Atlassian tops $1 billion in revenue after a “ripper” quarter

“Australians often to refer to ‘something excellent’ as being a ‘ripper’,” Atlassian chief executives Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar said at the start of their letter to shareholders. “And we had a ‘ripper’ of a quarter.”

The billionaire tech duo weren’t lying. Atlassian’s second quarterly earnings report for the 2019 fiscal year is a glowing review of the local tech darling, with the company’s revenue up 39% compared to the previous quarter, coming in at $US299 million ($415 million).

That result has placed Atlassian into the coveted dual-billion club, with the company’s revenue for the 2018 calendar year exceeding $US1 billion, and the company having a valuation of a billion or more ($US21 billion to be exact).

The company also boasted an operating loss of $3.2 million for the quarter, compared to a loss of $13 million for the same quarter last financial year. Additionally, the tech company reported a net income of $US45.2 million for the quarter, compared to a net loss of $64.2 million in the same quarter last year.

The company now has 68,000 users for its flagship product, Jira, and over 138,000 organisations using all of its products.

Analysts were pleased with the company’s results but threw co-founder Scott Farquhar for a loop when inquiring if the company was in its second, third, or fourth innings, referring to baseball.

“I think that’s an American term. I think you have to translate that to a cricket term, are we the third [day] of the test I guess. The software market is growing incredibly fast, every company is becoming a software company,” he said.

“We are growing out, continue to grow our customer base within that market incredibly well and then we’re also growing our share of wallet within our customers as we do more things for them.”

The founders also hinted to the future of Atlassian, when asked on the investor call if its range of software offerings were complete.

“I’d say we provide a huge amount of what IT does today. So if I think internally the areas we’re focused on, one is that we’re changing that perception. So people do turn to us and will choose stable products and see what we already have to serve them,” Farquhar said.

But we are also building and investing. We have a huge R&D investment to tackle the areas we don’t have at the moment, and some of those are very small adjacencies on top of the platforms we already got.”

Shares in the company spiked 10% after the report, and are currently trading slightly down at $US90.60.

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