Phong Le
Analyst · Citi. Your line is now open
Thank you Michael and good evening everyone. Various remarks that we may make about our future expectations, plans and prospects may constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provision under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. These statements reflect our views only as of today. It should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments may cause the company's views to change. While the company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. Also during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of the GAAP versus non-GAAP results can be found in our press release issued after the close of market today and the supplementary information, both of which are available on our Investor Relations page, ir.microstrategy.com. MicroStrategy made significant progress executing on the strategic objectives during the first quarter. As Michael will discuss in more detail, the highlight of the quarter was the successful introduction of MicroStrategy 2019, which we believe is the most innovative platform release in the company's nearly 30-year history. MicroStrategy 2019 is a modern analytics, open architecture, enterprise platform that, for the first time, brings together federated analytics, transformational mobility and HyperIntelligence capabilities in a single offering. We believe MicroStrategy 2019 provides the most powerful and flexible analytics platform in the market that allows customers to leverage existing DI desktop tools while utilizing our enterprise-grade platform. MicroStrategy 2019 was a key area of focus at our MicroStrategy World Conference, which we held in February in Phoenix. MicroStrategy World 2019 was a big success with more than 2,600 attendees, an increase of 10% from last year. Early customer feedback for MicroStrategy 2019 has been positive. We already seeing upgrade and new customer wins for the platform. To date, nearly 200 customers have upgraded to MicroStrategy 2019. In particular, HyperIntelligence is generating significant interest. We had dozens of closed deals in Q1 that included the sale of our HyperIntelligence product, which is the fastest adoption of a new product we have seen in years. The market is looking for a platform that can leverage the incredible growth of data in a way that empowers any employee to make a faster, zero-click, smarter decisions that will improve business performance. Other key areas of focus for us include delivering on our enterprise support strategy. A key part of our growth strategy is to have a disciplined approach to customer support that includes proactive outreach. This has two benefits. It provides even greater value for customers' product support spend and it also provides us an opportunity to educate customers on the new solutions available on MicroStrategy 2019. We are seeing good returns on this investment, including increased upgrade and upsell activity, increased customer satisfaction and improved internal coordination across technical support, consulting, sales and technology. Second is the move to the cloud. Growing customer interest and comfort in leveraging public cloud platforms like AWS or Azure is opening up new growth opportunities for MicroStrategy. We believe our enterprise-grade, flexible, open architecture can provide significant value for our customers. These includes our hosted cloud as well as our Bring Your Own License solutions where customers use MicroStrategy's cloud solutions to deploy in their own cloud instance. In 2018, Bring Your Own License solutions accounted for about 10% of our product license revenue. Before I review our financial performance in detail, I would like to provide some high level takeaways for investors. One, 13% constant currency growth in product licenses revenue year-over-year Q1 2019. We believe this increase reflects momentum in our business and the positive impact of the investments we made in the business in 2018. This marks year-over-year growth in product licenses revenue in three out of our last four quarters. Two, 0% constant currency change in product support revenues year-over-year in Q1 2019. Q1 2018 marked a strong quarter for product support revenue, given the runoffs from previous periods. We continue to see industry-leading renewal rates and do not believe the flat constant currency product support revenues in Q1 2019 is indicative of the future performance of this revenue component. Three, leveraging our operating cost structure and the investments we made in 2018 is an important goal for the company. In Q1 2019, we had the lowest year-over-year growth and operating expense in eight quarters. Managing costs throughout the company will be an area of increasing focus throughout 2019. And four, we continue to target constant currency revenue growth for the business for the full year 2019. In addition, we seek to decrease operating expenses and expand year-over-year margin. We remain on track to deliver each of these goals with the exception of other services revenue growth, which is less significant as it has lower margins and is less strategic. Turning to our financial results in more detail. Total product licenses revenue were $18.3 million in Q1 2019, a $1.0 million or 6% increase year-over-year. Foreign currency effects negatively impacted product licenses revenue by $1.3 million or 7%. Product support revenues were $71.5 million in Q1 2019, a 4% decrease year-over-year with foreign currency effects negatively impacting such revenue by $2.7 million or 4%. Overall, we continue to see strong customer renewal rates which reflect the value customers generate for MicroStrategy products. We have a broadly diversified customer base by vertical. In overall, our retail, technology and financial services were sectors where we were seeing positive demand trends in the aggregate. Deferred revenue at March 31, 2019 was $194.6 million. This is a $12.8 million year-over-year decrease, primarily driven by lower deferred product support revenues. The decline reflects the negative impact of foreign exchange and the impact of the move to the force.com quoting system, which has delayed certain product support contract renewals. The headwind from the new billing system decreased notably in the first quarter. We expect to have this issue resolved by the end of Q2. Other services revenues were $18.5 million in Q1 2019, a 22% decrease year-over-year with foreign currency effects negatively impacting such revenue by $0.8 million or 4%. As Q2 2018 marked a larger quarter-over-quarter decline in other services revenue, we do not expect this large level of year-over-year decrease in Q2 2019. Turning to cost. We have transitioned from a period of significant investment to a focus on leveraging those investments to generate revenue growth and driving efficiencies across the organization. This is evident in our total operating expenses of $99.6 million, which grew only 3% year-over-year. While we continue to invest in our R&D efforts, we expect to see sales and marketing and G&A expense flat and/or decrease as a percentage of revenue in the balance of 2019. Looking at the expenses by line item. Q1 2019 total cost of revenues was $26.2 million, a $1.0 million or 4% increase year-over-year. This increase is the result of increased staffing levels, which reflect our enterprise support efforts. Our enterprise support program aims to provide more proactive product support offerings and other services to our customers and in Q1 included services to prepare customers for an upgrade to MicroStrategy 2019. As mentioned earlier, these services will continue to be a focus area in 2019. More information on our enterprise support program is available under the services section of our website. Sales and marketing expenses declined $2.6 million or 5% year-over-year. These decreases represent a focus on sales productivity as well as higher impact and higher ROI marketing activities. Research and development expenses increased $4.7 million or 20% year-over-year. Investing in the platform, particularly on the capabilities inside MicroStrategy 2019 are key priority. We added net over 100 employees to the R&D team in the past 12 months providing us with the deepest and most talented team we have ever had. General and administrative expenses increased minimally at $0.4 million or 2% year-over-year. Our operating loss for Q1 2019 was $10.4 million, compared with operating income of $0.7 million in the prior year period. We had a net loss of $7.9 million in Q1 2019 and diluted loss per share of $0.77. We had net interest income of $2.6 million and other expenses of $0.6 million, which primarily consisted of foreign exchange losses and a benefit from income taxes of $0.5 million. During the quarter, we repurchased 362,148 shares of the company's common stock for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $48 million. These repurchases were in addition to the approximately $111 million of common stock we purchased last quarter. We believe buybacks can be a useful way to opportunistically generate value for shareholders. However, it's just one component as we evaluate our broader long-term capital allocation strategy. Before I turn the call back to Michael Saylor, I want to finish by reiterating that our product licenses revenues growth in the quarter was a promising sign. We are optimistic that we will continue to see positive growth in product license revenue throughout the year as we benefit from the investments we have made in our sales and marketing functions and the introduction of MicroStrategy 2019. Now I would like to turn it back to Michael Saylor.