Earnings Call Transcript - BOX Q4 2023

Operator, Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Aby and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Box, Incorporated Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Thank you. Cynthia Hiponia, Vice President of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Cynthia Hiponia, Vice President of Investor Relations

Good afternoon. And welcome to Box’s fourth-quarter full-year fiscal 2023 earnings conference call. I am Cynthia Hiponia, Vice President, Investor Relations. On the call today, we have Aaron Levie, Box Co-Founder and CEO, and Dylan Smith, Box's Co-Founder and CFO. Following our prepared remarks, we will take your questions. Today’s call is being webcast and will also be available for replay on our Investor Relations website at www.box.com/investors. Our webcast will be audio only. However, supplemental slides are now available for download from our website. We’ll also post the highlights of today’s call on Twitter at the handle @BoxIncIR. On this call, we’ll be making forward-looking statements, including our Q1 and full-year fiscal 2024 financial guidance, and our expectations regarding our financial performance for fiscal 2024, fiscal 2025, and future periods, including free cash flow, gross margins, operating margins, operating leverage, future profitability, net retention rates, remaining performance obligations, revenue and billings, and the impact of foreign currency exchange rates, and our expectations regarding the size of our market opportunity, our planned investments, future product offerings, headcount targets, and growth strategies, our ability to achieve our long-term revenue, operating margins, and other operating model targets, the timing and market adoption of, and benefits from, our new products, pricing models, and partnerships, our ability to address enterprise challenges and deliver cost savings for our customers, the impact of the macro environment on our business and operating results, and our capital allocation strategies, including potential repurchase of our common stock. These statements reflect our best judgment based on factors currently known to us and actual events or results may differ materially. Please refer to our earnings press release filed today and the risk factors in documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q for information on risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made on this earnings call. These forward-looking statements are being made as of today, March 1, 2023, and we disclaim any obligation to update or revise them should they change or cease to be up-to-date. In addition, in today’s call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for or in isolation from, our GAAP results. You will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations with comparable GAAP results, in our earnings press release and in the related PowerPoint presentation which can be found on the Investor Relations page of our website. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to financial measures are on a non-GAAP basis. With that, let me hand it over to Aaron.

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Thanks, Cynthia, and thank you all for joining the call today. We had a strong year at Box, exceeding a $1 billion annual revenue run-rate on a quarterly basis and delivering a healthy balance of revenue growth and increased profitability. For the full year, we achieved 13% annual revenue growth. Our operational excellence drove significant margin expansion as we achieved 23% non-GAAP operating margins, up more than 330 basis points from 20% a year ago. Our continued execution and our sharp focus on profitability allowed us to deliver on our revenue growth plus free cash flow margin target of 37%, a 400 basis point improvement from last year's outcome of 33%. We delivered these results amidst a challenging macroenvironment and our ability to execute on delivering bottom-line performance even with a slowing demand environment is a testament to the strategies we put in place several years ago to lower our cost structure while still investing for long-term durable revenue growth. Turning to Q4, we achieved revenue growth of 10% year over year while delivering record quarterly operating margins, gross margins, and EPS. As expected, our Q4 net retention rate was down year over year, impacted by pressure from customers' lower headcount growth and greater budget scrutiny on internal transformation initiatives. In some cases, these dynamics impacted our customer's IT decisions and priorities across their business, and this dynamic included some deals pushing out or deals getting incrementally smaller than anticipated, leading also to a softening in billings as we exited FY '23. Even with this added macro pressure, our platform remains top of mind and extremely relevant for customers as they look to secure their most important data, drive up productivity, or retire legacy IT systems and simplify their IT stack. Examples of Box delivering this value to our customers in Q4 include a global logistics company that upgraded to enterprise plus through a six-year deal to leverage shield governance and sign and the unlimited Salesforce and e-sign integrations. With Box's additional security and e-signature capabilities, the company expects to see significant cost savings while improving employee productivity by eliminating the need for multiple solutions. A medical research center that purchased enterprise plus in Q4 will be retiring their legacy share file environment as well as other systems to reduce cost and complexity while increasing their security posture with Box. This news also sets up Box for additional expansion when a new research facility opens next year. As I continue to speak with CIOs and CEOs in a wide range of industries, their digital transformation imperatives remain focused on enabling productivity across their business, especially in a hybrid work environment. They are working to optimize their spend and simplify their IT stack as they move more to the cloud and, most importantly, ensure they are dealing with a number of challenges in data security and compliance, ranging from ransomware threats to data leak challenges. At the center of these challenges is how enterprises work with their content. Fragmented content architectures have led to greater security risks, lower productivity due to complex tools, and limited ability to automate anything, and too many overlapping or legacy solutions with significant IT management overhead. We know that our content cloud is best positioned to help customers solve these challenges. Our platform enables our customers to drive up productivity in their organization, simplify their IT stack, and optimize spend and protect their most important data from a wide range of threats. We continue to solve these challenges for customers with even more innovation in Q4, such as releasing key enhancements to Box Shield, adding new authentication and verification controls to our platform to drive customers with greater protection against unauthorized account access. We launched the public beta version of Box Canvas, our virtual whiteboarding solution, and we continue to integrate deeply across this vast landscape with the delivery of new enhancements to the Box Salesforce Integration on the Salesforce AppExchange. And we're just getting started. As I look forward into FY '24, we will be going deeper on our three major pillars of differentiation. To help protect our customers' most important data, we will be dramatically enhancing our core security and admin features for all customers, building out further shield features to support an evolving threat landscape, expanding governance capabilities to support more complex life cycle requirements, and continuing to maintain our high compliance standards. To help customers drive up productivity with seamless internal and external collaboration and workflows, we will be continuing to improve our core product experiences and usability, focusing on adoption and awareness of products to all users and admins, doubling down on sign and relay for advanced workflows, building out our modern collaboration experiences for the hybrid workplace with notes and canvas, expanding to help our customers disseminate content to internal and external audiences more easily, enhancing our content insights capabilities to offer richer visibility into what's happening with your content, and more. With our platform, we will continue to focus on connecting content across all our customers' IT systems, making Box the single source of truth for content in the enterprise, and we'll continue to enhance our critical partner integrations like Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zoom, and many others while also further building out the tools for customers to build applications on Box. We will also be further building out our security ecosystem, driving enhanced partnerships across a wide range of security partners like IBM, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk. With our content Cloud, we have built the defining company that helps enterprises store, secure, automate, collaborate, sign, digitize, analyze and gain insights from their most important information. We know that our customers' most important data resides in their content, it's their contracts, their movie scripts, their marketing campaigns, critical research reports, project plans, and more. The recent breakthroughs in AI and large language models enable a new universe of use cases that we can also solve for customers. Building on Box Skills, our framework that applies best-of-breed AI technologies from leading providers to our customers' content in Box, we see all new use cases for enterprises to generate more value from their content when it is in Box. As an example, being able to query Box for the risky clauses of a particular contract, synthesize a research report for key insights or summarization, quickly find the answer to a sales prospect's question from a document, extract key metadata from an invoice without any pretraining, and much more. This vision will take time, but we expect the digitization of content combined with AI will bring us exciting new product opportunities in the future. Now turning to go-to-market. We continue to enable more new and existing customers to recognize the full value of the Box platform with increased adoption of our multiproduct offerings in Q4. Enterprise Plus, our latest suite offering, was over 90% of our suite sales in large deals with suites now representing 72% of deals over $100,000, up from 65% a year ago. We saw continued solid suite attach rates in large deals across all geographies. Our Q4 customer expansion and new wins with Enterprise Plus include a multinational healthcare company that became an Enterprise Plus customer through a six-figure upsell, enabling them to use Box Zones to meet in-region EU storage compliance requirements, roll out Shield to safeguard their collaboration with partners, and leverage Box's GXP compliance to accelerate validation of complex use cases. A leading global manufacturer chose to go wall-to-wall with Box for a six-figure enterprise plus deal as well. With Box, they will be able to integrate across their current tools like Microsoft Teams, O365, and RingCentral and execute some of their most mission-critical business operations, including contract management and R&D and sales approval workflows while also fulfilling regulatory compliance requirements. We recently held our global go-to-market kickoff, and the team is fully energized to tackle the opportunity ahead of us. Throughout FY '24, we plan to continue to focus on ensuring our over 100,000 customers get the most value out of Box and continue to focus on moving more of the customer base to Enterprise Plus. Our programs across go-to-market are all about doubling down on our land, adopt, expand, retain motion through our digital engine inside and field sales efforts, working with key strategic system integrators and technology partners, applying more focus to our key international geographies as well as going deeper in key industries like financial services, life sciences, healthcare, public sector, and more. Finally, over the past year, we have been executing on our strategy to drive long-term sustainable growth while also delivering continued operating margin improvements. As we began to see the impact from the challenging macro environment, we adapted to the environment and continued to deliver significant gross and operating margin expansion. Even amidst the ongoing macro dynamics, which may pressure top-line results at times, we remain focused on continuing to deliver bottom-line improvements. We are driving efficiency across the business, making ROI-based decisions across every area of investment from product to go-to-market initiatives, continuing to improve our gross margin by fully moving into the public cloud and driving operational excellence in everything we do. Our resilient financial model allows us to respond dynamically to the market environment, which is even more important as we enter into a period of incredible change throughout the world of business and technology. There has simply never been a more exciting time for what we can now do with content, and our business strategy will ensure that Box is at the very center of how customers work. With that, I'll hand it over to Dylan.

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Thanks, Aaron. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. As Aaron stated, FY '23 was a strong year for Box as we delivered on the three key financial objectives we laid out at the beginning of the year. We accelerated annual revenue growth on a constant currency basis, expanded operating margin significantly, and optimized shareholder returns through a well-executed capital allocation strategy. Additionally, we are very proud of the strong cash flow margin expansion we delivered in FY '23. In FY '23, we delivered annual revenue of $991 million, up 13% year-over-year or 17% in constant currency, and in line with our initial full-year guidance despite experiencing significantly greater currency and macroeconomic headwinds than we initially anticipated. FY '23 also marked our first year of achieving GAAP profitability, a significant milestone for us. We expanded our non-GAAP operating margin by 330 basis points to deliver a 23% operating margin, a full percentage point ahead of our initial expectations. We generated $238 million in free cash flow, a 40% increase year-over-year. Finally, we achieved our target of delivering revenue growth plus free cash flow margin of 37% in FY '23, demonstrating the resiliency of our financial model amidst the challenging macroeconomic environment. Turning to Q4, revenue of $256 million increased 10% year-over-year, or 15% in constant currency. We ended Q4 with remaining performance obligations or RPO of $1.2 billion, a 16% year-over-year increase or 21% growth on a constant currency basis and once again growing faster than revenue. We expect to recognize roughly 60% of our RPO over the next 12 months. Q4 billings of $357 million grew 6% year-over-year or 9% in constant currency. Q4 billings were partially impacted by the early renewals we experienced in the prior quarter and continued scrutiny of larger deals. In Q4, we had approximately 1,650 total customers paying more than $100,000 annually, representing a 16% year-over-year increase. Our suite attach rate was 72% in deals over $100,000, up from 65% in the year-ago period. And in Q4, we saw consistent attach rates globally. Suite customers now represent roughly 46% of our revenue, up a full 11 points from 35% a year ago, demonstrating that customers are increasingly adopting suites to support high-value use cases and to reduce cost and complexity for their organizations. Our net retention rate at the end of Q4 was 108%, in line with the expectations we set on our Q3 call. Our annualized full churn rate was 3%, an improvement from 4% in the prior year, demonstrating continued product stickiness with our customers. In FY '24, we expect full churn to remain at roughly 3%, and our net retention rate to be roughly 106%, as we anticipate continued pressure on seat expansion rates due to the macroeconomic climate where certain customers are reducing headcount and lowering IT budgets. We expanded gross margin by 340 basis points year-over-year to 78.5%, driven by continued efficiencies from our infrastructure strategy and the impact of higher price per seat due to strong suite adoption. Q4 gross profit of $201 million was up 15% year-over-year, exceeding our revenue growth by a significant 500 basis points, demonstrating the continued leverage in our business model. As I discussed on our last earnings call, we are completing the transition to running fully in the public cloud in FY '24, and we'll see our redundant public cloud and data center expenses peak during Q1 and Q2. We expect gross margin to be approximately 76% in Q1 and Q2 before improving in the back half of this year. For the full year, we expect gross margin to be roughly 77%, positioning us with an even more efficient underlying cost structure to expand gross margin in the following year. In FY '23, we achieved our sales force headcount target, growing our sales force by roughly 15% year-over-year. In FY '24, we intend to grow our quota-carrying sales force in the mid-single-digit percentage range with a continued focus on our higher-performing geographies and segments. We continue delivering on our commitment to drive profitable growth with a 37% increase in Q4 operating income. Our record 26.0% operating margin was up an exceptional 520 basis points from the 20.8% we delivered in Q4 of last year. We delivered $0.37 of diluted non-GAAP EPS in Q4, above the high end of our guidance and up 54% from $0.24 a year ago despite a negative impact of $0.05 from currency headwinds. I'll now turn to our cash flow and balance sheet. In Q4, we generated strong free cash flow of $75 million, representing a 124% growth from $33 million in the year-ago period. In Q4, we delivered cash flow from operations of $92 million versus the $49 million in the year-ago period. Capital lease payments, which we include in our free cash flow calculation, were $11 million, down from $12 million in Q4 of last year. Let's now turn to our capital allocation strategy. We ended the quarter with $462 million in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments. In Q4, we repurchased 300,000 shares for approximately $9 million. For the full year, we repurchased 10.2 million shares for approximately $267 million. As a result, we have reduced our total diluted shares outstanding by more than 3% since last Q4. Our disciplined equity management approach and location strategy are paying off, enabling us to reduce stock-based compensation as a percentage of revenue by roughly 200 basis points year-over-year in fiscal '23, despite significant headwinds from foreign exchange rates. We will continue to be prudent in our equity compensation practices. We remain committed to opportunistically returning capital to our shareholders and leveraging our strong balance sheet and increasing free cash flow generation to invest in key growth initiatives to drive long-term sustainable growth. As of the end of Q4, we had approximately $140 million of remaining buyback capacity under our current plan. With that, I would like to turn to our guidance for Q1 and fiscal 2024. We continue to see significant volatility in the FX environment even more recently. Given our international exposure, particularly in Japan, we expect FX to remain a headwind for us in FY '24. At current spot rates, we expect a roughly 300 basis point headwind to revenue growth for the full year of FY '24 on an as-reported basis. Due to the timing of when the dollar strengthened versus other currencies in which we do business over the past year, we expect to experience a 500 basis point headwind in Q1, with the impact becoming smaller throughout the course of the year. With respect to our FY '24 expectations, we have factored in the current macroeconomic challenges into our guidance, and our current expectations are for this environment to persist throughout FY '24 for the first quarter of fiscal 2024. As a reminder, there are three fewer days in Q1 versus Q4, which we estimate creates a sequential headwind of approximately $9 million to revenue and 250 basis points to operating margin versus the fourth quarter of FY '23. We anticipate revenue of $248 million to $250 million, representing 5% year-over-year growth. This includes an expected FX impact of approximately 500 basis points to our Q1 revenue growth rate. We expect our Q1 billings growth rate to be in the mid-single-digit percentage range on an as-reported basis, including an expected FX impact of approximately 500 basis points. We expect our Q1 RPO growth to once again be slightly higher than our anticipated Q1 revenue and billings growth rates. We expect our non-GAAP operating margin to be approximately 21%, representing a year-over-year improvement despite an approximately 200 basis point headwind from FX and our temporarily duplicative data center expenses. We expect our non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.26 to $0.27, representing a 17% year-over-year increase at the high end of the range, and GAAP EPS to be in the range of negative $0.04 to negative $0.03. Weighted average basic and diluted shares are expected to be approximately $145 million and $154 million, respectively. Our Q1 GAAP and non-GAAP EPS guidance includes expected impacts from FX of approximately $0.06. Our Q1 EPS guidance also includes a roughly $0.01 headwind due to a one-time write-off related to real estate consolidation for the full fiscal year ended January 31, 2024. We anticipate our FY '24 revenue to be in the range of $1.05 billion to $1.06 billion, representing 7% year-over-year growth at the high end of this range, or 10% on a constant currency basis. We expect FY '24 non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 25%, representing a 190 basis point improvement from last year's results of 23.1%. We expect our FY '24 non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $1.42 to $1.48, up from $1.20 in the prior year. Our GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $0.17 to $0.23. Weighted average basic and diluted shares are expected to be approximately $145 million and $153 million, respectively. Our FY '24 GAAP and non-GAAP EPS guidance includes an expected annual impact from FX of approximately $0.14. Our FY '24 billings growth rate is anticipated to be roughly in line with revenue growth on an as-reported basis. We expect FX to have a negative impact of roughly 100 basis points on our FY '24 billings growth based on current spot rates. Finally, we expect our FY '24 revenue growth rate combined with our increasing FY '24 free cash flow margin to be approximately 35% based on today's current spot rates. As a reminder, this includes the combined 400 basis point headwind from FX to revenue and billings we discussed previously. As we look forward to FY '24 and beyond, it is important to note that our ability to navigate through a slowing demand environment while expanding profitability is the result of a multiyear strategy we began years ago to lower our cost structure while investing for long-term durable growth. We saw the benefits of these initiatives in our FY '23 results, and our outlook once again calls for operating margin and free cash flow expansion in FY '24. While we expect our revenue growth to continue to be pressured by the economic environment, in FY '25, we expect to deliver a revenue growth plus free cash flow margin of 40% to 42%, with a greater weighting toward profitability improvements versus our prior expectations. We look forward to providing further details on our long-term financial model at our Annual Financial Analyst Day in New York City on Tuesday, March 14. The continued execution of our content cloud platform strategy and the discipline and focus of our boxes will drive a healthy balance of revenue growth and margin expansion in the years to come. With that, Aaron and I will be happy to take your questions.

Operator, Operator

Your first question comes from Steve Enders at Citi.

Steven Enders, Analyst

I guess I just want to ask a little bit and start on the outlook and how you're thinking about both '24 and '25. I guess within the assumptions that you're seeing currently, I mean, are you expecting for things to get worse here or is it pretty much as expected? And then can we get a little bit more kind of details on how much things have changed from a duration and maybe deal size impact versus kind of what you're expecting before?

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Yes. This is Aaron. I think I'll maybe just first comment on the general way that we think with the outlook, and then Dylan can hop in on the second part. So we want to be appropriately prudent just given the trends that we see in the market. I think that's reflected in our FY '24 outlook and our initial commentary on FY '25 around the kind of rebalancing a little bit more to profitability, though with still a meaningful improvement on the rule-out basis. So I think without sort of getting too much in the dynamics that we expect to see in the macro, I think what we are trying to do is, again, drive a prudent set of expectations around what we see particularly from a top-line standpoint and then obviously make up as much of that delta in the form of bottom-line improvements. So for this year, again, it's sort of somewhat of a continuation of what we saw in Q4 and just putting the right level of conservatism into the plan.

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Yes. And then to address kind of what we're seeing in some of these customer deals, you asked about durations where we have seen a continued lengthening in contract duration. So customers are continuing to commit to Box more regularly with long-term commitments. That's one of the big drivers of the very strong backlog growth that we saw of 24% and fueling a lot of the strength in the RPO growth as well. Deal cycles overall have remained relatively stable. And what we have seen, talking about the average contract values, as we mentioned on our last call, this environment is leading to pressure on deal sizes for certain customers as they might elect to go to the smaller initial deal, but the overall customer economics have remained very strong, and price per seat is actually up about 5% on a year-on-year basis.

Steven Enders, Analyst

Okay. That's very helpful context there. I guess maybe as we think about the deal environment again and the execution that you're seeing from sales reps, I guess, any kind of further details that you can provide on how they perform versus the expectations? And how you're thinking about productivity rates kind of moving forward, given I think you called out mid-single-digit kind of investments on the sales side there?

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Sure, I'll recap some insights from the quarter, and then Dylan can elaborate on productivity. It's an intriguing environment because the largest deals span various industries, including tech, life sciences, healthcare, and the public sector. This suggests widespread engagement across different segments. However, we are experiencing some budget pressure, which means that a deal that might have previously been valued at a certain amount is now lower. Additionally, some companies may not be increasing their workforce as quickly, which affects the total seat count we would typically anticipate from upselling to those customers. Overall, while we performed well across the business, the results were somewhat below our expectations from six months ago. We are incorporating some of this caution into our plans for the upcoming year.

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Yes. And so as you'd expect, these macroeconomic dynamics do have a direct impact and provide sped wins to the sales force productivity. And while we aren't expecting the environment to get better through the course of FY '24, as a reminder, because of the ramp times that we see in our sales force, typically about six months for our SMB reps, nine to 12 months to become fully ramped on the enterprise side, the hiring that will be more metered this year, about 5% mid-single-digit range versus 15%, that really shows up in capacity for the following year in FY '25. So really thinking about building that durable longer-term growth despite some of the challenges that we're seeing this year.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of George Iwanyc from Oppenheimer.

George Iwanyc, Analyst

Maybe building on the overall environment, Aaron, can you give us some perspective on what you're seeing in Japan and Europe with respect to deal engagement in channel support?

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Yes. So taking Japan first, still a very kind of healthy environment for us, great kind of channel support. Overall, we've gotten a lot better participation rate, for instance, on our suite deals in Japan. So we're very happy about that. That number could still come up more over time, but we're just happy with the momentum there. I called this out on the last earnings call, but I was in Japan in Q3, just a lot of great kind of customer interactions, a lot of upsell potential from that customer base as well as a bunch of new logos that we see in the mix as well. So very happy with the Japan performance. Again, all things considered with some of these macro dynamics. And EMEA, less of a channel-centric approach there, I'm just picking up on your question specifically. But overall, working across a range of industries and segments within EMEA driving that execution with, again, that slight added element of the macro environment still being in the mix. So that's how I kind of characterize it.

George Iwanyc, Analyst

Maybe looking at your net expansion rate, the 108% that you had in the fourth quarter, how are you accounting for that for the coming year? Do you expect relatively stable expansion? Or are you pulling back expectations a bit from the fourth quarter level?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Yes. So for the coming year, we expect that net retention rates to be roughly 106%. And so we do expect to have a very strong and stable 3% full churn rate. But that seed expansion that we had called out earlier, we do expect that to put some downward pressure, driven by the economic environment, which is really what impacts the net retention rate going forward.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Baer from Morgan Stanley.

Joshua Baer, Analyst

Something that you could just help bridge the gap between the 15% constant currency billings growth from this year and the 10% constant currency revenue growth for next year?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Sure. There are several factors that can cause a difference between billings and revenue on a quarterly basis. For instance, early renewal volumes can significantly impact billings; we noted a large multiyear prepay in the third quarter that contributed to this year's billings in a considerable way. Additionally, before the economic dynamics affected us in the first half of the year, we experienced stronger billings outcomes, which need to be adjusted for certain unusual factors that do not contribute to revenue. While billings and revenue are generally closely related, deferred revenue growth at the end of the year in constant currency was 10%, which typically aligns more closely with the following year's revenue growth.

Joshua Baer, Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And then I wanted to ask in regard to the step down in some of those role of targets, I mean, I guess FY '24, maybe a little bit more straightforward, given the revenue growth guide, the macro and FX. Just wondering if you could add some more context for what that's saying about FY '25 stepping down, just thinking through growth prospects that might be more positive in FY '25 off of a lower FY '24? Or are you sort of incorporating macro into FY '25? And really just wondering if there's other changes sort of beyond macro that’s embedded in that rule of change for FY '25?

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Yes, that's a great question. I'll start off, and then Dylan can add more. As we navigate this environment, it's important to be cautious about predicting when the macro conditions will improve. We aim to avoid making too many assumptions in our forecasts. Instead, we are outlining a framework that acknowledges various possible revenue growth outcomes. This year, we'll get clearer insights based on our billings and the remaining performance obligations, which will influence both FY '24 and FY '25. Consequently, we expect the operating margin rate and cash flow margin to be fairly aligned with revenue performance. We anticipate the margins will be in the range of 40 to 42 percent, with a stronger focus on profitability. We're highlighting this in contrast to previous models. Overall, we expect a substantial improvement, pushing us beyond the 40 percent mark, and this reflects our current projections.

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Yes. And just to build on that a bit, in terms of how it all works together, as we had mentioned, we are expecting to see a pretty challenging macroeconomic environment throughout the duration of FY '24, and it's really that performance and the bookings in this coming year that's going to drive the revenue for FY '25. So that's kind of how it fits together as we are expecting that revenue pressure to persist in FY '25 versus what our expectations had been a year ago. But to reiterate what Aaron had said, we are expecting to deliver greater profitability than our prior expectations. And we'll get to a lot more of the details into the dynamics and how we're thinking about the years ahead in just a couple of weeks at our Analyst Day.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Rick Hilliker from Credit Suisse.

Richard Hilliker, Analyst

Dylan, I was wondering if you can just go through the trajectory of gross margin as we think about the coming year? I think you gave us some comments last quarter, but I thought it might be helpful to just hit on those again to make sure we're on the same page as we progress through the year and maybe where the exit rate looks like?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

We anticipate our gross margins to be lower in the first half of the year, around 76%, due to peak duplicative data center expenses and foreign exchange impacts. In the second half, we expect it to be in the high 70s, approximately 77% for the full year next year, and to exit in that high 70s range. We foresee an increase in gross margins towards the upper 70s as we transition into the following year. The real effect of the data center migration will become apparent as we head into FY '25.

Richard Hilliker, Analyst

Awesome. That's really helpful. And then last one on my side. I was wondering if you can give us any comments or maybe we can also talk about it at the Analyst Day, but your sense of where multiyear bookings start to shake out, how that's looking for the coming year? And basically, how that's trended, would be really helpful?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

So we don't tend to see a very high volume at all in terms of multiyear prepayments. So from a contract duration standpoint, it’s increasingly the norm, especially for enterprise customers, that they’re signing up for multiyear commitments with Box, typically three years, but billed annually. We don't incentivize either customers or our sales force to sign multiyear prepaid deals. So we don't see those very often. We do see them from time to time, such as the one that we called out in Q3, where a large customer elected to do that for dynamics on their end. But we don't expect that to change in the coming years. So I would say the trend of seeing it being the standard that customers are signing multiyear agreements prepaid annually is what we continue to expect. So don't expect multiyear prepayments to be much of a factor in the coming year.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Noah Herman from JPMorgan.

Noah Herman, Analyst

Just any other incremental color you could provide on the global go-to-market kickoff you briefly mentioned just to get a better sense of some of the key go-to-market initiatives heading into this year? And then just a quick follow-up.

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Certainly. We will share more details about our overall market strategy at our Analyst Day. The kickoff was very strong, with our global go-to-market team and the wider Box community attending. It's essential to align our go-to-market organization with the significant trends and discussions we are currently observing with customers. In conversations with CIOs and CEOs, it's clear that digital transformation remains a top priority for organizations. They are focused on enhancing productivity in the hybrid work environment, particularly through increased automation and AI, as they seek to maximize their IT investments. Simplifying their IT infrastructure and ensuring more integrated platforms are crucial, alongside maintaining strong data security. The kickoff centered on aligning our messaging and strategy with these customer discussions, specifically on encouraging adoption of our Enterprise Plus package. We have robust internal initiatives aimed at generating new logos, especially within the larger enterprise segment, and we are seeing notable success there. Our goal is to drive greater adoption of our core products as well as new offerings. We are focusing on practical execution and enabling our go-to-market teams while ensuring that our messaging aligns with current customer conversations.

Noah Herman, Analyst

Got it. That's really helpful. And then you touched on this a little bit briefly, but how can you sort of use large language models to really drive value for customers? And should we expect something in the near term?

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Yes, thanks. Obviously, a topic I'm personally very excited about. I can't get into any timing at the moment or else, obviously, a bunch of teams internally will kind of free cat. But what I would say is the general way to think about it is if you take something like chat GPT that's learned basically all of the words across all of the Internet and ends up being this incredibly helpful assistant using the language that's learned from everything. While one of the amazing use cases is, what if you could prompt that kind of model with existing data? And obviously, we happen to help customers manage tens of billions of files and, in particular, a large amount of documents. We think there's a lot of potential for what happens when you can begin to synthesize the information in those documents. I call out a couple of examples in the prepared remarks, but if you can summarize content or provoke it for important insights or generate content in the future. So we think there's a wide range of use cases that are going to be very relevant for enterprises. And we think we're highly differentiated because of our focus on data security, privacy, and compliance. And so we can really work with customers to ensure that when we bring AI to their content, it's done in a way that keeps their data extremely private. And then the other major differentiator we have is we can play a role of a neutral platform or Switzerland approach, where I think there's going to be a lot of leapfrogging of model advancements between Open AI and Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and maybe other vendors. So our ability to offer a range of technologies to customers, we think, puts us in a very advantageous position over the long run as customers think about having a future-proof architecture. So we're very excited. It's extremely early, at least in this new wave. It's one that we're very prepared for because of our efforts around Box Skills. But stay tuned as we expose more about our plans here.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria from RBC Capital Markets.

Richard Poland, Analyst

This is Richard Poland standing in for Rishi Jaluria. Given the expectation for retention rates to decrease by a few more points, can you explain where some of that contraction is originating? Is it primarily on the enterprise side, or do you anticipate some slower overall upsell and cross-sell in the suite offering?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

So it really is primarily on the seat side. So a few receipts from an expansion point of view, we've seen, as mentioned, both very strong and stable retention of seats as well as the kind of cross-sell and adoption of Suites and Enterprise Plus in particular, as we had noted, that was up a very strong 11 points year-over-year. So really pleased with the momentum there, and that's having a nice impact on the pricing as well. So when we think about the net retention rate, that kind of reduction is really coming primarily from seat volumes.

Richard Poland, Analyst

Got it. That's very helpful. And then if we were just to kind of break apart the demand trends between the enterprise and the SMB side of the business. Are there kind of anything that you would call out that are signaling differences between the two? Or is it kind of pretty similar across the business?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Yes. It's actually been pretty consistent. So both across the different segments of the business as well as industries. For the most part, we've seen just kind of general softening related to the macro, but no particular parts of the business that we call out that are seeing any kind of outsized pressure.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of John Messina from Raymond James.

John Messina, Analyst

This is John on for Brian. I'm just curious if you could talk about the puts and takes you're seeing as we head into FY '25 because on one hand, I understand the headcount reductions. But with your expanded platform into areas like Sign and Canvas, I'd imagine you be in a prime position to be a beneficiary of vendor consolidation, so I'd just love to get some color there.

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Yes. I think that's a great way to kind of think about it, which is on one hand, we've seen and Dylan just kind of articulated, if you have a kind of slower headcount growth across various industries that we're more used to faster growth, that kind of creates some normal seat pressure from an expansion standpoint. At the same time, we have a broader value proposition. And I think we've increasingly become more strategic for our customers as a result of things like sign and workflow, Canvas, and Shield. And that's letting us, in some cases, drive our seat prices up as customers expand into things like Enterprise Plus. So it's definitely an interesting market because we still see very, very healthy momentum in a broad set of industries and segments. But you just have that sort of added pressure on kind of maybe some of the normal seat growth you would see in some segments. But overall, I think the message of consolidation simplifying our IT architecture and being able to bundle Box in such a way with these add-on products in a much more streamlined approach where a customer can go and replace three to five other technologies is extremely compelling. I've been having a number of conversations with customers that now kind of start the conversation with, hey, I'd love to get rid of this legacy document management system or storage infrastructure or maybe an e-signature tool that only be used by one part of the population, and I can fold all of that into Box. That's been definitely an increased conversation in the past couple of quarters that we've seen in light of this macro environment.

John Messina, Analyst

Okay. Great. That was really helpful color there. And then can you also talk about linearity in the quarter? I think you guys mentioned more deal scrutiny. I'm curious if it was similar to last quarter focused on larger deals? And I'm also curious if scrutiny was focused on any particular region?

Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO

Yes. I would say that the linearity was quite consistent with what we usually observe, with macro pressures gradually building throughout the second half of the year. There were no significant changes, particularly regarding the typical linearity we'd see in the fourth quarter. Additionally, the scrutiny followed the same general trend as the overall macro impacts, with no specific areas experiencing increased scrutiny. It seems to be a more cautious IT spending environment overall.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Nick Mattiacci from Craig Hallum.

Philip Winslow, Analyst

This is Nick on for Chad Bennett. So at the Analyst Day last year, you talked about targeting more than 50% of your revenue coming from suites in FY '25. So with that penetration right already up to 46% in the past year. Is there a reason why Suites penetration should level off here as we near the 50% level? Or have your thoughts changed where that penetration rate can go over the next couple of years?

Dylan Smith, Co-Founder and CFO

Yes. So that's an area that we have been very pleased with the momentum. So certainly, kind of Suite adoption where we are at the moment is ahead of what we had expected a year ago. So certainly, from a timing standpoint, we would expect to reach that kind of 50% plus milestone sooner than we thought a year ago, and we'll certainly provide more details as we get into the longer-term thinking at our Analyst Day. And then in terms of where we see suites headed, as optimistic as ever that a steady state, the significant majority of our revenue is going to be coming from suite customers.

Operator, Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. Ms. Cynthia Hiponia, I turn the call back over to you.

Cynthia Hiponia, Vice President of Investor Relations

Great. Thank you, operator. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on the call. We look forward to seeing many of you at our New York Analyst Day on March 14, and we look forward to updating everyone at that time. Have a good day.

Operator, Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.