Axon Enterprise, Inc. (NASDAQ:AXON) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brittany Bagley: I think a bit of both. So we’re absolutely going to keep hiring. I think, first of all, our stated goal in R&D is to invest basically top-line growth back into R&D. You can hear all of the exciting things that even with what we’re doing, we still feel like we can work on and we have in front of us. And so there’s going to continue to be a very robust pace of hiring from an R&D standpoint. Again, we won’t get ahead of our revenue growth, but we’re really investing there. Then on the SG&A side, we will absolutely get leverage in SG&A, but we can’t do what we need to do with flat headcount from where we are today. We do need to continue to invest. Some of that is in sales, but honestly, a lot of that is really on the G&A side as we, you know, figure out how we can get this company to support the level of top-line growth that we’re delivering on.

You know, better IT systems, get our material weakness remediated, do a lot of that housekeeping that hopefully we very much keep in the background and you don’t see, but will overfire investment to deliver nicely on all of these opportunities in front of us. And will give you some leverage too, because we still have our 25% adjusted EBITDA margin target out there. So hopefully this year shows that we can deliver and head towards that. And you all believe us that we’re going to hit that. But there is a balance to do between here and there.

Josh Isner: And of course, world-class tech recruiting requires world-class tech recruiters. So that’s also part of that fun picture.

Josh Reilly: Awesome. Thanks, guys.

Andrea James: Awesome. I want to respect Jeremy Hamblin at Craig-Hallum. We haven’t called on you. You’ve been off video. Do you want to ask a question? I know people are juggling multiple earnings calls and does anybody have any follow-ups? Oh, no, we’ve got Jeremy. Jeremy, go ahead, you’re up.

Jeremy Hamblin: Yes, Hey, thanks. And yes, juggling calls here. You know, I wanted to and apologies if you’ve gone through this a little bit already, but I wanted to come back into the Fleet product just to understand, you know, where we are in terms of, you know, it looks like you’ve really continued to gain share in that product and, you know, in terms of where we go in the platform and tying that in, you know, more holistically with, you know, some of the things you’re trying to do on the AI side of the business as we move, you know, a couple of, let’s say, years down the road. You know, I wanted to just understand in terms of where you think about the TAM on that portion of the business and whether or not just the total value of what the Fleet business is changed from where it might have been a couple of years ago.

Rick Smith: Well, let me start on this one. This is one where I was just wrong. I assumed that body cameras would obsolete in car cameras. And I believed that once body cameras became ubiquitous, there would be less reason to have cameras in a car. And that’s one where just I was wrong. And what I learned was that, you know, customers who’ve had in car cameras want to keep that perspective, especially state highway patrols, where a lot happens in front of the vehicle, and the availability of extra battery power and the ability to put more sensors to be able to do things like license plate reading, which, you know, would be not possible given the battery constraints in the body camera. So I’m happy to have been wrong and had, you know, people who together with our customers who educated me on that, to where now we have a sizable, and I think the market leading Fleet product, and we’re finding other areas, you know, in some adjacent markets, and ambulances and EMS, I think even in the military, you know, starting with vehicles that are more like military policing vehicles.

But over time, the array of capability and our ability to move at sort of commercial speed to bring AI and sensor capabilities, I think there could be opportunities for us to move up the value chain from just sort of policing vehicles into other types of vehicles where we can integrate our network, all of our workflow together with our sensor development, and of course, in the future, AI running on all that data. So I don’t know that I could give an exact like TAM comparison between the two, but I would say that the vehicle Fleet business is certainly here to stay, and it just — it has different needs and requirements, and you can do more when you’ve got, you know, access to power and a little more space to be able to put more equipment and more powerful sensors.

Jeremy Hamblin: Yes, no, that’s to the crux of the question. And then just a follow-up also on comment that Brittany had made. You know, in terms of the cloud portion of the business and thinking about these slightly larger jumps that we’re going to see in that business. Just wanted to understand, in terms of thinking a year, two years down the road on your gross margins given what you’re generating on that portion of the business and the bigger jumps, is that something that we should expect the model to iterate as we drive towards 25% EBITDA margins, is that going to be a decent portion of what gets us there?

Brittany Bagley: You know, we haven’t given any commentary on how we get to that 25% between gross margins and OpEx leverage, other than to say, you know, we’re obviously looking really closely at both of them. I think for as much as software is a benefit to our overall gross margins, you also see incredible success in our sensors business, and that’s a drag on gross margins. I’d still take all the growth we get from there. And to your question, on Fleet, you know, right now, that’s part of our $9 billion camera TAM. But I think we still feel like we’ve got nice penetration opportunities and good runway in front of us on Fleet still. We’ve talked a little bit about how we were playing catch up this year and next year will normalize a bit.