Earnings Labs

Yext, Inc. (YEXT)

Q3 2019 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 29, 2018

$3.92

+1.42%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to the Yext Third Quarter Fiscal 2019 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to James Hart, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

James Hart

Analyst

Thank you, Andrea, and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our quarterly conference call. With me today are Howard Lerman, CEO of Yext; Steve Cakebread, CFO; and Jim Steele, President and Chief Revenue Officer. As a reminder, this call cannot be taped or otherwise duplicated without the Company’s prior consent. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements about revenue and non-GAAP net income guidance, cash flow, gross margin, our industry outlook, market opportunities, business performance, financial outlook and other non-historical statements as further described in our press release. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those related to Yext’s growth, evolution of our industry, product development and success, market opportunities, adoption of accounting principles and general economic and business conditions. These statements reflect the Company’s current expectations based on its beliefs, assumptions and information currently available to it. Although we believe these expectations are reasonable, we undertake no obligation to revise any statement to reflect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of these and other risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in our reports filed with the SEC, including our most recent report on Form 10-Q and our press release that was issued this afternoon. During the call, we will also refer to non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations with the most comparable GAAP measures are also available in the press release, which is available at investors.yext.com. With that, let us begin by turning the call over to Howard.

Howard Lerman

Analyst

Thank you, James, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We had another great quarter with record revenues and continued growth in our mid 30% range. To give you just a few highlights, revenue grew 33% over the third quarter last year. That's above the high end of our guidance. Gross profit increased 34% and we also substantially improved our quarterly non-GAAP net loss margin. And for the second consecutive quarter, we added nearly 80 new enterprise logos that’s the most new logos we’ve ever added in two quarters. We continue to see some of the best-known brands in the United States, Europe and Japan choose Yext. Brands like Air France, Lacoste, Papa John's, Krispy Kreme, Valentino, Tooney , Bane and Olson, the Texas Children's Hospital, The Body Shop, Thomas Cook, Pizza Hut UK, Welcia Yakkyoku that’s one of the Japan's largest drugstore and pharmacy chains. So far this year, we have added well more than 200 new enterprise logos, and that's nearly as many as we added all last year. And while we continue to add new logos, we’re always looking for ways to grow with our existing account. Let’s talk about that for a minute, this quarter we signed renewals or expansions with AutoZone, FedEx, Boston Medical Center, Stop & Shop, SunTrust Bank, Ameriprise Financial, Hyundai and many, many more. We believe every business and every geography needs digital knowledge management, healthcare, travel, financial services, food services. the United States, Germany, the UK, Japan is a business has a website that business needs Yext, and that's because websites are dumb. A website is nothing more than a big giant document that makes you think. Let me tell you about what I mean. Last month, we held our Annual User Conference, ONWARD. ONWARD brought together leaders from around…

Jim Steele

Analyst

Thanks Howard. As Howard said, we are very pleased with the year we've had so far and are excited with the energy and enthusiasm coming out of ONWARD as we head into the fourth quarter. We continue to win new business this quarter closing nearly 70 deals with at least $100,000 in contract value. There is a broad range of deals including new wins, renewals and expansions of existing accounts. We also saw success in key verticals as well as across all of our geographies. EMEA had its best ever quarter for new business. In short, this was a very balanced portfolio of new business, which is something we love to see. It tells us our success it not limited to just one specific region or one particular type of customer. As Howard described, every business needs Yext whether it's a large multinational corporation or a local mom and pop. We've created a go-to-market strategy to address these three customer types small, medium and large. If we look at how we're doing across each of these with small business this quarter, we accelerated our move away from the direct sales approach in favor of going deeper with our partners to address single license accounts. S&P is an attractive market, but we want to pursue this channel in the most economically rational way. In mid-market, we have built out the leadership team, but are still in the early days. Mid-market should be such a sweet spot for us given the profile of the customers, so we're looking to ramp here quickly and as quickly as possible and have more work to do. For our enterprise business, we could not be more pleased with the team we have in place and the results they have achieved so far. Their pipeline is strong…

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

Thank you, Jim. As Howard and Jim have mentioned, we’re really pleased with our results this quarter and over the first nine months of the year. The revenue of $58.7 million grew 33% over the third quarter last year. If we exclude the decline related to direct SMB, revenue increased 38% this quarter, and 41% over the first nine months. As Jim said, we're focused on enterprise which is performing very well. We're just getting started in mid market and transition away from direct SMB. Growth is coming from a mix of new customers, expansion up sales with existing customers. Our net revenue retention was a 109% this quarter and just to note our retention and enterprise in this markets continue to be consistent or even a bit stronger than our usual levels. Deferred revenue increased 40% from the year ago quarter to $83.2 million. And as we previously discussed, we will see variability in this balance from time to time. We remain comfortable with our long-term trends, and as Jim discussed, we're pleased with our business opportunities. Now, looking at profitability, gross margins were 74.7% this quarter. This is an improvement of 100 basis points over the third quarter last year and reflects improved economies of scale. We continue to be comfortable with operating our gross margins in the mid 70% range. Total operating expenses increased from 49.9 million in the third quarter last year to 68.7 million this quarter. The largest driver to this increase was sales and marketing. This was primarily due to the higher headcount of quota-carrying sellers. In addition, ONWARD happened in the third quarter as compared to the fourth quarter last year, so incurring these expenses sooner this year. Looking at other expense lines both R&D and G&A as a percent of revenue were…

Operator

Operator

We’ll now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Mark Mahaney of RBC. Please go ahead.

Mark Mahaney

Analyst

Let me ask two financial questions. Steve, could you just walk through the variability of deferred revenue? What factors would cause that to go -- to accelerate or decelerate? And just maybe give us some thoughts on, what that number could look like next quarter? And then just on the guide, I know you reiterated your breakeven in terms of cash flow for the fourth quarter, have you talked at all or could you talk now about how we should think about cash flow going into next year directionally?

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

With regard to deferred revenue and we’ve had this conversation a number of times, it is seasonal with our business as well, but there's a number of things that influence the deferred number on the balance sheet. One is our billing, so if we have monthly, semiannual, quarter annual, now we continue to drive our customers, to annual. But as we've had in previous quarters we do take semiannual and quarterly and monthly billing depending on the deal and a lot of some of the smaller businesses are still on monthly. So that mix continues to move around. We continue to drive it to annual, but it does influence in the calculations that you’re going to have. Obviously, since we’re enterprise driven right now in terms of big deals, deal timing has a big influence on that too in terms of when we may close the deal when we build that deal. So those are the two big variables that influence a lot of what you see in deferred revenue and a lot of what we look at in terms of billings I’ll also say that the third component is we have a pretty seasonal business here. So Q1, Q2, Q3 all can behave slightly differently. So those three effects will impact in what you see in deferred and a year-over-year basis often times. With regard to cash flow you’re right we’re driving this company as best we can to get to cash flow breakeven for the fourth quarter. In terms of longer-term cash flow, a couple of things, we’re still working on next year's budget, so I can't speak specifically to what might be next year, I will say that and I think we've proven this since going public. We said we will continue to drive non-GAAP margins and improve those year-over-year and we’re still driving towards breakevens. This is no exception. We've done that this year so far we will continue to do that. We have also said that our longer-term business goal is to get to cash flow breakeven. I think we’re doing that as well. We’ve lowered our cash burn in the first nine months and I think we’re going to continue to focus on that. That said it's really important that we make sure we invest in this business and look for the opportunities of growth expansion and we are going to do that. But I think you look at the historical trends that we have done and we are on our trajectory to drive this company's breakeven. The timing is something that we have not talked about and it's still uncertain based on our business opportunities.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Brent Bracelin of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Clark Jefferies

Analyst

This is Clark Jefferies on for Brent. First question for Howard. One of the articles at Crawford Desk early this week was, the Bank of India experiencing branches of its bank having the phone number changed, fraudsters trying to direct phone traffic away from the physical location. Wondering if you could just maybe have a quick take on that and situations like that so that can be a demand driver for your business? And maybe as it relates to the international market, the relative dependency on search engines and how some markets may see greater value in your solution?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

It made me think I wish we had already set up our operations in India, we are ready to go. It underscores the fact that digital knowledge management is a global opportunity. Every business in the world whether you are a small business or a multinational enterprise or you are a bank in India with regions across the entire subcontinent needs to have a structured set of information and take control of their information everywhere. And it underscores what can happen when you don't do it. It's funny. Finserv is one of our biggest categories. We work with tons of banks and financial services institutions around the globe that can benefit from Yext. I wish we were already in India and set up, Jim maybe we will send you there soon.

Jim Steele

Analyst

I'm ready.

Clark Jefferies

Analyst

And then a question for Jim, still strong enterprise logo adds, still strong 100K deal activity. Anything you could comment about, what is the nature of those maybe even midseason kind of strong adds, and maybe anything if you could talk to the pipelines to your end maybe in the $1 million deal activity?

Jim Steele

Analyst

Yes, sure. So, the enterprise business is really one of our great success stories. We started almost two years ago with building a whole new focus on the enterprise and we had a number great logos but we were selling a product, maybe a couple of years ago, and we've really shifted in last year with kind of our year of transforming that enterprise team to focus on selling the top form and selling a solution. And that's a very different way that to engage it, it requires new skills and some cases we hired many new people. We trained our team on how to engage in enterprise. Most importantly, we hired great enterprise leadership with Dave Rudnitsky whom I worked with for 20 years at Salesforce and other companies. And in Europe we hired three amazing MDs that have tremendous enterprise experience. And Japan we did the same thing. So enterprise has really been a great bright spot for us. As we like to talk about the logos and the significant brands and what we are focused on is building C level engagement within these big enterprises and that's helped us a lot as we have gone from selling products to selling a solution and a platform. So on top of that our client services team has done just an amazing job at driving very high the world class performance in terms of renewals and retention in the enterprise space that's really been just a total bright spot, the tam there is enormous, the pipeline I'm not going, I can't give you any numbers on that, but I can tell you that's something I think about every single day we focus on it. So it's really now just executing in the enterprise, we're hiring like crazy, it's about capacity and it's a big investment and enablement to make sure that our enterprise team is well-equipped. So that's what I'd say plus we have a great product roadmap and it certainly helped with ONWARD to announce Brain, and Think. And our enterprises love that when they see us the evidence of us really building the platform are supported by that announcement.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Naved Khan of SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Naved Khan

Analyst

Few questions and maybe a clarification, first, so I think Steve just said that or maybe Jim you said that. One of the factors is seasonality in terms of deferred growth and billings and how it affects deferred. Can you just sort of clarify how the seasonality is in the business between the four quarters so that we have a better understanding? And then I had a couple of follow-ups.

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

We are a software company and technology, generally Q1s are light, Q2s are good, Q3s some can be light, if you don't have a good August or it start slow in August, and then Q4 is strong. So you'll see that reflected if you're doing top billings and as I've said before, for a company of our size at this stage a top billing's is rather volatile metric to be looking at, but as that -- but and I appreciate everybody does it. But I believe that were on track and I think the message is seasonality will move differed revenue around, if you guys all know. But our enterprise business is really doing well and we continue to believe that the product roadmap the excitement that came out of ONWARD is something that we are looking forward to in the future.

Jim Steele

Analyst

And by the way thank you for your business, SunTrust bank was expansion and renewal in the quarter, we appreciate it.

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

We will make sure that there no scammers taking over your Google listings.

Naved Khan

Analyst

Good to hear. So a follow-up I had was on the, I guess, earlier this year you said or kind of mention a goal of sales direct sales being 20% of the overall headcount now that you are getting closer to year-end do you feel you're going to hit that number or just kind of give us some commentary there?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

I don't think we are announcing our the number yet we're going to announce that at the end of the year, but Naved, we are hiring very aggressively not just in the enterprise, but midmarket on our partner team as well. And you will see those numbers -- we will tell you the numbers at the end of the year, but that's been our goal and every week at our management meeting that's the first thing Howard ask, let's go through our hiring and capacity because this is really we've been talking about this for a while. This is a market that we've been building and capacity is everything and then the enablement of that capacity. So, we are hiring aggressively in the sales organization and you will hear us tell that story at the after our fourth quarter.

Naved Khan

Analyst

And then one last question if I may so, can you just sort of comment on the clients willingness to upgrade to higher tier packages such professional or ultimate, what are you seeing there?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

Yes, we're -- in the newer geographies like in Europe and in Japan, we’re kind of in the land grab mode where we're going in and say, we have a lot of new business and a lot of new logos, and we would expect that business to be highly skewed towards new, new landings. And in the U.S. now where we had a more mature business, we been here for few years and we've got great success in the enterprise. You'll see that our mix is pretty even, I don’t think we’re talking about the percentages, but we see a lot of customers upgrading to either expanding their footprint with us to new locations and new entities. We talked about the healthcare business where doctors are not locations there the way we look at that, that's a new license opportunity for a doctor for example, even though they might have a certain number of medical facilities like the example I used with ENTA. So, we’re seeing a lot of our customers are expanding their footprint as they've been successful in one division, they come back and say, okay, now we’re willing to look at this other division and that's additional licenses. We're also seeing customers expanding to our pages for example from listings and reviews as well and now with events. So, we were seeing and that’s really our strategy, it's land and expand strategy and it's we're a couple years ahead in the U.S., and I'll expect now with a strong base that we have in Europe and starting to see in Japan, we will see that same kind of progress.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Stan Zlotsky of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Stan Zlotsky

Analyst

I hate to beat on billings but this is just preempting the question that we’re going to get tomorrow morning. Is there any maybe big deals that slipped out of Q3 and into Q4 because you did mention the 80 new enterprise logos, which is very much in line with what we saw in Q2, but it just a little odd to see the deferred revenue dynamics and just a sequential quarter on quarter decline in billings. And maybe just more broadly for Jim, what are you seeing as far as just like the productivity and the consistency of execution within your sales organization, and the just a very quick follow-up for Steve after that.

Howard Lerman

Analyst

Well, thanks for the questions, Stan I will talk about Brain. So Stan, there is something of note that came out in terms of big deals moving overall. We have a couple for an enterprise business you're always going to get that particularly in the Q3, Q4 timeframe while people assess by this and everything, but I think this is again when you do the calculation it is volatile. You can go look back and see this number's moved around quite a lot. In terms of the deferred again it's somewhat influenced by seasonality. This quarter has August in it when we lost a lot of Europe in August obviously. So there’s -- I think there’s a point I’d like to make is the number does move around because we’re still too small and a small change will move that number around to make it somewhat volatile; the fact of the matter is that we have really strong enterprise quarter which you saw the logos we’re building our midmarket and feel really good about that. And it's still a little early days but it's starting to grow, we’ve got the right team in place and we have small business which we’re trying to transition -- and so I don't think there's anything wrong with the business, the metrics just kind of move around a little bit more than would feel comfortable but nothing of any bad note.

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

Yes I would just add to that Stan, with the enterprise especially in some of the big deals, you're always going to see that lumpiness. You know it's not linear kind of growth, necessarily it is highly based on buying cycles and so every quarter is going to be different on the enterprise. With that said, we are doing great in the enterprise across the board, especially in Europe in the third quarter and so the -- consistency is something we obviously strive for, across the three different types of markets that we’re going after between enterprise, midmarket, and SMB, just to piggyback to what Steve said. In the SMB, we made a very strategic decision that our partners can do such a much better job selling into that market, it is a much more economical way to do it so we definitely plan to as we’ve done moved that from direct to indirect and so you’re going to see maybe a bit of a lag on the SMB side and the very low-end, the onesie-twosie’s. Midmarket, we’ve really -- we’re about a year behind where we were with enterprise. When I came in my main focus was on enterprise and we hired executive at the end of last year, guy, I used to work with at Salesforce Dave Lehman, to run our midmarket. He’s brought in new leadership, he’s brought in new processes, we’ve hired a bunch of people there and that's where we’d expect to see as I said, we think that should be a huge sweet spot for us and we’d expect to see that market really start to perform in the coming quarters. So every market go after is different, every type of customer is different every geography is different, and they all have different performance results and we are always looking for that balanced performance and right now I’d say that the big plus for us is the enterprise business and we’ll -- when we see that on midmarket we’ll be happy to tell you about it in the future.

Stan Zlotsky

Analyst

And maybe Steve just a very quick follow-up, you mentioned 41% growth year-to-date in the enterprise part of the business. Could you just maybe and I missed that I was jumping between quarter and between different calls, but did you give exact the growth rate in the quarter ex-SMB?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

Yes, we did.

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

38% for the quarter, 41% for the nine months year-to-date, and again that -- and we talked about before too, the SMB business is falling off here, so it’s significantly smaller enough, that’s somewhat of creating the volatility in deferred right now too.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Tom White of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Tom White

Analyst

Surprise, surprise I have got a question about Brain, but maybe before that just one on guidance. So, it looks like you guys raised full year revenue outlook by maybe slightly less than the amount of the third quarter be I guess versus the midpoint of the guide anyway. Anything in the fourth quarter that’s maybe looking a little bit different than it was a few months ago? And then just on Brain, we would love to hear your early observations, maybe about how customers are starting to use the custom entity functionality? Specifically, I guess I'm particularly interested in the mix between them creating entities for their first party assets versus ones that are purely for distribution to third-party sites. And curious about, what that first party to third party mix might look like over time, if you have any predictions?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

On Q4 guide, it's our largest quarter and so I think we are very thoughtful about what we're going to do. We have obviously a lot of brand-new business to bring in, but also we have large renewals. So, there's nothing there. Like I said, we feel really good about where we are at and what we are doing but we are pretty thoughtful since Q4 is always a huge number for us.

Jim Steele

Analyst

Couldn’t be more excited about Brain. We unveiled the beta version at ONWARD on stage with us demoing that we had Steward Health, we had Wendy's and Morgan Stanley showcasing their use of the Brain. Brain is a breakthrough product. It enables a company to create any type of entity they want and to relate them together in a way that is designed to power their knowledge and search, in their third-party search services and voice search in Alexa and Google assistant and also in their first party search experiences using our product called Think. And Think and Brain are highly tightly integrated they allow the Company to get structure to give their end users answers instead of documents that are searching on their website. It's funny a decade ago Google went through the shift of blue links on a page when you search to one box sensors, maps math sensors so just telling you the answer when they know it. Today, we see that companies are going to begin to be able to do the exact same thing, and instead of going to a website and searching for a nearby typing a location or give me a doctor that has certain attributes and getting a set of documents that match that query back, a company can now will be able to the Brain put those answers into the Brain and just give answers back. We see access the platform of truth, the source of truth for every company that today has a website that’s a dumb document that’s going to need to structure their information in a smart way for third and for first party as you point out Tom, assets that is one place to update third and first party services to their Brain.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Alex Zukin of Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead.

Alex Zukin

Analyst

Maybe just another crack at the deferreds, I'll ask in a different way. If I look at the sequential deferred in 2Q, it was actually a lot stronger than your historical seasonal patterns which lends [indiscernible] volatility comment. But I guess -- is that, is one of the reasons for the third quarter kind of sequential weakness was that actually maybe some business got pulled into 2Q from 3Q? Or is it more of the pushing from 3Q to 4Q?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

A lot of this has got pushed, pulled into Q4 for sure, and a lot of enterprise deals are as Jim described, timing is always a challenging part of this. So, it’s a little bit of all of those that's why you know, like I said, the deferred number is still 40% what's really strong, but that's also why we have the optimism around of business that we're in and what we're doing. So, yes a little bit of all those Alex.

Alex Zukin

Analyst

And then maybe just to that optimism then, looking beyond billings, looking beyond deferred, I know you are not giving guidance to fiscal -- for the next fiscal year, but just some high level commentary around your confidence? I mean you can see how consensus estimates are at, any confidence or commentary around just 30 plus percent growth being an intermediate goal?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

Well, like I said we haven't really gone through our numbers yet. I mean we have consistently believed that over the long-term we will be able to grow at 30% plus, so that's not changed, but we need to look at all other factors in terms of our product and the roadmap which continues to grow which is the positive. But building out to the sales force as Jim described they were hiring enterprise and midmarket sellers now because that's a big area, and I think that's the area that we need to build-up to get some of this seasonality and flexibility taken out of the system. But all-in-all, I think we feel pretty good about where we're at and what we're doing, but we just need to get through our budget and planning, we have another 60 days and see what next year is going to look like.

Alex Zukin

Analyst

And then maybe on dollar-based net expansion, as you lap the [indiscernible] and I apologize if you mentioned this in the beginning, I was also jumping between the calls. As you lap that merger I guess where should we expect that number to trend? Is it fair to expect that the trend back into kind of the one teens or is kind of 109 or less than 110 million normal?

Howard Lerman

Analyst

Hey, Alex sorry. It's Howard. I wanted to jump in here and add something to the optimism. When I look at our business, I look primarily at our non-SMB growth, that is to me the critical thing that we're looking at everyday because that's where were making the investment in the business to grow. And so, when I look at 41% year-to-date 38% in the quarter, I'm feeling really good about our first off obviously Q4 with the guidance we've given. But you know, looking next year and beyond and our ability to continue to deliver results particularly as SMB becomes a smaller and smaller percentage overall of our mix, even if it maybe kind of shrinks a little bit faster than we'd even wanted it to originally just because of the path they were totally focusing these other areas. So the optimism I see is in that 41% that we've seen year-to-date and the 38% and the vast majority of our business that isn’t a drag on everything else.

Alex Zukin

Analyst

And then maybe on the dollar base net expansion, Steve?

Steve Cakebread

Analyst

The dollar base net expansion, I think again we're using a 12 months rolling metric. It's clearly leveled out right now to 109 to 110 range. So, we feel good about that. We'll see as we get into enterprise to midmarket because as I've mentioned, we're not losing those as we say really good with our accounts, but it still will take some time to goes back into 113.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to James Hart for any closing remarks.

James Hart

Analyst

Alright, thank you, Andrea, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We look forward to reporting our fourth quarter results to you next year. But in the mean time, hope you will enjoy the holidays and if you have any follow-up questions, please reach out to me, I'll be available.

Operator

Operator

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.