Earnings Labs

Shutterstock, Inc. (SSTK)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, May 4, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Shutterstock First Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder this call may be recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Craig Felenstein, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Finance. Please go ahead, sir.

Craig Felenstein - Senior Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us for Shutterstock's first quarter 2016 earnings call. Joining me today is Jon Oringer, our Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman; and Steven Berns, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, management may make forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainty, including predictions, expectations, estimates and other information. These include statements relating to the expansion of our addressable market; the success of new product offerings, including products we recently acquired; revenue growth and the predictability of our revenue; adjusted EBITDA; equity-based compensation; taxes; and capital expenditures. Our actual results may differ materially from results predicted, and reported results should not be considered as indication of future performance. Please refer to today's press release and the reports and documents we file from time-to-time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including the section entitled Risk Factors in the company's Form 10-K for discussions of important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in any forward-looking statements that we may make on this call. On this call, we will refer to adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net income and free cash flow, which are non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a description of these items, along with the reconciliation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in today's earnings release, which is posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. We believe that the use of these measures provides important additional insights for investors. However, these non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. And with all that out of the way, let me turn it over to Jon. Jonathan Oringer - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks,…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Youssef Squali of Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Youssef Squali - Cantor Fitzgerald Securities

Analyst

Thank you very much. And guys, congrats on the solid quarter. Two quick ones, maybe starting with you, Jon. Can you talk, just broadly speaking, about the competitive environment? By just looking at your sales and marketing, it seems that you're actually showing leverage where we thought you wouldn't necessarily, considering what's going on in the broader market. So, maybe you can speak to that. And just broadly speaking, with these increased investments that you're calling out – or with the increase in sales and marketing that you've mentioned, and Steven mentioned, which areas are you basically going to be spending money on, if it's not customer acquisition? And then, Steven, if I look at your EBITDA guidance, it looks like Q1 of last year was kind of the trough EBITDA period followed by higher levels of EBITDA Q2, Q3, Q4. If I look at your – if I look at Q1 of this year relative to your guidance, even at the higher end of your range, it looks like we're going the other way. So, maybe you can kind of call out any one-time issues, or just why would that actually be happening? Thanks. Jonathan Oringer - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. I think, I'll start on the competitive environment, talk about our marketing spend and hand it over to Steven. On the competitive environment, same as usual. The past 13 years, we see the competitive environment change around us. Sometimes, there's consolidation, sometimes there's investment, sometimes there are big moves, sometimes there are small moves. It's always changed though, and every year has been a year of change in our competitive environment. What has not changed is that we continue to be focused on the customer. And we listen to our customer, we build what the…

Youssef Squali - Cantor Fitzgerald Securities

Analyst

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Ralph Schackart of William Blair. Your line is open. Ralph E. Schackart - William Blair & Co. LLC: Good morning. Just want to touch on the strong Enterprise growth that you saw in the quarter. Maybe you could give some color just in terms of how much of that growth was from the work and effort you've added and the workflow products, the content that continues to grow, your focus on converting e-com to enterprise, and maybe just sort of how many new enterprise sales customers were there? And a sort of broader color on that would be great. Steven Berns - Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer: So, as it relates to the workflow product, it's still early for the workflow product, that I think from an attribution standpoint, as it relates to your question, in saying, as a result of this thing, this activity, or this product, or this enhancement that we provided, that we are able to attribute our growth to that, I think we've stepped up a lot of our efforts on both innovation, not just workflow but Reverse Image Search, visually similar, so that it makes it easier for creatives to find the image they're looking for to engage with our library in a very meaningful way. So, I think, this summation of activity is what we would say has resulted in the increased level of activity with Enterprise. About half the growth from new customers comes from Enterprise and about half from increased spending with the existing customers. So, we're seeing both activity with existing as well as the attraction of new customers. And we're increasing our sales team both geographically as well as in those countries and markets in which we currently have people, because we see the opportunity for continued growth as well as expansion of growth in some regions. Ralph E. Schackart - William Blair & Co. LLC: Great. And one more if I could, please. I think in the last call you talked about somewhere in the neighborhood of around sub-$10 million impact from some new investments that you're planning in 2016. Is that still sort of a good range for us to think about? Steven Berns - Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer: Yes, it is. Ralph E. Schackart - William Blair & Co. LLC: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Blake Harper of Topeka Capital. Your line is open.

Blake T. Harper - Topeka Capital Markets

Analyst

Hi. Good morning. Jon, I wanted to ask you about some of the workflow tools especially the mobile Editor. And just want to see how could you have gotten adoption there, and how that compared with some of your other workflow tools such as WebDAM? And how (25:45) customer base, or how much – how many of your customers are using that yet? And what (25:53) adoption and what else you can get them to use? Jonathan Oringer - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure, actually, Editor (26:59) through the browser. It's right off of the download. And what Editor allows you to do is to manipulate the image in ways that we know a lot of our users do manipulate image in some of the tools out there, and we allow all of that for free. The simple resizing to common format; filtering, just some of the more popular filtering kind of theme; adding text to your image. Those are the kind of things that are all available now in browser, right when you're downloading the image. And these are some of the most common reasons why someone would go to another tool. And we're seeing that users that use these editing tool continue to download our images at faster paces than users that do not. And we're also seeing increased adoption of these tools. One of the things that's holding us back right now that we continue to work on and we'll be done with a lot of this, this year is our tech migration. We're spending a lot of effort right now moving our tech stack to a services-based architecture set. All of our property and all of our product can be within this one tech stack, and we can use all of our available technologies across all of our products. So, while we're even focused on doing that, we still released some amazing stuff like Editor and like Reverse Image Search. We continue to learn, and we're going to continue to innovate from there.

Blake T. Harper - Topeka Capital Markets

Analyst

Got it. Okay. Thanks. And then if I can just follow up with that. If we can fast forward a year from now and you have the tech platform migrated, what would you say were the most significant things that you would have that's different now for your customers to use, either from workflow or from – just related with the content or search? And what are some of the things that you would expect to be able to monetize on top of that, too? Jonathan Oringer - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: So, there's going to be amazing stuff we'll be able to do internally, where we can track customers across all of our products with a single user ID, for one. Externally, we'll be able to – customer-facing features will be a lot easier. So, imagine, as our Editor product grows, we'll be able to deploy that in multiple different environment on our site, off our site, in WebDAM, across all of our different types of products, off-deck, Premier, or Enterprise platform et cetera. So, the reason for the migration is that we have a single view of our customer across all of our products and when we develop the technology, we can develop it once and use it across all of our products within Shutterstock.

Blake T. Harper - Topeka Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. Thanks, Jon.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Lloyd Walmsley of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Lloyd Walmsley - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks, guys. Just wanted to turn it back to the marketing. I guess, it did look like you saw a lot of leverage there. Can you just elaborate a bit more on the timing differences, what exactly where those? Was some of that hiring in the Enterprise group or something, or just timing of ad spend? And then, are you actually seeing leverage just come out of the Enterprise side, as your sales force gets more efficient and that are you kind of seeing that continue in numbers? That would be... Steven Berns - Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer: Yes. So, appreciate the question. I mean, what we're seeing is really nothing that is specific to any one area. The marketing spend is the outcome of the activity. We've had some related to timing. There are things that occur, both product launches, releases and activity that we have. Our cost per acquisition is growing more predictably year-over-year. We've got more efficient and better in our SEO and SEM work that we're doing. There are some events that are pushed to later in the year. The actual event themselves that we had extended, some money in the first quarter and prior years. So, there's nothing that – it wasn't like oh, we were trying to – we weren't saying, oh, we want to spend less marketing dollar. I think it's a summation of a number of activities that happened to occur in the quarter. And, of course, we're looking at, obviously, have the highest return on investment we've had over multiple period. And so, we're focused on continuing to be able to manage our spend across all of our categories. But we will also lean in and spend on marketing, as and when appropriate, to drive profitable growth that has high cash return on investment. So, it's – I guess, I think it's – there's nothing unique that you're missing or that we're not telling you. I think it's just the activity within the quarter. But once again, we expect that will pick up in the second quarter. We have a number of both events, and we also have a product activity in the second quarter, which we will be supporting aggressively. Jonathan Oringer - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Hey. One thing I just want to add is that over the past 13 years, we have clearly been, in our space, the most aggressive market, and we've learned a ton. There's no one in the space that spent more money marketing than we have, especially on the performance side. And we have all this data, and we know exactly how to reach our customers. Some, of course, will get more efficient than others. And we won't spend that money if it doesn't make sense. And during that pullback, you can see some of the stuff that you see this quarter for those numbers.

Lloyd Walmsley - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And just as a quick housekeeping question. Forgive me if I missed it. Did you all give Enterprise as a percent of overall revenue, or could you? Steven Berns - Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer: What we've said in the past was it was in the low to mid-20%s. It accelerated from there to be between slightly over 25%. And we certainly expect it to continue to grow, given the opportunities we see both at existing and new customers.

Lloyd Walmsley - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks guys.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. . Our next question is from Brian Fitzgerald of Jefferies. Your line is open.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Hi, guys. This is John (32:36) on for Brain. Thanks for taking my question. You noted in your commentary that around 6% or so is coming – of revenue is coming from outside of North America, especially some growth coming from India and Germany and Korea. And maybe, if you can just talk a little bit about the dynamics of international versus North America, and what you see from the customer base, and also maybe from the contributor side as well? Thank you. Jonathan Oringer - Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I don't have any specifics on the countries you mentioned, but we continue to grow around the world across all of our regions and across the many different countries that we do business in. We continue to get more local, we continue to learn more about our customers around the world, and that causes us to sell more images and products and video to all of our customers. Steven Berns - Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer: So, as it relates to some of the markets in which we're expanding, Korea and India and other, not necessarily emerging markets, but developing markets are ones where there's great amounts of advertising and communication, especially when you think about markets like India. We have not historically been – had a large business there. And so, our growth rates have been significant. We're just hitting a great user base in terms of both larger-sized enterprises as well as small and medium-sized businesses in those markets. We have been relatively strong in Germany, and we continue to see strength. We have an office in Berlin, aggressively pursue the European market with our team there and continue to see opportunities across both Western and Eastern Europe to further expand. Asia-Pacific remains a significant opportunity, and we're focused on continuing to expand not just in India but in other markets in the Asia-Pac region, especially given, as Jon said, our ability to be more local, to provide both content as well to the customers and the customers in those markets. So, we feel real strong about it. Enterprise is now growing fast internationally. And as we talked about in past quarters, we're seeing greater consistency in Europe as well versus some of the fluctuations during the maybe economic crisis that they were going through. So, overall, we're seeing good stabilization. But I think being local in market and having that network effect is really important for us. And we'll continue to do everything we can to continue to grow those opportunities.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And that does conclude our Q&A session for today. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Craig Felenstein for any closing remarks.

Craig Felenstein - Senior Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. If you have any follow-up questions, please let me know here in New York. We're happy to help. Thanks.