Ed Meyercord
Analyst · Lake Street. Your line is open
Thank you, Stan, and thank you all for joining us this morning. Today, we announced Q4 results at the high-end of our expectations, our revenue of $252 million above our guidance range of $240 million to $250 million. We're inching closer and closer to our 60% gross margin goal at over 59% ahead of history, and non-GAAP earnings of $0.06 per share at the high-end of our guidance range. For fiscal '19, we achieved $1 billion in revenue, improved our gross margin despite headwinds from tariffs, and finished off our year by taking action to improve our cost structure heading into fiscal '20. We also generated $82 million in free cash flow in fiscal '19, paid down $20 million of debt and ended the year with $170 million cash balance. We're on track with our pending acquisition of Aerohive having already received U.S. and German antitrust approvals, and see clear line of sight towards closing the transaction shortly after our tender offer, which is currently set to expire on August 8. We reorganized our software engineering team under new leadership to combine with a DevOps Cloud management team from Aerohive to hit the ground running. Our intent is to bring cloud management to our entire portfolio of Enterprise Wi-Fi, network switching, and software to accelerate pitcher velocity. We are exiting fiscal '19 with the knowledge and confidence that our solutions are winning in the marketplace. Last year, we had over 110 customers investing more than $1 million worth of Extreme products and services. In Q4 alone, we closed 23 deals of $1 million or more, up from 17 in Q3. We're winning larger deals and see this trend continuing, based on the growth of these large software-driven opportunities in our pipeline. In Q4, our Smart OmniEdge Solutions drove performance and highlighted early success of our product cycle that will continue to ramp over the next nine to 12 months. Our total Smart OmniEdge product bookings grew 4% year-over-year, and 27% quarter-over-quarter. Specifically, we saw success in education, government, healthcare, retail, and wins in hospitality with Wi-Fi 6 leading the way along with our new X465 Switch Extended Edge Switching Extreme Cloud appliance and associated software. We also released several new products in our Automated Campus portfolio, such as the 32/100 and 48/25 solutions that drove double-digit year-over-year growth in the Americas. Our Agile Data Center business continue to benefit from strong momentum, and our SLX 9640 border routing solution and customers migrating to the SLX platform from the BDX and MLX platforms. Q4 was a difficult comparison quarter outside of our service provider federal and OEM segments, but we finished the year at the high-end of our previously-guided run rate of a $162 million to $180 million in revenue for this business. Our software business grew for a $6.25 million in a row, up 7% year-over-year, and 22% quarter-over-quarter. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback for all our solutions, pillars at our Connect User Conference in May in Nashville, where attendance doubled year-over-year. Last year, customers who attended the conference increased their investments in Extreme by over 10%, and those who participated in technical sessions increased their spending with Extreme by 64% year-over-year. From a vertical standpoint, we experienced a strong rebound in the education vertical and lots of success in the government and healthcare verticals. In retail, we are seeing lots of large opportunities going into fiscal '20 that are now focused on switching, validating the strategic rationale of our acquisitions. The biggest customers we've picked up from the Zebra acquisition close to three years ago were wireless-only and are now embracing our switching portfolio. Heading into fiscal '20, we continue to expect to see growth in our education vertical based on strong e-rate wins and higher ed coming through in fiscal '20. Our e-rate bookings grew three times quarter-over-quarter, while business outside of e-rate such as higher ed also grew strongly. In EMEA, service revenue growth drove stability and margins, while challenges in Germany and Southern Europe were offset by strong new logo additions of approximately 20% above corporate average of 15% in year-over-year growth in wireless. APJC revenue fell 25% year-over-year on a tough comparison quarter and lumpy deals. However, we made progress in diversifying our business outside of traditional datacenter customers in regions such as Japan, by expanding our enterprise customer base. Our tariff mitigation plans in the U.S. are on track. Today, we move 90% of our product manufacturing to Taiwan and other TAA compliant countries for products bound for the U.S. Our Taiwan standard costs are 4% to 5% higher than in China. We estimate that tariffs at a greater than a 1 percentage point headwind to gross margin following the increase from 10% to 25% in the quarter. We expect a 60 basis point decrease in our tariff impact next quarter owing to our move to TAA compliant countries. I'd like to elaborate on a few customer wins we highlighted in our press release. Our SLED team in the U.S. which is State, Local and Education vertical led the way in Q4 two top deals and SLED drove $10 million in business alone. We won both of these educations and government campus refreshes with integrated solutions across our technology solutions pillars with end-to-end wireless campus core and data center switching with XMC riding on top. We won these in head-to-head competition with Cisco and HPE. Leeds Beckett University, a top university in the UK is upgrading its campus network with Extreme's Smart OmniEdge solutions serving 25,000 students and 3,000 staff across 85 buildings and sports facilities featuring new Wi-Fi 6 run over our automated campus network where our Extreme Fabric Connect enabled automatic configuration of the new access points. The extreme management center application will provide single pane of glass management across the two networks. We were also selected by the Houston Dynamo Major League Soccer and Houston Dash, the National Women's Soccer League to provide high density professional grade Wi-Fi connectivity in their home field BBVA stadium. The solution includes ExtremeMobility featuring Wi-Fi 6 access points, Extreme Management Center and ExtremeAnalytics Software. This new network will enable mobile ticketing and improved social media connectivity for fans today and soon fans will be able to wirelessly order food from concessions and engage an augmented and virtual reality experiences that will bring fans even closer to the field. As far as our own digital transformation initiatives are concerned, we are increasing automation and productivity and our operations across the board. Our new channel self-serviced tools, like our full solutions catalog came online in May for coding and configuration by partners. We expect to drive 25% of our business in the form of frictionless transactions within the next two quarters. Nearly three quarters of our discount approvals are now auto-approved and we have cut down the processing time in half our remaining transactions. This means nearly 30% of our transactions were touchless in Q4, up over two times from Q3. Net-net we're putting more time back into the field so they can focus on selling and driving productivity. We initiated a restructuring program at the end of fiscal Q4 that we expect to produce $24 million to $27 million of annualized cost savings largely in OpEx. We're aligning our cost structure and upgrading our IT platforms to accommodate the Aerohive acquisition. The acquisition of Aerohive has built significant enthusiasm with our customers, partners and field teams who are interested in cloud-managed enterprise. The merger will make Extreme a technology leader in cloud-managed Wi-Fi with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. This accelerates our strategy of adding more applications and micro services in the cloud to serve our customers. We also aim to leverage Aerohive's ML and AI platform honed across a user base of 10,000 customers who use this technology today. Looking ahead, we're adding conservatism to our forecast to account for customers and partner evaluation of overlapping products in our Smart OmniEdge Wi-Fi portfolio and the new cloud-managed Wi-Fi from Aerohive. Also we continue to see challenging macroeconomic trends in both EMEA and typical seasonality in fiscal Q1 results. With that our outlook for core Extreme in fiscal '20 is to grow in the low single-digits to over $1 billion in revenue and we continue to target 60% gross margin. And the Aerohive acquisition will accelerate revenue growth to the low teens and boost gross margins given their mid 60% run rate. We believe the investments we have made in our digital transformation will pave the way for productivity gains and operating efficiency. The combination of growth, increased gross margins and operating efficiencies allows us to target a 15% operating margin exiting fiscal '20. I also want to note that our balance sheet remains strong with the $170 million in gross cash, $181 million in debt from net debt of just $9 million. I'm confident in the Extreme team and our ability to improve execution and operational efficiency as we move forward, especially as we enter in the next chapter of our corporate transformation with a pending acquisition of Aerohive. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Rémi Thomas.
Rémi Thomas: Thanks, Ed. As Ed noted, our revenues of $252.4 million, declined 9% year-over-year and grew 1% quarter-over-quarter and came in above the high-end of our guidance non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.06 at the high end of our range. EPS benefited from the gross margin of 59.2% towards the high-end of our range and offset by higher than expected operating expenses. Our product revenue of $189.5 million declined 14% year-over-year and was down just 1% quarter-over-quarter. Our book-to-bill ratio was close to 1.1, with product bookings up 16% quarter-over-quarter and flat year-over-year. Our Smart OmniEdge switching business grew year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter while our wireless business recovered sequentially, but still face difficult year-over-year comparisons in certain verticals, such as retail, transportation, logistics. Services revenue grew 10% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter. The year-over-year growth was largely driven by the deferred revenue add-backs of $5.1 million from prior acquisitions. On a like-for-like basis, services revenue grew 2.7% year-over-year, reflecting the positive impact of continued growth in multi-year bookings we've seen over the past several quarters. Our services bookings grew 6% year-over-year and 13% quarter-over-quarter with strength in renewals and new service attached. During the quarter, the Americas contributed 64% to total revenue, EMEA 28% and APAC closed out the remaining 8%. Globally, education was our top performing vertical with bookings at a strong 30% year-over-year and 123% quarter-over-quarter on strength across each of the K-12 E-rates and higher add sub-segments. Government was a close second and grew a healthy 11% year-over-year including both state, local and federal government in the U.S. and internationally. The next largest verticals were healthcare, which also grew a strong 295 year-over-year and to a lesser extent manufacturing followed by retail to round out the top five. Non-GAAP gross margin was 59.2% compared to 57.6% in the year ago quarter and 57.6% in Q3. The sequential improvement is attributable to the services gross margin recovering 220 basis point quarter-over-quarter to 61.6% and product gross margin increasing 130-basis point quarter-to-quarter to 58.4%. We estimate that tariffs had an adverse impact of 110 basis points to total company gross margin in Q4 and 150-basis point on product gross margin consistent with our estimate entering the quarter. The sequential improvements in our product gross margin can be attributed to the impact of lower standard cost due to our product refresh and procurement savings, a positive mix shift to the U.S. and better pricing offset by the impact of tariffs. Q4 non-GAAP operating expenses of $136.8 million were up from $132.9 million in the year ago quarter and from A $130.6 million in Q3. The sequential increase in non-GAAP operating expenses was mainly due to higher sales and marketing expense with higher sales commissions in the U.S. Higher R&D expense was mainly due to work on new product introductions we expect to release in the next one to two quarters and ahead of our planned restructuring at quarter. We kept G&A expenses in check. As a result, our operating margin of 4.9% compares to 9.8% in the year ago quarter and 5.6% in Q3. As a reminder, most of the restructuring we announced a quarter run related to OpEx cost savings that will flow through to our P&L over the course of fiscal 2020 with a step up in operating margin for the second-half of the year. Free cash flow of $18.9 million grew from $12.8 million in Q3 and from just $2.4 million in the year ago quarter. For fiscal 2019, we generated total free cash flow of $82 million versus in the outflow of $21.4 million in fiscal 2018. Our total cash balance at the end of Q4 was $169.9 million, up from $156.8 million at the end of Q3. DSO of 63 days, fell 6 days year-over-year and grew 8 days quarter-over-quarter. On a sequential basis, the strong collections drove DSO lower. Our cash conversion cycle stood at 61 days compared to 66 days a year ago, but up only marginally from 60 days in Q3. Now, turning to guidance, as Ed mentioned, we're adding conservatism to our forecast to account for overlapping products in our Smart OmniEdge Wi-Fi portfolio, continued challenging macroeconomic trends in EMEA and typical seasonality in our fiscal Q1. With that in mind we expect extreme standalone total Q1 revenue to be in the range of $235 million to $245 million. Q1 GAAP gross margin is anticipated to be in the range of 55.1% to 57.2% and non-GAAP gross margin in the range of 57.5% to 59.5%. We estimate that tariffs will have an impact of about 60 basis points on our overall gross margin for fiscal Q1, mainly related to the transition of manufacturing to Taiwan. Q1 operating expenses are expected to be in the range of $140.2 million to $145.8 million on a GAAP basis and $126 million to $131.6 million on a non-GAAP basis. The sequential decrease in OpEx is primarily related to lower sales commission and OpEx savings as a result of the restructuring actions taken at the end of Q4. Q1 GAAP earnings are expected to be in the range of a net loss of $15.8 million to $10.6 million or a loss of $0.13 to $0.09 per share. We're still evaluating the impact of our integration costs following the pending acquisition of Aerohive and we'll be in a better position to refine those estimates post-closing. Non-GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of $4 million to $9.2 million or $0.03 to $0.07 per diluted share. Assuming a mid-quarter close for the Aerohive Networks' acquisition we assume a $15 million contribution to revenue with a 68.6% gross margin on both the GAAP and non-GAAP basis from Aerohive. We assume a GAAP Aerohive operating expenses will be $17.7 million and non-GAAP operating expense will be $12 million resulting in a 49.2% GAAP operating loss margin and 11.4% non-GAAP operating loss margin. With incremental interest expense of $2 million for the past year, this results in a GAAP loss per share contribution of $0.08 and a non-GAAP loss per share contribution of $0.03 to Extreme earnings. In Q4, we expect average shares outstanding to be approximately $118.9 million on a GAAP basis and $121.6 million on a non-GAAP basis, excluding the impact of any shares we may repurchase. With that, I will now turn it over to the Operator to begin the question-and-answer session.