Netscout Systems Inc Q4 FY2024 Earnings Call

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to NetScout's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 conference call for the period ended March 31, 2024. Joining me today are Anil Singhal, NetScout’s President and Chief Executive Officer; Michael Szabados, NetScout’s Chief Operating Officer; and Jean Bua, NetScout’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. There is a slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks. You can advance the slides in the webcast viewer to follow our commentary. Both the slides and the prepared remarks can be accessed in multiple areas within the Investor Relations section of our website at www.netscout.com, including the IR landing page under financial results, the webcast itself, and under financial information on the quarterly results page. Moving on to slide number 3, today’s conference call will include forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include statements regarding our future financial performance or position, results of operations, business strategy, plans and objectives of management for future operations, and other statements that are not historical fact. Actual results could differ materially from any forward-looking statement. These statements speak only as of today's date and involve risks and uncertainties including but not limited to those described on the slide and in today's financial results press release, which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website as well as in the Company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings, on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NetScout assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information except as required by law. Let’s now turn to slide number 4, which involves non-GAAP metrics. While this slide presentation includes both GAAP and non-GAAP metrics, unless otherwise stated, financial information discussed on today’s conference call will be on a non-GAAP basis only. The rationale for providing non-GAAP measures along with the limitations of relying solely on those measures is detailed on this slide and in today’s press release. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of all non-GAAP metrics with the applicable GAAP measures are provided in the appendix of the slide presentation in today's earnings press release and on our website. I will now turn the call over to Anil for his prepared remarks.

Thank you, Tony, and good morning, everyone. Welcome and thank you all for joining us today. In fiscal year 2024, strong cybersecurity revenue growth was a highlight for NetScout as customers continue to prioritize cybersecurity spending amidst heightened geopolitical tensions and an expanding cyber threat landscape. This strength was more than offset by the constrained customer spending environment, affecting our service assurance offerings, primarily related to our domestic service provider customers. Despite the top line headwinds, our diligent cost containment actions and flexible cost structure contributed to non-GAAP earnings per share growth year-over-year. With that as a backdrop, let's now turn to slide number 6 for a brief high-level recap of our non-GAAP financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024. Jean will provide more detail on the results later in the call. For the fourth quarter, we delivered revenue of approximately $203 million, down 2%, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.55, up $0.17 or approximately 45% both on a year-over-year basis. For the full fiscal year 2024, we delivered revenue of approximately $830 million, representing a decline of approximately 9% year-over-year due in part to a lower level of service assurance and radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue compared to an unusually high level in fiscal year 2023. When excluding the radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue from total revenue, the decline was approximately 3% year-over-year. From a non-GAAP EPS perspective, for the full fiscal year 2024, we delivered $2.20 per diluted share, a $0.02 or approximately 1% improvement over fiscal year 2023. We achieved this result despite the revenue headwinds, partially due to our cost containment actions taken during the fiscal year. Now, let's move to slide number 7 for some further perspective on business and market insights. Starting with our Service Assurance offerings, in fiscal year 2024, Service Assurance revenue declined approximately 18% year-over-year. This decline was primarily attributable to lower radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue year-over-year, as well as constrained spending from the domestic Tier 1 carrier market, as previously discussed. Excluding the impact of radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue, service assurance revenue was down approximately 11% year-over-year. As we consider the demand dynamics for the service assurance offering moving forward, we continue to see customers being cautious as budgets remain tight and the number of required approvals remains elevated. While we expect relative stability in the enterprise vertical as customers continue to prioritize mission-critical solutions and monitoring at the edge, we believe the ongoing headwinds in the service provider vertical will persist for much of fiscal year 2025. The demand dynamic for the service provider market is primarily domestic. Domestic service providers remain cautious in their spending decisions, as 5G stand-alone infrastructure deployed has not yet delivered a return on investment with network traffic below capacity and no material new applications driving increasing demand. This has caused providers to delay significant further investments until a monetization strategy becomes clearer to obtain acceptable returns on the investments. Strategically, we continue to be ready to support both the domestic and international carriers as customer demand progresses and as emerging network technology trends gain momentum. For example, fixed wireless access is a promising long-term opportunity, although service providers currently already have the bandwidth to support recent deployments. Additionally, networks likely also offer long-term opportunity for NetScout, but are still in the early stages. We are also encouraged by 5G investment activity at the international carriers. While international carrier spending levels tend to be lower than the domestic market, they remain an important contributor to long-term growth. Finally, NetScout is actively taking early steps to bring a new value proposition originated as it collaborates with customers to fund fully unlocked solutions that unlock the critical value of our smart data generated from our DPI technology. This will lead to increasingly evolving needs and requirements surrounding AIOps strategies, toolsets, and applications. In the future, we intend to be an important contributor to this emerging technology market, as we make our smart data available for customer AI use cases in partnership with other technology innovators in the industry. Shifting to our cybersecurity offering, in fiscal year 2024, our cybersecurity offering delivered approximately 15% revenue growth year-over-year, which was the result of growth in both our Service Provider and Enterprise Customer Verticals. In addition, we believe customers are prioritizing spending amid heightened geopolitical tensions and an expanding threat landscape. As revealed in our recently released DDoS Threat Intelligence Report, politically motivated activist groups and an increase in DNS Water Torture attacks contributed to over seven million DDoS attacks globally in the second half of 2023, marking an increase of 15% from the first half of the year. With this high-activity threat landscape, companies are increasingly depending on NetScout for their cybersecurity protection needs. As we look to fiscal year 2025, we believe the value proposition of our solution should continue to resonate with customers and expect our core, as well as new offerings, such as Adaptive DDoS, Mobile Security, and Omnis Cyber Intelligence Solution to fuel continued momentum in this space. Michael and Jim will provide more insight regarding customer wins, as well as product offering and customer vertical performance during the remarks. Now let's move to slide number 8 regarding our outlook and summary. As we look forward to fiscal year 2025, we are encouraged by the momentum in our cybersecurity offerings. We have begun to take further actions that will enhance our focus on cybersecurity, including increased R&D spending and modifications to our go-to-market strategy. We recognize the lingering headwinds in the domestic service provider vertical impacting our service assurance offering. This will likely create a top-line offset resulting in a flat to slightly down revenue scenario for the new fiscal year, despite the continued growth in our cybersecurity offerings. We continue to align our cost structure with the current demand environment. We have implemented a voluntary separation program as part of the restructuring efforts focused on reducing headcount as we seek to execute on our strategic priorities with a focus on earnings for shareholders and positioning NetScout for long-term success. Jean will provide more specifics on the outlook in her remarks. NetScout has always been and remains a long-term focused company, and we believe we are well-positioned to benefit from future fundamental demand trends as enterprise and service providers request a leading cybersecurity and service assurance solution to deliver actionable visibility at scale. We remain confident that our Visibility Without Borders platform is essential for helping customers tackle the performance, availability, and cybersecurity challenges of an increasingly complex connected digital world, and we remain committed to delivering long-term shareholder value. We look forward to sharing our progress with everyone on our quarterly earnings calls. With that, I will turn the call over to Michael.

Thank you, Anil, and good morning, everyone. Slide 10 outlines the areas I will be covering today, starting with Customer Wins highlights in the fourth quarter. In our cybersecurity offering, we secured multiple seven-figure DDoS-related deals with both new and existing customers across various geographic markets and industry sectors as customers continue to prioritize investments that protect them against the expanding cybersecurity threat landscape. For example, we've won a low seven-figure deal as we acquired a new financial industry enterprise customer in the Middle East. We had been engaged with this customer over multiple years, pitching the value proposition of our leading DDoS capabilities, while they were leveraging our competitors' managed services. Although an unfortunate catalyst, the customer experienced a challenging cyberattack, and we were able to quickly demonstrate our superior capabilities during the situation. This persuaded the customer to buy a full solution suite in a multi-solution purchase with us that included the Arbor Edge Defense, Arbor Cloud, managed services, and the resident engineer bringing the capability on-prem and in-house for better control of the cybersecurity defenses. Shifting to our Service Assurance offering, and particularly the service provider vertical, we continue to benefit from contracts in support of 5G deployments, upgrades, and capacity expansions both domestically and internationally, albeit at a somewhat muted base given the constrained spending environment in this customer vertical. One example win during the quarter was a 5G related mid-teens eight-figure deal with a leading Asian Tier 1 service provider that we already support with our solutions through prior 4G network efforts. Given our strong historical performance and incumbent relationship, they selected NetScout to provide visibility for their 5G networks. In the bigger picture, we believe the deal is the first of other potential opportunities with this customer as they expand their 5G network in the future. Turning to our go-to-market activities, we attended Mobile World Congress at the end of this year in Barcelona in late February, where we held many productive meetings with existing and prospective customers to discuss our latest offerings including service assurance, AIML analytics, and cybersecurity solutions related to 5G network visibility and cybersecurity requirements. More recently, in May, we attended the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, where we showcased our cybersecurity solutions and had valuable meetings with existing and prospective customers. In June, we will head to Las Vegas for Cisco Live as well as the Splunk user conference, and look forward to meeting with customers and partners, both current and prospective, and demonstrating our Visibility Without Borders platform offerings. In our effort to expand our market presence, we recently entered into a technology alliance with Palo Alto Networks, which includes other companies such as Nvidia, in order to help customers protect against cyberattacks in the nascent private 5G network space. This is a good example of the type of value-creating alliances we are establishing to benefit our customers and our business prospects. This concludes my remarks. Thank you, everyone. I will now turn the call over to Jean for review of our financial results.

Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. I will review key metrics for our fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024, and provide some additional commentary on our fiscal year 2025 outlook. As a reminder, this review focuses on our non-GAAP results unless otherwise stated, and all reconciliations with our GAAP results appear in the presentation appendix. Regardless, I will note the nature of any such comparison. Slide number 12 details the results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 focusing on our quarterly performance: total revenue was $203.4 million, down 2.2%. Product revenue was $89.4 million, a decrease of 2%, while service revenue was $114 million, a decrease of 2.4%. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis. Gross profit margin was 77.2% in the fourth quarter, down 0.4 percentage points year-over-year. Quarterly operating expenses decreased 8.3% year-over-year, primarily due to cost containment efforts. Accordingly, we reported an operating profit margin of 19.2% compared with 15.7% in the same quarter last year. Diluted earnings per share were $0.55, up 44.7% from $0.38 in the same quarter last year. For the full fiscal year 2024, revenue was $829.5 million, which was a decrease of 9.3% over the prior year for the reasons previously stated. Product revenue was $360.4 million, a decline of 20%, and service revenue was $469 million, an increase of 1.1% over the prior year. Gross profit margin was 79.4%, an increase of 1.9 percentage points. The improved gross profit margin is attributable to less contribution from lower-margin radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue and lower variable compensation expenses year-over-year. Annual operating expenses decreased 6.1% from the prior year, primarily due to previously mentioned cost containment actions. We reported a consistent operating profit margin year-over-year of 22.6%. Diluted earnings per share was $2.20, a 0.9% increase year-over-year, primarily driven through cost containment actions. Additionally, we had an investment valuation increase in the minority held investment that had favorable tax treatment. This, in combination with the finalization of certain tax positions, reduced our annual tax rate to 17.2%. Turning to Slide 13, I will review key revenue trends by product lines and customer verticals. Please note that all comparisons here on are on a year-over-year basis, consistent with our other remarks. For the full year of fiscal year 2024, our cybersecurity revenue increased by 15.3%, while our service assurance revenue decreased by 17.8% for the reasons Anil previously mentioned. During the same period, our service assurance product line accounted for approximately 67% of our total revenue, while our cybersecurity product line accounted for the remaining 33%. Turning to our customer verticals, for the full fiscal year 2024, our enterprise customer vertical revenue was consistent with the prior year, while our service provider customer vertical revenue decreased by 17.7%. During the same period, our enterprise customer vertical accounted for approximately 53% of our total revenue, while our service provider customer vertical accounted for the remaining 47%. Turning to Slide 14, this shows our geographic revenue mix. For the full year fiscal 2024, 57% of our revenue was derived from the United States, with the remaining 43% provided by international markets. Regarding the mix shift versus a year ago, international fiscal year 2024 revenues benefited from growth in both cybersecurity and service assurance offerings, while domestic revenues were primarily impacted by the headwinds related to the Tier 1 domestic service providers, as previously discussed. No customer represented 10% or more of our total revenue in the fourth quarter or for the full fiscal year 2024. Slide 15 details our balance sheet highlights and free cash flow. We ended the fourth quarter with $424.1 million in cash, cash equivalents, short and long-term marketable securities, and investments, representing an increase of $94 million since the end of the third quarter of fiscal year 2024. Free cash flow for the year was $52.5 million. From a debt perspective, we ended the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 with $100 million outstanding on our $800 million revolving credit facility, which expires in July 2026. For the full fiscal year 2024, we repurchased approximately 1.8 million shares of our common stock for approximately $50 million. We currently have capacity in our share repurchase authorization and, subject to market conditions, plan to be active in the market during the first half of fiscal year 2025. To briefly recap other balance sheet highlights: accounts receivable net was $192.1 million, representing an increase of $48.2 million since March 31, 2023. The DSO metric at the end of the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 was 81 days versus 58 days at the end of fiscal year 2023. The higher DSO metric in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year was due to the timing and composition. Moving to Slide 16 for commentary on our outlook, I will focus my review on our non-GAAP targets for fiscal year 2025. We anticipate our fiscal year 2025 revenue to be approximately $800 million to $830 million. We anticipate non-GAAP diluted earnings per share within the range of $2.10 to $2.30, with the midpoint flat year-over-year. The effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 20% as we return to a normalized effective tax rate. Our weighted average diluted shares outstanding is assumed to be approximately 74 million shares, which does not currently assume any planned repurchase activity. NetScout's fiscal year 2025 guidance reflects the Company's anticipated benefits associated with the previously mentioned voluntary separation program, restructuring actions, and ongoing cost management initiatives. In conjunction with these actions, the Company expects to record GAAP restructuring charges primarily in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025 attributable to one-time separation payments in the range of approximately $18 million to $22 million in aggregate. The Company expects that these actions will generate annual run rate savings in a similar range with approximately 75% of the benefit expected in fiscal year 2025 due to the timing of these actions. This is an estimated range and will be finalized as the program is completed. Finally, I would like to provide some color for the first half of fiscal year 2025. Assuming the midpoint of our revenue range, we anticipate a revenue skew of approximately 45% in the first half of the fiscal year and 55% in the second half, which is primarily attributable to the prior fiscal year's first quarter benefiting from the usage of approximately $35 million to $40 million from backlog. Accordingly, we expect first quarter of fiscal year 2025 revenue to be in the range of $165 million to $175 million. As a result, we expect corresponding non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $0.08 to $0.17 due to the continued cost containment efforts partially offsetting the revenue backlog usage impact. That concludes my formal review of our financial results. Before we transition to Q&A, I would like to quickly note that our upcoming IR conference participation is listed on Slide 17. Thank you, and I'll now turn the call over to the operator for questions.

Yeah. Hey, good morning. It's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking our questions. Just on the prepared remarks and trends around service provider spending. Anil, I know you spend a lot of time with those Tier one carriers. Maybe what are you hearing from them as far as budgeting for the new year here, and then maybe could you contrast what you're seeing from them with international and demand beyond the Tier 1?

Yeah. So overall, Matt, if you look at the top 10 providers in the world, eight or nine of them are big customers of NetScout. Their budget cycles are different. This quarter we benefited from some big orders on the international side, and they are often lumpy. But overall, I think budgets are stabilizing. If we didn't have the overhang from last year's revenue calibration stuff, I think this area is stabilizing. Budgets are not increasing; they are still tight. We are hearing that our technology can be redeployed or used for different purposes. We announced our Omnis AI offering about six months ago, and we think that we can drive additional opportunities in that area since we already have the technology in place which we can repurpose for AIOps solutions. That's where we are hoping to stabilize or perhaps even grow that service assurance plus AI business, while the rest of the growth will come from cybersecurity.

Great. And then with cybersecurity there, could you dig a little deeper into some of the areas that you're leaning into a bit more here this year?

So I think if you look at our main bulk of the revenue up till now has been in our DDoS area, a company we acquired some time ago, but we never integrated until about two years ago into the main business. Besides our traditional core business of DDoS, which seems to be performing flat to up, there are two other areas we’re focusing on: one is bringing our DPI technology to the DDoS world, what we are calling Adaptive DDoS, and there are additional developments happening there. The second area is a brand new product in the NDR space. We have competitors in that area, but our Omni Cyber Intelligence product is set to grow. In summary, we have the core business of DDoS, plus new adaptive DDoS solutions and the Omnis cybersecurity in the NDR market, which we believe are maturing, and that’s why we are optimistic about continued growth in this area.

Hi, good morning. Just on the service provider side of things. I was wondering, Anil, if you could talk a little bit longer term beyond this current year. Do you think this is just kind of a pause in terms of customer capital deployment? Or do you still see a lot of opportunity around the development of new services like fixed wireless access and other applications that maybe just aren't flowing through the network?

Yeah. I see a lot of interest in that area, but there's still a challenge regarding budget and some trends in the industry. AIOps is the new name for ITOps, but it appeals to different buyers. There are additional opportunities in the service assurance market for enterprise as well as service providers, with 5G continuing to expand globally. There will be adjacent opportunities in the market, even though there is a different buyer profile concerning AIOps. We believe we have the technology already in place to capitalize on both the service assurance for enterprise and providers.

Understood. And could you just elaborate a bit on that AIOps opportunity? How is kind of the usage of your products different in that market versus what you've traditionally done for the wireless provider?

So for example, the use cases are different. For instance, international customers are looking at end-user experience for subscribers, both internal and external audiences. In traditional service assurance, people prioritize high-value customers differently, focusing on their specific needs. On the fixed wireless side, we can address potential misuse of bandwidth that impacts users across the radio access network. These applications fall into the AIOps area, emphasizing the need for visibility into not just hacking activity but also hacker activities. There are numerous use cases emerging outside traditional service assurance that AIOps can cover.

Great. Thank you for that color. And if I could just sneak in one more on the cybersecurity side, can you talk a little bit about how much of your business over the past year might have been directly attributable to some of the geopolitical conflicts going on? And as you're thinking about your customer spending for this year, would you expect that buying to be kind of repeated from existing customers? Or do you have to go out and acquire new customers? Thank you.

Yeah. I think it's very hard to know what's directly attributable since we don't have a specific option for that, but overall, there was an impact. The DDoS attacks and cyberattacks are rising everywhere for different reasons. Now with elections and major events coming up, we see increased interest in those areas, particularly in Europe with the Olympics and in U.S. elections. While these can be labeled geopolitical, there’s always some factor driving attacks. Additionally, there’s a growing trend of smaller, sophisticated application-layer attacks, where our adaptive DDoS solution is capable of addressing these new types of attacks, adjusting in response to various circumstances, including geopolitical situations.

Thank you, operator. That concludes our call for today. Thank you for joining and have a good day.

This does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.