Coronavirus lockdown lifts Atlassian fortunes

It has been a good COVID-19 lockdown for Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.

Atlassian co-founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes

It has been a good COVID-19 lockdown for Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar — in paper wealth terms at least.

The software billionaire duo, who both turned 40 late last year, have seen their fortunes each rise by about $2bn since markets started plunging worldwide early last month.

So impressive has been Atlassian’s rise since then that its shares hit a record high of $US158.98 on the Nasdaq overnight on Tuesday.

At that level, both Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar’s respective wealth will have surged past the $15bn mark, taking into ­account other investments and assets such as their mansions next door to each other in Sydney’s Point Piper, bought for $100m and $70m respectively in the past three years.

Investors in the US have marked up Atlassian on the expectation that the company, best known for its Jira and Confluence collaboration software products, has benefited from the rising demand for tools and programs to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic.

Atlassian is expected to deliver revenue of $US395m-$US399m ($612m-$618m) when it reports its March quarter results on Friday morning.

Atlassian shares are up 27 per cent since January 1, compared with a 1 per cent rise in the ­Nasdaq 100 in the same period, and more than 400 per cent since the shares floated at $US21 in December 2015 and then surged 32 per cent on the first day of trade.

Analysts tracking the stock such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have upgraded their recommendations on Atlassian in the past month to “buy” and “overweight”, though the consensus 12-month price target among the analysts is about $US155.

Cannon-Brookes has also been a supporter of the federal government’s new COVIDsafe app, saying on social media this week that he had downloaded the app and urging others in the technology sector to do so as well.

“Turn … the angry mob mode off — it’s not helpful,” he wrote on Hacker News.

“We’re all in this together.”

Cannon Brookes said he wanted to “commend the government on some smart privacy and security choices” and that “we as a tech community can help them” by “finding any bugs in the app” to get them fixed.

In wealth terms at least, Atlassian’s share price rise puts the billionaire co-founders at about the same level as Sydney apartments king Harry Triguboff and closing in on the likes on Australia’s richest person, Anthony Pratt (whose wealth was measured at $16.95bn on this year’s edition of The List — Australia’s Richest 250), Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest.

Of that group, Forrest has seen his paper fortune increase by about $3bn since Fortescue Metals’ share price fell to a low of $8.58 on March 9.

The Perth-based billionaire recently received about $750m in dividends from his Fortescue shares, and then made headlines by pouring $520m into his Minderoo Foundation, which now has more than $2bn in it.

Meanwhile, Farquhar earlier this month backed another raising for Australia’s newest tech unicorn, SafetyCulture, which now has a $1.3bn valuation. It has an app that provides safety checklists for businesses.