Bandwidth Inc. (NASDAQ:BAND) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Bandwidth Inc. (NASDAQ:BAND) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 23, 2023

Sarah Wallace: Welcome to Bandwidth’s Inaugural Investor Day. Thank you for joining us virtually today. I’m Sarah Wallace, Bandwidth’s Vice President of Investor Relations. We have an exciting agenda focused on Bandwidth’s key differentiators, our long-term strategy and the opportunity ahead. In a moment, you’ll hear from David Morken, our Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He’ll share Bandwidth’s origin story, vision and strategy. Anthony Bartolo, Chief Operating Officer, will elaborate on operationalizing our vision; and Daryl Raiford, our Chief Financial Officer, will discuss our recent financial performance, our capital allocation strategy, and how it all comes together in our long range plan. At the end of our speaker presentations and closing remarks, we will have a live question-and-answer session with today’s presenters covering the Investor Day content as well as our fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings, which we released earlier today.

All of the materials we’ll present today, including the speaker video presentations, and the accompanying slides will be available on our website shortly after the event. Before we begin the presentations, I would like to remind you that statements made today, including any statements regarding goals for our financial performance, over the next three years, may contain forward-looking information, so typical safe harbor and risk factors apply. Please review the slide you now see that provides additional details about risks related to those forward-looking statements and where to obtain additional information about risk factors in our SEC filings. All financial measures are presented on a non-GAAP basis except for revenue, which is a GAAP measure, unless otherwise specified.

Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results for historical periods can be found at the end of this investor presentation. Please be aware that similar to our prior quarters, details related to our fourth quarter and full year 2022 performance are provided in a separate earnings presentation that may be accessed on our Investor Relations website. So now let’s get started. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Bandwidth. In the global economy, delivering exceptional experiences is how businesses compete and how they communicate is at the heart of their customer experience. Bandwidth is a communications cloud that simplifies how you deliver integrated global experiences. It’s flexible and robust, ready to connect across your entire communications stack, built on our own global network for unmatched reliability.

It’s grounded in telecom, regulatory, and real world software expertise, so you can create exceptional experiences for whatever you’re building, wherever you’re going, and however you want to communicate.

David Morken: Welcome to Bandwidth Investor Day. My name is David Morken and I serve our team as Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman. You are joining us here in our Raleigh, North Carolina office, one of several we have around the world, and this is where the magic happens. Many of you are new to our story. Thank you for joining us. You’ve chosen an amazing moment in time to get to know us. We’ve chosen the famous movie Back to the Future to capture this moment, a rare opportunity to climb into a time machine. It was actually a 1980s car called the DeLorean, buckle in next to Michael J. Fox and travel back to the future. Are you with me? Our first destination is the year 2017 when Bandwidth IPOed. In 2017, our revenue is one third of today.

Gross margins are 7 points less than today. We only offer one primary service in a single country, and messaging is a new product. Spin the dial on the DeLorean dashboard from 2017 to 2026, and when we land, you will see we provide service in over 60 countries, serve billions of messages and voice calls, expect 60% non-GAAP gross margins, 20% EBITDA margins, and approximately $125 million in total free cash flow from the prior three years, all while growing annual revenue 15% to 20% on average. Set the year in the DeLorean one more time to get back to 2023, and you suddenly realize as you get out of the car that you can invest in Bandwidth today at a price close to that of 2017. Yes, it really is like being able to go back to the future. We believe that after today, you will want to join us on the road ahead.

Actually, as Doc said in the movie, roads, where we are going, we don’t need roads. We are more confident about our mission to develop and deliver the power to communicate than when we started the company or at any time since. So why are we so motivated today? Bandwidth is leading in the front ranks of a worldwide cloud communications revolution. Migrating voice, text messaging, and emergency calling to the cloud is the fastest way for enterprises in today’s economy to build a better brand experience, reduce operating costs, leverage emerging AI technologies, lighten regulatory burdens, and simplify digital transformation company wide. And they’re doing it with Bandwidth because we believe our rare global footprint, powerful cloud platform, and scalable offerings have become the most compelling route to the cloud.

How do we know this to be true? Global 2000 enterprises are either growing their usage with us or coming to us directly for the first time. We believe the move away from on-premise and national incumbent wireline telephone providers to our powerful global communications cloud is part of a secular, long-lasting trend that will help drive future profitable growth through all seasons and for years to come. Well, what about the challenging near term macro environment? There are two key reasons we expect to do well. First, we were bootstrapped almost entirely until our IPO in 2017. Since then, we have demonstrated responsible growth and profitability discipline exhibited by few others. Second, communications are essential and represent durable demand for our services.

These are key reasons why we weathered the last two macro storms. Before we talk about what’s next at Bandwidth, let’s take a moment for those new to our journey to understand what we do, how far we’ve come, and how hard it would be for others to follow. Bandwidth helped to launch the era of cloud communications. This is a space with a current total addressable market of $12 billion. In 2022, our revenue was $573 million with a 55% gross margin. We are ranked a leader in CPaaS by the influential research firm IDC as global businesses use our software APIs to deliver communications workloads through our global platform as voice calls, text messages, and emergency services calls and notifications. You could say that we are the Bandwidth inside for some of the most compelling digital communications experiences wherever people live, learn, work, and play.

In fact, chances are you’ve already used Bandwidth this morning maybe to text an appointment confirmation to your doctor through one of our healthcare messaging customers or maybe you called your bank about a suspicious charge on your credit card, which routed through one of our contact center customers like Genesis or Five9. Did you dial into a meeting this morning on Teams or on Meet, Cisco or Zoom just to name a few? If you did, you likely used Bandwidth. And while we are proud of having one of the most robust emergency services solutions in the world, let’s hope you haven’t had to call 911 yet. But seriously, if you did, our newest technology could show the exact floor and location you were calling from if your firm is compliant with RAY BAUM’s Act.

Our expertise in 911 regulations like RAY BAUM’s Act is a strong source of new customers like the IT managed services provider we closed last quarter. They have a highly complex organization with 23,000 customers in 50,000 locations and they chose Bandwidth because we solve their unique needs for E911 compliance. As a company, analysts put us in the CPaaS space that stands for communications platform-as-a-service. We win customers away from incumbent telecom network operators around the world. Our key competitive differentiator is the Bandwidth Communications Cloud, which we believe is one of the most comprehensive and connected platforms for digital communications on the planet. We envision the Bandwidth Communications Cloud to be for global enterprise communications what Microsoft Azure or Amazon web services are for enterprise computing.

Just as they provide secure developer frameworks on top of their owned and operated, storage and computing hardware at their own data centers, our communications cloud provides a communications developer platform on top of a bandwidth operated, all IP network with global reach, that is enterprise grade. Just like AWS and Azure we aim to provide unmatched reliability, scalability, and pay as you use control for business-critical communications worldwide. And just like in cloud computing, what used to be on-prem, high cost, inelastic and incapable of orchestration is now an always on accessible everywhere cloud solution where communications service can be provisioned globally and instantly and it’s usage based so it’s dynamic and scalable. Here is why this matters, in the CPaaS space, our competitors have software interfaces but they don’t own the network, they rent it.

Can you imagine AWS running on Rackspace hardware, or as you are Azure on IBM? Quality scale and innovation is severely diminished and they are forever chasing terminal gross margins with profitability always out of reach. In contrast, our owner economics create a flywheel effect. Every incremental revenue dollar instead of paying rent or underlying infrastructure includes higher and higher gross margins available for reinvestment in innovation. Our competitors among incumbent carriers are slow and lack the innovation to keep up with the enterprise migration to the cloud and they are limited to very specific geographies. So enterprises cannot use them as a single trusted partner for global coverage. The Bandwidth Communications Cloud is available virtually everywhere global enterprises are today and where they want to expand in the future.

And here’s the kicker, the barrier to entry is magnificent. We estimate that if you tried to build the Bandwidth global communications cloud starting today, it would take over 15 years and at least $500 million. And the level of difficulty would be extreme because regulators in each country move at the speed of government. So just like the pioneers in the enterprise cloud computing world, Bandwidth has built a unique and highly scalable cloud for voice, for messaging and for emergency communications. That’s our moat and it’s why we believe we’re the best positioned CPaaS provider in our space. You will hear a lot more about this from Anthony in a few moments. The depth and breadth of our competitive moat or barrier to entry is further illustrated by the fact that we now serve all the leading power platforms in cloud communications recognized by the Gartner research firm.

Whether it’s iconic hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, or Zoom for hybrid work, customer experience pioneers like Genesis and Five9 for cloud contact centers, the many innovative SaaS companies building text messaging into everything from healthcare to conversational e-commerce, bandwidth is their communications cloud. All these power platforms know they can count on us for global reach, scale, reliability, security, and customer support. Let me focus in on an example of how co-creation with our customers has fueled our success up until today and how it will drive our momentum in the future. This story begins in 2004 when Google needed a partner to power cutting edge experiences like Google Voice. Their options were large telecom incumbents who knew nothing about software APIs. Bandwidth answered their call.

In what seemed audacious at the time, we built out a nationwide platform for Google that was cloud native and also available to all innovative companies to use to create the next-generation of communications. In doing so, we broke through a 100-year-old wall of telecom with cloud software, making exciting new experiences possible everywhere. This was the beginning of the Bandwidth Communications Cloud and it started our fruitful innovation partnership with Google. Over the past decade and a half, we’ve helped them build on our platform with AdWords emergency services for Google Fiber and Google Meet. Then we supported Google Home, G Suites, Google Voice for business, and we are now supporting their global expansion into new geographies. On top of this voice network, we then added 911 emergency services and rode the next rising tide of text messaging as the first use cases for identity authentication, civic engagement and e-commerce began to emerge.

By the time of our IPO in 2017, we powered the full suite of voice, messaging and emergency services that remain our foundation today. Another key milestone was our acquisition of Voxbone at the end of 2020 that took the Bandwidth Communications Cloud global, giving us the capability to serve our customers everywhere they need or want to be. More recently, our innovations in the text messaging space have ignited demand for our capabilities making this the fastest growing part of our business today. Bandwidth’s capacity, high deliverability and regulatory know-how have positioned us as the provider of choice for three growing categories. First, we began by serving high volume enterprise customer experiences like point-of-sale message confirmation for customers like Block, e-commerce engagement for customers like Wish, two-factor authentication for financial services customers and contact center use cases as well.

And we continue to win high volume contracts from enterprises who have run out of capacity with our competitors such as a leader in B2B text messaging that just signed with Bandwidth last quarter. The reliability and scale of our commercial messaging soon led us to be a leader in messaging for those doing civic engagement with various constituencies like schools, congregations and memberships. And finally, and most recently, our same robust and reliable capabilities attracted a broad spectrum of customers in the political campaign messaging segment. This segment is predictably cyclical with larger and larger growth waves every two years in connection with the U.S. election cycle. That’s why coming off a year where we exceeded expectations in 2022 and benefited from messaging related to the U.S. midterm elections, we expect low-single-digit revenue growth in 2023.

Excluding the contribution of 2022 campaign messaging from year-over-year comparison, we actually expect core growth in the high-single-digits for 2023. You’ll hear more detail on our growth expectations and progression from Daryl in his presentation. In a few moments, he and Anthony will walk through the strategy, business model and financial framework that we believe will increase our momentum. But first, I want to share some thoughts on where we’ve been and where we’re going. The role we play at the center of cloud communications has driven incredible growth as we’ve expanded the capabilities and scale of our platform. Just five years ago when we launched our IPO, Bandwidth had less than a third of the revenue that we have today. Our total addressable market was about a quarter of our total addressable market today.

Our reach was limited to North America, compared to the vast global footprint we enjoy today, spanning 60 plus countries and more than 90% of the world’s gross domestic product. And our product offers have more than doubled, while significantly expanding in scope and capabilities. The race to the Communications Cloud is now underway among the largest enterprises. So, once again, our TAM is expanding. Throughout our history, we’ve been so focused on our customers that they have always led us to the next step we needed to take in our journey. In 2004, it was Google asking us to build out a software-driven network. Now it’s Global 2000 enterprises seeking to leverage the Bandwidth Communications Cloud as the essential component of their business.

That’s why we are at another key inflection point, both in the growth of Bandwidth and our space. A new era of artificial intelligence is beginning not just in computing, but in enterprise voice and messaging as well. We are already developing ways to apply AI models to improve call routing and resolution in the enterprise contact center and other exciting use cases. It’s early days, but incredibly exciting to see how adding artificial intelligence and machine learning at the core of our communications cloud can yield higher and higher value for the Global 2000. We are investing to be a strong leader in this new and growing market. And AI is just one of the technologies we are bringing to our growing momentum with cloud contact centers. Last quarter, a healthcare leader in diabetes care chose Bandwidth as the network provider for their Genesys contact center.

The peace of mind, our new Call Assure product delivers in toll-free calling redundancy was the differentiator that won the sale, the enterprise race to the cloud is on, but even in this latest wave, rest assured that the core operating principles that carried us here will be the same that take us into the future. Profitable growth, operating leverage and cash flow generation have been the bedrock of our business and will continue to drive our financial goals. Our long-term ambition includes growing annual revenue at an average 15% to 20%, and with continued operating discipline, we expect to deliver greater than 60% gross margin, greater than 20% EBITDA margin and a greater than 15% free cash flow margin over the next three years. We also have the team to accomplish our mission.

We are blessed with a tremendous team of both new and long-tenured leaders, each an expert with deep and proven experience in our space. In the past year, we’ve brought aboard a new Chief Operating Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Software Strategy Officer. These new leaders have strong track records leading billion dollar portfolios and scaling growth at high profile global technology companies. As I said, when we began, we are more confident in our future than we have ever been before. We believe that there is a remarkable opportunity for investors to go back in time or back to the future and invest with us at a price close to our IPO five years ago. The most compelling difference is that we are now a team with larger assets, larger revenues, more customers, higher profits, more R&D and larger global total addressable market.

Now we’re going to show you how we are operationalizing our vision and competitive advantage. First up is our Chief Operating Officer, Anthony Bartolo. Anthony joined us almost exactly a year ago after spending his distinguished career at some of the biggest global players in cloud communications. He has been a tremendous leader for us putting in place a new multi-year operating plan and expanding our market offers to meet our customer needs. Following Anthony will be Daryl Raiford, our CFO, who will cover our 2022 results, 2023 outlook and longer term financial targets. Take it away, Anthony.

Anthony Bartolo: Thanks David and hello everyone. You may know that Bandwidth is admired for its strong reputation in the market and unique work culture. What I’m most excited to share with you is that after a year operating with the team, we are exceptionally well positioned to lead the next chapter in cloud communications transformation. We believe we have the right strategy, compelling offers and proven team to make our ambitious goals a reality. I want to start by looking at the market dynamics in our space and how Bandwidth has the key differentiators for success. As David mentioned earlier, there are traditionally two ways for enterprises to choose how they consume communications. They can either go to a pure-play CPaaS provider or source from a legacy network operator.

Each has its limitations. The CPaaS platforms are very innovative, but they have to rent their cloud. They don’t own it. That means their customers get limited control and limited scalability, so eventually they outgrow them and guess what? They also have a terrible support experience. In most cases, you can’t even reach a real human who would only hand it off to the vendor they rented it from anyway. On the other side, there are network operators also known as incumbents, which are the legacy carriers whose names you probably know, characteristically they often lack any software integrations and they are slow to innovate. They also often provide a disappointing support experience. If you want to work with these carriers, you have to do it their way.

And if you want to operate globally, well, you have to sign contracts with multiple providers wherever you want to do business because they’re geographically restricted. That’s an incredibly complex, expensive, and time consuming proposition. Power platforms need the best of both worlds, and we are the better half for each. Bandwidth is the only global CPaaS provider that also owns and operates our own communications cloud. We provide the connectivity, APIs, security, privacy, workflows and tools to give enterprises of all sizes a simple scalable way to consume business critical communication services. And here’s where we give more than the best of both worlds. As a global operator in a highly regulated environment, Bandwidth has unique insight into a critical need for large enterprises, which is regulatory compliance.

We provide regulatory insights that assist our customers as they navigate global, national, and local regulations, industry compliance and layers of rules. It’s a challenge so complex that last year alone, hundreds of new changes were issued around the world. Failure to comply with just one of these could negate an enterprise’s revenue and operations in an entire country. The stakes are high. Our regulatory insights are built into the Bandwidth Communications cloud. So when a customer consumes our platform, they tap into our expertise even better. We’ve made it easy to consumers software so our customers can have a single global partner with built-in redundancy if they choose. Now these differentiators match up perfectly to the needs of the three main customer categories we serve and how each of our unique market offers are consumed.

Our first market offer is global communications plans. We serve all the biggest power platforms that you’re familiar with, Microsoft, Google, Zoom, Genesys, 59 and many more. This offer has been the foundation of our business from the very beginning. It’s a B2B2B channel, which our customers use to build power platforms for their customers. Our second offer is programmable services, which serves a B2B2C channel. This mainly includes our text messaging portfolio, a very fast growing and newer category for Bandwidth here. We support the innovative SaaS platforms through a variety of commercial use cases like healthcare, patient engagement, retail and e-commerce promotions, financial services, identity authentication, and as David mentioned earlier, civic engagement with a focus on political text messaging.

Our unique ability to scale with customer demand is a big reason why this category has quickly become a significant portion of our portfolio today, particularly in alternating years when political engagements peak. I’m particularly excited about our newest offer, which is direct to enterprise. This is a B2B channel, much like how the power platforms have done for years now. The largest global 2000 enterprises are coming directly to Bandwidth to consume our services, they need to accelerate their digital transformations and Bandwidth de-risks, the move from their current on-premises equipment to a fully or hybrid cloud solution. We now have a dedicated go-to-market focus on enterprises in the global 2000. Ensuring that we capitalize on this large and growing opportunity, Bandwidth’s portfolio is rapidly diversifying.

At the time of our IPO in 2017, global communications plans dominated our revenue at 94%. In 2022, our mix represented 19% in programmable services and 5% in direct enterprise revenue, excluding surcharges. In the future, we expect this mix to balance even further as customers continue adopting our expanded offers. Now let’s take a closer look at global communications plans. We have built a strong reputation as a central provider in the cloud communications space. We power all the leading power platforms in cloud communications. As recognized by Gartner, our software enables customers to automate voice emergency services, number management, and many other services on a global basis at a rapid pace and at scale. We also help them avoid hiring armies of people to do what’s not their core business, however, it is called to ours.

Our authority in this space continues to expand with our global footprint. We now reach more than 60 countries covering in excess of 90% of the global GDP. We aim to be present everywhere these power platforms are or aspire to be. The depth of our relationships with these giants has solidified our credibility in this space, and we have been co-creating with many of these customers for more than a decade. Let me give you an example of one of these longtime multi-threaded relationships, Microsoft. They have been an amazing partner for over 10 years now. Early in our history together, Microsoft chose our APIs to assign numbers and activate service in real-time for its popular Skype app, our relationship expanded and now Bandwidth is a primary platform for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Azure, Teams uses Bandwidth APIs to assign all numbers and activate their service while as Azure uses Bandwidth’s APIs to provision numbers, messaging, and voice services.

In addition, Bandwidth’s Duet for Microsoft Teams helps large enterprise move to the cloud by powering their teams telephony via direct routing or operator connect. We’re also one of only three certified 911 emergency calling providers for Teams. Finally, we recently launched a native messaging app for teams through the Bandwidth Communications cloud, which is called Send-To. That is what it looks like to co-create with Bandwidth. And with our acquisition of Voxbone a couple of years ago, we continue to expand the opportunities with Microsoft globally. Looking at the key stats, global communications plans represents $360 million in revenue in 2022 with a gross margin profile in excess of 50%. As a core provider for all the power platforms in this space, we expect to grow at minimum in line with the market, which we estimate is 8% CAGR through 2026.

Notice that our margins have expanded since our IPO. That’s because of our owned and operated network with global reach. We own it rather than rent it. This is important. Our margin leverage is inherently built into our platform. That’s the power of owner economics and I’ll talk more about this later. Next up, let’s turn to our Programmable Services offer. This is where B2B2C platforms use our communications cloud to deliver engagement experiences through the many commercial and civic engagement use cases I mentioned earlier. With an amazing 98% open rate text messaging has become a business critical communications channel. Programmable Services customers come to our platform because they know their messages will get delivered. Our easy to use APIs and proven track record for deliverability and industry compliance have made Bandwidth the choice for the leading power platforms in text messaging.

Our commercial messaging customers are powering digital engagements across all major brands of products you wear, eat, drive, and use every day. This is fueling a steady increase in base traffic. On the civic engagement side, political campaign text messaging is a key driver, particularly in active election cycles. We have emerged as a leading and trusted platform due to the scale requirements in this dynamic but highly predictable space. We just came off a strong political season in 2022 and we expect another one in 2024. So we are seeing higher highs each alternating year as this business continues to grow on top of our strong core of commercial messaging. An example of how we win in messaging is Attentive mobile. If you’re one of the millions of people who interact with brands over text message to get coupons or shopping assistance, then you’re most likely interacting with Attentive.

They are a fast growing leader in text messaging commerce with a customer base of over 5,000 top retail brands sending billions of messages every year. Attentive came to us in the middle of last year because their incumbent provider could not adequately support their growth and capacity needs for peak events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Only Bandwidth could provide them the reliability, capacity and deliverability they needed to scale. Our dynamic software driven platform paired with trusted industry expertise became the winning combination for Attentive. Let’s take a look at the opportunity in Programmable Services. This category represents about $91 million in revenue for us in 2022 at a 60%-plus non-GAAP gross margin. Our growth in this category is accelerating significantly above the full year market CAGR of approximately 21%.

We estimate the total addressable market to reach nearly $18 billion by 2026. So we see ample space to keep our pacing the market. Our third market offer is designed for the Global 2000 enterprises who actively seek out Bandwidth to help them execute on their vision, to differentiate their customer experience, while reducing overall operating costs. The rules have been rewritten in a new era of digital communications. Consumers have new expectations for how they engage with the brands they love and trust. To compete successfully, enterprises don’t just want to move their communications to the cloud, they must. To accomplish these goals, enterprises have specific and unique needs pushing them to come directly to Bandwidth to consume intelligent enterprise services.

They need simple management of services in a global portal. They need assistance as they often have smaller or less experienced regulatory departments and lack of trusted expert. They need specific business insights delivered through software and they need a way to simplify and reduce costs. As a result, Bandwidth endeavors to become their one-stop shop responding to their needs by delivering a pre-integrated consistent customer experience everywhere in a world where they require and aspire to operate. This is a trend that is inevitable but is still in its early stages. Today, according to IDC only 24% of enterprises have actually moved their business critical communications to the cloud, but almost all plan to become cloud only and decommission their on-prem equipment.

Meanwhile, Gardner says, taking a software approach to enterprise communications will become a core competency with just 30% of them using CPaaS today, but expected to grow to 90% by 2026. In summary, the Global 2000 know they need to move to the cloud and they know they need to consume it with software to have any chance of measurable success. So they’ve been pursuing it actively spurred on by the desire to provide an exceptional customer experience. Now, this trend has only intensified by the need to also optimize costs. Why do enterprises seek out the Bandwidth Communications Cloud? Because we believe it’s the power platform for business critical communications globally. It is available in virtually every country a multi-national aspires to be.

We simplify complex communications down to one strategic partner with one contract simplifying vendor management at a global scale, one customer experience and operating procedure to manage with renowned industry-leading support, one source for helping navigate a complex global regulatory environment and one click pre-integrations with leading SaaS communications platforms that deliver key capabilities for an enhanced customer and employee experience, and so much more. With Bandwidth, when multi-national enterprises want to add a new global capability, they can obtain it from one source. They don’t have to plug it into every single carrier in every single country where they operate. The Bandwidth Communications Cloud is already pre-integrated for the services we offer.

We often see customers who want to move to the cloud but have backed off due to the perceived difficulty in doing so. That’s why they come to Bandwidth. Their energy is best spent on what they do best, which is not cloud communications. It’s a simple core versus context decision for them. We have a name for this. We call it telecomplexity. At its core, Bandwidth solves and eliminates telecomplexity, giving the Global 2000 a faster and easier path to the cloud. Let me give you just two examples of how Bandwidth Communications Cloud helps simplify telecomplexity. DocuSign, a leader in electronic signature came to us with a challenge. They wanted to move their entire 15 country global contact center stack to the cloud. We leveraged our global footprint to help DocuSign execute their vision.

Not only were we able to eliminate complexity from their existing on-premises setup, we also consolidated their nine legacy carrier agreements into one. It’s a great example of how we solve telecomplexity for a global enterprise. They told us that Bandwidth made the entire cloud migration process stress free. Here’s the story of how we landed and expanded through the many ways we deliver value, solving telecomplexity, incredible customer support, reliable service delivery, and new capabilities across our communications cloud. A very big bank that is one of the largest issues of Visa and MasterCards in the U.S. originally chose Bandwidth for a complex cloud contact center buildout to support its vast credit card services operation. That deployment went so well.

It gave the customer the confidence to use Bandwidth for yet another business line, their retail branch banking network. Recently, we innovated once again with this customer investing our R&D dollars to enable AI driven fraud, security and privacy capabilities to help move their on-premises authentication system to the cloud. Solving a critical software integration gap, Bandwidth works swiftly to pre-integrate voice biometric authentication and anti-fraud technology right into our communications cloud for them. The result was an out-of-the-box solution to migrate one of the bank’s most critical lines of business. To summarize, the enterprise category is still in its infancy for us. With revenues of approximately $24 million in 2022, it represents a 70%-plus margin profile in a market expected to grow at about 14% CAGR with a total addressable market of over $4 billion in 2026.

We expect our enterprise offer to become a significant part of our business over the next three years, expanding to 10% of our revenue by 2026. Now, let’s zoom out of each of our core market offers to reiterate the key differentiators that are consistent across all aspects of our business model. Everything rides on the Bandwidth Communications Cloud. We give businesses a resilient global connection, software-centric platform and trusted regulatory expertise that instills confidence for them to drive more and more traffic on our cloud. This is how we built our foundational success in this space. Through pure tenacity and grit in our earlier stage, we delivered more innovation in automation, expanded coverage and resiliency across the world. All the unified communications and cloud contact center power platforms began choosing us as their preferred provider.

This created a scalable growth multiplier for Bandwidth, which emerged as our network effect. These power platforms have continued to increase consumption of our Bandwidth cloud over time, and that has strengthened our advantage. We can leverage these increasing communications workloads on our network as we continue to unlock direct cost saving traffic agreements with the major global carriers. This part of our network effect fuels margin expansion. As our product mix broadened to incorporate business critical messaging services, it enhanced the network effect even more. Then we added massive reach and scale with our newly acquired global coverage and the model expanded yet again. Now we are inserting our highest margin offer into the network effect, the Global 2000 enterprise opportunity, giving us even larger capacity to realize cost optimizations through additional enterprise usage.

All while still delivering innovation through our enhanced product mix across our customer base. Our core business model has repeated and grown over the years we’ve been in business with each wave we have benefited more and more from Bandwidth operated network economics, which have expanded our margins from 48% in 2019 to over 55% in 2022. Now, our broadened approach across all three market offers further enhances the network effect. It’s an engine that will accelerate future growth opportunities while driving our core principles of profitable growth, operating leverage and free cash flow generation. David walked through all of the ways people use Bandwidth in their daily lives. Now we are taking that further. Our vision for the Bandwidth Communications Cloud is no less than to be the universal platform for intelligent network-based CPaaS.

This means key functionality is already built in, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning for identity authentication and fraud mitigation, advanced data and insights and pre-integration with leading vendors. Since the Global 2000 is coming to the Bandwidth cloud, the ecosystem will want to integrate once with us to access these enterprises. In the past few months, we have launched a number of new solutions, including Call Assure, which was just named the finalist for most innovative product, as well as pre-integrated conversational AI, expansions to our Duet portfolios for UCaaS and CCaaS and native fraud scoring technology. Our near-term roadmap includes a range of solutions to help enterprises create a better total experience, whether it be in the contact center, hybrid work, text messaging engagement, or intelligent emergency services.

We believe all of this will accelerate our momentum with new and longtime customers alike. In closing, we hope you see from this presentation how we have a unique and winning business model, hyper-focused market strategy, expansive global reach and operational excellence to capitalize on the massive opportunity ahead. And in everything we do, we will continue to serve our customers both new and longstanding every step of the way to achieve their global aspirations and business goals. Thank you very much.

Daryl Raiford: I’m Daryl Raiford, CFO of Bandwidth and it’s really great to be speaking with you today. David and Anthony shared our rich history, our customer stories, and our business model, all of which have led to Bandwidth’s financial success over the last five years. Today, I’m going to cover three topics. First, a review of our quarterly and full year 2022 results. Second, our 2023 outlook. And lastly, our three-year financial targets. Turning to our first topic, we had a very strong fourth quarter with revenue of $157 million, which was higher than expected, exceeding the midpoint of our guidance by $10 million. Fourth quarter fully diluted EPS of $0.19, likewise, well exceeded our guidance by $0.15. All of our products came out higher.

Messaging continued to be a strong driver at 17% of our total fourth quarter revenue and growing 62% year-over-year, benefiting from the U.S. midterm election. Our fourth quarter revenue included $33 million of pass through messaging surcharges. For the full year 2022, our total revenue was up 17% from the prior year. Excluding pass through surcharges, our revenue grew 6%, certainly exceeding our expectations from the start of the year. Our fourth quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 56% up 3 percentage points from the prior year’s quarter. Our full year 2022 non-GAAP gross margin set an all-time annual record at 55%, also rising 3 percentage points from last year. We’re focused on margin expansion, and this record result shows that. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $8 million and $35 million for the full year.

Also, in the fourth quarter, we strengthen our balance sheet by repurchasing $160 million of our 2026 convertible notes at a nearly 30% discount. Turning to KPIs, our dollar-based net retention rate or DBNR grew sequentially to 112% for customers greater than a $100,000 annual recurring revenue, our DBNR grew to 115%, 3 percentage points higher than the total customer metric and clearly demonstrating the benefits from focusing on direct to enterprise and larger customer opportunities. We’re also pleased with our performance in other customer metrics. Our customer count grew to 3,405. While we continue to deliver on our sales strategy of focusing on high ARR customers. Average annual customer revenue continued its upward trajectory reaching $171,000.

For customers with an ARR greater than $100,000, we achieved a customer name retention rate of 99.5%. In fact, to amplify this point for these customers with greater than a $100,000 ARR, if we go all the way back to our 2019 cohort of customers, our customer name retention rate over three years was 97.4%, which is an amazing performance. I know of no other proof point that better demonstrates the quality of our customer relationships and the durability of our revenue. It truly showcases that once a customer adopts our Bandwidth Communications Cloud, nearly every customer stays with our Bandwidth Communications Cloud. Our customer name retention rates clearly demonstrate our belief in revenue durability. But we’ve also had a longstanding commitment to profitable growth.

This commitment is even more important in today’s uncertain environment. Anthony details some of the important drivers of leverage inherited our business model. Those drivers combined with a durable revenue base and experience management team give us confidence that our business model will produce sustainable profitable growth, operating leverage and cash flow generation over the long-term. The commitment and focus on profitable growth is evident in our results over the last five years. The strong results you see here on revenue growth, non-GAAP gross margin expansion and customer additions are the direct result of progress the business has made, adding product offers, expanding services globally and establishing Bandwidth as the critical enabler of cloud communications.

I’m proud of our Band mates for these accomplishments, especially, because we did it profitably growing adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP net income also during this time. Profitable growth is in our DNA and we believe this positions us to continue delivering profitable growth. Turning to my second topic around our 2023 outlook. Overall, we believe that our core revenue growth, especially in the first half will be relatively constrained and that our profitability will grow faster as we benefit from our gross margin and operating leverage. Let me address both revenue and profitability separately. In terms of revenue, two factors impact our view. First, we expect uncertain macroeconomic conditions to persist through 2023. While we’ve enjoyed best-in-class customer retention rates, recall, we’ve retained 97.4% of all of our customers with greater than $100,000 ARR over the last three years.

We expect the near-term weaker macro conditions will play against usage growth from our existing customers, specifically within the global communication plans category. The second factor is campaign messaging cyclicality. 2023 won’t be a campaign messaging growth wave year. Revenue growth from campaign messaging comes in predictable waves where usage aligns with election cycles in the United States that occur every two years. In 2022, we had approximately $17 million of campaign messaging revenue due to the U.S. midterm elections. 2023 is not an election year. Instead, we expect sustained strong messaging growth in our other verticals of e-commerce and retail, healthcare and financial along with continuing civic engagement. These two revenue factors taken together result in our revenue outlook of a 1% growth rate year-over-year and when adjusted for the campaign messaging cyclicality, we expect a growth rate of 8%.

Now, addressing profitability will continue to adhere to our long-standing principles. Based on the expected top line revenue growth I’ve described, we expect a favorable combination of non-GAAP gross margin and operating leverage to produce adjusted EBITDA of approximately $45 million at the midpoint, an increase of 30% year-over-year. We expect non-GAAP EPS for the year of approximately $0.59 to $0.65 per share, an increase of 15%. Given all the considerations I’ve just discussed, 2023 will represent a below average year for revenue growth. Zooming out to our longer-term targets, we expect to see a revenue CAGR of 15% to 20% over the subsequent three years. We expect to see this revenue acceleration from improving macro conditions, faster growing enterprise adoption and dependably cyclical campaign messaging.

We also expect to achieve a greater than 60% non-GAAP gross margin by 2026, as well as more than 20% EBITDA margin and greater than 15% free cash flow margin. These targets implied the generation of approximately $125 million in free cash flow over the next three years. We’re excited about our business and its projected financial capability. Let me walk you through the drivers that will help us achieve these milestones in each of these measures. Let’s first look at the revenue growth dynamics we expect to see over the next three years. We expect to see continued moderate growth within our core foundation of global communications plan customers. Messaging is expected to continue to grow at a faster pace to make up approximately 30% of revenue reflected here in the programmable services category.

And direct-to-enterprise is expected to contribute 10% of revenue within three years. We’ve grown our direct-to-enterprise customer count by more than 200% over the last two years. What’s exciting about this growth and diversification of our revenue streams is that the two fastest growing categories are also accretive to margins, which we believe will enable us to achieve our long-term non-GAAP gross margin target within three years. Our revenue is also becoming more geographically diverse, where markets outside of North America are projected to grow at a faster pace. We essentially concluded our international integration efforts in the third quarter of 2021, since then, 23% of our North American customers now utilize our communications cloud internationally.

We’re going to keep driving cross-sell adoption of our North American customers into the international markets, and we expect greater than 20% of our revenue to come from outside North America within three years, representing a CAGR of 15% to 20%. The benefit of this increasing international revenue is the resulting higher margin profile that comes with many of the international locations. We have four gross margin expansion drivers. These drivers have contributed to the 7 percentage point increase in non-GAAP gross margin we’ve achieved from 2019 to 2022. We expect to add about 5 additional percentage points to non-GAAP gross margin over the next three years. All four drivers will be instrumental in the achievement of our 60% plus non-GAAP gross margin target.

I’ve already addressed two, increasingly diversified customer revenue driving favorable product mix and expanding revenue across international markets. There are additionally two further drivers that are equally important contributors. One of these relates to scale where we benefit from our Bandwidth operated cloud platform. As David and Anthony both stated earlier, we don’t rent our cloud, favorable owner economics occur as we grow our top line and spread the fixed cost of our communications cloud over a larger revenue base. This flywheel dynamic inherent in our business model has been key to driving higher margins. The final driver comes from operating efficiency. As the organization has scaled and matured, we’ve developed an aptitude for working smarter and driving operating costs down.

Taken together, these four drivers have clearly improved our non-GAAP gross margin over the last several years, and we believe will continue to power us beyond our goals in the next few years. Turning to our investment in operating costs, we expect to see improved leverage. We have invested in both sales and marketing and research and development to extend the reach capabilities and adoption of our communications cloud. We now believe we are at the right levels of ongoing investment. Through 2026, we expect both sales and marketing and R&D to settle in a 14% to 15% of revenue range. We also expect our G&A as a percent of revenue to continue to decline over time as we demonstrate operating leverage. As Bandwidth has scaled over the last five years, we’ve historically taken a conservative approach to stock-based compensation and that will continue into the future.

Stock-based compensation today is a percent of revenue is only 3%, and we expected to remain well below our pure average over the next three years. In fact, as you can see from the pure comparison chart, well below is a polite understatement. The communication software average stock-based compensation expense as a percent of revenue was 18% in 2022. When viewed as a percent of revenue Bandwidth stock-based compensation is a positive outlier. Bandwidth does not expect to be the tech company excessively diluting our shareholders. At the same time, we believe our total compensation practices and award-winning employee culture yielding innovative, motivated workforce of highly engaged bandmates that will continue to drive our success. Our commitment to our whole person promise is unsurpassed in our space.

We’ve sufficiently invested and will continue to invest in our talent and our workplace with the aim to be the best, but also with a firm view towards financial discipline and stewardship of our shareholders’ capital. In summary, our 2026 targets of 15% to 20% revenue growth and expanding non-GAAP gross margin to greater the 60% leads us to a greater than 20% adjusted EBITDA margin. Let me drive home the power of growing our gross profit dollars in combination with our increasing cash gross margin referred to here as EBITDA produced from gross profit. In 2022, Bandwidth produced $260 million non-GAAP gross profit dollars. 87% of those non-GAAP gross profit dollars were invested in operating expenses, leaving 13% of gross profit dollars for adjusted EBITDA.

Through 2026, we expect to grow gross profit dollars and within our business strategy, we expect to invest 60% of our gross profit dollars for operating expenses, leaving 40% of cash gross profit in adjusted EBITDA. This represents an improvement in profit of 208% and clearly demonstrates the power of our business model to drive profitable growth. Now that you have a real sense of our long range targets and how we plan to both sustain and accelerate profitable growth, I’ll turn to our capital structure. We believe that our cash and securities and expected cash flow generation are more than adequate to satisfy our debt obligations. I stated earlier that we strengthen our balance sheet in the fourth quarter of 2022 with the repurchase of $160 million of our 2026 convertible notes at a nearly 30% discount to par value.

Following the repurchase, there remains $240 million of debt maturing in 2026. We ended 2022 with a cash and securities balance of $186 million. That cash balance combined with the approximate $125 million of free cash flow that we expect to generate in the next three years would be more than sufficient to retire the 2026 notes and fully fund our business needs. Also, our targeted 20% adjusted EBITDA margin and 15% free cash flow margins in 2026 position us to fully retire the 2028 convertible note obligations if we choose that option. In summary, I’ll leave you with one key message. In the near-term and with the weaker macro, we’ll continue to focus on what we can control, serving and delighting our customers every day being disciplined with our cost and growing our 2023 profitability for the longer term we believe we’re uniquely positioned to win in our space for all the reasons you’ve heard today.

Our core principles, which we have rigorously adhered to since our inception, will continue to be our North Star. Guiding our path forward as we accelerate momentum and achieve our goals through the next three years and beyond. Now, I’ll hand it back over to David.

David Morken: Thank you, Daryl for a terrific update. In a moment, we’ll open it up for Q&A. So allow me to summarize what we’ve heard together. We are more excited about the next three years than at any time before our cloud strategy, owned assets, market offers, flux capacitor and amazing team create an extremely wide moat. We are in a great space where we are a proven leader. We’ve shared a three-year plan for the first time in our history showing our businesses predictably cyclical, and that we believe we are in control of our profitability and our financial density. And finally, we are inviting you to go back to the future with us between now and 2026.

Q&A Session

A – Sarah Wallace: Thank you for joining us for the live Q&A session of Bandwidth’s 2023 Investor Day. I’m Sarah Wallace and I’m happy to be joined today by David, Anthony and Daryl. The question-and-answer session will last 30 minutes. If you’re joining us on the live stream, there is a form for you to submit questions. We’ll get to as many of those as we can. Now let’s get started. Our first question comes to us from Ryan McWilliams of Barclays. Go ahead, Ryan.

Ryan McWilliams: Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. Love this presentation by the way. Great idea. I also like the new long-term targets and how Bandwidth can capitalize from here and improve profitability on some of the strategic investments that you already made over the life of five years. So just in the near-term, how do we bridge what the macro could mean these targets and your strategy like, so we think about the profitability improvements for now and then more top-line growth when the macro outlook is better.

David Morken: Ryan, thanks for your good question to kick us off. I sure appreciate it. And to answer your question, I think it is important to understand how to bridge from 2022 through 2023 to 2024 and that our long range targets, and that’s exactly why we wanted to have an Investor Day to talk beyond just the next 12 months for the first time in our five-year history as a public company. So great question. Let me back up for a moment and talk about 2022. We did really well in 2022 in particular with messaging. And for those who aren’t familiar with our messaging business, we began growing messaging with commercial applications for point of sale customers like block and financial customers like the largest credit card issuer in the United States.

We achieved high deliverability and massive scale and great support for commercial messaging capabilities and that attracted civic engagement customers. These are constituencies and classrooms and congregations. And in 2022 midterm season campaigns. So in 2022, we did $37 million of messaging, civic engagement directly related to political campaigns. The next campaign season is in 2024. And between now and then there aren’t elections. And so the bridge that you should think about toward our long-term targets that we articulated today includes the 2023 guide. And how do we get from here to there. In 2022, as you’ve seen from our materials, we are guiding low single digits or net of political messaging just under double digit growth. And there’s a another reason for our bridge from an outperformance in 2022 to 2024, and that’s the macro in 2023.

As we’ve heard from many other teams, we’re also being very prudent about the 2023 macro environment and what it means in particular for a usage-based model like ours. We serve, for example, the Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders in UCaaS. And so you’re going to see initial macro consideration and then from there, us guiding appropriately. So what can we do as we approach the long-term targets of 15% to 20% growth and 60% terminal gross margins and 20% EBITDA margins and 15% free cash flow margins? What can we do in 2023? Well, what we’ve done is take in control of what we really have control of, and that’s our profitability. So we’re growing EBITDA 30% in 2023, and we’re doing it by tightening our belts. And it’s really important to understand we aren’t a team that is profitable for the first time, nor are we achieving this profitability in a way that I would describe as unhealthy.

We didn’t binge on a hiring spree in 2020 and 2021. And we’re not purging by layoffs. We’re achieving 30% increase by a healthy, balanced diet of investing for growth responsibly in a way that we’re used to as a company. So that’s the best way I can think of bridging from 2022 when we outperformed particularly in civic engagement campaign messaging. And as we’re headed to a banner year in 2024 for the big election season. Until then, we’ve got lots of growing customers to talk about in 2022. But you’ve got a macro environment that is troubling to many, including us to be prudent about. And you’ve got us appropriately taking on profitability and growing at 30% to $45 million.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Our next question will come from Tom Blakey at KeyBanc.

Tom Blakey: Well, hey, great guys. My question is around go to market on the enterprise opportunities. That sounds like an exciting opportunity . Just wanted to know where the investment you made and how you’re back?

David Morken: Thank you, Tom. Let me ask Anthony to handle that one.

Anthony Bartolo: Sure. Thanks for the question, Tom. It’s actually a really good one. Look, firstly, we think that there’s the undeniable shift that we articulated in my presentation, which the IDC articulated. That enterprises are moving their business critical communications to the cloud. So about 96% of them are moving them to the cloud. Only 24% have moved thus far. So we think that’s definitely going in our favor. The other is we think our offers themselves attract these enterprises, the global two thousands and messaging customers to us because we have that unique combination of the software consumability network ownership and regulatory experience. And that removes tele complexity for these guys. They’re all growing markets for us, whether it’s in the global communications area, which is growing about 8%, we’re seeing our programmable services growing about 21%.

We also see enterprise growing about 14%, which we plan to outstrip. And we plan to outstrip that because we have a focus on that. Each of those constituencies that consume those three offers are all consuming the very same platform. But how you go to market matters. So we’re putting fine tuning our go to market with regards to channels as well as dedicated account representatives to some of those large enterprises to help nurture them through that tele complexity. So it’s a good pickup on your part, but one we’re spending a lot of energy behind and it’s paying off, it’s growing at a pretty fast clip. Yes, it’s a relatively small base, but it’s growing at a pretty fast clip. We’re proud of it.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Our next question will be from Meta Marshall at Morgan Stanley.

Meta Marshall: Great guys. Quick question, kind of back to the programmable services and just €“ you just addressed a little bit. But just like, how should we think of either, are most R&D resources invested there? Or like is there a change with the sales people to kind of direct them more towards these services versus kind of the traditional communication? I guess I’m just trying to struggle a little bit with like what the difference is between these kind of programmable services and the traditional telephony business that you guys have always had and just whether there’s a difference in the sales people that are more directed one way or another?

David Morken: You met Meta and thank you for joining us this morning, and I’ll let Anthony handle that one as well.

Anthony Bartolo: Sure. Our sales team is centralized. We have a centralized sales team, Meta. So our sales team has the cranial capacity to handle all of our products. They’re very focused. We simplified our product and our portfolio. And they’re easily consumable. So our sales guys can position each and every one of them to and tailor them to each of the enterprises or the large players that are consuming them. So we haven’t really changed our sales force with regards to consuming or being able to sell those particular products. What we’ve done is we’ve just simplified the packaging. I mean, now customers are coming to us for real-time communications capabilities at scale that are mission critical. And today that is just another real-time mission, critical communications that they’re looking for their businesses.

And it’s becoming even more prominent than email. Right now I think our customers are actually seeing that messaging gets opened about 98% of the time, whereas emails, a lot of them get filtered and moved into your spam folder. So it’s becoming a much more critical piece of enterprise communication. So it’s just a natural extension of the conversation ourselves guys are having already.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Our next question will come from Matt Stotler from William Blair.

Matt Stotler: Hey everybody. Thank you for taking the question. Maybe just one on the partner ecosystem. You mentioned a couple of your key relationships there. We’d love to get some thoughts on forward investments and expanding that ecosystem, especially as you’re looking at the revenue diversity and the direct to enterprise cohort specifically?

David Morken: Hey, Matt, can you clarify for me, when you say partners, are you talking about channel or are you talking about some of our largest enterprise customers?

Matt Stotler: Talking about I guess broadly, channel partners, system integrators, or consulting firms that maybe could add value when it comes to implementation and processes and things like that. But also some of the enterprises that maybe are leveraging you for and customer solutions as well.

David Morken: Yes, perfect. Thank you very much. And Anthony will take that as well.

Anthony Bartolo: Sure. It’s a great question. It’s a natural €“ another natural progression is that our ecosystem is actually expanding to systems integrators and other and our existing customers who are also reselling our product. So we are seeing that expand. It’s a natural progression because they’re seeing that business critical communications is a key part of putting any solution together. That’s what you saw with our major initial customers or very large customers who are power platforms. They’ve built their power platforms on top of our power platform of communications. Well, that’s €“ and that would be a Microsoft or a Zoom or a Google, et cetera. And all of the Gartner Magic Quadrant guys it’s no different for a large enterprise.

And as systems integrator who serves a large enterprise wants a power platform to ride communications upon, and that’s what they’re doing. So it’s a natural extension. So your question’s right on and it’s really focused on how we are seeing the progression of customers consuming our product.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. And our next question will come from Will Power from Baird.

Will Power: Great. Thanks again for hosting us, a lot of helpful color. Question on the next three-year revenue growth target of 15% to 20%. I wonder if you could help us understand what you’re assuming for macro in that? And how do we think about growth excluding the political messaging, you’re going to have an uplift in 2024 and again in 2026, hold on those two fronts would be great?

David Morken: You bet will. Let me ask Daryl to speak to the assumptions on the macro to answer your question initially.

Daryl Raiford: Hi, Will. We do expect the macro to persist mostly through 2023? It’s been fairly uncertain, and so we’re taking a prudent approach on that. It’s possible. We’ve heard from some of our customers of improvement in the latter half is possible. Our view for 2024 and 2025 is an improving macro, a stabilization as the €“ as the economy begins to digest through the federal bank policies that are inhibiting at the moment.

David Morken: And let me take the second part of your question, Will, if I could. When you think about our growth longer term in our plan from 2023 into 2024 and beyond, and what the role of messaging is about half of the growth that we’ll see in 2024 is attributable to messaging during a Presidential campaign year. You also have Gartner contributing well, new products in our portfolio that Anthony’s been really driving velocity to market with. So those are contributors, but messaging is significant and wonderfully predictable and durable. So whatever the macro may end up being during that year, we know that it is going to be all hands on deck at the political campaigns. And so we’re confident as we get to know those customers about that contribution level for 2024. Let me pause and ask Anthony if he wants to add anything.

Anthony Bartolo: Yes. The only additional color I would add is if you think about how we build the grounds up model, we’ve invested in our sales organization, but we haven’t increased the close rate. So we’ve put some assumptions into the model that are somewhat conservative with regards to the close rate. We know it takes time for sales forces to get up and running. But there’s Daryl and David have both articulated. We are taking a view that the macroeconomic environment stays somewhat muted through 2023 and a little bit into 2024.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Excellent. Our next question will come from Ryan Koontz at Needham.

Ryan Koontz: Hi, thanks for the question. I wanted to ask about the Microsoft relationship and the competitive environment there in that ecosystem, particularly as it applies to Microsoft teams, which is really putting up some, some strong growth here in PSTN connectivity, obviously. And it doesn’t seem that kind of growth from teams doesn’t really seem to be reflected in the kind of bandwidth core voice revenues. So I wonder if you could kind of reflect on what’s happening within the voice business in this migration to cloud that doesn’t seem to really be benefiting the revenue line as strongly for bandwidth? Thank you.

David Morken: You bet. And thanks for the good question. I know a big part of the answer is Operator Connect, and admittedly we are later with Operator Connect and launching it and really excited about its impact precisely for the reasons you’re articulating, which is it should disproportionately impact the Microsoft benefit and the team subscription rates for the Bandwidth revenue going forward. We’ve been foundational with Microsoft Teams, if you’re getting a license directly from Microsoft, Operator Connect is a really important development that we’re excited about launching. And so I think you’ll see in terms of share with Microsoft greater contribution going forward, which we’ve factored in considered in both 2023 and beyond. Do you want to add to anything?

Anthony Bartolo: Look Ryan, I think it’s important to recognize we are one of the primary players in each of the Gartner Magic Quadrant players. So even though some of that €“ some of that growth may occur in one of the €“ one of those particular players, it should €“ having 100% of those players in our €“ in our net as it were, as our user shifts from one player to another, we may not see a net increase as a result of that. So any given quarter market share shifts from one to the other, we, because it just moves to another part of our network to be perfectly honest. So that’s what we €“ that’s what we see. But Microsoft’s been a fantastic partner. We think they have a gravitational pull because of their power platform and I think your observations are right on that one.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Now we’ll take a question from the website. How do you think about gross margin going forward and what do you need to do to get 60% gross margins?

Daryl Raiford: I’ll take that one.

David Morken: Please.

Daryl Raiford: Well, firstly we have a €“ it’s a great question. I’ll answer it in three parts. We’ve got it. The first is we believe 60% is easily is attainable because we have a track record of attaining gross margin growth. Over the last three years we’ve grown 7% and the next three years we’re predicting to grow another 5%. So we’ve done it before. We’ve got that economic engine or that owner economic engine that I’d sort of highlighted in my presentation. The other is the business mix of our product portfolio. If you take a look at those €“ the business that product mix in that portfolio, couple of them are growing in excess of 60 points margin, non-GAAP gross margin, whether it’s programmable services or it’s the enterprise side.

So we’ve got the product mix wind aiding us as well. And then there’s the business model value drivers. You heard us talk about them. The scale from the platform helps and the network ownership as a result. The product mix, I just articulated the global coverage that we now have as a function of the Voxbone acquisition as that’s been totally ingested into the company and providing a consistent experience in every country that a €“ our enterprises aspire to be in. And then lastly, just operating efficiencies. We are known to be quite prudent with our operating position., and I think those efficiencies are going to continue.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Our next question will come from Pat Walravens at JMP.

Pat Walravens: Great. Thank you. Hey, Daryl, can we €“ your slide on the debt, can we go a little deeper into that? At the end of your last bar there, it says you’ll have $120 million after you pay off the first trache, but the second trache is due two years later, it’s 250 and I assumed you need some pack, right? So what are the options?

Daryl Raiford: Well, I did address thank you, Pat. That’s a great question. I did address it in terms of the remarks earlier. We think that at the end of 2025, as you see on the chart in advance of retiring the 2026 notes, that we’ll have sufficient resources to do that and to have very sufficient resources to continue to fund and capitalize the company. At the growth rates we’re expecting and at the through 2026 into 2027 and 2028 with modest revenue assumptions and our greater than 20% EBITDA margins and greater than 15% free cash flow margins, we think in 2026 and 2027, it will give us plenty of capability to retire the 28 notes when they come due. If we so choose to do that, there are certainly other options as well, but that’s a rundown of how we believe the cash flow will playout.

David Morken: Hey Pat, this is David. I would also just add that our debt continues to trade well below par.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Our next question will come from Tyler Radke at Citibank.

Tyler Radke: Hey, good morning. Can you hear me okay?

Sarah Wallace: Yes.

David Morken: Yes. We hear you fine.

Tyler Radke: Okay, wonderful. So I was hoping you could just help us bridge the long-term targets in terms of your EBITDA and free cash flow margins. How are you just thinking about the incremental cost opportunities that you see in terms of the belt tightening you mentioned and just as it relates to growing headcount in some of the go-to-market initiatives how should we think about that in relation to the growth that you’re targeting, which seems to be above corporate average?

David Morken: Yes, let me start thanks for the great question. And I don’t know if this is absolutely true, but I suspect it’s very, very close. I think we may be the only team that’s achieving the growth in EBITDA that we’re projecting in 2023 and beyond without doing any layoffs. So when I say belt tightening, that’s because we’re already a lean and mean healthy team and have been for quite a while. We will continue and are continuing to hire. So Anthony has open Rex right now for roles that drive growth in 2023 and beyond 2023. And so while others are laying off, our approach reflects a discipline that really comes from our background of being profitable and that belt tightening in this season is right, growing EBITDA and free cash flow, as Daryl just talked about toward our debt repayment is absolutely right.

It’s controlling our density, if you will. And we’re just that we’re built that way. So it’s good for the season that we anticipate in a macro sense. But what you won’t see us doing is unnatural acts related to our future period growth. You’ll see it be disciplined in the allocation of capital to respectable return while we significantly and responsibly grow the bottom line.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. We’ll go to a web question next. How should we think about CapEx cycles for the business as a whole? For 2023 and 2024 in particular?

David Morken: Daryl?

Daryl Raiford: We expect our CapEx to be roughly in line with our longer term expectations for 2023 of 3% to 5% of revenue. In 2022, we had approximately $30 million of capital expenditures of a one-time nature that we don’t expect to recur in 2023. Going forward, we do expect when we bridge between 20% greater than 20% EBITDA margins and greater than 15% free cash flow margins, we expect about 3% to 4% of CapEx as part of that bridge.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. And next up we’ve got Quinton Gabrielli from Piper.

Quinton Gabrielli: Hey guys, thanks for taking our question. I’m on for Jim Fish. One interesting point that we got up early in the presentation was the investment in AI specifically for call routing. And this is an area that’s really been focused by the CCaaS players. So how do you view what you can bring to the, from an AI that maybe won’t step on the toes of some of the customers that you’re

David Morken: Quinton, apologize, you’re breaking up a little bit. We should have applied some AI to your voice signal there during the call. Let me just begin and hand off to Anthony quickly. But we are excited about what having a very flexible software platform and global IP network means for all the incredible emerging applications and conversational AI, the fidelity of audio and the intensity and importance of conveying inputs and outputs across third party apps in the contact center is firing us up and is exciting. Without getting into too much detail, would ask Anthony to round out our answer.

Anthony Bartolo: Hey Quinton. Great question. Great observation. Yes, AI is important to us. I think it’s important to a lot of our enterprises, which is more important. Our approach to AI is not to go off and rebuild what other people are building in AI space. Our opportunity is to enable our enterprises CIOs to execute their strategy for AI. We’re agnostic with regards to the AI platform. We have an AI bridge capability that’s being built native into the network. And you’ll see it all the way from conversational intelligence to noise suppression, but it gets built into the baseline power platform. So anybody who rides on our platform gets the advantage of that and allows them to integrate to their AI player of choice, which is really powerful for an enterprise not to uproot.

And we don’t pick winners and losers in the AI space. We enable the enterprise to pick the winner that they’ve chosen to allow them to execute consistently around the world, their AI solutions. So you’ll hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks and look forward to seeing you at Enterprise Connect where you can see some of it live if you like.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. Our next question will come from Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity.

Mike Walkley: All right, thank you for the all the details in the presentation today. Just wanted to dig in a little bit to the 2023 guidance as it relates to gross margins. Should we expect some more gross margin expansion this year? Or is it more flattish with 2022 given some adverse mix effects from messaging and the tough back environment and then expands more towards 60 and 2024 through 2026?

David Morken: Hey Mike, you nailed it with $37 million of messaging revenue going away in 2023 and a macro that is going to put downward pressure that’s reflected in our gross margin thinking four 2023. Daryl, would you like to add anything to that?

Daryl Raiford: I think that’s exactly right. Our gross margin expectation that’s comprehended within our guide for adjusted EBITDA of $35 million is essentially in line with 2022 or slightly higher because of the dynamics that David mentioned.

David Morken: And I’ll just add Mike, we are incredibly proud of having grown, as Anthony mentioned, gross margins seven points over the last three years and anticipate growing it another five points over the next three years while doubling revenue and more during that period. That reflects the health of a business model. We are consistently going to drive over six years, 12 points of gross margin expansion while more than doubling revenue. Those are the attributes of a very healthy functioning business model.

Sarah Wallace: Okay, we’ll go to a question from the web. What do you attribute the very high customer retention rates to? What do you attribute the very high customer retention rates to and why do you believe that they are sustainable?

David Morken: Customers stay with us at an extraordinary rate statistically, if you think about the last four years in terms of logo retention 97% and in terms of revenue retention it’s 99.8%, which is extraordinary. So why do customers love us? The short answer, I think is quite simple. Our people are extraordinary. Our technology is reliable, and we tell the truth and you put those things together and your customers love you for a lifetime.

Sarah Wallace: Okay. And before we wrap it up, I have one question that I wanted, to get in that I’m surprised actually, frankly, no one else has asked. And David, this is for you. If you could get into the DeLorean right now, spin the dial, where would you go? What time would you go to and why?

David Morken: Thank you, Sarah. And thanks for all the work that you’ve done to get this day a reality for us. If I could spin the dial on the DeLorean what, where would I go? There is no greater time than the present. And at Bandwidth, we are an in-person culture. We come to the office and work together. We are present, in the present. So counterintuitively, if I spun the dial, it would be right now, there is no better time than the present. Great questions. Thank you. And to close our first ever Investor Day, everything we’ve shared has been made possible by our really remarkable team of Band mates all around the world. They inspire us each and every day with their ideas, their achievements, their sacrificial serving of each other, and serving our customers.

Thank you for the honor of serving with you, and we thank God for blessing our work and our families. I’ll end with this. Today, we invite you to go back to the future with us through 2026, and you might be asking why you should believe us today. Maybe you’re wondering if we’re the mad scientist, like in the movie like doc, well the past isn’t necessarily prologue, and I’m the first to add Lord willing to all future plans, which my dad taught me. Rest assured that far from mad. We are instead the motivated team that has expanded our and exceeded our quarterly guidance to you on all metrics. Not for a few, not for 10, but for 22 quarters in a row. Thank you for joining us. Hope to see you in person in Raleigh, North Carolina soon.