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spk00: Please stand
spk06: by, your program is about to begin. If you need assistance during your conference today, please press star zero. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to NetScout's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 financial results conference call. At this time, all parties are in a listen-only mode. Until the question and answer portion of the call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Tony Piazza, Senior Vice President of Finance and his colleagues at NetScout are on the line with us today. If you require operator assistance at any time, please press star zero. I would now like to turn the call over to Tony Piazza to begin the company's prepared remarks.
spk04: Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to NetScout's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 conference call for the period ended March 31st, 2024. Joining me today are Anil Senghal, NetScout's President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Zabados, NetScout's Chief Operating Officer, and Gene Bua, NetScout's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. There's a slide presentation that accompanies our prepared remarks. You can advance the slides in the webcast viewer to follow our commentary. Both the slides and the prepared remarks can be accessed in the investor relations section of our website at .netscout.com, including the IR landing page under financial results, the webcast itself, and under financial information on the quarterly results page. Moving to slide number three, today's conference call will include forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include statements regarding our future financial performance or position, results of operations, business strategy, plans and objectives of management for future operations, and other statements that are not historical fact. Actual results differ materially from any forward-looking statements. These statements speak only as of today's date and involve risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those described on the slide and in today's financial results press release, which are available on the investor relations section of our website as well as in the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NETSCOUT assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information except as required by law. Let's now turn to slide number four, which involves non-GAAP metrics. While this slide presentation includes both GAAP and non-GAAP metrics, unless otherwise stated, financial information discussed on today's conference call will be on a non-GAAP basis only. The rationale for providing non-GAAP measures along with the limitations of relying solely on those measures is detailed on this slide and in today's press release. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with the GAAP. Reconciliation of all non-GAAP metrics with the applicable GAAP measures are provided in the appendix of the slide presentation in today's earnings press release and on our website. I will now turn the call over to Anil for his prepared remarks. Anil.
spk02: Thank you, Tony, and good morning, everyone. Welcome and thank you for all for joining us today. In fiscal year 2024, strong cybersecurity revenue growth was a highlight for Netscout as customers continued to prioritize cybersecurity spending amid heightened geopolitical tensions and the expanding cyber threat landscape. This strength was more than offset by the constrained customer spending environment effective over service assurance offerings, primarily related to our domestic service provider or customer. Despite the top line headwind, our diligent cost containment actions and flexible cost structure contributed to non-GAAP earnings but share growth year over year. With that as the backdrop, let's now turn to slide number six for a brief high-level recap of our non-GAAP financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024. Gene will provide more detail on the results later in the call. For the fourth quarter, we delivered revenue of approximately $203 million, down 2% and non-GAAP diluted earning per share of 55 cents of 17 cents or approximately 45% both on a year over year basis. For the full fiscal year 2024, we delivered revenue of approximately $830 million, representing a decline of approximately 9% year over year due in part to a lower level of our service assurance, a radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue compared to an unusually high level in fiscal year 2023. When excluding the radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue from total revenue, the decline was approximately 3% year over year. From a non-GAAP EPS perspective for the full fiscal year 2024, we delivered $2.20 per diluted shares, a 2% or approximately 1% improvement over fiscal year 2023. We achieved this result despite the revenue headwinds partially due to our cost containment actions taken during the fiscal year. Now let's move to slide number seven for some further perspective on business and market insights. Starting with our service assurance offerings, starting with the service assurance offerings. In fiscal year 2024, service assurance revenue declined approximately 18% year over year. This was primarily attributable to lower radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue year over year, as well as constraint spending from the domestic tier one carrier market as previously discussed. Excluding the impact of radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue, service assurance revenue were down approximately 11% year over year. As we consider the demand dynamics for the service assurance offering moving forward, we continue to see customer being cautious as budgets remain tight and the number of required approvals remains elevated. While we expect relative stability in the enterprise vertical, as customers continue to prioritize mission critical solutions and monitoring at the edge, we believe the ongoing headwinds in the service provider vertical will persist for much of the fiscal year 2025. The demand dynamic for service provider is an issue that is primarily domestic. Domestic service provider remain cautious in the spending decision as the 5G standalone infrastructure deploy has not yet delivered a return on investment with network traffic below capacity and no material new application driving increasing demand. This has caused providers to delay a significant further investment until a monetization strategy becomes available. To obtain acceptable returns on the investment. Strategically, we continue to be ready to support both the domestic and international carriers as the carriers, customer demand market progress and as emerging network technology trends gain momentum. For example, fixed wireless access has been a promising long-term opportunity although service providers currently already have the bandwidth to support recent deployment. Additionally, network slice also offers long-term opportunity for Netscout but is still in early stages. We are also encouraged by 5G investment activity at the international carriers. While international carriers spending levels tend to be lower than the domestic market, they remain an important contributor to long-term growth. Finally, Netscout is actively taking early steps of bringing new value proposition opportunity as it collaborates with customer to fully unlock the critical value of our smart data generated from our DPI technology. This relates to the increasing needs and requirement of emerging AI of strategies, tool sets and application. In the future, we intend to be an important contributor to this emerging technology market as we make our smart data available for customer AI use cases in partnership with other technology innovators in this field. Shifting to our cybersecurity offering, in fiscal year 2024, our cybersecurity offering delivered approximately 15% revenue growth year over year which was the result of growth in both our service providers and enterprise customer verticals. In addition, we believe customers' prior time spending amid heightened geopolitical tensions and the expanding threat landscape. As revealed in our recently released DDoS threat intelligence report, political motivated activist groups and an increase in DNS water torture attack contributed to over 7 million DDoS attacks globally in the second half of 2023. This is an increase of 15% from the first half of the year. With this high activity threat landscape, companies are increasingly depending on NETSCOT for their cybersecurity protection needs. As we look to fiscal year 2024, we believe the value proposition of our solution should continue to resonate with customers and expect our core as well as new offering such as adaptive DDoS, mobile security and Omni Cyber Intelligence solution to fuel continued momentum in this space. Michael and Gene will provide more insight regarding customer wins as well as product offering and customer vertical performance during the remarks. Now let's move to slide number eight regarding our outlook and summary. As we look forward to fiscal year 2025, we are encouraged by the momentum in our cybersecurity offerings. We have begun to take further actions that will enhance our focus on cybersecurity. This includes increased R&D investment as well as -to-market strategy modification. Also, we recognize the lingering headwinds in the domestic service provider vertical of our service assurance offering. This will likely create a top line offset resulting in a flat to slightly down revenue scenario for the new fiscal year, despite the continued growth in our cybersecurity offerings. We continue to align our cost structure with the current demand environment. We have implemented a voluntary separation program as part of the restructuring effort focused on reducing headcount as we seek to execute our strategic priorities, preserve earnings for shareholders and position NETSCOUT for long-term success. Gene will provide more specific in the outlook in our remarks. NETSCOUT has always been and remains a long-term focus company and we believe we are well positioned to benefit from future fundamental demand trends as enterprise and service providers require the leading cybersecurity and service assurance solution to deliver actionable visibility at scale. We remain confident that our visibility without borders platform is essential for helping customers tackle the performance, availability and cybersecurity challenges of the increasingly complex connected digital world. As we also remain committed to delivering long-term shareholder value. We look forward to sharing our progress with everyone on our quarterly earning calls. With that, I will turn the call over to
spk01: Michael. Thank you Anirudh and good morning everyone. So I turn out lines the areas that I will be covering today starting with customary highlights in the fourth quarter. You know, cybersecurity offering secured a multiple seven figure related, a multiple seven figure DDoS related deals with both new and existing customers across various geographic markets and industry sectors as customers continue to prioritize investments that protect them against the expanding cybersecurity threat landscape. For example, we want a low seven figure deal as we acquired a new financial industry enterprise customer in the Middle East. We had been engaged with this customer over multiple years pitching the value proposition of our leading DDoS capabilities while they were leveraging a competitors managed service. Although an unfortunate catalyst, the customer experienced a challenging cyber attack and we were able to quickly demonstrate our superior capabilities during the situation. This persuaded the customer to buy a full solution suite in a multi-solution purchase with us that included Arbor Edge Defense, Arbor Cloud, managed services and the resident engineer bringing the capability on-prem and in-house for better control of their cybersecurity defenses. Shifting to our service assurance offering and particularly the service provider vertical, we continue to benefit from contracts in support of 5G deployments, upgrades and capacity expansions both domestically and internationally, albeit at a somewhat muted pace given the constraint spending environment in this customer vertical. One example when during the quarter was a 5G related mid-teen eight figure deal with a leading Asian tier one service provider that we already support with our solutions through prior 4G network efforts. Given our strong historical performance and incumbent relationship, they selected Metscout to provide visibility for their 5G network. In the bigger picture, we believe the deal is the first of other potential opportunities with this customer as they expand their 5G network in the future. Turning to our -to-market activities, we attended Mobile World Congress, MWC in Barcelona in late February where we held many productive meetings with existing and prospective customers to discuss our latest offerings, including service assurance, AI ML analytics and cybersecurity solutions related to 5G network visibility and cybersecurity requirements. More recently in May, we attended the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco where we showcased our cybersecurity solutions and held valuable meetings with existing and prospective customers. In June, we will head to Las Vegas for Cisco Live as well as the Splunk User Conference and look forward to meeting with customers and partners, both current and prospective and demonstrating our visibility without borders platform offering. In our effort to expand our market presence, we recently entered into a technology alliance with Palo Alto Networks, which includes other companies such as NVIDIA in order to help customers protect against cyber attacks in the nascent private 5G network space. This is a good example of the type of value-creating alliances we are establishing to benefit our customers and our business prospects. This concludes my remarks. Thank you, everyone. I will now turn the call over to Jean for review of our financial results.
spk03: Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. I will review key metrics for our fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 and provide some additional commentary on our fiscal year 2025 outlook. As a reminder, this review focuses on our non-GAAP results unless otherwise stated, and all reconciliations with our GAAP results appear in the presentation appendix. Regardless, I will note the nature of any such comparisons. Slide number 12 details the results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024. Focusing on our quarterly performance, total revenue was $203.4 million, down 2.2%. Product revenue was $89.4 million, a decrease of 2%. While service revenue was $114 million, a decrease of 2.4%. All comparisons are on a -over-year basis. Gross profit margin was .2% in the fourth quarter, down 0.4 percentage points -over-year. Quarterly operating expenses decreased .3% -over-year, primarily due to cost containment efforts. Accordingly, we reported an operating profit margin of .2% compared with .7% in the same quarter last year. Diluted earnings per share was 55 cents, up .7% from 38 cents in the same quarter last year. For the full fiscal year 2024, revenue was $829.5 million, which was a decrease of .3% over the prior year for the reasons previously stated. Product revenue was $360.4 million, a decline of 20%, and service revenue was $469 million, an increase of .1% over the prior year. Gross profit margin was 79.4%, an increase of 1.9 percentage points. The improved gross profit margin is attributable to less contribution from lower margin radio frequency propagation modeling project revenue and lower variable compensation expenses -over-year. Annual operating expenses decreased .1% from the prior year, primarily due to previously mentioned cost containment actions. We reported a consistent operating profit margin -over-year of 22.6%. Diluted earnings per share was $2.20, a .9% increase -over-year, primarily driven through cost containment actions. Additionally, we had an investment valuation increase in a minority-held investment with a favorable tax treatment. This, in combination with the finalization of certain tax positions, reduced our annual tax rate to 17.2%. Turning to slide 13, I will review key revenue trends by product lines and customer verticals. Please note that all comparisons here are on a -over-year basis consistent with our other remarks. For the full year of fiscal year 2024, our cybersecurity revenue increased by 15.3%, while our service assurance revenue decreased by 17.8%, for the reasons Anil previously mentioned. During the same period, our service assurance product line accounted for approximately 67% of our total revenue, while our cybersecurity product line accounted for the remaining 33%. Turning to our customer verticals, for the full fiscal year 2024, our enterprise customer vertical revenue was consistent with the prior year, while our service provider customer vertical revenue decreased 17.7%. During the same period, our enterprise customer vertical accounted for approximately 53% of our total revenue, while our service provider customer vertical accounted for the remaining 47%. Turning to slide 14, this shows our geographic revenue mix. For the full year fiscal 2024, 57% of our revenue was derived from the United States, with the remaining 43% provided by international markets. Regarding the mix shift versus a year ago, international fiscal year 2024 revenues benefited from growth in both cybersecurity and service assurance offering, while domestic revenues were primarily impacted by the headwinds related to the tier one domestic service providers, as previously discussed. Also, no customer represented 10% or more of our total revenue in the fourth quarter, or for the full fiscal year 2024. Slide 15 details our balance sheet highlights and free cash flow. We ended the fourth quarter with $424.1 million in cash, cash equivalents, short and long-term marketable securities and investments, representing an increase of $94 million since the end of the third quarter of fiscal year 2024. Free cash flow for the year was $52.5 million. And from a debt perspective, we ended the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 with $100 million outstanding on our $800 million revolving credit facility, which expires in July, 2026. Also for the full fiscal year 2024, we repurchased approximately 1.8 million shares of our common stock for approximately $50 million. We currently have capacity and our share repurchase authorization and subject to market conditions, plan to be active in the market during the first half of the fiscal year 2025. To briefly recap other balance sheet highlights, accounts receivable net was $192.1 million, representing an increase of $48.2 million since March 31st, 2023. The DSO metric at the end of the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 was 81 days versus 58 days at the end of fiscal year 2023. The higher DSO metric in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year was due to the timing and composition of programs. Moving to slide 16 for commentary on our outlook, I will focus my review on our non-GAAP targets for fiscal year 2025. We anticipate our fiscal year 2025 revenue to be approximately $800 million to $830 million. We anticipate non-GAAP diluted earnings per share within the range of $2.10 to $2.30 with a midpoint flat year over year. The effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 20% as we return to a normalized effective tax rate. A weighted average diluted shares outstanding is assumed to be approximately 74 million shares, which does not currently assume any planned repurchase activity. NetScout's fiscal year 2025 guidance reflects the company's anticipated benefits associated with the previously mentioned voluntary separation program, restructuring actions, and ongoing cost management initiatives. In conjunction with these actions, the company expects to record GAAP restructuring charges primarily in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, attributable to one-time separation payments in the range of approximately $18 million to $22 million in aggregate. The company expects that these actions will generate annual run rate savings in a similar range with approximately 75% of the benefit expected in fiscal year 2025 due to the timing of these actions. This is an estimated range and will be finalized as the program is completed. Finally, I would like to provide some color for the first half of fiscal year 2025. Assuming the midpoint of our revenue range, we anticipate a revenue skew of approximately 45% in the first half of the fiscal year and 55% in the second half. This is primarily attributable to the prior fiscal year's first quarter, benefiting from the usage of approximately $35 million to $40 million from backlog. Accordingly, we expect first quarter fiscal year 2025 revenue to be in the range of $165 million to $175 million. As a result, we expect corresponding non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of 8 cents to 17 cents due to the continued cost containment efforts partially offsetting the revenue backlog usages impact. That concludes my formal review of our financial results. Before we transition to Q&A, I'd like to quickly note that our upcoming IR conference participation is listed on slide 17. Thank you, and I'll now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Madison?
spk06: Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, press star two. We do ask in the interest of time that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. We will take our first question from Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.
spk05: Hey, good morning, it's Dan Bergstrom from Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking our questions. Just from the prepared remarks and trends around service provider spending, and Neil, I know you spend a lot of time with those tier one carriers. Maybe, what are you hearing from them as far as budgeting for the new year here? And then maybe, could you contrast what you're seeing from them with international and demand beyond the tier ones?
spk02: Yeah, so overall, Matt, if you look at the top 10 providers in the world, out of them, about eight or nine are big customers of NetScout. So their budget cycles are different, and this quarter, we benefited from some big orders in the international side, and they're often lumpy. But overall, I think budgets are, I mean, with the numbers we had last year, our big booking seemed to be stabilizing, and if we didn't have the overhang for the revenue from the calibration stuff from last year, I think we are, this area is stabilizing. Budgets are not increasing, they're still tight. And second thing is what we are hearing is that our technology can be redeployed or used for it. And we have a different purpose, and we announced our Omnis AI offering in about six months ago, and so we think that we can drive additional opportunities in that area because we have already on the network, and we already have the technology which we can use or repurpose for AIOPS solution, and that's where I think some more demand will be there. At the same time, we have to be selling to a different buyer, so there are some benefits of being in that account, and that's what we are hoping that we will use it to stabilize or perhaps even grow the service assurance plus AI business, and then the rest of the growth will come from cybersecurity.
spk05: Great, and then with cybersecurity there, could you dig a little deeper into some of the areas that you're leaning into a bit more here this year?
spk02: So I think if you look at our, I mean, bulk of the revenue up till now has been in the Arbor DDoS area, a company we acquired some time ago, but we never integrated them until about two years ago into the main business. So in addition to the traditional core business of DDoS, which is seem to be doing flat to up, there are two other areas. One is bringing our DPI technology to the DDoS world, and that's what we have been calling adaptive DDoS, and there's some more things we are doing there. The second area is a brand new product in the NDR space where players like Dark Trace and Vectra and some other companies have been playing, and that's the Omni-Cyber Intelligence product. So in summary, basically we have the core business of Arbor DDoS, we have the new adaptive DDoS solution using some technology from the service assurance side, and third is the Omni-Cyber Security in the NDR market. The last year's number is mostly in the first category, and so we think that now the solution is maturing in the second and third category, and that's why we are sort of bullish about continued growth in this area. Great, thank you.
spk06: Thank you, and we will take our next question from Kevin Liu with KLU Company.
spk07: Hey, good morning. Just on the service provider side of things, I was wondering, Neil, if you could talk a little bit longer term, beyond this current year, do you think this is just kind of a pause in terms of your customers' capital deployment, or do you still see there being a lot of opportunity around the development of these services like fixed wireless access and other applications that maybe just aren't flowing through the network yet?
spk02: Yeah, I think having a lot of interest in that area, but there's still a challenge of budget, and there are people in the industry saying the AIOps is the new name for ITOps, but it appeals to different buyers, and even in the fixed wireless case, there are traditional service assurance use cases, which is almost all over business in the carrier, but there are other cases of misuse of bandwidth and which fall in the AIOps area, so that's what we think that is the additional opportunity. 5G will continue to pick up in different parts of the world, and it will keep a big portion of the core business going, and then there'll be additional opportunity, which is adjacency in the market, even though there is slightly different buyer in that market for AIOps. So we look at both in the service assurance for enterprise as well as service provider that some of the markets will move into the AIOps area, and we think that we have the best context and technology already in place.
spk07: Understood, and could you actually just elaborate a bit on that AIOps opportunity? How is the usage of your product different in that market versus what you've traditionally done for the wireless providers?
spk02: Yeah, so for example, the use cases are like instead of looking at end user experience for a subscriber, both internal and external audiences in the traditional service assurance area, people could look at high value customers differently, who have better calling plans, who are willing to pay more, and they may need a different level of service. There could be abuses of bandwidth on the fixed wireless side, which could impact all other users on the radio access network. So those are technically for in the AIOps area, and they are not traditionally for direct end user experience. So then there are things in the cybersecurity area which borderline on AIOps where you want to get visibility onto all the hackers, not just their hacking activity. So there is a whole bunch of use cases. Slicing also technically can be put in the AIOps area. So there are about 20 or so new use cases besides 10 or so we have been going over in terms of end user experience and service triage, and moving more from troubleshooting and triaging to analytics, which is more appealing to business people. And I think that's why it can come in higher level of interest and budget.
spk07: Great, thank you for that, Kala. And if I could just sneak in one more on the cybersecurity side, can you talk a little bit about how much of your business over the past year might have been directly attributable to some of the geopolitical conflicts going on? And as you're thinking about your customers spending for this year, would you expect that buying to be kind of repeated from your existing customers, or do you have to go out and acquire new customers? Thank you.
spk02: Yeah, I think it's very hard to know what is directly attributable because we don't have a special option for that. But yeah, there was the impact. But overall, the DDoS attack and cyber attacks are rising everywhere. And for various reasons, and now we have elections coming. We have Olympics coming in France. And so all these events are are are a sort of opportunity for hackers to go after. So we are seeing interest in that area, for example, in the Europe area for the Olympics and then US elections. So I think it's you can call them all geopolitical in, I mean, events in some sense. But there's always something like this is going on, in addition to normal attack activity increasing. Also, there is another dimension given, which is more smaller, sophisticated attack, which we call application layer attack. So this adaptive DDoS, which we have come up with, that option allows us to go after those activities where the traditional prior solution of our work was mainly volumetric attack. And so we have adjusted our product to some of those newer type of attacks, whether it's because of geopolitical situation or other reasons.
spk07: Great. Thanks for the responses and collective fiscal year.
spk02: Thank you.
spk06: Thank you. It appears that we have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the program back over to Tony Piazza for closing remarks.
spk04: Thank you, operator. That concludes our call for today. Thank you for joining us and have a good day.
spk06: This does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.
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