Adena Friedman
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is open
Thank you, Ed, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My remarks today will focus on three areas: I will review Nasdaq's start to the year, in particular how we are adapting to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and our results for the first quarter of 2020. I will discuss how we are seeing the potential for our business in 2020 to be impacted by the pandemic and I will discuss the secular trends that have informed our long-term strategy and how we see them developing through and after the current pandemic crisis. I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are all navigating through an unprecedented moment in history as our global community fights the spread of COVID-19 and prepares for what will be a lasting impact on our daily life. I speak for the entire Nasdaq family when I say our thoughts are with those who are battling this virus, the families who have lost loved ones and those who are on the front lines of our economy and our society putting themselves at risk every day to care for us and our well-being. They include the millions of people who work extremely hard to make sure that we have food, power and other necessities. They are the many who are keeping critical stores open and shipping goods to our homes. They are the healthcare workers, who are putting their health and their family's health at risk to care for the sick and handle the heartbreaking loss of life. There are not enough words that can express our deep gratitude to the millions around the world who are enabling us to stay home and stay safe. The crisis has highlighted how the human spirit manifests itself and it has been truly awe-inspiring. To provide immediate assistance to those in our communities who are most at risk, we took action last month and committed $6 million in cash and in-kind donations to the COVID-19 response and relief efforts. In addition Nasdaq employees have been engaged in our philanthropic response including our double matching program which has raised more than $400,000 so far for charitable organizations fighting the pandemic. Turning to the Nasdaq community specifically from the start of the pandemic, we have been committed to the safety and well-being of the Nasdaq team as well as the broader needs of the Nasdaq client community. As COVID-19 spread across the world we moved quickly to transition our global workforce to a remote operating environment through a combination of work from home and split teams for critical on-site employees. At this time 98% of our global team are working from home to support the various country or statewide measures to flatten the curve. For those few staff around the world who are performing critical on-site functions, we're deploying extra precautions to ensure their safety. We remain deeply committed to serving our clients seamlessly while keeping our employees as safe as possible. I am so proud and impressed with the entire Nasdaq team and their commitment to our mission. In fact, our role in the economy in which we serve as a critical market operator has never been in sharper focus as it has been in the past six weeks. Additionally, our clients across the world have turned to us for technology expertise as well as insights and analytics to support their decision-making in this period of extreme challenge. We have invested and prepared for many years to be ready for what has transpired around the globe in the past several weeks. Across our markets in the U.S. and Europe, our teams across technology, operations, legal and client service are collaborating extremely well to provide a high-quality trading experience for our broker-dealer and investor clients during a period of unprecedented volatility and volume. Our market technology team, who provide strategic technology solutions to other exchanges around the world has been supporting our exchange clients with our technology expertise to support their own spikes and trading activity. Across corporate services, we are providing our corporate clients with critical insights regarding the drastic changes in their investor base and what it means for their equity relationships going forward. And in information services we are providing institutional investors with key insights into their funds positioning in relation to their peers and now with the addition of Solovis with deeper insights into their portfolios across private and public assets. These times of stress and uncertainty test us and I'm extremely grateful to the entire Nasdaq team for rising so successfully to the challenge while they also balance their own personal situations throughout this period. Turning next to our financial results. During the first quarter of this year, we set new quarterly highs of $701 million in net revenues and non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.50, up 11% and 23% respectively compared to the first quarter of 2019. Our market services business rose 21% and our non trading segments grew 7% from the prior year period. On an organic basis revenues in the non-trading segments increased 8% year-over-year. We also continue to make certain investments to advance our business acquiring ESG workflow provider OneReport and investments analytics firm Solovis during the quarter. These initiatives aligned with our disciplined strategy to maximize opportunities as a technology and analytics provider while sustaining our leadership position of our core marketplace franchise. Turning to the specific highlights in the first quarter, I will start first with our foundational marketplace businesses. Our Market Services segment saw net revenues of $281 million driven by higher cash equity and equity derivatives revenue as the business was able to handle the historic surge in quoting and execution volumes despite having to navigate the many business continuity challenges as the health crisis posed. While I believe in aggregate, the exchange industry, our broker dealer intermediaries and our regulators have responded strongly and successfully to the significant challenges that came with the enormous rampant activity, I'm particularly proud of how Nasdaq's marketplaces were able to fulfill their mission to the investment community, all while we took proactive steps to protect the health and safety of our staff providing critical market functions. Our Corporate Services segment delivered revenue of $128 million in the first quarter, a 6% increase boosted by year-over-year growth in our issuer base, particularly from larger cap issuers and increased demand for our investor relations intelligence and governance offerings. Nasdaq was extremely busy in the earlier portions of the first quarter. Nasdaq led U.S. exchanges for IPOs during the period welcoming 27 IPOs, a 69% win rate. We listed six of the top 10 IPOs by dollars raised including PPD Inc. which provides drug and development services to the biopharmaceutical industry, the largest U.S. IPO year to date. Our acquisition of OneReport during the period will broaden our strategic engagement and collaboration with corporate clients who are seeking clarity and efficiency in their ESG reporting. We believe this solution will further strengthen our value with the thousands of clients who already rely on our team for counsel on a range of governance and sustainability related issues through solutions like our ESG advisory service and our board assessment and collaboration technology. Now let me turn to our technology and analytics businesses. In the first quarter, our market technology segment delivered $81 million in revenues and signed $80 million in new order intake. Our annualized recurring revenue in the quarter was $257 million, [indiscernible] increase year-over-year. I'm extremely impressed with how the multitude of exchange and broker-dealer customers of Nasdaq market technology business successfully responded to the challenges of running their franchises in the midst of both market turbulence and the human health crisis. And I'm proud that our resilient marketplace technology was able to support them meaningfully as they did so. Turning to our information services segment. We delivered net revenues of $211 million in the first quarter, up $18 million or 9% year-over-year. I would like to highlight that our index revenue saw double-digit growth as AUM in Nasdaq licensed ETPs rose 5% year-over-year meaningfully outperforming the declines in a broader -- in the broad market indices over the same period and volumes in Nasdaq license equity index futures set new highs in the quarter. The AUM was bolstered by continued inflows into our flagship index products. For instance, despite the sharp declines from the market peak on February 19, through the bottom experienced on March 20 for the Nasdaq 100 over that time the largest ETF globally that tracks in Nasdaq 100 which is the Invesco QQQ ETF, experienced $5.2 billion in net inflows. In fact total ETF industry AUM for the 12-month period ending March 31 was down 0.5% according to research provider ETF GI, while Nasdaq's ETF AUM increased by 5%. We are pleased with the resilience of our index products in a period of record volatility and extreme downward pressure in the broader market. I will also note that for the second quarter, the majority of Information Services revenue came from index licensing and investment analytics products, the result of years of investment into expanding our capabilities in these higher growth areas. Now that we've covered the first quarter results, I would like to talk about the changing industry dynamics we are observing. We are fortunate to have a particularly resilient operating and financial model at Nasdaq. We deliver many essential and increasingly strategic products and services to diverse ecosystem of clients. The balance of a trading franchise that performs best during periods of maximum uncertainty and a larger recurring revenue business across Information Services, Corporate Services and Market Technology delivers relative stability in aggregate over a wide range of macroeconomic environments. Focusing on our volume driven businesses, as we look forward to the remainder of the year it is very difficult to project the volume environment. We are currently focused on the following signals. First is the continued volume strength in April with $12.7 billion in average daily share volume in U.S. equities, which is a 92% increase over last April and nearly $25 million – I mean sorry $25 million in average daily contract volume in U.S. equity options, a 51% increase over the last April. Second is a myriad of economic unknowns that the COVID-19 virus carries with it as it continues its global spread. And third is the upcoming U.S. election which when coupled with the virus for providing ingredients for continued elevated volumes for our markets in the months ahead. The flipside impact of the volatility and economic uncertainty however is the effect on IPOs. In our Corporate Services franchise, we entered 2020 with incredibly strong momentum maintaining our U.S. listings leadership through what had been a very busy period for IPOs. In addition, we steadily grew the issuer base in Nasdaq's Nordic markets and in our Corporate Solutions sub-segment after many years of investing, restructuring and reposition, we saw growth reemerge. All of these factors will continue to benefit us. However, we are beginning to see the impacts of the pandemic influence corporate issuer behavior in the near term. While a number of corporate clients are turning to our IR intelligence team for short term mandates to understand the underlying activities in their stock and demand for our ESG advisory offering continues to have momentum, the vast majority of IPO candidates are waiting to see if market conditions stabilize. We are also seeing some companies delaying corporate solutions purchasing decisions and in some cases looking to reduce near-term discretionary spend. In our Market Technology business we're extremely fortunate to have a large diverse and well-established customer base across market infrastructure operators and banks and brokers with long term locked in contracts as the underpinning of the business. Therefore, our revenue base is very solid and we had a successful year in 2019 and signing up new clients and renewing some of our key existing clients. However, our early observations of the impact of the virus in 2020 makes us more cautious about our short-term growth prospects for the remainder of the year. Specifically, our clients are dealing with the twin challenges of a surge in trading volumes and the logistical challenges of the health crisis with their staff working remotely. As a result we're seeing clients take longer to make upgrades and new purchasing decisions. They are also extending implementation schedules and instituting temporary code freezes that will delay the timing of short-term change requests. Additionally, we continue to have great engagement prospects in our new market initiatives and we believe that our sales pipeline remains strong. However, we expect the purchase and market launch decisions will likely come under additional scrutiny and review while these prospects observe the economic impacts of the virus. In our Information Services business, the dynamics of the environment bring varied implications for each of the sub segments. At investment, we have not yet felt substantial impact from the pandemic and remain focused on expanding our capabilities in client and markets, but we could see short-term results impacted by some of the following COVID-19 related factors. On the positive side, when asset owners see more alpha opportunity in more volatile markets and become more interested in active and/or alternative asset management investments evaluation data and analytics become especially important. We also believe asset owners are more likely to demand the real time portfolio analytics delivered by Solovis and those that have them are more likely to respond by adjusting their allocations. On the risks to our near-term revenue growth, while we have not yet experienced a measurable change our clients behaviors, we will be watching to see if the pandemic leads to heightened client attrition through closures of small asset managers or consolidation, as well as the potential for moderated spend per client or delayed purchasing decisions by new client prospects. Our index franchisee so far is demonstrating strong resilience is bolstered by continued elevated volumes in the futures products. However, it's hard to predict, how the market performance of index products will develop as the economic impact of the virus continues to evolve. We're very pleased to see that the investment inflows mute the downward pressure on the AUM from the drop-end market values, which we also experienced in Q4, 2018 when the market had a different valuation dislocation. However, it is always difficult to predict future investor behavior. Our market data business has demonstrated resilience across prior recessionary periods but it is not completely immune when economic downturns are more protracted. Additionally, in recent years we have successfully diversified our clients outside our traditional U.S. markets but there could be some pullback from these clients if they view real-time data to be discretionary in a time of economic pressure as this period may represent. As you know, we do not issue short-term current year revenue growth guidance at Nasdaq. Our trading businesses are subject to significant external factors such as volatility and therefore we do not provide any revenue outlook for our market services segment. For our non-trading businesses with recurring revenues as their foundation, we have issued ranges describing where we expect organic growth in these segments to average over perspective rolling three to five year period, which we consider medium term. Since early 2018, we have targeted an organic compound annual revenue growth rate across these non-trading segments collectively of 5% to 7% over that medium term 3 to 5 years period. We also said that over short term -- shorter periods of time, we expect there to be data points above and below our communicated range, especially during the most impactful peaks and troughs of the economic cycle. Over each of the past two years, we have delivered organic growth from the non-trading segments at or above the top of that 5% to 7% medium-term outlook range and we continue to believe that same range is appropriate outlook looking forward over the next 3 to 5 year period. However, in the short term taking into considerations all of the dynamics that I've just described across our businesses, while we remain confident in the strength and resiliency of our business overall we see increasing risks to reaching the lower end of that 5% to 7% range collectively across our non-trading segments for the full year of 2020. We will continue to provide updates in our growth progress for 2020 in upcoming quarterly calls, as we gain more knowledge and experience in the current environment. Overall, we are proud of the resilient and diversified nature of our business with a coupling of volume driven revenue and more stable recurring revenues serving as our foundation. With our diversity we benefit from certain segments bolstering our results when others face some short-term pressures. That has been the story of Nasdaq for many years now. And overall, it provides for more stability and predictability than many of our direct peers. As a result, while we remain a performance culture where individual employment decisions are still made on the basis of each of their efforts and contributions, we have made a commitment to our employees that we will not initiate any broad-based layoffs this year. We are proud to support our employees and help them feel secure in their professional lives, while they address the challenges of COVID-19 and its implications that they have on the personal and family situations. While we actively address the particular challenges of the pandemic and related economic impacts in the near term, we're also paying close attention to what the changing world tells us about the most important long-term secular dynamics in our industry, the changes that are most impacting our clients and where we have the largest opportunities to grow as we deliver against the opportunities they create. What we are seeing overwhelmingly is that the pandemic is in many ways reinforcing these longer-term dynamics. For example, we recognized during our strategic review in 2017 that the investment management industry is going through profound change including an enlarging passive investing trend on one end of the spectrum, a private market on the other end of the spectrum and an increasingly pressured traditional active management industry in the middle. During the pandemic induced downturn, we're seeing continued positive flows into ETF despite the market pullback, while private equity firms are raising new capital that might be put to work in particularly distressed industries. Among our traditional asset management clients, it's an increasingly competitive world with certain firms outperforming the market and drawing a new capital while others face significant outflows. We believe that how we partner with asset managers to launch new innovative ETFs that help them participate in the passive trends, how we assist private companies and private equity funds with the liquidity events through the private market and how we help active managers and private equity funds compete for flows with the investment will continue to be increasingly important. In market technology, with our next-generation trade lifecycle technology platform, we see the benefits of marketplace and surveillance solutions leveraging the cloud to be scalable to any level of activity and accessible by both users and operators from anywhere in the world. We view that to be even more critical in a world that likely considers a much wider spectrum of business continuity scenarios than it ever has before. And with our corporate issuers who are faced with increasing challenges that they have to meet to effectively navigate public ownership, we believe that the need for technology enabled and highly specialized consultative partner to assist with activities such as managing buy side interaction and governance and sustainability matters will be even more essential. Over the past three years, we have set a course for transformation of our business without sacrificing the quality of service we provide to our clients and while remaining focused on value creation for our stakeholders. The results we have delivered is a rewarding indication that this strategy is working. Yet we recognize that to maintain our momentum against a business backdrop that is still digesting the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic we must continue to challenge ourselves each and every day. As I wrap up, I will summarize by saying our communities are adapting to the challenges of isolation and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. These times of stress and uncertainty test us and I am proud of what we have delivered for our clients and stakeholders this past quarter. We are looking out for each other and we are continuing to get the job done for those who rely on us. We are also incredibly grateful for and inspired by the collective compassion that has surfaced as a result of this crisis particularly demonstrated by frontline healthcare and other essential workers. Moving forward in 2020, we remain focused on advancing our strategic mission. As our teams have adjusted to the remote nature of daily life, I'm reminded by one of Nasdaq's founding principles that people do not need to be in the same physical place to be part of the same community. This founding principle continues to drive us as we face the unexpected and I believe we are moving Nasdaq in the right direction this year. And with that I'll turn it over to Michael to review the financial details.