Communications PaaS player Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) recently announced its fourth-quarter results that surpassed market expectations. The market was impressed with its performance and the company saw its stock soaring to record-high levels in the after-hours trading session.

Twilio’s Financials

For the fourth quarter, Twilio’s revenues grew an impressive 65% over the year to $548.1 million, surging ahead of the market’s forecast of $454.8 million. EPS was $0.04 per share, shattering the market’s expectations of a loss of $0.08 per share.

Among key metrics, its active customer accounts grew by 13,000 to 221,000. The company ended the quarter with 4,629 employees. The dollar-based net expansion rate, which is calculated using total revenue, was 139% compared to 125% a year ago.

Political activity contributed $23 million in revenues for the quarter, and Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app contributed 5% of revenue, down from 6% in the third quarter.

It ended the year with revenues growing 55% over the year to $1.76 billion and an adjusted net income of $0.23 per share.

Twilio expects to end the first quarter with revenues of $526-$536 million and a loss of $0.12-$0.09 per share, which was significantly ahead of the Street’s forecast of revenues of $484.12 million and a loss of $0.02 per share.

Twilio’s Social Initiatives

Recently, Twilio announced that it was teaming up with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) to help with digital transformation of services world-wide as well as speeding up the delivery of humanitarian aid. Last year, nonprofits, social enterprises, and local governments using Twilio reach 266 million people. It also launched its WePledge movement, which empowers every individual employee to pledge 1% of their time or income to do good. Twilio’s employees volunteered more than 7,800 hours and donated more than $1 million in 2020. Other companies joining the movement included Atlassian, Zoom, Okta, and Pledge.

Twilio made several senior management hires as well. It hired Jeremiah Brazeau as its CTO to lead its technology strategy and roadmap. Last month, it added Deval Patrick, former Governor of Massachusetts, to its board of directors.

Twilio continued to expand its partner network during the quarter. Last year, consulting partners influenced three times as much revenue in 2019, and were involved in 50% of its top Flex deals. It recently added Deloitte Digital as its first premier global systems integrator. Deloitte Digital’s Twilio practice will provide access to the full Twilio product suite, which includes the contact center solution Twilio Flex, Twilio communication platform, and API services. Twilio’s partner program enables organizations to become consulting partners, offer professional services, and become technology partners by embedding Twilio connectivity into their enterprise applications.

I think Twilio has a very successful PaaS strategy. Back in 2014, when I had spoken with its CEO Jeff Lawson, it had over 400,000 developers. Recently, Twilio recorded more than  8 million developers globally supporting more than 795 billion interactions across its platform. Read more about my views on the importance of a PaaS strategy here: Cloud Stocks: Which SaaS Players Will Win in PaaS.

Its stock is currently trading at $443.41 with a market cap of $71.2 billion. The stock had climbed to a 52-week high of $457.30 earlier this month. It hit a 52-week low of $68.06 in March last year amid all the market turbulence.