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spk03: Greetings and welcome to the Ribbon Communications 4th Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Bita Melanian, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing. Thank you, Bita. You may begin.
spk00: Good afternoon and welcome to Ribbon's fourth quarter 2022 financial results conference call. I am Bita Moulanian, SVP of Marketing at Ribbon Communications. Also on the call today are Bruce McLennan, Ribbon's Chief Executive Officer, and Mick Lopez, Ribbon's Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being webcast live and will be archived on the investor relations section of our website at rbbn.com, where both our press release and supplemental slides are currently available. Certain matters we will be discussing today, including the business outlook and financial projections for the first quarter of 2023 and beyond, are forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in these forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in our documents filed with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K. I refer you to our safe harbor statement included on slide two of the supplemental slides for this conference call. In addition, we will present non-GAAP financial information on this call. Reconciliations to the applicable GAAP measure are included in the earnings press release we issued earlier today, as well as the supplemental slides we prepared for this conference call, which again are both available on the investor relations section of our website. And now I would like to turn the call over to Bruce. Bruce?
spk02: Thanks, Peta, and thanks to everyone for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter results and our outlook for 2023. I'm very pleased to report solid financial results for the fourth quarter, the strongest quarter of the year, with year-over-year growth in revenue and earnings. Overall, sales were above the midpoint of guidance, growing 13% sequentially and 1% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 25 percent versus the third quarter and 11 percent versus the fourth quarter of 2021. And bookings momentum continued with book-to-revenue of 1.1 times, even with higher sales levels in the quarter. Operating expenses were slightly higher than we projected, primarily related to higher customer-related travel expenses and variable sales compensation. Continued elevated supply chain costs and component expedite fees along with customer and product mix resulted in gross margins a little below our initial projections. The highlight of the quarter was the continued improvement in our IP optical business, with sales improving across all regions and multiple new customer wins. In particular, momentum continued to grow in our IP routing portfolio, which we believe will only get stronger as additional new products enter the market this year. But we also posted good results in our Cloud and Edge segment with one of the strongest quarters ever for sales to enterprise customers and a strong quarter for session border controller sales. All of this resulted in $16 million of free cash flow in the quarter and $67 million of cash at year end. Overall, it was a very good quarter and sets a great foundation for 2023. Now, a little more detail on each of our operating segments. This was by far the strongest quarter for our IP optical networks business since the ECI acquisition in early 2020. Revenue was $97 million, growing 18% quarter-over-quarter, following growth of 20% in the third quarter. Sales of optical transport equipment grew 16% versus the third quarter and were up 6% year-over-year. Sales of our IP routing portfolio grew even faster, increasing 21% quarter-over-quarter, and 34 percent versus the fourth quarter of 2021. Production of several of our high-volume access routers continued to be limited by availability of very specific microcontroller parts, which would have further increased our Q4 revenue by approximately $10 million, but which has now moved into backlog for the first half of 2023. We expect to have a new design in production by the end of the second quarter, as well as additional supply eliminating this following. The EMEA region was once again the strongest region for IP optical sales across a broad range of customers in continental Europe, Africa, the UK, and the Middle East. Highlights include growth with the Israeli Defense Forces, Cicero Networks, formerly Corning Services, British Telecom, and the Finnish Defense Forces. We also had several new wins in Europe at the end of the quarter, including expansions with the Swiss Army and German railway operator Deutsche Bahn. as well as the Czech Republic Science and Education Network Operator. We believe these new wins will get us off to a good start in the first half of 2023. The most significant growth this quarter was in the Asia-Pac region with multiple key wins, including Eastern Telecom and InfiniiVan in the Philippines, Viettel in Vietnam, Taiwan Mobile, and multiple operators in Africa, including MTN Global Connect and Bofanen. And we were very excited to be awarded for the first time ever a portion of Bardi's optical transport long-haul DWDM network in India. This is a major accomplishment for the team and highlights the completeness of our portfolio in a highly competitive and fast-growing market. These are the exact type of Tier 1 operators we're targeting to provide additional scale and predictability for the business. We also continue to make progress on our strategic goal of gaining scale in the critical North American region, with full-year sales increasing more than 30 percent versus 2021 and exceeding 10 percent of overall IP optical sales for the year. Opportunities with additional major Tier 1 mobile and telecom operators also continue to progress. I count a total of six wins at this stage where we have now received orders and are at various stages of early deployment, and at least eight additional highly active engagements that have potential for incremental revenue in 2023, along with a variety of other engagements in early stages. This funnel is key to our strategy to drive longer term scale and growth for this business and incremental to the current base. Product and service bookings were strong again this quarter, keeping pace with increased shipments with a 1.05 times book to revenue in the quarter. Optical bookings were particularly strong on the back of several new customer wins in Asia back. Now some highlights from our Cloud and Edge business. Sales in the fourth quarter increased 10% versus the third quarter, but we're down 7% year over year. Despite the lower sales, adjusted EBITDA margin for the segment improved 117 basis points versus the fourth quarter of 2021, primarily due to spending improvements implemented throughout the year and continued strong mix of software sales. Product and service bookings were strong at 1.15 times. Our focus on the faster growing enterprise market segment showed positive results once again this quarter, with revenue growing 67% quarter over quarter and 7% year over year. reaching 37% of CloudMed's product and service sales in the quarter. Sales were distributed across a number of market verticals, including customers such as Liberty Mutual and Insurance, HCA and Healthcare, JP Morgan and Vanguard in financials, and Qualcomm in technology. We believe Ribbon is uniquely positioned to meet the large, complex communication needs of these Fortune 500 companies. Our business model in the enterprise market continues to evolve, with an increasing mix of annual enterprise-wide license agreements and as-a-service recurring monthly subscription revenue. Multiple significant opportunities in the federal government segment continued to progress in the quarter. We're working with a number of important channel integration partners, including Dell, to provide a comprehensive, pre-integrated federal solution. I remain very excited about the potential opportunity and expect revenue from these large, complex projects to begin to build throughout the year. From a product mix perspective, sales of session border controllers and associated policy routing products were strong in the quarter, increasing 59% from the third quarter. Shipments of both core high-performance SPCs as well as enterprise edge appliances were strong, serving both enterprise and service provider segments. We also had a strong quarter with cloud communication partners such as Bandwidth, SoftBank, IntelliQuint, and Peerless, and contact center providers such as InContact. We also continued the momentum behind our analytics offering. We had new international wins with Optus in Australia and Colt in France for our fraud and robocalling prevention application. By leveraging cloud technologies, these customers benefit from a fast and seamless deployment experience, helping them protect customers from a wide variety of annoying and potentially malicious calls. Shipments of our voice network transformation solutions were consistent with the previous quarter, with a continued shift towards telco cloud solutions such as our virtual C20 call controller. We were excited to announce a strategic win with Liberty Latin America as they consolidate multiple legacy platforms across their footprint onto our modern cloud-based architecture, while also leveraging our advanced analytics application suite. There remains a strong pipeline of similar network modernization opportunities that will provide a solid underpinning for the business in 2023. Revenue with our largest customer, Verizon, once again exceeded 10% of our overall sales and was consistent with the third quarter. Finally, fourth quarter is our strongest period for renewing maintenance and support contracts, and bookings were even stronger than usual and underpins the profitability and stability for this business. Our focus on securing multi-year agreements is a key part of our strategy, and we have broadened our offering to include a variety of value-added services, including software upgrade assurance, to further increase our value and attachment rate. With that, I'll turn it over to Mick to provide additional detail on our fourth quarter results, and then come back on to discuss outlook for the first quarter and 2023. Mick.
spk01: Thank you, Bruce. In the fourth quarter of 2022, our financial results showed good improvement over the previous quarter and prior year, with revenue growth momentum for our IP optical networks business and continued profitability contributions from our cloud and edge business. Please refer to our investor relations website for supplemental slides summarizing our fourth quarter of 2022 and historical performance. Let's start with consolidated corporate financial performance. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Riven generated revenues of $234 million, which is an increase of $3 million, 1.3% from the prior year, driven by a 17% increase in IP optical networks that compensated for a 7% decrease in cloud and edge. Non-GAAP gross margin was 52.4%, which is 150 basis point decrease from prior year, entirely driven by the increased percentage mix of IP optical networks, from 36% of total ribbon revenues in fourth quarter of 21 to over 41% in fourth quarter of 22. Gross margins were unchanged year over year for cloud and edge at 64% and for IP optical at 36%. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $97 million, a decrease of $5 million, or 5% year-over-year, as we continue to reduce labor costs, even in an inflationary environment, and look forward to additional efficiencies in 2023. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $29 million a quarter, which is an increase of $3 million, or 11% increase from prior year. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.09, higher than our guidance as a result of improvements in our global tax provision estimates. Our non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 3.2% to reflect the modification of our quarterly tax provision. Our non-GAAP tax rate for the full year 2022 was approximately 31%, which is an 800 basis point reduction from 39% in the prior year in 2021. Our cash taxes for 2022 were $16 million, which were in line with our 2021 cash taxes of $13 million. Our basic share count was 168 million shares, and our diluted share count was 172 million shares for the quarter. Now, let's look at the results of our two business segments. In our cloud and edge business, fourth quarter revenue was $137 million, down 7% year over year, and up 10% quarter over quarter. software as a percentage of total product revenue was 59%. Once again, the cloud and edge business contributed robust gross margins of 64%, which led to a $36 million EBITDA or 26% of revenues. For the full year, gross margins were 65% and $128 million of EBITDA or 25% of EBITDA margin, showing the resilient profitability and cash contributions from this business. Let's turn to our IP Optical Networks business results. We recorded fourth quarter revenue of $97 million, which was an increase of $15 million or 18% quarter over quarter and 17% year over year. Non-GAAP gross margin for IP Optical was 36%, which is 170 basis points lower than the previous quarter, but 20 basis points higher than the fourth quarter of 2021. As Bruce mentioned, Gross margins were below our projected level due to supply chain issues with expedite fees higher than initially projected and lower margins on several new customer projects associated with the initial infrastructure portion of the project. Non-GAAP EBITDA loss for the quarter was $7 million, or 8% of revenues. While still negative, our EBITDA improved every single quarter over the previous quarter in 2022. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $67 million. This is an increase of $11 million from the end of the third quarter. As expected, we returned to positive cash flow in the quarter as we had cash from operations of $16 million. Our term loan is currently at $330 million outstanding as we have paid off $70 million or 17.5% of the original balance. Our $100 million revolver remained undrawn at quarter-ending. For the fourth quarter of 2022, we met our amended term loan covenant metrics. Given that we revert to the original leverage and fixed charge coverage covenant metrics in 2023, we are exploring alternatives to ensure credit facility compliance, such as paying down debt or raising additional capital. While we have confidence in executing a plan to ensure term loan covenant compliance, as you may understand, there is always a risk of noncompliance, which would require us to reclassify the long-term debt into current debt for the year-end 2022 balance sheet. Ribbon enjoys the benefit of a fixed rate swap, which is valued at about $25 million on our balance sheet, that limits our effective LIBOR rate to only 90 basis points. compared to the current one month spot rate of about 450 basis points. Please note that we are working with our banking syndicate to change our base rate from LIBOR to SOFR, the secured overnight financing rate. Even though short-term rates were up significantly, we kept our interest rate total charges flat to 2021 through debt repayments and our swap hedge instrument. Ribbon was also very effective at managing other expenses under our control. In spite of increased inflation, supply chain disruptions, and higher labor costs, we were able to contain our 2022 operating expenses to almost the same level as previous year, while simultaneously investing more in IP optical research and development. Finally, we were able to decrease our non-GAAP annual effective tax rate, as we said, by 800 basis points with changes to our global tax provision. Now, I'd like to turn the call back to Bruce to provide more comments on our outlook for 2023.
spk02: Great. Thanks, Mick. As we enter 2023, the operating environment for the telecom industry remains healthy despite a variety of macro pressures, including higher inflation and operating costs. Consumers continue to rely heavily on the services provided by our customers in order to enable a digital mobile lifestyle, and competition for consumer dollars remains fierce. It's imperative for our customers, both service provider and enterprise, to invest in their communication infrastructure in order to stay competitive. There are a number of common themes that we hear from our customers on how they are prioritizing their investment in 2023. First and foremost, mobile remains the top priority for the majority of operators. The adoption of 5G has hit a tipping point, with mass market adoption exceeding 50% in many countries. The higher speeds and improved coverage enabled by 5G technology greatly increases the data traffic on the network. This in turn is a major catalyst for the deployment of increased fiber capacity from the radio head to the core network and broader deployment of IP and PLS to the edge of the network. The next major priority is to increase the capacity and reach of the fixed broadband network. Availability of fiber to the home, internet access for the majority of consumers is an imperative for practically all countries. reflecting the adoption of hybrid work and education practices. Significant federal funding is supporting more aggressive business plans and a supercharged investment cycle. These first two priorities adds an even higher level of attention on total cost of ownership, the third key focus area. Increased competition and impacts from inflation puts a premium on every dollar spent and a spotlight on the cost of maintaining both new platforms and legacy infrastructure. Solutions that lower support costs, reduce power consumption, and decrease real estate needs have grown in importance as a result. Finally, there's a clear recognition that all aspects of business can yield significant benefits from adoption of a digital or cloud-first approach. Service providers and enterprises are reinventing all aspects of their business, leveraging the power of cloud to reduce cost, accelerate service availability, and improve overall quality of experience. This includes practically all of the traditional voice and data communication functions. We believe the products and solutions provided by Ribbon are extremely well aligned with these investment priorities and provide us confidence that we're in one of the few parts of the economy that will remain robust despite macro environmental pressures. For Ribbon, we're in a significantly improved position from a year ago. Sales in our IP optical segment increased 36% in the second half of 2022 compared to the first half. And we anticipate this growth to continue in 2023 on the strength of incremental investment we've made in new products and associated new customer wins. In particular, our focus and investment in IP routing provides us a significant opportunity to realize our strategy of becoming a major supplier of IP optical solutions. From a regional perspective, we've significantly diversified and strengthened our customer base. In Europe, we have a broad range of customers across multiple market verticals. We have a strong presence with critical infrastructure providers where there's a relentless focus on security and reliability. We're very well positioned to continue to grow and take share in this market. A recent example is the multi-year extension we have reached with the Israeli Defense Force to provide critical support and products supporting their unique communication requirements. And the telecom industry is proving very resilient across Europe, and we have significant opportunities with several of the major carriers in the region. There's a critical focus on supplier diversity given the shifting political landscape and importance of supply chain assurance. The presence we have with our CloudNedge portfolio in this region is a major asset as we build confidence in our expanded portfolio. Developing markets such as Africa also present a major growth opportunity in the region, as major carriers such as MTN, Airtel, Etisalat, and Orange make significant investments alongside major content providers such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Fiber networks, both subsea and terrestrial, are the fundamental building blocks for these networks, and we're very excited by the early success we've had in the region in 2022. This will be a major focus for us again this year. And we expect the India market will also be a major source of growth for us this year, building on the new wins we've achieved with Bardi in the last several months. The investment we've made in new products is paying dividends as we expand our presence and gain market share in both optical and IP networking. In the broader Asia-Pacific region, we've also gained share with new customers such as SoftBank, Eastern Telecom, InfiniVan, Vietel, Taiwan Mobile, and others. These are all new accounts over the last year and provide us an opportunity for additional extensions and sales of our entire portfolio. And in North America, we continue to win new regional service providers as they invest in additional network capacity to support broadband and mobile growth. We've also identified multiple entry points with the major carriers and are making good progress towards breakout wins in this critical region. We also believe that we've made the right investments in our cloud and edge segment to maintain revenue and profitability and to ensure our portfolio of secure voice communication products are positioned to gain share in both enterprise and telco market segments. We have a strong recurring revenue base of critical maintenance services that underpin this part of our business. And the US federal voice modernization opportunity is a large multi-year investment cycle where we are very well positioned. We continue to make progress on our core strategy to cross-sell our entire portfolio to existing customers where we have a track record of success and have built a strong level of trust. More and more of our customers are purchasing products from both operating segments, and in some cases are being deployed as an integrated solution, which is a major differentiator for us. So our primary focus in 2023 is on improving the profitability of the business. Our strategy is focused on four key elements. First, we expect a major improvement in profitability from the IP optical business as revenue grows this year. We expect to be able to continue to grow and gain share in the multibillion-dollar optical transport market, and recent wins such as the Barty Long Haul Award highlights our portfolio competitiveness. We expect this will continue to improve with the launch of a new platform called the 9400 later this year. Even more significantly, we're very encouraged by the growth we're seeing in our IP routing business on the strength of our new XDR2000 portfolio and believe this will be a major factor in improving profitability in 2023. Second, we're focused on several key areas of our cloud and edge addressable market to maintain revenue and profitability in this business. This includes continued growth in the enterprise market, including winning a significant share of the large federal voice modernization opportunity. We're also encouraged by the pipeline of new telco cloud transformation projects that directly contribute to lowering operating costs, a major priority for our service provider customers. Third, we anticipate the impact from global supply chain challenges to continue to moderate, improving product costs and operational flexibility. In addition, we have a number of product redesigns that will further reduce our reliance on problematic components and technology and eliminate the majority of issues. And finally, we're targeting a reduction of operating costs of $25 to $30 million, which will yield approximately $20 million of in-year savings, net of inflation and other costs. To help achieve this target, we've recently implemented a series of organizational changes under the banner of Ribbon 3.0. Our current business unit structure served us well during the initial integration of Ribbon and ECI, providing separate empowered teams focused on the unique aspects of each portfolio. But we're now seeing a growing number of areas where closer collaboration and coordination would be beneficial. and have therefore combined leadership of the business units under Sam Bucci as Chief Operating Officer. Similarly, with the recent addition of Dan Reddington from Juniper, we have combined our global sales organization under Dan, emphasizing the importance of IT networking to our growth strategy. In many ways, this is the next logical step in the integration of Ribbon and ECI, reflecting the Ribbon 3.0 branding. From a program perspective, after a surge in investment the last 18 months, we're moderating R&D investment and IP optical somewhat as multiple new products reach completion. A part of this is related to a new partnership we're finalizing with TechMahindra. We're very excited to be working with TechM to collaborate in the development and deployment of an advanced cloud-based multi-domain, multi-vendor orchestration and management platform that leverages ribbon technology and TechMahindra's global market presence. We plan to formally announce our engagement at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month. With that backdrop, we expect overall company revenue to grow in 2023 with a range of $840 million to $870 million, with cloud and edge revenue relatively flat year over year and IP optical revenue growing greater than 15%. increased sales along with modest improvement in gross margin and lower operating costs combined to significantly improve projected adjusted EBITDA for 2023 in the range of 95 to 110 million dollars. Our business has an element of seasonality with the second half typically much stronger than the first half as we experienced in 2022. We anticipate a similar pattern in 2023 with the first quarter being the lowest point for the year but we're in a much better position from a momentum and visibility perspective. As mentioned, we do expect component shortages to limit shipments this quarter by approximately $10 million. So, for the first quarter, we're projecting revenue in a range of $180 to $190 million, non-GAAP gross margins in a range of 46 to 48 percent, and non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA in a range of minus $6 million to plus $1 million for the quarter. The upper end of our guidance includes several million dollar benefit from the potential Tech Mahindra partnership that we expect to close in the quarter. I'd like to thank the entire Ribbon team and our partners for a strong finish to 2022 and look forward to our continued progress in 2023. Operator, that concludes our prepared remarks and we can now take a few questions.
spk03: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Tim Savageau with Northland Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
spk05: Hi, good afternoon. I have a question on the win you announced with Barty and also a follow-up on the pipeline. And you made some comments in the prepared remarks, which were along the lines of what I was thinking, which is this is a new area for Ribbon in terms of the long haul. I wonder if you can... give us a sense of how significant, well, I think it's significant from a competitive standpoint, if you can talk about that competitive environment, how you were able to translate from backhaul to long haul, and then in terms of the business, how incremental do you think that is to what you're doing with Airtel right now? I think the word massive appeared somewhere in this press release, so maybe expand on that as well.
spk02: Yeah. Hey, Tim. Well, thanks for joining us for sure. Yeah, so we're obviously pretty excited about the opportunity to expand the business with Barty Airtel. As you highlighted, our business traditionally has been more around the access aggregation layer of the network. And a lot of what we've been doing has been IP and PLS at the layer two, layer three layer of the network in order to move into the long haul portion of their network. There was additional product development work required to meet some of their requirements. And so that's been a work in progress for the last year or so, you know, going through POCs and field trials, et cetera, and culminating finally with the award and the initial deployment starting here this year. So, you know, it was quite a process to become one of those selected vendors. It's a portion of their network we've never been in before. And, you know, as I mentioned, I think it really does kind of reinforce the competitiveness of the portfolio. So, you know, from a kind of an incremental or scale perspective, you know, it's certainly meaningful for us, you know, in the initial purchase, you know, kind of double-digit million level as we scale here this year. So we'll see how that grows over time. But, you know, it's one of those, kind of major tier one things that were, you know, very strategic for us and where our focus has been. And, you know, I think from a competitiveness perspective, you know, as operators in that part of the region of the world and others look at, you know, different alternatives from a supply perspective, you know, it's given us the opportunity to gain some market share and expand what we're doing.
spk05: Great, and congrats on that. And your kind of last comments there lead me into my next question, which is, you know, you're looking for Tier 1s. And you specifically, I don't know if it was six or eight, but you put a number on the number of opportunities that you're pursuing in North America. Also made reference to multiple, and I think the comment was about Tier 1s in terms of opportunities in Europe. I wonder if you might just give us an update on the – the state of the pipeline in terms of maybe extend that to Asia and make the comment global with regard to opportunities pursued and how you've seen that develop over the last little while?
spk02: Yeah, so obviously I'm trying to provide some level of forward indicators of future success here in the engagements with what I've called Tier 1s. These are major operators in different regions of the world, and so obviously you know, Bardi were able to announce here in India. Uh, you know, I mentioned a few others like Eastern Telephone and, uh, and InfiniDAN who are, you know, major, major operators and they're part of the region of the world or MTM Global Connect operating out of Africa. So, you know, those are all the types of examples that maybe aren't, uh, top of top names known in, in North America, but they're clearly, you know, major, major operators internationally. Um, You know, so that pipeline, you know, is still very active of additional opportunities that we're working on either from an RFP or a proof-of-concept perspective, several in North America, several in Europe, and several in Asia Pacific. So it's, you know, pretty well balanced and, you know, a real key part of our strategy, obviously, to grow that business, provide a more stable source of revenue, more predictable revenue, allows us to be more predictable from a supply chain perspective, improve cost, all those things that I think are really required to have enough scale to be, you know, a really strong competitor in the space. And they span both optical and IP, you know, both are key focus areas for us to find those entry points and kind of land and expand once we're inside these major accounts.
spk05: Great. Thanks very much.
spk02: Yeah, thank you, Tim.
spk03: Thank you. Our next question is from Greg Messiam with West Park Capital. Please proceed with your question.
spk06: Yes, thank you, and congrats on the results. Thanks, Greg. First question I wanted to ask you was the business, the IP optical business in Europe, particularly the U.K., can you give us some indication as to what percentage of that business is Huawei replacements?
spk02: It's a little hard to put our finger on it, and I can't comment specifically on the UK. I would say, just to give you a sense though, Greg, I think the majority of our business is more in continental Europe than it is in the UK today from an IP optical perspective. We mentioned before, BT is one of our customers more on the access side, more traditional portion of the network for ECI that we continue But a lot of our business in Europe is either with the regional telecom providers and or a lot with the critical infrastructure. And I mentioned a few names where we're very active there today. So I would say that's the stronger part. Just to comment on your Huawei replacement question, certainly there are countries like the UK which have been pretty aggressive in their position around Huawei as part of their infrastructure. As you get into other countries in Europe, you know, it's less a stringent requirement at this point, you know, whether it's in Italy or Spain or Germany, there isn't quite as strong a mandate. And so, you know, we do face Huawei in many of the countries that we compete in today. And, you know, we don't win them all, but we definitely have to compete against them. And many of the cases we're winning, you know, in an environment where we're competing directly with them.
spk06: Got you. And turning to the cloud and edge business, It seems to me the session border control market, when you subdivided by carrier and enterprise, has kind of gone through some shifts in the last couple of quarters in terms of both market share and relative importance. What are you seeing from kind of a macro view of that market in terms of carrier versus enterprise? Are you gaining in enterprise? Are you... holding steady and carrier? I mean, what are the competitive dynamics you're seeing there? Thanks.
spk02: Yeah, good question, Greg. In the carrier space, it can be a lumpy business. You know, many times we're selling, it's a capital, you know, CapEx purchase, either hardware and software together or a software license purchase and a, you know, perpetual license And so we'll sell capacity to one of our carrier customers in a quarter, and maybe it'll be two or three quarters before they need more capacity again. And so we do see that kind of move around, and one quarter could be up, another quarter could be down. In some cases, we're selling SBCs alongside our voice infrastructure, our NTR business. And in other cases, we're selling SBCs and not voice. So it can vary customer to customer. I think we're holding our own very well from a market share perspective. I feel like, uh, our portfolio is really well positioned with the carriers and, and when we get an opportunity, we do pretty well. Um, as you know, enterprise has been a strategic area for us to focus on and grow and, and, and gain share. It's a, um, you know, part of the market where we have not had as much market share traditionally, and it's been a real focus the last 18 months to, uh, of all the portfolio as well as the go to market and the sales motion to gain more share. In some cases now we're providing annual enterprise wide licenses that basically authenticate the amount of software and capacity that our customers can use. In some cases we're still selling appliances and in fact our enterprise edge portfolio of session board controllers It really addresses small, medium-sized business. It's been very robust selling through our carrier partners. But, you know, long answer to your question, the enterprise piece has got a real focus. I'm really pleased to see the growth happen in the fourth quarter here.
spk06: Thanks, Bruce. I'll pass it on.
spk02: Thank you very much, Greg.
spk03: Thank you. Our next question is from Dave Kang with B Reilly. Please proceed with your questions.
spk04: Thank you. Nice quarter. Perhaps you talked about bookings and book the bill. Just wondering if you can provide some color on backlog. I don't think you really talked about backlog, any color on backlog, whether it was up, down, and how should we think about or what should our expectation be going forward?
spk02: Yeah, thanks, Dave. So as you said, we don't disclose absolute numbers around backlog, but with the book to bill or the book to revenue above one in the quarter, it directly implies that we were building some additional backlog. I did comment that we would have shipped more in the quarter if we could. We were supply limited, particularly around our access routers. and upwards of $10 million or so would have shipped in addition in the quarter if we could have built it. And that's really carried forward into the first quarter. And in fact, a lot of that backlog has really moved out into the second quarter as we continue to be short on a specific component around that part of the portfolio. So as I mentioned in the comments, because of all that, I think we feel like we have better visibility and kind of better line of sight around the momentum in the business given the booking momentum in really both cloud and edge and in the IP optical business.
spk04: And so you gave the annual outlook of 840 to 870. Just wondering if you can go over your assumptions as far as bookings you expected and where the backlog will be, any kind of comments.
spk02: Yeah, so the 840 to 870 at the midpoint is, I think, a little over 4% growth over what we reported in 2022. You know, the assumptions around that are that the cloud and edge business is fairly consistent to what we did in 2022. And there's obviously a lot of things going on there with enterprise growing, the federal portion of the business where we're really focused on gaining share, growing. and maybe other parts, you know, growing less. But overall, we feel like we have visibility to, you know, maintaining the level of business that we just did in 2022. And with some of the operational savings, improving the earnings from that part of the business. The top line growth, clearly, we expect to come from the IP optical networks portion of the business. Again, we've now had two quarters of pretty solid growth Q3 and Q4. Obviously, we've got some seasonality. So naturally, Q1 is not at the same level as Q3 and Q4, but we think up from the previous year. And that'll be the large part of the top line revenue growth to drive overall for the company of 4% plus growth. But that part of the business growing at a much faster rate.
spk04: Got it. And my last question is on your gross margin outlook. So you're starting at 46% to 48%. First of all, so it's going to be down, what, six, seven points sequentially from fourth to first quarter. Just wondering if you can explain what's driving that decline. And then for you to hit 53 to 54 for the year, I'm assuming you have to, you know, exit the year like, I don't know, 56 to maybe 58%. So can you, you know, what's going to drive that margin expansion from 47 to 50 something from first to fourth quarter this year?
spk02: Yeah, no, that's a good question, Dave. You know, the first quarter gross margin is not indicative of what we think the year looks like. In addition to just a lower revenue level, kind of dragging down the gross margin, fixed cost absorption, the IP optical portion of the business we think is down a little bit on margin in the quarter. Some of these new wins I mentioned, you know, typically would have a lower margin at the early stages of the project as we deploy some of the infrastructure. And, you know, it's kind of a gift that keeps on giving then as you add capacity and transponders in the network, the margins are better. So, you know, that's kind of the phenomenon going on in the first quarter with IP optical. And kind of similarly with cloud and edge, we think the margins are a little lower than they were a year ago. We do expect to ship more of the enterprise edge equipment I mentioned in the first quarter, which has more hardware content. So that combination, you know, drives a lower expectation on margin in the first quarter. Again, we don't think, obviously, with the full-year guidance that that's an indication of what the full year looks like at all. But, you know, we just, you know, had fairly good margin results in Q3 and Q4-22, and that's more indicative of what we think the rest of the year here looks like.
spk04: Got it. Thank you. Thank you, Dave.
spk03: Thank you. Our next question is from Eric Supiger with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.
spk07: Yeah, thanks for taking the questions and good quarter. First off, India has come up a couple of times as an active area on 5G. Curious, what does the opportunity there outside of Bharti look like? And then secondly, I'm not sure if you commented, but can you comment a little bit in terms of the timing on the new contract win that you had with Bharti? how that will ramp up over the course of 23?
spk02: Yeah, hey, Eric. Yeah, thanks for joining. Good question. You know, it's hard not to get excited about where Indy is headed at this point. Of course, it's been a, you know, a tougher area for us the last couple years, but obviously we're seeing incremental investment going on. And it's not just in telecom. You probably saw this morning the big – purchase around airlines, airplanes going into India. And I think that tells you something about the economy. It's pretty hot at this point. And, you know, the investment we've made over the last few years establishing the infrastructure that we have in India that's for our customers, usually strategic force. And, you know, part of the win, part of the differentiation I think we bring is that local presence. You know, as I've mentioned to you a few times, we've got resources across all the major metro areas throughout India supporting our customers with the deployment of the products. And that's just a fundamental asset for us as a company. Bharti, obviously, is our lead strategic customer in the region, but the other operators such as Vodafone and even Tata are really important customers. I think it's an interesting dynamic, obviously, with Reliance Geo being such a dominant force and creating a super competitive environment. And so how each of the operators reacts, I think, will be a little bit different. Clearly, Bardi is, you know, kind of doubling down on the investment. And, you know, we'll see what the other operators do and how we can expand our business in that region, given the investment we've made there. But it's a really exciting market right now.
spk07: And in terms of the new contract with Barty, what comments did you make earlier about that? How can we think of that in terms of 23 contribution?
spk02: Yeah, so in the last two months or so, we've announced two new wins there, one around the cell site router portfolio or product, which is a brand-new area for us, where we're providing that edge router, kind of an access-level router, right at the edge of the 5G mobile network. And then the new one we just announced yesterday is really on the optical transport layer in the long haul of the infrastructure investment they're making around fiber. Both of these are significant wins for us, multimillion dollars that we're now shipping against in the first half of the year. Of course, if we execute well, we hope to compete and continue that and grow that business going forward. So we're We're kind of in the early stages of deployment and off to a good start. Very good. Thank you. Thank you.
spk03: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back over to Bruce McClellan for any closing comments.
spk02: Yeah, great. Thanks again for everyone being on the call and your interest in ribbon communications. We look forward to speaking with many of you at upcoming investor conferences. And we've got a big presence at major events such as Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Diego, and Enterprise Connect coming up in Orlando. So look forward to meeting many of you and continuing the discussion. And operator, thank you as well. This concludes our call.
spk03: This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
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