Bandwidth Inc., a communications technology services company, reported fourth quarter earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations.
The Raleigh-based company reported non-GAAP net loss of $800,000, or 4 cents per share, in the quarter, compared to net income of $1.6 million, or 9 cents per share, in the fourth quarter a year ago.
Analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research were expecting a loss of 29 cents per share.
Revenue was $52.3 million, up 23 percent from revenue of $42.5 million in the fourth quarter a year ago. The results also beat the company’s own projection made in its last earnings announcement, which was between $49.1 million and $49.6 million.
“Our solid results continued to be driven by expanding our relationships with existing enterprise customers,” said David Morken, chief executive officer of Bandwidth, during the conference call. “Demand for our services has been solid throughout the year and in the fourth quarter was again driven by a diverse set of customers using a full breadth of our offerings.”
Morken said that Bandwidth had just started a new relationship with one of the fastest-growing cloud strategy company that serves more than 1,500 enterprises in the fourth quarter.
“Changes in the messaging industry are driving more demand for Bandwidth’s enterprise messaging services,” Morken commented. “Wireless carriers are sunsetting shared short code messaging and developing new solutions to balance the urgent need to protect consumers from unwanted messages with reliable deliverability by filtering, blocking and raising rates.”
During the conference call, Morken also made specific remarks about employment. During 2018, the company grew its team by 62 percent from 378 to 611, said Morken.
Sales and marketing team were more than doubled from 63 to 150, including 45 Enterprise hunters and eight strategic sales reps. In addition, Bandwidth also grew its technology and R&D teams from 66 to 156 during the past year. The majority of these hires were software developers and engineers.
Bandwidth’s shares closed at $47.35 on Thursday, down $1.19, or 2.45 percent from previous day’s closing. The earnings were released shortly after the market closed on Wednesday.
The company went public last year. In the five quarters since it has been a public company, it has beaten Wall Street expectations.
Companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Ring Central use Bandwidth’s APIs to embed voice, messaging and 9-1-1 access into software and applications.
