Fortinet Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
February 6, 2025

There are 17 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter twenty twenty four Earnings Announcement Conference Call.

Operator

At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Aaron Ovidiva, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. This is Aaron O'Vadia, Senior Director of Investor Relations at Fortinet. I am pleased to welcome everyone to our call to discuss Fortinet's financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024. Joining me on today's call are Ken Zee, Fortinet's Founder, Chairman and CEO Keith Jensen, our CFO John Whittle, our COO and Christiana Olgaard, our CAO and Sales Operations Leader. This is a live call that will be available for replay via webcast on our Investor Relations website.

Speaker 1

Ken will begin our call today by providing a high level perspective on our business. Keith will then review our financial and operating results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024 before providing guidance for the first quarter and full year of 2025. We will then open the call for questions. During the Q and A session, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question to allow others to participate. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, we will be making forward looking statements and these forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected.

Speaker 1

Please refer to our SEC filings, in particular the risk factors, in our most recent Form 10 K and Form 10 Q for more information. All forward looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation, and we undertake no obligation and specifically disclaim any obligation to update forward looking statements. Also, all references to financial metrics that we make on today's call are non GAAP unless stated otherwise. Our GAAP results and GAAP to non GAAP reconciliations are located in our earnings press release and in the presentation that accompany today's remarks, both of which are posted on our Investor Relations website. The prepared remarks for today's earnings call will be posted on the quarterly earnings section of our Investor Relations website following today's call.

Speaker 1

Lastly, all references to growth are on a year over year basis unless noted otherwise. I will now turn the call over to Ken.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Erin, and thank you to everyone for joining our call. We are pleased with our strong performance in the fourth quarter, successfully balancing growth and profitability, including record operation margin of 39%, total revenue growth of 17% including product revenue growth of 18%, our highest growth rate in six quarters as we further strengthened our market leadership in secure networking and strong growth in unified SaaS and secure operation with secured service edge billing growth of 85%, which drove our unified SaaS billing growth of 13% accounting for 23% of our business. The strong unified SASE growth highlights the value that our customers see in our single vendor SASE strategy. We are the only vendor to organically develop the key SASE functionality into a single operation system for TOS, which integrates market leading, next gen firewall, SD WAN, DTNA, Secure Web Gateway, CASB, DLP and other innovations, seamlessly unifying networking and security, delivering an enhanced user experience and securing access to application across on premise and cloud environment. This is far where an SD WAN customer can deploy 40 SASE in the cloud or on premise within minutes.

Speaker 2

We also enable sovereign SASE for service providers and a large enterprise to host 40 SASE within their own data center, enabling heightened control of their data and the grid connectivity, while leveraging our FortiAC technology to accelerate such a function for superior performance. Additionally, Fortinet's AI power security, unified management and single agent approach provide consistent protection across all locations and devices, ensuring full control, visibility and simplified deployment while also offering industry's simplest licensing and a 3x or 5x better performance per user. AI driven secure operations accounted for 11% of total billings, while ARR grew 32%. We recently enhanced our Secure Up portfolio by acquiring Perception Point, a leader in advanced email and collaboration security. This acquisition strengthened our end to end cybersecurity by extending protection beyond email to the entire modern workspace, addressing the growing advanced threat risks in today's elevated threat environment.

Speaker 2

In secure networking, we continue to lead industry with a convergence and consolidation strategy, a vision we have been driven for twenty five years. Industry forecasts predict that Secure Networking will surpass traditional networking by 2026 As the number one secure networking vendor, Fortinet secured over half of all global firewalls and lead the convergence trend. Also as shown on Slide four, Fortinet continued to be the only vendor to leverage a single operation system, FortiOS, across five secure networking Ghana Magic Quadrant. Customers are increasingly recognized that our FortiOS and Fort ASIC technology deliver a 5x to 10x better performance than competitors, while enhancing security effectiveness and reducing total cost of ownership. This is especially evident in the operation technology where OT sales approached 1,000,000,000 in 2024.

Speaker 2

Today, we introduced the forty day thirty gs, 50 gs and 70 gs next generation firewall and unified SASE solution, designed for SMB and its distributed enterprise, with cutting edge performance and enhanced security, delivering up to 5x to 10x faster throughput and better threat protection than industry average and supporting a wide range of secure network interface for remote access. In addition, we recently acquired a remaining share of Linksys, a leading provider of connectivity solution to expand our enterprise grade security to employees working remotely, home business and consumers. Lastly, I am very proud to share that Fortinet was recently recognized on Forbes' Most Trust Company in our market list, ranked number seven overall and the only cybersecurity company in the top 50 list, highlighting our transparency and commitment to our customer as the most trusted cybersecurity company. I would like to thank our employees, customers, partners and suppliers worldwide for their continued support and hard work. I will now turn the call over to Keith.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Aaron, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's start with the key highlights from the fourth quarter. We delivered strong execution and financial performance with top line results above the high end of guidance together with record operating margins at 39%. Total revenue grew 17% driven by strong product and service revenues as product revenue growth pushed up to 18%.

Speaker 3

In addition, we added a record 6,900 new logos, driven by close alignment with our channel partners. Looking at our financial results in more detail, total buildings grew 7% to $2,000,000,000 including double digit security operations and unified Sassy growth. RPO grew 12% to $6,400,000,000 ARR growth was very strong for SecOps and grew 32% and Unified Sassy, which grew at 28% to a combined total of over $1,500,000,000 Within Unified Sassy, SSE continues to gain traction with ARR growth of 96% as we continue to see early success upselling 40 SASE to our large SD WAN customer base. 40 SASE deals increased over 60% and the pipeline was up 90%. The typical Forti SASE journey starts with the customer's first purchase of our ASIC based market leading FortiGate firewall, followed by an expansion to SD WAN and then to our single vendor SASE solution.

Speaker 3

The expansion journey is particularly significant as over 70% of our large enterprise customers have adopted our SD WAN functionality and are poised to expand to 40 SASE. Our large enterprise 40 Sassy penetration rate increased to 10%. That's up two points just since our November Analyst Day reporting. Rounding out the billings commentary, deals between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 increased over 90%. SMB was our top performing customer segment with growth of over 30%.

Speaker 3

And EMEA was our best performing geography driven by growth of over 25% from international emerging. Among our top five verticals, worldwide government and service provider both grew over 20%, while financial services saw the expected challenge from the difficult year over year comparison driven by several 7 and 8 figure deals in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three. Turning to revenue and margins. Total revenue grew 17% to $1,660,000,000 Product revenue increased 18% to $574,000,000 our highest growth rate in six quarters driven by hardware revenue growth of 19%. On a sequential basis, product revenue increased 21% and represents the third quarter in a row with elevated sequential growth.

Speaker 3

Software license revenue continued its double digit growth and represented a mid to high teens percentage of total product revenue. Service revenue of $1,090,000,000 grew 17% to 65% of total revenue. Service revenue growth was driven by SaaS solutions at 130%, which includes Latus Works as well as strong organic services growth in unified SaaS and SecOps. Combined revenue from software licenses and software services such as cloud, Lacework and other SaaS security solutions increased 41% and provides an annual revenue run rate of over $1,000,000,000 Total gross margin increased three forty basis points to 81.9% and exceeded the high end of the guidance range by 140 basis points. Product gross margin of 69.3% increased nine twenty basis points as inventory related charges normalized from last year's highly elevated levels, adding eight forty basis points to product gross margin and two ninety basis points to total gross margin.

Speaker 3

Service gross margin of 88.6% increased 50 basis points to a quarterly record as service revenue growth outpaced labor and hosting cost increases, while benefiting from the mix shift towards higher margin FortiGuard security subscription services as well as some early AI related savings. Operating margin increased seven twenty basis points to a record 39.2% and was five twenty basis points above the high end of the guidance range, reflecting the strong gross margin and FX tailwind of about 110 basis points as well as the top line over performance that flowed through to the bottom line. Before moving to the statement cash flows, I'd like to summarize the financial impact from the Lacework, Next DLP and Perception Point acquisitions. These acquisitions increased fourth quarter billings by 115 basis points versus our expectation of 75 basis points and decreased operating margin by 190 basis points versus our expectation of a decrease of two thirty basis points. Looking to the statement of cash flow summarized on Slides 18 through 21, free cash flow was $380,000,000 and free cash flow margin was 23, up 11 points.

Speaker 3

Adjusted free cash flow was $549,000,000 representing a margin of 28%, up 16 points. Cash taxes were $156,000,000 down $186,000,000 reflecting the prior year's regulatory extension of estimated tax payments, while infrastructure investments were $98,000,000 or up $71,000,000 Average contract term in the fourth quarter was twenty nine months, down one month year over year and up one month quarter over quarter. DSO decreased ten days, reflecting improved linearity year over year. And the remaining share buyback authorization is $2,000,000,000 Moving to an overview of our 2024 full year results. Buildings exceeded $6,500,000,000 while total revenue grew 12% to $5,960,000,000 driven by revenue growth of around 25 for both unified Sassy and SecOps.

Speaker 3

Service revenue grew 20% to $4,050,000,000 driven by a 22% increase in security subscriptions and 33% growth in Unified Sassy services. Gross margin was up three ninety basis points to 81.3 benefiting from the revenue mix shift to service revenue and a 140 basis point tailwind of inventory related charges normalized during the year. Operating margin increased six sixty basis points to a record 35%, resulting in operating income of 2,100,000,000 which was up 38%. Our GAAP operating margin of 30.3% continues to be one of the highest in the industry. Earnings per share increased 45% to $2.37 Free cash flow was a record $1,900,000,000 representing a margin of 32% Adjusted free cash flow was $2,200,000,000 representing a margin of 37% If I were to just sum up 2024, I think it's important to note that we have now met or exceeded the rule of 45 for the fifth consecutive year.

Speaker 3

Now I'd like to share a few significant fourth quarter wins showcasing our Sassy expansion and our leadership in operational technology. In a 7 figure new customer win, the healthcare provider strategically included 40 SASE in its first for net purchase alongside SD WAN, while replacing a competitor's firewall. With a new leadership team focused on vendor consolidation, reduced operating cost and complexity and addressing technical debt, the FortiOS consolidated multiple security functions onto a single platform, modernized an outdated firewall infrastructure and replaced VPN technologies with a 5,000 seat SASE solution that relies on Fortinet's PoPs. In another 7 figure SASE deal, an existing Fortune 500 SD WAN retail customer purchased 40 SASE for 2,000 users with the potential to scale up to 12,000. They chose for a net for a flexible and consistent security enforcement, which enhances user experience while securing access to both on prem and cloud applications.

Speaker 3

Additionally, they valued our strategy of building our own SaaS e delivery infrastructure powered by our proprietary ASIC technology. And lastly, in a high 7 figure deal, a large energy company expanded its partnership with us by signing its first enterprise agreement to protect its global critical infrastructure. This customer secures its infrastructure using FortiGates across approximately 1,000 sites, spanning branch locations, data centers and cloud environments. Key factors in this win included our ability to support their global critical infrastructure, both technically and through world class support programs, our leadership in OT infrastructure capabilities and the automation and seamless integration of our FortiOS system. With Fortinet supplying over 50% of the firewalls worldwide, Fortinet security solutions themselves have become critical infrastructure, protecting the critical infrastructure, in a threat landscape where there has been a step level increase in sophistication and risk.

Speaker 3

Given our scale, innovation and broad adoption, we and national cybersecurity agencies around the world view our partnership as key to protecting the most important customers and entities in this dynamic landscape. Next, I'd like to review some of our key AI solutions for threat intelligence, networking, NOC and SOC, and LLM leakage. For threat intelligence, FortiGuard AI powered security services combined with real time threat intelligence helps organizations combat known, unknown, zero day and emerging AI based threats. For networking, FortiAI ops reduces the time needed to diagnose networking issues. By monitoring trends of the network and with full access to logs across the Fortinet security fabric, our AI engine uses machine learning to understand the optimal conditions for the network and highest potential issues.

Speaker 3

For the knock and sock, four d AI uses natural language and generative AI to guide, simplify and automate analyst activities. Four d AI is integrated into seven different network and security operation products with additional products to be added. For LLM leakage, our AI based DLP services actively identify and block sensitive information from being uploaded or shared with AI systems. Before discussing our guidance, I'll offer a few updates on the record level firewall upgrade opportunity that we shared during our November Analyst Day. In the fourth quarter, we saw early upgrade movement with large enterprises, both on buying plans and actual purchases.

Speaker 3

We expect the momentum to build as we move into the second half of twenty twenty five as we get closer to the 2026 and the service dates. The 2026 and 2027 cohorts present a substantial upsell opportunity for SASE, switches, access points and SecOps solutions. To maximize our upgrade and cross sell potential, we're implementing several initiatives, including creating sales plays for each customer segment and key vertical expanding our account plans for larger enterprises to more specifically target the upgrade and expansion opportunities and collaborating with our channel partners on SMB opportunities, incentive programs, end user data and developing targeted bundle offerings for these customers. Moving on to guidance. As a reminder, our first quarter and full year outlooks, which are summarized on Slides twenty three and twenty four, are subject to disclaimers regarding forward looking information that Aaron provided at the beginning of the call.

Speaker 3

I should note we expect Linksys and Perception Point to increase first quarter billings and revenue growth by approximately 90 basis points and decreased operating margin around 40 basis points. For the full year, we expect Linksys and Perception Point to increase billings and revenue growth by approximately 125 basis points and decreased operating margin by around 50 basis points. All right. For the first quarter, we expect billings in the range of $1,520,000,000 dollars to $1,600,000,000 which at the midpoint represents growth of 11%, revenue in the range of $1,500,000,000 to $1,560,000,000 dollars which at the midpoint represents growth of 13% non de capped gross margin of 80% to 81% non GAAP operating margin of 30% to 31% non GAAP earnings per share of $0.52 to $0.54 which assumes a share count of between $774,000,000 and $780,000,000 infrastructure investments of $80,000,000 to $100,000,000 a non GAAP tax rate of 18% and cash taxes of $30,000,000 to $35,000,000 For the full year, we expect buildings in the range of $7,200,000,000 to $7,400,000,000 which at the midpoint represents growth of 12% revenue in the range of $650,006,000 to $850,006,000 which at the midpoint represents growth of 13% service revenue in the range of $575,004,000 to $725,004,000 which at the midpoint represents growth of 15%.

Speaker 3

Non GAAP gross margin of 79% to 81%, non GAAP operating margin of 31% to 33%, non GAAP earnings per share of $2.41 to $2.47 which assumes a share count of between $773,000,000 and $783,000,000 Infrastructure investments up $380,000,000 to $430,000,000 a non GAAP tax rate of 18% and cash tax was between $525,000,000 and $575,000,000 And on a personal note, you have made read in today's eight ks filing that after a four decade career in finance, including eleven years of Fortinet, it's time for me to enjoy retirement. I'll continue to serve through the next quarter earnings call and up to May 15 and plan to stay at Fortinet to help with the transition through June 30. Most importantly, I'm leaving Fortinet in very good hands. Pursuant to our succession plan, Christiana Olgaert, who as discussed in the eight ks has served in various roles at Fortinet for almost six years, will take over as CFO at my step down in May. I'd like to thank Ken, Michael and the Fortinet team and all of you for making this chapter of my life so rewarding.

Speaker 3

I very much appreciate the time I've had at Fortinet working with Ken, Michael, the entire team and certainly with the investors and financial analysts. I know I'll miss Fortinet, it's people, customers and its noble mission to protect and serve important customers and entities around the world.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Keith, for your great service and contribution. And, Christiana, we're looking forward to working with you in your new role to continue to drive the success and the format. So I will now hand the call over to Aaron for Q and A session.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Ken. As a reminder, during the Q and A session, we ask Ken. Operator, please open the line for questions.

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Hamed Fodderwala with MS. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, thank you for taking my question. This is Jonathan Heisenson on for Hamzah. First off, Keith, congratulations on your career and best of luck with retirement and with your next endeavors. So Ken, for you, so I believe some of the hyperscalers like Oracle are big customers and partners with Fortinet. So just curious as you have Oracle and some of the other hyperscalers building out new data centers, just curious to what extent Fortinet is involved in securing these?

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. Thank you. It's a great question. So Fortinet is the only company we develop the secure ASIC processor. It's increasing the secure computing power quite a lot compared using general purpose CPU.

Speaker 2

That's drive a lot of our growth into, we call it, internal segmentation within the data center, hyperscale and all these things. So we see a huge opportunity and not just secure network in there, but also lot of data center also related to AI. We also see huge opportunity to drive the AI security, whether secure the infrastructure itself or secure the data or secure the access. So there's a lot of opportunity. I do believe that's the huge potential for growth because a unique advantage using the 04/1986.

Operator

Thank you. And we'll move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Tal Liani with Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

It's an honor for me to ask a question after John, my ex associate that crossed the line. But I want to ask you two things. Number one is about the billings. Why is billing weak in weak guidance? And that second question is product revenues outperformed so much this quarter.

Speaker 4

And that might be a cycle, a refresh cycle, but the guidance for next quarter, I don't see outperformance. So why is it just this quarter phenomenon you don't carry the strength into the next few quarters? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes, Tom, I wasn't sure if on your first question about billings, if you're asking about the fourth quarter or the first quarter.

Speaker 4

I'm asking billing in general. So billing for the fourth quarter was better, but billing for the first quarter is weaker. So why is the weakness in billing?

Speaker 3

Yes. I think if you look at the fourth quarter, maybe we'll start there a little bit. As you recall, we talked last quarter about the fourth quarter guidance process. There was a lot of concern around the August, probably the 8 figure deals and what we were going to get out of that and we were being cautious in the guidance. That was logically or rather a prudent approach.

Speaker 3

Where we got the upside was on those deals from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 And I would say the close rate and the opportunity there was probably $40,000,000 to $50,000,000 more than what I anticipated in the guidance setting process. And you saw that same over performance on those larger deals show itself in the product revenue line. And then also we saw in the product revenue line, our significant growth in product revenue was in the mid enterprise pardon me, the mid sized firewalls and the large firewalls. And when you peel back on that that onion, you start to see enterprise companies have actually started their purchasing of the refreshes that we talked about at the Analyst Day. So I think obviously that the information, the news about Q4 is very good.

Speaker 3

I think if you look at Q1, whether it's billings or product revenue, probably just a little more caution there as we kind of got exposed to the tariffs here over the last week and we saw the reaction. And some of the concerns for us were the more of a multinational footprint, particularly in Latin America and Canada, for example, the customer footprint, a little more exposure there. And then of course, the direct impact of perhaps some disruption in the U. S. Government, where we do have a footprint also.

Speaker 3

So maybe a little caution in that regard.

Speaker 2

Yes, the other probably may impact some of the buildings, right. We are more also driving the ARRPO, which are kind of a little bit different than before. It's more about building, but this is RPA probably would defer some building to the future, but we'll kind of secure the customer with all these the platform, the unified SASE approach. That's where the SASE and the SecureOp tend to have a higher growth in the AR and IPO than the billing.

Operator

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I would love to hear a little bit more on the refresh opportunity for this year. I know you've broken it out for us in product versus cross sell in a couple of different ways. I wanted to ask you specifically about the implications for subscription revenue as you see the hardware come up for renewal and as you sell some of the networking components on the hardware side into your installed base.

Speaker 5

So either for Keith or maybe Christian, how do you think about the implications for subscription specifically as hardware comes up? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Richaun, do you want to jump in there? Okay.

Speaker 6

I think at the end of this day, I explained a little bit that the existing hardware has subscriptions. In order to grow subscription revenue, we need to upsell and sell either more subscriptions with the same hardware or more services. So we have put plans and incentives in place for our sellers and our channel partners to do so, but that's kind of the prerequisite for us to grow our service revenues or accelerate the service revenues.

Speaker 2

Also the new hardware tend to be have more capacity to run additional function and better performance. That's also enable additional service, including a lot of new service we developed in the FortiOS in the last few years as like all this unified SaaS is functioning and some other AI kind of base function. That gives the new opportunity leverage new hardware.

Speaker 5

Thank you for the detail. Congrats on the quarter and congrats to Keith and Christiane as well.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment as we move to the next question. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Essex with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. Keith, I thought when you started with key highlights for the quarter, your retirement would be up to the top. But seriously, it's been a real pleasure working with you and best of luck on the retirement. Well deserved and Christiana looking forward to working with you.

Speaker 7

So congratulations on the appointment as CFO. I guess the question I had was with regard to the billings guide for this next fiscal year. Would love it if maybe Christiana, if I think you've done a lot of work on it, if you could unpack the assumptions behind that. How much is upgrade growth of SecOps and Sassy and how much is product related refresh cycle baked into that? And maybe if you could share an exit rate that would be super helpful?

Speaker 6

So in our billings and revenue guidance, of course, we have the two components, right? Product is what we sell this year. Services is what we what rose off the balance sheet mostly and about 10%, fifteen % is from new services that we are selling this year. And our assumptions, of course, are as we presented at the Analyst Day that we have a significant upsell component, but we also are planning to with certain incentives for again our own sellers as well as our channel partners to drive new logos. And from an exit rate perspective on were you looking at exit rate for services?

Speaker 7

Well, I guess overall for billings and then maybe if you can help us understand how much product revenue is baked into that, but really just trying to get a sense of the trajectory that you're baking into billings to kind of get to that full year billings guidance that you have.

Speaker 6

The product revenue growth, we assume is around 10% right now as we saw already the significant traction this year. But yes, that's the current running assumption.

Speaker 7

Okay, that's helpful. And does that require like a exit rate in 4Q of like teens, like high teens billings growth or are you expecting more moderate build throughout the year?

Speaker 6

Right now it's more moderate.

Speaker 7

Okay, super helpful. Thank you so much and congrats.

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Boolani with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. And Keith, congratulations. I hope you very much have an enjoyable ride into the sunset. It's been terrific partnering with you.

Speaker 6

I wanted to go back to

Speaker 9

some of the commentary you made on the tariff impact. I did want to dig into that a little bit. So I think there is significant amount of uncertainty from these tariffs. They're influx. There's some potential retaliatory policies being thrown around.

Speaker 9

So I both wanted to dig into some of the demand comments you made and how far ranging those are and how they are being contemplated in guidance. And then also from a supply chain perspective, how is that influencing or potentially impacting your supply chain and ultimately COGS and gross margin? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes. It's as you pointed out, it's going to be dynamic time, if you will, and trying to understand where these may end up. I would say that for selling purposes for demand, we have a fairly significant footprint in both Latin America and Mexico, as well as Canada. And over the weekend when the tariffs were announced, there was a lot of activity here internally Sunday night and Monday morning to understand what the disruption would be more about those economies and their buying habits, if you will, of our products. And I think it's that type of reaction that we are focused on.

Speaker 3

I would also supplement that way a little more context. Our 40 authenticator product, I believe it is, is actually it's a very small product line, but it is manufactured in Canada. And we were looking at what the tariff impact would be like that. And then by Monday night, all those things all bets are off. So we're kind of chasing a little bit.

Speaker 3

And we do have similar to our sales leadership in Latin America raising their hand immediately in what they were seeing and being concerned about with Mexico, our U. S. Federal team similarly raised their hand and said, if there aren't going to be employees in the federal government to sell to, it's going to be challenging. So I just think we're acknowledging that it's a very dynamic situation right now and let's try and not get too far ahead of our out of our skis until we know more. On the other side, I think in terms of tariffs coming into the country or the products, keep in mind that our pure U.

Speaker 3

S. Business is around 25%, twenty six %, twenty seven % of our total business. So obviously that 30% or 70% plus international would not be subject to the tariff schemes of The U. S. And that is I think there's obviously if we had to respond in some way to the market, I think the tariffs would be broad brushed and would affect not only ourselves in our U.

Speaker 3

S. Business for that remaining 25%, twenty six %, but our competitors as well. And I would expect that we would still, at this early stage, still have the pricing advantage that we currently have.

Speaker 9

Thank you, Christiana. Congratulations.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Shaly Yal with TD Cowen. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Thank you so much for taking my question. Good afternoon. Congrats on the results. Congrats Keith and congrats Christian. Keith, my question maybe builds a little bit on the prior question, but touches more specifically on your U.

Speaker 8

S. Performance. This year, you had, I think, this quarter the best quarterly performance in 2024. Do you see that being sustained into 2025 given some of your prior investments? What are the plans specifically as it relates to U.

Speaker 8

S. Sales operations? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes, it's a great question. So I think probably starting a little bit over one year ago, we're starting enhancing U. S. Enterprise sales and also more focused on like adding sales capacity and also kind of working closely with our channel partner to drive the growth, which both in the Haikon and also drive the program with a partner there. So that's we see some pretty good result.

Speaker 2

And so we do see there's a lot of loan to grow in The U. S. And at the same time, we have a huge advantage on the resource, on the facility, on the people here in The U. S. And Canada that continue to drive the future growth.

Speaker 2

So that's why we see The U. S. Could be the fast growing region in the next few years.

Speaker 8

Thank you so much.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Rob Owens with Piper Sandler Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 10

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping you could expand a little bit just on the Linksys relationship and what you hope it brings. And I know, Ken, you did outline some expectations relative to revenue and billings, but just strategically where it positions you better? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. This is actually we acquired about 51% of share about three years ago. And then we keep in private shaping the company to more line up with our own kind of a secure networking strategy. But also these are kind of a new market we feel Fortinet Properties only player can play in consumer home based network security because we have this technology like AC, we have all this unified SASE and together with the Linxis consumer and also their huge user base, which they have 25,000,000 active user and has been shipping almost two fifty million device in the last almost forty years. So it's a leading brand and with this customer base without technology, without this combined resource, we feel we can really drive the new market for consumer to support in work from home and also to cover some SMB space we see pretty fast growth.

Speaker 2

So that's the strategy, but that's also probably will take some time to continue kind of develop all this technology market together, but we do feel this could be a huge potential in the next five to ten years for the company growth.

Operator

Thank you. And we'll move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Heath with KeyBanc. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 11

Great. Thanks for taking the question here and Keith congrats as well. So Keith and Christiane, I wanted to understand a little bit just ahead of the refresh opportunity that's starting in the second half. How should we be thinking about inventory levels in anticipation of that demand? And then secondly, maybe to follow on to Brian's earlier question, just the assumptions embedded in the product guidance specifically from the end of service refresh, are you assuming half of that $400,000,000 to $450,000,000 opportunity happens in 2025?

Speaker 11

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. I'll cover off the inventory question a little bit and then maybe Christiana can come back over the top and talk a little bit more about the model for 2025. And I don't know that we will explain specific dollar amounts to each individual item in that. But in any event, Ken and I have been at this for a long time. He likes to see an inventory turns at two.

Speaker 3

I like to see inventory turns at five or six. I lose constantly on the inventory turns. We've gotten as we've gone through the supply chain cycle here, you saw the inventory turns. We did very well with those storing inventory, if you will, on our balance sheet as we got into COVID and supply chain crisis. And it really helped fuel the super cycle for us on our income statement.

Speaker 3

And with that in mind, I think a healthy number for us, I'd have to agree with Ken now, is probably in the range of 2x for the turns. And I would imagine that you would expect you could expect us to target that each quarter in terms of our inventory balances. Nishant?

Speaker 6

Yes. On the linearity of the product revenue assumptions, while there is definitely a compelling reason to refresh in the second half year because you can only renew for one year. We've seen refresh activity happen already, especially for large customers. And we will try to accelerate the upgrade cycle as much as we can. So we've assumed that there is a more gradual than kind of spiky upgrade path.

Speaker 11

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And one moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 12

Okay, great. Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions here. And I tip my cap to both of you on your respective exciting next steps. So very clear numbers and a lot of helpful questions. Keith and Christian, maybe I'll ask just a couple of housekeeping questions, if I may.

Speaker 12

First, can you just remind us I think you touched on it a little bit. Can you remind us how big LatAm and Canada are just in terms of percentage of billings? And then maybe on top of that, can you just remind me of the 12% growth that we're guiding to roughly in 2025, how much of that is organic versus inorganic?

Speaker 6

To your first question, LATAM and Canada are about 15% of total business. And on the organic growth number, we expect about one point inorganic.

Speaker 13

Very helpful. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Borg with Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 14

Hey guys, we've got Max on here for Adam at Stifel. Thanks for taking the question. Over the last few quarters, we've talked about Sassy and SecOps billings coming primarily from existing customers. So

Speaker 2

as we

Speaker 14

look out into '25, just wondering what the opportunity is for Sassy and SecOps to become a more meaningful contributor to new logos and do you or do you expect that to kind of remain as primarily an upsell motion?

Speaker 2

I think we do have a huge installation base on the next gen firewall and also SD WAN. I still feel grow upgrade from that part probably will count most of the new unified SASE and that's also more easy sell for the sales source and also for the partner. I believe last few quarter probably over 90% all come from leasing customers which are already firewall major firewall and also SD WAN customer, which does give us also more advantage compared to all these SASE only player. So that's where and that's also the reason is also because we have the single OS, have all this networking security with all this SD WAN and also all the SaaS is functioning in the same OS, so it's very easy upgrade. On the other side, we do have to see a lot of new customer and especially some big enterprise, some of them do have an issue with some other SaaS players and we do have a lot of advantage on the better function, better integration, a single OS solution and much better performance and pricing.

Speaker 2

Like I mentioned, probably three to five times more price advantage and plus our own kind of infrastructure supporting this kind of lower cost, better margin and at the same time integrate function together is more easy to manage and better protection. So that's the advantage we have. That's what we're also pretty confident. We believe we not only were leading the number one player in the night gen firewall and SD WAN, we also give us some time, we're also leading become the number one unified SaaS supplier in the space.

Speaker 3

Yes. And I think Ken is

Speaker 11

spot on in terms of

Speaker 3

the factors that and I'll build on one of those, which is removing or reducing complexity and reducing costs and making things simpler. I was really impressed with the first deal that I talked about in the early script here when I talked to the sales team, which was a pure white space account that started off as a competitive firewall displacement. And we know we're really good at that and we know how to do that. But then to see them consult and collaborate with the customer and make it not only an SD WAN deal, which made a ton of sense, but also to get them in the boat on the Sassy deal. And I think that speaks to one of our very good sales team that brought that to the table for us.

Speaker 3

But the evolution and the maturity that you're seeing in our own organization as we get more experience underneath our feet and our ability to branch out and sell into those organizations that are focused on a consolidation play, removing complexity and controlling cost.

Speaker 2

That also will benefit from a lot of our long term investment like in the single OS in the hardware and also in ASICs. So we are the only ASIC designer in the whole space and a lot of new ASIC design will drive the new SASE function, will keep give us a much better performance, lower cost, lower consumption. And also the sovereign SASE for service provider, for enterprise, for data center, we also see a lot of growth potential. That's really the unique advantage Fortinet has.

Operator

Thank you. And we'll move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Shrink Kothari with Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 15

Hey, thanks for taking my question. Just really solid unified SaaS growth rates, you guys are seeing increased penetration among larger enterprises, which in the earlier commentary was still building momentum. So just curious, can you provide an update on strategic incentives, which are tied to kind of upselling SaaS side costs and how these incentives are impacting overall kind of proctor metrics, deal conversion and yes, and then I had a follow-up question as well.

Speaker 2

Yes, Ravi, we do want to accelerate the training to both our sales team, the technical team and also our partner. And it's but they do see the long the customer definitely see some of the long term benefit of using a single OS to gradually adding more function and adding more security and easily upgrade to the next kind of security function they needed. And on the other side, I think we also need to keep in higher end, keeping our self capacity and at the same time provide better training. On the other side, we see the feedback already from customer partners. They do see this upgrade of SASE is much easier compared to this new SASE approach and much shorter sales cycle.

Speaker 2

And you can see since like we only launched our own SASE approach a little bit over one year and you can see the ramp up is very, very quick and probably the fast growing in the SASE space right now. So we do see a lot of great potential going forward.

Operator

Thank you. And one moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Junaid Siddiqui with Truist Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 16

Great. Thank you for taking my question. Keith and Christian, congrats to both of you. Keith, you mentioned SMB being one of the top performing customer segments, which is a bit different from what we hear from some of the other vendors. I was just curious what is underpinning that demand and what are you seeing that others are not?

Speaker 16

Thank you.

Speaker 3

I think the channel program at Fortinet is probably fairly mature. I mean, Ken has been doing it for a long, long time. I don't think we're scrambling to find channel partners, if you will. I would also give a lot of questions for Shana and what she's done in her year here, which is really focused on the channel and getting to more senior levels with the channel leadership to understand what's important to them and how to structure incentives that are tailored to what the channel is trying to accomplish. There's just much more collaboration with channel partners today than I've ever seen before here.

Speaker 3

And so I think these we had some fairly specific and targeted incentive programs in the fourth quarter that Christiana helped develop. And I think those were, as you see in the numbers, the new logos and June and the mix of the business extremely successful.

Speaker 2

Yes, I think we have probably the best product because none of our competitor, not just small, has this technology, single OS with so many it's almost 30 function integrate in the same single OS and with about half the function about fourteen, fifteen using asynchronous Celery. That's give us huge performance and function advantage than any other competitor because the SMB, like the three models we announced today, they run the same FortiOS compared to some other big box, bigger appliance there. And that's where the SMB and even the long term, the home users see some huge advantage using the same FortiOS and they can kind of whether connect to the enterprise or they can connect to the cloud and also leverage all these new unified SASE approach. So that's what we feel as a technology product advantage give us huge kind of unique benefit to our customer, SMB customer, eventually can be their home user consumer space, which we feel is because so far even in The U. S.

Speaker 2

And Europe, the developed country, the SMB still has only single digit of SMB customer has any network security to protect their network in there. So we do see there's a lot of growth potential. But how to address this technology, it needs to be easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to support in that news for AI. And all these, that's where we kind of invest quite long time and we do see it's kind of a long term benefit of this long term investment and also huge potential going forward.

Operator

Thank you. And one moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Gallo with Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 12

Hey guys, thanks for the question. Keith, congrats on the much deserved retirement and congrats to Christiane. Look forward to working more with you. It was great to hear about the early end of life refresh demand. In those early renewals, how was the average deal size increased versus four years ago?

Speaker 12

I'm just trying to understand how you're thinking about the size of the cross sell opportunity versus that $450,000,000 product refresh? Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. I think trying to make the point that what we've seen and I guess it kind of makes sense is that the larger enterprises are probably moving first. We expect that the SMBs may move a little bit later on the timeline. They probably have less advanced purchasing departments and maybe less regulatory pressures and things of that nature. There's probably a lot of reasons for it.

Speaker 3

I think what we what you see in our large enterprises historically is they often have a deployment schedule. They may not necessarily take all of the equipment at one point in time, but rather take a certain amount each quarter, maybe nothing in one quarter and more in the third quarter. And that it was that same buying behavior or patterns I think we started to see in the fourth quarter, which are looking back at some of these more regulated industries, also some technology companies. And we could see the swapping out of the mid major products that are being end of life and then taking on new products. And we talked to the account person about, yes, that's they're on that runway and they will continue doing that now over the next several quarters.

Speaker 6

And let me add to what Keith just said regarding your question of average deal size. So as we have a lot of large customers that have enterprise agreements, they pretty much have an ongoing purchasing habit of replacement devices that they build out during the EA. So you don't necessarily see creeping up large deals because they negotiate at a certain point in time what they need for the next five years and then they buy as they are ready to upgrade.

Operator

Thank you. And one moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer and Co. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 13

Thanks and congrats as well for both of you, Keith and Christiana. Good luck and enjoy retirement Keith, you earned it. A couple of questions for me. Just again on this upgrade cycle, if you know the devices and you can ping them and you know exactly where they are and when they get retired for the vast majority, can't you just be a little bit more specific on what was the contribution of this upgrade to revenue this past quarter? And what is the exact dollar contribution you expect from the upgrade in your '25 guide?

Speaker 13

And the second question is for Ken on Sassy. Great to see the progress in adoption over there. Can you comment though of how much of the adoption with the large enterprises is against brownfield displacement of old Sassy solutions or walking into a vacuum? Would love to understand how much of your footprint in your opinion has something that you need to displace versus you're stepping into a vacuum? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes, I think on it's a great question. And keep in mind with the two tier distribution model, we sell to distributors and resell to resell to end users and oftentimes it's SMB. The quality of the data about the end user gets better and better the closer you get to the end user, which would be the reseller. And it's why you heard a reference in the script about the importance of working with them on data gathering. There's a bit of an honor system when they register the devices.

Speaker 3

It may be more intuitive to us that of course, when you get a device, you register it like our phone or something like that. But that's not what happens in practice, particularly in the SMB. And really there's a heavy reliance there on the channel to spend time and energy if you want to get good reporting and tracking on that. So we'll get better at it as we go and that's part of working closer with the channel partners. It is easier easier with the enterprises because we can talk to our sales rep who's working in the large enterprise and understand the account plans and what they're seeing, but you're still only getting a partial set of information.

Speaker 3

I think the reporting and the information will get more mature as we go along. It's moving pretty quickly right now on us in terms of how we're developing it. Anyways.

Speaker 2

Yes. For your second question, actually, you can refer to the presentation Slide number five. So they do give some real benefit penetration rate. I think for Sassy, it's around 10%, it increased two points from like two months ago on Honest Day. And then also SD WAN, large enterprise, probably about 70%.

Speaker 2

So that's where we see with our leading in the firewall, major firewall market. And then that's actually drive a lot of SD WAN growth. And then also after SD WAN, the SASE will be the next growth. We'll keep in helping customer build better security infrastructure.

Speaker 3

And in terms of your question, whether it's brownfield or not, we are seeing some of our biggest SaaS deals as displacement. So either legacy VPN providers or legacy SaaS providers.

Speaker 13

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And I would now like to turn the conference back over to Aaron Odeva for closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you. I'd like to thank everyone for joining today's call. We will be attending an investor conference hosted by Morgan Stanley during the first quarter. The Fireside Chat webcast link will be posted on the Events and Presentations section of Fortinet's Investor Relations website. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact me.

Speaker 1

Have a great rest of your day.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating and you may now disconnect.

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Fortinet Q4 2024
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