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NetScout Systems, Inc. (NTCT)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 30, 2015

$32.61

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to NetScout's First Quarter Fiscal Year 2016 Results Conference Call. After the speakers' remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Andrew Kramer, Vice President of Investor Relations and his colleagues at NetScout are on line with us today. I would now like to turn the call over to Andrew Kramer.

Andrew Kramer

Analyst

Thank you, Melisa. And good morning, everybody. Welcome to NetScout’s fiscal 2016 first quarter conference call for the period ended June 30, 2015. Joining me on this morning’s call are: Anil Singhal, NetScout’s Co-Founder, President and CEO; Michael Szabados, NetScout’s Chief Operating Officer; and Jean Bua, NetScout’s Senior Vice President And Chief Financial Officer. We have included the slide presentation of key financial data that accompanies the financial section of our prepared remarks. For those listeners who have dialed into the call this morning and would like to view this slide presentation, you can find it by going to our website at www.netscout.com/investors and then clicking on today’s webcast. You can advance the slides in the webcast viewer to follow along with our commentary. We will try to remember to call out the slide number we are referencing in our remarks. In terms of our agenda for today’s call, Anil Singhal will first provide an overview of our first quarter results and share his perspective on our business going forward and the opportunities we see now that our acquisition Danaher’s Communications business has been completed. Our COO, Michael Szabados will offer some insights on customer success stories and key drivers for customer adoption. CFO, Jean Bua will then provides additional detail on our first quarter financial performance as well as discusses our guidance. Moving on to Slide 3. I would like to remind everybody listening that forward-looking statements in this presentation are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and other federal securities laws. Investors are cautioned that statements in this presentation, which are not strictly historical facts, constitute forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. These include without limitation, our financial guidance, anticipated share repurchase, product development…

Anil Singhal

Analyst

Thank you. Andy. The past several quarters and more certainly the past several weeks have been very energizing for NetScout with the completion of the transformative acquisition of Danaher’s Communications Business. At the same time, our team stayed focus on addressing our customers' needs which enabled us to report a solid first quarter performance in line with the guidance we have provided. Our results this quarter were marked by revenue in excess of $100 million and solid non-GAAP profitability. While I'll provide some perspective into our first quarter result in the later, I'll spend the majority of my time outlining our perspective on the transaction and why we are positive that this transaction will help us via significant value over the long term for our all key stakeholders. Before I do that, I wanted to make sure I expressed our thanks to all of our shareholders for the tremendous support we received at the special meeting last month when approximately 98% of those voting voted in favor of the primary proposal related to the transaction. On a related note, also want to welcome our new shareholders who are invested more recently in NetScout either by tendering their ownership o Danaher stock or in purchasing of our stock in the week leading up to or following the completion of the acquisition. This transaction has the potential to significantly accelerate the strategic plan that we put in place several years ago to further expand our business and extend our reach into complimentary market. By extending our leadership position in the Broader Service Assurance in Cyber Security Market, we'll move forward with a clear focus on fulfilling the responsibility associated with our new tagline and mission called - Guardians of the Connected Word. More than two decades ago, NetScout pioneered the network traffic-based…

Michael Szabados

Analyst

Thank you, Anil. It is a very exciting time for NetScout. Having spent considerable time with the teams from NetScout, Tektronix Communications, Arbor Networks, VSS Monitoring and Fluke Networks since closing the acquisition, we see great enthusiasm for what we can accomplish together. The opportunity in front of our Company is a significant one and we move forward with a value proposition that we believe will be uniquely compelling to hundreds of service providers and more than 10,000 enterprise customers around the world. I’d like to review a couple of recent success stories for NetScout as they should be helpful to you as you think about our potential to leverage the combined capabilities of our post-acquisition company across a larger, more diverse and more global customer base. Last month, we announced that Open Mobile, a leading network operator offering a complete range of Internet and mobile cellular services exclusively in Puerto Rico, selected NetScout to ensure service delivery and provide operational intelligence support for its wireless network. Although the incumbent vendor competed aggressively to win this business, NetScout was chosen based on the strength of our proven workflows that offered deeper insight into their LTE network. NetScout’s solution includes our nGeniusONE management system, InfiniStream Appliances and Packet Flow Switches for traffic aggregation and distribution. We see potential to deliver further value in the future to this customer, as we will have a broader range of capabilities and offerings that can help us extend our footprint within this and other accounts. One win I’d highlight in the financial services vertical is a leading diversified insurance and financial services provider with a nationwide footprint. This firm has rolled out NetScout’s nGeniusONE to assure the connectivity and quality of the firm’s unified communications infrastructure as well as support a new data center build…

Jean Bua

Analyst

Thank you, Michael. And good morning everyone. This morning, I will plan to review key metrics for the first quarter, and then I will discuss our guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. As mentioned at the outset, we will be referencing non-GAAP metrics when appropriate, and comparing all figures against the comparable prior year period unless otherwise noted. To begin our financial discussion, we will be starting with Slide no 7 of our presentation which is accompanying this call. As a reminder, it is posted on our website. For our first fiscal quarter, total revenue was $100.7 million which is a decline of 7% from the same quarter in fiscal year 2015. The decline was led by a 17% decrease in product revenue as the result of an exceptionally strong first quarter of the prior year, which was led by one of our large Tier-1 service provider customers who purchased in the comparable quarter of last year in order to support one of their large multi-quarter deployments. Service revenue was $47.1 million and represented an 8% increase over the prior year’s quarter. Gross profit was $80.7 million. Our gross margin percentage for the quarter was 80.1% which is relatively in line with the gross margin percentage of the prior year’s quarter. Operating income for the quarter was $21.9 million with a 21.8% operating income margin. Due to the higher product revenue experienced in last year’s quarter, the comparable period’s operating margin last year was 23.4%. For the first quarter, we reported net income of $13.7 million, or $0.33 per diluted share. The net income margin was 13.6% as compared to the prior year’s quarter of 14.1% Slide 8 provides detail on our product revenue composition for the first quarter. As we move forward under the combined businesses, we are consolidating…

Andrew Kramer

Analyst

Operator, we are now ready for the Q&A.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Alex Kurtz, Sterne AGG

Alex Kurtz

Analyst

Yes, thanks guys for taking the couple of questions. And congratulations on completing the deal. First on Jean on this $50 million deal that you are talking about in September. How does that factor in Q, how you view the guidance for the year and also the accretion that you guys talked about when you announced the deal. Then I have a couple of follow ups.

Jean Bua

Analyst

Sure. So factoring into the deal, so the deal has only been awarded. It was rewarded to Tektronix and they are in the final stages of execution where what is required to just be able to report the revenue is the documentation and acceptance from our customer. We anticipate that, that will definitely happen before the end of this fiscal year. And so it is in embedded in our $1.05 billion to $1.1 billion revenue range. We currently anticipate since the project is on path for its completion in the quarter that it should happen in this quarter. But I just want to caution because we don't give our guidance on quarterly basis. But the timing of that might switch into Q3 depending on when the customer prepares and sends our documentation. So it definitely it is just more of timing issue between Q2 and Q3 but it should happen in this fiscal quarter. Regarding accretion, as we've said a year ago, we believe we are on the path for accretion. We said it would be accretive in the first full year which is the three quarters of FY16 that is remaining and the first quarter of FY17 and high end of our EPS guidance ranges, we are confident that we will still be able to achieve our goal of the deal being accretive in the first 12 months of operation.

Alex Kurtz

Analyst

Okay and then just a couple of quick follow ups on the 20 million buyback, how much you know all discussion about aggressively you can use that in the first year. What is the actual fact on that? How much of that 20 million shares can you buyback in the first 12 months and what's the plan?

Jean Bua

Analyst

So the 20 million shares are represents about 20% of the outstanding shares. And we have an agreement that we would not buyback more 20 million shares over the first two years. Within those two years there is nothing that really precludes timing of that other than just looking prudently at your cash flow and your capital structure. We put a 10b5-1 in place before the beginning of the quite period for our second quarter. And under an open market purchase plan which is what we decided made the most sense because as we've discussed in the past, after this RNT transactions there is generally a large amount of volume which everyone saw in the month of July. So we put 10b5-1 plan in place to be able to take advantage of buying, generally you can buy and line with say 10%-15% of the average of the trading volumes over like a four week period. So we have doing that and we plan to do that for the continuing period going forward. So we've been happy so far with the stock price, the way the stock has reacted from the transaction and the tender and the shareholder vote. And we've been active in buying in the market at this point.

Alex Kurtz

Analyst

Just last question. If you look at the last filing here on Danaher’s comp business that was put out I think last week, it showed a pretty weak June quarter and I can imagine a lot that is from just the deal and sort of pausing some spending in demand. So can you just help us explain the reacceleration of your assumptions of Tektronix and Danaher’s comp business from that filing from Danaher from the June quarter into the September quarter?

Anil Singhal

Analyst

So, Alex, so first thing is from a business point of view we talked about last time that book-to-bill ratio remains higher than one and actually there is a good backlog and one of the deals we just talked about is also the reason for this to be weaker last quarter. So I won't -- we are not concerned about what happen last quarter at Danaher partly because there have been a lot of uncertainty also, so I think overall we feel confident about the guidance we've provided and I don't think this number is a reflection of not believing in that.

Jean Bua

Analyst

They seem good order flow and they also are going to start from a comparison perspective lacking some of the softer quarter within the Tektronix business. Fluke and Arbor have continue to grow as they historically which have been in the low to mid single digit to mid teen respectively. When we did our guidance we did a very detailed operational review business by business and looked at all of their opportunities. So at this point we believe that they should be a grower. We understand that projects that they have in their pipeline and the projects that they are working on. So at this point we are comfortable with our guidance range of $1.05 billion to $1.1 billion for fiscal year 2016.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Scott Zeller, Needham.

Scott Zeller

Analyst

Hi, good morning. Thank you. I just wanted to ask Jean about your guidance just to be clear you mentioned there are two scenarios for the fiscal second quarter at 25% to 27% of annual and 20% to 22% of annual but then I heard you say also that you are not guiding specifically or granularly to the fiscal second quarter. So could you help us with that?

Jean Bua

Analyst

Sure. There is a lot of moving pieces to this business right. And I think it is also why we always provide annual guidance. I think it's just helpful to share with our -- with the investment community how we see each coming quarter given all of the integration pieces. So the guidance right now that -- I am sorry -- the color that I gave for Q2 assumes that the larger transaction that we've been talking about with Tektronix definitely occurs in this quarter. And I am just explaining that should the documentation for recording the revenue which is into the third quarter. The second quarter revenue would be impacted by that and the third quarter revenue would have a pickup. If that should happen, I imagine we will be and we don't see there is a communication from the customer will be coming in. I would imagine that we would update our guidance or at least discuss it accordingly more towards the end of October beginning of September.

Anil Singhal

Analyst

I think one other thing, Scott, to mention is at the VSS they were smaller business standalone, we've talked about the lumpiness of service provider and that percentage is going to increase now as Jean mentioned from 40% to 60%. And specially we have these two weeks after the closing and so all these factors are creating that a little bit of uncertainty with Jean talked about. And that's one of the reasons we prefer to give -- look at the performance of the company on yearly basis and we've been doing that for last three years and meeting the guidance.

Scott Zeller

Analyst

Okay. So if I understand then there is no official guidance for fiscal second quarter just color and you have only annual guidance.

Jean Bua

Analyst

Yes. We have only annual guidance but we are more than happy to provide color in each of these calls for the upcoming quarter given the complexity and the integration of the businesses.

Scott Zeller

Analyst

Given the changes, well the combination of business now, can you update us on what your thought are around the seasonal pattern for revenues now because in the past we've seen a seasonal pattern where the second half of the fiscal year is materially higher for NetScout, so could you -- as we look at the two together should we see more of a steady or up the right or can you just offer your thoughts on the balance between the first and second half of the year please.

Anil Singhal

Analyst

I think Jean can be give more specific but I see the pattern very similar. I think second half will be better than the first half. But maybe Jean you can comment and maybe more specific.

Jean Bua

Analyst

Sure. I would say that the third quarter, the fiscal year third quarter is probably going to be one of the stronger quarters when our fourth quarter also being strong. So the skew will still be there with the first half is a little less in revenue and second half is greater. I don't want to be definitive at this point because we don't have four full quarters yet to look at and the business will be ramping. But at this time I would still tell you it is probably still going to be slightly backend loaded and consistent with the NetScout revenue pattern.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Mark Kelleher, DA Davidson.

Mark Kelleher

Analyst

Great, thanks for taking the question and congrats on the deal closing as well. I want to talk about the sales integration between the two. I know you only been together for two weeks but particularly in the service provider, are the Tektronix sales people and NetScout people still independent or still address customers independently or is there some interaction going on there?

Anil Singhal

Analyst

No. The sales force has been completely integrated and so there are not two people calling the same account, we have a joint sales presentation. We have integration plan for the combined personality for later this year. So that was one of the areas where we had to do it on day one. And as I mentioned that we have consolidated all the sales, bulk of the sales under single leader that we chose, VP of worldwide sales of NetScout before John Downing. But even at the next level, next couple of levels we have done similar things as far as Tektronix and so everything has been fully integrated. I would say 95% to 98% of those procedures have been made and well accepted.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi, Lake Street Capital Market.

Eric Martinuzzi

Analyst

Just I keep seeing on the Q1 just reported the legacy NetScout business, you did come in within your guided range on the top line there but it was in the lower half. Just curious to know what the -- what puts you there as opposed to maybe the upper half?

Jean Bua

Analyst

So as we discussed last -- on the earnings call last quarter, Eric, the range was pretty wide due to FX headwinds as well as the potential for service providers who want to understand the roadmap after the transaction closed. It is a difficult quarter to have been able to compare against anyway. Last quarter was probably our largest Q1 in at least five years. And we were happy with that last year. So this quarter I would it was just timing of FX headwinds even though we still -- even though the EURO has stabilized, there are still some of our customers in Europe who still are experiencing economic strain due to that as well as just as Anil said he has been on the road talking with a lot of our customers especially tier one about the combination and they would like to be able to understand the roadmap and the design going forward as they begin their purchasing cycles.

Eric Martinuzzi

Analyst

And has their purchasing cycle been impacted -- is there a potential risk of freeze as people want to see maybe merged product to comes out in six months as opposed to the one that's available now?

Anil Singhal

Analyst

No. I don't think so Eric, there will be like timing issue as we talked about one of the deal, got a different reason this quarter but there could be some more questions. This is a like vacation time, holiday time in Europe but we are going on the road again in September. And I think that time everyone will be very clear that there is no real advantage to wait. In fact there might be an advantage from a pricing point of view to do it sooner than wait till the end of the year.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Chad Bennett. Craig Hallum.

Chad Bennett

Analyst

Yes. Good morning. Just a couple of questions for me. Can you Jean can you give us a sense of with the combined company now what D&A depreciation and amortization will be and what's stock comp will be at least looking forward 12 months roughly?

Jean Bua

Analyst

Looking forward 12 months.

Chad Bennett

Analyst

Yes. Just kind of annually I guess I should say.

Jean Bua

Analyst

I would say that share based compensation is probably going to be in line with what it was for NetScout given on the increased scale of the business. Meaning that we still don't anticipate that we are going to be giving out more shares to employees than we have in the past. Generally we have given out about 2% and 2.5%. So I would just look at the share based compensation as commensurate with the scale increase of the business. For depreciation and amortization, we are still finalizing our purchase accounting. And we still we have to be able to fair value some of the intangible and stuff. So I really would say I get back to you on that question probably in a couple of weeks when we finished the opening balance sheet procedures.

Chad Bennett

Analyst

Okay, fair enough. And then I believe when we were talking about the deal we talked about at least initially preclose synergy $50 million-ish in think in synergies for the combined business. I guess I assume -- can you tell us how much of that is implied in the EPS guidance that you gave and I assume some or maybe all of it is and kind of how tha stages in throughout the year.

Anil Singhal

Analyst

Well I think basically we talked about so that number is part of the guidance, is included it and it is going to be realized more towards the second half of the fiscal year. And you can think of them partly as some cost savings and second is some gross market synergy by moving some other products to the next got gross margin -- rather than maybe Tektronix margin level as well as -- so that's how the $50 million of synergy are made of that and like I said we will see it more towards the third and fourth quarter and that made into the EPS guidance.

Jean Bua

Analyst

As well as the first quarter of fiscal year 2017.

Anil Singhal

Analyst

Yes.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Kevin Liu, B Riley and Company.

Kevin Liu

Analyst

Hi, good morning. First off just in terms of the European talk that contributed within Q1 and can you talk about whether that was a new customer or whether it was an existing one? And how do you expect your penetration of that customer to expand over time?

Anil Singhal

Analyst

Yes. It was a nice customer and I think the penetration we hope moving forward is going to be -- we hope it better because Tektronix business was much stronger internationally and we think that those people will be very interested looking at the joint company and the best of breed functionality. And having said that, we still need to present a roadmap and we did interaction to them. But we see longer term and basically it sound dim or maybe even some positive to act this fiscal year, we see the European business will be more positive than before.

Kevin Liu

Analyst

Got it. And just since day one of the close of the transaction, have you noticed anything changing in terms of deals that were already in the respective company pipeline and in another words first maybe your service platter touch might you have seen those deal sizes either extend or perhaps they longed as decisions need to be made around the kind of the future direction of the products.

Anil Singhal

Analyst

I think there was -- it was not clear when the date the close is going to happen in July. Yes, that impacted some of the businesses slightly but I don't see any big change in terms of people specifically waiting for the deal. They just -- that's where I think there was uncertainty in the Q1 for last year for us as well as Tektronix and some of it, maybe they are little bit in the Q2 also. But I don't see that continuing beyond that.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ruykhaver, Stephens.

Jonathan Ruykhaver

Analyst

Yes, good morning. I am wondering Anil if you can talk a bit about your strategy around the enterprise segment. I think in the segment there is underperformance to some extent and how do you see the Fluke Networks' business impacting that opportunity?

Anil Singhal

Analyst

I see I mean this is a maybe longer discussion but a short answer for this is we see two main synergies. One is that we going into the mid market segment with Fluke Networks tools and their solutions. And which is the area we have not focused on and it is more channels friendly and there are other businesses international. We have to look stronger so I see enterprise business growing in those areas on the high end side; I see lot of synergy between a combined security and service assurance product. We typically placed in the similar point in the network and you can think of DDOS as short of service assurance also. So I think lot of the financials who have been spending lot more money in compliance and security, we now can go back to them with a different message and then sell a higher level functionality. So those are the two big synergies we see over the next year or so.

Jonathan Ruykhaver

Analyst

Is that a product integration opportunity you see between NG as one in Arbor or is it more just cross sell that you think you can focus on to be more effective in financial services with Arbor.

Anil Singhal

Analyst

Yes, both. We see both because we have a much larger enterprise sales force than Arbor and they have bigger force on service provider side. So we have great relationship to sell the security solution through some kind of overlay model or otherwise and second are like I said when we have more integrated solutions like taking our ASI technology and feeding into some advanced persistent threat solution. And aligning with existing roadmap of Arbor that could create additional synergy. But that will be maybe beyond this calendar year.

Operator

Operator

And I'll turn it back over to management for closing remarks.

Andrew Kramer

Analyst

Well, thank you very much, Melisa. And thank you everybody for joining us on this morning's call. As a reminder, there is a replay that will be available for the next week or so. Obviously there will be webcast archived on our website as well. Look forward to seeing folks at our Investor Day next week in New York. And we understand that there is likely to be additional follow up questions. Folks are welcome to engage with us. We look forward to the dialogue. And we look forward to reporting back to you in October when we announced our Q2 results. Thank you very much.