Mike Scarpelli
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open
Thank you, Frank. Q4 was another quarter of exceptional execution and strong finish to our fiscal year. Q4 product revenues were $360 million, representing 102% year-over-year growth. Remaining performance obligations accelerated to 99% year-over-year, reaching $2.6 billion. Of the $2.6 billion in RPO, we expect approximately 52% to be recognized as revenue in the next 12 months, representing 85% year-over-year growth. For Q4 product revenue, we anticipated holiday season headwinds. However, we did see a slower-than-expected return to normal consumption in January. We also introduced platform enhancements that improved efficiency higher than expected, which lowered credit consumption. Our increased net revenue retention rate of 178% includes 15 new $1 million customers and reflects durable growth among our largest customers. Similar to last quarter, six of our top ten customers’ product revenue grew faster than the company overall. Our industry vertical investments are yielding strong results. Q4 was our largest bookings quarter to date, and the outperformance spanned across all our core verticals: financial services, retail and CP&G, advertising and media, health care and technology accounted for 85% of net new bookings in Q4. Large deal volume continues to increase in these verticals. In the quarter, we closed seven deals at or above $30 million in total contract value, up from just one in Q4 of last year. Significant contractual commitments give us confidence that our largest customers’ consumption will continue to grow. In Q4, we saw a number of customers with greater than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenue increased to 184 up from 148 last quarter. Turning to margins. On a non-GAAP basis, our product gross margin was 74.99%, up nearly 500 basis points from last year. Enterprise success and growing scale across regions contribute to steady gross margin improvement. Operating margin was 5%, benefiting from revenue outperformance and hiring linearity. Our adjusted free cash flow margin was 27%, positively impacted by strong collections and operating margin outperformance. We do experience free cash flow seasonality, and Q1 and Q4 will continue to be our strongest free cash flow quarters. Given the record bookings in Q4, you should expect to see outsized adjusted free cash in Q1 of this year. We are proud of our free cash flow progress, and we will continue to invest for growth with a focus on efficiency. We are committed to showing leverage year-on-year. We ended the year in a strong cash position, with approximately $5.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term and long-term investments. Going forward, we are using our strong cash position to transition to a net share settlement for vesting of employee RSUs in almost all countries. This will help us further manage dilution, which has already been running below 1% year-on-year on a fully diluted basis. Now let’s turn to guidance, which includes the full impact of the Streamlit acquisition. For the first quarter of fiscal 2023, we expect product revenues between $385 million and $388 million, representing year-over-year growth between 79% and 81%. Turning to margins. We expect on a non-GAAP basis, negative 2% operating margin, and we expect 359 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. For the full fiscal 2023, we expect product revenue between $1.88 billion and $1.9 billion, representing year-over-year growth between 65% and 67%. As we have mentioned before, certain product improvements create a revenue headwind for our business. We undertake these initiatives because they benefit our customers and expand our long-term market opportunity. Last year, we called it improvements in storage compression that reduced storage costs for our customers. Similarly, phased throughout this year, we are rolling out platform improvements within our cloud deployments. No two customers are the same, but our initial testing has shown performance improvements ranging on average from 10% to 20%. We have assumed an approximately $97 million revenue impact in our full year forecast, but there is still uncertainty around the full impact these improvements can have. While these efforts negatively impact our revenue in the near term, over time, they lead customers to deploy more workloads to Snowflake due to the improved economics. Turning to profitability for the full year fiscal 2023, we expect, on a non-GAAP basis, 74.5% product gross margin, 1% operating margin and 15% adjusted free cash flow margin. And we expect 360 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. Our gross margin guidance includes performance improvements and investments in additional deployments around the world, most notably, government deployments and international. In order to support our continued growth initiatives, we plan on adding more than 1,500 net new employees during the year. And lastly, we will host our in-person Investor Day the week of June 13 in Las Vegas in conjunction with Snowflake Summit, our annual users conference. If you are interested in attending, please e-mail ir@snowflake.com. With that, operator, you can now open up the line for questions.