Netscout Systems Inc

NASDAQ:NTCT

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q4

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to NetScout's Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Tony Piazza, Senior Vice President of Finance and his colleagues at NetScout are on the line with us today. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Tony Piazza to begin the company's prepared remarks.

[Anthony Piazza, executive]

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 to Slide #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 statements. 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 #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 the 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. Anil?

[Anil Singhal, executive]

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, I mean, amid heightened geopolitical tensions and expanding cyber threat landscape. This trend 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 headwind, 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 #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 our service assurance, a 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 #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 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 were 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, which persist for much of the fiscal year 2025.

The demand dynamic for service provider is an issue that is primarily domestic. Domestic service providers remain cautious in their spending decision as the 5G stand-alone infrastructure deploy has not yet delivered a return on investment with network traffic below capacity and no material new application driving increasing demand. This has caused providers to delay significant further investment 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 the customer demand market progress and as emerging network technology trends gain momentum. For example, fixed wireless access has been a promising long-term opportunity, although service providers currently already have the bandwidth to support recent deployments. Additionally, network slicing also offers long-term opportunity for NetScout, but is still in 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 important contributor to long-term growth.

Finally, NetScout is actively taking early steps of bringing new value proposition opportunity as it collaborates with customers to fully unlock the critical value of our smart data generated from our DPI technology. This relates to the increasing needs and requirements of emerging AI of strategies, tool sets 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 this field.

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 prioritize spending amid heightened geopolitical tensions and the expanding threat landscape. As revealed in our recently released DDoS Threat Intelligence Report, politically motivated hacktivist groups and an increase in DNS water torture contributed to over 7 million DDoS attack globally in the second half of 2023. This is 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 2024, 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 Gene 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 #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. This includes increased R&D investments as well as go-to-market strategy modification. Also, we recognize the lingering headwinds in the domestic service provider vertical of 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'll continue to align our cost structure with the current demand environment. We have implemented a voluntary separation program as part of the restructuring effort focused on reducing headcount as we seek to execute on our strategic priorities, preserve earnings for shareholders and position NetScout for long-term success. Gene will provide more specific in 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 require 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 the increasingly complex connected digital world as we also 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.

[Michael Szabados, executive]

Thank you, Anil, and good morning, everyone. Slide 10 outlines the areas that I will be covering today starting with customer win highlights in the fourth quarter. In our cybersecurity offering, we secured a multiple 7-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 won a low 7-figure deal as we acquired the new financial industry enterprise customer in the Middle East. We have been engaged with this customer over multiple years, pitching the value proposition of our leading DDoS capabilities while they were leveraging a competitor's managed service.

Although an unfortunate catalyst, the customer experienced a challenging cyber-attack, 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 Arbor Edge Defense, Arbor Cloud, Managed Services and the resident engineer, bringing the capability on-prem and in-house for better control of their cyber 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 pace given the constrained spending environment in this customer vertical.

One example win during the quarter was a 5G-related mid-teen, 8-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 network. 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 MWC in Barcelona in late February, we held many productive meetings with existing and prospective customers to discuss our leaders offerings, including service assurance, AI/ML analytics and cybersecurity solutions related to 5G network visibility and cybersecurity requirements. More recently, in May, we attended the RSA Securities Conference in San Francisco, where we showcased our cybersecurity solutions and held 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 offering. 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 cyber-attacks 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 Gene for a review of our financial results.

[Jean A. Bua, executive]

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 comparisons.

Slide #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 was $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 a minority held investment with a 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 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 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. Also, 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. And 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. Also, 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, planned to be active in the market during the first half of the 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 of bookings.

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 a 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 onetime 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. This 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 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 usages impact.

That concludes my formal review of our financial results. Before we transition to Q&A, I'd 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. Madison?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We do ask in the interest of time that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. We will take our first question from Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.

[Dan Bergstrom, analyst]

It's Dan Bergstrom for Matt Hedberg. Just from the prepared remarks on trends around service provider spending. Anil, I know you spend a lot of time with those Tier 1 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 1s?

[Anil Singhal, executive]

Yes. So overall, Matt, on the -- if you look at the top 10 provider in the world out of them, about 8 or 9 are our big customers of NetScout. So their budget cycles are different and this quarter, we had -- we benefited from some big orders in the international side, and they're often lumpy. But overall, I think budgets are -- I mean, with the numbers we had last year, our big bookings seem to be stabilizing. And if we didn't have the overhang for -- of the revenue from the calibration stuff from last year, I think we have -- this area stabilizing. Budgets are not increasing, they're still tight.

And second thing is what we are hearing is that our technology can be redeployed or used for a different purpose, and we announced our Omnis AI offering in about 6 months ago. And so we think that we can drive additional opportunities in that area because we are already on the network, and we already have the technology which we can use or repurpose for AI solution. And that's where I think some more demand will be there. At the same time, we have to be selling to a different buyer. So there are some benefits of being in that account, and that's what we are hoping that we will use it to stabilize or perhaps even grow the service assurance plus AI business and then the growth will -- rest of the growth will come from cybersecurity.

[Dan Bergstrom, analyst]

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?

[Anil Singhal, executive]

So I think if you look at our -- I mean, bulk of the revenue up until now has been in the Arbor, DDoS area, a company we acquired some time ago, but we never integrated them until about 2 years ago into the main business. So in addition to the traditional core business of DDoS, which is -- seems to be moving flat to up, there are 2 other areas. One is bringing our DPI technology to the DDoS world, and that's what we have been calling adaptive DDoS. And there are some more things we are doing there. The second area is a brand-new product in the NDR space, where players like Darktrace and Vectra and some other companies have been playing. And that's the Omnis Cyber Intelligence product.

So you can -- in summary, basically, we have the core business of Arbor, DDos; we have the new adaptive DDoS solution using some technology from the service assurance side. And third is the Omnis Cyber Intelligence in the NDR market. The last year's number is mostly in the first category. And so we think that now the solution is maturing in the second and third category, and that's why we are sort of bullish about continued growth in this area.

[Operator]

And we will take our next question from Kevin Liu with K. Liu & Company.

[Kevin Liu, analyst]

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 your customers' capital deployment? Or do you still see there being a lot of opportunity around the development of new services like fixed wireless access and other applications that may be just aren't flowing through the network yet.

[Anil Singhal, executive]

Yes. I see, Kevin, a lot of interest in that area, but there's still a challenge of budget. And some -- there are people in the industry saying the AIOps is done new name for ITOps, but it appeals to different buyers. And even in the fixed wireless case, there are traditional service assurance use cases, which is almost all of our business in the carrier. But there are other cases of misuse of bandwidth and which fall in the AIOps area. So that's what we think that is the additional opportunity. 5G will continue to pick up in different parts of the world, and it will keep a big portion of the core business going.

And then there will be additional opportunity, which is adjacency in the market, even though there is a slightly different buyer in that market for AIOps. So we look at both in the service assurance for enterprise, as well as service provider that some of the markets will move into the AIOps area. And we think that we have the best context and technology already in place.

[Kevin Liu, analyst]

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

[Anil Singhal, executive]

Yes. So for example, the use cases are like instead looking at end user experience for a subscriber, both internal and external audiences in the traditional service assurance area, people could look at high-value customers differently, who have better calling plants, who are willing to pay more and they may need a different level of service. There could be abuses of bandwidth on the fixed wireless side, which could impact all other users on the radio access network. So those are technically fall in the AIOps area, and they are not traditionally for direct end user experience.

So then there are things in the cybersecurity area with borderline on AIOps, where you want to get visibility into all the hackers, not just their hacking activity. So there is a whole bunch of use cases. Slicing also technically can be put in the AI Ops area. So there are about 20 or so new use cases beside 10 or so we have been going over in terms of end-user experience and service triage and moving more from troubleshooting and triaging to analytics, which is more appealing to business people. And I think that's why I say it can command a higher level of interest and budgets.

[Kevin Liu, analyst]

Great. 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 your existing customers? Or do you have to go out and acquire new customers?

[Anil Singhal, executive]

Yes. I think it's -- it's very hard to know what is directly attributable because we don't have a special like option for that. But yes, there was the impact. But overall, the DDoS attack and cyberattacks are rising everywhere, and for various reasons. And now we have elections coming, we have Olympics coming in France. And so all these events are sort of an opportunity for hackers to go after. So we have been seeing interest in that area, for example, in the Europe area for the Olympics and U.S. elections.

So I think it's -- we can call them all geopolitical -- I mean, events in some sense. But there's always something like this is going on in addition to normal attack activity increasing. Also, there is another dimension, Kevin, which is more smaller sophisticated attack, which we call application layer attacks. So these adaptive DDoS, which we have come up with, that option allows us to go after those activities where the traditional prior solution of Arbor was mainly volumetric attack. And so we have adjusted our product to some of those newer type of attacks, whether it's because of geopolitical situation or other reasons.

[Operator]

It appears that we have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the program back over to Tony Piazza for closing remarks.

[Anthony Piazza, executive]

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

[Operator]

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