DocuSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:DOCU) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

DocuSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:DOCU) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript June 8, 2023

DocuSign, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.15 EPS, expectations were $0.55.

Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining DocuSign’s First Quarter Fiscal Year ’24 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the Investor Relations section of the website following the call. [Operator Instructions] I will now pass the call over to Heather Harwood, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Heather Harwood: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to the DocuSign Q1 fiscal year 2024 earnings call. I’m Heather Harwood, DocuSign’s Head of Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today are DocuSign’s CEO, Allan Thygesen; and our CFO, Cynthia Gaylor. The press release announcing our first fiscal year 2024 results was issued earlier today and is posted on our Investor Relations website. Now, let me remind everyone that some of our statements on today’s call are forward-looking. We believe our assumptions and expectations related to these forward-looking statements are reasonable, but they are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results or performance to be materially different.

In particular, our expectations regarding the pace of digital transformation and factors affecting customer demand are based on our best estimates at this time and are therefore subject to change. Please read and consider the risk factors in our filings with the SEC together with the content of this call. Any forward-looking statements are based on our assumptions and expectations to date and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these statements in light of future events or new information. During this call, we will present GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. In addition, we provide non-GAAP weighted average share counts and information regarding free cash flows and billings. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from, a substitute for, or superior to, our GAAP results.

We encourage you to consider all measures when analyzing our performance. For information regarding our non-GAAP financial information, the most directly comparable GAAP measures and a quantitative reconciliation of those figures, please refer to today’s earnings press release, which can be found on our website at investor.docusign.com. I’d now like to turn the call over to Allan. Allan?

Allan Thygesen: Thanks, Heather, and good afternoon, everyone. We’re pleased to have delivered a solid start to the fiscal year, reporting financial metrics that exceeded our guidance. We announced new product innovations to enable smarter, easier, trusted agreement workflows. First, some highlights from this quarter’s financial results. Q1 total revenue came in at $661 million, up 12% versus prior year. Q1 non-GAAP operating margin came in at a healthy 27%, driven by our continued focus on profitability and efficiency. We’re pleased with the early traction we’re making against our objectives. However, we do continue to operate in a challenging macro environment with cautious customer sentiment, evident in moderating expansion rates.

Last quarter, I shared our plans to accelerate our product release cycles in fiscal 2024. What you’ll see is that our roadmap builds on DocuSign’s strength as the world’s leading e-signature company while also moving us towards enabling the entire agreement journey with intelligent workflows. We’re deepening these capabilities to deliver more strategic value to our customers. With that, let me touch on three new releases that shipped this quarter. First, as mentioned on the Q4 call, DocuSign Web Forms launched in April. In the first few weeks since launch, we’re seeing strong traction for Web Forms across verticals, including financial services, real estate, healthcare and life sciences, leveraging our differentiated approach to streamlining how agreements are generated.

Web Forms are simple and powerful for both senders and signers. They’re easy to use and customers benefit from the ability to more easily capture and leverage data from their agreements. Next, we made strong progress penetrating and innovating in highly regulated markets. One example is our work in the healthcare vertical, which is undergoing dramatic digital transformation. We’re proud that our e-signature product can now seamlessly connect to electronic health records in the U.S. market, including from Epic and Cerner in accordance with industry standards. This will modernize the patient experience and improve efficiency for healthcare companies, while also deepening DocuSign’s presence within the vertical. And finally, we introduced DocuSign ID Verification Premier, our tier of ID solutions which meet the highest levels of trust, security and compliance.

Our first offering within this tier is ID verification for EU Qualified e-signature. By combining verification of an ID with confirmation of the presence of the person on the ID, it fully replaces face-to-face verifications and a handwritten signature under EU law. We look forward to leveraging this powerful offering as we expand our business in Europe. More broadly, our strategy is to partner closely with leading identity services companies to leverage — to integrate the best breed solutions into our platform. Looking ahead, I’d like to share our vision and thinking on generative AI. In brief, we believe AI unlocks the true potential of the intelligent agreement category. We already have a strong track record, leveraging sophisticated AI models, having built and shipped solutions based on earlier generations of AI.

Photo by DocuSign on Unsplash

Generative AI can transform all aspects of agreement workflow, and we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. As an early example, we recently introduced a new limited availability feature Agreement Summarization. This new feature, which is enabled by our integration with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service and tuned with our own proprietary agreement model, uses AI to summarize and documents critical components, giving signers a clear grasp of the most relevant information within their agreement while respecting data security and privacy. Future launches will include search across customer agreement libraries, extractions from agreements and proposed language and edits based on customer, industry and universal best practices.

DocuSign is a trusted partner to leading companies across many industries. As the leader in agreement workflows, we can use AI to deliver important value to customers by leveraging the world’s largest set of agreement data, our proprietary agreement models and deep integrations with best-in-class third-party models. We’re excited to showcase new products and enhancements at our — on our intelligent agreement roadmap, including significant AI-powered innovations at our user conference Momentum. The event will kick off next week in Santa Clara with virtual and in-person events in eight cities around the globe over the next few months. Turning to our initiatives around our omnichannel go-to-market. We are continuing to drive deep relationships within our partner ecosystem and enhancing our AI capabilities.

We were honored to be showcased in the main keynote of Microsoft’s Build Conference as one of the first companies using Microsoft Azure OpenAI. This further underscores our growing relationship with Microsoft and the opportunities we’re seeing to enhance our AI capabilities. During the quarter, we also joined the SAP Endorsed Apps program. E-signature has been rigorously tested and validated by SAP to ensure that it seamlessly integrates with SAP solutions and meets their high standards for quality and performance. We’re pleased with the progress we’re seeing across our partner ecosystem, which will continue to drive further adoption of our products globally. Last quarter, I shared how we are investing in product-led growth and self-serve capabilities in order to drive more go-to-market efficiency and deliver a better experience for our customers.

This is one of our most important areas of investment as we evolve how DocuSign goes to market and further integrate our digital, direct and partner selling motions. Our digital business had stronger relative performance in Q1 as we launched a number of improvements on our website and within our product experience. These changes were designed to grow traffic, improve conversion rates and drive monetization, and it’s just the beginning. Whether it’s a small business or a large enterprise, our vision is to make it easy for every type of customer to buy and consume our products in any way they prefer, self-serve, through our direct sales teams or through a partner. Turning to our go-to-market execution in the first quarter. We’re pleased with how our field team navigated the distractions in Q1 as we rebalanced our approach.

However, we are seeing more moderate pipeline and cautious customer behavior, coupled with smaller deal sizes and lower volumes. We recognize it’s a dynamic competitive environment across multiple categories. We’re confident in our premium positioning, especially in complex and high-value use cases. As we’ve stated, international expansion remains a largely untapped opportunity for us. We’re making investments not only with market-specific product innovation like identity verification, but also in stronger local market presence to strengthen our footprint. We recently released funding to further invest in Germany and Japan. And in Japan, note, we just went live with our first CLM customer this past quarter. Further supporting our focus on the international expansion, I’m pleased to share that Anna Marrs, Group President of Global Commercial Services and Credit & Fraud Risk at American Express, has joined our Board of Directors and as a member of the Audit Committee.

She is a fantastic operating executive with deep global experience and will be a great asset to the Board and the leadership team. Finally, I am thrilled with the key hires we’ve announced to round out our leadership team. Most notably, Blake Grayson will be joining as DocuSign’s new CFO next week. Blake’s considerable track record and experience in finance leadership roles in category-leading public companies, including Amazon and The Trade Desk, make him a very strong addition to the DocuSign leadership team. I’d also like to take this opportunity to once again thank, you, Cynthia, for her tremendous contributions to DocuSign as both a Board member and as our CFO for the last four-and-a-half years. I’m grateful for her partnership and strategic leadership as the company navigated immense change.

In closing, we had a solid start to the year with strong financial results, continued traction on the key pillars of our strategic vision to transform agreement workflows and intelligence and in rounding out our leadership team with high-caliber talent. We look forward to continuing to share progress as we execute against our initiatives this year. Now, let me turn the call over to Cynthia to walk through our financial results and outlook.

Cynthia Gaylor: Thank you, Allan, and thanks to everyone for joining the call today. We had a solid start to the year, exceeding our top-line and operating margin guidance. We made progress during the quarter against our priority initiatives and demonstrated leverage in our operating model. We remain focused on delivering value for our customers with easy-to-use high ROI products, which in today’s macro environment continues to be increasingly important as customers look for ways to drive more efficiency in their businesses. With that, let me turn to our Q1 fiscal ’24 results. For the first quarter, total revenue increased 12% year-over-year to $661 million, and subscription revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $639 million. Our international revenue grew 17% year-over-year and reached $168 million for the first quarter, representing 25% of revenue.

First quarter billings rose 10% year-over-year to $675 million. As a reminder, billings can fluctuate quarter-to-quarter due to the timing of deals and complexion of renewals. The macro environment continues to create uncertainty for our customers, and we’re seeing the impact of smaller deal sizes and lower expansion rates across the business as customers scrutinize budgets. Q1 billings outperformance was driven by a higher rate of on-time renewals. We are encouraged by initial signs of improved sales execution across our installed base. We added approximately 45,000 new customers during the quarter, bringing our total customer base to 1.4 million, a 13% increase year-over-year. This includes the addition of approximately 9,000 direct customers to reach a total direct customer base of 220,000, a 21% year-on-year increase.

We also saw a 20% year-over-year increase in customers with an annualized contract value greater than $300,000, reaching a total of 1,063 customers. The slight decline quarter-on-quarter was primarily driven by customer buying patterns, lower expansion rates and partial churn. Dollar net retention was 105% for the quarter. We continue to see headwinds impacting our expansion rates coupled with muted customer buying patterns in a tough macro environment as budgets remain under scrutiny and customers optimize existing spend. Looking ahead, we expect the Q2 dollar net retention rate to continue to experience downward pressure. From a vertical perspective, we saw pockets of relative strength within insurance and business services, highlighting the importance of our diverse customer base and durability of our model, while we continue to see headwinds across financial services and real estate.

Non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter was 83% compared with 81% a year ago. First quarter subscription gross margin was 85% compared with 84% a year ago. Q1 non-GAAP operating income reached $176 million compared with $102 million last year. We delivered a record non-GAAP operating margin of 27% compared to 17% last year. This year-on-year improvement demonstrates our focus on profitability and the leverage in our business model. We remain committed to investing in a disciplined way to transform broader agreement workflows that will drive our top-line over time. As we move through the year and execute against our operating plan, we expect a quarterly decrease in operating margin. Non-GAAP net income for Q1 was $150 million compared with $77 million in the first quarter of 2023.

The fiscal 2024 non-GAAP tax rate remains at 20%. Q1 non-GAAP EPS was $0.72. We ended Q1 with 6,586 employees compared to 7,642 the year prior. Operating cash flow in the first quarter grew 19% year-over-year to a record high of $234 million or a 35% margin. This compares with $196 million or 33% in the same quarter a year ago. Q1 collections were at an all-time high, benefiting from seasonality and enhanced automation and operational efficiency. Operating cash flow includes one-time cash expenses of $20 million in Q1 related to the 2024 restructuring plan we announced in February. Free cash flow for the quarter was $215 million or a 32% margin compared to $175 million or 30% in the prior year, a 23% year-on-year increase. We exited Q1 with more than $1.4 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and investments.

Turning to our share repurchase program. We repurchased over 700,000 shares during the quarter for approximately $40 million, which demonstrates our confidence in the durability of our business. As a reminder, we have strong cash flow and an attractive balance sheet that gives us flexibility to optimize our capital structure with a focus on opportunistically returning capital to our shareholders. With that, let me turn to our Q2 and fiscal ’24 guidance. While we are pleased with our Q1 financial results, it is still early in the year, and we remain cautious in our outlook, given moderating expansion rates and slowing customer demand, driven by the uncertainty in the current macro environment and continued competition, particularly in more basic e-signature use cases.

For the second quarter and fiscal year ’24, we anticipate total revenue of $675 million to $679 million in Q2 or growth of 8% to 9% year-over-year, and $2.713 billion to $2.725 billion for fiscal ’24 or a growth of 8% year-on-year. Of this, we expect subscription revenue of $658 million to $662 million in Q2 or growth of 9% year-on-year and $2.64 billion to $2.652 billion for fiscal ’24 or growth of 8% to 9% year-over-year. For billings, we expect $646 million to $656 million in Q2 or flat to 1% growth year-over-year, and $2.737 billion to $2.757 billion for fiscal ’24 or growth of 3% to 4% year-over-year. We expect non-GAAP gross margin to be 81% to 82% for both Q2 and fiscal ’24. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to reach 24% to 25% for Q2 and 22% to 24% for fiscal ’24.

We expect non-GAAP fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of 207 million to 212 million for both Q2 and fiscal ’24. We’re pleased with the financial results in Q1, along with the resilience and focus the team has demonstrated as we continue to evolve the business. We maintain a disciplined and focused approach to delivering profitability at scale as we invest for the long term. In closing, I want to thank our amazing team for their commitment to delivering for our customers and partners and driving forward the vision for smarter, easier and trusted agreements. On a personal note, the last four-and-a-half years has been an incredible adventure, helping the company operationalize tremendous growth at scale, while providing a stabilizing force through unprecedented change.

I’m looking forward to what comes next and to seeing DocuSign continue to be the innovator of defining how the world agrees. With that, we will open up the call for questions. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Our first question comes from Tyler Radke with Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.

Kylie Towbin: Hi. This is Kylie Towbin on for Tyler Radke. First off, Cynthia, just wanted to say congratulations, and thank you for your time, and you’ll be missed. And on that note too with Blake starting next week and the additions of Dmitri and Kurt too, would love to hear about sort of all of their biggest areas of initial focus. Thanks.

Allan Thygesen: Yes. Well, so, Blake will, obviously, step into Cynthia’s shoes and take on the CFO responsibilities. So, this will be about executing our operating plan, helping us uncover both top-line and bottom-line opportunities and, in general, executing our strategic roadmap. I think Dmitri will lead our product teams, so reporting to Inhi Cho Suh, President of Product & Technology. He has very deep strong background from a number of different enterprise software companies and he’s been a real category creator and innovator. We’re thrilled to have attracted him. Obviously, product vision and leadership is incredibly important to our future. So, this is a key hire for us and we’re delighted to have Dmitri on board. And Kurt is leading our security organization, which has enormous implications both from a risk and compliance perspective.

We have a particular given the nature of our business of managing highly sensitive documents and processes, it’s essential that we maintain the trust of our customers. I think we’ve done a good job of that so far, but I think Kurt will — it’s a critical role with, obviously, responsibility to maintain and further grow that as we delve deeper into agreement workflows.

Kylie Towbin: Great. Thanks. And just one more of maybe for Cynthia. With the 8 point beat on billings this quarter, how did the early renewals trend relative to your expectations? And with the full year raised a little bit less than the beat, is it fair to say that the amount you raised guidance was operational beat and the rest was potentially pull forward? Thanks.

Cynthia Gaylor: Yes, thanks, Kylie, and thanks for the kind words. So, I think we were really pleased with the performance in Q1 and particularly on billings. The beat on billings was mainly due to strengths we saw in on-time renewals, which means the team did a great job executing across our installed base. And so, we saw less on the early renewal front. And so that is factored into the guide. So, I would say that’s probably the driving force of what we’re seeing. When you think about kind of the push through on the guide, I would say that’s really colored by the dynamics we’re currently seeing in the business and some of the softness that I talked about in the prepared remarks around expansion rates and some of the other metrics. So, we think the guide is reasonable for what we’re seeing, but the Q1 beat was mainly driven by on-time renewals in the installed base.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Brad Sills with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Brad Sills: Sorry, I think I was on mute. My apologies.

Cynthia Gaylor: No worries.

Brad Sills: Sorry. The question is on…

Cynthia Gaylor: Hey, Brad. How you doing?