James Benson
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Your question please
Thank you, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I get into the highlights of our Q1 results, I want to start with three quick financial housekeeping reminders. First, as I mentioned on last quarter’s call, we adopted the new revenue accounting standard ASC 606 effective Q1, 2018. We adopted ASC 606 on a full retrospective basis. So on today's financial results, all prior periods comply with the new rules. And we told you in February, the new accounting standard dose not materially impact Akamai’s historical or projected revenue and income statement. And for clarity on the modest impact of the changes, we've provided detailed reconciliations on the Investor Relations section of the Akamai website. The new standard primarily impacts revenue timing of a few license software customer contracts, a very small component of our revenue. And while immaterial on a full-year basis, the new standard may result in modest quarter-to-quarter revenue fluctuations. The new revenue standard also requires us to defer and amortize certain sales commission costs. And as I mentioned on our last call, our Q1 and full year 2018 guidance projections reflected the impact of the new revenue standard. The second housekeeping item pertain to some detailed revenue reporting disclosures. As we outlined in the last call, we are now reporting revenue under a two division customer-centric structure, Web Division and Media and Carrier Division. This divisional dimension is the primary lens through which we drive and report the business. Finally, as we also told you in February, we will no longer be providing a solution category revenue view, because we no longer believe it is the useful measure in understanding our business performance. Especially with the growing overlap between some of our media delivery and web performance product portfolios. We will provide additional visibility into areas of our business that we believe are important to understand as key drivers of our future growth, which is why, we will continue to breakout our Cloud Security Solutions. Now, on to our strong Q1 results. As Tom outlined Akamai had a tremendous first quarter, exceeding the high-end of our guidance on revenues, operating margins and earnings. Q1 revenue came in well above the high-end of our guidance range at $669 million, up 11% year-over-year or 9% in constant currency. And up 11% in constant currency if you exclude the six large internet platform customers, an acceleration over Q4 levels. Revenue growth was strong across the business. With the primary overachievement compared to guidance driven by higher media traffic volumes than we anticipated going into the quarter. We also continue to see rapid growth of our security products across both divisions. Revenue from our Web Division customers was $353 million, up 16% year-over-year or 13% in constant currency. We remained pleased with the strong growth in this division and the expanded product and customer revenue diversification across the company. And our Web Division customers now represent roughly 53% of Akamai's overall revenue. Within our Web Division, we continue to see strong uptake in our new product areas, namely Image Manager, Digital Performance Management and Bot Manager, as well as continued strong growth in our core Kona and Prolexic Cloud Security Solutions. First quarter revenue for total Cloud Security Solutions was $149 million, up 36% year-over-year or 32% in constant currency. Another tremendous quarter of revenue growth and customer adoption of our Cloud Security Solutions globally. Entering the second quarter, our rapidly growing cloud security business now has an annualized revenue run rate of over $600 million and represents over 22% of our total revenues. As Tom mentioned, we believe security presents a tremendous growth opportunity for us and we plan to continue to invest in this area with a focus on further enhancing our product portfolio and extending our go-to-market capabilities. Moving now to our Media and Carrier Division, revenue for this set of customers was $316 million in the quarter, up 6% year-over-year or 4% in constant currency. And up a healthy 8% in constant currency excluding the large Internet Platform Customers. Revenue from the Internet Platform Customers was down from Q4 levels as expected, while revenue and traffic volumes in the rest of the division was strong across all geographies and industry verticals and significantly exceeds our expectations in the quarter. Traffic growth accelerated for the third straight quarter and was particularly robust from our video delivery and gaming customers. And as Tom noted, we also had a number of notable sporty events in the quarter that contributed to the strong traffic and revenue growth, each event with record breaking online audiences. As we’ve highlights on the last several calls, our Media and Carrier division management team has been focused on capturing more traffic share and improving the quality of delivery for the top 250 media customers that account for most of our traffic and revenue. Because of these efforts, traffic growth accelerated and exceeded market growth rates in Q3, Q4 and Q1 and we are now beginning to see the associated revenue acceleration. Moving onto our geographies, sales in our international markets represented 37% of total revenue in Q1, up 2 points from Q4 levels. International revenue was $245 million in the first quarter, up 22% year-over-year or 14% in constant currency, driven by continued strong growth in our Asia Pacific region. Foreign exchange fluctuations had a positive impact on revenue of $17 million on a year-over-year basis and $7 million on a sequential basis. Revenue from our U.S. market was $423 million, up 6% year-over-year and up 9% excluding our large Internet Platform Customers, an acceleration from Q4 levels in our Media Division notably. Moving onto costs, cash gross margin was 77% consistent with Q4 levels and in line with our guidance. GAAP gross margin, which includes both depreciation and stock-based compensation was 65% consistent Q4 levels and also in line with our guidance. Non-GAAP cash operating expenses were $258 million, down $2 million from Q4 levels and about $7 million below our guidance, probably due to higher software capitalization rates and partly due to early traction from our operational efficiency efforts. It is notable that we reduced operating expenses in the quarter, while at the same time absorbing the full quarter impact of the recent Nominum acquisition. Moving now to profitability, adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $256 million, up $11 million from Q4 levels. Our adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 38%, an improvement of 1 point from Q4 levels and 2 points above our guidance range, primarily due to strong revenue achievement and the accelerated traction in operational efficiency I just mentioned. Non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter was $167 million, up $8 million from Q4 levels. Non-GAAP operating margin came in at 25%, up 1 point from Q4 levels and 2 points above our guidance range. As our margin expansion in Q1 highlights our efficiency efforts have already positively impacted the P&L and we are working hard to drive further operating margin improvements. Capital expenditures in Q1 excluding equity compensation and capitalized interest expense were $76 million or 11% of revenue. This was $6 million above our guidance for the quarter, due to higher capitalized engineering expenses and the acceleration of some network build out, given the stronger than expected traffic volumes. Moving onto earnings, non-GAAP net income was $136 million or $0.79 of earnings per diluted share, $0.9 above the high end of our guidance range and driven by the combination of revenue performance, reduced operating expenses and a lower tax rate. Taxes included in our non-GAAP earnings were $35 million, based on a Q1 effective tax rate of 21%. This tax rate is a couple of points lower than our guidance due to a higher mix of foreign earnings. Moving onto our GAAP earnings, there were a few large and noteworthy items excluded from our non-GAAP results, but impacting our Q1 GAAP results that I would like to provide some color on. First, as we highlighted in our last call, we recorded an additional $15 million restructuring charge in Q1, bringing our total Q4 and Q1 restructuring charges to $66 million. These charges are related to headcount reductions, facility closures and capitalized software impairments and resulted from decisions to reprioritize certain investment areas that have not achieved the commercial success and return on investment we expected, notably in our Media and Carrier Division. We implemented some of these actions in the middle of the fourth quarter and completed most of the remaining actions in the first quarter. It is important to note these restructuring actions were taken to enables from rebalancing of our investments, divesting in some areas, investing in others, with a goal of positioning the company to meet our long-term objectives of continued growth and scale. The second noteworthy item, impacting our Q1 GAAP results was the decision to settle the long standing legal disputes with Limelight. The terms of the settlement include a roughly $15 million settlement fee paid over five quarterly installments, but recorded in full within our Q1 results. This settlement allow us to finally put these disputes and the associated costs and distraction behind us and instead focus most of our efforts on the strategic priorities in the business. The last item impacting our Q1 GAAP results were some one-time financial and legal advisory services, related to the initiatives associated with our recent collaboration with one of our largest shareholders. Factoring in these various GAAP only items, GAAP net income for the first quarter was $54 million or $0.31 of earnings per diluted share. Now I’ll review our use of capital. We continue to focus on the importance of returning capital to our shareholders. During the quarter we spent $20 million in share repurchases, buying back roughly 300,000 shares. And just last month, our Board of Directors approved an increase in our current share repurchase authorization to $750 million, which we plan to utilize by the end of 2018. Given our strong balance sheet and cash generation, beyond 2018 we intend to continue our share repurchase plan to offset solution from equity compensation plans and at times to opportunistically return more cash to shareholders depending upon business and market condition. As always our overall aims to deploy our capital to achieve favorable return to our investors in a manner that we believe is in the long-term interest of the company and our shareholders. In summary, we are extremely pleased with the revenue acceleration and margin expansion we delivered in Q1 and our momentum exiting the quarter. Moving now to guidance. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we are projecting another strong quarter on the top and bottom lines. We do expect some currency headwinds from the recent strengthening of the U.S dollar over the last couple of weeks. At current spot rates foreign exchange fluctuations are expected to have a negative impact on Q2 revenue of just over $2 million compared to Q1 levels. Coming off a very strong first quarter for Media, from several large gaming releases and sporting events, combined with the foreign exchange headwinds, we are projecting Q2 revenue in the range of $658 million to $670 million. At these revenue levels, we expect cash gross margins of 77% and GAAP gross margins of 65%, consistent with Q1 levels. Q2 non-GAAP operating expenses are projected to be $249 million to $254 million, down from first quarter levels as we see the full quarter benefits from our Q1 operational efficiency and restructuring actions. Factoring in the cash gross margin and operating expense expectations, we anticipate Q2 EBITDA margins of 39%, a 1 point increase from Q1 levels. Moving now to depreciation. We expect non-GAAP depreciation expense to be between $89 million to $92 million. Factoring in this depreciation guidance we expect non-GAAP operating margins of 25% to 26% for Q2, an increase of roughly 1 point from Q1 level. And with the overall revenue and spend configuration I just outlined, we expect Q2 non-GAAP EPS in the range of $0.79 to $0.83. This EPS guidance assumes taxes of roughly $35 million based on an estimated quarterly non-GAAP tax rate of 20% to 21%. This guidance also reflect a fully diluted share count of just over 172 million shares. On CapEx we expect to spend approximately $111 million to $116 million excluding equity compensation in the quarter. This spend is up over Q1 levels, as we expand our network capacity to support the traffic growth that we were expecting on the platform. Looking to the full year, we are anticipating revenue of $2.69 billion to $2.72 billion and at the midpoint an increase of $20 million from our prior outlook. At these revenue levels, we anticipate EBITDA and non-GAAP operating margins of 39% and 25% respectively, an increase of 2 points from our prior outlook, driven by the revenue achievement and accelerated traction in our operational efficiency initiatives. Factoring in these revenue and margin levels and an expected non-GAAP effective tax rate of 20% to 21%, we anticipate non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $3.15 to $3.25 for full year 2018 and at the midpoint an increase of $0.25 from our prior outlook. As a helpful reference, we will post our Q2 and full year 2018 guidance ranges on the Investor Relations section of our website after this call. In closing, we are very bullish about the opportunities ahead for Akamai. We are confident in our ability to continue to innovate and add new capabilities to drive future revenue growth. While at the same time drive margin and earning expansion in 2018 and beyond, which we believe will add significant shareholder value over both the near-term and long-term. We will be hosting our Annual Analyst Day on June 26th, at the Boston Cambridge Marriott Hotel. And we look forward to sharing more details about our business strategy, market opportunities, product vision and our work to find a path to achieving non-GAAP operating margins of 30% in 2020, while also continuing to invest in the development of new products and capabilities to fuel our future growth. If you can’t join us live that will be webcast by the Akamai platform. Thank you and Tom and I’d take your questions. Operator?