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Gen Digital Inc. (GEN)

Q1 2018 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 2, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Ian, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Q1 2018 Fiscal Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. I'd now like to turn it over to the Head of Investor Relations, Mr. Nate Pollack. Mr. Pollack, you may begin.

Nate Pollack - Symantec Corp.

Management

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our call to discuss our first quarter fiscal year 2018 earnings results. We posted the earnings materials and prepared remarks to our Investor Relations Events webpage. Speakers on today's call are Greg Clark, Symantec CEO; and Nick Noviello, Executive Vice President and CFO. This is a live call that will be available for replay via webcast on our website. I'd like to remind everyone that all references to financial metrics are non-GAAP unless otherwise stated. We provide year-over-year constant currency growth rates in our prepared remarks for revenue. During the call, we may speak to a growth adjusted for acquisitions metric, which includes prior period non-GAAP revenue from acquisitions adjusted for Symantec's accounting policies including quarterization. All non-GAAP revenue and expenses excludes the impact of Veritas. However, the continuing operations deferred revenue on the balance sheet includes a portion of Veritas' deferred revenue from Symantec and Veritas bundled contracts entered into prior to operational separation. The Veritas deferred revenue from those contracts will amortize into discontinued operations. As a result implied billings growth calculated from the change in deferred revenue on the balance sheet will not be representative of standalone Symantec's performance as it will include an impact from Veritas. Please note, non-GAAP financial measures referenced during this call are reconciled to their comparable GAAP financial measure in the press release and supplemental materials posted on our website. We believe our presentation of non-GAAP financial measures, when taken together with corresponding GAAP financial measures, provides a meaningful supplemental information regarding our operating performance for reasons discussed below. Our operating management uses those non-GAAP financial measures in assessing our operating results, as well as when planning, forecasting and annualizing future periods. We believe those non-GAAP non-financial measures also facilitate comparisons of our performance to prior periods and to our peers and that investors benefit from understanding of the non-GAAP financial measures. Non-GAAP financial measures are supplemental and should not be considered a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Today's call contains forward-looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it. Those statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations, speak only as of the current date and, as such, involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release for more information. You will also find a detailed discussion about our risk factors in our filings with the SEC and, in particular, on our Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. And now I'd like to introduce our CEO, Greg Clark. Go ahead, Greg.

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

Thank you for joining us, and good afternoon. I'm pleased to share that both our business segments exceeded their Q1 revenue outlook and have strong underlying growth drivers with attractive profitability. We continue to accelerate our leadership in the Enterprise Security and Consumer Digital Safety businesses, as evidenced by customer success, technological innovation and our financial results. We are on track to achieve our full-year financial outlook and confident of the momentum building in our second half pipeline. At the same time, today we also announced DigiCert's acquisition of our Website Security and related PKI assets. Later in my remarks, I will share a summary of the transaction, impact to customers and impact to Symantec. Firstly, I'd like to touch on the dynamic threat environment and how Symantec continues to protect our customers. As many of you are aware, there were two major malware outbreaks in the past quarter, WannaCry and Petya. Both are stark reminders of why the world needs Symantec more than ever. These attacks spread quickly, infecting many high-profile companies globally and rendering data on victims' computers unusable. Symantec's advanced endpoint security capabilities proactively protected against both WannaCry and Petya. Neither attack had virtually any impact on our customers. While some other security companies failed to protect their customers, Symantec's software has, to date, blocked more than 1 billion attempted WannaCry attacks. This is a testament to our significant presence on Enterprise and Consumer endpoints, as well as the effectiveness of our advanced technologies. We are committed to protecting customers against all forms of cyber attack across all attack surfaces and continue to evolve our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform and Consumer Digital Safety offerings to fulfill that mission. In this regard, I'm pleased to report that innovation is thriving across Symantec. We're now regularly applauded by customers…

Nicholas R. Noviello - Symantec Corp.

Management

Thank you, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I will review our first quarter fiscal 2018 results, discuss several critical achievements we've now completed on our integration and transformation journey, update our fiscal second quarter and fiscal year 2018 outlook, and update our medium-term outlook from Financial Analyst Day, reflecting our planned divestiture of our Website Security and related PKI assets. We have also made additional details available in our CFO commentary, which has been posted on our Investor Relations website. I'd like to remind everyone that all references to financial metrics are non-GAAP, unless otherwise stated. Let me start with an overview of our Q1 financial results. Our first quarter revenue was $1.228 billion, exceeding the high end of our $1.185 billion to $1.215 billion guidance range, driven by outperformance across both our Enterprise Security and Consumer Digital Safety segments. As the dollar depreciated during the quarter, currency tailwinds provided an $8 million benefit to revenue relative to our Q1 guidance. Total year-over-year revenue growth in constant currency, adjusted for acquisitions, was down 1%, which was at the high end of our Q1 guidance of down 4% to down 1%. Operating margin for the first quarter was 31%, above our guided range of 27% to 29%, driven by top line outperformance and continued execution against our cost savings initiatives and synergies. We remain ahead of schedule to achieve our expected net cost efficiencies, as well as our expected Blue Coat and LifeLock cost synergies, which gives us further confidence around our guidance and the significant increase in operating margins we expect this year. As you may recall, we expect to achieve net cost efficiencies and Blue Coat and LifeLock cost synergies of $580 million in the aggregate by the end of fiscal year 2018. Currency tailwinds also provided a…

Nate Pollack - Symantec Corp.

Management

Thank you. Operator, we're ready for Q&A.

Operator

Operator

We would now like to open up for questions and answers. In the interest of time, so that we may attempt to get everyone's questions, please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up question. Our first question is from the line of Sarah Hindlian from Macquarie. Sarah Hindlian - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Hi, guys. Congratulations on the quarter, Greg and Nick. A couple questions for you. I would love to get some clarity on the rationale behind the sale of DigiCert's business? And what that 30% stake is going to enable you to do and how that's going to impact the Enterprise segment, if at all, going forward? And, Nick, you mentioned using the proceeds of the sale to delever the balance sheet. Is that sort of the entirety of the proceed usage? And then, a follow-up for Greg. I'd love to know how the subscription adoption of web proxies is progressing within Blue Coat as well?

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

Okay. Thanks, Sarah. So let me start with some of the rationale, and then I'll pass over some of the financial numbers to Nick. So as many of you have followed in the news, the SubCA and Website Security SSL/TLS certificate business has been ongoing. And we feel that this area needs a very focused and dedicated team on it and we think that DigiCert is the right partner for that. As you all may be aware, we were looking through all of the Certificate Authority partners to find the best partner to execute a model where certificates could be minted outside of Symantec also. And DigiCert definitely differentiated themselves in that space, for the global nature of our business, and also I think it's a very well run, excellent business. So we feel that this part of the industry needs an extremely focused management team. And we also are very pro-consumer here at Symantec, and this also removes some uncertainty for our customers and gives a path forward for Website Security. I think this industry needs some investment, and DigiCert is very well set up, especially when combined with Symantec Website Security, to really lead that investment and really drive the state of the industry forward, especially around things like certificate management lifecycle, things like that. So we feel that this a great move for our customers. It's also something that allows us to focus on what our Enterprise core business is which, as we discussed in our prepared remarks, is our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform. And we think that, all in all, this is a great outcome for long-term Symantec growth and also for the certificate cap industry and also a great outcome for our customers. So with that, I'll pass over to Nick to hit a couple of those financial questions. Go ahead, Nick.

Nicholas R. Noviello - Symantec Corp.

Management

Hi, Sarah. Let me sum up a couple of pieces for you and a little bit is in the script, but let me walk through it. So on the Enterprise side of the fence, keep in mind, if I look forward to 2019, FY 2018 we have to close the transaction. We've given you a perspective of a full-year basis for FY 2018, but I think it's better for you to look forward to 2019. And if I think about the Enterprise business in 2019, we think this benefits the growth outlook for Enterprise in 2019. So when we talked before about our medium term outlook at our Financial Analyst Day of Enterprise Security revenue of mid to high-single digit growth, that gets benefited. So it's actually a little higher than that. So it's high-single to low-double digit in terms of organic revenue growth for the Enterprise group. On the profitability side, it impacts it a bit the other way because we won't be over 30% in terms of margins, but we'll certainly be in the high 20s. That's a combination of the business itself, which we walked through the profitability of it, as well as those stranded costs. And the stranded costs are really around, as we support the transition services of the agreement and try to do our best to transition the business to DigiCert and help them get it ramped up and going. So we just need to be thoughtful about that. I think, importantly, on those stranded costs, those will fall off over time; and again, that's a $50 million number that will fall off over time. In terms of the overall transaction, the equity, we feel good about this business being managed by the experts at DigiCert. And that equity interest is – they're running the business, so that is equity interest for us and that will show up in other income going forward. We've not put that into any models or thought about that in terms of any models at this point in time. We'll update you once we close and get past those pieces. And then, finally, you asked about proceeds. And certainly this is a business where once we get to close and once we get through determining evaluations and tax liability, et cetera, there will be a set of net cash proceeds and a split of that between domestic and international. And you should expect that the U.S. proceeds, we'll be able to use pretty quickly for debt reduction. And then, on the international side, we have to just work through on our ongoing structures there. But that hopefully sums it up for you.

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

And, Sarah, just one more comment. DigiCert is very experienced at migrating large web PKIs. So in their history, they have a substantial experience of doing that and we think that that's going to be extremely good for our customers. And I think that's really big shout-out on the call that we think that this is going to land things in a great spot for that very important Enterprise customer and other folks in the (47:13). So moving on to your next question about subscription and Blue Coat. I think one of the things that we are very excited about in the quarter, which was in our prepared remarks, we have had some very nice network cloud success. What we've done in Integrated Cyber Defense is we've put a big effort into integrating our Web Security cloud with our Cloud Access Broker, with our Data Protection technology. So if you're a customer and you're wanting to go all cloud for your sort of Web Security needs, we have that covered. If you have any compliance issues, data compliance issues, that's in the stack through our DLP integration. And then, if you need any multifactor authentication to reduce risk there, that's in the stack. That's all integrated. We had an outstanding quarter in displacing our competitors in that space and winning just net new business. We feel really good about that. From a booking to revenue situation, over the last year and a half, if you think about what that number was like in Blue Coat prior to the Symantec integration a year and a half ago, that number is a lot more to the balance sheet, which is really the effect of selling a lot more cloud in the Blue Coat mix.

Operator

Operator

Okay. And our next question is from the line of Shaul Eyal from Oppenheimer. Shaul Eyal - Oppenheimer & Co.: Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. Congrats on the solid set of results. Also, thank you for the added color and transparency on the Consumer on some of the ARPU numbers. Greg, I want to start with bird's-eye view type of question. So I know you mentioned bits and pieces of that during your prepared remarks, but WannaCry hit the tape on May 14, Petya took place during the final week of June. Can you share with us whether you've seen that as a headwind or a tailwind? I think, clearly, in your case, it appears to be a little bit of a tailwind. And secondly, Symantec has a sizable European exposure, yet you showed the solid performance in that region unlike many other security players this quarter specifically. How do you see yourself different from some of the other players within that European arena? Thank you for that.

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

Yes. Let me start with sort of the malware crisis that we had in the quarter. WannaCry, Petya, they were serious things. One of the things that happened here at Symantec was our customers were protected from both of those malware plagues. And I mentioned in my prepared remarks that as of a few days ago, we had blocked over 1 billion attempted infections from that EternalBlue vulnerability and WannaCry. We were out in front of that one. We had coverage in all kinds of pieces of that technology. And that really helped us because some of our competitors didn't fare well in that crisis. We were a good operator for the industry. We shared our information through, I think, what is a very solid alliance that we have the other network security players and other security players through Cyber Threat Alliance and helped the world kind of get around that. I think the fact that WannaCry and Petya didn't get our customers was really a testament to the innovation and R&D that we have put into in our product set over the last few years. SEP 14 was a solid release. It definitely carried a lot of water on that. And also, our threat labs were all over that. You might have seen us on the news really early in that attack. We knew a lot about it and we shared that with all the various enforcement agencies and whatnot. So I think we fared well there. What happened there is, we did definitely saw an uptick in pipeline from some of the very major accounts that were affected by that malware; and that has given us a solid lift in our Enterprise pipeline. Those things are displacements of existing competitors. They take a little while to get tested and deployed. We do hope to see some better outlook in future quarters from what happened there. So that was quite good. Now, moving to Symantec Europe. We're definitely not seeing the same as many others had reported around issues in Europe in our business. I think what's happening there is we have our Integrated Cyber Defense offering. So we're in accounts. We've taken some share. We've got a very powerful story for kind of the higher end of the market, and that is something that is carrying the water for us. And then, I think also in the middle market, our effectiveness around some of this malware was great. And so, if you think about that, we have a very powerful opportunity just mining in the installed base, which is really helping us out as we're bringing a differentiated value proposition to point vendors.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from the line of Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley. Keith Eric Weiss - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Thank you, guys, for taking the questions. I wanted to dig in a little bit on the sales force reorg. It was a pretty significant change that you made in the overall organization. Can you kind of give us sort of a mark-to-market on where are we in terms of implementing those changes? I guess, the overall question, are we out of the woods in terms of feeling comfortable that there's not going to be any further disruption in that business?

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

Yes. So, Keith, thanks for that question. That's a good one. So we did enter, the beginning of Q1, with a completely aligned sales force. And summary is, it worked, as you can see in the results. And that was where had truly – if you think about it as a capacity at sort of the named account layer, we have had two people in the same account. We started April with having realigned that entire sales force to a few accounts each. And so, that give us a massive capacity expansion in the (53:17) of the market. As you know, from the Financial Analyst Day and other remarks, we had put more emphasis on the back half of FY 2018. We expect that capacity to come into play later in the year and then into FY 2018 and 2019. In addition to that, we integrated a bunch of information systems that we manage the sales force with that went live in the quarter. They held up. And so, we do think that we are underway in a good place on that sales force alignment. We have some more to go in terms of systems and integration and making sure we've got all the pieces right. So I want to give us a health check that that transformation is in a good place. Just a little bit to go in the next couple quarters. And so, we're keeping a real close eye on it. The other thing I'd just like to mention is attrition is extremely low in our sales force, which is always a test of whether or not our folks think we're set up for success in the future. So that was a big change. We were definitely very focused on it as a management team and a sales execution team in Enterprise, and we've got through it pretty well. Keith Eric Weiss - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Got it, and maybe one follow-up for Nick. The $0.20 number you gave for potential EPS impact in FY 2018 from a full year view, just so we're clear, is that just sort of the impact from the operating income that's going to come out of the equation? Or does that also include the potential sort of benefit from sort of the other income? Does it have anything in there for debt repurchases on that side of your ledger?

Nicholas R. Noviello - Symantec Corp.

Management

Yes. Good question, Keith. So what we're trying to do for FY 2018 is give you the perspective full-year basis of the business. So the $350 million of the business we talked about in Website Security plus the related TKI assets gets you to the $400 million level. It's the operating income associated with that. It is also a set of the stranded costs. There are some puts and takes otherwise for 2018, but we really have to get to close, which is why I was really pointing at FY 2019 on the business side of the fence. We will expect that there is a result from the JV side of the fence that will show up in other income, though us talking about or guiding to any of that at this point in time is a little premature. So we want to wait until we get to closure and get past close, where we will update with certainty the FY 2018 guidance for you and then be able to roll through those things for FY 2019 for you as well. But the big chunks here are, you've got the business itself. And I walked through the operating income associated with the business, the $400 million issued business, and then the stranded costs which are a good $50 million in stranded costs. And the stranded costs, once we get to FY 2019 and we mostly get out of the transition services arrangements and some of those could go longer. That's when we'll be able to really be thoughtful about going after those stranded costs, which will be beneficial to the EPS side.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from the line of Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs. Gabriela Borges - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Great. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe for Greg on the M&A strategy from here. Could you elaborate a little on the process to select Skycure and Fireglass and some of the key inputs that went into your discussion on valuation? And going forward, what are the areas where you think you can still build up the technology? And is there is also a scenario where you would consider divesting other pieces of the portfolio that may not be core to that cloud security umbrella?

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

So I think, yeah, we are super excited about both Fireglass and Skycure. And these things they stand on their own. Every piece of M&A we do has got a certain case. It's our individual sort of details. So we really like the Fireglass acquisition, because as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, it allows us to isolate potentially risky stuff that's coming from e-mail consumption and also coming from consumption of the web. What that means is, your endpoint is no longer running at risky stuff, its running isolated off in the network somewhere, but the user doesn't really know that that's happening. So it looks like exactly the same user experience without exposing that endpoint to a lot of the risks of that kind of content consumption from the Internet. That is something that is right alongside our endpoint franchise and also our network franchise from the ProxySG franchise, and we can quickly ramp that into the market. And so, we were extremely excited about that. Results at the (58:21) of the security operations center is we're hearing from customers that have been doing this kind of thing, numbers that are a reduction in SOC events that are in very high numbers can't be ignored. And we have run this past a large number of our customers and they're very excited about it. Moving to Skycure, Skycure brings technology to the table that we've been looking for in our consumer and in our SEP franchise. It brings us, in the iOS context, on the Apple phones and iPads and whatnot from, I would say, not number one in the industry, to definitely being right up the top of the industry around effectiveness on iOS and mobile. But even more importantly, Skycure brings a technology approach to malware detection…

Operator

Operator

And our next...

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

I think we have time for one more question. Then we've got to run. Go ahead.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Andrew Nowinski from Piper Jaffray. Andrew James Nowinski - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. Nice quarter, guys. So I just want to ask a question on the Consumer segment. So Consumer revenue exceeded the high end of your guidance. I know LifeLock was above expectations. But can you give us any more color on the growth rates or demand trends you saw for both Norton and LifeLock in Q1? And then, I have a follow-up.

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

Yes. Nick, do you want to take that one or – you go ahead, yeah.

Nicholas R. Noviello - Symantec Corp.

Management

Okay. I think the first thing I'll say is – and we tried to make sure it was in the script – we're seeing a big difference from a business that's growing 1% in the first quarter this year from one a year ago that was shrinking 8%. So that's, number one, something we feel really good about. And the teams on the Consumer side deserve a lot of credit for making a lot of progress. We saw benefit on both the Norton side and LifeLock side. We're bringing together a set of things now and we're rolling out those Digital Safety bundles. We're rolling out Norton Core. There's a lot of positive energy. I think what you also saw is on the operating margin side some recognition of synergies early, which we also feel good about. So all in all, a very different picture than a year ago. Integration is, I would say, almost ahead of schedule in places. So that's good as well.

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

And I also just would like to comment on the integration. I think that the shot in the arm that Symantec gets from an organization like LifeLock that bring a lot of talent, a lot of passion to the business, that's huge shout out for those guys in the company that are really making a difference and our Norton team. Norton performed extremely well. That WannaCry and Petya outbreak, our Norton customers were protected from that. I think that that part of the business is absolutely on the front foot morale-wise making a difference. And we are very confident that that acquisition of LifeLock is going to do very well. Andrew James Nowinski - Piper Jaffray & Co.: That's great. And then I think you mentioned that you're going to start cross-selling the LifeLock product this quarter into the Norton installed base. Do you intend on adjusting the pricing of the bundled products and what's your estimate for the number of Norton customers you think you can cross-sell that LifeLock into?

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

We think that that percentage of people that are potential to purchase a combined bundle, we'll call it Digital Safety concepts, are very high. Pricing on each of the different cohorts and the different packaged bundles is a pretty detailed discussion. There's a lot going on there, and we have an excellent set of folks that are working through that and we run a lot of surveys and test. But we are bringing out combined bundles this quarter, as we mentioned in our prepared remarks, and we look forward to that being well accepted.

Gregory S. Clark - Symantec Corp.

Management

So with that, I think we need to end the call, folks. Really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening to us today. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for participating in today's Q1 2018 fiscal earnings call. You may now disconnect.