Palantir goes parabolic on robust earnings, strong guidance

Retail trading favorite Palantir is mooning 15% in the after-hours session after posting much stronger quarterly results than Wall Street analysts had expected, with a rosy outlook to boot.

For the three months ending December 31, 2024, the defense and data analytics software company reported sales of $827 million, which exceeded every analyst’s projection. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.14 were above the Street’s $0.11 forecast.

The future looks brighter than Wall Street anticipated: management thinks full-year revenues will be around $3.75 billion, while analysts had penciled in a figure $200 million below that level.

Sales to the US private sector — an area that Palantir executives have talked up in relation to the company’s AI software offerings — were up a whopping 64% year on year. The conference call is due to start at 5 p.m. ET.

“The business we have built has now developed its own internal momentum and strength, its own interior life and forms of untamed organic growth, with the output that we are seeing far surpassing what we are investing,” CEO Alex Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Our results, the admittedly vulgar metric by which a market often unsure of what it wants to reward attempts to assess value in this world, have now surpassed even our most ambitious expectations.”