Getty Realty Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
February 12, 2025

There are 13 speakers on the call.

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the SimilarWeb Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year twenty twenty four Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Rami Myerson, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Operator

Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. Welcome, everyone, to our fourth quarter twenty twenty four earnings conference call. Joining me today are our CEO and Co Founder, Earl Ofel and our CFO, Jason Schwartz. Yesterday, after market close, we released our results for the fourth quarter and and published a discussion of our results in a letter to shareholders, as well as an investor presentation with a strategic overview of the business on our Investor Relations website at ir.simulaweb.com. Certain statements made on the call today constitute forward looking statements, which reflect management's best judgment based on the currently available information.

Speaker 1

These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from our expectations. Please refer to our earnings release and our most recent annual report filed on Form 20 F for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from our forward looking statements. Additionally, certain non GAAP financial measures will be discussed on the call today. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available in the earnings release and the earnings presentation. We will begin with Aure and Jason's highlights of the quarter and then we will open up the call to questions from sales side analysts.

Speaker 1

With that, I'll turn the call over to Aure. Aure, please go ahead.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Remi, and welcome everyone joining the call today. I'm extremely proud of the financial results for the fourth quarter and the 2024 that we reported yesterday. Revenue for the year of nearly $250,000,000 was up 15% year over year and for Q4 was up 16% year over year. Overall NRR was 101% and for the over 100,000 ARR customer, the NRR was 112%, up from 111 in Q3 and 107% for last year. Our customer base grew 17% year over year ending with more than 5,500 ARR customers.

Speaker 2

In Q4, we signed 15 customer contracts, each of which were seven digit contract value. Our top line demand remains strong with more than 10,000,000 visitors to our website on a monthly basis and more than 120,000,000 users visiting our similar website in 2024. I'm encouraged by two new customer relationship with companies that are global leaders in the financial sector. In December, we announced that S and P Global, a leader in credit scoring and risk management analytics, will begin to integrate similar web digital data into its credit risk analysis. And today, I'm also excited to share that Bloomberg Professional Services has entered into a multi year agreement to supply similar web digital data to Bloomberg terminal subscribers.

Speaker 2

I believe that these deals highlights the strength and the versatility of our data assets as alternative data for investors. But 2024 was not only about revenue and customer growth. We also demonstrate our disciplined execution as a top line growth accelerated. We delivered our first full financial year of non GAAP operating profit and free cash flow. And I'm super proud that we delivered a rule of 26 performance for the full year of 2024 with a great mix of accelerating growth and improving profitability.

Speaker 2

As a leading supplier of digital data, the AI evolution presents a significant opportunity for similar web. High quality, comprehensive, actionable and trusted data like SimilarWeb is critical component for every AI and LLM tech stack. The AI revolution present opportunity for our digital data with many new use case. Last quarter, I discussed about four different opportunities for us to capitalize and monetize the generative AI opportunity. The first one is embedding AI solution into our own platform.

Speaker 2

The second one is helping brands navigate the shift in consumer behavior driven by increased of the use of the chatbots and all those brands need this visibility and they come to us. The third one is providing fresh data for LLM training and the last one is stream internal process and make more efficiency internally in our company. To capitalize on this huge growth opportunity, we have decided to ramp up our investment in R and D and our go to market teams. We plan to increase our investment in R and D to enhance our data collection and measurement for the new Gen AI world and continue to develop additional products and solution as companies require to compete and win in this new world. We are also investing in our go to market teams, hiring people across all the geographies, as well as upskilling and expanding our sales force to capture the opportunity present by the AI revolution and the high demand we are seeing in top of our funnel.

Speaker 2

I believe that we are still only starting to realize the potential of our data and the addressable market we serve. This investment will reduce our operating profit in the short term, but I believe it will enable us to continue to accelerate growth and capitalize on the growth opportunity. As we have demonstrated, we know how to drive efficiency and scale and believe that this is the right time for us to make those investments. And as I like to say, we are just getting started.

Speaker 3

Thank you to everyone on the call for continued support. And with that, I will turn the call over to Jason. Thanks, Orr, and everyone joining us on the call today to discuss our fourth quarter results. I'll provide highlights of our financial performance and then we'll open up the call to questions. We generated $65,600,000 of revenue in Q4, a 16% increase relative to the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 3

For the full year of 2024, we generated $249,900,000 of revenue, representing 15% growth over 2023. Revenue from our $100,000 ARR customers increased and represents 61% of our overall ARR. The number of $100,000 ARR customers grew to four zero five at the end of 'twenty four, increasing 11% year over year. As this customer base grew, the average ARR per customer increased 7% year over year to approximately $376,000 The increase in the average annual revenue per customer was driven by further product adoption and expansion by our customers. We are proud that 49% of our ARR is contracted under multi year contracts, up from 42% last year.

Speaker 3

We believe this demonstrates the importance and critical nature of our data to our customers, and we expect these multiyear contracts will contribute to improved retention rates ahead. Our remaining performance obligations or RPO totaled $246,000,000 at the end of Q4, up 26% year over year. We expect to recognize approximately 69% of total RPO as revenue over the next twelve months. Our operational performance in the quarter and the full year demonstrates our continued commitment to disciplined execution, and we delivered a non GAAP operating margin of 4% in Q4, a sixth consecutive quarter of non GAAP operating profit. For the full year, we delivered a non GAAP operating margin of 6%, an 800 basis point improvement relative to 2023 and our first full year of operating profit on a non GAAP basis.

Speaker 3

We generated $2,700,000 of normalized free cash flow in the quarter, a fifth consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow and $27,700,000 in 2024, reflecting an 11% free cash flow margin. We expect to continue to generate positive free cash flow for 2025 as well. Turning to our outlook for 2025. For the full year of 2025, we expect total revenue in the range of $285,000,000 to $288,000,000 representing 15% year over year growth at the midpoint of the range. In Q1 twenty twenty five, we expect total revenue in the range of $66,000,000 to $66,500,000 For the full year, we expect our operating profit to be between $1,000,000 and $4,000,000 Non GAAP operating loss for the first quarter of twenty twenty five is expected to be in the range of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 Our guidance reflects increased operating expenses to accelerate our hiring to capture the opportunities presented by the growing demand for our data and solutions, as Or mentioned.

Speaker 3

After delivering a year of accelerating revenue growth, non GAAP operating profit and positive free cash flow, we remain focused on delivering profitable growth over time as well as achieving our long term profit and free cash flow targets. And with that, Oren and I are ready to answer your questions.

Operator

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. Thank you. Our first question is from Surinder Thind with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Can

Speaker 2

you provide a

Speaker 4

little bit more color on this incremental spend? I'm estimating it's about $20,000,000 versus expectations here. How much of that is towards the go to market strategy? How much is that towards R and D? And how should we think about the cadence of hiring as we look across the year?

Speaker 2

I think the majority of the spend is for accelerating our go to market and ramping it up. And we just see also nice investment

Speaker 5

in

Speaker 2

the R and D. But I think also the Forks pressure that we saw in Q4 and Q1 is also part of that $20,000,000,000 that you're talking about.

Speaker 4

And then just the cadence of the spend, like how did you come up with that number in terms of just thinking about, was it that you just wanted to keep margins kind of positive at this point? Like why not more, why not less at this point?

Speaker 2

Yes. I think it's a great question. So our philosophy was always that we are pivoting our company to profitability and we're going to stay profitable moving forward as long we're going to see good opportunity to accelerate our growth. We're still a small CAC company and now ending up the year with close to $250,000,000 meaning that we have a lot of market to capture. And we did a lot of strong demand on the already funded.

Speaker 2

So we made a decision to do a big investment and help capture this opportunity as long as we are improving the growth and keeping the company profitable on the free cash flow basis and the EBITDA for the year. And we can maximize the opportunity as we do see that we can bring CIM and AWE to be one of the top growing software company in the public market with the opportunity ahead of us, and we want to capture it.

Speaker 4

Got it. And then I guess as my second or the follow-up question here, can you talk a little bit about the growth outlook in terms of the midpoint being 15% year over year? That seems like it's roughly the same as what it was in 2024. So with the incremental spend, is the idea that you're expecting to see an acceleration growth in 2026 then? Or is there expectation of what how do we think about the return or what we should expect in terms of the acceleration that we should expect?

Speaker 4

And maybe why is there not perhaps higher expectations for growth given all the spend in 2025?

Speaker 2

I think it's an excellent question and you're right. I think there's two elements that this is why we decided to come with the 15 as a starting line for the year. What we did see is that because we are arming our go to market and hiring a lot of people during the end of Q4 and still continue hiring them in Q1. And a lot of our sellers and managers are spending time with interviewing ramping people and also going through change management. So placed managers and old performance in Q4 and then ramp up people.

Speaker 2

So we did see a little bit softness with the execution in Q4 now going into Q1. And on top of that, we have the ForEx pressure. We as a global company, around 50% of the revenue comes outside of The U. S. We saw a headwind from the ForEx on Q4 that hurts the growth.

Speaker 2

And now that you start the year already below, so you need to close that gap. And then you saw another headwinds on the 4x going into Q1, meaning that the Q1 is a little bit soft and we guide for 12%. But you see, we are very confident on the 15% for this year, meaning that during the next quarter, we're going to see an acceleration of the growth, meaning that we are expecting much more growth rate going to Q3, Q4 as an exit rate for 2026. So we're going to see, I think it's again increasing growth in the second part of the year. And this is why we decided to give 15 as a starting point.

Speaker 4

Okay. That's helpful on understanding the near term dynamics.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Ryan MacWilliams with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 6

Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. Maybe for Jason, how did revenue results in the fourth quarter perform versus your expectations into the quarter? It looks like you guys kind of came in around the high end of your guide and usually you do a little higher than that. And then can you quantify any one time impacts to consider for the fourth quarter, like if there was an FX impact, what that looked like either on the revenue or profitability side?

Speaker 3

Sure. Thanks, Ryan. So as Orv mentioned, we saw some of the FX pressure hitting in Q4 and part of that is built into the guide. It's about 1% to 2% on run rate. So that is built into some of what you see in achieving the high end of our guide for Q4 as well as the guide that we have going forward.

Speaker 6

Okay. And then just on the fourth quarter, was there any FX impact to that quarter? And then I guess how would you characterize the quarter in general versus your expectations into the quarter?

Speaker 3

So I think that again from an overall perspective, it was a good quarter. You see acceleration in terms of the larger customers, both in growth of 11% year over year in customer count, the ARR average revenue from those customers up 7%, seeing the NRR for that group tick up another 1%. We think that that was very strong indications of what was going on as well as some of these large relationships that one of which we had shared previously while we were on the road of S and P. The second one, which sorry, the second one, which we announced just today with Bloomberg, a multiyear relationship as well. We think those things are good indications as to what we were have been working on and continue that growth.

Speaker 3

So we were pleased with the where it was. We would have the FX headwinds are something that we are dealing with in terms of the guidance going forward, but we feel comfortable with the overall momentum that we're seeing in the business.

Speaker 6

I'll leave it there. Appreciate the color. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 7

Perfect. Thank you guys. Or maybe one for you. On the AI investments you're making, I know you mentioned a lot of it's go to market, but on the product side, I think you mentioned you're investing in data collection and forecasting to get ready for the Gen AI kind of revolution. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Speaker 7

Because I had assumed that the platform, the way it exists today, has a lot of those capabilities and can be maybe more easily pivoted for Gen AI. But it sounds like there is some more change on the platform required. So what are you changing and what's evolving on the product side?

Speaker 2

Yes. Hi, Arjun. Thank you for the questions. There's two fronts now that we need to make investments. Basically, we want to integrate AI in order to accelerate the insight coming from our data to make our customer life easier to discover value and get ROI from the platform.

Speaker 2

We're starting a really amazing innovation with that. We're basically putting agents on top of our platform and automatically generating insights. So we're shifting lots of teams to start working on those innovation and we don't want to stop the regular cadence. We had to do some investment in that front to continue the development to make our platforms much better for the majority of the users. This is the first front.

Speaker 2

The second front as we getting more and more demand for brands that want to get better visibility on the change chatbot and Gen AI is having the consumers and the way they search consumer information and making purchase decision. And in order to do that, we need to collect and analyze much more granular data around shared conversation and the different channels and basically introducing what I will call Gen AI intelligence. The brands can understand those sentiments and the impact each one of those shareable to have on their brand and purchase decision. So this is some investment that we are doing now to collect this data, productize that we can start presenting to customer in more scalable ways. So this is another fund of investment that we are doing.

Speaker 7

Okay, understood. Thank you. And then, Jason, one for you again on the revenue guidance. Did you it seems like there's a few changes on go to market that you're incorporating in. But are you is it fair to say this is more this is a more conservative outlook on '25 than you've given historically?

Speaker 7

Are the changes driving any kind of change in your guidance philosophy as you maybe wait to see how the year unfolds in the first half year before growth really starts to pick up? Like what did you consider when you were giving the revenue guidance?

Speaker 3

Sure, Arjun. As you know, we like to give guidance we know we can meet. And we looked at the with the backlog that we have as well as the some of the macro like the FX impact and we built all that into our assumptions. As Orr mentioned, when you look at the guide, which starts at a midpoint of 12% for Q1 and ends with a 15% for the full year, that mathematically means that we are expecting to have a strong back end of the year that is already built into our philosophy, which is exactly what we've been talking about, that we are accelerating the investment in our go to market teams in order to drive that contribution happening in the back end of the year, and we think this is the right way to approach that.

Speaker 7

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Luke Horton with Northland Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 8

Yes. Hey, guys. Just wanted to touch on gross margin, which is down sequentially here. Could you just talk a little bit about what drove this? And then is this kind of a level you see it being at in across 2025 as you guys are investing in the business?

Speaker 2

Yes. So I think this little bit decrease in gross margin is to mostly invest in this new data capturing for the Gen AI. So we need to put the investment. And then on top of that, we also introduced two new data sets of AppIntelligent and AppIntelligent to acquisition we did in 2024. So we are now integrating those data sets.

Speaker 2

So every time we are adding more data sets, it's increasing a little bit the gross margin, but we expect that to get better over the year.

Speaker 8

Got it. And then just on the Bloomberg customer announcement, seems like a very nice win. I was just wondering if this is going to be like an add on that people will be paying separately as an add on for that service or if this will be just embedded into everyone who has a Bloomberg terminal and that this is kind of a fixed contract for you guys or if it has anything to do with people adding that on to their Bloomberg?

Speaker 2

Yes. So we're very proud on this engagement. It's many years of dialogue and Bloomberg testing our data and getting to the conclusion that we are the number one digital data providers of choice. And this is why they decided to go with us. And it was a long discussion, and we feel very proud about this relationship.

Speaker 2

And from what I remember, they will add us as an they will take small portion of our data that represents digital growth and we'll add it as part of the alternative data solution for their subscribers. And I'm not sure if it will be free to the subscribers or a little bit premium, but the consumer will be able to get exposed to the concept of digital market and how it can predict public companies growth. And if they would love and use it, they can come to similar well and buy more advanced solution that we are offering with our stock intelligence. So what we see in Bloomberg is a small part of our capabilities and for I think for all of the customers.

Speaker 8

Got it. Makes sense. Awesome. Thanks for taking the questions guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 9

Hey, everybody.

Speaker 2

So just really it's kind

Speaker 9

of like one question. How do you think about the timing of the payback on the increased investments, again, around like AI and go to market? Should we think about target margins for '26 and '27? Or do you want to think about it like your progress to a rule of 40 scale? And then can you kind of be maybe a bit specific on how you see yourself progressing over the next few years, just obviously given that everyone's surprised by the level of investment, but you obviously are confident around the payback?

Speaker 2

Thank you. Yes. We are confident thank you for the question, Jason. We are confident on the demand because it solves the hardest part that is really demand. And it's there, and we just need to approach and monetize it.

Speaker 2

And what we're doing now is just changing the way we are growing. We are focusing more on growth, but still maintaining profitability. I think that last year, we were super proud with driving 15% growth and 11% free cash flow. And going into this year, we're just going to change the balance to be more on the growth side. And I think we're going to see the return in the second part of the year while this investment.

Speaker 2

And going into 2026, we are positioning the company to be top notch growth software company and of course profitable and would start to work on increasing profitability and to probably double digit around 2026.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Scott Berg with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question. Hi,

Speaker 10

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Or I wanted to focus on a comment you had early in the Q and A that you did see some softness in your fourth quarter execution. Can you help elaborate on that a little bit? And I guess as you look at that softness, is it corrected for in Q1 or how do we think about the timing to returning to a more normalized sales cadence?

Speaker 10

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. We start seeing improvement. We have an amazing new CRO, Susan Dunn, who came over from Nelson IQ, and as she driving group changes and doing some great change management in order to send foundation for the growth. And so moving low performance, getting new strong managers and increasing the hiring, we saw that it creates some more noise in the go to market and we're able to stable it. And we're seeing better performance now in Q1.

Speaker 2

Funny enough, all across our team around the world, the sellers got too many meetings and from the high demands that it starts hurting the win rate. So we were not hiring fast enough in Q4 and we're now also closing the gap in Q1. And so we do see strong performance now, so to hitting the floor.

Speaker 10

Very helpful. And then Jason, as we look at your guidance for this year, this is kind of a follow-up to the last question. Your revenue growth guidance suggests that the rest of the year accelerates from the Q1 guidance here today. First of

Speaker 2

all, is that an accurate statement?

Speaker 10

I assume that it is given how the math works. But then two, First of all, is that an accurate statement? I assume that it is given how the math works. But then two, is your confidence high in that acceleration relative to what you're seeing on the sales execution side here in Q1?

Speaker 3

So on the first question, the answer is yes. Like you said, that's the way the math works. So we do see that acceleration coming in the back end of the year. We also see pipeline, and so we have some visibility that gives us the confidence that we build the guidance. And like I like to say, we'd like to give guidance we know we can meet.

Speaker 5

Thanks, Ken.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks so much for taking the questions. You talked a lot about this initiative, the monetized brands that are navigating shifts in consumer behavior. I just want to get an update on how that's trending, particularly your conversations into the beginning of the year. How are brands sort of evolving to the evolving Gen AI environment and how does SimilarWeb plan to address that?

Speaker 2

Yes. I think more and more brands start to look out there for more visibility about how much consumer are querying chatbots about their brand or about their industry and how the answer that chatbots are giving X are changing the decision of purchase they're going to make. And they want to understand if this sentiment is positive around them or negative or if the, chatbots are bringing them the right choice and how they can impact the chatbots to understand the resource the chatbots are using in order to generate those answers. And this is not how that's probably only similar work can bring many, very few companies in the world can give the visibility about what people are asking the chatbot, what are those answers and how they're impacting the consumer journey. So we are positioned, I think, the best in the world to supply those answers that are becoming more and more important to brand as the consumer behavior change and they start using more and more of those chatbots for purchase decision decisions.

Speaker 5

Okay, great. That's helpful. And then could you just give us an update on the large language model opportunity? I know this evolves quickly and you've signed a couple of 8 figure deals here. But I'm curious how you're thinking about monetization potential now that we're a couple of months away from some of those announcements.

Speaker 5

Have you had any incremental conversations with folks that give you confidence around monetization? How should we think about that?

Speaker 2

Yes. I think there is not a lot of companies with numbers that's trying to build those chatbots, probably less than 100, maybe single digit. It's not a big market. It's a lot of investments they need in order to build those separate. So this market is not big, but when they are going into those venture to build shared boats, they will need the best data to feed those LLM.

Speaker 2

And when they want to choose the best data providers like Bloomberg, they're all ending up engaging with similar web as they recognize us as the leader for digital market data. They know that we are the best one to provide this data. And so it's low level engagement because there's not a lot of them. And but if we have it's great engagements.

Speaker 5

Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Patrick Walravens with Citizens JMP. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 11

Great. Thank you. And thanks for all the color on this. Forgive me or if I go back to Q4, I mean, how sort of a series of questions here, how soft was the execution in Q4? Like was it a pretty big miss by the sales team?

Speaker 11

When's the last time you guys had a soft execution quarter? Was Susan surprised, right? And when you broke it down after, what caused it, right? So like we don't usually hear that too many leads or too many meetings is the reason for a miss, right? Usually, we hear things like customers didn't want to commit.

Speaker 11

So if you could drill into that more, that would be great. And I just think the reason it's important is because you're investing on the back of that. So we just want to we want to sort of close that get a better understanding of why you decide to invest in sales and marketing if Q4 wasn't very good, right? Thanks so much.

Speaker 2

Yes, yes, of course. And I think it's a great question. Thank you for raising it, Pat. I think that Q4 was okay, wasn't great. Usually, our Q4 is amazing if you look historically on 2023 and 2022.

Speaker 2

And Q4 was okay, like it was soft. I wish it was better, but it was okay. And we had some areas in the business when the softness were stronger mostly because of Nigeria and low performance and the season that wasn't been cleaned before. And in Q4, we've moved the opportunity to improve new improvements around the book market. We did some change management in EMEA and it was behind the change management in Japan when we were behind the numbers.

Speaker 2

And I think this is also was impacting the performance a little bit. And but the new people, we hired their own place and they look looking good. So I'm full confidence and I see the numbers and we are investing because we polish on the what we see.

Speaker 11

That's super helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Ashley Kim with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 12

Hi, Youra and Jason. Thanks for the question. Just wanted to ask about the 15 customer contracts that were 7 figures. Could you kind of give more color on whether the deals grew into that or whether anywhere new lands and how many of those were AI related?

Speaker 2

Yes. Hi, Ashley. First of all, thank you for asking this question because I think it's important to discuss this great indication. This is a record high quarter response for closing 7 figures and as you saw in the past few quarters, we started reporting 8 figures engagement. All of those indicate that we are now ready to increase our engagement with our customers.

Speaker 2

And most the majority of those $15.07 figures were expansion. It's meaning that we have more and more customers that are now ready to invest more with us. And we from our side are now ramping up and more senior OEM on the process to know to negotiate and expand and really great business of customers that XylvaWeb have. And you can also see that with the multi year increase of our customers. We are now going into this year with almost 50% of the book of businesses multi year.

Speaker 2

This is a very strong indication that the customer are trusting our data and want a long term relationship. I think these 15 deals showing you that a lot of them are now ready to invest more with us. And we from our side just need to hire more executive, more experienced sales and support. And on the post side in order to drive this expansion and improving our NRR going

Speaker 12

forward. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to management for any closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you everyone for the question. We have confidence for a really great year to the end of 2024 with a really amazing result and we are looking very positive going into this year. And good luck to all of us. Bye

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Earnings Conference Call
Getty Realty Q4 2024
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