There was no let up in the stellar growth at US-based hosting player Rackspace in Q4. Another impressive quarter saw the company beat revenue and earnings expectations, pushing the stock price up 7% in after hours trading. Incidentally, not even Apple can match Rackspace’s 10-fold stock price gain over the past three years – in fact it’s the fastest growing S&P 500 stock over that period.
As for the numbers, Q4 revenue was up 32% at £283m, which took full-year 2011 revenues just over the billion dollar mark with 31% growth. Profitability keeps improving too. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 36.1% in the quarter, compared to 33.5% in 2010. Meanwhile, the full-year EBIT margin was up from 10.2% in 2010 to 12.0%.
The UK is Rackspace’s most significant operation the US, although there’s no detail yet to give us a steer on UK numbers for the quarter and full year. That said, there’s also no reason to think our growth and volume estimates from Q3 results time need to be adjusted (see Rackspace powers ahead in UK and US).
As for the overall business mix, Rackspace broadly reflects our view of the current state of the cloud services market. Its “dedicated”(i.e. private) cloud services were up 23% in the year. Meanwhile public cloud, where it competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, rose by 88%. The private side of things still, however, represents 82% of total revenues.