Raymond Winborne
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open
Thanks, Scott. I will touch on the financial results for the quarter and the outlook for the rest of the year. We delivered another solid quarter with great top-line performance and strong growth in unlevered free cash flow, while continuing to invest for the future, including closing the acquisition of Main Street Hub earlier in the quarter. On the top-line revenue came in at $680 million in the quarter, growing 17% year-over-year, or 14% excluding the impact of purchase accounting and Main Street Hub. Underlying growth was in line with the second quarter and reflects strength across all segments of the business with particular outperformance coming from domains on the back of strong registrations and aftermarket sales. International revenue was $236 million in Q3 growing 19% year-over-year or 15% excluding the impacts of purchase accounting. Foreign currency headwinds were negligible on Q3 revenue. Bookings grew to $742 million rising 11% year-over-year, or 12% on a constant currency basis. Let me touch on a few things related to our bookings trajectory. First, as the US dollar strengthened midsummer, we saw currency flow from 130 basis point tailwind in Q2 to a 110 basis point headwind in Q3. That affect has obviously magnified in the international results. Second, as we’ve mentioned in the past, we are continually testing merchandising tactics to improve the customer experience and customer lifetime value. Some of these will impact bookings and revenue in the short-term but are good for the long-term health of the customer, and in turn, for our business. While this will show up in all regions it will likely show up more in international as we prefer to test and iterate within smaller control segments before launching initiatives more broadly. And finally, it was still a relatively small piece of our business that's been growing quickly. We are seeing some softening in China that led to a little less to 1 point of deceleration in Q3 total bookings. Moving on to key metrics. Customer growth was solid at just under 7%, bringing the quarter end customer base to 18.3 million, including 8 million international customers. We've added 1.1 million net new customers in the past 12 months, reflecting a mix of strength in gross new customer adds and slight improvements in retention. ARPU rose to $145, up 9% year-over-year, with growth favorably impacted by the effects of the HEG acquisition last year. ARPU grew in the mid-single-digits on a more normalized basis. With lifetime customer value at 10 times the cost to acquire customers, our unit economics remain robust and our source of value creation for shareholders. We’ve been leaning into marketing spend, particularly as we find strong returns and conversational marketing where we are evolving our ability to more precisely target the need states of our customers present the right message and meet them in the right channel. Through this and other efforts, we’re creating incremental capacity for go-to-market spend through both product on-ramps and spending into our base. Unlevered free cash flow for the quarter grew 28% year-over-year to $176 million. Unlevered free cash flow margin was 26%, reflecting solid flow-through on top-line growth. One point on cash flow, you'll notice the CapEx was light in Q3, which was due more to timing of planned spend but we expect that to bounce back in the fourth quarter. We remain early in our transition to the cloud, and we don’t expect to drive any meaningful leveraging CapEx in the near term. With respect to the balance sheet we finished Q3 with $852 million in cash and short-term investments, net debt landed at $1.6 billion or about 2.3 times net leverage on a trailing 12 month basis and we're on track to be at 2 times leverage by the end of the year, exactly where we said we would be a year ago. Our priority remains taking advantage of the highly cash generative nature of this business, first through internal investment, second through acquisitions, and third via share repurchases. Given the strength of our balance sheet our declining leverage ratio and financial capacity, the Board of Directors approved an open-ended authorization to purchase up to 500 million of our Class A shares. We’re going to execute this in a thoughtful manner so as not to constrain our ability to take advantage of M&A opportunities as they arise. We’ve had a strong year thus far, both in terms of top-line and bottom-line strength as well as investments we made in product, customer experience and our platform. So with that let me turn to the outlook for the rest of the year. Revenue as a result of strong third quarter performance and our expectations for the fourth quarter, we are raising our full year range to $2.655 billion to $2.660 billion implying full year growth of 19% at the midpoint. For full year unlevered free cash flow, we expect to generate approximately $620 million implying 25% year-over-year growth. That reflects the impact of cash burn associated with Main Street Hub and investments that we’re making in the customer experience, expanded business capabilities and an acceleration in branding and conversational marketing. As a reminder, on our cash flow guidance, it includes total cash tax-related payments of approximately $25 million, excludes a onetime tax payment of $24 million associated with the gain of PlusServer sale last year and excludes cash interest payments which we project will be approximately $85 million for the year. As we look to 2019 we feel great about the consistency of our results, which reflect the power of our strategy and execution. The framework of double-digit top-line growth and 18% to 20% growth in unlevered free cash flow that we provided to you at our Investor Day holds true for 2019. We see this is a healthy mix of run rate top-line and bottom-line growth plus investing for the future while continuing to create margins over time. Obviously, the last couple of months have been choppy in the markets. From a GoDaddy standpoint, it's nice to provide mission-critical services for getting people's ideas online and making them great, which is a business that has the defensible advantages. And in an increasingly volatile world there is a stability and consistency with GoDaddy that hopefully resonates with everyone on this call. Thanks everyone for joining us today. And with that, let's open up the call for questions.