Smartsheet Inc. (NYSE:SMAR) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Smartsheet Inc. (NYSE:SMAR) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript December 7, 2023

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Smartsheet Third Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Call. Today’s call is being recorded. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Aaron Turner, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Aaron Turner: Thank you, Lisa. Good afternoon and welcome everyone to Smartsheet’s third quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me today are Smartsheet’s CEO, Mark Mader; and our CFO, Pete Godbole. Today’s call is being webcast and will also be available for replay on our Investor Relations website at investors.smartsheet.com. There is a slide presentation that accompanies Pete’s prepared remarks, which can be viewed in the Events section of our Investor Relations website. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. We have based these forward-looking statements largely on our current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends.

These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and other factors, including, but not limited to, those described in our SEC filings available on our Investor Relations website and on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, our actual results may differ materially or adversely – and/or adversely. All forward-looking statements made during this call are based on information available to us as of today and we do not assume any obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events, except as required by law. In addition to the U.S. GAAP financials, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.

A reconciliation of the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measures is available in the presentation that accompanies this call, which can also be found on our Investor Relations website. And with that, let me turn the call over to Mark.

Mark Mader: Thank you, Aaron, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2024. Smartsheet revenue for the quarter exceeded our guidance and grew by 23% year-over-year to $246 million, and billings grew 22% year-over-year to $268.5 million. In Q3, we generated non-GAAP operating margins of 8%, and free cash flow was $11.4 million. We ended the quarter with annual recurring revenue of $981 million and more than 13.9 million Smartsheet users. In Q3, 89 customers expanded their Smartsheet ARR by more than $100,000 and 256 companies expanded by over $50,000. Additionally, we now have 59 customers with ARR over $1 million, up from 40 a year ago. Our strength in the enterprise continued in Q3 with expansions at companies such as Cushman & Wakefield, Cintas Corporation, biotech company BeiGene, and CommVault Systems, among others.

Q3 was also a strong quarter for our suite of capabilities-based products. Similar to last quarter, capabilities were present in each of our top 10 expansions. Smartsheet Advance, which is our bundle of our capabilities, was included in 250 of our expansions in Q3. Advance played a key role in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal with a Fortune 500 specialty beverage company. Their expansion to Smartsheet Advance Gold will help support the company as it executes high-impact projects, including new product rollouts and associated equipment deployments, network upgrades as well as new store openings and store improvements. In Q3, we also saw a significant expansion that included an upgrade to Advance Platinum at a major airline. For a number of years, Smartsheet has powered aspects of the carrier’s flight ops, flight products and tech ops units.

Due to growing demand for Smartsheet from other departments, they decided to upgrade to Smartsheet Advance. By implementing the platinum tier of Smartsheet Advance, they were able to consolidate their licenses and bring them all under IT’s purview to give these divisions access to all of our capabilities such as Control Center, Dynamic View and Bridge. This consolidation means that the airline has an opportunity to increase visibility into its IT spend and empower Smartsheet users as it brings greater efficiency to critical activities like resource management, maintenance and scheduling. And that resulted in a 3-year commitment with a total contract value of $4.5 million and an opportunity to further scale Smartsheet across the organization.

The ability to rapidly scale was also key to an $850,000 deal at one of the country’s largest quick service restaurant brands. The company is in the process of a multiyear transformation initiative and selected Smartsheet Control Center and Resource Management to help drive its global digital transformation and implement portfolio reporting on day-to-day and annual operating plan projects for the senior executive team. By using Smartsheet, the company has been able to enhance and simplify collaboration across over 30,000 locations, and in doing so, rendered a number of other applications obsolete. Another customer example relating to scale is the significant expansion at a global media and entertainment organization that was looking to streamline its tech stack.

The company was already using Control Center to manage 14,000 projects and 12,000 workflows in Bridge to track and manage their portfolio of projects. Because that work went across its retail, events, theme parks and publishing divisions, Smartsheet was well positioned to win this consolidation. Going forward, the company will extend its use of Smartsheet to other initiatives such as improved speed to market for technology projects, efficient headcount management, cost controls and profit improvement initiatives. This expansion brought the company’s ARR to over $4 million. On the product front, in Q3, we introduced a new way for our customers to discover and use two of our premium capabilities without the need to first contact a Smartsheet rep or partner.

We believe empowering frictionless self-discovery of high-value Smartsheet capabilities will drive greater adoption of these premium offerings, and early results have been promising with hundreds of trials started with just within the first few months. One of those trials occurred at a mid-cap biotech company and directly led to the purchase of Data Shuttle to migrate significant amounts of data into Smartsheet from legacy clinical storage systems. While the company has been a customer for years, it had never utilized our premium capability. Once discovering Data Shuttle, the company’s clinical trial team launched automated workflows to import data they use to track the progress of its research on cancer and rare disease therapies. They found that it had a positive impact by allowing them to centralize view and manage data from these disparate sources, and their success with Data Shuttle has now led to interest in other premium capabilities.

Over 40% of these deals in Q3 that were closed as a result of capability self-discovery were with customers buying a premium capability for the first time. We continue to make strides integrating AI across the Smartsheet platform. We now have approximately 50,000 enterprise users in early access to AI-powered skills that allow users to generate formulas and content directly in their sheets. Both these skills will be generally available later this quarter to enterprise customers. The feedback from early access users confirms that our AI features will help power enterprise processes and make it simple for any user to gain insight into the work being done across teams. These AI skills are helping customers achieve their desired outcomes even more rapidly with the Smartsheet platform.

Additionally, AI-powered skills will roll out to eligible early adopters next month. We continue to invest internationally in response to increasing global demand. To support data residency requirement for our international customers, we launched a Smartsheet platform instance in Germany in 2021, and we will launch an instance in Australia next year. This new Smartsheet region will enable Australian customers to comply with important data residency requirements and offer them the flexibility to choose where they want their content to be hosted. We will be pursuing IRAP certification, ensuring that it will have the right policies and security controls to meet Australian government information security requirements. This enables Smartsheet to serve a growing regional customer base, including organizations and agencies with the most demanding governance and regulatory requirements.

Q3 was also a productive quarter for our federal government business in the U.S. reaching some notable milestones. We signed a 6-figure expansion at a large government agency, which brought its ARR up to $1.6 million. This agency uses Smartsheet for critical workflows from purchase management to managing grant funding to using Control Center to manage travel budgets and expense management across its multiple regional offices. Additionally, we now have a presence in all 15 U.S. cabinet-level departments and have 2 government agencies with ARR over $1 million. In closing, as we approach crossing the $1 billion ARR milestone this quarter, we remain focused on both product innovation and customer value by continuing to execute as the user-preferred enterprise work management leader.

Now, let me turn the call over to Pete.

Pete Godbole: Thank you, Mark. We outperformed all aspects of our guidance in Q3. Similar to previous quarters, our enterprise business continues to perform well, which is reflected in the growth of our higher ARR customer cohort tiers and volume of large deals. We continue to see macro-related pressure on our higher velocity transactions and on our SMB customer segments. Given these pressures, we are maintaining our prudent approach to our Q4 and full year guidance. I will now go through our financial results for the third quarter. Unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses and operating results are on a non-GAAP basis and are reconciled to our GAAP results in the earnings release and presentation that was posted before the call.

Third quarter revenue came in at $245.9 million, up 23% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $232.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 25%. Services revenue was $13.4 million. Revenue from capabilities made up 33% of subscription revenue. Turning to billings. Third quarter billings came in at $268.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 22%. Approximately 94% of our subscription billings were annual with about 3% monthly. Quarterly and semiannual represented approximately 3% of the total. Moving on to our reported metrics. The number of customers with ACV over $50,000 grew 26% year-over-year to 3,719. And the number of customers with ACV over $100,000 grew 32% year-over-year to 1,779. These customer segments now represent 65% and 51%, respectively, of total ARR.

The percentage of our ARR coming from customers with ACV over $5,000 is at 91%. Next, our domain average ACV grew 16% year-over-year to $9,225. We ended the quarter with a dollar-based net retention rate, inclusive of all our customers, of 118%. The full churn rate was 4%. We expect to exit FY ‘24 with a dollar-based net retention rate of around 116%. Now turning back to the financials. Our total gross margin was 84%. Our Q3 subscription gross margin was 87%. We expect our gross margin for FY ‘24 to remain at or above 83%. Overall, operating income in the quarter was $19.4 million or 8% of revenue. Free cash flow in the quarter was $11.4 million. Now let me move on to guidance. For the fourth quarter of FY ‘24, we expect revenue to be in the range of $254 million to $256 million and non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $21 million to $23 million.

We expect non-GAAP net income per share to be $0.17 to $0.19 based on diluted weighted average shares outstanding of 140 million. For the full fiscal year ‘24, we now expect revenue of $955 million to $957 million, representing growth of 25%. We expect services to be 6% of total revenue. We expect our non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $82 million to $84 million, representing an operating margin of 9%, and non-GAAP net income per share to be $0.68 to $0.69 for the year based on 138 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. We expect our Q4 billings to be $339 million, bringing our FY ‘24 billings growth guidance to 20%. This includes the impact of our decision to invest more in our partner network that will include shifting more services delivery to this channel.

The impact of this shift will be a reduction of around $3 million to billings in Q4. We are raising our free cash flow guidance for FY ‘24 to $130 million. To conclude, we outperformed all aspects of our guidance in Q3 and are encouraged by the signals we are seeing from our incremental growth drivers such as self-discovery of capabilities and the new AI features. Now, let me turn the call over to the operator. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We’ll take our first question from Scott Berg with Needham.

Scott Berg: Hi, everyone. Really nice quarter here. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start on the billings side. You saw some acceleration in the growth quarter-over-quarter, speaks to some of the large deal environment there. But how do we think about kind of pipeline and demand trends going into Q4? Do they like kind of normal and similar from what you have seen last quarter or two or do you see any changes either up or down further? Thank you.

Pete Godbole: Thanks, Scott. This is Pete. As we looked at the pipeline, we are seeing basically the same strength in enterprise continuing into Q4. Obviously, it depends on the composition of deals and closing those deals. And what we are anticipating in Q4 is on the SMB expansion, the trend we saw in what I would call Q3, which was degradation in the expansion rates. We are extending that out in a trended basis into Q4 as well.

Scott Berg: Got it. Helpful there. And then from a follow-up perspective, your operating margins have trended lowered the last couple of quarters. I know that’s in line with guidance. Your sales and marketing expense is up a little relative to subscription growth rates that are down a little bit there. Is the higher sales and marketing expense – is that all related to the partner enablement activities that you are going through? Is there some other increased costs there that we should be aware of? Thanks.

Pete Godbole: I think when you think of the sales and marketing expense in Q3 and you look at that trend, remember, sales and marketing in Q3 is a function of the event we had in Q3, which was the ENGAGE event that plays into that spending. And then there is, what I call, investments that we are making as needed in the right parts of the sales and marketing machinery.

Scott Berg: Got it. Helpful. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the good quarter.

Pete Godbole: Thanks, Scott.

Operator: We will take our next question from Michael Berg with Wells Fargo Securities.

Michael Berg: Hi, thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask on the demand dynamics in a different way. Anything to point to in the renewable environment outside the SMB vertical? Is it improving? How does it relate to the first half of the year? And how is it trending as we look into calendar 2024? Thank you.

Pete Godbole: I think in general, our renewals are staying pretty strong. There’s no big difference in the environment that we’ve seen between the first half and the second half. But remember, our business is pretty well diversified across all verticals. So we get the benefit of that, but we’re not seeing any big changes in the renewal environment.

Michael Berg: Helpful. And then one quick follow-up on capabilities. It’s been in the 30 – low to mid-30s for several quarters now, and it seems to be a high-value proposition type of product. Maybe you can help us think about – is there anything preventing further incremental adoption of that, whether it be driving home the ROI equation, budget priorities, just macro and budget scrutiny? Just any way we can think about how that adoption could accelerate? Thanks.

Mark Mader: I think when we look at – this is Mark. When we look at the various phases or elements of driving growth in this area, one of the big initiatives for us in the second half has been how do we get them more aware to people at the right time. So that was part of the self-discovery effort. One of the things that we can see in next year and the years out is how do we not only increase discovery, but also how do we dramatically accelerate the transaction on those types of things. So we see a future in which the entire portfolio is visible to people, can be utilized by people and can also be transacted by people in a variety of methods, whether you speak with a partner, whether you speak with a direct rep or whether you do that online. And we continue to see that aperture opening. But the first phase of the game is how do you get in front of people. And I think we’ve made really good progress in the second half on that.

Michael Berg: Helpful. Thank you.

Mark Mader: Thanks.

Operator: Let’s take our next question from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.

Josh Baer: Great. Thank you. Wanted to follow-up on capabilities, Mark. Just wondering, like, what percent of your customer base do you think capabilities can apply to. I think that third of revenue is generated by only 6% of your customers. Just wondering where that number can go.

Mark Mader: Yes. I’m – I think I’m the eternal optimist on this one. I think this relates to every single person in our community. We have a wide portfolio. It has to do with being able to bring information and data into our system, with integrating our system, with visualizing our system, sharing our system. These are all things that virtually every person on our platform does. And I think when you reduce the cost of – reduce the hurdle height on what it takes to experience and give people multiple options how to transact at a very low – cost-effective way to start all the way up to really massive enterprise deployment, that penetration should go well into the double digits. And yes, I think over the next – over a 5-year frame, I think 50 – our median customers should be buying capability from us.