Tim Regan
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thank you, Drew. As I've done before, I want to begin with a reminder of our financial objectives as this provides the context for how we operate the business and outlines where we are headed. The core tenets of our financial plan are as follows: doubling free cash flow to $1 billion annually by 2024, investing for continued revenue growth, driving annual improvements in operating margins targeting 28% to 30%, allocating capital to organic initiatives and acquisitions that align with our strategic and financial objectives, and returning capital to our shareholders by allocating some significant portion of our annual free cash flow to share repurchases with the goal of reducing our share count. We believe that execution against these objectives will generate long-term value for our shareholders, and we remain committed to making decisions in line with this financial trajectory. Today, I'll talk through our performance for the quarter, our updated guidance for this year and about some of the actions we've taken in the period, which I'll tie back to and demonstrate our progress executing against these objectives. Let's first turn to our quarterly results. Total revenue for the first quarter have increased to 12% year over year to $512 million, beating the high end of our guidance. Foreign exchange rates provided a one-point tailwind to growth. Total ARR for the quarter was $2.112 billion, up 13% from the year ago period. On a constant currency basis, ARR grew $61 million sequentially and 12% year over year. I'd note that we update the FX rates used to calculate ARR at the start of each year. We have continued to drive growth in ARR through the release of value-enhancing features, the introduction of new SKUs, such as Family plan, the expansion of HelloSign's capabilities and market awareness and the acquisition of DocSend. We exited the quarter with 15.83 million paying users, and added approximately 350,000 net new paying users in the first quarter, driven in part by positive momentum in our adoption of the Family plan. Average revenue per paying user was $132.55 in Q1. Before I turn to the P&L, I'd like to highlight some of our go-to-market wins in the period. As a reminder, our go-to-market strategies involve both our self-serve motion as well as our outbound sales motion. On the self-serve side, we've recently made meaningful improvements to the way our users discover and purchase paid SKUs. Now our web pages more clearly surface our selection of paid plans as well as the corresponding features each plan offers. This has helped SMBs adopt our Pro plan, which offers robust functionality for sharing, transfer and file requests. These improvements have also helped our individual users to discover and migrate to our new family plan. In Q1, we saw a resulting improvement in conversion rates stemming from these changes, helping to drive our revenue performance. On the outbound side, we are excited to announce that any American building materials retailer is now a Dropbox Enterprise customer. The company has over 400 retail locations nationwide and has helped to transform millions of homes with their digital rendering resources. They also chose our Dropbox to enable them in creative workflows that take place across their marketing and design teams while also allowing them to securely share and receive content from external vendors. Before we continue with further discussion of our P&L, I would like to note that unless otherwise indicated, all income statement measures mentioned are non-GAAP and excludes stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangibles, certain acquisition-related expenses, impairments of our real estate assets, and our expenses related to our reduction in force. Our non-GAAP net income also excludes net gains and losses on equity investments and includes the income tax effect of the aforementioned adjustments. As we have previously mentioned, given that we have transitioned to a virtual-first model, we have taken steps to decost our real estate portfolio by subleasing our existing facilities. We have estimated total impairment charges of up to $450 million associated with such transition to -- and in Q4 last year, we recorded a charge of $398 million, representing the vast majority of the impairment we expect to incur. In Q1, we recorded an additional impairment charge of $17 million driven by several factors, including the impairment of DocSend's lease, additional costs stemming from the sale of our San Francisco headquarters and other factors. This also brings us to our cumulative impairment incurred to date to $416 million. We continue to estimate the high end of our total exposure to be $450 million. As a reminder, we continue to expect to generate in excess of $800 million and sublease cash inflows over the course of these leases, which predominantly range in duration between 13 and 15 years. Now let's continue with the P&L. I'd note that all expense categories continue to benefit from lower facilities-related costs driven by employees working from home, a reduction in the depreciation as a result of our writedown of the real estate assets stemming from the aforementioned impairment as well as lower overall costs related to our workforce reduction, which took effect in Q1. Gross margin was 80% for the quarter, representing an increase of 2 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. The improvement in gross margin is primarily a result of unit cost efficiency gains with our infrastructure. First-quarter R&D expense was $131 million or 26% of revenue, which decreased compared to 31% of revenue in the first quarter of 2020. Sales and marketing expense was $88 million or 17% of revenue, which decreased compared to 21% of revenue in the first quarter of 2020. In addition, we've been delayed in certain marketing initiatives, which are now expected to occur in the second half of 2021. G&A expense was $43 million or 8% of revenue, which decreased compared to 10% of revenue in the first quarter of 2020. As a result, we earned $149 million in operating profit in the first quarter, which represented an operating margin of 29%, which is a 13-percentage point improvement compared to the first quarter of 2020. Net income for the first quarter was $142 million, which is just more than the 100% improvement over the first quarter of 2020. Diluted EPS was a record $0.35 per share based on 405 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding, up from $0.17 per share for the first quarter of 2020. Moving on to our cash balance and cash flow. We ended the quarter with cash and short-term investments of $1.916 billion. Cash flow from operations was $116 million in the first quarter. Capital expenditures were $7 million during the quarter. This resulted in free cash flow of $109 million, which compares to $25 billion in Q1 of 2020. In the first quarter, we also added some $24 million to our finance leases for data center equipment. We also executed some important financing initiatives in the quarter that not only improve overall capital structure that will enable us to continue delivering value back to our shareholders. In February, we successfully raised nearly $1.4 billion, including the exercise of the related overallotment options through a zero coupon convertible debt offering, which was comprised of roughly equivalent five- and seven-year notes. We then used $62 million of the net proceeds toward executing bond hedge and warrant transactions, which effectively raised the conversion price of the notes to over about $46 per share, representing a 100% conversion premium over our share price on the day of the offering. These collective terms culminated in some of the most favorable pricing seen in comparable offerings in recent years. This transaction strengthens our balance sheet, and allows us to support organic growth initiatives, pursue M&A and return capital to shareholders through share repurchases. Looking ahead, we will also remain disciplined in allocating capital to high ROI opportunities. I'd also like to provide an update on our share repurchase strategy. As we signaled during our November earnings call, we increased the pace of our share repurchases, starting in the fourth quarter of 2020. And accordingly, in our Q1, we exhausted our first $600 million authorization and subsequently announced a new $1 billion share repurchase authorization. Over the course of Q1, we repurchased nearly 19 million shares, spending approximately $430 million. These figures include shares we repurchased in conjunction with our convertible notes offering, which were not related to our existing share repurchase program. As a result and as of the end of Q1, we have approximately $970 million remaining on the $1 billion share repurchase authorization. We continue to believe that utilizing our capital for share repurchases is efficient, and we will leverage the strength of our balance sheet to deliver returns back to our shareholders. And with that, let's now turn to our guidance for Q2 and for the full year. For the second quarter of 2021, we expect revenue to be in the range of $522 million to $525 million. Currency exchange rates assumed in this guidance account for approximately 2 points of growth at the midpoint of guidance, and are based on a combination of recent and historical average rates. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 27.5% to 28%. Finally, we expect diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be in the range of 397 million to 402 million shares based on our trailing 30-day average share price. For the full year, we are raising our revenue guidance range, which was previously $2.095 billion to $2.115 billion to $2.118 billion to $2.130 billion. Currency exchange rates assumed in this guidance account for approximately 2 points of growth at the midpoint of our guidance, and based on a combination of recent and historical average rates. We continue to expect gross margins to be approximately 80%. We continue to expect non-GAAP operating margins to be in the range of 27% to 28%. We are raising our free cash flow guidance range, which was previously $645 million to $655 million to $670 million to $690 million. This includes $29 million in cash outflows comprised about $16 million for the 2021 installments of deal consideration holdback related to our acquisition of HelloSign. And onetime severance payments of approximately $13 million related to our reduction in force. We continue to expect capital expenditures for 2021 to be in the range of $25 million to $35 million, net of the tenant improvement allowances. We continue to expect additions to our finance lease lines to be approximately 6% of revenue in 2021. Finally, we expect 2021 diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be in the range of 397 million to 402 million shares, down from our previous guidance range of 402 million to 407 million shares. This reduction in our share count reflects our new commitment to an anticipated impact of our share repurchase program. To share some additional context on this guidance. We are raising the midpoint of our full year revenue guidance from 10% to 11% year-over-year growth where approximately half of this increase relates to the strength we are seeing in our organic business, and these -- the remaining half relates to the revenue contribution from our acquisition of DocSend. We are maintaining our operating margin guidance as we absorb DocSend into our P&L as certain marketing initiatives initially planned for Q1 shift to the second half of the year, and as we plan to make strategic investments back into the business to drive long-term revenue growth. We are also raising the free cash flow guidance due to an increase in expected billings from our organic business in DocSend as well as increased confidence in the favorable impact of FX rates. With regard to paying users and ARPU, as I mentioned during our call in February as we drive upsell to Family plan and other SKUs, while concurrently shifting away from pursuing large paying user deals with low ASPs, we could see variability in both paying users and ARPU on a go-forward basis relative to historical trends. We, therefore, continue to focus on ARR growth as being the best indicator of the long-term health of our business. Lastly, while we are rapidly approaching our long-term gross margin and new operating margin targets, we remain focused on investing for sustainable revenue growth. Accordingly, we plan to reinvest some of the savings we are generating from our efficiency initiatives into growth opportunities where we see a compelling ROI. Therefore, we have remained committed to our long-term target model, to our 2024 free cash flow goal of $1 billion and to generating shareholder value. In conclusion, we're off to a solid start to the year. We delivered strong results across both the top and bottom line, strengthened our balance sheet through our capital raise, reduced our share count by accelerating our share repurchase activity, and that enhanced our growth potential with the acquisition of DocSend. We continue to execute against our financial objectives, and we remain on course to achieve these long-term targets. With that, I'll now turn it back to Drew for his concluding thoughts.