Wall Street's leading indices fell on Tuesday but Israeli work operating system company monday.com (Nasdaq: MNDY) rose 24.5% after reporting strong second quarter results - its first as a publicly traded company. The company's share price rose a further 16.71% yesterday on Nasdaq to $355.98, giving a market cap of $15.563 billion, making Monday.com the third most valuable Israeli company, after veteran tech companies NICE Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: NICE; TASE:NICE) and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP)
Since monday.com's IPO in June, the share price has more than doubled from $155 to $356 as the company has leapfrogged the value of other veteran Israeli companies like Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) and Amdocs Ltd. (Nasdaq: DOX).
Monday.com is one of 10 Israeli companies that has held an IPO on Wall Street since the start of 2021 - all of them worth more than $1 billion. This is a trend that reflects the rise in demand for tech companies with major growth in their activities, and the rises on the US capital markets over the past year, probably due to the impact of the Covid pandemic and the pouring of huge amounts of capital into the markets.
Mann holds shares worth over $2 billion
Monday.com has developed a work operating system (Work OS), which allows organizations to create the tools and procedures that they need. The company beat the analysts in the second quarter of 2021 with revenue of $70.6 million, up 94% from the corresponding quarter of 2020 and a non-GAAP net loss of $11.3 million and earnings per share of $0.26, considerably lower than the analysts has forecast.
monday.com CFO Eliran Glazer told "Globes," "It was a very successful quarter. We prepared the forecasts and also subsequently improved the forecasts. We see continued growth that stems from a number of factors: our ability to bring new customers, the expansion of enterprise customers - customers whose purchases are above $50,000 in terms of annual recurring revenue (ARR) and we have 470 of these compared with 144 in the corresponding quarter, and continued geographical expansion through partners."
monday.com cofounder and co-CEO Roy Mann told "Globes," "In order to begin using monday you just need to register and try it out. And the fact that it is very easy to start and is one of the major things about our ability to grow."
After the jump in the company's share price, Mann holds share worth $2.1 billion, while cofounder and co-CEO Eran Zinman's shares are worth almost $820 million. The largest shareholder in monday.com is the US fund Insight Partners which holds shares worth nearly $6 billion, while another US fund Stripes has shares worth over $1 billion. Entrée Capital founder Avi Eyal holds shares privately through Sonnipe (which belongs to Entrée Capital) worth nearly $2 billion - a vast return for an investment of just $13 million in monday.com's early years.
One of the Israeli companies that monday.com has overtaken in value over the past week is cloud-based web services SaaS company Wix.com (Nasdaq: Wix), whose share price has plunged after weak second quarter results and which is currently worth $11.5 billion. The two companies have close connects as Mann previously served in senior technological positions there before quitting to set up Monday.
Wix was monday.com's first customer and Wix founder and CEO Avishay Abrahami is aprivate investor in Monday with a 3.5% stake part of it through Wix). Abrahami invested at the seed stage and sits on the board. In fact Abrahami's personal stake is higher than that of Wix - he holds shares worth $552 million and Wix holds shares worth $410 million.
Were you surprised by the reaction of the share price after the financial results were published?
Zinman: "It's very positive of course but we are trying not to think about day to day and looking at the long term. Shares go up and down and there are many things that influence it.
You overtook your friends at Wix in terms of market cap.
"That's an example of how it is all trends and a share goes up and down. Wix has come an amazingly long way and we are still at the start. By the way, we were given a tip by Avishay Abrahami - he told us 'don't look at the share, and you mustn't let it determine your mood."
Glazer: "The ecosystem in Israel is changing. There are amazing companies today like SolarEdge (Nasdaq: SEDG), Global-e (Nasdaq: GLBE) and others. We want all of them to succeed."
"High rate of revenue and efficiency in sales and marketing"
Like many tech companies, particularly in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sector, but not only, monday.com is not profitable and is investing large sums in future growth. The market likes companies that are investing in the future, even if it is at the expense of making losses today.
Glazer explains the situation. "Revenue grew at a very high rate, beyond growth in expenditure. In addition, in the wake of Covid, our move to a new structure was delayed by a quarter. There is also more efficiency on the issue of sales and marketing because we are deepening ties with existing customers and that requires less marketing expenses.
He added, "That is not an indication that we want lower expenses. We want to continue to grow and to continue to invest in an aggressive way. There will be more fluctuations from quarter to quarter.
So you are not about to become profitable?
No. We are addressing an enormous market - $56 billion, which is expected to rise to $88 billion in 2024, and we are only beginning to penetrate the market. It has been proven that companies that invest aggressively in sales and marketing in their early stages create a presence in the market and increase their market share. We are also saving on R&D costs for the benefit of future growth."
"With or without lockdowns, people still need monday"
monday.com has just launched a new solution monday workdocs, which among other things allows share work on documents in real time. The company has understood that many times documents serve as an opening shot to move a work procedure forward and they decided to allow customers to manage their conceptual and scientific work in an unstructured and open way through monday workdocs.
On his expectations about the new launch Mann said, "From our point of view, this is something big and exciting. This is a very major building block in the operating systems for organizations that we have built. The main work is building the initial process and in workdocs there is another infrastructure for this same thing , which is a management application but in a different way. Much of the work at the start is in documents: somebody opens a document, shares it with others and that's as far as it goes. With us it continues, and there are objects that can be embedded in the document, an infrastructure that allows building processes. This will be another way for people to come into monday and it will bring us new customers and deepen use by existing customers."
Zinman added, "Over the years people have taken tools like Excel or Google docs and used them for work but they are not designed for a team collaborating on a project. We have thought about them anew and built them a work environment.
Have the changes in work habit during Covid and the shift to remote working influenced demand for monday?
"No. Unfortunately, we have been living with Covid for 18 months already. Except for a one-off situation in March last year, when things were slightly slower, it has not influenced and we have returned to accelerated growth. Whether there is a lockdown or not, people will still need to use monday regardless of their physical location. At the end of the day it has not helped or hindered us, and I like it that we have not been impacted. It has conceptually sped up the understanding that we need digital transformation but it was a process that had already begun.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 19, 2021
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