Shopify, Twilio and Baidu to report fourth-quarter earnings

The week ahead

In the UK over the next couple of weeks, several companies with a June year-end report their December interim results. This week this includes results from Blancco Technology Group PLC (LON: BLTG) and Transense Technologies plc (LON: TRT). The December final results season will move into full swing in March.

Blancco, which provides data erasure solutions and mobile device diagnostics, announces interim results on Tuesday. In its final results in late September, the group announced 9% growth in revenue (including 3% organic at constant currency) and a 14% increase in adjusted operating profit. Following the storming first half, this implied a broadly flat second-half revenue performance and a small fall in operating profit. The group finished the year with cash of £6.7mln and no debt. The company said that enterprise sales cycles had lengthened following the pandemic while the mobile market was affected as retailers were closed, meaning fewer phones were moving through the ecosystem; however, the largest information technology asset disposition firms (ITADs) had seen an increase in business as demand for hardware rose to support the shift to working from home. The company said that trading started positively in the first quarter of the current financial year (FY21), with particularly high levels of activity in the enterprise segment and progress made with many blue-chip distributors further strengthening the pipeline. While the mobile segment was experiencing a gradual return to normal trading, the company said it believed the impact of COVID-19 on sales cycles would affect financial performance in the first half of FY21.

Transense, which develops specialist sensor systems, reports interim results on Wednesday.  In its annual general meeting (AGM) trading update in mid-December, the company said that revenues from Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) technology and Translogik probe products were substantially ahead of the modest level achieved in the equivalent period last year. Further, it said the rate of royalty income from iTrack has been increasing as expected, with expectations of further growth as the licensee continued to implement its roll-out and marketing strategy. The company said that the net result for the financial year (at the time of the update) was around break-even and cash neutral, in line with management expectations, and the board stated it was optimistic about the outlook for the full year and beyond.

Across the pond, markets are closed today for Presidents Day, also known as Washington’s Birthday; however, there still is plenty of earnings this week, with the busiest day on Wednesday. Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce giant, Twilio, the San Francisco-based cloud communications platform as a service company and Baidu, the Chinese internet giant that has ADRs listed on Nasdaq, all report their fourth-quarter (Q4) earnings on Wednesday. Shopify and Twilio have risen by more than 40% since the US election in early November while Baidu and more than doubled. In the semiconductor sector, Analog Devices and Applied Materials report their Q1 earnings on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Applied Materials has risen by 67% since the US election and all five stocks trade at or near record highs.

Other tech-related companies expected to report this week include Agilent, Cornerstone OnDemand, Lattice Semiconductor, Groupon, HealthStream, CommScope, Pegasystems, Synopsys, Wix.Com, BigCommerce, Dropbox, Epam Systems, Envestnet, Rackspace and InterDigital.

Source: Data from regulatory news and company websites