저자: JimCramer · 외국인
요약 보기
크라우드스트라이크는 최근 분기 사상 최대 실적을 기록(매출 약 15억 달러, ARR 순증 3.33억 달러 전년비 51%, 영업이익 46%↑, 잉여현금흐름 3.77억 달러)하고 연간 신규 정기매출 성장 전망을 27.7%→34%로 상향. AI 확산이 사이버보안 수요를 키운다는 논리로 AI 위협 대응과 AI 에이전트 보호 제품(AID) 출시를 강조. 시장 우려였던 AI에 의한 보안 잠식설은 반박되었다는 주장.
다듬은 글
As I mentioned at the beginning of yesterday's broadcast, all the main " bearish" theses regarding the technology sector have been refuted. I'm not just talking about Nvidia and Salesforce. Take a look at CrowdStrike. Last night, the cybersecurity leader reported the best quarter in the company's history, sending shares up more than 20% today.
This was an excellent result on both revenue and profit, and management raised its forecast for annual growth in net new regular revenue from 27.7% to 34%. This is a huge and important indicator, and such growth is simply impressive. Just a few months ago, everyone was worried that cybersecurity would be destroyed by competition from AI .
It turned out that the development of AI only made CrowdStrike even more important, because attackers also have this technology. They have become the security platform on which the AI economy rests, and this is making them rich. Don't take my word for it. Let's talk to George Kurtz. He is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike to learn more.
Mr. Kurtz, congratulations on a successful quarter. Welcome back to "Mad Money." Jim, good to be here, thank you. Of course. George, I have to tell you, you taught me this a long time ago . We want to look at annual recurring revenue figures because that's how we learn about the true state of affairs in your industry.
Your numbers were impressive. What is their driving force? Well, when you think about these numbers and the quarter that we delivered, it was truly a record-breaking quarter. Our revenue amounted to almost 1.5 billion. Annual recurring revenue— net growth was 333 million, up 51% year-over-year . Operating income—372 million, up 46%, and record free cash flow of 377 million, or 26% of revenue.
So in all areas we saw simply tremendous success. And the driving force behind this is what I call a "moment of realization." This is the understanding that the adversary, armed with AI, is already here. They operate at the speed of AI inference, and companies need the technology created by CrowdStrike to stop hacking.
This is what is driving momentum not only this quarter, but also creating a sustainable tailwind for the future. You know, George, a lot of people I talk to tell me: you know, nothing can stop these agents anymore. They came out of the sandbox. We should be afraid. I always say that if you read anything that George Kurtz publishes, you will understand: they can actually be stopped, but it requires modern technology, and anything else, even something that is only a couple of years old, may not work.
You have a solution. Right. We have a solution, Jim, and it's called the Falcon platform. We built it from the ground up to adapt and take advantage of the AI era , right? This is the speed with which the opponent acts. This is the complexity of the attacks, and the platform was designed from day one when I founded the company to take this into account.
Today we see more attacks . We are seeing these attacks faster. But you need the right AI, defensive AI to combat offensive AI. And that's exactly what we built at CrowdStrike. And so we're not only stopping the hacks, Jim, but we're also eliminating the complexity that comes with having a bunch of disparate products.
And that's one of the reasons why CrowdStrike is the security operating system for the agent era. Okay, George, what percentage of companies do you think are protected well enough? I think most companies, depending on the industry, have some gaps, and the problem is that even if companies are sophisticated and spend a lot of money, the threat landscape is changing very quickly.
We saw the sandbox exits that were being talked about, and luckily, it was an agent who was just trying to pass the test. They were n't really trying to do anything bad, but we saw what happened. So if we think about the era of AI and how quickly these AI agents are able to act, find vulnerabilities and exploit them, then a completely different level of security is needed.
And that is why we believe we are in a leading position. Well, I have to say that one thing that concerns me — first of all, congratulations on that — but you made an eight-figure deal with an advanced AI lab. Well, I thought maybe they knew how to do it themselves. Some of them certainly seemed certain they knew.
Apparently they can't , they're not in this business, so maybe they need you. I think, Jim, we see that we are doing very well with leading-edge labs, and a lot of that is driven by customer demand. Customers trust CrowdStrike. We have gained incredible authority over the past 15+ years. We work and understand safety every day.
And again, customers want choice. We certainly use advanced models. But ultimately, it's very difficult to replicate what CrowdStrike does. And this is one of the reasons why clients choose us. We reduce complexity. We are reducing costs. And we get the result in the form of preventing breakages. Cost reduction.
You know, this is important because people can never understand the profitability of what you do until their business is destroyed. Well, I'll tell you, Jim, we spend a lot of time working with customers and showing them the profitability. We call this value validation. We discuss in detail how many different individual products we can combine.
And we're constantly consolidating, meaning we're removing two, three, four, five or six products from the environment to reduce complexity and overall costs. But we're getting a much larger share of the wallet, which is why you saw our flex model, which is our innovative licensing model, reach a record high of almost $2.3 billion .
Which is extraordinary. There's not a single moment now when I go out and don't look back and see something new. I have this. Here is an article from Greg Brockman. A call for collective action in the field of cyber defense. An open letter on global strengthening of cyber defenses signed by over 100 organizations.
It came out today. You are a cybersecurity company in this matter. Well, Jim, again, I think people have realized that if you have a unique data set that CrowdStrike has, if you are the creator of the data, and we create it based on our security agents, if you want, then you need us, right ? Both large enterprises and small businesses have already understood this.
Laboratories understand that they need to work with us. Clients are driving this and we are at the center of this agent revolution, so we are part of this announcement. So, you have a big conference coming up soon, and I know that at conferences you tend to surprise and introduce new things. I know, we always think you have the latest and greatest.
What will we see at the conference? Jim, what we're about to show you is going to blow your mind . We've spent a lot of time perfecting a technology we call AID, as an example, which is the next evolution of endpoint detection and response, but for AI agents. When we founded the company, of course, we protected people and computers, but now it's about protecting agents.
On average, the industry says each person will have 90 agents under their control; we want to protect each of them, as well as the agents in the cloud. So when you see what we've created, it's just amazing, and it's one of the reasons why this business is growing so rapidly . We are looking forward to showing it.
We are also excited to showcase some of the advances in our AI technology and what we have developed to combat the AI adversary. So I can't wait for next week. I always say that every Falcon will be our best, but I'm sure this one will be the best we've ever had. You made a very timely acquisition in the identification space, didn't you ?
Yes, we did. That's right. We bought a company called Signal, which was really next-generation identity . This is an incredibly strong area of our business. And if you look at what we've done over the years, we've built a great next- generation identity portfolio, focused on both human and non-human identifiers, which is necessary to create a control plane to control all these pesky agents that like to steal the identities of everything else in the environment to do their job.
What do you think, some companies, like , there was one company in the medical device industry, I don't want to get hung up on them. They've had enough problems this year in the medical device business, and they've been pretty seriously hacked. And I thought, were they just being cheeky or didn't update in time?
So when you see someone seriously hacked, is it because they didn't update their system, or because they thought they were invulnerable? No, I don't think most companies consider themselves invulnerable. I think there are two things at stake here. First, if they think their security is good enough or they get it for free, it usually doesn't end well.
And secondly, you have to have the best technology with the right level of expertise to be able to counter these adversaries. They move very fast. Their methods are changing very dramatically. And part of the advantage of CrowdStrike is that we're able to collect all this information from everywhere, with visibility into 176 countries where our software agents operate, and that really helps our algorithms get better and better.
So, you know, people are trying to do their best. They think that “ good enough” is already good, but many companies realize that outdated technologies and free solutions are no longer suitable. OK. Well, I want to thank you for coming to us. There was a period, a period when your stock was falling pretty steadily, and you said, " Listen, I want to tell this story." Most people don't do this .
Most just say, “Hey, listen. "I can't do anything." You didn't do that. You wanted people to understand what exactly you do and why there was a misconception, and you captured a turning point in this person's business. If you've been listening, the tipping point in AI is that most CEOs don't give you a chance to make that much money.
George Kurtz, thank you very much for helping our viewers make a lot of money. It was just good, it's good that you did it. I am grateful for this and thank you for giving me this opportunity. Certainly. Good luck at the conference. George Kurtz, founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. Nice to see you. Thank you.
Mad Money will return after a break. Next, Kramer will return to the clothing company, which showed surprisingly good results yesterday. Don't miss it. .
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