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Autodesk, Inc. (ADSK)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 25, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Autodesk Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2016 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the meeting over to David Gennarelli, Senior Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

David Gennarelli - Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thanks, operator. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining our conference call to discuss the results of our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2016. Also on the line is Carl Bass, our CEO; and Scott Herren, our CFO. Today's conference call is being broadcast live via webcast. In addition, a replay of this call will be available at autodesk.com/investor. As noted in our press release, we have published our prepared remarks on our website in advance of this call. Those remarks are intended to serve in place of extended formal comments, and we will not repeat them on this call. During the course of this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding future events and the anticipated future performance of the company, such as our guidance for the first quarter and full year fiscal 2017, our long-term financial model guidance, the factors we use to estimate our guidance, including currency headwinds, expectations regarding our restructuring, our transition to new business models, our market opportunities and strategies, and trends for various products, geographies, and industries. We caution you that such statements reflect our best judgment, based on factors currently known to us and that actual events or results could differ materially. Please refer to the documents we file from time-to-time with the SEC, specifically our Form 10-K for the fiscal year 2015, our Form 10-Q for the periods ended April 30, July 31, and October 31, 2015, and our current reports on Form 8-K, including the Form 8-K furnished with today's press release and prepared remarks. Those documents contain and identify important risks and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ from those contained in our forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today. If this call is replayed or reviewed…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Philip Winslow from Credit Suisse. Philip Winslow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hi, yeah, thanks, guys. I mean, congrats on a great, great quarter, and Carl, I really appreciate that update on the outlook, it certainly is impressive on the cash flow metric. So it's clearly above your old guidance and above where we were. When you look at those cash flow long term targets you gave up there; I know, you're not updating the whole framework, but it certainly implies, and feel like margin solidly ahead of what you talked about at the Analyst Day and obviously you talked about in fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018 on the cost side, I wondered if you'd give us just sort of how you're think about the framework of margins kind of in that long-term guidance, and then from a top line perspective, sort of how you're building up there, obviously not giving the full detail that you guys talked about? Then just one quick follow-up to that. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. So, let me just quickly touch on it, and Scott, can jump in. Most of the update to the guidance was not a change in the overall demand, so let's just put that out there that kind of assuming the same level of demand, we were pleased in Q4 to see greater demand, but no difference in demand from when we talked about the model. A lot of the upside is driven by greater cost control, so a lot has to do with some of the stuff we outlined for FY 2017 and 2018, and it's just as you roll out through the subsequent years just starting from a lower cost base…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia from Barclays.

Saket Kalia - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. Carl, you talked last quarter about selling anywhere from 500,000 units to 800,000 units in a given year, and I think you said that it was about 650,000 units this year, correct me if I'm wrong. You've given us the subscription component of that with the subs guidance for fiscal 2017, but just normalizing for all the noise in 2017 how do you think about unit volume for fiscal 2017? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think, unit volume will be up, not a huge amount, but up. There – one of the tricks that we're kind of referencing in the forecasting is that in particular I think we have a couple quarters where it's hard to know which way people will go, Q1 and Q2 in particular, but even extending into Q3. So, we're doing our best job on triangulating from what we're hearing from our partners, what we're hearing from our sales people, top down models, extrapolation of trends, but to be honest it's a little bit hard and that's why we have a slightly broader range in terms of guidance and why we gave a slightly paradoxical guidance that I wouldn't mind seeing revenue down. I think they have now done something like 40 of these earnings calls at the end of the quarter, and I don't think, I've ever alluded to revenue to be down, but this may be – this is certainly a first, and so, it's just different than it's ever been. I can't highlight enough that the next four quarters are just going to be a little bit odd and that's why we point it to you, and I think you're on the right point, which is look at volume, we…

Saket Kalia - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

That makes sense. And then for my follow-up. I'm not sure for Carl or Scott, but one of the difficult things that I find modeling externally is that ARPS number particularly around new model ARR. And so, I'm not sure if this is something that you've looked at, but on a steady state basis, in Q3, Q4 and beyond, based on the historical mix that you've seen of historical volume and subscription pricing, what's a fair range to think about new model ARPS in sort of a steady state, if that make sense? Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. I understand that the model drives, you don't want to focus on that metrics, Saket, and I think that the key is what Carl said earlier, we geared the entire machine, from sales comp through the variable comp bonus plans that every employee has, you look at our promos, you look at the way we're – we will point our channel partners next week at our sales kickoff event, we've geared everything toward driving subs. Because the more we drive subs and in particular, the more we drive the new model subs, ultimately that's what builds the strength of the model and get us to that vision of fiscal point that we've laid out. So, ARPS to us is more a derived number. We're focused on driving subs, and driving ARR. And when you divide those three, you get ARPS. I think if you want to think about it a little bit more mechanically, I would – give you two pointers, one is the fastest growing piece of our desktop business, which is what's driving the new model subs, as much as anything is the low end, it's the AutoCAD LT Desktop subs. So that's naturally going to put downward pressure on ARPS. The second is the way we calculate ARR on a quarterly basis is, we total up our recurring revenue for the quarter, multiply that by a 4 and you get it annualized, and that's our ARR. And so the linearity in a given quarter will drive the ARR calculation.

Saket Kalia - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: In other words, the more those sales are coming late in the quarter, there is fewer revenue that actually accretes into the reported revenue for that quarter and so you don't get to see the full effect of it until the following quarter. So there is a – there is a little bit of seasonality and linearity effects on ARR in any given quarter, that I think can also throw off your ARPS calculation. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I mean just in general, the one thing I would say that ARPS, is I can see it come slightly higher this year, as more of our suites in our full-fledged offerings hit. But as Scott pointed out, our lower cost products like the LT will put pressure on it downward, as well as many of the cloud subscriptions. So as we've talked about many of the cloud subscriptions of larger groups working together is mostly individual design and engineering products. So things like BIM 360 and PLM 360 connect hundreds of thousands of users and so the average cost per subscriber will – could go – will be substantially lower than a design product. So it really is all caught up in that first word of average.

Saket Kalia - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Got it. Very helpful. Thank very much, guys. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Just driven by mix, yeah. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line Sterling Auty from JPMorgan.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Yeah, thanks. Scott, the comment that you made in the desktop it's the lower end that's really kind of driving the subscriptions at the moment. Do you think that's just a matter of who is interested in adopting first, and we'll see that mix change over time, or is there something about the subscription format that's going to drive users more towards a lower end product versus some of the higher end products? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: It's just that we introduced it first. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, from a volume standpoint, Sterling, that's essentially right, it's not – there's nothing inherently advantageous of buying a subscription on LT versus buying a subscription on AutoCAD or PRDS or any of our other products. It is a highest volume product and given it is our highest volume product in perpetual sales, it will be our highest volume product on recurring sales as well. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So, we really focused on it first, because one of the – one of our concerns going into this transition was that the customers, who are more paying for the flagship products, would be very comfortable with the new models, but that some of the LT users were more casual and might not want to enter into longer term commitments. So, we've focused very heavily given that it was our highest volume product on making it go there. So, I think what we're seeing a little bit is we're measuring the effect of our influence on this. A better time to take the measurement will be as we hit Q3 and we get to the – where we get to the end of sale of the perpetual licenses for suites as well as introduce our new offerings that are really the desktop replacements for suites.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. And then as a follow-up, you mentioned couple times the good results in terms of the large deals. Was there anything in particular that you saw stood out to drive some of those deals in terms of the timing, whether it just be year-end budget flush or particular types of problems that those customers are trying to solve with doing these larger deals? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I think, there're a couple of things that have happened; some short term, some long term. One is there has always been more of a seasonality to our large enterprise deals. Some of it is driven by their end of year. And remember, even though the – one of the perks of this company is our calendar and fiscal numbering, it does give us a second close. So, we not only have a customer end of the year, but our sales people have an end of the year too. And so there's always been a stronger influence on Q4 because of that. So the second thing is, if you go back a handful of years we had almost no enterprise licenses, that was a non-existing part of our business, and I think, we've done a number of things over the mid-term to change that. One is we built out the sales force that did it, we changed the nature of some of our products, to better accommodated, we have licensing models that are more aligned with what they want to do, and I think our drive really to take a leadership position in the industry, whether it was – that's what we're doing in media and entertainment or BIM and AEC or what we're doing on the cloud and manufacturing has led companies to view Autodesk as a more strategic partner. I don't know how many years I'd had to go back before I would find that $1 million deal in a quarter was a big deal, and now it's fairly routine. So, we've invested heavily as we've detailed at Analyst Day this year and last year. We think there's a lot more there. We think the offerings coming enabled us to grow much more quickly and what we love about it is, it does have some trickledown effect in that all of these companies really affect their supply chain. So we're really excited about the enterprise business and we're going to continue to keep investing in it. And matter of fact, the biggest investment came during the 2008, 2009 downturn, when we recognized that our statistical run rate business was falling off and one of the places we could really invest was in the enterprise, and it was really out of kind of that soul-searching in the darkness that we really landed on this, and it's just been a continual success.

Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. Thank you. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs. Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thanks, Carl, for taking the question. I just wanted to ask you a little bit about your maintenance ARR, which declined in the quarter, and I guess after you canceled suite licenses at the end of the second quarter, should we expect the declines in the maintenance ARR to accelerate, and I'm just thinking about it, it's a high margin maintenance stream. So, what's baked into your assumptions on how this should decline for fiscal 2017, given your earnings guidance? And then I just have a follow-up. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Let me just say one word, and then Scott, can go. Yes, you absolutely should count on maintenance ARR going down after the end of Q2. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, Heather, I wouldn't say I don't know if accelerate is the right word, but this is again one of the trends we talked about back at Investor Day that as we sell our last perpetual license that will be the apex on maintenance subscriptions, which will come down at a rate consistent with our churn rate, and of course maintenance ARR will trail down as well. There is a lot of maintenance sitting in deferred revenue, right. So it's not going to come off quickly out of the reported revenues, but it will trickledown, it will become – in the second half of the year, both maintenance ARR and maintenance subscriptions growth will be a headwind to our total ARR total subscriptions growth. Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Okay. And then the follow-up question, and I guess there's actually…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jay Vleeschhouwer from Griffin Securities.

Jay Vleeschhouwer - Griffin Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah. Thanks. Good evening. Carl in the second half of this year, after you terminate the perpetuals for suites, you will be introducing your so-called collections. You've stated before that this is one of the opportunities you have to reduce the complexity in your business. Could you talk about how you've anticipated perhaps the cost savings and the selling process from introducing these new collections and improving or aiding the overall salability process of introducing that? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So the way – so let me just break this apart into two halves, Jay. I don't think our – any of our financial guidance is just predicated on what we're going to do with collections, but we do think about it a lot. We are – we would really like to simplify the offering for a whole number of operational reasons, it's incredibly important that we do that. The second and probably more important thing that we're trying to accomplish with collections is to give an incentive for the existing customers, who are on maintenance for suites, a more attractive thing to move over to. So, as we said, we want to try to use the carrot as much as possible to convince our customers, our best customers, who are on maintenance subscription to move over, and that's what we really are looking to do. At the same time, it is a great way to simplify our product portfolio. So, we're going to use it for both those things. I think it will be important and we will kind of get a better read on it as we go through the year, but a lot of financial modeling that we've been talking about so far this afternoon is really predicated on overall volume and we're not assuming on any kind of outsized performance from collections.

Jay Vleeschhouwer - Griffin Securities, Inc.

Analyst

All right. At the analyst meeting, you mentioned that about a tenth of your named accounts had already adopted EBAs, and I was wondering if you now have an updated adoption rate in light of the strength you highlighted for large deals in Q4, and looking out how would you talk about the pipeline or assumptions of close in the EBA pipeline for fiscal 2017, our understanding is that you've got a number of interesting names in terms of industrial and automotive accounts, for example, and then perhaps you could talk about that. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we do. We have a lot of really large manufacturers and large construction companies. I mean, there are certainly other companies in there, a number of media and entertainment companies. I mean, it's there, but it is focused in large manufacturing and large construction companies. I don't think we've hit 20% yet. So, we're somewhere in that 10% to 20%. I don't have a more precise number at this point. But I mean there's still a lot of room to grow and what's particularly good about this business, the growth in the business is just not the number of accounts, it's the growth within the accounts that's been so substantial. So it's not like we signed an EBA and at the end remember there is a consumption based aspect to this as well and we kind of detailed why we think it's a win-win. And so the existing EBAs continue to grow and we have more than 80% of our large customers are still not on these flexible licenses. So, last part, just to tie both your questions together Jay. There is essentially collections is a form of flexible licensing for smaller customers that can be sold through the channel. So, what we really want to do is use the patterns, just see the model that's worked so well for the enterprise and bring it to small and medium businesses and allow our partners to sell more flexible consumption based licenses as well.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley. Stan Zlotsky - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hey, guys. Good afternoon. It's actually Stan Zlotsky sitting in for Keith. I wanted to come back to the restructuring that you guys announced. 10% head count being taken out. Where are the costs that are being taken out? Where are they being reinvested as we head towards fiscal 2017? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So, I mean, there is only a small amount of reinvestment, but if you want to think about there are probably three areas where we are doing reinvestment. One area is moving to more inside sales, which I think is really important. The second is we continue to build out our back office. So remember, these flexible license offerings we talked about and are so proud about, we actually need to build the infrastructure to support that consumption based models unit. So, we are still investing in doing that. And then the third thing that we're doing is, you know, and I know it's gotten a lot less focus. I feel like I stand on my head and talk about this, it still doesn't matter, but the really big thing we're doing is investing in the cloud and mobile. And we're trying to change the dynamics of the market and we're continuing to invest in that. And so some of it is tied to cloud infrastructure and things like that. As you step-down a level, you would see things like continued investment in our enterprise sales force, things that are working. I think, you know, some of that first will fall in the category of the regular rejigging – rejiggering you do within a business. Clearly we…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Ken Wong from Citigroup.

Kenneth Wong - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Hey, guys, maybe a question first for Scott. In terms of your spend target for next year being kind of flat to down 1%, any conservatism baked into that particular number, I know, I get from the top line and from subscriber base perspective, it's particularly tough to gauge what might happen, but from spending, you guys generally control most of that, so. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. I wouldn't say there is aggressiveness or conservatism built into that number, Ken, that's one that's fully in our control. I mean, clearly the only variable there is if variable comp goes way up, because we have a blowout year, beyond that, and by the way we gauge that on subscriber growth. So I think that would actually be a good thing if it went up, but this is – the spend number is one we've got a pretty firm handle on.

Kenneth Wong - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Got you. And then a follow-up, Carl, in terms of your kind of new subs, what are you guys seeing on renewal rates, maybe not specific renewal rates, but relative to internal targets is that coming in better than expected and how should we think about that going forward? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I mean, so far so good, I mean, all of that was really good. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. I'd really – I'd say when you look at both the attach or on the maintenance side, we look at attach rate and renewal. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: And then of course on the new model subs we look at renewal and we've seen upward pressure across the board, both attach rate and renewal rates. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: So it's – I'd say that's one of those, as Carl talked about, we look at next year, our fiscal 2017 with lot of excitement and lot of that's based on what we've seen now in terms of the acceptance of the new models and what we're also seeing on kind of the general bias upward. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, look – and I think, it will continue. And if you want to think about this, we did the end of sale of the perpetual license for individual products last quarter and the ones for suites next quarter, customers are more incented than ever to stay on the program that they're on. So in the past somebody could get off and then get back on, relatively painlessly, that is no longer a possibility by the second half of this year. So I think, it will continue to lend pressure on an upward bias.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Steve Ashley from Robert. W. Baird. Steven M. Ashley - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Thanks so much. Something if you might be willing to disclose, what kind of unit volume you had in the year just ended FY 2016? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, unit volume was about 650,000 licenses. Steven M. Ashley - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Perfect. And then at the Analyst Day you outlined – gave an outline chart showing what you saw that revenue might be going out to FY 2022, what expenses might be, what margins might be, you've already commented that you're tweaking it a little bit with screwing down the expense growth a little more than that, and in the near term maybe the revenue is somewhat you thought, but if we looked in those out years of FY 2021 and 2022 is your revenue expectation for that still similar to what it was back at the Analyst Day? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, so let me start at the end and then I'll work backwards. The answer is, yes. Our revenue outlook in the out years is still exactly what we outlined. Steven M. Ashley - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Okay. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Get back to the beginning of your question, I would say relative to September, our expenses are much lower – considerably lower. Steven M. Ashley - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Yeah. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Just to put – from 5% to 6% that we said, was kind of the feeling. Now, we're talking…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Gregg Moskowitz from Cowen & Company. Gregg Moskowitz - Cowen & Co. LLC: Okay. Thank you very much and good afternoon, guys. Carl, I was wondering if you could give us a bit more insight into recent customer behavior in conjunction with the termination of perpetual standalone for customers that opted not to buy one last license prior to the end of January to allow them buy a subscription instead before the end of month, do they wait one week, two weeks, three weeks after the quarter and then move forward or have yet to make a decision, just wondering any more color you can provide on that typical customer just from like you've seen and heard so far? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: What it looks like to us is most of the customers are moving to the desktop subscription, that's the general one. There's still enough choices out there, and still enough people that we can't totally account for but we won't really know. I mean we'll get a much better feel in Q3 as this becomes the only way to buy. But from all the anecdotal info talking to our partners, what people are tending to do is buy desktop subscription, like we said we thought about 10% of the volume was people who were taking advantage of the last moment opportunity to buy. I think we'll see that again in Q2, maybe slightly stronger with the suites, but I'm not convinced about it yet, but many people are finding desktop subscription as the only attractive alternative and may be when we started talking about this a couple years ago, we were the tall pole in the tent or something about this,…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Brendan Barnicle from Pacific Crest Securities.

Brendan Barnicle - Pacific Crest Securities

Analyst

Thanks so much. Just as a follow-up to that question on new model subs. At the Analyst Day, you guys shared that I think 40% of the desktop subs were new to Autodesk. Do you have any update on what those look like as you look back over the year in terms of new customer – net new customers to you on the subs? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: No. We don't have anything that we can update you on yet. No, I don't – I wouldn't suspect there is any change there. But bear in mind there is a couple of statistics there. One is within desktop, right, how many of the new – of the desktop customers are net new to Autodesk. The other is and this is really where the future lies. Remember some of the statistics we have on the cloud products, where they are overwhelmingly net new customers that are coming to Autodesk. Now, it's still a small number today, but as you look further out in the future that's – we talk about TAM expansion, we talk about the upside of making not just the business model change, the advertising change, but the platform shift with that, and that platform shift really drives. We see a lot of net new customers, Autodesk can expand their TAM. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. If you look at this carefully, just to put it in size and why we defer to the existing base, you know, our cloud products that are doing well, are in the tens of thousands as opposed to our other things which are in the millions. So, the growth rates can be high, the percentage of any particular characteristic can be high, but we're still comparing 10,000. On the other hand 10,000 is growing at 50% a year, so it's turning into real numbers.

Brendan Barnicle - Pacific Crest Securities

Analyst

And then just following up you mentioned, you have any meeting with the channel next week and you mentioned the collections product is one sort of new offering for them, any other changes that you expect to see in the channel this year and anything related to either re-org and spending cuts that are going to change anything on that side? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: No. I think what you'll see in the – yes, they will see collections and they will hear about that, they will hear about new products, some of the improvements in the back office which has improved the efficiency of their businesses as well. There's always minor tweaks to the programs we have in place, but I don't see anything hugely different coming out of it, just one more year, our partners follow us closely as you know, and we've been working pretty closely. I will be disappointed if anything we said was a huge surprise to our partners.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets.

Daniel Bergstrom - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst

Hi, it's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking the question. Say to build on Heather's question and even Steve's with fiscal year 2017, free cash flow moving higher with the updated target, should we still think of free cash flow bottoming in fiscal year 2017 and then thinking back to the mentioned free cash flow glide path chart from Analyst Day. Is there a quarter or a year you'd point to when free cash flow would start to diverge from that chart and move more towards the updated targets? Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, Dan. I would say in fiscal 2017 still looks like the bottom for free cash flow, fiscal 2018 still looks like the bottom for net cash versus net debt. So I don't think that's changed. I think the hard part about pointing to the quarter is that is the nadir, that is the actual bottom, there's linearity within a quarter, has such a huge impact on free cash flow when you take this 90-day snapshot. I could just talk about the linearity of Q4 which was a strong quarter from any dimension, but because of the linearity we a saw lot of the sales that came in in Q4 coming in that third month and depressed our reported free cash flows for Q4 by about $95 million which now has shifted from Q4 and into Q1. So, I think with linearity being such a large variable there, it's really hard to say this quarter definitively is going to be the bottom, but think of it as happening in fiscal 2017 from a free cash flow standpoint and then from accumulated cash standpoint think of that as fiscal 2018.

Daniel Bergstrom - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Brent Thill from UBS.

Brent Thill - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Carl, I think maybe your answers going to be – you're going to have to wait to my question, but when you think about the suite bundles that you're going to have available, you have a very complex line up of products and I think everyone is just trying to understand how you think about directionally the number of bundles, what they look like, is this just something we're going to have to wait or is there any hints in terms of how we should think about that? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: No, no, no, you don't have to wait that long. I mean, we're going to be rolling them out to our partners. So basically it looks like – think of it as a couple per industry. It's kind of in rough terms, I know I can give you a lot more detail, but just think of it as a couple per industry and then there'll be a handful of standalone products that generally are in different price points and different levels of sophistication and complexity that, so for example, some of our complex simulation tools like Moldflow, we're not going to wrap into a bundle, because it just doesn't hit a broad enough section of the base. So the things that we're putting into the collection are the things that we think will be broadly used, and we're going to put together a couple of offerings in each of our three large industries that we serve. Richard Scott Herren - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: The way to think about it is the goal is first of all to simplify, and so you'll see us bring down what is a fairly large menu of offerings into a much simpler set of offerings, point one. And the second is to drive consumption, to build those bundles in a way that drives product consumption, much like we see with the T-Flex on the very high end. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah.

Brent Thill - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. And this is a follow-up. Carl, many of the analysts on the call have covered software for close to two decades. It's been rare you see a seven-year out goal and on the free cash flow number and just going and looking at history, you've never achieved $0.75 billion of cash flow, yet you're giving a $2.5 billion goal. I know this is an aspirational target and there's a lot of things that could change, but what gives you the confidence at this point to do that when historically these long-term targets have been tough to hit? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Good question, Brent. I mean, I think it's partially what I just answered is that we start – so for example, we start building a model in which almost all of the revenue comes off the balance sheet. So just starting with that idea, that quarters used to start at zero and will now start at 80 or 90 or 95, is different. You will also be able to look at things like the churn and see the renewal rates and extrapolate from there. To the extent that you are – and we generally haven't gone out that far, but people really didn't understand the dynamic of this and so we were just trying to put it in perspective. I mean to the extent that you want to discount FY 2023, feel free to. It's way in the future. I think the FY 2020 is there, the problem we had and really the reason why we gave details around FY 2023 is because FY 2020 or FY 2021 is still so much in the steep part of the curve and so when we were doing that and only talking about FY 2020, people were saying, is that the terminal – is it the terminal cash flow, is it the terminal EPS, is it the terminal operating margin, and it wasn't. And just to the extent now that traditional financial metrics are going to go down, predictably as a result of how we account for this, it's just as certain that they come up on the other side, so I'm totally fine with people wanting to discount FY 2023, we just wanted to make sure that people understood that that's what our model looks like. And if you back off it, look we've impressed, there are some people that think we should be able to get a lot more, there's some view we'll get to less, but you can then look at it in a pretty reasonable way about thinking about the number of subscribers, because remember if anything, we have been attacked for our ARPS. So, there's not a lot of assumption about the ARPS going up. So it really is all about subscribers and then ARR really translates directly to revenue. So, put whatever discount you want on it, Brent.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Steve Koenig from Wedbush Securities.

Steve R. Koenig - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hi, gentlemen, thanks a lot for squeezing me in. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the long-term trajectory, when it comes to thinking about new users. And I know that there's definitional issues there. But if we suppose that out of your 650K seat sales, run rate, let's just say for the sake of argument, half of those are kind of new users versus half are people that are active, but weren't regularly paying and maybe buying a new license or something. Unless I mangled that, if I'm thinking about that the right way, if we can assume that, what happens to that new user addition number as you move through the transition? Can that 300K go up due to adding pirated users, it probably should go up, you should be adding those old license users as subscriptions, but then those become renewals, later in time. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yep.

Steve R. Koenig - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

So, how can we think about the unit sales and the seat sales as we move along the transition? Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, we would hope to see those continually going up, we've been pretty modest in our assumption. But you're right, you have the old subscribers and remember the definitional issue just really gets to this thing of a user could be at a different company, but they have been a user before and let's just ignore that for a second, but the old subscribers would be there. Piracy, we think this will put a significant dent in casual piracy. And as we said, the new offerings are the places where we're getting new customers. So come at this different way, we talk about it sometimes as TAM expansion, we talk about it as new users, I referenced the 100 million people in manufacturing and construction who didn't have a need for many of the tools we've previously sold, who didn't (69:09) do now whether that's BIM 360 or PLM 360. Those are new users, those new users may be inside of existing customers or they may be in new accounts, but we maybe can give you an indication of many of these products are relatively high in almost all cases, the majority of the customers that are doing it are not traditional customers. The other thing that I think is really important and I know you guys do not want to bake too much of this into your model, but we're running a business, not a spreadsheet. And in our world, the investments we've made in going into cloud based engineering tools has led us to have a leadership position in that. We deeply believe that the future of all software is in the cloud and in mobile and it opens up big markets. I've always believed for people who invest in Autodesk, this is one of the fundamental tenets you should believe in. There are less difficult ways to get there, but we think the business model transition starts the curve we just talked about with Brent, but if that is going to continue into the out years, that's based on the fact that we expand into new markets, get new users and win the platform of the future.

Steve R. Koenig - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Great. I will leave it there. Thanks a lot, Carl. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay. Good.

Operator

Operator

Thank you and that concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Carl Bass, CEO for any additional comments. Carl Bass - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I just wanted to say one thing, I kind of hesitate to do it, because it's all been going so swimmingly. But I am really just trying to avoid work for Dave and Scott and I over the next couple of days, in having the same conversations several dozen different times, because I have had it in private, even as I go down to the coffee store, I get asked by all the investors in our building. And that's just the question of what's going on with our activist investors. And so, I just want to take that head on, I'm happy to talk about it privately with others, but it seems like a mistake not to address it to some degree. So, let me just give you my view point on this. The first thing is that I think a number of the 13D filers as well as some of the activist investors have raised legitimate concerns. The one part that kind of troubles me about it is that there are other long-term investors, really constructive investors, who have raised the same issues in a much better way. And so while we are absolutely talking to the activist investors, I think too much credit is being given to them and not enough credit is being given to our long-term investors, who have asked for a change in a constructive way. They've understood kind of the subtleties and complexities of running a business and they truly have taken the time to understand what the challenges and the opportunities we face. And so, I feel…

David Gennarelli - Director-Investor Relations

Management

All right. That concludes this afternoon's call. As many of you know, we'll be at Morgan Stanley conference on March 3. And you can contact me directly, you can reach me at 415-507-6033.Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does concludes the program and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a good day.