Akamai stock surges 6% on Q2 beat-and-raise; analysts positive

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:) shares gained nearly 6.5% in premarket Wednesday following the company reporting its .

EPS of $1.49 came in better than the consensus estimate of $1.41. Revenue grew 4% year-over-year to $936 million, beating the consensus estimate of $930.38M.

Security revenue was up 14% year-over-year to $433M, while delivery revenue fell 9% to $380M. Compute revenue was $123M, representing a year-over-year increase of 16%.

“Akamai delivered excellent results in the second quarter driven by the strength of our security solutions and our continued improvements in operating efficiency. Building on our solid momentum from the first two quarters, we are increasing our guidance for revenue and earnings for the remainder of the year, while continuing to invest in key growth areas of security and cloud computing,” said CEO Tom Leighton.

For Q3/23, the company expects EPS in the range of $1.48-$1.52, compared to the consensus of $1.41, and revenue in the range of $937M-$952M, compared to the consensus of $931M.

For the full year, the company sees EPS at $5.87-$5.95, compared to the consensus of $5.75, and revenue at $3.765B-$3.795B, compared to the consensus of $3.76B.

Oppenheimer analysts said the results were better than expected.

“With declining margins and weak revenue growth, we remain sidelined,” they said in a note.

William Blair analysts are more bullish on AKAM stock.

“We were pleased to see the reacceleration in the company’s security business, which continues to become a larger part of the overall business. We believe the company’s security products are well-positioned to solve current and evolving challenges such as ransomware attacks, botnet mitigation, and API security, which are top of mind for CISOs,” they said, before adding:

“At the same time, we would like to see the delivery business show more signs of stabilization as pricing pressure and volume challenges persist. Longer-term, we view the company’s core compute and global load balancer as large potential growth drivers.”

(Additional reporting by Senad Karaahmetovic)