Edward J. McGowan
Analyst · Needham & Co
Thank you, Tom. As Tom just mentioned, we delivered very solid second quarter results with total Q2 revenue of $1.043 billion, which was up 7% year-over-year as reported and 6% in constant currency. We also had another quarter of very strong bottom line performance with non-GAAP EPS outperforming our guidance range by $0.15. The strong non-GAAP EPS performance was driven by a combination of higher-than-expected revenue, lower-than-expected bandwidth costs, higher interest income related to the convertible debt issuance in May and lower share count as a result of our stock buyback activity in the first half of the year. It's also worth noting that we received an unusually high amount of bandwidth and colocation credits during the quarter, resulting in a onetime positive benefit of approximately $5 million to gross margin in the second quarter. Moving now to revenue. Compute revenue was $171 million, up 13% year-over-year as reported and in constant currency. Compute revenue was driven by continued strength in our cloud infrastructure services, or CIS. CIS revenue was $71 million, up 30% year- over-year as reported and 29% in constant currency. As Tom noted, we expect the growth rate of our CIS business to accelerate throughout the rest of this year and into next year, driven by some large contracts signed earlier this year that will start generating revenue late this year and into 2026 and beyond. We continue to expect CIS ARR year-over-year growth in the range of 40% to 45% in constant currency at the end of the year. Revenue from other cloud applications, or OCA, was $100 million, up 4% year-over-year as reported and up 3% in constant currency. As we mentioned on our Q4 call in February, OCA includes many of our more mature compute products such as image and video manager, cloudlets and legacy NetStorage. We expect the revenue from OCA to remain relatively flat quarter-over-quarter for the rest of this year. However, as a result of a $7 million onetime benefit included in Q3 2024's results, we anticipate that the year-over-year revenue growth rate for OCA will take a onetime dip in Q3. As a reminder, this onetime benefit was related to the release of some deferred revenue in conjunction with the expiration of a long-term legacy compute contract. Putting this all together, we remain very excited about our opportunities for compute. Based on the timing of revenue recognition for the larger deals I mentioned earlier, our compute growth for 2025 could be a little less than our goal of approximately 15% in constant currency for the full year. Security revenue was $552 million, up 11% year-over-year as reported and 10% in constant currency. Within security, the combined revenue for API security and Zero Trust enterprise security was $67 million, up 48% year-over-year as reported and 49% in constant currency. These results include approximately $8 million of inorganic revenue from Noname. Excluding this inorganic contribution, year-over-year revenue growth would have been approximately 32%. We continue to expect security revenue growth of approximately 10% in constant currency in 2025. And we continue to expect the combined ARR for our Zero Trust enterprise and API security solutions to increase by 30% to 35% year-over-year in constant currency for 2025. Delivery revenue was $320 million, down 3% year-over-year as reported and down 4% in constant currency, well above our expectations. We're very encouraged by the continued improvements in both pricing and traffic growth we observed during the first half of the year. International revenue was $516 million, up 10% year-over-year or 8% in constant currency, representing 49% of our total revenue in Q2. U.S. foreign exchange fluctuations had a positive impact on revenue of $17 million on a sequential basis and a positive $8 million impact on a year-over-year basis. Moving now to profitability. In Q2, we generated non-GAAP net income of $251 million or $1.73 of earnings per diluted share, up 9% year-over-year as reported and in constant currency and $0.15 above the high end of our guidance range based on the items I mentioned earlier. Finally, our Q2 CapEx was $214 million or 21% of revenue. Moving to cash and our capital allocation strategy. As of June 30, our cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities totaled approximately $1.6 billion. As a reminder, during the second quarter, we used cash on hand and funds available under our revolving credit facility to fully repay $1.15 billion of our outstanding convertible senior notes that matured on May 1, 2025. Following this repayment, we issued $1.725 billion in senior convertible notes with the maturity date of May 15, 2033, and with a coupon of 25 basis points. As part of the offering, we incurred net cost of $275 million from note hedging and warrant transactions while concurrently spending $300 million on stock buybacks. It's worth noting that in the second quarter, we used approximately $250 million of the proceeds from this offering to pay off prior borrowings on our revolving credit facility. The net proceeds of approximately $900 million from this offering have been invested in highly liquid marketable securities currently yielding approximately 4% on a weighted average basis. As it relates to return on capital, as I just mentioned, we spent approximately $300 million to buy back approximately 3.9 million shares during the second quarter. We ended the second quarter with approximately $1.2 billion remaining on our current repurchase authorization. Year-to-date, we spent $800 million to buy back approximately 10 million shares. Going forward, our intention remains the same to continue buying back shares to offset dilution from employee equity programs over time and to be opportunistic in both M&A and share repurchases when market and business conditions warrant. Before I provide our Q3 and full year 2025 guidance, I want to touch on some housekeeping items. First, despite initial concerns, the likelihood of a complete TikTok ban in the U.S. appears to be less likely. With this in mind, we are now including domestic revenue from TikTok in our Q3 and full year 2025 revenue guidance. Second, regarding compute revenue. As I mentioned earlier, last year's Q3 results included a onetime $7 million benefit that will not reoccur in Q3 2025. Third, as it relates to gross margin, we are projecting an increase in colocation and related costs starting in Q3, as we anticipate additional compute capacity coming online during the quarter. This will result in roughly a 1 percentage point increase in cost of revenue in Q3 compared to Q2. In addition, for our qualified compute partner sales, or QCPs, we occasionally bundle third-party products as part of a total solution for customers. In certain situations, we must record the gross revenue from these sales and the associated costs. The gross margin on the partner resales is typically lower than our company gross margin. Therefore, as qualified compute partner revenue increases, we expect it will lower our overall gross margin. We anticipate the sales of QCP partner solutions will impact gross margins by approximately 70 basis points this year. It's worth noting, the primary advantage of working with QCP partners is their solutions do help drive additional higher-margin CIS revenue. Fourth, as we previously discussed, we are investing to strengthen our go-to-market approach. We're increasing our sales rep hunting capacity to be more proactive in finding and securing new business and we're adding experienced specialists to help support the sales of our new security and compute products. In addition, we're also growing our channel organization to expand our partnerships and open up potential new revenue growth opportunities. These investments are crucial to our long-term success, but it will take time for the incremental headcount to ramp and start delivering results. As a result, we anticipate that our operating margin in the second half of the year will be lower than in the first half. Finally, on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The act includes significant provisions such as the permanent extension of certain existing provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, modifications to the international tax framework and the restoration of favorable tax treatment for certain business provisions. The new legislation has multiple effective dates with certain provisions effective in 2025 and others implemented through 2027. We are in the process of evaluating the act, but we do not expect it will have a material impact on our tax rate in 2025. So with those factors in mind, I'll move to our Q3 guidance. For Q3, we are projecting revenue in the range of $1.035 billion to $1.050 billion, or up 3% to 4% as reported and up 2% to 4% in constant currency over Q3 2024. At current spot rates, foreign exchange fluctuations are expected to have a positive $3 million impact on Q3 revenue compared to Q2 levels and a positive $6 million impact year-over-year. At these revenue levels, we expect cash gross margins of approximately 72% to 73%. Q3 non-GAAP operating expenses are projected to be $327 million to $332 million. We expect Q3 EBITDA margin of approximately 41%. We expect non-GAAP depreciation expense to be between $139 million to $141 million, and we expect non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 28% and for Q3. Moving on to CapEx. We expect to spend approximately $227 million to $237 million. This represents approximately 22% of our projected total revenue. Based on our expectations for revenue and costs, we expect Q3 non-GAAP EPS in the range of $1.62 to $1.66. This non-GAAP EPS guidance assumes taxes of $54 million to $55 million based on an estimated quarterly non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 19%. It also reflects a fully diluted share count of approximately 145 million shares. Turning to the full year. For 2025, we now expect revenue of $4.135 billion to $4.205 billion, which is up 4% to 5% as reported and 3% to 5% in constant currency. At current spot rates, our guidance assumes foreign exchange will have a positive $13 million impact on revenue in 2025 on a year-over-year basis. For 2025, we are estimating non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 29% as measured in today's FX rates. We anticipate that our full year CapEx will be approximately 20% of total revenue. And for the full year 2025, we expect non-GAAP earnings per diluted share in the range of $6.60 to $6.80. This non-GAAP earnings guidance is based on a non-GAAP effective tax rate of approximately 19% and a fully diluted share count of approximately 147 million shares. In closing, we're very encouraged by our strong first half financial performance marked by solid results across both the top and bottom lines. With that, I'll wrap things up. And Tom and I are happy to take your questions. Operator?