Dennis Story
Analyst · Truist Securities. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Eddie. As Eddie highlighted in 2022, we set all-time records in RPO, total revenue, operating profit, cash collections and earnings per share. Congratulations to our team members around the globe for great execution. Overall, for the quarter and the year, we delivered a strong balanced financial performance on topline growth and operating margin, with both results comparing favorably to the Rule of 40 and if our revenue growth is normalized for our cloud transition, excluding license and maintenance attrition, both results exceed the Rule of 50. We continue to deliver strong metrics across revenue growth, profitability and cash flow. I'll start with recapping our financial performance for the quarter and year. All growth rates are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise stated. Additionally, we are also providing constant currency growth to demonstrate apples-to-apples comparisons. Unless otherwise stated, constant currency will compare results as if rates were unchanged from the year ago period. Q4 total revenue was $198 million, up 16% as reported and 19% excluding FX. Full-year revenue totaled $767 million, also up 16% and 18% removing FX. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the revenue compression by our cloud transition, Q4 revenue growth was 29% and full-year 25%. Q4 cloud revenue totaled $52 million, up 49%, with full-year revenue totaling $176 million, up 44%. We closed out 2022 with RPO of $1.1 billion on the round, growing 50%. This was at the high end of our guidance. If FX rates remain unchanged from the year ago period, RPO growth would be 54%. And if rates remained unchanged from September 30 levels, sequential RPO growth would be 6%. As of December 31, over 97% of our RPO represents true cloud-native subscriptions. Q4 services revenue increased 22% to $100 million, and full-year services revenue increased 18% to $394 million. Both were records as cloud sales continue to fuel services growth globally. Shifting to earnings leverage. Our Q4 adjusted operating income totaled $60 million with an operating margin of 30.2%. The 740 basis point increase was driven by revenue growth. Full-year adjusted operating margin was 27.6%, up 80 basis points on revenue growth. Our Q4 GAAP operating income was $45 million with a 22.6% operating margin, with full-year GAAP operating income totaling $153 million with a 20% operating margin. Our Q4 earnings per share increased 69% to $0.81. Note, our EPS includes $0.05 of tax benefit associated with expiring tax statutes, lowering our effective tax rate in the quarter to 16%. This resulted in full-year EPS of $2.76, which was up 24%, exceeding guidance. Q4 operating cash flow increased 38% to $55 million as Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin was 31% and free cash flow margin was 26.6%. Our full-year operating cash flow was $180 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 28.5% and free cash flow margin was 22.6%. Remember, these figures include $58 million in cash taxes paid, which is roughly doubling the amount of cash taxes paid over last year. For more information on the $26 million incremental cash taxes paid associated with the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, please refer to Item 8 in our earnings supplemental information schedules. Turning to the balance sheet, deferred revenue increased 36% year-over-year and 23% sequentially to $209 million. We closed 2022 with $225 million in cash and zero debt. For the year, we invested $175 million in share buybacks, including $25 million in Q4. Also, our Board has approved the replenishment of our $75 million share repurchase authority. Now moving to guidance. As consistently mentioned, our financial objective is to deliver sustainable double-digit topline growth and top quartile operating margins benchmarked against enterprise SaaS comps. As Eddie mentioned, we will continue to invest with a balanced approach to growth and profitability. We are raising the midpoint of the preliminary 2023 revenue, operating margin and EPS guidance that we provided last quarter. We are also reiterating our 2023 RPO guidepost midpoint of $1.35 billion. Consistent with our recent earnings releases, our guidepost can be found in today's earnings release, supplemental schedules. As noted on prior earnings calls, we will be updating our RPO outlook on an annual basis. Additionally, as previously discussed, our bookings performance is impacted by the number and relative value of large deals we close in any quarter, which can potentially cause lumpiness or nonlinear bookings throughout the year. For full-year 2023, we expect total revenue of $820 million to $833 million with an $826.5 million midpoint, up from our prior midpoint of $810 million. Excluding license and maintenance attrition, this represents 16% growth. All in, our target is 8%. First half and second half total revenue splits are expected to be about 50-50. For Q1, we expect total revenue of $198 million to $202 million, which at the midpoint represents 21% growth, ex license and maintenance attrition and 12% growth all in. We continue to track ahead of our original margin expectations. And reflective of our higher revenue outlook, we are increasing our 2023 adjusted operating margin range to 25.5% to 26.5%, with a midpoint of 26%, up from our prior guidance of 25.5%. Included in this range is a 260 basis point headwind from the $35 million reduction in maintenance and license revenue from our transition to cloud. At the midpoint, operating margin on a quarterly basis is expected to be roughly: For Q1, 26%; Q2, 26.8%; Q3, 27%; and accounting for retail peak seasonality, 24.3% in Q4. Those are pretty exact targets. This results in a full-year adjusted EPS range of $2.61 to $2.75. The $2.68 midpoint, up from our prior $2.55 midpoint outlook for GAAP EPS, our guidance range is $1.81 to $1.95. Note, if the 2022 below-the-line income taxes and other income were normalized at 2022 levels, 2023 adjusted EPS would be $0.13 higher and GAAP EPS would be $0.14 higher. For Q1, we expect adjusted EPS of $0.64 to $0.66 and GAAP EPS of $0.46 to $0.48. For Q2 through Q4, we expect GAAP EPS to be about $0.20 lower than adjusted EPS per quarter, which accounts for our investment in equity-based compensation. Here are some additional details on our 2023 outlook. For full-year 2023, we are increasing our cloud revenue range to $232 million to $236 million, representing 33% growth at the midpoint and assumes $53.8 million in Q1 with about a $3 million sequential increase per quarter throughout the year. For services revenue, we are increasing our forecast of $428 million to $437 million, representing 10% growth at the midpoint. On a quarterly basis, we expect Q1 services revenue of roughly $103 million; Q2, $111 million; Q3, $114 million; and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $106 million in Q4. On attrition to cloud, we expect maintenance and license to represent about an 8-point headwind in total revenue growth in 2023. For maintenance, we expect a range of $122 million to $124 million, or a 14% decline at the midpoint. On a quarterly basis, we expect Q1 to be $33 million; Q2, $32 million; Q3, $30 million; and Q4, $28 million. We expect license revenue to be roughly $9 million or 1% of 2023 total revenue. For Q1, we expect $3.5 million of license revenue; $2.5 million in Q2; and $1.5 million in both Q3 and Q4. And for hardware, we anticipate approximately $7 million in revenue per quarter. For consolidated subscription, maintenance and services margin, we are targeting about 54% for the full-year. On a quarterly basis, Q1 will be about 53%, Q2 and Q3 is expected to be 54.5%. And accounting for seasonality, Q4 is expected to be about 53.5%. We expect our effective tax rate to be 21.7% and our diluted share count to be 63 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. In summary, 2022 was a great year, and we expect 2023 to be another year of balanced growth across revenue, profitability and cash flow. Thank you. And back to Eddie for some closing remarks.