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

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Keith Jensen: Yes. I don’t know that I’ve really seen a change in the mix, if you will. I think the — when you look at the — what we call the FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer. And certainly, the virtual machines are doing very, very well. And then as you start looking at the tail of the fabric products in the — on the areas of EDR and monitor and SIM and so on and so forth, I think that they’re smaller dollar totals, but sometimes very dramatic and exciting growth rates. So I want to be a little bit careful about getting — painting anybody in too great a light in terms of their contribution because everybody is contributing. Certainly, the networking equipment part of the business has done very, very well, and this is a key component of this convergent story that we’ve talked about, and it remains probably about one-third of the fabric business.

Ittai Kidron: Got it. Excellent. And then just going back to the cancellation rate, just to make sure I understand this. How much of this is tied into supply chain, meaning of supply chain? Is it getting better availability is no longer an issue? Customers are less perhaps interested in getting too far ahead in line and waiting for product. How much of that is a factor in this?

Ken Xie: The supply chain environment definitely have some improvement for networking for the WiFi. That’s where sometimes a customer, they may have a multiple order to see which vendor can deliver because a lot of networking equipment WiFi is a pretty standard product. Even for us, we do add quite some security functions in there. But at sometimes customers just cannot wait. So that’s where we see a little bit higher cancellation rate with — I think right now, the overall supply chain environment, I think is improving.

Keith Jensen: Yes. I think the conversation around cancellation rates, a few things there. We said it went from mid single-digits to high single-digits. And then as we built into the guidance, it is a multiple that we built in the guidance of what we just saw in the fourth quarter. What we actually get out of it, we’ll see. But the reason to be so cautious about it is what Ken is talking about. We knew that we had an advantage with firewalls and dealing with our suppliers and our vendors and we thought we’d be successful in pushing down that component of backlog first. And indeed, the mix has shown that. I think it’s now something on the order of about 75%, 25% between networking equipment and firewalls still firewalls in the mix.

But as Ken pointing out is there may be more risk with that networking equipment of cancellations as we go forward, and particularly its a backlog deal for those elements continue to age out a little bit as we move through this process. In terms of continuing supply chain challenges, I’m not quite sure I was making the length on that. I don’t — I guess that would have an impact on the continuing to build of backlog. But as we said in our comments, we really expect to get to a backlog number by the end of this year that’s much more closely aligned with our historical norms.

Ittai Kidron: Very good. Thanks. Good luck.

Operator: Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nowinski of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Andrew Nowinski: Okay. Thank you. Just two quick questions. First, I want to ask a question on EMEA. You’ve had five quarters now of accelerating growth in Europe, and that seems to defy the macro trends that we consistently hear about in Europe. Just wondering if there’s something specific in your portfolio that might be driving that strong growth in Europe?

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