E2open Parent Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the E2 Open Fiscal Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Adam Rogers.

The floor is yours. Good afternoon, everyone. At this time, I would like to welcome you all to the E2 Open Fiscal Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I am Adam Rogers, Head of Investor Relations here at E2Open. Today's call will include recorded comments from our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Farlacus, followed by our Chief Financial Officer, Marie Armstrong. And then we'll open the call for a live Q&A session. A replay of this call will be available on our website. Information to access the replay is listed in today's press release, which is available at E2Open.com in the Investor Relations section. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that during today's call we will be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance, including guidance for fiscal third quarter and full year 23. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties. E2 Open cautions that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. We encourage you to review our most recent reports, including our 10-Q, or any applicable amendments for a complete discussion of these factors and other risks that may affect our future results or the market price of our stock. And finally, we are not obligating ourselves to revise our results or these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Also during today's call, we'll refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP measures and certain additional information are included in today's earnings press release, which can be viewed and downloaded from our investor relations websites. And with that, we'll begin by turning the call over to our CEO, Michael Farlikas.

Thank you, Adam, and thank you all for taking the time to join our earnings call for the second quarter of fiscal 2023. First, I'd like to thank our nearly 4,000 team members for another great quarter. More than anything, we are a people business. Our software begins with our great team. Our clients derive immense value from our software because we have assembled what we believe are the world's foremost experts in the broader supply chain space. We had a strong second quarter and first half of the year, and we're excited to share our financial results with you. I'll start by highlighting our second quarter results and what we observe in the broader macro environment based on our network and the data we are seeing. I'll focus much of our call on Q2 commercial and operational highlights are critical milestones for us as we pursue our strategic objectives for 2023 and beyond. Marie will then cover the Q2 financial results in more detail. Over seven years ago, we set out to build a scaled compounding business that generates highly profitable growth focused on one of the largest enterprise software markets, solutions for the most complex supply chains in the world. We have and are building our business to generate increasing organic subscription growth over time with high margins and a high translation to cash based on operating efficiencies and low capital intensity. This profile again presents itself in our second quarter results, despite a challenging economic and geopolitical environment. In Q2, we generated $132 million in subscription revenue, which is our key indicator of long-term durable client relationships. Subscription revenue was 82% of our total revenue of $161 million and grew 11% organically on a constant currency basis. Our Q2 adjusted EBITDA was $48 million and represented a 30% EBITDA margin. Furthermore, we generated over $40 million of adjusted unlevered free cash flow. This is equal to 84% of our EBITDA and 25% of our revenue. Despite significant FX headwinds, investing in strategic efforts for our future growth and absorbing integration costs from our recent acquisition of logistics, we remain highly profitable, a testimony to the resilient business we have built and our unwavering focus on balancing growth and profitability that drive long-term shareholder returns. While foreign exchange fluctuations are a headwind to our reported results for us and many other global SaaS companies right now, Our constant currency results reflect the strong underlying fundamentals in our performance. That said, we continue to see in the data from our network a weakening economy. Specifically, we have observed that ocean bookings began to decline in the late spring and today are down about 30% from a year ago. In addition, we are now seeing the spot rates for U.S. over-the-road transportation drop. demonstrating increasing capacity in the North American trucking market, another indicator that economic activity is slowing. As we mentioned in our last call, we have carefully built and in many cases transitioned subscription revenue sources from being volume dependent to fixed in nature, meaning any volume impacts with our clients have a small impact on our revenue. The unusual and challenging economic conditions today are largely a result of three significant changes over the past six months. Number one, a rapid and dramatic shift in consumer behavior as the pandemic ended. Buying behaviors changed from durable goods consumption to travel and services-based consumption. There was a smaller multiplier effect when supplying a service as compared to supplying a hard good. As a result, economic activity is slowing. We saw the opposite of this in our data in the fall of 2020 as the COVID experience began. The war in Ukraine and the broader impact to the European economy. And lastly, central banks are rapidly unwinding the support they provided the economy prior to and during the pandemic period. Despite the macro challenges we are seeing, we are maintaining our guidance on a constant currency basis while taking prudent actions to invest in the future and absorbing a $13 million FX-related headwind to maintain our original guide on EBITDA and gross margin. We built this business to have multiple ways to win in all environments, and as such, we are able to meet our growth and margin expectations despite the elongation of sales cycles. A great example of multiple ways to win is the expansion of the announcement we made with Uber Freight on our last call. We are taking our first important step, albeit small, to create incremental value for the members of our network of over 400,000 connected parties. This creates an incremental revenue source for us. I'll provide more details in a few minutes when I share some Q2 highlights. E2Open's strategic objective is to continually generate highly profitable growth by becoming the standard bearer for the very large supply chain software market. e2Open is a network business, which was built to support how the largest brand owners actually make and ship goods. Today, they do that through using a network of service providers that need to be continually connected to very sophisticated applications that the brand owners use to make real-time decisions as autonomously as possible. Our network is made up of those very service providers, and our software are those sophisticated AI-enabled applications that our brand owners rely on every day. When we deploy our software, we become the primary system of record for our clients. And the software and data connections we provide through our network become the operational backbone for the world's largest companies, providing the connections to our client service providers and best-of-breed software to our clients. We become embedded in our clients' operations over time, which allows us to enjoy a 15-plus year relationship with our top 100 clients. Those relationships and the use of our platform grows over time. While we have done a nice job building a connected software platform built upon a 400,000-party network of service providers, we know that to accomplish our strategic objectives, we need to become more well-known to the broader market and build strategic relationships with the world's largest systems integrators. This cannot be done without work and investment and will not happen overnight. So next, I'll discuss technology. Our Q2 highlights describe how these milestones support our FY strategic goals and our broader plans to build our business. Marie will provide more details on our financial performance and also an update on our previously announced growth investment. Let me start with our investment this year to further reflect our growth rates in FY24 and FY25. The purpose for our strategic investment of $20 million this year is to accomplish two important goals and emerge as the connected supply chain platform. The first is to build our brand to become more well-known in our buying communities and increase our business development operation to identify more top-of-the-funnel opportunities. Second is to build strategic partnerships with the large systems integrators, recognizing the important role they play in the buying and delivery process for software like ours. Stated a different way, We have been able to build a $600 million-plus business, mid-30% EBITDAs, growing at double digits, without a well-known brand, and without the benefit of strategic support from the integrator community. We are incredibly excited to show the world what we can do as we build our brand, further scale our commercial organization, and add the world's largest system integrators as strategic partners. We began this work in earnest in our second quarter. We refreshed and positioned our brand as a leader in supply chain enterprise software, relaunched eatopen.com, invested in our sales force, and made significant gains in forming key partnerships critical to our future success. On the brand side, we are seeing our share of voice metrics improve sequentially, and our data indicates we are now number two in the supply chain technology market. Further, we are at or above target for four of the five milestones we have built to ensure we are on track, with this critical investment. We are investing in building an ecosystem of strategic relationships with global systems integrators such as KPMG and Accenture and others to increase the universe of certified people to deploy our solutions and also to drive more opportunities with increasing velocity and win rates. We have identified that partners have a significant role with approximately 25% of our in-play pipeline for the balance of this year. Of these partner-influenced opportunities, several large opportunities have been brought to us directly by them or progressed through the pipeline much faster than they otherwise would have. Although it's early, this is a key indicator that our progress is on track. By the end of the year, we will have trained and certified over 75 engineers within these integrators who will serve as a foundation for future train-the-trainer efforts. Our goal is to unlock the extraordinary influence and capacity these global integrators bring to our marketplaces. by investing in the training and certification of their engineers. These certified resources will see the development of the global services practices these global integrators have committed to building around our software. This investment is essential to allow our customers to access their own trusted advisors and professional services providers to complement our own world-class capabilities in the selection and deployment of our solutions. Moving to our platform of integrated best-of-breed supply chain applications, let me highlight one of the many go-lives of an end-to-end integrated solution for a large global retailer that describes the differentiated value having a very broad application platform and the foundation of a network creates. This client story describes exactly our strategy and is exactly how we scaled our business 10x in seven years while increasing growth rates and profitability along the way. This large global retailer selected ETA Open Global Logistics Orchestration Solution to use many elements of our platform to provide an end-to-end application with a focus on collaboration across their network of suppliers and service providers. The solution reduces shipping times, builds greater agility in their supply chain, and reduces overall supply chain costs. This solution was sold in the fourth quarter of our last fiscal year. and combined our global trade solution, our collaboration platform, and the then recently acquired BlueJay TMS solution. Wave 1 is now live, consisting of trade automation and our transportation management system, or TMS, with a focus on providing export visibility across their distribution network in the Gulf region. Combining global trade and our TMS into one integrated solution is very unique in the market. is one of the many strategic reasons we made the combination with BlueJ in the first place. We sold the solution one quarter after acquiring BlueJ and delivered the integrated solution within six months. Wave 2 adds supplier collaboration across the client's global network of over 2,000 suppliers, enabling greater collaboration and communication between our client and their suppliers. In the final wave, going live later this fiscal year, we are deploying E2Open's full logistics orchestration, providing an integrated import and export shipping experience with automated bookings, global trade, and transportation capabilities. I wanted to focus on this specific example as it perfectly describes how we provide differentiated value to our clients and how embedded our solutions become over time. This highlights the uniquely differentiated solution we offer when we integrate our combined companies quickly. and generate differentiated value for our clients by leveraging all aspects of our platform, of the various sophisticated applications, and the world's largest supply chain network. Next, I'd like to highlight a recent technical and commercial innovation. During our last time together, we mentioned a strategic partnership with Uber Freight, which is now live. Our relationship with Uber Freight creates an entirely new source of value for our brand owners, as well as Uber Freight as a network participant. This partnership allows Uber Freight, a digital freight broker, to use our combined technologies to automatically offer real-time spot market rates to all shippers that use our transportation management system. For reference, our TMS plans and executes over 60,000 truckloads per day, or roughly $70 million of transportation spend per day across over 200 clients in one multi-tenant system. Uber Freight can now extend their ability to secure additional revenue to our clients at their very point of decision-making 60,000 times per day, automatically with no personnel involved. This partnership increases Uber Freight's chance of capturing a portion of that $70 million market every day. For our brand owner clients, they get to access increased capacity and potentially lower freight rates automatically from one system. Our technical and commercial innovation creates real and substantial value for both the brand owner and the transformation provider. This innovation is an example of capturing the incremental value we saw in the Blue Jay combination. This is an initial, although small and important step to creating a two-sided network where both participants gain value from our network, paying eToOpen a small portion of the value that is created by leveraging our network and our applications. What is most exciting about this is that we were able to secure two additional large digital freight brokers as clients to use this technology as well, and several more in a pipeline. The scale of our multi-tenant TMS application allows us to form a unique marketplace where both buyer and seller of transportation services benefit greatly from this technology. Partnerships are also part of our growth strategy. And we continue that growth in Q2 by expanding our partnerships with Shipio, a leader in providing real-time, global, multimodal transportation visibility. This partnership unlocks additional value for our clients by combining an unprecedented level of transportation visibility into each open full range of supply chain planning and execution capabilities. All modes, all geographies. Beyond simply alerting shippers to a transportation delay, the platform now enables users to peer inside and understand the specific goods that are moved, how transportation performance will impact their customer experience, and most importantly, proactively take the best action. This level of control at a global scale enables enterprises to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and operate more sustainably across even the most complex global supply chains. I would like to touch on something that is extremely important to me personally. Our mission statement refers to our desire to lower the cost of everyday living by reducing unnecessary costs in the supply chain and to improve our environment by leveraging our software to reduce the carbon required to make and bring goods to market. Yesterday, we released our annual Environmental, Social, and Governance report, ESG. This is an ongoing journey for us. Anita Open is proud to make tremendous progress in this area. Not only are we evaluating our own ESG commitment as a company, but we add significant leverage to help the global effort by delivering solutions to help our clients' ESG efforts. specifically in reducing their carbon footprint. Monitoring and managing activities outside the four walls of an enterprise is key to managing ESG. You'll see incremental steps in our platform's quarterly releases in our aim to unify the connected supply chain to make positive impacts for people and our planet, then improve planning, reduce waste, and GHG emissions, optimize inventory, protect labor and human rights in the supply chain, and facilitate compliance and reporting. Our recent release allows our clients to use a templatized approach to gather ESG data from their suppliers. The result is a more accurate view of supplier-specific ESG risks, low-score trigger third-party audits, strengthening due diligence, enabling data-driven reporting and risk management. As I said, our ESG report and our preliminary strategy were released yesterday, and I encourage you all to visit our website to check it out. Finally, EDA Open continues to gain third-party recognition from industry analysts. This includes being named as a leader in five of the five IDC MarketScape vendor assessments for supply chain planning, including the overall worldwide holistic supply chain planning MarketScape. We were also recognized as a leader in the 2022 Nucleus Control Tower Value Matrix. In summary, we have been very productive and very busy in our second quarter. building for the future while also producing strong operational and financial results. We are excited about our multiple growth opportunities in front of us, and we remain focused on executing our strategy. I'll now turn it over to Marie to go into more detail about our financial performance for Q2 and the rest of the year.

Thank you, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone. As Michael mentioned, we're pleased with our second quarter results. We reported subscription revenues at the high end of our guidance range, a testament to the tireless focus and dedication of our team. Like other companies, we continue to navigate macroeconomic headwinds, including foreign exchange rate volatility, higher inflation and interest rates, as well as elongated sales cycles where our clients are distracted by geopolitical and macroeconomic considerations of their own. Regardless of these temporary headwinds, the stability of our subscriber base on long-term contracts, and the further need in the marketplace for robust supply chain solutions has not changed. We firmly believe in the significant market opportunity ahead of us and continue to make strategic investments to ensure a long-term growth path for the company. I will detail shortly where we stand with investment spend that was part of the plan for the year outlined at the end of our last fiscal year. While investing in the future, we also keep a keen eye on near-term profitability as part of E2Open's long-standing strategy of balancing growth and profitability. We're taking a measured approach to headcount growth, remain highly focused on continuing to unlock cost savings by eliminating duplicative system spend and exiting select office spaces. We are internally aligned in our focus to drive towards the highest long-term free cash flow growth algorithm. That is our North Star. In my first full quarter as the CFO of e2Open, we have also taken a targeted approach to standardizing internal processes and operating cadences, reviewing team structures and defining improvements to drive additional medium and longer-term efficiencies across teams. In addition to identifying operational efficiency, we're also looking for ways to reduce financial risk and noise from our results, and that allow for a focus on the true fundamentals of the business. As an example, we hedged a portion of our Indian rupee cost this quarter to eliminate future volatility around this cost item. We do not have an Indian rupee denominated revenue, only cost, which is why we chose to hedge that currency, not the euro or the pound, where we have both revenue and cost exposure. providing a natural hedge. We will opportunistically look to hedge or eliminate all pure financial volatility and complexities over time. To sum up, the focus is on simplification, transparency, and efficiency across the organization in order to scale and drive further future operating leverage for the business. We will continue to invest in the business to fuel top-line growth, but we will also carefully and continuously evaluate all decisions to ensure they are long-term ROI positive, with the eye towards compounding free cash flow growth. Now to get to the details of the quarter, I will begin by reviewing our fiscal second quarter results, briefly touch on our progress integrating our recent acquisitions, and then finish with an update to our guidance. Thereafter, Michael and I will open the call to your questions. As a quick note, I will talk about our results on a non-GAAP basis. we show a reconciliation to gap measures in the press release, which is available in the investor relations section of our website at e2open.com. In the second quarter of our fiscal 23, we reported subscription revenue of $131.6 million, reflecting an organic revenue growth rate of 8.6% on a pro forma basis, or 10.7% on a constant currency basis, when adjusting for the negative 2.5 million year-over-year impact from foreign exchange fluctuations. In the first half of fiscal 23, organic subscription revenue grew 11.4% on a constant currency basis. Professional services and other revenue were 29.1 million, reflecting a decrease in organic growth rate of 1.1% on a pro forma basis, or an increase in growth rate of 1.2% on a constant currency basis when adjusting for a negative 700,000 year-over-year impact from foreign exchange fluctuations. Our subscription revenues are growing faster than our services revenues as part of our overall strategy to focus on durable, high-margin subscription revenue. As we mentioned on our previous earnings call, we are strategically shifting our services revenues to new partnerships with system integrators, as part of the planned expansion of our channel ecosystem in order to aid our future subscription revenue growth acceleration. I will provide more details on these investments shortly. However, there were also some temporary negative impacts to our services revenues in the quarter that we are addressing and expect to normalize for the balance of the year. First, we were capacity constrained in Q2 which did not allow us to capture as much services revenue as was available. This was mostly due to higher than normal turnover in our prior quarters as part of broader industry-wide trends. We have focused on bringing new hires through training and expect to see these issues abate as overall our attrition has moved back to historical levels. Second, I would also note that our logistics business product migrations are taking slightly longer than expected and resulted in a temporary impact of depressed revenues as we are providing free hours to complete the project. Again, we're addressing both issues and expect the trends to improve for the balance of the year. We reported total revenue in the fiscal second quarter of $160.7 million, reflecting a total organic revenue growth rate of 6.7% on a pro forma basis, or 8.9% on a constant currency basis when adjusting for a negative $3.2 million impact from foreign exchange fluctuations. In the first half of fiscal 23, total organic revenue grew 10.1% on a constant currency basis. Our gross profit was $106.9 million in the fiscal second quarter, reflecting a 1.6% increase on a pro forma basis. or 2.9% increase on a constant currency basis. Gross margin was 66.5% or 66.0% on a constant currency basis for the second quarter of fiscal 23 compared to 69.9% in the comparable period in fiscal 22. Our gross margin was impacted by several specific items that were not present in the year-ago period. Adam is pulling up a couple of supplemental slides we prepared to help walk through the details. These slides are also posted to the investor relations section of e2open.com. The first bar on the slide represents FX, which had an approximate $1 million negative year-over-year impact. The second bar shows strategic system integrator impact to gross margin, which was $2 million this quarter but not present in the year-ago period. As Michael mentioned, we have been investing in building an ecosystem, training staff, and developing go-to-market capabilities with global systems integrators, such as KPMG and Accenture. This is part of the previously disclosed $20 million investment spend for fiscal 23. Third, as we're integrating our logistics acquisition from earlier this year, We are upgrading the logistics legacy products to a platform integrated with E2Open's common infrastructure while also adjusting their go-to-market to our standard approach. These transition costs represent an approximate $1 million drag to our gross margin on a year-over-year basis. And lastly, as we discussed last quarter, the timing of our merit increases and promotion fell into the second quarter this year versus third quarter in the prior year. This is purely a timing difference that led to an approximate $2 million negative impact on a year-over-year basis, representing both the September 2021 and June 2022 merit and promotions. Adjusted EBITDA was $48.3 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 30.1% or 29.0% on a constant currency basis. for the second quarter of fiscal 23 as compared to EBITDA margin of 33.5% during Q2 of fiscal 22 on a pro forma basis. I will also walk you through the specific items impacting our second quarter fiscal 23 EBITDA that were not present in the year-ago period. These are items specific to each open and in addition to the overall post-COVID increase in T&E and other expenses as we have returned to in-person work environments. Similar to last quarter, FX was an approximately $1 million year-over-year benefit to our EBITDA line. We have natural cost hedges to our largest top-line currency exposures, which are the euro and the pound, along with additional costs in other currencies. The second bar on this slide, investment spend, refers to the previously disclosed totaled $20 million fiscal year 23 investment in system integrator ecosystem, marketing, and internal support for investment spend, which totaled $6 million in the second quarter. As we showed in the prior slide, approximately $2 million of this $6 million relates to the system integrator spend and therefore sits within our gross margin line. The balance of the $6 million is part of OPEX and only impacts EBITDA. Investment spend had just started to ramp last quarter, totaling less than 2 million, but has now reached the approximate run rate for the year. Finally, merit increases and promotions represent an approximately $4 million year-over-year negative impact to EBITDA, inclusive of both COGS and OPEX line items, and again representing a double impact, as explained before. There is no negative impact from logistics, as OPEX synergies nearly offset higher COGS described earlier. Adjusted unlevered free cash flow for the second quarter was $40.6 million, which represents a flow-through of 84.1% of adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted earnings per share for the second quarter of 2023 was $0.05. As discussed before, driving bottom-line profitability and free cash flow continue to be important priorities for us. I also wanted to provide a brief update on our recent acquisitions. For logistics, as mentioned before, upgrading the logistics legacy products to a platform integrated with E2Open's common infrastructure is taking a bit longer than expected. We're seeing some higher than expected transition costs and lower services revenues due to free hours for additional work as a result. However, we remain on track with starting to materialize on OPEX cost synergies. Total synergies related to the recent logistics combination were projected to be just over 10 million. We still expect to action approximately 85% of run rate savings by the end of fiscal 23 and realize 50 to 60% of the run rate savings by our fiscal year end. Now turning to our BlueJ acquisition. We're nearly complete with the execution phase of our integration of BlueJ solutions that closed on September 1, 2021. Last year, we announced that our total synergy target related to the Blue Jay combination was projected to be more than $25 million. We have surpassed that amount, and we have actioned over 115% of these synergies as of the end of our fiscal second quarter. Back-end integration is nearly complete. It is a huge lift being able to integrate a company half our size in 12 months. We feel very good about the combination with Blue Jay and are excited about the continued cross-selling opportunities beyond the stated cost synergies. Now on to guidance. We are maintaining our initial revenue guidance ranges on a constant currency basis for fiscal 23. Given additional foreign exchange rate moves since we last provided guidance, especially in the British pound and euro, we have adjusted our guidance to the latest rate. Our GAAP subscription revenue for fiscal 23 is now expected to be in the range of $535 million to $543 million, which includes an approximately $3 million additional negative FX impact compared to the last time we reported earnings. We now expect an $11 million negative headwind year-over-year from FX. Our subscription revenue organic constant currency year-over-year growth is expected to be in the range of 10.8% to 12.4%. Total gap revenue for fiscal 23 is now expected to be in the range of $668 million to $676 million, including an approximately $4 million additional FX impact since the last time we reported. We now expect a $14 million negative headwind year-over-year from FX. Our total revenue organic constant currency year-over-year growth is expected to be 10.7% to 12.0%. We continue to expect non-GAAP gross profit margin to be in the range of 68% to 70%. We're also reaffirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance in the range of $217 million to $223 million after our previously announced strategic investments. We can maintain our EBITDA guidance for the year despite the $13 million incremental FX headwind to our top line due to our natural FX hedges and keen cost control focus, as described earlier. Now to quickly touch on Q3 guidance. GAAP subscription revenue for the fiscal third quarter of 23 is expected to be in the range of 131 million to 134 million, including a $4 million year-over-year FX headwind. This guidance range represents an 8.1% to 10.5% year-over-year growth rate on a constant currency basis. As a reminder, quarterly subscription growth rates fluctuate from quarter to quarter, which is subject to timing and revenue recognition of new sales, renewals, and churn of larger transactions. Annual growth rates are more indicative of growth rates for our business. There are also several macro driven impacts to our top line that we already discussed last quarter. Elongated sales cycles in some cases and pressure volumes impacting the small part of our subscription base that is subject to volume based variability. We did see several large deals in our pipeline, mainly in Europe, pushed from the second quarter into the third quarter. We still expect these to close in the third quarter, but given there is generally a one-quarter lag when we start to recognize revenue, our third quarter growth may be slightly lower than the full-year trend. These near-term macro-driven impacts do not change the strong long-term growth trajectory we're on. As Michael discussed earlier, we have an incredibly well-positioned software platform, large TAMs, strong strategy, and a focused and highly capable team to execute the strategy. We remain excited to be investing in the significant growth opportunities we see ahead of us with an eye towards long-term compounding free cash flow growth, our North Star. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to finishing this year strong and updating you on our results and progress next quarter. With that, Michael and I would now like to take your questions. Operator, ready to begin the Q&A session.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you have any questions or comments, please indicate so by pressing star 1 on your touchtone phone. Pressing star 2 will remove you from the queue should your question be answered. And lastly, while posing your question, please pick up your handset if listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for questions. Once again, that's star one if you have a question or a comment. The first question is coming from Chad Bennett with Craig Hallam. Chad, your line is live.

Thank you for my questions. So just maybe a quick housekeeping question for Marie. I see, I think you recorded a $514 million Goodwill impairment in the quarter. Can you give us an idea what that was related to?

Thank you so much, Craig, for the question. Absolutely. So the impairment of Goodwill was just triggered by decline in our stock price. This is a GAAP-required impairment, similar to other companies that have had to take that given, you know, the market conditions and stock price moves, but that's just an audit gap required impairment.

Got it. Okay. And then, you know, Michael, just in terms of your kind of macro commentary, you know, on ocean bookings and container rates and spot rates on OTR, I mean, you know, I think, you know, if the data is correct, I mean, ocean container rates have been, you know, off significantly since the spring and throughout the whole summer. And I think, you know, over-the-road rates have been tough for a while or coming in for a while. You know, is there something, is it just kind of the length of kind of the compression in those macro data points? And, you know, I appreciate the company-specific indicators that Marie talked about, about elongated deal cycles and a couple deals in EMEA. I think you pointed to some deals in the tech sector in EMEA last quarter. So just kind of trying to reconcile from a company-specific standpoint, you know, what you're specifically seeing, you know, while you're still kind of reiterating second half guide from a constant currency basis?

Yeah, thanks, Chad, for the question. Yeah, I'm differentiating our view of the macro economic conditions and then focusing on what it means for us. So for us, we are seeing some elongation. It's similar to last quarter, Europe and in the high-tech world. But, you know, given that a lot of our, you know, new subscription comes from existing customers, we can kind of, you know, maintain our revenue guide for the year. You know, it is a more difficult environment, and my expectation is that's going to continue for a while. You know, we've built this business, as I indicated, with lots of different ways to win, and I think it's really, in our view, a testimony to the resiliency we have on our revenue model. that we can absorb some of those elongations and still hit our numbers.

Got it. And then maybe one last one for me, and I'll hop off. But just, Michael, I think it's been close to a year and a half since you've really ramped the new logo team over the last five to six quarters. And I think the $20 million in go-to-market investments, that's I think a decent part of it. Just kind of give us a sense of new logo activity in the current environment and how that team's progressed, and then I'll hop off. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks. The $20 million really is for this year. The initial new logo ramp of the team started last year, and we continue to see good progress on that. It is fair to say, though, that in a more challenged overall macro environment, it's more difficult to get new logos than it is to get existing, you know, client subscriptions. I think, you know, we've historically had been, you know, 15% of our new net bookings be from new logos, and that increased to the mid-20s. And we're seeing that dip a little bit. But, you know, our pipeline looks strong, and our pipeline continues to grow sequentially, you know, month on month. So, you know, entering into a slowing economy, which I think everybody sees, And I've been through this in 2002, 2008. It's just easier to get more and maintain your growth with existing customers and new logos, mostly because of the customers realizing and not want to take additional risks. And that means it affects us a little bit on the new logo side for temporary reasons. So we don't see really anything macro. It's just that right now it's going to be a tougher environment for the next one to three quarters.

Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Chad.

Up next, we have Mark Chappelle with Look Capital. Mark, you're live. Hey, Mark.

Hey, thank you for taking my question. Question for you in the services business. I believe last quarter it was mentioned that you were closely watching that business for a few customers. You saw delaying some projects, and you were going to keep an eye on that. Any update on that you could provide?

Yeah, we see the demand there, and I think Marie kind of touched on this. We are seeing two impacts to our services business, and I'll take three. One is the continued detachment from our subscription growth and our services growth. I mean, part of that is because we have additional revenue sources that don't come with any services. That's a positive kind of overall gross margin profile. The other two is we were subject to, as everyone was through the great transition and you know, the December, January timeframe of, you know, a lot more attrition than normal. Everybody saw that. And I think we're seeing a little bit of capacity constraints because of getting the new people in and then ramped up. You have to kind of remember a lot of our services is deployed in Asia where you have, you know, notice period. So that affects us both on the outside and the inside. So it's kind of all showing up in Q2 in terms of a bit of capacity constraint. And then Marie touched on logistics. We acquired that business on March 1st. And, you know, that business is a great business for the long term, but it's a smaller business, about $30 million. And what we've seen for companies of that size is we oftentimes inherit issues with customers that we have to absorb and take on. And that's kind of been our ethos and how we've been able to grow the business. So those two impacts we see are really kind of driving a little bit of the flatness in services revenue. Overall, in terms of the high-tech environment, that's actually gotten a little bit more normalized. I think the people that were going to slow down have slowed down, and now we're actually seeing some ramp up with some very large projects. So I think the services business will continue to grow slower than our subscription. We've seen that now for several quarters, and I do think this issue of capacity constraint and logistics kind of a little bit of a fixed plan will wash out here in the next quarter or two.

Okay, great, thanks. And then circling back a little bit to the earlier question, and I appreciate your comments on ocean bookings and over-the-road spot rates, but macro-wise, I was wondering if you could just provide some additional details about what you said in your prepared remarks around deals pushing from Q2 to Q3 in Europe, and maybe just a little bit on industries or particular countries where you're seeing this.

I think it just falls into the category of Companies, you know, when they sign a contract with us, they're signing a contract that's, you know, intended to last for, you know, three to five years, which means the contracts always get a lot of scrutiny. And companies will always kind of revisit and say, okay, is this right at the right time? Do we want to wait for more checks? And we've kind of seen that, you know, really kind of in a couple select cases, especially on the new logo side, where companies say, okay, let's just, you know, do one more review. I think that's just kind of companies identifying that the market overall is in a very choppy condition right now. You have a lot of cross-currents that's happening in the environment with interest rates and clear indicators of economic slowdown, but then you have full employment. So I think companies are really trying to figure out, like everybody, like we are, how do you reconcile all of those data points? I think that just means a little slower decision-making overall. The main indicator for us is pipelines. And our pipeline continues to grow in excess of what we closed. And that's been the case now for several quarters in a row really for the past year. So, you know, we don't really see anything other than this might take a little bit longer, a month or two to close some deals. But, you know, I think that's kind of normal in this environment. I say nothing too specific. It's just kind of, you know, overall that tends to happen in this kind of environment.

Thanks. One final question. Product-wise, do you see any particular trends or strengths in certain products this quarter versus other quarters?

Yeah, we mentioned what we've done with Uber Freight, and that's pretty important to us. We have a 400,000 participant network. That's really important to deliver the solutions that we can for our clients. It's really kind of our biggest and most important differentiator in our moat. And now we are identifying interesting ways to add significant value to not just the brand owners, but also the network participants. So Uber Freight is an example of that, where we effectively are starting the beginnings of a marketplace. So that's really interesting for a lot of people who are coming to us for that service. I think that's one. And the other is continuation of global trade, where you have a lot of interest in terms of what I can ship to whom, when. and we're really seeing that. And that's actually one of the big areas that Accenture is investing heavily in because they see that kind of in their data as well. So those two are really kind of the big areas that I'd highlight right now.

Great. Thank you. That's all for me.

Thanks, Mark.

Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please indicate so by pressing star 1 on your touchtone phone. Up next, we have Andrew Orban with Bank of America. Andrew, you're live.

Good evening, this is David Ridley laying on for Andrew. Could you talk about pricing in the current environment? Have you taken any steps to increase pricing or the annual price escalators on new contracts? Are customers receptive to that?

Yeah, we have been taking price really for the past, I call it, year. We've taken price in our services business pretty consistently. We've taken, and that also kind of, one of the things that we always do is kind of focus on, you know, the pricing of our services for that business. We're also taking price in terms of just raising our list price. We did that two quarters ago. And what we found is that our average discount rate has actually gone down while we raised our overall list price. It doesn't flow directly through to us because of the nature of our contracts. Now, we have three-year contracts on average. But since we extend contracts with additional sales, about 20% of our contracts renew. So we are seeing that flow through. It just doesn't have an immediate and dramatic impact to our business right in the current one or two quarters. But we are taking price, and we have been able to do that. And I think it's also indicative that on our escalators, they're much easier now to put into contracts where two years ago when you had basically zero CPI you had a lot of pushback from purchasing agents. Now that's becoming much more acceptable in terms of getting CPI escalators within the contract period itself, a lot less pushback than we normally got a couple of years ago. So I think the idea of pricing is definitely real for everybody, and we're certainly taking our share there.

Got it. And, you know, obviously it takes time to ramp, you know, strategic alliances with systems integrators. But could you help us frame what success would look like for you in fiscal year 24, sort of calendar, you know, 2023? You mentioned, I think, partners influencing 25% of the pipeline. What would kind of success look like from those relationships?

Yeah, thanks for the question. I think it really comes into three categories. The first is having a larger ecosystem of people that can actually deploy our software. And as we said, we have on track that I think over 75 this year, which is a lot. It's way more than we've ever even thought about. So that's going really on as planned. I think a great indicator for us would be to ramp that to 50%, maybe by If we had the same metric, you know, when we started Q1, and then maybe get that to two-thirds and add some toting out there. But I think the big metric for us is going to be in tracking, and this is going to take more time, is how many deals those folks kind of bring to us. And the partnerships we've formed have been around the concept of us as a platform. That was kind of our going-in proposition and part of our agreement to invest with them. is that we're not really interested in these big partners talking about Eat Open as this particular part of the supply chain or that, but actually for the idea of an integrated end-to-end, outside-in platform. So the real opportunity is what they will kind of bring to us. We've seen this happen in sporadic cases. We had actually one seven-figure deal this year so far, and I think it's going to start slowly. And again, the investment is going to take time, And I think we'll see this more in 24 and then towards the back half where we hope to see them bring us more deals and influencing more deals where they have a customer that they already have kind of talked about a completely different strategy. That's going to take a little time. And the real reason we're investing now is to be able to kind of get at that influence as we look into next year.

Okay. Up next, we have Fred Lee with Credit Suisse. Fred, your line is live.

Hey, Maria, Michael. Thank you for taking my question. I had a quick question on BlueJ. And if you could remind us the historical contract duration there and how renewals have been trending more recently. And by the way, congratulations on the 115% synergies. That's fantastic.

Yeah, I think their contracts were not as, and as we found this a lot, most companies we acquired kind of looked like this. They would have a three-year contract to start, and then they would have annual kind of ability to auto-renew on a subsequent year. So if you look at the kind of duration of their contract, it's very long, although the contract length as the contract was written, was actually three years. But they have a longevity not quite as long as ours, but several years, several cycles. Our strategy has always been to change that, where we would actually not like to auto-renew, but where we'd actually like to have a renewal point. And our best contract looks like three years where the contract just kind of ends, and there really isn't an opportunity for the client to just auto-renew. And we found that really helps us in terms of setting a line of demarcation in price, and also creating an environment where we can really talk about the next three-year deal and add something to that. So that's going to take a year or two to kind of wash through the system. So to answer your question, three-year contracts, but that doesn't tell the whole story because most of those contracts were on some kind of auto-renewal. And we go through systematically and try to adjust that to another three-year term at the time of auto-renewal. Since they can auto-renew, we obviously can't. do that on our own. We have to work with them to kind of make that adjustment. Does that make sense?

That makes sense. It does make sense. Thank you. And so how would you characterize the renewal success getting away from auto-renew thus far?

I think it's, well, I mean, just in the numbers, they were kind of running at a nine plus percent churn. We were running at five and now we're kind of down to five-ish, a little below five, I think now, related to numbers. So we've seen, historically, we've seen our ability to you know, lower churn, pretty important to our overall strategy. And we've seen that here with BlueJ. So I think that kind of is indicative of, you know, how we're seeing those renewals going. I think that's a pretty important part of our strategy is to drive, you know, lower gross churn. I just want to just put some context on that churn number. That's gross churn to include reductions in subscription. So our client churn would be much, much less than that 5%. Thank you.

Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you. And a quick question on the gross margin drag from the logistics of the platform and the pro services issues. It sounded like most of that is behind the company, or is there a little bit more to go?

Yeah, Marie, do you want to tackle that one?

Yeah, absolutely. And hi, Fred. So I would say that there is still parts of it that we are working through. We want to be very thoughtful and make sure that we do everything the right way. So you'll see some of it still trickle through in the next couple of quarters, but it should be trailing off, and we'll make sure to, again, be transparent and disclose that on an ongoing basis as well.

Got it. Okay, thank you. And my final question is with regard to the Google write-down that was asked earlier. Sorry, which asset was that specific to?

The goodwill? It's the entire, it's consolidated the entire, you know, company. Again, it's an EY or auditor requirement based on, you know, triggered by the stock price move for the entire company, company value.

Okay, so isn't that typically a bottoms-up for, you know, asset-by-asset goodwill allocation? I was just wondering if there was a larger portion that was specific to any specific asset.

So this is a, you know, your traditional auditor, you know, driven. It looks at multiple different things such as, you know, DCF, multiples, you know, everything in one reporting unit basis. But it's a holistic company value analysis, again, that, you know, auditors ask all companies to do on a periodic basis.

Got it. Okay. We can take this offline. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Great. Thanks, Fred. There are no further questions in queue. This completes the Q&A portion of the call. I'd now like to turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody, for taking the time to visit today. And just kind of recap, you know, we're very excited about how we're continuing to build the business. We're very excited about kind of all that we're accomplishing as a team. So look forward to seeing you all in 90 days or so. Have a great day.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.