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Venkisakthi
2021-06-30

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Cloudflare Is Much More Scalable Than You Think

Summary We think Cloudflare’s business model has not been well understood by investors. While Cloud

Cloudflare Is Much More Scalable Than You Think

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{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"data":{"magic":2,"id":151002987,"tweetId":"151002987","gmtCreate":1625055316649,"gmtModify":1633945409251,"author":{"id":3585780555170064,"idStr":"3585780555170064","authorId":3585780555170064,"authorIdStr":"3585780555170064","name":"Venkisakthi","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3ec08c0f381636758efa60d454734dc0","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":0,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body>Sure..</body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body>Sure..</body></html>","text":"Sure..","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/151002987","repostId":1181301986,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1181301986","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1625043232,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1181301986?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-06-30 16:53","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Cloudflare Is Much More Scalable Than You Think","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1181301986","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nWe think Cloudflare’s business model has not been well understood by investors.\nWhile Cloud","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>We think Cloudflare’s business model has not been well understood by investors.</li>\n <li>While Cloudflare operates in the Content Delivery Networks space, it has never positioned itself as a CDN player.</li>\n <li>We present a clearer view of what Cloudflare represents, in order for investors to more appropriately appreciate the high scalability of the company’s business model.</li>\n <li>While we think Cloudflare is primed for outperformance even at the current price level, we would prefer to add further only at the next retracement.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5bd63105e871f3b7086e6743081853b5\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1022\">Steve Jennings/Getty Images Entertainment\nUnderstanding Cloudflare's Business Model\nCloudflare (NET) has come to be known as many things to different investors. We have seen investors classifying Cloudflare as a cloud or web security company, or a content delivery network [CDN], or an identity access management [IAM] company. The fact is, while Cloudflare is involved in all of those, the company actually has a much larger scale of operation. Cloudflare sees itself as “a networking company”, that “you have to think about [Cloudflare] almost like&nbsp;Cisco-as-a-service. Anything where you would have bought and acquired hardware on-premise, whether it's firewalls, routers, load balancers, VPNs, we offer this as a service from our network. And this network is masked by now.”\nIn fact, CEO Matthew Prince emphasized:\n<blockquote>\n So the reason that we picked the&nbsp;ticker symbol NET&nbsp;was because, fundamentally, what it is that we sell is the network that you plug into and then you don't have to worry about anything else. And so that's what we want to deliver. And so a piece of that is you want to make sure you have a fast network. A piece of that is you want to make sure you have a reliable network. But a big piece of that is you want to make sure that you have a network which is helping you solve the security problems that you have.\n</blockquote>\nWe think that one of the key reasons that Cloudflare wanted investors to clearly understand the company's scope of business is to allow investors to have the appropriate strategic view of the company’s still-expanding TAM, which the company highlighted has been expanding since its IPO in 2019. Although the company started with a TAM of $37B in 2019, which then saw it being revised upwards to $72B, and now the company is looking at a TAM of $100B over the next 3 years.\nCloudflare is the Undisputed Market Leader in DDoS Protection\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c5a18d2b88858258dd3212a23e6a41c4\" tg-width=\"600\" tg-height=\"371\">DDoS and bot protection software market share worldwide as of Apr 21. Data source: Datanyze\nWhile Cloudflare started with “load balancing, firewalling, DDoS mitigation services” and the company is the undisputed worldwide market leader in DDoS protection with an 81.4% market share, the company has moved swiftly to extend its TAM to VPN and&nbsp;remote browser isolation service&nbsp;(through its&nbsp;S2 Systems Corporation acquisition&nbsp;in Jan 20), targeting these two markets with&nbsp;Cloudflare for Teams, and thebrowser isolation servicewhich can also be added on to its Teams product. However, its third TAM extension in which the company planned to “disrupt the corporate network and Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS]” through itsCloudflare Magic Transitproduct by protecting companies' on-premise data centers which saw the company entering to disrupt the highly lucrative stronghold of \"the Ciscos (CSCO) of this worlds and Fortinets (FTNT) and Check Points (CHKP) and Palo Altos (PANW) and Riverbeds.\"\nTherefore, investors should be able to clearly appreciate the extremely high scalability of Cloudflare’s business model and its ambitions to take on the market’s biggest on-premise security players in their home ground. Magic Transit will be a key player in the company’s penetration of its enterprise segment as “the MPLS spend is a significant dollar item in the budgets of our customers” would help the company to build up its enterprise segment which has been growing rapidly.\nRapidly Expanding Enterprise Segment\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/fa220975bc1c2c02ff1e97a20a87a09d\" tg-width=\"600\" tg-height=\"371\">Large / Enterprise customers trend. Data source: Company filings\nThe company has certainly made tremendous inroads into the enterprise segment, which is now the company’s “fastest growing business”. While it may seem like its 945 enterprise customers as of Q1'21 (this segment has grown at a CAGR of 69% from Q1’18), pales in comparison to its customer total of 119,206, this segment now represents the majority of the company’s revenue as Cloudflare highlighted: “This is now 50%, a little bit more than 50% of our revenue.” In fact, the chart alone would not do full justice to the company’s ability in penetrating this segment as the larger paying customers within the enterprise segment have been growing even faster, as Cloudflare further added: “Let's look at customers that give us more than $500,000 or even more than $1 million a year, the larger the cohort, the faster the growth. So our largest cohort, so $1 million-plus customers, has been growing north of 70% now consistently over last the 7 quarters”\nExpansion of Products Helps to Sustain its DBNRR\nWhile investors may have been inundated with the number or scope of products or services that the company has been offering to its customers, Cloudflare highlighted that in fact, “first of all, the more products we have, the easier expansion becomes.” The company has of course been mindful of building products that provide significant value to its customers and have seen its customers move up the product adoption ladder rapidly over the years.\nImportantly, the company attaches a \"magic number\" to its customers’ product adoption: 4 products per customer. It emphasized that while at IPO 70% of its customers were using 4 products each, “that number has now moved far beyond 80%. And now more than 70% of the customers are using 5 products. So with the increase in the product portfolio, we've been able to sell more products to existing customers”\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/3cc7b20c40180d118295622722286980\" tg-width=\"600\" tg-height=\"371\">Dollar-based Net Retention Rate [DBNRR]. Data source: Company filings\nThat has seen the company consistently maintaining its DBNRR over the years, while it posted its most impressive DBNRR of 123% over the last 3 years in Q1’21. While its DBNRR is in line with its SaaS peers median of 120%, we are confident that the company would continue to maintain a consistently high level of DBNRR as more and more of its customers adopt more products moving forward, “and with that, [leading to] the stickiness of the product and [having] the churn rates come down.”\nCloudflare was Never Designed as a CDN\nMany investors often compared Cloudflare to Fastly (FSLY) as competitors in the content-delivery networks (CDN) space. While we think NET certainly competes in that space with FSLY, the company specifically wanted to remind investors that:\n<blockquote>\n We were never designed as a CDN. We had to provide CDN-like functionalities in order to deliver security and performance-based products and services at the edge of our network. But CDN was a means to achieve that, but not the business model in itself. We are pricing our products differently. We have no usage -- or hardly any usage-based pricings. Even today, less than a low single digit of our revenue is variable billing-based. And of that, less than 1/3 is really bandwidth-driven.\n</blockquote>\nWe had recently highlighted in&nbsp;an article on FSLY&nbsp;and reminded investors that FSLY is not your typical SaaS model, as the company mainly derives its revenue from usage, rather than subscriptions. On the other hand, NET derives the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, and therefore the revenue model driving their respective businesses is entirely different.\nIn fact, the unpredictable bandwidth cost of usage-based model was one of the key reasons why NET chose not to adopt a usage-based revenue model as the company wanted to focus on driving down costs for its customers with an offering that bills in a “predictable and reliable way”. Cloudflare’s priority would then turn to finding ways to “drive the cost of bandwidth to close to 0 over time” by making sure its “software-defined network could allow any server anywhere in our network to run any different function that we did and to be able to shift traffic around to deliver a level of efficiency that no one else has.”\nCEO Matthew Prince also succinctly added:\n<blockquote>\n And so where I think a typical CDN company worries about things like how many people are going to tune into the Super Bowl and is the new show on Disney+ going to be popular or not, I spend my days worrying about what are the new cyber threats coming out of Russia or Iran, around the world and how do we stay in front of those. And so again, just completely different businesses.\n</blockquote>\nTherefore, investors could be assured that those type of usage volatility that FSLY had endured whenever they lost a major customer like we saw inTikTokis unlikely to happen to NET, simply because Cloudflare doesn’t bill by usage, and therefore providing the kind or revenue visibility that we have come to expect of typical SaaS companies.\nHowever, Cloudflare’s subscriptions-based revenue model is not without its inherent disadvantage as compared to FSLY’s usage-based billing model whenever there’s a huge surge in its customers’ usage, like what the company experienced last year during the throes of the pandemic:\n<blockquote>\n All of a sudden, we saw this dramatic uptick and a dramatic spike in the amount of bandwidth that people were using across our services. And unlike traditional CDNs, we couldn't just pass those costs on to our customers. And so those actually, I think, were pretty substantial headwinds to us, and I'm proud of our team for really adjusting, solving customers' problems, focusing on expanding our existing customers and making them bigger customers and getting more efficient over time. And so I think that what were headwinds for us are turning into tailwinds now, where we're seeing the sort of bandwidth usage plateauing, which is attractive for kind of our cost side of our business.\n</blockquote>\nCloudflare's Excellent Margins\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/94dc84122254553246848c5eee09615d\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"727\">NET and FSLY Gross margin. Data source: S&amp;P Capital IQ\nWhile the company had to deal with the dramatic increased bandwidth costs that its subscriptions model wasn’t designed for in the first place last year, it had still managed to maintain its gross margins consistently north of 75% over time, which easily outperformed FSLY’s usage-based revenue model. We believe the company’s full suite of networking products has helped the company to strongly diversify its revenue base, which lends further credence to the superb execution of the company’s business model across multiple markets and industry verticals, strengthening its revenue resilience against any unexpected slowdown or unanticipated costs surge. If investors were to coin Cloudflare as a “Jack of all trades”, we think it may be apt to call it a “master of all” as well.\nExpected to Turn EBIT and FCF Profitable\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/7f441756caaca11d36431b00ab64f090\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"678\">NET projected revenue mean consensus and projected YoY revenue growth. Data source: S&amp;P Capital IQ\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/eec9b55dc6e235a1304a54224c0f90b7\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"711\">NET projected EBIT margin and projected unlevered FCF margin. Data source: S&amp;P Capital IQ\nEven though NET has yet to achieve FCF and EBIT profitability, the company has guided for a long-term operating margin of 20%, which in our model we think is highly achievable over time as we projected the company to achieve an EBIT margin of 15.7% by the end of FY 25 especially when the company is still expected to post rapid revenue growth north of 30% in the years ahead.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c617eade5b53ed1383b6438691464f52\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"711\">NET LTM SG&amp;A margin. Data source: S&amp;P Capital IQ\nOur confidence is mainly predicated on the sustained improvement in operating leverage that the company has been demonstrating in its SG&amp;A margins, which has been the company’s largest operating expense segment. We believe that the company is likely to maintain this improvement moving forward that would cascade down strongly to its EBIT margins and move the company towards EBIT and FCF profitability in the next few years. Therefore, the party is surely just getting started for NET.\nValuations are Compelling If Execution is Sustained\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c991d9200f0424a6c2739f78335a667e\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"726\">NET EV / Fwd Rev. Data source: S&amp;P Capital IQ\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b81c5bc076bc34bcc9135201909e8028\" tg-width=\"1000\" tg-height=\"600\">NET NTM (TEV / Rev).\nWhile we continue to applaud NET’s superb business model and world-class execution, we are aware that this is unlikely to be lost among astute market participants. Therefore, we were not surprised to observe NET’s EV / FY+1 Rev is valued at 52x, while its mean is about 35.5x over the last one year. Based on our calculations of NET’s expected revenue growth rate in the next few years, we derived an expected share price 4Y CAGR of 19.66%, even at the current price level, representing potentially market-beating returns in the years ahead, if the company is able to maintain its excellent execution track record and achieve its growth targets.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/52ff2c1614d64bd26c28b2b3c0c17488\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"442\">Projected FY 25 share price and projected 4Y CAGR. Data source: S&amp;P Capital IQ\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f5eac1f8292520dd62f2d5c23328a0a9\" tg-width=\"1280\" tg-height=\"783\">Source: TradingView\nWhile we were somewhat fortunate to enter our full position in NET at about $30 last Sep, based on the current price action, we don’t think there is any optimal entry point for new investors right now, even if we think that based on the current price level, NET would likely continue to outperform the market.\nTherefore, we would encourage investors who consider price action in their decision-making to wait for a retracement first, while investors who do not consider price action may enter now if they have high conviction of NET’s execution in the next few years.\nWhile we would not add more positions at the current price level, we would surely keep the stock on our watchlist to consider increasing our exposure at the next retracement.\nWrapping It All Up\nCloudflare has been a true outperformer for its investors since its IPO in 2019, and we think that the company’s growth story has barely just begun as it moves towards EBIT and FCF profitability in the next few years. Investors in NET are encouraged to sit tight and enjoy many years of solid growth to come.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Cloudflare Is Much More Scalable Than You Think</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nCloudflare Is Much More Scalable Than You Think\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-30 16:53 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4437171-cloudflare-is-much-more-scalable-than-you-think>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nWe think Cloudflare’s business model has not been well understood by investors.\nWhile Cloudflare operates in the Content Delivery Networks space, it has never positioned itself as a CDN ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4437171-cloudflare-is-much-more-scalable-than-you-think\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"NET":"Cloudflare, Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4437171-cloudflare-is-much-more-scalable-than-you-think","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1181301986","content_text":"Summary\n\nWe think Cloudflare’s business model has not been well understood by investors.\nWhile Cloudflare operates in the Content Delivery Networks space, it has never positioned itself as a CDN player.\nWe present a clearer view of what Cloudflare represents, in order for investors to more appropriately appreciate the high scalability of the company’s business model.\nWhile we think Cloudflare is primed for outperformance even at the current price level, we would prefer to add further only at the next retracement.\n\nSteve Jennings/Getty Images Entertainment\nUnderstanding Cloudflare's Business Model\nCloudflare (NET) has come to be known as many things to different investors. We have seen investors classifying Cloudflare as a cloud or web security company, or a content delivery network [CDN], or an identity access management [IAM] company. The fact is, while Cloudflare is involved in all of those, the company actually has a much larger scale of operation. Cloudflare sees itself as “a networking company”, that “you have to think about [Cloudflare] almost like Cisco-as-a-service. Anything where you would have bought and acquired hardware on-premise, whether it's firewalls, routers, load balancers, VPNs, we offer this as a service from our network. And this network is masked by now.”\nIn fact, CEO Matthew Prince emphasized:\n\n So the reason that we picked the ticker symbol NET was because, fundamentally, what it is that we sell is the network that you plug into and then you don't have to worry about anything else. And so that's what we want to deliver. And so a piece of that is you want to make sure you have a fast network. A piece of that is you want to make sure you have a reliable network. But a big piece of that is you want to make sure that you have a network which is helping you solve the security problems that you have.\n\nWe think that one of the key reasons that Cloudflare wanted investors to clearly understand the company's scope of business is to allow investors to have the appropriate strategic view of the company’s still-expanding TAM, which the company highlighted has been expanding since its IPO in 2019. Although the company started with a TAM of $37B in 2019, which then saw it being revised upwards to $72B, and now the company is looking at a TAM of $100B over the next 3 years.\nCloudflare is the Undisputed Market Leader in DDoS Protection\nDDoS and bot protection software market share worldwide as of Apr 21. Data source: Datanyze\nWhile Cloudflare started with “load balancing, firewalling, DDoS mitigation services” and the company is the undisputed worldwide market leader in DDoS protection with an 81.4% market share, the company has moved swiftly to extend its TAM to VPN and remote browser isolation service (through its S2 Systems Corporation acquisition in Jan 20), targeting these two markets with Cloudflare for Teams, and thebrowser isolation servicewhich can also be added on to its Teams product. However, its third TAM extension in which the company planned to “disrupt the corporate network and Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS]” through itsCloudflare Magic Transitproduct by protecting companies' on-premise data centers which saw the company entering to disrupt the highly lucrative stronghold of \"the Ciscos (CSCO) of this worlds and Fortinets (FTNT) and Check Points (CHKP) and Palo Altos (PANW) and Riverbeds.\"\nTherefore, investors should be able to clearly appreciate the extremely high scalability of Cloudflare’s business model and its ambitions to take on the market’s biggest on-premise security players in their home ground. Magic Transit will be a key player in the company’s penetration of its enterprise segment as “the MPLS spend is a significant dollar item in the budgets of our customers” would help the company to build up its enterprise segment which has been growing rapidly.\nRapidly Expanding Enterprise Segment\nLarge / Enterprise customers trend. Data source: Company filings\nThe company has certainly made tremendous inroads into the enterprise segment, which is now the company’s “fastest growing business”. While it may seem like its 945 enterprise customers as of Q1'21 (this segment has grown at a CAGR of 69% from Q1’18), pales in comparison to its customer total of 119,206, this segment now represents the majority of the company’s revenue as Cloudflare highlighted: “This is now 50%, a little bit more than 50% of our revenue.” In fact, the chart alone would not do full justice to the company’s ability in penetrating this segment as the larger paying customers within the enterprise segment have been growing even faster, as Cloudflare further added: “Let's look at customers that give us more than $500,000 or even more than $1 million a year, the larger the cohort, the faster the growth. So our largest cohort, so $1 million-plus customers, has been growing north of 70% now consistently over last the 7 quarters”\nExpansion of Products Helps to Sustain its DBNRR\nWhile investors may have been inundated with the number or scope of products or services that the company has been offering to its customers, Cloudflare highlighted that in fact, “first of all, the more products we have, the easier expansion becomes.” The company has of course been mindful of building products that provide significant value to its customers and have seen its customers move up the product adoption ladder rapidly over the years.\nImportantly, the company attaches a \"magic number\" to its customers’ product adoption: 4 products per customer. It emphasized that while at IPO 70% of its customers were using 4 products each, “that number has now moved far beyond 80%. And now more than 70% of the customers are using 5 products. So with the increase in the product portfolio, we've been able to sell more products to existing customers”\nDollar-based Net Retention Rate [DBNRR]. Data source: Company filings\nThat has seen the company consistently maintaining its DBNRR over the years, while it posted its most impressive DBNRR of 123% over the last 3 years in Q1’21. While its DBNRR is in line with its SaaS peers median of 120%, we are confident that the company would continue to maintain a consistently high level of DBNRR as more and more of its customers adopt more products moving forward, “and with that, [leading to] the stickiness of the product and [having] the churn rates come down.”\nCloudflare was Never Designed as a CDN\nMany investors often compared Cloudflare to Fastly (FSLY) as competitors in the content-delivery networks (CDN) space. While we think NET certainly competes in that space with FSLY, the company specifically wanted to remind investors that:\n\n We were never designed as a CDN. We had to provide CDN-like functionalities in order to deliver security and performance-based products and services at the edge of our network. But CDN was a means to achieve that, but not the business model in itself. We are pricing our products differently. We have no usage -- or hardly any usage-based pricings. Even today, less than a low single digit of our revenue is variable billing-based. And of that, less than 1/3 is really bandwidth-driven.\n\nWe had recently highlighted in an article on FSLY and reminded investors that FSLY is not your typical SaaS model, as the company mainly derives its revenue from usage, rather than subscriptions. On the other hand, NET derives the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, and therefore the revenue model driving their respective businesses is entirely different.\nIn fact, the unpredictable bandwidth cost of usage-based model was one of the key reasons why NET chose not to adopt a usage-based revenue model as the company wanted to focus on driving down costs for its customers with an offering that bills in a “predictable and reliable way”. Cloudflare’s priority would then turn to finding ways to “drive the cost of bandwidth to close to 0 over time” by making sure its “software-defined network could allow any server anywhere in our network to run any different function that we did and to be able to shift traffic around to deliver a level of efficiency that no one else has.”\nCEO Matthew Prince also succinctly added:\n\n And so where I think a typical CDN company worries about things like how many people are going to tune into the Super Bowl and is the new show on Disney+ going to be popular or not, I spend my days worrying about what are the new cyber threats coming out of Russia or Iran, around the world and how do we stay in front of those. And so again, just completely different businesses.\n\nTherefore, investors could be assured that those type of usage volatility that FSLY had endured whenever they lost a major customer like we saw inTikTokis unlikely to happen to NET, simply because Cloudflare doesn’t bill by usage, and therefore providing the kind or revenue visibility that we have come to expect of typical SaaS companies.\nHowever, Cloudflare’s subscriptions-based revenue model is not without its inherent disadvantage as compared to FSLY’s usage-based billing model whenever there’s a huge surge in its customers’ usage, like what the company experienced last year during the throes of the pandemic:\n\n All of a sudden, we saw this dramatic uptick and a dramatic spike in the amount of bandwidth that people were using across our services. And unlike traditional CDNs, we couldn't just pass those costs on to our customers. And so those actually, I think, were pretty substantial headwinds to us, and I'm proud of our team for really adjusting, solving customers' problems, focusing on expanding our existing customers and making them bigger customers and getting more efficient over time. And so I think that what were headwinds for us are turning into tailwinds now, where we're seeing the sort of bandwidth usage plateauing, which is attractive for kind of our cost side of our business.\n\nCloudflare's Excellent Margins\nNET and FSLY Gross margin. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nWhile the company had to deal with the dramatic increased bandwidth costs that its subscriptions model wasn’t designed for in the first place last year, it had still managed to maintain its gross margins consistently north of 75% over time, which easily outperformed FSLY’s usage-based revenue model. We believe the company’s full suite of networking products has helped the company to strongly diversify its revenue base, which lends further credence to the superb execution of the company’s business model across multiple markets and industry verticals, strengthening its revenue resilience against any unexpected slowdown or unanticipated costs surge. If investors were to coin Cloudflare as a “Jack of all trades”, we think it may be apt to call it a “master of all” as well.\nExpected to Turn EBIT and FCF Profitable\nNET projected revenue mean consensus and projected YoY revenue growth. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nNET projected EBIT margin and projected unlevered FCF margin. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nEven though NET has yet to achieve FCF and EBIT profitability, the company has guided for a long-term operating margin of 20%, which in our model we think is highly achievable over time as we projected the company to achieve an EBIT margin of 15.7% by the end of FY 25 especially when the company is still expected to post rapid revenue growth north of 30% in the years ahead.\nNET LTM SG&A margin. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nOur confidence is mainly predicated on the sustained improvement in operating leverage that the company has been demonstrating in its SG&A margins, which has been the company’s largest operating expense segment. We believe that the company is likely to maintain this improvement moving forward that would cascade down strongly to its EBIT margins and move the company towards EBIT and FCF profitability in the next few years. Therefore, the party is surely just getting started for NET.\nValuations are Compelling If Execution is Sustained\nNET EV / Fwd Rev. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nNET NTM (TEV / Rev).\nWhile we continue to applaud NET’s superb business model and world-class execution, we are aware that this is unlikely to be lost among astute market participants. Therefore, we were not surprised to observe NET’s EV / FY+1 Rev is valued at 52x, while its mean is about 35.5x over the last one year. Based on our calculations of NET’s expected revenue growth rate in the next few years, we derived an expected share price 4Y CAGR of 19.66%, even at the current price level, representing potentially market-beating returns in the years ahead, if the company is able to maintain its excellent execution track record and achieve its growth targets.\nProjected FY 25 share price and projected 4Y CAGR. Data source: S&P Capital IQ\nSource: TradingView\nWhile we were somewhat fortunate to enter our full position in NET at about $30 last Sep, based on the current price action, we don’t think there is any optimal entry point for new investors right now, even if we think that based on the current price level, NET would likely continue to outperform the market.\nTherefore, we would encourage investors who consider price action in their decision-making to wait for a retracement first, while investors who do not consider price action may enter now if they have high conviction of NET’s execution in the next few years.\nWhile we would not add more positions at the current price level, we would surely keep the stock on our watchlist to consider increasing our exposure at the next retracement.\nWrapping It All Up\nCloudflare has been a true outperformer for its investors since its IPO in 2019, and we think that the company’s growth story has barely just begun as it moves towards EBIT and FCF profitability in the next few years. Investors in NET are encouraged to sit tight and enjoy many years of solid growth to come.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":334,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"EN","currentLanguage":"EN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":6,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ORIG"},"commentList":[],"hasMoreComment":false,"orderType":2}