Good morning, everyone. Thank you for tuning in. I'm Mary Lai, Head of Investor Relations at NortonLifeLock. Welcome to NortonLifeLock's first Investor Day. For our Q&A discussion today, we have a great lineup for you, including Vincent Pilette, CEO, Natalie Derse, CFO, and other members of the leadership team. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this event posted on the IR website. By now, you should have seen our press release and have access to all the video presentations. I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, comments and statements may contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our business, financial performance, and operations.
These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement in our press release and the risk factors in our filings with the SEC, and in particular, our annual report on Form 10-K and recently filed quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. In addition, we may also make references to financial metrics that are non-GAAP. Please refer to our IR website for reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures. Before we start our Q&A session, let me pass the mic over to our CEO to kick off the event. Vincent?
Thank you, Mary. Good morning, everyone. I hope you are all safe and well. As you may have read, we just delivered a record quarter, closing a very strong year. Since becoming NortonLifeLock, we achieved a lot, delivering on every one of our commitments, the more important of which was returning the company to growth. In the last quarter, reported billings was up 17%, revenue up 11%. Record numbers. In the last year, we increased our direct customer count to almost three million, to a total direct customer count of 23 million. For this team, it is just the beginning. We have a broad vision of protecting and empowering everyone to live their digital lives safely. We set big goals of drastically improving customer experience and making cyber safety mainstream. Our strategy is simple, is working.
We're building the best integrated cyber safety platform, which we are expanding with adjacent trust-based products and services. Through our results, through the videos we posted yesterday, today, and of course, ongoingly, I hope you can sense the passion and the drive that this new leadership team brings to the opportunity. We have the capabilities and the confidence to accelerate our growth to double digits and double our EPS in the next three to five years. You know Natalie, you know me. We have decided to bring a subset of our leadership team to this session. This is about teamwork. You can get a better appreciation of who we are, how we look at our opportunity, and how we drive together with a common set of values in pursuit of our vision. With no further ado, let's move to Q&A. Mary, back to you.
Thank you, Vincent. All right. Let's get started. We will now open up for Q&A. Our first question comes from Saket at Barclays.
Okay, great. Thanks, Mary. Can you hear me okay?
Yes. Hi, Saket.
Okay, excellent. Hey, Vincent. Hey, Natalie and team. Thank you so much for taking my questions here and for the very helpful presentations posted last night. Maybe I'll start with you, Vincent. First, I appreciate the triple-double goals. I think it all starts with doubling customers. I'd like to zero in on that just to start. Doubling customers from 50 to 100 million, I think, over the next three to five years, I think it was said. Can you just talk a little bit about some of the drivers there, right, on kind of that path? How you think about broad brush, that potential split between sort of direct customers, right, which you've been beating here for several quarters, and indirect customers as well. Does that make sense?
What you referred to about the triple-double is what Natalie, in her presentation, graphed, and it's a matter of quantifying the objective. Double number of customers, double-digit growth delivered in the next three to five years, double our EPS. When we set our big goals, actually had a fourth one, as you know, it all start with doubling the customer experience, improving that, which means really doubling the net promoter score. I think it's all about making cyber safety relatable, easy to use, easy to benefit from, giving the true peace of mind to customers. When we look at the market itself, markets or marketers are going to define the market as they know it today. When we look at the opportunity, we know there are 5 billion people connected to the Internet, those have their digital lives growing exponentially.
You've seen it over the last 12 months, how many more activities have moved online, right? Students now moving online, socializing. Many of the activities we used to do in the physical world are now overlapping with the digital world. That has opened the door for cybercriminals to attack in many different ways and doing ransomware on student scorecards and asking a ransom, otherwise embarrassing them on social media. Everything is increasingly at risk, if you want, as what we value in the past has now moved online. We see the overall need for cyber safety to only increase. Today, less than 5% of people who have a digital life pay for a cyber safety plan. If you compare that to the physical world, in the physical world, 90% of people who have a car have a car insurance.
30% of the homeowners have a home alarm system or home insurance. When you talk about a digital life and what you valued online, less than 5% of people are paying for a cyber safety plan that fully protects them. That's how we look at the opportunity. The second big goal after experiencing improving customer experience is really about making cyber safety mainstream, right? Doubling the customer that we have is one way. Of course, as you also know, we acquired a freemium capability. We have today 80 million users. 30 million of our users are not paying customers because they just use the basic simple of cyber protection. We also want to increase that number tremendously, and you'll see us do that. When it comes to the driver of that growth, it's really around three axes. The first one is increasing our international penetration.
Today, we're very focused, 70% of our business is in the U.S., we can expand exponentially. Internationally, we acquired Avira to get more operations in Europe. We actually saw a strong double-digit growth international in the last quarter with Europe. In addition to Avira growing double digits, we had our core business, Norton, growing double digit as well. Very strong capability to expand internationally. The second one is to continue to push the boundaries of cyber safety, add new products, add new services, addressing the new needs. You've seen us launch the Privacy Monitoring Assistant, which has been really well received. It's not only about security, it's about your privacy, managing your persona on the Internet.
The third driver, of course, for us is scaling up cyber safety through partnership. You've seen us last year signing up with TELUS to go into Canada, to go with Aon to develop a novel cyber safety protection, to partner with Visa recently that we announced to be at the moment of truth when you use your credit card or when you pay to have your identity protected online. I think that overall set of activities, international expansion of our products and services and partnership expansion will help us get to our big goals.
Great. Thank you, Vincent.
Got it. Sorry, Natalie, can I ask one follow-up?
Of course.
Go ahead.
Excellent. Natalie, maybe my follow-up for you. It was great to see the retention rates at 85% again this quarter. I think it was mentioned in one of the presentations that the first-year retention rates are about 10 points lower than that. Can you just maybe talk through some of the things that you feel like NortonLifeLock can do to improve those first-year retention rates in particular? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Yes, 85% retention rate is our average. It has been for a while. We've been on that clip for a while. Industry-leading retention, we're very proud of that. We look at that retention rate as only opportunity. When you think about how we bring that opportunity to life, what I would say is, for me, it's product, brand, service, go to market. I would say we're going to bring retention increase opportunities to life in all four of those buckets across. You've heard from all the leaders on the screen here today during their analyst videos, what they're going to prioritize, how they're going to focus.
It gets back to, I think, the great thing is we've got a lot of health at the top of the funnel to everything that you just heard from Vincent in terms of on our path to doubling customers. We've got that growth at the top of the funnel. Now, how we increase engagement, how we increase customer experience, how we increase product usage, how we leverage our brand, the brand strength, and how we really deliver on our value proposition and our commitment to our customers is obviously so incredibly critical and only increasingly so. When I go back to the whiteboard and I think about all of those levers coming together, not only to drive top-line growth, but again, from a customer perspective, those engagement metrics, the math becomes really simple.
What I mean by that is let's go fast-forward or maybe get to extreme math day one. Five points of retention on a base of customers, 23 million growing. Multiply that by our current ARPU over the next five years is just exponential growth that we are just really excited about. I think, look, we talk about a flywheel, right? We've got the top of the funnel. You've got these leaders and across our teams, just a relentless focus on driving more and more value for our customers, being very customer-centric. We really think we've got the levers to bring that to life. You'll see that in some of our metrics, like retention, like ARPU, like revenue growth, EPS.
If I can add on retention, I want to pass the ball to Gagan. In the past, we had three views, like when you onboard, then at the time of renewal, and then at the time where you leave. When Gagan joined us and Krista Todd at the same time, we redefined what the consumer cyber safety journey would be and how we would interact with them in product, on the side of the product, at the right moment of truth. Now with Norton 360 platform, that has enabled us, if you want to engage even more. Gagan, do you want to talk a little bit about the product and what you're doing in that area?
Yeah. I think both of you covered it quite well. Listen, it starts with simplifying the choice for the end consumer as they are making a decision about which cyber safety product or which aspect of cyber safety are they most concerned with. Carrying them all the way into the product and building points of engagement that not only provides us an opportunity to perhaps educate that customer on the need they have in that specific moment, but also migrate them either to another product or move them up the value chain in our membership portfolio.
It goes to each point of engagement or interaction that you have live with Patrick and his team coming on board. When you complete that full circle, starting with simplifying the choices, engaging with them in moments of truth, and then delivering world-class customer service, I think that's where you really kick it up a notch in terms of driving higher retention.
Thank you, Gagan.
Thanks very much, folks.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Fatima, UBS.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions, and nice to see you all in a Brady Bunch format. My first question, I'll start with you, Vincent. Just to put a finer point on the double-digit revenue growth expectation, and Natalie, please also chime in here. Maybe being greedy here, but double-digit, as you know, anywhere from 10 to 99, but maybe narrowing that down a little bit, what are maybe the most sensitive inputs for you to get into the 10%-15% growth zone, and what needs to go really right for you to move into the 15%-20% plus growth zone?
Yep. Before we talk about the double-digit exactly, let me talk to you about what I'm excited. I believe in business, it's all about momentum. As you know, when we started one year ago, and we separated Symantec between an enterprise business that we sold to Broadcom and created NortonLifeLock, the first dedicated consumer cyber safety company at scale, nobody thought we could grow, as you remember. We say, "Hey, we're going to launch Norton 360, redefine what cyber safety means." We know that the digital life will only increase, and with that, the need for protection will continue to increase. Of course, the last year has just created a step function. We move from low-digit growth rate to mid-single-digit growth rate.
We guided the quarter at high single-digit growth rate, and then we delivered here a revenue up 11%, supported by a billing growth of 17%. I think it's on that momentum that we want to build in. Of course, investor and analysts will want to say, "Which quarter do I put what number?" I think the acceleration of our momentum is what we want to focus on. We jump into, hey, look, it doesn't matter what we grow at, we still have 5 billion of people having a digital life that are left at risk of being attacked by cybercriminals, and let's go and reach the maximum number of people.
Now, to come back to your question, we guided 10%-12% for the next quarter. We put an annual guidance at 8%-10% and put a little plus behind the 10% because we know there are a lot of activities we're driving that we cannot tell investors to already put that into their model, but we know we're going to deliver our results on those, and we'll quantify them at the right time. We focus on what we control, which is, again, I'll repeat, which is improving the customer experience, continuously developing those new go-to-market routes that Robert is driving, developing the portfolio, and redefining what cyber safety means.
I predict that in three to five years, as we achieve all of our long-term goals, cyber safety defined at that time will be very different than today, because we'll have pushed the boundaries of those. That's the overall framework. Obviously, every quarter, we'll try to go after the best result, looking at all of those people unprotected from cybercriminals versus just the short-term results.
Just to build on that. You asked about maybe a 10 to 15 or what kicks us into a different clip. Of course, the core business and the investment there and the continuous acceleration that we've got to plan around is critically important, and that's really the fundamentals and the foundation of our guidance ranges. I would call out, as you heard in the videos and you see in our capital allocation, M&A is going to be a huge focus for us.
We're going to deploy capital in a growth-focused manner. M&A, the way we look at it, is an accelerator to the growth plans that we've laid out for you. You'll see us be very active there, very aggressive. We're very interested in that. As we progress, we'll leverage the healthy balance sheet we've got. We've got flexibility in our capital allocation to really be driving, again, focus on growth and delivering incremental EPS along the way, no matter what opportunity that we're taking advantage of.
Just to use that as my jumping off point to kind of drill into the cost and investment side of the equation that contributes to your long-term outlook. Clearly, several pathways that you've identified, that Robert identified in his session with respect to the funnel, direct acquisitions, marketing partnerships, employee benefits. Natalie, I'm curious, how does this change the composition of the sales and marketing investment envelope? Does that $300 million that you've seared into our brains, does that change dramatically in the context of your longer term guidance?
Yeah. The way I would look at that is, from our core business, we are going to continue to invest for growth. When we get that growth, when we see that accelerating momentum, that leverage that comes from that top line at an 85% gross margin business allows us massive investment capability and flexibility. We are very clear we are going to prioritize continued rate of investment in product and technology to drive innovation, speed to bringing products to market faster, as well as sales and marketing. From a go-to-market perspective, our dry powder and our investment in sales and marketing is going to get behind, again, growth. It's not going to be solely on acquisition.
That's going to be a component of it. We've been investing behind acquisition in a diverse manner, and we believe that's working. We believe that top of the funnel health is there, and as the momentum continues to build, you'll see us diversify into all of the go-to-market channels that Robert talked about. We believe consumers, how they engage in their online digital lives is going to continue to evolve, and we need to evolve right there with them. Even in the last year, how consumers engage online has dramatically changed. The pandemic has taught us that or brought more awareness to that.
We're going to iterate as we navigate through our three to five-year plan. For sure, without a doubt, you can count on Vincent and I, the rest of the leadership team, honestly, the operating team across the business. We are relentlessly going to go after driving more productivity, driving more efficiencies, and immediately reinvesting those into product and technology, as well as sales and marketing. We're very hungry for growth, and we're going to put all of our resources that we identify right behind that.
I think you bring a good point, Natalie, which is every investor is asking us, "Hey," we raised our marketing envelope from $200 million to $300 million, the famous $300 million that Fatima mentioned. We're going to grow that with Robert and say, "How much more do you have to do as a step function to sustain your growth?" The reality is we still have inefficiencies working in our cost structure. Every day when we capture those, we then rebalance the investment. Investing into our new product is as critical as investing in our go-to market model. In the last year, you've seen us launch eight new products, which was like tripling or quadrupling the rate of new products we had launched in the prior years.
I think building up that product innovation momentum is extremely important. We've redirected some investment into Patrick's area, and we talk about the overall service level that consumers expect, and how we build more services into our product to offer really a solution for customers. We invested into our brands and trying to simplify the brand framework and doubling down into our Norton overall. Of course, we have the marketing, but also the partner, the channel, the employee benefit channel that we invest into to support. It's really an end-to-end investment envelope.
Fair enough. I'll jump back in line and see before . Thank you.
Sounds good. Thanks, Fatima.
Thank you, Fatima. All right, let's go to the next question. I have Morgan Stanley, Hamza.
Taking my question. Can you hear me okay?
Yes. Hey, Hamza.
All right. Great. Well, I really appreciate all the details that you provided on the long-term drivers in that whiteboard slide. Maybe a first question for Vincent and/or Natalie. Just when we think about the drivers, I think you mentioned seems like 8%-10% organic revenue growth minus acquisitions over the next three to five years. About five points of that is coming from sustainable momentum, which is roughly in line with the organic growth you're doing today. I'm just curious, what does the sustainable momentum part entail? How are the drivers behind that different relative to some of the things you called out, like higher cross-sell and up-sell or converting more users from the top of the funnel?
Yeah, the sustainable growth momentum is critical. We feel great about it in terms of if we rewind the clock just a year ago, we've been building accelerating momentum throughout fiscal year 2021, capping it off in Q4 with just such a great quarter. We believe that momentum's going to continue into fiscal year 2022. We've got an incredible organic growth plan already kicked off with the teams, focused on all of the things we talked about in the organic side, right? Again, product, brand, service, go to market, all reaching and kicking up into a different notch across the board. In terms of sustainability momentum, keep in mind, when you think about how we progressed through 2021, we haven't yet seen the full year impact to revenue, right?
That's going to catch up as we navigate through the next couple quarters. In parallel, we're building and driving. Those things are going to continue just to scale up and to the right. Of course, on top of that, I know you're touching on just more the organic side, but again, really in parallel, driving across the globe, international expansion. We are driving the diversity in the go-to-market channels with Robert. We're again, expanding the portfolio and the pillars that we are engaging and bringing value propositions to market. Coming with our existing user base, and as we add those new cohorts in, just focused on increased customer engagement.
It's product usage. It's making sure that they are aware of everything in our value proposition that they can take advantage of. Making sure that we are driving more and more happy customers, the engagement in our flywheel is massively important. On top of that, the M&A, right? Again, getting after M&A, really moving into adjacent markets, adjacent services, acquiring new cohorts of customers. All of that is going to help us drive towards the path to doubling the rate of growth. Gagan, Robert, I don't know if you have anything to add. Robert, you're on mute.
I would say that, as I just brought up at the beginning, focusing on that first year retention also goes into that sustainable growth. As we add more customers in the first year, and we close that gap between our ongoing retention rates of 85% and our first year retention rates, that helps as well. As Natalie pointed out, that's about consumer engagement. We talked about awareness to consumers, and that kind of brings them into the Norton family. Also that first year, continually reinforcing the value proposition, the product benefits, what we're doing for them and their families helped encourage that 75% to grow to 85% and mirror the rest of our retention numbers, and that goes into that sustainable growth as well.
Yeah, I think that segues nicely into just a brief follow-up question on retention. You mentioned 85% ongoing retention on the direct subscribers. Do you think that there's any sort of upside to that over time as you drive more engagement, as you have more multi-product customers, which I presume are stickier? Can you give us any color as whether you see that 85% going to 90% over time even?
Oh, the clear, simple answer is absolutely. Honestly, when we look at the 85% rate, we've been at that rate. When I look at the historical trends, we've been at that. That gives us great confidence for sure, at least in the stability of that industry-leading retention. Without a doubt, our sights are on much higher retention. Robert can't wait to jump in and tell you what he's going to do. Patrick, the same. Gagan, the same. It's all of those levers that we talked about, again, underpinned with that strong brand awareness, the brand strength that we've got, and just delivering on that value proposition for sure is a main priority for us. Sorry, Robert, go ahead.
No, that's a great answer, Natalie. I would also add that. One of the opportunities we have is to capitalize on changes in the family and our customer dynamics. As they originally joined us as an individual user, and now they have a family, and maybe they have gamers in the family, and maybe they move overseas or become travelers. We want to make sure that we keep that relevant, and that gives us the ability, because some of the reasons that we have 85% versus 86 or 87 is the fact that we want to make sure that we're relevant as these people progress through their life and their situation changes. With Gagan's help, we've been introducing products that make us more relevant at different points in people's lives, which will help that retention number.
Patrick, I'm sure you have things to add in terms of our path to happier and happier customers.
No, completely agree. The whole experience we keep talking about, increase the customer experience, plays a huge role in retention, and we actually have dove into it and looked at people that give us the highest promoter score, retain at a higher rate as well. It's kind of the reason we made it a foundation for the entire company to focus and be the advocate and think customer first across the entire end to end journey.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Gregg Mizuho.
Right. Thanks, Mary, nice to see everybody. My first question is for Gagan, actually. Yesterday you hinted at potential expansion for NortonLifeLock into some other areas such as digital persona, online reputation, anti-bullying, access management. The question is, do you have the engineering bandwidth to accomplish this today? How should we think about the cadence of significant product releases in these or other areas going forward?
Yeah, look, I would love to give you my roadmap for the year. I'm not sure Vincent's going to be too happy about that. Let me take a step back. Look, I think this came up earlier. When you look at the opportunities for improving on that experience, you heard from Natalie saying, look, there were a lot of inefficiencies that existed that we continue to clean through and produce capacity, in making further investments. I think I have full support from Natalie and Vincent, in talking about as we create those efficiencies to go reinvest in product, reinvest in acquisition and so forth. I feel absolutely confident that we have the capacity. We're also getting more agile and more nimble in how we pursue opportunities, test them out at a smaller scale, and then double down on it if we find early signs of success.
You saw the bit I talked about in Privacy Monitor Assistant, I talked about VPN a bit. It's not so much about bringing 100 people into investing into the next capability. It's much more about bringing 10, proving that capability out, and then doubling down on it as we see success. One of the advantages of having an 80 million user base is that we can deploy different capabilities on different cohorts of customers, in a different region, in a different cohort, and test out the validity of that offering, and then quickly release it across the board. Yeah, I feel very confident that we have the support, we have the wherewithal to continue to invest in that innovation as we go into the year and beyond.
Okay, that's helpful. Thanks. Just follow up for Natalie. I think the path to $3 in EPS over the next three to five years, I think that includes the potential for $0.30-$0.35 of accretion from M&A. Can you just walk through what gives you the confidence that you can drive that level of accretion without presumably having identified specific M&A targets at this time? Is it just a function of a massive install base and the power of the NortonLifeLock brand, et cetera? Or is there anything else that you would sort of add to that?
Yeah, I would go back to our vision and driving cyber safety, cyber protection to more and more of the growing market, but massively under-penetrated market. We have a lot of opportunities. The way I would look at it from an EPS whiteboarding exercise, we showed both M&A and share buyback. We've talked to you guys about we will deploy our capital in a growth-focused manner. There's multiple paths. There's multiple ways to get to that $3 EPS. I feel confident in our capital allocation strategy, right? A third of it dividend, and then the other two-thirds of it set aside for both M&A as well as share buyback. Look, we can find ourselves in different situations. We may find ourselves in a situation where all of that goes to M&A.
We may find ourselves in where we don't find ourselves in an acquisitive fashion, and we'll go more share buyback or a combination of the two. Honestly, it's about that flexibility. It's about making sure that we're deploying capital in a growth-focused manner and relentlessly focused on delivering 100% free cash flow back to our shareholders, excluding M&A. Those are our priorities. Those are our tenants. We have multiple ways to get there. We have so much opportunity. I'm going to ask Vincent to jump in on your M&A portion of your question.
Quickly, and to close on the capital allocation, last year was the most balanced year. As you know, we generated about $900 million plus of free cash flow, and a third was used for the dividend, a third for the acquisition of Avira, and a third for buyback. As Natalie mentioned, dividend is secure, and then between buyback and M&A, we'll have flexibility. Now, I don't want to over-focus on M&A as the word because frankly, when you look at Avira, we acquired customers, 1.6 million customers that are now part of the Norton family. If I had to spend the same amount in marketing to acquire 1.6 million, you would have said, "Yeah, for sure. Invest in marketing." We did increase marketing by $100 million. I would just have increased by $200 million that would acquire those customers.
I think that's one of the elements that you need to understand. The second one is, once a customer has a minimum of cyber safety, we continue to build new products, new functionality you mentioned, and ask Gagan if we have the capabilities. We definitely have the capabilities and the skill set to do that in-house, and we continue to increase more into our R&D engine. That enables us to then drive the ARPU up, right? We acquire the customer, whether inorganic or organic, doesn't matter to me. It's you pay to acquire the customer that is now being protected, and you can move up the ARPU as it comes. Avira came with an ARPU of roughly under $5. You know that the average customer in Norton family is at around $9 a month, and the highest is actually at $18-$20 a month.
We have the opportunity to expose the customer to a higher value portfolio and membership, and that's what we do. The last element is Patrick and his customer experience that he's driving on our collective behalf. For the customer, it's about the engagement and the retention. There, too, we have an aggregate retention rate of 85%. Avira came at about 80%, and we have more opportunity to engage more as we move up through the value.
With that, we have some in our portfolio and retention rate, some cohorts, and the retention rate in the 90-plus %. Moving them up to the higher level is that. It's a whole customer journey, if you want, that you take from awareness on behalf of the customers to acquisition, to enrollment, to engagement, and all the way to being fully protected. That's how we look at deploying our capital, whether that is OpEx or CapEx, frankly.
Very helpful. Thank you, guys.
Thanks. Thank you, Gregg. Let's go to our next question from Raymond James. Robert, you're on.
Hey, Robert.
Great, thanks. Nice to see you all. My question is on Avira. You noted that the first integrated product is expected to launch in June. Can you just talk about your acquisition integration strategy and the thought process behind each future acquisition? What makes sense to integrate versus what brands does it make sense to manage separately? Thanks.
Yep. No, very good question. There are about three type of initiatives that we drive. One is to bring more customers to our platform, whether it's spending in marketing or acquiring an asset that's already on one platform. The second one is to add products to the current cyber safety platform as it's defined today. The third one is to push the boundaries of cyber safety to redefine what it really means, and we're uniquely positioned to drive on all three criteria. Avira actually met a few of those, acquired 1.6 million customers, added a few functionalities inside our current portfolio, and that's what you talk about product integration. We've been together build up additional products and services. When it comes to operational excellence, there's no better team than the team you see here right now.
We've integrated the back end of the Avira business in 86 days, all on our ERPs, all on our common system. Synergies have been realized, not fully flowing through the P&L, but realized within the quarter in that 86-day timeframe. I give A+ to this team, plus frankly, the collaboration and contribution of the Avira team that really understood our vision of fully integrated company. It comes to product integration to ensure we can offer every customer the utmost value of our Norton 360 Ultimate platform, if you want, over time. That's where the product integration start to matter. I'll pass it to Gagan, who can talk a little bit about it without revealing everything that we're going to do, of course.
Some acquisition, before I pass it to Gagan, may be fully integrated in the back end, but kept separate because it redefines the value, and you first want to capitalize on that value. That's how we've defined our strategic framework. It's no different, frankly, again, I think there's a lot of talk about M&A here. It's no different than an organic investment. Some investment we say, "Okay, let's go and acquire a new customer." Some investment we say, "Okay, let's push new functionality." We had our privacy monitoring. We added Privacy Monitoring Assistant working between Patrick and Gagan's team. We have to say, "Okay, how do we define new services all organically?" That's how we drive the business fully. Gagan, do you want to talk a little bit about where you are in bringing all the organizations together?
Yeah. I mean, look, the organizations are integrated, fully integrated. I think when it comes to product, you've already delivered the synergies that the business case was built on. You really look at what capabilities do we want to bring in-house, what capabilities are redundant that we think we should have shared across the board. Also you trade off against time to market. You look at what is the richness of experience that you can create and where the opportunities are for the highest gain.
You look at that entire experience holistically, then you just continue marching on. I think as you alluded to, our first integrated capability coming out in June. That also creates, tying into the earlier question, creates an opportunity for further investment. When you're not so much distracted with integrating backend systems and so forth, you've gotten that out of the way. You can look at where can you deploy that capability to bring on new products, new experiences, into different geographies, for that matter as well.
If I can add, we spend a lot of time inside with our leadership team thinking about our big bets. What else? If we have the next 20 million, where do you put it? How do you get there? In line to the strategy of doubling the customer count, making cyber safety mainstream, redefining the boundaries. Where do we go? How do we go? Today, in our quarterly board meeting, we will spend 70% of our time talking about strategy, organic investment. How do we push the boundaries of our value proposition?
Robert, did you have a follow-up?
That's helpful. Thank you. Maybe one more, if I can. Does everyone hear me?
Yes.
I'll just add my appreciation for the whiteboard slide as it lays out the necessary steps nicely to get to $3 in EPS. Perhaps approaching the question in a different way, could we break down those components into more near term versus long-term buckets? When do you expect to see each of these drivers really kick in, such as the NPS improvement, improved cross-sell motion, and so on?
Yeah, we're not waiting, that's for sure. We started the efforts in 2021. We started to accelerate momentum. We started, as we stood up NortonLifeLock, just a reinvigorated, relentless focus on the customer, on operational efficiency, to be experts in our craft, and to execute every single day. I think, as I look back and reflect on 2021, I believe the team has built up a high level of credibility, a very high say-do ratio in terms of do you do what you say you're gonna do, and do we hit or exceed commitments? We've done all of that in 2021. That momentum will not only continue, it will continue and build as we enter into 2022.
Fiscal year 2022 is the first year in the journey that we are articulating on that whiteboard. Make no mistake, we're getting after it quick. We've got our priorities. We've got our plan. We are funded and resourced, and the teams are already off to the races and driving all of those levers. Now, how we get there, how do we achieve that 8%-10%+ growth? How do we achieve that incremental EPS, that EPS accretion? Of course, we're going to have multiple ways to get there. We got a lot of levers on that whiteboard, and you could probably double and triple click into each and every single one of those.
We've got just an enormous amount of opportunity ahead of us. You've got an incredibly hungry leadership team, not only the folks that you see on the screen here, but across the business. Look, we will continue to be an efficient machine. We will continue to be high execution. We will, like I said on my video, we will continue to inspect what we expect, and be very data-driven, all through a growth-focused mindset.
If I can add a couple of things, your question also come from our past. The company was, or the division, NortonLifeLock, was really focused on the installed base and then the bottom line. When we separated the asset and became NortonLifeLock, it was into return to growth. At that point in time, we launched Norton 360, and we put $100 million of marketing at work. Of course, we built the leadership team and the capability. Those two were really clearly highlighted and easy to understand, and we delivered and over-delivered in many of our metrics. Now is the first year of a full fiscal year for NortonLifeLock. We've taken an approach much more balanced. We've squeezed as much as we could in the short term, the inefficiencies in our cost structure, and redirect the investment across all.
There is not one here, partners of mine, that does not have a budget that includes incremental investment to drive on the big objectives. We guided this year at 8%-10%+. We gave you the three to five year target of double-digit growth and $3 EPS. I think what I want everyone to walk away from this meeting is the understanding that we have a lot of levers at our disposal. Maybe back to Fatima's question. If every one of those plans gets into a blue sky scenario, we'll beat the number by a mile. So keeping the flexibility and the intellectual agility to take risk, learn from the mistake, turning the mistake into an asset, a learning for the customers, and constantly adjusting on all of those levers is really what we're building here in our culture.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Let's go to our next question from RBC. Matt, you're on.
Hey, Matt.
Oh, hey guys. Thanks for the time. This has been great. The presentation last night was super helpful. I guess, when I reflected all the opportunities for growth, I look at international as a massive opportunity. I guess for Robert or Krista, you've had success internationally, Canada, obviously, but it's only 30% of your business today. I guess the question is, how realizable is the international opportunity, and how do you effectively target that versus maybe what works here in the U.S.?
Maybe we'll start with Krista, since you have not heard from Krista yet, and then she'll pass it to Robert. Krista, the ball is yours.
I think that you're right there. We talked about the balance of our business right now, domestically and internationally, which just simply means we have a huge opportunity in front of us. We can take learnings from what we do in any market and apply it really well to other markets to scale, to drive efficiency very quickly. From a brand perspective, we see a lot of promise with our Norton brand internationally. We are number one or number two in all of our key markets today. The one exception is Germany, where we're number three, but Avira is now number one in Germany.
When we think about the strength of brand, and we're in a category where brand matters, building a trusted brand in cyber safety is critically important. We also heard from consumers around the world. We have brand momentum, which means they believe that we are moving forward, not standing still or going backwards. We will use the power of brand, the differentiation of our brand, to understand consumers, deliver platform needs for them. Really understanding consumers in other markets and going to market with them to connect deeply to bring them in to our solutions.
Absolutely. But I'd like to. We have a number of levers, right? We talked about the direct-to-consumer being one of the levers, the partner lever being another one, and obviously Avira being the third and then also an important lever. Just to dial in a little bit on the partner side, each one of these partners brings a local perspective, right? In some cases, they are more local partners. They could be retailers or e-tailers in those partners. They could be affinity group, they could be affiliates. They have a local expertise that we can partner with so that our marketing goes much further, right? Because it's much more informed so that while we think global, we act local, and that's through a partnership with various e-tailers and retailers around the world. In addition to the fact that Avira widens that net considerably, right?
Now we bring in a new type of consumer who is looking for this product but has a different price point that they were looking at. We can pull them in from international markets as well, and then put them into the fabric of Norton to move them up as their life changes or as their situation changes. It's all part of casting the widest net, but also being relevant at the geographic level, not just at the socioeconomic level or at the age level, right?
In fact, you can add a few things. It's all about the operational plans, right? You've seen that our penetration in the next 10 countries after the U.S. is half of what it is in the U.S. We believe also it's because we've taken too big of a global approach in the past, and we want to make it much more local. Every week now, every Friday, we meet with a country review. What is the country strategy? Who are the competitors? What are the customer characteristics? What feedback do we get? Then we bring Patrick in, who's kind of the voice of the customer and the last touch. Patrick, maybe you can share a bit what you do in terms of making your support and services more localized.
Yeah. One of the really exciting things to report if that an entire year of product to unify all the customer experience to be able to control the end-to-end journey. What we've been able to do is create a superior close to world-class customer support team because we can actually know exactly why customers come in, what is the issues they're having, and kind of what Vincent talked about earlier, what's the moments of truth that allows us to put high touch, high value people or local resources to make sure that they end up having their issue dispositioned quickly and correctly. It's one of the things that allows scale very quickly, too. We can move to new markets from a service standpoint very quickly now, which we couldn't have done a couple of years ago.
Super helpful. Vincent or Natalie.
Just to cap it off. Sorry, go ahead.
No, please.
No, I was just going to cap it off with some numbers. Look, we're coming off a solid year, a very strong Q4. We've got momentum to build on as well. That momentum is across products. It's across regions. We grew double digit, both domestically as internationally, across Europe, across APAC, with, without Avira. We are just really trying to capitalize again on, to Vincent's point, right? The momentum is so critically important. We've got it, and now we're really trying to take that forward. My apologies. Go ahead with your follow-up.
No, that's great. Gee, that was a good question. We touched on everybody but on the product side on that one.
Yeah.
I guess, for Vincent or Natalie, obviously it really does seem like you've got an opportunity to drive higher renewal rates. Natalie had talked about sort of the potential and what that could mean for your growth. Maybe this question is hard to answer because I'm sure it's an evolving thing, When you study the cohort of COVID subs, do you foresee them acting any differently when they come up for renewal that maybe is a bit different than other cohorts? Just sort of wondering on what you think drove them to the franchise here and how you think that might behave in the future.
Yeah, I appreciate the question. We spent a lot of time looking at this, thinking about it, et cetera. First, I would say, look, we have industry-leading retention at 85%, and the new cohorts, of course, they're lower. We've been open and sharing about that. That's nothing new, right? We've seen both of these trends for a while. As it pertains to the growth related to COVID, I'll just throw out there, for me, I look at specifically just being in the data and the analytics. Is it causation, correlation? Of course, the pandemic increased the awareness of the need for more and more cyber safety across a broader population. The pandemic really drove just change in all of us, all of our daily lives. For me, though, I step back, and I look at it for growth.
That growth timing kind of correlated with the pandemic, but we were doing a lot of different things, and I believe that growth result was driven by a lot of different things. For sure, the awareness, beyond the shadow of a doubt, accelerated. Secondly, we were investing in marketing significantly. I think, greater than a 50% increase year-over-year clip. In addition, we launched our Norton 360 integrated platform, where this was a new integrated platform that offered the multi-tier membership profile and solution. All of that coming together during that same timeframe, and then now I have the luxury of looking back and reflecting on 2021. Q1, our fiscal Q1 that laddered up or lined up with the early pandemic timing. Three out of the four quarters, we added around 300,000-400,000 customers net new, locking in a sixth consecutive quarter of adds.
This year just being the first year we've added net customer growth since 2014. A step back, the sentiment is the same. How are we going to get after increased retention? Overall, how are we going to bring that first-year renewal rate up? That gets back to the levers that we've been talking about, product, service, brand, go to market. We're just trying to get out of the gate strong on all of those. Again, just high-quality products, faster innovation, pace to market, great customer service, making sure that our customers understand the current usage of their products that they already pay for, increasing that up and to the right.
Obviously, really getting after just diverse go-to-market channels to make sure that as the customers engage, as they operate online, that's going to continuously evolve over the next few years. Again, the pandemic taught us that as well. We're right there where the customers are, where they're making these critically important decisions on how to protect themselves and their family. We'll evolve along with them. In the meantime, absolutely focused on happy customers.
If I can add, so clearly Natalie highlighted for you how we think we have a structural growth opportunity in front of us with under-penetrated cyber safety, and all the levers we have at our disposal to drive towards that growth. Last year, the increase in our digital ads has created a step function at a minimum in terms of awareness. Frankly, it's not like because the pandemic is stopping, that suddenly cyber criminals will go home and stop attacking, right. I think that awareness is here to stay. That step function is here to stay. If I make it numbers, we finished very strong in March, we had a very strong month of March, and maybe March could be the first month of growth under the aspect of a pandemic, as you know.
We've seen a solid April, we do not see at this point in time a change in behavior of new customers compared to a year ago, if you want. That being said, we have many levers to continue to increase our retention. As we said, Norton 360, higher engagement, higher retention, first-year cohorts, international cohorts, lower retention. Those are the normal dynamic we are seeing as opportunities.
Super help. Great answers, and best of luck, team.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right. Let's go to our next question from Monness Crespi. Ryan?
Great. Thanks for taking my questions, and I really appreciate the format. Good to see everyone. I wanted to ask about Avira and the freemium model. Is freemium something we can expect to see rolled out more broadly through the portfolio? I'm thinking maybe testing new products or specific geos. Related to that, on the conversion to paying, I'm just curious how predictable that transition is and what sort of visibility you have there.
Clearly for us, freemium is a capability, and it's not as simple as saying, "I'll make my product for free." It's about making a product that's relevant, a minimum set of functionalities so the customer can experience cyber safety. Then building up the interaction, identifying the moment of truth or the moment of risk if you're a consumer, during which you can then move into the higher value set of the portfolio. Engaging, identifying that engagement, and driving that upside is a capability. We have acquired a team that has experience in that, and we make it in many aspects of our portfolio. You don't have to come at the core on just a simple AV on a device.
You could come into cyber safety from either some functionality of the security pillar or some functionalities of the privacy pillar or some functionalities of the identity pillars, and it's all about getting into cyber safety and then engaging into that higher-level protection. You'll see us use that more and roll more around basic. Our goal, again, would be that one day, everyone, the 5 billion internet users, have a minimum of cyber safety that they've consciously chosen to go and drive, because that increases their awareness and makes the cyber world safer. Gagan, do you want to add anything on freemium?
No, I think you said it right. Look, framing back to what Vincent started off the conversation with, there's 5 billion connected users and less than 5% penetration. Freemium is only one of the many ways for us to go grab those customers, and tying it into what Patrick does and what product team does in building that long-term relationship with that user, turn them into a customer, and then they're really no different than any customer that you perhaps acquired in any other way or any other format or product, et cetera. I think it's really as simple as that, and the fact that Avira has a concentration in Europe just further ties into our bigger term goals around international expansion and so forth.
Great. Then a quick follow-up, if I can sneak it in. You guys have done a lot of work over the last several quarters here to shed the image of sort of this legacy desktop antivirus vendor. What are the primary marketing efforts to kind of further this awareness of NortonLifeLock being a holistic platform for consumer identity and security?
I'll pass it to Natalie or Krista. First, I want to say it has been many years, not just last year, that the NortonLifeLock team was thinking about moving from being device-centric and a protection of a weak operating system to really protecting a digital life and becoming a lot more user-centric. We were the first at introducing an identity protection, then building up the first cyber safety integration, a full platform where we can add new functionalities with a common architecture. That's because we are all user-centric.
The overall momentum we've had is thanks to the team, my predecessor in the role, and the entire NortonLifeLock team to really drive that conscious change in the market and where the customer will be in five years from now. They did that five years ago. We do it today. We spend a lot of time today and say, "What would a digital world look like in five years from now? And what can our cyber safety plan look like when we do that?" With that, Natalie, maybe you want to pick it up.
Oh, no, that's a perfect question for Krista.
Okay, good.
Absolutely. I think the opportunity we have is really to make Norton the bright side to a pretty dark problem out there. We know that cyber criminality has only increased, and we need to be there to protect and empower consumers to live their digital life safely. All that we do, we focus on that effort, and that includes making sure that they feel safe when they're jumping on as well.
Look, we've got the investment behind it. I think, if I can just go down the path of marketing investment for a second. We've been on not only a path to increase it, right? Fatima's back on the phone with the $300 million reference. We'll continue to get behind it, but it's about diversification. I think, again, it's not just from one lens or one path. We will put the marketing investment behind the priorities, whether that is acquisition, whether that is diversification, either internationally or in some of our partner channels, as well as driving the customer engagement.
Making sure that our consumers, either existing or potential, know the innovative products that we are bringing to market, the new pillars that we're expanding into, the new services that we are trying to build out from. At the end of it, I think, this relentless focus on customer. We believe, even in our retention metric, we focus on a user retention metric, not a dollar retention metric. There's multiple ways to look at every metric, when you're solely focused and relentlessly focused on behalf of the customer, I think it provides you a lot of clarity as to what you need to focus on, how you prioritize, and what you put powder behind to drive those priorities.
Appreciate the detail. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ryan. We have some additional follow-ups here.
Yep.
Next question goes to Fatima.
Hey, Fatima.
Yes? Hi. Back for seconds. Thank you. This is a jump ball, just around ARPU, if I can drill into that a little bit more explicitly. We've addressed the concept of ARPU in a number of different ways as it relates to retention and the efforts you have there. Maybe more specifically, what is the priority sequence? Well, actually, maybe to take a step back, what type of ARPUs are you anticipating or contemplating in certainly the near term, and over the course of the next three to five years bringing to your guide?
If you can help us think about it in the context of the bookends you shared with Avira being sort of a little south of $5 and organic ARPU a little south of nine. If you can help contextualize how you're thinking about ARPU, and really, between your ability to nudge and shepherd customers into the higher priced bundles and selling a la carte offerings, how should we think about the overall ARPU complexion from the baseline levels that you're expecting short-term and long-term?
Great simple question on ARPU that could almost summarize our entire strategy because it really comes first with our vision, which is everyone would be cyber safe when they live their digital lives. At a minimum, have access to a freemium that gives them a first level of protection. That would be an ARPU of zero, as you know. We want to really make that cyber safety mainstream. That is about building the capabilities to really identify those moment of truths, moment of risk for the customer. When can the cybercriminals attack you, put your assets, your values, everything you have online, all the way to your digital reputation at risk? Identifying those moments, providing a value for the customer, i.e., they would pay for it, that they get something out of it, so they're fully protected.
We move them up from protecting your device and your data to protecting your overall information and going into a privacy angle, then protecting your identity and going to the identity angle, all the way to our ultimate offering, which is Norton 360, with all of the functionalities where we would feel confident you're fully digitally protected. Where the tools cannot because it's not 100% always, cybercriminals continue to evolve, then we have a follow-up restoration services all the way to an insurance services if you experience a loss. The full end-to-end protection.
The customer journey would move. Some would choose directly because they're either more aware or more exposed or have a higher intensity in digital life to join directly on Norton 360, which is the majority of our new customer coming in. They'll say, "Hey, I joined on Norton 360 level 3, and I need more identity protection, and here it is. I'm doing a lot of processing and/or my credit card has been breached or other things." You move into the higher level, all the way to the ultimate, as I mentioned. There, you have an ARPU of $20 a month.
Okay.
It would be a mistake, I think, to only solely focus on an aggregated ARPU for our business. It's really by cohort, by moment of truth, making sure people get more and more cyber safe. Ultimately, when 5 billion internet users will be fully protected on Norton 360, you can imply what the ARPU is. I think it's the right balance between, hey, bringing new customers, moving internationally, adding more values, retaining higher, improving the experience. Between retention rates, ARPU, which drives that new customer versus old one, partner customer versus direct customer.
Also the ARPU change. As you know, in a partner relationship, we share the ARPU with our partners, then as we move them up through the cycle of the cyber safety journey, we can have an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell our offering. Again, it's a little bit back to Natalie's capital allocation. It's a balanced set of levers to achieve our ultimate vision, which is everyone would be cyber safe.
Does that answer your question, Fatima?
Yes, very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Fatima.
Come back for thirds.
Well, it's been a great discussion. We actually have time for a couple more. Let's go to Saket at Barclays.
Yes. Great. Thank you. Mary, can you hear me still okay?
Yeah. Great.
Okay. Excellent. Maybe for a quick follow-up for Krista. Enjoyed some of the marketing videos, by the way, around reinforcing the brand. Maybe just thinking about a little bit more broader, how do you think about marketing the message of paid security versus something free? In particular, by free, I kind of mean Microsoft Defender. Does that make sense?
Yes.
Krista, before you answer, and you think as you answer, I want to share a little anecdote with everyone. When I interview Krista, we're looking for someone who really understand how to talk to consumers. Krista has had the long experience really designing and helping designing a brand and products for consumer. When I interview with her, she say, "Well, Vincent, your problem you have is cyber criminals are scary. When you talk to customers and new consumers, you make everything look so scary."
We really need to work on if we are delivering a peace of mind, we need to make cyber safety relatable, where consumer can really understand, yes, cyber criminals are scary, but it shouldn't be scary for you because we are offering you that protection, that peace of mind. Immediately when she came in, she started to write, and she told me, "Vincent, if I join, there's only one thing you need to do, is make sure you listen to me." Boy, I'm glad I did. With that, Krista, I'll pass it to you.
No, that's fantastic, and it's such a good question. I'm glad the videos resonate with you. I'm glad the messaging at that brand level really resonates with you because it's truly what we're all doing today. We've talked about it a lot in our videos and today. We are all spending so much more time online. We're inherently opening ourselves up to more risks because we're doing so many activities. Taking one step up, and just to step back there, we have to make cyber safety, we have to build the education for it. We have to make it mainstream or popularize it and make it relatable, easy to understand, easy to buy, easier to use.
Then to your question, when we think about the differentiation of marketing messages from a free to paid service, I still believe we have to inject some feelings with our consumers. People need to feel empowered to take control of their digital life. They have to be inspired to do whatever they want to do online and feel safe and have this peace of mind. We also need them to recognize us as the leader, the undisputed category leader, that we're going to protect them, and we're going to constantly bring innovation.
Once we get to that level, the differentiation of marketing features by feature or product platform by product platform, that actually becomes easier because there's differentiation, and then we can actually grow together. What might be free for a moment, and they get on board with a premium solution, if we do our job right with protection, innovation, quality, making it simple, then we'll continue to grow them in our journey and their journey.
If I can add one more thing, Saket, that your question made me think about, which is I still have a few misunderstanding in this overall area. One of them, which is a question I get very often from investors, say, "Well, if you're really an antivirus, now you have maybe Microsoft that has a better OS system and maybe they have Defender." It's been a long time since we've changed our strategy and really decided to focus on the user, the user digital lives. Everything sitting in the cloud that you value, some we may control through a device, some we may not. How do you offer that full protection for your digital life?
Starting, of course, with data and device, but moving into information, moving into privacy, moving into identity, moving into a full management of your digital persona, if I can call it that way, or multiple identities. That's what we're about. That's our focus. That's where we're going. I can tell you, of course, products and services have to constantly being developed and customer experience has to improve, and we have a lot of room for innovations. But as we define it, as we see it, this is a massively under-penetrated market, and that's how we look at that opportunity.
Thank you, Vincent. We actually have time for one more question. Saket, would you like to ask the final question?
Oh, boy. That's a lot of pressure. Well, I think, if I can keep it tactical, actually, maybe just to go back to the ARPU question. Vincent, a really interesting part in your presentation, you talked about some ARPU opportunities with Norton 360 specifically. I think you said, right, 55% of the paid customer base, the majority of new customer adds. Actually, 80% of those Norton 360 customers are on lower price tiers. Maybe the question is, what are some of the things that you can do to help drive that higher value over time, if you will, in that kind of growing part of your cohort?
100%. You mentioned we launched Norton 360 18 months ago, first cyber safety, fully integrated platform, and we really see it as a platform, common architecture in which we can interact with the customers, increase the functionalities, add the new services, if you want, and then build on top of that platform additional adjacent digital solutions, which we're working, and Gagan and everybody is working on those. Definitely, a lot of benefit in seeing security at the core, Norton 360 as a platform. We were really glad to see the adoption rate. In 18 months, we moved from zero to now 55% of our customer base on Norton 360, giving us a common platform.
When you upgrade from, today we have six levels, from a Level 1 to a Level 2 to a Level 3, which is the first set of values, it's seamless for you. You don't have to download a new app. We upgrade your functionalities. You move up into the membership plan. You touch what still has to be more awareness. Cyber safety is not just security. It's security, it's privacy, it's identity. Those are the current pillars of our portfolio that we offer. We're thinking about new pillars. We're thinking about products and functioning on top of that. The awareness has to continue to increase.
We've seen about 20% of those 13 million Norton 360 members moving for fully higher level. We have more that are still on the single product LifeLock, right? We have about five million there. They still need to adopt the whole platform. We really are consumer-led, if you want. We make them more aware. It's really consumer deciding to adopt the right way. I see this as a tremendous opportunity to continue to drive higher engagement, higher protection, higher retention, and higher ARPU for those who are already into that platform.
Very helpful. Thanks.
Well, thank you for that last question. I will now turn it back to Vincent for closing remarks. Vincent?
Thank you, Mary. I'll try to do as well as the last question that Saket asked. Thank you, everyone. I hope you learned something today, that you discovered who the key leaders of our company are, and I hope that you are as excited as we are about our plan for growth. We've embarked on a mission to build the most comprehensive cyber safety platform and then expand it with trust-based digital products and services, as I discussed.
We'll continue to build on this strong foundation and focus on transforming in pursuit of that broad vision of protecting everyone from cyber criminals. I believe, we believe, this team believes that our future is very bright. The 3,000 employees at NortonLifeLock are really, truly, just getting started. It's, as someone said, day one every day for us. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for your support. We look forward to catching up with many of you very soon.
Thank you.
Thank you, Vincent. This concludes today's event. Thank you.