John Chen
Analyst · TD Securities. Your line is open
Thanks, Tim. Good afternoon, everybody. Today, I’d like to keep the financial and business updates relatively brief, because I’d like to spend a little bit more time discussing our recent BlackBerry IV announcement. This third fiscal quarter we continue to build on the momentum from our second quarter, delivering results in line with our outlook we provided. We delivered sequential revenue growth both in the Total Software and Services section and as well as BTS. We continue to deliver positive EPS and positive free cash flow this quarter. BlackBerry reported total revenue -- company revenue of $224 million. Software and Services revenue came in at $168 million, 1-6-8. License was $36 million [ph]. Gross margin was 70%. Earnings per share was positive $0.02. Cash generated from operations was $29 million. Total ending cash and investment at November 30th was $757 million. I will start my business commentary with the Software and Services Group. ARR was approximately $475 million. Dollar base net retention rate was 90%. Net customer churn reduced to around 1%. Spark is a combination of -- as a reminder, it’s a combination of our UEM and UES, the unify endpoint security offerings. This quarter we made good progress in both the Government and Financial Services verticals with customer wins, including U.S. Army, U.S. Postal Service, the IRS, the Department of Energy, and Department of Justice, as well as Raymond James Financials, Citibank, the German Bundesbank, the Bank of India and the Government of Rwanda. In addition, we have customer wins in other verticals including healthcare and manufacturing. We continue to see progress in upgrading BlackBerry UEM customer to the full Spark suite, i.e., adding our UES suite, example in the quarter, including Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Boerse, ConvergeOne and multiple Ministry of the Dutch Government. Significantly during the quarter we released BlackBerry Cyber Suite. Our AI powered Cyber Suite, which combines our industry leading EPP, EDR and MDR product. It is further strengthened by the continuous authentication and the mobile threat defense capabilities. This Cyber Suite is highly competitive against both traditional and the next-gen player in the cybersecurity market. This has been validated by 451 Research and other industry experts. Cyber Suite brings together the best of BlackBerry and Cylance technology. Further Cyber Suite will be available in version that integrated with all major UEM offerings, including Microsoft Intune, VMware’s Workspace ONE, Mobileye, as well as IBM MaaS360. This integration will allow BlackBerry to provide additional security to users of our rival UEMs. Cyber Suite has only been in the market for a month. But early interest is strong, both in the new logo and existing customer base, with significant pipeline growth this past quarter. Cyber Suite obviously allows us to give our prospect and customer greater options for increasing the cybersecurity while protecting their UEM investment. As a result of these technology enhancement and positive customer receptivity, we will in turn step up our investment in sales and marketing to compete more aggressively. Before I move to BTS, I’d like to highlight the security certifications we have achieved. This quarter, BlackBerry UEM achieved the National Security Agency, NSA, Commercial Solutions for Classified Program approval. This adds to the portfolio of U.S. Government certifications we have received with BlackBerry UEM, including the NIAP Certification, the Department of Defense Information Network approval product list, which I think we talked about last quarter, called IN-APL or HINAPL [ph], FedRAMP *, FIPS 140-2. No other software vendor in the cybersecurity space has been awarded more security certification by the U.S. Government than* BlackBerry. BlackBerry achieving NSE* Certification comes at a time when most of our major competitors have been identified having vulnerabilities that are being exploited by national -- by nation state hackers. This should give our customer and prospect a higher degree of comfort about the cybersecurity protection they receive from BlackBerry. Now moving on to BTS. QNX the largest component of BTS reported sequential revenue growth. QNX remain on track to be back to its normal run rate by early next fiscal year. In the quarter we have 17 new design wins, sorry, six in auto and 11 in a generally embedded market. Our expansion into gen continues, which with diverse wins, including a controller system for power turbines, a next-generation cell receiver system and a rail traffic management system from the Seoul’s Sunan Subway [ph]. In auto we have design wins in full kinetic cars and electric vehicle. The wins included instrument clusters, a couple of them in domain controller, a handful of them in ADAS designs, the advanced driver-assistance, sorry, the advanced driver-assistance. Speaking of electric vehicles, we’re very pleased to share with you our strong position in the EV market. QNX now has designed wins with 19 of the top 25 electric vehicle OEMs, which together has 61% of the EV market in the first half of this calendar year. We’re working hard to recruit the remaining six. Moving on to secure communication, which includes AtHoc and Secusmart. Secure communication has a strong quarter. This strength was primarily due to ongoing transition to remote working, which has been obviously greatly accelerated by this pandemic. AtHoc had some strategic win this quarter, including the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation or Rehab -- Department of Corrections & Rehab, as well as the California Department of Justice. I believe that no one now can claim to power the entire State of California. Other notable renews and upsell from AtHoc in the quarter including the United States Army, Navy, as well as the Air Force, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA. We also renewed the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Commerce -- the Energy, Treasury and Agricultural, as well as the FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. Finally, I want to touch on licensing. Revenue for the quarter came in at $56 million. As before, the majority of the licensing revenue comes from our IP licensing business. As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, I’d like to spend some time discussing BlackBerry IV, which we’re very excited about. Modern cars [ph] continue generate huge amount of data. I think you all agree, you know. The auto industry is not prepared to capture and create value from the analytics because these data is difficult to cars collect and interact with without very costly integrations. BlackBerry IV’s mission is to make it easy to gather, securely transport and analyze these data in a standard and a cost efficient way across multiple brands and models on a common platform. This will allow the developers ecosystem to use the data to provide intelligent insights and application on a global scale. We have entered into a multiyear exclusive co-development and co-marketing agreement with AWS. This type of agreement is rare. BlackBerry and AWS engineer have been working very closely to jointly build the platform. Under the terms of our agreement BlackBerry will own all the commercial relationships with customers and we share revenues with AWS. Each side contributes the key capabilities required. On the BlackBerry side BlackBerry QNX brings over 20 years of auto industry experience, as well as relationship, as well as a huge footprint of over 175 million cars. We are a trusted leader with a deep knowledge of automotive safety and security software system. AWS is the world’s largest cloud provider with a vast developer community and outstanding expertise in consumer experience, interfaces, as well as IoT. Combined, we’re able to provide a full end-to-end platform. We expect an ecosystem of apps and services developed on the BlackBerry IV platform over time, we will work with AWS a proven builder of successful developer communities to help drive the process. With BlackBerry IV, we’re creating a recurring revenue data business -- recurring revenue model that is targeting revenue on a usage, as well as the subscription base. An important difference between BlackBerry IV and competitors in this space is that we allow the OEM to own the data and with that the relationship with their customers. We already in discussion with some automakers who were granted early access and we have received positive initial feedback. The target is to be in the 2023 auto model -- 2023 years model with possibly potentially some professional services apply to it. While it is too early for us to provide a revenue outlook, we are confident that BlackBerry IV addresses a very large market opportunity that will greatly increase our ASP. With that, let me turn the call over to Steve to provide more details of our financial performance.