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by PaywallBuster 1223 days ago
unlike other companies Gitlab is _still_ not profitable

https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git...

Fiscal Year 2022 Highlights:

Total revenue of $252.7 million GAAP operating margin of (51)%; Non-GAAP operating margin of (39)%

hence cutting costs before borrowing money becomes too expensive (0% interest rates are gone)

3 comments

I'm honestly surprised they're not profitable. The cloud tax and cost to acquire new customers is just too high I guess.
Noob question: how does one learn to read these financial statements?
You could start by going through some Accounting or Finance videos from edu sites like Khan Academy, and also spend some time looking at the financials for public companies on a site like Yahoo Finance. Annual statements are also available on EDGAR (https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch) rather than, e.g., Yahoo Finance, but maybe a bit harder to parse even though its closer to source data.

I think you only need some basics to learn how to look at a financial statement and understand information like whether or not the company is profitable, or roughly how long the company can survive if things continue the way they are, or get better, or get worse. If you want to be able to really understand and assess a business and its financial health based on these statements, I'm not sure you can just learn that. I certainly don't have the confidence that I can do that yet. My feeling is that I'd probably have to work in the industry in some capacity where I am looking at this information daily, across dozens or hundreds of companies.

At best, I can pick up on anomalies that can later be explained (e.g., I saw there was a large amount of cash added to GitLab in the past year, and later it was clear that this was largely because of their IPO, which seems obvious but nobody told me there was an IPO before reading the statements (granted, the existence of the statements tend to imply this is a publicly-traded company)). That gives me some confidence that I know what I am reading, but I haven't done much outside of Khan Academy videos and taking a university-level accounting 101 course where I learned about the accounting equation, the accounting cycle, and how to write financial statements based on the financial events for a business.

In the US at least, there is a baseline standard based on Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and SEC reporting requirements. Generally it is reported quarterly (every three months) with a big year end summary.

They’re a bunch of terms and abbreviations you’ll also need to understand eg FY means Fiscal Year, what the various GAAP measures are, and often many companies and industries have their own non-GAAP measures.

To really understand it all takes a lot of work, corporate accounting is nothing at all like managing person cash flow, there are a lot of accounting practices you need to understand like depreciation, how revenue is recognized, etc - all of which can be games to a degree.

Note that a private company doesn’t have to release this kind of info.

Take an accounting course.
Interesting. Looks like the bulk of their spend is on sales and marketing, which I suppose makes sense in that these companies require using this kind of money to acquire new customers. But obviously that spells out the questions, how sustainable is this business model, and also, how much of this are they decreasing in addition to or as part of the layoffs?

This is on the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations. Total OpEx: 351,625; Sales and Marketing as part of that is 190,754 or about 54% of their operating expenses. I don't read finance statements that often so I don't know how normal this is for the industry.