Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wix Q2 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 Emily Liu, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Wix's second 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 center on the Investor Relations section of our website, investors.wix.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Avishai.

Thanks, Emily, and good morning, everyone. We continued the momentum built up over the past few quarters into a strong Q2, exceeding expectations as we accelerated both profitability and growth for the third consecutive quarter. This is a testament to our focused commitment to our growth strategy while balancing operational efficiency. Revenue in Q2 grew to $390 million, above our guidance. We generated more than $49 million of free cash flow or 13% of revenues, also outperforming expectations. A meaningful driver of the strong performance this quarter was our Partners business, which grew revenue 36% year-over-year in Q2. For the last several years that our Partners business has grown, we have been listening to our partners' needs and innovating on a set of solutions tailored especially for professionals. This all has led to the launch of one of our most significant product releases in the last few years, Wix Studio, the new cornerstone platform of our partners' product experience. Wix Studio is the first-of-its-kind web creation and development platform, meant specifically for agencies and freelancers. It is an all-in-one platform for professionals to create websites, easily collaborate and delegate among team, manage workflows and clients at scale and grow their business more efficiently. I want to share a bit more about how Wix Studio came to life. Three years ago, we launched Editor X. Since then, we have gained significant traction with agencies and designers and have learned a great deal about the types of projects they build, about their needs in design and control and about how they run their business. We learned that agencies and freelancers need more than just a high-end design environment. They need tools to manage and grow their business. The knowledge we have gained has enabled us to make a significant leap forward in…

Thank you, Avishai, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I want to start by sharing a bit more about the significance of Wix Studio for our business, and then I'll share more about this quarter's performance. While professionals have always used the Wix platform, over the last several years, we have invested significantly into infrastructure, product development and marketing to expand our TAM by building the go-to-platform for professionals. Last year, we presented how the partner cohorts generate compounding growth. This compounding growth is inherent to the difference between partners and self-creators. Partners take on more and more projects over time. And therefore, each partner generates more subscription revenues over the lifetime of the cohort. Partners' website also delivered higher GPV, and they have a deeper grasp of advanced capabilities, adopting more business solutions and generating higher ARPS across the board. We continue to see this behavior and we will share more at our Analyst Day next week. The financial results from all of this have been outstanding as partners now make up 30% of our total revenue and continue to grow. This growth is a testament to the success of our investments. Wix Studio represents an important milestone in this journey. With Wix Studio, we are not only delivering to partners an updated powerful design and development experience with AI technology, we are also bringing something completely new that meets their specific needs. With the Wix Studio Workspace and its set of new workflow tools that will help agencies manage our business, scale and grow, we believe Wix Studio is a unique offering that no one else provides. And there will be much more to come. We will continue to add products and tools to Wix Studio as our partners grow with us. We believe that this…

Thanks, Nir. As Avishai mentioned, we continue to make progress in the disciplined execution of our profitable growth strategy in Q2 with growth and profitability accelerating for another consecutive quarter. Continuing to meaningfully expand margin will ultimately drive us to reach the Rule of 40 in 2025 under a variety of scenarios. At our Analyst Day next week, I will show you how we plan to reach this goal from where we are today. This quarter, we accelerated gross profit margin further, up nearly 580 basis points year-over-year as we continued hosting optimization and benefited from the cost efficiencies completed over the past year. Non-GAAP operating expenses as a percentage of revenue declined meaningfully from 66% in Q2 2022 to 51% in Q2 2023. This decline was a result of continued execution of our streamlined marketing strategy and the cost savings actions executed over the past year and completed last quarter. This drove us to log a new record high for quarterly non-GAAP operating income. Additionally, we achieved the first quarter of positive GAAP operating income in Wix history. This milestone demonstrates strides we've taken toward sustained GAAP profitability, which we believe we are very close to achieving. Non-GAAP operating expenses also declined more than 300 basis points sequentially from increased operating leverage as revenue grew 13% year-over-year, while operating expenses remained stable. This outperformance in Q2 caps off an incredibly strong first half to 2023 with free cash flow generation of $93 million, or 12% of revenue, which was better than expected. Excitingly, we expect to accelerate margin expansion in the back half of the year as we drive further leverage. Now on to the details of the quarter. Total revenue of $390 million exceeded the top end of our guidance range by $5 million as we continued to…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Matt Pfau from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys and great results. I wanted to ask first on Wix Studio. What are the monetization plans here? Is it something that you're going to charge for some of these features separately, or is it more of a plan to help your partners bring more subscriptions on your platform? Thanks.

Hey, Matt. It's Nir. So in terms of how we think about pricing and monetization. So the pricing for Studio at this point is going to be the same as it was for Editor X, and the way we think about monetization, and I think it also tightly relates to what I spoke about before in terms of the cohort behavior of the partners, is we are -- by introducing Studio, we believe that we can be much more attractive for these partners, for the designers and agencies that want to cater and build projects for their clients. It means that we'll increase the adoption of partners into the platform. And by increasing that adoption, we will just get more completed projects, which mean more websites and more subscription revenue coming out of it. We also know that these kinds of websites have a much higher likelihood to be commerce websites that also drive GPV and higher GPV, which is another great contribution to our monetization. And again, these partners are also much more sophisticated in their general approach to more complex business applications on the Internet, which means that they adopt more of our business solutions and therefore end up with a higher ARPS. So all of that together is a driver for monetization that we believe is going to not only continue the compounding effect of those cohorts, but hopefully even acceleration -- we'll see an acceleration of that effect.

Our next question comes from Ken Wong from Oppenheimer & Co.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to dig into the partner side of your business. That saw a notable step-up in terms of acceleration. Can you help us walk through some of the moving pieces there? How much was maybe the B2B flow through, or was there a lot of net new ARR that might have come through from kind of the traditional partner channel as well?

Hi. This is Lior. So I think that in order to understand it, I think that if you look at the net growth of the ARR, which was about 66% this quarter and Q1 was more than 90%, I think that it provides you with the right understanding that we managed to generate an incremental revenue to our business, mostly coming from partners, as you suggested. It's a combination of both B2B, obviously, but most of it is actually coming from agencies that are moving to Wix and using Wix to build their website. And we need to understand that this business has a compounding effect, because once you get an agency, they continue to build websites for their customers. And on top of it, you are getting a new one. This is why we see that the actual growth of partners is accelerating. This is why we still believe in this business and the fact that it can be even more profitable than the self-creators because of its compounding effect. In addition to that, we know that partners growth is also due to the fact that it's a different mix of customers. It's more businesses using more business applications, generating more GPV and transaction revenue, which obviously also contributed to the growth of this business. It's also worth mentioning that we expect this business to deliver also higher growth in the future due to the fact that we just launched Studio. So it will be interesting to see the result of it.

Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan from Needham & Co. Please go ahead.

This is Stefanos Crist calling in for Bernie. Can you just talk on the revenue acceleration? What you're seeing in the macro environment and how much impact that's had?

So we see some modest improvement in the overall economy, but it's only modest, obviously. Most of the acceleration that we see right now in the revenue is actually coming from the fact that we are getting and taking more market share in our Partners business. I think that it's worth mentioning the growth on a year-over-year basis it was 36%. So yes, we see some modest improvement in the overall economy as people are buying more online, but it's really, really modest. I think that most of the growth is attributed to the fact that Partners' business is going very well for us.

Our next question comes from Elizabeth Porter from MS. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you so much. Really impressive growth on the partner side of the business. I'd like to switch it to ask on the self-creators and more specifically about your top-of-funnel trends. Are we getting back to kind of normal cadence after digesting the impacts from COVID? And can you also speak to any change in conversion rates from paid customers to the user base that you've been seeing as you've been attracting kind of more high-quality customers? Thank you.

Hey, Elizabeth. It's Nir. So from the standpoint of the self-creators, you asked whether we are getting to normal pre-COVID cadence from the top of the funnel. The answer is not yet. As Lior mentioned before on his comments on the macro economy, we have seen some improvement to top of funnel, but it's still not where it was pre-COVID. And our belief is that there is still room for more recovery there over time and as the general economy gets better and better. In terms of conversion rates, yes, we have seen conversion rates going up. First of all, because of the significant changes we've done to our marketing strategy, and we're bringing much higher-intent users now. So obviously, that is paying off. But you've also seen improvement simply due to the cadence of our product release and innovation that is aimed at helping users become more successful. The February release of ChatGPT within the Editor is a good example for something that drove that. And obviously, we have many, many of those coming. So that's also another positive effect on conversion.

Our next question comes from Chris Zhang from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking our question. So the question is around the marketing expense guide which you took down from 27% to -- net to now 25% to 26%. And remember, previously, you mentioned the second half increase of the brand marketing expense, which would represent probably a 400 basis point step-up. Are you still expecting that, or is there any change in the strategy there? Thank you.

Hi, Chris. This is Lior. Yes, we do expect to see increase in marketing due to the fact that we just launched Studio. So obviously, we are going to invest in order to accommodate that. The amount of spending that we have in our plan, yes, we plan to increase the investment in marketing. But going forward, obviously, it will be a reflection of how successful we are with this product, meaning that it's a strict variable cost, very linked and attached to the success that we are going to see in Studio. So it's hard for me to tell you what will be the run rate? But obviously, yes, we are going to see some increase of our marketing investment in the second half of the year.

Our next question comes from Ygal Arounian from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Hey. Good morning, guys. Good afternoon. So first on Studio. Can you maybe just talk a little bit more about when you expect it to kind of hit general availability? Is there anything additional to share on the marketing efforts you just talked about around it? The agencies that are currently partners, do you just switch them over? And how on that kind of expectation that partner growth accelerates or has more strength in here because of this product? What does that kind of sell-through process? And then, I just want to talk about GenAI for a little bit. You guys have done a great job of late highlighting how it benefits in the things you're doing. Site Generator looks really interesting. Are you seeing any tangible evidence that AI is helping drive more website creation and web building, helping your customers create better websites so far, or is it still too early for that? Thank you.

Ygal, it's Nir. I'll start with the first question about the Studio. So the current launchpad that we already started this Tuesday aims to first open and invite our existing very large base of partners to adopt it. Obviously, to get feedback, to introduce more improvements, to iron out whatever needs to be ironed out as well as understand and help educate them on this new platform with a goal of, first of all, teach these people that have been with us for many, many years and already use our platform in order to cater to the needs of their own customers. That being said, the next step will indeed be to go to general availability, sometime in probably Q4. We will determine what is the best path to do that as we gain more insights from the first phase of the launch, which is already happening. I'm happy to say that already yesterday, we started opening and adding partners into it in thousands, in many thousands. And the initial feedback we are getting is very, very encouraging. We're getting very positive feedback on many, many different fronts. So we're very happy about that. And we will continue to monitor that and make sure that we have a very smooth transition into it and then continue in the launch plan towards the general public.

In regards to your question, if we see any tangible evidence that GenAI is actually improving business performance, then yes, we do. I'm not going to disclose all the details, but I'm just going to say that the thing we released in the first part of the year and late last year already are showing improvement in business KPIs. So it makes us very optimistic. And of course, the more we put those kind of technology in front of more users, we expect that factor to grow. But if you think about it right, the core value that Wix brings is reducing the friction when you try to build a website. And when you use that technology, that can do tremendously well in order to improve that core value. And then, of course, we expect the results to be significant.

Okay. Thanks. Anything you can share on when generator will be ready or can't do that yet.

Like every research project, it always looks more easier than it actually is in reality. I can say we already managed to generate real websites with it. So we are past the critical and hard part. Now it's a lot about publishing it and making sure that it is a clean product and reliable. So we are at that phase now.

Our next question comes from Clarke Jeffries from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hello. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask about profitability, certainly at a brisk pace in terms of getting to 18% operating margins. And even going back to the last Analyst Day, I think it was contextualized that much of the profitability improvements are going to come from the partner business. Is that still tracking to be the case? And has the recent revenue outperformance in that segment lended at all to a faster pace to cash flow breakeven? And then, as sort of a follow-on to that, I think it was interesting to see sequential dollar decrease in Creative Subscriptions COGS. Lior, how much optimism do you have that the actual dollar value in COGS could go down in the future, recognizing we have guidance here for gross margin on the Creative Subscriptions side?

So first of all, let me start with saying that I will show in our Analyst Day, a very detailed plan both for -- in terms of the profitability, both for self-creators and partners and will show exactly how we are getting this leverage. I want to start and say that yes, improvement is coming from partners, but not just from partners, but also from self-creators just from the fact that we've become more efficient company. So for example, when you are taking down our hosting, it impacts both partners, but also self-creators. So we managed to optimize the gross margin by keeping the cost fixed while revenue is increasing, so there they get more and more leverage. We are doing it by developing all kinds of tools in order to help us to optimize the hosting. To your question with the gross margin, yes, I think that I believe that we are going to see more leverage also next year. Obviously, it's not going to be huge, but there will be some more leverage to our gross margin just from the fact that revenue will be growing more than the cost or more than the variable part of the cost. Now with regard to the profitability, the overall profitability, I will show during the Analyst Day that we've already reached in the second half of the year to a run rate in terms of our cost structure that will lead us to the Rule of 40. And this is something that is really important to mention. We don't need to do anything else. We're simply going to see every quarter, every year some more leverage coming from the fact that revenue is growing, but only the variable part of our cost is growing, which delivers a huge leverage to our model.

Our next question will come from Andrew Boone from JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to go back to generative AI. As you guys bring this to market, can you talk about how you feel like your product will be differentiated versus the competition, as we think about AI generated by others? Thanks so much.

You're mentioning the AI. So what we do in terms of generating websites, right, is different than others. So the ones that we've seen until now are essentially doing the following, right? They take a template, and they generate the text for the template and then they save that as a website. Essentially, they're using ChatGPT to write text and then just put it inside of a template. When we started, we did that. We're now doing -- with ChatGPT, we're doing it since last, I think, November. And with ADI, we did it, of course, with algorithm less sophisticated. But even then, we didn't just inject text to template. We actually created layouts around the text, which is the other way around. And that creates a huge difference in what we generate because when you fill text into a template, you are creating essentially artificial text that will fit the design. While in most cases, if you think about building a business, you do the other way around, you create your marketing messages and then you create a design, right, to fit that. And visually, it creates a massive efficiency of those websites and very different. So that is the first difference. The other difference is that if you think about it, since probably 1998, you could write text in a word document and then save it as HTML. So now you just build the website, and you have the text and you have a very, very basic website. Of course, you cannot run your business on top of that because it doesn't have everything you need to run a business. It doesn't have analytics. It doesn't have a contact form. It doesn't have e-commerce. It doesn't have transactions. All of those are the platform that makes it into…

Thanks. And Lior talked about the growing number of partners. Can you talk about the driver of that? I understood Studios has come and so was that more product-driven, or did you guys do anything different on the marketing side? Thank you so much.

So in terms of the growing number of partners, yes, it's both product-driven more than marketing. We need to remember that we haven't really started with a marketing campaign for partners. I think that we built a business that is close to $0.5 billion in a few years without significant investment in marketing. Obviously, now when we have the complete solution Wix Studio, we are going to invest more in marketing. So a different way to look at it is it just opens for us much more opportunities in terms of the growth. But most of the growth for partners is actually was driven by product.

Our next question comes from Brad Erickson from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thanks. Just a couple of follow-ups. I guess, first, as you speak to the acceleration in the second half growth and kind of looking into next year. Maybe just talk to the growth algorithm for bookings between subs and price, particularly as you lap those price increases? And then, second, just some housekeeping. Lior, can you just speak to any FX changes that are assumptions that are contemplated in the guidance versus last quarter? Thanks.

Yes. So look, everything with regard to the FX was not meaningful. I mean there is a kind of a few hundred thousand or $1 million effect of FX. So it's not really worth spending time over it. When we look at the second half of the year in terms of the acceleration, obviously, the comp are decent. Remember that Q1 of this year, the growth was about 10% over a very strong quarter of last year. So we are benefiting from a different comp. But on top of it, we are very encouraged to see the growth in our Partners business and the growth of our Business Solutions. So as usually, what we do when we provide the guidance, we see the cadence. We see the fundamentals that we have in front of us now. And based on that, we provide guidance. So it's simply just taking what we see right now and without taking into effect any upside, for example, from the launch of Studio. So this is with regard to the acceleration.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference back to the company for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Antone, for that. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Have a great day. Bye.

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