Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Raymond McDonough: Great. Thanks for the color and congrats on the strong results.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Tindle of Raymond James. Your line is open.

Adam Tindle: Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon. Keith, I wanted to start with pricing. I think we picked up if we got this right, another pricing increase announced in January effective in February. Wondering if you could touch on the rationale and early response to that — where are we in the elasticity of demand? And thinking forward, obviously, costs are ultimately going to normalize, hopefully, in your model. What would be the strategy for you once costs normalize, would you reduce price or capture margin? Thanks.

Keith Jensen: Yes, on that part first. I mean I think we’ll continue to monitor the market and make the appropriate adjustments there. I don’t seeing inflation go backwards it’s probably not something that’s happened a lot in history, but it could happen, I guess. In terms of the most recent price increase that we talked about, it’s almost a non-event to me. It’s extremely low single-digits growth and after discounting, it’s a fraction of an interest point.

Adam Tindle: Got it. Okay. And then maybe just as a follow-up for Ken. I wanted to ask on SASE competition. When your main competitors has said they’ve integrated their SASE offering with SD-WAN and Secure Web Gateway in particular. They’re pushing that sales motion across the entire sales force now. As we think about Fortinet, obviously, very strong in SD-WAN, but that Secure Web Gateway or proxy piece is perhaps not as prevalent or a different strategy. It’s clearly not impacting your unit market share at present, but just thinking forward to competing and differentiating in SASE now that your competitor really pushing that motion across the entire sales force? Thank you.

Ken Xie: Yes, I think we — our strategy, like seeing in the last few years is; first, we want to have a SASE or integrated in the same system, the same OS, including all the SD-WAN or the SASE function. So making SASE can be more easily broader deploy and also working with service provider to leverage their infrastructure to offer a SASE. So it’s a little bit different than some of the SASE players right now in the market. So we do believe this is highly integrated the single system as will be more efficient and same time will be more secure. And so that’s what we’re keeping building and whether the new FortiASIC and also the new FortiOS reflect all this kind of development we reported into the solution. At the same time, we’re keeping working closely with pretty much all the carrier service provider, even cloud provider to offer SASE together.

And that’s also a little bit different strategy compared to some other SASE player. So we do believe long-term leverage infrastructure, a lot of our own service provider telecom provider had will be much more efficient than the profit model compared to some of the SASE solution or player kind of losing money, which will be difficult to last long. So that’s what we will keeping invest in this area. And also, we want to be a long-term player in this space and also we’ll be keeping internal innovation R&D and keeping driving this space.

Adam Tindle: Very helpful. Thanks and congrats on the year.

Ken Xie: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Ben Bollin of Cleveland Research. Your line is open.

Ben Bollin: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Could you share a little bit of what is happening with respect to the cloud infrastructure build-out. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing, where you are in the progress and customer response thus far? And then I had a follow-up on the networking category.

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