Scott Herren
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is now open
Thanks, Andrew. Digging deeper into the numbers for the third quarter, I’ll start with a few more details on our strong ARR performance. ARR benefited from a 17% increase in ARPS, a 14% increase in subscriptions, and 30% growth in billings for the quarter. Looking at subscriptions, we added 143,000 subs in the quarter and hit a milestone in total subscriptions as we crossed the 4 million mark, which is nearly twice the number of maintenance seats we had at the peak of the previous business model. Subscription plan subs grew by 252,000 led by product subscriptions. Core sub ads once again increased by 3% sequentially and we also added 53,000 cloud subs which is a nice step up from the 31,000 we added in Q2, and 18,000 in Q1. Strength in cloud was led by broad based adoption of the BIM 360 family. Moving to the maintenance for subscription program, we continue to make solid progress. In Q3, the customers migrated to 71,000 maintenance subs to products sub subscriptions, while the number of them to our subscriptions was down sequentially, the conversion rate remains strong with approximately one third of the maintenance renewal opportunities migrating to product subscriptions. Of those that migrated, once again, over 30% of eligible subscriptions upgraded from an individual product to an industry collection. We expect the number of M2S subs to increase in Q4 as our maintenance renewal opportunity is higher. The renewal rates for both maintenance and product subscriptions picked up slightly from Q2 and were in line with our planning assumptions. Helping to bolster renewal rates for product subscriptions are the M2S related subs, which have as expected very high renewal rates, because the program was designed to be sticky. We expect the renewal rates for product subscriptions to continue to increase as the product mix shifts toward higher value products. Now let’s talk a little more about annualized revenue per subscription or AARPs. Total AARPs posted another quarter of strong growth, as it continued to benefit from the same drivers we discussed at Investor Day and that we saw in Q2. These drivers include the growth of the renewal base, the ongoing strength of industry collections, and various pricing adjustments we made earlier in the year and are now having a greater influence on AARP’s. The pricing adjustments included the price increase associated with the M2S program, lower channel discount on AutoCAD LT and an increase for multi-user subscriptions. Long term ARPS drivers will continue to be the growing renewal base which comes at a higher net price to Autodesk, the increase in digital sales also at a higher net price to Autodesk. The product mix shift to Industry Collections, the maintenance price increase for those customers who don’t take advantage of the M2S program and less discounting and promotional activity. We expect total ARPS to continue to increase for all the reasons I have just discussed as we progressed through the transition and well beyond fiscal 2020. Our eStore which is like a bigger part of our digital sales grew over 65% year-on-year. For the past five quarters, our eStore has generated over 20% of the product subscriptions. Q3 also marked the eight consecutive quarter of greater than 30% growth in our EBAs. In fact, our EBAs posted over 50% growth in the quarter, highlighting strong execution as well as adoption and expansion of EBA contracts. What’s interesting is that while the growth of our total direct business accelerated even from the record levels in Q2, our indirect business expanded even faster. We continue to believe that over time the mix of direct business will outpace the growth of indirect, leading to a more even spilt between direct and indirect revenue. Moving to spend management, our total non-GAAP was up 5% and was slightly higher than expected as we’ve done a nice job following the open positions created by last year’s resource rebalancing, . However, if we normalize for ASC 340 and foreign exchange rates, the year-over-year growth in total spend would have been less than 2%. The sequential increase in spend was related to the continued hiring ramp that we’ve been calling up for the past few quarters as we near the completion of the resource rebalancing, call costs are higher year-on-year and due to the impact of ASC 340 which requires us to capitalize sales commissions. Normalizing for ASC 340, the growth in total spend would have been less than 4%. Looking at the balance sheet, total deferred revenue grew 17%, unbilled deferred revenue increased by $45 million sequentially to $451 million due to a strong EBA performance. We expect unbilled deferred revenue to increase meaningfully next quarter with seasonally strong enterprise transactions. While we continue to experience and expect a decrease in long term deferred, our short term deferred revenue grew by 14% due to a strong billings in the quarter. Looking at cash flow, we generated $39 million in operating cash flow as we benefited from the growth in billings and strong cash collections. We expect our cash flow to accelerate in the fourth quarter. We use $103 million in the quarter to buyback roughly 800,000 shares at an average price of $131.42. Year-to-date we have repurchased 2.1 million shares for $270 million, an average price of $129.86. We continue to be committed to managing dilution and reducing shares outstanding over time. Before I turn to the outlook, let me run through some details about our acquisition of PlanGrid. As announced this afternoon, we are paying $875 million net of acquired cash. We will finance the deal with cash on hand and a short term pre payable loan. The transaction is expected to close during our fiscal Q4. Since we cannot be sure of the exact timing, we have not included any impact in our guidance. That said, we would expect it to contribute slightly to revenue growth and be modestly negative for profitability and cash flows for the quarter. For fiscal 2020, we expect PlanGrid to contribute approximately 100 million in ARR that create a slight headwind for our profitability. The transaction and associated financing costs will have some dilutive effect on our cash flow, but we believe we can achieve our goal of 1.35 billion in free cash flow for the year. There are more details about the company and our rationale behind the acquisition and a slide deck on our Investor Relations website. Now let’s turn to the discussion of our outlook. I’ll start by saying that our view of the global economic conditions remains mostly unchanged from the last few quarters, but we’re monitoring the potential macroeconomic impacts from various trade and tariff disputes. There’s been some foreign exchange volatility, but our hedging program has succeeded in smoothing out the bigger swings. As we look at our outlook for Q4, we expect to see continued sequential increases in most metrics, including ARR, ARPS, Billings, Revenue, Spend and Earnings. We are raising our outlook on all of those key metrics for the year. We expect our hiring ramp to continue as we finish the rebalancing of resources to the most strategic projects, and as such we expect our spend to increase slightly sequentially. However, the sequential uptick in total operating expense in the fourth quarter will be lower than previous years due to the adoption of ASC 340 that requires capitalization of commissions, which historically has been very heavy during Q4. Given our full year expenses are moving up modestly, our operating margin for the year will be higher by one percentage point versus our previous target. Also our new margin forecast for the year represents nearly 17 points of improvement over last year, and we expect a sizable uptick in cash flow in Q4. Regarding subscriptions, I’ll reiterate the next quarter will be the last time we will report on subs and our ARPS on a quarterly basis. After that we will use events like our annual Investor Day to report on important metrics that will help you build your long term models. For fiscal year 2019, we continue to expect subscription additions to end up at the low end of our guidance range, primarily related to the success we’re having with the adoption of industry collections and the consolidation we’re experiencing with the M2S program. Before we start the Q&A part of this call, I want to summarize by highlighting the great progress we have made on driving the sum of our revenue growth plus free cash flow margin, which is a key metric for driving shareholder value under the rule of 40 framework. We ended the quarter with the sum of both metrics at 32% [ph], a level we have not seen for four years. And as Andrew said, we plan to nearly double this metric in the next few years. Operator, we’d now like to open the call up for questions.