Trend Micro Inc S/Adr

So we'd like to get started with China Micro's Q1 results for FY2024. So today we have Ohanjiro Neki, CFO and Representative Director, and also Kevin Semser, COO, and Akihiko Omikawa, Director and EVP. Kevin will be speaking through the video. And at the end of the session, we'd like to kindly ask you to fill out some questionnaires. For some of the questions, we would like to get your feedback on the IR day that we scheduled to hold this year. So without further ado, we'd like to hand over to Mahendra Nagy to go through our Q&A results. So, Mr. Nagi, please share the screen. Yes, thank you. Can you see the presentation? Yes.

So, this is a summary of the K1 results. Revenue grew by 12%. OP grew by 27%.

we were able to achieve double-digit growth for revenue and profit. Later, Kevin will offer you more details, and I will just give you the highlights. Looking at the sales growth, the enterprise revenue improved last year. In Q4, the growth rate slowed down, so there were some concerns around that. But from this fiscal year, we have started to see some improvement. And also, for the North American business, the enterprise business is growing by double digit. And looking at operating profit, the operating margin has improved by 2 percentage points. So now, in Q1, the OPM was 18%. And as you can see, this year, Our target is the improvement in the operating margin, so on that note, we were able to make a good start toward that goal. The ordinary income growth rate was higher, and this is because we had the devaluation gain of 2 billion yen on the affiliate stocks, And that's why the ordinary income grew by 52%. And looking at this quarter, the revenue and also the ordinary income achieved record high levels. And at the bottom, you can see the pre-gap numbers. The pre-gap revenue grew by 13%. A pre-gap OP grew by 32%. And the operating margin on a pre-gap basis was 18%. It improved from last year's 15%. There are some complications with these numbers. But I think that was the case in the past. But in Q1, I think we were able to see a very clear path. And this is a progress. for the four-year guidance. Revenue progress was 24%. For opening profit, the progress rate was 23%, which were both in line with our plans. The pre-gap sales and the pre-gap profit are shown here. Compared to a year, the opening margin improved from 15% to 18%. For the enterprise business, this is the ARR for the enterprise business. Previously, we were showing the subscription ARR, which is in the red here. And in terms of the dollar, the subscription ARR was 810 million, growing by 18%. And on top of that, with a dark card, brownish color. We have the perpetual ARR, and if we combine those two, we get the ARR for the enterprise. We use the word hybrid ARR, and we are combining these two ARR as enterprise ARR. Also, from this year, we are changing the way we disclose data, and we are now going to disclose this hybrid ARR. And Kevin will offer you more details later. And this is the cash flow. Nothing special to comment on this slide. And I think this is a slide that you may have high interest about. In January, we reduced the headcount, and there was a new release on that. So this quarter, They can't decrease by 249 people. On the right hand side, if you look at the pie chart, the reduction is mostly coming from sales and marketing and also tech support. This is not for cost reduction, but we would like to improve productivity by using technology. So that's why we're using generative AI. to improve the productivity of the business. And also below, you can see the geographical breakdown. The big impact was in Americas, shown in blue, and also EMEA. That's where we saw a big headcount reduction. And this is a trend of the cost. As you can see in the red box, the cost increased by 4.6 billion yen year-on-year, but most of that was due to foreign exchange. With that, before an exchange impact, the cost was relatively flat over last year. And nothing special to add on this slide. And I would like to quickly go through or summarize the Q1 highlight. As I said earlier, we were able to achieve the highest silver net revenue and annual income. And also in the U.S., we achieved double-digit growth for the enterprise business, and we were able to achieve improvement in the operating margin. And as for the guidance, we have not changed the full-year guidance. As I said earlier, this fiscal year, the big goal is to improve the operating margin. And with that, we would also like to achieve revenue growth and profit growth. And this is the That's all for me. Thank you very much.

Next, Kevin.

Next, Kevin, I believe. Thank you so much. Next. Kevin Simzer would like to make his presentation, please.

Thanks Mahendra. Hi everyone, my name is Kevin Simser and I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Trent. Mahendra did a great job of providing a summary of how we did in Q1 and I wanted to do something similar where I talk about Q1 in the context of where we're going, our plans for 2024 and our road to 2027. So let's get started. I presented this before, but as a reminder, we really have, I think, a solid business strategy in place. We're working feverishly at growing our overall sustainable recurring revenue. We believe that that's gonna be much, much more predictable. We think we can do that while driving higher operating margins, and you'll see evidence of that this quarter. Ultimately, it comes down to driving customers onto our hybrid platform. We believe we have the market leading unified cybersecurity hybrid platform on the planet. So getting customers onto that. If we do all of that, that will give us better predictable revenue growth and ultimately increase shareholder value. In terms of Q1, Mahendra already gave you the highlights, but I wanted you to know that from an internal plan perspective, we actually need our top line and bottom line post-gap revenue performance objectives that we had set for ourselves. The team is very focused. We're executing really well. And this is on the backdrop of the restructuring that we did in Q1, moving our manufacturing facility for our network appliances, rolling out a transformational level of go-to-market and how we actually have our sellers focused in on our installed base. Lots of change going on, and I'm really proud of the trend team where we dug in and figured out how to execute through all of that and produced above-plan performance. Where that performance came from was from an enterprise business business standpoint, net sales was up plus 15% year over year. And interestingly, it was powered by exceptional performance in the US. And I'll talk about that in a second. Within the enterprise group, it was all about our AI powered platform growth, our next generation SOC grew 27%. It's really what we have the team fixated on, attaching that to our installed base accounts and using that as our foothold to expand. Now, I wanted to show this because I know there's often questions in around our regional performance. This is a pre-gap revenue chart, and it's using a constant currency. So you can get an idea of truly how the different, our four regions, how they performed across the globe. So let me zero in on the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa region, plus 14%. If you followed us, you know that that's been a consistently growing region for us. And we continued that in Q1. What might surprise you is the performance in the Americas at plus 12%. year over year growth and in particular in the US at plus 14%. So fantastic performance above plan in and around the Americas. Then you might look at Japan and Europe and ask, well, what were the dynamics there? And quite honestly, actually Japan and Europe really executed very close to in and around their plan numbers. As you might be aware, a part of our business is based on renewals of perpetual license transactions. And in both of Japan and Europe's case, the addressable renewal list was smaller for this quarter than it was the same time last year. So actually the dynamics were as expected. From a recurring revenue standpoint, this is total recurring revenue. I said this was one of our fundamental objectives to drive more and more recurring revenue. You can see us sitting here across consumer, large and small enterprise at $1.63 billion, up 6% year over year. And I broke it down by those three segments so you can see where that growth came from. the large enterprise at plus nine, the smaller enterprise at minus one and consumer flat. I can tell you on the small enterprise, we do have plans in the second half of the year where we're going to be taking our market leading platform that's been so successful on the enterprise side and we're going to be pointing that and positioning it much better in the small enterprise space and we think that's going to We believe strongly that's going to give us some good lift in small enterprise, so we have a plan for that in the second half. And around consumer, we've been working tirelessly at adding alternate channels. Our mobile channel performed really well. We're starting to grow in terms of our B to B to C channel, so we're making some progress. At the end of the day, we all know it's an attachment to personal computers, and with Some planning, we think that these initiatives that are brewing with a number of the PC manufacturers around AI PCs, that that could give that whole industry some lift. If that industry lifts, so too will we. Like I said, it's about enterprise today and it's all about this AI powered cybersecurity platform. It's market leading. It's got the broadest set of capabilities of anybody on the planet. It's hybrid in that it's supported in both a SaaS and an on-premise mode. We can even operate in an air-gapped environment. So we believe we've got all the capabilities that we need and we're going to continue to innovate. Attack surface risk management, we added that literally six months ago. We went zero to 3,000 customers running our attack surface, our AI powered attack surface risk management. So that's been a very, very big component. A lot of customers want to assess the risk. They want some visibility across their entire enterprise. So that's been a lot of what has been fueling the growth that we have. but we're not just stopping at AI built into our platform. We're also thinking about customers that want to deploy AI, but they want to be able to do it in a way that they feel like they're not exposing some of their own intellectual property. So how can they introduce LLMs within their environment, but make sure that actually it's done safely. We've got some capabilities that we added and we're introducing even more going forward. So some really nice additional capabilities, all with AI as the theme. It's not just us bragging about our platform. So Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and Canalys in Q1 all had either quadrants or waves or write-ups also boasting about the performance of our platform. So we feel like we're in a very good spot. We did talk about it a little bit in the news. We tend to be somewhat of a humble giant, but we do like to talk about certain things. AI is one of them. Threat intelligence is another. We're very, very big on just trying to vacuum up as much threat intelligence as possible, in particular through our zero-day vulnerability research program. That's one of our flagship programs that we have. Lots of initiatives there. And then finally, some really innovative capability, which I don't think anybody else has, but we've been spending quite a bit of time building out an offering in the private 5G, private LTE space. Well, why not be able to add that telemetry coming from that into our Vision One platform? We did it. So we announced that. That went over very well with the customers that are Many large infrastructure companies, manufacturers are deploying private 5G or private LTE and they want to have that visibility in their security operation center. If we were to look at the recurring revenue, this is the enterprise recurring revenue. We started with the total company's recurring revenue. This is the enterprise recurring revenue, the ARR associated with it. And it sits at $1.24 billion. That's up 7% year over year. But I want to point you to the different colors. If you look at the subscription ARR sitting at $810 million, 18% year over year growth, that's what we've been primarily leaning into. And we're embracing... and trying to connect to our on-premise customers who have those perpetual license and renewal business. But you can see the decline. We're gradually migrating those customers onto the SaaS platform. Not everybody wants to migrate, by the way. There's a lot of customers that we have would say, no, for data sovereignty reasons or for whatever, they want to continue to run their on-premise gear. That's okay. We can continue to do that and we can connect them up to our platform

The large enterprise growing at 9%.

We have plans to take a small prize.

We are moving in that direction in the second half.

But if we were to look at that large enterprise recurring revenue business, that's that $1 billion, it actually grew at 9% year over year. And we wanted to show you how we're doing at actually connecting up some of our on-premise customers onto that Vision One platform. You can see it here where it's increasing at 50%. platform, $48 million. And that's now 43% of the total $1 billion in recurring revenue associated with large enterprise. So you can see that that's gradually going to be increasing more and more. I thought you might find this interesting, another different view of the world. We have our large enterprise recurring revenue, that $1 billion. Now this is divided up into four different categories. The AI-powered next-gen SOC, which is the things that I've been talking about in particular, the hybrid multi-cloud endpoint security, network security, and email security. And you can see where the growth in particular is coming from, we actually do very well with a consolidation of vendors use case. And, you know, many customers say, hey, I'm spending too much on cybersecurity. How can we eliminate the number of cybersecurity vendors that I have in place? Well, when with our platform, the fact that we support endpoint, XDR, email security, network security, we can protect your cloud. we have all of that, including attack surface risk management, we have all of that wrapped into this single platform and more, you can really get an idea of why we tend to have a lot of conversations with customers about consolidating. And you can see it here, a lot of customers growing their email with us and in particular XDR. In terms of Vision One itself, that platform that I keep bragging about, if we look at the attachment rate, you know, we're really fixated on our installed base accounts. We're sitting at 9,708 Vision One customers today. That's a 35% attachment. That's up 1,373. So 1,373 Vision One customers in the past year. The AR is growing nicely at plus 27%. And once we land, we know that the ASP is bigger once we attach. But we also know that the expansion potential is much higher. And you can see it in that bottom bullet with 116% NRR. The way we're doing it is... We are gradually expanding. We have over 10 modules. And as you can see in this chart, 54% of our 28,000 enterprise customers have one module deployed. So how do we move them to multiple modules? So the addressable market within our install base accounts is big. We know that once we expand, the retention rate improves, the ARR increases dramatically. So we're very much fixated. on expansion within our installed base. Here's three examples just to give you the types of deals that we end up doing. The first is in the US, a large energy infrastructure company. It's a Fortune 500, actually eight of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies are actually our customers. So we do very well in these larger enterprises. This is one of them. They've been with us a while. They have a lot of our gear deployed and they were looking for our AI powered attack surface risk management. So it was a very nice expansion opportunity for us within this account and we won. This next one in EMEA was in the retail space. This is a customer that's been with us for a while as well. They have quite a bit of ability. They were interested in. So this was a really nice essentially. Finally, in Europe, this next new logo, which is a product prior to the launch, A lot of our capabilities, but also included why we want it was a lot of our MDR services capability. In all of these, we tend to see CrowdStrike and Microsoft, and we beat them in all of these cases. some really nice wins. Let me finish with, we feel like we're well positioned. We've laid out our road to 2027 with some long-term objectives, 2.7 billion in sales, 30% margins, 1.7 billion in enterprise hybrid ARR with a 60% Vision One attached. And then for this year, as a step along the way, We have our milestones set up and we feel like Q1 were set up well in order to meet those. Thank you so much for taking the time with me. I look forward to any questions that you might have during the Q&A. Thank you.

Next, Mr. Okima will talk about the Japanese business environment. So please.

Thank you. I will be talking about the Japan region business situation. One moment. So first, starting this year, from our side, three points, three focus areas that we have been talking to you, the enterprise business, personal business, And in the middle, we put together small to medium business. So three pillars that we will be speaking about moving forward. First, enterprise businesses, as Kevin also mentioned to us, cybersecurity area and AI powered is added on. So the customer value, continuous value is being provided. The recent economic security area, Enterprise infrastructure and supply chain risk needs to be taken into account at SOC area. Value. guideline is also coming about this managed services partner MSP and together with MSP to manage security remotely so this service type of security expansion and provision will be strengthened moving forward as well as this is moving smoothly for us. And for personal business, beyond device security is what we are doing. Number one, enterprise business, enterprise ARR growth, global, same as global, Japan, plus 7% year over year, especially trend vision one has been permeated. We are using the existing customer base. Vision One platform has been split, and we are doing more than double than same time last year.

A lot of the customers are improving as a result of using our products. The value proposition to our customers are also working. And number three, compared to the Western countries, the regulation is still by industry, the government,

regulation is not very strong yet. We were behind. Gradually, this part also is increasing compared to other regions. We may be three years behind. Japan needs to do much better. So this is an area we are catching up. Vision 1 compared to 309% is now 25-30%. Similarly, We're about 1515, so this percentage we're making up. We think in a sped up manner and customer implementation feedback. It's been quite good that they like it once they start using it, so we are getting a lot of good customer voice managed services. Vision one related technical support. 2.6 times. So customer is asking for expertise and our expertise is being appreciated and we can see the benefit. And number two, the SMB related enterprise. XDR demand is strengthening. Supply chain risk included. By industry, we see a lot of things coming down. We need to be in sync, otherwise you will not be part of the supply chain. So this is a must for many of our customers. Our SaaS type of MSP partner. Further, they can do managed XDR services. Many partners are starting this up, especially. Year-end last year, we see announcements, NTT East, NTT West included. We have very strong partners who is doing the managed XDR services. So this Q1, just in our Q1, 3,700 companies we increased by in one quarter. So we were able to do 3,700 in just one quarter suddenly. And SaaS type of endpoint security, so package type of on-prem, to SMB also. SAS type. We're switching to a managed services. Demand is strengthening. So this is a big change. A marketplace service security. AWS marketplace too. We are seeing the sales are growing.

With the device, the product, the sales rate is 20%. The old one. The old one is a little higher. It's 26%. It's a little expensive. It's 26%. It's 26%. It's 26%. It's 26%. So 20% revenue going up. Device security area, PC shipment also in this Q1. January was minus 23%. YOY minus 9% in March.

It was plus 7%, so PC shipment also is returning. So going forward, AI PC, this new demand is going to be strong. We think this will be a new solution that we can be moving into the space. AI-related, AI-related chat support test, we started operation. Using this, we can brush up and to reduce support costs. And further, customer satisfaction can also improve. Also, security and enlightenment activity. Working with public 47 prefectures, like police, institutions, law enforcement, we are doing security and enlightenment activities, as well as it's written for local municipalities, Safe and secure digital usage promotion well-being alignment agreement has been signed with these local municipalities, which we are trying to see to make sure that they are supported. That's all I have for you. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Thank you for your presentation. We'd like to move on to the Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question, please state your name and affiliation. And the audio of the Q&A session will be uploaded to the company homepage. And It would proceed that if you ask a question, you agree your identity and the questions to be disclosed on the company homepage. Also, when your microphone is unmuted, please state your name and affiliation before asking your question. I have one question.

I'm sorry, the Japanese audio is very bad.

It's inaudible and translation cannot be provided. So now we saw a big improvement in your North American business. What is the reason behind that?

Maybe I can jump in, Mahendra. Yeah, yeah, please. So we did see some incredible improvement in the performance of the business. And quite honestly, it's about a couple of different things. One is we have the team very, very focused in on our Vision 1 expansion. You know, that is just something that is really resonating in the U.S. market in particular. There's a lot of demand for XDR products. for the capabilities that it provides. So we're very fixated on that expansion potential. We did get a little bit of tailwind with a deal that had pushed from Q4, but even without the deal that had pushed from Q4 into Q1, we still grew really, really nicely based on that expansion sales motion focused on our installed base accounts.

Do you think this is sustainable?

Can you translate that again?

This trend in the US be sustainable.

Yes, we believe so. We believe it is sustainable. We completed the restructuring, as Mahendra said, in January. And part of the rationale for the restructuring was to actually make the business actually much simpler and more straightforward and everybody with clear objectives and much more accountable. So with that as the backdrop, with the sales motion of focusing on our installed base accounts and landing our vision one platform we feel like we're in a really good spot to be able to continue the growth this year also with all of the new capabilities we have we're really really set up well when i talk to customers there's really a couple of different things that come to mind. One is their environments. They feel like they have too many security vendors and it's not very effective for them in their security operations center to have so many security vendors. So they want to consolidate vendors. The second thing is with these economic times, the second thing they talk about is cost. and how I can get a better return on my investment in cybersecurity. And we address both of those things. So I think we're very well positioned. Thank you very much. Yes.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Please give us your question. Thank you. Please raise your hand if you have any questions.

SMBC Nikko Securities. Kikuchi is my name. We can hear you.

Thank you. By region. ARR. Trend. The trend of the ARR by region and the forecast going forward for each region. Overall, 7% increase. Japan, 7% plus.

Sustainable progress, growth, overall 7%. Is that correct?

By region, Japan is 7%. Japan's revenue today, and compared to pre-gap, it seems to be very strong. But the other region trend I'd like to know, outside of Japan, how are you going to increase your revenue? What are the things that you're going to do? Some, Kevin, and some I can explain. One would be by region trend, by region trend, or we don't disclose because, as Kevin said, global company revenue and those who use, there's a difference. So by region, details, the numbers to be disclosed, we want to give you an overall picture that Kevin gave you is the intent. Next, expectation. Kevin can talk about that. Okay, go ahead.

Yeah. Thank you for clarifying on the ARR, Mahendra. And what I would add is, you know, I think of the world in terms of pre-gap revenue and I like to use constant currency. And I shared the chart in my part of the presentation where I shared how we did from a regional performance perspective. And we saw double-digit growth from the AMIA region and from the Americas region. And we do have plans to continue that. Within both Europe and Japan, we will also see those increase as the year progresses. So we feel like the dynamics that we had in Q1 were significant. specifically related to how our renewal business was lining up. We also have a number of very exciting things going on in Japan in particular, how we're very focused on the enterprise business right now and our ability to expand there. So, yeah, we will see those two regions on a pre-gap basis increase as the year goes on.

Just to confirm, Japan is 7%, and likely APAC.

Europe is like a much stronger number, seems to be the recent trend. U.S. 7% for U.S. may be too low, and for Japan, the increase in revenue ARR 7% increase seems strong. The revenue going forward. Is it going to get close to 7 and then is it going to continue to grow for Japan? So those are the questions from me. Thank you. So two parts one for me. Kevin can get that global. Japan ARR is 7%, yes. ARR. The subscription business, Japan is perpetual license, a renewal business we have in Japan, so the revenue growth is not just 7%. Did that answer your question? Also, I'd like to add one point. Earlier, Mr. Omikawa, large enterprise, If we limit it to large enterprise, the discussion in Japan, large and SMB composition is like 50-50. SMB, we have a lot also. Large enterprise, we said 7% increase is what we presented. Also, going forward, outside of enterprise, Japan, we said we were coming from behind, but customer, environment, compared to Western countries way behind also our internal structure. We said we are doing organizational change and we did organizational change in Japan so that to existing customer, we want to copy the success cases from the Western countries and make it so through our organizations for large enterprises, ARR, Improvement is going higher. Having one solution, we give them another solution, a multi one. So that kind of best practice is now being deployed in Japan. For enterprise, we are able to provide one customer improvement in a big way. We think we can grow per customer for large enterprises. Thank you so much.

The only thing I would add, because your question was specifically around ARR, globally, total ARR, our total consumer plus small enterprise plus large enterprise, total ARR across the company was 6%. Within the enterprise space, total at the end of Q1 was 7%. And for large enterprise specifically, which is the largest number, it was 9%. We continue to see a lot of the growth coming from the large enterprise, and we will continue to see globally those numbers increase slightly.

Thank you very much. Next question, please.

So you did the restructuring, and going forward, I guess you will not be increasing the headcounts. But previously, I think you made a comment that to grow the revenue, so in the future, maybe next year and beyond, you might be increasing the number of people or increasing the headcounts. I think that was a comment from Kevin. And given the current situation, this year, without increasing the headcount, Would you be able to achieve the revenue target you uphold today and also for next fiscal year and the years beyond? Is there a possibility to increase the headcounts? And if so, which point would you be increasing the headcounts? Because without the increase in headcounts, the cost will not increase materially, including the marketing cost. So I want to understand the hiring plans for this year and beyond. So that's my second question. So Kevin, please.

Okay, maybe I'll start, Mahendra, and then you can jump in if you want. So during our investor conference in December of last year, we announced that we would perform restructuring. The restructuring was based on the fact that we felt like there were technological improvements some process improvements that we could implement in order to improve our overall productivity we identified around 50 million dollars u.s of savings and um i'm pleased that we ended up executing on that in q1 we got that all behind us actually it was a little bit more than even the 50 million that we had targeted But we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. That said, I feel like the innovation internally is going to continue. We're using a lot of AI internally, and we're going to continue to see that. And I think we might see the mix change ever so slightly. So, for example, I fully expect that we will be needing to hire more quota-carrying salespeople in the second half of the year as we build out towards getting ready for 2025 as an example. But we don't see an increase net in overall headcount happening. Did that answer your question?

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

That's all my questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Next question, please.

No further questions? We have no one raising their hand, so we'd like to close the Q&A. If you'd like to inquire through telephone, please look at the number on the screen, 458-88572. 03-458-88572 will be the number you should contact. Also, after the closure, we are asking for you to fill the survey. Also, give us your request for our IR day. 2024. So this concludes the Trend Micro KK 2024 Q1 presentation. So I know you are busy with other presentations, and thank you for taking time in your busy schedule to be with us.