Mark Gallenberger
Analyst · Evercore
Thanks, Sanjay. I’ll first review the strong performance for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2019 and then I will provide guidance for our fiscal year 2020 as well as for fiscal year or fiscal quarter one. Although I will be presenting both GAAP and non-GAAP revenue results for historical periods and under ASC 605 and 606, beginning in FY '20 we will only be reporting GAAP revenue under ASC 606. Additionally, there are GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation tables in the appendix of this presentation for your reference. As you can see from the table on Page 4, our GAAP revenue for the quarter and the fiscal year were up 10%. This performance demonstrates Cerence’s ability to outpace the auto SAAR by a significant margin driven by the increasing penetration of our Edge and Connected Services technologies in the automobile. On Page 5 when comparing our revenue guidance to actual results, you can see that we exceeded the high end of the revenue range. More importantly, our non-GAAP operating margin and adjusted EBITDA exceeded expectations and was primarily due to better-than-expected operating expense management. The table on Page 6 provides a breakdown of the different revenue streams that make up our business. And you can see that our license revenue was up 1% from the prior year. However, when adjusting for our prepaid licenses, our variable license revenue increased by 10% from FY '18, which demonstrates the increasing penetration of our embedded solutions. As we have stated before, the use of prepaid contracts is something that we expect to hold flat or potentially reduce over time and this is reflected in the FY '19 results with prepays declining by $11 million from the prior year. The rate of growth of our Connected Services accelerated with the 33% increase in FY '19 compared to FY '18. This reflects the rapidly increasing availability of Connected Services in cars and the strong adoption of our offering. The other highlight to note is the significant growth of our new connected business. While the legacy contract revenue continued to grow in FY '19, the faster growth was associated with the new connected business. The 83% growth year-over-year is being driven by the expanding adoption of our Connected Services platform that continues to benefit from improving technology, a broader selection of capabilities and the tight integration with our Edge products. Revenue from our professional services rose 20% year-over-year reflecting a record number of customer projects that we are currently working on. These projects our expected to enable us to continue our strong top-line revenue growth for our license and connected offerings. Page 7 highlights our strong backlog of 1.36 billion as of the fiscal year ended September 30. Our backlog increased approximately $20 million from June 30, which demonstrates the continued strength of our business and high win rate that Cerence has achieved over the last several years. We continue to expect that approximately 50% of the backlog will convert to revenue over the next three years. Going forward, we will be reporting backlog on an annual basis in our Form 10-K filing. On Page 8, we are reaffirming the original fiscal year '20 guidance that we previously provided on September 9. The original guidance for gross margin, operating margin and adjusted EBITDA was based upon the non-GAAP revenue estimates. Going forward, we will only provide GAAP revenue guidance. And as a result we've updated the gross margin, operating margin and adjusted EBITDA estimates to reflect this change. This non-GAAP to GAAP change reduces our top-line revenue by approximately $4 million, which also flows through the rest of the P&L which is why we updated the profitability metrics. Overall, the industry conditions and our business model are performing as expected when we originally provided the FY '20 guidance in September. Moving on to Page 9, we expect a strong start to the new fiscal year with Q1 revenue up approximately 8% from the same period in the prior year. Also, we expect gross margin to be approximately 70% to 71%, operating margin to be approximately 21% to 23% and our adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $19 million to $21 million. Page 10 provides a view of our beginning and expected ending cash balance for fiscal year '20. The company's opening balance sheet as of October 1 had a 110 million of cash and 270 million of debt, and the net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio as of October 1 was approximately 1.6 to 1. $25 million of the initial 110 million opening cash balance is from Nuance in order to prefund stand-up related capital and operating expenses that we expect to incur in fiscal year '20. You should keep in mind that our capital expenditures in FY '20 are higher than our typical run rate, primarily driven by approximately $20 million in capital expenditures related to stand-up activities. Our normalized run rate is expected to be approximately $7 million per year starting in fiscal year '21. Despite incurring these significant capital expenditures, we still expect to have positive free cash flow for the year due to our strong business model. So this concludes our prepared remarks. And now we will open it up to questions.