Insight Enterprises Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 1, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Hardware and Cloud Momentum: Hardware revenue grew 1%—the first increase in ten quarters—and SaaS/Infrastructure as a Service gross profit rose 17%, driving gross margin expansion of 80 basis points.
  • Revenue and Software Declines: Net revenue declined 12% year-over-year, with on-premises software revenue down 32% and Insight Core Services trailing forecasts by 2% as large enterprise clients delayed projects.
  • Macro Uncertainty: The company cites increased market volatility from tariffs and supply chain disruption yet views low share in a fragmented market as a growth opportunity.
  • Cost Management and Profitability: Effective expense controls led to a 5% reduction in adjusted SG&A, offsetting gross profit shortfalls and keeping adjusted EPS of $2.60 in line with expectations.
  • 2025 Outlook Reiterated: Insight expects low single-digit gross profit growth, a 20% gross margin, and $9.70–$10.10 adjusted EPS, with performance weighted toward the second half of the year.
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Earnings Conference Call
Insight Enterprises Q1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

I will now hand over to your host, Ryan Miasato, to begin. Ryan, please go ahead.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Investor Relation at Insight Enterprises

Welcome everyone and thank you for joining the Insight Enterprises earnings conference call. Today, we will be discussing the company's operating results for the quarter ended 03/31/2025. I'm Ryan Miasato, Investor Relations Director of Insight and joining me is Joyce Mullen, President and Chief Executive Officer and James Murgado, Chief Financial Officer. If you do not have a copy of the earnings release or the accompanying slide presentation that was posted this morning and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Form eight ks, You will find it on our website at insight.com under the Investor Relations section. Today's call, including the question and answer period, is being webcast live and can also be accessed via the Investor Relations page of our website at insight.com.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Investor Relation at Insight Enterprises

An archived copy of the conference call will be available approximately two hours after completion of the call and will remain on our website for a limited time. This conference call and the associated webcast contain time sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, 05/01/2025. This call is the property of Insight Enterprises. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the expressed written consent of Insight Enterprises is strictly prohibited. In today's conference call, we will be referring to non GAAP financial measures as we discuss the first quarter twenty twenty five financial results.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Investor Relation at Insight Enterprises

When discussing non GAAP measures, we will refer to them as adjusted. You will find a reconciliation of these adjusted measures to our actual GAAP results included in both the press release and the accompanying slide presentation issued earlier today. Please note that all growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year unless otherwise noted. Also, unless highlighted as constant currency, all amounts and growth rates discussed are in U. S.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Investor Relation at Insight Enterprises

Dollar terms. As a reminder, all forward looking statements that are made during this conference call are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. These risks are discussed in today's press release and in greater detail in our most recently filed periodic reports and subsequent filings with the SEC. All forward looking statements are made as of the date of this call and except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward looking statement made on this call, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. With that, I will now turn the call over to Joyce, and if you're following along with the slide presentation, we will begin on Slide four. Joyce?

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Thank you very much, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. In Q1, we delivered adjusted earnings from operations adjusted diluted earnings per share in line with our expectations. We were pleased with the continued hardware momentum led by commercial and corporate demand and our gross margin expansion. Although gross profit was slightly below our expectations primarily due product related services performance, effective expense management allowed us to achieve our profitability target.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Specifically, in Q1, hardware revenue met our expectations with good performance in servers and storage along with continued recovery in devices. Cloud performance also met our expectations, and the underlying SaaS and Infrastructure as a Service gross profit grew 17%, offset by the partner program changes we've discussed previously. On prem software revenue was down 32% due to a large transaction in Q1 twenty twenty four, making the comparison difficult. And Insight Core Services revenue was down 2% and below our expectations as our large enterprise clients delayed services projects due to lack of market clarity. Since our last earnings call, the outlook for the macro environment has deteriorated, resulting in increased volatility and uncertainty.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

However, volatile market dynamics represent an opportunity for Insight, given our low share position in a large and fragmented market. For example, as clients look with increased skepticism at complex contracts and entrenched service partners, we take a different approach. We provide targeted solutions to specific business problems, deliver results fast, and earn the right to do more. This approach resonates with clients. For the year, our primary focus is accelerating profitable growth.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

First, we are working closely with our partners and clients to navigate the supply chain and pricing environment with the understanding that trade policies can change rapidly. In addition, we are enhancing our consulting business engagement model by adopting the proven framework from our recent acquisitions, which have delivered exceptional client engagement scores. This framework includes adopting a more disciplined methodology and leverages GenAI technologies to deliver quick assessment of our clients' environments, improve speed and effectiveness of project scoping and define a road map of value creation projects and services. And finally, as hardware demand returns, we are focused on driving attached services to hardware sales. We are also expanding programs with our distribution partners to further improve availability of supply and to help with price uncertainty in the market, increasing the frequency of our price monitoring and price adjustments across our product portfolio and helping our clients optimize technology purchase decisions given tariff and supply chain structures.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

And in Q4 of last year, we adjusted our operating expense cost base in anticipation of demand challenges in the first half of twenty twenty five. As the year progresses, we will continue to make necessary adjustments. Despite the volatility and uncertainty in the market, we remain focused on our strategy to drive long term profitable growth and the fundamentals driving the tech industry continue to accelerate. AI will be a huge driver of business process transformation for our clients. We are pleased to be a key partner with the leading AI platforms that will enable this change.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

For example, as data volumes continue to grow exponentially, clients turn to us to help provide actionable solutions. Our data and AI teams guide clients to process complex data at scale, enabling them to achieve business outcomes faster. The Sherlock Company is a leading creative studio, serving top entertainment brands like Disney, Hulu, and ESPN. They faced the bottleneck in creating thumbnails for personalized recommendations. Each new campaign required days of manual image review.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

This labor intensive process limited content variation and engagement. Sherlock turned to Insight, an eight time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, to solve this problem and deliver AI driven content creation. We implemented this AI solution leveraging Google Cloud's Vertex AI and Gemini to automatically analyze video content and extract on brand imagery. What once took days of manual effort now takes about ten minutes. Free from this bottleneck, Sherlock can now scale up creative personalization with minimal increases in cost.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Their CEO summed it up best. We anticipate we will save hundreds of hours of work per month, providing immediate value to our customers in the entertainment industry. As a result, we've become Sherlock's primary AI innovation partner. There are already multiple expansion opportunities in the pipeline to further optimize production workflow. In another instance, a client encountered a common challenge faced by so many organizations, disparate data silos that hinder effective analysis.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Boeing Resorts is one of North America's premier hospitality companies with a dozen ski and golf destinations, over 10,000 employees, and millions of guests annually. However, disconnected systems had created data silos that limited guest insights and put their guest first ethos at risk. Our Microsoft architects developed a customer three sixty platform to unify guest data from all sources into a single comprehensive customer record. We also guided Boeing's transition from a monolithic system to a best of breed ecosystem, incorporating data from multiple platforms, including ecommerce, warehouse management solutions, product management, and data intelligence software, all designed for scalability and future flexibility. Armed with this new modern architecture, Boeing is developing a My Account application that gives guests a seamless digital experience and one consolidated view of all their interactions.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Boeing's VP of IT enterprise architecture called it a game changer. With the ability to track guest activity across each touch point, Boeing will be able to make smarter operational decisions, deliver more personalized guest experiences, and scale quickly to meet changing market demands. These examples illustrate our broad capabilities leveraging AI and our strong partner relationships to deliver quantifiable business outcomes to our clients. We take pride in the recognition of our efforts to develop and strengthen business relationships with these partners. Recently, we have been honored with the following accolades: twenty twenty five Google Partner of the Year for Google Workspace Intel US Data Center Partner of the Year, highlighting our expertise in the infrastructure space ESET, Canada Enterprise Partner of the Year, showcasing our proficiency in a variety of enterprise security products.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We have attained top tier status as an elite consulting partner with Databricks, a leader in data analytics and AI. And we have achieved five Google public sector partner expertise specializations in AI and ML, data analytics, maps and geospatial, security, and work transformation, essential components in deploying cloud environment. Our teammates are critical to delivering the value we create for our clients. We continue to foster an inclusive environment, and Insight has been recognized by various organizations, including Newsweek America's Greatest Workplaces for Diversity for 2025, Best Workplace for Large Companies in The Philippines Twenty Twenty Five, and a perfect score of 100 out of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's twenty twenty five Corporate Quality Index. Finally, we are dedicated to leveraging technology to make a positive impact.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We are proud to present the progress we've made and our ongoing commitment to the UN Global Compact, as described in our seventh annual corporate citizenship report. Now I'd like to share my thoughts on 2025. Entering the year, we anticipated demand with our large enterprise and corporate clients would remain challenged in the first half and hardware demand would build throughout the year. While we continue to believe that the second half will be stronger than the first, we now see an added layer of complexity for the year with the impacts of tariffs, potential supply chain disruptions and client spending patterns. The extent to which demand for products and services is impacted by the macro environment remains to be seen.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Our view of the key puts and takes include the following. Mindsets and priorities have shifted from growth to cost management, but AI spend remains a priority. Firms are reallocating budgets from other segments to invest in AI. We're seeing delays in new projects and scaling back of current services projects and anticipate ongoing challenges, especially with our North America large enterprise clients. The drivers of hardware demand, Windows 11 and an aging installed base remain, and we expect continued momentum throughout the year.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We expect cloud gross profit to be flat to slightly down as we continue the pivot of our Microsoft and Google Cloud businesses to the corporate and mid market space. And we remain diligent on expense management while investing in strategic sales, relevant services delivery, and internal automation. As we navigate the near term challenges and fluctuations, we are confident in the fundamental drivers of our industry. We continue to invest in areas that matter most to our clients, cloud, data, AI, edge and cyber. The importance of digital transformation, data accessibility and realizing the potential of GenAI remains strong.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

With that, I'll turn the call over to James to share key details of our financial and operating performance in Q1 twenty twenty five as well as our outlook for 2025. James?

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Thank you, Joyce, and good morning, everyone. Our Q1 adjusted earnings from operations and diluted earnings per share were in line with our expectations, with gross profit slightly below, offset by strong operating expense management. Net revenue was $2,100,000,000 a decrease of 12%. The decrease was driven by a 13% decline in product, primarily due to on prem software related to a large deal in Q1 twenty twenty four as well as the effects of a partner consolidation that shifted gross product revenue to net agency services. Hardware revenue increased 1%, the first time in ten quarters.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Gross profit decreased 8% due to partner program changes as well as a decline in on prem software and agent services, primarily related to the large software deal in Q1 twenty twenty four. Hardware gross profit was down 1% driven by mix. Devices gross profit increased mid single digits, while infrastructure declined high single digits, primarily due to networking. Insight core services gross profit was $73,000,000 a decrease of 4%, primarily due to our product attached services as large enterprise clients delayed projects. Cloud gross profit was $103,000,000 a decrease of 3% due to the decline in legacy Microsoft enterprise agreements and, to a lesser extent, a decline in our Google Cloud business related to our pivot to the mid market.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

This was in line with our expectations. And as noted last quarter, we anticipate the headwind to be weighted more in the first half of the year. SaaS and Infrastructure as a Service increased 17%, excluding the impact from the partner program changes we described last quarter. Gross margin was 19.3%, an increase of 80 basis points due to mix, primarily reflecting lower on prem software. Adjusted SG and A declined 5%, driven by the actions we took in Q4 as we accelerated the integration of recent acquisitions.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

This resulted in adjusted EBITDA of $111,000,000 a decrease of 16%, while margin contracted 30 basis points to 5.3%. And adjusted diluted earnings per share were $2.6 down 13%. The decline was primarily due to lower gross profit, partially offset by lower adjusted SG and A, share count and a favorable tax rate. For the quarter, we generated $78,000,000 of cash flow from operations. For the year, we continue to anticipate cash flow from operations in the range of $300,000,000 to $400,000,000 As of the end of Q1, we have $300,000,000 remaining for our share repurchase program.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

We intend to opportunistically repurchase shares while balancing organic and inorganic investments. Our adjusted return on invested capital for the trailing twelve months at the end of Q1 was 14.9% compared to 18% a year ago, reflecting the recent acquisitions. In the quarter, we settled $333,000,000 of convertible notes by utilizing our ABL facility. In addition, we have associated warrants, a portion of which we settled in cash in Q1 and the beginning of Q2, totaling 3,600,000.0 warrants for $222,000,000 We currently have approximately 1,500,000 warrants remaining, which we expect will mature or be settled before the end of the year. We exited Q1 with total debt of $961,000,000 compared to $882,000,000 a year ago.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Over the last year, we spent $574,000,000 on acquisitions, share repurchases and the settlement of warrants, while debt only increased $80,000,000 As of the end of Q1, we had access to the full $1,800,000,000 capacity under our ABL facility, of which $1,300,000,000 was available. We have ample liquidity to meet our needs. Our presentation shows our performance through Q1 twenty twenty five relative to the metrics that we described at our Investor Day in October 2022. On a trailing twelve month basis through Q1, here's the status. Cloud gross profit growth of 14%, core services gross profit growth of 8%, adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.2%, adjusted diluted earnings per share decline of 9%, adjusted ROIC of 14.9%, and adjusted free cash flow as a percentage of adjusted net income of 129%.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

As we think about 2025, we have considered the following factors in our guidance and expect, similar to our previous guidance in February, our growth and profitability will be more heavily weighted towards the second half of the year as we navigate the partner program changes. We expect hardware gross profit to grow in the mid single digits. We expect demand with our large enterprise clients to remain subdued, particularly impacting our core services business, which we anticipate will be stronger in the second half and grow in the single digits for the year. We anticipate cloud to be flat to slightly down due to the decline of enterprise agreements and our pivot to the corporate and mid market space. And we will continue to prudently manage SG and A expenses.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Considering these factors, for the full year, our guidance is as follows: We expect to deliver gross profit growth in the low single digits and that our gross margin will be approximately 20%. And we anticipate adjusted diluted earnings per share will be between $9.7 to $10.1 This guidance includes interest expense between 70,000,000 to $75,000,000 an effective tax rate of 25% to 26% for the full year, capital expenditures of $35,000,000 to $40,000,000 and an average share count for the full year of 32,900,000.0 shares, reflecting the settlement of the remaining warrants associated with our convertible notes. This average share count is a decrease of approximately 2,000,000 shares from year end due to the warrants settled to date. This outlook excludes acquisition related intangible amortization expenses of approximately $74,000,000 assumes no acquisition related costs, severance and restructuring or transformation expenses and assumes no change in our debt instruments and no meaningful change in the macroeconomic outlook either as a result of tariffs or otherwise. I will now turn the call back to Joyce. Joyce?

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Thanks, James. While the current macro environment is uncertain, we remain confident in the long term drivers of our industry. In fact, the pace of innovation has been accelerating with the rise of Gen AI and multi cloud environments, and our clients need insight to navigate this increasingly complex set of choices. We continue to invest in our sales and technical resources, improve our go to market execution, and deepen our technical expertise in areas like cloud, data, AI, edge, and cyber. We're also driving deeper integration with our partners who, now more than ever, need Insight to integrate their offerings into solutions for clients.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

This is our strategy to become the leading solutions integrator. I would like to thank our teammates for their unwavering commitment to our clients, partners, and each other, our clients for trusting Insight to help them with their transformational journey and our partners for their continued collaboration and support in delivering innovative solutions to our clients. This concludes my comments, and we will now open the line for your questions.

Operator

Thank you, Joyce. Our first question comes from Joseph Cardoso from JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Joseph Cardoso
Joseph Cardoso
Vice President, Equity Research at JP Morgan

Hey, good morning and thanks for all the details and the question here. I guess maybe just the first one for me and on the guidance, it's nice to see the reiteration here just given the macro. But anecdotally, it also sounds like it's a much tougher backdrop than it was ninety days ago, exacerbated tariffs, larger customers seem to be pausing. So maybe you can just take a second and just flesh out in more details, like, from a high level, what's driving the confidence here to kind of reiterate or, you know, essentially get to the same outlook that you had ninety days ago. You know, what are the key puts and takes that you think, you know, balance each other off and and you think investors should, you know, essentially focus on that helps you achieve a similar guide from what you were thinking about, you know, when we last met at last earnings? And then I have a follow-up. Thank you.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. I'll start and then James, you can chime in. I I you know, Joe, thank you very much for for the question. I I I, have we've been spending a lot of time thinking about kind of the macro environment and the impacts that we see. And there's been so much uncertainty that it's really hard for us to read either a very you know, either a huge correction in either direction.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

So so if we stay kind of in the same environment that we're in today, we have a lot of reasons for optimism. We're seeing good momentum in hardware spend. We're seeing good momentum in AI interest and spend. Those are not yet big numbers for us on the services side, but we expect those to improve over time. We're seeing really good performance from the acquisitions, that we purchased last year and the year before.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

So there's there's some really good reasons for optimism. The drivers for device refresh remain. Those there's still, runway there. We're seeing pretty nice bookings across the board in hardware as as, decisions are being made around infrastructure, and that that's also an aging environment. And then and then we have we're you know, as we took that we as we talked about almost, I think, two quarters in a row around the the partner program changes that impacted us last year and this first half of the year especially, but throughout the whole year, We're managed managing through that quite effectively.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

So, that's why we're optimistic. And, of course, we we have no crystal ball, and we don't really know exactly what's gonna happen with tariffs and the macro. But if we stay sort of in this environment, then we we feel optimistic about the need for customers to spend money on technology to modernize and continue to improve their their, their infrastructure, and we're in a great position to do that.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

And hey hey, Joe. I would just add to that and say that q one, there were some puts and takes, but largely, lined up to our expectations. So seeing q one land, you know, on the on the cloud and partner program changes, Q1 landed to our expectations there. That's obviously something we have to navigate through the year, but that gives us more confidence as we've navigated Q1. And I'm sure you or somebody else will ask this question in terms of how Q2 is starting.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

It's early in the quarter, but so far we're seeing the continued momentum in hardware at the start of Q2 as well. So it gives us a little confidence in terms of the first half potentially shaping up to the way we have in our expectations.

Joseph Cardoso
Joseph Cardoso
Vice President, Equity Research at JP Morgan

No. Fair enough. I appreciate the color. And then maybe just a quick clarification. Obviously, you guys talked about some of the delays or pauses that you're seeing or hesitation that you're seeing from customers on the services side.

Joseph Cardoso
Joseph Cardoso
Vice President, Equity Research at JP Morgan

But maybe if we switch gears on the hardware side and particularly kind of the trends you saw in the first quarter and maybe second quarter today, like, you seeing any demand pull in from the customers that you're servicing? And then, you know, particularly, like, how has that progressed as we kind of have gone through the first couple of months here in the year? And then maybe more specifically, you know, if you are seeing any demand pull in or at that type of behavior, know, is it really focused on PCs? Are you seeing it broadly across the different categories that you guys service on the on the infrastructure side as well? Thanks for the question, guys. I appreciate it.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. We saw some minimal pull ins in response to the threat of tariffs in q one, but not not impactful. We see kind of the same trend in q two, and it's mostly device related, Joe. But it's, you know, I what we really think is driving this is, there's definitely an a general movement to figuring out how to improve and leverage AI technologies. Every single client is talking about it.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Almost very, very few clients have actually started working on it, but they know that they have to have fairly robust infrastructure capability. They know they have to have improved data capability, and they know they they need to make sure that their, their teammates can be productive with their devices. So I think that's that's really driving, the demand more than anything else.

Operator

Our next question comes from Adam Tindle from Raymond James. Line is open. Please go ahead.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Yes, thanks. Good morning. Okay. Thanks. Good morning.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Hey. Good morning, Adam.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Just wanted to start, Joyce. Yep. Can you hear me?

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Yep.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Okay. Sorry. Just headed to the airport at the moment. Joyce, I wanted to start or continue the conversation on hardware since I know you've got a long history in that space. In time periods like this where we've got tariffs announced, what do you expect the vendor OEMs to do as it relates to pricing going forward?

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Have you seen any of them begin to potentially raise prices at this point? And relatedly, as you kind of think about that potential environment and and the guidance for the year being a little bit more back half weighted profitability, how are you thinking about the potential impact to elasticity of demand if we do experience some aspect of price increases? And then I have a follow-up. Thanks.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Thanks, Adam. Yeah. I mean, so so the tariff response and preparation depends on the OEM. It depends on their supply chains, and it depends on their inventory positions. So we've seen one or two OEMs increase prices.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We've seen a bunch of OEMs talk about sort of restricting the validity of the time frame of quotes, things like that. But I would say, generally, the pricing motion has been pretty subdued. And as I said, that really depends largely on kind of, where what their supply chain and how how their mix looks like what their mix looks like geographically. We spent a lot of time modeling the tariff impacts and trying to understand exactly what we would expect to see given what we learned in, about four or, I guess, eight years ago or when we dealt with this the last time. And also, frankly, we we we use some of the same skills during COVID because there was a similar type of impact.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

And, generally, if the tariff rates stay kind of where we think where they are today or they're in that 10% range, it's frankly, the impact on us is slightly positive because ASPs go up, and we generally pass on the cost to our to our clients. If those tariffs increase beyond that in that '25 or, you know, much bigger range of of of impact, then, the demand does get muted. And not only that, it starts to create even more uncertainty around budget allocation and capital allocation for for our clients. So, that's how we're thinking about it. And right now, as as James said, we're we're assuming basically status quo in in our guide.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Got it. Okay. And then maybe just as a follow-up on the services side of the house. You you mentioned a number of moving parts and things that you're doing there. I just would like to double click on why now, what's happening there.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

And if I look at some of the results of delivered services, I think we're down mid single digits or so, for example. What what's happening in the environment to to drive a little bit of the, more challenge in the services business? I wouldn't think that would be related to the partner program changes, for example, but maybe if you could just sort of flush out a bigger picture on the services piece and and what's where it goes from here. Thanks.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. So the services piece is is, there's there are a bunch of moving parts. So we're very, we're very pleased with the performance of our SADAM, DARZ, and InfoCenter acquisitions. That's working very, very well. As we said, the primary driver of the decline was product related services, so there's a couple things going on there.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

James mentioned that, you know, well, you see that our our device our hardware business was up, which is but but minimally. So there's a little bit of a lag between, the the hardware sale and the services attached. So there's that that is a big, big focus for us, making sure that as that hardware business returns and we're encouraged by the bookings in Q2, as James said, although it's early, we expect to see that services business improve. We're also taking lessons in our consulting business, broadly speaking, from one some of our acquisitions. So, we have learned that very strong methodologies, lots of discipline as I described in my in my remarks, and a very, very focused effort around scoping projects rapidly and keeping them small enough so that they are digestible by our clients so that we can follow-up and earn the right to do more with exceptional execution really does work.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We're applying those same methodologies to our entire consulting business, and we're all very pleased with those results. That retooling is happening now, and, and and I think we're we're we'll we'll absolutely deliver dividends. The other thing that we're doing around services, I should you know, I wanted to mention is m and a continues to be a focus for us. As we become and pivot to an AI first solutions integrator, We expect to continue to focus on data and AI, multi cloud, cyber, and edge. But we're also noting that there is an inextricable link between business process reimagination and domain expertise and AI technology deployment in order to deliver those real outcomes that clients are looking for.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

So we're in the process of building these capabilities, and we're very, very excited about that. And we think that has legs for a while.

Operator

You. Our next question comes from Harry Reid from Redburn. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Harry Read
Equity Research Analyst at Redburn Atlantic

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking some questions. Looking at some of The UK peers, they've been saying obviously versus their own expectations, but the Microsoft commission changes on enterprise agreements have been better than expected in certain areas, I. E. With certain end clients, whether that be public, private, SME, etcetera.

Harry Read
Equity Research Analyst at Redburn Atlantic

Just wondering if you're seeing any differential on the impact by end client. And then the second one is just you went through a little bit of restructuring late last year, on headcount. Just wondering how you're thinking about headcount today as you've got more incremental information on how you expect the market to develop throughout the rest of 2025? Thanks.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Thanks, Harry. I'll I'll start with the first one. I'll turn it over to James for the the head count conversation. So, yes, you know, we are so on the cloud on the cloud performance, our our cloud performance was in line with our expectations. We we obviously expected some of those impacts that we talked about in our earnings call in February.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We said the first half would be compares would be more difficult and and that we would see improvement in the back half. We're pleased with the underlying SaaS and IS growth at 17%, and that includes kind of some of those, commission changes as you call them, Harry, around the CSP products, for example, from Microsoft. So, those are in line with with our expectations. And, so, generally, we are pleased with our cloud performance and expect that continue to improve throughout the year.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

And, Harry, from a from an SG and A standpoint, as as you rightly mentioned, we took actions at the end of last year in anticipation of of of the year and the headwinds that we're gonna see in terms of the partner program changes. Pleased to see our performance in Q1 in terms of the discipline that we have around operating expenses. For the year, we're going to continue to be very disciplined around our SG and A expenses. We would expect that this year that our SG and A will grow slightly slower than our GP, which is what we would expect in our long term model as well. But in terms of investments, we're continuing to make sure we preserve as much capacity for sales and our technical talent.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

We'll watch that very carefully as the year progresses. But we'll continue to be very disciplined around SG and A.

Harry Read
Equity Research Analyst at Redburn Atlantic

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Vincent Colicchio from Barrington Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Vincent Colicchio
Managing Director at Barrington Research Associates

Yes. Curious, if the market slows down versus expectations, what are some of the actions you want to take maybe such as offshoring more labor, things of that nature?

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Hi, Vince. Yeah. I mean, we have an entire set of plans around significant downturns in the market that address our OpEx expense. Of course, there's there we the the improvements that James alluded to in the SG and A efforts that we have underway, are largely are very much in process. And, so we have a pretty good playbook around that.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

And, yes, we have more room on on offshoring. We certainly have a lot more room on automation, and we've launched an internal, set of AI initiatives, which we're very, very excited about, to help us figure out how to improve our overall SG and A structure and leverage. So, I feel like we're well prepared for, for a cost management and improvement, and we're gonna take those actions with with or without a downturn. And if there's a downturn, we'd obviously execute those faster.

Vincent Colicchio
Managing Director at Barrington Research Associates

And are you assuming that enterprise spending on services remains weak, through the balance of the year?

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

We expect that, in the back half of the year, we will start to see services spend improve. That really line up with improved product sales. And then there's, as I mentioned, bit of a lag before we see the services associated with those.

Vincent Colicchio
Managing Director at Barrington Research Associates

Thank you.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Thanks, Vincent. We

Operator

currently have no further questions. So I'll hand back to Joyce Mullen for some closing remarks.

Joyce Mullen
Joyce Mullen
President & Chief Executive Officer at Insight Enterprises

Thank you very much everyone for your questions and your interest. Now more than ever, our clients really do need a trusted adviser to help them navigate this increasingly fragmented and complex landscape. And especially amidst the uncertainty impacting global technology supply chains, our job is to figure out how to optimize those supply chains for our clients, so we feel very optimistic about the opportunities ahead. And I look forward to sharing you with you our continued progress on our journey as a leading solutions integrator. So you can now close the call, operator. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Joyce. This concludes today's call. Thank you very much for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

Executives
    • Ryan Miyasato
      Ryan Miyasato
      Investor Relation
    • Joyce Mullen
      Joyce Mullen
      President & Chief Executive Officer
    • James Morgado
      James Morgado
      CFO
Analysts
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