Radware Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the RADWARE conference call discussing first quarter 2023 results and thank you all for holding. Today's conference 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. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one once again. Thank you, and I would now like to turn the call over to Yiska Erez, Director of Investor Relations at Radware. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Abby. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Radware's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Roy Zisopel, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Gaya Bidan, Chief Financial Officer. A copy of today's press release and financial statement as well as the investor kit for the first quarter are available in the investor relations section of our website. During today's call, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from RADWR's current forecast and estimates. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, impact from the changing or severe global economic conditions, the COVID-19 pandemic, general business conditions and our ability to address changes in our industry, changes in demand for products, the timing in the amount of orders and other risks, details from time to time in rather risk filings. We refer you to the documents the company files and furnishes from time to time with the SEC, specifically the company's last annual report on Form 20-S, as filed on March 30, 2023. We undertake no commitment to revise or update any follow-up statement in order to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statement is made. I will now turn the call to Roy Disappear.

Thank you, Yiska, and thank you all for joining us today. We ended the first quarter of 2023 with revenue of $69 million and earnings per share of 14 cents. The macro challenges that we experienced in the first quarter were stronger and broader than previous quarters. These challenges translated into longer sales cycle, more cautious spending, and closing delays across all regions. Despite that, We saw strong cloud security bookings and our cloud ARR grew 21% year-over-year, in line with Q4 2022 growth rates, highlighting the strength of our offering and the critical nature of our solutions. While the macro environment is creating business challenges, organizations remain under pressure as they face more frequent and more complex cyber attacks. Attacks accelerated during the first four months of the year. There were significant attack campaigns against the U.S. healthcare sector, Canadian government, Australian ports and government websites, Israeli government and banks, as well as airlines and airports in Scandinavia, to name a few. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a whole new wave of activism that is generally bolder and more determined than ever before. Any organization, independent of size and industry, can become a target for hacktivists who desire to advance their cause. According to our recent threat intelligence report, three hacktivist groups claimed responsibility for more than 60% of DDoS attacks between February and April. As a result of the escalation in attacks and downtime in enterprise networks, we saw multiple emergency onboardings to our cloud platform by organizations under attack. We estimate that many of the companies that were onboarded under attack during the first quarter will convert into longer-term customer contracts.