Dennis B. Story
Analyst · Benchmark
Thanks, Eddie. I'll cover our Q4 and 2013 results followed by our 2014 annual guidance, and then I'll turn the call back to Eddie. As Eddie mentioned, we posted Q4 total revenue of $107.6 million, up 13% from last year and adjusted earnings per share of $0.24, increased 33% over Q4 2012. Apples-to-apples, adjusted earnings per share was $0.22, growing 22% excluding about $0.02 of favorable FX currency impact driven by rupee depreciation and a lower effective tax rate driven by state R&D and jobs tax credits. Strong revenue growth in license services and hardware combined with solid operating expense leverage and a lower effective tax rate led to the strong performance in the quarter. Our Q4 2013 GAAP earnings per share was $0.22, increasing 38% over Q4 of 2012. Full year total revenue totaled $414.5 million, growing 10% over 2012. Total revenue by region was solid with Americas up 10%, EMEA up 7%, and APAC growth was 20%. Full year adjusted earnings per share was $0.92, growing 30%, and GAAP earnings per share was $0.86, growing 34% over 2012 on strong services revenue growth and operating expense leverage. Apples-to-apples, adjusted earnings per share grew 25%, excluding $0.03, or $4.1 million, pretax of favorable FX currency impact, which totaled $2.5 million, and a onetime sales tax reversal benefit of $1.6 million in the year. As you may recall, the release of the sales tax reserve occurred in Q2 2013, positively impacting G&A expense and operating income. This reserve was originally established in 2008 and was released due to expiring tax statutes. Regarding currency, for your reference as part of our supplemental information disclosure in today's earnings release, Item #5 provides a breakout detailing the currency impacts for both total company and the Indian rupee. Q4 license revenue increased 20% to $17.3 million over Q4 2012, and full year license revenue was $62.4 million, increasing 1% over 2012. Despite a sluggish macro environment, we continue to experience solid activity in our target markets, and the demand environment remains quite positive. Overall, our license performance continues to depend heavily on the number and relative value of large deals we close in any quarter. Given license growth has essentially been flat over the past 2 years and estimating sales cycles for large deals remains challenging, our goal for 2014 is to achieve about a 6% to 7% license growth rate over 2013. Q4 services revenue was $77.8 million, growing 8% over Q4 2012. For the year, services revenue totaled $315.9 million, an increase of 11% over 2012. As a reminder, total services revenue includes both consulting and maintenance revenue. As Eddie mentioned, we achieved new milestones surpassing $200 million in consulting revenue and $100 million in maintenance revenue. While holiday seasonality was a bit more pronounced this year, strong demand in Q4 consulting services continued as we posted revenue of $51.5 million on 12% growth and full year revenue of $210.8 million on 14% growth. For the year, we increased our global services headcount by another 9%, or about 130 heads, to meet customer demand. We added 20 new associates in Q4, and our Q1 2014 hiring plan is to add 100 more new associates. And we're off to a good start with 30 already in the door. Q4 2013 maintenance revenue of $26.3 million was flat compared to Q4 2012 due to strong collections pull-through we noted in our Q3 earnings call. Full year maintenance revenue grew 7% to $105.1 million over 2012. Solid license revenue performance, cash collections and retention rates of 90-plus percent contributed to the year-over-year growth. And as a reminder, we recognized maintenance renewal revenue on a cash basis, so the timing of cash collections can cause inter-period revenue lumpiness from quarter-to-quarter. As for consolidated services margins in the quarter, we posted 53.8% compared to 58.2% in Q3 2013 and 53.4% in Q4 2012. As typical, Q4 margins were down sequentially from Q3 2013 due to the usual Q4 seasonal holidays impact and the addition of 70 new billable professional services associates in Q3 and Q4 combined with the previously mentioned timing of maintenance cash collections. For Q1 2014, we expect services margins to be in the 53.5% to 54% range reflecting the Q4 2013 new hires and the Q1 2014 hiring plan aimed at adding about 100 billable heads. The investment of onboarding new staff in Q1 2014 combined with annual salary increases, which apply to all global employees on a January 1 cycle, and seasonally high payroll tax expense, will raise our cost of services sequentially from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014 by about 5% to 6%. For the full year 2014, we're estimating margins to be in the 55.5%, that's 55.5%, to 56.0% range. We expect Q2 and Q3 services margins to obviously increase as billability and utilization ramp for our Q1 hires then drop off again in Q4 due to the usual holiday seasonality. Our operating expenses, which includes sales and marketing, R&D, G&A and depreciation, were $32.2 million for the quarter, up 5% from Q4 2012 and $126 million for the year, a 1% year-over-year decline. Apples-to-apples, our full year underlying operating expense increased by 2% over 2012 excluding the year-over-year currency benefit of $1.4 million driven by rupee depreciation and the sales tax reserve release of $1.6 million, which is in the G&A expense line. For 2014, we are forecasting about an 8% increase in operating expenses driven by increased headcount investment primarily in R&D and sales, variable sales comp increases on higher license revenue, and investments in facilities and IT to support company growth. Excluding the 2013 sales tax reserve release, the year-over-year underlying operating expense growth is about 7%. Turning to operating income. Through strong revenue growth and operating expense discipline, we delivered record Q4 operating income of $26.7 million, growing 23% over Q4 2012. Q4 operating margin was 24.9%, up 220 basis points. Full year operating income totaled $108.6 million, increasing 23% over 2012 with operating margin of 26.2%, up 270 basis points. Apples-to-apples, operating income growth for the year was 19% with operating margin of 25.3%, improving 180 basis points over 2012, excluding $3.5 million of favorable FX currency impact and the sales tax reserve impact. So for 2014, we are currently estimating operating profit to grow 13% to 15%, and we are raising our operating margin expansion objective from 50 basis points discussed in our previous earnings call to 100 to 120 basis points, or 27.2% to 27.4%, for full year 2014. Below the operating profit line, other income, which primarily includes interest income and foreign exchange gains or losses, was a negative $118,000 in Q4 and a positive $1.8 million for the full year 2013. Consistent with prior years, we do not attempt to budget for FX gains and losses in other income, so we're forecasting quarterly interest income of about $250,000, totaling $1 million for 2014. Income taxes. Hold on to your belts and suspenders. Our adjusted effective income tax rate for 2013 was 34.8%, which benefited from 2 years of R&D tax credits recognized in 2013. This compares favorably to our 2012 effective rate of 36%, which included no R&D tax credit. So you may remember, last year in January of 2013, Congress approved both a retroactive R&D tax credit for 2012 and the full year 2013 credit. The 2012 R&D credit was recognized in Q1 2013, lowering the Q1 2013 effective tax rate to 32.8%. That's because you had a full year's recognition in Q1. During our last earnings call, we expected Congress would approve the 2014 R&D tax credit before December 31. But unfortunately, a number of widely relevant U.S. tax law provisions affecting business, including the 2014 R&D credit, expired on December 31, 2013. With 2014 midterm elections and overall gridlock in Washington, a 2014 approval is uncertain. This has negatively impacted our forecast effective tax rate for 2014, which has now increased to 37% versus the 36% we discussed on our last call. This is notable for Q1 2014 and full year 2014 comps. Now turning to cash. Strong earnings growth drove record operating cash flow of $89 million in 2013, up 19% from $75 million in 2012. 2013's operating cash flow performance was especially impressive when you consider global income taxes paid more than tripled, representing a $15 million incremental increase over 2012. Capital expenditures for 2013 totaled $4.7 million. For 2014, driven by company growth and legacy IT systems replacements, we estimate capital expenditures to be in the range of $8 million to $10 million. We closed the year with $133 million in cash and investments compared to $126 million in Q3 of 2013 and $103 million in Q4 of 2012. We continue to carry zero debt on our balance sheet, self-funding our investments in innovation, growth and capital structure management from operating cash flows. Our Q4 DSOs were 61 days versus 58 days in Q3 of 2013 and 60 days in Q4 2012. Regarding capital structure, we reduced our common shares outstanding 3% in 2013 buying back 708,000 shares before the split, 2.8 million shares on a post-split basis, totaling $59.2 million offsetting option exercises of about 254,000 shares before the split and 1 million shares on a post-split basis. With our repurchase activity, last week, our board approved raising our repurchase authority limit to a total of $50 million, 5-0, $50 million. Regarding diluted shares for 2014, our weighted average share estimate for the quarters and full year is 77.1 million shares. Consistent with prior years, our diluted share estimate and EPS guidance does not assume any common stock repurchases in 2014. Now this closes the chapter on a fantastic 2013 year in terms of financial results. Now I'm going to move to our 2014 guidance. Overall, we continue to be committed to achieving steady organic revenue growth and earnings leverage through investment and technical innovation while efficiently managing our capital structure to drive shareholder returns. For 2014, our growth thesis is similar to what we put forth at the start of 2013. While there are modest signs of improvement, the global recovery cycle continues to be weak and slow, so we are going to remain cautious. For 2014 revenue, we are forecasting to grow total revenue at roughly 1.5x the market growth rate of 5% to 7%. Our current annual guidance for 2014 revenue is to deliver $450 million to $455 million of total revenue representing 9% to 10% growth. As I mentioned previously, coming off of 2 consecutive years of essentially flat license revenue growth, our goal for 2014 is to achieve a 6% to 7% license growth rate. From a revenue mix perspective given the unusually strong Q4 2013 hardware revenue result, we believe 2014 hardware and billed travel will decline over 2013 and will represent about 7% of total revenue. Overall, we expect our full year total revenue split to be about 49% in the first half, 51% in the second half. For license revenue, we are modeling a pure 50-50 split for first and second half with a normalized seasonal pattern of Q1 and Q3 license revenue lower than Q2 and Q4. And for services, as usual, Q4 revenue will be down sequentially from Q3 due to the seasonal holiday impact. For 2014 adjusted diluted earnings per share, our guidance range is $1.01 to $1.03 representing 10% to 12% growth over 2013 adjusted EPS of $0.92. Apples-to-apples, our underlying EPS guidance growth is 12% to 14% excluding the previously mentioned impacts of currency, the Q2 2013 sales tax reserve release and 2014's effective tax rate increase due to expired U.S. R&D tax credit provisions. With the beginning of the year salary increases worldwide, headcount additions to support services demand and a higher effective tax rate, we expect Q1 2014 EPS to decline sequentially from Q4 by about 10% while posting low double-digit growth over Q1 2013. And somewhat similar to revenue, we expect EPS to have a first half/second half split of about 45% in the first half to 55% in the second half. We expect our 3 remaining quarters of the year to average adjusted EPS of about $0.27, plus or minus, reflecting typically quarterly seasonal patterns for license and services revenue. For 2014 GAAP diluted earnings per share, we expect to deliver $0.94 to $0.96, representing 10% to 12% growth over 2013 GAAP EPS of $0.86. The $0.07 full year EPS difference between GAAP and non-GAAP diluted adjusted EPS is the impact of equity-based compensation, which we expect to be spread evenly across the year at approximately $0.0175 per quarter. That concludes my commentary on the financial results. Now I'll turn the call back to Eddie for the business update.