John Chen
Analyst · Scotia Capital Markets. Please go ahead
Thank you, Chris -- Christopher. Sorry, Christopher. I didn't know your name is Christopher. But anyway, thank you, Christopher. Good morning, everybody. As Chris stated, I will reference non-GAAP number in my summary for our quarterly results. BlackBerry had an exciting third fiscal quarter. First, we exceeded revenue, earnings per share and -- sorry, revenue and earnings per share expectation for the quarter. We delivered year-over-year double-digit percentage growth for total software and services revenue, earnings per share as well as free cash flow. We also entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cylance, an artificial intelligence and cybersecurity leader. This acquisition will be a key investment to accelerate BlackBerry’s future software and services growth. I will chat more about our acquisition and how it fits into BlackBerry strategy, later on the call. We continue to execute against our fiscal 2019 financial and operating plan. We delivered another good quarter of financial results. We are tracking to achieve the annual financial guidance we shared at the beginning of the year. Let me provide some highlights for the third fiscal quarter. Total revenue came in at $228 million; total software and services revenue was $219 million. This is a new record quarterly high. Total software and services billing grew year-over-year. Year-to-date fiscal 2019 total Company software and services billing grew a double-digit percentage versus the comparable period last year. Gross margin came in at 76%; operating income was $27 million, positive for the 11th consecutive quarter. Operating margin was 12%, an increase of 4 percentage points from last quarter. This by the way matches the highest operating margin reported by the Company since fiscal 2012. EPS came in at $0.05. Total hand-in cash and investment were $2.4 billion. Next, I will cover some of the significant highlights by business. First, I’ll start with Blackberry Technology Solutions, which includes embedded software and assets tracking. BTS revenue grew 23% year-over-year. Growth in BTS continued to be driven primarily by BlackBerry QNX, where software development license, services and royalty revenue have all grown double-digit percentage year-over-year. The increase in revenue has been broad-based across various different applications in both the automotive as well as the general embedded market. We continue to be chosen by customers from around the world and the number of design wins in the quarter increased both sequentially as well as year-over-year. I will speak about our automotive business, since I know a lot of you are mostly interested by our activities in that vertical. We have five infotainment design wins in the quarter, including a notable win with Aptiv in Asia Pacific. We also had four design wins in non-infotainment categories like ADAS, instrument cluster, and domain controllers. Two of those wins with our instrument cluster was with DENSO in North America and with Dalian Eastern Display in Asia Pacific. In addition, after the quarter ended, LeddarTech, a Canadian startup, chose QNX as the operating system for its Auto and Mobility LiDAR platform. LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. LeddarTech is known for its production of solid state LiDAR sensor and was recognized for its new innovation last year CES or CES this year CES 2018. On BlackBerry Radar, our assets tracking business, we are making progress quarter-over-quarter. We added nine new customers, including Bimbo Bakeries USA; Kreilkamp Trucking and Maxon. [Ph] We also received repeat orders from six existing customers including [indiscernible]. A word on our licensing business. Our licensing business continues to perform well. We have a robust pipeline. We intend to close this licensing opportunity while building upon our recurring revenue base of $40 million to $50 million per quarter. Next, I will discuss our enterprise software business. We achieved 7% sequential revenue growth this quarter. This represents our second consecutive quarter of sequential growth, revenue growth after implementing ASC 606 in the first fiscal quarter of 2019, which moved more of our enterprise software and services revenue to a more -- to a ratable model. In the quarter, the standout performer was our government business. Some of our notable wins included defense intelligence agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA; the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service; the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, the U.S. Air Force, as well as U.S. Marine Corps. Our authority to operate has increased from six U.S. government agencies last quarter to eight agencies this quarter, including the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as the Department of Energy in the United States. Our BlackBerry FedRAMP cloud user base increased by 20% from last quarter to approximately 1.2 million users. Additionally, we saw increased demand for a subscription to the UEM content suite from existing customer. The content suite provides customers with our highest level of security and includes secure document collaboration which is BlackBerry Workspaces and the digital rights management. Some brief comments on Spark. As you are aware Spark is a platform we're developing to secure communication and collaboration amount of smart endpoints. Spark brings together all our technology assets and capabilities on a single end-to-end platform. We believe there are many significant opportunities for Spark to address in the world where endpoints are hyperconnected and as well as intelligent, but also require absolute data privacy and security. So, one such opportunity is the smart city and intelligent transportation systems. You see evidence of our vision and leadership with our recent announcement of a security credential management system, simple as SCMS, that will allow vehicle and infrastructure to exchange information in a trustworthy and private manner using our digital certificates technology. We believe BlackBerry can be at a foundation of smart city in the future autonomous vehicle world. And it is necessary too. Last month we announced entering into a definitive agreement to acquire Cylance. As I mentioned on our November call, the acquisition will provide BlackBerry with additional cyber security capabilities with state of the art AI, artificial intelligence, and as well as machine learning technology. These cybersecurity capabilities will fit nicely with everything we do. From today with UEM and QNX into our future which is including the Spark. And it's consistent with our long-term strategic strategy we shared with you throughout the fiscal year. Our customers should be excited because our combination will bring complementary technology from cryptology to NOCs to AI and knowhow that will allow BlackBerry to offer what we believe is the most secure end-to-end data and communication platform. We'll go into more details on the technology as well as the use cases at our Analyst Day next April. Before I turn the call over to Steve, let me provide you with a quick update on the acquisition process. We have already received the HSL antitrust clearance. We actually received this early. Our joint voluntary notice has been filed with CFIUS. We anticipate receiving comments by the end of January 2019 and should be close shortly after. I will now turn the call over to Steve to provide some more details about our financial results and our quarterly performance. Steve?