NetScout Systems Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
July 27, 2023

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Welcome to NETSCOUT's First Quarter Fiscal Year 20 24 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all parties are in a listen only mode until the question and answer portion of the call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Tony Piazza, Senior Vice President of Corporate Finance and his colleagues at NETSCOUT are on the line with us today. I would now like to turn the call over to Tony Piazza to begin the company's prepared remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Netskow's Q1 fiscal year 2024 Conference Call for the period ended June 30, 2023. Joining me today are Anil Singhal, NETSCOUT's There is a slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks. In multiple areas within the Investor Relations section of our website at www.netscout.com, including the IR landing page under Financial Results, the webcast itself and under Financial Information on the Quarterly Results page. Moving on to Slide number 3.

Speaker 1

Today's conference call will include forward looking statements. Examples of forward looking statements include statements regarding our and other statements that are not historical fact. You can identify forward looking statements by their use of forward looking words such as anticipate, These forward looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from the forward looking statements due to known and unknown risks, For a more detailed description of the risk factors associated with the company, please refer to the company's annual report on Form 10 for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023, on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NETSCOUT assumes no obligation to update any Forward looking information contained in this communication or with respect to the announcements described herein. Let's now turn to Slide number 4, which involves non GAAP metrics.

Speaker 1

While this slide presentation includes both GAAP and non GAAP results, Unless otherwise stated, financial information discussed on today's conference call will be on a non GAAP basis only. The rationale for providing non GAAP Measures along with the limitations of relying solely on those measures is detailed on this slide and in today's press release. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliation of all non GAAP metrics with the applicable GAAP measure are provided in the appendix of the slide presentation in today's earnings press release and on our website. I will now turn the call over to Anil for his prepared remarks.

Speaker 1

Anil?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Tony, and good morning, everyone. Welcome and thank you all for joining us today. Let's turn to Slide number 6 for a brief recap of our non GAAP financial results for the Q1 of fiscal 2024. We delivered solid financial performance in the Q1 of fiscal year and released several key product Our last earnings call. Revenue was $211,100,000 representing year over year growth of over 1%.

Speaker 2

We expanded both our gross margin and operating margin and grew our diluted EPS by nearly 30% year over year to deliver $0.31 per diluted share in the period. We also accomplished several product milestones Contributing to revenue in the second half of the fiscal year. This includes the release of our Visibility Without Border platform that provides performance, security and availability across one common data framework. By proactively identifying areas of complexity, Just needed to increase visibility, improve agility and keep data and application secure. Additionally, We relaunched our Omni Cyber OCI or Omni Cyber Intelligence solution.

Speaker 2

This next generation of OCI is an advanced network OCI also applied historical investigation of high fidelity network metadata and packets. In the face of rising cyber threats, OCI provides security team with real time packet level visibility across their digital infrastructure and helps identify threats earlier in the attack lifecycle. OCI also quickens investigation by gathering network based forensic evidence to reduce the Mean time to response. OCI is a valuable tool for verifying the effectiveness and improving the existing cybersecurity ecosystem, ensuring compliance and lowering the risk of successful cyber attacks. We also released our 2 new DDoS solutions.

Speaker 2

The first is Adaptive DDoS, which helps protect enterprises from rapidly spreading dynamic DDoS attacks. It adapts to the evolving threat landscape and automates countermeasures used to address cyber attacks, including the latest multi vector direct path attacks. And the second is Mobile Security, which extends our powerful DDoS capability that service providers currently leverage in their wireline Networks to now protect their mobile network and address their distributed threat service. Now let's move to Slide number 7 for some further Perspective on market and business. Starting with our enterprise customer vertical.

Speaker 2

In the Q1 of fiscal year 2024, enterprise revenue grew nearly 13% year over year, driven by the We remain confident that our value proposition of extending visibility to the edges of the network We'll continue to resonate with enterprise customers seeking to cover blind spots, address control challenges and facilitate Moving to our service provider customer vertical. As expected, revenue in the Q1 for this vertical declined approximately 0 point Year over year 9% year over year, primarily due to the lower level of radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue in the Q2 compared with the same quarter last year. We continue to see domestic and international carriers invest in their 5 gs deployments. Notably, several carriers now have the spectrum and deployed standalone networks in certain markets and are ready to drive Traffic over those networks over 5 gs once 5 gs required applications materialize. We believe that the 5 gs adoption advances that as the 5 gs adoption advances and 5 gs traffic volumes increase, Our core visibility and cybersecurity solutions will be required.

Speaker 2

We are prepared and ready to support Carrier through this inevitable transition with our differentiated solutions. Michael will provide more insight regarding customer orders in a vertical during his remarks. Now let's move to Slide number 8 to review our outlook. Looking ahead, we remain excited about the market opportunity We are seeing for both our existing and new solutions and are reiterating our fiscal year 2024 outlook. We also continue to see the supply chain challenges that drove the increase in fulfillable backlog Resolving and anticipate that our fullfillable backlog will continue to return to more normalized levels.

Speaker 2

We remain focused on operating the business with a balanced approach to driving revenue growth and profitability As we manage through the dynamic micro environment and position NETSCOUT to deliver long term sustainable value for our stakeholders as the guardians of the connected world. Jean will provide additional color and a recap of the outlook and actual numbers in her remarks. In summary, we delivered solid Q1 financial results and achieved several product milestones that establish our financials delivering our objectives for fiscal year 2024 and beyond. We remain confident that NetScout is well positioned to help customers address the challenges and opportunities of today's Digital World through our unique and expanding solutions. We look forward to sharing our progress with everyone throughout the remainder of our fiscal year.

Speaker 2

With that, I'll turn the call over to Michael.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Anil, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to highlight the areas that I will be covering today, Starting with customer win highlights in the Q1. In our enterprise customer vertical, our proven technology Our long productive partnerships with our installed base customers have always been a strong foundation for our business. As customers continue to adapt, Advance and expand their IT strategies, they continue to depend on NETSCAR to ensure the success of these transitions. As an example, During the quarter, we won a mid-seven figure deal in service assurance with a large U.

Speaker 3

S. Regional bank In support of the data center transformation, the opportunity erodes from the bank's initiative to upgrade its infrastructure from on premises To a distributed colo based architecture, Petscad's solutions have been critical to several areas of the Bank's Business, including Online Banking and Unified Communications and others, our long and productive partnership position NetScout to win the business despite competitive bidding process. Now turning to the service provider customer vertical, we remain focused on supporting both our domestic and International Carriers 5 gs Network Evolutions. We also continue to support our service providers in their security efforts Cyber attack incidents permeate and threat surfaces continue to expand. As an example from the quarter, on the service assurance front, a long standing Tier 1 North American carrier customer placed additional orders with us amounting to a mid-seven figure sum as they continue to advance their 5G projects.

Speaker 3

On the security front, A midsized international service provider customer placed a low 7 figure order for our Arbor products to upgrade The DDoS Protection replacing a competitor. The main driver for this investment was to deliver a reliable so called clean pipe, Leveraging an integrated detection and mitigation solution for the high value customer base. We won the order due to our superior technology, Strong reputation and positive references from the leaders in their sector. These strengths combined with our recent innovative new product offerings Should continue to drive customer interest in our best in class solutions in the rapidly evolving cybersecurity environment. Turning to go to market activities.

Speaker 3

We remain focused on promoting our industry leadership, trusted brand, Next Generation Solutions and Platform. This included attending several high profile events such as the RSA Conference, Cisco Live, Dell Technologies World and Big 5 gs. In the 2nd fiscal quarter, we plan to participate in VMware Explore and BlackHat to name a few. Looking ahead, NETSCOUT plans to host its customers and partners At our annual Engage Technology and User Summit from 2nd to October 5th in Orlando, Florida. At ENGAGE 2023, we'll demonstrate how our Visibility Without Borders platform provides a unified approach to addressing the industry's Most pertinent issues, including how performance, security and availability challenges are multiplying and are often interconnected and overlapping.

Speaker 3

We also highlight our next generation omni cyber intelligence solution and our new DDoS products such as Adaptive DDoS and Mobile Security. Thank you, everyone. That concludes my remarks, And I will now turn the call over to Jean.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. I will review key metrics for our Q1 of fiscal year 2024 and provide some additional commentary on our fiscal year 2024 outlook. As a reminder, this review focuses on our non GAAP results unless otherwise stated, And all reconciliations with our GAAP results appear in the presentation appendix. Regardless, I will note the nature of any such comparisons. Slide number 12 details our Q1 fiscal year 2024 results.

Speaker 4

During the quarter, total revenue grew 1.1% year over year to $211,100,000 Product revenue declined 3.7% And service revenue grew 5.4 percent both on a year over year basis. We ended the Q1 with backlog of approximately $15,000,000 consisting of approximately $12,000,000 of fulfillable orders and approximately $4,000,000 of radio frequency propagation We anticipate that backlog will return to historically normalized levels as global supply chain challenges appear to be subsiding and as radio frequency propagation modeling projects have led to the deployment of the 5 gs infrastructure needed for supporting business and consumer applications. Our Q1 fiscal year 2024 gross profit margin was 78.3%, up 3.8 percentage points over the same quarter last year. As you may recall, the prior year's quarterly gross margin was impacted by approximately $15,000,000 in radio frequency propagation modeling projects, which had an average gross margin of less than 30%. Quarterly operating expenses increased 3.6% year over year, primarily attributable to increased sales headcount, travel and events.

Speaker 4

We reported an operating profit margin of 14% compared with 11.7% in the same quarter last year. Diluted earnings per share was $0.31 compared with $0.24 in the same quarter last year, an increase of 29.2 percent year over year. Turning to Slide 13, I'd now like to review key revenue trends by customer verticals and product lines. For the Q1 of fiscal year 2024, on a year over year basis, Our enterprise customer vertical revenue grew 12.9%, while our service provider customer vertical revenue declined 9.3%. During the quarter, our enterprise customer vertical accounted for 52% of our total revenue, while our service provider customer vertical accounted for the remaining 48%.

Speaker 4

Now turning to our product lines. In the Q1 of fiscal year 2024, our cybersecurity revenue increased by 9.9% And our service assurance revenue declined 2.4%, both on a year over year basis. During the Q1, the service assurance Product line represented approximately 69% of total revenue, while our cybersecurity product line represented the remaining 31%. Turning to Slide 14, which shows our geographic revenue mix. Compared to last year's Q1, Our revenue was less concentrated in the U.

Speaker 4

S. Due to the prior year's higher radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue. There were no customers representing 10% or more of our total revenue in the quarter. Slide 15 Details our balance sheet highlights and free cash flow. We ended the quarter with $390,500,000 in cash, cash equivalents, Marketable Securities and Investments representing a decrease of $37,400,000 since the end of fiscal year 2023.

Speaker 4

Free cash flow for the quarter was a use of $24,300,000 From a debt perspective, we ended the Q1 Full year 2024 with $100,000,000 outstanding on our $800,000,000 revolving credit facility, which expires in July 2026. We currently have capacity in our share repurchase authorizations and subject to market conditions planned to be active in the market. To briefly recap our other balance sheet highlights, accounts receivable net was 108 $300,000 a decrease of $35,600,000 since March 31, 2023. The DSO metric at the end of the Q1 of fiscal year 2024 was 44 days, in line with the end of the Q1 of fiscal year 20 23 and a decrease from 58 days at the end of our fiscal year 2023. Let's move to Slide 16 for commentary on our outlook.

Speaker 4

I will focus my review on our non GAAP targets for fiscal year 2024. As Anil noted earlier, we are reiterating our non GAAP outlook for the fiscal year 2024 that was presented during our May 4, 2023 4th quarter and full fiscal year 2023 earnings call. As a reminder, for fiscal year 20 We continue to anticipate revenue in the range of $915,000,000 to $945,000,000 which implies a low single digit growth rate at the midpoint of the range. The effective tax rate is anticipated to be in the range of 20% to 22%, Assuming approximately 74,000,000 to 75,000,000 weighted average diluted shares outstanding, we expect non GAAP diluted earnings per share to be between $2.20 $2.32 which implies a mid single digit growth rate at the midpoint of the range. I'd also like to offer some color on the first half of fiscal year twenty twenty four at the midpoint Of our full fiscal year 2024 outlook ranges, for revenue, we continue to anticipate delivering approximately 46 to 48% of our revenue outlook during the first half of the fiscal year.

Speaker 4

For earnings per share, We anticipate delivering mid single digit diluted EPS growth for the first half of the fiscal year on a year over year basis. That concludes my formal review of our financial results. Thank you. And I'll now turn the call over to the operator for Q and A.

Operator

And one follow-up. Thank you. We'll take our first question from Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.

Speaker 5

Great. Good morning, guys. Thanks for the time and congrats on Q1. Anil, maybe to start with you. Between your Service Assurance business, it was down obviously a little bit and Enterprise was up, Saw nice growth.

Speaker 5

Can you give us a sense just on overall demand trends? Do you think there's been some form of stabilization? Obviously, you guys have delivered Consistent results here, but what are you hearing from customers out there from a buying perspective? And maybe where are you most optimistic from a demand perspective as this

Speaker 2

Yes. Thanks, Matt. So I think first thing is that quarterly trend on service provider Business is usually has not been meaningful because of lumpy deals. So on a year over year basis, there is not much change from what we talked about At the prospect at the last conference call, you have heard some earnings and challenges in the service provider, which Sometimes tend to lengthen the sales cycle. But overall, the biggest investment we have made on the product side this year is Combining the Arbor and NETSCOUT technology to create some new solutions, we relaunched that OCI product, which we talked about, And some other features in both the service provider side, which is the mobile security and as well as on the enterprise side.

Speaker 2

So we see that We are expecting that to be a growth area, more so on the enterprise side this year, But also on the Service Provider side.

Speaker 5

That's helpful. Actually, that was a segue into the next question on OCI in particular. Maybe just a little bit more color on what that means from a product perspective, go to market perspective, how material is that relaunch? And from a pipeline generation perspective, is that one of the bigger announcements kind of coming out of the cyber side?

Speaker 2

Well, so right now, since we just released the relaunch the product and announced it in April time Prem, I think, has not had an impact on the final year, but we are expecting some improvement in that area quickly and hopefully have an impact on the second The big change is that industry is really focused on mitigation of cyber threat and there has been less and less focus on Early detection, which we think is the key to success and to deal with cyber threat. So that's a big change that doing analytic at source to do more detection early in the life of the cyber attack Is what we are calling the differentiator in this NDR space and network detection and response, and that's a change also from what we announced last year.

Speaker 5

Thanks guys. Congrats on the quarter.

Speaker 6

Thanks. Thanks, Mitch.

Operator

And we'll take our next question from James Fish with Piper Sandler.

Speaker 7

Hey guys, thanks for the question. Maybe just a follow-up on Matt's initial question. What are you guys seeing specifically with your Tier 1 North America carrier customers Given some of your competitors were kind of out there talking earlier this quarter about Digestion and inventory stuffing, just trying to understand how you guys feel about the pipeline in those large customers?

Speaker 2

Well, if you take the radio frequency orders out of the picture and both the backlog and that, I think pipeline is good overall and but we don't just do business with Tier 1, but People call Tier 2 is also a big portion of the business where there are about 10 or so Tier 2 provider. And also Some of the cable companies like Charter and Comcast are getting into the 5 gs business. And so we think we can make up for some of the shortfalls if there is challenges on the service provider. On the mobile traditional mobility provider side, with some of these things which we can do and those are All the cable companies, all the top 4 or 5 cable operators are big customers of NetScout already both on the Arbor side and the fixed line side. So that's what we are when we look at the overall service provider business, we've got mobility both on the Security side and on the service assurance side, I think we think that we are in good shape.

Speaker 7

Got it. And Gene for you, on the backlog side, first off, appreciate the continued disclosure here as We start to normalize overall, but it sounds from last quarter pretty meaningfully. Is this level of backlog of $16,000,000 or so normal As we think about coming out of fiscal Q4 into fiscal Q1 or what's giving the confidence in the outlook then as it seems like it's about Half of your normal backlog if we compare it to long term disclosures, where it was somewhere around $25,000,000 $30,000,000 in the past and fiscal Q4s. Thanks.

Speaker 4

Yes. Actually, if you look back over a long period of time, and I would say At least the 10 years, our average backlog has probably been closer to somewhere between $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 It's been as low as like $200,000 And if we and just to reiterate, the backlog started growing in Q3, 3Q4, I believe, of FY 'twenty two. And that was again due to the Hardware issues that were in the supply chain, so people were buying software. So we see it as we said in the Comments. We see it normalizing back to somewhere probably between $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 Obviously, we always like backlog.

Speaker 4

So if we have the opportunity to continue, we would be very happy with that. What gives us Confidence to reiterate our revenue guidance is a few things. 1, as I think you've seen in the Headlines. The 5 gs infrastructure has been pretty much laid down, and that actually I can point to all of the radio frequency propagation modeling projects that we had that Tenor is the capture of the signals, the RAN network that way is also getting established. So for us, it's less about the infrastructure build and more about the applications that will go over the 5 gs network.

Speaker 4

And what we hear when we talk to various people in the industry is that hopefully private networks within enterprise would be the first It has been established that the applications will start to come to bear production traffic, which is where our products are really needed. And then as Anil said, in security, we have the relaunch of OCI, which again in talking to certain salespeople, they've seen at least Pockets of sales and especially internationally where they have a lot of opportunities where customers are really liking what we can do. And then we have mobile security, which is being which is launched, which has been something that's been in development for a few years. And then as Anil also mentioned, to DDoS. So when we point to those areas, this is what we would give confidence to the range of $915,000,000 to $945,000,000 at this point.

Speaker 7

Very helpful. Thank you, Eugene.

Speaker 4

You're welcome. Thank you, Jim.

Operator

And we'll take our last question from Kevin Liu with K. Liu and Company.

Speaker 6

Hi, good morning. From a near term perspective, given kind of the government business typically hits in this chamber quarter, just wondering how that pipeline looks To you today and whether you expect any sort of meaningful uptick in that revenue this year versus last year?

Speaker 4

We actually had a good overall Q1 for government, including some federal. So right now, again, they are the users are a big demand of our products and it always is What gets funded, we probably would see right now being consistent on a year over year basis with what we had in Q2 of last year.

Speaker 6

Got it. And then just with all of the new security announcements that you guys have, do you expect that contribute meaningfully to the Q2 results or would we still see kind of a more normal mix between your service provider and enterprise business? And then maybe longer term, just when do you think security starts to shift more materially in terms of the overall revenue mix here?

Speaker 2

Well, Adi, if you look at when we break out the security revenue, it includes DDoS, which is practically 100% Of the security revenue last year, maybe a small single digit percentage was for MOCI. So with 3 pronged strategy to grow the security business. 1 is on the service provider side, grow it through the mobile security and some of the That initiative we have announced. On the enterprise DDoS so that's on the security DDoS side. On the enterprise DDoS side, Adaptive DDoS as one of the drivers to drive refresh to the new solution.

Speaker 2

And third is OCI, which is In the enterprise security area, which is non DDoS and which was, like I said, a very small number last year. So those are the 3 areas. And I think we expect growth in the security area this year to be much higher than The growth in the overall business.

Speaker 6

All right. Thanks for taking the question.

Speaker 2

Sure. Thank you.

Operator

And it appears that we have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the program back over to Tony Piazza for any additional or closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. This concludes our call for today. Thank you all for joining us and enjoy the rest of the day.

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NetScout Systems Q1 2024
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