliver profits in Q4, that might explain their enthusiasm for the stock today.
But what is Wilmer really telling us here?
Non-GAAP earnings is a pro forma number that can mean basically whatever the company that invents it wants it to mean. In ChargePoint's case, non-GAAP losses in Q3 were only $106.3 million, nearly $52 million better than the company's actual GAAP loss for the quarter. Thus, even if ChargePoint does achieve positive "non-GAAP" earnings in Q4, it's entirely possible the company will still be unprofitable under GAAP.
And in fact, according to analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence, this is exactly what you should expect to see: negative profits from ChargePoint in 2023, in 2024, and in 2025 -- in fact, negative profits all the way out to 2029, with the company only finally turning profitable (maybe) in 2030.
Long story short, no matter how many investors are buying ChargePoint stock today, in my book this stock is still a sell.
