Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Fiscal 1Q '21 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Soohwan Kim, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. I'm pleased to welcome you to our call to discuss our first quarter fiscal '21 earnings results. We posted the earnings materials and slides to our Investor Relations events webpage. Speakers on today's call are Vincent Pilette, NortonLifeLock's Chief Executive Officer; Natalie Derse, Chief Financial Officer. This call will be available for replay via webcast on our website. I'd like to remind everyone that all references to final metrics are non-GAAP, unless otherwise stated. Please refer to the supplemental materials posted on the Investor Relations website for further definitions of our non-GAAP metrics. Please note non-GAAP financial measures referenced during this call are reconciled to their comparable GAAP financial measures 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 provide meaningful supplemental information regarding our operating performance for reasons discussed below. Our management team uses these non-GAAP financial measures in assessing our operating results as well as when planning and forecasting future periods. We believe our non-GAAP financial measures also facilitate comparisons of our performance to prior periods and that investors benefit from understanding our non-GAAP financial measures. Non-GAAP financial measures are supplemental and should not be considered as a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Today's call contains forward-looking statements based on conditions we currently see. 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. In particular, our statements regarding the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on our business and industry, our sale of our Enterprise Security assets to Broadcom, any anticipated benefits from such sale and cost reductions associated with this transaction are subject to a variety of risks. Please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release for more information. You will also find a detailed discussion of our risk factors in our filings with the SEC and in particular, our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 3rd, 2020 and recently filed quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Let me now turn the call over to Vincent.

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…

Thanks Vincent. Before I dive into our results, let me first say how excited I am to join NortonLifeLock. I'm inspired by our mission to bring cyber safety to consumers worldwide and I'm energized to help drive that mission in my new role. Over the course of my career I've chosen to join companies where the mission and the brand are focused on helping people in their everyday lives. From GE to Black & Decker to eBay and now NortonLifeLock albeit leaders in different industries. These brands were all built on establishing trust with and delivering intrinsic value to their customers. Here at NortonLifeLock we must continue to deliver on our commitment to keeping consumer safe and then control their digital lives. This commitment combined with our incredible business model, an opportunity to drive accelerating growth is what drew me to NortonLifeLock. I look forward to working with our team to achieve our strategic aspirations. Now let me share our Q1 performance focusing on non-GAAP results. Q1 revenue was better-than-expected at $614 million, up 4% year-over-year. Q1 reported billings was up 9% year-over-year with the two point positive impact from FX in our ending contract liability balance. Billings growth was supported by customer -- growth in customer count increasing approximately 400,000 both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. This was our third consecutive quarter of net customer adds and our first quarter of year-over-year growth in customer count in over five years. Diluted EPS was $0.31, up 48% year-over-year and exceeded our guidance range driven by strong execution on top line growth and removal of stranded cost. For the quarter total company operating margin from continuing operations was 47% burdened by approximately $30 million of stranded costs. Therefore excluding stranded costs, the business is operating at over 51% operating margin with headcount below…

Thanks Natalie. In the last eight months, we have turned NortonLifeLock into a growing leader with distinct competitive advantages. We have eliminated stranded costs. We have build a consumer-centric leadership team. We have reinvested into our go-to market model and reinvigorated our product development team. I'm proud to say we have delivered on all of our initial commitments, but as we have increased our execution capabilities, our ambitions have also grown where our sight set on our mission. Consumers are beset by constantly evolving cyber threats. Our current platform is just scratching the surface of what can be done and we now singularly focused on innovating on our consumer cyber safety vision. We have a large engaged customer base, terrific technology capabilities, and innovation pipeline and significant financial resources. Combined these things with recurring revenue high margins and significant cash flow and you can see why I'm super optimistic about our future and long-term growth potential. And with that we are now happy to take your questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Keith Weiss.

The headline number from my perspective, of course, is almost 400,000, new subscribers added to the platform. That's the biggest sequential increase that we've seen in quite some time. And so maybe to start out, can you help us understand to certain extent, is this just like the programmatic stuff you guys put into place on the marketing side of the equation and particularly spending to international or is this kind of like a delayed reaction from work from home because you guys would see it a little bit later than kind of other people because you don't do sort of the bundling with OEMs. So it's more about getting sort of more PCs out there and you guys do your marketing against them. If you could help us understand kind of where that screen came from and how much of it do you guys think is going to be durable on a go-forward basis in terms of just adding customers to the platform?

Yes, and as I do that, we have to go back to where we are coming from, right. When we broke out and decided to focus slowly on the consumer business how tedious has been that cyber safety will become more and more important for everyone as we move more and more of our activities online. And cyber safety doesn't just mean security, security for your device, security for you data. It also means privacy, protecting your identity, and including services to restore when it can't be prevented. So it's a overall rollout we know we have -- we are building in the long-term. There are a lot of applications and fields that we still need to fill in that portfolio and build up the category. So we believe the thesis if you want is long structural one. So that's number one. Number two is the division at the time under Symantec had not invested in marketing as we discussed in the past and we re-accelerated marketing as a way to communicate our message to consumers. We raised our marketing envelope by $100 million on an annual basis. We also said that the efficacy of that marketing investment, if you want, has to show up over time as we consistently deliver and spend in market. And then we started to tweak that marketing investment, moving to new channels of marketing, moving to new regions and starting to market in Europe, for example, where we had not marketed in the past. So those are our contributors, if you want, for the return to growth. And we said, hey, the most important is product. In April '19 we launched the first version of Norton 360 an integrated platform addressing four pillars security, privacy, identity protection and restoration and the entire family and homes if you want and we still are in the process of rolling that out. I believe it's very attractive for consumer to adopt that overall umbrella for membership fee having access to all of those areas and having a peace of mind. And then the last one is then COVID-19 happened and definitely it change the way people operate online. Is it a peak change or is it a step function. I don't know but we believe in the long-term view of building up our portfolio and creating awareness to drive growth.

And then and the underutilized asset sales. Can you just remind me what the like the remaining I guess the 600 million is in terms of the expected proceeds like what are those assets left to be sold?

Yes, Keith. This is Natalie, I'll take that one. We have few assets held for sale on our balance sheet including the three campuses that we have here in Mountain View as well as one in Dublin. We have active discussions with interested parties and albeit it's very hard to predict the timing of the sales especially given current conditions. Please note we are focused on striking the right balance between value, price and timing of those sales.

And then on the operating side of the equation. How should we think about the pace of hiring for you guys through FY'21 like where are you guys looking to sort of making investments where should we expect to see hiring and any kind of indications on the pace would be great?

Yes. Absolutely. So before the pace, I want to say, we put a business model out there and we say, hey, we're going to grow at mid single-digit and operate the business at 50% operating margin and I don't have to remind you that eight months ago I think the majority of people were doubters. We delivered on that business model at least a quarter ahead of plan. I think we've proven we can operate at these levels. We reduced the headcount from the Symantec company 12,000 people, today where our business model should be around 2500. And for the first time in a long time, we shifted from restructuring to hiring talent where it makes sense. And I can tell you, it's definitely energizing for the entire company to talk about hiring the right talent, the right skill set. We are hiring engineers in Dublin where we are trying to create a prototype over there and we are hiring in threat analytics. So we definitely are building up the functions. We have a few new leaders. I mentioned Gagan and his passion around machine learning. Robert came in and has a passion around the customer life cycle. Both of them are coming up with proposal for investment to accelerate the growth. And I can tell you I'm super happy to have Natalie here. So I found my match in term of CFO skill set and she and I will partner trying to prioritize those investment to accelerate our performance.

And your next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani from UBS. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking the questions, and welcome Natalie look forward to working with you. Maybe just to start if I can drill in onto the strength on the indirect side. You specifically called out strength from the employee benefits vertical. I'm wondering what were some of the steps you took to actually revitalize that channel and what investments or mechanisms or programs you have in place to sort of have this continue to sustainably help drive subscriber growth and then I have a couple of follow-ups.

Yes. No, absolutely. So first of all the employee benefit program has been a grower channel for us or growing channel for us for a few quarters. This quarter it was very strong performance that offset the physical retail weakness of course. The overall proposal I think is the number activity. Norton 360 overall that offers with your identity protection also the security element is a big one. Today if you take employee benefit right at a very macro level. The U.S. company spent 37 billion on employee benefits. There 5.6 million employers and there are programs address a few thousand. So we want to bring on new and unique solutions to more employers and at a very basic level after obviously upgrading the platform, it's really about sales and sales coverage. So you'll see us continue in that area.

And then just on the subscriber count growth both sequentially. I mean year-over-year. I wanted to get a better understanding of the demographic in terms of the age potentially socioeconomic backdrop and how that factors into your retention rate assumptions as we move forward provided that a lot of these more subs are very new to the Norton family. So I just wanted to get a better understanding of this profile of the new subscriber that's coming into the Norton ecosystem relative to the subscribers you had in the past outside some of the comments you made with strength from the international front and that's it from me. Thank you.

No, absolutely. So we said it now for a few quarters. Our number one objective was to return the company to growth and the number one priority in our metrics was to attract more customers, so they can expand the cyber safety program. Moving into new demographics in term of age if you want to pyramid as well as new geographies was an important objective. As you know we are marketing in Europe, we partner with TELUS in Canada and then some of demography and reaching out. We are moving from traditional form of marketing into new reform social media digital videos. I was looking obviously quarter in quarter out, you cannot always map it. But I was looking at the long time two years trends. If you look at 2018, our Gen X plus baby boomers were over 70% of our total customers. Today that group is around 55% and the rest into newer cohorts. So we'll continue in that trend we'll continue with that effort. We launched a gaming addition of Norton 360 and as we develop programs we are going to have in mind this needs to reach out to all cohorts.

And your next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions here. Vincent, maybe first for you. I think you've touched on this in a couple of other questions. But can we just drill into subscriber acquisition outside the U.S.. Just a little bit more what markets are doing well and do you typically lead internationally with Norton over the LifeLock over the bundle just a little bit more meat on the bone in terms of what's working internationally?

Yes, we're still refining our program, but I would say over the last couple of quarters. Specific last quarter mature countries in Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand in Europe, Germany, France, U.K. where high performance for us. We definitely pushing one message when it's come to marketing awareness, and it's under Norton 360. The ability and unique competitive advantage to offer a cyber safety blanket full consumers is our main value prop. This is our way to build that vision to ensure that everyone can get that digital lives pace. There are some cases where we lead with specific standalone products and that's market specific. We can go into more details, but overall we charge was Norton 360.

And maybe my follow-up for you, Vincent. I guess the question is, how are you thinking about market share in both the anti-virus and sort of identity protection parts of the business separately or together how you want to talk about it. And more importantly, do you feel like the changes that we're making at the company here are sort of sustainable in terms of market share.

Yes. So I'm not upset by market share especially because today market the way they are defined are by pillars, you have the security traditional security pillar then you have the identity pillar, you have still forming once waste privacy. Privacy is the new frontier of security or own standalone set of market. Frankly, we really working, as we said about acquiring new customers and delighting those that we have and you've seen that we've done somewhat of a good job with our retention of 85%, but we continue to improve there and that's our major focus. If we continue to focus on innovation building up the portfolio and trying to build that cyber safety vision. I think that's the ways we want to run.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard from Citi. Please go ahead.

Hi, Vincent, and good to talk to you for the first time here Natalie. On the international, can you help us understand your marketing effectiveness. How you're -- what you're seeing in terms of measurement and marketing effectiveness internationally versus domestically. In other words I assume it still lags. How much does that lag relative to what the sort of effective as you've seen in the U.S.?

I think if you're interested in FP&A role, we have a job for you. You're totally, right, you've seen it. We first invested in the U.S., we mature CAG. We had good return. We're now moving from traditional forms to digital forms are playing out ahead. Two quarters ago, we started to do international, international we started directly more digital and social media, leading the charge with Norton 360 as I mentioned. We're still building up new identity feature and privacy features and dark web monitoring being expanding into new countries in Asia next quarter into Europe. So we definitely are behind the U.S., but it's faster growing and we are very focused on building up that international presence. I think it's the huge opportunity for us moving forward.

And how are you thinking about from a higher level, you've achieved the goal. I mean as you noticed earlier in terms of getting to the, you know, the mid single-digit growth at 50% margin. How are you thinking about the next step? Is it to push harder on the growth? Is it to preserve that margin? Is that's the optimal sort of marginal cost? I just curious how you're thinking about just philosophically the next step.

So you have a new leadership team for them achieving mid single-digit was the entry point, okay. What's next. Where can we go? What do we do? This vision is fantastic and full of opportunity. And so we discussed and we agreed that accelerating the growth and making our solution more complete and available to more consumers is our number one mission. Now we are running the consumer business slightly above the current operating margin target. I'm not going to change it. So we still intend to run the business at 50% and some quarter we'll find operational efficiencies. We don't have an immediate reaction to spend it, but we have plenty of new ideas to fund to try to accelerate the growth if we're able and I think we will be in the long-term to accelerate that growth. I would say growing EPS faster than revenues is our segment metric. We won't be bounded by a ratio of percentage, it's really about accelerating the top line growing and growing EPS faster than revenue.

And your next question comes from the line Yi Fu Lee from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the strong results. Welcome Natalie and hope everybody is safe. I guess my question just a follow-up from the last question. In terms of the growth in the international data presence. I understand the last couple of quarters you invested in TELUS. I was wondering which market whether is it EMEA, APAC, Latin America would you say is the most critical for NortonLifeLock to invest at this juncture.

Well, I think, we are global leaders. I have to invest in developing the portfolio and developing the marketing and sales channel. I have to invest indirect digital media and building up on the opportunity in the employee programs and with Natalie's help and I can tell you, she has a growth mindset, but very analytical. So when you use data to prioritize those investments. Canada is a huge opportunity penetrating the identity space internationally where digital identity and I would say [technical difficulty] are growing very fast all huge opportunity for us.

And then maybe one more follow-up, would it be Natalie or Vincent in terms of I understand the restructuring process. Again it's really ahead our plan and ahead of target. If you were to spend your investment dollars in the future in terms of other M&A or the investments you want to add to the large portfolio where would the dollar be spent on this areas?

Sure. I'll give you main target. Look, we've earned the credibility of looking at also growth inorganically or organically. So our process really start with the portfolio and the market to build up cyber safety. What are the gaps in the other applications we can build on. And then we have real-time assessment on organic capabilities or time to market needs versus what already exists, whether it's a prototype of product or fully developed business. And then at the end of the day all matches it becomes a financial decisions. I think we've earned the credibility. We have the operational chart on the whole management team, leadership team and company including the Board is focused on growth from all sites.

[Operator Instructions] And I have no further questions at this time in queue. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.