Snowflake is ‘a growth company with rapidly slowing growth,’ analyst says as stock melts

“Snowflake is a growth company with rapidly slowing growth, which would hurt the near-term prospects for the stock,” Bernstein’s Mark Moerdler said in a note to clients following Wednesday afternoon’s report. “While the company is trying to improve the profitability profile, it may not be sufficient to offset the impact from growth deceleration.”

In his view, a deterioration of the economic landscape “is certainly impacting Snowflake’s growth,” but “a meaningful portion of [the company’s] growth deceleration is due to [a] non-macro-related consumption slowdown.”

Moerdler reiterated a market-perform rating on Snowflake shares while reducing his price target to $157 from $161.

Snowflake announced a $2 billion buyback program over the next two years that management expects will help manage dilution related to stock-based compensation, but Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci wasn’t sold on the move.

“Although the company has more than $4B in cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet, we question if this is the best use of cash for a hypergrowth company, especially considering the company remains the most expensive software stock in the entire market,” he wrote, while maintaining a sell rating on the stock.

See also: Snowflake plans to hire 1,000-plus workers this year as other tech companies cut

Elsewhere, Snowflake found defenders.

“Despite the mixed results, with guidance that is better than peers but lower than expected, Snowflake remains in rarified territory in the current environment as it is one of the remaining at-scale businesses growing in the ~40% range, showing overall less [deceleration] than other consumption models such as AWS, Azure, and Datadog, and guiding to a growth+margin Rule-of-65,” wrote JPMorgan’s Mark Murphy.

He added that Snowflake is “clearly not immune to challenges within the current IT spending environment or [the] volatility of consumption models” but expects that Snowflake “will see a resurgence whenever the environment normalizes and continue its path toward becoming a key layer within the modern tech stack.”

He has an overweight rating on Snowflake shares but cut his price target to $165 from $180.

Don’t miss: Salesforce’s ‘clear shift in tone’ helps send stock flying toward best day since 2020

Evercore ISI’s Kirk Materne also stayed bullish, maintaining an outperform rating and $196 price target.

“Nothing SNOW is seeing in the market in terms of consumption trends is unique to SNOW and our partners all remain very bullish about the opportunity over the long-term,” he wrote. “As such, while the revenue ‘reset’ is going to create some near-term pain, we continue to believe SNOW is one of the more unique growth stories in software at scale.”