Why CrowdStrike Is A Top Growth Stock Pick

Crowdstrike Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CRWD) shares traded lower by 2% on Wednesday after the company reported a profitable fourth quarter and issued guidance above Wall Street expectations.

On Tuesday, CrowdStrike reported fourth-quarter adjusted EPS of 13 cents on $264.9 million in revenue. Both numbers topped consensus analyst estimates of 8 cents and $250.4 million, respectively. Revenue was up 74% from a year ago.

In addition, CrowdStrike said it added 1,480 net new subscription business customers in the quarter, up from 1,186 additions in the third quarter.

Crowdstrike also guided for fiscal 2022 revenue of between $1.31 billion and $1.32 billion, ahead of analyst forecasts of $1.22 billion.

Secular Tailwinds: RBC Capital Markets analyst Matthew Hedberg said CrowdStrike remains one of his top growth stock picks.

“Secular tailwinds continue to fuel the land-and-expand motion, which a broadening platform could accelerate,” Hedberg wrote.

JPM Securities analyst Erik Suppiger said CrowdStike has a strong finish to the fiscal year as it aims to expand its total addressable market.

“CrowdStrike is realizing significant operating leverage as the company’s record 13% operating margin for F4Q21 was up 490 bps from the prior quarter and more than 1,700 bps from the year-ago quarter,” Suppiger wrote.

Impressive Subscriber Growth: Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron said strong subscription revenue and customer growth were highlights of the quarter, and Humio could be an excellent growth opportunity.

“We believe CrowdStrike is well-positioned competitively and technologically to benefit from multiple tailwinds (cloud security, digital transformation, DevOps),” Kidron wrote.

Needham analyst Alex Henderson said CrowdStrike’s numbers exceeded expectations across the board.

“Crowd also delivered strong new products and platform integration including major expansion into Cloud Workload protection and now with the additions of Humio and Preempt, Crowd has expanded its capabilities to include integrated Identity protection and improved data ingestion, visibility, and R/T analysis allowing a unified data layer,” Henderson wrote.

Ratings And Price Targets:

RBC has an Outperform rating and a $250 target.

JPM has an Outperform rating and a $295 target.

Oppenheimer has an Outperform rating and a $225 target.

Needham has a Buy rating and a $275 target.