Bracken Darrell
Analyst · Loop Capital. Go ahead, please. Your line is open
Thank you, Ben, and thanks all of you for joining us. Logitech delivered another great year with fiscal year 2019 sales and profits up double-digits for the third year in a row. Sales were up 10% and profits were up 23%. Our three growth businesses, and it's kind of fun to call this first one growth business, creativity and productivity, Video Collaboration and Gaming all performed well and will continue to drive growth through this year as well. I'm excited about the secular trends underpinning growth in these large categories. There are three major global trends driving these businesses and they're just a few of the many reasons why we're so excited and where we about being the world’s leading cloud peripherals player. First, the first trend, if you're under 30 or have kids who are, you know that there are only two kinds of calls you make. Audio calls when you're moving and video calls when you're stationary. But when you look at your offices, you will probably see that most rooms are not video enabled. The cloud's changing this by making it accessible, affordable and easy and we're in the very, very early stages as today only a low single-digit percentage of those rooms or video equipped. I believed in the not-so-distant future every single close face will be designed for video and that's why we're so excited about the growth opportunities ahead of us in our Video Collaboration business. Just look at the recent successful IPO of our cloud video partner Zoom. We're ready to outfit all of those cloud video enabled rooms with our best-in-class solutions. The second trend is one that you've heard me talk about time-and-time again. PC game play is destined to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest of sport or pastime, if you protocol it that in the world. It's not just a fad; it's a full blown secular title wave. And like VC the roots of this second massive trend are fueled by the cloud and the social experiences it creates. And the social nature not only drives viral adoption by gamers, it also drives viral viewership and casual gamers. Today more people are watching others play video games in almost any other sporting event, and that viewership is concentrated, concentrated under 30. Imagine as this generation grows up with leading technology in a broad portfolio of peripherals that deliver fantastic gaming experience, we've delivered six consecutive years of double-digit Gaming sales growth. And we're not expecting that secular momentum to slow anytime soon. The third trend is the explosion of content creators. Today more people are watching content created by other people than any time in human history and it's hard to imagine this trend slowing. While we all watch and love big-budget movies like Avengers: Endgame, or shows on Netflix, there's an ever-growing library of content that people are creating and that audiences are watching. The democratization and instant availability of this content is surging, thanks to Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and LinkedIn and others. Content is being created by someone in a bedroom, in a living room, in a dorm room, in an open office, in a Starbucks or outdoors right now, all the time, all over the world. And employee recently told me his five-year-old niece is infatuated with watching this seven-year-old boy named Ryan unbox and play with toys. Here's a little known fact. That seven-year-old boy, YouTube Ryan Show is called Toys Review, and was the highest worldwide earner on YouTube last year, pulling in $22 million according to Forbes. No, I'm not kidding. Content creators edit, stage and format at a desk using a PC, using a keyboard, a mouse, a webcam, and sometimes a microphone. And this is one of the reasons why our PC peripherals business has consistently been growing ever since fiscal year 2015, and frankly we've not been specifically designing for that user. And while new PC shipments may lag or even decline, we expect continued low single-digit growth for this large business going forward. Three big secular trends driving our business. Now let's talk about the track record we built driving into these trends. We did delivered another year of exciting growth in Gaming with fiscal 2019 sales up 33%, gaining market share and improving profitability. Our core PC Gaming Group grew double-digits across all three regions. While ASTRO Gaming expanded our presence into the console headset space and most recently in the console controllers. This offset unexpected decline in our simulation group, mainly racing wheels, since most of the major racing titles were updated in fall 2017. Gaming, in particular the simulation part of the business is seasonal and title-driven. What's most impressive though is that our Gaming business still managed to grow double-digits in Q4 despite being well into the tough Fortnite growth comparisons from last year. That said, growth in ASTRO in fiscal year 2020 will be tough to predict given the unprecedented growth we saw last year. And that's why we expect 15% to 20% growth in total Gaming sales for fiscal year 2020 versus a 33% we just posted. While growth in Gaming will sometimes be more lumpy, especially by product line, we expect the eSports phenomenon to continue to fuel the long-term growth of our Gaming business for many years to come. Video Collaboration sales grew 44% in fiscal year 2019. Sales in this category were practically zero a mere six years ago. Since then, our VC sales have put up a six-year sales at CAGR compound average growth rate of over 50%. While we're looking for VC sales growth of 25% to 30% for this coming year, you can be sure that I'm pushing the team to outperform that. As you heard us say before, we're continuing to grow and invest in our direct sales force. And on top of that, we're also innovating in our product portfolio. Sales of our huddle room MeetUp product more than doubled year-over-year, and we showed at our March Analyst Day, our VC product portfolio can now address both small huddle rooms and all the way up to large conference rooms. What's that mean? It means that our previous average customer hardware price point of around a $1,000 for MeetUp can now potentially go to $2,000 or $3,000, using our new Rally Camera system, all the while expanding our addressable market in those larger rooms. In fact, Rally has shown early signs of success after its initial launch this past quarter. And one of our newest products, the universal meeting rooms control panel tap, has already created a lot of excitement with customers and we'll be shipping shortly, and I strongly encourage you to see the commercial for that. It's incredibly good and funny. It's still early days for companies to adopt lower-cost cloud-based Video Collaboration solutions. And we see years of strong runway ahead of us. PC peripherals sales increased 7% in fiscal year 2019 representing the fourth consecutive year of growth with all three product lines, pointing devices, keyboards and webcams delivering growth. We've demonstrated that as long as we keep innovating for all different use cases, whether you're a creative designer, a social content creator, a student, an investment analyst or somebody else, we can achieve consistent growth. Our MX Vertical has become a hit, and it's not only taking share on the vertical mouse market, but it's also actually dramatically expanding the size of that market. Our China team also developed a slim inexpensive Pebble mouse that's strongly resonated with millennials in China and it’s off to a great start. Staying close to users and using designs to unlock the power of our engineering has been one of our hallmark capabilities in the last five or six years and we're not letting up. Tablet & Other Accessories sales grew for the second straight year, up 20%. While we saw a decline in Q4, this is due to the timing of our introduction of the new Slim Folio to the latest generation of the iPad Pro, which just launched this month. As long as the iPad market remains healthy, we'll continue to introduce new products and drive growth. Mobile Speakers were down 26% for the full-year with Q4 sales up 81%, don't get too excited about our strong Q4 growth. We had a very weak fourth quarter for Mobile Speakers last year. So I wouldn't view this Q4 performance as a trend. And as we have stated before, the overall Mobile Speaker market remains soft and so we've taken measures to better align our investments, our resources, and our channel inventory. But we'll continue to innovate and come out of the new products and experiences. Audio & Wearables sales were up 11% for the year, due largely to our recent acquisition of Blue, which contributed roughly 2 percentage points to our overall growth in 2019. We love Blue and we love the Blue team, which delivered another strong double-digit quarter. Excluding Blue, Audio & Wearables was down single-digits. We remain excited about the opportunities in the Wireless Earbud market. Jaybird is taking a disciplined approach to carving out its own unique niche, building out great products targeted at athletes. Now let me talk about the news we announced regarding Vincent Pilette, our CFO and my Partner. He and I are actually much to your surprise, both wearing our jackets today in honor of his last earnings call at Logitech. I can't end this call without thanking Vincent for the last six years. He's dedicated Logitech as our CFO and as one of my closest partners. He was here in the early stages of Logitech’s turned around as were many of you, and played a critical role driving the company’s transformation, which is the Logitech you know today, the multi-category, multi-brand design Company, the growth Company. But more important than the work Vincent did and helping us get back to a growth company is the team he built and the rigor he’s brought to the way we work. We now have a strong season finance team across every area and that's the most important legacy he'll leave. We've named Nate Olmstead, who was sitting down on the table from me as our interim CFO while we search for the new CFO. Nate joined us earlier this year from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and brings over 16 years of deep financial management expertise, most recently as the Vice President of Finance for Global Operations at HP. Vincent and Nate will spend the coming weeks together working on a transition plan and meeting with each of you. Now let me turn the call over to Vincent to walk you through our financial metrics.