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2021-07-27

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Snowflake: 5 Reasons Why It Is Truly Special

Summary Snowflake is the leading cloud-computing data warehouse company that will play an integral

Snowflake: 5 Reasons Why It Is Truly Special

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{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"data":{"magic":2,"id":809403465,"tweetId":"809403465","gmtCreate":1627383946657,"gmtModify":1631890246818,"author":{"id":3581580235774783,"idStr":"3581580235774783","authorId":3581580235774783,"authorIdStr":"3581580235774783","name":"Fishleg","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f15d7ad9123a41ff258e8f90a304b592","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":2,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body>🙌</body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body>🙌</body></html>","text":"🙌","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/809403465","repostId":1157314860,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1157314860","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1627379639,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1157314860?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-07-27 17:53","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Snowflake: 5 Reasons Why It Is Truly Special","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1157314860","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nSnowflake is the leading cloud-computing data warehouse company that will play an integral ","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Snowflake is the leading cloud-computing data warehouse company that will play an integral role in the future of Artificial Intelligence.</li>\n <li>This article discusses five key competitive advantages that make Snowflake unique and able to dominate its industry for an extensive period.</li>\n <li>Snowflake recently announced an ambitious plan of achieving $10B in Revenue by 2028. We evaluate the possibility and future growth estimates.</li>\n <li>I discuss the competitive dynamics and future risks for investors to watch for those looking into purchasing Snowflake.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/243b84d3fd988927c4b86e5b512afae0\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1025\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">amriphoto/iStock via Getty Images\nThesis:\nSnowflake(NYSE:SNOW)founders have built a truly unique software product and a robust Go-To-Market strategy that will make it hard for competitors to replicate and take away their market share.\nSnowflake needs no introduction. They are a leading cloud-based computing-data warehousing provider that builds solutions for companies to store and run analytics/artificial intelligence on the cloud\nSome people will say that Snowflake's current valuation has priced in many of its future domination. However, if Snowflake continues to grow rapidly while maintaining its core competitive advantages, then they have a good chance of providing investors with a decent return.\nThis article will evaluate their competitive advantage around the uniqueness of the product, platform optimization, the TAM, their best in class financials and management team.\nIntroduction:\nAt their recent conference, they recently announced an ambitious plan of achieving $10B in Revenue by 2028. This shows great confidence by management in their ability to sustain their competitive advantage over that period.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/818e9b6119fe734e015455a98e1611d0\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"344\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nBelow are the operating models and the assumptions as they plan towards achieving that audacious goal by 2028.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ca9357623df4e55e00cc12f5c79646db\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"364\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nWhat made management so confident in providing such guidance many years ahead into future? I believe it has to do with management's confidence around the core product strengths. We will discuss five key competitive advantages that may provide us with a hint towards how Snowflake can archive this milestone.\n1. Vast Total Addressable Market Opportunity ahead with few Competitors:\nSnowflake estimates a $90B TAM for the data cloud, but this number could increase with the recent information that “90% of all the data that has been created were done over the last two years.”If all that data was created within the last two years, can you imagine what the opportunity looks like 10-years from now?\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9dcfef417212217b1442a8bc0ead54bb\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"360\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nSome of the major reasons for the growing TAM opportunities include:\n<ul>\n <li>Data volume and digital footprints are rapidly growing</li>\n <li>Many companies moving their businesses to the cloud.</li>\n</ul>\nAs a result of the first two points, there is a high demand for data management and data sciences tools to capitalize on the opportunity. There are increasing needs for new database architectures to accommodate and keep up with the rising volume of customer data.\nHence, compared to the Fintech industry where a large Total Addressable Market (TAM) has a low barrier to entry and invites numerous competitors, the data cloud industry TAM that Snowflake has carved out for itself truly allows them to capture enough of the TAM dollar opportunity with relatively few competitors. The primarily is due to the high barrier to entry of building a specialized technical software similar to Snowflake (or Databricks/Amazon Redshift).\n2. Uniqueness and Defensibility of the Product:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a3d27d98fe1e663f4515fcabd0f28bb1\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"390\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nPlatform moat:Snowflake’s product was built in the cloud for companies on the cloud. The company has been able to provide a platform that centralizes all forms of the high volume of structured &amp; unstructured data in a centralized location (Data Warehouse &amp; Lake). Traditional companies like Teradata, Hadoop, Cloudera require on-prem infrastructure such as servers, databases, etc. However, Snowflake has built everything solely in the cloud to allow their customers store, manage, analyze, &amp; share data seamlessly.\nSoftware defensibility:This concept is linked to the moat. Defensibility in my definition is the ability for a company to build a unique product, whether through a much more efficient process or system, and the product solves a problem in a differentiated way that is hard for competitors to replicate. The architecture of Snowflake’s platform has been purposely built in this manner. This is the reason they have been able to starve off 'strong' competitors over the last 10-years. Defensibility can drive customer loyalty and high stickiness as evidenced by Snowflake’s high retention metrics of 168%.\nStorage and Compute Optimization: One of the unique features that Snowflake offers is the ability to separate storage and compute for customers. They have created one platform that serves multiple purposes. Customers can store their data on Snowflake’s cloud but choose not to utilize their computational products or vice-versa. In addition, Snowflake’s computational power is extremely strong and fast, managing a high amount of analytics workload while still providing best-in-class performance.\nIn summary, when you combine the platform's uniqueness on the cloud, storage and compute differentiation and defensibility due to the inability to easily replicate the product. When you combine this together with a first-mover advantage, this enables a company to starve 'strong' competitors and allows for more revenue runway.\n3. Platform Innovation &amp; Optimization drives Scale:\nSnowflake has done a great job constantly reinventing and innovating on their product despite being the industry disruptor. One of the things to observe with Snowflake is the obsession with innovation. Recently, major platform improvements were discussed at their conference.\nStorage Compression Costs:At the last quarterly result, Snowflake announced storage compression improvements. It was also announced that they have reduced storage costs for new data coming into their platform by 30%. I believe that customers are more likely to want to store their data on Snowflake’s platform moving forward due to this change. Computation speed has increased, making the platform 6x better with regards to improvements on query and throughput on a single compute cluster and 8x improvements in average query duration and high consistency for latency. In my previous company, I encountered challenges, and my colleagues did experience problems with how slow Microsoft SQL queries performed when you ran multiple or concurrent complex queries, but Snowflake offers a much faster compute power/speed capability.\nOn the surface, it might appear that this improvement in computing power will reduce revenue (since snowflake makes money based on how much time consumers spend on the platform). But reflecting deeper, this situation allows Snowflake to reach scale efficiencies which is a core competitive advantage. The faster and smoother queries I can run, the more I will be more likely to utilize Snowflake’s platform and run more queries. I will assume that more companies will be increasing workloads and bringing more items to snowflake’s platform due to the performance improvements/speed at a cost that fits their budget. The company is also working on developing a chip technology that will massively improve performance for customers, but we are waiting to obtain more information on this product. The marginal scale efficiencies here will benefit Snowflake.\nThe usage-based model drives customer Autonomy:Snowflake has optimized its platform performance to provide efficiencies in billing customers. Customers are guaranteed that they are not going to have any idle time wasted on the platform. Customers pay for only what they need and use. Snowflake provides strong analytics and data as usage evidence to their customers. This is unlike Amazon AWS where the customer pays whatever bill is presented, regardless of how much time they have spent on the platform. There are some nuances here too.\nBased on the usage-based model, customers have full autonomy on the price they pay vs the performance they receive. For example, In the case of a customer who may not use snowflake’s platform in the summer months compared to higher usage in the Fall/Winter, if they want to save more money upfront - they would be more likely to sign up on Snowflake's platform because they are guaranteed they would have a much lower bill as compared to Amazon AWS. Customers can adjust usage to how best they want it. On the other hand, customers who pay a lesser amount will accept that their queries and requests take longer. Customers can decide to pay snowflake more money, to get faster speed performance. Business customers have better control and autonomy in how they utilize the platform.\nOptimizing the time-to-value for customers:The biggest challenge for businesses trying to use the Snowflake platform is the length of time it takes to get Snowflake up and running, because of the extensive data migration from companies with an on-prem legacy system, moving all that data into the cloud. The average company on the Snowflake platform takes around 249-days before consuming snowflake’s product. The length of time has now been reduced to 212-days. Now imagine, if it takes a company more than 200+ days to patiently migrate data into Snowflake’s cloud, do you think that such customers will easily churn after a few months? I doubt it. Hence, companies that are signing up conduct extensive due diligence before making the decision. This is a major strength for Snowflake because customers who have signed up are more than likely going to last on the platform for multiple years. Snowflake has improved its platform optimization to deliver more value to its customer base. Although a higher time period to use a product leads to high Customer Acquisition Costs, in snowflake's case, it is a strong moat that customers are willing to wait so long. It means they will last longer on the platform and it will be very hard to churn.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2eb1b69e71391c44e6ac1f70f2c6e635\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"318\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations.\nFlexibility and Usage-based business model: The flexibility based on the usage-based business model has continued to translate into a major strength for Snowflake. Companies can consume based on their contracted capacity during a contract period. A company may decide to roll over unused capacity to future periods.\nTo summarize this third point, the usage-based business model, the combination of innovation that keeps driving down the cost of the platform relative to its higher effectiveness, the autonomy that customers receive, and the optimization of value is truly one of the unique competitive advantages that snowflake continues to hold over the competition.\n4. Building a powerful ecosystem and empire around the data cloud\nI believe Snowflake’s long-term ambition is to control a large empire of the entire data analytics and Artificial Intelligence space. For example, Amazon AWS has been built in such a way that almost a third (1/3rd) of the entire technology market today touches or is somewhat connected to AWS. Similarly with Microsoft Office suite, in Corporate America, it is difficult to not interact with a Microsoft product.\nI believe that Snowflake’s long-term goal is to be embedded within the entire Data Analytics and AI ecosystem. Below are a few pointers:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/65b01f8df1a2df85043f55b601a82e7f\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"200\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nBuilding strong partnerships with Data Universe Partners: As mentioned, Snowflake has established many partnerships with major players across the entire Data Analytics spectrum - from integration to data visualization partners. They have mentioned it several times and it is clear; they would like to control a major component of the entire space. As a result of becoming an ecosystem that every company running ML and AI computation would eventually touch, this will increase the long-term viability and stickiness of the platform. As part of building the ecosystem, has established major partnerships with companies like Deloitte. Consulting firms discussing digital transformation with large corporations can now discuss Snowflake as part of the engagement. It was recently announced at the last quarterly call that Snowflake has surpassed over $100M in deal flow with Deloitte. Snowflake's aim is to be the central nervous system and unified systems within the Data Ecosystem and that includes winning system integrators.\nMarketplace and Data Programmability Building on Snowflake:\nSnowparkis a new data programmability system that has been built to provide developers with an API for building applications or querying/analyzing data on Snowflake’s Cloud platform.\nThe goal is to automate data pipelines making programmability easy. It allows for integration with Microsoft SQL so that developers can use SQL to easily program or run codes within the platform.\nThe ability for developers, data scientists, and data engineers to seamlessly integrate with Snowflake’s platform will be game-changing. Companies or individuals can now utilize Snowflake’s partner program to help build, market, and operate applications in the snowflake Data Cloud bringing in a lot of future potential. In the near future, creative entrepreneurs can build truly successful products (or even companies) on Snowflake’s platform, elevating its brand and value.\nSnowflake Marketplace:As we are aware, Snowflake runs a marketplace where companies can share and monetize data across clouds and regions and have more relationships with business units, partners, and customers.\nAt their most recent conference, Snowflake announced massive improvements to the payment processing capability of this marketplace. Companies can easily make transactions on Snowflake’s platform. Snowflake thereby generates revenue based on take-rates on every transaction, similar to a marketplace business model.\nThe last point here is that Snowflake is focusing on becoming more industry-centric rather than purely customer-centric. In the sense that the company is focusing more on understanding the data needs of major industries and thereby catering to products that meet the needs of those industries.\n5. Best in Class Management Team &amp; Financial Metrics:\nOne of the most unique asset of every company is the Founders and Leaders. The Founders of Snowflake were previous Oracle employees and specifically, they were \"data warehousing\" and Data Architect experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. They knew the ins and outs, and the challenges with on-prem data storage infrastructure. They were able to turn the data world on its head by building a product that was solely for the cloud due to their knowledge.\nIn 2019, they were hired Frank Slootman. Frank is a highly respected and well-versed CEO within technology. As many people know, Frank took over a small company in 2003, doubled the company's revenue, and took them towards an IPO in 2007.\nSecondly, he joined ServiceNow in its early days when they were generating only about &lt;$100M in revenue and quadrupled their revenue to over $2.6B eventually taking them public and retiring.\nIn summary, Frank Slootman is an executor and someone who delivers results. He is a unique CEO that has been placed at the right time for Snowflake. This&nbsp;article&nbsp;breaks down why he is special: The Outsider: How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowflake Into Software's Biggest-Ever IPO\nFinancials:\nSnowflake has some of the best ever seen financial metrics in the SaaS Industry. Below are a few highlights of their financials:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/8727ba421dab01c8d569bf5045926039\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"337\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nBelow are more important metrics:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/def281fb5281a940aecbac7bf74a4278\" tg-width=\"405\" tg-height=\"389\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Author - Investi Analyst\nValuation and Future Metrics:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/75edbb94dd1c58ff092936d7ccc9694c\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"321\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Clouded Judgement\nOn a high level, it has been much talked about that Snowflake is overvalued. The company is currently trading at EV/ 2021 Sales of 58x.\nThere are a few metrics to justify the valuation. They are currently the market leader within an industry with relatively few strong competitors. The company has been growing consistently at a rate of over 100% within a TAM industry that continues to increase. They have improved Gross Margins from the 50% to now 70%. Operating Leverage is gradually showing on its bottom-line margins.\nSnowflake has one of the highest ever dollar-based net retention and expansion rate at 168%, arguably one of the highest DBNER within the SaaS industry. Customers realize that they can run multiple clusters and workloads at the same time. The loyalty of customers gives us some visibility into future revenue.\nBiggest Risks - Competition:\nSnowflake’s ability to hold its premium valuation relative to its growth for an extensive period will be key for investors to make money on this stock. The competitive landscape will become the biggest risk for investors to watch.\n1. Amazon’s Redshiftis lacking behind Snowflake because they do not have some of the unique features that Snowflake offers around flexibility/ optimization for data storage and computational analytics. Many people prefer Snowflake because of the pay-as-you-go package and the fact that customers are charged based on strictly business and technical needs. There are many other reasons Snowflake is outpacing Redshift, but recently Amazon Redshift has been making major updates to its platform and library. Snowflake is dependent on Amazon AWS for the cloud. If Amazon prioritizes and invests significantly in Redshift, it can catch up with Snowflake because Amazon already controls many of the workloads of most enterprises.\n2. Databricks and Its Impending IPO:Databricks is a data science tooling software making massive improvements to their data cloud warehouse as well as their computational capabilities to catch up to Snowflake. If they did IPO or continue to make significant enhancements, this could lead to multiple compression for Snowflake.\n3. Slowing Customer Growth Momentum: Snowflake currently has around 4500 general customer base. On a Quarter-over-Quarter, their Fortune 500 customers growth slowed down dramatically as they only added one customer last quarter.\nIn general, their customer growth rate is slowing down. While this is not a problem, it is something that investors should keep watching and monitoring.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/287c587c7732dee4e6581e3f6880a2be\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"360\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Snowflake Investor Relations\nPre-Earnings Expectations:\nBelow are Analyst’s estimates for Snowflake:\nAs Snowflake faces very difficult comps against last year, this earnings report will play a major role in determining if their valuation multiple continues to expand or compress moving forward.\nCustomer growth will be very important. Last quarter, they only grew by one customer amongst Fortune 500 Companies on a QoQ basis in Q1 FY 2022 Earnings. Investors will be watching these metrics closely and will provide a projection into future revenue expectations.\nAnnual Revenue Growth:\nBelow are the current estimates by Analysts:\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/83e32e0275bec6c0c313c9f4a244bd9b\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"225\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Koyfin/Wall Street Estimates\nQuarterly Revenue Growth:\nBy next quarter, they are expected to deliver over $256M while facing tough comps.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/090dd266e206c4606d700b0b8ab488ed\" tg-width=\"574\" tg-height=\"281\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: Seeking Alpha Estimates\nA Glimpse into the Future:\nEnterprise Technology Research firm conducted a recent Q1 2021 research amongst major Global Enterprise Companies (over 1500+ Organizations) to ask about their future spending intentions on Databases/Data Warehouse.\nAs can be seen on the y-axis (net score represents the future spending momentum and it is calculated using dollar-figures), but ETR uses a net score to summarize it and on the x-axis, that represents the existing market share of the database market.\nIn summary, the chart below shows that Snowflake has the highest spending momentum (companies are planning to spend more on the platform), but they have a low market-share as at today. This proves that Snowflake has so much more room to run into the future to gain more market share of this market.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5684bbfe5ff5f7be8caa27669cc6b8c0\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"351\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: ETR Research/SiliconANGLE theCUBE\nBelow were survey questions that were asked to companies: Overwhelming almost all the companies said that they are planning to increase their adoption and 0% said they plan to drop the product.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/5d34a8f72f3d995dfbb7a3ba62974da9\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"351\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: ETR Research/SiliconANGLE theCUBE\nInstitutional Ownership keeps increasing:\nBelow are snapshots that I wanted to show investors. As you can see below, major institutions such as Hedge Funds, ETF, Mutual Funds are increasing their ownership of Snowflake stocks (despite its premium valuation).\nThis shows that big money investors have confidence in Snowflake's future and long growth runway ahead.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e3b6fceb59d1600cd67295f9dea32731\" tg-width=\"303\" tg-height=\"444\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Source: IBD Marketsmith/Funds Holding\nSome personal experiences:The reason my former company ultimately chose Snowflake over AWS Redshift or Microsoft Azure was because of the turnkey approach of Snowflake. Snowflake made it incredibly easy to access/use the platform and handled all the maintenance services. All customers had to worry about was transitioning data and performing analytics on them.\nThe second reason had to do with flexibility. The ability to manage your compute needs and storage needs differently were invaluable. Hence, even though getting on the platform was expensive and took over 200+ days, it was worth it over the long-term, we were able to control costs and pay-only-as-we-use.\nSummary and Conclusion:\nTo summarize this article, there are five major competitive advantages and moats that Snowflake holds:\nFirst, the vast market potential for Data Analytics with relatively few competitors, Secondly, the uniqueness and defensibility of the product. Third, the platform innovation and optimization driving marginal scale efficiencies as workloads increase on the platform. Fourth, the building of a powerful ecosystem and empire around the data cloud through partnerships, data programmability, data sharing on the marketplace, and merging industries. and Lastly, the Best in Class Financials and Management Team.\nOverall, Snowflake is still the preferred leader within their category. Snowflake is an interesting company that will continue to play a major role in the ongoing digital disruption of enterprises moving into the Cloud. They will also be integrated as AI and Data Analytics continues to play a crucial role for companies all over the world.\nThe big question for investors to continue to reflect upon is if Snowflake can continue to sustain its premium valuation for the next 3-5 years especially as Databricks and Amazon Redshift continue to gain traction. Investors would want to monitor and track the competitive landscape because I believe the competitive dynamics may be the future biggest risk.\nI will continue to follow and track developments with Snowflake. Please tell me in the comments section, what do you see as the biggest risk to the Snowflake story, and have you invested in the stock?","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>Snowflake: 5 Reasons Why It Is Truly Special</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\">\nSnowflake: 5 Reasons Why It Is Truly Special\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-07-27 17:53 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441421-snowflake-five-reasons-why-it-is-truly-special>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nSnowflake is the leading cloud-computing data warehouse company that will play an integral role in the future of Artificial Intelligence.\nThis article discusses five key competitive ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441421-snowflake-five-reasons-why-it-is-truly-special\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"SNOW":"Snowflake"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4441421-snowflake-five-reasons-why-it-is-truly-special","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1157314860","content_text":"Summary\n\nSnowflake is the leading cloud-computing data warehouse company that will play an integral role in the future of Artificial Intelligence.\nThis article discusses five key competitive advantages that make Snowflake unique and able to dominate its industry for an extensive period.\nSnowflake recently announced an ambitious plan of achieving $10B in Revenue by 2028. We evaluate the possibility and future growth estimates.\nI discuss the competitive dynamics and future risks for investors to watch for those looking into purchasing Snowflake.\n\namriphoto/iStock via Getty Images\nThesis:\nSnowflake(NYSE:SNOW)founders have built a truly unique software product and a robust Go-To-Market strategy that will make it hard for competitors to replicate and take away their market share.\nSnowflake needs no introduction. They are a leading cloud-based computing-data warehousing provider that builds solutions for companies to store and run analytics/artificial intelligence on the cloud\nSome people will say that Snowflake's current valuation has priced in many of its future domination. However, if Snowflake continues to grow rapidly while maintaining its core competitive advantages, then they have a good chance of providing investors with a decent return.\nThis article will evaluate their competitive advantage around the uniqueness of the product, platform optimization, the TAM, their best in class financials and management team.\nIntroduction:\nAt their recent conference, they recently announced an ambitious plan of achieving $10B in Revenue by 2028. This shows great confidence by management in their ability to sustain their competitive advantage over that period.\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nBelow are the operating models and the assumptions as they plan towards achieving that audacious goal by 2028.\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nWhat made management so confident in providing such guidance many years ahead into future? I believe it has to do with management's confidence around the core product strengths. We will discuss five key competitive advantages that may provide us with a hint towards how Snowflake can archive this milestone.\n1. Vast Total Addressable Market Opportunity ahead with few Competitors:\nSnowflake estimates a $90B TAM for the data cloud, but this number could increase with the recent information that “90% of all the data that has been created were done over the last two years.”If all that data was created within the last two years, can you imagine what the opportunity looks like 10-years from now?\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nSome of the major reasons for the growing TAM opportunities include:\n\nData volume and digital footprints are rapidly growing\nMany companies moving their businesses to the cloud.\n\nAs a result of the first two points, there is a high demand for data management and data sciences tools to capitalize on the opportunity. There are increasing needs for new database architectures to accommodate and keep up with the rising volume of customer data.\nHence, compared to the Fintech industry where a large Total Addressable Market (TAM) has a low barrier to entry and invites numerous competitors, the data cloud industry TAM that Snowflake has carved out for itself truly allows them to capture enough of the TAM dollar opportunity with relatively few competitors. The primarily is due to the high barrier to entry of building a specialized technical software similar to Snowflake (or Databricks/Amazon Redshift).\n2. Uniqueness and Defensibility of the Product:\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nPlatform moat:Snowflake’s product was built in the cloud for companies on the cloud. The company has been able to provide a platform that centralizes all forms of the high volume of structured & unstructured data in a centralized location (Data Warehouse & Lake). Traditional companies like Teradata, Hadoop, Cloudera require on-prem infrastructure such as servers, databases, etc. However, Snowflake has built everything solely in the cloud to allow their customers store, manage, analyze, & share data seamlessly.\nSoftware defensibility:This concept is linked to the moat. Defensibility in my definition is the ability for a company to build a unique product, whether through a much more efficient process or system, and the product solves a problem in a differentiated way that is hard for competitors to replicate. The architecture of Snowflake’s platform has been purposely built in this manner. This is the reason they have been able to starve off 'strong' competitors over the last 10-years. Defensibility can drive customer loyalty and high stickiness as evidenced by Snowflake’s high retention metrics of 168%.\nStorage and Compute Optimization: One of the unique features that Snowflake offers is the ability to separate storage and compute for customers. They have created one platform that serves multiple purposes. Customers can store their data on Snowflake’s cloud but choose not to utilize their computational products or vice-versa. In addition, Snowflake’s computational power is extremely strong and fast, managing a high amount of analytics workload while still providing best-in-class performance.\nIn summary, when you combine the platform's uniqueness on the cloud, storage and compute differentiation and defensibility due to the inability to easily replicate the product. When you combine this together with a first-mover advantage, this enables a company to starve 'strong' competitors and allows for more revenue runway.\n3. Platform Innovation & Optimization drives Scale:\nSnowflake has done a great job constantly reinventing and innovating on their product despite being the industry disruptor. One of the things to observe with Snowflake is the obsession with innovation. Recently, major platform improvements were discussed at their conference.\nStorage Compression Costs:At the last quarterly result, Snowflake announced storage compression improvements. It was also announced that they have reduced storage costs for new data coming into their platform by 30%. I believe that customers are more likely to want to store their data on Snowflake’s platform moving forward due to this change. Computation speed has increased, making the platform 6x better with regards to improvements on query and throughput on a single compute cluster and 8x improvements in average query duration and high consistency for latency. In my previous company, I encountered challenges, and my colleagues did experience problems with how slow Microsoft SQL queries performed when you ran multiple or concurrent complex queries, but Snowflake offers a much faster compute power/speed capability.\nOn the surface, it might appear that this improvement in computing power will reduce revenue (since snowflake makes money based on how much time consumers spend on the platform). But reflecting deeper, this situation allows Snowflake to reach scale efficiencies which is a core competitive advantage. The faster and smoother queries I can run, the more I will be more likely to utilize Snowflake’s platform and run more queries. I will assume that more companies will be increasing workloads and bringing more items to snowflake’s platform due to the performance improvements/speed at a cost that fits their budget. The company is also working on developing a chip technology that will massively improve performance for customers, but we are waiting to obtain more information on this product. The marginal scale efficiencies here will benefit Snowflake.\nThe usage-based model drives customer Autonomy:Snowflake has optimized its platform performance to provide efficiencies in billing customers. Customers are guaranteed that they are not going to have any idle time wasted on the platform. Customers pay for only what they need and use. Snowflake provides strong analytics and data as usage evidence to their customers. This is unlike Amazon AWS where the customer pays whatever bill is presented, regardless of how much time they have spent on the platform. There are some nuances here too.\nBased on the usage-based model, customers have full autonomy on the price they pay vs the performance they receive. For example, In the case of a customer who may not use snowflake’s platform in the summer months compared to higher usage in the Fall/Winter, if they want to save more money upfront - they would be more likely to sign up on Snowflake's platform because they are guaranteed they would have a much lower bill as compared to Amazon AWS. Customers can adjust usage to how best they want it. On the other hand, customers who pay a lesser amount will accept that their queries and requests take longer. Customers can decide to pay snowflake more money, to get faster speed performance. Business customers have better control and autonomy in how they utilize the platform.\nOptimizing the time-to-value for customers:The biggest challenge for businesses trying to use the Snowflake platform is the length of time it takes to get Snowflake up and running, because of the extensive data migration from companies with an on-prem legacy system, moving all that data into the cloud. The average company on the Snowflake platform takes around 249-days before consuming snowflake’s product. The length of time has now been reduced to 212-days. Now imagine, if it takes a company more than 200+ days to patiently migrate data into Snowflake’s cloud, do you think that such customers will easily churn after a few months? I doubt it. Hence, companies that are signing up conduct extensive due diligence before making the decision. This is a major strength for Snowflake because customers who have signed up are more than likely going to last on the platform for multiple years. Snowflake has improved its platform optimization to deliver more value to its customer base. Although a higher time period to use a product leads to high Customer Acquisition Costs, in snowflake's case, it is a strong moat that customers are willing to wait so long. It means they will last longer on the platform and it will be very hard to churn.\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations.\nFlexibility and Usage-based business model: The flexibility based on the usage-based business model has continued to translate into a major strength for Snowflake. Companies can consume based on their contracted capacity during a contract period. A company may decide to roll over unused capacity to future periods.\nTo summarize this third point, the usage-based business model, the combination of innovation that keeps driving down the cost of the platform relative to its higher effectiveness, the autonomy that customers receive, and the optimization of value is truly one of the unique competitive advantages that snowflake continues to hold over the competition.\n4. Building a powerful ecosystem and empire around the data cloud\nI believe Snowflake’s long-term ambition is to control a large empire of the entire data analytics and Artificial Intelligence space. For example, Amazon AWS has been built in such a way that almost a third (1/3rd) of the entire technology market today touches or is somewhat connected to AWS. Similarly with Microsoft Office suite, in Corporate America, it is difficult to not interact with a Microsoft product.\nI believe that Snowflake’s long-term goal is to be embedded within the entire Data Analytics and AI ecosystem. Below are a few pointers:\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nBuilding strong partnerships with Data Universe Partners: As mentioned, Snowflake has established many partnerships with major players across the entire Data Analytics spectrum - from integration to data visualization partners. They have mentioned it several times and it is clear; they would like to control a major component of the entire space. As a result of becoming an ecosystem that every company running ML and AI computation would eventually touch, this will increase the long-term viability and stickiness of the platform. As part of building the ecosystem, has established major partnerships with companies like Deloitte. Consulting firms discussing digital transformation with large corporations can now discuss Snowflake as part of the engagement. It was recently announced at the last quarterly call that Snowflake has surpassed over $100M in deal flow with Deloitte. Snowflake's aim is to be the central nervous system and unified systems within the Data Ecosystem and that includes winning system integrators.\nMarketplace and Data Programmability Building on Snowflake:\nSnowparkis a new data programmability system that has been built to provide developers with an API for building applications or querying/analyzing data on Snowflake’s Cloud platform.\nThe goal is to automate data pipelines making programmability easy. It allows for integration with Microsoft SQL so that developers can use SQL to easily program or run codes within the platform.\nThe ability for developers, data scientists, and data engineers to seamlessly integrate with Snowflake’s platform will be game-changing. Companies or individuals can now utilize Snowflake’s partner program to help build, market, and operate applications in the snowflake Data Cloud bringing in a lot of future potential. In the near future, creative entrepreneurs can build truly successful products (or even companies) on Snowflake’s platform, elevating its brand and value.\nSnowflake Marketplace:As we are aware, Snowflake runs a marketplace where companies can share and monetize data across clouds and regions and have more relationships with business units, partners, and customers.\nAt their most recent conference, Snowflake announced massive improvements to the payment processing capability of this marketplace. Companies can easily make transactions on Snowflake’s platform. Snowflake thereby generates revenue based on take-rates on every transaction, similar to a marketplace business model.\nThe last point here is that Snowflake is focusing on becoming more industry-centric rather than purely customer-centric. In the sense that the company is focusing more on understanding the data needs of major industries and thereby catering to products that meet the needs of those industries.\n5. Best in Class Management Team & Financial Metrics:\nOne of the most unique asset of every company is the Founders and Leaders. The Founders of Snowflake were previous Oracle employees and specifically, they were \"data warehousing\" and Data Architect experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. They knew the ins and outs, and the challenges with on-prem data storage infrastructure. They were able to turn the data world on its head by building a product that was solely for the cloud due to their knowledge.\nIn 2019, they were hired Frank Slootman. Frank is a highly respected and well-versed CEO within technology. As many people know, Frank took over a small company in 2003, doubled the company's revenue, and took them towards an IPO in 2007.\nSecondly, he joined ServiceNow in its early days when they were generating only about <$100M in revenue and quadrupled their revenue to over $2.6B eventually taking them public and retiring.\nIn summary, Frank Slootman is an executor and someone who delivers results. He is a unique CEO that has been placed at the right time for Snowflake. This article breaks down why he is special: The Outsider: How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowflake Into Software's Biggest-Ever IPO\nFinancials:\nSnowflake has some of the best ever seen financial metrics in the SaaS Industry. Below are a few highlights of their financials:\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nBelow are more important metrics:\nSource: Author - Investi Analyst\nValuation and Future Metrics:\nSource: Clouded Judgement\nOn a high level, it has been much talked about that Snowflake is overvalued. The company is currently trading at EV/ 2021 Sales of 58x.\nThere are a few metrics to justify the valuation. They are currently the market leader within an industry with relatively few strong competitors. The company has been growing consistently at a rate of over 100% within a TAM industry that continues to increase. They have improved Gross Margins from the 50% to now 70%. Operating Leverage is gradually showing on its bottom-line margins.\nSnowflake has one of the highest ever dollar-based net retention and expansion rate at 168%, arguably one of the highest DBNER within the SaaS industry. Customers realize that they can run multiple clusters and workloads at the same time. The loyalty of customers gives us some visibility into future revenue.\nBiggest Risks - Competition:\nSnowflake’s ability to hold its premium valuation relative to its growth for an extensive period will be key for investors to make money on this stock. The competitive landscape will become the biggest risk for investors to watch.\n1. Amazon’s Redshiftis lacking behind Snowflake because they do not have some of the unique features that Snowflake offers around flexibility/ optimization for data storage and computational analytics. Many people prefer Snowflake because of the pay-as-you-go package and the fact that customers are charged based on strictly business and technical needs. There are many other reasons Snowflake is outpacing Redshift, but recently Amazon Redshift has been making major updates to its platform and library. Snowflake is dependent on Amazon AWS for the cloud. If Amazon prioritizes and invests significantly in Redshift, it can catch up with Snowflake because Amazon already controls many of the workloads of most enterprises.\n2. Databricks and Its Impending IPO:Databricks is a data science tooling software making massive improvements to their data cloud warehouse as well as their computational capabilities to catch up to Snowflake. If they did IPO or continue to make significant enhancements, this could lead to multiple compression for Snowflake.\n3. Slowing Customer Growth Momentum: Snowflake currently has around 4500 general customer base. On a Quarter-over-Quarter, their Fortune 500 customers growth slowed down dramatically as they only added one customer last quarter.\nIn general, their customer growth rate is slowing down. While this is not a problem, it is something that investors should keep watching and monitoring.\nSource: Snowflake Investor Relations\nPre-Earnings Expectations:\nBelow are Analyst’s estimates for Snowflake:\nAs Snowflake faces very difficult comps against last year, this earnings report will play a major role in determining if their valuation multiple continues to expand or compress moving forward.\nCustomer growth will be very important. Last quarter, they only grew by one customer amongst Fortune 500 Companies on a QoQ basis in Q1 FY 2022 Earnings. Investors will be watching these metrics closely and will provide a projection into future revenue expectations.\nAnnual Revenue Growth:\nBelow are the current estimates by Analysts:\nSource: Koyfin/Wall Street Estimates\nQuarterly Revenue Growth:\nBy next quarter, they are expected to deliver over $256M while facing tough comps.\nSource: Seeking Alpha Estimates\nA Glimpse into the Future:\nEnterprise Technology Research firm conducted a recent Q1 2021 research amongst major Global Enterprise Companies (over 1500+ Organizations) to ask about their future spending intentions on Databases/Data Warehouse.\nAs can be seen on the y-axis (net score represents the future spending momentum and it is calculated using dollar-figures), but ETR uses a net score to summarize it and on the x-axis, that represents the existing market share of the database market.\nIn summary, the chart below shows that Snowflake has the highest spending momentum (companies are planning to spend more on the platform), but they have a low market-share as at today. This proves that Snowflake has so much more room to run into the future to gain more market share of this market.\nSource: ETR Research/SiliconANGLE theCUBE\nBelow were survey questions that were asked to companies: Overwhelming almost all the companies said that they are planning to increase their adoption and 0% said they plan to drop the product.\nSource: ETR Research/SiliconANGLE theCUBE\nInstitutional Ownership keeps increasing:\nBelow are snapshots that I wanted to show investors. As you can see below, major institutions such as Hedge Funds, ETF, Mutual Funds are increasing their ownership of Snowflake stocks (despite its premium valuation).\nThis shows that big money investors have confidence in Snowflake's future and long growth runway ahead.\nSource: IBD Marketsmith/Funds Holding\nSome personal experiences:The reason my former company ultimately chose Snowflake over AWS Redshift or Microsoft Azure was because of the turnkey approach of Snowflake. Snowflake made it incredibly easy to access/use the platform and handled all the maintenance services. All customers had to worry about was transitioning data and performing analytics on them.\nThe second reason had to do with flexibility. The ability to manage your compute needs and storage needs differently were invaluable. Hence, even though getting on the platform was expensive and took over 200+ days, it was worth it over the long-term, we were able to control costs and pay-only-as-we-use.\nSummary and Conclusion:\nTo summarize this article, there are five major competitive advantages and moats that Snowflake holds:\nFirst, the vast market potential for Data Analytics with relatively few competitors, Secondly, the uniqueness and defensibility of the product. Third, the platform innovation and optimization driving marginal scale efficiencies as workloads increase on the platform. Fourth, the building of a powerful ecosystem and empire around the data cloud through partnerships, data programmability, data sharing on the marketplace, and merging industries. and Lastly, the Best in Class Financials and Management Team.\nOverall, Snowflake is still the preferred leader within their category. Snowflake is an interesting company that will continue to play a major role in the ongoing digital disruption of enterprises moving into the Cloud. They will also be integrated as AI and Data Analytics continues to play a crucial role for companies all over the world.\nThe big question for investors to continue to reflect upon is if Snowflake can continue to sustain its premium valuation for the next 3-5 years especially as Databricks and Amazon Redshift continue to gain traction. Investors would want to monitor and track the competitive landscape because I believe the competitive dynamics may be the future biggest risk.\nI will continue to follow and track developments with Snowflake. Please tell me in the comments section, what do you see as the biggest risk to the Snowflake story, and have you invested in the stock?","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"SNOW":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":1587,"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":2,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ORIG"},"commentList":[],"hasMoreComment":false,"orderType":2}

Snowflake: 5 Reasons Why It Is Truly Special

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