Vincent Pilette
Chief Executive Officer at Gen Digital
Thank you, Mary, and welcome, everyone. Before I start, I want to acknowledge the current geopolitical uncertainties the world is facing. Our hearts and support go out to those impacted, including friends, families and customers, and of course, we hope for a quick and peaceful resolution. As we come together for this call, I also want to take a moment to thank each and every NortonLifeLock employee for doing their part to deliver the success we've had today. NortonLifeLock's third year of growth is the result of an ambitious team working to build a great business together. Cybersafety is more needed than ever, our vision and strategy are clear and our culture of authenticity and action that we're building upon every day gets me very excited about our future. Q4 is our tenth straight quarter of top line growth, with revenue and bookings of 8% and 6%, respectively, in constant currency. The quarter's performance was particularly important as it lapped a strong COVID-led double-digit growth quarter a year ago and the anniversary of our Avira acquisition. Although slightly more pronounced in identity and privacy, our growth in Q4 was once again broad-based across products and regions as our customer needs are truly global. Our customer base is now 50% international as we continue to focus on developing our product offering to be available in over 150 countries. To reach new customers, we have continued our strategic investments in both direct and indirect channels.
Total direct customers are now over 23.5 million with nearly 600,000 net new customers added year-over-year and over 120,000 customers added sequentially. Our indirect or partner business delivered double-digit revenue growth for the sixth straight quarter, up 20% in Q4 and we added almost 100,000 customers sequentially in the employee benefits and mobile channels alone. We delivered these results while we expanded our Q4 operating margin ahead of the Avast merger and grew EPS 15%. Natalie will go more into the Q4 financial details later on the call. With $2.8 billion in revenue, up over 10% year-on-year, fiscal '22 was the third consecutive year of bookings growth and customer expansion. It was made possible by our ongoing investments in product innovation and go-to-market activities, shaping up the portfolio and expanding into new ways to reach customers. Fiscal '22 was also an important year for us as it delivered great progress towards our three- to five-year long-term objectives, one of which is delivering $3 in EPS. Less than three years ago, we launched the first integrated consumer cybersafety platform, Norton 360, and now we have over 14 million members, trusting us to protect them more comprehensively. Our Norton 360 has unparalleled scale and reach in over 50 countries today and growing. Our customers recognize the value we provide, which is also supported by our strong retention rate of over 85% and annual ARPU of $107 as we exited fiscal year 2022.
We still have plenty of work and room to educate more of our customer cohorts on the need for more comprehensive cyberprotection, which is an integral part of our growth strategy moving forward. So let me provide some more details on our organic strategic areas that supported fiscal year '22 results and will continue to be key to our strategy moving forward into next year. First, with products. We maintained our accelerated pace of product innovation and introduced more than 10 new products and features this year, broadening our product line to incremental privacy and identity solutions. Just to name a few, Norton AntiTrack, my privacy assistant, social media monitoring and the expansion of social and dark web monitoring to 16 additional countries in the fiscal year. In the areas of identity and privacy, we continue to step up our international efforts, expanding our product portfolio into new countries. In Q4, we launched Norton Identity Advisor Plus in the U.K. to help consumers resolve their identity theft issues. It is a robust identity monitoring solution that also provides access to a dedicated identity restoration specialist to victim of identity theft. In Germany, we launched Avira Identity Assistant, which includes both dark web monitoring and localized support from identity restoration specialists. Moving forward, we still have a big opportunity to expand our product portfolio internationally, especially in the areas beyond core security.
The second area of investment is our go-to-market. In the last 12 months, our initiatives evolve rapidly as we adapted to changing environments and customers' behaviors and expectations. In our direct-to-consumer business, we balance social and traditional long and short form of marketing activities. During the year, we continued to increase our investment in top of the funnel and performance marketing. While we faced higher advertising costs, we continue to believe we have plenty of room to increase our effectiveness and returns on our investments as we operate well within our target range for customer acquisition costs. That is particularly true as we continue to increase the value and retention along the customer journey towards total cybersafety. Our partner business continues to outperform expectations with a record 23% revenue growth in fiscal '22. This is the result of growing indirect customers and signing up new accounts in our telco, mobile and employee benefit channels, providing us with solid momentum into fiscal year '23. Our partnership with TELUS in Canada, which was our first offering of identity theft protection and restoration services outside the United States, has begun to bear fruit. We've also gained meaningful market share in Japan with our dark web monitoring mobile attach product.
Our mobile and employee benefit channels were both up double digits for the sixth consecutive quarter with about 300,000 net new customers added for the year in these two channels. Going into fiscal year 2023, we will continue to focus on building a multichannel environment, including direct acquisition, marketing partnerships, employee benefits, retail and eTail, OEMs, service providers and new pathways established earlier this year, such as the freemium channel. To that effect, Travis Witteveen, who joined us as CEO of Avira, has taken the leadership of a newly formed commercial organization focused on all customer acquisition activities. Building on last year's momentum, we are working to strengthen our business with more intentional go-to-market efforts, focused on market segmentations, targeted geographies and increased sales motions to drive higher adoption of a comprehensive cybersafety offering across the globe. So we have talked about product innovation and go-to-market as two of our key growth drivers. A third one is our branding initiatives. In fiscal '22, we focused on driving higher engagement with our customers by diversifying our marketing investments. Our marketing dollars went towards a combination of digital and traditional media in driving brand awareness and consideration, increasing brand trust and brand loyalty. One memorable marketing campaign that comes to mind is our award-winning Unsafe Norton 360 campaign launched last year.
The creative storytelling for this campaign made our Norton brand more relatable, relevant and localized to many countries across the globe. It was activated in both DTC and partner channels via traditional TV, OTT, digital video, radio and social media. For this specific campaign, our performance metrics showed great improvements in response rate and digital video click-throughs. Moving forward, we will continue to balance these investments through different channels and crafting impactful storytelling to make cybersafety more relatable to consumers' day-to-day activities. Finally, customer engagement and satisfaction is another critical component of our strategy as we build the integrated cybersafety offering. We have improved the overall customer satisfaction in the last 12 months and increase our Net Promoter Score to over 45. We put our customers first in everything we do, we ensure the voice of the customer is heard and we generally embrace an end-to-end customer experience. We know that in this area, it is a never-ending journey that we have embarked upon with plenty of opportunities to improve and delight our customers. So product innovation, diversified go-to-market channels, a multi-brand strategy and customer insight and satisfaction are key priorities and critical components of our strategy to maximize our growth moving forward and scale up the best cybersafety platform for people everywhere. Cyberattacks have only elevated and evolved to become an unfortunate part of everyday reality.
Consumers need more than just device security, there will be more touch points into identity, privacy and other trust-based adjacencies. Our mission is to build easy-to-use technologies and solutions that help save guard consumers. So looking ahead, we are well positioned to drive the transformation of consumer cybersafety and pursue our long-term objectives. While we recognize that geopolitical events or macro level headwinds, can create bumps along our journey, we know that consumers will continue to need comprehensive protection of their digital lives. As we pursue our vision, we have multiple growth levers, strong profitability, proven financial resiliency and we are backed by our robust balance sheet and cash flow generation. Of course, we also know we have a lot of work ahead. As we enter a new fiscal year, continue to expect from us innovation and portfolio expansion and the pursuit of new opportunities in customer acquisition, cross-selling and retention activities. Finally, a brief update on our proposed merger with Avast. Our anticipated closing of the merger remains at mid to late calendar 2022. We are actively engaged in the phase two review process with the U.K. market authorities and continue to strongly believe that this transaction can only benefit consumers across the globe in a very competitive and dynamic market. In the meantime, we will continue to move our business forward. We're still very eager to come together with Avast to accelerate the transformation of consumer cybersafety and power digital freedom for everyone.
And now let me turn the call over to Natalie to cover the results in more details.
