Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining Dropbox second quarter 2019 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the investor relations section of Dropbox website following this call. I will now hand the call over to Darren Yip, Dropbox Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Dropbox's second quarter 2019 earnings call. Today, Dropbox will discuss the quarterly financial results that were distributed earlier. Statements on this call include forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected performance of our business, future financial results, strategy, long-term growth, and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call. In particular, those described in our risk factors included in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2019, and the risk factors that will be included in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2019. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.
All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for or in isolation from, our GAAP results. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC and may also be found in the supplemental investor materials posted on our investor relations website at investors.dropbox.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Dropbox's Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Drew Houston. Drew?
Thanks, Darren. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our earnings call. On the call with me is Ajay Vashee, our Chief Financial Officer. Yamini Rangan, our Chief Customer Officer, will also join us during Q&A. Today, I'll talk about our business and product highlights and the continued expansion of our ecosystem. Ajay will review our Q2 financial results, touch on our go-to-market strategy, and provide guidance for Q3 in fiscal 2019. In Q2, we delivered strong results across our business. Revenue grew 18% year-over-year, driven by paying user growth and ARPU expansion. We also generated robust margins as we continue to deliver a balance of both growth and profitability. These results continue to demonstrate the strength of our global collaboration platform, our efficient go-to-market strategy, and our operational discipline. Let's begin with our product update, where we've had a number of exciting announcements.
In Q2, we unveiled the new Dropbox. We believe that there's a lot of room for improvement in the experience of using technology at work, and we think the new Dropbox can help make that experience a lot better for our users. While there are new tools and productivity apps are meant to help us work better together, the reality is that they're creating new problems, too. Having all these new tools means our content is now scattered in all these different places. We have to keep toggling back and forth between the different apps, and teams have a hard time staying coordinated, and it's hard to figure out who should be doing what. While we have a bunch of new tools, a bunch of the old ones we're using haven't really changed.
The way we interact with files on our computers today hasn't really changed in 30 years. The file browser on your desktop is still the static view of files and folders, and there are no people, no teams, and no activity. That's where the new Dropbox comes in. For over a decade, Dropbox has been a magic folder that lets you have all your stuff in one place. The new Dropbox evolves the magic folder into a magic workspace, where you can have all your work in one place. The new Dropbox is a unified workspace to organize users' content, connect them to their tools, and bring everyone together wherever they are. This includes an all-new desktop app that offers our users a foreground experience they've never had with Dropbox before. First, this new workspace brings users' content together.
The new Dropbox builds on our history of keeping people organized by bringing both cloud content and traditional files together so everything is in one place. Now users can create, access, and share cloud content like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as traditional Office, PDF, and image files within Dropbox. In addition, they can create and store shortcuts to web assets, news articles, wiki pages, and online project management and productivity tools together with the rest of their work in Dropbox. With everything in one place, it's a lot easier to navigate. Users will have one search box, not 10, to search across all their stuff. Second, the new Dropbox brings its users' tools together. We're making sure the apps people use throughout the day are an integral part of the new Dropbox experience.
Building on our existing integrations with tools from companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and Autodesk, we're introducing several new ones. They'll work seamlessly with Dropbox to help bring users' content into context, starting with our new strategic partnership with Slack. The new Dropbox and Slack integration helps bridge the gap between content and communication, letting users collaborate seamlessly on shared items. Users will be able to start Slack conversations and send files to Slack channels directly from Dropbox and easily share Dropbox files within Slack conversations. We also plan to facilitate cross-customer discovery of one another's products, similar to our go-to-market relationship with Zoom.
Speaking of our Zoom partnership, we went live with our integration in June, enabling users to bring their work into video conferences. From Dropbox, they'll be able to add and join Zoom meetings, and during Zoom meetings, users will be able to share and collaborate on content that lives in Dropbox. We also announced a deep partnership with Atlassian. We're in the process of building enhanced integration with Atlassian to help teams more effectively manage their projects and content, and we'll have more to share on this dimension soon. All of these partnerships expand our robust ecosystem and put Dropbox at the center of our users' workflows. We're firm believers in the power of integrations, and our open and interoperable platform is one of our most important differentiators. Finally, the new Dropbox brings people together. It isn't just about content and tools.
At the heart of all that work is the people making it happen. We've built new features to help teams stay in sync. We've transformed shared folders into rich workspaces. Now, teams can get coordinated by adding descriptions to folders to help collaborators understand more about the work they're doing. Key content can be highlighted by pinning it to the top of a workspace, and users can even @mention people and assign to-dos, so everyone knows what happens next. Teams can also gain visibility into the latest progress on shared work. The new Dropbox lets users see file activity, including viewer info and team collaboration on Dropbox content in Slack and Zoom, and keep tabs with the new team activity feed. To close the loops, teams can also share feedback by creating comments right alongside their content across desktop, web, and mobile.
With the new Dropbox, all of your content, tools, and teamwork live together in one collaborative workspace. In addition to our new desktop app, we made improvements to our individual plans last quarter to help users work more efficiently. First, we added Dropbox Smart Sync to our Plus SKU. Smart Sync frees up hard drive space on users' computers by moving their content into the cloud while still giving them the ability to view and access files right from their desktop. In addition, we brought machine learning-enabled full-text search to Plus users, allowing them to search their files using keywords instead of just a file name. We also introduced Dropbox Rewind to the plan, which is an account rollback capability that can quickly undo accidental edits or restore deleted work by taking folders, or even an entire account, back to a point in time.
Next, to enhance our professional plan, we launched an even more powerful version of Smart Sync, which automates the process of moving less frequently accessed items off users' computers and added an extended history version of Dropbox Rewind. In addition, professional users now have access to premium rich previews, which includes an expanded list of newly supported file types. Our professional plan also includes a new watermarking tool that overlays ownership and date information onto files, allowing customers to protect their work when sharing with clients. Finally, we're increasing storage limits across both our individual and team SKUs to help us further differentiate our plans. Turning to Dropbox Paper. While the new Dropbox is a powerful workspace to organize content and bring teams together, Paper continues to play an important role as our first-party experience for content creation and collaboration.
Over the past few months, we've added a handful of new features to Paper tables. These enhancements help teams simplify project management with task assignments, color-coded progress markers, and data and image organization. Tables are a key part of how teams stay organized, and the updates we've rolled out will help to further improve coordination and alignment so everyone working on a project can stay focused. Paper is also helping to drive customer wins. In Q2, this included a Dropbox Business deployment with SHO-BOND Holdings, which is a Japanese firm specializing in contracting, civil engineering, and construction. SHO-BOND Holdings is partnering with Dropbox to drive its digital transformation efforts and plans to use Paper to facilitate more efficient workflows for its field workers.
In addition to improving productivity and efficiency, SHO-BOND will leverage Paper's native image embed capabilities to eliminate the need for physical whiteboards and enable workers to more effectively share critical information with their colleagues. Next is the admin experience. Earlier this year, we launched activity pages to our business teams, providing admins with visibility, controls, and deployment tools to monitor how their users are engaging with Dropbox. Adding to these capabilities in Q2, we recently launched Quick Actions, which is a feature unique to Dropbox. This feature allows admins to quickly remediate issues they've identified in their team activity page through one-click actions, saving time on processes that would have previously taken multiple steps. Quick Actions enables admins to unlink apps, remove and wipe devices, restore files, and much more. Now let's move on to the infrastructure that powers our platform.
I'm pleased to announce that our new Oregon data center went live at the end of July. The Oregon facility is our fourth data center in the U.S. and will provide a more cost-efficient footprint for our West Coast traffic. As our user base continues to grow, we're managing our global infrastructure footprint with an eye towards maintaining best-in-class performance, reliability, and cost efficiency. In summary, it's been an exceptional quarter for us on the product front. We've reimagined how Dropbox works and designed an all-new foreground experience and desktop app. We're also thrilled to be partnering with Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian to bring the tools that our users love into our ecosystem. With the new Dropbox, we're evolving the way we work together, and we're excited about its potential. I'll now turn it over to Ajay, our CFO, to walk through our financial results.
Thank you, Drew. Our Q2 results demonstrate our strong execution and focus on delivering a healthy balance of top-line growth and profitability. Total revenue for the quarter was up 18% year-over-year to $402 million, driven by an increase in total paying users and ARPU expansion. We ended Q2 with 13.6 million paying users. ARPU was $120.48 in Q2, up 3% from $116.66 a year ago. The year-over-year ARPU expansion was primarily driven by strong adoption of our premium professional and advanced plans by new paying users. There was a modest sequential headwind to ARPU in Q2, driven by the timing of some large outbound deals. I'd note that given the investments we are making in the business from both a product and go-to-market perspective, we remain confident in our ability to drive continued ARPU growth for the remainder of 2019.
Let me highlight a few ways we're executing on this strategy. First, we continue to optimize our plans and pricing to ensure we deliver the best value proposition for our users and our business. As Drew mentioned in his prepared remarks, we recently announced a number of new product features across our subscription plans. With the additions we made to our Plus plan, we raised the price of that SKU by approximately 20%. We remain committed to generating value where we are delivering value to our users and believe that the expanded feature set across our individual plans will enable our customers to continue doing their best work with Dropbox. Moving on to HelloSign, we've made great progress in integrating the company into our go-to-market efforts. In Q2, we began offering 24 by seven support for all of HelloSign's enterprise SKU customers globally.
We also began testing a series of in-app marketing campaigns designed to drive awareness of HelloSign's product capabilities and functionality to our large global install base. Finally, our data science team has been experimenting with a model that identifies which Dropbox customers are most likely to use HelloSign. Going forward, we believe this data will help to inform our targeting efforts and drive higher adoption of HelloSign's e-signature and workflow product suite. While it's still early, we're pleased with the progress of our collective teams and are excited about the opportunity ahead of us. In Q2, we also had a number of customer wins and team expansions across a range of verticals, including healthcare, construction, education, and retail. To highlight a few of these deals, we're excited to share that Partners HealthCare meaningfully increased its commitment to Dropbox in Q2.
Partners is the largest private employer in the state of Massachusetts and has been a Dropbox customer since 2016 when they started with an initial deployment of 20,000 users. Since then, Partners has leveraged Dropbox enterprise features like account capture and domain verification to manage Dropbox usage across dozens of domains. With their most recent upsell, Partners has entered into a formal enterprise license agreement with Dropbox, enabling continued user expansion over the next three years. In addition, the City University of New York recently selected Dropbox as the collaboration platform to connect its 20-plus campuses, creating a unified home for information and making research and coursework more accessible to its faculty and students. CUNY is the nation's leading urban public university, and Dropbox's integrations with tools that the institution already uses, like Blackboard and Office 365, were key factors in their decision to work with us.
Before I move on to the rest of the P&L, I want to note that unless otherwise indicated, all income statement measures that follow are non-GAAP and exclude stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangibles, and certain expenses related to the acquisition of HelloSign. Our non-GAAP net income also excludes net gains on equity investments. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC and in the supplemental investor materials hosted on our investor relations website. Moving to the P&L, gross margin for the quarter was 76%, an increase of two percentage points compared to the second quarter of 2018. The increase in gross margin was primarily driven by continued unit cost efficiency gains with our infrastructure hardware, which was partially offset by the investments we've made in our customer support teams.
We expect gross margins in the second half of the year to be roughly consistent with Q2. Moving to operating expenses, Q2 was the first quarter in which we recognized a full period of expenses related to HelloSign. As a reminder, we are also temporarily incurring overlapping facilities-related expenses for both our existing and new headquarters across all of our OpEx categories. Second quarter R&D expense was $121 million, or 30% of revenue, compared to 27% in Q2 a year ago. The increase as a percentage of revenue was primarily driven by higher headcounts and investments in new product development and testing. S&M expense was $97 million in the second quarter, or 24% of revenue, compared to 23% in Q2 a year ago. The modest increase was due to higher headcount, as well as a slight uptick in App Store fees.
G&A expense was $46 million, or 11% of revenue, and one point higher than our G&A expense as a percentage of revenue in the prior year. The increase as a percentage of revenue was due to higher non-income-based taxes and outside services spend. Taken together, we earned $40 million in operating profit in Q2 of 2019. This translates to a 10% operating margin, which is four percentage points lower than Q2 of 2018. As I noted earlier, operating margin in the second quarter of 2019 included our overlapping facilities-related expenses as well as the impact from the integration of HelloSign and the associated purchase accounting write-down of its deferred revenue. Net income for the quarter was $42 million, down from $48 million a year ago. Diluted EPS was $0.10 per share based on 419 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding, down from $0.11 in Q2 a year ago.
Moving on to cash balance and cash flow, we ended Q2 with cash and short-term investments of $973 million. Cash flow from operations was $129 million in the quarter. Capital expenditures were $34 million, yielding free cash flow of $95 million or 24% of revenue. CapEx in Q2 included $29 million of spend on our new headquarters, of which $15 million was offset by tenant improvement allowances. Excluding the headquarters spend net of TIAs, free cash flow would have been $109 million or 27% of revenue. In Q2, we also added $36 million to our capital lease lines for data center equipment. We continue to expect additions to our capital lease lines to be high single digits as a percentage of revenue on an annual basis going forward. Let's turn to our guidance.
For the third quarter of 2019, we expect revenue to be in the range of $421 million-$424 million, non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 11%-12%. This range includes non-recurring expenses related to our new headquarters and HelloSign integration of approximately 2.5% of revenue, and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be in the range of 421 million-426 million based on our trailing 30-day average share price. For the full year of 2019, we are raising our revenue guidance, which was previously $1.634 billion-$1.646 billion to $1.648 billion-$1.654 billion. I would note that similar to last quarter, this range continues to reflect the impact of currency headwinds.
We continue to expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 11%-12%, and this range includes non-recurring expenses related to our new headquarters and HelloSign integration of approximately 2.5% of revenue. We continue to expect free cash flow to be in the range of $375 million-$385 million. This range includes one-time spend related to the build-out of our new corporate headquarters. Excluding this spend, free cash flow would be $445 million-$465 million. We expect to generate approximately 25% of FY 2019 free cash flow in the third quarter. Finally, we expect 2019 fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be in the range of 419 million-424 million based on our trailing 30-day average share price.
In conclusion, the investments we've made in our business from both a product and go-to-market perspective are performing well, and we believe we're well-positioned to deliver consistent year-over-year revenue growth across Q3 and Q4 of fiscal 2019. We've continued to innovate and deliver more value to our users, enabling them to do their best work. I'm excited about the trajectory of our business and the opportunities we have ahead of us. I'll now turn it back to Drew for closing remarks.
Thank you, Ajay. We're operating in a new best-of-breed ecosystem where people bring the tools they want to work. It's a world that's fragmented, not just across tools, but across content and teams. We see an opportunity to bring everything together. With the new Dropbox, that's what we've done. We're committed to our mission of designing a more enlightened way of working. I'm really excited about the future we're building. I also invite you to hear more about that future at Dropbox's first Analyst Day as a public company on September 25th, here in San Francisco. Details will be available soon on our IR website. With that, I'd like to invite Yamini, our Chief Customer Officer, to join Ajay and me for Q&A. Operator?
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star and one. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the # key. Due to the essence of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from John DiFucci from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Howard Mann for John. Thanks for taking the question. Drew, you mentioned a lot of neat features that are part of this new Dropbox experience, including like Smart Sync and the ability to restore deleted work, I guess, you call it Quick Actions. I'm just wondering, what of these functionalities do you think will become really table stakes in the near term? A lot of these features are things that we're increasingly used to in our mobile and our daily lives. Within the greater philosophy of spend, how do-
The R&D has been kind of inflated over time, even though it's come down. How do you manage spend in R&D versus go-to-market, for example? Thank you.
Thanks. Well, first, I'd say probably the highlight from a product standpoint was we launched an entirely new desktop app, so what we call the new Dropbox, which is the biggest change we've ever made to our product. I mean, Smart Sync has been a great feature we've had for a while. It's something that drives conversion to our paid plans, and it's something that we moved into our Plus plan last quarter. I would say the highlights are much more about how we've turned Dropbox from this, our metaphor from a magic folder to more of a magic workspace.
The big improvements on the product front, which I think are important to a lot of questions you're asking are, we're solving a much bigger problem for our customers because we found that people are, well, really all of us are suffering from information overload at work and that the experience is incredibly fragmented. We reimagined the Dropbox experience to become a living workspace with a couple of advantages. First is moving beyond files to any kind of cloud content. You can have Google Docs next to your PowerPoints, next to your Trello boards, really everything you need with your project, and we're definitely the only company that does this in a native experience. Second is turning Dropbox from a place where you put content when it's done to a workspace you're living out of all day.
Being able to not just see the content, the files and cloud content, but be able to see other people and activity, see what's going on, be able to Slack people from the Dropbox app, being able to start a Zoom meeting, it's just a much more engaging experience. It's still in early access, but we're really excited about it. I'd say this is pretty transformative product change because what we find, maybe where we started was the problem we were solving is people forgetting their thumb drives or things like that. Now the problem we see at work is a much higher value one, which is help me organize my working life across different ecosystems and tools. It's actually been a great quarter on the product front. I think that reflects some of the investment we've been making on R&D front.
We don't expect our levels proportionally to change very much.
Yep, this is Ajay. I can give a little bit more color on the second part of your question. At a high level, we certainly remain committed to driving efficiency across the business. That includes R&D. Our R&D spend in Q2, I would just remind you, includes additional expenses from the integration of HelloSign, as well as overlapping facilities related expenses for both our existing and new corporate headquarters. Neither of those were included in our financials a year ago. At a high level, we invest across three major categories in R&D. One is in new product experiences like the new desktop app that Drew just talked to. We also invest in a whole lot of machine learning and intelligence initiatives that we call DBXi. We also invest in our conversion engine, our self-serve conversion engine. That spend and that team sits in R&D for us.
A lot of data science initiatives and optimizations of conversion and onboarding flows. Finally, we're also investing in infrastructure, and this is an area where we're focused on driving continuous innovation and announcements that we made around SMR and our cold storage tier are examples there.
And can you ask-
Thanks, Drew and Ajay. Yeah. Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, just sorry, follow up on which parts will become table stakes. I mean, I'd say we're very differentiated from other products in our space at this point. I mean, you're not going to see Google Doc support in OneDrive anytime soon, I don't think.
Okay, you got it. Great. Thanks. Thank you guys so much for the additional color.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thanks. This is Dan Church on for Heather Bellini. Thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering, a couple of quick questions for you. With respect to the price increase in May, can you give us some color on how churn has been relative to your expectations? With respect to ARPU growth, can you help us unpack the drivers a little bit and help us understand the magnitude of what's the ARPU for new customer adds relative to the install base and how much room is there to run? Lastly, how do you think about your ability to raise prices over time?
Sure. This is Ajay. I'm happy to take a stab at those questions. We can start perhaps with some more color on the repricing and packaging of our Plus SKU and our individual plans. As a quick reminder for those on the call, we recently announced a number of new product features across our subscription plans. With the additions that we made to our Plus plan, we raised the price of that SKU by approximately 20%. We really want to expose more of our users to our platform's capabilities, and the repackaging of our individual paid plans is a way for us to do this. The changes at a high level are being received really well. The features of our Plus plan were upgraded in June, and existing subscribers began renewing at the higher price point in July.
That process will continue for the next few quarters based on the rebuild cycles of our annual subscribers. I will say, as it pertains to the numbers and our guidance, the baseline forecast around our pricing and packaging efforts was included in our guidance last quarter, our latest outlook further incorporates positive early signals related to both conversion and churn. In fact, we saw churn improve across our business in Q2. To answer the second part of your question around ARPU growth going forward, we do continue to see a wide variance between gross new ASP and ARPU. Certainly, a lot of headroom there, this most recent pricing and packaging initiative will also increase the variance there between gross new ASP and ARPU. We have a ways to go there.
I think part of that question probably indirectly was just around the sequential ARPU that we delivered in Q2 relative to Q1. I'll just make a quick note on that modest sequential headwind to ARPU that we saw in Q2 really driven by the timing of some larger outbound deals, as well as some FX headwinds. In the period net of those two items, we would have seen ARPU expansion in Q2. Looking ahead, just to reiterate, we are very confident in our ability to continue to expand ARPU over the course of the year, tailwinds from strong adoption of our premium professional advanced SKUs by new paying users, and early success from our Plus two repricing and repackaging initiative.
The final part of your question around price increases, a little early for us to comment on future initiatives, though I will say that we'll continue to evaluate and refine our pricing and packaging approach in the future, just like we have in the past.
Very helpful. Thanks. Then I just had a really quick follow-up. Deferred revenue growth was I think 11% of the quarter behind revenue growth of 18%. Anything to call out there, or is it just the mix of monthly billings versus annual?
That's a large part of it, and as I've mentioned previously, while billings, and deferred revenue are related to revenue growth, they're not consistently predictive of revenue for us. I think that's actually pretty apparent with the revenue guidance that we issued for Q3. Just as a reminder, in a given quarter, there can be various items that can drive billings growth higher or lower, but don't directly correlate to revenue. For example, additions to our deferred revenue balance, as you noted, are highly sensitive to the mix between monthly and annual subscribers, so small changes in mix shift can skew deferred revenue, and that results in deviations between billings and revenue. FX can also impact billings in a meaningful way, as billings are more sensitive to FX movements relative to revenue. Normalized for FX, billings growth in Q2 would have been about two percentage points higher.
I would note that going forward, we expect to see billings growth accelerate in Q3 as a result of the success we've driven with our recent growth initiatives.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Richard Davis from Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks very much. It's good to see the, whatever, forward-looking metrics looking interestingly good. Quick question for you. You've partnered with some of the really great collaboration tools, obviously, the Slacks and the Zooms and things like that. Talk to us a little bit, or just fill us in on your viewpoint, if you're using other tools, whether you're using Teams or you're using other systems, and how do you think about that in terms of your product roadmap and how you make that part of the experience for those who don't use the cool stuff yet? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Broadly, we see Dropbox and communication tools or the other tools that we integrate with as complementary use cases. We see from our customers what they struggle with is the need to toggle back and forth between all these different apps, or that the state of their work or a project is scattered in all these different places. Particularly the new Dropbox, we see our role as bringing it all together. These deep integrations in many ways make Dropbox more useful, and they make Slack more useful because you can send someone a Slack message from Dropbox, or you can start a Zoom meeting from Dropbox, and that wasn't possible before what we launched in June.
To the second part of the question about what about folks who haven't adopted these yet, we see Dropbox as being a potential on-ramp for use of these tools. I'd say even since Dropbox Extensions launched in Q4, that's sort of our broader platform. The new Dropbox both offers more surface area to engage with those kinds of integrations and extensions, and already Dropbox Extensions have driven adoption of a lot of those partner apps. We broadly see the experience of the new Dropbox and desktop app as an opportunity to drive a lot more engagement generally and drive engagement of our partner apps and solve a problem that we see no one really solving, which is how do you pull all of this together?
Perfect. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Murphy from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Coming off of Q2, and given that you're increasing the 2019 revenue guidance, and you're increasing it by more than you did last quarter, directionally, how is your confidence moving in your ability to try to curb the rate of revenue deceleration by Q4 or by the end of year, and then to try to stabilize that and head into 2020 with this structure for consistent compound growth, as I think you've commented on in the last couple of quarters?
Yeah. Great questions, Mark. This is Ajay. Happy to answer them. I would say at a high level, we continue to have a very large opportunity ahead of us, and we're doing more and more to unlock that opportunity through investments in product, in our ecosystem conversion engine, as well as through M&A. Longer term, our philosophy is consistent with what we've talked to in the past, and that's that we'll continue to be focused on delivering leading growth and profitability. We're certainly structuring the business for consistent growth and continued margin expansion at scale. You've seen us guide to that now with respect to Q3 and Q4 guidance, and we'll have more specifics to share on 2020 when we formally issue guidance on our call in Q1.
Thank you, Ajay. Just as a quick follow-up, is it possible to quantify the sequential ARPU impact from what I think you described as some large outbound deals, which I'm assuming must have closed later in Q2?
We had some large deals that closed later in the quarter. We also saw some FX headwinds in the period. What I can say is a net of those two items, we would have driven ARPU expansion in Q2. The second thing I can say is if you look at gross new ASP, effectively ARPU for new paying users. That metric grew in the period, as it has in every prior period since we've gone public, and that continues to lead ARPU by a meaningful margin. Certainly, the headroom is there and continues to be there for us to continue to drive ARPU expansion.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Maynard from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Thank you. I guess, I'm curious as to when, Drew, we might know about whether the new Dropbox is really making a big difference, moving the needle on your business. How long you think it will take before you guys know, and then we know?
Well, we look at a variety of indicators or inputs when answering that. I mean, first, we were really happy to see that our launch really resonated with customers and the press, and analysts, and that we're addressing a big need. Then second, we're really happy with the new Dropbox itself. We think it solves a lot of new problems. More to your question, how will it move the needle? Now our focus is turned to driving adoption. In June, we launched a new Dropbox. It's in early access, it's not broadly rolled out to our audience yet. You'll hear a lot more about that throughout the rest of the year. We certainly want to roll it out to as many people as possible, but we have to be thoughtful about how we do that.
I mean, it's a major change to the experience. When you make major changes to a product, you just need to communicate well, and do that respectfully. That's what we'll be focused on in the coming quarters, and for sure, we'll be making the new Dropbox much more broadly available.
In terms of the adoption, are there some specific things that you can talk to and how you're going to kind of roll this out? Is it going to be first with the team side of the business? Is that how you're thinking about it?
We're already letting in new cohorts of users, and so people can opt into it on our website. As far as broader rollout, I mean, we're just striking a balance. Obviously, we want to get it out to as many people as possible. But it's really important to do that migration well, because, again, whenever you massively change the experience of a product and technology, people initially are kind of taken aback by that. And so we want to help introduce the new functionality to people in the right way. Importantly, also, anyone who is using Dropbox a certain way yesterday will still be able to use it that way tomorrow.
For continuity, we're not taking anything away or anything, or it's not a gamble on that dimension, but we just want to make sure that we do some one-time work to educate people as to what we're offering, and then it's a bit of a mindset shift where thinking about Dropbox, again, not just for a place for files, but a place for all your cloud content and a living workspace that we hope is one of the first apps you open in the morning and last ones you close at night. What we're paying attention to right now is just that early signal from customers has been positive. Both qualitative response from early users, and then also metrics we look at like engagement per user. Those things are all trending in the right direction. You'll hear a lot more about that in coming quarters.
All right. One quick housekeeping for Ajay. What was the FX impact to revenue in the quarter, and then is there any impact to the full year guide from FX?
Yeah. Good questions. The impact to revenue in the quarter from FX, roughly a 1.5 point headwind in the quarter. That's about the same for our Q3 guide. Constant currency would add about 1.5% to the growth rate in Q3, and for the year, about 1%. Constant currency would add 1% to the growth rate guide for the year.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Justin Post from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hey, this is Sean Hancher handling for Justin. I'm wondering a little bit if you could unpack the subscriber net adds in Q2. I know you said a lot of enterprise deals at the end of the quarter, but are you guys seeing higher win rates on the enterprise side, and how could you compare that sort of to the consumer side, and individual tier?
Sure. This is Ajay. I can take the first part of your question, then I'll pass it over to Yamini. I will say, in any given quarter, we always close a number of larger deals in addition to a large volume of licenses through our self-serve growth engine, which is the primary growth engine for Dropbox. This quarter was really consistent on that dimension in aggregate. Yamini, if you want to provide more color.
Yeah. I think that in the outbound side, we had another quarter of really solid performance and a number of notable wins that Ajay talked about earlier during his remarks. What is critical here is that our motion is very efficient and continues to be efficient. This quarter, we saw wins in healthcare, in education, in tech, and broadcasting. The land and expand motion is something that we are paying particular attention to and is working well. We won a 1,000-seat enterprise deal with a European broadcasting company, which originally began as organic adoption. Partners HealthCare, which Ajay talked about, that started as a smaller 20,000-seat deal, and now they are expanding their usage with the enterprise SKU and with significantly larger number of domains.
The investments we are making in scalable, efficient, data-driven model with an outbound is working, and the land and expansion motion is also really working well. We continue to see that good performance in Q2.
Great, thank you. Next question, I guess, would be, I just want to re-ask that question on the Plus tiers churn. I think the street is really looking for sort of consistent net adds in the second half. I want to get a better sense of what you guys are seeing in the Plus tier, and I think it makes up the majority of your subs, so anything you can give us there will be greatly appreciated.
Yeah. I'll just reiterate, this is Ajay, a couple of points there. One, we did include a baseline forecast around what we expected from our pricing and packaging efforts last quarter in our guidance. Our latest outlook incorporates some really positive early signals related to both conversion and churn that we're seeing. The second thing I will say, we provided some color on churn back when we went public last year. Directionally, churn has been very stable for us since then. It did in fact improve across the business, in Q2, so those rates have improved.
Okay, one last one if I can. I just want to get a bit of a signal on the enterprise side. It seems like there's a little more closure this quarter on what the pricing looks like relative to the other tiers in Teams, Advanced and Standard, on a per subscriber basis.
It's negotiated pricing for our enterprise SKU, it depends on the customer and the kind of deployment that we're targeting with that customer. We are very disciplined about how we manage margins with these larger deals, my team works closely with Yamini's team. I'm not sure, Yamini, if you want to add any additional color.
Yeah, I think on the enterprise side, like we mentioned, there are a number of verticals where we are seeing momentum. We talked about CUNY. This is, again, a vertical in terms of education where we are seeing good momentum. We've had a number of use cases for faculty staff, and we're seeing adoption on the student side as well. University of Sydney, CUNY, University of Florida, these are all examples where education vertical is actually adopting Dropbox. Again, in terms of ARPU, it is pretty similar to what Ajay said. It is negotiated, it really depends on the deal, but overall, it is reflected in the comments that Ajay made in terms of ARPU growth in the future.
Awesome. Thanks, guys, appreciate it.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Karl Keirstead from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks. Question for Ajay. Ajay, back on the Plus price change, could you give us a little bit of color, maybe you'll elaborate at the Analyst Day, but what does the conversion timing look like over the next 12 months? Maybe just in broad strokes, what's the mix of conversion that's likely in the second half of 2019 versus first half 2020? I guess the context here, maybe you could figure out, I'm just trying to understand if we do see a change in churn or ARPU as a result of the Plus price change, just trying to be a little bit more specific as to when we would see that.
It's a good question, and we can certainly provide more detail at the Analyst Day in September. At a high level, the features of our Plus plan were upgraded in June, and so new conversions to the Plus plan were converting at the higher price point beginning in June. Existing subscribers began renewing at the higher price point in July, so last month, and that process will continue for a 12-month period for the next few quarters, and that's based on the rebill cycles of our annual subscribers. We can provide a little bit more color on the ins and outs and how that flows into the numbers at our Analyst Day.
Got it. Maybe secondly, Ajay, just on the margins, I remember a couple of quarters ago when you set the margin arc for this calendar year, it sounded like the first half a little bit weaker, second half stronger. So the 3Q guide of 11%-12% is a little bit better than you put up, but not a big jump. Looks like it's a little bit more 4Q skewed. Is there anything occurring in 3Q that might have been weighing operating margins a little bit versus the guide that you were thinking about a quarter or two ago, or quite similar?
Quite consistent and similar just from the internal perspective here and what we've been driving towards. I can say at a high level, while we're absolutely focused on balancing growth and profitability and remain committed to driving margin expansion, as it relates to your question specifically in Q3, we are reserving some flexibility to spend on product adoption and marketing initiatives related to the new desktop application that Drew was talking to, and that includes our upcoming user conference in late September. I would note that for fiscal 2019, the midpoint of our operating margin guidance would be about 14%. That's net of non-recurring facilities and HelloSign related expenses, so that's up about two points year-over-year.
Our implied guide for Q4, as you noted, signals that we plan to drive pretty meaningful sequential and year-over-year margin expansion as we exit the year, and that's consistent with what we previously indicated.
Yep. You got it. Okay, thanks a lot.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Rishi Jaluria from D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. This is Hannah on for Rishi. Thank you for taking my questions. First off, I was wondering if you could talk about how the computer vision algorithm performed in the quarter, and if you could quantitatively speak to the success you've seen with upselling to groups you've identified.
Thanks a lot for the question. For folks that don't know, we use computer vision algorithm. We use data science in general to drive adoption as well as identify the propensity of our users to buy. Typically, the motion works with landing 50 to 100 seat deals, and when we look at those 50 to 100 seat deals, it is driven a little bit by the conversion algorithms as well as the algorithms that identify the community. It continues to do well. That is how we have such a scalable, efficient, and data-driven outbound sales motion. From there, what we really are focused on is driving broader adoption within those teams, and that's the success that you have seen in Q2 with Partners HealthCare, with other outbound wins that we mentioned. It starts with the computer vision type algorithm.
There are multiple of those algorithms that we use to look at the propensity of our teams, and then we leverage our outbound salespeople to go target those, and then we continue to drive adoption through engagement. That overall motion, the overall system of different algorithms are working well, and we are pleased with the progress.
Okay, that's good to hear. Could you talk about the effect you've seen from the three device limit on Dropbox Basic, and if you've seen a lot of conversions from free to paid in the quarter?
Sure. This is Ajay. We don't break down the impact of a specific initiative. Certainly, the three device limit initiative that we launched earlier this year is a good example of how we drive investment in product-driven conversion and our upsell engine through ML and data science. It certainly is a driver of conversions for us, but we manage our growth initiatives as a basket and as a pipeline. That's one of many initiatives that we've launched over the course of the year that's having an impact on the business.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Christopher Eberle from Nomura Instinet. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Could you give us some idea of what the implied ARPU impact from the price increase is for Q3 and Q4?
Yep. This is Ajay. We'll have some more color we can share as part of our Analyst Day in September. I can say at a high level, we do expect a tailwind to ARPU from the Plus repackaging and pricing initiative. The primary driver of ARPU expansion for us over the last few quarters has been higher adoption of our premium plans by new paying users, so folks that are converting to our professional plan and folks that are converting to our advanced team SKU at higher and higher rates. That tailwind is going to continue based on the visibility that we have for the remainder of 2019 as well. You'll see both of those factors driving some pretty significant ARPU expansion for us across Q3 and Q4.
Got it. Just one other one. When you guys think about your balanced growth throughout the year or even into next year, I think there's been a pretty big disconnect between the number of net paying subscribers and where the street's at. I think the street has come down to 200,000-250,000, and you guys consistently keep putting up that 400,000 number. How should we think about the balance between those two? Is there just a miscommunication between what balance is here, or is there something more to that?
They're both important. This is Ajay. They're both important levers to us, and you'll see us lean into both in varying degrees based on the initiatives that we're shipping in a given quarter and how we're managing those initiatives. There has been a fair amount of consistency in the net new paying user adds that we've driven over the last few quarters. That's certainly not been something that's been intentional. It's been a result of the basket of growth initiatives that we've funded and we've launched. There's been some variability in the expansion rate of ARPU as well, and that really depends on what's in the pipeline and what we're graduating out of the experiment pipeline into a live initiative. I think you'll see both levers be important for us going forward. You'll see us execute against both.
You'll see that rate of expansion vary quarter to quarter based on what's happening with the business.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Great, thanks. It's Zachary Schwartzman on for Mark. Drew, can you talk a little about the difference between rolling out an improved product towards the consumer or less tech-savvy market versus, I guess, a developer market? Part of the reason why Dropbox has become so successful today was the ease of use for the everyday individual original Dropbox. Do you think this product change could have as much natural virality as the original Dropbox? What type of headwinds do you foresee? Do you think of ways to proactively affect engagement of this new UX? Thanks.
Thanks, Mark. Well, I'd say first, we're focused on the end user. I make that distinction because we certainly want consumer-type ease of use. That is certainly what has gotten us here. Importantly, we're not focused per se on consumer use cases compared to the use cases of folks at work and folks collaborating in teams. That's certainly our sweet spot. That's where 80% of our subs are using Dropbox at work. We think the best experience is when you're using Dropbox in a team, when you're using it at work. We've made good progress in terms of that strategic focus over the last few years, which reflect in all the numbers. The new Dropbox is kind of the product we would've built if we had been focused on this use case in the beginning. Historically, Dropbox has operated behind the scenes.
It's been sort of in the background, in the file system, or you're just navigating folders on your desktop. Whereas with the new Dropbox, you have a dedicated app. Again, as I said, it's much more of a workspace. Instead of just a static list of files, you see people and you see comments and you see activity and all the things you'd expect in a real-time collaborative app. We think it's a very generationally different experience from what other folks have. As you're alluding to, this is a new foundation for engagement, for virality, for all the kinds of metrics that we want to drive, and for conversion.
Because now that we have this foreground surface that we entirely control, as opposed to being limited by the operating system, it's a lot easier for us to drive adoption of things like Paper or HelloSign when we can have a button that says "Send out for signature" within Dropbox natively, whereas we couldn't really do that in the operating system. The ability to drive adoption generally of the new Dropbox and especially encourage viral adoption of the new Dropbox, we think there's much more powerful levers there over time. We think there's much more powerful levers to drive distribution of apps like ours and our partners' apps. We think there's a much better surface to drive conversion.
When you're actually sharing something, being able to highlight inline the benefits of having a paid plan. We think the new Dropbox has the potential to drive monetization even though we're rolling it out. It's not something you're going to have to explicitly pay for. Our basic users will be able to use the new Dropbox as well. All of what I described will take place over time, but it's a new foundation we're really excited about.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We have time for one last question. Our last question comes from Patrick Walravens from JMP Securities. Please go ahead.
Oh, great. Thank you. Drew, maybe this is for you, but what does the ideal customer look like for the new Dropbox? They're at work, and they work in teams, but that's a lot of people. What do you think is the best profile of customers for you guys for this new product?
Sure. I think it's, in many ways, the same sweet spot as we've had in the past. In many ways, we're also following customer demand. A lot of the ideas we had for the new Dropbox came from observing how our customers work and the pain points they experience in this new environment. Which is, on the one hand, there are all these new tools, so the experience is a lot better on some dimensions. There's also this new problem, which are things are a lot more cluttered and fragmented, and there's this information overload and distraction that people are dealing with. We have a different philosophy. We see our role as organizing your working life across all these different tools and ecosystems, and we think that's something that every information worker needs.
More granularly, we focus on both you personally as an information worker and your personal productivity. We also focus on the manager or the owner of a team. If you have a group and people you're working with, we certainly think about that. Importantly, even in a 10,000-person company, it's composed of a lot of little work groups and units. Even executives or a CEO still manages a small team and is an information worker themselves. We think that our sweet spot remains the same. I mean, really targeting information workers generally. The value prop to the end user might really be about collaboration and personal productivity. For a team manager, it might be more alignment and how do you get your team on the same page and executing well.
For an executive, the value prop might be more like, how do I get a better return on my cognitive capital? How do I free up from my employees from having to do all this busy work or toggle between those different apps and help them focus? There's a whole bunch of stuff on the IT side as well, like help people wrangle all the complexity that's happening on the back end too. We think all of this is the beginning of really addressing some much bigger problems in collaboration, some new problems in collaboration that we didn't see our industry focused on.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thanks. All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We really appreciate your support and look forward to speaking with you at our Analyst Day in September.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for attending today's conference. This concludes our call. You may all disconnect. Good day.