E2open Parent Holdings, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the E2 Open fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A 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. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Dusty Beal. You may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone. At this time, I would like to welcome you all to the E2 Open Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I am Dusty Buell, Head of Investor Relations here at E2 Open. Today's call will include recorded comments from our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Farlacus, and our Chief Financial Officer, Marie Armstrong. After those comments, we'll open the call for a live Q&A session. A replay of this call will be available on the company's investor relations website at investors.e2open.com. Information to access the replay is listed in today's press release, which is also available on our investor relations website. 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 our fiscal first quarter and full year 2024. 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-K and 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 stocks. 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 website at investors.e2open.com. And with that, we will begin by turning the call over to our CEO, Michael Farlikos.

Thank you, Dusty, and good afternoon. Welcome to our report of fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2023 results. I'll share my thoughts on our broader performance last year, including what went well and what didn't go as well as we would have liked. Offensive time discussing how we arrived as one of the largest purely SaaS-based supply chain software companies. scaling our business nearly 10x in seven years. I'll outline how we have begun our pivot from a company optimized for rapid scaling through acquisition to being optimized to deliver very high margins and double-digit organic sufficient revenue growth. I'll close with a discussion of our strategic focus for FY24 and share some recent highlights that demonstrate the value the platform creates for our clients. Finally, Our CFO, Marie Armstrong, will provide detailed discussion of our fourth quarter and full year results, as well as our guidance for fiscal 2024. While we continue to perform well from a margin perspective and deliver solid organic growth in FY23, economic uncertainty, lower shipment volumes, and in particular, cautious spending by high-tech companies, which generate a quarter of our revenue, are combining to prove a headwind for us at the moment. Our current FY24 forecasted growth rates are below our potential given our unique and differentiated competitive position. Embedded in our discussion is how we are building our business to realize the potential we've created over the past seven years while delivering significant margin and free cash flow. I'm proud of what we accomplished in the two investment areas we outlined at the beginning of FY23. We began the year determined to build two functions at Eat Open that were less important when we were scaling through acquisition, but are foundational to drive repeatable and expanding organic growth, namely a strong marketing organization and robust network of system integrators. These are long-term efforts, and I'm very pleased with our progress. Having made the important additions to our organization, we can now leverage these critical functions as part of a broader pivot to organic growth. marketing was simply not a prime focus for Eat Open during the rapid scaling phase of our business. Last year, we completed a wholesale refresh of our brand and increased our position for care of voice from last in our category to top three, reaching a number two position for several months. We now have an effective organization to target high quality prospects and execute sophisticated account-based marketing programs to increase adoption within our client base. On the partner front, We have built a dedicated network of system integrators to access the critical role they play in supply chain technology purchases. Over time, these partnerships are necessary to increase our growth rate as they help write in our specifications early in the client-finding process. Building this ecosystem is critical to seeing more large-scale opportunities that were previously not on our radar screen. Partners clearly see the benefits of working with Eat Open, and we are seeing this work pay off in pipeline and client wins. These initiatives will take time to materialize as bookings, and even more time to flow through to our revenue line. In particular, building a partner ecosystem is a two to three year process. That said, we have made significant progress, and the large upfront investment is now behind us. We previously communicated that these investments could generate incremental bookings in the second half of FY24 and into FY25. Based on the growth of our SI activated pipeline and a meaningful pickup in plus $1 million opportunities, we are now on track to meet or exceed this timeline. I also want to remind our investors that our SI strategy requires us to gradually transition portions of our services revenue to the integrated community. The SIs simply cannot build a practice around our solution if we retain all of the implementation services work. Over the long term, this is a good trade for Eat Open, given the relative margin profiles of these two business lines and the long-duration recurring nature of software subscription. This trade-off has and will negatively impact near-term services revenue growth and therefore total revenue growth. The decoupling of subscription growth and services growth has begun, and going forward, we will increasingly communicate our financial performance on the basis of organic subscription growth, profit margins, and free cash flow. While we are pleased with the progress of our two initiatives in FY23, like many companies, we did have our challenges. Most importantly, we did not carry the momentum of bookings we saw exiting FY22 into FY23. A key issue here was the macro environment. What we saw during FY23, particularly in the second half of the year, was that in a volatile and uncertain economy, customers scrutinized large commitments and spend lines more than small ones. Our second half results show this clearly. The pace of small run rate bookings came in as expected, flat and slightly up. While large deal closings over $1 million were down year over year, they did not go away. And a pipeline of these large transactions has grown nicely, from equally pushing to the right and also from engagement with RSI. While it is our job to adjust to changing business conditions, the slower deal closures will negatively impact our FY24 growth, keeping it below our potential for the next fiscal year. While the macro environment was a headwind for us, we must also take responsibility for below commercial performance. We were aware that integrating two businesses at the same time would put a strain on us. We have done this in the past, where we drove high performance as we integrated acquisitions. It is fair to say, however, that the size and complexity of these integrations, the speed at which we accomplished them, against the backdrop of a challenging economic environment, proved a greater challenge to our commercial organization than I anticipated. This had an impact to our net bookings performance in FY23 and is a primary reason why we expect FY24 to be a lower subscription revenue growth year for us. Even with lower growth rates, we are expanding our EBITDA margin as we continue to build our business. It is useful to remember how Eat Open arrived to where we are today in a short amount of time. Over the past seven years, we increased the size of our network from 40,000 to over 20,000 executive companies. we've grown revenue nearly 10x and increased our EBITDA from negative 13 million to nearly 220 million. A key driver of this growth was our rapid acquisition and integration. There were 14 strategic assets into one cohesive integrated supply chain platform. A one of one in our market. Our strategy was informed by the knowledge that point solution companies have a natural limit to their growth and many see their growth rates and profitability decline as they reach the natural limits of their single solution orientation. We saw Lane to scale rapidly by using our unique ability to integrate to create a highly differentiated network business that drives extraordinary value for our clients, produces very long durations of significant, excellent unit economics with very high operating margins. Over the last 18 months, We scale our business by 50% with the acquisitions of BlueJ and Logistics. We are now the largest pure SaaS company in the supply chain space. We are built upon the largest supply chain network, and our platform serves as a core operational backbone for many of the largest and well-known brands in the world. While M&A will remain an element of our value creation engine going forward, as we enter FY24, with the heavy lift of integrations largely behind us, Our primary focus now is to calibrate our business from one built for rapid scaling through acquisition to a business focused on robust and reliable organic growth. In this respect, our largest and most important organic growth opportunity is to increase adoption within our 650 enterprise clients. Our ability to cross-sell and up-sell is fundamental to our organic growth model. we have clearly demonstrated we can execute this strategy on a repeatable basis. We have proven we can grow a client relationship from several hundred thousand dollars per year to several million in a few years. While we have proven our ability to scale adoption within a client, we now need to scale that activity across our much larger organization, which is our primary focus for FY24. To build a scaled growth engine is a company-wide effort that is now well underway. Our team has spent considerable time analyzing our business. We've evaluated the factors we can control and have agreed on the changes we need to make to position ourselves for strong, consistent organic growth and high profitability for the years ahead. In doing so, we will be guided by four strategic pillars. Client engagement, client experience, product excellence, and operational efficiency. More specifically, We are taking concrete steps now to reaccelerate our growth. We are increasing our sales takeout so we can support better sales coverage and build closer client relationships, especially with core enterprise clients. We are refining our go-to-market processes to become more repeatable and scalable. We remain disciplined and have proven we can consistently produce high margins and generate extraordinary free cash flow. We are able and willing to make the hard choices to balance costs, investment opportunities, and realistic revenue assumptions to maintain our commitment to strong profitability and high free cash flow in all economic environments. In short, over the past seven years, we have created enormous potential through rapid scaling through acquisition. This strategy yielded a large business with durable competitive advantage and high free cash flow. We are committed now to building the capabilities needed to realize our potential of robust and reliable growth at scale, built on best-in-class unit economics and a very efficient translation of gross profit to the bottom line. We are energized by the opportunity we have created for ourselves. We know it won't be easy. We will have our fair share of setbacks. We will overcome each of them to build a truly special business that produces double-digit sufficient growth while driving very high operating margins and free cash flow. Our drive and focus are immutable. I'll close by highlighting some recent customer engagement. Starting with the demand side of our platform, a publicly traded global company is utilizing E2Open's channel application to visualize sales trends and inventory positions for better decision-making. On a supply side, one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies has deployed Eat Open Supplier Collaboration Suite. This long-time client purchased an additional solution to manage the supply side of their business, adding their original solution on the demand side. The additional solution connects their supplier community digitally to manage their entire order delivery to production cycle on our platform. In this supplier collaboration category, we are seeing an uptick in adoption in the automotive and process industries. Eat Open was founded on delivering this very solution to the high-tech industry over 20 years ago. In logistics, one of the largest North American retailers and a new customer for us will deploy our transition management solution. As a result of adopting our solution, this client estimated savings over eight times the annual cost of our subscription. Before I turn the call over to Marie for a detailed review of our financials, allow me to share a large scale solution we are delivering for a major automotive client. I recently met with them to review our seven-year relationship. They started with a planning solution from a company we acquired. We worked with them to address the very real challenges they faced with semiconductor shortages, which we all witnessed in the auto sector. 18 months ago, we expanded our partnership to grow our planning solution to the supply side, deploy our supplier collaboration solution, and also our logistics solution. They are now connected in real time to hundreds of their suppliers, can manage their constrained supply, and can see both inbound and outbound products as they ship around the world. This product is being delivered with one of our strategic SI partners. It is a clear example of our ability to execute a five-fold expansion within an existing client. We are now quite literally integral and embedded as part of a global manufacturing process. These capabilities delivered in one connected platform is unique to E2Open and represents the durable competitive advantage and massive potential we see. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Marie to review our financial results and discuss our guidance.

Thank you, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone. I want to start by thanking the finance organization and all other E2Open teams that worked collaboratively over the last few months to get us ready for year-end reporting, our earnings cycle, and our new fiscal year operating plan. We have made tremendous progress over the last year in building the finance capabilities that our company needs to support its future organic growth plans and the strategic priorities that Michael outlined. I'll start by reviewing our fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2023 results, and then close with a discussion of our FY24 guidance. Subscription revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter 2023 was $136.9 million, reflecting an organic growth rate of 5.4% on a pro forma basis and 6.6% on a constant currency basis when adjusting for the negative $1.5 million year-over-year impact from foreign exchange fluctuations. Our subscription revenue came in within our 137 to $140 million guidance range. For full fiscal year 2023, subscription revenue was $532.9 million and grew 8.1% on a pro forma basis and 9.8% on a constant currency basis. While this represents solid top-line growth, our fiscal year 2023 subscription revenue performance which is a critical element of our overall business model, came in short at 10% growth versus our original expectations of 11% to 12% set at the beginning of fiscal year 23. Following a strong FY22 exit rate, we started to see delays in large deal closings as we moved through the year, ultimately leading to a weaker-than-planned FY23 exit. As Michael noted, we believe that a key factor behind this lower than normal run rate was macroeconomic uncertainty that led some customers, particularly in the tech sector, to spend more cautiously and push out decisions on larger projects. We believe the procurement delays we have experienced are largely temporary and that these projects still represent attractive sales opportunities for E2Open. In summary, The customers and the demand have not gone away, but large-scale project spending in many cases has been pushed to the right. Also as mentioned earlier, during the fourth quarter, we saw an out-of-trend increase in downsell that is included in our churn metrics, which slightly impacted quarterly growth and will have a more meaningful impact on subscription revenue during fiscal year 2024. A combination of one-time volumetric adjustments and other macro-related factors were the main drivers. We had some legacy clients with volume-based adjustment provisions that we set at lower tiers as compared to the high shipping volumes experienced during the COVID pandemic. In some select cases, we saw customers respond to budget cuts by reducing project spend. Timing related to customers that we knew would churn when we acquired them through M&A also had a small impact during the quarter. As Michael noted, our overall retention metrics remain strong and we intend to maintain and improve them as part of our strategy to deliver double-digit organic growth in subscription revenue. Overall, delivering on this growth commitment remains a cornerstone of our operating model and business strategy. As the go-to-market changes that Michael described start to yield results, we have a clear path to driving an acceleration in growth as we exit FY24. Professional services and other fiscal fourth quarter was 29.4 million, reflecting an organic pro forma growth rate of negative 6.9% and negative 5.2% on a constant currency basis when adjusting for a negative $500,000 year-over-year impact from foreign exchange fluctuations. While a key aspect of our business strategy is to place more focus on our subscription business, professional services revenue performance in the fourth quarter fell below our expectations. Weaker services revenue was driven by the same macro factors that affected our subscription business, including scaled down customer purchases and longer than typical sales cycles for large projects. Our proactive shift towards partnering with system integrators also had some impact. These forces will have a continuing effect in early FY24 with first quarter services revenue likely to be sequentially softer before strengthening later in the year. We have recently brought new leadership into our services organization as part of our larger go-to-market adjustments mentioned previously. These changes should help us maintain our profitable services franchise, even as we continue our strategic pivot to shift services work to integrator partners as a means to drive faster future subscription growth. Putting it all together, total revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter was $166.3 million, reflecting pro forma organic growth of 3.0%, over the prior year quarter and 4.3% growth on a constant currency basis after adjusting for a negative $2.0 million year-over-year impact from foreign exchange fluctuations. For full fiscal year 2023, total revenue grew 5.9% on pro forma organic and 7.7% on constant currency basis. Turning to gross profit, in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2023, Our gross profit was $116.6 million, reflecting a 3.5% increase on a pro forma organic basis and 4.1% increase on a constant currency basis. Gross margin was 70.2% in the fourth quarter or 69.8% on a constant currency basis compared to 69.9% on a pro forma basis in the prior year quarter. Our gross margin performance for the full year was roughly in line with our fourth quarter. This strong gross profit margin, even during a quarter when we experienced softer than expected revenue generation, reflects our ability to leverage cost control and operational efficiency as effective tools to drive consistent profitability. Turning to EBITDA, our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $61.2 million, compared to 54.1 million in the prior year quarter, an increase of 13.2% and 11.7% on a pro forma constant currency basis. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin was 36.8% or 35.9% on a constant currency basis, compared to EBITDA margin of 33.5% on a pro forma basis for the prior year quarter. For full fiscal year 2023, adjusted EBITDA was $217.1 million compared to $196.1 million versus the prior fiscal year, an increase of 10.7% or 8.8% on a pro forma constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the full fiscal 2023 was 33.3% and 32.2% on a constant currency basis, up from 31.8%. in the prior fiscal year. This continued margin expansion reflects our focus on balancing profitability with growth. Our fourth quarter EBITDA included approximately $5 million of strategic investment spend to improve our marketing capabilities and build our system integrator ecosystem. The full year spend totaled $19 million, slightly below the $20 million plan announced in the beginning of fiscal 2023. As Michael mentioned, we remain confident that our strategy of investing in staff training and go-to-market resources at leading integrators such as KPMG and Accenture will, over time, pay dividends in the form of stronger future pull-through of e2Open software into large enterprise IT projects managed by these integrators. For FY23, despite a lower-than-expected top line, we were able to deliver EBITDA within the original guidance range. a testament to our ability to effectively manage variable costs, including bonus and incentive compensation. Moving forward, we will remain disciplined as we balance growth-oriented investments with our commitment to strong profitability and cash flow. Our goal will remain growth and realize the benefits of operating leverage. Finishing up on profitability, net loss for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2023 was $303.5 billion, and full fiscal year 2023 net loss was $720.2 million. The net loss figures include a non-cashed goodwill impairment charge of $386.8 million during the quarter and $901.6 million for the full year. These impairments were made in accordance with U.S. GAAP. As a reminder, E2Open's goodwill carrying value was reset as part of our IPO transaction using the offering price of $10 per share. GAAP requires companies to continually monitor goodwill carrying value by evaluating potential triggering events, such as share price declines and changes in market conditions. Now turning to cash flow. As discussed in our third quarter earnings call, we have changed our presentation of adjusted operating cash flow in order to provide a clearer view of our cash generation, starting with GAAP operating cash flow. This revised approach to normalized cash flow includes the full range of key recurring cash drivers, including cash interest, networking capital, and cash taxes, but adjusts out temporary or one-time items, such as spending on M&A integrations. For this new presentation, during the fiscal fourth quarter and full 2023 fiscal year, we generated 29.8 million and 104.8 million of adjusted operating cash flow, respectively. We're pleased with our improving level of cash conversion as we continue to prioritize strong cash flow growth. We view cash flow as both a key performance metric and as a source of financial flexibility to optimize our capital structure and fund strategic growth. As a result of our strong cash flow generation, we ended fiscal year 2023 with $93 million of cash and cash equivalents, a sequential increase of $7 million from the third quarter. This completes my remarks on our fiscal Q4 and full-year financial results. At this point, I'd like to introduce our FY24 and first quarter financial guidance and provide our thoughts around key drivers of our forecasted performance. We expect subscription revenue in the range of 545 million to 555 million for FY24. This represents growth of two to 4% year over year. Key drivers of the slower-than-target growth are the softer net bookings momentum in late FY23, as well as our view that the challenging macro environment will continue to impact customer purchasing levels and the timing of large projects through mid-FY24. Gap subscription revenue for the fiscal first quarter of 24 is expected to be in the range of $131 million to $134 million. representing a growth rate of 1% to 3% as compared to the prior year of fiscal first quarter. We expect FY24 total revenue to be within the range of $655 million to $670 million in FY24, representing year-over-year growth of 0.5% to 3% as compared to FY23. Our total revenue forecast, which includes our professional services business, reflects our focus on our subscription business and our strategic plan to shift services revenues to our system integrator partners. Given current exchange rates, we expect FX to have less than 50 basis point impact on our year-over-year revenue growth rates for FY24. We expect FY24 gross profit margin to be within a range of 68 to 70%. The midpoint of this range is roughly flat to what we achieved last year. Overall, our gross margin targets for the new year demonstrate the strong underlying attractiveness and unit economics of our core subscription software offerings and is the basis for our ability to drive value through profitable growth. Finishing off on profitability, we expect FY24 adjusted EBITDA to $228 million. This represents growth of 0.5% to 5% over the prior year. This range implies an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33 to 34% for FY24. In addition, given the importance we place in generating strong cash flow, I would like to comment on some of its key drivers for FY24. We expect CapEx to normalize to approximately 5% of revenue in FY24 versus 7% of revenue in FY23, which included M&A-related CapEx. We plan to drive significant year-over-year improvements in working capital and expect FY24 working capital to be a modest use of cash as typical for a growing company. Cash interest expense net of interest income is expected to be in the range of 90 to 95 million. This projection assumes that the floating interest rate we pay on term loan debt stays within a range of 4.5 to 5%, and that we do not make any prepayments on our term loan during the year beyond required amortization. Finally, we expect one-time cash costs, including M&A integration, which were $29 million in FY23 to be substantially lower in FY24. In conclusion, while we did not hit our full growth target for fiscal 23, we achieved solid revenue growth as well as strong profitability and cash flow performance. Looking ahead to FY24, we will continue to support our large and growing customer base as they advance their supply chain capabilities. We remain confident in our strong strategic positioning, given the unique supply chain software platform we have built through strategic M&A. We have a clear path to achieving higher future growth and remain committed to our long-term goals of 12% plus subscription revenue growth, 70% plus gross profit, and mid-30% plus EBITDA margins. That concludes our prepared remarks. I want to thank everyone for joining us today, and we look forward to connecting with you again as we proceed throughout the year. With that, Michael and I are ready to take your questions. Operator, please open up the line and begin the Q&A session.

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would 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. Once again, that's star one if you have a question or a comment.

And our first question is from Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs.

Please proceed.

When you think about the revenue growth guidance for fiscal 24 and some of the near-term growth challenges that have materialized and you discussed on the call, how does that impact your view on getting back to the 12% plus organic growth long-term? And when you think about what some of the things are that you have to see go right for you outside of just improving macro, could you just go through that for us? Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for the question and good to hear your voice. Yeah, listen, we have enormous confidence in our business. We've created a unique asset through, as we spoke about, scaling rapidly by combining unique assets into one platform. I think it's fair to say the macro environment, along with the combination that increased our business by about 50% in the last year, it did slow us down from a commercial perspective. So we don't have any hesitation around that long-term growth outlook. In fact, I think we're more confident than ever We do have some challenges from the macro that will subside, and we do have some things to work on internally as we train our people to kind of sell more than one of our solutions to our clients. But we've seen this happen, and now we have to scale that and calibrate our business to do that at scale. So I think what needs to happen for us is to continue to work on part of our business and just get better commercially at training a large number of people. integrating companies quickly doesn't come without a cost. And I think it's fair to say, as I said, that this one was a little more, these two are a little more complex than normal. And that combined with the macro kind of will make for a lower, you know, revenue growth year in FY24. But we're seeing, you know, great green shoots really around the business. So we're as confident as ever, Adam.

Yeah, it's great to hear. And then just on the revenue turn that you mentioned on the call, What are the sensitivity of outcomes that you're baking into fiscal 24 guidance? And when I think about this sort of worst case scenario versus the best case scenario, you know, what's the percent of your base that's exposed from a volume perspective that we could see vary throughout the year?

It's not that much. And, you know, we had a little bit of uptick in our overall annual churn numbers. But, you know, there was a little bit more in Q4 and we see a little more in Q1. which, you know, because of the timing, drives a lower, you know, revenue year. Remember, we have nearly all of our revenue comes from subscriptions. So if you have, you know, increase in churn earlier in the year, it's going to have an outside impact to your revenue for the year. So in terms of range of outcomes, I think we have a pretty good handle on what that looks like, and that's fully informed by our guidance. But we don't really see a dramatic change in that respect at all.

Okay. Super helpful. Thank you, Michael.

Thanks, Adam.

The next question is from Mark Chappelle with Loop Capital. Please proceed.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Michael, starting with you, I was wondering if you could just provide some additional details around some of the internal issues related to the acquisition integration that unfavorably impacted bookings, or that you expect to unfavorably impact bookings in the coming year.

Yeah, I think it's more, Mark, as we saw, softness in the macroeconomy Last year and some of those challenges as we brought the companies together, I think impacted our bookings results, specifically on the larger transactions. As I said, the run rate transactions have come in about where we expected them to, but the larger ones did push to the right, and they're larger now. Some from pushing to the right and some because of the SIs are contributing more. In terms of the impact of integrations, generally it's about having a much larger set of clients that we need to kind of engage with and have our people learn how to sell more than one solution into bigger companies. And we get a lot of our sales talent from the acquisitions, and it's fair to say we have more work to do to train them on how to sell into that environment and how do we build a repeatable organization for the scale we are now. That work's already begun, and part of our, as Marie mentioned, we are increasing our headcount in the sales group. So we expect that to kind of normalize and get back in the second half of this year. So to us, it's just an additional part of our business to build, like we built the other parts of our business. So that's kind of how we think about the progression. Normally, we don't have as large an impact in terms of these integrations, but But this one was larger and a bit more complex, given the broader nature of the BlueJ acquisition.

And just to add to that, in terms of the integrations more broadly, as we've said before, we're done with the BlueJ acquisition integration. In terms of the logistics integration, the total synergies are still projected to be over 10 million. And just to give you sort of the latest of where we stand in terms Integration work was actually approximately 80% of the run rate savings, realized 60% where we are now. We have also seen sort of improvements. We've talked about logistics before, but we've seen improvements in revenue as well as gross margin side. And we do expect to be fully complete with integration of logistics as well by the second half of FY24. I think what we mentioned in terms of the integration impact also in churn is just, you know, some of the timing of the churn we already knew at the time of the acquisition just happened to coincide, you know, a couple of other churn-related impacts. So, it just all happened at the same time. So, just want to make sure you have that full context.

Great. Thank you. That's helpful. And just kind of building on, Michael, on your point, your prior comments regarding the Salesforce and some of its plans for the coming years. Could you just go through, you know, the thought process in adding sales capacity, you know, because it looks like, you know, there's lower subscription revenue growth expected this year. Just talk about, you know, why you think adding sales capacity at this time is the right decision.

The potential that we created is adding a lot of clients that have one or two solutions. What we found is the more time we spend with them, the more we can amplify their subscription more quickly. That's really how we thought about really engaging with our clients. If you remember a year and a half ago, we said we needed to build a new logo sales team. We did that. We increased our kind of for bookings percentage from, you know, mid teens to 25 and up percent. So that was successful. And then now given the potential we have, we think adding more salespeople, you know, throughout the year allows us to kind of, you know, engage and drive what we know we've done in the past that we do today, which is to increase the adoption of our full suite into those clients. And that's the primary growth engine for our business. So, It's all about how do we make sure we meter in those salespeople at a pace that we can train them effectively and maintain our margins. But clearly, that's our biggest opportunity.

Thank you. That's all for me.

Thanks, Mark.

The next question comes from Jeff Hickey with UBS. Jeff, please proceed.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Would love to just maybe understand some of the more recent trends. you're seeing since the end of February, namely March, and now into April, obviously there's been volatility and, you know, financial services volatility, namely. You brought up the commentary around the tech sector, but curious if you're seeing any, you know, changes in customer behavior, even in the last six to eight weeks versus what you saw in the December and January timeframe.

Yeah, I think, you know, in general, you know, People, I think, are getting used to a very uncertain future where, you know, in the early part and mid part and late part of last year, it's like, okay, what's the next shoe to drop? And I think people are kind of getting maybe normalized around that. Obviously, the banking issues, you know, doesn't help. I'll let Marie talk about our exposure there. But I think in general, we're seeing customers engage. And like Marie said, I think towards the back half, we'll see, you know, things kind of be really settled. It's kind of our view of it right now. Maybe, Marie, just talk about some of the banking issues, make sure we're clear on that.

Yeah, absolutely, and great question. So in terms of financial sector exposure, we have very, very little to none exposure to the sector from a customer perspective, but then also for E2Open as a company, we have really no exposure to the financial turmoil that's happening. I would also say that... In terms of our customers more broadly, they're mainly large enterprises that, you know, again, as a general rule, were less impacted by the turmoil in the regional banks in general. And in terms of, you know, trends, I think, you know, just as a data point, you know, one of the large deals that slipped from Q4, we have now closed already in Q1. So, you know, We're making progress and, you know, nothing has sort of materially changed from the, from the regional bank's turmoil.

Okay, the next question comes from Andrew Obin with Bank of America.

Andrew, please proceed.

Hi, this is David Ridley laying on for Andrew. What are the macro assumptions behind the fiscal year 24 subscription revenue? I'm just wondering how this particular slowdown compares to historical cyclicality. And I may have misheard, but just to be clear, you are expecting bookings to improve in the second half of fiscal 24.

Yeah, I think let me break that down into two categories. One is macro and then it's kind of our own outlook in terms of our own business. In terms of macro, I think this is significant. I don't think it's as significant as the beginning of COVID and not as significant as obviously 2007 or 2001, going back to my start of my career. So it's significant, but I think it's not as significant as other events. In terms of how that informs us, I think we really are informed more by what we see on our own metrics in terms of our pipeline. in terms of, you know, what we see working, what we see we have to work more at. In that regard, you know, we're informed by the pipeline of large deals that's, you know, up sequentially from last year at the start, and, you know, our ability to kind of penetrate and have, you know, pretty good visibility into that, and then good visibility into kind of the overall kind of churn and down sell. So I think we have a realistic view of kind of what the year is, And I think, as Marie said, we think the back half of the year thing is kind of, you know, getting back to some kind of a normal run rate for us. And that's what's kind of driving our FY24, you know, lower growth rate than, you know, our potential and what we would like to do. We think that, you know, it improves as we get into 25.

And just to add to that, you know, in terms of the assumptions in our guidance, you know, just as Michael mentioned, You know we had some timing of churn that you know That because of the the early in the air timing sort of has a has an impact right from the start of the year, but Will normalize as we go through the year and number one number two. I would say that we are proactively Taking steps to also control what we can and Michael has talked in detail about sort of the go-to-market changes and you know the pipeline reviews and the pipeline growth that has allowed us to kind of build the internal plan. So I wouldn't say that it's, you know, that our guidance hinges on, you know, significant macro improvements. It's all these different items working together that we've discussed on this call.

Thank you. Just one more. How do you bridge the fiscal year 24 EBITDA Because I think you have the non-repeat of the $20 million in strategic investments, but maybe I'm underestimating the magnitude of the sales additions that are planned here for fiscal 24.

Yeah, I mean, we constantly – go ahead, Marie.

So just in terms of the numbers, and then, Michael, please do add. So when you look at the investments, the $20 million that we announced last year ago that ended up being $19 million for last year. It was a combination of brand and marketing as well as system integrator and then also internal sort of staffing bill to support these investments. So if you think about the way we've talked about these investments going forward, you know, some of the brand investments on the marketing side was one time that's going to drop off. The SI spend, there is still a tail there, but that will be lower as well as we go forward. The internal investments, you know, will be part of the run rate, again, as we've discussed previously. And then as you think about the new and additional investments, they are on the go-to-market and sales side. So that is kind of how I would think about, you know, the new investments and the trajectory going forward.

Yeah, I think long term, you know, we operate with discipline, and that means we're focused a lot on margin expansion as we grow. And I think that's no different, you know, this year as we try to, you know, build the next things we need in our business to become a bigger and a more reliable organic producer of revenue. And it's just a matter of us kind of making those choices and making tradeoffs that we need to make, you know, every single year.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Okay, the next question comes from Nick Mariachi with Craig Hallam. Please proceed.

Hi, this is Nick on for Chad Bennett. Thanks for taking our questions. Michael, maybe if you could comment on the competitive environment. It seems like some of your adjacent SCM peers are continuing to post strong results despite the environment. And I know not all of them have the same maybe product overlap or same vertical exposure, but just what are your thoughts on your guided growth rate relative to the industry?

Yeah. Listen, we think there's a strong tailwind in overall industry growth, and we think we have a differentiated position and a huge amount of potential right in front of us. And I think we have a strategy – that's distinct and unique. And our strategy is really about how do we expand from one product category to the other and then have very, very long duration, you know, subscription revenue at a very high margin. That is the stated strategy. That's what we've been able to accomplish in the past seven years. We're going to have different puts and takes as we grow our business. And then clearly, you know, we have a bigger exposure in the high-tech area, which kind of has not been helpful. And also, you know, we did combine ourselves with two other companies and, you know, we have a lot of integration work we did in the past, you know, year to 18 months. So I think those things kind of, you know, fill in that gap between, you know, what we would see as our potential at our scale as we're larger and kind of what the others are doing. But moreover, we focus on kind of our strategy and, you know, winning at the opportunities we have in front of us, which is That differential between what a large number of our clients have with us and what, you know, we know we can deliver for them. And that's kind of the long-term opportunity that we see, and that's why we're so excited about kind of our long-term, you know, our long-term guidance in terms of 12% plus growth and, you know, mid-30s EBITDA.

Got it. And if you could just share your framework on how you think about EBITDA margins relative to revenue growth going forward and kind of what is your appetite to get back towards that real 40 mark if growth remains challenged in the back half of the year and into next?

Yeah, I think our guiding principle and what we've always believed in is generating high margins, mostly because of the unit economics we've created for ourselves and being efficient in terms of translation to the EBITDA line. And then from there, it's a matter of, okay, what can we responsibly add to our business every year and permanently build another part of our business to support ongoing organic growth given the large potential we have? And those are the trade-offs we make kind of literally every year and even throughout the year. And we could easily convince ourselves to spend a lot more money and drive down our EBITDA margins to chase growth, but I don't think that would be the right balance. And I also think it would be the right steward of our investors' capital. We think we have an opportunity to sequentially increase our growth rate as we go while generating high margins. And maybe, Marie, your thoughts on the rule of 40.

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. You know, I think we've already proven and shown our ability to cut costs even if our revenue slows. But our current investments really are squarely aimed to accelerate organic growth back to double digits. And, you know, overall, we remain very committed to balancing revenue growth and profitability and, moreover, generating a strong cash flow. You know, mentioned already previously, but, you know, we expect the one-time M&A related costs to significantly decrease in FY24. further supporting our strong free cash flow generation and the results also helping take our FY24 net leverage naturally to four times or even below that. So we are very, very focused on making sure that we get back to double-digit top-line subscription revenue growth. also balancing margins, and very importantly, also ensuring that we continue to produce strong and compounding free cash flow growth that will really allow us to continue to invest in the business as well as, you know, continue to take our leverage down and really set us up for a lot of strategic optionality going forward.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Thanks, Michael.

Once again, if there are any remaining questions, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. The next question comes from Fred Lee with Credit Suisse. Please proceed.

Hey, Michael and Murray. Thanks for taking my question. A quick question for Murray. You mentioned you were able to maintain gross margins, which was a solid sequential performance, by the way, due to some cost levers despite revenue weakness. Can you talk about what those levers were and if there's further room for improvement through fiscal 24?

Thank you, Fred. Great question. You know, in terms of when you look at the gross margin, right, so as a couple of different things working together. So as our subscription revenue growth increases the percentage of our total revenue as we continue to emphasize subscription revenue growth over the services revenue growth, you know, there's sort of a natural help to our gross margin. I would also say that we did take action in terms of just cost cuts last year, you know, including external vendor costs, but then also, you know, within our own staff and pay and so forth. So we continue to really closely monitor our costs and make sure that we, you know, drive profitability along with revenue growth.

Just building on that for one second. So we have a strategy where we have a hybrid method of deploying our solutions, and we've been doing that for literally 20 years. So that gives us a natural margin expansion in terms of our unit economics over the long term so that we don't increase our cost linearly as we grow our revenue. So I think we're set up to kind of take advantage of, you know, without incrementing our costs at the same rate. I think that's one of the reasons we're so confident in our unit economics as a gross margin level, which has been pretty steadily, you know, solid at this level for a long time now.

Got it. And then one quick question for you, Michael. Last quarter, you mentioned the pause in M&A because bid-ask spreads weren't reasonable. Can you talk a little bit about how the spreads look today and, you know, for targets on your radar and if your appetite for acquisitions has shifted in either direction?

You know, listen, we generated a lot of potential for our business, and we generated a high cash flow business through the M&A by thinking about unique assets that we thought were highly unique and very complementary to our platform so we could grow within our client base. It's a very efficient way to grow your business. But I think it's fair to say that now, as a much larger company, You know, we had to, you know, retool ourselves from one to being, you know, one that was built literally for rapid integrations to one that's built for long-term organic growth. I mean, we literally built a business to, you know, acquire something every six months, and we've optimized it for that. And now, as I look at our business, it's just the next, you know, building of our business to kind of orient ourselves around organic growth at this scale, which is a different proposition than growing a business that's half our size. You have to do it differently. So that's what we're taking on now, Fred. So the bid-ask spreads, I think, are still really kind of not where they need to be in general. But moreover, I think we have the biggest opportunity to build the next piece of our business, which is an organic growth engine at our size. Remember, we grew our business by 50% by combining two-point solution companies that were much smaller than us. and that takes a little bit of time for us to kind of build and get right. I think that's our primary focus right now. And then once we do that, which we expect to do in the next year or so, then at that point it's like, okay, now we're at the next level and we can kind of think about what to do next. But our core mission is to create a platform that is completely unique because it's built on 420,000 connected parties. So having a network of our size is unique. Having the application set that we have is unique. Having all the clients that we have is really unique. So that's the opportunity we see in front of us, and now it's a matter of building the organization for that proposition, now that we've kind of created this much opportunity for ourselves. That's our primary focus, and it will be for the next while, and we look forward to being able to realize that potential.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Brad. We hear your voice.

We have no further questions in queue. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. This concludes today's conference and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.