Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wix Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rona Davis, Head PR & Communications. Please go ahead.

Thanks, and good morning everyone. Welcome to Wix's first quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Avishai Abrahami, CEO and Co-Founder; Nir Zohar, our President and COO; and Lior Shemesh, our CFO. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements, and these statements are based on current expectations and assumptions. Please consider the risk factors included in our press release and most recent Form 20-F that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we will comment on non-GAAP financial results and key operating metrics. You can find all reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results in the earnings materials and in our Interactive Analyst on the Investor Relations section of our website, investors.wix.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Avishai.

Thanks, Rona, and good morning, everyone. We have had a fantastic start to 2023. And I'm pleased to say that we exceeded our expectation across many areas of our business. The drivers of our results this quarter were broad based across our business, both on the top line and on the profitability. Revenues in Q1 grew to $374 million, above our guidance. We generated $44 million of free cash flow, excluding one-time charges and [Technical Difficulty] also ahead of our expectation. These great results are a testament to the strong execution of our strategy to provide the best platform of innovative product for our users while increasing operational efficiency and discipline. Much of the growth this quarter was also driven by our Partners business. This year, scaling our business with Partners, including designers, freelancers and enterprise partnerships, the main key strategic focus. Partners revenue growth accelerated this quarter, up 27% year-over-year. We recently announced some exciting product for Partners, including Wix Headless and have many more incredible product announcements and marketing plans for later this year. The outperformance of this first quarter is very encouraging. So, we are raising our revenues and free cash flow outlook for the full-year, as well as pulling forward many of our profitable targets for 2023. Our profitability at the firm, boosted our confidence in achieving the Rule of 40, 2025. I will let Nir and Lior share more detail about this quarter and then I will close with my thoughts on AI. Nir?

Thank you, Avishai and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'll share a bit more details about our performance this quarter. As it relates to our user cohorts, some color on our marketing investment in the quarter following the recently announced strategy shift and an update on our focus on operational efficiency. Let's start with user cohort performance. Our Q1 2023 new user cohort performed exceptionally well with 5.4 million new user collectively generating more than $30 million in bookings in this first quarter. Easily the highest same quarter booking in a non-COVID cohort. And on the base of a significantly smaller size cohort. This clearly indicates the inherent improvement in the fundamentals of our business, including subscription conversion and average collections per subscription, as well as stable retention. Diving deeper into these fundamentals shows the returns from our focus on bringing higher intense sales creative users and partners, which convert at higher rates. It is also the result of higher monetization driven by users choosing higher price subscription, strong adoption of business solutions applications, more transaction revenue as a result of higher GPV and increased take rates, and continued contribution from our B2B partnerships. We expect these trends to continue in the coming quarters this year. Lastly, this performance is a testament to the strength and scale of our global brand as reflected in the success of our marketing strategy shift implemented last year. As a reminder, based on tests we started last summer, we determined that we could keep new cohort bookings stable even if we will reduce acquisition marketing spend by half. We continued this marketing strategy this quarter and decreased acquisition marketing spend by approximately 47% year-over-year, while still increasing new cohort bookings. After more than 8 months of expanding and perfecting this new strategy, we are confident in the results and therefore expect investment in acquisition marketing to remain at reduced levels throughout the rest of the year and beyond. In addition to the strong fundamentals and the significant increase in marketing effectiveness, we also intensified our focus on driving operating efficiency across our business. We successfully implemented the cost savings outlined last quarter, as well as realized additional hosting optimization opportunities and continued to decrease headcounts. We added Q1 with 5,006 employees, down 18% year-over-year for nearly 6,100 employees in Q1 2022. With that, I will now hand it over to Lior to walk through more details on our financials. Lior?

Sure. Thanks, Nir. This quarter was marked by fantastic profitability improvements that allowed us to achieve our 2023 profitability targets much earlier than anticipated. Even more importantly, these steps firmly put us on a path to achieving Rule 40 in 2025 with significant expansion of our margins. In Q1, we grew gross margins by nearly 500 basis points, driven by hosting optimization and headcount efficiencies among other cost savings. We further drove operating leverage by executing on our new marketing strategy, reducing headcount, and implementing savings across our entire operating cost structure. Non-GAAP operating expenses as a percentage of revenue declined significantly from 77% in Q1 2022 to just under 54% in Q1 2023, resulting in the highest non-GAAP operating income in our history. This effort drove free cash flow generation to finish higher than anticipated. Looking past this year, we expect to continue this quarter's momentum by advancing our commitment to operational efficiencies across all aspects of our organization, continued cost management, mostly across operating expenses will enable us to drive further leverage and expand our cash flow margin significantly. In addition to our continued profitability improvements, I'm also very excited about the execution of our strategic initiatives, particularly our focus on the Partners business that will enable us to continue to deliver growth in the coming years. Now, on to the details of the quarter. The fundamentals of our business remained strong this quarter, which led us to exceed the top-end of our guidance range for revenue. Total revenue was 374 million this quarter up 10% year-over-year. Total bookings were 415 million in Q1, up 6% year-over-year. Remember that we signed our partnership with LegalZoom in Q1 2022, creating a difficult comparison this quarter, removing this amount from bookings in Q1 of last year, our FX neutral year-over-year…

Thanks, Lior. I've been getting a lot of questions about AI lately. So, I want to share my thoughts to close out our time today. [Our background] [ph] prior to Wix was in the development of advanced computing algorithm, including AI, which is why I find the recent AI breakthrough so exciting. In fact, the data and AI groups here at Wix report directly to me. Over the past decade, we've been unlocking more and more opportunities based on AI, breakthrough, while also collaborating with the best teams on the planet at OpenAI, Google X, IBM, and others. My thoughts on AI can be summarized in three key points. First, our goal at Wix is to remove friction. The easier it is for our user to build website, the better Wix is. We have proven this many times before for the development of software and products including AI as we make it easier for our users to achieve their goals. Their satisfaction goes up, conversion goes up, user retention goes up, monetization goes up, and the value of Wix grows. In 2016, we launched Wix ADI, an AI based [titration platform] [ph]. In fact, it's equivalent to using a prompt to build a site. The user enters some basic information about their business and they recommend the pages images and text that makes sense and then generate the site personalized to the business. Obviously, the tech generation ability in 2006 were a bit naive compared to the recent [gen AI tools] [ph] of today. That said, due to our long established team, and institutional knowledge of AI, it was easy for us to replace that initial text generation tool with open AI, ChatGPT for our text – AI text creation, which we introduced earlier this year. Today, new emerging AI…

Certainly. [Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Ygal Arounian of Citigroup. Your line is open.

Hey good morning guys and good afternoon. A lot of good color on the AI, and we just want to focus on that maybe a little bit more specifically on that last point, would you talk about more opportunities to leverage AI and add value for users even, kind of further into the future as all this evolves? I guess, I want to maybe expand on that point a little bit. And as we talk to investors over the past couple of weeks, this question has come up more. I think the biggest fear is that all the stuff happens and that folks start to go to some of the larger players in AI where you can build websites and do some of these things and as they develop their AI capabilities, they started to develop some of the stuff more. So, maybe just talk about how you envision that? And why has the AI capabilities improved, you expect users to continue to come to Wix?

Of course. Well, the first thing I want to say is that – the first part of your question right is about what kind of opportunities to leverage the AI do we get, right? And I think it's about a few things. I'll start the first one. It's about how many of the people that try to build a website on Wix actually finished with the website that they are very happy with, right? And the more we increase that ratio, the better is the customer experience, the longer those customers will stay with us, and of course, the better monetization. And we've proven, right, we did AI in 2016, but by just generating a lot of the finger to [indiscernible] for the users. So the text, which we did and the images and the layouts, we increased conversion. I think the current technology will allow us to do it even further. So, I look at it as a way to – and website is a combination of many things, not just the text. So ChatGPT help us some of it, but you still have to have the right structure, the right visuals, the right layout, the right design and way to use the user images. So, there's a lot of work there. And the – so I think this is the first part, right, creation on the website. The next part is, how do you edit and modify and use the website. There it’s a bit harder to use any of the standard models because you want to replace an image, you don't want to write – I want to replace the third image and the fifth column, can you please change it to something – actually it's easier to go and click and point on it. And you…

Yes. Essentially they leverage their AI capabilities and build create website builders and replicate what you're doing and use some of the – so why people stay on Wix?

Yes. So – okay, so – but if you look at what you can do today with AI, there are actually two things that changed dramatically. The first one is the creation of text, right, which has changed dramatically. And images, which you can invent images and do that. But as I said, we've been doing it for a very long time. And of course, not in the same tech generation, not nearly as good as ChatGPT, but this is a very small part of what we do, right? Because how do you use that to create e-commerce, right? How do you use that to make a scheduling engine? Just think about all the way that you need to sign contracts, repayment processes to run that. How do you edit things, okay, on top of it? So, pretty much 8% of what we work on and develop, right, is not covered by that. You need your site to be running well. You need to be managed well, you need to have SEO, you need to have security. And then you need the ability to update content, you need to have the ability to do slideshow and scheduling e-commerce transaction, collect leads, all of those are not covered. So, what you can do essentially is create with all those tools and the basic level is get simple lending pages, right, which is, kind of like a very [static pay] [ph]. But you could always do that already with micro support. You can just go and take the text and publish it as HTML and put it in some hosting company. So – and those guys have never been our competitors, The one that do that, okay. The do just very basic simple lines. In fact, you can do those in Wix. And it is a very small portion of our business. So, if you look at the majority of our business, I think there is a very – still very – quite a few years and probably more than just quite a few years until we see that the AI is starting to cover that kind of software.

Great. Thank you. That's really helpful. Just as a quick follow-up on some a little bit more near-term. A number of interesting [tier] [ph] announcements this quarter. Maybe if you could just expand on the Google ads, because you talked about that being a meaningful contributor to the growth in Business Solutions. And then – but the news around the [indiscernible] products was really interesting and could potentially open up the opportunity with the partners a little bit more. So, maybe if you could just hit on that as well. Thank you.

Well, this is actually a good demo of what we are utilizing the power advanced algorithm to bring an AI to bring more value for our users, right. It's a way for you to not understand anything about what you need to do in Google in order to create great advertisement and for us to fully create that and generate it for you. And by doing that, we reduce the friction for our user have – and running successful Google [indiscernible] is a very – well, it's a real skill that you need to learn and takes time, and we use advanced algorithms to read for the users. And the result of that is that we have more – the happier users that their business is more successful. And of course, for us, it means more monetization opportunities. It is [as funny as] [ph] it is, it's also being used a lot by what we call partner as web agencies because even for them, it provides so much value and reduction of friction and labor that we see a lot of the professionals are using that product.

Thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question will come from Aaron Kessler of Raymond James. Aaron, your line is open.

Great. Thank you. Maybe just a couple of questions. Maybe just you comment a little bit on the macro in the letter, just maybe your updated thoughts there and kind of the environment we're seeing, especially with SMBs right now. And second, just the non-GAAP OpEx guide. I think you lowered that a little bit, but still given the strong Q1 performance there, it looks relatively conservative to guide. Just any updates on the non-GAAP OpEx for the year as well? Thank you.

Hey Aaron, it's Nir. I'll take the first part and Lior can follow up on the second part in regards to the OpEx. So, in terms of the macro environment, we've seen some modest improvements kind of across the board in terms of – on the demand side, top of funnel, some – I would say, some recovery in growth in GPV, a little bit in the transaction revenue, as well as the subscription behavior of the – both the existing cohorts and the new cohorts. That being said, it's still relatively early. The increase is modest. So, we're being cautious not to call it a recovery, but we do point out that we're seeing a little bit of it.

Hey Aaron. This is Lior. With regard to the OpEx, I think that this is one of – in my mind, one of the most amazing things that we will manage to achieve. OpEx this year, the non-GAAP OpEx is going to be around 58% to 59%. And I believe that this trend of taking down OpEx as a percentage of revenue will continue into 2024 and 2025, which brings me the confidence and our ability to meet the targets that we set for the Rule of 40. So, you should expect it to continue decline as a percentage of revenue even in the next couple of years and it will be significant.

Got it. And just in terms of 2023 though, I think you did 54% in Q1 in terms of the non-GAAP OpEx. I guess any reason it wouldn't be lower than that 58%, 59% for a full-year?

Yes, because as we mentioned last time, the second half of the year, we do plan to invest more in branding for the weeks, especially with regard to the Partners vertical. And we said that we are going to do that in the second half of the year. So, it's reflect that.

Great. Thank you.

And one moment for our next question. And our next question will come from Mark Mahaney of Evercore ISI. Your line is open, Mark.

Great. Thanks, two questions. Could you talk about the revenue growth outlook in order to get to that Rule of 40. I think for the full-year your guidance implies maybe the potential for very modest acceleration, are there factors that could cause that revenue growth rate over the next two or three years to get back to the, kind of the mid-teens levels? And if it does, what would be the two or three biggest drivers of that? And then secondly, just on Google ads, could you just talk through the mechanics or the materiality of that? Thank you very much.

Okay. For the first question, Mark, we obviously see a tremendous growth in terms of our partners business, approximately 30%, very much in-line with what we said during the Analyst Day, but I must tell you that I didn't plan into my model growth or acceleration in growth in revenue in order to achieve the Rule of 40, meaning that the Rule of 40 will be mostly achieved by more efficiency and leverage coming from both of gross margin, but mostly operating margins. With regard to the Google ads, look, this is something that we started and it's a great – as Avishai mentioned, it's a great monetization of our funnel of our customers. It is millions of dollars. I don't want to provide the exact amount, but this is one of the very exciting growth driver for our business solutions.

Okay. Thank you, Lior.

One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from Elizabeth Porter of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you very much. Really helpful color on why, kind of the current AI platform is harder replacement for Wix, but you also referenced emerging AI technologies, providing the opportunity to actually increase Wix’s addressable market. So, could you provide more color on who that incremental user type is that you expect to be able to address and how that's different than your core TAM today?

Of course. I think that – one of the things that we always see in Wix is that we have a lot of users that come to Wix and sometimes, they can't finish the website that they want. And there are many reasons for that, right? Some of the reason is that it just takes too much time. At the end of the day, you have to personalize the template, you have to – even if you use ADI, you still have to go around and fix a lot of things and understand how to do that. You need to understand how the user interface works for that? So reduction of that complexity and making Wix more available to users that are less advanced or don't have the time is something that we think is one direction of increasing that addressable market. The other side of it is exactly the opposite is that users that actually understand not use the platform pretty well, but cannot use the more advanced functionality. I don't know whether it exists, right? So, you come to Wix and you think about, Oh, I need to have an application that does something specific, and it's not obvious to you or you cannot find how to do it on Wix. And these are actually the opposite, right? Because on one side, those are the – users that don't have the time on [sophistication] [ph]. And here, we have users that have a lot of time and sophistication. For example, they'll be using Velo to actually [quoting] [ph] into the website. Here, I think we have the advantage that with AI, we can expose them, give them the ability to ask way more complex questions. And we get more detailed answers and actually guidance into where they should be going. So, in other words, I think that the expansion of addressable market will go both ways towards more advanced users, more advanced functionality. And then for the people that just want to finish a website quickly, and do [indiscernible] get results. I think those are both directions that it will allow us to expand into.

Great. And then on the B2B partnership side, you mentioned that it's starting to impact revenue in the model. And while it's small today, how should we think about the magnitude of the impact, kind of building through this year into 2024?

So, I believe that, Elizabeth, if you take the overall bookings that we already had and some of the deal we already mentioned in the past, it is growing very fast, meaning that 2023, we are going to see millions of dollars. And I guess that 2024, it will be more like tens of millions of dollars. But it's growing, and we are able to sign more and more deals, and this segment is actually growing very nicely. I do want to mention that we see less people that are willing to sign for a multi-year agreement. Nevertheless, we see many of them actually moving to Wix and start to Wix for their customers.

Great. Thank you.

One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Clarke Jeffries of Piper Sandler. Your line is open Clarke.

Hello. Thank you for taking the question. First question is for Lior. I mean, one metric that seems to jump off the page is improvement in net new ARR and creative subscriptions ARR. I wanted to ask what specifically drove the improvement? I mean, the color around the Q1 cohort is helpful, but it doesn't seem to really fully reflect the inflection there. Wondering if you could maybe break apart maybe changes in churn or what might drive that improvement in the ARR from Q4 to Q1?

Well, so there are a few reasons for that. The first one, I might say that it's coming from the growth that we see in our partners business, we see more and more agencies using Wix and building an existing agencies, building more websites for their customers. And we saw also a better conversion of existing users, creating more subscriptions. The third point is, as we mentioned before is, we see more revenue coming from the B2B partnerships also has a positive effect on that. So, those are like the three main reasons. And the [four reason] [ph] was obviously the ARPU increase that was happening this quarter, meaning that we see a more shift to like more expensive packages, has a positive impact on the growth of our creative subscriptions.

Perfect. And then just one follow-up. You're characterizing half of the increase to free cash flow being driven by some of the cost of revenue efficiencies and another half from OpEx. Wondering if you could parse-out maybe where you are in terms of your expectations splitting that between Partners and self-creator, is there a disproportionate amount of the cost savings both on cost of revenue and OpEx coming from either self-creator or the Partner business? Thank you.

Yes. So obviously, it's coming from both of them, but mostly from Partners. I mentioned many times in the past that we are going to see more leverage in Partners where Partners is growing. And this is exactly what we are seeing. We see more leverage coming from the Partners. And it's mostly because of the fact that we invested a lot of building this vertical in the last 2 years. And we started to see the fruits of it and getting more and more leverage from this business.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Trevor Young of Barclays. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. First one, just dovetailing on that prior question. On free cash flow margin, ex all the items at 12%, can you kind of break that down into core self-creator versus Partner itself create or kind of still high teens, which would put Partners still modest, but improving free cash flow declines or self-creator now north of 20% in-light of all your cost actions, which would maybe a result in Partners still being quite a bit more negative. And then on the geo mix, Europe slowed to just 5% year-on-year ex-FX, despite easier compares and maybe lapping some of the headwinds that started with – after the Ukraine conflict. Any color on why Europe is slowing?

So, with regard to the first question, we do not provide at this point of time, the breakdown of the free cash flow between Partners to sales creators and promise that I'm going to do it in the next couple of months or in a quarter or two, I will provide all the information. With regard to Europe, you are right. I think that it's mainly due to a tough comp in Q1 2022, but we obviously see the effect of also the war in Europe that's affecting the overall business.

One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Brent Thill of Jefferies. Your line is open, Brent.

Thanks. Just a question on sustainability of demand in the back half. I know Nir mentioned it's still too early. You don't want to call it a recovery, but you did raise the guidance more than the actual beat in the quarter. Can you just talk to the visibility and maybe for Lior, can you give us a sense of just what the linearity of the quarter looked like? And ultimately, what happened into April into May?

Sure. So, the way that we provide guidance is, we take the KPIs, the fundamentals as we see right now. We don't improve it. And I didn't count as any improvement or further improvement to what we see right now based on that, we provided our guidance. But I believe that you see increase or acceleration in growth in the second half of the year, due to a different comp because Q1 of last year was a very strong quarter for us. So, obviously, if you are looking at it on a year-over-year basis, the second half of the year is going to be stronger due to that. But again, it's not coming from a place that we took any kind of assumption about more recovery than what we see right now. April, May also has been good and continue. I cannot say more than that.

Thank you.

One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from Andrew Boone of JMP Securities. Your line is open.

Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Avishai, you talked about the importance of integration in the back-end in terms of AI, I think in the context of also launching ahead the solution, what else do you guys need to build in terms of the back-end to make the business more defensible and compete against maybe other competitors that have already built out, kind of head of solutions. And then secondly, thinking about the self-creator business, as well as marketing. As we think about the rest of 2023, can you talk about the puts and takes in terms of marketing spend and how we should be thinking about self-creator revenue growth? Thanks so much.

I just want to add a quick – to clarify. In the first question, do you mean in regards to AI or just you mean to a Headless vendor – software vendors?

I think more broadly. So, if I think about the back-end and you talked about the defensibility that creates when you think about AI coming online, if I think about your Headless solution, I think those – it's somewhat connected in terms of what else you guys can build to make the platform more defensible, as well as to attract more Headless dollars? I mean, maybe that's wrong, but talk about them why that thesis is wrong or what else you guys need to build there?

Well, okay. First of all, I think I understand the question better now. So, there's quite a few parts with that. But the first thing is that, Headless is just one of the things that current model AI cannot do, right? They can do very basic things [come to code] [ph]. And if you think about the [old start] [ph], right, the things that you need to have running booking, scheduling website, right, so you need databases, index data basis, a lot of APIs. And then you need to have also to sign contracts, right, with processing merchants and banks. And there's a lot of things that you need to do, right? So, I think this is something that – it's going to take quite a while. And when I say quite a while, we don't even have [excluded by] [ph] the algorithms that we'll need to do something like that yet. That's quite aligned in the future. But every element we're going to get from AI to simplify that, of course provides value for Wix just because it allows us to do it better faster and reduce the cost. Now, there's going to be a lot of opportunities on [indiscernible]. As for the Headless itself, so we have quite a few software stacks that we built that are being used by tens of millions of users and are quite fantastic, but we never offered them [on title] [ph] Wix. Now yes, in some cases, you have competitors that have – like e-commerce, right, where you have really great competitors out there. But in some case, like scheduling booking and the ability to manage a variety of events and other things, there's not really anything similar in quality to what we have. So, we think the opportunity there is the ability to allow people to use that and offer that on a website that are not built on Wix. And I think that is something that will create for us another marketing channel, which is very different than a standard one. It's mostly based on power there and professionals. And long-term, I think the value there is quite big. There is something that because we actually provide all of the different elements and not just one, like shopping cart, e-commerce base, then the thing is that there's also the integration so you can actually have all of them offered together and not in separate business and I think that provides quite a lot of value.

Andrew, it's Nir. In terms of the marketing plan, so as Lior mentioned and as we also illustrated in the previous quarter, we do expect on the Partner side to see an increase in marketing as we have some initiatives around that segment in the second half of the year. In terms of the sales creators, we will continue the current focus, which is a combination between brand activity, as well as the direct acquisition a similar cadence as we've done this past quarter and before is we see that marketing strategy really paying off.

Thank you.

I would now like to turn the call back to Rona Davis for closing remarks.

Thank you for joining, and have a good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.