Earnings Labs

Fastly, Inc. (FSLY)

Q1 2025 Earnings Call· Wed, May 7, 2025

$24.64

-4.52%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+26.37%

1 Week

+37.15%

1 Month

+37.31%

vs S&P

+30.45%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Rebecca, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fastly First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. [Operator Instructions] Thank you.

Vernon Essi

Analyst

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to our first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. We have Fastly's CEO, Todd Nightingale; and CFO, Ron Kisling with us today. The webcast of this call can be accessed through our website, fastly.com and will be archived for 1-year. Also, a replay will be available by dialing 800-770-2030 and referencing conference ID number 7543239 shortly after the conclusion of today's call. A copy of today's earnings press release, related financial tables and investor supplement, all of which are furnished in our 8-K filing today, can be found in the Investor Relations portion of Fastly's website. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to the expected performance of our business, future financial results, product sales, strategy, long-term growth and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. Further information regarding risk factors for our business, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report filed on Form 10-K and quarterly report filed on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC and our first quarter 2025 earnings release and supplement for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ. Please refer in particular to the section entitled Risk Factors. We encourage you to read these documents. Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Also during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers we discuss today other than revenue will be on an adjusted non-GAAP basis. As discussed last quarter, we’ve adjusted our non-GAAP treatment of gross margin to exclude the amortization of stock-based compensation and our internal use software costs and cost of revenue. This treatment is reflected in our financial tables in the earnings release and the eight quarter historical trended non GAAP P&L in our investor supplement. Also, unless otherwise noted, all discussions on this call reflect this adjustment. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the earnings release and supplement on our Investor Relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Before we begin our prepared comments, please note that we will be attending four conferences in the second quarter, the 20th Annual Needham Technology Media and Consumer Conference virtually on May 12, the William Blair 45th Annual Growth Conference in Chicago on June 4, the BofA Global Technology Conference in San Francisco on June 5, and the D.A. Davidson Conference in Nashville on June 10. Now I’ll turn the call over to Todd. Todd?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Thanks, Vern. Hi, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us today. I’m excited to share with you our strong results for the quarter, beating the upper ends of both our revenue and operating loss guidance ranges. As a result, we are raising both our 2025 revenue guidance and operating loss guidance by $10 million and $3 million at their respective midpoints. We also generated $8 million in positive free cash flow, bringing us closer to breakeven on this benchmark for the year. We made great progress in our go-to-market transformation, capitalizing on product release velocity and growing traffic share with our larger enterprise customers, which yielded upside in our results. Our Q1 revenue was $144.5 million coming in above the high-end of our 136 to $140 million guidance range with a growth rate of 8% year-over-year, an improvement compared to the 2% in the fourth quarter of 2024. Our customer count was 3,035 and enterprise customer count was 595. We brought in 19 new enterprise customers in the $100,000 annual revenue threshold in the first quarter compared to $10,000 in the fourth quarter. This comparison does not account for declines in the count due to falling below the $100,000 threshold or churn. Year-over-year, we grew our enterprise customer count by 18 or 3% and average enterprise customer spend grew 4% quarter-over-quarter to $907,000 as we saw solid cross-sell growth biased towards larger customers. Our platform strategy continues to yield results as now almost half of our customers leverage two or more Fastly product lines, generating three quarters of our revenue. We are excited about our revenue progress and the team's performance in Q1 accelerating the recovery in our top customers. We drove share gains at some of our largest customers and closed new enterprise accounts. Our top 10 customers…

Ronald Kisling

Analyst

Thank you, Todd, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I will discuss our financial results and business metrics before turning to our forward guidance. Note, unless otherwise stated, all financial results in my discussion are non-GAAP based. Revenue for the first quarter increased 8% year-over-year to $144.5 million coming in above the high-end of our guidance range of $136 million to $140 million. There were no unusual true up payments in the first quarter. Network services revenue was $113.2 million and grew 7% year-over-year. Security revenue of $26.4 million also grew 7% year-over-year, and our other products contributed $4.8 million to revenue, growing 64% year-over-year, driven primarily by our compute products. Traditionally, our first quarter experience is seasonally flat to modest sequential revenue decline over the fourth quarter. However, in our first quarter of 2025, we saw better-than-expected seasonal traffic demand and share gains, which contributed to the 3% sequential revenue growth. Consistent with what we shared on our year-end earnings call, we anticipate the revenue contribution of our top 10 customers will remain in the low to mid 30% range throughout 2025. We consider this a healthy level of concentration in our revenue mix. Also, as was the case for every quarter in 2024, no customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue in the first quarter. Our trailing 12 months net retention rate was 100%, down from 102% in the prior quarter and down from 114% in the year ago quarter. Decline is primarily due to the revenue declines with a few of our largest customers in prior quarters and closely follows our overall revenue growth rate trend. We anticipate our LTM net retention rate will remain flattish near-term followed by expansion in the second half of 2025 as we begin to see the benefit of revenue…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Param Singh with Oppenheimer.

Param Singh

Analyst

Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Really good job on the quarter. I wanted to firstly dive into your network side and the drivers for the upside. What's really driving incremental customer demand? And then I had a follow-up on the security. Thank you.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Yes. It’s a great question. We are pretty happy with the results across the board. We saw strong customer acquisition in some of the strategic verticals we mentioned. And I think that the sales team's ability to execute not just the customer acquisition, but the cross-sell has been enhanced, for sure on under Scott's leadership and under a new incentive plan there. And we've also certainly accelerated our recovery in the largest, in our largest media accounts. And by doing so, posted better-than-expected results, in that top 10 cohort as well.

Param Singh

Analyst

Got it. Thanks so much for the insight. And then moving to security, what percentage would you say of your installed base or customers are using WAF? And then how would you categorize both, DDoS and bot mitigation in terms of the adoption and where it could go to by the end of the year?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Yes. We don't disclose exactly the last number, but we mentioned about half or almost half of our customers are using more than one product line. It's a smaller number than that that's using security, and WAF is going be smaller than that. So I think there's an enormous amount of opportunity we have to penetrate with to penetrate our existing network service customers with WAF. It's still very early days on reactive DDoS and bot. And the percent penetration there is going to be single digits percent for sure. There's tons and tons of opportunity. And that’s why I mentioned, enriching the security portfolio, now having three, like, fully fledged, kind of flagship products gives us enormous opportunity to drive, real momentum in the security business, especially in the back half of the year.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with William Blair.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair.

Hi, good afternoon and congratulations on the strong results. I wanted to start out with your compute and observability business just given the 64% growth there. Can you give us some additional detail into maybe what products drove that and what the demand drivers were and how we should think about that business growth for the rest of the year?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · William Blair.

Yes. Absolutely. The biggest chunk of that growth is in compute for sure. And it’s interesting we are seeing a lot more of those strategic expansion verticals really focusing on that dynamic user experience. And so they’re using serverless edge compute to be able to give real time experiences, like we mentioned with airlines or travel companies that real time engagement, in the web experience is so important. We are seeing expansion there. And we’ve had some interesting launches specifically on the storage side, allowing some really creative use cases and really the ability to take compute and leverage it everywhere across our network, and drive some real innovation. So it's both in the storage, kind of innovative storage side of the house and that dynamic user experience.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair.

Got it. And then just in terms of what you are seeing from a macro perspective, can you give us a sense of, I think you mentioned there was some additional conservatism in the guidance. Can you talk about what you are seeing from customers? Is there any sort of extensions or elongation of deals? Just want to understand what that's looking like. Thank you.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · William Blair.

Yes. It’s interesting. We haven’t seen a change in the demand pattern or the buyer behavior yet, and I think that's a good sign. Generally, we tried to take a lot, a lot of precaution to make sure that we were set up on the CapEx side regarding any kind of tariff impact. But as far as the demand side goes, we haven't seen anything yet, but we are still taking a fairly conservative view in the outlook for the rest of the year just to hedge there.

Jonathan Ho

Analyst · William Blair.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley.

Sanjit Singh

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Yes, hi. Thank you for taking the questions. I wanted to ask about the sequential increase in RPO this quarter. It's like the largest in some I mean, if you sort of unpack the drivers there, whether it was sort of the packaging motion and is there any sort of additional sales incentives to the salespeople to sign up these larger commitment contracts? Just want to understand the dynamics behind the strong RPO growth this quarter.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Yes. And I think you mentioned a lot of the drivers there. So there’s really three drivers. We had strategic renewals at large accounts, which is great, helps us maintain the predictability of that large customer cohort for the long-term. We have an incentive program that is driving our sales team to negotiate for better and better commits, and that’s across our entire sales force, and that’s certainly helping us drive that number. And the packaging solution, which is becoming more and more kind of the default motion that we're using in the mid market and commercial accounts, that drives RPO by its very nature. And all of those all three of those are contributing factors, I'm certain that that's why we saw a record number on the RPO side of the house and why we are seeing good growth year-over-year. Anything you would add?

Ronald Kisling

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

The only thing I would add, I think last year, we put in an effort to just improve our engagement at more senior levels across our largest accounts. And I think we've also seen some benefit from that engagement in driving larger commits as a percent of their traffic when we see renewals. So I think that's an additional impact that's driving some of success we’re seeing in RPO.

Sanjit Singh

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Understood. And then talking back to the Network Services business, you guys mentioned in your script about signs of market share gains. Is that in terms of what's driving that, is that Edgio conversions? Is it just a lot more favorable pricing environment so that Fastly can more effectively compete on just the performance advantage you have? Just sort of the drivers of the market share gains that you guys expect to continue going forward.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Yes. I think the as far as market share gains go, we are seeing some, SEO customers coming to the Fastly platform, and we're seeing some of the traffic from existing accounts that were on Edgio increasing their traffic share. Those are both nice to see. But I do think that the, ability of the team to expand into new logos is fueling this as well. And there's no doubt that that is delivering a healthy result. It's why we are seeing 17% growth outside of those top 10 accounts. And as more and more as we start to index on that larger tail of customers, we are going to start to see the growth rate index closer to that 17%.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with RBC.

Rishi Jaluria

Analyst · RBC.

Wonderful. Thanks so much for taking my questions, and nice to see continued progress and acceleration here. Maybe I wanted to start with TikTok. So appreciate the conservatism in not including U.S TikTok revenue kind of after the deadline. Maybe can you walk us through the non U.S piece and maybe how we should be benchmarking the potential, geopolitical risk that TikTok may try to bring kind of all of it in house or to Chinese carriers given, obviously, all the trade tensions between the U.S and China. Just how are we thinking about that? And maybe alongside that, is there an ability to offset some of the, loss -- potential loss of U.S traffic with other products, including compute and security? And then I’ve got a quick follow-up.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · RBC.

Yes. It's a good question, and I want to make sure not to over share too much about a single -- about a single customer in that engagement. But it's been a very strong relationship. It continues to grow. We have a lot of optimism that we're going to be able to continue to operate in the U.S., but more importantly, that overall account globally because we’ve had such a strong partnership there. And as we said, that includes not only more use cases within network services, but across the portfolio.

Rishi Jaluria

Analyst · RBC.

Got it. Thanks. That was helpful. And then maybe just to piggyback on Sanjit's question. With as you are out of the market and a few others kind of having exited the space, what are you seeing in terms of the pricing environment as you work through renewals? How should we think about that going forward? Is there some level of maybe not pricing stability, but at least maybe more favorable pricing or less severe pricing declines than we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years? And where is there your opportunity to kind of use that to your advantage? Thanks.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · RBC.

Yes, Ron can give good color here for sure because we are seeing that pricing environment getting better, which I think is definitely giving us optimism for the next few quarters and even 2 years on how healthy this part of the market is going to be. But we -- largely, our strategy is based around acquiring new customers and driving market share gains. And I think the biggest upside we have is accelerating that motion across the board. But there's no doubt that the pricing environment can be a tailwind in the near and midterm.

Ronald Kisling

Analyst · RBC.

Yes. The only thing I would add, I think what we saw last year, particularly amongst our largest customers, was an acceleration in kind of the price downs to kind of the low 20s above kind of what we've seen that longer term trend be kind of in the high teens. What we've seen this year is kind of a return to kind of that normal trend line. We -- from what we've seen, expect that trend line to stabilize kind of back into the high teens with the changes we've seen in the macro market.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler.

James Fish

Analyst · Piper Sandler.

Hey, guys. Wanted to circle back on shockingly Edgio. I was surprised it took that long to talk about it. Congrats on the LinkedIn win. But can you just parse through how much of the tailwinds you are seeing today between new accounts to Fastly versus the existing overlapping accounts and any color there?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · Piper Sandler.

I'd say that -- I'd say the first thing I would mention is that we are not done. The commits that were part of the SEO platform are still active, and they still haven’t all settled out. So we are still in the middle, probably halfway through this motion, and we are pushing hard to make sure we are acquiring as much business as possible. As far as accounts that are new to Fastly and traffic upside, I'd say there’s more opportunity, and there's been more business in terms of traffic increases than new logos, but it's been healthy on both sides for sure.

James Fish

Analyst · Piper Sandler.

Got it. And how are you guys thinking about the opportunity with AI accelerator and why Fastly perhaps the right to win that workload or if there is required more caching at [indiscernible]?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · Piper Sandler.

Yes. I think AI accelerator and more and more, we are looking at the opportunity to expand that into more sophisticated use cases. I think that they absolutely have the right to win. The core usage, the core value is delivering a more human, a more lower latency experience for LLM interaction, and we absolutely have the performance leader in this space and our caching technology and in this case, the Symantec matching caching technology is really best-in-class. I think we absolutely have the right to win there. And we've also seen some real traction in deploying AI solutions in other parts of our business, especially security. We just launched the AI scraper bot mitigation, which has gotten a ton of interest, especially at RSA last week, And we are leveraging AI in our reactive DOS in our reactive DDoS product as well now and really delivering, I think, a pretty differentiated solution here. So I think there’s opportunity on the AI side across the portfolio. And for sure, I think we have the right to win.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Madeline Brooks with Bank of America.

Madeline Brooks

Analyst · Bank of America.

Hi, team. Thanks so much for taking my question. Just one broader one, I guess, kind of a multi part one though. But if I think about the comparing your comments on one being a little bit more conservative for the year just in general with the macro backdrop in geopolitical. But then I look at the guide being raised by I think from my calculation roughly $3 million more than the beat and your strong commentary on expectations for second half. I just want to know how we kind of marry those two things just because if I also look at some, of course, trailing metrics, but still NRR doesn't give a lot of cushion right now where we are for any further deceleration or contraction. So it just seems like second half, there’s a lot of optimism behind it. And I just would like to know kind of where that’s coming from and if there’s any early signs you’ve seen that could kind of help us get comfortable with your level of optimism?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · Bank of America.

We've got pretty good visibility into the pipeline right now. And beyond, I do think we are being fairly conservative on that guide. There’s opportunity for us to see a policy adjustment on TikTok again that would drive revenue into the projection. And we’ve got, I think, an opportunity to get up side on the Edgio traffic transformation here, which again would deliver upside to the -- to our projection. There’s you can see that with 17% growth outside the top 10, our top 10 is still in negative growth. We’ve got an opportunity to turn that around. And really I think turning that around faster and driving a better result sooner gives us an opportunity not just to get to that, to the new raise guide, but to beat that as well.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from the line of Rob Palmisano with Raymond James.

Rob Palmisano

Analyst · Raymond James.

Hey, guys. Congratulations on the quarter. So sticking with the elevated full year guide, do you expect to be EBITDA positive for the rest of this year? And was also wondering just in terms of what you're seeing with respect to the pace of new deals that are coming in and whether you’re seeing any improvement in your sales cycles?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst · Raymond James.

Yes. I think with respect to adjusted EBITDA, we would expect to continue to see positive EBITDA for the year and across the year. And particularly, as we talked about, in the second half as a whole, we would see operating profit given the trajectory in our revenue outlook and OpEx for the year. As far as the sales cycles go, I mentioned we haven’t seen a change in the buyer behavior. What we have seen, I think, is a change in the rigor, in the operational rigor that our sales team is operating with Scott and his new leadership. And because of that, our pipeline conversion is getting better and our ability to project and predict those deals has been cleaner. I think we are seeing some efficiency gains on the go-to-market side, and we’ve got opportunity to double down on that efficiency as well. So I see improved execution for sure. No doubt about it.

Operator

Operator

And your final question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger with D.A. Davidson.

Rudy Kessinger

Analyst

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Todd or Ron, I guess, on security, just why is the growth so slow? It's been single digits last few quarters. Should we think of the WAF, market just being a single digit growth market from here and out? And then secondly, when should we start to see some acceleration from bot and DDoS? I think the bot management product was launched about a year ago now. And so could you just talk about how the pipeline is shaping up for those products and where maybe security growth could be by year end?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Yes. We don’t publish the projection by product line or individual product, but I will say I don’t think we’re yet seeing the impact of bot or reactive DDoS in those numbers. I believe that security, as you mentioned, I believe the security growth number can be much higher, and we can get to that mid teens growth rate, where that -- where the security space is and being a market share gainer actually beat that. And that's going to be our target. How quickly we get there, I think, will remain to be seen. But as far as bot and DDoS, we are, I think, really right at the beginning of the growth curve there.

Rudy Kessinger

Analyst

Okay. And then if I look, kind of [indiscernible] on the quarter, it looks like about 70% of the quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in dollars was from the top 10 customers. How much of that you talked about share gains. Last couple of years, you have gains, you have losses, it kind of ebbs and flows. How much of that feels like permanent share gains or at least semi-permanent share gains versus were there any kind of one-time events that surprised you or temporary traffic shifts with those customers that benefited Q1?

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Those top 10 media customers, there’s a lot of seasonality, but, no one-time events I can think of. And I think, to be honest, the share gains here are continuing to increase with the effect of the Edgio change, and I think some a lot better execution with what we've now deployed, a much higher touch customer success and customer engagement model for our top media accounts. But, again, like, revenue diversification is important to us. We saw 17 growth outside that top 10, and we are going to continue to aggressively pursue not just growth in the top 10, but across the customer base to continue to diversify our revenue and sort of strengthen the portfolio growth outside of networks and outside network services as well. [Indiscernible] Rudy?

Rudy Kessinger

Analyst

Yes. Yes, all good. Thanks, guys.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the call back over to Todd for closing remarks.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Excuse me. I’m sorry. It looks like we do have one more, Rebecca.

Operator

Operator

And we do have a question that has come into queue. It is Param Singh with Oppenheimer.

Param Singh

Analyst

Yes. Hi. Thank you. Thought I’d ask a follow-up question here. What do you think is needed in the market to rationalize pricing here? Obviously, getting to high teens from 20% decline is definitely an incremental improvement. But the idea was that once some of the bad actors in the market go away, you could probably get down to maybe low double digits price decline and hopefully improve from there on. So what’s really missing in the market? What’s really needed to -- for the customers to actually accept a better pricing environment? Thank you.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

I think strong sales execution is a part of that from our team, and we are starting to see that. But I think this be like, a healthy market here looks like mid teens. And we are going to be pushing hard, at least to do our part to drive the market towards that direction. And I do think that with the current competitors in the space, the market for sure, supports that. And that would be a nice tailwind to the business, both on the gross margin and the top line side for the next few years.

Param Singh

Analyst

Got it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Thanks. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And I will now turn it back over to Todd for closing remarks.

Todd Nightingale

Analyst

Thanks so much. I want to thank our employees, customers, partners and investors. We remain focused on execution, bringing lasting growth to our business and delivering value to all of our shareholders. Thank you so much for your time today.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.