TeamViewer SE

XBER:TMV

Earnings Call Analysis

Revenue and EBITDA Growth Amid Challenges

The company reported a 10% year-over-year increase in Q3 revenue, reaching EUR 158 million, staying on track with their full-year guidance. Despite currency headwinds trimming billings growth by 4 percentage points, Q3 billings still rose by 8% to EUR 150 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin grew impressively to 44%, and the adjusted EPS skyrocketed by 24% to EUR 0.22. The SMB business continued its robust performance with an 8% revenue jump to EUR 128 million and billings up 9%. Notably, the enterprise segment's revenue surged by 20-22% year-over-year, indicative of significant growth and customer expansion by 22%.

Steady Growth Amidst Economic Headwinds

In the face of a volatile economic environment, the company has reported an encouraging 10% year-over-year growth in revenue, reaching EUR 158 million for the third quarter of 2023. Their long-term net retention rate has shown resilience, maintaining a strong level at 107%, indicating customer loyalty and a robust business model. Despite currency fluctuations, particularly with a weaker US dollar, the firm has managed to stay on track with its full-year guidance for revenue growth.

Solid Profitability and Efficient Cost Management

The company has demonstrated a sharp focus on profitability with a 19% increase in adjusted EBITDA, translating to a solid 44% margin. The earnings per share have outpaced EBITDA growth, surging by 24%. This performance is underscored by prudent cost management, allowing for increased investment in growth while achieving a net income growth of 61%.

Investment in Product Development for Future Growth

Significant resources have been allocated to product development, particularly targeting improvements in remote management and frontline offerings, which are central to the company's future growth strategy. These efforts are expected to yield positive results in the coming periods, hinting at potential growth acceleration.

Strong Performance in Small and Medium Business (SMB) Segment

The SMB sector has continued to post solid results for the company, with an 8% revenue growth to EUR 128 million and 11% growth in the average selling price. This highlights the company's pricing power and successful product enhancements that cater to high-value SMB customers. While the lowest enterprise subscription bucket witnessed a slight decrease, the company remains optimistic due to stable churn rates and subscriber growth on a year-over-year basis.

Enterprise Focus with Ambitious Customer Growth

Despite a less-than-expected enterprise net retention rate of 102%, the company remains committed to its strategic focus on the enterprise segment, showcasing a 22% increase in customer numbers. Enterprise revenue grew by a notable 20% year-over-year, suggesting effective upselling and cross-selling as well as promising deal closures.

Cost Drivers Linked to Growth Investments

The company has effectively balanced cost savings with growth investments, experiencing only a 4% increase in recurring costs. By managing expenses, including sales and marketing strategies and partner commissions, the firm has managed to enhance profitability, underscoring the successful execution of its growth-oriented investment plan.

Positive Cash Flow Trends and Future Tax Benefits

The company has expressed satisfaction with cash flow trends, which align with expectations and their capital allocation strategy. Year-to-date September shows a levered free cash flow growth of 47%, ahead of the target growth rate of around 9%. Looking beyond 2023, the company anticipates a lower tax rate in the low 30s, further boosting future net income gains.

Guidance Affirms Revenue and Margin Targets

With nine months of financials indicating a 12% revenue growth, the company is confident in meeting its annual revenue guidance of EUR 620 million to EUR 645 million. Additionally, they anticipate exceeding the full-year EBITDA margin guidance, aiming for around 40% in 2023, with even better profitability expected in the subsequent year due to cost structure improvements.

Continued Investment in Expansion and Customer Acquisition

Investments in reorganization, particularly in the Americas, are projected to generate substantial benefits in the next year. The company is also focusing on strategic partnership deals that are likely to drive higher average selling prices (ASPs) and improve pipeline management. Price increases for the following year are anticipated to bolster revenue further.

Preliminary Insights on Next Year's Product Roadmap

Management has hinted at product enhancements around managed devices, integrations, mobile device management, and patch management, indicating concerted efforts to bolster their SMB portfolio. The company is involved in strategic partnerships and potential acquisitions related to IT/OT convergence and AI collaborations, poised to introduce new products into the market in the second half of the next year.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, and thank you for joining the TeamViewer SE Q3 2023 Results Call and Webcast. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be listen only mode. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Ursula Querette, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Ursula Querette, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TeamViewer's Q3 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Ursula Querette, and I'm pleased to host today's call. I am joined by our CEO, Oliver Steil; and our CFO, Michael Wilkens. As always, Oliver will kick off the presentation by updating you on the quarterly business and financial highlights. In the second part of today's call, Michael will guide you through our Q3 financials in detail. As always, the presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

Please note that you can find the important notice and the APM disclosure on Slides 2 and 3. And with that, I hand it over to Oliver, whose CEO contract has been extended for 5 years, as you may have heard last week. Congratulations Oliver.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Thank you, Ursula. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q3 2023 earnings call. Now before we start, a few personal words, as Ursula just mentioned, TeamViewer Supervisory Board and I have agreed to extend my term as CEO until October 2028. which I think is great, it will give me enough time to focus on the strategic development of the business and the sustainable and profitable growth of the company. I'm actually very excited looking forward to this new term and to continuing the work that we have initiated here. We will certainly talk more about our strategic plans and the strength and focus on innovation, technology, leadership, together with our full year results. At the moment, we are really fully focused on bringing this year's results home and with that, I think we should focus on the Q3 numbers. So let me get back to those.

As always, let me start with the key figures for the quarter. So we increased our revenue by 10% to EUR 158 million. Our adjusted EBITDA grew even stronger by 19%. This is resulting in a very high EBITDA margin of 44%. And this shows once again our ability to create profitable growth. Looking at billings in the third quarter, our core SMB business delivered strong performance again, grew by 9% on constant currency. And despite the quite difficult macro environment, our enterprise business contributed 6% billings growth in constant currency, and we were actually able to close some relevant large deals, which I'm going to talk about. In addition, in the quarter, we announced when we will take on a new role with the Manchester United within the Manchester United Partner ecosystem. We now communicated that from the start of the 2024-2025 season, so mid next year, we will see a reduced level of marketing spend for the Manchester United Partnership. As we've said before, we will reinvest some of the savings in other branding activities and other marketing activities and of course, also in our product but the remainder will have a positive impact on TeamViewer's adjusted revenue EBITDA. And I think it's very important and we had communicated it before, the impact will amount to approximately EUR 17.5 million improvement in 2024 calendar year and approximately EUR 35 million in 2025. We've also made significant progress in terms of product and tech collaborations through our new partnership with unified endpoint management provider, Ivanti, we have significantly enhanced our remote monitoring and management offering. For those who don't know this, Ivanti is the company that acquired MobileIron 3 years ago. And with Ivanti's industry-leading mobile device management capabilities integrated into our remote and tender solutions, we can provide our customers with a one-stop solution to manage all their desktop and mobile IT devices in a secure and efficient manner. And another achievement on the product side was the completion of the certification process for our enterprise connectivity solution Tensor to become an SAP endorsed app.

This is a very important accomplishment for us especially since our productivity solution frontline has already been available in the SAP App Center for some time. The Tensor endorsement is clearly rounding up our enterprise offering within the SAP certified ecosystem. This will not only lead to increased visibility, but it can also drive aftersales and support use cases for Tensor in the OT environment.

It's also worth mentioning that we saw a general increase in customer interest in digitalization and innovation projects in the past quarter. This has also led to more traction for our frontline solution across regions, and sales have very often been supported by our channel and tech partnerships. We were able to introduce our vision picking solution in the bottling industry in APAC as well as in the logistics and supply chain industry in the Middle East. The most important frontline project was the further rollout of our picking solution to more warehouses of Nadro. This is Mexico's largest wholesaler to the health care industry. You might remember that we won that deal less than a year ago as part of our SAP partnership. And it's a good example. It's great to see how it is becoming more relevant over time and how the partnership investments start to pay off.

So from our perspective, to sum it up, double-digit revenue growth in Q3 at a high profitability, while we further enhanced our product portfolio and improved our go-to-market approach. So overall, we achieved good results despite a continued challenging macro environment. We continue, let's now take a closer look to our SMB and enterprise business over the last 12 months. You can see that the core SMB business which is the higher value bucket with contract volumes between EUR 1,500 and EUR 10,000 is significantly growing with 25%. And we really see this as our sweet spot in the SMB space as we constantly enhance our product, especially for larger SMB customers and managed service providers. And as always, we were successful in cross and upselling and growing our customers' contracts again.

Also, the lowest enterprise bucket with contracts between EUR 10,000 and EUR 50,000, where we currently achieve most of our enterprise billings saw a strong increase of 21%. This means that our largest bucket in SMB and enterprise are growing the most, and it reflects the strong contribution of core customer audiences to our LTM billings. Moreover, and important, the highest enterprise bucket, so above EUR 200,000 annual contract value is growing again with 4% after a dip that we had at the beginning of the year. During the last quarter, and actually, despite the challenging macro environment, we were able to close some relevant larger deals, which I will tell you more about a bit later.

Next is always a view on the regions. In Q3, development of billings and revenues showed quite a mixed picture across the regions. APAC again showed the strongest operational performance with billings up 15% year-on-year on constant currency. Revenue was up 8%. And I think in this region, we do see a continuing upswing, which was initiated by the recent investments and then also the organizational restructuring that we did quite some time ago. So it's really coming together nicely now. Americas region, where the reorganization of the sales team set up has been initiated in the first quarter this year, showed the lowest billings growth rates of 5% in constant currency. It's still an environment with longer procurement cycles in the current environment which has contributed to this situation.

However, we are fully committed to bringing this strategically important region back to its previous successes. And revenue-wise, the Americas region showed good growth with a year-on-year increase of 10% and this can be attributed to currency tailwinds from previous periods, billings, converted into revenue now. So this obviously is slightly lagging indicator. Our last region EMEA reported good growth in Q3, billings up 9% in constant currency revenue up 11%. And especially in EMEA, we saw an accelerated trend towards more channel and partnership deals in the quarter. Next slide, please.

As always, like to put a highlight on some customer success stories for you. This time, we brought 2 remote connectivity examples from the third quarter. On the left side, we talk about a major U.S. telecommunications equipment company. Here, we were able to migrate the customer from multiple existing SMB licenses to really large Tensor deal, which is worth more than 6x the aggregated value of the former smaller licenses. We often talk about our strength in upselling, and this is one, I think, very successful example. At the same time, the new Tensor deal also provides much more value to the customer before there were hundreds of small TeamViewer licenses spread across departments, regions and subsidiaries, which have developed over the years without a systematic or strategic approach on the customer side. Now with 1 single Tensor license for the whole group, the customer benefits from enterprise-grade security, auditability and scalability.

On the right side, you can see an example from the APAC region. If you've ever been to South Korean restaurants, you know that ordering and paying via touchscreen or tablet, tablet mostly right at your table is already very common there. Obviously, there is a need for maintenance and troubleshooting for the companies offering those systems. Therefore, t’'order, which is the market leader for these systems in South Korea decided to integrate TeamViewer into each of its devices. Customers can now very fast and reliably access the systems in the restaurants remotely and get them up and running again, which is a huge benefit for both t’'order and their customers. And to give you an idea of the size of these implementations, this is an installed base of about 120,000 devices in restaurants across South Korea.

I would also like to give an example of the scaling potential of deals we closed some time ago. This example on the slide is a customer from the engineering sector based in Europe. It's a multinational manufacturer of agricultural equipment, including vehicles such as tractors. Actually, some of you remember the story, we've talked about it around our IPO. The deal had been just recently closed at the time of the IPO, and the whole project was in development phase really without almost any revenue.

As you probably know, tractors nowadays are packed with IT and all kinds of digital devices on board. And to support the tractors operators when they're out in the field, TeamViewer's integrated X factory into these devices. When an issue comes up, the operator can call customer service and they were remote into the device to instantly solve the issue as any downtime in the agriculture sector is critical for the business and the vehicles are far away out in the field, the value for the company and its customers, I think it's pretty obvious.

And looking at the ACV development, this is a nice example to show how we scale together with our customers. Firstly, we benefit from more vehicles being sold now. And secondly, we benefit from digitalization in the agricultural sector, meaning a growing number of these onboard devices that are added to each and every tractor are being shipped. Every additional connected device means revenue for us, started small and can get very sizable, as you see.

And 1 last comment. The graph you see on the slide shows the ACV development for that specific use case will be on vehicle devices. Additionally, this customer uses TeamViewer for internal IT support, where we have a separate contract with the 6-digit [ GE ] revenue in place. So this is also an example of a successful cross-sell into separate departments of the same company.

Let me now come from customer stories to the marketing side to explain how we target and reach those customers. After the introduction of TeamViewer remote in the second quarter with the associated campaigns, we have focused on comprehensive marketing activities dedicated to enterprise customers in the third quarter. Just to give you some examples, we've introduced our new brand campaign, Find Your Better, on the left side. And at the core of the campaign is our brand promise of helping our customers each day to become better in their business-critical operations.

One example is how we support our partner, the Mercedes Formula 1 team with our technology. And if TeamViewer works in the fast space environment, or Formula 1, it can definitely make a difference in any industry that will be added over time. So we start with this launch campaign element, and then we'll have other customer examples that we will be quoting over time.

Second campaign we launched last quarter was explicitly promoting Tensor as our enterprise-grade remote connectivity solution with all the relevant enterprise features like enhanced security and scalability. And the motto there is engineered for enterprise that we've brought to life with obviously online marketing measures like video pay debt, social media and the likes and the likes. These are only 2 examples to give you an impression of how we support our product enhancement and the overall transition to an enterprise software provider with our dedicated marketing campaigns. I think it's worth mentioning that last summer, we welcomed Peter Turner as our Chief Commercial Officer on the Management Board. And I'm really happy to say that he and his team have done what over the last year really makes a big difference for us, I think, as you can see from the campaigns also.

Website campaigns, content, both presentation appearance of the company, we reached a new level, which is very important to show and communicate the transition to more enterprise and more OT geared use cases. And after customer success stories and marketing, let's get back to the financials that Michael will explain to you in more detail.

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Thank you, Oliver. Good morning, and a warm welcome to all of you. I'm now happy to guide you through our financials for the third quarter of 2023. On Slide 12, you see our Q3 revenue of EUR 158 million, which increased by 10% year-over-year. With this, 9 months into the year, we are on track to reach our full year guidance. Our Q3 billings grew by 8% to EUR 150 million on constant currencies. In Q3, we saw further increased headwinds from currency. This average U.S. dollar exchange rate, for example, was 8% weaker year-over-year. As roughly 30% of our billings are generated in U.S. dollars. This had quite an effect on our Q3 billings growth. As you can see on the slide, this results in 4 percentage points difference between reported and constant currency. Rightfully so, we based our guidance on fixed foreign exchange rates. Our LTM net retention rate remained strong at 107% on group level and is up 4 percentage points year-over-year. On ARR, which adjusts for the multiyear impact was again above 100%. This shows that we operate a highly recurring and resilient business model, which is key in these times. It is also key for us to continue to invest to be up and running when the macro situation improves. So while we continue to invest, we manage our cost base diligently. In addition, we also had some favorable currency and phasing effects in Q3 on the cost side. Therefore, our adjusted EBITDA increased by a strong 19%. This translates into an adjusted EBITDA margin of 44%. Our levered free cash flow decreased as expected by 6% to still high EUR 46 million. I will get into that in more detail later.

The adjusted EPS grew even stronger than the adjusted EBITDA by 24% to EUR 0.22 year-over-year. Let's now have a closer look on quarterly sequential developments globally and for SMB and enterprise on the next slides. I already explained our global revenue, billings and margin growth and the influence of currency and growth rates, especially for billings. Graph, which still needs explanation is the new billings development on the bottom right. Oliver talked about some compelling use cases and deals before. T’'order, for example, was a net new deal in the APAC region. It also mentioned an increasing traction in channel and tech partner deals. Some of these also count into the net new deals of Q3. In total, we generated EUR 14 million of billings with new customers.

When looking at the quarterly development, we see stable new business volumes, which on the back of the recent macroeconomic environment is proof of our high-quality product offering. Of course, we want more than a stable new business development. And as mentioned before, we are preparing our organization for a reacceleration.

Let's move to the next slide, please, and look at our SMB business, which again delivered a strong performance. Slide 14 depicts the continued strong SMB business with revenue growth of 8% to EUR 128 million. Billings were up 9% in constant currencies to EUR 123 million. In my opinion, the highlight of this slide is the further increase of the average selling price over the last quarters. The year-over-year ASP growth of 11% in Q3 is not only due to our pricing power, but also fueled by the strong growth in the highest SMB value bucket.

This is our core value bucket for SMB and recent product enhancements around RMM are targeted to serve customers exactly in that bucket. However, I mentioned the Ivanti integration before. While the highest SMB bucket grew strongly in Q3, the lowest bucket slightly decreased. This is also the main reason why the number of subscribers decreased by 1% on a sequential quarterly basis. On a year-over-year quarterly basis, however, SMB subscribers grew by 1%. At the same time, churn remained rather stable. Next slide, please, where we take a closer look at the enterprise. Let's start with the enterprise net retention rate. We are definitely not satisfied with 102% especially as the transition towards enterprise remains at the heart of our strategy. This number reflects a combination of various external and internal factors.

The slow start of our enterprise business into the year, the macroeconomic environment with longer procurement cycles, negative currency effects and the ongoing reorganization, our Americas region, to name just a few. Oliver and I told you before, we are working on this. The highlight on this slide is the development of customer numbers, a plus of 22% year-over-year. Some of these new customers are quite large, which is a promising development and which will ultimately drive the enterprise ASP. Q3 enterprise revenue grew by 20%, 22% year-over-year, driven by successful previous period up in cross-selling and the ongoing release of multiyear billings to revenue. Billings grew by 6% year-over-year on constant currency with relevant deal closures in Q3. So all in all, a meaningful enterprise growth.

Let's now have a closer look at our cost base. Recurring costs, consisting of cost of goods sold and total operating expenses increased by only 4% or EUR 3.3 million in Q3. As we gave clear explanations on each of the line items on the slide, I will focus here only on the main effects. Let's talk first about the cost savers. Favorable currency effects, especially positive natural hedge effects and sales and positive financial hedge effects and the other cost items. Over EUR 2 million of gains from improved bad debt management, and positive timing effects in marketing, mainly due to temporary less digital marketing activities.

Now let's talk about the cost drivers, which are all connected to growth investments. Increased COGS due to more frontline deployments and higher integration partner commissions like for Ivanti. The sales cost item features more strategic partner commissions. And finally, R&D costs increased due to an accelerated product development mainly to improve our remote management and frontline offering. Since the cost drivers were overcompensated by the cost savings, our adjusted EBITDA increased significantly by 19%. And as you will see on the next slide, the net income increased even stronger by 61%. What are the main reasons? First, in Q3, we again saw a decreased amount of nonrecurring items. You can find the detailed development of these in the appendix. So deducting the nonrecurring items brings us to the unadjusted EBITDA, which is 29% higher year-over-year.

Second, G&A remained almost stable with our low CapEx intensity and stable PPA amortization. And third, income taxes increased to a much lower extent than profit. This is due to our improved tax scheme, which I explained already in August. This allows for a capitalization of existing tax costs and interest carryforwards, which will result in a full year 2023 tax rate in the high 20s. For the first 9 months of the year, it was at 25%. Beyond '23, we expect a tax rate in the low 30s, which is a significant improvement from the low 43 incurred so far. Due to these main reasons, the Q3 net income increased significantly to EUR 26.5 million. Our earnings per share increased even stronger by 70% to EUR 0.16, which in addition, reflects the reduced share count following our share buybacks. The adjusted EPS, which mainly adjusts for nonrecurring items and PPA amortization increased by 23%.

Next slide, please. On Slide 18, I first want to focus on the 9-month free cash flow development, which is very well in line with our expectations. Remember, in February, when we laid out our capital allocation strategy, we targeted a circa 9% growth of our levered free cash flow on a yearly basis. Year-to-date September, we are well above this level at still 47% growth. The Q3 decline was mainly due to a lower reported billings growth in the quarter versus 2022 and higher cash outflows from sponsorships. The latter includes onetime effects from reducing the scope of the Manchester United partnership. So in Q3, the unlevered free cash flow amounted to EUR 63 million and delevered free cash flow to EUR 46 million. Let me finish my presentation by moving to the guidance slide. Within the first 9 months of the year and despite a difficult market environment, we already generated EUR 464 million of revenue. This corresponds to a growth rate of 12%, which is well in line with our communicated full year growth range. We therefore feel confident to reach our annual revenue guidance, targeting revenues at guided FX rates in the range between EUR 620 million and EUR 645 million. This corresponds to growth rates between 10% to 14% for the year of 2023. After a highly profitable Q3, the 9 months adjusted EBITDA margin is 43%, which is above our full year guidance level. While we are aware that we had some favorable timing effects. Again, in Q3, we feel very comfortable with our full year margin guidance, which targets around 40% for 2023. And for 2024, due to the adjusted scope of the Manchester United partnership, we will see a further improvement of our profitability. This will, however, not prevent us from continuing to invest into our product offering and go-to-market approach which are at the heart of our future growth.

With that, I would like to end the presentation. Thank you all very much for your attention. We now look forward to your questions.

Operator, over to you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of James Goodman from Barclays.

[James Goodman, analyst]

I'll start with a couple around the guidance, please. So at the beginning of the year, I think you talked about the old basis of guidance being 6% to 11% constant FX billings growth. Just wondering really if that is also reiterated this morning, I think it implies maybe a wide range of about 1% to 15% billings growth for Q4. Maybe you can comment where you see the likely outturn on billings within that range for the fourth quarter. And are you confident that it will remain positive given what you still have around price, et cetera, that you can do in the fourth quarter?

And then the second question, maybe just looking a little bit further ahead to '24, you've already made some comments clearly around the profitability given the sponsorship developments. But on the revenue side, given the combination of the billings trajectory this year and the multiyear deal effects, are you confident you can keep revenue at double digit or close to it next year?

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes, James, let me start with your first one on billings. A, we didn't guide on billings. We only for a convenience and transparency factor showed how the guidance would have looked like in the, let's call it, in the old regime of 2022. So we guided on revenue 10% to 14%, and we are in this range. And on billings, let's see how it works out. We had so far 3 very good quarters. Remember also comparison Q4 last year was very strong. We have now 4 quarters in with Q4 last year starting on price increases, which we mentioned. So we will still do price increases, but not to the same extent.

So let's see how it works out. And Q4 is always skewed to the high end of enterprise pipeline deals. So, so far, our pipes are very well equipped, looks all good. But it's an important quarter, and it's too early to say where we will end. On the second one on profitability with regard to 2024...

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Revenue, revenue.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes, yes. But you started with profitability. This is what we said. And on revenue, it's too early to say, let's first finish off the year and then we do 2024.

[James Goodman, analyst]

Okay. And maybe quick follow-up in that case then, just around the multiyear deal effect. I mean you're now lapping 2 years of multi-deals. So I think on the billings side, it's actually turning into a headwind. But obviously, it's still helping revenue. Can you comment a little bit on your expectation around multiyear into Q4 next year?

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes. No, exactly. It's not just 2 years, but already 3 years. Remember, we started with multiyear deals already in 2021. So from the overall vicinity of the multiyear deals in this year, we mentioned that before, EUR 60 million, maybe a little bit above EUR 60 million. So next year, this will come down. But as the billings are in from the multi deals as you rightfully lay out, we expect a nice development of the consecutive revenues.

[Operator]

Next question comes from Victor Cheng from Bank of America.

[Hin Fung Cheng, analyst]

Maybe first of all, if you can give us some color on how TeamViewer Remote is performing? How the free base is doing and the number of downloads? Just some color on the SMB side. I appreciate, obviously, the focus is a bit more on the higher end and enterprise. But if I look at the lower 2 buckets, it seems like the mid-tier bucket is growing slowly as well. So the question is, is the competition moving to upper markets as well? Do you see that happening? And I have one quick follow-up.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes, let me take this Victor. So TeamViewer Remote is now nicely established in the customer base. Obviously, customers can pick and choose whether they want to use new version, old version. I think we are through the hypercare phase in a way and have addressed some of the concerns of long-standing customers that obviously see different user flows then, which we needed to address. So that worked very well. And hence, we've decided that we're now putting the TeamViewer Remote functionalities, remember, web functionalities, additional security measurements, better integration of different products that we all transition this also into the Tensor product, which has now been launched.

So from that, I think you can see that we fundamentally believe that we've done a very good job on TeamViewer Remote. So that's very helpful. It's clearly helpful and a good contributor to our SMB performance, which is again 9% growth, which is, I think, strong given the segment and obviously competition in this segment as well. So we're happy with this.

Competition, you were asking, I think, is pretty stable and this is always the highest and the strongest at the lower end of our SMB range, which you can see again, but even they are mostly stable on that side, so that's good. We lost a few subscribers sequentially, but year-over-year, we are positive. So there's a very small movement on the subscriber side, which I think is something you've seen over the last quarter, so pretty uneventful. Very good on this one.

Free user ecosystem also developing nicely. So as you say -- as you know, we monetize free users to become paying customers. And then we try to refill the ecosystem that works quite well. Obviously, with the exception of some markets where we deliberately decided to be kind of more forceful in count qualification to make sure that we don't get so to say the wrong users into the ecosystem, and that has continued. And TeamViewer Remote in this sense, has been another stepping stone and another development there by asking -- actively asking for accounts which I think is the way to go to improve security of the whole ecosystem and make sure that we don't have the views of our product for remote use cases. So that's very important to us. Well accepted by customers.

Obviously, that comes at the expense of some free users needing to generate an account which they might not like, but we still believe this is the way to go and qualify our customer base. So all in all, I think we're very happy with this development there and kind of don't see significantly increased competition there.

[Hin Fung Cheng, analyst]

Got it. Very good color, Oliver. Maybe just one follow-up is on thinking about the enterprise. And obviously, you have some large enterprise deals in the form of Tensor this quarter, which is great. But then when I think about the partnerships with SAP, Siemens, Google, I appreciate these are longer pipeline. But so far, we haven't seen too much from these partnerships. How should we think about these partnerships going forward? Have you changed your expectations with these partnerships or how augmented reality plays a role within TeamViewer or it's just taking a bit longer term still?

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes. Good question. I think generally, there's a few learnings. One is, as you say, it does take a bit longer to work with these large organizations. But I think we also have to be fair, all these large organizations are operating in the same macro environment. So this is also not the case that there has been significant strength in enterprise software over the last quarters, and this is where these people play, so to say, and we play that together.

So I think we all need to put that in perspective. I think the most important thing is that whether or not when we see customers and talk to customers about it or invite customers to our events quite often together with these partners, whether we have the right solutions, which customers are interested in and that's has to be the case. And you can see from the latest development now, the Tensor certification in SAP. This is spot on a use case where industrial customers want to improve their after sales and after-sales support use cases, so do more remote, travel less, save money, save people traveling around for work. So this is spot on for the use case, and that's what customers are interested in. Same is true for the Siemens partnership with 3D visualization of objects for trainings, remote trainings and the likes and the likes. Very interesting use cases. And we do see the customer interest, we see traction. It just takes a longer while. And then customer try the solutions. There's a proof of concept. And then from there, it scales. So early days, and we're very, very positive on these partnerships, but we also need to be patient there. If we see a win, for example, last year with Nadro, which we also talked about quite a bit. If we see this win and the customers really actively using the solution in this case, the augmented reality, frontline solution for picking and then some months later, they do the analysis of the upside, the economic benefit that has been realized in the deployment, then they're very happy with it, and then they start to scale. So we know it takes a while until we land first, but from there, we feel very confident and very positive. And we see the development. It's been a significant rollout now, and we have more of these deals in the pipeline, as Michael said.

So I think we need to be a bit patient there. We do expect a significant uptick as we go along because the use cases are spot on and our customers -- sorry, our partners are also very happy with it.

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

And Victor also underpins that from the numbers only in Q3, we had the same amount of billings in the partner deals like we had in the first half year. So we are not over selling. It's a journey, but we see the uptake now. And also, we feel a little bit of upbeat in our sales organization when it comes to the partnership management.

[Operator]

Next question comes from Toby Ogg from JPMorgan.

[Toby Ogg, analyst]

Yes. A few questions from my side. So perhaps just coming back on the 2024 dynamics, some of which we've already touched on. I guess you'll be lapping price increases and as you mentioned, multiyear deals likely to be a year-over-year headwind to the billings growth or some of the potential headwinds. What are some of the potential tailwinds that we should be thinking about that could provide a degree of offset to this?

And then secondly, just on the gross margins, slightly down year-over-year. You mentioned the frontline deployments and the product partner commissions contributing to that. Could you give us a sense as to the breakdown between these 2 different components? And is it fair to think that gross margins probably go down rather than up from here as these 2 dynamics become more relevant?

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Let me start with the first one, Toby, on the tailwinds. So first of all, we are investing right now a lot into our Americas reorganization. And this has to be a massive tailwind coming in next week -- next year, sorry.

And another one is obviously what we just also discussed with Victor, our partnership. Also from what we see right now in the pipeline management, this should develop nicely, plus also all in everything, which the marketing team around Pete has invested this year into way more content, stability, new look and feel of the web page. We also believe that there are some elements to kick in and last but not least, at least from my end and Oliver may prolong this with May coming in we have now -- since we did the remote launch, both now on Tensor and on our other platform, we have no other capacity also to invest far more into Tensor and flowline applications and grow from there.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes, that's also -- I think on the SMB side, we have a much better integration of our cross-sell products and TeamViewer Remote all the products are in 1 place. So cross-sell part and upsell part are much easier done also from a marketing side campaign. So there's also many good things that happen on the SMB side. And the other thing, I think the tailwinds, as Michael mentioned, we see the same way. There will also be selective price increases. I mean, I think we should also not see that as a one-off. Clearly, we hadn't done price increases for a very long while. But you know that a significant amount of customers are still sitting on older subscription discounts, which were only slowly moving towards market level. So there will always be a bit of price increase also for next year. So I wouldn't be so worried about next year in this respect with all the effects that are coming into play.

The performance we're seeing at the moment is actually in a relatively rough environment plus Americas only very early innings in stabilizations and not that big contribution from large enterprise deals, which we've seen in the past. So on that one, I feel pretty good to gross margin question.

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Yes. It's too early, of course, but it should increase slightly if we look at it right now. But we are building the entire pack.

[Operator]

Next question comes from Florian Treisch from Kepler Cheuvreux.

[Florian Treisch, analyst]

I have 2. One is coming back to the SMB part around the subscriber trend in Q3. You mentioned some thousands of subscribers lost. Can you just kind of add some color to it. Was it like a specific event? Is that, let's say, a more flat assumption for the quarters to come as we have built up over the last 5, 6 quarters, a decent positive growth trend and then around the, let's say, ASP assumption going into Q4 for SMB. As you mentioned, Q4 will be the first quarter with year-over-year or -- not any longer any support from this year-over-year effects. Is it fair to say it's 4%, 5%, what is your kind of achievement so far in Q4?

And the second question is around the free cash flow. As you have mentioned, you're clearly tracking ahead of expectation of this 9% year-over-year for the full fiscal. So what is holding you back to lift that guidance or this implication? And can you maybe quantify a bit, you mentioned some phasing in Q3 and kind of quantify that effect?

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Let me do the first one on subscriber and then I hand over to Michael.

Yes, so subscriber color, I mean, it's a function of the development at the entry-level segment, and this is influenced by kind of customer leaving us at first anniversary mostly when they decide whether they need the product as a paid product or whether they can go back to free usage and then also the free-to-pay conversion campaigns, which we are running. We have been quite active in the first 2 quarters, not so active in the third quarter. It's also a summer quarter, never really like the best quarter to run free-to-pay campaigns. And the net of this time is a slight subscriber loss. As you say, it's a few thousands in other quarters when we were running free-to-paid campaigns, we had a subscriber gain.

So generally, I think as we've started to say 2 years ago or so, we're not focusing on the subscriber numbers. We were pleased to see a little bit of uptick in Q1, Q2. Now we see a little bit of down, but over 12 months, it's almost stable, 1% growth or so and that's how I would look at the world in terms of subscriber more or less stable, but not being the driver of growth for us. And that leads us then to the second part of your question. Obviously, it's the ASP development on SMB. I don't know, Michael, you probably want to give some color on.

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

So ASP development, first of all, we are happy with that, and we will always push for higher development on the ASP's, but we don't track this proactively as a KPI. It obviously depends on the deals, how they come in. Maybe then to cash flow.

Number one, we didn't guide on cash flow, but you're exactly right, we mentioned the 9% on a full year basis. For us, by the way, it's important that we don't steer towards quarterly cash flow development, but we manage the full year. And now, actually, we feel very happy with the 9% because remember, it's a nonrecurring level free cash flow number. And this is the normal course of business for us. So please bear with us with the 9% or around the 9%, what we mentioned at the beginning of the year. We feel happy about that one.

On the decomposition question on Q3 it's in the end twofold. Number one, it's a lower billings EBITDA growth in Q3 and the other decomposition items are sponsorships. And they are twofold: number one, obviously to the P&L effect of the Formula 1 sponsorship, which is flat every year around the duration of the contract, there's a rising cash flow impact because the payouts are higher, and this is simple IFRS accounting standard. And the other one is Manchester United. We had to decouple a hedge that we did on the Manchester United contract because it was in dollar and because Manchester pulled the option -- the foundation of the business for the partner, we had to decouple the underlying hedge on this one. These are the 2 main drivers for the Q3 development. But all in all, for us, totally expected.

[Operator]

The next question comes from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

[George Webb, analyst]

A couple of questions, please. Firstly, on the enterprise performance in the quarter. When we look at the net adds, I appreciate it's only the summer months, but [indiscernible] relatively low. So can you outline what you've been seeing on enterprise customer churn, please? Has that picked up over the course of the year at all?

And then just a big picture question for you, Oliver. I guess, over the last couple of years, a lot of the focus has been on repositioning the business, particularly the cost structure with [ ReMax and exiting the United deal or at least widen it down. But on the revenue front, maybe the focus has been on go-to-market restructuring and the shift to Tensor. When you think over the next 5 years, how should we really be thinking about the core focus that you and the management team have and what's the story we should be latching on to.

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Yes. Let me start off with the enterprise churn. So we have multiple campaigns in play now and this is for us a topic to improve and constantly work on churn. And it's rather stable so far. But of course, all of the initiatives are in the development. So we also expect going forward an improvement here on churn. And then I guess, over to Oliver.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes, big picture. I mean what you see is and what we're focusing on very strongly is 2 things. One is move the company into an enterprise digitalization proposition across multiple elements. So that's on the IT side, this is really developing Tensor, the Tensor proposition further using new technologies, for example, more data-driven using AI and so forth and so forth to make process automation on the IT side, device management side even stronger, really lots of effort on this one.

And then a big focus on IT/OT conversion. We do see very good interest from customers about industry digitalization. It's a complex topic for customers in manufacturing, in service, in support, not easy in the OT environment, but it's due to come because of skilled labor shortages and many other trends that are for efficiency and improved efficiency on the customer side.

So customers do want it. Not many companies crack the code there to help out. If you talk to other big companies like SAP, Microsoft and so forth, they will all say the same thing, which is it should come, but technically much more complex than in the IT world, and we play in this field, and we have the right use cases, and we really drive the business to focus on this together with our partners like SAP, Siemens, also Microsoft more and more in industrial digitalization. So this is one big focus.

And then we have the second piece, which is obviously our core business where we come from SMB IT. We're constantly improving our proposition there as well, focus on the higher end of that segment, allow for more cross-sell opportunities through device management, security, asset discovery. So really actively talking to many industry participants to round up the portfolio there, to also drive the cross-sell in the segment and grow that part of the business at least high single digit. But then obviously, focusing the additional growth from the enterprise IT/OT convergence across the globe.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Gianmarco Conti from Deutsche Bank.

[Gianmarco Conti, analyst]

I have about 3. So on the first one, I understand that you've been reorganizing the Americas region with regards to your sales force at the start of the year. But could you shed some color on whether you saw any improvement in the pipeline development in this quarter? And sort of like when should we expect the sales force to be converting more meaningfully enterprise deals in the region? Is it a theme in Q4, Q1, Q2 of next year? Just kind of like any direction, that would be great.

My second question is, I saw that there was a slight sequential uptick in new billings. Could you share some color on whether this was SMB or enterprise driven? And then finally, if you could share some light on the dynamics for a continuously lower ASP in enterprise and whether this is simply a function of needing to lower the price to remain competitive? Or is there something else in the mix?

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes, let me start. So Americas reorganization, yes, as you pointed out, started Q1. I think then we saw probably the low of the development in Q2 and really many things were in flux with new leaders coming on board and refocusing the teams and shifting the sales teams. I think Q3 saw a good stabilization. Definitely, clearly not where we wanted it to be. I mean, obviously, hard to low for this region. But what we're seeing now is happening in a relatively difficult environment in the Americas, which we hear from other participants as well.

We are looking at a good pipeline for Q4. So I think we see an upward trend there. I think the team over there feels much more confident about Q4 in terms of our own organizational and operational performance and what we do with the pipeline and how we convert and how we discuss with customers.

We had some good scaling in Q3, which we talked about before telecommunications operator, Nadro and the likes and the likes. So good indications but it's all happening on the overall macro backdrop. And I think nobody really knows how the end of Q4 will play out. I think last year, we did have still significant budget flush in many regions, Q4 last year. I don't think this is something that the industry participants would expect in Q4 this year. So we're operating in this environment, but we do see improvement.

For us, if I take macro out and say like-for-like, how do we develop, we see sequentially improvement Q2 to Q3. We also feel good about -- better about Q4 and then Q1, Q2, we will compare ourselves against pretty difficult quarters this year with a much better team and much better pipeline. So I do feel very positive about the Americas over the next few quarters.

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Yes, on your question with regard to the new billings. So on a year-over-year comparison of those EUR 40 million, this is good a little bit more towards enterprise. So, and you saw that also here in the deck, especially, for example, the APP, which Oliver explained, very nice. And for us, a good sign that enterprise is taking up again. And on the -- question on the lower bucket of the enterprise, it was just where it's coming from, if this was the question.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

No, the question is that was whether there's continuous trend, I think, to lower ASP and enterprise. But I think what you see this year is that we do try to focus on the things which do convert and the deals that convert. Obviously, we have in our pipelines, we have very large deals, and we have the smaller deals where we move SMB customers into the Tensor and the enterprise world. The current environment, quite honestly, in most regions, the entry-level enterprise works better than the upper end. We did see some growth in the above 200,000, and we had a nice new order with t’'order in Korea, and there's a few other good deals that we have. But in generally, it's easier to sell into the middle part or the lower part of the enterprise bucket at the moment. This converts more easily, and that's what we focus on.

There's nothing which we strategically do or is a continuous trend. It's just, I think, a testament to the current market environment where we see this development. In Q4, obviously, there is a gearing towards bigger deals, together with partners across the different regions and we are middle of it. So we have still the -- I think, the important 2 months to go on this one. So let's see how this comes out then.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Deepshikha Agarwal from Goldman Sachs.

[Deepshikha Agarwal, analyst]

So first, just following up on the question on enterprise ASP. So we see that the ASPs have been like going downwards from like first quarter onwards. So would it be fair to assume that like fourth quarter would be the last quarter where you would see this trend around like people more bending towards like the smaller size deals in the enterprise bucket, and then it will stabilize post that. And then this is more on SMB. So like you talked about pricing. So should we -- like given you had upside from pricing increases for the last 3, 4 quarters, what is the normalized level of growth that you see from pricing? Would it be like more 3% to 4%? And again, in that SMB itself, you talked about free-to-pay campaigns where like it was indicated that the relevance of it is reducing as compared to how it used to be previously. So any color on how that will track going forward?

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Yes. Let me start from the back. So exactly, as you assume, free-to-pay campaigning it's not the most important part of the equation anymore. So we are also careful now we rebuild our free base and then we will continue. But on a careful element, as we, by the way, did already in this year, a complete different approach versus the other years. On pricing, you're spot on in the vicinity of 3% to 4%, this should become for us a normal part of the equation exactly as you say.

And on the enterprise ASP quite honestly, right now, and Oliver explained that, so far, right now, we are obviously more successful in selling into the lower and middle part, but you saw the deals, especially the major ones. And if macro eases up a little bit, we believe also from what we see in the pipe and from the status where we are with our partnership deals, which obviously bound towards higher ASP deals, we believe that we have also had a chance that the ASP will increase again going forward.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes. I think the -- look, sequentially, clearly, Q4 is the quarter where high ASPs are possible because this is when the big deals are being discussed. So that should be good. And then Q1, Q2, as I said before, we're comparing to the starting of the trend where ASPs came down quite significantly, as you rightly pointed out. So I think from here onwards, enterprise ASP development should see positive movement, and we're going into this Q4 now with a good pipeline for this.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Ben Castillo-Bernaus BNP Paribas.

[Ben Castillo-Bernaus, analyst]

One for me, please, just around the enterprise retention rate, which obviously fits quite materially in Q3. Could you just unpack a bit the moving parts there? How much was that lapping the multiyear deal impact? And how much was sort of less cross-sell and upsell from your installed base? You said churn was stable, actually few any other variable in there? And then I guess, what should we expect going forward, should that eventually return back to that 110% or above level that it was running at before?

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Yes. So the decomposition of the enterprise NRR is the biggest chunk is currency related. Remember, this is a reported KPI, which we released. And then there are 2 other impacts. Number 1 is multi-year deal a little bit, and the other 1 is obviously the contraction of the enterprise segment, which we have seen. So that's a natural development of what we have seen it so far. And with what we have explained before, we, of course, indeed believe that it's improving from here.

[Operator]

Our last question comes from Gustav Froberg from Berenberg.

[Gustav Froberg, analyst]

Three quick ones for me. Just on pipeline first, but on SMB. You talked about not doing free-to-pay conversions in Q3. How is the pipeline and ecosystem around your SMB business developing into Q4? Then you -- now kind of revamped Remote and you revamped Tensor. What comes next on the product side for TeamViewer and what should we look forward in next year? And the last question is on capital return and share buyback. How do you feel about your balance sheet at the moment? And what should we expect looking into next year in terms of share buybacks or returns to shareholders?

[Michael Wilkens, executive]

Yes. Let me start with the capital allocation question on share buyback. First, we want to finish this current running share buyback and for us, this is always a very attractive tool in the overall equation of the capital allocation. So in the vicinity of whatever it will be, but in 2024, we will make up our mind, but we are positive on that one, as we could say today.

[Oliver Steil, executive]

Yes. So then 2 others. So first of all, I think, question one, SMB pipeline. I don't think that's the right way to look at it, honestly, because this is velocity business where it's not so much about pipeline management, but campaigning and the kind of very active inside sales folks and then also Webshop driving this. Free-to-pay campaigning will not play a big role in the fourth quarter. I think we see good healthy business development there across the regions, honestly. Weakest kind of is the Americas, but that's also improving.

So we do feel good about stability of the SMB segment. Again, last year, Q4 was very strong. So we need to see how that plays out in the year-over-year growth, but overall, a healthy development that we see there. And we have more to talk about and more to sell with the managed devices, integrations, MDM, we have the patch management. We have security features now [indiscernible] better cross-sell. So I feel good about this. And what we hear from our inside sales people around the world is that they go confidently into the fourth quarter. So that's good. Second question, products next year. I suggest we talk about that later when we do the annual results, really full focus now on delivering this year. And we are very, very active at the moment in partnership discussions and, call it, tuck-in M&A, alliances, smaller acquisitions in different areas. I mean, not a secret. It's around IT/OT conversions. It's also collaboration around AI with some of the larger players. So there's a lot going on at the moment in the business development and corporate development teams to have additional products out there in the market for the second half of next year. I think it's better if we talk about the concrete items and propositions there with the full year results. We're in the middle of working through many of these topics at the moment.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, as there are no further questions, with this, we conclude today's conference. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. You may disconnect now. Goodbye.