Trend Micro Inc S/Adr

more or less as expected. And then below that, we have operating income of 8.8% and 13%. This is compared to the previous quarter. It is a lot lower, and I'm sure that we'll get questions about this. And in the purple part, you can see the answer, pre-capped numbers. So more than 100 billion in terms of net sales, up by 30% a year, pre-gap operating income was at 41.1 billion yen. Now the variable revenue, so this is related to the pre-gap revenue as well as the profit increase, so this is a biggest factor. pre-gap performance was very strong. And this is why the variable formulation changed. So the difference between pre-gap and non-pre-gap is quite big. But I'm sure that Kevin Simpson will explain this more in detail later on.

So I would like to move on to the next part.

There are some negative factors. Outside of Japan, for consumer business, we are outsourcing their online settlement payment. And the outsourcer, Little River in the United States, had a problem with its financing funding. and recovery of accounts receivable became impossible, which translated into 1.7 billion. This is deducted from the pre-gap revenue, and without that, pre-gap growth would have been 22%. Now, that's the pre-gap number, but the gap in its sales number will be affected in this fiscal year. impact of the non-recoverable AR, and also we have switched to another vendor from Little River, which means that the renewal extension will have to be applied automatically, which means that approximately 20 million or more negative impacts will be seen in the net sales. So, negative growth from the previous year, and this is one of the factors behind this.

In white, you can see Free cap, profit, liquidity, 40%.

It was at 27% one year ago. Now, we are as high as 40%.

Moving on to enterprise ARR. Enterprise subscription business growing at 15%.

But, unfortunately, the potential of that renewable energy is down to 1% growth. Oh, sorry, single-digit growth. Cash flow, no change. Headcount. In the quarter just closed, there was a minor decrease. So, at the end of 2024, We had 6,869. We had 7,423, which means that this is a big decrease. But as I mentioned before, we're not just We are trying to improve profitability by reducing the headcount. We are trying to increase efficiency of the organization and introduce new technology, specifically AI, in order to improve productivity of each employee. This is the biggest impact. And for this fiscal year, as Eva and Kevin will talk about, I'm sure. So we may be able to increase the sales by 20 million in order to get the new sales. We want to increase the headcount and also invest into AI. So this is why we are increasing the headcount. And this is the variable compensation numbers. 3.2 to 8.1, this is the selling marketing increase related to sales activities indicated in purple. And the yellow part is salary and benefits. And as you can see inside the box, pre-gap base. supporting income growth basically led to increasing bonus of 3.1 billion. This is the big factor.

And the Q4 highlight, in summary, highest ever pre-gap organic growth was observed.

And why are we saying pre-gap organic? Well, in FY2017, we saw a similar growth. But at that time, checking for business acquisition took place. And that revenue was basically added on top This is why, and it's all true, but this time round, there was no impact of acquisition.

This was a pure organic growth.

And we have seen recovery in the growth in Americas and Europe. This year, the growth rate of the Americas and Europe was seen as a problem, but We had phasing of large deals, and this was also questioned. But finally, in the Q quarter, we posted those. And for the full year, FY24, we had the highest ever net revenue and operating income. Moving on to dividends.

For annual earnings,

259 yen per share, and with a 70% payout ratio, the dividend is 184 yen per share. Compared to the previous year, it may look lower, but as you may remember, we had a special dividend payment in the previous year. So if we do an apple-to-apple comparison, 156 yen in 23 versus 184 yen this fiscal year, which means that the dividend has increased.

And for the four-year forecast, this is the basic assumption.

We will see growth in all the regions. And India will grow at 10%. Asia will grow at 10%. And the cost growth will be slower than the growth of net sales. All the cost will slightly increase. And we want to further improve the opening income for this fiscal year. and we don't expect no extraordinary items this year. ¥154 to the dollar this year versus ¥152 last year, so the impact of FX should be minimal as well. And the 6% growth in itself is expected. Now, 2027, we have road to 2027, and compared to that, you may think that this number looks small, but... enterprise revenue is still strong, showing 10% growth. Unfortunately, consumer business, because of a digital river, online payment, that had to be switched. And also, overall, in Japan, the PC business continued to struggle, and the There is a negative for the consumer business. So overall, net sales growth will be 6%. And the 25% growth, 35% growth in operating income. And the FX impact is going to be minimal. So even without the FX impact, that growth is expected to be 6%. Adding on to shareholder return, this is something that we announced last year. This is a basic policy.

So, there is no retained earnings.

All the net income will be allocated for shareholder return. This is a basic policy. Now, based on that, 184 yen dividend based on that 2.4 billion yen will be paid out in dividend this time and we still have 10 billion left in net income so we will be buying back our shares by approximately this amount and the timing of this will be decided and communicated to you later on but I just wanted to share with you the basic concept Welcome to our first analyst meeting on Trend Micro's financial report. I originally formulated this presentation as the title of Proactive Cybersecurity in the AI Era, and I believe it's a great opportunity dying ahead of us. But during the New Year's, and I think everybody, Chinese New Year, I think everybody's been deep washed by deep sick. So I changed my title to Cybersecurity Reimagined. AI, I call it the AI democratization and the path to proactive cybersecurity. But I do want to Keep the title also saying that even greater opportunity ahead of us. Let us think about Trend Micro's strategy has always been it's our North Star. It's cyber security problem equal to infrastructure change plus user behavior change and minus threat actors activity. That is our formula. And this formula has been impacted and changed by AI. Because AI actually changed the whole infrastructure stack from the hardware part from the next generation AI data center and to the software development that your platform for development actually shipped to the AI LLM model. And then also coupled with people need to rethink how do you optimize the network How does the traffic is that in the cloud, in the local, all this optimization of network and AI. So this AI change will impact and this innovation of 50, I think, will further democratize AI. Why do I say that? Because first, the new model of LLM has lower training and operational cost. And therefore, it can run on cheaper hardware. Its efficiency comes from redesign of the software architecture. And also, its open source and highly accessible nature will make developers can use this LLM as their own base and further development on it. And therefore, that can be developed more domain-specific models to be deployed by smaller enterprise not just very large enterprise can use AI but smaller or even small business and even consumers mobile devices can have a local model of this AI so we think this saying that In the past one year, two years, everybody focusing on the AI innovation for the hardware improvement of the computing power. But now this innovation will shift to software redesign based on the new AI model. So we think all of this will create a rise of the AI-enabled edge computings. means that the AI local model will run on cheaper server and software and so company enterprise that concerned about the privacy sovereignty will be able to host their own AI in their local data center and on a cheaper hardware and also even the consumer, they can download this AI onto their endpoint, their mobile devices and not concerned about their privacy being leaked out. So that's why I call it is the AI democratization. And this would certainly reshape our cybersecurity because all of these agents sitting on all the local machines does need security. and how do you secure all these local agents. It will require a lot of knowledge about utilizing AI and also understand the possible threats against all these AI models. Trend Micro has been invested In AI, we have our specialized cybersecurity LN model, which we call it Train Cybertron, and we have used it to enable train companion on the Vision 1 console and also utilize it to predict the attack path, which is the base for what I call proactive cybersecurity. Because we can utilize this, therefore, cybersecurity can shift from a purely reactive mode to a proactive mode. That is what proactive cybersecurity means. Security and AI is combined together. One change, the other must change. And when one is democratized, then cybersecurity needs to follow where AI goes. and therefore provide the best security for each of the layers, from the user behavior, user, how do they use their AI on their endpoint, and the network, how do customers will utilize AI or the local edge computing to provide AI for themselves, and the infrastructure, how would the cloud provider provide the different model of AI All of this, up to the data layer, all will change what security control needs to be. And I am very excited and very proud that Trend Micro, after so many years investing in AI, we already have all this security control stack already there. And we can utilize our Trend Micro Vision 1 platform to deploy and expand all of this security control for all our customers' AI infrastructure. So this leads to, we believe, the shift in paradigm because cybersecurity for so long has been always spending all the money on reactive mode. We spend on response, detection, protection, but only 5 to 10% was spending on proactive. Because before, we don't have the AI structure to do the prediction. And therefore, we cannot do proactive. But now, with AI democratization, it's Very possible, very feasible that we can enable all our customers using AI to take proactive mode cybersecurity. And that proactive cybersecurity will prevent a breach before it happens. What is the better mean time to detect or mean time to respond? minus, it's minus mean time to detect and minus time of mean time to respond. And therefore, we can reduce the instance response cost and downtime shift from reactive overspending to smart predictive defense and addressing AI-driven threats with AI-powered defense. That's what we call proactive cybersecurity, and 2025, I would say that's proactive cybersecurity start right here, right now. Trend Micro already have our Vision 1 as the platform for all of this proactive cybersecurity by connecting all the points. When you want to do proactive cybersecurity, you need to connect the dots. you cannot have silos solution for security, and Trend Micro already have bring our expertise from endpoint, cloud, network, email, identity, AI, data security, all connected together and presented in one vision for security operation, and that's our vision one. I'm very excited about 2025, and I believe that AI democratization lays an even bigger opportunity for proactive cybersecurity, and that is what we will bring to our customers in 2025. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin Simzer, and I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Trend Micro. I'm here to give you a quick update on our 2024 Q4 and fiscal year performance. If you've been following us at all in the media, you will see that we're sticking to our DNA, all things innovation. We're known as cybersecurity threat experts, and we continue to talk about that, as well as our strategic alliance with NVIDIA and how we're leveraging their technology in order to consume that in our overall platform while protecting AI infrastructure for our customers. We're so pleased with our Q4 and our full-year performance We started the year out and we said that we really wanted to do double digit top line growth. And we wanted to do that while improving the overall operating margin substantially. And we did both of those. Fiscal year up 10% year over year. Operating margin now sits at 18%. Really nice performance overall. Where the top line growth came from, in particular, was in the enterprise business. You can see the enterprise business up 12% year-over-year for the year, Q4 up 10% year-over-year. And that's all in the back of Vision One and the strength of that platform being adopted by our installed base accounts. The consumer business, we said at the start of the year, it was not about top line growth. It was about improving the overall profitability. And the way we were going to do that is we were going to increase the ARPU. We were going to do fewer multi-year transactions. And that would cause a softening of the top line. But that we would stay focused in on that in order to improve the overall operating performance at the bottom line while we innovated. And I'll talk about that in a second. Our total recurring revenue across all three segments now sits at 1.7 billion U.S. That's up plus 5% year over year. And you can see the three segments in this chart, large enterprise, small enterprise, and consumer. Large enterprise at 1.1 billion and plus 8%. That's the majority of our recurring revenue. And that is from customers with over 500 seats or more. We also made improvements on the overall income statement. We did the top-line double-digit growth that we set out to do. We reduced our COGS and improved our overall gross margin. We did the double-digit growth while reducing our overall sales and marketing expense through a very set of methodical and calculating set of reductions that we made in order to make sure we could still drive the top line. We did. We also did this while continuing to innovate quite heavily. You can see that we actually increased our overall research and development. And cybersecurity is so important that you continue to reinvest back in the platform in order to stay one step ahead of those threat actors. And we drove the operating margin improvement. So this was a very good step towards our road to 2027. In the enterprise business, the tagline we're using is proactive security starts here, and that's so important. There's a ton of money being spent from companies like us on defensive measures. Very little money right now is being spent on proactive, but that is the future, and that's what we've implemented inside our market-leading platform. So we have the ability to actually help customers predict where threat actors may come, and you can put compensating controls in place. So incredible innovation. This platform can run in a public cloud environment, on a private cloud, or in an on-premise environment. Also very unique in the cybersecurity market space to support all three of those deployment models. It's not just us saying great things about our platform. Market-leading worldwide industry analysts continue to ring praise on us around the performance of our platform. I am so happy to see All of our regional teams performed so well in Q4. These are pre-gap numbers in a common currency, so you get a true reflection of the performance of the business. Up 24% year-over-year in Q4 in the enterprise segment, so really strong performance overall. across all four regions. And I know many of you ask, well, what about the U.S. specifically in the Americas? In the U.S. specifically, we're up 19% year-over-year in Q4. So strong performance across the board. Enterprise recurring revenue now at $1.3 billion. That's up plus 7%. How we're tackling small enterprise is we have hundreds of thousands of small enterprise customers. And the way we reach them is through MSP partners. And several years ago, we started selling them an advanced package that included XDR capabilities. What we realized was actually they actually had an appetite for even more than what we were offering. And on October 14th of last year, we introduced Vision One to those MSP partners. And we now have 85 of those MSP partners transacting using our Vision One platform. So we feel like that is the future for us and that we'll be in a much better spot for us to be able to help those customers out and compete in that MSP partner space. In large enterprise, in 2024, we were very focused on our install base for good reason. We have over 27,000 large enterprises, and the mission was to have conversations with them around security operations. This report that just came out in January from a market-leading industry analyst firm called Enterprise Strategy Group. You can see the priorities that customers have for 2025. And it lines up with everything that we do, including the second row. We just announced that we will be entering the SIM space. We'll be using our EDR, XDR, our data lake technology, but we will be adding SIM and SOAR capabilities to it, and that will allow us to go after those legacy SIM vendors and expand our overall addressable market. Right now, in our installed base account, our addressable market sits at $7.3 billion U.S. That's opportunity that exists in our installed base accounts. We also said at the investor conference in 2025, we will be opening up the aperture to actually go after new logos. The sales motion has been crystal clear. Go out to our enterprise accounts, have conversations with them about security operations center and help them land with Vision One, and we measure it in terms of attachment. We're up at very close to 40% attachment now. Added 1,200 customers, did a nice job of increasing the ARR, and we do that because we know we can expand. The NRR is far higher once we get Vision One landed. We see it when they start adopting modules. not only does the retention rate increase, but so too does the ARR. In fact, at the end of the year, our module count, actually our average number of modules on all of our Vision 1 customers sat at 4.8. So we're really doing a nice job of getting more and more of our platform turned on and enabled within those customers. We also found out something rather interesting, which is one of the modules is called this cyber risk exposure management module. And when a customer has that, they actually have a higher likelihood of deploying even more modules because that triggers more compensating controls. So we'll have a big priority in 2025 to land with this module in those customers. The large enterprise recurring revenue sits at $1.1 billion and up 8% year over year. And we're really fixated on customers that are not on Vision One and how we're getting them connected to the overall Vision One platform. So we're moving them and giving them a place to go by getting connected to Vision One. And that allows us to pull them in to the overall Vision One family. Four good customer examples in the U.S. We had a really nice win where we actually replaced a SIM. LogRhythm was deployed in an existing customer of ours. They realized the power of our XDR and the data lake that we have, and they decided to actually not renew their SIM vendor and use us instead. So this is an example where we're moving into the SIM space, and we already have wins. In Europe, it's a manufacturer where we really had a fantastic win, $440,000 of subscription business and a nice expansion with platform adoption. And EMEA, a large, large chemical company, they actually needed our help. They were overwhelmed from a security standpoint. They had a lot of silos and they really wanted to pull things together. And our AI platform gave them that vehicle to be able to do that. And finally, in Japan, a manufacturer. And this team really lacked the security expertise. They had troubles hiring. And they really loved our unified platform because it was a lot easier for them to use. And they picked up our managed services as well that we offer, our managed detection and response. So we are their second set of eyes. And we can help support and supplant them. their team in the off hours. So four nice wins, all expansions across the globe. Now switching gears to consumer. Like I said, consumer, the plan was not to drive top line growth. We were very fixated on two things. We were driving improvements in the overall operating margin, and we were doing that by increasing the ARPU, doing less multi-year transactions, We were also spending time innovating. We took this AI technology and some things we had built around deepfake detection, and we started pointing it at this new category of things called anti-scam. While we will continue to protect consumer endpoints themselves, In 2024, we also embarked on a mission to go beyond device protection, and we started to explore using AI technology, some of our deepfake detection capabilities, how we could address this new market, this new area that consumers are feeling pain in and around scams. How could we build some anti-scam technology? Early indicators are the telemetry that we're getting from From the deployments we've seen in Australia, we've had massive numbers of downloads. In Japan, we're starting to see more and more consumption of this offering. So we see this as high potential. What that means is that we will continue to try and find ways to drive some top-line growth in the consumer business. And we will be making some incremental investments in the consumer business in 2025, specifically around... replacing our e-commerce platform, the one that Mahindra referred to, but also around getting more adoption of this anti-scam technology that we've built. The road to 2027 remains the same. $2.1 billion in ARR is our target, and this 30% margin is what we're marching towards. It may not be in a straight line as we move towards that 30% margin. Like I said, we may find ourselves in situations where we do find that we will have to invest a little bit more in order to go after something that we think is right for our end customers. But this remains our North Star. This is what we are marching towards is this road to 2027. Thank you, everyone. I look forward to your questions at the end.

Thank you.

So I would like to start my presentation on Japan business update.

So this is how things were in 2024.

So it's a recap. And first, domestic enterprise segment is what I would like to talk about.

Highlights.

As Kevin already talked about, more than 500 customers are here in this segment, and the sales ratio there increased by 21%, 61% growth. year-on-year in new sales because of the Vision One that has been mentioned already. Japan lags behind, but it is growing, and security operations is one area where our product has been spreading and taking root. And also, a new sales model, as you can see here, includes Vision One Credit and AWS Marketplace, private offers through which multi-year comprehensive contracts are concluded. Local governments as well as enterprise users are getting micro-solutions over multiple years, and this used to be more in the U.S. or in Europe. However, Since last year, users are starting to purchase services in this fashion. And Trend Micro Vision 1, we're growing customers. Year-on-year growth is 34%. And the Vision 1 users, there is a unit price increase, or sales per unit is increasing. And for the existing customers, I mentioned 500 seats or more, and there are many such users in Japan. And of those customers, the Vision 1 attachment rate has reached 20%. And actually, for higher-end enterprises, the ratio of attachment is higher. And Olight includes – well, it relates to the focus that we had on existing users, their new user acquisition flowdown. And for users with 500 to 1,000 seats, yes, we were – really focusing on those bigger customers. Therefore, slower growth in sales to mid-tier customers. Now, less than 500 seats. Well, let me talk about SMBs. Highlight sales growth in SMB was 9% higher year-on-year, and security services business growth. 16% year-on-year growth and customer base. We have been growing constantly. And in 2023, Q4, around that time frame, we started providing this XDR service through MSP partners, and that increased in 2024. So if you just compare Q4 against Q4, year-on-year growth is 618% plus growth. And so the major S&P partners are providing XDR managed services, and they are growing that business very steadily. In addition, CloudEdge, which is hardware service that are also added onto this, Now, low light. Well, major key partners are growing. However, the growth in sales from mid-tier partners has been rather low. So that's the low light. And full-year business, this is how it was. So sales growth in enterprise year-on-year growth was 10%. Vision 1 is spreading. So the sales... The pattern has changed, and more customers are purchasing this, and Vision 1 has been growing throughout the year. And low light, as before, we focused on particular customers, and therefore there was some low growth in other parts of the existing customer base. And for small businesses, less than 500 seats, Actually, there was growth steadily, and MSP partner, they're steady, and XDR services sales have been increasing steadily as well. So these are highlights. Low light has to do with the mid-tier partners because we were focusing on the key partners, and therefore that's the low light. Now, 2025, enterprise overall, what I can say is that we are – a growing Vision 1 on a global scale and security operation is catching up in Japan as well and there is accumulation of references and we would like to leverage such references so that we can win new customers this year. So that's our strategy for 2025 and through Vision 1 security operations center platform will be one so that we can enhance the units price increase, and we can actually see the customers directly, therefore we will gain trust. And for MSBs, or rather SMBs, As Kevin mentioned, Vision 1 is threading, working through the MSP partners, and so in addition to the existing customers, we are going to further promote the introduction of Vision 1 in 2025. So we will focus there. Now, consumers. Next. Beyond device security product is mentioned here. Virus buster. But rather than virus, this is now fraud buster or scam buster. We are growing that in Japan 34% right now with the ratio of sales growth. And for Q4... PC sales have seen a slight recovery, a slight though. Now, we're engaged in various security awareness activities. 47 prefectures there are in Japan, but we have very close connections with over 30 prefectures. prefectures, mainly the police agencies and departments. And throughout 2024, it's not really that different from what I already talked about, so I will skip this. And then for consumer fiscal 2025 business strategy, we're going to really focus on the new non-violence buster, but the scam buster and the other strategies anti-scam related products and services. We're going to focus on that in developing our businesses. We will take proactive measures so that this new consumer business can be established and expanded. So we are taking measures towards that. Therefore, a consumer's business in 2025, of course, we will try to keep the existing customers, but we will go after New customers with the anti-scam products and services, the image and the brand of Trend Micro hopefully will take a stronger root in the minds of these companies, or rather the customers, and we're trying to spread the use of our products. And so this is the end of my presentation about Japan Business Update. Thank you very much.

I have two questions. Price 60. Opening income 60.3 billion.

23% increase. This is great. And last fiscal year, and this fiscal year, the revenue and the profit, no surprise, but 60.7, sorry, 6.3 billion. Also cost is, well, 228. and only 1.7% growth from the previous year. Considering inflation, this growth seems to be very small. even against the net sales growth. So, on page 11, you have a cost breakdown. Can you please explain, according to this, why is the total cost only going up by 2%? Which one is going up and which ones are going down? This is my question. That's my first question.

Yes, I would like to respond to that question.

As you have mentioned, inflation is, of course, there. But... salaries, headcount related expenses will continue to go up. This is our estimation. But as you can see in the slide, cloud related expenses and also outsourcing. These are the areas where we can pursue more efficiency. So expenses that we are paying to the outside players by improving the productivity, we can reduce that. And also internally, we have admin expenses and other expenses that can be controlled better. Cloud expenses. This should go up according to the sales of your service to the client, no? Yes, but as Eva said, with new AI, we can make the use more efficient. And with the critical advancements, we can increase the efficiency of use of cloud as well. Right. Pre-gap growth is very strong. Obviously, into the next fiscal year, PRECAP net sales related incentive will be also higher. Is that already reflected in your forecast?

Yes.

In the case of PRECAP, we have to wait until the very end. But yes, we have accounted for some of that already.

I see.

Thank you.

Second question.

Omikawa-san, I think you have explained this in one of your slides. XER growth.

680% of this XER through NFC partners.

But in terms of the absolute sales amount, is this for beginners for us to account for that, for the calculation? Well, we only started two years ago. And this is monthly charges, monthly numbers. So you may think that this number is a surprise, but surprising. This is more than 100 million, and we will be accumulating this every month, month after month.

I see.

MSP partners. What kind of partners are you talking about? Otsuka, RICO, and... Ah,なるほどね。 I see. And SMEs are growing because of them.

Yes.

They're starting new managed services. Vision 1 for NSP is a new module. A new module is being added. And we have high expectations for those as well. When, not only at the timing of the installment, but also on a monthly basis, do they charge fees too? Yes, sometimes it's an annual payment, sometimes it's monthly payment. It depends on the partner, on the reseller. You see the potential here. This has just started, so it's difficult for us to guess. Economic security, supply chain risk, our government is focused on that, and the regulations are now tightening in Japan as well, like in other countries. dependency is now higher and the environment is becoming more complex. Therefore, we believe that this potential is growing. So, roughly speaking, I was talking about 1 billion or 10 billion in 3 years or 5 years down the line. SMB for the fourth quarter is more than 3 billion already. And in the past, as you may know, Ueno-san, it was not double-digit, but we had growth from a 5 and 10. Now, Vision 1 for MSP is new. We have a new module that's been added. which means that we can target the volume zone of the plan. Of course, the enterprise business is still bigger, but the government business is steadily growing as well, and the size is growing.

But for the volume zone, we're talking about the annual revenue of a certain number.

And maybe it's not as big as 10%, but hopefully close to that should be expected for SMB in Japan.

I see.

That's very clear. That's all from me. Thank you. Excuse me. May I take a little bit of time to just... Talk about Q4 and talk about our business model, the whole transformation. First of all, I think you all see our Q4 performance was very strong. Usually a software company, you cannot see, it's like a bump up pre-gap revenue, right? But this is the nature of our platform performance. transformation has started and start to get into the flywheel it already started turning so platform business model versus before our software distribution model will be very different no matter is the cost the speed the customer adoption and how they committed to this platform the whole measurement is quite different than before our software distribution. For instance, you can see our pre-gap is very different than our post-gap. And also, our ARR seems like, hey, if your pre-gap is so strong, how come your ARR did not grow so strong? It's because in all these pre-gap revenue, a lot of it, More, more percentage come from multiple year committed contract. So customer willing to commit and buy multiple year on our platform, not because of discount, not because we offer discount for multiple year, but because they believe this is their strategic partner and they want to make sure they can get more my share from 10 Micro. And that's why we've seen a lot of customers, we become their strategic partner. Even like a government sector, we become their framework provider, their framework contract in there. I think this is a very important transformation for Trend Micro that we completed moving onto platforms. Also, I just come back from Europe attending the AI Action Summit in Paris and also in Munich for the MSC. Those are the very important cyber sectors, cyber security sectors, especially for government and others. country leaders are there. And I would say everybody is investing in AI. This is a tremendous transformation for the whole country. And this AI wave is going to change a lot of our software business. Software business before was platform on, say, operating system and then using later it become cloud API. But now, the software platform is ARLM. It's AI model. So, a lot of jump of, I think, a lot of application and usage will jump the dimension. Actually, Even I was listening to NATO's CIO talking about their whole acceptance of the new software. They say, we realize that we cannot use compliance as regulatory to restrict the AI anymore. We need to get on to the speed of adoption with the AI. These are a very different business model that we are getting into. So for Trend Micro, I think we have been investing in AI on the technology part. But next step we will see, or maybe investors will see, is our business model also starting to change. I know you asked how come your costs only increased 2%. even not cope up with the inflation but that's the new business model that's the possibility that could change I don't know how it would be but I know it will become faster and faster in the whole AI adoption and cyber security of course need to get to their speed and try micro I believe is the the best position in this whole transformation because our, we already seen because of AI sovereignty and something they call even some country are talking about IT sovereignty and therefore they are pulling back from cloud rather than everything go to cloud, they are thinking about going hybrid or even back on-prem, and trend Microsoft investment in hybrid strategy plays the best to meet this type of transformation. So those are the things that I'd like to highlight about Q4. It's not just one quarter bump, and we have a big quarter. It's actually... the transformation already starting and this flywheel already starts to turn. And allow me to say also one thing about consumer business. I think, of course, consumer is a low light in our Q4, but taking this opportunity, I think consumer also, before we are PC attached and it's antivirus focused, But now we are transforming to anti-scam, and it's mobile device focused, and we were able to start in the B2B2C business model. So 2024, actually we plan to invest more on consumer business transformation because we believe this is also another big change. that will be happening on the consumer computing device and computing behavior. So that's why you will see in our 2025 planning, we do put in more investment and money. We want to rebuild our digital distribution platform and focus on the mobile platform. advice and understand business. So those are the... I think I made a video one week ago, but within one week there's already so much change happening that I'd like to just give a update.

Thank you very much, and I appreciate a lot of information you just gave us. Yes, sales from 10%, 20% increase might happen in the future. At least that's my hope, so thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Another person with a hand up, I will unmute you. Wait just a moment, please.

Morgan Stanley, can you hear me?

Yes, we can. I have two questions. The pre-gap, multi-year or large-scale contracts or deals are included, and so the mindset of the customers is supporting that. Now, is it... And likely that this will continue. Are there large-scale contracts included? And in the United States, for example, I think this has been looked at. What I mean is the weaning pattern recently. What are your weaning patterns? If you can elaborate on those aspects as well, I would appreciate it.

Maybe I can start, and perhaps Eva or Mahendra or Omakawa will jump in. Okay. Yes, the pre-gap numbers up 24% in the enterprise business were quite strong. And as Mahendra and Eva did talk about, multi-year transactions is something that we're doing more and more of. I don't know if you remember or not, but at the investor conference one year ago, we had made a decision that we would – to modify our sales compensation plans. And the reason why we did that was we could foresee that customers really wanted to cement their relationship with us as they were adopting a platform versus a product. So we modified the compensation plan, which allowed our quota-carrying salespeople to actually be much more focused in on growing the overall size of the opportunity within that customer, and that included multi-year transactions. So we did see it up five percentage points. So we have been measuring how much we do in multi-year transactions for 15 years, and it's been roughly the same, 32%. We're up at 37% of our transactions now are multi-year, so we're at five percentage points. So we definitely saw an increase, and we see that continuing. We did... make a tweak to the compensation plan going into 2025. So potentially it's not quite as lucrative for salespeople. So we'll see some relaxing of that. At the end of the day, we're doing what the customer wants to be done, and they want to secure their position in our platform. They want to make sure they've got the pricing established over that period, so they're the ones that really want to make the commitments. Overall, million-dollar-plus deals are definitely up, and we see that continuing. And in 2024, we did do the biggest deal in the history of the company. It was in the hundreds of millions, and we booked $20 million in Q4 specifically for that one deal. So, yes, we're seeing larger and larger transactions, and we see that continuing.

And I'd like to add that before, usually we don't want to take too many multiple-year deals because it's always by discount, the customer asking for discount. But this time, customer want this multiple-year deal because they want to get more mindset from Trend Micro, more interaction as a strategic partner with Trend Micro. Platform and AI enable software to do something that is impossible before, which is customizable but scalable. Before, it packaged software very scalable, or you need to customize. You write a code for a specific customer that is not profitable that way. But with AI and platform, that's what customers want. They like to have more deep relationship with us so that we can understand their need better and help them customize their cybersecurity. But that customization in front micro because of utilizing the platform and the AI technology, we will not increase our R&D costs at the level to deliver that. That is why this type of a bigger, larger, larger long-term commitment deal will increase, and Trend Micro will be able to support this type of need by utilizing the AI and platform technology.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

And just to confirm, the pre-gap numbers this time, local currency basis in Q4, is that 80%? Am I correct? Is it 18%? 1.8? Okay. On page 30, yes, as you see on the material. Well, maybe large enterprise. Actually, there were some segmentations. Maybe there might have been some difference in the percentages, but yes, what you see in the materials are correct according to that definition. On page 5, pre-gap, 20% is mentioned overall, but this time... This impact of this receivable is not recovered, so that's considered 20%. But local currency base, 80%. Local currency base, well, in Mahindra's material, the latter half has been omitted, but your question, Mr. Tanaka, has to do... with this part that I am trying to look for. Sorry, I cannot show it right now, but on page 30 of Mahendra's presentation, yes, plus 24%, and... Minus 13. So enterprise, local currency base, 24% is the number that you should look for. Okay. Thank you. And as for this fiscal year pre-GAAP plan, what is your expected growth? What is your expectation?

The management should answer that question.

Pre-GAAP forecast is not shared. As I said, pre-GAAP numbers, it's difficult to estimate. And therefore, on a quarterly basis, we're going to disclose numbers. Okay. Now, finally, global online commerce transaction players. So... So 1.769 billion was the number. So the losses incurred as a result of unrecoverable receivables, has that been already addressed or handled or is it yet to happen?

Well, Kanaka-san?

Yes, it was posted in the sales plan. In the balance sheet, the deferred revenue, actually, that was not included, so it was not included, but the gap revenue this year will be determined accordingly. Yes, as Negi-san mentioned, accounting-wise, Thank you for numbers. In KL, maybe the loss is about $100 million. That is included in sales and SG&A. And consumers, for a year, we will actually post it for free gaps. We have to cancel what we have posted, and so the impact on sales was minimal, and so unrecovered receivables, 100 million, so that is offset, the number, and so by canceling what was to appear in 2025 has been offset. So it is actually included in this number that Mr. Arnegi has put in here. So accounting has been taken care of already in 2024. So this amount is... opportunity for profit. Yes.

And also the online payments...

we have to actually choose one to replace this. And there is this time gap, so about 20 million US dollar worth of clothes will be sold. So that's the impact in fiscal 2025. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Can I meet the next person? This is Sato, Sheffield Securities. Can you hear me? Yes. I have two quick questions. I'm supposed to have two full operating income and costs. the profit will be bigger than this. But in terms of cost, the salaries has gone up. So the pre-gap was good and that's why you have to pay bigger bonus and that was posted in the first quarter. Is that the correct understanding? And also, Sales and marketing. Sorry, I didn't catch what was said earlier about payment. Fees had to be paid in bigger amounts, and that pushed up the cost. Are these the two major factors behind the higher labor expenses? That's my first question. Yes, you're correct. Okay, thank you. Second question. And this fiscal year guidance tells single-digit growth in Europe and America. I understand that this is a bottom-up and causally, but I think this guidance may be too conservative.

What would you say?

Well, enterprise double-digit growth is expected, but the consumer will not grow as much. Well, consumer impact is big only in Japan, and there's heavy in consumer business in Europe, and there's most consumer business in the United States. Yes, we do have consumer business in the United States, which will be impacted by this as well. I see. So you said that you'll be investing into consumer business as well. And the PC replacement cycle will be quite active in 2025, I think, in Japan. And I think that this is a good unit for the consumer business to grow again in Japan. But we have to see how it goes. But generally speaking, Japan's consumption is not really growing. We are setting through GFMs. And I don't think they're very strong right now. But as you said, if the consumer mindset changes at one point, and the PC sales start to grow, then we can benefit from that growth. So Otsuka said that they would sell about 2 million this year, 2 million units. They're very aggressive. Can't you work with them? Well, enterprise versus consumer, I think there is a difference. Oh, I see. There's a gap. Yes, there's a gap. Okay, Omika, let me ask you. Can you see the investment cycle for enterprise? Is that counted as enterprise rather than consumer?

Yes, that's correct.

Some people use it purely for consumer purposes, but it's counted as SMB sales. Oh, I see. So if it goes to big camera, it's counted as consumer? Yes. If it's GSM, like big camera, then it's counted as consumer business. Oh, I see. In that case, I did not know that. Thank you very much for the email. Well, AIPC each time. We'll have to wait until fourth quarter for the shipment each time. I see. I look forward to that.

That's all from me. Thank you. I will unmute the next person. Speaking, I have a question. There were a lot of questions about pre-job top line. I would like to ask you about the cost of this term. For the labor cost of $1 billion, that is an increase from the previous year. year, is that five times increase is my understanding. Well, you're increasing, well, it's a question to understand that you're not going to increase headcount, therefore labor costs will not increase? And non-operating parts in the past two years, equity in loss, I think there was that piece. But is that the same this time this year in your guidance? I think there is this loss likely to happen in non-operating loss.

So what is that?

And the tax ratio, I assume, is quite high. That's typically the case, but is there any tax-related... concerns are you just being conservative or are you expecting the regular level of taxation okay I think there are different questions so labor cost can you repeat your question about labor cost okay labor cost I have two questions in that so the Q4 that just ended What's increased is the $3.1 billion that was an increase in the performance-oriented or base remuneration. Excluding that, there has not been that much of an increase. Yes, that is included in that 3.1 billion. And selling and marketing, self-commission is included there. Therefore, variable compensations, just limiting to that, that is 3.1 billion plus. what you see above. Okay. And for this year, headcount is to increase. Is that the plan? Yes, that's our plan.

Then the labor cost will increase accordingly, yes, but at this point we have to think about productivity and

organizational, signing of the organization, it's not going to grow as much as the revenue growth. And non-operating, I think there was this operating versus recurring numbers being different. Now, what are included in this So, the term that just ended. Okay, let me address the second question. The second question that you asked, the non-operating part. Yes, you're correct in your understanding. Our affiliates, the equity method losses and is included but as of now we're not assuming anything there so we're assuming that there will be several hundred billion in the loss there and the ratio of taxation you might think that it's assumed at a higher level however about 32 or 33% is assumed we're assuming a reduction 2024, as you know, we did pay for the corporate tax from the past years, and so ostensibly that made it look higher, but that was no longer the case. and therefore it will come to the normal level. Now, what's different is the dividend from the subsidiaries that will come, the dividends will come to Japan, and that ratio... tax ratio is higher. Therefore, compared to four or five years ago, on the surface, it looks like the tax ratio being higher. However, that is because of the fact that we're bringing all the dividends from the subsidiaries. So, again, 25 to 24, the tax ratio will come down is what we're assuming. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Any other questions? Yes. Yes, I will unmute you. This is Henderson from JPMorgan Securities. I have two questions.

First of all, you talked about your AI initiative, and the AI project module actually already existed from before.

But now, what has changed because of DeepSeek? And I think the module maybe went down and like self-force, agent-force business model.

Is that what we should expect?

That's my first question about AI. Kevin, do you want to take this one? Are you asking about customer implementing AI, their costs will go down?

You'll cut it for your Right, product.

Okay. Using AI, it will make my product development cost, I should say, it's not the cost go down, it's the speed of implementation much faster, the coding part. And therefore, we can, we will be able to provide customer with more customized solution without increasing the cost. Is that the question?

Yes, thank you.

Maybe I'll just – can I just comment on what Eva – so Eva covered that side of it. The other side is that we think about with DeepSeek and what it's – Eva used the term democratization. So what DeepSeek did is it all of a sudden demonstrated to the world that AI is not just for large government and very large enterprises. Actually, it can be made available to all enterprises. It's also being made available to threat actors. So it's important for even more companies to be adopting AI. And one of the powerful capabilities of our platform is that we can protect a customer's AI environment. If there's more customers that are deploying AI, that gives us more opportunities to protect them. Does that make sense?

Yes, thank you. And I guess additional to that, is it, do you have, could I like, I guess, imagine this as a server, that you would add a service like an AI agent on your platform. Is that the correct way to take it in the longer term?

Actually, in our AI platform, we already have something we call a Cybertron. It's our own specialized cyber security llm and that concept is very similar to what uh dipstick is it's a domain it's more um deducted reasoning matter and able to explain why we come to this conclusion that type of uh channel thought um design model so Yes, we already in our region one, there is a cyber, which is our cyber security specialized and built inside.

Thank you very much. And second question.

I'm sorry, but for the purpose of recording, could you ask?

Yes, my second question.

In the United States, I understand you have multiple large deals in the United States. Are these brand new deals, or is this a store-based signing up for a large-scale platform multi-year contract? Which one is it?

Maybe I'll take that one. Matthew, perhaps I misspoke, but two things with your question. Number one is, globally, we are doing more and more multi-year transactions. That's a byproduct of our platform and the tailwind, the flywheel starting to spin faster. So we're doing more and more multi-year transactions in particular. That incredibly large... transaction that I talked about, that was in Europe. But in the U.S., specifically to your question, yes, we are doing multi-year transactions as well. And for the most part, it tends to be with our installed base accounts. So we've been very, up until the end of 2024, we've been very fixated on our installed base accounts. We did add 1,200 new logos, but we've been very fixated on our installed base accounts. You're going to see us in 2025 open the door more to some very targeted programs, going after some new logos by leveraging our ecosystem partners. Like our strategic alliance folks, like NVIDIA, like AWS, like Google GCP, we will be leveraging those big partners in order to help us get some new logos. We will also be leveraging some very specialized value-added resellers globally. So, yeah, that is our initiative in 2025. Thank you very much.

That's very clear. That's all from me.