Dennis Story
Analyst · Truist Securities. Please go ahead
Thanks, Eddie. Nothing but accolades for our Manhattan global teams. Top to bottom, we continue to raise the bar in a choppy macro delivering strong growth, profitability, cash flow and balance sheet metrics. I'll start with a quick recap of the quarter with growth rates on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise stated. Total revenue was a record $169 million, up 13%. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the compression driven by our cloud transition, our total revenue was up 27%. Notably, 70% of our total revenue is now driven by cloud and services. Our Q3 operating profit was a record totaling $53 million, up 20% with adjusted operating margin of 31.3% and GAAP operating margin of 25.1%. Our performance was driven by strong cloud and services revenue combined with lower expenses driven by the COVID pandemic. Compared to 2019, we estimate COVID lowered our year-to-date 2021 expenses by about 425 basis points and year-to-date 2020 by about 325 basis points, respectively. Adjusting for COVID or put another way, assuming these expenses remain unchanged from 2019 levels, adjusted operating margin would be approximately 24% year-to-date, up over 200 basis points compared to year-to-date 2020. Earnings per share was a record $0.71, up 39%. Our earnings per share did include $0.06 of nonrecurring tax benefit associated with expiring tax statutes. So, normalized EPS was $0.65, up 27%, either way a record. Our Q3 and year-to-date operating cash flow performance was a record with Q3 totaling $60 million and year-to-date $145 million, both up 41% on record global cash collections. How about our free cash flow margin? It continues to be strong at 35% for the quarter and 29% year-to-date. EBITDA margin was 32% in the quarter and 29% year-to-date. Our balance sheet continues to be rock solid with $246 million in cash and 0 debt, providing us excellent flexibility to invest for growth. We invested $20 million in share buybacks in the quarter, resulting in $80 million in buybacks year-to-date. And for the fourth quarter and full year, we estimate our diluted shares outstanding to be about 64.3 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. Also, our board has approved our customary $50 million share repurchase authority. That covers the macros. Now let's drill down a little bit into revenue. Cloud revenue in the quarter totaled $32 million, up 53% as our new annual contract value continues to accelerate on strong market demand. For Q4, we expect cloud revenue of roughly $33.5 million. As Eddie mentioned, Q3 was a record third quarter with RPO, remaining performance obligation. Our RPO bookings totaled $574 million, up 123% year-over-year and 17% sequentially. With RPO continuing to compound positively, our visibility into future subscription revenue continues to strengthen, giving us confidence in our forward visibility and guidepost projections. Services revenue was $88 million, up 20% as our cloud momentum continues to fuel our services revenue growth. Americas and Europe are running at double-digit growth, with APAC demand improving. For Q4 retail peak season, it's starting earlier than normal given supply chain constraints. We are forecasting services revenue to be about $82 million with year-over-year growth of 16%. As a reminder to most of you, the sequential revenue decline from Q3 represents our traditional retail peak seasonality as customers slow implementations to meet their customers' demand. Our consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin for the quarter was 56.8%, up over 380 basis points compared to the year ago period and was predominantly driven by revenue performance and cloud operating leverage. Accounting for retail peak season and growth investments, we expect Q4 margin to be about 50.2%, resulting in full year 2021 margin of 53.5%, up 190 basis points over the prior year. License revenue was $8 million, down 36% and maintenance revenue was $34 million, down 8%, primarily on cash collection timing. And one final revenue call out, our hardware team is in the double-digit growth gain, up 25% year-to-date. Good job, guys. Transitioning to guidance. Barring any major global macro setbacks, our full year 2021 guidance and preliminary 2022 outlook puts us on track to deliver consecutive record revenue years. Our overarching objective obviously is to deliver sustainable double-digit top line growth and top quartile operating margins, benchmarked annually against enterprise SaaS comps. For 2021, we are raising our total revenue guidance to $653 million to $655 million, up from our prior range of $643 million to $650 million. Our underlying total 2021 revenue growth ex license and maintenance, which removes the revenue compression from our cloud transition is targeted to be 19% at the midpoint. For Q4, we expect total revenue of $161 million to $163 million. Full year operating margin is expected to be 25.8% to 26%, factoring in retail peak season revenue impact and including $10 million in special performance-based compensation and retention investments. We expect full year adjusted earnings per share to be $2.12 to $2.14, up from our prior range of $2.00 to $2.06. For GAAP EPS, our guidance range is $1.61 to $1.63 with a midpoint of $1.62, up 6% from our previous midpoint of $1.53. And for Q4, we expect adjusted EPS to be in the range of $0.37 to $0.39. For full year 2021, our cloud revenue estimate is increasing to $121 million, representing 51% growth. Given our strong performance in Q3 and year-to-date, we are also increasing our RPO outlook to a range of $675 million to $700 million, up from our prior outlook range of $550 million to $600 million. The $688 million midpoint is up over 75% from our initial RPO target provided on our Q3 2020 earnings call. For full year 2021, license and maintenance revenue continues to positively attrite on increasing demand for our cloud solutions. We expect license to be about $33 million and maintenance roughly $143 million. For Q4, we expect license to be about $7.5 million and maintenance roughly $35 million. Our CapEx estimate for 2021 is $3 million to $4 million. And for full year 2021, we expect an adjusted tax rate of about 19.5% and a GAAP tax rate of approximately 17.5%. So that covers the quarter and our 2021 outlook. Let's cover some 2022 preliminary targets and guideposts. We are in our budget cycle currently, so we will firm up our parameters on our Q4 call. Please note, though, to facilitate a review for you all, we have added a supplemental schedule, Item Number 9 last page in today's earnings release, providing a comparison of our original geometrics and our current updated guideposts. As the schedule shows, we are moving all our guideposts for cloud revenue and RPO materially higher. In addition, our adjusted operating margins are improved from our initial color provided in February. Please note year-over-year growth rates are based on the midpoint of our 2021 guidance. Our preliminary estimate of 2022 total revenue is $695 million to $715 million, excluding license and maintenance attrition at 16% growth. All in, our initial growth target is 8%. Our full year 2022 adjusted EPS range is $1.90 to $2.10. For 2022 cloud revenue, we are targeting $160 million to $165 million in revenue, representing 35% growth at the midpoint. Exiting 2021, including ramp transactions, we expect to achieve a three-year 2022 to 2024 compounded annual growth rate of 40% at the midpoint of our cloud revenue targets. For RPO, we are targeting a three-year CAGR of 35% at the midpoint of our targets of $1 billion in 2022, growing to $1.7 billion in 2024. Those are big numbers. In 2022, we are also targeting services revenue of $362 million to $370 million, which represents 9% growth. License revenue of $13 million to $15 million and maintenance revenue of $137 million to $140 million as we continue to expect a longer attrition tell for maintenance. Our consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin is expected to be about 54%, and we are pegging 2022 operating margins at 22.5% to 24% and are targeting an annual 75 to 125 basis point expansion annually starting in 2023. The factors impacting the inherent leverage in our model and driving the 2022 year over decline in operating margin include license attrition of 57% and to $14 million with maintenance revenue attrition at 4% as customers shift to cloud, totaling about 200 basis points of margin impact. Wage inflation and labor market trends accounting for about 200 basis points in margin investment. As we've previously discussed, demand for technical talent is high, and we expect the labor market to continue to be very competitive through 2022. Continued investment across our company fueled by customer demand, we are investing in R&D, services and sales and marketing and the continued return of COVID impact expenses such as travel, our annual momentum customer conference, employee appreciation events, contractors, et cetera, total about 100 basis points. We also expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 22%, and our diluted share count will be approximately 64.3 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. So, lastly, I'll summarize our 2023 and 2024 guideposts that should better assist investors' assessment of our future cloud growth and earnings trajectory. Remember comparison of our guidepost versus historicals are located in our earnings release. For 2023, we are targeting RPO of $1.25 billion to $1.4 billion, representing 33% growth at the midpoint. Cloud revenue of $220 million to $240 million, representing 42% growth at the midpoint. And introducing 2024, for RPO, we are targeting $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion, representing 28% growth at the midpoint. Cloud revenue, we're targeting $310 million to $345 million, representing 42% growth at the midpoint. So that covers the financial update. Thank you very much, and back to Eddie for some closing remarks.