Doron Abramovitch
Analyst · Needham & Company. Your line is open
Thank you, Anat, and thank you all for joining us. We reported today another good quarter with continued growing revenues and expanding margins. We are growing a strong year during which we delivered growth, profitability and cash generation exceeding our initial guidance for the year and above our long-term CAGR which we showed last year. Revenues for the fourth quarter were $63.8 million at the high end of our expectations, and up 9% year-over-year. Full year revenues were $234 million, and up 11% from 2017. Revenues from the Americas were 44% of total 2018 revenues and increased 5% from 2017. Revenue from EMEA were up 34% and represented 32% of the total, and revenues from Asia-Pacific were down 1% year-over-year and accounted for the remaining 24%. For the full year, revenues from the enterprise vertical represented 69% of total revenues and increased 17% from 2017, and revenues from the service provider vertical remained at the same level as last year. Subscriptions, continued to be the fastest growing type of revenues. Recurring revenues that includes subscriptions and support represented approximately 64% of total 2018 revenues, compared with approximately 56% in full year 2017. I will discuss now expenses and profit all in non-GAAP terms. Non-GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter grew to 83% from 82.3% last year and full-year gross margin went up to 82.7% from 82.2% in 2017. Over the long term, we expect gross margins to moderately increase driven by economies of scales of our cloud operations, our utilization rate of our scrubbing centers and then increasing proportion of non-cloud subscriptions. However, product and geography mix differences from one quarter to another, can cause some fluctuations around the trend. Q4, non-GAAP operating expenses were $43.2 million below our guidance, compared with $45 million in Q4 last year mostly due to a benefit from a stronger U.S. dollar compared to last year and ASC 606 impact. We continue to invest in our business selectively and moderately to support our growth on the one hand, while delivering operating leverage on the other end. We are very pleased with the balance between these two metrics in last couple of years. Our non-GAAP operating profit in Q4 2018 was approximately $9.8 million representing a 15.4% margin, which was up from 5.2% in Q4, 2017. Full year 2018 operating profit was approximately $21.6 million, up from $3.8 million and operating margin was 9.2%, up from 1.8% operating margin in last year. Non-GAAP tax rate was 11% for the year, down from 18% in 2017. Tax rate was lower than last year due to impact of the lower federal tax and adjustment related to ASC 606. For 2019, we expect the tax rate to be approximately 11%. Q4 non-GAAP net income was $11.4 million or $0.24 per share diluted exceeding our guidance for $0.16 per share to $0.18 per share. The strong non-GAAP EPS was driven largely by strength in revenues and gross margin, expenses discipline and stable headcount as well as lower tax rate. Revenue growth affected EPS by approximately $0.01 to $0.02, tax and financial income by another $0.02 and the rest of the upside came from OpEx. Non-GAAP net income for the full year was $26 million or $0.55 per share diluted well above the net income and EPS for 2017, which were $7.6 million and $0.17 respectively. Turning to balance sheet and cash flow. As subscription continued to be main growth driver, it positively impacted our total deferred revenues. We ended the year with a balance of approximately $167 million, up 13% from December 2017. Our business mix provides us with visibility for future financial performance. In the coming 12 months we will recognize as revenues, approximately $105 million out of the December total deferred revenues balance or 63%. This compares with $91 million or 62% in Q4 last year. We had a very strong collection from customers in Q4 and we generated approximately $26 million of operating cash flow in the quarter, and more than $49 million in the full year, up 57% from last year. During Q4, we executed on our share buyback program and repurchase approximately 200,000 of our own share in the amount of $4.3 million. We ended the year with approximately $401 million in cash and financial investments, up from $344 million as of the end of 2017. In early January we announced the acquisition of ShieldSquare, a leader in bot mitigation, were we discuss this acquisition in more depth shortly. We expect the acquisition to close at the end of Q1 and the total cash consideration that we will pay will be up to $18 million and part of it will impact the Q1 2019 cash flows. There will be approximately 70 people joining us, the vast majority of them are based in India. We expect the acquisition to be immaterial for 2019 revenue and dilutive to our fully diluted 2019 non-GAAP EPS by $0.09 to $0.10 starting in Q2. And now to our outlook for the first quarter of 2019 we expect Q1'19 revenues to be between $58.5 million and $60 million. Non-GAAP gross margin to be approximately 82.5% and non-GAAP operating expenses to be between $44 million and $45 million. We expect tax rate to be approximately 12%. Non-GAAP EPS for Q1 is therefore expected to be between $0.12 and $0.13. This guidance assumes closure of the ShieldSquare acquisition at the end of Q1, so we didn't take any EPS impact for this quarter. I said from Q2 we expect the EPS to be impacted by approximately $0.03 per quarter. As for our outlook for the full year of 2019, we expect it to be in line with our long-term model, which we present in last year of 9% revenue CAGR between 2017 and 2020. On the back of our strong 2018 revenue growth, we expect revenue growth in 2019 to be between 7% and 9%. The midpoint of this range leaves 2018 revenues, slightly above the CAGR rate from 2017. We will provide a more detailed 2019 guidance in our Investor meeting in New York on February 20. I will now turn the call over to Roy.