Just this morning, Stratasys Ltd. (NASDAQ: SSYS) released its first quarter financial results, which look healthy enough to me — but what do I know? To my inexperienced business eye, non-GAAP revenue growth of 54% in the first quarter, as compared with the same period last year, seems pretty good news for the company and positive for the industry as a whole. Stratasys does go out of its way to point out however, that this percentage growth figure reduces to 33% when excluding the revenue contribution from MakerBot products and services. And with this announcement they do that quite a lot — perhaps in a bid to maintain Makerbot’s identity, following the merger / acquisition / coming together of the two companies last year, while also demonstrating strength and growth across the whole company.
In that vein, Stratasys further reports that “…system and consumables revenue grew by 40% and 29%, respectively, when excluding the contribution from MakerBot products. MakerBot branded products and services contributed $20.6 million to first quarter revenue, a 79% increase over the revenue that MakerBot generated as an independent company during the first quarter of 2013.”
Furthermore, sales of the company’s higher-margin products and services, for that read the Fortus and Connex ranges, drove a significant increase in non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter, which expanded to a record 60.9% compared to 59.0% for the same period last year.
There’s a big long list of the results in summary here, should you be interested. And I’m sure that if you use Google appropriately, you can find a ‘proper’ analyst with an opinion that matches yours.
I agree the SSYS results were good, but apparently the market expected better.
For me the standout in their earnings was the growth from MakerBot- much higher than I expected them to show. Consumer grade 3D printing is very much alive!