Nutanix (NTNX) Earnings Aug 26: Revenue Up 12%, Cash Flat

TL;DR

• Nutanix reports fiscal Q4 and full-year 2026 after the close on Wednesday, August 26, with the call at 4:30pm ET. The period ended July 31, and the date comes from Nutanix's own conference call announcement.
• Revenue is guided to $725-745m, which is +11.0% to +14.0% against the $653.3m Nutanix did in the year-ago quarter. Street consensus of $737.8m sits above the guide midpoint, so a small beat is already assumed.
• The cash line is the one I would read first. Subtract the $563.1m of free cash flow Nutanix has already booked in Q1 through Q3 from the $760-780m full-year guide and Q4 has to produce $197-217m. The year-ago quarter produced $207.8m. At the midpoint the quarter grows revenue 12.5% and makes the same cash.
• The full-year cash guide has been cut over the year. November: $800-840m. February: $745-775m. May: $760-780m. Management raised it last quarter and it still sits about $50m below where the year started.
• ARR growth is decelerating cleanly: 18%, then 16%, then 15% across the first three quarters. The stock closed Friday at $66.61.

The Board

The revenue line and the cash line are pointing different directions.

When Does Nutanix Report Q4 Earnings?

Wednesday, August 26, after the market closes, with the conference call at 4:30pm ET. It covers fiscal Q4 and the full year to July 31, 2026.

That puts Nutanix on the same evening as Nvidia's quarter, which is a scheduling problem for a $16bn company. The tape that night belongs to somebody else, and the hour-by-hour board for August 26 has PCE and the second GDP estimate landing before either of them. Dates for the rest of the season sit in the earnings calendar.

The Subtraction That Sets Up the Quarter

Nutanix guides full-year free cash flow and reports it quarterly, so the fourth quarter's requirement is arithmetic rather than forecast.

Through three quarters the company has produced $174.5m, $191.4m and $197.2m, which is $563.1m. The full-year guide is $760-780m. So Q4 has to land between $196.9m and $216.9m, call it $197-217m, with a midpoint near $207m.

Fiscal Q4 2025 produced $207.8m.

So the guide asks this quarter to grow revenue about 12.5% at the midpoint and generate roughly what the same quarter generated a year ago. Run it as a margin and the gap is wider: 31.8% of revenue converted to cash in Q4 last year against about 28.1% implied this time.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not prove. Nutanix has been explicit that server supply constraints stretched customer lead times, and it flagged in February that this would move the timing of both revenue and cash. Timing effects are real and they reverse. A cash conversion rate that steps down for two quarters and then recovers is a different company from one where it steps down and stays. Nobody can tell those apart from outside, which is exactly why the Q4 print and the FY2027 guide matter more than usual here.

What Happened to the Cash Guide

The full-year free cash flow number has moved three times:

• November 2025 (Q1 results): $800-840m
• February 2026 (Q2 results): $745-775m
• May 2026 (Q3 results): $760-780m

Coverage of the May quarter described this as Nutanix raising its outlook, which is fair on a quarter-over-quarter basis: the midpoint went from $760m to $770m. Measured against the guide management set in November, the midpoint is down from $820m to $770m.

Both readings are accurate and they leave a reader in different places, so here is mine. The February cut was the real event and the May increase recovered a fifth of it. The operating margin guide went the other way over the same stretch, from 21-22% up to approximately 22.5%. Margin up, cash down. For a business whose entire investment case rests on cash conversion, that divergence is the thing I would want management to address on the call.

ARR Is Slowing in a Straight Line

Annual recurring revenue grew 18% in Q1, 16% in Q2 and 15% in Q3, reaching $2.43bn. For a subscription business ARR leads reported revenue, so a clean three-quarter deceleration is worth more attention than a revenue line that is still printing 10-12%.

The bull case has a straightforward answer to this. Nutanix has spent two years absorbing customers who left VMware after Broadcom repriced it, and Q2 delivered more than 1,000 new logos, the company's best new-customer quarter in eight years, with net revenue retention at 107%. Land now, expand later. On that reading, decelerating ARR alongside record new logos is a mix effect: new customers start small.

The bear case is that the VMware migration wave has a shape, and the easy half of it has happened. Broadcom is not standing still either, and this site has covered how the market keeps selling Broadcom on news that is not obviously bad for it. If the migration cohort is maturing, 15% becomes 13% and the multiple compresses regardless of what the margin line does.

I lean toward the second reading, though not hard. Three points of ARR deceleration across three quarters, while new logos hit an eight-year high, tells me the new customers are landing smaller than the old ones expanded.

Management Guides Low. Consensus Knows.

One number keeps me from being outright negative into the print.

In February, Nutanix guided fiscal Q3 to $680-690m of revenue at a 16-17% non-GAAP operating margin. It delivered $703.1m at 22.3%. Revenue came in $13m above the top of the range, and the margin beat the top of the range by 530 basis points. That is not a rounding error, it is a company that set the bar on the floor after a supply scare and then cleared it comfortably.

Which makes the Q4 guide of $725-745m and 21-23% look conservative on the same pattern. The Street has noticed: consensus of $737.8m sits above the $735m midpoint, and the whisper computed from recent surprise history runs above the $0.49 consensus EPS.

So the beat is largely priced. A company that beats its own conservative guide and gets sold anyway is a common August outcome, and it is why I would separate the question "will the quarter be good" from "will the stock go up".

The Options Angle

I could not source a listed expiry that isolates the August 26 print. The nearest chain the calendar data carries is the $67.50 straddle expiring September 18, costing roughly 14.9% of spot against Friday's $66.61 close. That contract covers 23 days, and inside those 23 days sit Nvidia's quarter the same evening, Jackson Hole, and a PCE print. Buying it is a bet on three weeks of market-wide volatility that happens to contain a Nutanix event, and paying about 15% of spot for that is a wide ask.

A straddle needs a bigger realised move than the premium to pay, and I do not have clean per-event realised move history for this name to check implied against, so I am pricing it on structure alone and passing.

On the shares, I would also pass into the print, for a specific reason rather than caution. The revenue and margin beat is the part I am most confident about, and it is the part consensus has already taken. The two lines that can break the stock, Q4 cash conversion and the FY2027 ARR trajectory, are the two I cannot handicap from here. Paying $66.61 for a quarter where the good news is priced and the bad news is unknowable is a poor trade, and I would rather buy it after the guide.

Both rows are logged so they can be scored, and the full ledger is at /data/track-record.

Trade log

#	Stance	Structure	Strikes and expiry	Cost or credit	Spot at writing	Implied move	Conviction	Breakeven
1	Pass	Long straddle	$67.50 straddle, Sep 18	~14.9% of spot	$66.61 (Aug 14 close)	±14.9%, Sep 18 expiry	5/10	needs >14.9%
2	Pass	Long NTNX shares into the print	n/a, common stock	$66.61	$66.61 (Aug 14 close)	±14.9%, Sep 18 expiry	6/10	n/a

The One-Line Read

Nutanix cut its full-year cash target in February and nudged it back up in May, and it still sits below November's. Revenue and margin should clear. Free cash flow is the line I would read first on the 26th.