Earnings Labs

Gen Digital Inc. (GEN)

Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Tue, May 6, 2025

$19.29

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. My name is Tamiya and I will be your conference operator today. Today's call is being recorded and all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. At this time for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Jason Starr, Head of Investor Relations.

Jason Starr

Management

Thanks, Tamiya, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Gen's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Vincent Pilette, CEO, and Natalie Derse, CFO. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this call posted on the Investor Relations website along with our slides and press release. I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, all references to the financial metrics are non-GAAP and all growth rates are year-over-year unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our press release and earnings presentation, both of which are available on our IR website at investor.gendigital.com. We encourage investors to monitor this website as we routinely post investor-oriented information such as news and events and financial filings. Today's call contains statements regarding our business, financial performance, and operations, including the impact on our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Those statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions, and expectations as of today's date, May 6, 2025. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statements in our press release and the risk factors in our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. And now I'll turn the call over to Vincent.

Vincent Pilette

Management

Thanks, Jason, and good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today as we share our Q4 results, review our fiscal year 2025 performance, and share our plans for the upcoming year. Fiscal 2025 was a transformative year for Gen, and our results demonstrate the significant progress we have made in driving accelerated growth in a profitable manner. We continued to execute on our strategy to delivering the best cyber safety solutions to our customers, investing to drive innovation across our portfolio, and growing our customer base, all while maintaining strong financial discipline. Q4 marks another quarter of mid-single digit top-line growth at 5%, a 23rd consecutive quarter of growth, another quarter of customer account growth, and double-digit growth in earnings. Our reliable and consistent executions may seem easy, but it is not, and I'm very proud of our team for their drive to protect our customers with passion and care every day. Natalie will walk you through the details of Q4 in a moment, but I would like to first summarize our fiscal 2025 financial results and further expand on our operating plans for this coming fiscal year. In fiscal 2025, total bookings was a record $4 billion, up 4% year-over-year, with revenue above the high end of our annual guidance. The growth was broad-based, driven across our core cyber safety offerings, security and privacy, as well as in identity theft protection, a market-leading trust-based solution. Our accelerating top-line growth was underpinned by a record non-GAAP operating margin of 58.4%, reflecting a strong cost control and continued operational efficiencies, including leveraging AI in and for our product portfolio. Non-GAAP EPS of $2.22 was also a record at 15% year-over-year and at the high end of our annual guidance. To round out these strong results,…

Natalie Derse

Management

Thank you, Vincent, and hello everyone. It's a very exciting time for Gen. We've made significant progress in transforming our business over the past five years and now we are thrilled to welcome the MoneyLion team into our portfolio. With the financial wellness capabilities gained through this acquisition, we're extending our momentum in the fiscal year 2026. For today's call, I will walk through our full year fiscal 2025 results, followed by our Q4 results, and share our outlook for Q1 and fiscal year 2026. I will focus on non-GAAP financials and year-over-year growth rates unless otherwise stated. Fiscal year 2025 was a defining year for Gen as we posted our sixth straight year of growth while continually delivering on our guidance commitments and now positioning ourselves for further acceleration with our acquisition of MoneyLion. Our results demonstrate the significant progress we're making across the five growth levers that we shared in our 2023 Analyst Day, resulting in broad-based growth across our brands, regions, and expanding product portfolio. Total bookings for the year were $4 billion of 4% in both constant currency and cyber safety and up 3% in USD. We finished with $3.935 billion in total revenue, also growing 4% in USD and constant currency. Operating income was $2.3 billion and operating margin was 58.4%. Our robust revenue growth combined with our operating discipline and capital allocation enabled us to deliver $2.22 in full-year EPS at the high end of our guidance and up 14% year-over-year as reported and up 15% in constant currency. Turning to Q4 performance, Q4 was a record quarter, reflecting our 23rd consecutive quarter of growth with financial results at or above the high end of our guidance. Q4 bookings was $1.08 billion, up 5% in constant currency. Total Q4 revenue exceeded the billion-dollar hurdle…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. The first comes from Andrew Nowinski with Wells Fargo.

Andrew Nowinski

Analyst

Congrats on those solid results. I really like the way you segmented the business between cyber safety and the trust-based solutions. Certainly makes a lot of sense putting that LifeLock in the trust-based segment. So I guess my question is, my first one would be on guidance. It looks roughly like your guidance for fiscal 26, as soon as the MoneyLion growth can kind of stay in that 29% to 30% range that they delivered this last fiscal year. How much visibility do you have in that segment relative to your cyber safety platform?

Vincent Pilette

Management

Well, maybe I'll take that one from [indiscernible]. I thought you wanted to complement. So you're right that the guidance is basically based on what we had said in the past, which is our cyber safety all-in before MoneyLion line has a growth potential about mid-single-digit. And we delivered Q4 exiting at 5%, fully at 4%. You have a similar momentum and a similar trend if you want going into fiscal year 26. When we combine MoneyLion, MoneyLion grew at around 24%, 25% in the last calendar year. There will be a few shifts here. So a few things to keep in mind in your guidance as we closed the business at the end of April, so you don't have a full year. And then while we maintain the current momentum in the MoneyLion business, we really are focusing on, A, cross-selling into our install base, building a branded version of our cyber safety but financial wellness feature using the MoneyLion architecture. And then secondly, transforming the business from a pure transactional revenue engine today to something that is moving over the years towards a subscription business. And so you have those two combination of trends going into the view. And so when you combine it all in, it gives the guidance that it gave you a 6% to 8% pro forma.

Andrew Nowinski

Analyst

Got it. Thank you. And then maybe a question on capital allocation. I guess, how are you thinking about sharing purchases this year while you're balancing the dividend and driving down the net leverage ratio?

Natalie Derse

Management

Yes, thanks for the question. We'll get right back to it. The last couple of quarters, we've been on pause because of the pending acquisition activity. So we couldn't really get out there. We very much look forward to getting back into a balanced capital allocation application or allocation. And we'll do that with a mixed bag of accelerated debt paydown as well as opportunistic share buyback given the different factors that we use to make those decisions. We're high cash flow generation. Q2, keep in mind, we do have to have that elevated level in Q2 of tax payments. But outside of that, very much looking forward to leveraging the cash flow generation that we will build and then allocating in a disciplined way. In terms of the balance and how we'll decide, I would just say, very much going to continue a balanced approach. You see the balanced approach we've had the last couple of years between opportunistic share buyback and accelerated debt paydown. And our plan is to continue that playbook as we look forward.

Operator

Operator

The following comes from the Saket Kalia with Barclays.

Saket Kalia

Analyst

Thanks for taking my questions here and congrats on closing MoneyLion.

Vincent Pilette

Management

Yes, thank you.

Saket Kalia

Analyst

Vincent, for sure. Vincent, maybe for you. MoneyLion, and you touched on this in your prepared remarks, MoneyLion really brings a big network of potential customers to cross sell to. And maybe one question around that is, how does that network maybe change the type of potential subscribers that you can go after? Does that make sense?

Vincent Pilette

Management

Yes, it does. And if you don't mind, let me first step back on the strategy, right? So we have a big platform, cyber security, cyber safety platform, and we extend it to almost all aspects of an online, safe and confident digital life. And, as the world, digital world expands, the first need for everyone is to be safe. And so we offer that. And following our consumer demands, we said, okay, now, what do you do in that safe environment? You have your data that are protected, you're empowered and control your data. What else can you do? And obviously, as we discussed, protecting your identity, of course, is next, having a good digital reputation. What do you do with that reputation? You also maximize your financial potential and do best financial decisions. And that's how we entered first organically and now inorganically into financial wellness. And that's how I would look at it. Cyber safety is a foundation and then trust-based solutions on top. So the first view is to use the MoneyLion architecture, the engine they've developed, the PFM features they have to embed that into the solutions and cater for our current 65 million plus customers and cross-sell into that install base. So that's the number one focus. You'll hear more about product and feature launch as we progress to 2026. It does evolve and follow that consumer needs if you want into better financial decision. The second one that it's providing as a benefit is, it gets us the ability to improve MoneyLion itself in terms of offerings. They've been essentially a premium with a transactional revenue stream. As you know, we're very strong into subscription, customer retention, and basically applying the gen overall consumer internet platform skills if you want to the MoneyLion business. And then the third one, which is a bit further down the line is to offer the full life cycle of a cyber safety and financial wellness offering. So think about in the past, we're only offering protection and restoration of your credits monitoring system if you want. And MoneyLion was offering you different banking and investment or lending solutions. And now you're going to have the full spectrum from building new credits to leveraging new credits, to then protecting it and then expanding it. And that full cycle, if you want as a customer move from different cycles of their journey, we will have or we will be the trusted brand, whatever brand you take to follow you in that digital journey. So those three steps would be as we deploy gen over the next few years. And that's why when Natalie said this is a new chapter, we're excited by all those opportunities. I think that truly reflects it.

Saket Kalia

Analyst

Yes, absolutely. That's helpful. Natalie, maybe the follow up for you and kind of related to sort of that big customer base that MoneyLion brings, you've always been very thoughtful just around customer acquisition cost and sort of individual kind of customer economics. How does MoneyLion maybe change that customer acquisition cost or how you think about that equation?

Natalie Derse

Management

Hi Saket. It makes me very, very excited. We just have so much opportunity ahead of us to take the existing MoneyLion customers and that scaling base and that scaling business model, combine it with our growing customer population, our growing ARPU, our growing retention, now bring them together in a synergistic way. And we just have in an environment where financial wellness demand has never been greater. And so now we just have the opportunity to leverage all of the strength in our cyber safety business, combine it with the MoneyLion assets like their proven model and their proven penetration and customer base of the financial wellness tools, their proven AI recommendation engine, and just even further expanding us into customer lives, maybe earlier in their financial journey. And so it just allows us even more breadth and depth, more opportunity, a wider range of portfolio and products to go to market with. And in just such a data driven way with a recommendation engine on top of all of the data that we have for our existing customers, the world's our oyster quite frankly. And so with that will come efficiencies, in terms of the dollars that we can free up to invest in the capacity to drive that growth. Yes, the efficiency should go along with it. We typically say cash is king, here it's volume is king. And so we'll leverage that volume from a margin appreciation or accretion perspective, always trying to free up as much capacity as we can to invest behind that growth. But when you think about the actual tax, we should be seeing efficiencies with that additional expansion.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Tomer Zilberman with Bank of America.

Tomer Zilberman

Analyst · Bank of America.

Hi guys. Appreciate the comment earlier that you said that the business remains resilient despite some macro uncertainty. But I wanted to ask as you look at the remainder of the year, especially in the second half of the calendar year where the tariff pause kind of goes away, are you seeing or what I should say like this, what signs of demand are you seeing that gives you confidence that the business remains durable? And maybe the second part to that question, as we think about MoneyLion, is there any concerns that that could be more macro sensitive versus other parts of your business?

Vincent Pilette

Management

Hey, Tomer. This is Vincent. I'll take that one. And you and I have in October, we did a lot of study around our business, the resilience of our business, the curve during difficult moment, whether it was 2008 or the COVID period. And frankly, with a high level of subscription, a high level of auto renewal. So a business model, if you want, is extremely resilient. In an environment where the threat landscape continues to be as active as ever, we don't see a direct correlation to the overall macro environment. I would not say we're immune, obviously, it serves with it. But the demand is there for, frankly, a cyber safety product that is, in my opinion, very cheap in terms of giving you full confidence to serve in a secure way on the digital world. So from that perspective, we feel confident that we have a good grasp on our business. We exited March on a strong note, as you've seen by our results. But March was actually a stronger month within the quarter. And frankly, April is in line to that. So from that perspective, we feel good. When you add MoneyLion, maybe introduce a little bit more volatility. But again, remember that the number one opportunity in this transaction is to offer those features to our current customers that have asked for more PFM and marketplace features. And I think we feel good about that view. And then, if really the environment gets a bit more tense, frankly, people will need to make even better financial decisions in a tight environment. And I think that's where the MoneyLion offering fits right in that overall view.

Tomer Zilberman

Analyst · Bank of America.

Got it. Thank you. Maybe this is just a quick follow-up. Given your experience maybe in past market downturns, is there anything that you're doing in terms of go-to-market or any marketing programs to kind of get ahead of a weaker macro?

Vincent Pilette

Management

We are a paranoid bunch here on the table. I can tell you that. So we're always looking at, okay, what can we do? What opportunities do we have? And I think when you look at the diversification of our business, whether that is geographical diversification, product and needs that we address diversification, or channels diversification, or marketing channels diversification, we feel really, really well balanced to be able to play and leverage any opportunity we see in the market while we have a very good grasp on our business being a data-driven team.

Natalie Derse

Management

And I just supplement that, complement that with we keep our customer right at the center. And so whether it's using our products as customers, understanding what macro or any kind of economic factors our customers are facing and navigating through. We really challenge ourselves to keep that customer at the center, whether it's through our products, whether it's the way we talk to them, engage with them, or service them, or what they're going through. And we have such a diverse set of product solutions, and now such a wider breadth of solutions that we can go to market to help our customers. That's what we're going to stay committed to. No matter what comes our way, what comes our customers way, we have a way to go to market and figure out ways and solutions and products that can help them through that.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. The next question comes from Roger Boyd with UBS.

Roger Boyd

Analyst · UBS.

And again, congrats on a strong quarter and closing the acquisition. A nice quarter of subscriber ads, and we've gotten a couple of questions from investors around Google AI overviews might impact your business. I'd love to hear about how you're thinking about this potentially impacting your SEO lead Gen strategy and any assumptions you're making around click-through rates or customer acquisition costs or anything on that side of the lead Gen.

Vincent Pilette

Management

Maybe I can take it first. So first of all, we have a very diversified reach to market if you want, and whether it's desktop or online, whether it's on long form or short form marketing, there is a lot of diversification, and we almost play in every dimension that you could think of. Definitely AI is changing the landscape. We have not seen any current immediate change, and it's all about contextual marketing, adapting as you go, and trying to make sure you're right where the context is right. So maybe AI will bring maybe some efficiencies and different ways of doing certain things, but we stay in touch with how the market moves. We're not too worried about it. Actually, it might even be an opportunity.

Roger Boyd

Analyst · UBS.

Good to hear. And then maybe just to circle back to indirect revenue, a really nice acceleration there. Natalie, I know you noted strong traction with employee benefits, but any guardrails for how we should be thinking about indirect growth in your initial outlook for fiscal 26? Anything to keep an eye on in terms of potential revenue timing around open enrollment? And then I think you also brought in a new partnership leader there. Any specific changes they're making or new opportunities that you're thinking about for fiscal '26? Thanks.

Natalie Derse

Management

Yes. Our indirect channel is just to kind of circle around is about 10% share of our revenue. 15% growth for the quarter. Very, very happy to see that. That growth came from broad-based. We've got a lot of channels that make up the indirect revenue. We saw broad-based growth across all of them. The leaders I always try and call out, the bulk of the growth is going to be coming from employee benefits and telcos. They're not the only ones that grew, but those are the heavier contribution to the growth. And that's a pretty consistent growth profile. It's a growth trend that we've seen. The acceleration employee benefits was exactly what we talked about during the script, which was we do see just a change of behavior. We see the investments that we've put into building those pipelines for multi years now, whether it's through our direct sales or it's through the brokers that we use in the employee benefits channel, just the quality and the effectiveness of those sales channels have really built a very, very profitable, very robust pipeline. And we see the fruit coming from those labors. And then from a telco perspective, we just continue to have those strong partnerships, increase the expansion. And with that expansion is coming increased demand. We have a great new sales leader over the overall partner channels. He brings a ton of expertise in the market, a ton of experience. And with any new leader, they have the opportunity and the privilege to have a clear-eyed approach. And so we very much have very high expectations for the indirect channel under his leadership. But keep in mind too, let's go back to AID back in our fiscal year 2023 AID look forward. We said that we wanted to scale a high single digit rate of growth in overall partner. Of course, we're not limiting ourselves to that. We'll take a scaling double digits all day long. But in terms of as we look forward, especially in the next year, we're looking to a sustainable, profitable, high single-digit rate of growth for all our partners.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The final question comes from Dan Bergstrom with RBC.

Dan Bergstrom

Analyst

Hey, it's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking our questions. Congrats on the MoneyLion close. I guess maybe on those two new segments, sounds like we're going to get bookings and operating margins. Are there any other KPIs for those trust-based solutions that we should be thinking about? Anything that maybe MoneyLion brings in that was either maybe disclosed historically or might make sense to disclose from time-to-time?

Vincent Pilette

Management

Let me take that one from a business perspective, and Natalie one supplement she can. But we're very strong making sure we align. How we talk to you about the business is also how we, of course, share the results with our board. It's then how we drive internally and it's how we organize around the consumer needs at the core, core, core. I think that's a super important one. The way we look at our business and the strategy, as I mentioned, is looking at that cyber safety platform as the opportunity to then upgrade your needs to then wanting to manage your identity, your reputation, and all the way to your financial wellness. And that's how we've organized the innovations and the approach all the way to the market communications or marketing and go-to-market activities. And so we'll report in those segments for you to better understand because we see different dynamics and we see different opportunities in those two segments. Operationally, we'll supplement with some KPIs. We're still refining exactly how we're going to position the KPIs. So I'm not sure I want to hit on the core already exactly what we will report, but we will share more at our Q1 results at the end of July, early August, and we'll make sure that every investor understands how we look at the business and how those KPIs support the things. Otherwise, they will be part of the classic KPIs, obviously, that you already probably have in mind on the core business.

Dan Bergstrom

Analyst

That's great. Very helpful. And then the presentation talked to stronger growth here in the U.S. Any thoughts or could you drill down into that stronger domestic growth?

Natalie Derse

Management

I would say, look, we saw broad-based growth across the different product lines and the global markets. So we saw mid-single-digit rate of growth in the U.S. That was propped up by, a couple of quarters ago, we had that NPD breach really brought in a lot of LifeLock awareness, additional LifeLock customers. Those identity offerings and the scaling of the identity offerings, as well as the increase of membership adoption, all is helping to drive the growth in the United States, as well, of course, the membership adoption helping across the world.

Jason Starr

Management

Hey, everyone. Thank you. For this concludes our conference call today. Thank you very much for joining.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation.