Summary
Palantir's Q4 earnings beat expectations, with revenue up 36% YoY and EPS up 75% YoY, driven by strong US commercial growth.
Despite stellar performance, Palantir's valuation is alarmingly high, trading at a P/E of 583 and a Price/Sales ratio of 87.
Analysts are cautious, with most rating Palantir stock as a Hold due to its premium valuation and the need for accelerated revenue growth.
While Palantir's future in AI looks promising, the stock's high valuation poses significant risks, making it speculative rather than a solid investment.
Palantir Technologies
Palantir Technologies Inc. is up over 32.5% since the company reported its Q4 earnings on Tuesday, beating both the top and bottom lines and receiving praise from Wall Street.
Palantir already made its name in the defense industry, but the company is now laser-focused on establishing its name in the commercial space and, so far, has done an excellent job.
Particularly commercial space is the reason why Palantir received a handful of price hikes from analysts after the excellent Q4 earnings:
Bank of America raised its target from $90 to $125, citing Palantir's value proposition becoming evident in the ever-more commoditized AI solutions market.
Morgan Stanley upgraded their rating from Underweight to Equal-weight and raised its price target from $60 to $95.
Jefferies maintained its underperform rating, but the firm raised its price target to $60 from $28. The firm praised the strong earnings and progress made in the commercial AI solutions, but argues the firm would need to accelerate their revenue growth to 50% over next four years to justify its current valuation.
From the ratings, we can see a common theme rising that most of the large investment firms are on the cautious side, particularly due to Palantir's very premium valuation, trading at a P/E of 583 or 87x its trailing twelve-month sales.
Palantir's stock astronomic 1,000% rise is something I admire, and as an investor who failed to see the potential early on, even though I followed the stock, it leaves a bit of a sour taste, but at the same time, as one standing with both feet firmly on the ground, I must warn fellow investors, the valuation is raising alarms.
Data by YCharts
Investing is not a black-and-white world, and despite trading at a very steep valuation, it doesn't mean Palantir's stock is set for a major reversal, but let's not forget 2022, when Palantir's stock dropped as much as 83% in value, and very few investors held on.
Previous Coverage
I published my first coverage of Palantir back in October 2024, just a month after the company joined the S&P 500, opening the door for institutions, mutual funds, and analysts to buy the stock, greatly lifting the popularity and demand for their shares.
In the first coverage, I went in-depth into Palantir's business model and revenue sources, claiming that up to 60% of the company's revenue is derived from dealing with government agencies and the remaining 40% coming from the commercial sector, with the company setting their eyes for expansion, as that is the most lucrative sector to be in, and future of Palantir.
I praised Palantir's AI-solution strategy, as the company has secured major defense contracts, and the business was gaining momentum in its expansion into financial, healthcare, and energy commercial spaces.
One reason why I never pulled the trigger on Palantir in the past, even though looking in retrospect, this was a mistake, was it's dealing with the government. I prefer to own businesses in my portfolio where I understand the product, and it's not clouded by secrecy, which US defense contracts always are.
Now, with the commercial segment of larger importance, Palantir would pass the criteria for inclusion into my portfolio, but as I argued in my previous coverage and as I will argue once again today, the valuation is the sole reason behind my skeptical view of any future gains.
Yes, since my last coverage, Palantir's stock went on to gain another 162%, challenging my initial bearish call, but the market can simply stay irrelevant for longer than we can stay solvent. That's why I would never recommend "short a stock," but instead, perhaps consider trimming and realizing some of the hefty gains.
Performance Since Previous Coverage (Seeking Alpha)
Palantir's Q4 2024 Earnings
Palantir's Q4 earnings crushed their expectations, winning the esteemed title of "best earning report of the season". But not only that, the company's guidance suggests the growth might be just getting started.
In Q4, Palantir brought $828M in revenue, up 36% YoY and 14% higher than previous quarter. The EPS came at $0.14, up 75% YoY.
If we look at the expectations prior to the release, we see analysts were looking for $782M in revenue and EPS of $0.11, so it's clear the magnitude of the beat.
Palantir's results were helped by the US commercial revenue, which has increased 64% YoY and 20% compared to the previous quarter. The 64% growth in this, what eventually will become Palantir's most important business segment, has come well above the management's guidance of 50%.
However, the core US government segment also delivered superb results, with revenue up 45%.
US Commercial Segment Highlights (PLTR IR)
If we look at the customer metrics, we see that Palantir has grown its customer base by 43%, diversifying its revenue streams, now with 711 unique customers. The growth was particularly driven by the US Commercial segment, which grew its base by 73% YoY.
It's important to see the business is not reliant on the single-largest customer, as was the case with lumpy defense contracts, but in fact, Palantir, during the Q4, reached 129 new deals, each worth at least $1M. Of those, 58 are worth at least $5M, and 32 are worth more than $10M.
This confirms the positive momentum for the business and establishes the thesis that while the AI market is becoming more commoditized with software solutions, Palantir's value proposition is more pronounced, winning more and larger contracts among commercial enterprises.
US Commercial Customer Growth (PLTR IR)
Another important element here is that new contracts are laying the foundations for future revenue. If the new customers are satisfied with the software solutions Palantir offers, the switching costs will be high, and the company's retention rate will further improve. As a result, I expect Palantir will generate excess returns over the invested capital.
In case you are not familiar with Palantir's use cases, for both government and commercial, the company leverages data to develop insights and create efficiencies in an organization's operations. High sought-after solutions, particularly as enterprises are looking for cost-cutting and might need to redesign their supply chains switching from international markets to domestic, in the face of potential tariff threat.
Palantir's KPI, RPO, sales not booked yet as revenue climbed 40% YoY to $1.73B. As long as the rate of new RPOs is above the revenue growth, we can conclude that we will likely see revenue growth around similar rates in the future as well, if not faster.
The Q4 earnings confirm my previous thoughts that the US is experiencing an accelerating AI adoption, and likely, we will see more and more enterprises trying to catch up with the trend. Palantir will likely remain the key beneficiary of this adoption.
One reason why Palantir's approach to winning new contracts is so successful is their novel approach, hosting booth camps, connecting Palantir's engineers with enterprises, with the engineers in 1-5 days being able to deliver first use cases, tailored for the organizations, hooking up its customers and upselling from there.
But all the superlatives I said are not all. The other star of the earnings report was the guidance for Q1 and total 2025 revenue. Palantir expects to deliver 35-36% growth in Q1 and 31% growth for the full-year, which lands far ahead of the 25% revenue growth consensus.
For 2025, the company is expecting 54% US Commercial revenue growth.
The data, both the historical one now and forward-looking, clearly suggest Palantir is just getting started. However, most analysts, including myself, are worried about the valuation, claiming the stock is getting ahead of itself. In reality, only three analysts have either a Strong Buy/Buy rating on Palantir, with 13 rating it as a Hold, and the valuation argument is nearly universal.
Price Target (IBKR)
Valuation
Palantir's flawless execution, accelerating revenue growth, stellar customer acquisition strategy, and the secular tailwind of AI adoption certainly deserve a premium valuation, but the question is, how premium?
Palantir's stock is currently priced trailing a twelve-month P/E of 583 and Price/Sales of 87.
Yes, perhaps looking at trailing twelve-month data with hyper-scaler as Palantir is not the best strategy.
If we instead consider the twelve-month forward EPS of $0.54/share, Palantir is still trading at a forward P/E of 200. If we take the 2026 expected EPS of $0.68/share, the 2-year Forward P/E valuation would still be 161.
It's more likely than not that Palantir will deliver better results than the forecasted ones if the momentum stays, but owning such an expensive business in one's portfolio creates unnecessary risks and certainly doesn't justify buying more shares; that's not investing but speculating.
Of course, there is a point at which Palantir's valuation would be justified if the company managed to grow their earnings at least say 50% annually, over the next 3-4 years, but that's not what analysts are forecasting, implying the stock has gotten ahead of itself.
As per FactSet, analysts are forecasting following Palantir's EPS growth:
FY25 EPS: $0.54E, YoY growth: 32%
FY26 EPS: $0.68E, YoY growth: 26%
FY27 EPS: $0.88E, YoY growth: 29%
Average 30% annual growth is superb by any conventional standards, but in my view, that's not enough to justify a 12M forward P/E valuation of 200.
If we assume, Palantir will be able to deliver the EPS FY25-FY27 growth as forecasted by FactSet and FY28-FY29 growth will still stay elevated around 30%, but the valuation would contract to a more reasonable (yet very expensive) P/E of 100 by end of FY29, investors would be looking at an annual ROR of abysmal 6.4%.
This is far too low to justify the risks associated with owning such an expensive company as Palantir is.
Potential Return (Fast Graphs)
Investor Takeaway
All in all, lofty valuations don't mean equities will reverse to realistic ranges overnight. What this means is that expectations are sky-high, and failing to deliver does have the potential to send Palantir's stock crashing down.
We have seen in the past, over and over again, stocks falling from the skies simply because they couldn't live up to investor's expectations and the margin for error was virtually nonexistent.
Palantir is firing on all cylinders, and I think the business has a great future ahead of itself, thanks to the AI adoption, particularly by the private sector, but even market darlings, as Palantir occasionally suffers market cap wipeout as we saw with Palantir in 2021-2022, sending the stock 83% lower.
According to McKinsey, the Gen AI market is expected to be worth anywhere between $2.6-4.4T over the next ten years, so the playing field for Palantir is tremendous, but the ride might get bumpy, starting from such a high valuation.
