Vincent Pilette
Analyst · Fatima Boolani from UBS. Please go ahead
Thanks Soohwan, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Since we closed the sales of the enterprise business, we committed to return to customer growth, drive sustainable revenue growth, completed overhaul of the cost structure and deliver a healthy profit. In just our second full quarter at NortonLifeLock, our first quarter of fiscal year 2021, we delivered better-than-expected results with strong reported billings growth of 9%, revenue growth of 4%, and EPS growth of 48% year-over-year. As we created NortonLifeLock, we believe in the potential of the business solely focused on building personal cyber safety for consumers. We initially set our sights on sustainably and meaningfully growing customer count and delivering revenue growth in the mid single-digits. In Q1, we delivered both sequential and year-over-year 400,000 net new customers a first since 2014. Revenue growth was 4% meeting the long-term objective of mid single-digit in just our second full quarter. At the end of June, we eliminated 95% of the stranded cost, and we expect to be done this month, one quarter ahead of plan. In Q1, included stranded, we reached 47% operating margin for the company, up 15 points year-over-year and expect to reach 50% by September, another one of our commitment. If you exclude the stranded cost, the consumer business has been running above 51% better than our operating margin target of 50%. Our Q1 EPS was $0.31, which included a $0.04 impact from stranded cost and is up $0.10 year-over-year. By the end of this fiscal year, we expect to run the business at a target of $1.50 annualized EPS, which can be achieved by virtue of mid single-digit revenue growth, operating margin above 50% or utilizing our remaining 600 million share buyback program or some combination of any or all of them. Finally, we projected to run the company at 900 million annualized free cash flow after the transition period. While we have been and are running at that level in Q1 excluding cash spend on stranded cost. We are trucking for those levels to be reflected in our cash flow statement, once our financials are clean of stranded cost in the second half of this fiscal year. As we demonstrated the operational discipline with which we want to continue to operate, we made it a priority to build out our post-transition leadership team. This quarter we welcomed new and accomplished leaders with deep experience in consumer technology. Natalie, who you will hear from in a minute brings operational skills with a growth mindset. Overall, we added seasoned leaders from very successful consumer technology companies. These leaders are joining us for a mission to bring cyber safety to every consumer around the world. We believe the company is uniquely positioned to seize the tremendous growth opportunity. Our initial level to restart the growth was to increase our marketing spend, which as you know is our main way to reach new consumers and educate them on the benefits of our solutions. As we maintain a consistent messaging level in the market, we saw increased efficacy. Our overall customer acquisition cost continue to benefit not just from lower ad rates related to COVID, but also from our own initiatives to shift marketing spend to new digital channels including search, social media, and digital video. In terms of reach despite the global strength of the Norton brand, we had not invested in international marketing in recent years. We reversed that in Q3 fiscal year '20 and we are beginning to see the results from those investments. The strategic shift in our marketing efforts have broadened our reach and we are making steady progress in reaching younger and international customer cohorts. As of the end of Q1, we count 20.6 million customers who buy our products or services directly through our e-commerce platform. This represents an increase in net customer by 379,000 sequentially and 416,000 year-over-year. Our Q1 growth was broad based with growth across the board, the portfolio, and the geographies. We grew both in the U.S. and internationally across all regions. The increase in international customer count outpace that in the U.S. another first in a long time here. Supported by trends like work from home, virtual meetings, and online shopping and transacting, we saw both our security and identity product categories grow sequentially and year-over-year another first in a very long time. Our average revenue per user or ARPU remained strong at $9.03 per month even as we recorded strong net additions. Our retention remained very strong as well at around 85% suggesting that customers recognize the value and stay with us for long time. In addition to our direct business, which accounts for about 90% of our revenue, we also have a partner organization developing new ways of distributing our offering to individuals. In Q1, we grew our indirect revenue 11% year-over-year. In retail, our performance in Amazon and other e-tailers offset the weakness from traditional stores being shut down or operating with limited hours. Our indirect sales also benefited from the strong performance of employee benefit programs, our fastest growing partner channel. We are seeing strong growth from new employee acquisitions and greater participation within existing employers. Furthermore, while we are still in the early stages, I'm also pleased to report progress in our long-term partnerships with organizations like TELUS and ARP. Also it takes time to develop and ramp up new relationships. We believe in the long-term potential to expand our reach and continue to grow. Growing through new marketing channels and various forms of partnerships and consistently messaging our value proposition to them is extremely important. Our new Chief Commercial Officer, Robert Clarkson has significant experience building out global partners and platforms over his tenure at PayPal. His passion is around consistently delivering the customer experience throughout the customer journey and lifetime. That is the reason we regrouped our direct, indirect and renewal sales organization under his leadership. Our vision is to keep people around the world cyber safe. We believe it is our responsibility to provide everyone with innovative products and solutions to protect and control the digital lives. That vision was the impetus for creating the Norton 360 integrated platform and we believe customers are starting to see it. The vast majority of new customers are now coming directly to Norton 360. And as of the end of Q1 over 40% of our installed base was on Norton 360 up from approximately 25% at the end of Q4. These penetration is important as it enables us to offer comprehensive cyber safety and the one common experience to seamlessly upgrade our platform with new features like Home Title Protection and to increase the engagement and with the retention of our customers. Some of our platform features might continue to be offered as standalone products where it makes sense for our customers and help accelerate the growth of our company. Last quarter, we talked about SurfEasy VPN, as an example of a standalone product. This quarter I want to share a new example that demonstrates how we constantly are looking at new ways to protect people and the highly dynamic digitalize. Some customer want help limiting the public availability of the own personal data. Serve the web and you will likely see that a lot of your personal information that you may not want out there is readily available such as name, age, addresses phone numbers. Privacy Monitor, which is available as a feature with Norton 360 with LifeLock stands for personally identifiable information or PII accessible on the most popular people search websites. But taking control of this data is tedious at best and often too complex. Recognizing this consumer need, we developed and better tested a product called Privacy Monitor assistant. It's a white glove service where our agents assisted by software find and delete all your PII on this data broker website. Wouldn't you pay for a reasonable fee to secure your personal information. It's still early, but we have seen positive response so far, and we think this capability has tremendous value for our customers. This is a good example of how we can continue to fulfill our vision by protecting our customers and enhancing the control they have over the digital lives. It's also a good example of how our service capability combined with software can differentiate us from competitors. We have a large customer base that constantly uses our service and provide us with insights we can turn into new features or products. Growing through innovative products and solution is key to fulfill our mission. That is why we have put product management and R&D under our new Chief Product Officer, Gagan Singh. Gagan has a passion for technology and in particular how artificial intelligence and machine learning can help build cutting-edge product. He was particularly interested in our internal research team and their capabilities. This June our research team released Botsight, which can be downloaded for free as a browser extension or iOS app in the targeted efforts to enable people to identify this information on the Twitter feeds. Botsight technology is based on machine learning and leading-edge algorithm. It looks at over 20 different distinguishing features such as age of the account and tweet frequency to detect twitter bots and show them directly on feeds in real time. We are now looking to advance this technology and extend this capability to other use cases and threats. Before I pass it to Natalie let me take a minute to step back and talk about our vision to deliver cyber safety to every person across the globe. Even before the world was starting to turmoil our mission was relevant as the digital world is taking over how we work, learn, shop and basically live our lives. Now with COVID-19 our mission is more important than ever. Clearly, this pandemic has accelerated people's reliance on technology and we are seeing the impact of that increased activity online to the number and variety of attacks on consumers. Attackers have elevated the techniques on stealing information, disrupting sites and cascading malware through phishing attacks, camouflage the tracing apps, social engineering portraying COVID vaccines and poisoned website eliminating stimulus benefits. All resulting in an increased need for security, identity protection and restoration and privacy solutions. These are just a few of examples of the many threats facing us now, that's more of our everyday activities are done digitally. So once there is a lot of uncertainty at the macro level, one thing is certain, there is a real need for cyber safety for individuals, families and homes through innovative products and expanding distribution channels. Our mission is to meet that need and provide cyber safety to everyone. And with that let me pass it to Natalie to give you more details on our Q1 financials.