What: Shares of cloud-based software technologist Five9 (FIVN +2.39%) had surged roughly 16% by 1:50 p.m. Wednesday after its quarterly results and outlook topped Wall Street expectations.
So what: Five9 shares have been volatile over the past year on uncertainty over its growth prospects, but strong Q3 results -- adjusted loss of $0.08 per share beat estimates by $0.05 on a revenue spike of 25% -- coupled with upbeat full-year guidance reignited optimism over the company's long-term potential. In fact, Five9's enterprise LTM subscription revenue increased 35% while its adjusted operating margin improved a whopping 1,600 basis points year-over-year, suggesting that the call center opportunities being pursed by management are a lot juicier than many investors think.
Now what: Five9 now expects its full-year earnings to range from a loss of $0.39-$0.37 per share on revenue of $125.3 million-$126.3 million, both improvements from management's prior forecast. "Our strong momentum in the enterprise market is being driven by key differentiators including our comprehensive end-to-end solution, our trusted platform which is delivering 99.993% uptime, our deep CRM integrations and ecosystem partnerships and best in class implementation and support execution," said President and CEO Mike Burkland. "As validation of our leading position in the enterprise market, Five9 was recently named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, North America, and positioned highest for ability to execute." Given Five9's still-speculative nature and suddenly hot stock price, however, I'd hold out for a much wider margin of safety before betting too heavily on it.
