The company’s shares took a beating earlier this month on the firm’s guidance for this year’s performance. Shares in Alteryx (NYSE: AYX) sank more than 7% in after-hours trading on Feb. 9 immediately following the fourth-quarter earnings release, and closed down 11% for the week.
Shares for the company are off a little more than 20% from a year ago. Alteryx, Orange County’s most valuable publicly traded software company, counts a market value of nearly $8 billion.
Anderson takes the latest hit from Wall Street in stride and says the company is aiming for “long-term value well beyond the end of this year.”
“We’ve got to put our heads down and execute,” Anderson told the Business Journal the day after the earnings release. “We’ve kind of lowered expectations. Now we’ve got to go meet or beat those expectations and just do a great job with customers.”
Anderson says he is looking for a “good strong FY21” after the company “guided down in Q1 and that stair-stepped Q2, Q3 and Q4 down accordingly.”
Q4 Revenue Up 3%
Alteryx forecast first-quarter revenue of $104 million to $107 million, which would be below the $108.8 million registered in the same three-month period of 2020.
Still, fourth quarter and annual revenue remained strong—$160.5 million, an increase of 3% over the previous year, while the full year was up 19% over 2019.
The company previously had been growing more than 50% annually.
Alteryx products let companies manipulate huge amounts of data to find insights for business decisions, a market that Anderson sees growing to “hundreds of billions of dollars” in a year or two.
As of Dec. 31, the company had approximately 7,100 customers in more than 90 countries, including over 760 of the Global 2000. Customers include Anheuser Busch, Daimler, Netflix, Pfizer, Visa and L’Oreal USA.
Alteryx in its 10-K annual report issued Feb. 12 said that “in 2021, we expect to continue to expand our operations and headcount and we anticipate that further significant expansion will be required in the future.”
“I think people certainly understand and I think they’re very optimistic about the changes that we’re making,” Anderson said.
Employee Increase
“We expect 2021 will be a year of transformation for Alteryx,” according to Anderson.
The company reported that the number of employees rose to 1,469 as of the end of last year, an increase of almost 14% over 2019.
“In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, our global hiring and expansion plans temporarily ceased or significantly slowed in 2020,” the company said in its annual report.
Anderson is optimistic as he looks ahead.
“I’m quite happy with the way things are going. We’ve done a lot of hiring in the last quarter. We’ve done a lot of planning,” he said.
Anderson is looking forward to an analyst and investor day in early June where he can showcase the company’s executive team, including Suresh Vittal, the newly appointed chief product officer. Vittal had been serving most recently serving as senior vice president for platform and products at software company Adobe.
Anderson himself took over the CEO role from co-founder and current executive chairman Dean Stoecker in October.
Alteryx is moving crosstown in Irvine to the Spectrum Terrace development, and Anderson said the shift is going “really well.”
The move has dragged on longer than expected due to the pandemic and should be completed by September. Alteryx is in the process of deciding on work-from-home policies, with many employees likely to be allowed to split their work days between home and office.
