Hi, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us at the Rosenblatt Age of AI Tech Conference. I'm Mike Genovese, the Cloud and Communications Equipment Analyst. That's my other job, Equipment Manager. So again, thanks for joining us. Super happy to have management from Calix with us today. We've got the Chairman, Carl Russo, the Chief Financial Officer, Cory Sindelar, and with her camera off right now, Nancy Fazioli, the Head of IR. I'm sure if anybody says anything they're not supposed to say, maybe then we'll hear from Nancy. But hi, Carl. Hi, Cory. Nice to see you.
Nice to see you, Mike.
Nice to see you, Michael. Great. This is going to be a 45-minute fireside chat. For those in the audience with questions, the best way to ask them is to type them into the widget in the Zoom interface, and they will come to me. I always make sure to ask all the questions from the audience to the company. I assume a lot of people here are pretty familiar with you, but maybe for those newer to the story, just sort of frame why Calix exists, like what your mission is, what your purpose is, what problems you're solving, and your strategy in five minutes or less. Take it away, Carl.
OK, let's go all the way back for those who are older. I hope you understand the mission and the vision, or the vision that we had and the mission that we're on. The strategy hopefully will become clear. If you're as old as I am, you remember that there used to be a telephone company and a cable company and a mobile company, a wireless company. Back then, there was AT&T or Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania. There was Comcast, Cox. There was McCaw Cellular. Those were the different forms of communications. If you think that through, we had a device for each of them. That device connected in different ways, whether it was on a twisted pair of pieces of copper or a coaxial cable or wirelessly to an antenna. The physical layer that those networks were built on was different.
The protocols that ran over those networks were different. The business models were different. The legislative regimes that they operated under from the federal government were different. If you fast forward that to the internet, as the internet became an offering first on dial-up and then on others, ultimately, all three of those types of service providers offered an internet service that was basically a pipe for a price. You could get a speed for a dollar. In 2006, it became clear to us that the world was going to change by virtue of devices that could, in essence, receive all services, whether it was a mobile phone or a landline voice or video. There were going to be converged devices that would enable you to start to separate the specialized devices.
If you allied that with an always-on internet connection, which did not exist at the time, but clearly was coming, you could then start to squint and realize that there was not going to be a cable provider in the future or a wireline provider in the future or a wireless provider. There was simply going to be something that we called a broadband service provider. They were going to provide all of your services to you, to your devices. We referred to you as the device-enabled subscriber. Once you had an always-on connection, the applications and the content would no longer reside on your device. It would move to a server. At the time, that is what we called it. Obviously, that became the cloud and then a CDN, et cetera.
That business model and that network is utterly different from what the networks of the previous three legacy service provider models looked like. To put it simply, it's a wireless endpoint, whether it's today a 5G, Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 6 in the unlicensed spectrum sitting on a piece of fiber that comes back via a PON to the inside edge of the data center. That service provider is going to be 100% focused on providing you, the subscriber, with internet connectivity. Hopefully, if they're advanced, with your experience. The second thing that we sorted out was in that network, if you think about the picture, everything that you do goes through the network of that broadband service provider. They literally are in possession of, but did not know how to get or utilize all the first-person data, everything.
Our approach was we could figure out how to get that data and utilize it to then help the service provider provide the superior experience, connectivity, wireless, whatever the case may be was. Our journey has been about helping people become broadband service providers and then evolving into a broadband experience provider. That is what we talk about today, some 18 years later from when we drew it on a board. Everything that you see in what is today an appliance-based platform cloud and managed services business is geared towards enabling a broadband experience provider to deliver an unrivaled experience to their subscribers, which results in very high net promoter scores, very high subscriber loyalty, very low churn, increasing ARPU.
It is all built over a network infrastructure with our appliances and clouds and operating systems that delivers it at the lowest cost per bit per mile. You have a very high ARPU with high margins over top of very low costs. Voila, a broadband experience provider becomes an entirely different business model at a very high profitability. That is the disruption that we have been engaged in in earnest since April of 2011 when we introduced our first cloud. We have been introducing all sorts of features ever since then. That is where we are. Maybe that is a good start to the story.
That is a good start. Now, you know, more recently, as you talked about your business, right, if you go back a few quarters ago, there was this idea of, hey, we're going to grow sequentially every quarter, but it would be low single-digit, you know, very low single-digit growth until we get to this other catalyst, which a few quarters ago we thought was going to be BEAD. Now we have had a quarter or two where we have actually had better than that, the kind of sequential growth we thought we would get to once we got to BEAD of that sort of 3% to 4%. When we talk to you, we are hearing confidence in the business. BEAD is not in your numbers. We are not any specific timing for BEAD.
There seems to be something going on certainly besides BEAD, like outside of BEAD, that's giving you this confidence. I guess if at a very high level, if we just sort of said, doesn't everybody in this country already have broadband? I mean, I think that would be an ignorant statement. That's not exactly what's going on in the market. What is going on in the market? You know, this broadband, people adding subscribers, is it the market in general? Is it just your customers? Where are you getting this confidence that you seem to be growing on this pace that before we thought you would need BEAD and now we don't even think you need BEAD to.
Parametrically, since you followed us and have followed us for quite a bit of time, BEAD has been a topic point. We've never had it in our numbers or in our model. It's always been sort of, it's out there. It's going to happen. It still isn't in our model. The pandemic disturbed what was otherwise a sequentially growing business for six or seven years now. If you, I would encourage you all, if you get a chance to go over to our investor relations website, and if you scroll down on the landing page, you'll see a video where Cory helps folks understand the effect of the pandemic and what's actually been going on in the business. Let me see if I can bring it forward to your question.
The business fundamentals are based upon subscribers going to broadband experience providers and the BXPs winning those subscribers. They've been winning those subscribers ever since we started working on this model. And the platform cloud and managed services business has grown every day since we started, literally every day, some days by more, some days by less. What's bounced around were the appliances, the hardware because of the pandemic, all those things that went on, et cetera. So the confidence in the business as far as the platform cloud and managed services conference has always been there. And it's unrelenting and slowly but surely accelerating. What's happened since then? You're through the pandemic, the lengthening of lead times, the shortening of lead times, all of that's there. There's another couple of things happening. Look, it's very clear broadband is inelastic. Subscribers want broadband. It is inelastic.
What is also clear is that most subscribers are not in love with their existing service providers because they do not get a high-quality service. We have been doing this enough now to know that the broadband experience providers are the ones that are taking subscriber share. That is what gives us the confidence, that the broadband experience provider model is winning at the point of the subscriber. We are the ones helping build the broadband experience provider model. It is not more complicated than that. There is just more runtime on what we have been doing. The disruption in the market has changed. Let me just give you a hallmark phrase. If you listen to BXPs and you ask them about subscribers, they will talk about subscribers served. We serve this many subscribers. If you talk to legacy service providers, they do not talk about that term.
They talk about homes passed, which if you think about it, is a construction term. Just because you pass a home does not mean you are deriving any revenue or you are providing any service. The legacy model, which was very much a homes passed model you would hear at our quarterly conference calls, has flipped over to a subscriber served model. In that model, the experience provider wins. That is what is giving us the confidence.
Great. Interesting. You know, I just want to ask this question to kind of get it out of the way, unless we really do need to dwell on it. Just the tariff and macro question, those do not seem to be like big overhangs on the company. What should we know about tariffs and about macro risk here?
Yeah, I'm going to turn that over to Cory just on the macro risk again. Two things that I would highlight again. The subscriber experience on an inelastic service enables our customers to win. The other item is, look, with the geopolitical uncertainty and the dynamism that exists on that side, for whatever reason, we are highly concentrated in the U.S. today. We are sort of in a bit of a safe harbor, so to speak. 95% of our revenue last quarter was U.S. Those are the two comments I would make. When you start translating it into tariffs and other things, Cory is far better placed than I to speak. Cory, all yours.
No, thank you, Carl. We're in a very uncertain time as it relates to tariffs. Our best approach has been to focus on the USMCA trade agreement, the fact that it was put in place under Trump's first term. Hopefully that agreement then stays. Under that agreement, we can produce products in Mexico and bring them into the United States at a zero tariff rate. Longer term, we're looking at creating that capacity in Mexico to have that ability. That being said, still more expensive to produce in Mexico than it is where we are at in Southeast Asia. In a sense, we want to have a foot in both camps. Depending on what happens with reciprocal tariffs, we have the ability to shift and swing supply into either of those geographies. That's kind of the longer-term strategy.
In the near term, we've got a beautiful balance sheet. We're going to use some of the cash on the balance sheet and go build as much product as we can while we have this 90-day reprieve from reciprocal tariffs. At the moment, it's not going to impact us. Our products currently, as they are situated, have a zero tariff on them. We can continue to bring them in there. That could change. The codes could change. So far, we're sitting in a good spot. Our goal is to bring as much inventory in. Maybe these trade agreements with some of these companies get kicked down and we get another 90-day reprieve. It gets us a little further towards our end goal of having capacity in Mexico to mitigate it. The bottom line is we have a world-class supply chain team.
I think we've demonstrated through COVID that we can adapt very quickly and work our way through it just like anyone else, better than most can.
Great.
Thanks, Cory.
It sounds like we do not have enough information today to kind of even talk about whether in the future that could weigh on the 100-200 basis points per year or make it 100-150 instead of a fifth. We just do not know because we do not.
You have to just X that out.
Yeah.
I mean, it could wipe it out and, you know, but.
Yeah.
I remember that 200 basis point expansion is set aside from tariffs.
Yeah. Right. I would add, if you go back to the COVID pandemic, when cost increases were all over the map, as you may remember, we took advantage of our margin structure and our balance sheet and waited until we had clarity on exactly that, Mike, before we ultimately raised prices. We did not know if we were going to raise prices or not. If we were going to raise them, we were going to be last to do it. There are already vendors that have raised prices on the tariffs today. As you might imagine, we have not done anything yet. We may not do anything. The reason I raise that is on an absolute basis, it may affect us.
On a comparative basis, it's always going to inure to our benefit because of the value of what we're doing and our ability to wait and engage customers directly.
Great. Let me slip in a question from the audience here. Maybe if you could comment on the new BEAD rules and specifically what % of funds do you think will go to, it says to broadband, but I assume they mean to fiber broadband.
The new, so the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) updated under the new administration came out on Friday. It basically removes any technology preference until you start reading into the fine print when they start talking about scalability requirements, et cetera. The long story short is no one knows. Because what you're going to see here, because this is a state-administered program, is different states are going to approach it differently and push on the administration to do what they think is right. Having a clue as to what the percentages will be, you know, there'll be a lot of fiber. I suspect there'll be quite a bit of fixed wireless. And there's going to be some satellite. Not different from what we thought was going to happen before. I think the percentages will be a little bit different. I think there's more room for fixed wireless.
There might be more room for satellite. We'll see. The most important piece to understand is this is in the hands of the states to go argue for what they want. The one thing I would tell you, in my view, this is my personal view, not the company's view, is in that NOFO is a 90-day requirement to go through the bidding process and come back. There's just no way, in my opinion, that that's happening. This is going to inject another delay of some period of time. There's going to be a lot of fighting. To ask for a percentage number would be like holding up a mirror and throwing a dart over my shoulder. I don't know.
If anybody tells you they know, they're either prescient, much smarter than me, or they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Pick one.
Yeah. I mean, if we think that part of the rewriting of the rules was to kind of favor one satellite player in particular, but then that satellite player is maybe not in favor anymore, are there other satellite players to just step in there?
I mean, Kuiper's going to be launching, et cetera, and there's other pieces. Look, at the end of the day, you're describing the current world we live in. Over the last 120 days or whatever it's been, you know, it's radical uncertainty. I think we should all have a healthy respect for that. Here we go again. In uncertain times, we will do better. I'll just leave it at that. Because the business model we built, the differentiation for customers, the data we have, the direct engagement model we have, our customer success teams, comparatively, we will do better. Absolutely, it may have an effect on the model. That's for you all to think about from an investment standpoint. Leading the business, Michael and Cory are thinking about it in a comparative sense.
Right. Yeah, let's get back to some of those questions. Yeah, I think, you know, ever since you and I have been speaking about Calix and this strategy, there's been this idea of crossing the chasm from smaller broadband experience providers to eventually larger ones would realize that they could solve their problems for cheaper with going with what you built rather than trying to build it themselves.
Sure.
What have been the latest data points on kind of the proof points of whether this is happening or how it's happening?
We have talked about it because ultimately, markets that disrupt go through that phase. That is the elbow phase. Then you start to go more vertical. It became clear that the market was starting to cross the chasm 24 months ago, 18 months ago. Michael and I certainly had lots of chats about how it felt, kind of conversations that he was having. It was time to go to the front. Part of that means the CEO goes to the front. I will do my best as Chairman to fill in for him and things that I can fill in for him, this conference being one. It is very busy. You are clearly seeing, if you follow our press releases, names of larger customers that are starting to show up in those press releases. Brightspeed would be most visible in recent times, but Windstream, Alta Fiber.
Obviously, Cox is a customer. We all know that Verizon is a customer. The disruption is hastening, and it is clearly crossing the chasm. That said, remember, these things happen at a pace commensurate with product-market life cycles. This is not a slow, this is not a fast market life cycle space. This is a decade-plus space. It is definitely happening. I would just simply say it will continue to happen and stay tuned.
Okay. Great. How about separation from competitors? You know, both when we try to analyze the business, you know, we look for comps, but it is difficult. Then also when we do valuation, it is kind of hard to find a group to put you in. How do you think about the competitive landscape and about how the company separates from competitors? Who should we group you in as we try to comp you to other people?
I don't have a good, I don't have a good group from a comp standpoint. I mean, internally, we think about appliance-based companies, which are typically going to be security companies. And we think of ourselves in an earlier stage than mature security companies. You know, if you go back, in Cory's video, he starts in the first quarter of 2019. If you go back and look at the lay of the land of 2019, you look at it today, there's very clear separation from anyone who might have thought about doing what we're doing to what we're doing. And so that's up to us to keep executing. I don't believe in being paranoid. I do believe in being vigilant. But we don't see it in that way.
Separate and apart from that, as the BSPs are becoming BEPs and the legacy service providers are falling away, there is also the web scale providers. The reason I raised the web scale providers is that is a separate space. We do not call them web scale providers. We are focused on the subscriber-facing network. The inter and intra data center network that is part of the web scale data center AI play has huge CapEx dollars in it. To the extent that you have a choice, you might be, let us just say, enamored with those large CapEx dollars. We are not chasing CapEx. It is a recurring revenue model. We have this comparatively slower growing space to the web scale players that is driving recurring revenue versus this very fast-growing space that is driving billions and billions and hundreds of billions of dollars in CapEx. Guess where everybody is going?
Many of the companies that you cover are just hard over to go there. I view it very simply. We anticipated the wave of disruption. We have built the platforms for it. Waves get bigger. If you do not paddle faster, you get stuffed. Let us stay focused on what we are doing and helping our broadband experience providers win. The rest will take care of itself. As far as comps, over the last 6 years, we have added 175 basis points to gross margins every year, basically. Find me a comparable to that. Find me something that has 56 or 57 point mark. We are in this space where most people are either in 40s or 60s and 70s. We are going from there to here. At our nadir, we started back, it was 37 points of gross margin.
Over that period of time, you've seen us add 20 percentage points of gross margin. I don't know of any other company that looks like that. To your point, I don't know what to comp it to if I'm an investor in that way.
Do you think you can add 20 more or is 10 more closer to right than adding 20 more from here? I'm basically saying, are we going to go to the low 60s or low 70s over time?
That would be 15. And I do think 15 is doable. Don't know about 20.
Yeah.
I do think the model gets into the 70s eventually. I don't know that it gets to the high 70s or the low 80s. I don't think that that's harder for one to think through.
If I kind of, to me, the obvious question when I take your last answer and the two parts of it, kind of the next question as an analyst that I have to ask, right? Because you've said in the past, you said, look, we've got these competitors. We're going to hold back on all of the financial disclosure that you guys want because we don't want to give too much away to our competitors. We're going after these recurring revenue buckets and software revenue, recurring revenue, experience revenue. I think things tied to inside the house and to the data and EXOS and things like that. We've got this recurring revenue. We want to keep it from our competitors. The competitors aren't doing so well.
To me, I have to ask, are you going to disclose more about the recurring revenue, more about the software revenue in the future since you've put so much distance between yourself and the competition?
Yeah, it's that. Thank you. It is also a matter of keeping an eye on the venture community and where they're going. Right now, to your point, they're also enamored with the cloud AI space. It would be disingenuous having said that for many years if we did not then look at this and go, you know what, it's clear and maybe it's time. Cory has certainly made that point to me on more than a few occasions. My commitment as Chairman is somewhere between now and the end of 2026, we will separate appliances out from the rest of the business. You will get a chance to see, in essence, what the box ship part of the business is and the rest of the business coming up.
Okay. Now, maybe you know more in anticipating this question, but now I'm thinking that if you're going to break it out, right, the non-appliance piece probably has to be at least 20% to kind of like be a separate category. Is that by the time you break it out?
It'll be broken out. It'll be broken out as a revenue number and a gross margin number.
Yeah.
The rest of the business will have a revenue number and a gross margin number. What it is when it gets broken out, we'll see.
Right.
It'll be a good guess.
Do you think that the whole story of a gross margin improvement comes basically just from those revenues growing faster? I mean, are either the, or also because the margins there go up as the platform gets bigger? I guess the platform margins probably increase because they're lower than they should be in the beginning.
Yeah, Cory would tell you. I'll let Cory take you through the mix. We're not subscale anymore. We have lots of scale opportunities in front of us. That will manifest itself on the non-appliance side. Cory, you want to give some color to that?
Yeah. If you're looking at our software stack, it starts with the OSs. They're sitting at 100 points. Our cloud comes next. It's not at the scale we think it can get to. Each incremental sub's coming on at a much higher gross margin than what we'll get today. We're in that high 60s, low 70s kind of number. Then you've got the managed services, which are in the 90s. There's a little bit of third-party content in some of those. Nevertheless, it's a growing part of the business, the fastest growing part of the business. Obviously, margins continue to expand even within that segment.
Great. Kind of, I don't know if this is a good question or not, but just sort of the latest and greatest on cloud or managed services, what are the features or offerings that are particularly relevant to customers?
Yeah, it's not features. If you go back a few years, we were thinking it would be this individual services. And what we found is what speeds our customers' ability to take share in their markets is when we verticalize the offerings into smart home, smart biz, smart town. Obviously, the most recent offering that's coming to market right now is Smart MDU. That is a big expansion of our addressable market because, as you're probably aware, 30% of subscribers live in MDUs. At one level, without that offering, we're addressing two-thirds of the market as opposed to the entire market, if that makes sense. Those are the big drivers. Obviously, what drives that is our customers continuing to understand how to go to market, sell it, take share.
Our customer success teams are engaged with them every day to literally help them do that. That is what we are doing. It is not just, that is not a product offering, right, per se, although customer service is a customer success is a service offering. That kind of partnering and consultative approach is every bit as important as any product that we would have.
When you put together something like Smart MDU, right, I can see the non-appliance revenues would get a jolt from those offerings. But then do you also see an acceleration in appliance because then your customers kind of, if they build more infrastructure to MDUs now, they can gain more share. So does it kind of drive the appliance sales as well?
Yeah. The appliance sales that it would drive would be much more on the premises side, so the revenue edge side, than it would be on the network access side. Because obviously, the network access to an MDU is one. And then you have condos or apartments in it, which are many. Those are endpoints. For sure, yeah. I mean, it's the same as everything else that we do. When you add subscribers, there's an initial end period piece of revenue that comes from a GigaSpire or somewhere in that family. Then you're back to the recurring revenues.
What's the takeaway? What should we think about? There's been just industry consolidation continues at the service provider space.
It sure does.
AT&T, Lumen, Charter, Cox. We're not seeing, obviously, the new BSP formation that we once did, right? I mean, I don't know if that's coming back at all, but it was very heightened and then it kind of went away. We're seeing consolidation. What does that mean practically for Calix and your investors?
The first thing it means practically is it's an indicator of where we are in the disruption. That behavior is not seen in the early adopter phase of a market. That behavior only starts to happen as the disruption starts to pick up steam. Now you have folks that are driving the disruption, our broadband experience providers. You have folks that are being eroded by the disruption, which are the legacy players. Often times what you see are the legacy players in a disrupted market will consolidate sort of as a bulwark against a rising tide. Inevitably, you know where it goes. The second thing that we're seeing is an increasing focus on the part of financial sponsors and some others that are sort of looking at it going, we're losing subscribers rather than consolidating with another company that's losing subscribers.
Can we shift our model to a subscriber-served model and away from a home's past model? It is also reinforcing of the disruption. It will be interesting to see what comes out of these latest consolidations. Every one of them represents an opportunity either lesser or greater. It is up to how they see the future and what their strategy is and also how we execute.
Okay. Great. We have about 10 minutes left. I just want to encourage the audience who have questions that they want to get in, now would be a good time so that we have some time to ask. Over a pretty long period of time now, Carl and Cory, Calix has been growing about 15% on the top line on average. We have seen about 1.75 points of GM's improvement per year, only really disrupted by the pandemic. Otherwise, just on that trajectory. I mean, is that still, as you think about managing the business, is that the correct framework, 15% and almost two percentage points of gross margin per year?
Mike, I would say if you think it back to our long-term model, which we haven't deviated from, we said that the top line would grow somewhere between 10-15%, right? So a double-digit grower. Margins would grow at 100 to 200 basis points per year. And we had an optic structure that rolls up somewhere between 40-42% of revenue. That's where we're still thinking and still planning to. That's the way we look at it. Yeah, it can continue within that framework.
It just so happens it executed to the higher end of those parameters. That does not mean it will again. So far, it has been very nice, a very nice pickup each quarter. You have watched the sequential rates growing. There is enough visibility to have the kind of sequential quarter we had in the first quarter and still be able to lift the model for the remainder of the year.
Yeah. How do you guys approach? I mean, I just noticed on the sell-side research on the street, right? There is still just a lot of, in this industry, a lot of framing things, meaning the questions that you guys get asked. The whole framing comes from this kind of hardware-focused cyclical industry. All the questions seem to have to do with seasonality and hardware cycles. I guess the challenge of how do you sort of, if people keep asking those kind of questions, how do you sort of bring them along to a new way of thinking about the company? One way of thinking about the company.
One way to do it is just to ridicule them, but I just kidding.
What, are you kidding?
No, but yeah, I understand. Let's go back. Let me start at the buy side. Our longer-term investors, that is not what they focus on at all. They're literally drilling into what's going on, what's happening with this service, this managed service, what's the take rate, what are you seeing, what are customers doing, what's the impediment? As you work your way back from there, there are clearly folks that will look at the end-period box revenue as a big driver. Our sell-side is shifting. I mean, look at you and your tenure here. It's not an easy model to just look at and go, got it. It takes some amount of work. You've put in the work, and I think you get it. Over time, I think that will be the case. Part of it is you're betwixt and between.
There's the 37 points over here, and there's the 72 points over there. Potential. I don't know. I can find no analog for what we're doing. None. I am also not advocating that you start, you found a startup, and then 6 years in, you go, "Holy crap. The whole world's going to change. Let's start a new startup inside of the existing startup." There are many, there's lots of points along that path that were not easy. When Cory joined, we had about $1.298 in capital total as we were transitioning from one company to the other. All along the way, I think it's a story that just takes time for folks to get. I think those that do and can see where we're going will ultimately be rewarded as we believe we are. Most importantly, the subscribers to our customers are.
As long as we keep the focus there, the rest of this will take care of itself. Inexorably, look, every connection, there are investors that will chat with customers. You'll get out and chat with them. They get it. Just takes time.
Let me fire, in the five minutes we have left, let me fire some questions from the audience if you have come in. I am just going to read them in the order that they came in. Going back to BEAD, the company has some fixed wireless customers already. To what extent is Calix indifferent between fiber operators and fixed wireless operators being funded?
To a perfect extent. Because the fixed wireless is only replacing the local loop. As an example, the converged network that we talked about at the very start of this call has an AXOS E9 at the data center edge. There are fiber that goes out to premises, but there is also fiber that goes to 5G antennas that is doing fixed wireless. We are literally indifferent. By the way, when you get into the house, guess what? There is a wireless router and managed services if we are doing our job.
Is it basically just the ONT that you're not selling? Or is there actually still an ONT? No, there's no ONT. Right. But that's like a very low margin.
That's right. That's right.
Okay. All right. Great. Next question from the audience. What is the biggest upside opportunity right now?
The biggest upside opportunity is what we talked about earlier. It's MDUs as far as expanding TAM. If you take that away as an expansion and you just look at what we're doing, by far the biggest opportunity is what we've said all along. It's just land and expand. We are so underpenetrated in our existing customers. They're still learning how to do subscribers, etc. We have multiple dimensions to the growth opportunity inside of the customers that we have. It's about working with our customers, with our success teams to help them evolve their models. The biggest opportunity, barring the space expansion from MDUs, is actually the transformation of the business models of our customers. That's a slow burn. Boy, as you do it, it's pretty rewarding.
What is holding back larger revenues in Europe? Is it just because there is so much opportunity here and the OpEx is going into that? Is there something timing-wise in Europe where they are not as far ahead on these experiences?
No, it's very much our investment portfolio. You keep looking at it going, "We want to go do more there." The problem is you're literally stepping over a $100 bill to get access to a $1 bill. The opportunities are so large in the U.S., North America that it just continues to dominate where you're investing. We would literally be counter-strategic if we did it differently.
Again, just reading audience questions. Still buying back stock at these levels?
The answer to your question is we won't share that because it's not how we buy back stock. We buy back stock with a disciplined process where we look at our balance sheet, our cash on hand. We look at it every 91 days. We then look at our C plus 4, which is our internal quarterly planning process, plus our five-year strategic extrapolations of that. We look at visibility that we then do valuations. From that falls out what looks like a purchase matrix. It's basically we'll buy this much, we'll put this much money against that price, this much money against that price, etc. If the price is in those ranges, we're buying. If the price is above those ranges, we're not. Obviously in the first quarter, we bought, I remember, 1.1 something, I think it was like that, million shares.
We'll see what happened in the second quarter.
Okay. We have about one minute left. I think I asked all my questions. I think you made a compelling case that the company is unique and there is a lot of value here and that top line with the margin expansion. I am really looking forward to the further revenue breakout. I think that will be great. As analysts, we like that kind of thing. Again, with one minute left, any final thing to say to the investors before we wrap up?
I'll pick your words. The company is unique. That's the good news. It's also the bad news from a comp standpoint. You have to look at it a little bit differently. You have to keep in mind it's an infrastructure space. We're not going to grow at 100% a week. To Cory's point, a 10-15% continuous growth with a gross margin expansion over what will be a fixed OpEx model spits off a lot of cash in the future. I'm a big fan of cash flow. That's how we think about the business. If that aligns with your investment methodologies, I think we'll do very well together.
Yeah, feel free to give Carl a call. He loves calls and follow up.
We are available. Nancy will make sure that you get what you need if you're interested. Again, thanks very much for the time to everyone on the call and to you as well, Mike.
Great. Thanks for joining us. Nice talking to you, Carl. Great to see Cory. And appreciate everybody in the audience and look forward to catching up with everyone soon. Thank you.