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Tamiya
Conference Operator
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. My name is Tamiya, and I will be your conference operator today. This call is being recorded, and all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Jason Starr, head of investor relations.
Jason Starr
Head of Investor Relations
Thank you, Tamiya. Good afternoon. Welcome to Jen's first quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Vincent Pallet, CEO, and Natalie Dursey, CFO. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this call posted on the investor relations website, along with our slides and press release. I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, all references to the financial metrics are non-GAAP, and all growth rates are year over year, unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our press release and our earnings presentation, both of which are available on our IR website at .jemdigital.com. We encourage investors to monitor this website as we routinely post investor-oriented information, such as news and events and financial filings. Today's call contains statements regarding our business, financial performance, and operations, including the impact of our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Those statements are based on current beliefs, assumptions, and expectations as of today's date, August 1, 2024. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statements in our press release and the risk factors in our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our most recent reports on Forum 10K and Forum 10Q. And now, I'll turn the call over to Vincent.
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Thanks, Jason, and welcome everyone to our Q1 earnings call. We've started fiscal 25 on a good note with operating KPIs supporting our long-term aspirations. We grew cyber safety bookings 4% in constant currency and reached a record direct customer count of 39.3 million up 1.1 million -over-year. Additionally, ARPU is up sequentially and -over-year in constant currency, and retention reached 78%, a GEN record supported by record level in LifeLock and Avast. A consistent focus on execution resulted in another double-digit growth quarter for earnings per share at 53 cents in Q1, up 15% in constant currency. I'm proud of our team for delivering these results and for our continued focus on evolving cyber safety for consumers in a very dynamic threat landscape. Before Natalie walks you through the details of our results, I would like first to remind everyone about our strategic opportunity and the steady progress we are making to achieve our cyber safety mission. Whether it is a biometric payment at the retail store or our personal performance data combined with recommendation algorithm to buy sportswear, it seems like not a day goes by where we don't do something digitally without sharing more personal information. And while these experiences can be convenient, our growing digital life leads to the proliferation of sensitive personal information, which is difficult to properly safeguard as it is increasingly out of our control. We depend on our banks, our government institutions, our mobile providers and our retailers to protect our data. And yet, as we can all see by the ever increasing number of data breaches in all industries, it is tremendously hard for them to do. In just the first half of 2024, we have seen more than 2000 reported breaches per month across the globe. And those are just the reported breaches, not to mention the many that occur across very small businesses, the local doctor offices, schools and shops that also get access to our sensitive personal data. Recent global breaches highlighted the growing threat of cyber attacks, which are often targeted at exploiting human vulnerabilities. In the aftermath of such events, there is a surge in impersonation scams, suspicious emails and text messages designed to trick people into sharing personal information. The rapid development of generative AI has made it easier for criminals to create more personalized and believable scams, including deep fake clones. The potential scope of these threats is broadening, resulting in significant economic and reputational damages. It is clear to anyone paying attention that these threats are creating a dynamic threat landscape, making consumers worldwide more vulnerable than ever to real threats to their privacy, identity and financial assets. And even the more careful and vigilant people, we struggle to control where their personal data lives and we'll have little to no visibility into how governments, companies and small businesses protect their data, identity and reputation, which I believe are amongst the most valuable assets. I strongly believe that it is not a question of if your personal data will be compromised, if it hasn't occurred already yet, but when. And that is why the team at Gen has made protecting you, your data and your digital identity our life's work. It is our never ending mission that we deliver through constant innovation. Today, we already have the most comprehensive product portfolio that meets the consumer needs for security, identity, privacy and reputation. Our flagship cyber safety membership offerings, Northern 360, Avast One and Avira Prime, continue to gain traction and regularly receive industry recognition and awards for the way we protect against the merits of cyber threats. We don't just stop at delivering to consumers industry-leading technology. We know that providing our customers with -in-class services sets us apart from our competitors. Solutions like LifeLock and Reputation Defender deliver personal life service to help protect and restore your identity and reputation in the event you become a victim. By focusing on the customer journeys with us, both products have achieved top ratings with LifeLock recognized as the best identity service in the marketplace and Reputation Defender with a near perfect rating for reputation management. As the leader of the industry, we are constantly investing in innovation to stay ahead of potential threats and provide our customers with the best possible cyber safety protection. Yesterday, we launched Northern UltraVPN, which offers more comprehensive online protection with three different plans catering to individuals, couples and families. Northern UltraVPN provides the best online privacy, dark web monitoring, VPN protocol support and worldwide content access. In addition, it offers protection against scams, viruses, malware and ransomware, as well as password managers and parental control. We believe it is the best and the next generation of VPN solution, offering a modern and personalized approach to cyber safety and adds another entry door into total comprehensive cyber safety. We're so excited to bring Northern UltraVPN to consumers. Not only it is a great product that meets the customer needs, but it also represents the promise of all the hard integration work we put into bringing two companies technology together under a new single common architecture. Northern UltraVPN is built on the new Genstack, which helped us not only with the innovation and the feature we delivered, but also with the speed with which we were able to bring it to market. And in the future, as we take those capabilities and combine them with our ever expanding AI tools, we can't wait to see what we can deliver in terms of customer experience and ease of use. Over time, that will result in improved customer loyalty and greater engagement, leading to more value adds, cross-sell and upsells. The last point I want to touch on today is that most everyone has heard about cyber crimes and cyber security, but most people are not fully aware of the very real risk that they are exposed to and often not adequately protected from. At Gen, we are hard at work every day, communicating, educating and earning the trust of consumers around the world. Although we have a host of industry leading brands that enables us to serve the needs of hundreds of millions of diverse customers across over 150 countries, we feel it is also our responsibility to constantly educate and inform people about cyber risk to their impact through initiative, such as our recent scam artist campaign. This campaign uses art and psychology to demonstrate the emotional impact of cyber crime and helps people take the right steps to proactively protect themselves online. This quarter, we also launched our personal data exposure scam by LifeLock, which is a comprehensive scam of millions of data points online, combining with our privacy monitoring and dark web algorithms. By simply entering an email address, individuals can obtain a free report card detailing all their supposedly private information that may be actually publicly available. These tools are free to everyone and give consumer visibility to their digital footprint so they can better protect themselves. All these types of cyber safety awareness initiatives are beginning to pay off as we grew cyber safety bookings and revenue by 4% in Q1. We had strong momentum in the identity and privacy business lines with bookings of 6%, supported by double digit new customer acquisition in that segment and accelerating privacy cross-sell growth. This success reflects the increasing consumer awareness of identity risk from recently reported breaches. Also, the identity market remains mostly US-based today. We continue to make steady traction in our efforts to expand identity protection globally, introducing Northern 360 Advanced to eight markets in Europe, providing customer additional identity protection services, such as dark web monitoring, social media monitoring, stolen wallet assistance, and ID restoration. Now, despite the importance of comprehensive cyber safety, most consumer mistakenly believe it won't happen to them or still believe that they digitalized our safe, basically choosing to self-insure. And two-thirds of cyber safety customers have only basic security or even just device security. But in today's user-centric cloud-based digital world, information and identity risk transcend personal devices. We believe that comprehensive cyber safety is paramount and yet still massively under-penetrated. And with our technology, portfolio, focus on innovation, trusted brands, and channel expansion, we are well positioned to drive its adoption. This is our never-ending mission. So in summary, we are pleased with our Q1 results and promising start to fiscal 2025. We are confident that our customer-centricity, innovation, and discipline execution will enable us to deliver on our goals for not only this year, but also on our plan to accelerate long-term profitable revenue growth to further increase shareholder value. And with that, then we pass it on to Natalie to review our performance in details.
Natalie Dursey
CFO
Thank you, Vincent, and hello, everyone. For today's call, I will walk through our fiscal Q1 2025 results, followed by our outlook for Q2 and full-year fiscal year 2025. I will focus on non-GAAP financials and -over-year growth rates, unless otherwise stated. Before I begin, I wanna highlight that as disclosed in today's presentation in our recent Form 8K, we made a revision to our historical practice of when we recognize revenue for certain customers, changing from successful bill date to renewal date. The impact of the revision is immaterial, however, for comparative purposes, we have corrected for this in prior periods reported. Please refer to the supplemental information section of today's slide presentation available on our IR website, as well as our Q1 Form 10Q for more details. Now turning to Q1 results. Q1 was another quarter of solid execution with financial results at the midpoint of our guidance, and reflects our 20th consecutive quarter of growth. Q1 bookings were $913 million, up 3% in USD and 4% in constant currency. Cyber safety bookings, which exclude our legacy business lines, also grew 4% -over-year in constant currency. Total Q1 revenue was $965 million, up 2% in USD and up 3% in constant currency. Cyber safety revenue grew 4% -over-year in constant currency, driven by our privacy and identity business lines, as well as continued cross-sell penetration into the Norton base. In the US, we also grew 4% with expanding demand for privacy and identity protection services, attracting new customers through direct and partner channels and scaling cross-sells with our existing customers. We also continued to further penetrate international markets with varying degrees of market maturity as we continue to seed new acquisitions and expand the reach of our cyber safety services. We will continue to execute on all levers at our disposal to drive broad-brace growth in a profitable manner. Direct revenue was $850 million, up 3% in constant currency, supported by improvements across our key performance metrics of direct customers, average revenue per consumer, and retention rate. Let me share some specifics. A key ingredient to our growth strategy is driving net new customers, and in 2.1, we expanded our customer base for the fourth consecutive quarter, increasing to 39.3 million, up 192K sequentially, and up 1.1 million -over-year. We continue to invest in a broad range of marketing channels to reach new audiences, generate more traffic to our sites while optimizing conversion. We are acquiring new customers with healthy ROIs as we further penetrate international markets with our mobile offerings. Leveraging our brand trust and awareness, combined with our highly rated, award-winning product portfolio, we will continue to push through with our diverse set of acquisition channels to grow our customer base. On monetization, our monthly direct ARPU was $7.23 in USD, up 1 cent sequentially, and down 1 cent compared to last year's result. However, please note, this result absorbs 4 cents of negative FX headwinds -over-year, and 2 cents sequentially. Operationally, ARPU remains stable to slightly up across our customer cohorts by brand and market. And as we grow our customer base, we have demonstrated the ability to further monetize through cross-sells and up-sells. With the Norton base, cross-sell penetration has grown from 15% to 20% over the past year. We have leveraged a vast best practices to offer the most suitable complementary products during the right moments of truth that will further protect customers and their growing digital needs. We also continue to refine our up-sell playbook to guide our customers toward higher tier memberships with more comprehensive protection, an exciting opportunity for growth as we look to the next few years. The expanded value proposition provided to our customers is also reflected in the retention increases to date. In Q1, our direct retention rate was nearly 78%, improving -over-year and progressing towards our goal of 80%. As we move through the GEN-STACK simplification, we see more opportunities to drive higher customer loyalty and increased lifetime value, leveraging better targeting capabilities to create more personalized customer experiences through their journey, in turn, activating the growth flywheel as we've previously shared. Turning to our partner business, partner revenue was $101 million in Q1, up 4% -over-year as reported and up 6% in constant currency. Our employee benefits channel pipeline is robust as organizations increasingly recognize the importance of protecting their workers from the identity and cyber risks they face. We continue to strengthen strategic partnerships with telcos, financial services, and insurance providers to expand our identity offerings. And we are also driving higher penetration of our private browsers and search partnerships. Scaling our partner business to half a billion dollars in annual revenue is a key component to achieving our overall growth plan. And we are confident in the progress we're making. Rounding out our revenue, our legacy business lines contributed $14 million this quarter down from $17 million the prior year. As a reminder, we expect our legacy revenues to continue declining double digits -over-year and represent less than 2% of our revenue. Turning to profitability, Q1 operating income was $564 million, up 4% -over-year and up 5% in constant currency, translating to an operating margin of 58.4%. We continue to make disciplined investments in targeted growth opportunities to reach new customers through full funnel marketing efforts and expand our international presence. We're also solidifying our technology capabilities, including the new GenStack simplification, to quickly adapt to ever-changing cyber threats and drive innovation through new offerings, such as Norton UltraVPN, to add to our comprehensive cyber safety product portfolio. Within our core, we will continue to drive efficiencies and productivity that can be reinvested into additional growth levers. Q1 net income was $335 million, up 11% -over-year. Deluded EPS was 53 cents for the quarter, up 13% -over-year and up 15% in constant currency. Interest expense related to our debt was $146 million. Our non-GAAP tax rate remained steady at 22% and our ending share count was $627 million, down 16 million -over-year, reflecting the impact of share repurchases. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow, Q1 ending cash balance was $644 million. We are supported by over $2 billion of total liquidity, consisting of our ending Q1 cash balance and a $1.5 billion revolver. Q1 operating cash flow was $264 million and free cash flow was $262 million, which included approximately $187 million of cash interest payments this quarter. As a reminder, earlier in Q1, we successfully repriced our existing term loan B, removing the credit spread adjustment and lowering the credit spread associated with it from 200 basis points over SOFR to 175 basis points. And as we see every year, we expect Q2 to be the lowest quarter of the year for operating cash flow, given the concentration of tax payments that are due. Turning to capital allocation, we remain balanced with our capital deployment and are committed to returning 100% of excess free cash flow to shareholders. We voluntarily repaid $30 million of our term loan B, as well as $58 million for our maturity schedule and are now three and a half times net levered. We also deployed $272 million for share repurchases this quarter, the equivalent of 11 million shares as part of the expanded $3 billion buyback program approved by the board in May of 2024. Since the start of fiscal year 23, we have remained committed to a balanced capital allocation strategy, paying down $2 billion worth of debt and deploying a total of $1.6 billion of share repurchases over that time period. We paid $82 million to shareholders in the form of our regular quarterly dividend of 12 and a half cents per common share. For Q2 fiscal 2025, the board of directors approved a regular quarterly cash dividend of 12 and a half cents per common share to be paid on September 11th, 2024 for all shareholders of record as of the close of business on August 19th, 2024. With our strong cash flow generation, we will continue to balance debt pay down and opportunistic share buyback deployment to help achieve our goals of delivering EPS growth of 12 to 15% and driving net leverage below three times EBITDA by fiscal year 2027. Now turning to our Q2 and fiscal 25 outlook. For Q2, we expect non-GAAP revenue in the range of $965 million to $975 million translating to three to 4% growth in cyber safety and Q2 non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of 53 to 55 cents up 13% to 17%. For fiscal year 2025, we are reaffirming our prior guidance. We expect full year revenue in the range of $3.89 billion to $3.93 billion translating to three to 4% growth in cyber safety expressed in constant currency supported by expected cyber safety bookings growth of three to 5%. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $2.17 to $2.23 per share representing an annual increase of 12 to 15% in constant currency. Please note that we expect continued FX headwinds to impact our reported revenue primarily from the Japanese yen which is depreciated over the last year. In summary, our Q1 results keep us on target for our 2025 plan and we've remained well positioned to achieve our longer term goals. Our key performance indicators continue to trend in the right direction. We are executing our plan and our strategic growth framework provides us guide points along the journey. We look forward to reporting on our progress over the year. As always, thank you for your time today and I will now turn the call back to the operator to take your questions. Operator.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason at all, you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, please press star one. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. The first question comes from Dan Bergstrom with RBC. You may proceed.
Dan Bergstrom
Representative from AdHedberg
Hey, it's Dan Bergstrom from AdHedberg. Thanks for taking our questions. It was nice to see the uptick in retention this quarter. I guess, what are some of the initiatives there that are working well for you from a retention perspective? And then is there maybe a good way to think about retention in the sense of, you know, was there some low-hanging fruit following the merger and incremental gains from here maybe a little more challenging or is it more of a steady march to that 80% target?
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Yes, thanks for your question. This is Vincent, I'll take that answer. So just as a context for those who were not here 18 months ago, when we merged with Avast, our retention rate and aggregated basis for all the brands and the new gen company was around 75%. And we identified about five points over improvement that would drive all the way to our target at 80% retention rate for gen. A big portion of that improvement was for Avast. Avast itself was around 65% retention and we told we could bring that business to a 75% retention rate overall. And so initially, yes, we had a few low-hanging fruit. As you know, or as you remember, Norton LifeLock combined was at the retention rate closer to 85% and we had a lot of good practices around the whole customer journey, breaking it down by the different experiences that the customer would have and trying to get the best optimal output for those. We applied those expertise and practices to the entire portfolio and improved for gen at first two points from 75 to 77%. And then we said that the remaining will be over the next few quarters, maybe next couple of years, as we really roll out the new gen stack. So this quarter, we reached 78% with actually an Avast record retention rate of 72%, but also improve a lot of retention rate to a record level as well. And I think you see here the benefit of two dynamic. The first one is the rollout of the new gen stack, which is much more aligned to a suite with high engagement in app communications and that engagement and the ability to demonstrate the value to the customers has led to improved retention rate. And then the second component to this is the work we've done and the work we are doing in breaking down the journey of the customers through our cyber safety cycles and really providing the right value at the right time using some of the AI and data analytics that we have built. And we're going to continue to roll those two, the new gen stack migration towards a suite approach on one side, and then the buildup of new features and AI enabled communications into that suite.
Dan Bergstrom
Representative from AdHedberg
That's very sensitive. And then you called out Cross-Sell a number of times in the prepared remarks, and it is one of those five or five drivers through Investor Day. How should we think about Cross-Sell in the context of maybe what you've accomplished so far using, we'll say Avast as a template this time, and then what could still be done here on Nordman and LifeLock from a Cross-Sell perspective?
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Yeah, so as we discussed six, eight months ago now, and that is there, right? We say one of the five drivers was to increase the Cross-Sell, and basically behind that is basically means moving customers that have entered cyber safety from a point product to a broader comprehensive cyber safety. Privacy and some of the identity features have been a very strong Cross-Sell discord. Before that, it was really about taking the products from the Avast portfolio that was more points products specifically and Cross-Selling into the Norton base and using their practice of Cross-Selling if you want, again at the right time and using as much as we can data scientists to deliver the right message at the right time. I think we've seen a trend of moving more and more towards that either total comprehensive cyber safety or towards more that privacy identity angle. And we'll see, you'll see us continue to develop that. We have more room into Norton where we've made progress, but it will be a three year roadmap as you know. And then we still have a lot of room in what you did mention, which is the Upsell, which is the migration towards the overall suite. Today we're slightly above 40% in the total portfolio and I think we have an opportunity to go to where we had brought the Northern LifeLock portfolio, which was 60%. So both Cross-Selling and Upsell have made progress, identity and privacy were essentially the focus and Cross-Selling plus Upsell is the big opportunity moving forward.
Operator
Operator
Thank you.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
Thank you. The next question comes from Peter Levine with Evercore. You may proceed.
Peter Levine
Representative from Evercore
Peter, hi. Great, thank you for taking my questions. So Natalie, I guess the first one for you is, as you think about the guide for the remainder of the year, what assumptions are baked into that? And then how do you think about the health of the consumer? Any color that you can give us around kind of what you're seeing from your pipeline in terms of just the overall health of the consumer into fiscal 25 versus where you were call it six to 12 months last year.
Natalie Dursey
CFO
Yeah, thanks for the question. The guide is very much in line with the plans that we've articulated for you guys. It's the five for five is the structural growth framework. And not that every one of those levers hits the same order of magnitude at the same quarters in the same years, but that is our strategic growth framework and we've got the business aligned to that in terms of, yes, the team's focused on gross acquisition, very, very important to get the health at the top of the funnel. We've spent a lot of time and focus on figuring out all the different cohorts that we've got in our customer base and how we retain them at the highest rates possible. And then ARPU, right? We've got to make sure that we continuously stay focused on having the most robust product roadmap that can fuel our growth opportunities in both cross-sell as well as upsell. And again, continuously communicate with our customers that we have the most relevant, most comprehensive cyber safety protection in the market. And so all of those things coming together as we navigate through the year is what helps us shore up not only the Q2 guide, but our reiteration of the full year guide. And then in terms of the health of the consumer, look, there's been a lot of movement and a lot of things in the news in the last couple days. But what I can tell you is what I can see within our business. And so we are growing customers, both from a gross ads perspective, we've just seen our highest Q1 that we've seen in four years. From a cancellation perspective, we've seen the lowest number of cancels we've seen in the last three years. So whether that's the health of the customer or that's the awareness of the ever increasing cyber safety threats that we've got combined with our trusted brands, from a customer account perspective, we see health and we see growth. And then combine that with the other two legs of the stool, as I speak about it, in terms of what is happening in ARPU. FX aside, we are growing ARPU consistently quarter over quarter, and we have seen increases in the last year across our brands and retention rate. And so from the measures of our customer in those three key performance indicators, I see a lot of health in our customer base.
Peter Levine
Representative from Evercore
No, thank you for the color there. And then if I can jump to the product side, I think last quarter, we talked, or we touched the least on the CFS, I think it was CFS, one silver membership offering, and you talked about the newer Genstack initiative. Can you maybe just give us an update on how that's trending?
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Yeah, so on the rollout of the new Genstack, we started at the end of the fiscal year with just a couple of small countries in the Asia region to test. We had very good, positive results. Since then, we've expanded to a few more countries. We rolled out our first new cohort, because we're doing by customer cohort in the US. We're very cautious monitoring, monitoring the first, the NPS after first 30 days rollout, measuring the engagement, comparing that to prior. And we said it will take the full year to roll out the new stock. And I think we're on track to that, and we're not changing that timeline. We're pleased by what we see so far. There's up and down, obviously, we rolled out new adjustments, and as we get customers feedback, but overall pretty positive.
Peter Levine
Representative from Evercore
No, thank you for taking my question.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
Thank you. The following comes from Tomer Zilberman with Bank of America. You may proceed.
Tomer Zilberman
Representative from Bank of America
Hey, guys, maybe just two quick questions for me. So this quarter, your sequential direct customer ads came in pretty strong, and you also talked about cross-sell penetration now nearing the 20%. With your guidance, or excuse me, with your performance falling in line with your guidance, my question is, how did the difference between existing customers and new customers play in per your expectation, or versus your expectation three months ago? Was it in line, or did you see one of the two performing better than expected?
Natalie Dursey
CFO
Yeah, I would say it's a balance across the metrics, and we've got different teams aligned to different segments of that -for-five strategic growth framework. In terms of how the customers performed, we are honestly working extremely, really hard and from a discipline fashion to free up as much capacity for investment for growth as we can. And so we've made it a commitment, and we stand behind that commitment in operation and execution to continue to invest in marketing. That marketing goes to the top of the funnel. So we are not surprised by the growth in customer count on a sequential basis. And so from a gross ads perspective, like I said, it's the highest gross ads we've seen in several years. And then from a retention perspective, an ARPU perspective, the levers of cross-sell, we are just getting started, quite honestly. We're very, very proud of the performance that our teams have driven in cross-sell penetration of the Norton base, moving from 15% to 20% the last year. But we are at 20%, and we feel like we have a ways to go, especially because we're not dealing or we're not selling into a stagnant customer base with a stagnant product portfolio. Both are growing. And so we will continuously invest in product and technology, enhance our value proposition. We will continuously work to cut through the message with our trusted brand and services to our customers. And we'll continue to focus on retention to make sure that the customers that we've got want to stay with us, and they're getting world-class customer service and protected by a product and technology value creation that is ever increasing.
Tomer Zilberman
Representative from Bank of America
Got it, so maybe the follow-up moving to ARPU and some of the effects headwind, what sort of hedging activities are you putting in place to protect against the weakening end?
Natalie Dursey
CFO
I don't hedge against the end from a currency rate perspective. We fix a rate at the beginning, and that's why we report USD versus constant currency. Got
Tomer Zilberman
Representative from Bank of America
it, thank you.
Natalie Dursey
CFO
Sure.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
Thank you. The next question comes from Saket Kali with Barclays. You may proceed.
Saket Kali
Representative from Barclays
Okay, Saket, guys, thanks for taking my questions here. Hey, Vincent, hey, Natalie. Hi. I joined late, so apologies. Hey, joined late, so apologies if some of these have been asked. But, Vincent, maybe just to start with you on just another part of the business, I think we get into the benefits enrollment season next quarter. And I know that last year there was a little bit of lumpiness there. And can you just talk a little bit about how that pipeline looks and maybe anything that you think about doing differently this time versus last year?
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Yeah, absolutely, Saket. And no worries about joining late. So the good news is we're recording the call. And we gave a lot of good information on where we stand with our business overall, feel pretty good. You may have heard or you may have already joined our partner, this quarter partner business, which is 10% of our overall business, a good 6% in constant currency. As you know, it's made of four categories. And I'm summarizing the context to give everybody context to your question. And it's about Telcos, selling through Telcos, our solutions, our employee benefits, strategic relationships, and then retails. Both Telcos and EB will continue to grow double-digit within that partnership revenue. And what you referred to is the fact that we signed a new, a set of new accounts. And then ahead of the enrollment time for employee benefit, which start normally around October, October to February time zone, we may or may not close some bigger deals into new accounts. So we've continued to invest into building up our overall coverage of the entire set of companies working through brokers. We have a very healthy funnel. And I think not different than last year, we will try to as aggressively as we can close as many deals as we can. Now, obviously, when it comes to estimating which deal falls into the full annual guidance, we feel we definitely have a very healthy funnel to cover the forecast for the year.
Saket Kali
Representative from Barclays
Got it. That's very helpful. Natalie, maybe for my follow-up for you, listen, the operating margin, all this speaks for itself. My question was just maybe on the gross margin. You know, last couple of quarters, it's just, I don't know, maybe like 100 basis points lower than it's been, you know, from the prior few quarters. So maybe the question is, can you talk to just any investments that are going into cost of sales or anything that we should continue there or anything that we should think about as we model the difference between gross margin and OPEX going forward?
Natalie Dursey
CFO
Yeah, hi, Socket. Thanks for the question. Yes, I think it is definitely appropriate to call out just what high margins we operate the business from, both the gross margin and the operating margin. Operating margin has improved seven points over the last three years and has up five points over the last two years. So I think that is the real measure of how we operate. It's a disciplined approach. It is one of very, very high margin, and we are committed to that. However, we also said as we navigate the business forward, although we're going to operate the core at those very high margins that we've been increasing to, we also reserve the right to invest in areas of growth that we believe are healthy and that will lead us to supporting the -for-five growth strategy because everyone wants to see an accelerating rate of growth on the top line. And so although you see .3% gross margin this quarter, that's flat quarter over quarter, down year over year, yes, but I would ask that you just zoom out a bit further. Gross margin is relatively stable. If you look back at 22, you look back at 23, it's incredibly stable. I would say the only pop that I would say that we've seen is honestly just P&L geography of our investments. We will continue to put firepower behind profitable, healthy ROI marketing investment to drive the top of the funnel, and that's all you're seeing with the gross margin variability. I would say zoom out. Look at the overall 86 to 87% range of gross margin and look to the operating margin health instability that we've delivered over the last few years.
Saket Kali
Representative from Barclays
Very clear. Thanks, guys.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
Thank you. Thank you. The final question comes from Hamza Farawalla with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed.
John Isensen
Representative for Hamza Farawalla
Hey, this is John Isensen on for Hamza.
Peter Levine
Representative from Evercore
Hey, how are you? Good.
John Isensen
Representative for Hamza Farawalla
Thanks for taking my question and great results in a very tough environment. Vincent, just for you, can you just talk about how you mentioned GEN.AI and the prepared remarks, but can you just touch a little deeper into kind of what's driving growth there in terms of maybe brand awareness across different geos and just what the opportunity overall there looks like?
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Yeah, definitely. We've seen, first of all, on the upstream, we've seen definitely a very strong double-g gross increase on data breaches and data getting into the hands of the overall hacking community. We've seen a surge of increased scams, stacks, and other things using some of those social engineering techniques to combine data breached with other private information that may sit on the web and making the scams more and more relatable, personable, and with that, obviously, increasing the risks for consumers. As you know, we've decided to use AI to combat AI, and we had launched the Northern Genie to detect those scams more and more. We have now well over one million users for download of that Northern Genie app, and we're merging for the second half. We're migrating that to integrate a basic anti-scam, AI-supported features into multiple product sets. So you'll see more and more shifts towards using AI to detect AI-generated scams today.
John Isensen
Representative for Hamza Farawalla
Got it. That's very helpful. And just for my follow-up for Natalie, so NetAds were obviously very strong again this quarter. Can you just talk a little bit about the contribution across different geographies and maybe any color on how you're thinking about NetAds tracking throughout the year, if you have any visibility? Thank you.
Natalie Dursey
CFO
Sure. I would say it's pretty broad-based. We look at it both online as well as mobile. We look at it by geography. We look at it across brands. And I would say when we look at the multi-year trending, we are headed in the right direction. And so I would say it's broad-based. We have called out, you know, as we expand in the global expansion portion of our -for-five and focus on acquisition, not only direct into, you know, I would say low-penetrated markets or underdeveloped markets, as well as through our partner channels, we know that the customers that we are able to acquire come in all shapes and sizes, so to speak. And so we've got to figure out a way to balance those through our model. But what we really focus on is the acquisition coming through with economics that we like and that point to health and sustainability. And the answer is yes, no matter which pivot that you look at, whether it's geography, whether it's brand, or whether it's the way that consumers engage with us. And so that's great. And then in terms of where we're going, I don't guide customer count quarter in, quarter out, but what I would really, really point you to is our commitment to continue to create the capacity to invest for growth. We are here to accelerate the rate of growth of this business, and there's no way we can do that if we don't really focus that fair share at the top of the funnel with net new acquisition. Gross ads, yes, but also net customer ads as we continue to focus on delighting our customers and therefore increasing the retention rate of our existing customers. Both are so, so critically important for our business model, and we will continue to invest in growing the top of the funnel and then servicing our customers all the way through their journey to make sure that they retain at the highest rate possible.
John Isensen
Representative for Hamza Farawalla
Got it. It's very helpful. Thank you very much.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back to Vincent Pellet for closing remarks.
Vincent Pallet
CEO
Thank you, operator. As the leading company in consumer cyber safety, we have a bold vision to provide digital freedom for everyone. The threat landscape is more dynamic than ever, and our investments in technology, AI, and product innovation are key to our success and future opportunities. We have a compelling AI-enabled product roadmap focused on security, financial safety, personal data control, and verification. Our -to-market strategy is effective, and we have a long track record of serving our customers. We are well positioned to expand the adoption of cyber safety globally with our trusted brands and omnichannel expertise. Thank you for your interest and your support.
Tamiya
Conference Operator
This concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.
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