Warren Jenson
Analyst · SIG
Thanks, David, and welcome to LiveRamp. In the short time that you’ve been here your leadership and partnership have been outstanding and it’s great having you on the team. As I sat down to prepare my script, I thought about the messages you would hear from me. As you listened to my remarks, hopefully, a few themes will ring loudly, durability and resilience; performance, we again and have consistently delivered; relevance; and finally, competitive advantage. With that in mind, today I will focus my remarks on three areas. First, share a few highlights from Q2; next, discuss our global progress with Safe Haven; and finally, provide updated and raised guidance for Q3 and FY 2022. Q2 highlights, please turn to slide four. First, our growth continues to accelerate. Revenue of $127 million was up 22%, international up 17%, subscription revenue of 23%, while ARR increased 15%. Q2 was a near record for net new ARR. Our net new customer count increased by 15 this quarter and our brand ACV was up a stunning 23% year-over-year. Our $1 million customer count is now 80 up 10 sequentially and up 29% year-over-year. Net retention was 108% and platform net retention 109%, CRPO was up 23%, and finally, marketplace was up 16% in line with our expectations. As expected, our results continue to be negatively impacted by the wholesale contraction as is outlined on slide 16. We continue to expect this impact to be $30 million for the year and it was $8 million for the quarter. If you exclude this impact, consider the following, total revenue increased 32% and international up 33%, subscription revenue was up 35% and ARR of 27%, our net retention would have been 118% and platform net retention 117%. In short, while we don’t discount the impact of the wholesale contraction, the numbers do speak for themselves. Second, our momentum continues. While there will always be ups and downs, the strength of our bookings are unmistakable. On a trailing 12-month basis, overall growth bookings were up over 40%, international up 110%, Safe Haven bookings up more than 150% and TV bookings up approximately 80%. Add it all up, there is one word that comes to mind, durability. While our industry has gone through seismic change, there is one constant we have delivered. LiveRamp’s importance has never been greater, our growth foundations are strong. Third, our model has consistently shown its strength and ability to scale. Our Q2 results are no exception. Gross margin was a record 77%, up 500 basis points. For the sixth consecutive quarter we were profitable. In fact, our operating margin was 14% and adjusted EBITDA margin 15%. What’s even more interesting is to look at our results on a trailing 12-month basis. Here’s some stats. Revenue increased by 18% and $73 million on an absolute dollar basis. Our operating income was $38 million, up from a loss of $19 million for the comparable 12-month period, an increase of $57 million. Added all up, on a $73 million increase in revenue, $57 million fell through to the bottomline, a fall through rate is 78%. Again, we performed. And finally, we are supporting our shareholders. In Q2 we repurchase $15 million of stock. Fiscal year-to-date, we have repurchased 44 million. Just like a year ago, we took advantage of the market opportunity and front end loaded our repurchase activity. In summary, accelerating growth, sustained topline performance through industry change, massive margin improvement, share repurchases and increased relevance, the importance of LiveRamp and strength of our performance unmistakable. Now, a quick update on our Safe Haven global expansion. Our opportunity just keeps getting bigger, and quite frankly, our biggest challenge is keeping up with demand. The market is embracing our platform. Please turn to slide 20, so why are we setting the pace and collaboration, when it seems there are countless clean room technologies in market? The answer is pretty simple. Our Safe Haven platform brings together things others can’t or they are simply just learning about. Leadership and global privacy and privacy enhancing technologies, the sophistication and importance of our Datafleets acquisition cannot be overstated, identity, federation and activation, our approach and the scale of our integrations are a hallmark of LiveRamp. ATS, we are helping global brands future proof their approach to identity and allowing them to do this consistently across all geographies. Neutrality, we don’t buy or sell media. We are cross cloud and enable our Safe Haven clients to collaborate with anyone regardless of their data infrastructure. And finally, we are setting the pace with permission based collaboration technology. Remember, we created the category that had been building and testing our Safe Haven platform for more than five years. Taken together a new category, unique capabilities and a platform the world needs. That’s relevance. And the numbers back it up. This quarter, we had our first $10 million bookings quarter and over half of our deals came from outside of the U.S. This is truly a global offering. We now have over 100 tenants for global endpoints and we expect that number to be over 150 by the end of Q3. In summary, Safe Haven has created a category, it is a powerful global solution and one where we are playing with competitive advantage and we’re only getting started. Now on the guidance, the headline, we’re raising our outlook, please turn to slides 13 and 14. For Q3, we expect revenue of approximately $139 million, an increase of 16% and non-GAAP operating income of roughly $10 million. For the full year, we are increasing our guidance on both the top and the bottomline. We now expect revenue of approximately $525 million or roughly 19% growth and non-GAAP operating income of approximately $40 million. A few other call outs for Q3 and the full year. For Q3, we expect subscription net retention to be roughly flat to Q2, give or take. As we mentioned last quarter wholesale contraction is negatively impacting this metric by approximately 10 points and we expect our gross margin to be roughly 75%. For the full year we expect revenue to increase approximately 19% to roughly $525 million. Absent a $30 million impact from wholesale contraction, we expect total revenue to increase by more than 25% and subscription revenue to increase roughly 30%. Gross margin to be approximately 75%, we anticipate added investment and customer experience, services and security, which will bring margin down a bit from our Q2 performance. We continue to expect to be profitable in every quarter, although we anticipate higher spending in the second half as we open and expand new regions, stemming from our global Safe Haven and ATS rollout. In addition, we expect T&E to normalize as we move into the second half. And lastly, we expect to be cash flow positive for the year. Before concluding, I’d like to make an announcement about which we are very proud. As you know, Lauren Dillard has been leading Communications and Investor Relations here at LiveRamp. Well, she’s been promoted. She is now taking on a much larger set of responsibilities inside of our finance organization and will have responsibility for FP&A in operations finance in addition to Investor Relations. Please join me in congratulating Lauren. Now, let me conclude with a few final thoughts. First, it’s great being part of a great company and working with a great team that is doing big things. We have the right products at the right time. Our technology is core to our customers’ data management, transformation and digital strategies. Durability, resilience, and global relevance, our numbers speak for themselves. Our foundations are strong and momentum continues to build. And finally, rest assured, we are only just getting started. On behalf of all my LiveRamp colleagues, thanks to our customers and to you our shareowners. Operator, we will now open the call to questions.