Palantir Q1 sales stronger than expected amid commercial, government demand
Palantir Technologies reported better-than-expected first quarter sales amid strong commercial and government demand.
The analytics company said US commercial revenue was up 72% in the first quarter from a year ago with government sales up 83%.
Palantir reported first quarter revenue of $341 million, up 49% from a year ago, with a net loss of $123.5 million, or 7 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings were 4 cents a share.
Wall Street was expecting first quarter sales of $332.2 million and non-GAAP earnings of 4 cents a share.
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In the first quarter, Palantir said it closed 15 deals of $5 million or more in total contract value, including 6 deals worth $10 million or more.
Shyam Sankar, chief operating officer of Palantir, said on the earnings conference call:
We only have a handful of Fortune 500 customers and less than one-tenth of a percent of annual defense spending. We have widened and are continuing to widen our capability to distribute our product. We see strength in forward-looking indicators and customer interest. Since the beginning of February, qualified commercial opportunities in the U.S. and the U.K. are up 2.5x, active commercial pilots across the business have more than doubled and opportunities across the U.S. and U.K. government continue to develop at pace.
Sankar also said that Palantir is building out its distribution channel. "Today, 15 different SIs are partnering with our customers to deliver work on our products. We continue to view cloud providers as channels. We have seen a market shift where cloud providers are integrating foundry into their reference architectures and core go-to-market activities," he said.
As for the outlook, Palantir projected $360 million in revenue for the second quarter with growth of 43%. Analysts were modeling second quarter sales of $344.3 million.
Palantir said that it expects sales growth to moderate. CEO Alex Karp has said that annual revenue growth will be 30% or more for 2021 through 2025.
Shareholders on a forum to aggregate first quarter questions asked about Palantir buying cryptocurrency for its balance sheet, impact from a partnership with IBM and whether the company can expand with mid-sized companies.