DocuSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:DOCU) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

DocuSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:DOCU) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript March 7, 2024

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Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining DocuSign’s Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available for replay on the Investor Relations section of the website following the call. [Operator Instructions] I will now pass the call over to Roger Martin, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

Roger Martin: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to DocuSign’s Q4 and Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Call. I’m Roger Martin, DocuSign’s Vice President of Finance. Joining me on today’s call are DocuSign’s CEO, Allan Thygesen and our CFO, Blake Grayson. The press release announcing our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 results was issued earlier today and is posted on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin, 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 product innovation 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 count 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 these 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, Roger, and good afternoon, everyone. DocuSign’s fourth quarter operating results reflect strong progress across the three pillars of our strategic vision, accelerating product innovation, improving the reach and effectiveness of our omnichannel go-to-market initiatives and strengthening operating and financial efficiency. Before discussing the pillars, I’ll briefly highlight Q4’s strong business results. Q4 revenue was $712 million, up 8% year-over-year, while full year revenue was $2.8 billion, up 10% year-over-year, both outperformed our expectations. Our continued focus on efficiency while still investing for long-term growth, drove significantly improved profitability. Q4 non-GAAP operating margin rose to 25%, up one point versus last year, while full year non-GAAP operating margin improved by more than five points to 26% from 21% in fiscal ’23.

In addition, free cash flow more than doubled in fiscal ’24 to nearly $900 million. Similar to Q3, we’re encouraged by momentum across the business. From solid retention and improving usage with existing customers to strong new customer growth, organizations, large and small, continue to invest in DocuSign’s value proposition. Let’s turn to our strategic pillars, starting with continued improvement in our omnichannel go-to-market initiatives. In Q4, we were encouraged by improving performance with customers managed by the direct sales force. We substantially increased the amount of business from customers signing and renewing multiyear, multimillion dollar contracts with DocuSign, including Fortune 500 global leaders in energy, industrials, consumer goods, insurance and several federal and state government agencies.

Our partner channel has been instrumental in driving large customer momentum. We continue to deepen relationships with strategic, enterprise-focused organizations, including SAP, Microsoft and Deloitte. These organizations are helping to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journeys. They also represent progress in building a vibrant partner ecosystem to extend DocuSign’s reach into new markets and customer segments. To that end, we recently launched global participation in Microsoft Azure’s marketplace. We can now co-sell our entire suite of products to Microsoft’s enterprise customers who can draw on their existing Azure commitments to purchase DocuSign licenses. We’re encouraged to already have our first $1 million customer from that channel.

These partners and many more help us accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journeys. We also continue to deliver more efficient customer growth even as we scale. In fiscal ’24, we invested to improve our digital and self-serve motions, leading to sustained new customer acquisition growth. In Q4, we surpassed 1.5 million total customers across our digital and direct channels. Our breadth, scale and customer affinity is unique in the broader SaaS landscape and speaks to the continued large opportunity in front of DocuSign. Across our digital direct and partner channels, international continues to be a strong underlying growth driver. In Q4, international revenue grew more than twice as fast as total revenue and now represents more than 27% of the business, up from 25% last year.

The international opportunity remains substantial and is one of our key long-term growth drivers. CRESOL, which is a financial cooperative in Brazil, recently adopted the new WhatsApp integration, adding WhatsApp signing to existing e-signature e-mail usage has reduced delays, increased response times and help CRESOL generate more revenue and broaden its reach. Much of CRESOL’s credit business is with farmers and the agricultural industry with limited rule connectivity. The DocuSign WhatsApp integration allows CRESOL to bridge that connectivity gap and accelerate its credit process from days to hours. Let’s turn to product innovation. Across all aspects of go-to-market, product investment is driving customer adoption. The WhatsApp integration I just mentioned led to significant envelope usage in recent customer wins in Latin America.

Over 1,000 customers in UK and Europe have used and now benefit from stronger identity verification products like AI-enabled IDV Premier and our recently launched QES-compliant Identity Wallet. The recent free launch of our premium DocuSign monitor created 1,500 new accounts just this quarter. First Financial Bank, a financial services company headquartered in Indiana is using ID verification, increase the speed of consumer lending and home equity line of credit offerings. This improved security for bank staff removes manual workflows for underwriters and creates a stronger customer experience. First Financial is expanding ID verification to other use cases like credit cards and online account openings. Looking ahead, as we exited Q4, we have several hundred customers in beta in new platform services that will transform DocuSign into a more powerful solution.

We’ll have much more to share, and we’re excited to have you join us virtually to hear about our evolving platform at this year’s Momentum Customer Conference in New York on April 11th. Product momentum is clearly creating value for our customers. In fiscal ’24, that momentum was validated by third parties like IDC, who named us the e-signature industry leader versus 17 other vendors in its annual worldwide assessment. Also, Gartner named DocuSign as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for contract life cycle management for the fourth year running. To that end, DocuSign CLM customers continue to be at the front line of embracing a broader agreement management use case. In Q4, DocuSign CLM growth once again significantly outpaced overall revenue.

This is a positive sign as we see CLM product demand as a precursor to the value we can create across all 1.5 million DocuSign customers. Today, DocuSign CLM helps users automate and manage complex workflows, and we see the future is taking those capabilities to a broader set of users than CLM reaches today. We’re seeing strong adoption of our CLM product among enterprise customers. Just this quarter, a luxury automaker used our CLM to create an elegant sales experience to match its brand value proposition. A multibillion dollar global manufacturers sped up its legal and supply chain operations with a company-wide implementation of DocuSign CLM. And a global energy company accelerated its sales processes and streamlined procurement with CLM.

Our third strategic pillar is strengthening DocuSign’s operating and financial efficiency. In February, we announced further cost management initiatives, including a reduction in force. This decision streamlined our business and focused investments on initiatives that provide the strongest foundation for long-term growth. Blake will share more details on the financial impact and its impact on improving profitability. In fiscal 2025, we will continue focusing on efficiency while investing to reinvigorate long-term growth. In conclusion, fiscal ’24 was critical to strengthening DocuSign’s foundation. We’ve reaccelerated product innovation, invested in our leadership talent and rightsized our organization. These are all critical steps to realize the multiyear journey to transform agreement management.

And we’re just getting started. The opportunity in front of DocuSign remains massive. Today’s world runs on agreements, but agreement processes haven’t changed in the last 100 years. Even with the evolution to digital documents, agreements and how we use their insights remain relics of antiquated paper-based systems. Sign a document stored as a flat file preserved, but disconnected from the systems that run your operations. Our sole focus is transforming those systems for our 1.5 million existing customers to make agreements more valuable for enterprises and SMBs alike. As organizations transition to a digital world, customers turn to DocuSign as the world’s most trusted agreement company. We are excited for fiscal ’25 and the continued impact we will have on our customers.

Thank you to our incredible team for your passion and dedication to our vision and culture. With that, let me turn it over to Blake.

Blake Grayson: Thanks, Allan, and good afternoon, everyone. Throughout fiscal 2024, we continue to build a solid foundation on the three pillars of our strategic vision, accelerating product innovation, enhancing our omnichannel go-to-market initiatives and strengthening our operating and financial efficiency. As a result, in Q4, we delivered strong operating and financial results. Q4’s financial performance exceeded the high end of guidance across every metric, with material improvements in operating income, operating margin and free cash flow. Total revenue in Q4 increased 8% year-over-year to $712 million, and subscription revenue also grew 8% year-over-year to $696 million. Billings of $833 million grew 13% year-over-year, accelerating from 5% year-over-year in Q3.

Q4 represented our highest year-over-year billings growth performance in over a year. With respect to billings, approximately half of the eight point acceleration versus Q3 came from solid execution around renewals, especially with large customers. This includes spillovers from the prior quarter and better early renewal strength from contracts that would have otherwise been billed in fiscal year ’25. The remaining half came from a strong close to Q4 and net new growth, which will support the business in future quarters. Similar to Q3 results, we are encouraged by continuing signs of stabilization in the business. First, customer usage continues to improve. Total envelope cent increased moderately year-over-year. Similar to last quarter, we saw improving year-over-year usage trends in key verticals with technology, insurance, business services, financial services and health care, all growing faster than the total business baseline.

Also, consumption with direct customers, our contract utilization measure increased slightly year-over-year. Second, customer retention is stable with positive large customer momentum. Gross retention was flat year-over-year in Q4 across the direct book of business. As expected, dollar net retention trended downward in Q4 to 98%, and we’re encouraged that the pace of year-over-year decline slowed substantially in fiscal year ’24 versus fiscal year ’23. We anticipate the moderating trend to continue in fiscal year ’25, and we expect dollar net retention to be flat to down slightly in Q1 ’25. While overall net new expansion continues to be impacted by software optimization and macro-related customer purchasing cost and we are encouraged by large customer spending behavior.

The number of customers spending over $300,000 annually rose to 1,060 in Q4, increasing sequentially for the second quarter in a row. Also, Q4 bookings for customers with total contract value over $1 million increased by more than 50% year-over-year. Third, new customer acquisition volume remained strong in Q4, partly due to improvement in go-to-market initiatives. DocuSign ended the year with over 1.5 million customers, up 11% year-over-year and consistent with growth in Q3. Direct customers grew 15% year-over-year also consistent with Q3, bringing total direct customers to 242,000. International revenue, a key long-term growth driver, grew at more than double the overall revenue growth rate and is now 27% of total revenue. We believe the international growth opportunity remains large.

Also, the scale and breadth of our customer base is unique across the software landscape and an asset we can leverage as we expand our product offerings in the future. Turning to our financials. Operating and financial efficiency initiatives drove strong performance in fiscal year ’24. Improved execution led to a significant expansion in operating margin and a more than doubling of free cash flow versus fiscal year ’23. Non-GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter was 82.5%, in line with the prior year. Fourth quarter non-GAAP subscription gross margin was 85%, also in line with the prior year. For the full year, non-GAAP gross margin was 83%, up slightly from last year. Q4 non-GAAP operating income was $178 million, up 15% year-over-year with an operating margin of 25%, improving over 100 basis points year-over-year.

We saw a more significant improvement in fiscal year ’24, with a record non-GAAP operating income of $711 million, up 38% year-over-year, resulting in a 26% operating margin. This is a substantial increase of over 500 basis points versus 21% in fiscal year ’23. We will continue to focus on realizing opportunities to achieve greater efficiency as we invest to drive sustainable long-term growth. Free cash flow improvement was even stronger in Q4 and fiscal year ’24. In Q4, free cash flow was $249 million. And for the full year, we generated $887 million in free cash flow, with both periods more than doubling year-over-year, resulting in a 32% free cash flow margin for fiscal year ’24. Greater operating efficiency led to a substantial working capital improvement that drove free cash flow yield above our operating profit margin.

Going forward, we anticipate free cash flow margin to more closely approximate non-GAAP operating margin. In fiscal year ’24, we used a portion of free cash flow to purchase DocuSign shares. We used $146 million towards repurchasing common stock. In addition, we used $144 million to pay taxes due on RSU settlements, reducing the dilutive impact of our equity programs. Non-GAAP diluted EPS for Q4 was $0.76, an $0.11 per share improvement from $0.65 last year. Non-GAAP diluted EPS for fiscal year ’24 was $2.98 per share, a $0.95 improvement from $2.03 per share last year. Fiscal year ’24 also represented DocuSign’s first full year of producing positive GAAP net income. For the full year, GAAP diluted EPS was $0.36 versus negative $0.49 in the prior year.

Going forward, we expect continued improvements in GAAP net income and per share profitability as we work to manage the dilution and cost of our equity programs. We currently expect stock-based compensation to be approximately flat year-over-year in fiscal year ’25 and expect SBC as a percentage of revenue to decline year-over-year. We ended Q4 with 6,840 employees, a 7% decrease year-over-year from 7,336 at the end of fiscal year ’23. This results from our ongoing focus on investing efficiently in the business and does not reflect the reduction in force announced on February 6th of this year. We will continue to optimize our hiring plans to align our sales organization with our digital and partner GTM motions, support long-term growth opportunities in R&D and realize efficiencies of scale and G&A.

With regard to the balance sheet. During the quarter, we used approximately $690 million of cash to settle our remaining outstanding convertible debt. We currently have no debt on the balance sheet. At the end of fiscal year ’24, we had approximately $1.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments. This strong financial foundation, including a business model that generates significant free cash flow, supports its future investment and increases our ability to opportunistically return excess capital to shareholders. With that, let me turn to guidance. For Q1 ’25 and fiscal year ’25, we expect total revenue of $704 million to $708 million in Q1, or a 7% year-over-year increase at the midpoint. For fiscal year ’25, we expect revenue between $2.915 billion to $2.927 billion, or a 6% year-over-year increase at the midpoint.

Of this, we expect subscription revenue of $686 million to $690 million in Q1, or an 8% year-over-year increase at the midpoint. And $2.843 billion to $2.855 billion for fiscal ’25, or a 6% year-over-year increase at the midpoint. For billings, we expect $685 million to $695 million. And $2.970 to $3.024 billion for fiscal ’25. As continually shown in recent quarters and years, billings are heavily impacted by the timing of customer renewals, which can create meaningful variability from period to period. This impacts year-over-year comparisons and is further amplified by the scale of our book of business. We expect non-GAAP gross margin to be 81% to 82% for both Q1 and fiscal ’25. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to reach 27% to 28% for Q1, and 26.5% to 28% for fiscal ’25.

Our non-GAAP operating margin guidance includes the impact from the recently announced restructuring of approximately 400 employees or around 6% of our employee base. While we intend to reinvest a small portion of the restructuring savings into the business, primarily in R&D, the vast majority of savings will drop to the bottom line as reflected in our expected operating margin expansion in fiscal year ’25. We are committed to improving efficiency while still investing in the areas we believe will drive long-term growth. We expect non-GAAP fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of 208 million to 213 million for both Q1 and fiscal ’25. In closing, we’re pleased to report another quarter of progress against our three strategic pillars, accelerating product innovation, enhancing our go-to-market initiatives and strengthening our financial and operational efficiency.

Q4 execution was particularly strong as the team delivered accelerating billings growth, double-digit customer growth, with improving operating margins and record free cash flow generation. While we still have work ahead to reaccelerate our top line growth, I’m proud of this team for its focus on execution as we continue to be the default trusted partner for customers around agreement management. We have over 1.5 million customers, ranging from the largest enterprises in the world to wide-scale adoption by the small and medium-sized businesses that power the global economy. That scale gives us the opportunity to help customers accelerate their business growth, mitigate risk and enable delightful customer experiences. I’m excited about the opportunity ahead of us and look forward to sharing our progress along the way.

That concludes our prepared remarks. With that, operator, let’s open up the call for questions.

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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 the line of Tyler Radke with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Tyler Radke: Yeah, thanks for taking the question. A couple for Blake, just to kick things off. So Blake, I appreciate the comments on kind of unpacking the Q4 billings outperformance. Obviously, the nine point beat versus the guide was pretty impressive. As I think about the moving pieces on that, could you just help frame the Q1 guide relative to the full year guide on billings. I think the full year would imply you need to grow a little bit faster than you’re guiding to on billings in Q1. So curious if some of that’s related to the pull forward? And then secondly, how should we think about NRR trends? I think that dipped below 100% at 98%. So as you just think about the drivers between expansions and new business for next year, just help us understand the trajectory of that and how that all fits into the guide. Thank you.

Blake Grayson: Sure. And thanks for the question. So to address the question on billings, I think it’s helpful to kind of cover it in totality. So starting with Q4 and then going into 2025, because the timing does play a big role as you think about the year-over-year comps. So just to recap quickly, Q4, really pleased with the execution and the acceleration from Q3. And like you heard in the prepared remarks, half of that acceleration was from renewals timing, and that includes early renewals from fiscal year ’25. In Q4, our book of renewals have the highest contribution from early renewals for any quarter that we’ve seen all year long, and that’s okay because that’s great execution by the team, like we’re super happy about that.

And then the other half was just from strong net new growth. We had a great close to Q4. And so that was a nice job again by the team there. Now that timing component impacts fiscal ’25. So with respect to Q1, and this also applies to Q2, there’s — we’ve got two hard comps to deal with — address in this first half of this year. The first is, if you recall, we had really strong on-time renewals in the first half of 2024, that came about because we made some adjustments to our sales incentive plans to improve execution there, and we did, and we did a really good job with it, when you go back and look at our billings performance in the first half of last year or 2024. And then the other hard comp is that Q4 component that I just mentioned that leads to some less spillover into Q1.

And so those two hard comps apply, obviously, to the full year as well. So you’ve got to kind of normalize for that a bit. And so just to give some direction too, as you think about that on a quarterly basis, and you mentioned this about how the full year is a little bit higher than the midpoint guide versus Q1. I expect to see Q2 to decel a bit from Q1, but then reaccelerate into the second half of the year. And again, we got those hard comps that we’re dealing with in the first half of this year and then you see that reacceleration. And then you just use your — that fiscal ’25 guide with regards to the magnitude of the quarters. Overall, I’m really pleased with the fiscal ’25 billings guide. It’s almost exactly $3 billion at the midpoint.

But the timing of these renewals makes the year-over-year comps pretty noisy. And so one way that you might think about — how to think about or try to normalize it is like on a two-year stack view, to normalize for some of those period-over-period components, to kind of normalize for those effects. But I hope that helps just kind of how you think about billings for Q4 and then relative to the full year. And then to your dollar net retention question, we did trend down as we expected, in line with our expectations into Q4. There’s still a tough macro environment out there for us where companies are scrutinizing investments, and it just leads to smaller expansion opportunities. Now that said, however, I am quite encouraged by the pace of decline in fiscal ’24.

It slowed substantially versus fiscal ’23. And we’re now expecting that the pace of decline is going to slow even further into fiscal ’25. And you heard in the prepared remarks, we’re actually forecasting for Q1 dollar net retention rate to be flat to down slightly from Q4. And part of that is related to the fact that we’re coming out of these COVID comps from prior quarters. And you’ve heard me talk about how the share of our book of business that was written during kind of the pandemic period is really de minimis now. And so I think that’s also one of the things where you can see this flattening out. And again, there’s a number of encouraging signs for us around renewal rates and consumption. And then we’ve got, hopefully, these new product launches releasing into general availability later in the year.

And over the long-term, we’re excited about our ability to impact that.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jake Roberge with William Blair. Please proceed with your question

Jake Roberge: Hey, thanks for taking the question and congrats on the great results. Blake, just a follow-up on that DNR remark. Can you help us understand how much of the downtick in that metric was driven by those remaining COVID era contracts that you just called out in your last answer. And then, Allan, it looks like you actually reaccelerated new customer adds this quarter. Do you feel like the 40,000 quarterly adds is the right way to think about the business moving forward? Or could that actually continue to ramp as the macro normalizes, and some of those new product-led growth initiatives take hold?