Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Mark Barrenechea: Yes, Paul, good to hear your voice and thanks for being on the call, absolutely. And as I noted, we have room to improve our margin right now. We’re focused on bookings and revenue growth. And I only decided on the call today to go into one area, very large area for us, a transformative area for us, which is the core of the company. We’re an engineering firm, right? And we create IP and products. But when we look across the entire company, we have other projects that we’re working on and that will come to fruition in the coming years in increased productivity in the support organization, in the pre-sales organization, in the renewals organization. So we can talk more about where we look to deploy them, but I wanted to be very grounded in kind of the first transformative area that we have our concrete plans are.

And it’s sort of a multiply, it’s a force multiplier to be able to get our engineering team more productive, next generation of talent, accelerating product to market. We think that’s the area that will have the nearest term and highest impact.

Paul Treiber: Thanks. And then just a second question, just more specifically on the outlook for ‘24. And when you look at Q4, you can back into what it implies for Q4 EBITDA margins. I think the midpoint is at about 41.5% EBITDA margins, which is quite high and it’s close to an all-time high for the company. What is driving that seasonality to the upside? We talked a lot about Q3, but how do we think about Q4, the drivers there?

Madhu Ranganathan: No, Paul. Thank you, it’s Madhu here. It’s a very important question. So a couple of things, one I spoke about the Q3 seasonality, which is actually very typical. So again, at the Uber level, we are making investments, but Q3 has its own seasonality in terms of people spend, payroll spend, benefit, et cetera. So Q4 is our seasonally strong quarter from a revenue perspective, and you will see that benefit the EBITDA margin as well. And some of the integration expenses we have for Micro Focus for this fiscal year, some of the spend is focused in Q3, we look to optimize some of those in Q4. So I would say the big contributor to Q4 EBITDA margin is going to be our seasonally strong revenue quarter and tapering off of some of the expenses. And you’re absolutely right for the second-half of the year, Q4 EBITDA margin will be much stronger than Q3 to get to our annual range.

Paul Treiber: All right, thanks for taking the questions.

Mark Barrenechea: Yes, thanks Paul.

Madhu Ranganathan: Thank you.

Operator: I’ll now hand the call back over to Mr. Barrenechea for closing remarks.

Mark Barrenechea: Very good. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. We’re just delighted with our progress and our momentum. You heard us, we’re investing for growth. We’re expanding our competitive advantage, strong financial update, and we’re focused on capital return. In the room today as well is Greg Secord, and we’d like to wish him a happy birthday, yes. Thanks, everyone, for joining. And Madhu, myself, Harry, and Greg, we look forward to engaging in the coming days and weeks. That ends today’s call.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.

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