By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Fastly stock (NYSE:FSLY) plunged 32% to a 52-week low of $19.66 Thursday after the internet content delivery company’s losses widened and the 2022 guidance didn’t hold out much hope.
The stock is now down to less than a fourth of its high of $87.61, struck a year ago.
An adjusted loss per share for 2022 is forecast to be 55 cents at the center of the guidance range, wider than previous guidance for a loss of 48 cents.
Quarterly revenue rose more than 18% from a year ago to about $98 million, but margins eroded and losses widened. Adjusted gross margin was down by 7.9 percentage points to 55.8%. On a per share basis, adjusted net loss came in at 48 cents compared to 18 cents in the same period a year ago.
At least four brokerages slashed their price targets for the stock. This included Piper Sandler, RBC, BofA and Morgan Stanley.
Fastly runs a content-delivery network to push data quickly around the internet. It hosts a service that large enterprises use to serve content to millions of users simultaneously.
Rather than hosting all website content on a single set of servers in one location, Fastly puts cloud infrastructure in dozens of locations to let people download from a server closest to them. It supports major websites like The New York Times, Reddit, that of U.K. government, The Verge and Bloomberg.
The company had a tough year as the impact of June outages at several of the global websites it supports lingered. At one point, the company had guided for annual revenue of $385 million at center of its guidance range, which it later revised to $345 million. It closed the year at just over $354 million.
Full-year revenue is now seen at $405 million at center of its guidance range, over 14% higher year-on-year. This compares with 22% growth in 2021.