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Ovh Groupe
6/29/2023
Hello and welcome to the OVHcloud third quarter fiscal year 2023 revenue call. My name is George and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. For the duration of the conference, your line will be in listen-only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your question at any time. If at any point you require assistance, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. Please note that this conference is being recorded. Today's speakers will be Mr. Michel Polin, CEO, and Ms. Stephanie Bigny, CFO. And I'd like to have a call over to the OVH team to begin today's conference. Thank you.
Hello. Good morning, everyone. I am Michel Polin, CEO of OVHcloud. Thank you for being with us today for OVHcloud's Q3 2023 revenue publication. Q3 has been a good quarter with a sustained revenue growth of 13.2% like for like. In absolute terms, our revenue reached 228 million euros and grew by 12.6% as reported. In terms of key takeaways for our third quarters, I'd like to highlight the following. First, we are growing above 20% in the public cloud and in the mid-teens in private cloud. Second, we have a continuous acceleration in Europe after an already very strong H1. Third, growing demand for sovereign solutions quarter after quarter acts as a catalyst for OVHcloud. And as the European leader in data sovereignty, we continue to benefit from it. The next point is about the rollout of our product innovation, which is successful with passive solutions growing very well. We are also well positioned to capture business opportunities such as AI with high-performance new hardware. And I will come back later on what we do concretely on AI. The company operates with a strong financial discipline across OPEX and CAPEX, while remaining focused on supporting growth. Let me now reconfirm our guidance for fiscal year 23. So, next slide shows that we are confirming all our targets for 2023. Our like-for-like revenue growth will be between 13 to 14%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin will be above 36%, and we expect our capex to be in the lower range of our guidance, recurring capex between 16 to 20, and growth capex between 28 to 32%. As I said previously, we have a clear focus on financial discipline and agility while continuing to invest selectively for future growth. What I mean by financial discipline is controlling costs and improving our productivity and the return of investments. We are positioned on a fast-growing market and remain focused on delivering profitable growth. And today, we are making selective investment by improving and expanding our infrastructure with new data centers, our new GPO for AI. Now, I'd like to focus on our Q3 strategic guidelines. Next slides show that we had in Q3 a continued double digit growth in both public and private cloud with respectively plus 20% and 14.5% like for like. All in all, the cloud business is growing mid-teens in the Q3. Overall, public cloud reached 39 million of revenue in Q3. Private cloud reached 142 million of revenues and WebCloud reached 47 million revenues. Stephanie will come back with more details on the revenue performance in a few minutes, and I will, on my side, give you some insights on our customer dynamic on the next slide. Our strong growth performance is driven both by high customer loyalty and by successful customer acquisition strategies. On the left-hand side, we are very proud of a high customer loyalty evidenced by a strong revenue retention rate, which reached 109% in Q3, and by a double-digit outback growth so far in 2023. On the right-hand side of the slide, the dynamic in terms of new customers and new contracts remained very strong, as we had another good quarter of acquisitions. Overall, so far in 2023, we have acquired more than 20K new customers in public and private cloud, with some exciting client wins highlighted by the logos. What is very interesting is that the business dynamic with system integrators remains strong, and we continue quarter after quarter to sign new deals and to increase our share of wallets with existing customers thanks to this strong partnership we have built. As I said at the beginning, we continue to innovate. First, on the fast product side, which enables users to develop cloud-based applications. We are happy to report that we enjoy a strong growth on the products already rolled out, such as database, storage, and containers. In Q3, we also launched new storage offering named Cloud Storage, And we have already customers in this product for industries such as media, legal, or financial services. There are multiple use cases for this product, which allow very long-term and cost-efficient data storage. Also, over the last month, we have reinforced our AI offering to offer our customers a complete suite of tools to train, to clean, to start, and to deploy our AI models based on very large private and public data sets. These developments around AI require works in the infrastructure as well, which I will highlight on the next slide. The AI wave represents an incredible opportunity and requires significant hardware capabilities to give customers the ability to run the most intensive AI computes. Today, we are the only large European cloud provider able to build the right infrastructure for generative AI. We already have powerful GPU designed for AI available in our cloud solutions, and we are currently working on rolling out the new A100 and H100 from NVIDIA, one of our partners. Our approach on AI is fundamentally different from other large players such as OpenAI or the hyperscalers. In addition to implementing new GPUs, we are integrating and improving open-source private large language models. They will be white-boxed as opposed to the current black box models, which are kept secret and raise critical privacy issues for the data. Our LLM will guarantee the intellectual property of our customers and the privacy of the data. Our customers will be able to use their own data set to train their private model and be certain that the generative AI outputs won't be shared with any third party. This will be the evolution of the B2B generative AI, giving customers a full control over the privacy of the data and much more relevant output as customers will be able to have specialized models trained with their own internal data sets that are highly relevant for their own business. We have already customers using our GPUs for AI workloads and we are working with some of them to improve our understanding of the need and serve them better. Quantum computing will be the next IT revolution. And it is already a reality. We have customers using our quantum as a service offering that enables them to simulate the constraints of the quantum and assess the potential opportunities of threat coming from this new paradigm. Current business opportunities on quantum are of two types. First, the large corporates or system integrators wanting to get ready. And second, the startups that are developing applications running on quantum. So our service will allow these customers to be ready and adapt quickly when quantum supremacy happens in the coming years. Large corporates must get ready to quantum and we are the European cloud provider for quantum computing. We are positioned as a supporter of the European ecosystem and we have a unique offering of different quantum providers available already in our cloud. This is a key differentiator versus other players. We are not developing our own quantum technology. We are integrating partners, and we should have five to six services available in the coming months. It enables our customers to discover and use and train different quantum technology easily through OVHcloud's offering. We are executing our roadmap in terms of selective investment to expand our footprint globally as part of our strategy plan. We are currently opening new data centers globally. recently a new data center in India with a core and shell model which is less capital intensive and enables us to implement and operate our own server, network, and cooling infrastructure. We will open the Indian website in the coming weeks to target local customers and increase our total addressable market as the Indian market is one of the most dynamic markets in the world. We have a roadmap of new data centers with a focus of improved efficiency for these targeted investment, but we also remain agile and opportunistic on new locations, depending on the business demand and the overall outlook. After this update on the key highlights for this quarter, I would like to zoom out and comment on our strategy to strengthen our European leadership in a growing cloud market. The slide shows that OverEdge Cloud operates in a fast-growing market with an expected five years I got off more than 20 percent the car market is driven by cloud adoption for all customer segments and it is mission critical to their operations everyone is moving to the cloud that is usually booming and we keep seeing new users new habits such as multi and ivory quadrupling global cloud updatation more and more organizations deploy multiple cloud solutions to finally address the digital transformation needs even in There is a short-term delay in some cloud migration projects or some optimization from customers. We are very confident in the long-term growth prospects of the cloud market. As the European cloud leader, we are ideally positioned to continue to capture opportunities in this fast-growing market. We are very happy that renowned industry analysts such as IDC recognize OVHcloud as the European cloud leader, and they underline our key competitive advantages. OVHcloud offers a sustainable cloud. It is a leading European cloud provider for data sovereignty. It is open and reversible. It has predictable and transparent pricing and offers one of the best performance ratios. Our continued performance is fueled by innovation, as I said earlier. But another key element of success is our way of addressing our customers, how we work on our go-to-market strategy. As part of our strategy plan, we have implemented a clear strategy with dedicated channels and programs. First, on the top left of the slide, we have the enterprise channel, which is the fastest-growing channel. It includes the direct sales from our sales teams and the indirect sales realized through our partners. Indirect sales is quite recent at OVHcloud, and it's already very successful. As I said previously, we have been winning more and more deals with our partners, and it has been made possible thanks to our dedicated partner program. In Q3, we had more than 1,350 partners, of which more than 400 are advanced partners. This program enables our partners, mostly IT integrators such as Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra, to integrate OVHcloud in their own offering. It gives them the capability to offer to their customers their expertise coupled with our unique cloud offering. Then, on the top right of the slide, we have the digital channel, which is our historical go-to market. It represents the sales that are done directly on the website and is driven by digital marketing and e-commerce strategy. We have a good growth in this channel, even if it suffers slightly more than the enterprise channel. Our digital customers are sensitive to the micro-conditions and have been looking for a few months already to optimize their spendings. The next slide shows that OVHcloud is the European leader in data sovereignty, and the global legal and regulatory framework is increasingly favorable to us. Europe is about to reach a major political agreement on the Data Act, with European institutions reinforcing freedom of choice for cloud users. The draft proposal for the new EU cybersecurity scheme incorporates in the highest level immunity to extraterritorial loads such as the French Cygnum Cloud. Also, recent news flows from around Microsoft, Meta, or TikTok confirmed that data sovereignty is becoming a key concern for authorities and public opinion all over the world. Regarding our sovereign solutions, we continue to see a strong traction with a combined growth. The revenue from our Cygnum Cloud offering has been multiplied by 10 in 12 months with a very strong growth every quarter. It confirms that data sovereignty is a strong driver for our business growth, with a lot of different market segments being more and more concerned by this issue, such as healthcare, insurance, finance, defense. And if we think about data and AI, it will raise huge concern of data privacy and sovereignty around generative AI. And again, we are very well positioned by offering a generative AI that respects our values and our customers' intellectual property. OVHCloud's leading position for sustainable cloud is recognized, and you'll see that in the next slide, by the analysts and by customers. And we keep innovating our offering. We are implementing a carbon calculator that will enable customers to assess their exact carbon footprint for any services that use OVHCloud. And this carbon footprint will include the three scope of calculation, which is a key in assessing your overall carbon footprint and knowing that all the large cloud provides only most of the time The scope one is their calculation. This will be a key differentiator and will bring even more value to our cloud offering as customers will be able to quantify how much greenhouse gas they use and save when they migrate to OVHcloud. Also, in May 2023, OVHcloud joined the European Code of Conduct for data centers to improve public recognition of our positioning. OVHcloud is a leading pioneer in sustainable cloud on several aspects. One of the most important is our unique at scale water cooling technology. It enables us to offer one of the best PUE and WUE ratio in the world. This water cooling technology is by design more efficient than air conditioning. We celebrate the 20th anniversary of the invention of the water cooling technology a few months ago. And it is interesting to note how we keep improving our performance in that space. 10 years ago, we were able to dissipate 60 watts of heat. Today, we are able to dissipate up to 500 watts of heat with our water cooling technology. It is more efficient. It's cost-effective. It's scalable even for the most advanced GPU used in AI and CPU. And now, I let the... to Stephanie.
Thank you, Michel. Good morning, everyone. I am Stephanie Lethny, and I am delighted to be with you today to present our Q3 2023 financial performance. As Michel said at the beginning, we registered in Q3 another strong revenue growth of plus 13.2% life on life and plus 12.6% as reported. This growth is fueled by a very strong performance in public cloud, which is growing at 20.1%, and a solid growth in private cloud, which is growing at 14.5% life-or-life. We also benefit from a rebound in web cloud in Q3, with a good performance of domain names. This continuous strong dynamic of our cloud businesses is generating a favorable mix evolution as shown in the next slide. So on this slide, we can see that we are growing quarter after quarter. Our mix continues to evolve towards more public cloud, which is a more dynamic market, and private cloud with a continued strong growth in this segment thanks to the success of our go-to-market strategy and of the continued rollout of our innovations. Public cloud now represents 17% of our revenues at one point versus last year, and private cloud represents 63% at one point. The strong performance of our cloud businesses is driven by A, another quarter of customer acquisition, B, a continued RPAG growth, and C, a steady ramp-up of our innovations, especially in past. This strong dynamism is also true when we look at the performance by geographies on the next slide. So when we look at our Q3 performance by geographies, we are very pleased with the growth in Europe, with a continued traction in the region, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe. Europe has been accelerating since the beginning of the year, and it shows that our positioning as the Europe cloud leader is bearing fruit. In France, we also had another quarter of acceleration with a strong performance from the enterprise segment and a double digit growth in private and public clouds. In the rest of the world, we are facing a continued optimization from some customers, especially in North America. In addition, the comparison basis remains high in the U.S. overall. And finally, Russia kept weighing on the region in Q3. As you already know, we have increased our prices recently with the first set of price increases during the previous quarter. We've continued to benefit from the price increases in Q3. As shown on the right-hand side of the screen, We had a price contribution to our revenue growth of around 2-3% in the first 9 months and we expect to have 2-3 points contribution on a full year basis. This strategy has progressive price increases with pedagogy with customers has been successful and has confirmed OVH pricing power. We have not seen any change in customer behavior. We have an unchanged term and as Michel said, we have a strong customer acquisition dynamic in the cloud businesses. Also, we continue to have a high stickiness of our customers with a revenue retention rate of 109% in Q3. All these indicators give us confidence in our ability to mitigate any inflation impacts today and in the future. We've implemented last quarter a strong financial discipline on the costs at all levels of the company while continuing to invest selectively for future growth. To execute this financial discipline in terms of OPEX, we've been limiting new hiring and implementing frugality at every level of the company. Regarding CAPEX, we are improving our return on investment by tracking productivity gains. Before handing over to Michel, I'd like to repeat that while we increase our financial discipline, we remain very much focused on growth, and we keep investing in key areas such as AI for our future developments.
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