Of course, there are three elements that speak in favor of Snowflake: an annualized growth rate of over 100% since its IPO; an investment - surprisingly - by Berkshire Hathaway from the IPO, certainly undertaken under the responsibility of one of Warren Buffett's two lieutenants, Todd Combs or Ted Weschler; and finally, a data analytics product that, let's face it, has been an invaluable commercial success with customers.

Snowflake's cloud-based solution enables the aggregation, transfer, sharing and ordering of huge amounts of data across multiple platforms.The added value is obvious: the solution allows to aggregate, transfer, share and order huge amounts of data on a multitude of different platforms without resorting to complicated APIs, nor to set up necessarily vulnerable exchange protocols. The added value is obvious: the solution is more secure, more fluid and more economical.

Management recently announced very ambitious projections: $10 billion in revenues by 2029, i.e. an annualized growth rate of 30 to 35%, with a free cash flow margin of 15%, i.e. $1.5 billion in profits virtually redistributable to shareholders at maturity. Last year it was also announced that the company would reach break-even by 2023.

Do the earnings reports, published on March 1, support this goal? Revenues grew by 70%, a marked deceleration compared to the triple-digit growth of previous years, even though the performance remains excellent.

Management anticipates a further deceleration for the coming fiscal year, with an expected annual growth rate of around 40%. This is the threshold below which it will have to avoid falling too far if it wants to meet its very ambitious 2029 projections.

The sensitive subject remains of course the pseudo "free cash flow" that Snowflake would generate. CEO Frank Slootman boasts a net margin - "adjusted", of course - of 25%, and the company's press release explicitly mentions a "non-GAAP" profit of $497 million.

All this would be great if we didn't mention the stock option compensation, which amounts to $862 million - neutralized in the cash flow statements since it represents a non-cash expense.

These stock options cannot be ignored in the general dynamics, since, just between them, Frank Slootman and CFO Michael Scarpelli currently have 80 million in the air, the equivalent of a quarter of the shares in circulation, with an exercise price of less than $10.

Slootman and Scarpelli, moreover, have both reduced their holdings over the past year, the first by two million shares, the second by one million. The same goes for the two reference shareholders Altimeter and ICONIQ, both of which are up for sale in 2022.

Unless it has other, less avowable aims, the board of directors clearly considers that Snowflake is undervalued by the market: it has just authorized a share buyback program of $2 billion, i.e. half of the - admittedly - excess cash.

Let's ignore stock options, and consider that they no longer exist. Management expects sales growth of 40% for the fiscal year just opened: with an "adjusted" net margin of 25%, all other things being equal, we anticipate a cash profit of $723 million for the fiscal year 2024.

This is for a current share price of $140 per share, or $40 billion in enterprise value, or a "forward" multiple of x55 "adjusted" profits before "non-cash" stock option compensation...

Probably too many quotation marks for the taste of instinctively skeptical and conservative investors...