John Chen
Analyst · Bank of America. Go ahead, please. Your line is open
Thanks, Tim. Good morning, everybody. And thank you for joining us and I hope everybody is safe and well. This past quarter we delivered strong revenue and EPS results, beating expectations, despite of the continued challenge related to the COVID-19. I would start with financial highlights in the quarter and then move on to the business commentary. As usual, I will reference our financial performance in non-GAAP - in the non-GAAP numbers. BlackBerry report total revenue of $266 million, increasing both sequentially and year-over-year. The core Spark platform performs well, maintaining the work from anywhere momentum from Q1. QNX continue to be a negative - to be negatively impact by the temporary slowdown in the auto production. But we are seeing signs of recovery, more of this later. As we mentioned during our first quarter earnings call, we anticipated licensing to have a strong second quarter and it did, reporting revenue of $108 million. Second quarter total company billings showed strong sequential growth in all parts of the business except for QNX, which remains flat sequentially. Gross margin increased by 6 percentage points sequentially to 78% due to the revenue mix. Earnings per share came in at $0.11. Cash generated from operation was $31 million. Total ending cash and investment as of August 31 was $977 million, 9-7-7. The company continues to be financially healthy and in strong position to focus on our long-term strategy. Let me start now by providing business commentary with the Software and Services group. Revenue for the quarter was $158 million. ARR was approximately 486, $486 million. Dollar-based net retention was 92%. Net customer churn was approximately 3%. Billings growth was sequential - was strong sequentially at 23%. As I mentioned earlier, the core component of the Software and Services group is Spark. The Spark Suite combines BlackBerry unified endpoint management, the UEM, and unified endpoint security, the UES. We combine the two products in one single pane of glass. The Sparks Suite will launch at the end of our first fiscal quarter. And since then, customer interest has been strong and demand is growing. In a quarter, a number of high profile customer purchases our Smart Suite, including the United States Air Force, which upgraded over 90,000 users from UEM to Smart Suite. Other wins including UK Ministry of Defense, the Royal Canadian Mint, Banco de Mexico, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Affairs and Trade, sorry, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Trade, Rolls Royce, Lloyd Span, Societe Generale and Mitsubishi, just to name a few of them. Given this early success in upgrading customer to our Sparks Suite, we are optimistic about being able to secure a significant number of further upgrades from the rest of our installed base. In parallel, we are also aggressively targeting new logos, and more on that later also. BlackBerry continues to have the trust of governments around the world. During the quarter, our UEM suite was added to the Department of Defense Information Network, approved product list, you know, they call it as APL. BlackBerry is the only UEM vendor that has achieved this level of approval today. This achievement is based on the completion of cybersecurity and interoperability certifications. This approvals will provide us better assets and a more streamlined approval process. This should naturally lead to a greater revenue opportunity going forward. The latest release of UEM has also recently achieved the very important NIAP certification, accreditation. We have recognized the strong industry-wide demand for managed detect and response services and known as MDR. Frost & Sullivan recently estimated that MDR market to have a CAGR, a compounded annual growth rate of 16% and for our annual revenue to reach about $2 billion by about 2024. Our MDR offering, we call it Guard, while relatively new continues to perform well. To take advantage of this opportunity, we plan to greatly enhance our channel programs. Certified partners will be able to deliver a managed service and threat hunting on the AI driven cybersecurity solution, greatly increasing our scale. This will differentiate us against our major competitors who prefer to provide order services themselves. Moving on to BTS. As you know, much of the BTS business really is reliant on the strength of the auto industry. The largest piece of the BTS business is QNX. We have recently seen some recovery in the production volumes on the very low level during our first fiscal quarter. This makes us optimistic that the BTS business will show sequential revenue improvement and could be close to normal early next fiscal year. Despite auto production volumes being down and moderate, QNX continue to win new designs and develop significant partnerships. In the quarter, we have 19 new designs win, 5 in auto and 14 in a generally embedded market, we call it GEM. Alongside infotainment, the new auto wins in the quarter include design for digital cockpit, instrument cluster and domain controller, which all typically has a higher ASPs or average selling price. The new GEM wins include design for next-generation blood analyzer, next-generation factory robotics and also with Schneider Electric for solar solution gateway. Furthermore, we are pleased to announce that together with Desay, Desay SV Automotive we have developed the autonomous driving domain controller for Xpeng. Xpeng Motor new, well it’s a model number, Motor’s new P7, it's a high-performance electric vehicle. Xpeng, as some of you may know, that it has recently been successfully on the New York Stock Exchange, and its one of the China's leading electric vehicle manufacturers. QNX will also be used by StradVision, an industry leader in AI base camera perception technology. In a number of the next-generation ADAS, that's advanced driver assist and autonomous vehicle system from South Korea automakers. QNX remains in a very strong position for the medium and long term, despite the short term macro challenges. Moving on to AtHoc, our critical event management platform that helps protect people and keep businesses up and running. This market is large and growing and our technology is already well-proven in the federal government sector. We see significant growth opportunities within both federal, as well as state government, as well as in the enterprise. New wins in the quarter include the New York Stock Exchange, the Officer, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Edmonton Police services. During the quarter we were awarded a new authority to operate or ATO for the US Department of Transportation, bringing the total to 14 for the BlackBerry AtHoc FedRAMP cloud. This was also a strong quarter for our high SecuSUITE Voice and Messaging offerings, where we both strengthen our position in the United States and extended our leadership position in Germany. Major wins in the quarter, including United States Department of Homeland Security, the US Internal Revenue Services in the United States, Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, these contracts were publicly awarded through our partner CACI, C-A-C-I. SecuSUITE also received a government of Canada Security Certification, clearing the way for us to provide this technology to the Canadian government at large, including Canada, Blackberry SecuSUITE, Secusmart technology is now used by 17 governments around the world. We have spoken about our focus on go-to-market for some quarters now. So go-to-market has many components and has taken time to get all of them optimized. Bringing in some new talent is just part of the process. And we did that successfully, along with making sure mindsets and incentives aligned to our growth plans. Equally as important, we have also revamped our customer success and marketing programs, as well as our partnership and channel programs. A good example of the progress we have made, like the Site 1 [ph] in the channel program side. As you all recall, in our device days, making hardware, we have strong relationship with telcos and they are becoming increasingly interesting - interested now in our UEM, UES AtHoc. We recently announced a partnership with TELUS to resell a secure – to secure AtHoc critical event management solution across Canada. This partnership as to our previously announced partnership with Bell and Vodafone. So things are coming together nicely across all the components of our go-to-market. We are now seeing results and an increase in both business pipeline and new business pipeline and conversion rates. Moving on to the licensing others. Revenue for the quarter was $108 million, as I mentioned earlier. The majority of licensing revenue comes from our IP licensing business. So with that, let me turn the call over to Steve to provide more detail about our financial performance.