Good day. Welcome to the Logitech second quarter fiscal 2020 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be conducting a question and answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. If at any time during the conference you need to reach out to an operator, please press star followed by zero. This call is being recorded for replay purposes and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written authorization from Logitech. I'd now like to introduce your host for today's call, Mr. Ben Lu, Head of Investor Relations.
Thanks, Zack. Welcome to the Logitech conference call to discuss the company's financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2020. The press release, our prepared remarks, and slides, as well as the live webcast of this call, are available online at the investor relations page of our website, ir.logitech.com. During the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements, including with respect to future operating results that are made under the safe harbor of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, actual results could differ materially as noted in our quarterly and other filings with the SEC. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new developments or otherwise. Please note that today's call won't include results reported on a non-GAAP basis.
Non-GAAP financial results have inherent limitations and are not meant to be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for or superior to GAAP results. Our press release and slides provide a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP numbers and are posted on our IR website. We encourage listeners to review these items. Unless noted otherwise, comparisons between periods are year-over-year and in constant currency. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay on the Logitech website. Joining us today from California are Bracken Darrell, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Nate Olmstead, Chief Financial Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Bracken.
Thank you, Ben. Thanks all of you for joining us. We delivered a solid Q2 with strong execution in what is obviously a volatile time in the world. There are U.S.-China trade wars, volatile currencies, and Brexit. Those activities are so newsworthy and so noisy that you can temporarily lose sight of the more relevant and proportionally bigger long-term trends affecting us. The emergence of content creation as a lifestyle and a career choice by hundreds of millions of people, and maybe one day, billions. The establishment of gaming as a new super sport virtually all over the world that will eclipse traditional sports in most dimensions, if not all. The explosion of video communication from large rooms to small rooms, from phones to homes. We're moving from video calls as the exception to video everywhere in our lives.
We have consistently managed our business well. This quarter is no different. We delivered 6% constant currency growth despite putting through the first widespread U.S. price increases in more than a decade. We improved our gross margins despite tariffs and currency exchange rate headwinds. In fact, we achieved record operating profits for a September quarter despite these factors. We generated 25% more operating cash flow than the same quarter last year. Performing at this level in a market with that much turmoil could be seen as very good. Since the trade wars began, we've managed through tens of millions of CHF of impact to our business. That's what you've come to expect from us, and it's what we expect of ourselves. Going forward, we will see the impact of new tariffs implemented in September and more projected in December.
Again, these types of macroeconomic challenges are part of why you invest in us. A recession-resistant portfolio of categories and countries and a practice of no excuses. I would say it's a solid quarter where we managed our business and operations well despite the challenges. The macro environment is not getting any easier. Like we have done many times in the past, we expect to manage through all of this and deliver our targets. Let's dig into the performance of our different categories, many of which tap into these trends. Video collaboration sales grew 60% in Q2 to another record quarter. Our recent innovations, Rally, a camera system for large conference rooms, and Tap, a one-touch controller that enables easy and fast access to meetings, are both delivering incremental sales on top of the continued growth we're seeing from our Huddle Room MeetUp product.
Because of the enterprise nature of our business, our quarterly sales growth can be uneven at times. I wouldn't expect the 60% growth rate we just saw this past quarter to continue. Just like we said in the prior quarter, that the 28% growth rate in Q1 was unusually slow due to the sell-in versus sell-out dynamic of the business. This past quarter's strong growth is a clear testament to the tremendous market opportunity ahead of us to video-enable all the conference rooms in the world. Such momentum puts us well on track to achieve the billion-dollar VC sales potential that we laid out back in our Analyst Day in March. Last quarter, we announced Sync Beta, our device management platform. We've had great momentum with close to 100 companies testing and giving us feedback.
We're headed to general availability by the end of the year, so stay tuned on that one. We love the video conferencing business. It's got all the things we love in it, cloud platforms we can enable, the need for regular innovation and great design, and a breathtaking market opportunity, in this case, 100 million rooms plus. Our PC peripherals business delivered a solid quarter of 6% growth. Pointing devices grew 5% with contributions from both existing and new products. Our MX Vertical Mouse that was released over a year ago continued to grow double-digit, while our Pebble Mouse continues to have great sales in China. It's doing so well that we're ramping up distribution of it across the rest of Asia and even into EMEA.
Our recently introduced MX Master 3 is a redesigned version of our flagship premium mouse, that the major blog, The Verge, described as making the best mouse even better. I love that line. In fact, there was even a teardown of the inner workings of the MX Master, something you don't see often for just a humble mouse, but something that's common for devices like the iPhone. This speaks to the technical and engineering prowess that our team has been able to achieve and put into our products. Keyboards and combo sales increased 7% in Q2, representing the seventh consecutive quarter of growth, and with growth from all three regions. Our new slim profile, MX Keys wireless keyboard, has received great reviews, with PCWorld giving it an Editor's Choice Award and calling it easily one of the best wireless keyboards.
We also saw great contributions from several other new keyboards that were more limited to their distribution. Let me touch upon this for a moment. One of the important benefits of our diversified product portfolio and our global go-to-market capability is our ability to roll out new products in a limited way to see how they do. If they resonate well with consumers, like the Pebble when it was first launched exclusively in China, then we will expand distribution to other countries. If the product doesn't do as well as expected, then we'll keep them in limited distribution. This is one of the ways we can manage the risk of our portfolio. Turning to gaming, Q2 sales were up only 2%, similar to the trends we saw last quarter, with continued tough compares in headsets, offset by double-digit growth in all our other gaming products.
Do get easier as we head into the first half of calendar 2020, I'd expect the growth momentum in gaming to improve with more normalized compares as we exit this fiscal year. It's easy to miss the big picture here, and that's that the underlying gaming market is thriving, and sales of several of our new products are too. PRO X headset with Blue VO!CE, our G815 and G915 wired and LIGHTSPEED wireless gaming keyboards are all off to a great start. Tablet and other accessories declined 6% this quarter. We maintained strong growth in our education channel, offset by a decline in our traditional retail business. As we'd anticipated last quarter, mobile speakers were down 24% in Q2, largely due to the timing of when we launched BOOM 3 and MEGABOOM 3 in Q2 of last year.
While the overall mobile speaker market remains soft, conditions appear to be stabilizing somewhat, getting incrementally neither worse nor better. This provides a more favorable environment for us to continue to innovate across new experiences and products, as well as expand into new channels. Overall, we expect our mobile speaker sales to be in line with the forecast we provided at our Analyst Day, which called for a slight decline this fiscal year. Audio and wearables were up 12%, with Blue Microphones growing double digits and Jaybird flat-ish in the quarter. Let me turn the call over to Nate to walk you through our financial metrics.
Thanks, Bracken. I'm pleased with our overall execution and the financial results we delivered. We grew sales 6% to $720 million, and non-GAAP operating profits grew 6% to $89 million. Drilling down further, we grew sales across all regions, gained share in key segments, and improved gross and operating margins while investing in our strategic priorities. With regards to our top-line performance in Q2, overall growth was unfavorably impacted by approximately 1 point, as certain U.S. customers took time to adjust to our recently implemented price increases. We saw pockets of delayed orders in a few product categories as a result of our relatively modest pricing actions. Those increases did, however, help offset some of the tariff costs. Moving to margins, our Q2 non-GAAP gross margin improved by 80 basis points to 38.4%, the highest we have achieved since Q4 fiscal 2017.
Favorable product mix and cost savings initiatives more than offset the unfavorable year-over-year impact from tariffs and currency exchange rates. As we look into the back half of our fiscal year, we will see incremental tariff pressures on our gross margins, as List 4A tariffs were just implemented on September 1st, so they did not have a material effect on our Q2 financials. I expect about one point of margin impact sequentially in Q3 from these new tariffs, net of our ongoing mitigation efforts. Our non-GAAP operating expenses increased 7% to $187 million, with sales and marketing up 9% and R&D spend up 6%, as we continued to reinvest gross profit growth back into our business to capture long-term growth opportunities. At the same time, we maintained our G&A spending at around $20 million again this quarter.
With a disciplined investment strategy funded by top-line growth combined with favorable product mix, we delivered another quarter of operating margin expansion while marching toward our long-term potential as a company. Let me talk briefly about our cash flows. Cash flow from operations was CHF 107 million in Q2, a nice CHF 22 million increase versus the prior year quarter, and helped by strong inventory management. Despite our typical inventory build into the holidays, our overall inventory balance declined CHF 20 million versus last year, and our inventory turns of 5.3 times improved from just 4.9 times a year ago. Our full-year cash flows tend to be heavily skewed toward the second half, and we are still targeting full-year operating cash flow to roughly equal our full-year non-GAAP operating profit.
In terms of capital allocation, we paid out CHF 124 million in the quarter for our annual dividend, up roughly 10% versus last year. With that, I'll turn it back to Bracken.
Thank you, Nate. We just wrapped up a solid first half and are optimistic about the second half of the year as we head into holidays. Today, we're confirming sales growth of mid to high single digits in constant currency and non-GAAP operating income of $375 million to $385 million. Our guidance includes the tariffs that have been implemented to date. With that, Nate and I are very ready for your questions.
Certainly. At this time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Asiya Merchant with Citigroup, your line is open.
Hi. Good morning, gentlemen.
Hello, Asiya.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
given all the volatility that Bracken talked about. Can you guys maybe talk a little bit about, as we look in the second half, the comps, I think, get easier, but then you talked about all the volatility, the recent price increases and the tariffs that are going in as well. If you could maybe help give some puts and takes as you look in the second half, easier comps against all this macro and tariffs, how you guys are thinking about it, and which categories you feel most confident about as we look in the back half of the fiscal year.
I'll jump in first and let Nate add. I think, in terms of comps, I think the comp we have in gaming is probably the one that's going to moderate, especially as we enter next fiscal year. We expect to continue to have good performance in our VC business, solid performance in our C&P business, and I think the gaming business will be strong, especially when you net out the Fortnite effect from last year. I think the key story at the end of the back half of the year is we're going to continue to manage against the currency and tariff impacts. As you know, more tariffs will be showing up as we exit this fiscal year. That's not assuming yet that the 4B tariffs come through in late December, so we'll see on those. Currencies, we don't expect any big change.
Yeah, I think as we go through Q3 and Q4, every quarter is different, but I don't expect the story to be dramatically different. Anything you want to add there, Nate?
No, I think you're right. Obviously, we're continuing to invest in our VC sales force.
Yep.
We have some great new product launches this last quarter in gaming, and we're seeing continued good performance outside of headsets. I think you laid it out correctly. I think the back half of the year, it really comes down to, again, just strong execution and focus on the plans that we have and delivering on those.
Hear, hear.
The tariff impact that you've mentioned, Nate, on the gross margins, if you can help maybe clarify that more. You're expecting one point negative impact in net, that is against a favorable product mix still continuing in the back half?
If you look sequentially, Q2 to Q3, I expect about one point of headwind in that sequential compare, Q2 to Q3 from the tariffs that were implemented in September. Those really didn't have an impact on us in Q2 because they occurred later in the quarter. We'll see some increased pressure there sequentially, Q2 to Q3, from those September tariffs. We have plans, obviously, to try to mitigate those things, I do expect to see some of that pressure flow through into the P&L in Q3.
How are retailers responding to the price increases? Are they sticking? Are they kind of moderating their inventory? That's the last one from me. Thank you.
Yeah. I'd say so far, our first round of price increase in the U.S. in over a decade, we saw what you would expect. Some of the retailers initially balked at taking in more inventory. That affected us a little bit this quarter. In the end, as the market generally accepted the price increases, those retailers bought, and the business starts to come back. I think that's kind of normal in a rising price environment.
Yep. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Saya.
Joern Iffert with UBS, your line is open.
Hey, Joern. How you doing?
Hey, Joern.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions.
You betcha.
The first one is please, on your guidance.
When the new list on tariffs is taking place from December, is this now reflected in your guidance, or do you have then to reassess your guidance with Q3 results, which we will release in January? This would be the first question. Second question is please, if I look on your organic sales growth, it seems more or less everything is coming from VC now. Do you expect this to become more balanced over the next 12 to 18 months? Also here, more medium-term question. If I look on your historic growth drivers, like it was tablet, then it was mobile speaker, then it was gaming, now it's VC, but everything slowed down at some point in time. What makes you confident you really can maintain your high single-digit organic growth guidance in the next one or two years here?
Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, these would be the first questions, please. Thanks.
Okay. Well, that's a good list there, Joern. Nice job. Let me jump into the organic sales growth and the balance. We have a portfolio. We love having a broad portfolio because both of businesses and also of geographies. We're one of the most globally dispersed companies in the world. We also have a really great balanced portfolio across different regions. When one category is going through strong growth, others might slow down, but then they come back. That pattern has repeated itself over and over again across the seven, almost eight years that I've been here. Yeah, do I think it'll become more balanced over time? Yes, I do, Joern. I think as you go through and look quarter after quarter after quarter, I think you'll see more balance in our growth. It will spread out.
We had really nice growth in the C&P business this quarter, up 6%, right in line with the total business. Yeah, I think it reflects that, boy, that business continues to be very strong. As you said, VC was super strong. Gaming's a little softer now. That will come back again, especially as you go into next year when the Fortnite effect is over. As you look out a little further, the tablet mobile speaker dynamic, we've seen this before. We've seen different categories slow down, other categories pick up steam. We're always looking at new categories, both organic and inorganic. This is all contemplated in our long-term targets of upper single-digit growth. Do I expect to be able to continue to deliver that? Yes, I do.
In terms of the List 4B tariffs that you talked about in December, we never incorporate those in until they're officially confirmed, so they're not reflected in our guidance. Our job is to go in and really try to figure out how can we offset any of those things, and we're certainly looking out now and saying, "Okay, what's it take? How might we do that?" Pricing, relocations, straight cost reductions. So far they're not in, but we'll certainly be after it if they do get implemented.
Yeah, I agree, Bracken. Since they're being implemented, if they were implemented as, I guess currently communicated in middle of December, it would not have an impact really on our Q3 PNL. We may look to pull in some inventory ahead of that to try to offset cost increases, so we may see a little bit of inventory build ahead of that, but otherwise, really no PNL impact expected in Q3.
Okay, many thanks. Maybe just the last question on M&A. Is it likely that we maybe see really a new growth category you potentially will acquire, which can be a similarity to kind of VC or gaming in its early years?
Yeah, Joern, we're always looking at M&A, and we're also always working organically on new categories. We've got five to 10 seeds at a time in development internally, that most of which you don't know about and we don't share publicly, and many of which don't get out the door in over a six to 12-month timeframe. That's why we don't share them. In M&A, we're always looking. We've always got targets out there, and I'm completely dodging your question. There you go.
Good. Thank you.
Thank you, Joern.
Okay.
Thanks.
Paul Chung with JPMorgan, your line is open.
Hey, Paul.
Paul.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question.
Thank you.
First up on video collaboration, looks like you're seeing pretty nice return on expanding your sales team. Where are we in that kind of expansion of your sales force, and how should we think about the pace of OpEx spending there? Secondly, are you starting to see better traction for some of your higher ASP products? How are you kinda gaining share from your existing players there? I have a follow-up.
Yeah, I'd say, in terms of what's our investment in our sales force, where are we? I would view that as a work in progress. We're going to keep investing and keep building, and we're certainly nowhere near finished. As you said, we've made a lot of progress, so we feel good about the investments we're making, and we're going to keep investing. How to put a point in time on that? It'd be hard to say we're a certain percentage done because we view this as a long-term investment trend and we're going to keep going. In terms of traction on our higher ASP products, we continue to see Rally, for example, had a really strong quarter. So did Tap, both of which are pretty high ASP products, and those are medium-sized to large huddle rooms. MeetUp continues to do super well, too.
By the way, all those are really high ASP products for little old Logitech, who sells a lot of mice. We love the whole category, and certainly within that subcategory of video collaboration, the higher-end products are doing well.
I think on top of that, too, I'd add, just look at some of the customer metrics that we're now able to track related to that VC business. We are seeing deeper penetration into some of our installed base accounts. We're able to expand and work strategically with them to add some of those higher-end products and those larger solutions. Very nice favorable trends in that respect as well.
Okay, great. My last question is on Streamlabs. I know you mentioned it's not going to be material in FY 2020. I read somewhere they have around 1.6 million users and 480K mobile users. Can you just help us kind of frame the opportunity here and the rationale behind the acquisition?
Sure.
How can you kinda scale that existing user base? What's the kind of revenue potential and margin impact? What are your expectations for kind of cross-selling some of your existing products? Lastly, is there a kind of shift in your acquisition strategy? Is there a preference now to kind of find smaller software tuck-ins that are potentially more accretive to gross margins? Thank you.
Thanks, Paul. That's a great one. Thank you for offering that question because we wanted to talk about it. We're super excited about Streamlabs. It's the first sizable acquisition we've done that really has no hardware component at all. I think, if you say, how does that strategically fit into what we're doing? It's really a direct hit. If you look at what we're doing from a broadcasting and streaming perspective, we make the webcams, we now have the microphones, even keyboards and mice that are used by streamers to put themselves out there. What this is, this is the layer that sits between the streamer or between the podcaster and Twitch or any of the other platforms that people are using. It's a really, really cool addition to our business and a way for us to expand into services.
As you said, there are millions of people using this platform, so it was really a great opportunity. In terms of cross-selling, et cetera, early days, we haven't even closed the acquisition yet. I hope that happens in the next few days. We're just about there. We'll see. I think the key is to make sure that business is successful, and I think the way that business is successful is by enabling people to either have that lifestyle experience of streaming or to actually generate some income or revenue or even a job out of it. That's what those guys are doing today. We want to keep enabling them, and their geographic dispersion continues to be an opportunity, we think, as does just the sheer number of people doing them and even that we see other growth opportunities as well I won't get into here.
I'm optimistic about it. I'm excited about it. It's hard for us to marginalize. You mentioned it, yes, the gross margins there are significantly higher than our core business, so that's pretty cool too. I think you'll hear more from us over time on this business and others like it.
Okay, great.
Thank you, Paul.
Thanks, Paul.
Jürgen Wagner with MainFirst Bank, your line is open.
Hey, Jürgen.
Jürgen.
Yeah, hi. Thank you for taking my question. You gave us the gross margin hit from the additional tariffs.
Yep.
What would the gross margin impact for the remainder of the fiscal year be from FX if the U.S. dollar versus euro stays where it is today?
Sure
A follow-up question on M&A and organic growth. We've seen that assets with a larger focus on enterprise solutions have become a bit cheaper over the last year or so. At what point would you consider buying into the enterprise space to re-accelerate your organic growth that's coming down currently? Thank you.
Okay. Let me answer that one first, and then I'll let Nate dig into the FX question. We look at a very broad range of targets, categories we're in today, categories we're not publicly in today, and that would include the enterprise space. We love the enterprise space, as you know. It's pretty clear from our results over the last couple of years that it's an area we believe in, we're investing in, and we're learning a lot from and building capability in both from a technology standpoint and also from a go-to-market standpoint. Absolutely, we would consider additional M&A in that space. We continue to be excited about the consumer business. There are more and more spaces we feel like are relevant to us, and the latest one we've talked about is broadcasting and streaming.
That's a cool opportunity for us, a little bit like gaming probably was a few years ago, and we're excited about that too. As for the FX, you want to jump into that one?
Sure. Hey, Jürgen, was your question on gross margin?
Yeah. Sorry. Yep.
Yeah. FX is about CHF 10 million a quarter, year-over-year impact for us at current exchange rates.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Jürgen.
Ananda Baruah with Loup Ventures, your line is open.
Hey, Ananda.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Good morning.
Taking the question here.
Absolutely.
Hey, just a couple from me. Just from a macro-
Sure
perspective, Bracken, you obviously sound pretty confident about the tempo of the business. You also mentioned just opening the call, ongoing macro headwinds. Have you seen or do you feel like you're experiencing anything incremental over the last 90 days with regards to macro impact? Just in doing the calculations, it seemed that the Q over Q growth, sequential revenue growth in September, wasn't as strong as the last couple of years. Is there anything to that, or is that just business sort of mixed dynamics like that? I have a couple of follow-ups too. Thanks.
Okay. I'm going to let Nate respond to that second one. I would say, in terms of the incremental macro, no, I don't think there's anything really significant that you don't know about. The tariff changes are kind of what you'd expect. I don't think from a macroeconomic environment, we see any real difference over the last 90 days. I think it's very similar. A lot of people are talking about recession. We view ourselves as kind of a recession-resistant company, because of the fact that we've either got products that are really relatively low priced and they're good escapes or good to make you more productive at home or anywhere else you are, or they actually help you avoid needing to travel so much, and you could save money if you're a company. I don't know whether there'll be a recession.
At some point, surely there will be, but we feel really good about our business in that context if it were to come.
Yeah, I think regarding the seasonality, I think you got to come back to just think some of the product dynamics, with extremely strong gaming growth in the prior year and what that did to sort of disrupt what you might typical sequential growth rates. New product introductions also get into your baseline, you have some of those impacts. I think this quarter was roughly in line with what we expected, again, other than the VC probably just being a little bit stronger than what we had in our models. Again, that was somewhat just offsetting Q1 being a little bit slower just because of the timing of sell-in versus sell-out in that business. I didn't see anything really sequentially that was surprising to me.
Okay, that's great and helpful context. Just moving over to gaming real quick.
Sure.
You guys, Bracken, just bigger picture, you clearly sound as enthusiastic as you have in the past about the market opportunity.
Good.
Just for fiscal 2020, you sound sort of enthusiastic about the second half and the ramping into fiscal 2021. Just for fiscal 2020, do you feel that the Fortnite effect is having a greater impact? It's a greater headwind than you anticipated, or do you think that you get back up into that forecasted range, or there's at least potential to as you go through the second half of the year?
Well, I think the Fortnite effect was huge. It really was. If you look at any of the quarters we've had, kind of, and you add the two years together, it looks like a more normalized growth rate. It certainly was a big effect, and I'd say it was strong. Really strong. The good thing about that is that I always feel like I always love it when you have a hard compare, because that means you're going to emerge from that, and then the compares get easier. We're pretty close to that. I think as we go into fiscal year 2020, I'm excited about the fact that we had that compare this year and we won't have it next year. As you said, I am really optimistic, Ananda, about the long-term secular growth trend here.
I don't see anything about this that's not going to continue. We get calls every day, or almost every day. Every few days, either calls or letters or somebody is interested in putting their gaming program into a high school or into a university or a small college. I think that bodes well. It just says that the fundamental engine here continues to grow and drive, and that young people are coming into gaming as a sport.
Okay, great. I guess, let me ask a bigger picture one, Bracken.
Sure
Do you feel any differently about the gaming opportunity than you did at the start of this year?
No. No, I really don't. I feel exactly the same. I think it's just a great opportunity for us and for a lot of other companies.
Okay, great. I have one last bigger picture strategic question. Sort of Streamlabs is a part that fits into this and just kind of broader Unified Communications as a Service.
UCaaS. A little bit distinct from what took place at Plantronics last year. Any way you could give us context around what the potential or the opportunity is to develop more of a service offerings aspect to the portfolio? Streamlabs is a toe in the water there. Services like that could become increasingly very large. UCaaS is obviously service kind of bent oriented. What's the appetite to kind of dip into that pond as you go forward? Whether it's those or others that we're not aware of yet as you evolve the model.
Yeah. The Streamlabs is a consumer service opportunity, and Sync, S-Y-N-C, is a B2B service opportunity that we're really starting now, where you can actually track and monitor conference room equipment or conference room activity. We think that's a place that we can and should be playing. I don't want to overset expectations. I think we're going to do this at the right pace as we build capability both organically and inorganically, as you saw with Streamlabs. I do think building a service opportunity inside of our business on the back of a very strong, continued hardware capability is in our future, Ananda, and you can expect more from us there.
Okay, great. Appreciate the context. Thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you.
Michael Foeth with Vontobel, your line is open.
Hey, Michael.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon. A few questions from my side. The first one is regarding your VC business again.
Can you maybe comment on how your visibility is on the sales development in VC, and how that differs from the rest of your portfolio? The second question would be maybe if you can give us a general initial comment on how you see channel inventories going into the holiday season. How is it building up? Have you already seen a lot? I think that the sell-in and sell-through data that you're showing is not suggesting any significant inventory building yet. The third and final question would be regarding tariff mitigation measures. You have mentioned.
price increases, obviously, are there any other specific measures that you have taken during the quarter that you can comment on?
Yeah. Let's go through those. I'll let Nate talk about the channel inventory, but I think you generally described it correctly.
That's right.
big impact there. In terms of tariff mitigation, we mentioned this before, within the quarter, we are relocating some manufacturing. We continue to drive our costs very hard down. I'm personally impressed by, and I don't usually pat us on the back in public, but I'm personally impressed by our ability to manage gross margins in the context of both currency and tariffs. I think we've done a really nice job of, and our team has done a really nice job of relocating the right things and doing it quickly and doing it well, so there's no hiccup in supply. I think that's been good. As we said, in end of July, we implemented the first pricing we have in a decade. A very long time in the U.S.
We've done pricing around different parts of the world, so I don't want to overstate the difficulty factor there, and you know what we're doing, and we're ready to do it again as we need to. VC visibility. VC does have a little better visibility than our core business in a way, because we use Salesforce like everybody else in the enterprise space. We have a little better picture of the activity that's coming, and so that gives us a sort of profile of the way sales are developing. I think we'll see that improve, our ability to look into the future will improve over time as we spend more years in this business. I'd say it's a little bit better. We're optimistic about that.
I think the future of VC is, I've probably said enough about that today, but the future of video inside of all companies is bright. By building a sales force and building capability in the go-to-market structure, we're going to get better and better visibility into where those best opportunities are and exactly what you can expect from us quarter-over-quarter. We don't guide quarter-over-quarter, but we have better visibility than we have in the past already.
Can you maybe just quantify how many months of visibility do you have?
I'd be hesitant to do that. We haven't talked about that in the past. I'd say that our visibility is getting better and better, as you would expect, with more time in the business.
All right.
Tom Forte with D.A. Davidson, your line is open.
Hey, Thomas.
Thanks for the question. Hey.
Absolutely.
I just want to come back to the gaming business. Can you talk about the product life cycle in the gaming segment for headsets and other segments in the category, and how you're anticipating the effect of the gaming segments as the new consoles are expected to roll out in the back half of next year? Thank you.
Yeah. First of all, I think the product life cycle in gaming is faster than obviously it is in our C&P business, we launched several good headsets just recently. The new PRO Wireless, which is a really, really cool product. I think you're going to see a lot more activity in that space, I would expect that you'll continue to see a ramp in activity in all areas of gaming as time goes on, particularly in the headset space. In terms of the console cycle, I think it remains to be seen. The console refreshes are coming. In the past, the console refreshes came with no compatibility to past products. This time, that's different. I'd say that's a good counterweight to the normal trend, which would be that you'd have a lower sales rate in console as a new console comes in.
This time, though, since you've got backward compatibility, I think it may be different. Anyway, the bottom line is, I think our overall headset business will improve as we go through, especially into the first half of next year, and our overall gaming business will improve after we escape from those Fortnite compares.
Great. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press *1. Nehal Chokshi with Maxim Group, your line is open.
Nehal.
Yeah. Hello, how are you doing? Thank you.
Good, thanks.
Nice results. I was wondering, of the constant currency growth that you're seeing, how much of that was due to the price increases that you guys were able to implement successfully?
I'm not sure that I would attribute anything really to the price increases per se. If you assume kind of an elasticity of one to one, it's probably pretty flat. I'd say the constant currency growth is really just almost purely organic and not related to price increases.
In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I actually saw about a one-point unfavorable impact, just as some of our customers did delay some purchases and sort of use their existing channel inventories in the quarter. I think there was actually a little bit of headwind, but as Bracken mentioned, the price increase actually went about as we expected, and it did help offset some of the cost increase.
Yep.
That one-point impact that you cite, Nate, that implies then a price elasticity of less than 1.0, then?
It varied a lot by product, I would say. Based on the magnitude of the price increase and by the different products, as well as by the customer.
I'll jump in. I think what Nate was referring to was less about the elasticity on pricing and more about channel impact. You have customers who just don't buy. They don't like the look of the new pricing in the beginning. Happens every time we do this anywhere in the world. After a period of digestion where the market's changed and the prices are starting to lift in the market, then they come back in. It's not really an elasticity question, it's more of a channel inventory temporary impact. That's largely on its way to mitigating right out.
I think also too, just the uncertainty sometimes around these tariffs, right? It's in the news quite often. I think you have some customers who may be willing to wait a little bit and see if maybe things will turn in their favor, and then they can buy again at lower prices.
Yep
lots of dynamics.
Right. Understood. Presuming that the tariffs don't go away, how long does it usually take for the customers to accept the new prices and say, "Okay, let's go ahead and order"?
Yeah, I think most take that right away. There are a few that will slow down or stop buying some products. Then over the 30, 60, 90 days, it gets back to a normalized buying level. I think we're on our way there. We're not quite there yet, but probably sometime in Q3 we'll be 100% there.
Yep.
Okay. Can you actually give a little bit of color as far as what was the magnitude of the price increases to offset the tariffs?
Because of the competitive environment we're in, I'm a little hesitant to do that in any level. We didn't fully reflect tariff pricing in here at all, but we put in the level that we thought was reasonable, and I'll stop at that.
Yep.
Understood. All right. Gaming's been flat year-over-year, which is actually incredibly impressive given the really tough compares. I think you guys have a pretty good view into what does the install base actually look like in terms of growth. Could you share your perspective as far as what's the gaming accessory install base growth rate over the past six months?
I'm not sure what the install base growth rate would be. I think the underlying growth rate, though, if you take the headset business out, we're still growing double digits in all three categories, or all the categories of gaming outside of that. That suggests pretty strongly that the installed base continues to grow around the world, and I'm quite sure that it does. I imagine you can expect that to continue. Now, the opportunity, big opportunity right now, is the fact that we sold in so many headsets, and probably first-time gamer headsets last year, that there's an opportunity to upgrade those headsets over the next couple of years. That's why we launched premium headsets this year, and I think we'll start to see those take hold as we go into, especially into next year.
They're doing well right out of the gate, and that's probably because there was an opportunity.
Great. Do you see any signs that channel inventory is elevated on the gaming side?
No, I think channel inventories are in good shape heading into the holiday. As Bracken mentioned, we had some sell-in from the new headsets, but it was pretty modest. Everything looks clean.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. It appears there are no further questions. At this time, we'll turn the call back over to Mr. Darrell for closing remarks.
Well, thanks everybody for joining us. It's an interesting time in the world, and it's an exciting time at Logitech. We will see you in Q3.
Thank you.
After Q3.
This concludes the Logitech second quarter fiscal 2020 financial results conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.