Absolute Software Corporation

Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call

11/8/2022

spk09: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Absolute Software's fiscal 2023 first quarter results conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone thumb. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. I would also like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded today, November 8th, 2022. I would now like to turn the floor over to your host, Joo Han Kim, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk08: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. With me on today's call are Christy Wyatt, President and Chief Executive Officer of Absolute Software, and Ron Fior, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Before beginning our formal remarks, Absolute Software would like to remind listeners that certain portions of today's call may contain forward-looking statements that reflect current views with respect to future events and conditions. Any such statements are subject to assumptions, risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements contained in today's conference call are made as of today's date, Tuesday, November 8, 2022, and Absolute Software undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable securities law. For more information on the assumptions, risks, and uncertainties relating to these forward-looking statements, please refer to the appropriate section of the company's most recent MD&A, which is now available on Absolute Software's website and will also be available on CDAR and EDGAR. I would now like to turn the call over to Christy Wyatt. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you to everyone joining us today for Absolute Software's Q1 Fiscal 2023 Earnings Call. As a part of today's call, we will cover the results as well as three important themes, the diversity of our customer base, investments we have made in the business, and how we're faring amidst macroeconomic concerns. First, our results. In Q1, we delivered consistent and steady year-on-year ARR growth of 15% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 21%. As we shared in our last call, this quarter we made a one-time investment in our company kickoff, as well as sales headcount investments to support growth later in the year, which was partly responsible for the downtick in EBITDA margin. We fully expect to maintain our Rule of 40 operating model for the full fiscal year, as we have previously discussed. Enterprise and government sector ARR growth continued to be strong and expanded as a percentage of our total revenue. The sector increased 18% year on year, despite being a seasonally slow quarter for the enterprise. Demand was particularly healthy for secure endpoint solutions for both security and IT use cases, as we continue to improve our customer-focused go-to-market motion. Our solid execution was also reflected on our customer satisfaction results. We continue to see our NPS score strengthen, setting another record this quarter. We were also recognized as a leader for the 11th consecutive quarter by G2.com in the Fall 2022 Endpoint Management Report, and for the second consecutive quarter as a leader in the Zero Trust Networking Grid Report. We also saw some nice mentions from industry analysts, including a feature in Forrester's The Future of Endpoint Management report, and Cuppinger-Cole, who named Absolute an overall leader in their 2022 Leadership Compass Zero Trust Network Access report. Finally, our active endpoint growth increased by 13% year-on-year and is now more than 14 million devices actively connecting to our cloud services. At our recent Financial Analyst Day in New York, we showed both the vertical market diversity in our business, as well as the diversity of our go-to-market channels, with just over 50% of our sales going through our OEM partners. One of the verticals that continues to grow nicely is healthcare. As an example, this quarter, we helped a large medical device company to improve their visibility, reporting, and compliance capabilities across more than 40,000 devices in a highly regulated environment. Their focus was ensuring their critical tools for endpoint encryption and device management remain healthy and operational, as well as the ability to remediate in the event that they need to protect intellectual property and other sensitive data on the endpoints. Another strong vertical for us in the quarter was professional services, where we saw yet another large global professional services organization with an extremely large hybrid workforce leverage absolute resilience for four critical applications to improve productivity and decrease the risk profile of remote work. Very much like Genpak, the customer who spoke at our investor day, this customer is taking advantage of the full suite of our secure endpoint capabilities. Turning to education, consistent with our view that education will remain at a high single digit, low double digit market for us, we saw 7% year-on-year growth as the segment continues to decrease as an overall percentage of our total revenue. We did see some effect of ongoing supply chain issues with our OEM partners resulting in some deals being pushed out or in some cases, shifting the mix from PCs to Chromebooks as they were more readily available. Like many of our education customers, one large US school district this quarter was seeing missing device rates in the teens. They turned to our resilience for Chromebooks offering across their 75,000 new student Chromebooks to help them identify lost or stolen devices and they are leveraging our professional services team to manage their growing device fleet and assist with recovering those devices at the end of the school year. While secure access experienced some summer seasonality, especially in Europe, we are happy with the growing set of opportunities, especially in transportation and logistics, where we saw several key design wins with major airlines, as well as continued strength in the state and local government segment. One of the key wins this quarter in our secure access portfolio included a large multi-county police force in the UK where we replaced their underperforming legacy VPN product with our persistent self-healing secure access solution, ensuring first responders are able to access mission critical applications in rural remote areas known for having poor cellular coverage and assuring officers can securely communicate with one another in pursuit of their safety and of those they are serving in the community. Staying on secure access for a moment, we are seeing accelerated demand for our cloud hosted secure access offering. With its near instant time to deployment, ability to scale with business demands and lower cost of ownership versus an on-premise solution, our cloud SA offering gives enterprises the ability to scale remote and hybrid work initiatives, as well as quickly implement a ZTNA solution across the company with our best in class user experience. While it was a small part of the overall SA business when we acquired NetMotion, cloud deployments are growing quickly and we expect cloud to be a material driver of new secure access ARR this fiscal year, as well as an efficient delivery vehicle as our OEM partners are bringing SA online. In addition to growing OEM support for our SA portfolio, we also added British Telecom and Ingram Micro US to the growing carrier and reseller partner community. The second theme I want to discuss today is around the investments we continue to make in our team. In our last call, we discussed investing early in the new fiscal year to set us up for growth in the second half. We accomplished that by filling quota carrying and key R&D positions at the end of Q4 and early in Q1, ensuring that teams were staffed and ready to execute against our first half plan. We also wanted to ensure that most of our employees could be on board in time to attend our company kickoff. Our company kickoff was a powerful start to our year, enabling the entire Absolute team to train, spend time on the Absolute story and with one another. These costs are all now fully baked into Q1 results and will produce continued revenue impact in the remainder of the fiscal year. As we continue to focus on driving awareness and demand for Absolute, we welcomed Alice Hansen as our new Chief Marketing Officer this quarter. Filling out the final pieces for our executive team this year, we also announced industry veteran Sameer Sharif to Chief Information Security Officer, and we promoted Mark Grace to Chief Revenue Officer as Matthew Schoenfeld exited the business to pursue a new opportunity. Mark has unparalleled knowledge and roots in Absolute's business and is known for his outstanding leadership and for building high-performance go-to-market teams. And finally, last week, we announced that Jim LeGille will be joining us as our new CFO. Jim is a seven-time CFO with a proven track record in financial leadership at SaaS companies and a passion for helping software businesses scale. I look forward to you meeting Jim after he starts with us on December 5th. While we are seeing steady demand for our solutions, we continue to monitor external market conditions closely and we remain confident in the financial outlook we provided last quarter based on our growing enterprise business and the diversity within that business. In New York, we talked about our customers and prospects need to adopt resilient first strategies, given the growing threat landscape and sophistication of cyber attacks. With the investments we've made, we're seeing the strategic impact that absolute self-healing intelligent security solutions are contributing to our 18,000 customers around the world and the massive opportunity in front of us with our unbreakable connection embedded in more than 600 million devices. steady execution, balancing profitability, cash generation, and growth to deliver value for our shareholders. Before I hand it over to Ron, I want to express my gratitude and sincere thanks to him. As you all know, Ron stepped in as interim CFO earlier this year, and has played a critical role in helping to drive our business. He's had a tremendous impact, and we have appreciated his support as we've conducted our CFO search. With that, I would like to hand it over to Ron for more details on the financials.
spk02: Thanks Christy. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. On the call today, I will first go over our Q1 fiscal 2023 financial results, spend some time reviewing the impact the NetMotion Secure Access product currently has on our business model, and then discuss our outlook. Now onto the Q1 results. As a reminder, we are reporting revenue and year-over-year comparisons on an adjusted basis that excludes any IFRS purchase accounting impact on deferred revenue. We believe this adjusted revenue metric provides a more meaningful and transparent view of the combined business. Adjusted revenue was $54.2 million for Q1 fiscal 2023, up 10.6% from the prior year, and relatively flat sequentially over Q4 fiscal 2022. The increase from the prior year is a result of the continued growth in our ARR base. We faced a tough comp as compared to the previous year's Q1, where we had a large multi-year international secure access deal, a slowing in the conversion of perpetual licenses to term, and a higher seasonal mix of secure endpoint versus secure access. We did see some macro pressures on contract length, which had a small negative impact on revenue, but didn't impact ARR. At the end of Q1, approximately 77% of secure access ARR portfolio was on subscription arrangements, up slightly from the 73% in the prior quarter and 59% at the end of Q1 fiscal 2022. In contrast with the routability of our secure endpoint sales, IFRS 15 accounting treatment requires Absolute to recognize 50% of the value of secure access on-premise term contracts in the quarter signed, with the balance amortized over the term of the agreement. As we have seen over the past year, this has resulted in some significant variability in the timing of revenue recognition. For example, if all of our absolute contracts had been amortized as a traditional SAS product, the growth rate in Q1 would have been 15% versus the 11% that we experienced. Over time, we expect Secure Access Cloud to grow faster than the on-premises term version of Secure Access and help us return to the same smoothness and predictability of the secure endpoint SaaS model we had before the acquisition. Total ARR was $215.7 million as of September 30, 2022, 15% growth versus the prior year, and up $6.2 million from the prior quarter. Unlike revenue, ARR is not impacted by IFRS revenue accounting complexities related to term licenses, and we believe it is the best indicator of absolute progress and growth. ARR growth was driven primarily by continued strength in enterprise and government, which grew 18% in Q1 versus 17% in the prior year and 17% in the prior quarter. Education grew ARR by 7% versus 18% in the prior year and 12% in Q4. The strength in enterprise ARR came from strong new logo acquisition and continued improvements in net dollar retention. New customer signings were a strong $4 million, up from the prior quarter's $2.8 million, and down modestly from last year's $4.7 million, which included a very large deal in secure access and a large new education customer. Secure Endpoint, in particular, saw strong new customer acquisitions as the go-to-market strategy of focused use cases continues to mature. We did well in professional and financial verticals, and we are seeing strong activity in other large verticals such as logistics and transportation. Net dollar retention of 108% was slightly down from last year's Q1 of 109% and was flat sequentially from the prior quarter. We saw enterprise net dollar retention continue to improve sequentially, despite the small drag of a legacy customer non-renewal of an end-of-life product. Education ARR of 47 million was up 7% year-on-year, but relatively flat sequentially in what is typically a strong education quarter. We saw some education deals pushed out due to their inability to receive delivery of laptop purchases due to the supply chain delays. We do expect to sign some of these deals in Q2. However, we are also seeing school boards adapt to this challenging environment by shifting their device mix to include more Chromebooks, which have been easier to acquire than laptops. The number of Chromebooks we are now attached to has increased significantly, but our lower ARR per endpoint from Chromebooks is creating a new near-term headwind in education. That said, we continue to believe our growing education endpoint population means it can still be a meaningful but slower contributor to ARR growth going forward. Moving on to cost and profitability for the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was $11.5 million, or a margin of 21%. The decrease in the adjusted EBITDA margin from prior quarter and prior year is a result of increased headcount from hires made throughout Q4 that are now fully loaded into the Q1 numbers, along with approximately $1 million in extra costs, approximately 200 basis points of margin associated with the company kickoff, which is in the sales and marketing line. Looking forward, given the number of new people we have already brought on board over the past two quarters, we expect modest additional hirings. While we expect operating expenses to be up in Q2 as we fully absorb the new hires, over the second half of the year, we expect operating expenses to be relatively flat. That said, the new hires are having the desired effect and we're excited about the increasing coverage in our pipelines and the number of more strategic conversations we're having with large Fortune 500 customers. And we believe we can continue to fund this growth by more fully utilizing and reallocating resources internally where necessary. Adjusted gross margin of 88% remains at historical levels in Q1. We have begun moving our service to the public cloud and are now incurring higher costs. As previously mentioned, over time we may see a gross margin contraction of 100 to 200 basis points. Operating cash flow from operations was $15.2 million and our cash and short-term investment balance grew to $67.6 million from $64 million last quarter after servicing the debt and paying our dividends. Concerning our debt, our coupon increased by 125 basis points since the last call, resulting in approximately $900,000 in additional interest expense for Q1 versus Q4. Given our strong cash flow from operations and our expectation of continued profitable growth, we are confident in our ability to service the debt while continuing to pay the dividend and organically de-lever the balance sheet as we continue to build our cash balance. To that end, on Friday, we made a $5 million payment against the debt, and we will continue to opportunistically pay down the debt as cash balances permit. Turning to guidance. The macro environment of inflation, PC shortages, layoffs, etc., are impacting many businesses, and we are not immune, as noted in our discussion about the education market and Chromebooks. However, Given our recent growth in the enterprise space and the increasing activity in the secure access product line with a higher mix of secure access in the coming quarters, we are leaving both of our adjusted revenue and adjusted EBITDA outlook for the full fiscal year ending June 30th, 2023 unchanged. And we'll be keeping a tight hand in the hiring and other operating expenses. The growth in our ARR base continues to drive sequential growth in our total revenue. However, as we saw in Q1 this fiscal quarter, we expect inter-quarter fluctuations to be greater this fiscal year than last year, driven by seasonality and the impact of multi-year term licenses and secure access. Looking at linearity, we are seeing the back half of the year be a slightly higher percentage of the year than 2022. As of September 2022, the remaining value of the deferred revenue write-down we will take going forward over future periods is approximately $2.5 million. The deferred revenue accounting write-down was $0.6 million in Q1, down from $5.3 million in Q1 of fiscal 2022 and $1.5 million in Q4 of fiscal 2022. We anticipate the quarterly difference between our IFRS reported and adjusted revenue numbers will continue to decline as we move forward and be immaterial by the end of the fiscal year. Before I turn it back over to the operator, I wanted to say congratulations to Jim LaGille, who will be taking over as the full-time chief financial officer on December 5th. This was my second tour of duty with Absolute, and I have been impressed by the remarkable progress the company has made in all facets of the business, and especially in its people and products. I have no doubt that the company is on the right track to find even greater success in the coming years. With that, we appreciate your time and support, and we're glad to open the call for any questions. Operator.
spk09: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And the first question will be from Doug Taylor with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
spk04: Yeah, thank you and good evening. Last call and during your investor day in New York, you spoke about the expectation that you'd exit the year closer to 20% revenue growth. Q1, as you noted, started a little below the guidance pace of 15% to 17%. My question is whether that 20% exit run rate is still a relevant target in this market, and what specifically gives you confidence in that acceleration from these Q1 levels over the course of the year?
spk02: Yeah, okay, so I think there's a number of things that we think about. Number one is that we've been having very strong ARR growth in the enterprise side, and you saw that with 18% year-on-year growth. And that was up from last quarter 17%. We also are actually looking at a growing secure access pipeline that we're seeing right now. And I would also remind you of the area that I talked about the IFRS impacts. And Q3 and Q4 are actually very large renewal quarters. So there's big linearity towards that back end of the year. And that makes a big difference. The other thing that's happening is, as you are aware, we've hired a lot of new people in the sales group in Q4 and into Q1, and those people are coming on board and they're scaling up very quickly, and we expect improving productivity with those. So, yeah, at this stage, we still see it as a meaningful answer to get to the 20%. Okay.
spk04: Thanks for that. I mean, you talked about the hiring for the company overall, but on the management level, you've expanded your executive team. That was very much on display at that investor day. Are there any other, you know, roles that you're looking to fill on the C-suite or at the executive management level, you know, following the recent hires?
spk01: Hi, Doug. I would say none immediately. I think that the – The addition of Samir, I think we spoke a little bit last year about some transitions between IT and security, and so I think Samir is definitely a welcome addition to the team. We had talked about kind of our new CMO, and then, of course, Jim will be joining us in December. So, you know, I've said before, I never say never. A team is always sort of a work in progress, but I think we feel great about the team we've put together and how they've really come together coming into this year.
spk04: Okay, well, on that note, I'll thank Ron for his stewardship over the financials and look forward to meeting Jim. Thank you. Thank you.
spk09: And the next question will come from Adam Tindall with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
spk07: Okay, thanks. Good afternoon. I just wanted to continue the conversation on guidance. I think, Ron, you said you're maintaining guidance, you're acknowledging that there's macro impacts that you're seeing, but you're expecting a higher mix of secure access, which underpins this. And I imagine Christy could probably add to this as well. But the question would be, that's a newer business for you guys. Obviously, you've had it for a little while now, but certainly not as much visibility and modeling as you have in your core. Maybe just help us with the visibility that you have in making that assumption that secure access is going to accelerate. I'm wondering if there's anything contractual with new channel partners or something that you can give us to help our level of confidence get as high as yours.
spk01: Sure. I can start, and then Ron can certainly jump in. I think Ron already touched on a couple of the big ones, which is first and probably most importantly is the visibility we have on that business. Given that it is recurring, and we have talked about the IFRS 15 impact and how we see that sort of trending through the year, and so given that these are seasonally large renewal quarters and we start to see some of the impact of that IFRS 15 sort of lightning in the second half of the year. So that's the first piece. The second piece is we've talked about pipeline coverage coming into the quarter. We've talked about kind of the number of large deals we see moving through and the kinds of design wins we're seeing in the pipeline. And I think that continues to look really strong. We've made some changes over the past couple of weeks as a result of the transition in the selling organization to really drive the focus behind the SA business across both North America and international. So I think we feel very good about not just the new capacity that we've brought on board over the past two quarters, but also the pipeline that's kind of building behind it.
spk07: Got it. Okay. And then, you know, I guess maybe as a follow-up to that, could you maybe just talk about plan B? If, you know, like enterprise spending, we've seen push outs at end of quarters for, you know, big enterprise technology companies, whether it's a ServiceNow or Salesforce, et cetera. So if that were to ultimately, heaven forbid, impact this business, maybe I'm sure you've kind of thought through a plan B. We're wondering if you could talk to what you would do if you ultimately did see some growth deceleration. Thank you.
spk01: Sure. And I think we talked a little bit about this in New York. We keep a very close eye on the pipeline, the coverage, what's going on sort of in the market around us. I think one thing that's quite unique about us, because we've been operating under this sort of balanced profitability model for quite a while now, is that if we start to see things shift on the top line, we certainly make the right set of decisions kind of on the hiring front. So we did make some investments coming into Q1 to set us up for growth in the second half. That said, we really have slowed hiring as we came sort of through Q1 and coming into Q2 as we kind of keep an eye on the market around us. And so I think operationally, as you would expect us to, we're sort of tracking both of those very, very closely. We're very committed to hitting that Rule of 40 target on the fiscal year and sort of know what we need to do to get there.
spk07: Got it. Yep, makes sense to me. And you've got plenty of margin to work with to invest. So look forward to following it. Thank you for the questions.
spk01: Thank you.
spk09: And the next question is from Thanos Mishopoulos from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk06: Hi, good afternoon. Chris, maybe just to close it off on the macro. I mean, so you called out the Chromebook mix shift. You called out maybe a bit of shortening in contract length. Anything else you're seeing or not at this stage? I mean, as far as sales cycles, level of sign-off required for deals, any change in that regard or not yet?
spk01: Not yet. And as I said before, I think we feel very comfortable with the coverage we came into this quarter and kind of what's building for the second half. So I don't think we've seen the effect of that. I think on the education side, it really has been driven by availability. So I think that where they have the opportunity to take a certain number of devices, if what they can get their hands on is Chromebooks, we see them take more Chromebooks than PCs if those are not available. But the Sort of the number of seed growth and the amount of seed growth we see happening within these accounts continues to maintain and sort of stay steady. So nothing that we've seen yet, but as I said before, we're keeping a close eye on it as we go into the end of the year.
spk06: Okay. And then there's obviously been some currency moves. So how do we think about it in terms of the recent decline of the Canadian dollar? Just how much of a tailwind is that as we think about OPEX and margins?
spk02: So our big exposures are obviously Canada and then the UK. We did, in fact, hedge some of that earlier in the year, which is actually very favorable compared to our plan, but not nearly as favorable as it could have been now, unfortunately. But our goal is not to speculate on those things. Right now, we're in pretty good shape. Obviously, it's a positive impact. We sell our product primarily in U.S. dollars, but it could have a negative impact at some point in time if the currency becomes U.S. dollar, it becomes too strong against everybody else. But otherwise, we're in pretty good shape.
spk01: The other thing I would remind folks, I guess, just on top of that, is that we've talked a lot about our growth strategy, and one of the key parts of our growth strategy being international growth. One of the reasons why that's such an interesting area for us is because so much of our market and our sales is still actually happening within North America. And so I think that that balances out a little bit, I think, some of the currency swing we see across customer accounts.
spk06: Okay, great. And then last thing for me is just remind us in terms of the FedRAMP certification. Any update there for the timing is unasked?
spk01: We're still awaiting some more details to come back from the FedRAMP office, so I don't have anything new to announce on that yet today.
spk06: Great. I'll pass the line. Thanks.
spk09: Thank you. And the next question is from Scott Berg from Needham. Please go ahead.
spk03: Hi, everyone. Congrats on the good quarter, and thank you for taking my questions. I have two. First is a follow-up to a comment Ron made. You're having more conversations with Fortune 500 companies today. I assume that's partially driven by the larger sales force, but as you look at those conversations, which side of the business are they really more focused on? Is it more on the resilient side or the secure access functionality or potentially both?
spk01: Hi, Scott. That's a great question, and I I'm sort of trying to think it through. I guess on the secure access side, I think we see organizations continue to manage the risk of remote workforce. So we talked on the call about some of the interesting design wins we've had, and they typically tend to be large multinational organizations who are sort of de-risking their hybrid and remote workforce strategy. And so that remains a really important part of the conversation. I think on the IT side with secure endpoint, That really is kind of, I think, hooking into, connected to the Work From Anywhere conversation, but even more broadly, as all of their budgets are coming under pressure, they're wanting to make sure that they get the most amount of coverage and protection that they already have. And in many cases, it is about sort of shoring up the protection that they have, because many of them are not in a position to sort of spin up and ramp up sort of new security projects going on across the organization. And so, If you look at some of the quotes that we've given in the past where they say it's like having another IT manager, it helps them sort of offset additional headcount costs on the IT side because we can automate some of the self-healing and the resiliency of those products. So I think it sort of fits within their do more with less strategy as a result of kind of the pressure that they're underneath within their own organizations.
spk03: That is helpful. And then from a follow-up perspective, Christy, You talked about the new CRO that's starting with Matthew's departure. You've had some change in your sales leadership over the last couple of years. I'd call it more evolution than revolution. But how should we look at this change? Is any of the playbook, does it change differently with the internal promotion? Or is this an opportunity to maybe inject even more change into the sales organizations?
spk01: I wouldn't say there's any sort of macro changes or large changes into how we're thinking about go-to-market most broadly. Clearly, we were disappointed around the timing of Matthew's departure, but these things happen. I think Mark is a well-established leader within the organization. He has been with the company for a long time. There's truly nobody within the building who understands the business as well as he does or has fostered the close relationships with our OEM partners. But he's also held incredibly large roles in his past within Dell and other companies with direct-to-customer roles as well. So I don't think you'll see any massive shifts from us. We were able to do the transition relatively quickly. I think within the week of announcing, we had already installed Mark in the position. He had already announced his next level down. We had done some consolidation of roles to kind of – as we brought people up within the organization, and so all roles are filled, everybody's locked in their teams. It happened within seven to 10 days, and now folks are focused on executing against the quarter.
spk03: Great, congrats again, and thanks for taking my questions.
spk01: Thanks, Scott.
spk09: And the next question is from David Kwan from TD Securities. Please go ahead.
spk05: Good afternoon. Wanted to talk a bit more about the effects particularly as it relates to the top line. I was curious to what extent the revenues were negatively impacted by the stronger U.S. dollar.
spk02: Well, they're actually – they're not actually impacted because we sell in U.S. dollars. The biggest thing that we have is the expense we have. We have – The exposure is actually on the expense side primarily with our employees that we have in Canada and in the UK. And obviously some other countries too, but those two in particular are the largest pieces.
spk05: But like how about when you're selling like into Europe, are you selling in U.S. dollars then?
spk00: Yes.
spk05: Okay, so the vast majority of your revenue is charged in U.S. dollars then? Correct. Correct. Okay. And then on a related note, the international ARR, that's been pretty strong, kind of 45%, 50% growth over the last year. But this quarter, it dropped into the low 30s. Any particular reason for that?
spk02: I don't think there was anything. It's just, you know, timing of deals.
spk01: Yeah, I would say Europe especially is typically a softer quarter in the summer quarter, and I think we talked a little bit about that with secure access. That has been historically a more direct sale for us, and so those projects do have a tendency to slow down a little bit when you hit the summer months, and folks aren't super excited about running POCs in the month of August. But I don't think we're seeing anything more broadly sort of internationally. We continue to get great traction with our OEM partners on ramping up and investing more in international reach. So I think because we're coming from a, you know, we've done quite well with international over the past couple of years, but we are still coming off of a relatively small base. So I think you'll continue to see us do more there.
spk05: Thanks. And just my last question. As it relates to the macro, how are you finding the North American environment versus Europe and other international areas and regions? Are you finding it more difficult in Europe in particular versus what you're seeing in North America?
spk01: I think, well, I think Ron talked on some of the sort of what I'd call things around the edges that we've been watching. Contract term is one that we said early on. I think we said even on the analyst day, that that's one of the things we'll watch closely. So not a huge impact on ARR, but can have an impact on some of the other metrics as well. I don't know that I'm outside of kind of the direct selling SA piece that I touched on for the summer months. I don't know that I've seen a big difference between Europe and North America from a demand perspective, but they're very different markets for us, right? We're much more entrenched in with our partners and direct within our North American space, and education has a bigger impact on sort of quarter over quarter on our North American business. So outside of that, I don't know that I have any sort of headlines or big conclusions to pull out of that.
spk05: All right.
spk01: Thanks. Thanks, David.
spk09: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Christy Wyatt for any closing remarks.
spk01: Thank you. And I want to thank you all again for joining us today. This month marks the start of my fifth year leading Absolute. In that time, we've grown into a security software company with more than $200 million in recurring revenue, 18,000 customers, and more than 14 million end-user devices that depend on us to keep delivering for them. Our path to success continues to be consistent, steady execution, balancing profitability, cash generation, and growth to deliver value for our shareholders. With our unique, resilient, self-healing, intelligent security solutions, we are positioned well in a large and growing market and focused on serving our customers at this critical time in our industry. Thank you all again for joining us.
spk09: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

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