Wix.com Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the WIX Q2 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 11 on your phone. I would like to turn the call over to your host, Emily Liu, Investor Relations Analyst. You may begin.

Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to WIX's second quarter 2022 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Abishai Abrahami, CEO and co-founder, Mir Zohar, our president and COO, and Lior Shemesh, our CFO. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements, and these statements are based on current expectations and assumptions. Please consider the risk factors included in our press release and most recent Form 20F that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we will comment on non-GAAP financial results and key operating metrics. You can find all reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results in the earnings materials and in our interactive analyst center on the investor relations section of our website, investors.wix.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Avishai.

Thank you, Emily, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I want to start our call this morning with some comments about Q2 and the highlights of some of the key points from our Analyst and Investor Day in May. Neil will walk you through a few operational updates on the business, and Leo will wrap it up with the financial highlights and an update on guidance. As you know, COVID obviously brought a massive surge of people and businesses to the Internet, propelling a business beginning in early 2020. We were forced to respond to the need of our users, helping them generate income while their offline income was brought to a standstill. As part of our response to the high demand, we increased our hiring activity. Now that we are post-COVID, the addition of new users to the funnels came back to similar rates to 2019 levels. and people are buying less on the Internet and buying less offline. This results in many of our users selling less, which lowers our GPV. This is not unique to us, as many Internet companies feel it. So, as the market continues to be volatile, which we obviously cannot control or predict, we are increasing our focus on what we can control to achieve the profitability targets we shared in the three-year plan we presented in May. We committed to this plan, and we are executing on it. And so, as we announced today, a $150 million cost-saving plan to allow us to meet our profitability targets and accelerate gross margins and operating margins in 2023, even if market conditions remain unchanged. Nir and Leo will walk you through more of those details. Now, let's talk about the quota. We are satisfied with how the fundamentals of our business remain strong in Q2. Revenue grew more than $345 million, or 9% year-over-year, about where we expected, and grew 11% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. The fundamental measure of our business performance remains very strong. In fact, our average revenue per subscription is now 32% higher as of this quarter compared to Q2 2019. This is very positive as conversion and retention remain the same over this period. This tells us that users are finding much more value in our platform. Our partners business also continue to perform well, growing revenues 31% year over year. This is on top of an incredible 87% year over year growth that we saw in the same quarter last year. Transaction revenues grew 13% year-over-year, and we continue to see increased adoption of weeks' payment growing our tech rate. Even with consumers spending slower, our GPV continued to grow. Even more amazing is that since Q2 2019, our GPV has grown 360%, which is incredible. So even with the demand coming back to 2019 level, our key growth initiative are producing strong results. Stepping back, I want to summarize some of what we shared at our analyst and investor day and expand more on our strategic strategy going forward. Since the IPO, we have scaled revenues from $80 million in 2013, nearly 17 times to $1.3 billion over the last year. while serving hundreds of millions of users across the globe. Our focus on product innovation and development, as well as marketing, has been a key driver of this growth. The first stage of our growth was introducing an elegant and simple website builder that anyone could use to create online. Many of our innovations, drag and drop, mobile design, and AI design, are now widespread across our competitors. Last month, we introduced our new Wix editor, which I'm very proud of and excited about. The new Wix editor combines the best of our Wix editor and Wix ADI and we will provide a user with an even better creation experience than before. In addition, it will bring efficiency and increase velocity to our product development. This is the most significant update to our Wix editor in many years and we believe it will contribute significantly to increase conversion and user success online. We have tens of millions of users, and it was clear they wanted more. So we moved into a second stage, which was an increased focus on businesses. We invested in what our users are telling us they want to manage and grow their business online. Over the last several years, we introduced many vertical commerce applications, communication, and marketing tools for businesses and payment capabilities. SafeCreator's business generates over $1 billion in annualized revenue and is very profitable, as we share with you in May. In fact, our SafeCreator business alone generates more revenues and is more profitable than the largest of our competitors serving the same market. We have now expanded into a third stage, and that is addressing the online creation needs of partners, professional creators, agencies, and enterprises. Our expansion has been informed by what we hear from our users. We now have industry-leading infrastructure that delivers performance among the fastest in the industry with vast security and high availability. We are now praised by partners for our outstanding SEO capabilities. We have massively improved our commerce application to meet the needs of professionals and agencies. And we have Velo for application development and Editor X for advanced design needs. All of this development requires us to invest a significant amount of resources into not only R&D but also our marketing to build and run for professionals. This expansion has grown our total addressable market significantly to eight times larger than it was in 2017 to over $200 billion today. We believe we will scale our partner business to become profitable. Our optimism is supported by a strong behavior in our partners' cohorts, which grow booking annually from three to four times this first year within the first three years, and the number of professionals coming to Wix every day to continue growth. We shared our three years plan for achieving this scale and profitability, and we are committed to it. And despite the market volatility we are experiencing during this period, I'm more excited about Wix today than I've ever been. With that, I want to turn it now to Neil.

Thank you, Avishai. I want to start with a quick update on our cohorts and then talk more about the cost-cutting measures we are taking. As Avishai mentioned, While we see demand at the top of the funnel returning to 2019 levels, our cohort fundamentals continue to improve. We continue to share with you the bookings of our Q1 user cohorts over the years, as you can see on slide 12 of our earnings slide. Our Q1 22 cohort through the second quarter illustrates this strong performance. This cohort has generated $40 million in bookings since it was created. This figure is nearly as high as the Q1 20 cohort at $41 million, which benefited from an increased online activity at the beginning of COVID. And it's higher than the last pre-COVID Q1 cohort from Q1 19, which generated just over $38 million in bookings. This growth is impressive for a couple of reasons. First, with 6.1 million users, the Q122 cohort was slightly smaller in size than either the Q119 or Q120 cohorts. Second, the growth also demonstrates that conversion and retention are at the same high rates as before, and just as importantly, the average bookings per subscription is increasing. This means we are monetizing our cohorts better. Users are selecting business packages much more, and more are adopting business solutions, products, and services. If you recall, at the analyst day, we showed you the cohort segmented between self-creators and partners. This performance in the Q122 court is a result of the strong growth and bookings retention we're seeing in both the self-creators and partners' courts. It's also worth noting that we're in much less favorable FX environment today compared to 2019 because we report in US dollars but collect cash in local currencies around the world, many of which are are at or near historic lows against the US dollars. Finally, I also want to point out that while our marketing spent for this Q1 2022 cohort was indeed higher than either Q1 2019 or Q1 2020, our returns are very much in line with our goals. As you can see on the TRI chart we shared on slide 13 in our slide deck. I now want to shift gears and talk about the measures we are taking to continue working towards achieving the profitability targets we set forth at our Analyst Day in May. The roots of this plan actually began in Q4 of last year as we were making plans for 2022. You recall, we saw a lot of volatility and uncertainty and chose not to provide guidance at that time for the year because of it. We began thinking more carefully about developing more operational efficiency. We reduced our hiring activity and took a closer look at what was working and what was not. As an example, we decided then that we should discontinue marketing Wix Answers as an external product. Volatility continued throughout the year with the war in Ukraine, with increasing energy prices, high inflation and currency fluctuations. Moving through Q2, we did not see improvements to the environment and recognize we need to take the next step in our plan to help us achieve our profitability targets. We are now executing this next step of the plan and announcing a series of cost reduction actions. They include right-sizing our employee base, which unfortunately means asking some people to leave. We are also making significant reduction in hiring activities for the remainder of this year and next year. As a result, we expect to realize approximately $150 million of annualized savings across our cost of revenue expenses, operating expenses, and capex. These cost savings are not one time in nature and will continue to benefit the company on an ongoing basis with 20% of the annualized savings being realized already in 2022. Also, we are not reducing any investments in user acquisition marketing that is adjusted by our TRI thresholds, which we have not changed. We expect that these cost savings will allow our free cash flow margin in 2023 to be consistent with the range provided in our three-year plan, even if market conditions remain challenged. It will also accelerate gross margin and operating margin expansion next year faster than we had presented. We continue to work to identify additional areas of productivity, improvements across our care, marketing, and R&D functions, as well as opportunities to rationalize our real estate footprint. These measures will allow us to increase our investments in our highest conviction growth opportunities, and we expect to see free cash flow margin expansion in 2023 and beyond. I want to also add that our leadership made some very difficult decisions during this process. We've always been laser focused on growth at Wix, and this will not change. These changes allow us to continue to grow with a greater emphasis on profitability that is needed. We believe that these changes will make us stronger and prepare us for an even better future once the market stabilizes. With that, I would like to hand it over to Lior.

Thanks, Neil. Before I discuss guidance for the rest of the year, I'd like to highlight some of our second quarter results. Even against the market dynamics, Avishai mentioned earlier, revenue in the second quarter grew to over $345 million, representing 9% year-over-year growth and towards the top end of our guidance range provided in May. Revenue growth was 11% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Total bookings grew 3% year-over-year to nearly $355 million, which was 7% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This was in line with our expectations, as the headwinds that impacted revenue mostly unfavorable FX changes, as well as the resetting of demand for online services and e-commerce to pre-COVID levels had an even larger impact on bookings. Essex decreased booking by approximately 10 million compared to the year-ago period. Both revenue and bookings growth were driven by strong fundamentals and continued successful executions against our key growth initiatives. In the second quarter, we saw conversion of new users to paid subscriptions continue at a stable rate, ARPS increase, and retention remains strong. Following the end of the quarter, we began to see early signs of improvements in top of the funnel trends and higher return on marketing dollars in July into August. Our efforts to grow the partner business continue as planned, with revenue increasing 31% year-over-year in the second quarter, as the investments we made in recent years begin to pay dividends and are driving momentum across agencies, designers, and developers across the professional ecosystem. Transaction revenue also continues to grow despite e-commerce growth largely resetting to the pre-COVID trade line. It was up 13% year-over-year, driven by better monetization of payments as adoption of Wix payments increased as well as GPV growth of 6% year-over-year to 2.6 billion as a result of our diverse e-commerce platform. On the expense front, this quarter, we focused on executing on the targets we share in May during our Analyst Day. and driving leverage from the investments made over the past two years as the business scales. Non-GAAP total gross margin was up sequentially to 62.5% as business solution non-GAAP gross margin increased to 23.2% driven by improved margin in our payments business. We continue to slow hiring and adjusted down our direct marketing investments by nearly 40% on a year-over-year basis to align with what we are seeing at the top of the funnel in order to stay within our TRY goals. As a result, NAND gap operating margin improved compared to the prior year period. Finally, Free cash flow excluding capex associated with our headquarter build out was negative 6 million in the second quarter. This was lower than what we anticipated due to primarily to the unfavorable ethics changes, which decrease free cash flow by approximately 10 million on a year over year basis. Turning now to guidance for both Q3 and full year of 2022. We expect third quarter revenue to be 341 to 345 million or 7 to 8% year-over-year growth. We now expect full year revenue to grow between 8 and 10% year-over-year. These growth figures account for additional year-over-year FX headwinds we experienced throughout through July and the assumption that 2022 is a year of continued volatility as demand resets to pre-COVID levels. Pre-cash flow margin for the full year is now expected to be at 2% to 3%, as the FX headwinds have deepened since May, but still remain within the target range we laid out during our analyst day. On a year-over-year constant currency basis, our free cash flow for the full year would have been 4% to 5% of revenue in 2022, as we discussed back in February. Regarding the cost reduction plan that Nir spoke about, we still expect to achieve the 2022 and the 2023 free cash flow targets we shared in May, despite timing of macroeconomic recovery. Of the $150 million of annualized savings, About 25% will come from cost of revenue, mainly our care organization, which will produce about 200 basis points of gross margin improvement in 2023 compared to our three-year plan. We also anticipate to see gross margin improve in 2022 as we start to recognize savings related to care. The other 75% will come mostly from headcount-driven operating expenses. These do not include any plans to reduce our user acquisition marketing investments that we adjust to match our TOI threshold, which we have not changed. This margin improvement will primarily be seen in our partners' business. In times like this, there are certain things we cannot control, so we are focusing on what we can control by executing on our strategic priorities while sustainably improving our cost structure. The action we are taking and decisions we are making today will help us emerge as a stronger and more resilient company once we are on the other side of these uncertain macroeconomic times. With that, We're ready to take some questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star one one on your touch tone telephone. We'll pause for a moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Kenneth Wong with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Great, fantastic. Thanks for taking my question. Abhishek, I guess I wanted to maybe dig in on the return to normalization. You know, when you look at the different pockets of your business, where are you seeing the biggest impact here? Is it the self-creators, your commerce customers? Is it across B2B agencies? Any color there would be extremely helpful.

Of course. So I think the first thing we're seeing is that the GPEV went down went down, right, in the last couple of months. I think this is something that every company seen. We've seen Amazon experiencing similar stuff, Shopify. So I think that was probably the bigger thing that we see now. In terms of self-creators, I think that inflation actually influenced more the formation of new innovation and people investing in their business. I think that has created some effect. In fact, we're pretty much there in the self-care back to a similar state of 2018. So the demand is similar to 2019. Of course, our output is better. And of course, now we also have GPV as a source of income. When it comes to designers and agencies, we see less of an effect. I think that because a lot of them have their constant flow of customers, And so we see less there, and so I hope that this answers your question.

Yes, that's fantastic. And then maybe just quickly, Nir, as far as the GPV downtick, would you say that that is just because consumer spend has obviously eroded, or is there any maybe longer-term impact from having that softer premium subscription funnel over the last three, four quarters? Any help in terms of what you're seeing as far as kind of when that might bounce back?

So it's, yeah, it is mainly through to less consumer spend more than anything else. 100% from less consumer spending. That's what we're seeing.

Okay, perfect. Thank you, guys.

One moment for our next question. And ladies and gentlemen, we ask that you limit yourself to one question. In fairness, everybody has a chance to participate. Our next question comes from Brent Bill with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Thanks. When you think about the assumptions you're making in the back half in and into 23, what are you making in terms of your assumption for the overall economy? Are you saying things are going to be stable, deteriorating, improving? How would you characterize your guide? Obviously, with the cut in numbers, everyone's just trying to calibrate. Are you baking in more conservatism here or How are you thinking about the overall environment?

So basically what we assume that the headwinds that we experienced so far simply will continue. We're also assuming that the FX impact will also continue throughout the year. And, you know, this is pretty much what we assumed. And obviously, you know, we are also conservative because of that.

We prefer to be very conservative regarding next year so we can build our free cash flow in a smart way to achieve the goals that we set to ourselves. Of course, if things get a bit more positive, that would be great.

And this is the main reason why we want to take control over the cost. And this is something that is really important to do right now.

Numbers have been coming down, so just I want to follow up. Are you assuming then a more conservative view than historically because the numbers have been coming down lower? Everyone's just curious. Are you baking in that extra layer of conservatism in that pipeline conversion?

Yes. I mean, yes. When we look at where we started at the beginning of the year and what's happened, So, you know, it just makes sense, you know, to be extra conservative on the assumption with regard to the second half of the year.

Great. Thanks.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Brad Erickson with RBC.

Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks. Maybe just to follow on there, what do you think is driving this improvement to the funnel trends? You mentioned a couple times in the letter in, I guess, July and into August here. Is that maybe just a little touch of seasonality? Is there something maybe improving on the margin macro-wise? And then kind of the follow-on to Brent's question, maybe what's baked into your guidance here relative to these near-term trends you're calling out?

Thanks. Let me try and take the first two parts, and then Leo will answer this later part. and i think that uh well we we when we look at it we compare seasonality to seasonality so it's not a seasonality thing i think that we did of course a lot of product improvement because we always do so we somewhat can be contributed to that the other thing is that it does look some recovery in the macro of our users i want to emphasize that if you remember last year we were the first which was the first to actually notice the decline right and i think our customers are They're acting faster than most to changes because they are small and very agile. So maybe that's what we're seeing now. It's very early to say. We'll keep you guys updated. But I think if I have to take a guess, I would say that our customers are starting to act differently. Again, it's very early, and that's why we don't want to declare anything there and say anything big about it. But we are seeing some positive changes.

With regard to the guy that Ravishai mentioned, it's still too early to call it a trend. Further, new subscriptions booking over the last quarter and the half of the year will have very little impact on revenue, as we all understand, because we recognize revenue over time. Also, I think that it's important to mention that we do not yet see an increase in commerce activity, which has a big impact on our revenue.

Got it. Thanks.

one moment for our next question our next question comes from ron josie with the city your line is open great thanks for taking the questions maybe i wanted to ask a little bit about the 150 million of savings and specifically maybe we already can talk a little bit more where they're coming from i think we heard call center some capex but i guess the focus here is any impacts of product development overall I think we talked to the analyst today just being in a good spot of cadence for a new product. So any insights on how you feel about product development given the cuts here? And then the next question is just about the new editor experience and then the New York City, like, development day that's happening in a few weeks. Just any insights on the rollout plans for the new editor and what to expect for this developer conference? Thanks, guys.

So I'll start with a description of the $150 million, and then you can talk about any impact at all, if we have any impact on future plans growth. So as we mentioned, about 70% of our $150 million is mostly related to headcount and subcontractor. And this is mostly in our operating expenses. And I think that this is go the same way for the 30%. Meaning the 30% is about all kind of mostly headcount related as part of our cost of goods sold, mostly in the care organization. So in the end of the day, we are talking about general operating expenses and headcount related expenses and subcontractors. And it has all effect, obviously, you know, the $150 million.

Hey, Ron, in terms of kind of the impact and how we think about, you know, the R&D as well as marketing, by the way, so as I mentioned in my comment before, our focus on delivering growth has not changed. So when we made this plan and look at these efficiencies, we made sure that we are not impacting the key drivers that are going to generate our future growth. Again, relating to R&D and also to acquisition marketing. And we believe that the way we're doing this will actually allow us to continue growing, but have just greater emphasis on the profitability. And I think that, moreover, it's an opportunity for us to become even stronger in kind of our future growth once the market stabilizes and we can return to faster growth.

In regard to your last question, which is actually a true question, it's about Editor 2. I think Editor 2 is, for me, a very exciting product. We took two things that were separate that we knew were working very well, the classic editor and the ADI, and combined them into one product. So this is actually making it a complete experience. You can use the power of AI design within the regular Wix classic editor. We did a lot of additional improvements that make the experience, I think, really smooth. So that is very exciting. It will be serving self-creators, and it will be serving agencies, of course. The event that we have in New York is aimed for agencies, and not just agencies. The most professional agencies, they want to actually do custom development on top of Wix. And we are releasing a lot of new products there and talking a lot about new things that we think will allow us to extend that line of business tremendously in the future. So it's going to be really interesting. More than welcome to come. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

And one moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Deepak Mathavanian with Wolf Research.

Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. So, Leo, can you unpack the second quarter bookings growth, maybe just on the, you know, self-create side between what you saw on the subscriber growth and pricing? I know you had pricing tweaks on certain tiers early in the year. Curious how much that's contributing to bookings right now. Thank you so much. The question was about pricing tweaks on certain tiers early in the year. Curious how much that's contributing to bookings right now. Thank you so much.

The question was about the price increase and how it affects bookings. That was the question.

Yeah, yeah. Just curious on growth in subscribers right now. Right now.

So first I will start with the price increase in the contribution to booking. So we had a positive impact. That was the reason why we've made those changes in terms for the pricing. But it was not a significant one to booking, meaning it does have positive impact, but it's not significant. With regard to the overall subscriptions, So it has a negative impact, although it is positive in terms of dollar value. So it's important to mention that.

Thank you. One moment for our next question.

Our next question comes from Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hi, thank you so much. It was really encouraging to see that the cost discipline help offset those revenue headwinds and the reiteration of the free cash flow margin targets. And my question is around kind of the revenue that we should be looking towards to applying those free cash flow target margin targets. And with bookings kind of growing 3% year over year and the revenue guidance implying Q4 revenue grows about high single digits year over year exiting the year. And understanding macro is challenging, how has the outlook for fiscal 23 revenue growth of that 20 plus percent changed over the last three months? And kind of walk us through any of the puts and takes between B and B contribution in pricing versus maybe a more challenging macro. Thank you.

So obviously the macro has been more difficult and very hard to predict in terms of the top line, but we are fully committed to the free cash flow target that we provided back in May during the analyst day. So I think that I'm happy to say that in any, almost in any given scenario, it's hard to say at any given scenario, but even if we are looking at the overall economics that continue, or the macroeconomic continue into 2023, the same way as we've seen in 2022, we believe that we will be able to achieve the free cash flow targets that we had in our analyst day.

I want to add something here. I think that this year we've seen a massive effect from things like, of course, FX. We've seen massive effect from Russia. We actually closed a lot of accounts. We've seen the effect of the size, of course, which on a relative basis is tremendous. from the COVID and this year. And I think that without, if you neutralize all of those, we'll probably still would have achieved this year close to 20% growth. I think that the combination of all those factors together in one year had massive effect on us. So next year, again, it depends. Will we see effects or not? Will we see some recovery or not? But I think that the one thing we can, as a company, can commit to is free cash flow and doing that by having discipline on how we spend our money.

Sorry, I was muted this whole time. One moment for our next question.

Our last question comes from Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Great, thanks. Two questions. Could you just again quantify the Ukraine-Russia impact to Wix's business, both on the incremental costs associated with that this year and then if there's the extent of the revenue impact And then secondly, I know somebody already asked about this improvement in the top of the funnel activity you talk about in July and early August. Was that the NUWIX editor product, was that part of that? Or do you think that was completely separate and getting back to what would have driven that improvement in the top of the funnel activity? Thank you.

So I think that if you look at the Russian-Ukrainian war, It has a lot of effect on us. And part of it is that we closed accounts in Russia. And then we've seen a much less growth from accounts in Ukraine. So this is the first part. I would assume that this is around $5 million. The additional thing was cost of helping our employees in Ukraine. We had about 1,000 people, still have, most of them are not in Ukraine anymore, but that used to be at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. We had to relocate them. We had to support them. So this is a lot of influence. It also has a lot of influence with product releases because, obviously, when people are running from war, they didn't do what they normally do, and that's working. And I think now most of it is in a place that we are in a controlled situation. We managed to take most of our employees to safe locations and we're pretty much back to normal. But the Ukraine-Russia war on us had a bigger effect, I think, on most of the companies, because we're in the sustainable business in Russia growing, and in Ukraine, and because we had a lot of employees in Ukraine. As part of your second question, which was, if we understand, what is the July-August improvement? So it's very hard for us to say, as I mentioned before, And I wouldn't call it a trend yet, right? It's very early. However, when you look at the numbers, we're seeing that they are, if we compare them to last year, we're actually seeing growth in some key areas. I believe that it might be a signal that the mood of our customers have changed. And that actually creates a place where they are starting to innovate, reinvest into their businesses, create new businesses, create new innovation. However, as I said, it is a very young trend. The new editor, Editor 2.0, was launched last week, so I don't think that that has contributed. In fact, a lot of those trend changes were happening before we released the new version.

Okay. Thank you, Amishan.

And I would now like to turn the call back over to the company for closing remarks.

Great. Thanks, Mark, and everyone else for those questions. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks, everyone, on the call for joining us today. Have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's presentation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.