Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining Dropbox's first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a 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's website following this call. I will now hand the call over to Darren Yip, Dropbox's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, welcome to Dropbox's first 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-K for the year ended December 31st, 2018. 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, 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 on 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, 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, the continued expansion of our ecosystem. Ajay will review our Q1 financial results, touch on our go-to-market strategy, and offer guidance for Q2 in fiscal 2019. In Q1, we saw strong results across our business. Revenue grew 22% year-over-year, driven by continued paying user growth and ARPU expansion. We also closed our first acquisition as a public company, adding the HelloSign team to the Dropbox family. We accomplished all this while delivering a robust non-GAAP operating margin. These results continue to demonstrate the strength of our global collaboration platform, our efficient go-to-market strategy, our operational discipline.
Let's begin with our product update. We're building a collaborative workspace by bringing together content and all the communication and coordination around it. Over the last few months, we delivered a number of innovations that make the Dropbox experience even better for our users, teams, and admins. To start, we recently unveiled a number of new capabilities at Google Cloud Next that allow users to work with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides right from within Dropbox. Managing work scattered across multiple platforms is difficult, distracting, and time-consuming. We're changing that. Now, users will be able to create, edit, share, and store Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides from within the Dropbox UI, viewing and organizing them right alongside their traditional files. These capabilities make it easier for our users to organize and manage their content, control access, and search the full text of their G Suite files natively within Dropbox.
In addition, comments made within Docs, Sheets, and Slides will appear directly as Dropbox notifications. This enables our users to stay up to date on their most important work, quickly process feedback from their teams, and maintain content and context in a single platform without having to toggle between multiple applications. Our deep partnership with Google allows us to bring this unique functionality to our users, breaking down silos and creating a digital workspace for content creation and collaboration. Let's take a look at search and retrieval, an area where we've continued to make technical advancements. Last year, we announced a machine intelligence initiative called DBXI, which included our new search engine and optical character recognition technology to help make content easier to find and organize.
In April, we enabled image-specific metadata on file previews, allowing users to access tag data on file previews across a variety of image formats. Users will now have access to critical information around images, such as focal length, shutter speed, camera model, and artist, all of which ensures better searchability, version control, and IP management. These are features commonly provided by digital asset management tools and help us expand the use cases for our creative audiences. Last week, we also announced the GA of content suggestions on the web, another feature powered by our DBXI machine intelligence initiative. When users log on to dropbox.com, they'll see a list of files and folders that our algorithms predict that they might need based on their account and sharing activity. Because our machine intelligence platform improves its predictions over time, content suggestions get better the more that users engage with Dropbox.
With content suggestions, users will be able to get straight to work without having to spend time digging through folders and files to find what they need. Moving on to HelloSign. In Q1, we continued to deliver on HelloSign's strategic roadmap, which is focused on e-signing features and functionality, and on extending its market-leading API to embed electronic signatures in any application or website. We added custom rules to validate texts that signers enter to improve data accuracy, and launched individual document tamper-proofing capabilities that seal each signed document to ensure its integrity. In addition, we built new API features to make HelloSign a more seamless experience inside Dropbox. We also launched a new version of HelloWorks, which is HelloSign's workflow automation product, complete with conditional logic functionality.
Conditional logic brings static forms to life by allowing questions or information presented in a form to dynamically change in real time based on a user's inputs. This facilitates an intuitive form-filling experience, even when managing some of those complex workflows. We're really excited about the opportunity ahead for HelloWorks. Customers that have adopted the product see meaningfully higher form completion rates and up to 3x faster turnaround times on key workflows. Turning to Dropbox Paper. Paper continues to drive monetization through higher conversion and retention of team subscribers. Customers like Meredith Corporation, a media company that owns brands including Better Homes & Gardens, People Magazine, and Sports Illustrated, are already seeing a number of workflow and process benefits. Paper's being used within the creative services team as a wiki for process and product knowledge, improving the way information is shared, and decreasing ramp times for new employees.
Paper is also being used to document and share meeting notes, which is helping to reduce silos and increase project visibility between team members. In Q1, we expanded our market reach for Paper by adding HIPAA compliance, which we expect to drive more usage in verticals like education, healthcare, manufacturing, and research. In addition, HIPAA compliance opens up usage to many customers not subject to the legislation, but use it as a proxy for security standards. Healthcare organizations, educational institutions, and nonprofits already leverage our HIPAA-compliant Dropbox Business plans to collaborate on content like medical research and scientific data sets. Bringing Dropbox Paper up to HIPAA compliance allows these customers to leverage the tool to collaborate more seamlessly with their counterparts. Next is the admin experience. In Q1, we launched bulk member imports to streamline identity management and provisioning for teams.
With our bulk member imports tool, admins can now invite team members by importing a CSV file containing members' emails, names, and group memberships to efficiently grant and manage folder-level access rights. This reduces the potential for errors and helps to onboard a large number of users more quickly as teams expand. To further improve the onboarding workflow, we also announced that admins can now use G Suite's single sign-on capability to automatically provision Dropbox Business to users and groups that exist in the Google directory. Let's move on to the infrastructure that powers our platform. In Q1, we announced that Dropbox Business customers will have the option to access and store their files locally in Australia and Japan. Working with our partners, we'll deliver infrastructure capacity in both countries that connect to our points of presence for secure and high-performance collaboration in country and around the world.
Establishing a local hosting environment will help to support our strong growth in Asia and is an example of how we're listening to our customers and responding to their collaboration needs. Switching to our ecosystem. We continue to build partnerships that position Dropbox at the center of our users' workflows. We're firm believers in the power of integrations. One of our most important differentiators is that we're a uniquely open and interoperable platform. We help our users stitch together their content and work across all types of devices, operating systems, and applications. As SaaS applications proliferate in the workplace, switching between different tools to manage content results in wasted time and lost productivity. To help address this pain point, we've been strengthening our partner integrations with leading workflow automation tools, including Zapier, Nintex, Workato, Tray.io, K2, and Cloudpipes.
Our customers will be able to leverage these integrations to automate common manual actions across a range of enterprise applications. For instance, a salesperson can manage opportunities across multiple apps like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Copper, and simply by changing the status of a lead, automatically generate an RFP workflow on Dropbox. In more complex workflows, users can even streamline hiring and onboarding by connecting a new employee's resume in Greenhouse to their signed contract in Dropbox, and subsequently merge that content with a new hire record in Workday. Our strengthened integrations address clear collaboration challenges and are another step towards reducing work about work. In summary, I'm really proud of the progress we made over the last quarter. We added a wide variety of new product experiences and features and expanded our partner ecosystem to strengthen our platform.
We continued to improve our search and retrieval capabilities, added new functionality to HelloSign and HelloWorks, and launched HIPAA compliance for Paper. Finally, our strategic partnership with Google enables our users to create and collaborate across a range of file types, ultimately making Dropbox the true digital workspace for all types of content. By delivering more value to our users, we're executing on our mission of designing a more enlightened way of working. I'll now turn it over to Ajay, our CFO, to walk through our financial results.
Thank you, Drew. Our Q1 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 22% year-over-year to $386 million, driven by an increase in total paying users and ARPU expansion. We ended Q1 with 13.2 million paying users. ARPU was $121.04 in Q1, up 6% from $114.30 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. We also continued to see some tailwinds from teams choosing to remain on our Advanced plan following the expiration of their grandfathering period, though we completed the renewal process for substantially all grandfathered teams during the quarter. As a reminder, our strategy is to drive revenue growth through a combination of paying user conversion and ARPU expansion.
Our continued growth in ARPU reflects our focus on converting our highest value users to drive sustainable monetization and retention. Let me highlight a few ways we're executing on this strategy. First, we're strengthening our growth engine by utilizing data science models to create new tools for our outbound sales team. Using advanced machine learning methods, we created an algorithm called Communities to better identify team expansion opportunities. Communities detects groups of users within a company who are using Dropbox to share and collaborate with one another, but who are not yet part of one unified Dropbox team plan. In addition, we recently implemented a device limit for Dropbox Basic that prompts users to upgrade to a paid SKU if they've linked more than three devices to their account.
The breadth of operating systems and devices that we support is a major advantage of our platform. We found that users who link multiple devices to their account often use Dropbox for work. This revision to our device management policy is an opportunity for us to generate value where we're delivering value to our users. Finally, we're working to integrate HelloSign into our go-to-market efforts and to provide a frictionless experience for our collective users. We've already begun Salesforce enablement around HelloSign's products. In Q2, we'll roll out a more seamless authentication process, enabling subscribers to log into both their Dropbox and HelloSign accounts with the same credentials. It's still early days, but we're excited about the opportunity ahead.
Go-to-market initiatives like these, as well as the product innovation that Drew talked to, helped drive customer wins and team expansion across a range of verticals in Q1, including construction, real estate, technology, and manufacturing. For example, last quarter, we grew our deployment at Avison Young, a commercial real estate services firm. Since their founding in 1978, Avison Young has experienced rapid growth and currently has 124 offices across 20 countries. Dropbox has been critical to helping the company scale its operations. After beginning with a Dropbox team of just five subscribers in 2011, Avison Young's deployment has grown to over 2,000 subscribers today. Internal teams like graphic design, investment sales, and project management all use Dropbox as a centralized workspace to organize and collaborate on content. We're also excited to announce that Trustpower, a New Zealand-based utility company, is now a Dropbox customer.
Trustpower's decision to deploy Dropbox was the result of an internal initiative focused on evolving the organization's digital strategy. Dropbox will help Trustpower accomplish several goals, including strengthening data governance, consolidating digital tools, providing a cloud solution that is easy to use for employees, and enhancing external collaboration. The company will also take advantage of our expanded infrastructure capacity in the growing APJ market that Drew alluded to earlier and host its data locally in region. 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.
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. I also want to highlight that we adopted the new leasing standard, ASC 842, on January 1st, 2019, which resulted in the recognition of right-of-use assets of $431.7 million and operating lease liabilities of $502.4 million on the balance sheet. Moving to the P&L, gross margin for the quarter was 75%, an increase of one percentage point compared to the first quarter of 2018.
The increase in gross margin was primarily driven by unit cost efficiency gains with our infrastructure hardware, including lower depreciation as a share of revenue, which was partially offset by higher compute costs. We continue to expect fiscal 2019 gross margin to be consistent with 2018 as we bring a new data center online to support continued growth. Moving to operating expenses, first quarter R&D expense was $117 million, or 30% of revenue, compared to 28% in Q1 a year ago. The increase as a percentage of revenue was primarily driven by higher headcount and investments in new product development and testing. As a reminder, we are temporarily incurring overlapping facilities related expenses for both our existing and new headquarters, because R&D carries the highest proportion of our headcount, it carries the largest percentage of allocated overhead.
S&M expense was $94 million in the first quarter, or 24% of revenue, compared to 26% in Q1 a year ago. The decrease was due to lower spend on our global brand campaign relative to Q1 of 2018. G&A expense was $41 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 a result of higher headcount and outside services spend. Taken together, we earned $39 million in operating profit in the first quarter of 2019. This translates to a 10% operating margin, which is one percentage point lower than Q1 of 2018. Operating margin in the first quarter of 2019 included our overlapping facilities related expenses, as well as the impact from the integration of HelloSign and the associated purchased accounting write-down of its deferred revenue.
Net income for the quarter was $42 million, up from $31 million a year ago. Diluted EPS was $0.10 per share, up from $0.08 per share in Q1 of 2018, based on 418 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. Moving on to cash balance and cash flow, we ended Q1 with cash and short-term investments of $915 million. Cash flow from operations was $63 million in the quarter. Capital expenditures were $30 million, yielding free cash flow of $34 million, or 9% of revenue. CapEx in Q1 included $21 million of spend on our new headquarters, of which $14 million was offset by tenant improvement allowances. Excluding the headquarter spend net of TIAs, free cash flow would've been $41 million, or 10% of revenue. In Q1, we also added $40 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. Now, let's turn to our guidance. For the second quarter of 2019, we expect revenue to be in the range of $399 million-$401 million, non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 9%-10%, which includes a 50 basis point headwind from planned spend, which shifted from Q1 to Q2, and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be in the range of 418 million-423 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 $1.627 billion-$1.642 billion, to $1.634 billion-$1.646 billion. I would note that similar to last quarter, this range continues to reflect the impact of currency headwinds.
We are raising our non-GAAP operating margin guidance, which was previously 10.5%-11.5%, to 11%-12%. 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 a one-time spend related to the build-out of our new corporate headquarters. Excluding the spend, free cash flow would be $445 million-$465 million. We expect to generate approximately one-third of FY 2019 free cash flow in the first half of the year and two-thirds in the second half of the year. 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, we continue to be focused on delivering a healthy balance of growth and profitability and are excited about the road ahead. I'll now turn it back to Drew for closing remarks.
Thank you, Ajay. In closing, we had another great quarter. We continue to add product functionality and build best-of-breed partnerships that position Dropbox as the collaborative workspace for all types of content and workflow. Our open ecosystem gives our users the freedom and flexibility to choose their preferred tools at work. We're harnessing the extensive amount of metadata on our platform to provide a richer experience for all of our users across the world. We're committed to our mission of designing a more enlightened way of working, I'm excited about the future we're building. On behalf of our management team, I'd like to take a moment to thank our customers, partners, and the entire Dropbox team. 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 the star then one key on your touch tone telephone. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. You may then return to the queue. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. To prevent any background noise, we ask that you please place your line on mute once your question has been stated. Our first question comes from Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs.
Great. Thank you. I was wondering, Ajay, if you could share with us. I know that you've got the deferred revenue write-down for HelloSign, just any color you could give about revenue that it may have contributed in the quarter versus your expectations, then kind of what you're thinking about for the year. The other question I had was related to, you obviously called out the FX headwind, which you talked about last quarter as, I believe, being about 100 basis point headwind for the year. I'm wondering if you could share with us if you think that's gotten worse or if it's staying the same in terms of the type of headwind you're expecting. Thank you.
Sure. Thanks for the questions, Heather. As it relates to your first question on HelloSign, certainly the deal and the team there is performing in line with our expectations. The integration there is going really well. We continue to expect HelloSign to contribute just over one point of revenue growth this year. As you noted, that is net of the write-down of deferred revenue, part of purchase accounting guidelines. That's also net of a partial year of revenue recognition just based on when we closed that deal. Longer term, I would just reiterate that we are very excited about the opportunity we have ahead to drive revenue synergies together. HelloSign shares a lot of the same core design principles that allowed us to get to scale quickly. Document workflow, certainly a very natural category extension for us that serves a clear customer need.
As it relates to the second part of your question on FX and FX headwinds, our view there is consistent quarter-over-quarter. On a constant currency basis, our growth rate for FY 2019 and our guidance would be about one percentage point higher.
Okay, great. I just had one quick follow-up then. Thank you for the HelloSign color and the FX color. One more question, given you had a fantastic ARPU growth number this quarter, given that the grandfathering is over, is there a way for you to help us think about how the shape of the year might progress in terms of growth in ARPU? That's it. Thank you.
Sure. I can provide a bit of color commentary there. As a quick reminder for those on the call, on our grandfathering process, we launched Dropbox Advanced in early 2017. At that time, we grandfathered all existing paid teams into our Advanced plan at their legacy price point. As of the end of last quarter, we completed the renewal process for really substantially all grandfathered teams. While that process has been a tailwind to ARPU over the past few quarters, I would note that the primary driver of ARPU expansion continues to be strong adoption of our premium and team SKUs by new paying users. Looking ahead, to answer your question more directly, we remain confident in our ability to continue to expand ARPU over the course of the year.
The only note I would make is that there's always going to be some quarterly variation in the rate of expansion from factors like subscriber mix and deal timing.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan.
Thank you. Congrats on the health of the results. Drew, I wanted to ask you at a high level, which opportunity is more promising to you currently or more tangible, the team collaboration content type of vector, in other words, Paper and showcase and those kinds of products, or what you're seeing in transactional workflow side of things, in other words, e-signature, contracts and forms. Just where are you investing more heavily between those two opportunities?
Well, we see both of those opportunities as related. I don't know if I could quickly quantify one over the other because we think about our roadmap on a number of dimensions. One is just, what is the life cycle that a document takes from concept to a signing event or any number of activities. I'd say we're very focused on making it so you can do more with the content in your Dropbox, and we've shown a lot of examples of that in recent quarters with our extensions launch late last year, continue to strike new partnerships. The Google partnership is a good example. Our G Suite partnership is a good example of that. Just making it so we get more content in Dropbox, make it more useful.
We're also excited about the HelloSign roadmap, and that's another angle of attack on some of these user challenges, where they've started an e-signing, but we see a big opportunity to do more to help with a larger part of that life cycle. We're focused on both, and we think that there's an overlapping and related opportunity.
Thank you. As a follow-up, Ajay, just given that you're focused on converting your highest value users, and I think you've been focused that way for a number of quarters now, and this should provide a better retention profile, I believe. Are you able to tell us whether the aggregate dollar retention of the business has been improving as a result, or whether you'd expect to see that in the future?
Sure. Happy to answer that question. At a high level, annualized net revenue retention isn't a metric that we're updating quarterly, but I can say that ANRR for us has steadily improved since we went public last year in 2018.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Justin Post with Merrill Lynch.
Thank you. Deferred revenue growth was 14% year-over-year, which is below your revenues. I think last quarter you mentioned some people are going monthly versus annual. The ANRR question helps with that, but can you help us understand why that growth might be lower than your overall revenue growth? Are you concerned about that, or is that a good leading indicator of future growth? Thank you.
Sure. This is Ajay. Happy to answer your question, Justin, I think you answered it in the way that you asked it, which is that we have had success with a number of initiatives that have driven a higher proportion of monthly subscribers, some of these have been mobile initiatives, so iOS and Android-focused initiatives. These have been great for us because we've been able to manage to a really attractive retention and LTV profile, we've also been able to bring in users at a higher ASP and effective ARPU. You've seen that both manifest in our growing ARPU over the past year. You've also seen that manifest in our improved ANRR, our retention rates over the past year as well. That obviously has an impact on billings and deferred revenue as subscriber mix changes.
Got it. Maybe one follow-up. With the device limit changes, how's been the reaction from your paying customers on that? Any pushback, have you seen any uptick in the percentage of people converting to paid? Thank you.
Sure, Justin, I can take this. Thanks for that question. Our focus is really generating value for our users, wherever we see that we are generating value, driving monetization initiatives. In case of this three-device limit, what we are doing is actually getting our basic users that are our power users exposed to more high value, premium features, right? Our paid users see the value in things like advanced data protection. Specifically with this device limit, when we look at basic users, when they have multiple devices, those are the power users. They also bring us into work. For those users that bring us into work, imposing a limit actually helps them see the value of what we have in higher paid SKUs.
In terms of the initial reaction, it has been consistent with our expectation for this particular initiative, we'll see how this develops in the next couple of quarters.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Richard Davis with Canaccord.
Hey, thanks very much. Got two quick questions. A few months ago, people were stressed about Google pricing and things like that. I guess I'm less concerned about that. A more important question, I think, is there a tipping point, in terms of modules that you need to offer, in which you therefore can then change the terms of discussion of competition from just kind of storage and price to something that's more orthogonal, in other words, feature functionality? I know that's a squishy question, but I feel that you're trying to go that way with HelloSign and stuff like that. Are we a third of the way there? Are we halfway there? Are we all the way there? That'd be helpful. Thanks.
Well, in terms of how we can add value, I think we're very early innings. We see no shortage of room for improvement with the experience of using technology at work. It's a good question, and as you can see, if you've looked at our product roadmap over the last several quarters, a lot of it is just making the Dropbox experience fundamentally more useful and continuing to take friction out of the experience of using a variety of different tools. More and more people, our customers are turning to Dropbox, less for things like storage or space. I'd say the last several years it's been a trend towards higher tier value, and people turn to Dropbox to be more of a workspace that ties everything together more than storage.
The Google partnership I mentioned is a great example of that, because we find that a lot of our customers use Office, but they also use the G Suite tools. Until now, they haven't had a great way to manage all that content and experience as a seamlessness that Dropbox provides. We see a big opportunity to continue helping people tie all their different kinds of content together and then bring your content and the communication tools and coordination tools that you use closer together. Our partnerships with folks like Zoom and Slack, Gmail, others, remove a lot of the need to toggle between all these different apps. For sure, our work users, we find that they're buying Dropbox because it saves them a lot of time and because it's the place where they're getting work done.
Obviously there's a lot of places you can get cheap storage.
Got it. Just more of a technical question. Look, external third-party integrations are obviously important to your value proposition. This kind of ties into what you said. Also you need to be really careful with security and integrations and things like that. Are you guys satisfied how you're handling that? That can be tricky. You got to make sure your partners are not
Going off the reservation in the wrong ways and stuff like that. Thanks.
Oh, for sure. I mean, security is critically important to us, and it's the first thing on our customers' minds, first thing on our minds. By all means, we have a security team that looks out for all of our product surface area, including our integrations. Certainly, the integrations we promote, we're thoughtful about making sure that the whole experience is secure end-to-end, super important.
Super. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney with RBC Capital Markets.
Hey, thank you. It's Zachary Schwartzman on for Mark. Ajay, on the last call, you mentioned that you'd expect operating margins to expand again exiting 2019. Have your thoughts here changed at all, and where do you see the greatest margin leverage? Just a quick update here would be helpful. Then I have a quick follow-up for Drew and Yamini.
Sure. Happy to take the first question there. We certainly plan to continue driving operating leverage over the course of 2019. We will resume our trajectory of year-over-year operating margin expansion by the end of the year. Thoughts there are very consistent with what we brought to market last quarter.
Thanks. Drew or Yamini, can you talk more about the newer Communities algorithm? Is the difference here the ability to assign a probability for these groups within an organization that aren't premium paying, but that likely will be? Just trying to get a better sense of this improvement in your user acquisition funnel strategy from a technical standpoint. Thank you.
Sure, Zach, I'm happy to answer that question. You've heard us talk about our outbound strategy, which is very much a data-driven strategy, and this is an evolution of our data-driven algorithms. What we are doing is really identifying Communities of users that have the highest propensity to convert into a Dropbox team. What we have found is that teams that are 50 to 100 seats, they are the right kinds and profiles of teams that engage with our product, but also expand and drive towards the wall-to-wall deployment. These algorithms help us identify and help us prospect and qualify, and this goes back to our focus of having a very scaled and efficient go-to-market model that is very data-driven. That's what you're seeing in terms of this, and we'll continue evolving our data-driven programs.
Great, thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Sarah Hindlian-Bowler with Macquarie Capital.
All right, great. Thank you so much. One of the things I was hoping you could talk about is the announcement you made a few days ago on your blog in regards to your new cold storage technology. You talk a little bit on the blog about some potential cost savings. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about this. I have a follow-up.
For context, we announced a few days ago that we've come up with a pretty interesting cold storage solution. A lot of content in Dropbox is accessed less frequently, that's often referred to as cold storage. We were able to, through some technical innovations, reduce the cost of doing that while maintaining reliability. Ajay can speak to the financial implications.
Sure. This is something that we previewed at a high level on last quarter's call. We referred to it as our new storage tier. Certainly provided more details this week that Drew alluded to just now. We do expect to generate cost savings from the rollout of this new storage tier. Those savings currently, Sarah, have been factored into our view of gross margin. Again, just to reiterate, we expect FY 2019 gross margin to be relatively consistent with FY 2018, but certainly to begin driving gross margin expansion across the second half of this year again, after we bring a new data center online in the first half.
All right, great. That's helpful. Then, a follow-up for Yamini. Yamini, you guys have done a significant number of partnership agreements over the past six months, I was hoping you could help us understand what you're seeing in terms of that driving higher paid users.
Yeah. Thank you, Sarah, for the question. Our partnership strategy is really to provide more choice and reduce the fragmentation that our users see. That's really the focus of the partnership strategy. As you pointed out over the past couple of quarters, we have announced a number of partnerships, one with Zoom, which drives a lot of value for both Zoom as well as Dropbox users, as well as this quarter with Google's partnership, and all of this is aimed at driving value for our users. What we end up seeing is our users then engage much more with our platform and therefore have better retention as well as expansion profiles. That's the way we look at partnerships, and we are seeing really good traction with the latest announcements as well as the initiatives to continue the engagement of our users.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Ader with William Blair.
Yeah, thanks. You guys mentioned on the call a steady improvement since the IPO in net retention, and then you also mentioned a focus on converting your highest value users to drive retention. I'm just wondering, does this mean you're favoring ARPU and upsell a bit in the near term over converting free users?
Sure. This is Ajay. Happy to take that question. As you mentioned, absolutely, our focus from a monetization perspective continues to be on converting our highest value users. These are users that tend to retain and expand at higher rates. We just see a better LTV profile overall, and better cohort value that we're able to deliver with this kind of a focus. We don't believe we're sacrificing near-term monetization by pursuing this strategy, though I will say at a high level, we continue to be focused on balancing growth and profitability. As we drive higher and higher rates of conversion and monetization, as we convert more users to our platform, we want to make sure that we're doing that in a sustainable way and that we can continue to deliver the margin expansion that we've brought to market.
We continue to drive conversion among free users, and we continue to see that as a big opportunity, another area of focus.
Okay, one quick follow-up just on profitability and margins in particular. We're at 75% gross margin right now. It sounds like we're going to have some pressure given the new data center, what is a good long-term, let's say, I don't know, two years out type of target for gross margin?
Yeah. What we've guided to in the past is that through the first two quarters of this year, gross margin will be slightly lower at roughly 75% as we bring the new data center online to support continued growth, and then that we resume our trajectory of gross margin expansion across the second half of the year as we exit 2019 into 2020. The long-term gross margin guidance that we provided at the time of IPO was 76%-78%. We are very close to that range. We aren't updating that range at this time, but as we continue to execute on infrastructure efficiency initiatives and innovate on that dimension, we'll continue to reevaluate whether or not it makes sense for us to change our guidance there. 76%-78% is still our long-term gross margin guidance.
Very good. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Rishi Jaluria with D.A. Davidson.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Let me start with the HelloSign acquisition. Now that the acquisition's closed, you're working with the teams. Could you just give us a sense, what does the overlap in the customer bases look like? I think we all understand the cross-sell opportunities in terms of selling HelloSign to existing Dropbox customers. Just want to understand, what does it look like the other way? Is there an opportunity to get Dropbox into existing HelloSign users that weren't on Dropbox before, especially if there's a replacement opportunity, and then I've got a follow-up.
Thank you, Rishi, for that question. One quarter into the acquisition, we are excited about the opportunity for cross-sell. We are much more focused on looking at getting HelloSign products into both our self-serve distribution channel as well as our outbound channel, and those efforts are progressing really well. In terms of the other way, looking at the opportunity to get Dropbox into the hands of HelloSign, we see opportunity there as well. They have been focused on a very different sales motion from an inbound perspective, which we can continue to leverage. There is plans to make sure that the overall customers we are leveraging in terms of the combined value proposition. Opportunities on both sides, although I would say we are much more focused on getting HelloSign into the hands of the Dropbox sellers as well as into our self-serve channel.
Got it. Thank you, Yamini. Ajay or Drew or Yamini, on the ARPU side, look, it feels like it's been a couple of quarters now that the biggest driver of ARPU, which has been expanding really nicely, has been, number 1, from landing new users at the higher tiers. Maybe number 2, the grandfathered users kind of staying on board. Especially now that factor number 2 is gone, how should we think about when the other two factors of potential ARPU expansion, converting existing users to higher paying tiers, converting free users to paying users, when do we think that can become more meaningful in terms of driving ARPU uplift? Thanks.
This is Ajay. Happy to take the question. We certainly are focused on driving more and more paying user conversion to our paid plans, as well as making sure that we're driving high-value conversion, so on driving higher attach rates to our premium plans. As you noted, the primary driver of ARPU expansion for the past few quarters, and today continues to be higher rates of adoption of our premium tiers by new paying users. We are also seeing a tailwind from folks that are moving from individual plans to team plans or existing paying users who are upgrading to a higher tier SKU. You'll see us continue to focus, A, on high-value conversions, B, on exposing existing paying users through our product services to some of the functionality of our higher tier plans and promoting and encouraging those upgrades.
I think they're both going to be drivers of ARPU going forward. The primary driver you'll see will continue to be the uplift that we see from new paying users, and that manifests in metrics like gross new ASP. Again, a metric we shared at the time of IPO, system high level color commentary, our gross new ASP, which is effectively ARPU for new paying users, continues to meaningfully lead ARPU today. A fair amount of headroom there for us to continue to drive ARPU expansion in future quarters.
I would just add that we're always investing in this product-driven conversion engine. When Yamini was talking about Communities and using machine learning and data science to figure, that's one example of many of addressing the opportunity we have, where in any given company, there tends to be a self-serve Dropbox deployment and Dropbox Business licenses, there's often a multiple more users who are using either the free version or an individual subscription. We see a number of ways to continue to drive people along that journey from free use to individual paid to team subscription. All of that increases ASP and lifetime value along the way.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our final question will come from Patrick Walravens with JMP Securities.
Great. Thank you very much. Congratulations on the quarter. Ajay, I hear the comment on balancing growth and profitability. What I'm wondering is, if I sort of step back, growth has decelerated, I think, eight quarters in a row, the numbers are getting bigger, there's definitely that. The question is there something in your plan that you guys think can reverse that, where growth can re-accelerate? If so, what would it be?
Sure. I can answer that question at a high level. I would say we have a healthy, steady, and predictable business. The guidance that we've issued reflects our latest thinking with respect to the quarterly phase-in and ramp-up of our growth initiatives. We're confident in our ability to continue delivering leading growth at scale. As I've said in the past, this gets closer to the question that I think you're asking, we are structuring our business for consistent growth as we exit 2019 into 2020 and beyond. The impact of many of the initiatives launching this year will accrue across the second half of the year, this is a combination of both some exciting product initiatives as well as a handful of go-to-market initiatives.
I would just add that we've got some really great stuff on the product front coming later this year. We are still very early in terms of the roadmap that's launching. We have a lot of reasons that we're excited about really substantially improving the core Dropbox experience and providing a lot more value.
Awesome. Thank you.
All right. Well, thank you all for joining us today, we appreciate your support and look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect and have a wonderful day.