Scott Wagner
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open
Thanks, Blake and thanks from me for joining us as well. As Blake said, we feel great about what we delivered in the third quarter. Overall, I would like to highlight three key financial points. First, we continue to deliver strong, consistent revenue growth with a nice balance between customer and ARPU increases. Second, we are consistently delivering even faster growth in free cash flow, with over 22% growth in adjusted EBITDA and an increase of more than 40% in unlevered free cash flow in Q3. Those are great gains in our two key profitability measures. Third, we are well positioned to deliver the solid combination of top and bottom line growth into 2016 and beyond. Touching on each of these three things in more detail and starting with the top line, we grew bookings 14% and revenue 15% in Q3. In terms of the drivers of revenue, customers grew 9% over last year and we ended Q3 with approximately 13.6 million paying customers. Our annual average revenue per user or ARPU grew nearly 7% to $119, up from $112 a year ago. Our product lines all grew at double-digit rates in the quarter. Touching on our product lines briefly, domains revenue finished the quarter at $215 million, up 10% year-over-year. Our domain business continues to be fueled by; one, international growth; two, share gain in the markets in which we compete; three, successful attachment of renewals of domains, driven by our proprietary search and merchandising improvement; and four, growth in the sale of [Technical Difficulty]. Hosting and Presence revenue was $151 million in Q3, up about 15% year-over-year. We currently reaped nearly 5 million aggregate customers with our Hosting and Presence products, including those customers who use either our easy and effective Website Builder products and more sophisticated audiences, those customers have build the site with open source tools and host it on our hosting infrastructure. Unlike many point solutions, we address a full range of online presence needs, serving our customers from those who want to build a site on their own to web professionals who need more capability to build sites for others. Just as important, we believe that a successful online presence requires not just a website, but tools and capabilities to extend the sites content everywhere it needs to be online. A great example of this strategy in action is our Search Engine Visibility tool, which Blake mentioned in his introductory comments. We are also having success combining our Hosting and Presence tools with those in our business applications offerings such as email, productivity and email marketing. In Q3, our business applications revenue was $45 million, up 47% year-over-year. This product category continues to be driven by strong growth in both productivity and email marketing. In Q3, we reached 2 million paying customers for business applications products. Blake and I get asked a lot about what’s next in our product roadmap for business apps. Importantly, we see plenty of growth opportunity just in our existing product categories. We also know there is value in many adjacent product areas where our customers spend a lot of money and there is ample room for innovation, whether it would be in online presence, marketing solutions or technical infrastructure. We have proven we can extend our model into other areas, but it’s also very clear to us that doing a few things really well and with distinction is the winning approach. That’s what we’ve done over the last couple of years and it served our customers and GoDaddy well. In addition to innovating and extending our product portfolio, we are increasingly bundling our products, bringing domains, basic presence and email and productivity products together in introductory offers. We have learned that when we make it easy for customers to attach and use our core products like site builder or email, they renew at very healthy rates and have attractive long-term economics. One example of this bundling and merchandising strategy is our offer of a free email with the Website Builder purchase. Attaching a domain specific email like Blake at blakesblog.com creates a more professional appearance and it makes a domain and website that much more valuable to our customers. Now an important point and bundling is that when we sell products at a package price, payment is allocated among the product types being sold in the bundle based on the list price of the individual products. As a result, our bundling strategy may shift revenue recognition across product lines in the short-term. However, our focus is on lifetime spend of our customers in aggregate. When you look at the growth rates of our three business lines, these allocations shifted a bit of growth from Hosting and Presence line to the Business Applications in the third quarter. We are 100% focused on maximizing the aggregate lifetime value of our customers and we will continue to explore pricing and bundling strategies that grow total spend and lifetime value at the customer level. We should also mention the impact of the stronger dollar on our top line growth. In recent quarters, I said our bookings growth would have been roughly 200 basis points higher if measured in constant currency. As bookings translate into revenue over time, that currency impact shows up in our GAAP numbers. Given the lag between bookings and revenue, we are now seeing the currency impact that affected bookings in the first half of the year show up in GAAP revenue. International revenue, which represents close to 26% of our total now, grew 17% on a reported basis in Q3, but keep in mind that the currency impact that I just mentioned in total really applies directly to this portion of the revenue base. Our underlying international business remains strong across all our key markets and we feel good about the underlying growth trajectory and health of our overseas offerings. In fact, we just topped 14 million – excuse me, we just topped 4 million international customers during the quarter and that’s double the number of international customers we had just 4 years ago. Turning to my second overall point on our growing profitability, we continue to deliver strong cash flow. Adjusted EBITDA grew over 22% in Q3 to $88 million, yielding a margin of over 21%, a gain of 120 basis points versus Q3 of last year. Unlevered free cash flow grew over 40% in Q3 to $80 million, roughly in line with our nine-month growth of 42%. So far in 2015, we have converted over 90% of our adjusted EBITDA into unlevered free cash flow at the high end of our long-term target of 70% to 90% conversion. We finished Q3 with approximately $333 million in cash and short-term investments and net debt of $753 million or about 2.4 times our 2015 adjusted EBITDA. We are delivering these levels of strong bottom line performance, while continuing to invest in the business. We have been and will continue to hire engineers across all our applications and are investing in marketing, care and our ongoing international expansion. Our strong cash and balance sheet position also allows us to pursue value-creating acquisitions, where and if buying businesses, technology or customers complement our strategy and provide distinctive return above our organic opportunities. Our performance both in the third quarter and year-to-date, clearly reflect the leverage in our financial aid and operating model as one our product innovation continues to drive better attachment, high-margin products beyond domains; two, our global technology platform creates scale in our infrastructure spend; and three, we scale G&A. We feel well positioned to deliver this solid combination of top and bottom line growth into the future. Turning to our outlook, we are raising our 2015 guidance ranges for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. For revenue, we expect full year 2015 to be $1.603 billion to $1.606 billion, implying approximately 16% growth versus 2014. This translates into Q4 revenues of $421 million to $424 million, implying approximately 14% growth versus prior year, in line with the long-term revenue expectations that we have shared before even while absorbing the currency impact mentioned earlier on the call. For cash flow, we are raising our full year adjusted EBITDA range to $334 million to $337 million, implying a Q4 range of $70 million to $73 million. The midpoint of our full year adjusted EBITDA range implies nearly 24% growth year-over-year. We also expect unlevered free cash flow in excess of $280 million in 2015, implying approximately 83% to 84% conversion of adjusted EBITDA into unlevered free cash flow and year-over-year growth of over 46%. More importantly, looking forward, we are well positioned for continued growth at scale in 2016 and beyond. We serve a huge market of small businesses, organizations and individuals who are looking to build an online presence. We deliver a true lifecycle experience to these customers that combine product, tech and care in a distinctively way. And the products and services that we offer grow with our customers over time. This value proposition translates into a proven financial model with great customer unit economics and strong and consistent revenue and cash flow growth. For those of you who are building models, we would like to reinforce our long-term targets of low-teens to mid-teens organic top line growth coupled with 20% plus adjusted EBITDA growth and unlevered free cash flow growth in the mid-20s. As we continue our growth trajectory, not just in the coming quarter or two quarters, but through 2016 and beyond. Given our strong cash flow and balance sheet position, we are also well positioned to pursue additional growth through inorganic [ph] activity into adjacent and complementary products and geographies. So to wrap up, we feel great about Q3 and our continued execution and we are focused on delivering for our customers and our shareholders over time. We believe GoDaddy’s unique combination of products, technology and care will continue to differentiate us in the market and produce strong future financial results. With that, let’s open it up for questions.