Lior Shemesh
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is open, Elizabeth
Thanks Nir. We finished 2023 on a very strong note, which we believe puts us on a great path going into 2024 and 2025. As our business fundamentals continue to improve, we have seen early success with Wix Studio and our AI products, as well as in improving the macro environment, giving us confidence in our ability to accelerate year-over-year bookings growth in 2024, which we believe puts us on a track to accelerate year-over-year revenue growth in 2025. We now expect to outperform the 2024 targets we shared at our analyst day in August, and believe that we will significantly surpass the Rule of 40 in 2025. Before I go through the details of our 2024 outlook, I want to quickly summarize our Q4 and full year of 2023 results. Know that all financial data are non-GAAP unless otherwise noted. Q4 total revenue was $404 million, up 14% year-over-year. Revenue growth was driven primarily by partners' revenue, which grew 38% year-over-year. As Avishai mentioned, Studio is off to a great start, exceeding our expectations. Creative Subscriptions revenue in Q4 grew nearly 12% year-over-year, and Business Solutions revenue in Q4 grew 20% year-over-year. We expanded total gross margin in Q4, to 70%, and operating income grew to nearly $65 million, or 16% of revenue. In Q4, sales and marketing expenses grew quarter-over-quarter to $92 million, as we increased our investment in the Wix Studio brand. While we expect to continue gaining leverage on marketing due to our streamlined marketing strategy, especially with Self Creators, we plan to continue investing in the Studio brand in 2024. Q4 free cash flow, excluding headquarters and restructuring cost, was over $19 million, or 22% of revenue, as we continue to benefit from high operating efficiencies. Moving on to 2023 full year results, total revenue grew to $1.56 billion or 13% year-over-year, and Creative Subscriptions ARR was $1.19 billion, up over 10% year-over-year. We ended 2023 with a total gross margin of 68%, an improvement of nearly 500 basis points, compared to 2022. Throughout the year, we benefited from improved efficiencies in hosting and infrastructure costs, and optimization of support costs, partially aided by integrating AI into our workflows. Creative Subscriptions gross margin expanded to 82% in 2023, and Business Solutions gross margin, grew to 29% for the full year, as we continue to benefit, from improving margin in new experiments. In 2023, we generated a total of $246 million in free cash flow, excluding headquarters and restructuring costs, a margin of 16% of revenue ahead of our prior expectations and guidance. This include breakeven free cash flow in our partners' business, a significant milestone and one-year ahead of our three-year plan. This was a result of strong sustained growth, as well as improved gross margin and meaningful operating leverage driven by the broader efficiencies implemented over the past two years. We expect to continue, to generate incremental margin improvements from the continued scaling of our commerce business, and the stable operating expenses base as our partners' business continue to grow. As a result, we now expect to significantly exceed the partners' free cash flow margin target for 2024 and 2025, as outlined in our three-year plan. I'm also happy to report that we finished 2023 with GAAP net income of $33 million, our first year of GAAP profitability. This profitability, was due to the careful management of costs throughout the last couple of years, including stock-based compensation costs, which declined as a percent of revenue for the third straight year. These results demonstrate the fantastic growth and incremental profitability of our business. We re-accelerated year-over-year revenue growth, due to a strong fundamentals of our cohorts and a strong cadence of product innovation. The continued returns from the cost efficiency culture, we have implemented at Wix over the last couple of years and the half drove - and drove strong incremental profit. We believe that these results, put us in a very strong position, to accelerate growth into 2024, as our successful efforts in implementing operating efficiency, gives me confidence we can continue to generate incremental profitability. And I want to spend the rest of my time on our expectations for 2024. We are reintroducing annual bookings guidance, due to the improved visibility and confidence in our business as stable and positively trending macro environment and strong cohort behavior, particularly in our partners business. For the full year 2024, we expect total bookings of $1.78 billion to $1.81 billion, or 12% to 14% year-over-year, an acceleration from 2023. We expect year-over-year growth of total bookings, to accelerate in the second half of 2024 to 15%, at the high end of the guidance range. In particular, the acceleration is expected to be primarily in creative subscription bookings, bringing it to double-digit year-over-year growth in the second half of 2024. This anticipated growth positions the business, to achieve accelerating year-over-year revenue growth in 2025. Nir will walk you through the drivers of our bookings growth in 2024, and you can find additional information in the shareholder update. For the full year 2024, we expect total revenue to be $1.73 billion to $1.76 billion, or 11% to 13% year-over-year. We expect revenue in Q1, 2024 of $415 million to $419 million, or 11% to 12% year-over-year. We continue to operate the business in an efficient manner as evidenced by the meaningful operating leverage we generated in 2023 on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We plan to operate with the same efficiency in 2024, and expect strong growth in gross profit, due to anticipated gross margin improvement on a year-over-year basis. For the full year 2024, we expect non-GAAP total gross margin, of 68% to 69% with non-GAAP Business Solution gross margin, to be approximately 30% for the full year, ahead of the plan we shared in August. We also expect to generate additional leverage due to minimal growth in operating expenses year-over-year. We expect non-GAAP operating expenses, to be 51% to 52% of revenue for the full year, also better than our August plan. And non-GAAP sales and marketing, to remain similar to 2023, at roughly 23% to 24% of revenue. We will continue with marketing activities related to Wix Studio throughout 2024, as we capitalize on the growth we have seen since its launch. We anticipate that our strong growth in operating efficiency will generate positive GAAP operating profit, and net income in 2024. We expect, to generate free cash flow excluding headquarters cost of $370 million to $400 million, or 21% to 23% of revenue in 2024. We expect this free cash flow guidance in combination, with our share repurchase activity, will translate to more than $6 in free cash flow per diluted share in 2024, ahead of our three-year plan. As we continue to responsibly manage dilution, we expect stock-based compensation expenses, to decline for the third consecutive year, as a percent of revenue to approximately 13% of revenue in 2024, in line with our three-year plan. We expect capital expenditures, including costs associated with our new headquarters build-out, of approximately $7 million to $10 million in 2024. We will incur the final cost of our new headquarters in the first half of the year, and anticipate this cost, to be roughly $8 million to $10 million. We are very excited about the upcoming year. We believe we have positioned ourselves, to reaccelerate growth and generate incremental profitability. With that, we will now take your questions.