Joshua Sheffer
Analyst · Citi
Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon to everyone joining us today. I'm pleased to report a solid performance in our third fiscal quarter. Recognized revenue grew 3.4% year-over-year in constant currency and was driven by our organic growth initiatives. Our profitability was stable and consistent with recent quarters and our mobilized free cash flow generating was healthy as we continue to progress many transformation projects towards production for our customers. We are particularly proud for our project execution this quarter as we successfully delivered the world's largest BSS implementation by migration of more than 200 million subscribers to our 5G-capable turbo charging platform for a leading operator in Southeast Asia. Q3 was also notable for our Managed Services business, which has its best ever quarter. Strong growth was driven by the continued ramp up of managed transformation activities for customer like PLDT and Infineon where we are combining the deployment of large-scale data transformation projects with operational benefits of our managed services model. Additionally, we continue the strength of capabilities in next generation network, one of our core growth engines, where we are today excited to announce the strategic acquisition of TTS Wireless to further enhance our open cloud and 5G network capabilities. I'll come back to TTS Wireless later in the call. But first, let me provide an overview of our original activities for the quarter. Beginning with North America. Sequential revenue growth was driven by stable trends at AT&T and healthy activity levels at many customer in the border region. Earlier this year, we said that Amdocs was selected by Altice USA to accelerate its digital and mobile offering, and I'm pleased to report today we are also helping to enable the mobile offering of North American 2 largest video Internet providers. This includes Comcast's Xfinity Mobile services, the operation of which we are hosting under a multiyear managed services agreement and Charter, which has chosen to extend our strategic relationship to support the growth of its Spectrum Mobile business. This was also an active quarter for Amdocs Media where we continued the path of integrating our media assets to sell the rapidly evolving content monetization needs of our media customer, both our traditional service providers and media studios. Along this line, we signed a managed service agreement for distribution of 3D video-on-demand services for new logo, [indiscernible], which includes distribution to mobile phones providing large screen 3D content that comes to life in your hands. Additionally, we are pleased to announce that Vubiquity extended its transport agreement with Viacom and its existing multiyear VOD services agreement with the MSN network. Regarding the outlook for North America. Revenue in AT&T is stabilizing around the levels of Q2 in our fiscal second half, as we predicted last quarter. Our partnership with AT&T remained strong, based on the value we've delivered in various growth areas. And we are working hard to demonstrate the unique innovation and efficiency improvements we can bring to AT&T's communication business for the long-term. Additionally, we continue to serve WarnerMedia, and particularly Warner Bros., where we recently extended our global agreement for transactional VOD. As to the future, we believe we are well positioned to bring additional value and support of several potential media and direct-to-consumer related opportunities at WarnerMedia, none of which are reflected in our fiscal 2019 outlook. At T-Mobile and Sprint, we continue to see healthy level of activities as they prepare for the merger of the recently received DOJ approval. Assuming the deal is completed, we believe we have the right credentials to support T-Mobile as a strategic partner for its post-merger requirements. This reflects our years of integration experience and our proven track record at both T-Mobile and Sprint. Although we have said before, consolidation activity like this can introduce uncertainty, the outcomes which may be hard to predict. To summarize North America. Favorable market dynamics are translating to healthy customer activity in the broader region, compensating for AT&T where we expect full year revenue to decline in more moderate pace as compared to fiscal 2019. We are therefore on track to deliver modest revenue growth in North America for the full fiscal year 2019. But we remind you that quarterly trends remain likely to fluctuate in the foreseeable future. Moving to Europe, where we have delivered our eighth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth, notwithstanding normal fluctuations in customer activity, which affect the sequential trend. During Q3, we signed an additional multiyear managed services agreement with Sky Italia, which includes the modernization of its digital monetization operations to support its move to fixed broadband. We also won an additional new logo with an affiliate of a large Western European operator, and we're chosen for a digital transformation that will modernize and automate the user experience for its enterprise and consumer customers. Looking ahead, regional consolidation activity and the growing trend towards multiplay and convergence is driving new requirements for our customers that we believe Amdocs is well positioned to address with our highly relevant product and services offering. This will support positive long-term growth for us in Europe, although we are, of course, always monitoring the macroeconomic climate of the region. Turning to rest of the world. We delivered our second straight quarter of record revenue with year-over-year growth of nearly 8% as reported. Among the Q3 highlights, we continue to see interest in our media offering outside North America. Oi Brazil selected Vubiquity as their preferred partner of its recently announced online video platform service, Oi Play. Additionally, we are delighted to sign a 3-year content licensing and management agreement with Vodafone Qatar to enable to be first mobile operator that launched ESP video-on-demand services in Qatar and offer its customer the ability to stream or download a wide selection of movies and TV programs, including first time exclusive TV shows. We are also encouraged to see an emerging trend in managed services where some of our earliest customers in the region are embarking on a second wave of modernization activity by expanding the scope of their existing engagement with new multiyear agreements. For example, Vodafone India in India has extended our managed services agreement for several years and selected us for a project to consolidate the posts related and enterprise operation in Idea Cellular, with which Vodafone merged last year. Additionally, today, we announced the expansion of our decade-long relation with XL Axiata in Indonesia by winning a project to deploy the AmdocsOne consumer experience and monetization solution under a multiyear managed digital transformation agreement. Looking ahead, we are encouraged by our recent win momentum and the solid pipeline of opportunity we see in the rest of the world, although we remind you that revenue trends may fluctuate from quarter to quarter. To conclude my little summary, we are executing well and generating new growth across our strategic areas of focus. These areas include next generation open cloud and 5G networks, where I am pleased to have highlighted some of recent new customer and project wins that demonstrate the innovation we are bringing to the market. Just this week, we announced that SES, a leading global satellite operator, will use Amdocs NFV orchestration solution to deliver SD-WAN and other extended services on Microsoft Azure's highly scalable public cloud infrastructure for its broadcast, telecom, corporate and government customers. Additionally, today, we announced that Amdocs will provide Globe Telecom with our 5G policy control function solution to help Globe design and build open cloud 5G network that will accelerate the rollout of an extensive set of 5G use cases for enterprise and consumer customers. To accelerate our network services strategy, we are excited to announce today the acquisition of TTS Wireless, a leading provider of mobile network engineering services, which specialize in network optimization, planning and software-enabled solution. We believe the strategic relation -- rationale for this acquisition makes sense on 2 levels. First, TTS Wireless has proven 5G planning experience that immediately expands our network customer footprint at leading American operators, including T-Mobile, where it has strong incumbency that complements our business position. Second, TTS Wireless expands our platform for growth in network services by bringing hundreds of highly skilled mobile network engineers that will enhance our Open 5G portfolio to help us to execute on our strategy of providing an end-to-end 5G solution that can accelerate and simplify the deployment and monetization of open smart 5G network for our customers. To wrap up, we are pleased with our performance in Q3 and the fiscal year-to-date. We enter Q4 with a record 12-month backlog that we believe reflects the strength of our market-leading position. The pipeline of opportunities remain strong, and we expect to maintain high win rates as we bring the innovative solution our customers need to modernize, automate and digitize their business. Taking everything into consideration, we are on track to meet our full year targets for constant currency revenue growth and normalized free cash flow. Additionally, we now expect to deliver diluted non-GAAP earnings per share growth in the range of 6.2% to 7.8% for the full year 2019, the 7% midpoint of which represents increase of approximately 50 basis points over previous guidance. With that, let me turn the call over to Tamar.