Snowflake Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 24, 2023

There are 17 speakers on the call.

Operator

Afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Snowflake Q1 Fiscal Year 'twenty four Earnings Conference Call. My name is Cole, and I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. I'd now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jimmy Sexton.

Operator

Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on Snowflake's Q1 fiscal 2024 earnings call. With me in Bozeman, Montana are Frank Slootman, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mike Scarpelli, our Chief Financial Officer and Christian Kleinerman, our Senior Vice President of Product, who will join us for the Q and A session. During today's call, we will review our financial results for the Q1 2024 and discuss our guidance for the Q2 and full year fiscal 2024.

Operator

During

Speaker 1

today's call, we will make forward looking statements, including statements related to the expected performance of our business, Future financial results, strategy, products and features, long term growth, our stock repurchase program and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause them to differ materially from actual results. Information concerning those risks is available in our earnings press release distributed After market close today and in our SEC filings, including our most recently filed Form 10 ks for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2023 in the Form 10 Q for the quarter ended April 30, 2023 that we will file with the SEC. We caution you to not place undue reliance on forward looking statements and undertake no duty or obligation to Any forward looking statements as a result of new information, future events or changes in our expectations. We'd also like to point out that on today's call, we will report both GAAP and non GAAP results.

Speaker 1

We use these non GAAP financial measures internally for financial and operational decision making purposes and as a means to evaluate period to period comparisons. Non GAAP financial measures are presented in addition to and not as a substitute for financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. To see the reconciliations of these non GAAP financial measures, please refer to our earnings Press release distributed earlier today and our investor presentation, which are posted at investors. Snowflake.com. A replay of today's call

Speaker 2

will also be posted on

Speaker 1

the website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Frank.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Jimmy. Welcome, everybody, listening to today's earnings announcement. Soflip's product revenue grew 50% in Q4 fiscal year 2024 totaling $590,000,000 Our net revenue retention rate reached 151 percent and remaining performance obligations came in at 3,400,000,000 Up 31% year on year. Non GAAP adjusted free cash flow was $287,000,000 up 58% year over year. We are, however, operating in an unsettled demand environment, and we see this reflected in consumption patterns across the board.

Speaker 2

While enthusiasm for Snowflake is high, enterprises are preoccupied with costs in response to their own uncertainties. We proactively work with customers to optimize their environments. This may well continue near term, but cycles like this eventually are on their course. Our conviction in the long term opportunity remains unchanged. Generative AI with its cat style of interaction has captured the imagination of society at large.

Speaker 2

It will bring disruption, productivity as well as obsolescence to tasks and entire industries alike. Definitive AI And we believe enterprises will benefit from customizing this technology with their own data. Snowflake manages a vast and growing universe of public and proprietary data. The data cloud's role in advancing this trend becomes pronounced. AI's focus on large language models and textual data, both structured and unstructured, will lead to a rapid proliferation of model types and specializations.

Speaker 2

Some models will be broadly capable, but shallow in functions, others will be deep, specialized and impactful in their specific realm. For years, we focused on the extensibility of our platform via Snowpark, Making Snowflake ideally suited for rapid adoption of new and interesting language models as they become available. AI is also not limited to textual data equally far reaching will be seen with audio, video and other modalities. Snowflake mission is to steadily demolish any and all limits to data, users, workloads, applications and new forms of intelligence. You'll therefore continue to see us add, evolve and expand our functions and feature sets.

Speaker 2

Our goal is for all the world's data to find its way to Snowflake and not encounter any limitations in terms of use and purpose. From our perspective, machine learning, data science and AI are workloads that we enable with increased capability, Continuous Performance and Efficiency Improvements. Data has gravitational pull and given the vast universe of data Snowflake already manages, it's No surprise that interest in these capabilities is escalating while its uses are still evolving. Data science, machine learning and AI use cases on Snowflake Growing every day. In Q1, more than 1500 customers leveraged Snowflake for one of these workloads, up 91% year over year.

Speaker 2

A large U. S. Financial institution uses Snowflake for model training. Facing memory constraints with their prior solution, they chose to move feature engineering workloads to Snowflake. With Snowflake, they can fully ingest all data replacing a sampling approach, which left models less predictive and long running.

Speaker 2

Snowflake enables machine learning for a broad spectrum of user types, not just programmers. For analysts, we have introduced and preview ML Powered SQL Extensions Such as anomaly detection, top insights and time series forecasting, simple proficient users can now leverage powerful machine learning extensions without the need to master the underlying data science. For data scientists and engineers, Snowpark is our platform for programmability. New here is a PyTorch data loader and an MLflow plug in both in private preview. PyTorch is a popular framework for machine learning And MLflow helps manage the lifecycle and operations of machine learning.

Speaker 2

Snowflake had an early start in support of language models through last year's acquisition of Applika now in private preview. Applika's language model solves a real business challenge, understanding unstructured data. Users can turn documents such as invoices or legal contracts into structured properties. These documents are now referenceable for for analytics, data science and AI, something that is quite challenging in today's environment. Streamlit is the framework of choice for data scientists to create applications And experiences for AI and ML, over 1500 LLM powered Streamlit apps have already been built.

Speaker 2

GPT Lab is one example. GPT Lab offers pre trained AI assistance that can be shared across users. We announced our intent to acquire Neva, a next generation search technology powered by language models. Engaging with data through natural language becoming popular with advancements in AI. This will enable Snowflake users and application developers to build rich Search enabled and conversational experiences.

Speaker 2

We believe Neva will increase our opportunity to allow non technical users to extract value from their data. More broadly, Snowflake continues to enable industries and workloads. In Q1, more than 800 customers engaged with Snowpark for the first time. Approximately 30% of all customers are now using Snowpark on at least a weekly basis, up from 20% at the end of last quarter. Snowpark consumption is up nearly 70% quarter over quarter.

Speaker 2

The Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow is in public preview. Customers can Access ServiceNow data inside of the data cloud without needing to manually integrate APIs or third party tools. ServiceNow data is significant because it holds a wealth of IT and security data. The connector is the first so called native app built by Snowflake. Native apps, which are in private preview, run insight to Snowflake governance perimeter and make use of common services.

Speaker 2

Today, developers waste time convincing customers to expose their data. With native apps, developers can focus on their core interests, application development. We offer security and deployment concerns to Snowflake. During the quarter, we also launched the manufacturing data cloud, which focuses on supply chain management As a data problem, supply chain management is one of the few remaining realms in enterprise software that have struggled to platform itself. Supply chains are all somewhat unique and the data siloing problem prevents supply chain visibility essential to managing it.

Speaker 2

With the Manufacturing Cloud, Snowflake continues to evolve from being a data cloud to also being an operational hub for large enterprises and institution. We also announced that Blue Yonder, one of the largest software companies in supply chain management will fully replatform onto Snowflake. Bouygandor is a key participant in both the manufacturing and the retail data clouds. They are the 1st major supply chain provider to make this commitment to creating the end to end supply chain platform on Snowflake. Supply chain management It's driving network discipline as the chains are typically comprised of numerous different entities.

Speaker 2

We therefore expect significant network effects from the strategic alliance with Blue Yonder. Our summit conference in June will feature more significant product announcements and we look forward to seeing you there. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Frank. Q1 product revenues were $590,000,000 representing 50% year over year growth Remaining performance obligations grew 31 percent year over year totaling $3,400,000,000 Of the $3,400,000,000 in RPO, We expect approximately 57% to be recognized as revenue in the next 12 months. This represents a 40% increase compared to our estimate as of the same quarter last year. Our net revenue retention rate of 151% includes 5 new customers with 1 With $1,000,000 in trailing 12 month product revenue. Q1 revenue reflects strong performance in a challenging environment.

Speaker 3

We continue to focus on growth and efficiency. We generated $287,000,000 of non GAAP adjusted free cash flow, outperforming our Q1 target. In Q1, consumption varied from month to month. We benefited from strong consumption in February March. Starting in April, consumption slowed after the Easter holidays through today.

Speaker 3

The strength in the quarter was driven by our healthcare And manufacturing customers. Financial Services customers outperformed our expectations. From a geographic standpoint, we saw in line performance globally with the exception of our S and B and APJ segments. It is challenging to identify a single cause Of the consumption slowdown between Easter and today. A few of our largest customers have scrutinized Snowflake costs as they face headwinds in their own businesses.

Speaker 3

For example, Some organizations have reevaluated their data retention policies to delete stale and less valuable data. This lowers their storage bill and reduces compute cost. We've worked with a few large customers more recently on these efforts and expect these trends to continue. History has shown that price performance benefits long term consumption. From a booking standpoint, we saw headwinds globally This is not due to competitive pressures, but because customers remain hesitant to sign large multiyear deals.

Speaker 3

Productivity is not where we want it to be, and our updated outlook reflects us. Q1 is always a challenging bookings quarter, and the current macro environment magnifies that, But we are still not satisfied with our results. We will only invest in areas that yield returns. For that reason, we will prioritize existing sales resources to drive growth before we onboard new capacity. Q1 represented another quarter of continued progress on profitability.

Speaker 3

Our non GAAP Product gross margin was 77%, more favorable pricing with our cloud service providers, product improvements, Scale in our public cloud data centers and continued growth in large customer accounts will contribute to year over year gross margin improvements. Non GAAP operating margin was 5%, benefiting from revenue outperformance and savings on sales and marketing spend. Our non GAAP adjusted free cash flow margin was 46%, positively impacted by strong linearity of collections and some early collections of May receivables. We continue to have a strong cash position with $5,000,000,000 in cash, cash equivalent and short term and long term investments. We used approximately $192,000,000 of our cash to repurchase approximately 1,400,000 shares to date At an average price of $136 we will continue to opportunistically repurchase shares using our free cash flow.

Speaker 3

As Frank mentioned, we are acquiring Neva. We are excited to welcome approximately 40 employees from Neva to Snowflake, and the full impact is reflected in our outlook. Before turning to guidance, I would like to discuss the recent trends we've been observing. As I mentioned, we have seen slower than expected revenue growth since Easter. Contrary to last quarter, the majority of this underperformance is driven by older customers.

Speaker 3

Although we expect this to reverse, We are flowing these patterns through to the full year due to our lack of predictability and visibility of customer behavior. As a result, We're reining in costs until we see a consistent change in consumption. We are still focused on investing in efficient growth with on continuing to sign new customers, ensuring these customers are migrated quickly and successfully, leveraging our PS team and partner resources When selling our newer solutions such as Snowpark and Streamlit to win more personas in the enterprise, we are confident That this will ultimately lead to the data cloud network effects we have laid out over the past few years. We still believe we can achieve 10,000,000,000 Product revenue in fiscal 2029 with a better margin profile than we laid out last year. Now let's turn to guidance.

Speaker 3

For the Q2, we expect product revenues between $620,000,000 $625,000,000 representing year over year growth between 33% 34%. Turning to margins, we expect on a non GAAP basis 2% operating margin and we expect 361,000,000 diluted weighted average shares outstanding. For the full year fiscal 2024, We expect product revenues of approximately $2,600,000,000 representing year over year growth of approximately 34%. Turning to profitability for the full year fiscal 2024, we expect on a non GAAP basis approximately 76% product gross margin, 5% operating margin and 26% adjusted free cash flow margin and we expect 3 62,000,000 Diluted weighted average shares outstanding. We will continue to prioritize hiring and product and engineering.

Speaker 3

We have slowed our hiring plan for the year. We expect to add approximately 1,000 employees in fiscal 20 24 inclusive of M and A. And lastly, we will host our Today, on June 27 in Las Vegas in conjunction with Snowflake Summit, our Annual Users Conference. If you are interested in attending, please e mail irlsnowflakes .com. With that operator, you can now open up the line for questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the call.

Speaker 3

I apologize for all the

Operator

Our first question is from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Speaker 4

Thank you very much. Frank, do you sense any connection to the cadence of hyperscaler Cost optimization activity. In other words, if the AWS and Azure optimizations begin to normalize Within a few quarters, do you think that Snowflake's consumption patterns and sequential growth rates would perk up around the same time? Or Do you look at this as more separate kind of phenomena? And then

Speaker 5

I have a quick follow-up.

Speaker 2

Yes. Well, we think that because Amazon is such a large percentage of our overall deployments That they are a good proxy. We just know from talking to them that what they experience, we experience as well. So there's definitely a ripple effect because we're in the stack. So the answer generally Speaking is yes, we will see that Microsoft is smaller.

Speaker 2

So they're not as predictive of our experiences as AWS would be.

Speaker 4

Okay. Then as a quick follow-up, and Mike, I'm sorry to ask you a question. It sounds like you've got a bit of a cold. But is it safe to assume that you're completely through the revenue headwinds From Graviton Adoption

Speaker 6

and the

Speaker 4

Warehouse Builder product, I think that's the case. But I'm also curious, are there any Other analogous developments on the horizon that we could be thinking about that you might have baked into guidance in the next several quarters? Yes.

Speaker 3

We've fully migrated all of our customers in AWS to Graviton too, And that's the bulk of where our revenue is. And I want to remind you there's really 3 types of optimization. There's the optimizations By the cloud vendors and that's with better hardware, better performance. Then there's the optimizations that we do regularly in our software, which improved performance and hence cheaper for our customers. And generally those 2 combined we forecast There's a 5% headwind every year to our revenue associated with those.

Speaker 3

And the 3rd optimization is the one that we really Saw in a few of our largest customers with them just wanting to really change their storage retention policies. Like one customer went from 5 to 3 years and it's a mass of petabytes and petabytes of data and so we lose that storage revenue. But on top of that, Now your queries run quicker because you're querying less amounts of data and we are seeing more customers wanting to do that. And I spoke to some of the hyperscalers, I won't say which one, and they confirmed they're seeing retention policies change within their customers, Wanting to archive more older data.

Speaker 4

Yeah. Thank you, Mike. That's very helpful.

Operator

Our next question is from Kash Rangus with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Speaker 6

Hi. Thank you so much for taking my question. If you could just To offer to the degree that you can, what are your customers that are going through consumption optimization telling you with respect to When it's likely to plateau and when they're likely to come back to normal consumption, if you can. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2

Yes, Kash, I would say, look, there's just a little bit more color on, there's optimization, which is just How do we run what we're already running more efficiently and driving a level of savings that way, but there's sort of another layer on top of that. I I would call it rationalization. One of the things that we've seen happen over the last couple of quarters is that The CFO is in the business and this is sort of an expression that we use in enterprise that we're selling is that there is a level of oversight Certainly, that's normally not there. This is not a frequent occurrence. You only see this happening in fairly severe episodes.

Speaker 2

In the beginning it's like, hey, we do smaller contracts, shorter term contracts, but then it's like, hey, you're going to live within your means. Here's the amount of money you're going to spend and You're going to make it work and you can figure out where you're going to cut to fit into our box. So that's really dynamics That we've seen playing out there. Now in terms of your question, when is it all going to be over? These things do run their course, because in the end, we're settling I said in my prepared remarks, things are unsettled, but eventually they will settle.

Speaker 2

We will settle into new patterns, And then we sort of resume from there. But I think as of right now, I think things are still unsettled and people Are adjusting and we don't have real strong visibility in terms of, okay, when is it all going to be different? Thank

Speaker 6

you so much.

Operator

Our next question is from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Speaker 7

Excellent. Thank you gentlemen for taking the question. Mike, this one's for you and it might be a little unfair, but it's the one that I'm getting most from investors and it's About kind of guidance methodology, and if anything's changed in that, we've seen the forward forecast have to come down a couple of times over the past couple of quarters. There's a lot of moving pieces in both the macro environment and kind of how your customers are acting. How can we give investors confidence that this is the last cut, that We're not going to be running into new types of optimization on a go forward basis and further taking down our forecast for the fiscal year.

Speaker 3

Well, the way we there is no change in our forecast methodology and we forecast looking literally at consumption trends On a daily basis, literally 4 weeks prior to the earnings through yesterday, and what I would say was a little unique. This past is we literally saw 4 weeks in April where there was no week over week growth per se or not material. And we do think that was driven a lot by some of these customers. That's when it happened, some of these big Optimizations on storage retention policies. But in a consumption model, Customers have the ability to dial it back and they can increase it as well too when they get more confidence in their business and I can only guide based upon the data we have available to us.

Speaker 8

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Keith. Our next question is from Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Speaker 9

Hey guys, thanks for the question. So maybe one financial one, if we and then a technical one. If we look at the balance of the growth headwinds from optimization versus rationalization or meaning How much people are doing less of versus still tight with the purse strings to do more with? Kind of how does that balance look? How has it Changed over the course of the last 6 to 9 months.

Speaker 9

And then maybe just from a technical perspective, what do you get with Neva? Why is it important? What does it unlock for your customer base relative to generative add?

Speaker 3

So in terms of What customers are doing actually the number of jobs, the number of queries actually grew 57% year over year in the quarter. It's outpacing our revenue. The queries are just running more efficiently and that is because of some of the optimizations both if you reduce the amount of storage you're running queries on, They run faster. It's also the impact you're getting right now of the full Graviton 2 this year versus the prior from last year. So the number of jobs is actually growth is actually outpacing revenue and just we're becoming so much more efficient for our customers.

Speaker 3

And on the Nevo, I'll go to Christian who's here.

Speaker 10

Yes. Hi, Christian here. The broad Vision that we communicated to all of you over the last several years is Snowflake is on a mission to extend its capabilities, so we can bring Complication to happen close to the data, it has evolved us into an application platform and a core Use case for applications is not only search and search enabled experiences, but with the advent of generative AI is the notion of conversational experiences. And the folks from EVA are the ones who are going to power, help us accelerate the efforts around Snowflake as a platform for Search and conversational experiences, but most important within the security perimeter of Snowflake with the customers' data so that they can Leverage all this new innovation and technology, but with the safety on the privacy and security of the data. Understood.

Operator

Our next question is from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Speaker 8

Yes. Thank you, Mike. I hope you feel better soon. The quick question, last quarter, we talked about like the newer cohorts Kind of expanding slightly at the lower pace compared to the more established ones or the more older ones. Have you seen any change in momentum there?

Speaker 8

Or is this like if you think about it, like we had the last quarter Slower expansion from the newer ones and now this quarter we have like more optimization from the older ones. Is that like the 2 things or are there other

Speaker 3

No, good question. The newer ones are growing faster. The older obviously are the larger dollars. So when they do optimizations that has a bigger impact. And it's interesting too the net revenue retention for Growth within AWS, those customers are materially above where our overall company is and that's because we're relatively new to that.

Speaker 3

So the Azure cloud is Really starting to take off for us as well.

Speaker 8

Okay. And then one maybe to help you with your voice for Frank. But Frank, if you think about the changes in policy in terms of storage retention and stuff like that, I mean, there was a reason why People stored at data like for a certain number of years, etcetera. Do you think this is what you're seeing now is kind of more Temporary, you think? Or and as we coming out, people just kind of do it, have a different approach again?

Speaker 8

Or do you think that's kind of the permanent move that's happening here? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes, I don't think it's permanent. Look, like I said, the CFOs in the business, Given very direct guidance in terms of here's where you need to be, then the operating teams are Trying to look at, okay, how do we implement this? Sometimes the low hanging fruit is, we'll just cut the data back. The processes might actually not Be running as well, okay? So there's actually a cost.

Speaker 2

But you know what, the cost concern It's prevailing at the moment because of the general sentiment that we are. In 2020 2021, there was it was Growth at all costs and the mentality was let it rip. Now we're in the complete inverse of that situation where we have Strong scrutiny on predictability on cost and so on. I don't think that will last. We're just on the other side of the spectrum right now, And we will reconverge to the mean at some point here.

Speaker 8

Okay. Makes sense. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Speaker 11

Great. Thanks so much for the question. Mike, I know in a consumption model, obviously, it's difficult to predict the number of new workloads and transaction volumes. A lot of that we know is tied to macro. I just wanted to come back to the optimization topic.

Speaker 11

You talked about the 3 different types of optimization. Is there any way you can compare your total customer portfolio To the most optimized customer that you have just to get a sense of maybe what the downside is If everyone were optimized as your most optimized customer.

Speaker 3

That would be so hard to do. I don't have that data. Each customer is different.

Speaker 11

Can I ask you a question

Speaker 3

right? Okay.

Speaker 4

Can I

Speaker 10

ask you a question right now?

Speaker 11

No, no, no, no. I know you do have the data. Please go ahead, sorry.

Speaker 10

No, I was going to add that in certain instances, some of these optimizations in the 3rd category that Mike described And what Frank was alluding to, it's changing how the business thinks about their needs. So when you made the decision to Reevaluate our storage policy. There's a business impact that only customers can do, so it's difficult for us to estimate that type of decision.

Speaker 11

Thank you, Christian. It's helpful. Mike, a question I know you do have the answer to. Since you forecast the trends every week, any commentary on how May looks relative to April.

Speaker 3

That's reflected in the guide that I gave you, the $2,600,000,000 for the year. I would say that there were a couple periods in May where it was strong, but it's kind of it's okay, But it's not where we want it to be, but that's reflected in the guide now.

Speaker 11

Cool. Thank you so much for taking the questions guys.

Operator

Our next question is from Karl Keirstead with UBS. Your line is now open.

Speaker 4

Okay, great. Thanks. Mike, if

Speaker 12

I could just build on Brad's line of questioning. The spirit of it is what assumptions you're embedding in your second half Guidance, are you essentially reflecting the April, May environment you saw and straight lining it? Or are you taking a little bit more of a Servative approach and sort of haircutting that assumes that it or maybe the Fins vertical gets a little bit weaker. That's question number 1. Question number 2, maybe this is best suited for Frank.

Speaker 12

Frank, Mike mentioned in his comments that sales productivity is not where Snowflake wanted it to be. Could you elaborate on that? Because that sounds like some of the pressure may not be entirely macro, but Might be sales execution. So I'd love to hear a little bit if I interpreted that correctly and the steps you're taking maybe to turn it around. Thank you.

Speaker 3

So, sorry, Carl. Yes, we are expecting that there will be week over week growth On average with our customers that will compound, but it's at a much lower pace than it was prior and it's more what we've been seeing in the last 4 weeks is what we're expecting inside there. I'm not expecting a straight line from where we are today, the end of the year.

Speaker 2

Yes. On the sales productivity side, I do think that's very much a macro thing. There comes a point where you can't push any harder. And we have applied the resources, but we're not converting Yes, on the resources in a way that we think is optimal. So is there an execution aspect that there always is, right?

Speaker 2

I mean, that's Day to day sales management, but in all the years of doing this kind of work, I felt like I've always sort of under applied the resource. In hindsight, I felt that I always thought I could have done more. This is definitely a situation where I feel like we have Tremendous amounts of resources. We've been very, very successful at it. But there comes a point where, okay, we need to become more selective, More prioritized on driving the performance.

Speaker 2

So I definitely think It's a macro thing. I mean the sentiment out there is of a sort that you just can't push it any harder Then up to a certain point.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you both.

Operator

Our next question is from Patrick Walravens with JMP. Your line is now open.

Speaker 3

We can't hear you, Pat.

Speaker 7

If I remember right, Blue Yonder is JDA and that's i2 and Manugistics. So Anything about why

Speaker 13

that's so interesting would be great.

Speaker 2

Look, I had a long term fascination with Supply Chain Management because Supply Chain Management has never been really platformed In terms of software, it's an email spreadsheet operation. It's incredibly inefficient and it's an incredibly high Volume opportunity and the reason that it couldn't be platformed is first of all, each supply chain is different. So it's very hard to have a standard Solution for something that is so variable. But secondly, there's the data problem. If you can't establish visibility across all the entities That make up the supply chain, you stand no chance of solving that problem.

Speaker 2

So the reason that I find it so interesting for Snowflake is that look, All the entities in the supply chain will become Snowflake accounts, right, because that's the way everybody will have visibility to everybody else And we have a real fighting chance of solving it. Secondly, the processes that run-in supply chain management are extremely computationally intensive And they run-in very, very high volume. And of course, Snowflake is ideally suited for taking on those kinds of workloads. So I really think that Supply Chain Management will be the most network segment of all industries that we're operating in. And today, the most network segment that we're running in is financial services By far, but I think it will be overtaken by manufacturing and retail in the fullness of time because there's absolutely no penetration right there.

Speaker 2

These are Unsolved problems, very much in almost in the history of computing. That's how serious that is. So Fantastic historical opportunity for the technology to address.

Speaker 13

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Kirk Materne with ISI. Your line is now open. Yes. Thanks very much. Frank, with sort of the explosion in questions around AI over the last 6 months, do you think That buyers or executives are tying the opportunities with AI to the data yet, meaning I know conceptually they might get that, but Any of your conversations with customers sort of starting to percolate because of AI and the need to get your data sorted out

Speaker 4

Take advantage of that or is

Operator

are most of you still sort of in the discovery phase on that front? And then Mike, can you just talk if NEBA impacts the Op margin guidance for the full year at all, I was just kind of curious, you've mentioned savings, but margins are sort of flattish year over year. I was just kind of curious if that had any impact. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 2

Yes, Frank. Obviously, customers make the connection between data and the ability to take advantage Large language models and the natural language interface and all that kind of stuff, and it's already happening. And with the services that are today Available on Snowflake and they're also available in the AI space. You can already rig things together and make some interesting progress. But the thing is, you need to have highly curated, highly optimized data and then that is what we do at Snowflake To really power these models, you cannot just indiscriminately let these things loose on data that is That people don't understand in terms of its quality and its definition, its lineage and all these kinds of things.

Speaker 2

So I think we are in a really great place and I said in the prepared remarks, data has a gravitational pull. So we will attract tremendous demand for these type of workloads. And Our strategy is to enable that to the maximum of 4th extent possible.

Speaker 3

And then with regards to neva, Kirk, That's fully baked into the guidance. They have a number of well, actually all of their engineers are very senior engineers and they're all based in

Operator

Our next question is from Brent Thill with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Speaker 14

Thanks. Frank, this concept of snow for everyone and having a simple chat like GPT UI in front of The Snowflake data, bringing it to the mass market. I mean, how long do you think this takes to Where you start to see that or it's we have you deploy internally, but I have to go to one person that's the power user. When do you think that ultimately we can start seeing that in everyone's desktop?

Speaker 2

Well, I think that the more, I don't want to say simplistic, it might not be the right characterization. But for example, one of these things on top of, for example, Salesforce data in Snowflake, which is a very common thing, something that we're already doing internally, That's going to be available in the second half all over the place. And people will like it. I like it. I mean, I prefer much over using dashboards and things like that because it just lets me ask questions.

Speaker 2

But they're also relatively simplistic Questions and where it gets harder when you start asking much, much harder questions, that's when you start finding the limits of these kind of technologies. So I think we're still sort of in the fun and games stage of the development of this technology and with the content generation side of This technology is fascinating and captivating for people, but asking really hard analytical questions that take people weeks weeks or even months to figure out, That will take some work for software to do that in a matter of seconds to be productive that way. So we're sort of at the top of the hype cycle and the real work really starts now.

Speaker 14

And then Mike, you mentioned you're not effectively it doesn't sound like bringing on a lot new There's still 183 job openings on your website. So I guess what you're saying is you're freezing quota carrying rep onboarding In the interim, until you see that capacity, are you still bringing people on? How are you thinking about this transition?

Speaker 3

In the sales organization, we're only doing backfills right now and we will look at performance management and upgrading people. And we could reallocate heads from one region that's underperforming to another region, but no net new hires,

Operator

Sorry.

Speaker 13

Great. Hope you feel better.

Speaker 3

Right. Yes. Sorry.

Operator

Our next question is from Greg Moskowitz with Mizuho. Your line is now open.

Speaker 15

All right. Thank you for taking the Shins, you mentioned the change in data retention as a more prevalent form of optimization recently. What about the refresh rate? Are you seeing customers pull back on the Frequency with which the data are updating?

Speaker 10

No. Christian here. We have not seen changes there. If anything, because of our cost model, the economics are fairly similar if people are updating More versus less frequently or reasonably similar and we don't see changes in the patterns.

Speaker 15

That's helpful. Thanks, Christian. And then just a follow-up on Neva, I guess, either for you or for Frank. So I think of the technology as fairly horizontal in terms of potential appeal. I'm I'm just wondering if you think this can be an avenue to help land new enterprise customers going forward.

Speaker 15

And then secondly, how much of a value add do you think that

Speaker 2

This is Frank. I'll go first. We view search and chat as really a complete evolution under the influence I have our relationship with data and how we interact with it. I think most of us remember when search first became available, You know how that's just dramatically changed our relationship with data. I'm personally a search junkie.

Speaker 2

I can't leave it alone. I find it incredibly empowering. But The problem with search has been it matches on strengths. It has zero context. It's not stateful.

Speaker 2

And now we have the technology to make Search, incredibly powerful. Also to the point that when it can't find it, it can actually generate the code to answer the questions that are posted in search. So this is incredibly important to Basically what we said from the beginning, Snowflake is about mobilizing the world's data and this is how we're going to do it. I mean search and chat are sort of morphing into a single Natural Language Interface. But the other thing I would caution you, this is not all about natural language interfaces.

Speaker 2

A lot of the intelligence that talking about is going to be manifested through the interfaces, not just through natural language.

Speaker 15

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Greg. Our next question is from Brad Reback with Stifel. Your line is now open. Great. Thanks very much.

Speaker 5

Mike, I hate to pose this to you, but you're probably

Operator

the best to answer it. Beyond the week to week usage patterns In the installed base, are there any other operational data metrics that you're looking at to give you confidence on when NRR will bottom?

Speaker 3

Obviously, that's not the only thing I look at. I look at pipeline generation, Weighted pipeline, I'm typically looking out 3 to 4 quarters, looking at I sit in on the sales call every Monday. We're spending a lot of time with reps these days on what is going on within their accounts. And so but the most important thing Is consumption patterns today are the biggest indicator of the future. And also looking at new products that may come out, it's hard to forecast anything for them, but that Gives us somewhat of confidence.

Speaker 3

We have some big announcements that are going GA towards Streamlit is one of them. We talked about the applicants in private preview. But stream that we think will be meaningful and we're really pleased with what we're seeing in the Snowpark daily credit consumption Great, Moe.

Operator

That's great. Thanks very much. Our next question is from Tyler Radke with Citi. Your line is now open.

Speaker 13

Yes. Thanks for taking the question. I'll pose this to Frank or to give Mike a break there. But Just on Microsoft, so obviously they're hosting their build conference this week and a ton of new product announcements including in data and analytics. But I wanted to ask you more on the partnership front.

Speaker 13

I think you commented on Seeing some better traction there. I think they've evolved their partner program, including adding you as a Tier 1 partner. So could you just talk about Kind of the status of that relationship, how you're fitting in given some of these announcements, like Fabric, which you're kind of unifying Microsoft's own products, but just the status quo in that relationship and the opportunity with this new partnership.

Speaker 2

Yes. Just Microsoft relationship has been growing faster than the other 2 cloud platforms that we We support. It's been very clear from the top of Microsoft that they're reviewing Azure as a platform, not as a sort of a single integrated proprietary Microsoft stack. And They've said over and over that we're about choice, we're about innovation. And yes, we will compete.

Speaker 2

We've competed with Microsoft from Day 1, and that will and then we've been very successful in that regard for a whole bunch of different reasons. But people keep on coming, and that's and we And I think that's sort of a net benefit for the world at large as they get better and better products and they get more choice. The good news is that, I think the relationship is relatively mature, meaning that's when there is friction or people are not following the rules. We have good established processes for addressing and resolving that. And that's incredibly important, right?

Speaker 2

We sort of get out of that juvenile state where Things are dysfunctional at the field level. So I have no reason to believe that, that will not continue in that manner. So I think Azure will continue

Speaker 13

Great. And on Snowpark, it sounded like that you're pleased with the consumption this quarter. Could you just Give us a sense for expectations on the revenue ramp there and what are the big use cases You're seeing today, is it Hadoop migrations, data engineering? Just give us a sense on kind of how you're expecting that ramp up And what are the main use cases driving that?

Speaker 2

Yes. So here's the important thing to understand about Snowpark. Snowpark is the programmable platform For Snowflake originally, I know Snowflake was conceived with SQL interfaces and that was the mode through which you would address the platform. So this has really sort of opened up a whole host of modalities, if you will, onto the platform. Basically, our posture is, look, if it reads our rights to Snowflake, we want to own these processes.

Speaker 2

And Snowpark is the platform to achieve that. Now the supply chain, if you will, how the data comes into Snowflake is Through data engineering processes, often these are Spark workloads and processes. We think they ought to run On Snowflake. The reason is they're going to be cheaper, they're going to be faster, they're going to be operationally simpler and they're going to be fully Governed, right. So we think if you are a Snowflake customer and you're not running these processes on Snowpark, you're just Missing out in all those four dimensions that I just listed.

Speaker 2

On the consumption end, it's the same thing. If you're doing analytics, if If you're doing data science, you're doing machine learning, if you're doing AI, if it reads from and writes back to Snowflake, we think That's Snowpark. And we have taken a very emphatic posture to this. We're campaigning Snowpark very, very hard around the world. The interest is tremendously high.

Speaker 2

As I said in the prepared remarks, we went from 20% in 1 quarter to 30% of our customers using it on at least a weekly basis. We think that's going to go to 100%. I think Snowpark will become extremely prevalent around the use of Snowflake. Now beyond that, There's a whole wide world that we're obviously also very interested in and we're going to start at home and own everything that is there that we can own over there.

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Brent Greyson with Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.

Speaker 5

Good afternoon. Frank, maybe for you, I totally get the current cost concerns and optimization efforts underway. I'd be more curious to hear what you think could get us out of the current slowdown. Are there Products or workloads that you would flag as the key ones to watch that drives the reacceleration of the business, just thinking through What's in your control? Or do you think we have to wait for further macro to improve?

Speaker 5

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Well, I definitely the number one issue is sentiment out there, just the lack of visibility, The anxiety watching CNBC all day doesn't give you any hope. That's absolutely number 1. Because what we're seeing is That when we're dealing with CTOs and Chief Data Officers, these people are chomping at the bit, But they are now literally getting stopped, as I said earlier, by the CFO being in the business and saying, well, I guess that's all good and well, but Here's how much you're going to spend. You know you're going to get a new contract, you're going to live within the confines of the contract that you have. So really artificially constraining the demand Because of the general anxiety that exists in the economy.

Speaker 2

So that really needs to start lifting and that will happen. These things run their course. We've been through these So it's before. So I think that's really the requirement. There's plenty of demand out there, absolutely.

Speaker 2

And with AI right now, I mean, it's going to drive a whole other vector in terms of workload development. It's going to be hard to Stop, CFOs or no CFO.

Speaker 5

Very helpful there. And then Christian, I wanted to follow-up on NEVA. Streamlit totally get that acquisition. Neva, little harder for me to fully understand. So as you look at Neva and the tech stack, what was most interesting?

Speaker 5

Was it the team? Is there some sort of differentiated search engine under the hood? Is it their large language model expertise? What why NEVA?

Speaker 10

Yes. It's a great question. I think it's the combination of traditional search technology With LLM technology, I think most of us have seen numerous demos of people that take an LLM in a couple of days or produce something that looks good, but then there are problems on how precise that search is and how reliable those results are. Well, the NEVA team did extremely well. It was able to combine LLM and generative AI type technology With traditional technology to be able to do attribution of results and it's very interesting in an enterprise setting where you want More precise answers.

Speaker 10

That combination was very appealing. And then of course, it is a world class team and the combination of those 2 were appealing to us.

Operator

Our next question is from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen. Your line is now open.

Speaker 13

Great. Thanks.

Speaker 16

I wanted to ask about the competitive and the pricing environment out there. I guess on the Competitive side, have you guys seen any change in win rates or workload shifts to different platforms? And when it comes to pricing, Yes. You talked about customers focusing a lot on cost savings. How is this translating into your ability to hold Kind of unit pricing, especially on renewals.

Speaker 2

Frank, I'll let Mike weigh in once he stops coughing. But the thing about pricing is, look, Physics or physics. A read is a read. A write is a write. And there's economics.

Speaker 2

It costs a certain amount of money, right? And There's just not that much room other than playing games or temporarily sponsoring or subsidizing different parts of the business To really get a sustained pricing edge on 1 player or another, we're all converging to very, very similar Where you see huge differences is in the total cost of ownership and that is not the cost of computing stories. And that is like what is the cost to run that technology. And this is where has a huge advantage and our customers know that it's just it's reduced skill sets, Far fewer people not having to touch the complexity of the underlying platforms on and on and on. I mean, we're more Descendants of Apple and Tesla than being the descendants of Hadoop like some people are in the marketplace, right?

Speaker 2

So we have really abstracted the complexity And that's what generates these TCO advantages. But the raw cost of computing and storage, There's not that much opportunity to be had.

Speaker 10

I want to add something to highlight what Frank mentioned in his Snowpark Answer, which is what we're seeing relative to competitive platforms Spark and by Spark, we're seeing Snowpark being not only better performance, But at price performance, so interestingly enough, we see customers giving us technical wins and wanting to migrate because of the better economics of the competitive dynamics.

Speaker 16

Great. If I could squeeze one more in. Just in terms of LLMs, you guys are obviously sitting on A lot of data to be able to be mined and training models. Do you guys envision kind of Building up GPU clusters and offering training and inference on your platform or do you think that's really the place for hyperscalers to be doing

Speaker 10

We're doing all of it. We alluded in the prepared remarks to Aplica, which it is Multi model, collection of models being built at Snowflake that require GPU. So We're doing our part, but we're also working. We'll show more at our conference on how we surface GPN. So All of the above, it's an important component of this Gen AI wave of innovation.

Speaker 16

Okay. Thanks. Mike, feel

Operator

better. Thanks. I'm so sorry. Thank you, Derek. Our next question is from

Speaker 3

We're having a problem here. Just wondering

Speaker 9

Yes. Sorry about that, Mike. It's hard to hear the operator. Yes. So just wondering, you've called out financial services as your largest vertical.

Speaker 9

Wondering how much of an impact that vertical had in the consumption patterns that you pointed out post the Easter holiday?

Speaker 3

Actually the financial services vertical is doing fine. It was very strong for us. It's still 23% of our revenue and growing quite fast. It was in some of the other areas with some of our bigger customers outside of Financial Services.

Speaker 9

All right, understood. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Speaker 3

Hey, operator, we're having a hard time hearing you. Oh, now we hear you. Okay.

Speaker 13

No, the operator is fading. I would agree. Appreciate you sneaking me in. Just going back to revised guidance suggests growth falls below 30%. We did mention confidence still

Speaker 7

And the longer term $10,000,000,000 target. So if we could just spend some time on what you're hearing from customers that drives confidence around What you're seeing is temporary, which suggests growth bounces back. And it's a second part on the bookings commentary. It sounded like North America large enterprise It's the area that's standing out favorably. I just want to make sure we have the right context there.

Speaker 7

And if there's anything else you can add around what's driving that, it's appreciated. Thank you.

Speaker 3

What I would say is we have a lot of customers who we have only moved a fraction of their data that we know they have multiyear plans to go on Snowflake And that's what gives us the confidence as well as the pipeline of deals. And I'm not just talking pipeline now, there's deals for next year that I know their long sales cycles, these big customers. That's what gives us the pipeline on top of a lot of the new products we have coming out over the next couple

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Key Takeaways

  • Q1 product revenue grew 50% year-on-year to $590M with a 151% net revenue retention rate and $3.4B in remaining performance obligations, while non-GAAP free cash flow rose 58% to $287M.
  • Executives flagged a near-term consumption slowdown as large customers optimize costs by cutting data retention, though they expect demand to rebound as macro uncertainties ease.
  • AI/ML adoption accelerated with over 1,500 customers running data science or ML workloads in Q1 (up 91% YoY), new Snowpark previews (PyTorch loader, MLflow plug-in), and the Applica and Neva acquisitions to boost language-model and search capabilities.
  • Snowpark usage surged as weekly usage rose from 20% to 30% of customers and consumption jumped nearly 70% quarter-over-quarter, while native apps like the ServiceNow connector entered public preview.
  • Management guided Q2 product revenue of $620–625M (+33–34% YoY) and full-year revenue of ~$2.6B (+34% YoY) with non-GAAP gross margin of 76% and operating margin of 5%, and said hiring and share buybacks will remain disciplined.
A.I. generated. May contain errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Snowflake Q1 2024
00:00 / 00:00