Amdocs Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Amdoc's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Matt Smith, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our disclaimer statement on slide two of the presentation. It notes that some of our comments today may be forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including as described in Amdoxy's SEC filings, and that we will discuss certain financial information that is not prepared in accordance with GAAP. For more information regarding our use of non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures, We refer you to today's earnings release, which will also be finished with the SEC on Form 6-K. Today's speakers participating on the call with me today are Shuki Shaffer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Amdocs Management Limited, and Tamar Rapaport-Digim, Chief Financial and Operating Officer. To support today's earnings call, we are providing a presentation which can be found on the investor relations section of our website. And as always, a copy of today's prepared remarks will also be posted immediately following the conclusion of this call. On today's agenda, Shuki will recap our business and financial achievements for the second quarter, and we'll update you on the continued progress that we've made executing against our strategic growth framework, including GenAI and our continued sales momentum in cloud. Shuki will finish by discussing our financial outlook for the full fiscal year 2025, after which Tamar will provide additional details on our second quarter financial performance and forward guidance. As we communicated previously, Shuki and Tamar will compare certain financial metrics on a pro forma basis, which adjusts prior fiscal year 2024 revenue by approximately $600 million to reflect the end of certain low margin non-core business activities, which were substantially already ceased in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. And with that, I'll turn it over to Shuki.

Thank you, Matt, and everyone joining us on the call today. Starting on slide six, I am pleased to report good results for our fiscal second quarter, credit for which belongs to MDoc's global base of employees who are executing our strategy to deliver the next-gen cloud, digital, and AI-based solution our customer needs to ensure amazing experiences and seamless connectivity for billions of people each day. Among the second quarter financial highlights. Revenue of $1.13 billion was above the midpoint of our guidance and increased by 4% from a year ago in pro forma constant currency. Profitability improved by 10 basis points equationally reflecting ongoing internal efficiency gains. We generate robust free cash flow of $181 million, excluding restructuring-related payments supported by healthy customer cash collection and Non-GAAP earning per share was $1.78 above the guidance range, primarily due to a lower than expected non-GAAP effective tax rate in the quarter. Additionally, we closed the second quarter with a 12-month backlog of $4.17 billion, up by 3.5% per former from a year ago. The healthy increase in 12-month backlog was supported by a strong pipeline to deal conversion and so on on slide seven. Among the highlights, we're striking our relationship with AT&T Cricket Wireless through payment solution, dealer commission, and expedited IT services. Consumer Cellular, a new logo for Amdocs in the U.S., has selected our ConnectX solution to introduce new digital brands. And we benefit from a healthy customer demand for our fiber deployment, orchestration, and data infrastructure management offering. Prong's self-momentum in cloud also continues this quarter. We are working with Microsoft to migrate Amdocs and non-Amdocs application to the Microsoft Azure platform for a leading tier one European operator. And in Philippines, we signed an agreement to support the next phase of PLDT's cloud modernization project. As to our project execution this quarter, we successfully achieved a high number of major milestones for many of our world's largest operations. At AT&T, we are progressing the mainstream to cloud migration using the Amdocs Argenting migration paradigm, which entails migration application and operational ecosystem to operate on the cloud. We also reach notable milestone in Japan, a strategic market for Amdocs, where we deliver an advanced cloud native platform to enable AT&T InfraNet to modernize and migrate its IT operations system to the cloud. This achievement continues our momentum in Japan, where we are now supporting three flagship customers, including JCOM and Paramount, in addition to NTT InfraNet. Rounding out the operation highlights, we delivered another record quarter in managed services, which contributed roughly two-thirds of total revenue. Renewal rate also remained very high in Q2, as we signed new multi-year managed services agreements that expand end of scope of activities with Telia Norway, PDT, and M1 in Singapore. Moving now to slide eight, let me address our multi-pillar growth strategy, which is designed to provide our customer with the innovation and cutting-edge technology they need to accelerate the journey to the cloud, digitize the customer experience for consumer and B2B, monitor investment in next-generation networks, to inline automated complex network ecosystem and simplify and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. Beginning with cloud on slide nine, Qt was another strong quarter of sales momentum and best in cloud project execution. Working with our strategic partner, Microsoft, I'm excited to announce that mDocs was selected to play a critical role in facilitating the migration of both mDocs and non-mDocs applications to the Microsoft Azure platform for a Tier 1 European service provider. Under the Microsoft umbrella, Amdocs is heading the delivery of number of workstreams pivotal to the operator's strategic transition to the cloud-first architecture, which will enhance performance, accelerate innovation, and improve operational efficiency across its markets. Androx has successfully completed the first phase of its cloud modernization project for a leading Philippine services provider, PLDT, and its wireless subsidiary, Smart, migrating PLDT business critical system and legacy application to AWS. We also signed a new agreement to upgrade and migrate PLDT's data platform and additional core system in the next phase. Additionally, Telstra in Australia has engaged Amdocs to consult its segment-specific Amdocs service order management solution to a single cloud platform servicing all segments, which will provide the operator with a faster time to market for new services, greater business agility, and improved customer satisfaction. I believe our ability to win deals and execute projects in the cloud is a testament to our expertise and end-to-end cloud offerings. Moreover, we remain on track to deliver another year of double-digit growth in cloud-related revenue in fiscal 2025. Moving to digital transformation on slide 10. I'm delighted to announce that Consumer Cellular, a US wireless provider, has become the latest in a growing list of customers to select the Amdocs ConnectX cloud native SaaS platform to support the launch of innovative new digital brands. As a new client of Amdocs, we look forward to partnering with Consumer Cellular to help them rapidly create and deploy new plans, achieve operational excellence, and boost customer satisfaction for the roughly 4 million subscribers. Amdocs MarketOne, a SaaS-based and scalable platform that enables service providers to rapidly monetize OTT and digital consumer service experiences, is also generating healthy customer demands. MarketsOne was recently selected by C.K. Hutchinson to equip participating group companies such as Sri, Ireland, and Wintrae in Italy with the ability to grow the digital ecosystem, capture new revenue streams, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. Another of our SaaS platform, mDocs eSIM Cloud, was recently ranked number one in the global eSIM orchestration landscape for the third year running by CounterPoint Research. The accelerated adoption of eSIM globally is creating opportunities for Amdocs. For instance, Amdocs is working with Telcel, the largest mobile operator in Mexico, and the subsidiary of American Mobile, to bring innovative eSIM technology to millions of Telcel users. Turning to slide 11, Amdocs continues to be recognized as the global market leader in overall monetization platforms. Illustrating our domain strengths, Comcast has renewed its multi-year commitment to Amdoc's bill experience as the bill presented platform for its residential and business customers. And we recently modernized N1 Bulgaria's convert charging platform to reduce billing processing times and speed up customer-facing interaction. In Latin America, we signed an agreement with Movistar El Salvador for a full BSS modernization to enhance its current prepaid platform. And Amdocs was recently selected by Botswana Telecommunication to modernize its convert charging and billing platform. Moving to network automation on slide 12. Amdocs has extended its network policy platform agreement at Claro Brazil for multiple consumer line of business. And we have secured multi-year extension of our OSS engagement with Costa Rica Group OISE, reinforcing our long-standing collaboration and commitment. I also would like to highlight recent milestones at PEDT in Philippines, where we partnered with Microsoft to deliver the successful go-live of the Amdocs Customer Engagement Platform. This enterprise B2B platform was seamlessly integrated with Amdocs Intelligent Network Suite to connect customers of its needs directly to the underlying network performance in an automated end-to-end manner. Beyond wireless, Amdocs is well positioned to meet strong demand for fiber deployment, orchestration, and data infrastructure management as global service providers accelerated their fiber expansion investment to launch converged broadband and mobile services offering. Turning to slides 13 and 14. Amdocs top strategic priority is to accelerate the telco industry's adoption of GenAI. Our key technology was recently recognized at NVIDIA's GCC event during CEO Jensen Hong's keynote address, where Amdocs was spotlighted as the key partner in driving the next wave of AI innovation in telecom. This quarter, we continue to evolve the Amdocs Amaze platform in close collaboration with NVIDIA and other GenAI partners. As part of the newly introduced AMAZE platform offerings, we launch our innovating network agents, supporting both network design and deployment, as well as network operation. These agents leverage our deep OSS and mobile network design and deployment expertise coupled with NVIDIA's AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Omniverse, digital twin capabilities, and Amazon SageMaker to support accelerated network design, planning and deployment network troubleshooting and healing. Additionally, We launched Amdocs AI Factory, which is designed to help service providers monetize surging enterprise customer demand for AI-driven infrastructure, such as GPU as a service, LLMs, and vertically tailored applications, enabling them to unlock significant new revenue streams. They're offering Mary's, Amdoc's, and May's platform a genetic experience as a monetization suite with NVIDIA and Dell infrastructure to provide the full ecosystem of capabilities needed to create innovative new services. As to our commercial progress, we are running multiple POCs in several of our flagship customers, many of which are in the relatively mature stage and producing highly compelling results. Adding to the expanding pipeline of opportunity, Amdocs is naturally well-positioned to meet the new wave of demand for the data-related services needed to support Gen AI adoption. Amdocs is already playing an expanding role in supporting Gen AI-related data requirements for several customers, such as AT&T and Globe in the Philippines. As another example, I'm looking to support a T1 operator in Canada, which has a unified customer profile as part of the data and I strategy, creating a single integrated view of each customer across worldwide operations. Now, to address the current operating environment on slide 15. The level of global macroeconomic uncertainty is clearly rising in the recent months. But we believe Amdocs is relatively well-positioned to navigate the present environment due to our unique business model. As a specialty software and service provider to the global communication and media industry, Amdocs is currently directly affected by the announced tariffs. Across our serviceable market of nearly $60 billion, we continue to see a rich and encouraging pipeline which we are working hard to convert to new deals by leveraging our technology leadership, project and operational expertise, and our proven ability to support customer industry consolidation initiatives. Having said that, no company is completely immune to operating environment, and we are of course closely monitoring any indirect impact of macro conditions on us and our customer spending behavior. Bringing it all together, Considering our strong first half performance and our current level of visibility provided by our 12-month backlog, we are iterating the midpoint of our fiscal 2025 performer revenue growth outlook of 2.7% in constant currency, albeit within a tightened range of 1.7% to 3.7%. We are also on track to achieve our target of double-digit expected total share of return for the fifth consecutive year, supported by significantly improved profitability and a robust earning-to-cash conversion. With that, let me turn the call over to Tamar for her remarks.

Thank you, Shuki, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Before our beginning today's comments, I will compare certain financial metrics on a performer basis which adjust prior fiscal year 2024 revenue by approximately $600 million to reflect the phase-out of certain low-margin non-core business activities, which were substantially already seized in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. To further assist your modeling, the regional mix of this revenue was similar to the overall company, and it contributed roughly $150 million per quarter. Now, picking up on Shuki's earlier comments, we delivered a good set of results for the second fiscal quarter as detailed on slide 18. Q2 revenue of approximately $1.13 billion was up 4% year-over-year in performa constant currency and was above the midpoint of our guidance, despite negative foreign currency movement of approximately $2 million compared to our guidance assumptions. We are pleased with the stronger pace of growth in Q2, which reflects robust sales, the ramp-up of previously signed engagements, and recent acquisitions. Reflecting the phase-out of certain business activities, reported revenue declined by 9.4% from a year ago. On a regional basis, North America was slightly up sequentially and up 1.4% from a year ago in pro forma constant currency. As anticipated, Europe rebounded from the weakness of the prior quarter, benefiting from the ramp-up of New Deal activities and a contribution from the previously completed acquisition of PROFINET. In Southeast Asia, healthy customer activity was offset by mixed trends in Latin America, resulting in sequential decline in the rest of the world. Shifting down the income statement, the gap operating margin of 21.3% improved by 10 basis points sequentially, supported by the ongoing adoption of automation, AI, and other sophisticated tools within our operations. Compared with a year ago, non-GAAP operating margin jumped by 290 basis points, primarily reflecting the end of the low-margin business activities and efficiency gains. Interest and other expenses amounted to roughly $8.5 million in the second quarter. On the bottom line, non-GAAP diluted EPS of 1.78%, was above our guidance range. This was primarily a result of a lower non-GAAP effective tax rate in the quarter, which included a tax benefit that materialized earlier than planned in the year. Similarly, diluted GAAP EPS of 1.45 was also above our guidance range due to a lower than expected effective GAAP tax rate in the second quarter. Adding to slide 19, Revenue for managed services was a record, $747 million in the second fiscal quarter, up 3.7% from a year ago. Revenue for multi-year managed services engagements accounted for 66% of total revenue in Q2, supporting our visibility and underscoring the importance of managed services as a key measure of business resiliency for Amdocs. Our renewal rates for managed services engagements have historically approached 100% and typically include an expansion in our scope of activities. To provide a few recent examples, we are extending our long-term strategic relationship with Telia Norway through 2030 to deliver enhanced managed services. This continued collaboration will improve Telia Norway's operational efficiency, empowering them to offer more streamlined and effective services to their customers. We are also expanding our managed services in PLDT with our current long-term engagement to cover non-AMDOX applications. And we recently extended the multi-year managed services agreement with M1 Limited in Singapore to manage these customers' new cloud-native charging platform. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow highlights on slide 20, PSO of 77 days fell four days sequentially and rose by one day year-over-year, reflecting normal fluctuations in business activity. And bill receivables net of deferred revenue declined by $25 million sequentially in Q2, aggregating both the short-term and long-term balances. As a reminder, the net difference between unbilled receivables and deferred revenue fluctuates from quarter to quarter in line with normal business activities, as well as our progress on significant multi-year transformation programs we are currently running in North America. Reflecting strong execution, free cash flow before restructuring payments was $181 million in Q2. Including restructuring payments of $25 million, reported free cash flow was $156 million. As expected, Q2 free cash flow was affected by the payment of our annual bonuses for the prior fiscal year, the timing of which occurred as it normally does in the second fiscal quarter. Overall, we ended Q2 with a healthy cash balance of approximately $324 million and bond borrowing of roughly $650 million, providing ample liquidity to support our ongoing business needs while retaining the capacity to fund our future strategic growth. Turning to capital allocation on slide 21, this quarter we repurchased $135 million of our own shares under our current authorization, of which there was roughly $258 million remaining as of March 31, 2025. Deflecting our confidence in the future success of Amdocs and the company's ability to generate cash, our board has today authorized a new share repurchase plan of $1 billion with no stated expiration date. Between the two authorizations, we have up to $1.26 billion of remaining repurchase authority as of March 31st. Additionally, we paid cash dividends of $54 million in the second fiscal quarter. Looking ahead, we are reiterating a free cash flow target of between $710 million to $730 million in fiscal 2025, which is before restructuring payments. Given the previously mentioned seasonality relating to the timing of second quarter bonus payments, with roughly 40% of fiscal year 2025 free cash flow targets already achieved in the first fiscal half of the year, we are well on track to deliver our annual free cash flow targets. Our annual free cash flow outlook equates to a conversion rate of more than 90% relative to expected non-GAAP net income, and translates to a healthy free cash flow yield of roughly 7% relative to Amdoc's current market capitalization. Regarding our capital allocations in fiscal year 2025, we expect to return the majority of our free cash flow to shareholders. Moving to slide 22, 12 months backlog was $4.17 billion at the end of Q2, up 3.5% pro forma from a year ago, and $30 million sequentially. We expect 12 months backlog to represent roughly 90% of forward-looking revenue, farther underscoring the importance of this metric as a leading indicator of our business. Now turning to our revenue outlook on slide 23, we are continuing to closely monitor the prevailing level of macroeconomic geopolitical business and operational uncertainty in the current business environment. The third quarter and full year 2025 financial guidance reflects what we consider to be the most likely outcomes based on the information we have today, but we cannot predict all possible scenarios. On a pro forma constant currency basis, we are reiterating the 2.7% midpoint of our fiscal 2025 revenue growth outlook, which we have tightened to a range of 1.7% to 3.7% year-over-year as compared to 1% to 4.5% previously. As a reminder, our annual guidance includes another year of double-digit growth in cloud and some contributions from inorganic deal activity this year. As to the third fiscal quarter, we expect revenue between $1.11 billion to $1.15 billion, which assumes a positive sequential impact of roughly four from foreign currency fluctuations as compared to second quarter of fiscal 25. Moving down the income statement, we are on track to produce non-GAAP operating margins within our guidance range of 21.1% to 21.7% in fiscal 2025, the midpoint of which equates to a substantial increase of roughly 300 basis points as compared with the prior fiscal year. As previously stated, the midpoint of our full-year margin outlook assumes roughly 230 basis points, improvement from phased-out business activities, and another 60 to 70 basis points resulting from our continued focus on operational excellence, automation, and gradual implementation of Gen AI. Below the operating line, foreign currency fluctuations and hedging costs are expected to impact non-GAAP net interest and other expense by roughly several million dollars on a quarterly basis. As indicated at the beginning of the year, we expect our non-GAAP effective tax rates for fiscal 2025 to be within an annual target range of 15 percent to 17 percent for the full fiscal year 2025. Bringing everything together on slide 25, we are reiterating our non-GAAP diluted earnings per share growth outlook of 6.5 percent to 10.5 percent in fiscal 2025. Considering our strong first half earnings per share performance, and the midpoint of our Q3 EPS guidance, we expect that by the end of Q3, we will have achieved roughly three-quarters of our full-year target for non-GAAP diluted EPS growth. Overall, we are on track to deliver double-digit expected total sheltered returns for a fifth consecutive year in 2025, including our dividend yield of more than 2%. With that, back to you, Shuki. Thanks, Tamal.

I am pleased with our performance in the first two quarters, and we are entering the second half with a strong backlog position and rich pipeline of opportunities. We have market-leading offering and proven ability to execute. We believe we are well-positioned to achieve our targets for the full fiscal year, while we, of course, are monitoring the current macro environment closely. With that, we are happy to take out your questions.

Certainly. And as a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone. Our first question comes from the line of Timothy Horan from Oppenheimer. Your question, please.

Great. Thanks, guys. Can we focus on AI a minute? Are you starting to see material contributions to revenue growth from AI or improvements to the product? And how are you kind of working with NVIDIA on AI at this point? Any more color on that collaboration? And then Related to that, it sounds like cloud growth is accelerating. Is that true? And, you know, is AI helping that growth, or is it go-to-market or other improvements in the product there? Thanks.

So, hi, Tim. Good to hear you. I think that what we see in Gen AI, I think all along we said that in order to reconnect strongly Gen AI activities with data, because the only way to get the benefit of Gen AI is to set the data. And this is to some degree what you mentioned, is there some overlap on the cloud, because definitely when we move the data to the new platform, whether it's Microsoft, AWS, or others, definitely it's also on the cloud. We see a lot of activity that supports GEN-AI in the data domain. We see some expanded activity in the data domain, which obviously contributes to revenue growth. In the use cases, I would say we see good signs of POC that are maturing to real deals. I think it will be more evident in the future quarters. But overall, we see good progress. Regarding NVIDIA, we are obviously collaborating with NVIDIA in many domains. I think the progress that is done this quarter beyond what we discussed before, how we can support call centers and monetization and upsell, use cases, I think that the progress we've done was mainly this quarter was mainly the network domain. So now we are having actually we build our network automation and domain this quarter building on NVIDIA tools. I think this was the progress regarding NVIDIA on top of what we've done with them already before.

Very helpful. And, Tamar, quick follow-up. Great improvement to the margins here. Are you using AI to improve your own productivity much? And, you know, can you kind of continue the pace of margin improvements going forward for a few years? Thanks.

So, Tim, let me take this question. When we talk about GenAI, there are three pillars in Amdocs that I think that we are actively working. One is the offering, the building on our image platform and developing AI factory and different use cases and data to support the GenAI. This is one pillar. The other one is all our products today are Gen-I enabled. So when you take our products, they're coming with Gen-AI capabilities. And the third element is more how we are going to get the efficiencies in our software development lifecycle and operation using a Gen-AI tool. We see a lot of progress and definitely When we look at the, remember we talked before, there's a lot of automation that we've done historically to support our efficiency and productivity. The next wave of improvement is coming by using the new tool. We are starting to deploy it across all our software development lifecycle and operation, and we're starting to see good results.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And as a reminder, if you have a question at this time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. Our next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stiefel. Your question, please.

Hi. Thank you. Shuki, can you just talk a little bit about the customer spending behavior, what you saw this quarter versus what you saw last quarter? We're into May already. There's obviously more risk and concern out there, but are your clients changing anything, or is it really kind of the same? And then I have another follow-up.

I would say we don't see any change right now in our customer spending behavior. And I think there were questions before because of different macro patterns that we discussed before, but we did not see yet any change in the spending behavior following what we experienced in the last three, four months.

Okay, great. And then maybe for Tamar, the AR, after several quarters of going up, has seen a couple quarters of going down. It looks like you're hitting milestones and unbuilds are going down. Should we think about this as something that was kind of lumpy that you needed to go past? Or is this something where there's a certain range that you expect to operate within? And these are just kind of the fluctuations within that range. In other words, did you have a lot of projects that were unusual that you had the milestones kind of in front of you and you got past them? Or is this the normal cadence of bouncing around?

The cadence is bouncing around because it's a combination eventually of a portfolio of different projects, but as I mentioned in the remarks, we are running very large transformations in North America. Of course, we have projects of transformation all over the world, but sizing-wise, when we are thinking about what's happening specifically and build the AR befell position, and I'm usually looking at the net difference because you know, sometimes the customer may be in an unbuilt position and then two quarters later it may be failed because eventually it's the gap between how we, what's the pace of recognition versus invoicing. So I don't think we can say that, oh, now it was a peak level of milestones and we issued invoices and necessarily now the only way is down. It may bounce around. I think the good news is in any one of these customers, in any one of these projects, we are making progress. We are hitting the invoicing milestones. Once we do, we collect the money so the cycle works. And I think that looking forward, you know, as we are going after additional significant deals that are in the pipeline, of course, that will be good news, right? I mean, if we get to win additional deals, and then they have the cycle of their own. But too early to tell exactly what will be the mix of these moving elements. And that's why we don't guide for these balances. It's very hard to predict exactly in every quarter all the moving elements.

Okay, if you don't mind me squeezing one more in, just following up on the question from previously, there's a lot of POCs on the AI offerings, and we've been talking about that for the last few quarters. Is there anything large that has hit in terms of contracting yet, or are we still kind of waiting for the really big, a few big referenceable clients to kind of start to cascade in?

Hi, Shlomo. I think that for me, data-related activities to support July, we do see a good progress, as I said before. And I cannot mention, but we have at least a couple of customers that are doing very good progress also from the commercial side, but I cannot name them yet.

Are they, though, referenceable for other clients and others? I understand you want to talk to us about it, but if someone else called in, are they ones that are far enough that someone else could talk to? Okay. Yes. Very good. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And as a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone. And this does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Matt Smith for any further remarks.

Thanks, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining this evening. If you do have any additional questions, please reach out to us here in the IR group. And with that, have a great night.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.