AvePoint, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVPT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

AvePoint, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVPT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript March 9, 2023

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the AvePoint Inc. Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. . Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jamie Arestia of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

James Arestia: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to AvePoint’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Earnings Call. With me on the call this afternoon is Dr. TJ Jiang, Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Caci, Chief Financial Officer. After preliminary remarks, we will open the call for a question-and-answer session. Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from management’s current expectations. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statements contained in our press release for a more complete description. All material in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of AvePoint with all rights reserved.

Please note, this presentation describes certain non-GAAP measures, including non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin, which are not measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The non-GAAP measures are presented in this presentation as we believe they provide investors with the means of evaluating and understanding how management evaluates the company’s operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is available in our fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings press release as well as our updated investor presentation, both of which are available in the Investor Relations section of our website.

With that, let me turn the call over to TJ.

Tianyi Jiang: Thanks, Jamie, and thank you to everyone joining us on the call today. Our fourth quarter was a strong close to 2022, our first full year as a public company, where, despite an uncertain macro environment, our results continue to underscore the ongoing need for organizations around the world to optimize and secure the digital workplace. Fourth quarter highlights included 32% ARR growth and 26% revenue growth, both adjusted for the impact of FX. And while Q4 non-GAAP operating income came in below guidance, this was entirely due to the onetime expenses related to the workforce reduction we announced in December. While these charges negatively impacted the fourth quarter, they position us well for improved efficiency in 2023 and beyond as we are laser-focused on profitability and margin expansion.

Given now we plan to hold our very first Investor Day on March 22, where we’ll provide a much deeper dive into our business and strategy, our remarks today will be fairly brief. But we look forward to sharing with you our view of the market opportunity, our strategy for capturing it and our longer-term financial outlook in 2 weeks. Today, I want to take a step back and remind you of the importance of what we do. AvePoint provides a cloud-native software platform that organizations rely on to optimize operations, manage critical data and secure the digital workplace. This has made us a software vendor of choice for more than 20 years. But today, as we look at the headlines are around us, be it the macroeconomic uncertainty I just mentioned, the need to reduce costs or a cyber threat landscape that is only becoming more dangerous, we believe the need for our platform has never been greater.

As companies around the world embrace the new normal of hybrid work, they must build and deliver new seamless workplace experience for knowledge workers, centered around an extensive portfolio of SaaS solutions and productivity applications aimed at improving collaboration across the organization. The adoption of this portfolio of solutions which has been generally described as the digital transformation is a substantial and ongoing challenge for most organizations. For decades, companies rely upon only a small number of multipurpose on-premises applications to drive business outcomes. However, to build and deliver efficient digital workplace today, companies must address this abundance of applications and associated explosive growth and sprawl of data with a platform offering that is well governed, fit for purpose, easy to use and built on automation.

This is where AvePoint comes in. AvePoint’s confidence platform empowers organizations of all sizes in all regions and across our industries to optimize SaaS operations and secure collaboration in the digital workplace. Our customers depend on AvePoint’s confidence platform to rapidly reduce costs, improve productivity and make more informed business decisions. And given that we remain in the early innings of the digital transformation, we only expect this need to grow in the years to come. Before I turn the call over to Jim, I want to spend a few minutes highlighting a few key customer wins in Q4. A leading British multinational retailer became an AvePoint customer in Q4. Their deployment of Microsoft 365 was aimed at improving collaboration, but also led to substantial excess storage costs associated with stale and data.

Our strong relationship with the managed service provider in the region enable us to discuss how the AvePoint confidence platform can help them archive their data. In turn, this tactical conversation naturally led to a more strategic one. The need for a clear view of employee ownership of workspaces and content, and we expanded the discussion to focus on the value provided by our governance, cloud records, and data protection solutions. Today, 16,000 users are taking advantage of the AvePoint confidence platform to implement end-to-end life cycle and information management. At the same time, we are already discussing the implementation of an enterprise-wide solution to protect the customers’ data in Azure and Power Apps. We also remain significantly underpenetrated with our existing customer base, and the team had another strong quarter closing expansion opportunities.

A great example of this is a leading international mining company headquartered in the U.S. a long-time AvePoint customer. We started with a competitive win to help the company swiftly preserve data integrity and ensure business continuity with our migration product following the completion of a divestiture. Once we proved our value, the customer turned to our cloud governance offering to ensure that their Microsoft 365 environment was secured for its 40,000 employees around the world. More recently, they asked how we could address the potential risks associated with 13,000 contractors accessing their cloud environment as their manual efforts do so were resource-heavy and inefficient. In the fourth quarter, they purchased our policies and Insights product and will use its reporting capabilities to rapidly understand usage trends, freeing up resources to focus on other high-value priorities.

At the same time, we’re already discussing how our data protection and information management solution can provide even more value from the AvePoint Confidence Platform. Lastly, I want to call out a groundbreaking project we’re starting for the Monetary Authority of Singapore, our third largest customer in the country. An AvePoint customer for more than a decade, they recently announced plans to launch a digital platform for global financial institutions to share customer and transaction data with the dual goals of preventing money laundering and terrorism financing as well as protecting client privacy. This project, where regulator and global banks share data is a national priority and the first of its kind in the world, and it will leverage our platform technology to ensure that proper security controls and regulatory frameworks are in place.

AvePoint won a highly competitive bidding process, which included the Big 4 and the largest system integrators in Singapore, and we look forward to sharing more in the future of our critical role in this next level of fintech innovation. These are just a few examples of how our proven technology provides our customers more efficient and secure operations every day. In summary, Q4 was a strong close to 2022. While we’re mindful of near-term economic uncertainty, we remain excited for the opportunities we see in 2023 and beyond, and I want to thank the entire AvePoint team for their tireless efforts this past year. With that, I’ll turn it over to Jim to discuss our financial results in more detail.

James Caci: Thank you, TJ, and good afternoon, everyone. As I review our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results today, please note that I’ll be referring to non-GAAP metrics, unless otherwise noted. For the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2022, total revenues were $63.6 million, up 18% year-over-year and up 26% in constant currency. Within total revenue, Q4 SaaS revenue was $33 million, up 36% year-over-year and up 46% in constant currency. We are pleased to see the continued strong growth of our SaaS revenues, which constituted 52% of total Q4 revenues compared to 45% of total revenues last year. Looking at the business geographically, we again saw healthy performance across all regions, especially as we look at the growth in our SaaS business.

In North America, SaaS revenues grew 39%, while overall revenues grew 28%. In EMEA, SaaS revenues grew 48%, while total revenues grew 19% on a constant currency basis. And in APAC, SaaS revenues grew 53%, while total revenues grew 32% on a constant currency basis. As of December 31, 2022, total ARR was $201.7 million, representing growth of 27% from the prior year. and up 32% adjusted for the impact of FX. At the end of Q4, average core ARR per account was $41,479, an increase of 10% year-over-year. We ended the quarter with 439 customers with ARR of over $100,000, up 31% from the prior year period. Our core ARR dollar-based net retention rate for the quarter was 105% and 108% when adjusted for the impact of FX, in line with our FX-adjusted NRR from a quarter ago.

Turning back to the income statement. Gross profit for Q4 was $46.1 million, representing a gross margin of 72.4% compared to 73.5% in Q4 2021. The slight year-over-year gross margin decline is the result of the impact of FX as well as our product mix with SaaS representing a higher portion of our total revenues this quarter versus last year. Operating expenses for Q4 totaled $44.7 million or 70% of revenues compared to $38.2 million or 71% of revenues a year ago. As a result, Q4 non-GAAP operating income was $1.4 million, or an operating margin of 2.2%. Our operating income included onetime expenses associated with the reduction in workforce we announced in December, which totaled approximately $3.1 million in the quarter, and primarily related to severance and other compensation benefits.

Excluding this impact, Q4 non-GAAP operating income would have been $4.5 million or an operating margin of 7%, which was ahead of our guidance. While our operating expenses through the first 3 quarters of 2022 grew 30% year-over-year, Q4 operating expenses grew only 17%, reflecting our focus on expense management and excluding the $3.1 million onetime charge I just mentioned, Q4 operating expenses grew only 9% year-over-year. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the year with $229.8 million in cash and short-term investments. For the 12 months ended December 31, 2022, cash used in operations was approximately $800,000, while free cash flow was negative $4.6 million. Lastly, with regard to our stock repurchase program, we bought back a small number of shares in Q4 and through the full year, we repurchased just over 4 million shares at an aggregate price of approximately $19.9 million.

Our program remains open, but as we discussed last quarter, we continue to take a more measured approach to buybacks with a focus on managing our cash and prioritizing strategic investments in the business including M&A opportunities that further our growth. I’ll now briefly recap our full year 2022 results. Total revenues were $232.3 million, representing growth of 21% and growth of 29% on a constant currency basis. Within total revenues, SaaS revenues were $117.2 million, representing growth of 37% and growth of 46% on a constant currency basis. For the full year, SaaS revenues represented 50% of total revenues the highest annual contribution we’ve shown from our fastest-growing revenue segment. As mentioned, total ARR as of December 31 was $201.7 million, representing growth of 27% and growth of 32% adjusted for the impact of FX.

Non-GAAP operating margin was a negative 1.2%, primarily driven by higher R&D investments we discussed throughout the year. Excluding the onetime expenses in Q4, our full year non-GAAP operating margin was slightly positive. This result was within our original guidance range from a year ago and ahead of the updated guidance we provided last quarter. I would now like to turn to our outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2023. For the first quarter, we expect total revenues of $57.5 million to $58.5 million or approximately 15% year-over-year growth. We expect a non-GAAP operating loss of negative $2 million to a negative $1 million. For the full year, we expect total ARR of $238.4 million to $244.4 million or approximately 20% year-over-year growth.

We expect total revenues of $253.8 million to $260.8 million or approximately 11% year-over-year growth, driven in part by our continued shift to SaaS, consistent with the strong growth we saw in 2022. And most importantly, we expect non-GAAP operating income of $12 million to $15 million. While the uncertain macro environment and the potential for a wider range of outcomes is reflected in our top line guidance, we are laser-focused on profitability and controlling the controllable, and we plan to show approximately 650 basis points of year-over-year operating margin expansion in 2023. Lastly, our improved profitability should also lead to better cash flow from our operations this year. In summary, we are proud of our 2022 results. As TJ mentioned, while we are mindful of today’s uncertain macroeconomic environment, we remain focused on consistent, steady execution as we position the company to successfully navigate any economic conditions.

Thanks for joining us today, and we look forward to seeing you in person at our Investor Day on March 22 in New York. With that, we’d be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Q&A Session

Operator: . Our first question comes from Jason Ader from William Blair.

Jason Ader: Just wanted to drill down a little bit on the SaaS mix. So where do you expect SaaS mix to go in 2023? And do you expect it to be a headwind at all to revenue growth just given the mix shift away from some of the upfront rev rec?

James Caci: Jason, let me take that first, and if TJ wants to chime in, he can. So great question. And I think you’re right. You’re seeing it — maybe one way to think about that is we’re forecasting the ARR growth at about 20% for the year and revenue growth is slightly less than that at 11%. And the biggest contributor to that is kind of what you’re referring to. We’re continuing to expect to see acceleration on the SaaS front. And you know as you accelerate the SaaS, your ARR is the same. But because of our rev rec on the multiple line items, we’re going to see a little bit of a headwind on the revenue for that.

Jason Ader: Got you. So — and the revenue growth rate of 11%, is that constant currency?

James Caci: Yes. So that is assuming that we’re effectively using the FX rates at the end of December. So we’ve kind of pegged to that and assuming that we’re matching to that the — all of 2023.

Jason Ader: Understood. Okay. So one quick follow-up on SaaS. So the impact on gross margins this year — what — where do you think the gross margins play out? How do you think the gross margins play out, just given the lower margins for SaaS?

James Caci: Yes. No, great question. So actually, the biggest impact for us on margins really comes from the services mix, which is obviously our least margin-contributing piece of our revenue. And so we’re going to expect to see a little bit of a decline in the overall percentage of revenue that services makes up next year. So that actually has a favorable impact. And then as you said, the SaaS is a little bit less. So the increase in SaaS kind of offsets that. So what we’re thinking about for next year is that margin stays roughly about the same that we have for ’22.

Jason Ader: Got you. Okay. And then one last one for you, TJ, can you just talk about some of the — from a macro perspective, like what some of the impacts have been so far in your business? And has there been any discernible difference across geographies, verticals, customer size, et cetera?

Tianyi Jiang: Yes. Jason. So 60% of our revenue comes from enterprise segment, and that’s the segmentation where we do see prolonged procurement cycles. There’s a lot more focus this year around vetting out investment from a customer side. This is actually where we help customers with maximizing their existing investment in the cloud. The overall tenor of customers’ demand in cloud is still very strong, given everything we have seen coming out of even Chat GPT, the infusion of that into Microsoft Office services. We see the market from the customer perspective, going to cloud. It’s a very natural next step to leverage those capabilities, ultimately make collaboration more efficient. And this is where we actually make them secure and govern better with a lot more generative data. So for our overall tenure of the business climate for us has remained very, very strong.

Operator: Our next question comes from Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs.

Gabriela Borges: I’ll pick up on the last question. So TJ, I think you mentioned the 60% of the business that’s enterprise. What are you seeing in the other 40% from a macro standpoint? So more on the SMB side?

Tianyi Jiang: Yes. So mid-market and SMB, our mid-market is about 30-plus percent and SMB is north of 15% now. And we continue to see no slowdown there. SMB is a smaller portion of our business, but the velocity continues to be the fastest-growing segment for us just because the market is so big. There, we really lever channel. So SMB is 100% channel, mid-market outside the U.S., it’s pretty much 100% channel already. From there, we actually see continued good motion around deal cycles and volume so far.

Gabriela Borges: Okay. That’s great. And the follow-up is on how you’re thinking about margins for this year. So we have the margin commentary. Tell us a little bit more about where you are able to find efficiencies in your business mix. And what are essentially the investment priorities that you’re continuing to channel OpEx all is towards?

James Caci: Yes. So thanks, Gabriela. So in terms of our, kind of, let’s call it, operating margin, the biggest contributors for us this year are going to be efficiencies both in sales and marketing and G&A. So this will be — 2023 will be our first full year as a public company where we don’t have any kind of hangover. If you think about last year, it was really our first full year, but the comparable from the prior year was only a partial year of being public. So again, we don’t have the incremental going from ’22 to ’23 that we did going from ’21 to ’22. So we naturally have some efficiency on the G&A side just for some of the lack of being public first time. So that’s helpful there. So we’re definitely expecting to see significant synergy and efficiency coming from there.

And the same thing on sales and marketing. We’re seeing, again, where we’re trying to be as efficient as possible as TJ alluded to, more heavy reliance on the channel is making us more efficient. So we’re expecting to see — those 2 things being the key driver. On the R&D side, we’re continuing to make investments both in R&D development efforts in terms of figuring out our strategic objectives going forward. So we’re continuing to invest heavily in R&D, and you won’t really see a slowdown there going forward. again. So that’s kind of where we’re going to see it both sales and marketing and G&A.

Gabriela Borges: That makes sense. I’ll ask one more on the topic of R&D priorities, which is tell us a little bit more about what milestones we should look for this year outside of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Tell us a little bit more about your plans with — I know you’ve talked about some other ecosystems in the past.

Tianyi Jiang: Yes, Gabriela, I’ll take this one. So we have seen meaningful uptick in the Salesforce ecosystem as well as Google side also. In fact, we will discuss a lot more of this in our upcoming Investor Day on March 22, along even with the segmentation commentary I just made. So we look forward to be brief you all in much more detail on March 22.

Operator: Our next question comes from Fatima Boolani from Citi.

Unidentified Analyst: This is on for Fatima. So maybe, TJ, sorry, want to start off. As ransomware attack volumes while still elevated, have really come down from the very peak level for the past few years, from your vantage point and really appreciate the macro comments, how has this trend impacted the customer purchasing behavior, especially around the urgency for data protection and backup. And maybe any commentary around like changes in conversions that has impacted your guidance outlook as well.

Tianyi Jiang: Thank you. That’s a great question. So yes, we continue to see cyber landscape, threat landscape to be highly elevated and it matters very much to our customers. In fact, with the SMB offer, we have this ransomware recovery warranty to our customers. This topic made back up in service a must-have for whether it’s enterprise customer to SMB customers, be able to recover your data point in time and very, very quickly upon attack. Our software actually detects ransomware attack in action to elevate and alert our customers and be able to allow them to successfully roll back point in time. So yes, that is absolutely one of the key drivers, pushing towards our protection area of offering. Having said that, what we also extend that coverage as the end-to-end life cycle provisioning and governance, even extend into applications like power apps. So that’s how we actually, as a vendor, differentiate in the space.

Unidentified Analyst: And then maybe one more, if I could. On your go-to-market refinements to really drive more indirect business, is there anything you guys could share on just early customer feedback, any quantifiable metrics that we could wrap or heads around, I guess, like drive more channel business and any sort of details around win rates, the competitive landscape updates there would be much appreciated.

Tianyi Jiang: Yes. We will discuss all those details on March 22. A short summary of it is — it’s always a competitive market. As we expand our IP, we will see more and more point solution providers. And the way we win, obviously, is as the singular platform provider, and in that sense, we don’t have a singular focused competitor. But we will discuss all of that at the indirect and direct and win rates and competition landscape at our Investor Day on March 22.

Operator: Our next question comes from Nehal Chokshi from Northland Capital Markets.

Nehal Chokshi: Your AR results relative to the prior guidance include 400 basis points of FX. So on the 500 basis points reported, effectively, you’re saying that your ARR came in $1 million above your expectations on a constant currency basis. Is that correct?

James Caci: Nehal, it’s Jim. So you’re going to have to work those numbers back to me again. So you just you shot off a few of those. So…

James Arestia: We want to make sure we heard those right, Nehal. You broke up a little bit.

James Caci: Yes. I just want to make sure we’re following.

Nehal Chokshi: Got you. So your ARR results relative to prior guidance, our guidance includes 400 basis points of FX, where the range was $202 million, $206 million. But you reported that you had 500 basis points of the FX headwind as opposed to 400 basis points you had guided on an as is basis. So adjusting for that incremental FX that you saw, is it then correct to say that your ARR result was $1 million above your midpoint guidance?

Tianyi Jiang: I think we can take this offline with you I don’t think that’s a correct conclusion because…

James Caci: That’s not how we’re viewing it, that we’re $1 million above. So we did have a stronger FX impact in Q4, as I kind of alluded to before, but I’m not getting the same $1 million.

Tianyi Jiang: I think the difference is you’re applying that across all of the ARR where 50% of our revenue that’s in USD. That’s not impacted by FX, the yen and the euro and the Aussie dollars, et cetera, are impacted by the FX, yes.

James Caci: So happy to go through that in a little more detail, Nehal, but again, we’re not seeing the full $1 million impact. So — and that, what TJ just said, may be the impact, but happy to walk through that with you.

Nehal Chokshi: Okay. And then your calendar ’23 guidance embeds how much FX impact on the ARR?

James Caci: Yes. So it is definitely built into there because when we look at ARR, so I think we’ve talked about this before. So we’re adjusting ARR as those customers come up for renewals, those contracts come up for renewal. So there is anticipated FX impact in ’23 related to those contracts that will be renewed, but not nearly the same impact that we had in ’22, but it’s definitely a couple of percentage points that it’s going to impact ’23 on the ARR side. But we baked that into currently. We baked that into the guidance. So what we’re providing in terms of our guidance on ARR, including that 20% growth is already factoring in as we look at the runoff of those contracts, we’ve already baked in the FX adjustment, assuming that the rates as of the end of December ’22 would have held. So we’re already adjusting for that in our guidance for the 20% growth.

Nehal Chokshi: And how would you expect the incremental ARR through the quarters of calendar ’23 flow? Similar to the proportionality you saw during calendar ’22 or any sort of material differences that you’d like to call out here?

James Caci: Yes. I think we’d see similar. The one call out would be, obviously, Q3 of ’22, we had the acquisition of tyGraph. So that had an artificial bump in terms of if you’re trying to project now ’22 to ’23 ARR growth. So I would just call that out. And then I would expect to see similar to ’22, but I would also expect to see incremental growth as we continue to move through the year. But I would say, similar to ’22, yes.

Operator: . Our next question comes from Brett Knoblauch from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Brett Knoblauch: I guess the last 3 quarters, we’ve kind of seen SaaS gross margins decline are actually, yes, I guess, much every quarter this year, they’ve deteriorated. How should we expect that trend going forward? And I guess, was that decline mainly FX driven? Or just help us — help me walk through that.

James Caci: Sure. Brett, so great question. So I think about it in 2 different ways, right? So FX, yes, had an impact. So that’s a way to think about it because one of our predominant costs would be our storage costs as it relates to SaaS. And that is all in USD. That’s not in — so we don’t get the benefit of the FX headwind that we had on the revenue side. We don’t get the benefit of that at all on the cost side of SaaS. So that’s a factor for sure. And then the second component is that obviously, we’re expanding, we’re continuing to grow. And obviously, we’re consuming a lot more storage. So we’ve had a recent renegotiation of our storage contracts. And so we’ve had some favorable impact there. And so we would expect to see that positively impact going forward. But again, we’re being measured on that because, obviously, we’re going to continue to grow. We’re incurring more costs but the unit economics of that should be more favorable going forward.

Brett Knoblauch: Perfect. Understood. And I might have missed this, but did you break out what core ARR and channel ARR was?

James Caci: I don’t think we did. And again, I think I’ll kind of defer that one to our Investor Day. We’re going to spend a lot more time talking about the business, how we’re looking at the business, and how we’ll be looking at going forward. So I would just say, stay tuned for that, and we’ll talk a lot more on March 22.

Brett Knoblauch: Perfect. Understood. And I guess maybe just a general kind of macro question. Have you seen any change in the macro environment from maybe a pipeline perspective or demand or deal cycle length perspective? And is it getting better out there? Is it the same? I guess, what are you seeing as we’re now almost, I guess, more than 2 months through the year?

James Caci: Yes. No, great question, Brett. I think when we looked at our guidance for ’23 as we kind of wrapped up really ’22, we were definitely starting to see at the tail end of ’22 some sales cycle elongation, right, where we were seeing that in some deals. So as we looked at ’23, we’ve kind of factored that into our guidance for ’23, anticipating that just based on the macro environment, what we’re all seeing in the broader picture, that we would expect that would continue, and we’ve kind of baked that into the guidance, which obviously you see. And I would say in Q1, we are seeing some of that. So I don’t think we were wrong to kind of bake that into the guidance.

Operator: There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to TJ Jiang for any closing remarks.

Tianyi Jiang: Thank you. I just want to conclude by saying that despite the current challenges in today’s business climate, and more energized than ever. During our 2023 sales kickoffs in North America, EMEA, Japan, Singapore, Australia, I could feel the passion and excitement from our teams. Together, we’re committed to continue advancing our mission to enable companies to collaborate with confidence, stronger and faster. We remain excited for the many opportunities ahead of us to help companies digitally transform their workplaces and we look forward to sharing our priorities in greater detail at our first Investor Day in New York on March 22. Thank you to all who have registered. And for those who haven’t, please be sure to register on our Investor Relations website. With that, thank you for joining us today.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.