Udemy, Inc. (NASDAQ:UDMY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Brown: Yeah, I’ll just add that the two primary trends transition to skills-based organization and then AI literacy are acute. And I was even a bit surprised at just how much pressure and how acute the need is for CLOs to be able to answer the question and really solve the problem and really it’s more of a take advantage of the opportunity to upskill an entire organization with respect to AI literacy. I mean — and it’s also something that I could feel it in the conversations that I was in that they believe and the CEOs believe that if they don’t move now, they’re going to get left behind. And it’s that fear of missing out or fear of losing the competition because they’re not moving fast enough to educate their employees on how to operationally leverage AI internally to get leverage and how to build AI capability into their products and services to provide more value and impact to their customers.

And like I said, I’ve been doing this a while. I’ve been in enterprise software for going on 30 years. And even the dot-com era and some of these other transitions, it hasn’t been this acute and pointed in terms of the conversations that we’re having right now and the investments companies are making. We’ve talked about some large multiyear deals that we’re signing as a result of organizations accelerating their transition as skills-based org and accelerating their investments in AI. And we truly believe we’re on the front end of this, right? We talked about the numbers. The vast majority of organizations do not have an understanding as to how to transition to this AI world or to a skills-based org capability. And so this is going to be in front of us for years to come to help organizations really address.

And that really is one of the reasons why we’re seeing that deal sizes go up and all the accelerants we’re seeing on the enterprise side of our business, as much as we’re seeing some depression still on the SMB side, the enterprise side and on a global basis within our large multinational organizations, there’s an accelerated level of activity around these key trends.

Operator: And our next question will come from Tom Singlehurst with Citi. Please go ahead.

Tom Singlehurst : Yeah, hi. Thanks a lot for taking the question. Thanks for the presentation. A couple of questions. First one on — I just want to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Combining your sort of — the trajectory of the revenue share and the comment about, hopefully, the instructors not experiencing any absolute congestion, am I right in just inferring that means at least 25% revenue growth next year and around 20% compound revenue growth as sort of a base — like a lower level base through to 2026? I just want make sure I got the math right and I wasn’t missing anything?

Sarah Blanchard : Tom, thanks for the question. So that response was overall that, that will grow, not necessarily that UV is 25% next year. But what we do think is we are going to be exiting Q4 on the UV side in the mid-20s. And we do think, plus or as a few points, but that’s a reasonable range in this continued like tough macro environment. We think that we’ll accelerate when the macro softens. But right now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be anytime soon. And so really, what we’re focused on is a stable instructor pool and growing over time and investing in the things that will allow that to grow at a greater rate over time than it could have without those investments.

Tom Singlehurst: That’s super clear. And the second one was just on, I suppose, cash usage. I mean we’re at the point where you’re delivering obviously better EBITDA than we were going for a positive free cash flow, which is great. I mean — and you’ve got that big sort of cash balance. I’m just wondering whether anything in addition there to say on cash usage given what you’ve sort of related about the sort of accelerated progress to that 15% to 20% EBITDA range and being more comfortable with the higher end of that. Should we expect more movement on cash usage, whether it’s M&A or capital return?

Greg Brown: Yeah, that’s a good question. Thank you. We’re still — and we talked about this on prior calls, and I’m happy to just reiterate that we are active in the market with respect to corporate development and M&A. But for us, it’s going to be — the bar is pretty high. And we will put that capital to work when we find the right opportunity either to leverage the technical capability that an organization has to enable us to potentially move further faster with respect to our AI strategy and/or platform strategy at large. And in addition to that, it could be geographic expansion. At this time, we haven’t found that right company that we believe is going to help us in one of those areas. And we’ll keep going until we do. We do have — it is her to put that capital to work, and it definitely is a focus for us. So we’ll keep you posted.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question here will come from Terrell Tillman with Truist Securities.

Connor Passarella : Great. Thank you. This is Connor Passarella on for Terrell. Appreciate you taking the question. I just wanted to ask one around the Docker partnership. If there’s any revenue minimums or financial impact from the partnership. And maybe if you could speak to the greater opportunity around expanding your leadership position in educating developers? Thank you.

Greg Brown: That’s a good question. No revenue minimums. This is a rev share — typical reseller rev share partnership. And I couldn’t be happier with the co-marketing capability, which is going to be kind of the primary lever for us that we’re going to execute against them. We’re both Docker and Udemy have agreed to spend into that. And it’s early days, the ability for us to help them with certification and skill development is significant, which is why they were excited to partner with us. And I do want to clarify, though, that as I’m thinking through the question, as far as revenue per se, this is primarily co-marketing right now. We will, over time, be evaluating the opportunity to develop revenue-generating opportunities or revshare opportunities. But right now, I think the initial phase of this relationship is primarily co-marketing. So we’ll keep you posted on that.

Connor Passarella : Great. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from Devin Au with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.