Sales soar but losses widen at Pure Storage

Flash firm reports quarterly results for the first time since IPO

Pure Storage said its Q3 was "outstanding" as it reports results for the first time – despite losses widening to $56.5m (£37.8m).

The all-flash firm went public in October, prompting it to shed some light on its financial performance to date, but last night's results announcement marks the first time it has formally reported a quarter's results to Wall Street.

For the three months to 31 October, sales at Pure Storage rocketed a massive 167 per cent to $131.4m compared with the year-ago quarter. But over the same period, its net loss widened from $40.4m to $56.5m.

Pure changed the time of its earnings webcast and "in response to the possible inadvertent disclosure of fiscal third-quarter financial data after the close of trading today by a third-party vendor."

Pure described its quarter as "outstanding" and said it grew its customer base to more than 250 in Q3 after signing the likes of Domino's Pizza and The Boston Globe.

In a blog post, its chief executive Scott Dietzen said he was "thrilled" with his firm's performance.

"We are in the right place (a $24bn market for performance storage hardware and software) at the right time (rapidly tipping to all-flash and the cloud model) with the right platform for customers," he said.

"We are different from other storage companies. The Pure Storage team came together out of a shared dissatisfaction with the state of datacentre storage. We were convinced that legacy storage vendors were ill prepared to make the leap to the solid-state, cloud-centric future."

He added that Pure's performance so far this year has been pleasing.

"Over the first three quarters of the year, our revenue grew more than 1.7 times faster than our operating expenses – that is, for each additional $1 of opex, we added more than $1.70 in revenues. As we invest aggressively in sales, marketing, support and our channel to maximise growth going forwards, we will also continue to improve our operating efficiency."