Welcome to Logitech's video call to discuss our financial results for the Q2 of fiscal year 2021. Joining us today are Bracken Darrell, our President and CEO, and Nate Olmstead, our CFO. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements, including with respect to future operating results that are based on the views only as of today.
Our actual results could differ materially, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial results. You can find a reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP measures and information about our use of non-GAAP measures and factors that could impact our financial results in our press release and our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report and subsequent filings.
These materials, as well as our prepared remarks and slides and a webcast of this call, are all available at the investor relations page of our website. Unless noted otherwise, comparisons between periods are year-over-year and in constant currency, and sales are net sales. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay on our website. I'll now turn the call over to Bracken. Bracken, you're on mute.
I couldn't see it because I had my script open. I should be unmuted now, correct?
Yes.
All righty. Okay. Before I start, every company's performance starts and ends with its people. Our people are working longer hours. Their work from home is overlapping with their personal life at home, and that's stretching work earlier in the morning and later at night. Our team is not only working more hours in a day, but those hours are being stretched out longer in the day.
Some are working with a child nearby, needing attention, while others are there where there's no one at all, and it's lonely. We're all overcoming many challenges, including those. Sam Harnett, for example, our General Counsel, started in June and has become one of my most trusted partners and advisors, as she has for many on our team. She's on this call today.
Jason Mayden, who probably isn't on, is running our new and exciting influencer offense, as we call it. I am deeply aligned with his values. I've discovered that even more deeply after he started work. Yet I've never seen Sam or Jason outside of this video screen. Somehow, this is working. It'll work even better as we learn how to work within the constraints we're in over time.
In fact, our team is just doing an amazing job in spite of it all. New products are flowing, new ideas are sparking, our capacity is growing, our supply chain is humming. We're building capabilities. We're building new growth engines for the future. Our morale is strong. I couldn't be more proud of everyone at Logitech. I joined a call on Friday with one of our teams of about 90 people.
As I entered the call, I found myself completely underdressed, or should I say inappropriately dressed. I discovered Rosie the Riveter, The Dude, the captain of a ship, and various Star Wars figures. There were 85 other Halloween costumes.
Our team is finding ways to have fun because Logitech is really a fun place to work, even when times aren't normal. This way of working won't ever be perfect, but I just want to say publicly to analysts and investors what we say privately to our teams. We know this is a hard period emotionally and even physically.
Thank you, all of you at Logitech, for your remarkable and collective persistence, energy, and ingenuity. You're really making a difference. It's hard to have a call like this without reflecting a little bit on what a weird year it's been for everybody. 2020 has been so challenging.
The health impacts of COVID-19 have been horrible, the unemployment rates unprecedented, and for those not directly affected by the virus or by furloughs, this strange lifestyle stays feeling strange. Despite over six months that many of us have lived like this, staying at home, it still doesn't feel routine. As we head into winter in the northern hemisphere, it seems likely we won't see a huge change in our lifestyles between now and the end of winter.
This really won't last forever. I've been imagining what will it be like next summer and fall? How does this play out, as they say? One thing's for sure, some changes are permanent. In my opinion, the biggest permanent changes were going to happen anyway. The pandemic accelerated them. In fact, we are really fortunate at Logitech.
Years ago, we identified, one by one, four major changes in global lifestyle and work life that we felt we built our business on. They are video calls will grow and replace audio calls over time. Work will increasingly spread outside of our offices, even though we'll continue to work in offices, too. Esports will become the biggest collection of sports in the world for spectators and participants.
Most content we engage in will be created by hundreds of millions of people, even billions, instead of the dozens of media companies it was in the past. Those four trends didn't seem as obvious when we first called them out for ourselves as they do now. COVID-19 didn't initiate any of those trends. It accelerated all of them, and they will continue to grow. Video's going to grow at the expense of audio calls.
Esports will continue to grow, too. One day become bigger than conventional sports in viewership and participation. More and more of us will share more and more creations with each other. That's great for Logitech. What will likely moderate is the extent to which we're working at home. Our belief is that while offices will reopen and people will go to work in them again, not all companies will be the same.
Some companies will go exactly back to the way it was before. Almost everyone in the office every day. I think this is going to be a small minority. Others will go completely the other way, and they're going to eliminate offices altogether. I think this too is going to be a really small minority, and that leaves the big middle, a hybrid of work in the office and work at home.
Most companies will allow people to work from home a few days a week, and in the office a few days a week. This will make workspaces in both home and office important. It will increase the number of desk spaces that we could call the installed base of workspaces, and gives us expanded upgrade opportunities across all these new and important spaces. Many of us see this in our own lives already.
If you didn't have a computer at home before COVID, you probably limped along before COVID with your phone or your tablet, or you worked with a laptop on your couch or in the bed. Now most people are getting a PC, a Mac, or a Chromebook, often really hastily, either bringing it from the office or buying it wherever you can find it.
You might even feel you have the need to equip a few more workspaces at home. One for you, one for your partner, one for each of your children, maybe even two for you, depending on what kind of spaces you have. In other words, the market for many of our categories is correlated with the number of locations people work from, and we believe this market will grow more rapidly as people rethink the number and locations of spaces they need.
After that hasty expansion to the home, there will be an opportunity to help people improve the experience. Better functionality instead of the first mouse I could find. Better ergonomics because I'm not up and moving like I was. Better aesthetics because these workspaces look like they'll be a permanent addition to the home decor.
That suggests a potential for a large increase in the installed base, longer-term, upgrade opportunities at the same time over years to come. On top of that, as the big middle, as I called it earlier, heads back into the office part of the time, in this hybrid work culture, we will most likely see an expansion of what some people are calling satellite offices to serve those who work from home a lot but don't always want to drive so far when they do go to work.
That creates the potential for even more workspaces to equip, more workspaces to later upgrade. Virtually all meeting rooms will be video-enabled over the coming years as more companies adopt video more broadly. The network effect of Zoom, Teams, and Meet is creating a growth wave that's unlikely to end anytime soon.
These video rooms will need to be improved and upgraded. Education will also be hybrid. Computing devices and the peripherals we build for them will have become mandatory, as have good cameras and computers for teachers. That reality will surely remain in place now in some way for good. Outside of work and outside of school, esports has grown, though traditional sports slowed or even temporarily stopped.
The number of people creating content to entertain, educate, and connect with others appears to be spreading more and more rapidly. Every day there's a new podcast, stream, and person showing content for the first time in your video feeds.
Content creation is growing and will not stop in our lifetime, will even accelerate as the network effect works its scaling magic. What's all this mean for Logitech? Growth. Long-term growth. We'll be innovating for that growth.
Let me go over some of the highlights of this quarter. Our Q2 sales were up 73%, and non-GAAP operating profits nearly quadrupled. Our quarterly sales surpassed $1 billion for the first time in history, and by a wide margin. Our Creativity and Productivity category posted double and triple-digit growth across almost all products.
Our mice and keyboard sales grew 35% and 44% respectively, as workers and students around the world set up those additional personal workspaces in order to stay productive and engaged. In the future, we will work to upgrade that much bigger installed base to even better-performing products.
PC webcam sales increased over 250%, doubling the growth rate we achieved last quarter. Despite improving our capacity throughout the quarter, we still couldn't make enough to meet all demand for Logitech webcams.
We're expanding our capacity even further as we qualify other component suppliers to meet this unprecedented demand for video devices. While we don't expect to maintain this level of triple-digit growth forever, we believe that the continued transformation of work, where video is an integral part of collaboration and staying connected, will provide a multi-year tailwind to this category.
Tablet and other accessory sales grew over 140%, with our education channel sales rising more than fourfold versus last year. We have seen significant demand from schools around the world for tools to better prepare students for a more digital and hybrid learning environment. Governments are getting in on it, too. They're allocating huge budgets for this for the future.
For instance, Japan's education ministry launched a program with over $3.5 billion in funding last year that's being used to improve school preparation for online classes, including distribution of iPad tablets and keyboards to many students. Japan is just one of many countries transforming how educators are thinking about teaching our children. Video collaboration sales increased over 160% to another quarterly record high of $237 million.
Sales of our conference room products, like MeetUp and Rally, nearly doubled and benefited from continued deployment of video in the office as some countries started to bring employees back to work or get ready to. Augmenting this growth inside conference rooms was the 4 to 5x growth in our enterprise-grade webcams, like Brio.
In fact, we're not only seeing companies accelerate the deployment of video in offices, we're also starting to see purchasing of large bulk orders of VC webcams to equip workers with video capabilities from their home workspaces. Gaming has not been left out. Gaming sales grew 84% in the quarter. Growth was across all three regions and across all our gaming product categories, including PC gaming, simulation, console gaming, and Streamlabs.
We introduced several new products in the quarter, this time I'll skip them in favor of talking about our brand. Logitech G is just hot. In the League of Legends final, just this past weekend in Shanghai, with an expected 110 million people watching it live. That's about the same as the Super Bowl. An estimated 1.5 billion will watch some portion of the League of Legends championships.
Get this, every team in the final four and seven of the eight final teams, representing China, Korea, and Europe, all use Logitech G products. It's not all about the best equipment, but it helps. In addition to these three large categories of C&P, video collaboration, and gaming, we had two other products that delivered impressive results.
Blue microphones and retail headset sales more than doubled this quarter, with supply for Blue mics remaining tight even as we exited Q2. The benefits of clean, crisp audio that you get from using a Blue Yeti mic have become much more pronounced with streamers, musicians, and video bloggers, who want their stories and songs broadcast to their fans in the best possible audio quality. Mobile speakers remained weak this quarter as expected.
We continue to reduce our investment in the category and reallocate our resources to the many other faster-growing market opportunities, as well as leverage Ultimate Ears' decades of audio engineering capabilities across other product groups. I'm going to turn the call over to Nate to walk you through the rest of our key financial metrics in Q2. Nate?
Thanks, Bracken. I want to start by repeating Bracken's thank you to our people for delivering these strong results in such challenging times. We are on pace to grow our revenues by more than $1 billion this year. The operating profits we achieved in this single quarter were more than what we did in all of fiscal 2019.
To accomplish these feats in a year which began with factories shut down and employees abruptly working from home, is a testament to our team's resilience and their talent. One of the most impressive highlights of this quarter was the expansion of gross margin by over seven percentage points to 45.7%. The strength in gross margin was largely due to three factors, significantly higher sales volume, considerably lower levels of sales promotions, and favorable product mix.
In the second half, we expect gross margins to return to the high end of our target range of 36%-40%. As supply-demand conditions normalize, we increase investment in retail store marketing, we move into the more promotion-heavy months of the year. As we noted last quarter, we anticipate that education iPad tablet keyboard sales will remain strong given the demand for remote and hybrid learning solutions, which Bracken mentioned.
These products carry lower than corporate average gross margins. Therefore, a higher mix of these tablet keyboards will also put some downward pressure on gross margin. non-GAAP operating expenses increased 18% to $221 million and were 17.6% sales, down from 26% in Q2 last year.
While we ramped up the pace of investments in sales and marketing and R&D versus Q1, it was not nearly at the same level as the sales upside we delivered in the quarter. With strong first half profits and confidence in the strengthening of our core markets, we plan to invest more aggressively in Q3 and Q4 to build out our Video Collaboration sales coverage, step up our brand marketing campaigns, and increase spend to drive hardware and software innovation.
I want to emphasize that these are the same priorities we've discussed for many quarters, but we are moving faster on all fronts. It's also important to note that some of the increased spend this year will be structural and long-lasting, like in product development, while a significant portion of it will be more elastic or variable in nature, like marketing.
I want to emphasize again that we are managing the business consistent with our historical approach by moving aggressively to capture the opportunities before us while being prudent and thoughtful to prepare for potential fluctuations in demand and market conditions. Let me move to our cash flow and balance sheet. We delivered another strong quarter of cash flow, reaching $280 million, up from $107 million in Q2 last year.
We achieved a record low cash conversion cycle of 19 days, largely due to quick inventory turns driven by our high sales velocity. We will continue to leverage our strong balance sheet to not only strategically invest in supply, but to also increase our manufacturing capacity, as Bracken mentioned, to support the heightened demand.
As such, consistent with the growth in our business, we are raising our CapEx outlook for the year from $40 million-$50 million to $70 million-$80 million. Now I will turn the call back to Bracken for guidance and his closing remarks.
Thank you, Nate. Sounds like I'm going to give my personal guidance. I'm not. I'm going to give company guidance. This morning, we announced an increase in our fiscal year 2021 sales growth outlook to 35%-40%, and our non-GAAP operating income outlook to $700 million-$725 million, an increase of more than 80% versus the prior year. This, of course, is up from our prior outlook of 10%-13% in sales growth the range of $410 million-$425 million in non-GAAP operating income.
I'm certain many of you are wondering, what will we do next year, next fiscal year? It's still way too early for us to commit to a target for next fiscal year. We will provide that guidance as usual next March in our Analyst & Investor Day. What I would say is the underlying trends driving our business are not going away.
Video calling will continue to expand. We'll continue to work from home, and for most of us, also in the office. Gaming will continue to expand its reach in our lives and in our culture. More and more people will create content for us, for all of us. We have such an exciting future ahead of us.
Today, we're worth more than 13x more than we were when I started eight years ago. Yet today, we have so many new opportunities and so much more momentum. We have so many opportunities to unlock enormous growth in existing and in new areas. It's going to be an exciting, really exciting next few years. Thanks so much. With that, Nate and I are ready to take your questions.
Thanks, Bracken. I'll take the first question from Joern Iffert from UBS. Joern?
Yeah, thank you. Hi, Bracken. Hi, Nate.
Great morning.
Thank you, Ben, for taking my questions. The first one would be, please, is it fair to assume that pricing and mix is supporting your sales growth by roughly around a quarter in fiscal year 2021? Also, what is the pricing strategy going forward? Second question would be, please, on your R&D allocation.
Now when cash flows are much stronger versus you anticipated maybe three to six months ago, are you willing to experiment a bit more on R&D, trying to develop new categories, also looking to healthcare, for example?
The last question is, I understand that you are saying you will step up your SG&A investments in the second half. You are guiding for non-GAAP even in the second half, only up 5% year-over-year, despite your sales in the second half should grow around 30%, according to your guidance.
What kind of SG&A investments are giving you the return as capital you need, to really justify this investment as COVID-19 is quite nice marketing tool for you? Many thanks.
Nate, I'll let you answer the first one on pricing and mix, then I'll jump in and maybe I'll try the next two.
Okay, thanks. Joern, let me just make sure I captured your first question. You asked how much impact has pricing had on our revenue growth for the year. Was there a second factor you mentioned?
Correct. What do you roughly expect is the benefit from price mix? Is it fair to assume it is around maybe 10% or so, 10 percentage points for fiscal year 2021? Is this a fair assumption?
I think it's in that ballpark. I think, in the Q2 , we had some restocking in the channel, bringing some products. We were pretty short on really across the portfolio at the end of the Q1 . There were some products we were able to restock.
If you look over the first half, growth being 50%, that sort of washes out. We had some benefit in this quarter from both the restocking the channel in some areas. We're still light in some areas like web cameras. We also got some benefit from the reduced promotions as well.
Good. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, Nate.
I was going to say, Bracken, if you want to get started maybe on the SG&A or R&D, or I can-
Sure. They're really kind of related questions.
Yeah.
On the R&D side, Joern asked if we would be given where we are, would we be willing to experiment with new categories, and you mentioned one in particular. The answer is we've always experimented with new categories, and we're going to keep doing it. We keep about between five and 10 new categories in development at a time.
We call seeds, and we're certainly going to keep doing that aggressively. Not all of them, many of them don't make it to market, but they're super interesting and exciting, and we're getting better and better at this, I think. Yeah, you can count on that we're working on new categories in development, both from an engineering standpoint and from a business model standpoint.
On the SG&A side, not only are we going to keep investing in those kinds of things and probably increasing it, certainly in the areas of Video Collaboration and others. We're also looking into the back half and planning to spend more on marketing.
We're trying to move our business over time from a, what's traditionally been kind of a push model in the vernacular marketing, to a more of a pull model, and we're going to spend a significant amount of money in the back half really trying to drive that further.
We're also going to increase our spending in infrastructure because, with this increase in demand, obviously it's stretching some of the infrastructure areas that we normally have, customer experience, consumer experience teams, some of the others. Yeah, we will be spending more on SG&A, and I think it's going to be a good investment.
You want to add anything to that, Nate?
Well, I think just a little bit more on the R&D side. I think, you've seen us pretty strategically increase investments in R&D. The first half of the year, R&D is up $17 million, on a non-GAAP basis, year-over-year already. It was up $10 million this quarter of 25%. I think, as Bracken has said, I think about investments maybe the same way a lot of you or the investors would, is we're investing in a portfolio.
As we see things that have great market potential, like VC and gaming and creativity and streamers, we're investing aggressively in those areas. We have other areas where we've pruned back the investments a little bit and reallocated resources. Even while you see that $17 million increase in R&D for the first half, some areas are getting more than 100% of that, and other areas are getting less.
We're pretty actively managing that investment portfolio.
All right. Many thanks.
Joern, thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Ananda Baruah, your line is now open. Please ask your question.
Hey, guys. Appreciate it. For both of you, Bracken and Nate, as we think about what the model looks like longer term, Bracken, you made a couple comments, and one was for all things video, you used the term multi-year cycle. You talked about some of the structural changes. I'm not asking for a forecast here, clearly it sounds like all COVID catalysts aside, there's been a pull forward and a leveling up of some of these trends into being more structural.
What would be the reasons you could see that your long-term kind of growth funnel, which has kind of been that five to, I don't know, it's actually been more recently like a 7%-12%, wouldn't structurally level up to something higher? What would be the reasons that that wouldn't take place or shouldn't take place?
I have just a quick follow-up as well.
Well, first, I do not use the word cycle when I talk about any of our businesses, because I don't really see us in a cycle. I see us in long-term secular trends. As you said, I think there's two ways to look at those long-term secular trends in the context of COVID-19. One is to say, "Oh, gosh, we've got all this short-term business that's going to take away from the rest of the longer term."
The other way to look at it is to say, actually, we've increased the overall installed base of workspaces, for example, it's actually going to accelerate our long term. We're not re-looking at our long-term guidance right now. We're not really talking about guidance for next year at all. I'm super optimistic about what's happened here.
I mean, it's basically leveled up the entire world in terms of the devices that we support. That is an incredibly exciting thing.
Yeah. The install base is the other thing. Okay, totally got it. Just a quick follow-up is with regards to the investments that you're making in video collaboration on the sales side, can you just talk to us structurally what you see is needed to be done? Not even from a spend perspective, but from an initiative perspective, we can sort of help fill out our map about how much there is still to sow there, and how you guys are thinking about that.
Yeah, I don't want to be too specific there just for all the reasons you would imagine. What I would say is we've increased the absolute number of salespeople and customer support people dramatically and added service around that. We're going to keep doing that systematically over time, not the same proportion that we've done before.
We're going to keep adding because a lot of what we've done with the sales force, we've separated it from our traditional sales force. It's really a high-touch business, and especially for the larger customers. We're going to make sure that we have the right people on the ground face to face with the buyers and the decision makers, and then supporting them once they bring in these big deals that we're increasingly seeing.
Without being too much more specific than that's going to require continued investment, and we're going to make it, but the margins certainly support that.
You know what, Ananda? If I add just a little on the VC side, I think it's important to emphasize what Bracken mentioned on the customer support side and the customer experience. Things around how you do pricing and the supply chain, and it's a little bit different motion and customer expectation than what you have on consumer.
There's some areas I think as we continue to grow, we're going to want to invest in that and really be able to do something that's differentiated and really pleases the customers.
You guys, just to wrap that real quick, you guys have been investing in that get to market for a while now. Should we think of this as being just part and parcel sort of ongoing with what you've been doing, that set of initiatives? Should we think of this as something that's been meaningfully incremental to what you've been doing from an initiative perspective?
Yeah, no, this is absolutely a continuation of what we're already doing, and we're really hitting our stride here. This is just continuing to double down on the growth we already have to drive further growth using the same mechanism, which is expanded sales force and customer support as Nate said.
Yeah.
Got it. Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Thanks, Ananda.
Thanks, Ananda. Paul Chung, your line is now open.
Hi, Paul.
Hey, guys. How's it going? Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the quarter. Just first up on APAC. You saw really robust growth in that market suggesting the hybrid work from home kind of go to offices has some staying power, at least in the near term. Can this region kind of serve as a leading indicator for other regions in your view? Then I have a follow-up.
Yeah. I mean, excuse me. We just had strong growth around the world. I mean, it's really hard to find a country where we didn't have strong growth, including China, greater China, which kind of went into the COVID-19 phenomenon the earliest and came out the earliest or started to come out the earliest. It's a little difficult to give any specifics on that. We don't normally give you details by country of growth, but China continues to grow very well.
That's reflected in our guidance, and we feel really good about the long-term growth potential of this business. As long as we keep investing and then keep upping our game, that's when we talk about marketing and moving from push to pull. As long as we keep investing and upping our game, I'm really optimistic about the long-term growth of this business in every place, including after COVID-19.
Okay. Thanks for that. Just to follow up on e-tail and direct-to-consumer, can you kind of give us a sense for how much of that business in the quarter went through those channels? How you expect that mix to evolve kind of near term, and then can you quantify any lift you get from DTC? If this shift is accelerating, do you think you are in a position to kind of structurally raise your long-term gross margin target sooner? Thank you.
Well, I'll punt on that last question because the answer to the first question will make it clear. It's still a relatively small part of our business. We're not one of these companies with 30% of our business going through DTC now. We look much, much smaller than that. We're in the single digits, mid-single digits, even low single digits. We're growing very rapidly, and it is better margin for us.
It wasn't better margin for us, but it's becoming better margin because we're getting better at it, and we're going to keep investing. We don't want to compete with the rest of our distribution, we're making sure that what we offer is the opportunity for a customer to buy anywhere they want, including directly from us. Where we can, we're offering something extra special. We're going to keep doing that.
I suspect that DTC will grow faster than the rest of our business. It's still relatively small, so I wouldn't expect it to have a really big margin mix impact on the company.
Yeah, I would agree with that, Paul. I think, just as we're diversified in other areas, I think that route to market e-tail, traditional retail, D2C, I really like having a diversified approach across all those. One of the things that's happened in the first half of the year, as a lot of business has shifted to retail, some of that may stick, some of it will move back in traditional retail.
We're increasing our investments in traditional retail marketing and point-of-sale displays in the second half of the year. That is one of the reasons I called out for why I believe gross margins will come down sequentially. We're going to reinvest into that channel, which has been a little bit slower in the first half as stores have been shut down. We'll always want to keep a really nice balanced approach there.
Yep. I'd add the other great thing about that channel is that it just gives you a chance to learn better how to deal with everybody, all the other channels we work through, because then we're skin to skin with the customer, and that makes us better overall.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Paul.
Thanks, Paul.
Thanks, Paul. Asiya, you are next.
Hi, Asiya. Again.
Great. Hopefully, everybody can hear me here.
Yeah.
Can you guys talk a little bit about seasonality and how we should think about seasonality in the second half? I know you guys were initially talking about March being negative year-on-year. Now with this growth here that we've seen in fiscal 2Q, how we should think about the March quarter.
What are some of the maybe the indicators that you're seeing that would suggest that March could be very negative from a year-on-year growth perspective? If you guys can kind of talk a little bit about that. Then, on the gross margin side, I know you guys talked about heavy retail investments, which benefited you guys here in fiscal 2Q, and you have some mix shift towards tablet accessories.
I get that, you also have the budget flush coming typically in the December quarter, and I don't know if enterprises and SMBs, and even consumers, because they have nowhere else to go, actually use the wallet to go out and buy some more peripherals, whether it's video conferencing, Blue, all these categories that are offsets to just very heavy tablet accessories. Again, if you could talk a little bit about gross margins from that perspective, that would be great.
Lastly, Bracken, I know you talked about high single digit, your long-term CAGR going up because the installed base has gone up. One of the other questions is also what about replacement cycles? I mean, are you seeing because of more content creation, et cetera, are replacement cycles for some of the peripherals shortening, or are they kind of hovering around the same? Thank you.
Let me answer that one first, Asiya. I certainly haven't committed to increasing our long-term growth rates. I do think there's an exciting increase in our installed base that's coming right now, which certainly bodes well for our long-term growth. It's too early for us to revisit the long-term growth rate. We'll talk about our entire business in bits, Paul, at the Analyst & Investor Day.
In terms of going through the backup here, if we gave you the impression we're super pessimistic about March, we probably, maybe we were in the beginning. I'm not pessimistic about March. I think March is, if you look at the relative growth rate of March this year versus the rest of March of fiscal year 2020 relative to the rest of the year, it wasn't that different. I don't think you've got something to really worry about there.
I think when we look out the rest of the year, we don't guide by quarter, we certainly don't guide by month. I think the biggest uncertainty that I have personally as we look out the rest of the year is what's going to happen during holiday. I mean, is it going to be a normal holiday?
We just have a lot of people around the world who have never been in a shelter-in-place environment like this and never gone through a holiday. Will they really give the same kind of gifts? Will the same kind of thing happen? We just don't know. We do have a pretty big seasonal skew. A normal holiday period, we're reticent to count- this year. We'll see. We also have a Bluetooth speaker business that was super seasonal.
It really pulled out of the mix because we're intentionally dampening that business and bringing it down. That's certainly not going to have any holiday spike. That's reflected in the way we look at the back half of the year. You want to add anything to that, Nate?
Yeah. I think if you just look at what we guided last quarter for the full year and what we've guided this quarter, obviously we delivered a lot of upside in Q2, but the back half of the year, we took up significantly as well, right? We were really cautious, I think, about what the H2 might look like three months ago.
We were guiding sort of flat to maybe up 5% revenue in the back half. We've taken that up to 20%-30% growth in the back half. As Bracken said, that's pretty well-balanced, we think, across the quarters. We don't know if this holiday we're going to see the normal spike that we see in Q3, whether you're going to see the type of volumes that Black Friday or some of the other big promotion days have.
It's hard to say that this is a normal year when it comes to seasonality for some of these things. Certainly, if you look past to past on the guidance, we took the revenue up significantly, and we took up our investment significantly in the second half, which is an indication of confidence. Confidence this year and confidence in the long term.
Okay.
We only,
Then the margins with tablets versus gaming and VCs, because there's going to be some kind of budget flush, I hope, I expect, for enterprises and SMBs.
Nate, I'll let you take that one.
Yeah. Normally in the enterprise, calendar Q4 is a strong quarter, as you said, for sort of budget flush reasons. I think with video right now, though, I think people are investing. I don't think it's a, "We're going to wait till the end of the year." I think they're investing now to make their teams productive, to get their offices ready for today and for the future.
I'm not sure that we'll see a spike, as you mentioned, which is often common in enterprise type businesses. I think people are investing right now. As far as tablets goes, yeah. As Bracken said, we had very strong demand for tablet keyboards this quarter. They are lower than average gross margin.
I think while we have a lot of mixed things that are favorable to us, that's one that is certainly a headwind, but it's a good business for us. It's a headwind to us from a gross margin standpoint, but it's still a very nice business for us, and we've got some new products that have come out, both in retail, on the tablet side, and retail as well, that have done well.
Right. Then in gaming and VC, did you guys gain share, you think, relative to your peers?
That's really hard to say. In areas where we were short of product, we certainly didn't. We lost some share in some of the categories in gaming, and we were really fighting to get back in the game. I think we're back in the game now, we're ready to play competitively. VC, I don't know the answer to that.
There's so much growth there. There's certainly a lot of opportunity for everybody. We have a great market position, and we still have a great market position. I don't think that's changed. You want to add anything to that, Nate?
No, I think that's accurate. I think as supply's improved on the gaming side, we believe we've regained some share that we probably did lose early in the quarter or at the end of last quarter.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Hey, Alex. You are next.
Hi, Alex.
Yes.
Alex.
Is it just me or,
Hi there, everyone. Just a couple of quick questions, if I may. Firstly, following on from your earlier answers, you talked about, obviously, confidence this year, and clearly your guidance raise implies 27% growth in the second half, even on top comps, if I'm not mistaken.
That would seem to suggest you see sustainability of growth in the next couple of quarters. I wondered if you could just give a bit more color to explain, for the various business segments, which are the ones that you're having more or less confidence on sustainable demand trends.
Sure.
Obviously given concerns around pull forward and so forth. Just my second question is on video conferencing. You've obviously talked about how you see a very long-term story there, but I wondered if you could just put numbers around where we were on penetration of connectable rooms with your VC solutions in the lower end before COVID-19 and where we are now, just so we can think about where that could go to in the next two to three years.
Okay. Let me do that one first, then maybe I'll give you the first one. I don't think there's a huge difference in the share of penetration of connected rooms yet. We're still at the very, very early days of this. I think we're at, I don't know what the exact number was, but say maybe it was 10% of the rooms available. I don't think we've made a huge difference in that yet as an industry.
There's a lot of room left. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised there are even more connected rooms coming now because I mentioned in the opening, I sort of view this as like a scaling impact. Now that everybody's gotten super comfortable with video like we are now, it's really hard to imagine going back into an office and not doing a video call.
I think you're going to have just more and more rooms which are going to be available. It's very elastic. To me, I think that's a very elastic market. It continues to grow, the number of rooms available. I don't think we've made a big dent in the rooms of that penetration. In terms of giving a little bit of color as we go through the rest of the year on what categories are likely to grow,
I think we expect all of them to continue to do well that have been doing well. I think VC will continue to be strong. For all the reasons we talked about, I think the desktop businesses will continue to be strong. Streaming will be strong. I think we're in for more of the same. You want to add anything to that, Nate?
I think on the VC room penetration side, I would say nothing's really changed there. I think it's still in the single digits. We've had a couple quarters here where the growth has accelerated a little bit, but as Bracken said, it doesn't really make a dent in the total number. A lot of our-
More people go back in the office broadly around the world.
Yeah. As mentioned in Bracken's remarks earlier, we've seen really strong growth in business quality or centric webcams, I would say. People, especially companies, are purchasing in bulk for their employees to make them productive at home. It's not just, we need something at home. You've got to be fully productive.
You're working from home. You're not just dropping in and doing a little bit of email. You're working from home. Some of that growth that we've seen in Q2 has come from some of these nice wins that we've had with business customers buying a lot of equipment for their employees to be productive at home.
Nate, thanks. That's super helpful. Maybe just to squeeze another very quick one in.
Sure. Go for it.
Just in terms of your sell-through, I noticed you had very strong sell-through from a regional perspective in China. It was actually the strongest area and actually improved. That's just interesting given they've probably come out of lockdown sooner than other regions.
I wondered if you could explain what's going on there, and does that mean that potentially sell-through could actually improve in some of these other regions when lockdowns ease?
I don't know about that. I don't know if I would say it's likely to improve as we come out of the lockdowns, but I think we expect to have. We're super optimistic, especially for the long term, on the growth potential of all the categories that we've talked about. China is both an example of the future and an anomaly at the same time.
I wouldn't over-conclude that from China, but also would say, yeah, we look at it as a bit of a bellwether for the rest of the world. It's a little different. They're faster, they're farther ahead in some areas, we'll see. It's hard to use that as a direct predictor, but it certainly is good that they continue to have good business there as they've come through the worst of the COVID-19 period.
Alex, maybe just to clarify, the data that we have in the slide, which I think you're referring to, is actually for Asia Pacific overall and not just China.
Yeah. Sure.
I think as Bracken mentioned, too, there really weren't significant differences in sort of the strength of the demand across countries. It was pretty strong everywhere. I do think there are some important differences about how each country is really attacking these problems related to COVID, whether how much the government's involved in things like education or in different ways that they're trying to support their economies, and culturally,
the way that people are adapting to these changes. In general, all the big trends, obviously, are consistently accelerating across all countries. There can be small differences and nuances. Obviously we have operations in each of those locations, and we try to learn from all of them.
China, as Bracken said, is certainly one that went into this early and has come out of it early, but they've attacked the problem differently than other countries have. We can't use them as the basis for all of our decisions.
No. Good.
Very helpful. Thanks again.
Thank you.
Tom, your line is now open.
Hi, Ben. Great, thanks. First off, Bracken, Nate, and Ben, congratulations on an amazing quarter. I had one question and one follow-up. Can you talk about the changes you're making that improve your ability to manage demand surges? I think you're doing a really good job, but I'm curious to see the adjustments you're making that are positioning you to manage future demand surges.
Yeah, that's a great question. What we did, we put in place as we went into COVID-19. I'll give you one example to just be reflective of what we've done. We've learned that we need to have a super fast cycle on matching demand and supply. We also need to make sure that we're reaching into our nervous systems and turning off the autopilot.
We learned that in the early days of COVID-19, when we made a supply bet that was well ahead of what our markets could see. Nate, Nine, and several others of us made that bet knowing that we were going to take some inventory risk. We did it, and it paid off big time.
We're well beyond where that was now, but I think having a leadership team that has the experience and the wisdom to be able to reach in and sometimes turn off the autopilot is part of it and not be afraid to, and we weren't, and we aren't. I think that's one. The second one is there's nothing like learning by doing.
We've increased our capacity. Our operations leader has really stepped in for all of us, and supply chain leaders both have stepped in for all of us and systematically increased our capacity, very aggressively working with component suppliers across the board. We have a great set of relationships upstream into our supply chain. Many of them are very long-standing relationships, and that's really helped us too.
I came out of this feeling really appreciative of that and probably a little sensitive personally that we haven't recognized how valuable that is in the case where you do have demand surges. We're going to take special care of those relationships in the future to make sure we're positioned well in the future.
Then on the other side of it is we're sometimes sole-sourced. Sole-source, we're hurt. We're going to try to avoid that in the future so that we have the flexibility to go up on certain components where the supplier just couldn't meet the demand.
Great. For my second question, one of many things I thought was interesting on the new iPhone launch and 5G, was the mobile gaming opportunity. Can you talk about what the mobile gaming opportunity means for Logitech?
Yeah. Not too much. What I will say is, mobile gaming is bigger than desktop gaming, and we don't do much of it. It's an opportunity out there for us to figure out how to get a handle on it and get some business out of, and help create a better experience there. We haven't figured that out yet.
We tried several things over time, but we've never really knocked it. We've never really got it right. Those of you who've been following us for a long time know we don't give up easily, so we're usually working on things, and we're not going to give up on that one. We'll sooner or later figure this out.
Great. Thanks. Second question.
Nate, Tom, you know what? I'd like to come back real quick to your demand surge thing, just to really emphasize or highlight one of the points Bracken made around how we've made this bet on inventory. We've really leveraged our balance sheet, which I think is a very strong balance sheet, and our strong cash collection.
We're really passionate about making sure that we have strong cash conversion cycle. Whether it's changes that we make to our collections processes, the way we manage payment terms, the way we think about inventory management,
All these things help us squeeze a little bit more cash out. I think our strong balance sheet, I think is an important differentiator against some of our competitors who may not have the flexibility to make the types of bets that we made in the H1 of this year.
I think that has been a strength for us, and I think it will continue to be a strength for us. I think it's important in these times so that you're not held back by those types of financial constraints. We're going to manage that really tightly, and we're going to make sure that we're managing risk. When we feel that we need to be aggressive and we need to go support potential business growth, we have the ability to do that.
I would add one last comment to that. That's a great point, Nate, and you're so right. I'd say, in a couple of categories, we probably should have been carrying excess inventory. Not excess. We should have been carrying more inventory for the, as you call, the demand surges, and we weren't. We've learned. We make mistakes every day, and we try to learn from all of them, and that's a mistake we made. We've learned.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you.
Michael, you are now open.
Hey, Michael.
Hey, Michael.
Hi, Bracken. Hi, Nate. Thank you. Two questions from my side, starting with your guidance. You mentioned that you increased your guidance because you're more confident, or you gained more confidence. My question is really, what is your visibility into the second half?
I mean, how did you come up with the actual growth range that you were giving? Why is it not just below that or above that? How good is your visibility actually with all the uncertainties that are still out there in terms of economic development and the usual holiday season uncertainty?
Sure.
The second question would be regarding your pointing devices and keyboards. In both, you mentioned very good demand across the product range, so high-end and entry-level products. My question is, did you have the same availability of all products, across the range as well? Was the sort of demand driven by the fact that there were shortages at one end or the other?
Yeah. I'll answer that one first, and then I'll jump on the visibility on the other hand. To start it off today, I would say, in the case of keyboards and pointing devices or mice, yeah, our supply was pretty evenly spread across our product portfolio. I think that's pretty reflective of the market. Now, I will say, I think we didn't market.
We really turned off our marketing because the demand was so strong. We were really trying to keep up with it. Now, when we market, we tend to try to market for more premium mix, and I think that's an upgrade opportunity for us as we go forward we haven't really touched yet. We got another round of upgrades.
All those people who hastily went out and bought whatever they could, now there's an opportunity for us to upgrade a lot of those people, a lot of you. The second part on the visibility, I'll let Nate come in there, but I would say, how much visibility do we have? I would say we had a normal level of visibility in some ways and less in other ways.
Normal in that, usually we can see based on the current trends what's going to happen over the next couple of quarters because of tradition, because of the long history we have here. We really have a lot of data on that. On the other hand, as you pointed out, there's this really unusual dynamic with COVID. That led us to think harder, for example, about the holiday period.
We normally would have said, "Gosh, holiday is going to be like every other holiday. We're going to see a certain increase over Q2. You can take the math, take the percentage, add it to it, you've got the number."
We didn't this time. I'd say that our visibility is probably a little lower, and it's reflected in the fact that we've tried to intervene in a couple of places. Normally, we would have had better visibility than we did, and we tried to adjust based on good judgment. You want to add anything to that, Nate?
I think you covered most of it. The only place where we might see a little more visibility sometimes is if we have a direct relationship with a large enterprise customer or with an education buyer or something like that, where they have a little bit more of a roadmap that they're building to, but that's still pretty small for us.
Well, that's improving. I would say that is getting better. Our visibility in VC is getting better.
Yeah. It's an area that I think I forget who asked the question earlier when we talked about the sort of structural types of investments we have to make around processes and tools to build up those capabilities. That's one of the things that we've been investing in this year, but we'll invest much more in in the H2 .
Our head of the Video Collaboration commercial organization is a zealot for getting better visibility. She is amazingly focused on this, so I'm sure we will get better and better.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Michael.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Hey, Serge, your line is now open.
Hi, Serge.
Serge, you're on mute.
Hey, Serge, you're on mute. It's a nice headset. Oh, no. Still on mute.
Frozen. Ben, should we go to somebody else and come back to Serge?
Maybe you want to try to type it real quickly into the chat while we go somewhere else, maybe.
You want to try typing it? Why don't you type it in, Serge? Why don't you type it into the chat.
Sure.
Show people just how multimodal we are.
Andreas, maybe if your line is open.
Hi, Andreas. Just showed you there are product opportunities here. We've got to get after this.
Yeah.
Hello. Hello, everybody. Thanks for taking.
Hi, Andreas.
Andreas here. Hi. Two questions, if I may. One is actually what is currently your view about sell-through in the second half? Is that going to be close to the guidance implied sell-in of roughly 27%, or do you see there some divergence in the sell-through?
Okay. Was there a second question?
Yes, the second one is the promotion activity. How far do you need to go in the Q3 with promotion activity, given demand has been so strong, also your, to a certain degree, supply constraint, at least on two products, probably also in Q3, which is the largest quarter. Is it different than the usual promotion sales in the last couple of years or the same?
Okay. I think on the first question you have, I would say we expect kind of a pretty balanced view of sell-in and sell-through in the second half. As you mentioned, there's a few products where we're still catching up, and Bracken mentioned that we're increasing capacity, and we'll try to catch up in the second half there.
In general, I would think about a more balanced second half between sell-through and sell-in. On the promo activity, I think while we're uncertain as to the magnitude of the holiday demand, it may not be as sharp of an increase, just because people have been buying so steadily throughout the year. I think we do expect the promotion to be similar to prior years. You have the typical promotion days around the world, and we're expecting to participate into those.
As supply and demand get in more balance, we think that those promotion levels will move in here in the second half to more typical levels. That's what we've assumed.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Andreas.
Serge, you want to try one more time or catch up later? Okay.
He said he would use the one-on-one to ask.
No, we can't hear you. Sorry for the technical problem.
Why don't you type it into the chat, Serge? That might be the best thing to do. Or not. Okay. Do you have somebody else we can go to there, Ben?
No, I think that is the end of it.
We're going to give Serge one more minute, see if he can type it in the chat. Serge.
He wants to wait.
Okay, no problem.
Okay. Well, I will close this off by saying, it was obviously a super strong quarter. We have tremendous momentum. It's an exciting place to be. The most exciting thing about Logitech right now is our long-term growth potential. We are really in the right places, and we're going to keep delivering more. It's been so exciting so far, and I feel like a newcomer. We have a long way to go. All right. Thanks so much. We'll see you guys next quarter.