Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 2, 2024

Cloudflare, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.16, expectations were $0.1318. Cloudflare, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Cloudflare First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I'd now turn the call over to your host, Phil Winslow, Vice President of Strategic Finance, Treasury and Investor Relations. You may begin.

Phil Winslow: Thank you for joining us today to discuss Cloudflare's financial results for the first quarter of 2024. With me on the call, we have Matthew Prince, Co-Founder and CEO; Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder, President and COO; Thomas Seifert, CFO; and Mark Anderson, President of Revenue. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings announcement. This announcement, as well as our supplemental financial information, may be found on our Investor Relations website. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements during today's discussion, including, but not limited to, our customers, vendors and partners' operations and future financial performance, our anticipated product launches and the timing and market potential of those products and our anticipated future financial and operating performance and our expectations regarding future macroeconomic conditions.

These results and other comments are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties, much of which is beyond our control. Our actual results may differ significantly from those projected or suggested in any of our forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. For a more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact our future operating results and financial condition, please see our filings with the SEC as well as in today's earnings press release. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers we talk about today, other than revenue, will be on an adjusted non-GAAP basis.

You will find a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures that are included in our earnings release on our Investor Relations website. For historical periods, a GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation can be found in the supplemental financial information referenced a few months ago. Before wrapping up, please save the date for our Investor Day on Thursday, May 30th, which is being held in conjunction with our user conference, Cloudflare Connect, in New York City. A live webcast will also be accessible from our Investor Relations website. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Matthew.

Matthew Prince: Thank you, Phil. We had a very strong quarter. We achieved revenue of $378.6 million, up 30% year-over-year. We added 122 new large customers, those that pay us more than $100,000 per year, and now have 2,878 large customers, up 33% year-over-year. Revenue contribution from our large customers during the quarter increased to 67%, up from 62% in the first quarter last year. Digging into our largest customers, we added a record number of net new customers year-over-year spending more than $100,000, $500,000 and $1 million on an annualized basis. We are successfully moving upmarket and becoming a larger and more strategic vendor to more and more of our customers. Our dollar-based net retention held steady quarter-over-quarter at 115%.

Our gross margin was 79.5%, again, above our long-term target range of 75% to 77%, and up from 78.9% last quarter. We delivered operating profit of $42.4 million, representing an operating margin of 11.2%. Our gross margin and operating margin performance underscore Cloudflare's efficiency and increasing operational excellence. We again meaningfully outperformed on free cash flow, generating $35.6 million during the quarter. We have our hands firmly on the levers of our business. I'm proud of the fact that our team has been able to continue to build our network, service larger and larger customers, and launch entirely new categories of products, including in the AI space, while remaining disciplined with our CapEx, gross margin, operating margin and cash flow.

We have an elegant business that works because how all the pieces fit together and leverage our hyper-efficient network infrastructure in a way that we believe no competitors can match. If I reflect back on the history of Cloudflare, it defines fairly neatly into seven-year eras. The first seven years, 2010 through 2017 were all about engineering and little else, figuring out if it was even possible to build the revolutionary network we have today. The next seven were all about product, taking that incredible engineering and packaging it up. As we got great at product, we didn't stop being incredible at engineering. We continue to build on and improve that foundation. Looking forward to the next seven years, we will continue to be the best in the world in engineering and product, but we'll add to that world-class sales and marketing.

To that end, just 90 days ago, we announced that Mark Anderson would be joining Cloudflare as our new President of Revenue to accelerate our next phase of growth at scale. He hit the ground running and has been enthusiastically embraced by our team. I thought it made sense for Mark to say a few words on what he has seen in his first 90 days. Mark?

Mark Anderson: Thanks, Matthew. I've been with Cloudflare and the team as a Board member for the last four and a half years. But the thing that surprised me the most getting in the trenches is just how incredible the product is. I know this space and we are leaps and bounds better than any of our competitors. What also surprised me is how much room for improvement there is for Cloudflare's go-to-market organization. The last year has been about clearing the way for a world-class enterprise sales organization to emerge. We've got some great people, great experiences, and gosh, I can see the early results, but I'm now planning to step on the gas, building and enabling this team that can take Cloudflare's best-of-breed products to every single enterprise everywhere in the world. I don't see anything stopping us from becoming one of the most strategic key vendors to every Fortune 500 company out there. I couldn't be more excited.

Matthew Prince: Thanks, Mark. Some of the benefits of a world-class leader are hard to measure in the short-term, but I'll give you one that can be clearly measured and it stood out to me. The number of applicants for strategic account and enterprise sales positions increased 56% in March versus February following Mark Anderson's appointment. We're definitely hiring. Across all positions, we had over 350,000 applicants in Q1, up 47% over the same quarter last year. We added several senior go-to-market leaders with proven track records in their areas of expertise, including a new Chief Partner Officer, a new Head of Global Sales and Renewals, and multiple regional strategic account sales leaders. If you're a sales professional who wants to win with great products and world-class leadership, the word is out, Cloudflare is the place to bet the next-stage of your career.

Beyond incredible hiring, our sales productivity from existing team members improved year-over-year. Sales cycles were similar to last quarter and new pipeline attainment exceeded our expectations. I don't think Mark can take credit for any of that yet, which is actually very encouraging. We have room for improvement, as he said, but now we have the right leadership and foundation to take our go-to-market efforts to the next level. I feel extremely confident and clear in the long-term opportunity that Cloudflare has in front of us. In the short-term, however, my crystal ball is less clear. We see a lot of signals based on our privileged position running a good chunk of the Internet. Even without that visibility, if you've been watching the news at all, it's clear that the near-term outlook for the world is uncertain, increasing tensions in the Middle East, no end in sight from the Russia-Ukraine war and potential signs of instability in Asia.

It's not at all certain on anything we see that things will get worse, but we do know from even recent history that macro factors can impact short-term sales trends. We're fortunate that we're in the cybersecurity space, perhaps one of the few sectors that can actually benefit from increased global tensions. We're already seeing that, especially in our government business. But we also want to acknowledge the risky world we live in and be, as we always have been, prudent and careful with our investments and our forecast as we look into what is a short-term cloudy crystal ball, that served us well in the past and I think will prove to be the disciplined approach once again going-forward. The short-term is uncertain, the long-term is bright, and so in the medium-term, we're going to keep our hands firmly on the levers of our business and thoughtfully invest in our go-to-market efforts in great engineering and in destructive new products that deliver incredible value to our customers.

That's the winning strategy, especially in uncertain times. Speaking of customers, let me share some great wins for the quarter. The National Cyber Security Centre, the UK's technical authority for cyber threats, signed a three-year contract with Cloudflare to deliver its protective domain name service. PDNS protects over 1,400 UK organizations in central government, local government, healthcare and emergency services from malware and cyber threats. This was a very competitive process with several vendors and a rigorous technical evaluation. We tightly collaborated with Accenture, a partner we're looking forward to working with even more closely on this landmark UK public sector win. A leading technology company expanded their relationship with Cloudflare, signing a three-year, $40 million pool of funds contract, $8.5 million of which are expansion.

This deal is an example of a strategic platform deal that we're increasingly seeing customers opt for with a rate card for more than 40 Cloudflare products and services. These include Cloudflare One, Magic Transit, R2, as well as Workers AI, which the customer was quick to dive in and start trialing. As a textbook land and expand story, this customer first came to us in 2017 for our application security services and has continued to expand over the years with this deal encompassing the vast majority of Cloudflare's platform. A Fortune 100 financial services company signed a similar four-year, $10 million pool of funds deal. This customer represents our largest new logo win with a major financial institution. We successfully completed six different proof-of-concepts, and the main business drivers for going with Cloudflare were resilience, the operational efficiency from a single unified platform, and our ability to meet data sovereignty requirements with complete flexibility at the country-level, a requirement that no other vendor was able to accommodate.

We anticipate this deal will serve as a beachhead for us to win more financial service customers looking for the same benefits. A large international energy company signed a five-year, $4.5 million contract. This new customer is going all-in with Cloudflare's SASE platform with 6,000 Zero Trust seats along with CASB, DLP, browser isolation, Magic WAN and Magic Firewall. Competing against a first-generation Zero Trust vendor, our focus on scalability and efficiency as well as the ability to consolidate several vendors due to the significant value in our overall portfolio were key factors delivering this win. A large financial institution in Latin America signed a two-year, $1.3 million contract for Zero Trust seats for their employees and contractors, along with our application security services.

A close-up of a server array powering a cloud-services system.

This is a very competitive process with 11 participants. Cloudflare's pace of innovation, speed of deployment, superior performance and integrated platform with DDoS and WAF for agentless access set us apart from the rest. A leading digital marketplace signed a three-year, $880,000 contract for Zero Trust, Magic WAN and application security. The company was looking to simplify, optimize, and reduce latency in their security architecture and WAN platform. With their incumbent solution, this company found it difficult to roll-out consistent security posture where they can manage security and network together. With Cloudflare, this customer is able to consolidate seven incumbent products on Cloudflare's modernized network, merging network and security solutions on our unified platform with a single control plane.

A Fortune 100 government-sponsored financial services company signed a three-year, $3 million contract for DDoS protection with our Magic Transit, Magic Firewall and DNS Firewall products. This customer was looking for a solution that was more resilient, performant and better architected than their incumbent solution. With Cloudflare's unified platform, this customer is able to improve attack mitigation outcomes on a single pane of glass and eliminate the need for dedicated teams to run and manage multiple products. Another deal with this customer is already underway. A leading construction company, signed a three-year, $720,000 contract for Zero Trust, Magic WAN and Magic Firewall. This customer is looking to shift from a legacy hub-and-spoke architecture, eliminating costly hardware appliances at job sites to a modern cloud-native SASE model.

Cloudflare won against the first-generation Zero Trust vendor due to our superior network, pace of innovation, ease-of-use and speed of deployment. A U.S. government agency signed a one-year, $800,000 contract for Zero Trust, Magic WAN and R2 object storage. The agency was looking to modernize infrastructure and eliminate a complex network of multiple legacy point solution vendors. Cloudflare displaced a first-generation Zero Trust provider due to our ease-of-use, speed of deployment, and integrated platform with a single control plane. These are all great wins, and again, I think what we are seeing is more and more customers are turning to the complete Cloudflare platform. Before I hand it over to Thomas, I wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about Cloudflare Workers, our developer platform.

The last few months were incredible for the entire workers ecosystem. First, we crossed over 2 million active developers building applications on Cloudflare Workers. Second, in April, we GA'd a number of key products like: D1, our serverless SQL database; Hyperdrive, which makes any traditional database perform like it's globally distributed; and Workers AI, which allows developers to run and tune AI models across our global network. We're ahead of schedule rolling out GPUs across our network and now have them running in more than 150 cities globally, making us what we believe is the most widely distributed AI cloud by a huge margin. Our next-generation of servers that begin to roll-out in Q2 have GPUs built-in by default and will support faster inference and even larger, more complicated models.

Developers are building incredible new applications using Workers AI and we're making it increasingly easy for them. We added support for Python, the second most popular programming language generally and the most common language for AI applications. We've rolled-out our partnership with Hugging Face, making it one-click simple to deploy most of their catalog of models to Cloudflare's network. And we added other bleeding edge models, including releasing Meta's Llama 3 to production simultaneously the day it was announced. One of my favorite aspects of my job is I feel like I get to see into the future when I talk to developers who are building on Cloudflare Workers. I'm proud that we're delivering the tools they need to build applications that are intelligent, scalable and lightning fast around the world.

Internally and externally, our innovation engine continues to fire on all cylinders. And as I said, I've never been more excited about the future for Cloudflare, the Internet, and us users who will get to enjoy the benefits of all of this innovation in so many aspects of our lives. With that, I'll turn it over to Thomas. Thomas, take it away.

Thomas Seifert: Thank you, Matthew, and thank you to everyone for joining us. We are pleased with our execution during the first quarter. Sales productivity improved year-over-year again this quarter, sales cycles were similar to last quarter, and our new pipeline attainment exceeded our expectations. The quarter was highlighted by sustained momentum with large customers, including our largest new logo win with a major financial institution and continued progress in the public sector, including our largest contract with a new foreign government customer. We are also seeing security remain a high priority for our customers given the continued geopolitical uncertainty and high-profile cyber-attacks, driving demand for our application and network security businesses as well as Cloudflare One.

We also maintained our strong commitment to being fiscally responsible and act as good stewards of investors' capital. During the first quarter, operating profit more than doubled year-over-year and we generated strong free cash flow of $35.6 million, driven by a notable uptick in collections on our accounts receivable. Turning to revenue. Total revenue for the first quarter increased 30% year-over-year to $378.6 million. From a geographic perspective, the U.S. represented 52% of revenue and increased 28% year-over-year; EMEA represented 28% of revenue and increased 35% year-over-year; APAC represented 12% of revenue and increased 22% year-over-year. Turning to our customer metrics. In the first quarter, we had about 197,000 paying customers, representing an increase of 17% year-over-year.

We ended the quarter with about 2,900 large customers, representing an increase of 33% year-over-year and an addition of 122 large customers in the quarter. As Matthew mentioned, we were pleased to see revenue contribution from large customers during the quarter increase again to 67% of revenue, up from 62% in the first quarter last year. We also added a record number of net new customers year-over-year across all three large customer cohorts, that is those spending more than $100,000, $500,000 and $1 million on an annualized basis with Cloudflare. Our dollar-based net retention rate was 115% during the first quarter and consistent sequentially. As we mentioned last quarter, there can be some variability in this metric quarter-to-quarter, but we continue to believe the prior decelerating trend in DNR is stabilizing near these levels.

Moving to gross margin. First quarter gross margin was 79.5%, representing an increase of 60 basis points sequentially and an increase of 170 basis points year-over-year. Network CapEx represented 8% of revenue in the first quarter as we continue to benefit from our focus on driving greater efficiency from our infrastructure and the uniqueness of our platform to onboard new workloads. We expect network CapEx to be 10% to 12% of revenue in fiscal 2024. Turning to operating expenses. First quarter operating expenses as a percentage of revenue decreased by 3% year-over-year to 68%, as we remain committed to driving higher productivity and greater efficiency across our operations. Our total number of employees increased 9% year-over-year, bringing our total headcount to 3,704 at the end of the quarter.

Sales and marketing expenses were $156.8 million for the quarter. Sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue decreased to 41% from 42% in the same quarter last year. Over the last five quarters, we focused on refining our go-to-market strategies and operations. We are encouraged by the double-digit year-over-year improvement in sales productivity that we again delivered during the first quarter, which continues the upward trend from the trough of early last year toward the productivity levels we consistently achieved in 2021 and early 2022. We expect this positive trajectory to continue based on the analysis of our pipeline and with the onboarding of Mark Anderson and the other senior go-to-market leaders Matthew referenced earlier. As you've heard us say many times, we are committed to the underlying unit economics of our business and make data-driven decisions to pace hiring.

The improvements in sales productivity and other leading indicators of our business give us confidence to invest in additional go-to-market improvements and further expand sales capacity. As a result, we intend to accelerate headcount additions in the coming quarters as compared to the first quarter. Research and development expenses were $58.7 million in the quarter. R&D as a percentage of revenue decreased to 16% from 18% in the same quarter last year. General and administrative expenses were $43.2 million for the quarter. G&A as a percentage of revenue decreased to 11% from 12% in the same quarter last year. Operating income was $42.4 million compared to $19.4 million in the same period last year. First quarter operating margin was 11.2%, an increase of 450 basis points year-over-year.

These results highlight our continued focus on becoming more efficient and more productive, given that operational excellence is a long-term competitive advantage. Turning to net income and the balance sheet. Our net income in the quarter was $58.2 million or dilutive net income of $0.16 per share. We ended the first quarter with $1.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents and available-for-sale securities. Free cash flow was $35.6 million in the first quarter or 9% of revenue compared to $13.9 million or 5% of revenue in the same period last year. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, came in at $1.343 billion, representing an increase of 8% sequentially and 40% year-over-year. Current RPO was 70% of total RPO. Moving to guidance for the second quarter and full year 2024.

We are pleased with our execution during the first quarter. However, ongoing mixed macroeconomic data points and heightened geopolitical uncertainty serve as reminders that we continue to operate in a business environment that remains challenging to predict. As a result, we remain prudent in our outlook for 2024. For the second quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $393.5 million to $394.5 million, representing an increase of 28% year-over-year. We expect operating income in the range of $35 million to $36 million and we expect an effective tax-rate of 10%. We expect diluted net income per share of $0.14 assuming approximately 360 million shares outstanding. For the full year 2024, we expect revenue in the range of $1.648 billion to $1.652 billion, representing an increase of 27% year-over-year.

We expect operating income for the full year in the range of $160 million to $164 million. We expect an effective tax rate of 10% for 2024 and we expect diluted net income per share over that period to be $0.60 to $0.61, assuming approximately 361 million shares outstanding. We expect free cash flow to be relatively consistent with operating profit for the full year 2024, with the first half lower and the second half higher compared with operating profit. In closing, our team remains committed to driving operational excellence, ensuring long-term growth and delivering significant shareholder value. I'd like to thank our employees for their dedication to our mission as well as our customers for trusting us to help them solve some of the hardest problems that they face when modernizing, transforming and securing their businesses.

And with that, I'd like to open it up for questions. Operator, please poll for questions.

See also

15 Best Gambling Stocks to Buy Now and

25 Countries with Highest Gun Ownership in 2024.

To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.