It’s easy to get lost in a sea of retail results this week, but there are several smaller software and internet companies that have notable Estimize/Wall Street deltas, and warrant investor attention. Look out for the names below—Ctripcom International Ltd (O:CTRP), Workday Inc (N:WDAY) and Splunk Inc (O:SPLK)—as they report earnings on Wednesday and Thursday.
Wednesday, November 18
Thursday, November 19
Ctrip (CTRP)
Consumer Discretionary - Internet & Catalog Retail | Reports November 18, after the close.
The Estimize consensus calls for EPS of $0.14, 7 cents above the Wall Street consensus. Revenues of $491.52M are also above the Street’s expectation for $487.19M.
What to watch: Technically, this one falls under “internet retail”… but it’s certainly not a traditional retailer. Ctrip is China’s largest online travel booking site, owning about 34% of that market. It’s closest competitor, Qunar Cayman Islands, owns closer to 20% and caters to more value-driven customers. The travel market is rapidly expanding in China, as people begin to increase the number of trips they go on, with Ctrip being one of the main beneficiaries of that trend, and ready to capitalize on the expansive growth potential in the space. Another benefit to Ctrip is the consolidation of the online travel industry in China, beginning with its purchase of a 36% stake in eLong, another Chinese travel site, from Expedia (O:EXPE) in May. While it is still very early, current analyst estimates predict that Ctrip could be earning $5/share by 2019. The stock is up 110% so far this year.
Workday (WDAY)
Information Technology - Software | Reports November 19, after the close.
The Estimize consensus calls for EPS of -$0.02, 50% higher than the Wall Street estimate. Revenues of $305.00M are also above the Street’s expectation for $303.41M.
What to watch: Workday provides enterprise cloud solutions to businesses, mainly to assist in managing human resources and critical business functions. Since debuting in late 2012, the software has been coming for the big guys, mainly Oracle (N:ORCL) and SAP (N:SAP). Workday software is targeting two main areas, human resources and financial departments. Cloud software is becoming much more appealing to customers as it costs less in the long run. Workday is working to differentiate itself with the addition of such new tools as Collaborative Anytime Feedback, which allows users to commend a colleague’s good work in a public forum. Despite having more than 1,000 clients, Workday is still far off from Oracle’s customer base of 10,000+, and while 2016 revenues are expected to surpass the $1B mark, that still pales in comparison with Oracle’s estimate of $38B. Year-to-date the stock is nearly flat.
Splunk (SPLK)
Information Technology - Software | Reports November 19, after the close.
The Estimize consensus calls for EPS of $0.04, 50% better than the Street’s expectation. Revenues of $163.06M are above Wall Street’s estimate for $160.27M and guidance of $159.00M.
What to watch: Splunk Inc., a software provider for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine generated big-data, will be reporting earnings next week. Recently, the Canadian marketplace for Canadian bond and derivative trading, CanDeal, implemented Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security across its platforms. Splunk has become popular within financial services as the company offers advanced security analytics data. However, Splunk’s rival ELK Stack, an open source stack company, has been gaining massive global traction and is starting to become a threat. Should ELK Stack continue to attract attention, despite how well-funded and how popular Splunk is, it could begin to grab market share. It’s stock is up roughly 4% for the year.