James E. Heppelmann
Analyst · Griffin Securities
Thank you, James Hillier. It's good to have you joining us here on your first earnings call with PTC, so welcome aboard. Good morning to all the rest of you who are joining us, and welcome to our fourth quarter in fiscal year 2013 earnings call. I'd like to thank you once again for sharing your valuable time with us here this morning. So I'm pleased to report that PTC delivered a solid fourth quarter, which in turn capped off a solid fiscal year 2013. Having achieved 5% constant currency revenue growth and 24% constant currency non-GAAP earnings growth in spite of a challenging economic environment, we think PTC can put fiscal 2013 firmly into the win column. When we spoke 90 days ago, we indicated that we were entering our fourth quarter with a strong pipeline of opportunities, but we had a concern that the difficult macro headwinds might decrease the close rate of deals in that pipe. As the quarter progressed, we sensed a modest improvement in the economic environment as the forecast ticked up on several occasions. The quarter ended strong, and we were able to surpass the high end of our revenue guidance on license and total revenue. Given the leverage we've created in our business model, that extra revenue allowed us to deliver substantially more earnings than our guidance had suggested. So with those strong fourth quarter results, the FY '13 year ended well, particularly when measured in terms of earnings performance. On the subject of earnings performance, I'll remind you that back in 2009, we first talked about our plan to deliver a 20% non-GAAP earnings CAGR for 5 consecutive years. The PTC team is proud that over the first 4 years of that commitment, we've actually delivered a 22% non-GAAP earnings CAGR, taking our non-GAAP operating profit from around $30 million a quarter in 2009 to around $70 million a quarter, on average, in 2013. The restructuring that we've done to our business along the way has now put us in a position to put forth a very interesting extended plan that will take us out through 2017. There were some notable highlights in the quarter. First, the strength was fairly broad based, and we delivered strong revenue without the benefit of any megadeals. Our European business showed good signs of recovery that mirrored the improved economic data that we see coming from that region. Our China and Japan results were very solid. And while our North American results look weaker, in part that's because we're comparing to what was really a blockbuster Q4 in that region last quarter -- or last year. We were pleased to see momentum in our CAD business, and though our extended PLM results as reported are unimpressive, they look a little better when you factor in the absence of megadeals that tend to power that business in its strongest comparable periods. Generally speaking, SLM did well, and while Servigistics had another good quarter, the incremental revenue strength in the quarter really came from stronger organic performance across our business segments. Looking ahead to FY '14, our guidance reflects the balance of pipeline strength on one hand, coupled with a real concern that the macro situation will muddle along or even get worse on the other hand. On the pipeline side, the rule of thumb in enterprise software is that for every dollar of revenue in your plan, you need $3 of opportunity in your pipeline. And going into FY '14, our situation is materially better than that. On the other hand, the economic data shows mixed trends, with Europe improving, but the U.S. perhaps weakening. And while the last quarter felt strong to PTC, we certainly took note that most of our industry peers and many other notable software and IT companies posted relatively weak results. So we want to avoid getting ahead of ourselves, and we provided guidance that we feel balances the various circumstances as best we can. Looking beyond FY '14, we also unveiled today an extension of our long-range plan that would take us out through fiscal year 2017. This plan will allow the company to continue to deliver superior earnings growth for 4 more years. The first key part of the long-range plan is continued expansion of the company's non-GAAP operating margin to the 28% to 30% range that begins to approach a peer average value. While the 2017 operating margin is 600 to 800 basis points higher than FY '13, keep in mind that we expect to get the first 300 basis points in FY '14, thanks to actions we've already taken in FY '13. The second key element of the long-range plan is growth. The 8% to 11% growth rate we contemplated in the plan is more than the 5% constant currency growth rate we saw in the difficult environment of FY '13, but it's in line with what we saw in the prior 3 years, during which the economy was okay, but certainly not great. During that time period, our average growth rate was better than 9%, with a few points of acquired revenue included in each year, which is more or less what we'd expect going forward. We think the 8% to 11% growth rate in our long-range plan is achievable in an improving macroenvironment with our current strategy. At the same time, here at PTC we continue to think about ways that we could increase the fundamental growth opportunity that's available to PTC, and that conversation keeps leading us back to SLM. To help you better understand where we're headed, let me take you back a few years to 2009. After 2 decades of focusing specifically on product creation software, we expanded our strategy to help customers transform the way they create and service products, so that they could have both a product and a service advantage. There were some skeptics, but we felt that this new category called SLM, was a natural adjacency and our deep knowledge of products would be very useful to optimizing service operations, just as it is for optimizing manufacturing. I think that the performance of our SLM business in the quarter and the year demonstrates that we have successfully bridged our way for the engineering world of creating products to the service department in charge of servicing them. Our SLM segment was our best performer in fiscal year 2013, and we've now completed the first year of our Servigistics acquisition, with really outstanding results. The organic part of the business is also strong, and has driven key new account wins, like the deal with Renault that we discussed last quarter. There's a couple of key reasons why we think that SLM will be an even bigger growth driver for PTC going forward. First, many manufacturing product companies are joining the trend toward servicization. That's a fancy way of saying that these companies are restructuring the relationship they have with their customers by bundling more and more service content with their product offerings. In the automotive industry, for example, OEMs now get between 1/4 and 1/3 of their revenue, and between 1/3 and 1/2 of their profit from the aftermarket services that they offer. This is a consistent theme across nearly every industry vertical we serve, and it seems that nearly everybody that PTC knows in the product business now has a service strategy to drive more revenue and profits. It's relatively easy to find companies that want to engage us in an SLM discussion, even in a difficult economic period. Second, the market for information technology to drive business process optimization in the service department is highly fragmented. Because ERP software provides a poor fit, most customers have had to patch together custom solutions and point solutions, so most of the time we find ourselves replacing tired homegrown environments. With the success we've demonstrated, PTC has a legitimate claim to an SLM leadership position measured in terms of technology footprint, customers and revenue. Not only can we successfully cross the bridge from product development in our accounts, but with this strong SLM story, we've seen time and again a new entry point into accounts, irrespective of whose technology they use upstream in product development. And offering a full solution suite in a fragmented industry not only gives us great differentiation, but it also keeps our corporate development team busy analyzing the many opportunities that exist to further expand our offering. Third, the products that we've been helping our customer create are becoming increasingly smart and connected, and in growing numbers they are coming online joining the Internet of Things, or what GE calls the Industrial Internet. This allows the manufacturer to carry on an interactive dialogue with a product, long after the product has been delivered to the customer. This approach completely transforms the way that products are serviced, and it has a profound effect on how they're created as well. Many analysts believe that the Internet of Things will prove to be an even bigger phenomenon than cloud computing. And nearly everybody agrees that the killer app will be one that monitors products and creates a highly efficient and proactive service experience. In other words, magic happens at the intersection of SLM and the Internet of Things. This is very exciting to PTC because as the SLM leader, we at PTC are in a strong position to do something really big, just as we did when the Internet and web itself became relevant with PLM, back in the late '90s. With the momentum we have to date, coupled with these larger strategic factors, we see our SLM segment living up to its promise in creating a significant incremental growth opportunity for PTC in the years to come. We're confident that this new long-range plan is achievable, and it's a plan that our shareholders will find attractive. But as with any plan that's attractive on the surface, we know you'll want to dig deeper into the underlying strategies and the planning assumptions that the plan is based on. So I'd like top put in a plug for all of you to join us at our December 5 Investor Relations Day. This event, at our headquarters near Boston, will provide a great opportunity to engage not only Jeff and I, but the broader PTC management team in discussions about the merit of our strategies and initiatives and the resulting financial plans and outlooks. On a final note, you'll probably notice we plan to change our stock ticker from PMTC to PTC on December 3. This is the final step in the rebranding away from Parametric Technology to PTC. As you know, the word parametric is a direct reference to CAD, and as our business diversified beyond CAD, we started thinking of ourselves as PTC more than a decade ago. However, we've consistently found situations where we were talking right past people who didn't realize that our PTC and their Parametric were in fact the same company. So last year, we changed the company's official legal name to PTC, which cleaned up most print and online references, and on December 3, the ticker change should remove the last vestige of confusion, and that will allow all of our energy and momentum to be focused into a single place called PTC. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff for a few quick comments on the financials.