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According to recent research, the global Enterprise Collaboration Market is expected to grow at 13% CAGR from $47.2 billion in 2021 to $85.8 billion by 2026. The continued remote working conditions have accelerated the demand for real-time and remote collaboration tools. Smartsheet (Nasdaq: SMAR) recently announced its fourth-quarter results that outpaced market expectations.

Smartsheet’s Financials

For the fourth quarter, Smartsheet’s revenues grew 43% to $157.4 million ahead of the market’s forecast by 3.83%. Net loss was $0.12 per share, better than the market’s estimated loss of $0.15 per share.

By segment, Subscription revenues grew 44% to $507.4 million, and Professional services revenue grew 33% to $43.5 million.

Among operating metrics, customers with annualized contract value (ACV) of $5,000 or higher increased 28% to 15,150. Customers with ACV of $50,000 or higher grew 55% to 2,354 and customers with ACV of $100,000 or higher soared 74% to 1,026. Its net dollar retention rate was 134% in the reported quarter and the average ACV per domain-based customer increased 37% to $6,977.

For the full year, Smartsheet’s revenues grew 43% to $550.8 million and net loss was $0.28 per share.

For the first quarter, Smartsheet expects revenues of $162-$163 million and non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.20-$0.18. The market was looking for revenues of $160.17 million and a loss of $0.13 per share. Smartsheet expects to end the year with revenues of $750-$755 million and a loss of $0.70-$0.62 per share. The market was looking for revenues of $721.51 million and a net loss of $0.28 per share for the year.

Smartsheet’s Growth Focus

Smartsheet has been trying to expand its market presence with a land, expand, and climb sales strategy. The plan has been working well so far. For the fourth quarter, Smartsheet’s net retention rate inclusive of all customers was over 134%. It is attracting new customers by introducing simpler pricing and onboarding processes while continuing to offer a free tier. It allows for the free use of its product by anyone who’s invited to collaborate, and it is able to pull its customers’ extended teams, partners, and suppliers into the Smartsheet environment. It introduced a Pro Plan that allows teams of at least 3 to a maximum of 25 members to collaborate, track, manage, and execute their work – all in one place. Coupled with a simpler onboarding process, Smartsheet saw a record quarter for new business bookings and a record quarter from the number of licenses purchased by new customers.

Besides expanding the user base within its customer base, Smartsheet is also seeing success with Smartsheet climbing up the value chain for its newer products. Last year, it introduced Smartsheet Advance which builds on its core functionality. Advance is offered on a tier-based model with Advance Silver enabling businesses to manage programs, projects, and processes using tools like Control Center. Customers can also create curated no-code applications to drive workflows across internal and external collaborators using WorkApps and Dynamic View.

Advance Gold allows customers access to a comprehensive set of data integration capabilities that enable the import and export of millions of records to and from other systems using Data Shuttle and DataTable. Finally, Advance Platinum adds key capabilities for organizations that desire additional levels of compliance, governance, and Advanced policy measurement. Advance packages are also seeing traction with 20% of Advance deals closed by new customers to the company. They have added more than 550 customers so far on Advance.

Some of the other features and services added during the year include Work Insights which allow users to automatically analyze and visualize sheet data as a snapshot, time series, or crosstab; Enterprise Plan Manager, which ensures all of the organization’s Smartsheet plans follow security, governance, and compliance requirements; and unified resource management that makes it seamless to build the best team for the job from within one core Smartsheet experience.

Smartsheet continues to make investments in sales and marketing to expand its market share. It is increasing its global presence by focusing on sales within international and enterprise customers. With pandemic restrictions easing, the company is stepping up efforts in increasing global awareness of its products with customers. It is resuming its in-person customer engagement and field enablement spending to help drive these initiatives.

Smartsheet is seeing traction in its PaaS strategy as well. In 2020, the company had released WorkApps, a no-code platform that enables users to build intuitive web and mobile applications to streamline business and simplify collaboration. Since its release, Smartsheet has seen strong growth in the number of applications available on WorkApps. Last quarter, the total number of created WorkApps grew 28% over the quarter to more than 69,000. Customers are using curated no-code applications to drive workflows across internal and external collaborators using WorkApps and Dynamic View. As I said earlier, Smartsheet does not divulge details on usage or revenue metrics for WorkApps. I would like for it to reveal important metrics on PaaS capabilities, ecosystem, and growth to provide analysts with the right tools to value this strong capability.

But despite the product upgrades, Smartsheet’s growth appears to be decelerating. The company expects to see a 36%-37% growth in revenues next year compared with last year’s 43%. The market did not react favorably to the news, and its stock fell in the after-hours trading session. Its stock is currently trading at $53.08 with a market capitalization of $6.68 billion. It climbed to a high of $85.65 in August last year. It had fallen to a low of $41.65 earlier this month.