SaaS universe guidance looks conservative again for 2021

The 22.3% average 2021 revenue growth guidance for our SaaS universe (excluding vertical SaaS and other) is 9.6 points lower than average actual 2020 revenue growth. Typically, this initial guidance proves conservative. Even in the pandemic year of 2020, actual growth was 4.6 points better than initial guidance that suggested 2020 revenue growth would be 10.9 points less than in 2019. As we have noted before, we believe the pandemic reduced the average growth rate for our SaaS companies by 5-6 points (albeit with some notable variance among the constituents). Twelve companies have not yet provided 2021 guidance, including three with June fiscal years that would normally have provided guidance around July 2020.

We have added recent IPO C3.ai (AI) to our SaaS universe and removed Pluralsight (PS) and Slack (WORK), both as a result of acquisition. In March, Talend (TLND) agreed to be acquired by Thoma Bravo for $66.00 per share.

SaaS stocks gave back gains in the second half of the March quarter after a strong start to the year. With market momentum shifted to value names, our SaaS stocks dropped an average 8.4% for the March quarter compared to a 5.8% gain for the S&P 500. The average enterprise value multiple of 2021 estimated revenue dropped to 16.0 from 17.6 last quarter. Some lower-multiple SaaS names saw notable gains, such as Mix Telematics’ (MIXT) 9.5% and ChannelAdvisor’s (ECOM) 47.4%. Talend gained 66.0% due to the proposed acquisition.

While it is easy to look at a company’s current growth rate, we continue to believe the most important factor in valuing SaaS names is a view on how revenue will grow over the long term (what we call the growth curve). Since revenue growth tends to slow over time as companies get larger, the key question is how quickly will growth decay? For 2021, our SaaS universe (excluding vertical SaaS and other) is guiding to a significant 9.6 percentage point growth rate decline, to 22.3% in 2021 from 31.8% in 2020 as shown in Table 1 (a 30.0% decay rate). In 2020, the actual decay rate was 16.4% (reflecting a 6.3 percentage point decline from 2019 growth). As we noted in our previous two reports, we estimate the pandemic had a 5-6 percentage point negative effect on growth despite some headline companies having seen growth accelerate due to the pandemic.