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  • Professor Stefan Witte, Delft University of Technology

Alarm.com (NASDAQ:ALRM) Beats Q1 Sales Targets

ALRM Cover Image

Home security and automation software provider Alarm.com (NASDAQ: ALRM) reported Q1 CY2025 results topping the market’s revenue expectations, with sales up 7% year on year to $238.8 million. The company expects the full year’s revenue to be around $983.5 million, close to analysts’ estimates. Its non-GAAP profit of $0.54 per share was 13.8% above analysts’ consensus estimates.

Is now the time to buy Alarm.com? Find out by accessing our full research report, it’s free.

Alarm.com (ALRM) Q1 CY2025 Highlights:

  • Revenue: $238.8 million vs analyst estimates of $234.3 million (7% year-on-year growth, 1.9% beat)
  • Adjusted EPS: $0.54 vs analyst estimates of $0.47 (13.8% beat)
  • Adjusted EBITDA: $43.54 million vs analyst estimates of $39.83 million (18.2% margin, 9.3% beat)
  • The company slightly lifted its revenue guidance for the full year to $983.5 million at the midpoint from $979.5 million
  • EBITDA guidance for the full year is $191.5 million at the midpoint, in line with analyst expectations
  • Operating Margin: 12.4%, up from 8.4% in the same quarter last year
  • Free Cash Flow Margin: 7.5%, down from 22.3% in the previous quarter
  • Market Capitalization: $2.65 billion

Company Overview

Founded in 2000 as a business unit within MicroStrategy, Alarm.com (NASDAQ: ALRM) is a software-as-a-service platform that enables users to control their security systems and smart home appliances from a single app.

Sales Growth

A company’s long-term sales performance is one signal of its overall quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but many enduring ones grow for years. Unfortunately, Alarm.com’s 6.9% annualized revenue growth over the last three years was weak. This fell short of our benchmark for the software sector and is a rough starting point for our analysis.

Alarm.com Quarterly Revenue

This quarter, Alarm.com reported year-on-year revenue growth of 7%, and its $238.8 million of revenue exceeded Wall Street’s estimates by 1.9%.

Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 3.6% over the next 12 months, a deceleration versus the last three years. This projection doesn't excite us and implies its products and services will face some demand challenges.

Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.

Customer Acquisition Efficiency

The customer acquisition cost (CAC) payback period measures the months a company needs to recoup the money spent on acquiring a new customer. This metric helps assess how quickly a business can break even on its sales and marketing investments.

Alarm.com is extremely efficient at acquiring new customers, and its CAC payback period checked in at 15.3 months this quarter. The company’s rapid recovery of its customer acquisition costs means it can attempt to spur growth by increasing its sales and marketing investments.

Key Takeaways from Alarm.com’s Q1 Results

We were impressed by how significantly Alarm.com blew past analysts’ EBITDA expectations this quarter. We were also glad its full-year EBITDA guidance slightly exceeded Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, we think this was a decent quarter with some key metrics above expectations. The stock remained flat at $55 immediately after reporting.

Is Alarm.com an attractive investment opportunity at the current price? If you’re making that decision, you should consider the bigger picture of valuation, business qualities, as well as the latest earnings. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here, it’s free.

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