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Shares of adtech giant Applovin tanked 18% in premarket trading on Thursday following a second-quarter revenue miss.
Here’s how the company performed compared with Wall Street’s expectations, according to LSEG estimates:
- Earnings per share: $3.76 vs. $3.76 expected
- Revenue: $1.92 billion vs. $1.94 billion expected
In the earnings call Wednesday, CEO Adam Foroughi blamed the miss on the timing of its improvements to its advertising models as the company continues to expand its artificial intelligence-powered adtech model into e-commerce. Revenue rose 53% year-over-year.
“We’ve always managed this business with the goal of outperforming our own expectations, and this quarter we fell short of that standard,” Foroughi told analysts.
He added that the “pace of meaningful model improvement was lighter than normal during the quarter and the next step up in model performance landed just after quarter ended.”
Piper Sandler analyst James Callahan downgraded the stock to neutral on Thursday following the miss, slashing the bank’s price target from $665 to $385.
“We remain impressed by mgmt, the business, and their market position, but we have more questions than answers on beat/raise cadence from here, and move to the sideline,” Callahan wrote.
