Shuky Sheffer
Analyst · JPM. Your line is open
Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon to everyone joining us on the call today. As Matt mentioned, today, we are growing – today and going forward, we are providing an earnings presentation alongside our remarks. We hope you find this additional information helpful in understanding our company as investment opportunity. I will start today’s call by recapping our business and financial achievements for the full fiscal year 2021. Second, I will add it to you on the main pillar of strategic growth framework and the significant progress we’ve made with key items from the past quarter. Finally, I will wrap up by summarizing our expectation for another year of accelerated growth in fiscal 2022. After which, Tamar will provide the detail on our financial performance and outlook as well as perspective on the overall environment 12-month backlog in capital deployment. As a reminder, our comments today will refer to certain financial metrics on a pro forma basis where applicable to provide you with a sense of the underlying business trends, excluding the financial impact of the open market, which we divested on December 31, 2020. I’m on Slide 7. Let me begin by saying that could not be prouder of our achievement in fiscal 2021. This was a pivotal year in which we began to see the results of our strategy to drive accelerated revenue growth and much credit belongs to a global base of talented employees and experienced leadership team. Operating highly model amid the global pandemic, our people execute exceptionally well this year to meet the mission-critical requirements of our customers. And it is so while embracing our culture of continuous learning and upside. I’m also proud we constantly found ways to demonstrate our corporate purpose and values, such as by providing support for the communities in which we live and work. As an example, in the Philippines, we recently ran a project to improve digital access and skill in peripheral communities, which included employees volunteering hundreds of hours to develop career planning, technology and upskilling webinars tailor-made to the needs of the thousands of students from more than 25 schools. This is just one inspiring story among the many vendors. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and to take all our people and the commitment – for the commitment conductivity and indication they’ve shown working together to serve our customers, partners, communities and one another over the last few year. And I’m confident we have the talent, experience and values to achieve even more in the future. Moving to Slide 8. Let me address the operational and financial highlights for fiscal year 2021. I believe Amdocs in an exciting inflation point of accelerated revenue growth and it’s worth taking a moment to quickly recap some of the key factors, which have led us to this point. First, we have certain investment in research and development by more than 10% in fiscal year 2021 to further position us as the market leader with the best technology and most relevant offering to support our customer investments in industry mega trends, including digital modernization journey to the cloud and 5G. Second, we divested a noncore asset open market and execute on strategic acquisition of Openet in August 2020 and Sourced Group in March 2021 in further – to further accelerate our technology capabilities and services that continue 5G and the cloud. Finally, we start our competitive advantage and established ourselves as the industry-leading transformation partner to build their next-gen platforms, greater example of reach include multiple project awards at AT&T, recent modernization wins at the 3UK, and the bigger transformation win with next-gen hybrid cloud operation, we are accelerating for T-Mobile under a multiyear managed service agreement. All in all, we finished the year 2021 in a strong business and financial position, you can see from the highlights on Slide 9. We delivered excellent pro forma revenue growth of 7% in constant currency in fiscal year 2021, driven by healthy customer activity across North America, Europe and rest of the world. Our sales momentum continued through the fourth quarter, which ended up with a record 12-month backlog of $3.7 billion, up 10.5% from a year ago on a pro forma basis. We report non-GAAP operation margin by 30 basis points and achieved our highest ever number of customer milestone, which we’re converting to record cash collections and record normalized free cash flow generation of $869 million for the full year. Moreover, we delivered on our target for double-digit total shareholder return in fiscal 2021, including our third pro forma non-GAAP earnings per share growth of nearly 10% plus our dividend yield. Now turning to Slide 10. Let me address you on the recent progress against our strategic imperatives. As a reminder, we have a simple and clear growth strategy to bring market-leading innovation to support our customer critical business needs and to provide an amazing experience to consumer and enterprises in; one, journey to the cloud to accelerate cloud adoption across all platforms of our customer base; two, 5G monetization to support exciting new 5G use cases; three, digital modernization to enhance customer experience and transform operation; four, network automation to the leader and automate dynamic real-time network-based services. During Q4, we made significant progress across each of these pillars. In cloud, we are thrilled that AT&T has selected us for next-gen cloud operations of its business support system evolution, BSSe, under the long-term agreement. BSSe is a technology modernization and certification program focused on increasing speed-to-market, improve customer experience and long-term cost efficiency effectiveness. As previously announced, Amdocs is already in the process of modernizing AT&T consumer mobility domain. And this new award expands its activity. Under the new BSSe agreement, Amdocs will provide its deep set of cloud-native products and next-gen cloud operation under a long-term agreement. Moreover the project will be run on a Microsoft Azure starting with AT&T’s consumer basis units which includes mobility, broadband and IoT. Additionally, I’m pleased to share with AT&T’s extended 2026 the managed service agreement signed in 2019 for the consumer domain. Moving to 5G monetization. Amdocs remains at the forefront of the industry working with leading service providers to add new and exciting 5G experiences. During Q4, we were selected by Orange to provide business support system for new first 5G Stand Alone experimental cloud network, largely July in France. In 2021, Amdocs engage in dozens of new 5G operational and modernization projects, across multiple countries and customers, including AT&T, T-Mobile to 3UK, Verizon, Korea Telecom Operations, LGU+ Korea and others. A small 5G Stand Alone networks are launched around the globe, we expect a growing number of service providers receive the benefit of Amdocs expertise for unlocking the monetization potential of 5G by curating new capabilities, unique business model and game-changing opportunities. Turning to digital modernization. We continue to see strong business momentum with several new wins this quarter. We expanded our relationship with VM to ramp up new digital services for its customers in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan under a seven-year agreement. We expanded our strategic collaboration with Globe Telecom in the Philippines to provide the Amdocs catalog and Commerce Suite to improve digital experience for its mobile and fixed line customers. Finally, this quarter, we continue to build the growth momentum of our network automation offering by successfully providing an end-to-end service orchestration solution for SES, the world’s leading global satellite operator that enable SES to support customer with service innovation and delivery agility for its satellite-based hybrid and open cloud network. In the satellite expansion, of the industry-leading collaboration between the two companies, Amdocs has also been engaged by SES to provide the network service assurance solution. We have extended our strategic partnership with Globe Telecom to include, Amdocs Service and Network Automation Suite to power Globes cloud and digital to network automation journeys quickly and easily. With that backdrop, let me turn to Slide 11 and our fiscal year 2022 outlook. We believe, we are in the early innings of a multiyear 5G and cloud-driven investment and transformation cycle. We see a rich pipeline of opportunities across the communications industry to enable our customers to create amazing experiences for consumers and enterprises. We are laser-focused on converting these opportunities to backlog growth in the coming quarters, leveraging: our cutting-edge technology, which supports the future roadmap of our customers and further extends our competitive lead in the market. Our execution track record and a highly skilled, customer-centric talent base, delivering value to our customers around the world. Tying everything together, we expect to deliver accelerated revenue growth of roughly 8% assuming the midpoint of our guidance on a pro forma constant currency basis in fiscal 2022. Moreover, we are positioned to deliver double-digit expected total shareholder returns for the second year running in fiscal 2022, including: pro forma non-GAAP diluted earnings per share growth of 10% assuming the midpoint of our guidance range, and our dividend yield of 2% based on the new quarterly rate of $0.395 per share, which proposed for the shareholder approval at our upcoming Annual Meeting in January. With that, let me turn the call to Tamar for her remarks.