En garde! Touché! Sorry for the cliché! Pure Storage flashes its blade

Can Pure Storage keep up its booming growth as FlashBlade, its Big Data flash box, becomes generally availabile? FlashBlade is its second solid-state storage product line following the primary data-storing FlashArray. It's aimed at fast access to unstructured data for analytics and so forth, with Pure mentioning data-intensive …

[Electron Shepherd]

Are they "growing"?

Q3 2016 financial highlights are:

Revenue: $197M

Loss: $78M

Source: https://investor.purestorage.com/news-and-events/press-releases/press-release-details/2016/Pure-Storage-Announces-Third-Quarter-Fiscal-2017-Results/default.aspx

Revenues are up, sure. But profitability? Seems a long way off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Are they "growing"?

The trends point to yes.

You seem to have conveniently left out one particular indicator in their most recent earnings call. They beat analyst expectations (yet again) for EPS. It's likely a matter of 3-4 more quarters before that EPS number goes positive.

Enough of the FUD, just try and compete.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Are they "growing"?

You meant LPS (loss per share). LPS is actually more than the previous several quarters. Both profit and operating margin are flat negative. Operating cashflow is flat negative.

I was expecting PSTG to get momentum in 2016, but it did not happen. Just look at QoQ trend, not YoY. I think what happened is they sell products at huge discounts, at the same time have to pay a competitive salary (more risk, more reward) and invest more in R&D as it turned out having just one product is not enough.