Mark Barrenechea
Analyst · RBC. Please go ahead
Thank you, Harry, and welcome, everyone, to our fiscal 2023 Q2 call. Madhu and I are delighted to be hosting today's call from Ottawa. Tomorrow, we ring the opening bells to NASDAQ live from the nation's capital. It is NASDAQ's first opening from Canada and tomorrow is a recognition and celebration of Canada’s and OpenText’s leading role in global technology innovation. We're a differentiated young company and we're just getting started. Let me get right to the most important points today. OpenText had a truly superb Q2, achieving overall constant currency revenue growth of 7.8%, which reflects very strong cloud revenue growth of 16%, excellent renewals performance and continued focus on efficiency with 37.7% adjusted EBITDA margin, even as many of our team members also worked very hard to prepare for the close and integration of Micro Focus. Many of the same secular factors that contributed to our growth have only increased our confidence and the potential that we see in the acquisition of Micro Focus. Specifically, in an increasingly connected and data-intensive world, our customers need actionable insights and information, strong security and continuing innovation and the tools that they need to accelerate, the digital evolution of their complex business environments, in order to securely deliver on their customers' expectations and do so efficiently. We are on track to deliver on every commitment we made at the time of the Micro Focus acquisition announcement. I'll elaborate later, but we are more confident than ever about the value we can create for our shareholders, customers and our employees and the performance we can realize by applying the OpenText business system at very experienced integrators. We have a proven track record that has been refined through the course of integrating many large acquisitions over the last decade. In addition, you'll hear today that we're on a path to deliver $6 billion in annual revenues, a $2 billion cloud revenue business and over $2 billion in adjusted EBITDA dollars with upper quartile free cash flows based on the trust of our customers. There's five specific topics I want to cover today. One, our vision, our differentiation and how we plan to win in our markets, two, delivering on our expanded information management mission and growth programs; third, multiyear financial milestones and aspirations, including our superb Q2 results, fiscal '23 growth markets -- we discussed today our preliminary F '24 growth targets and even stronger F '26 aspirations. We'll also talk about our strong capital allocation approach and plan and how we intend to create value with the OpenText business system. Let's get into it. First, our vision, our differentiation and how we plan to win in our markets. Markets are never static. Through time, we've expanded information management, to include many types of content experiences and business networks. With a Micro Focus acquisition, OpenText Corporate Mission expands again, this time to help enterprise professionals secure their operations, gain more set into their information -- more insight into their information and better manage increasingly hybrid and complex digital fabric with a new generation of tools that include cybersecurity, digital operations management, applications automation and AI and analytics. Digital Life is life, and this is generation digital. We call this business 2030. Organizations can only achieve their strategic aspirations by becoming digital leaders and top economic performers are already investing disproportionately in digital capabilities. We're on the cusp of a new world era, driven by digital, new productivity and harnessing the world assets, unlocking human potential, the reshaping of economies by the frictionless flow of goods, people, capital ideas and the new uses of technologies that will drive the next big arena of value and competition. Business 2030 will be achieved through 4 digital transformations. Total enterprise reinvention. – every industry totally transformed by digital, a new workforce led by Generation Y and Z and only a digital mindset, new digital paradigms and sustainability, climate, trust and social justice and new digital requirements and extended reality, voice and facial interfaces, diverse and AI. Organizations will continue to be the process advantage, of course, which they receive from ERP and CRM vendors, but the process advantage requires data and actionable insights. Customers need the information advantage, which they receive from OpenText forged by digital. I speak with a lot of customers and their business operations are getting more complex as they operate across many countries, many regulatory authorities, platforms, endpoints and cloud, including the rocketing security and industry compliance requirements. Process and information for is increasing for business information and automation that spans commerce, supply chain, service management, asset management, payment systems, financial systems, communications and service management. The more connected business becomes the more complex of business operations. At OpenText, we have the end-to-end software and cloud capability to help customers make this transformation rapidly and cost effectively. This is why I like to say we are the platform of platforms for information management. Customers need a single real-time view of information across these complex business infrastructure, that is intelligent, connected, secure and responsible, that is what we do, and it is unique. This is the OpenText Information Advantage. Specifically, we believe there are six-key markets required to enable the Information Advantage and deliver the high-impact digital transformation required for business 2030 and winning in this new digital era. The six markets are these. Number one, content services, which include experiences; number two, business networks; third, cybersecurity; fourth, application automation, which includes ADM and AMC; fifth, digital operations management, formerly ITOM; and sixth, analytics and AI. We are organizing around this strategic and growing totally addressable market of $200 billion plus, and we'll keep you updated on our progress in these six market areas. Second thing I want to talk about today is delivering on our expanded information management vision and growth programs. It's been a great first week speaking with Micro Focus, employees and customers and we have already completed our leadership, structural and key people integration. There's an enormous amount of energy and excitement. Please recall the transactional financial highlights are as follows. We paid an enterprise value of $5.8 billion financed with cash and debt. This equates to a revenue multiple of approximately 2.3 times and an adjusted EBITDA multiple of 6.7 times, a very attractive multiple and the business is immediately accretive to adjusted EBITDA dollars. Moreover, we love the amazing talent, marquee customers and great products, including idle in the content space, Vertica and AI, Fortify, Voltage and Security, SMAX in digital operations and load runner and Value Edge and applications automation, including critical maintain technologies that power the Global 10,000 today and tomorrow. We also intend to fix the things that need fixing, accelerate to the cloud, reinvention of the customer engagement with the OpenText love model, centralizing renewals and implementing OT best practices and rightsizing the organization for speed, impact and growth. On growth, let me summarize a few key programs. OpenText delivered a 95% renewal rate for off-cloud in Q2. We expect to make steady progress in transforming the customer experience with Micro Focus products and raising their low 80s renewal rates to ours by the end of fiscal 2025 or sooner. Rapid innovation, the highest correlation to high renewal rates as product value, and we are taking several actions to accelerate innovation to all our customers. Specifically, we are immediately engaging customers to migrate to the OpenText private cloud for all major Micro Focus offerings and transitioning Micro Focus to our 90-day release cycles to accelerate innovation. Within these Zix markets, customers will benefit from some fantastic new product value. Our growth strategy is to win the Zix market and go deep in each space with select and strategic cross-market integrations that include cloud, AI and security. Let me highlight some of those growth areas in our Zix markets. In the content space, we intend four programs to help customers expand the areas of digital potential. We're going to leverage our new idle capabilities to incorporate new business workloads that leverage voice, video, imaging and facial recognition. These are all new workloads we can bring content into. We're going to offer the OpenText private cloud capabilities to all Micro Focus customers to accelerate innovation. We're going to deliver the most secure content platform in the market with our new voltage. And with Titanium gain larger share in SaaS ECM market. We're on track with Titanium. In the business network space, integrate our new Vertica advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities and to the OpenText trading grid to provide massive data analytics to drive the next generation of supply chain transformations and leverage our new digital operations management capabilities to increase the speed of change, the rate of change within the supply chain. Security is job number one. In cyber security with the acquisitions of Carbonite, Zix and Micro Focus security products, OpenText is now one of the largest cyber security businesses in the world. We've created a single go-to-market motion covering enterprise, SMB and consumer, providing a complete cyber security stack in the marketplace from endpoint, forensic, identity, encryption and cloud-based application security. We intend to invest in cybersecurity, gain share and ensure this is a top driver of customer value from OpenText. With our applications automation space, we've added significant new DevOps capabilities and performance, quality and application testing within our -- with our cloud scale and experience, we will turn up the volume in helping customers use these new tools to migrate and modernize into the cloud even faster. And our new digital operations management space will help customers increase service levels and customer experiences by integrating extended ECM and digital operations. We ran this play very successfully with SAP applications, we'll run it again with ECM and digital operations. And in Analytics & AI. We believe Vertica is a gem. We have two per value plays. Integrate Magellan in our new Vertica for stand-alone AI and analytics and the two products already have their initial integration, and we demoed it live this week and embedded Vertica and all our major offerings from content, business network and security. Information management in the cloud, secured intelligence and at scale. Customers will benefit from some fantastic new product value. On our cost reduction programs, we confirm our approach to removing 400 million of combined company costs over the next 18 months, by reducing overlapping work, removing inefficiencies, eliminating redundant facilities and automating work. Madhu will speak more about this in a few moments. Earlier this week, we announced our plan to rightsize our combined workforce from 25,000 employees to 23,000 employees or an approximate reduction of 8% within fiscal 2023. This reduction is solely driven by the acquisition and we still plan for strategic hiring of key roles in select geographies to help us drive growth and innovation. This is going to be a rapid value-accretive integration. Thirdly, I want to talk about today is our growth plans, financial milestones and aspirations. As I said at the start, we had a superb Q2, and we're integrating Micro Focus from a position of strength. Let me walk through some of our Q2 highlights and year-over-year constant currency. It's our eighth consecutive quarter of cloud and ARR organic growth. We delivered $945 million in total revenues or 7.8% growth, $423 million of cloud revenues or 16% growth, and with Micro Focus, our cloud revenues are going to approach $2 billion a year. We reported enterprise cloud bookings growth of 12% and our adjusted EBITDA was 37.7%. On a reported basis, we delivered $163 million of free cash flow and adjusted EPS of $0.89 or $0.94 in constant currency. I couldn’t be more pleased about what we have accomplished with and for our customers this quarter. We have strong customer adoption of cloud additions within the quarter RR. Donnelley, Lear, Royal Bank of Canada, Los Alamos National Laboratory, AMD, The US Defense Health Agency and Transport of London. We're excited to partner with these leaders as they accelerate their digital transformation and look to own their digital capabilities. In an uncertain environment, we continue -- we see continuing high customer engagement and strong demand for our solutions. Last quarter, I talked about the current and compounding challenges in the world, inclusive of currency, wage and goods inflation, fuel prices, Russia’s war in Ukraine, supply chain constraints, skill shortages and more. Many of these trends continue. The only answer is digitalization to deliver insights, improve efficiency and lower costs and our strong Q2 results reflect the corresponding increasing need of businesses to partner with OpenText. It is clear that technology is playing a significant role in boosting productivity in the face of these challenges and technology is a greater portion of GDP today. IDC's research makes it clear that technology budgets are growing. They forecast IT spend will grow 5% in 2023 this year, software spend at 8% and Software-as-a-Service spend at 15%. Transitioning to our financial outlook, we promised more visibility, and we are providing it today. In our investor presentation, we have provided our updated F2023 target, F2024 preliminary targets and our F2026 aspiration, each include Micro Focus. Let me summarize in year-over-year terms and in constant currency. Our F2023 targets include total revenues up 28% to 30% or $4.47 billion to $4.55 billion with Micro Focus contributing between $870 million to $920 million continued enterprise cloud bookings growth of 15% plus. The total company is expected to grow organically. Adjusted EBITDA dollars between $1.46 billion and $1.52 billion, or adjusted EBITDA margin of 32.5% to 33.5%. Reported cash flow of $500 million to $600 million impacted from integration spend. It will be a year of cloud acceleration and onboarding Micro Focus. Let me provide our preliminary for F2024 targets. Total revenues, up 33% to 35% or $5.7 billion to $5.9 billion of total revenues. Enterprise cloud bookings growth of 15% plus. The total company is expected to grow organically. Adjusted EBITDA dollars between $2.1 billion to $2.24 billion or between 36% to 38%, approximately $800 million to $900 million of reported free cash flow. And let me spend a moment on Micro Focus and fiscal 2024. We are baselining Micro Focus revenues to our financial quarters in to our standards and expectations. We want to make this simple and clear for you. They ended their last fiscal year at approximately $2.5 billion in revenues and declining mid single-digits. Our revenue baseline for fiscal 2024 is approximately $2.3 billion in annual revenues and that is what we've modeled into our F '24 preliminary targets. The F '24 baseline includes transitioning from IFRS to US GAAP, transitioning to our reporting periods, our seasonality and the complete exiting of Russia, their previous sale of Digital Safe and stopping some non-strategic items. To be clear, that is all history now. The baseline for fiscal 2024 is a stable $2.3 billion, from which we intend to grow organically in fiscal 2025. Now if you want to do the forward metrics on the purchase price, that is 2.5x forward revenues that the midpoint of adjusted EBITDA 6.8x. This is an outstanding value purchase. We are replacing our F '25-year aspirations with our F '26 aspirations. Total company organic growth up 2% to 4%. Enterprise cloud bookings continue at 15% plus adjusted EBITDA margin expansion to 38% to 40% and reported free cash flows of $1.5 billion plus. Fourth thing I want to talk about today is our capital allocation approach and plan. We have a strong three-year plan, and we have the leadership, talent and tools to deliver. We're on a clear path to build a $2 billion cloud revenue business and $2 billion plus in adjusted EBITDA dollars. Based on this, our capital allocation approach can be summarized as following: a rapid delevering program. Starting in fiscal Q4, we expect to pay down our debt by a minimum of $150 million a quarter in over eight quarters until we are under 3x leverage, continuance of our dividend program. We intend to grow our dividend as our free cash flows grow. The OpenText Board approved a cash dividend of $ 0.24299 per share with a record date of March 3 and a payment date of March 23. Share count, our long-term plan is to hold our share count constant. Our business model is being designed to have a 20% plus conversion rate from revenue to free cash flow. This is upper quartile performance and we're on that path. Before I wrap up, let me just speak to how we create value with the OpenText Business System. The company is focused on growth, profits and creating value. We see three key stakeholder groups in the OpenText Business System, customers, employees and shareholders. For 125,000 enterprise customers with 1 million SMB businesses and 8 million home users, it starts with world-class delivery, trust in our products in cloud and the OpenText love model, land, operate, value, expand and creating a customer for life. For employees, we invest in three areas: performance, achievement and learning. And for our shareholders, total revenue growth that includes organic and acquired revenues like our superb Q2. A reinvestment strategy for growth with customer-informed R&D and sales and marketing, building a digital business that removes cost, improves productivity via higher automation, upper quartile adjusted EBITDA margins, strong free cash flow with a yield of 20% plus our capital allocation plan, as I previously noted, and continued acquisitions. We intend to acquire strategic assets that create value, leveraging the OpenText business system as we just did with Micro Focus. This is our virtuous cycle, how we create value using the OpenText Business System. Let me express something beyond our numbers in our business system. I have strong confidence in our business, team and plan. And I'll keep you updated in the coming quarters as to our progress. I've always liked the model from the great state of Missouri, the ShowmeState. Our results will speak for themselves. In summary, OpenText is a unique company as we understand the complexity of our customers, and we help them reliably manage that complexity. As a result, we have earned their trust every day, and we delivered the market value with the information advantage. I'll end my prepared remarks by reviewing the comments we made at the time of the Micro Focus acquisition announcement. One, we are reaffirming returning Micro Focus products to organic growth. The five months of fiscal 2024 will be on-boarding, F 2024 a year returning to constant and F 2025 organic growth. Accelerate cloud growth on a combined basis, expect enterprise cloud bookings growth of 15% plus. We expect to transform the Micro Focus customer engagement and renewal model, as previously noted. The acquisition is dollar accretive from Day 1, and contribute significantly more as we integrate, take cost out, improve renewal rates and return to organic growth. Upper quartile adjusted EBITDA margin of 36% to 38% in fiscal 2024 and 38% to 40% in fiscal 2026. Upper quartile free cash flows of $800 million to $900 million in fiscal 2024, $1.5 billion plus in fiscal 2026. Rapid de-levering, continuation of our dividend program and enhanced visibility as we're doing today and we'll continue to do so. We're on track to deliver on every commitment we made. Let me express my deepest gratitude to our customers that place their trust in OpenText every day. My deepest gratitude to our OpenText colleagues who – who did outstanding work over the last six months completing the acquisition, delivering an amazing Q2 and strong momentum into the second half of this fiscal year and doing the hard work to prepare for applying our proven integration playbook. And finally, a huge and warm welcome for 11,000 new colleagues from Micro Focus customers and value-added partners. We will grow and innovate as United OpenText. We the one that brings peace – bring peace for all. Let me turn the call over to Madhu Ranganathan, OpenText's CFO and my business partner. Madhu.