UBS downgrades Snowflake to neutral, says cloud computing spend could slow

Published Tue, Aug 16 20228:20 AM EDT

There could be trouble for Snowflake as macro and competitive pressures mount, according to UBS. Analyst Karl Keirstead downgraded Snowflake to neutral from buy, referencing findings from some recent field checks ahead of the cloud computing company's earnings next week . "Ahead of Snowflake's 2Q/Jul print on Aug 24th, we caught up with 7 checks (3 partners, 4 customers) to better assess how demand for Snowflake has tracked. This round of field checks felt like a tone downtick relative to prior rounds, with more customers flagging efforts to curtail discretionary data analytics spend," Keirstead wrote in a Monday note. Shares of Snowflake rebounded nearly 23% this quarter, while still down about 50% this year, as the growth company benefitted from an improved outlook on inflation and interest rates. Still, the analyst said UBS found evidence that customers will start to slow their cloud computing spending and that competition between Snowflake and Databricks is growing "faster than we were thinking last year." "Among the customers, one F500 customer told us that 'we're beginning to get more thoughtful about what goes into Snowflake' while another said that ~20% of Snowflake workloads are discretionary and could be curtailed. The feedback was hardly a disaster, but we simply weren't hearing such anecdotes a year ago," the note read. The analyst raised the 12-month target price to $175, up from $165, and just a little above Monday's closing price of $170.44. The stock fell 3% in Tuesday premarket trading. UBS isn't alone in its concerns over Snowflake going forward. Citi analyst Tyler Radke opened a negative catalyst watch on the company, noting that: "We remain believers in Snowflake long-term growth story. ... That said, we are becoming tactically cautious, and open a negative Catalyst Watch, following the recent ~30% run, as we see usage headwinds continuing to build, with consensus numbers too high (Q3 and FY24). Snowflake is a good bull market stock as consumption patterns can be levered to new line-of-business use cases such as marketing, but we are worried these make it less defensive/resilient in a more challenging backdrop." —CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this report.