Earnings Call: Q4 2016

Feb 27, 2017

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Shutterstock Incorporated Q4 2016 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to VP of Strategic Finance, Rossen Daniel. You may begin. Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Shutterstock's 4th quarter and full year 2016 earnings call. Joining me today is John Oringer, our Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman and Steven Burns, our Chief Operating and Financial Officer. During this call, management may make forward looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainty, including predictions, expectations, estimates and other information. These include statements relating to the expansion of our addressable market, the growth of our customer base and success of new and existing product offerings, revenue growth and the predictability of revenue, adjusted EBITDA, equity based compensation, foreign currency rates, taxes and capital expenditures. Our actual results may differ materially from the results predicted and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please refer to today's press release and the reports and documents we file from time to time with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including the section entitled Risk Factors in the company's annual report on Form 10 ks for the year ended December 31, 2016, for discussions of important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in any forward looking statements we may make on this call. On this call, we will refer to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth on a constant currency basis and free cash flow, which are non GAAP financial measures. You can find a description of these items along with a reconciliation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in today's earnings release and in our Form 10 ks, which are posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. We believe that the use of these measures in conjunction with GAAP financial measures provides important additional insights for investors about the performance of the company's overall business and operating performance and enhances the comparability for investors in assessing our financial reporting. However, these non GAAP financial measures should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. And with that, I will turn the call over to John. Thanks, Ross, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today for Shutterstock's 4th quarter year end 2016 earnings call. We made significant progress on the execution of our strategy in 2016. We improved and expanded the content we offer our customers. We enhanced the technology on which our customers access this content. We continue to diversify our product mix through video, music and editorial offerings, and we continue to grow internationally. This progress manifested into 18% annual revenue growth and 18% annual adjusted EBITDA growth on a constant currency basis, as well as strong growth across our key metrics. During the year, we expanded our image library by 63 percent to over 116,000,000 images. We expanded our video library by 68 percent to over 6,000,000 video clips. We grew paid downloads by 14% to 168,000,000 dollars and we increased revenue per download by 4% on a constant currency basis. Beyond the numbers though, what I'm most excited about how our long term vision for the business is now beginning to come to fruition. To date, Shutterstock has been about providing our users with real time access to a library of high quality content. Consumers and businesses of all shapes and sizes need imagery for their projects and we have been a go to option and valuable partner for them. Over time, we have innovated, making our products easier to use, providing better search and workflow tools and continuously diversifying our product mix. While this approach has brought us to where we are today, delivering over 5 downloads per second, nearly $500,000,000 in revenue and approaching $100,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA, we have designs for something much more. Over the coming years, our vision is to expand our business from a marketplace to a platform. We are confident that successfully executing our vision will mean a larger addressable market, consistent growth for us and allow our customers around the world to easily and effectively grow their businesses. So how are we going to get there? We continue to execute against 2 key items, continuing to build our platform and continuing to expand our network. So let's start with our platform. As you know, we have been dedicating considerable time and resources to migrate our tech stack to a more scalable efficient platform. This has been the first significant migration we have undertaken since I wrote the first few lines of code for Shutterstock in 2003, and we feel confident that this migration positions us well for future Crip. We believe that it ensures our pace of innovation can be sustained far into the future so that we can continually launch more and better products and a more personalized and localized customer experience. This is a very important component for our overall growth strategy. There's no hiding the fact that our total revenue growth has decelerated over the last several quarters due in part to the e commerce side of our business. That said, we do believe that the technological advancements we are making are positioning us nicely for reacceleration of growth by enabling an end to end workflow platform as well as generating strong operational efficiencies. In addition to our platform migration, we also continue to build our capabilities around additional asset types beyond the commercial imagery. In 2016, we made significant progress in our video and music offerings. Our video library grew 68% and we continue to see very strong demand for these high quality assets across both our e commerce and enterprise customer bases. As you know, we also now have an exclusive and entirely curated music collection across all genres. Our customer feedback gives us confidence that Shutterstock Music represents a significant upgrade to the traditional music licensing experience, and we are excited by its prospects. As a whole, our video and music products continue to represent a growing percentage of our total revenue. We also continue to be very excited about the progress we are making in editorial imagery. In 2016, we announced partnerships with the Associated Press, European Press Photo Agency and Billy Farrell, a renowned fashion and celebrity photographer. We also acquired the Cobalt Collection archive. We have put together a strong offering within the editorial market, including our acquisition of Rex Features and our partnership with Penske Media, which we completed in 2015. We expect our editorial business to have modest contribution to revenue in 2017 with a larger contribution in 2018. Now let's turn to the network effects of our business model. As we attract an increasing number of customers and contributors to Shutterstock, we have accumulated more data and feedback to ensure we are tailoring our platform according to their needs. There's no doubt that the constant learning and improvement that is happening through the network effect is leading to a growing number of loyal customers and contributors, which in turn facilitates an ever improving experience. On the supply side of our platform, our contributor base added more than 44,000,000 images and 2,000,000 video clips to our robust library in 20 16, giving us meaningful scale compared to our competition. On the demand side, we now have nearly 1,700,000 customers, a 14% increase over 2015. While we continue to see strong growth on both sides of our network, we also continue to develop our key growth levers, new asset types, enterprise and internationalization. As I mentioned earlier, we have made continued progress in the development of our video and music products and are well positioned heading into 2017 in the editorial market. Additionally, we now have over 36,000 enterprise customers and revenue from our enterprise business makes up roughly 30% of total revenue and is growing significantly year over year. Finally, our business continues to benefit from a focus on internationalization. We currently offer our products in 20 languages and generate approximately 2 thirds of our revenue from customers outside the United States. We believe that international growth continues to represent a large opportunity as there are key markets in Latin America, Europe and Asia in which are underpenetrated. To increase our market share in these regions, we have added resources, including direct sales leadership and capability. Overall, we are confident and optimistic about the opportunities ahead. We have great momentum in our business. We're bringing in new customers and contributors. The data we are collecting from those relationships is translating into innovative and amazing products. And we have a new technological platform that is giving us an improved way to connect with our customers and is capable of handling the significant growth we have in front of us. Today, we have a business that's way ahead of our competition, and we are focused on speeding up the pace of innovation. We are aggressively investing in and executing on a strategic plan that will mean stronger growth rates and ultimately shareholder value. I'll now turn the call over to Steven Burns, who has been appointed Chief Operating Officer in addition to remaining our Chief Financial Officer. Steven will provide you details on the drivers of our financial performance. Thanks, John, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We have posted a brief presentation deck on our website, which contains supporting materials for our quarterly and annual results as well as other items discussed on today's call. As John highlighted, Shutterstock delivered another year of profitable growth and operating momentum in 2016. Continued growth across both sides of our constant currency basis, 20 16 revenue On a constant currency basis, 2016 revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth were both approximately 18%. For the full year, our revenue was impacted by approximately $4,500,000 due to the strengthening of the U. S. Dollar versus the British pound throughout 2016. This impact was approximately $500,000 more than was expected at the end of the Q3 of 2016. Looking at the Q4 as compared to the Q4 of 2016 as compared to the Q4 of last year, total company revenue increased 12% on a reported basis. On a constant currency basis, 4th quarter revenue grew 14%, driven by increased results from our expanding video and music offerings as well as from sustained growth at our traditional e commerce and enterprise businesses. We continue to see solid trends across our key metrics as we attract new customers across multiple content types and increase customer lifetime value. This past quarter, our customer base expanded 14% to nearly 1,700,000 customers. As compared to the prior year Q4, we saw a 6% increase in paid downloads driven by new customers as well as increased activity across our existing subscriber base. We also saw revenue per download increase 6% on a reported basis or 8% on a constant currency basis, primarily driven by continued growth in our enterprise, video and music products, which operate at higher price points than our traditional e commerce images offering. International expansion and localization continues to be a core part of our long term growth strategy. Currently, of the approximately 2 thirds of our revenues from customers outside the United States, approximately 1 half is from customers in Europe with the balance from Asia Pacific and Latin America. Excluding the impact of foreign currency movements, revenues in each of these geographies grew at double digit rates throughout 2016. Shifting to the cost side of the business, we continue to align our expenses against revenue opportunities and a focus on long term profitable growth and cash flow. For the Q4 of 2016, operating expenses increased 16% versus the Q4 of 20 15, driven primarily by higher contributor royalty payments associated with our growing revenue and an increase in sales and marketing spend year over year. Contributor royalty payments were approximately 28% of revenue for the Q4, which was consistent with the Q3 of 2016 and slightly lower than the Q4 of 2015. Now I will discuss some of the major expense categories. For each category discussed, my comments and the numbers referenced will exclude stock based compensation expense. Our sales and marketing expense increased 28% versus the Q4 a year ago and was approximately 26% of revenue in the Q4 of 2016. As discussed on our 2nd and third quarter conference calls, while we experienced some seasonality in marketing spend throughout the year, we have been targeting a level of spend as a percentage of revenue that is consistent with 2015 on a full year basis, which was 24% in 2015 24.5% in 2016. Overall, the cost of acquiring a new customer remains relatively steady and the return on our marketing investment remains consistent with historical levels as we drive new customers to our platform while keeping retention and repurchase rates high across our subscription and on demand products. Product and development costs increased 39% in the Q4 versus the Q4 of 2015, primarily due to higher personnel and consulting costs related to building a more expansive user experience and transitioning our tech platform, partially offset by increased capitalization of labor of approximately $6,000,000 General and administrative expenses decreased by 1% for the 4th quarter versus the same period a year ago, driven primarily by lower personnel costs. Overall, our revenue growth in the 4th quarter, along with our consistent focus on managing our costs, translated into adjusted EBITDA growth of 1% on a reported basis, which compares to a very strong base in 20 fifteen's 4th quarter and a 13% increase on a constant currency basis. GAAP net income in the quarter grew 43% to $9,900,000 or $0.27 per diluted share. The increase was driven primarily by improved operating performance and lower income tax expense. As discussed on our previous two calls, we have been able to lower our effective tax rate from 43% in 2015 to 27% in 2016 due to a number of factors, including a claim of available U. S. Federal research and development tax credits related to the years 2013 through 2016. Adjusted net income, which we had previously referred to as non GAAP net income and which excludes the after tax impact of non cash equity based compensation expense as well as excluding the amortization of acquisition related intangibles and furthermore excluding changes in the fair value of contingent consideration related to acquisitions. Adjusted net income as just defined, the estimated and it also excludes the estimated tax impacts of these adjustments. So that number, adjusted net income was $15,100,000 for the year or $0.42 per share, which represents an 11% increase versus the Q4 of last year. Turning to the balance sheet. We generated $9,400,000 of free cash flow in the 4th quarter and finished the year with approximately $279,000,000 of cash, cash equivalents and short term investments. In February of 2016, our Board of Directors approved a $100,000,000 increase to our stock repurchase program, bringing the total authorization to $200,000,000 As of December 31, 2016, the company utilized a total of $77,500,000 to repurchase stock under this authorization at an average price of $36.76 per share, including our 4th quarter repurchases of approximately 370,000 shares for nearly 18,000,000 Therefore, including the newly authorized amount, the company is authorized to purchase an additional $122,500,000 of its common stock. Turning to 2017, we remain encouraged by the momentum across our business and expect continued profitable growth despite additional negative impacts on our financial results from currency movements. For the full year 2017, we provided detailed guidance in our press release. Headline financial guidance includes revenue of $545,000,000 to $560,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA of $105,000,000 to $110,000,000 In closing, as John highlighted earlier, we are confident in the fundamentals of our business. We are seeing strong growth on both sides of our marketplace. We are growing our traditional e commerce and enterprise customer basis and we are continuing to invest in our product and technology to position us well for long term profitable growth. Thank you for your time today. And now John and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have. Operator, please prompt the participants for questions. And our first question comes from Youssef Squali with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open. Thank you very much. Good morning all. A few questions. John, growth in paid downloads has been the lowest we've seen in many, many quarters. Just trying to understand or why isn't this a trend or why isn't this trend, sorry, an indication of maybe either a maturity of the industry or more intense competitive position that's likely here to stay? And also on can you expand on your strategy of expanding the business from a marketplace to a platform? Just give us an idea how big is this new larger addressable market you're discussing? And can you how quickly do you think you can get the business to reaccelerate based on these new initiatives? Thank you. Sure. The growth in paid downloads follows the growth of the e commerce business. So, it tracks pretty well to that. As far as the strategy, let's go back a few years. So when we went public, our strategy was at the time, we were a company that was just over $100,000,000 of revenue and we were building what was at the time a relatively new enterprise business. We were expanding our video product and we were building the business internationally. We took that 3 pronged strategy now almost 5 years later and did a really good job with that. The business is nearly $500,000,000 in revenue, nearly $100,000,000 of EBITDA. And today, what we're focused on is taking our transactional marketplace and turning it into an end to end platform. So what we did in 2015 2016 is build, rebuild our entire tech platform in order to do that, in order to take the company from being a transactional marketplace to having many more touch points with the customer over their entire creative life cycle for using imagery, deploying imagery, creating imagery and measuring imagery. We have a lot of work left to do and we're going to continue to build on top of the platform. This is not something that we do for the next quarter, for the next year. This is a multi year strategy and expands our addressable market pretty significantly. If you think of stock imagery as a $5,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 addressable market, You take the total workflow market and that's many tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of addressable market. So we think we have a great platform. We have a great model. We have a great starting point, which is selling over 5 images per second at businesses all around the world, and we're going to work off of that starting point. So how could just as a follow-up to that, how quickly do you think we should start seeing the positive impacts or the accretive impact of that to the growth rate. And Stephen, I think in looking at your 2017 guidance, it looks like your EBITDA margin guidance is somewhat flattish with the last couple of years. Can you just speak to the leverage in the model over time over the next couple of years? Thanks. Yes. I mean, I think as Youssef, as John just discussed, this is not, for instance, just a 2017 event. So in terms of providing financial guidance, we're providing 2017 guidance. But on a quarterly basis, what we think is that we're going to continue to build off of the platform that we are finishing up in this quarter that we're going to drive that growth as we go forward. And we're in the show me game. We're putting our heads down and executing. And we think that to provide here's we're going to do is less valuable than here's what we've just done. And so as we go forward, we think that we're planning aggressively to drive growth, but we want to be realistic about what the near term results might be. Okay. Thank you. And in terms of EBITDA margin, I think that goes hand in hand with the growth that we expect. And certainly, we as John talked about revenue growth acceleration, we expect that over time we'll have that EBITDA growth acceleration consistent with our prior communications. Great. Okay, thanks. And our next question comes from Brian Fitzgerald with Jefferies. Your line is open. Hi, thank you. This is John on for Brian. Just now that you're a few quarters to the integration with Google and Facebook, just can you provide any updates on how those partnerships are progressing? And just walk us through kind of how you guys are getting paid on that and how that affects the model going out? Thanks. Yes. So as it relates to those partnerships, to this point in time, those are not material impacts on our overall financial results. We are working well with both of those partners, but they're not individually or even together those 2 material. We continue to the payment models for those, we haven't described those in the public domain. We're working as you know with Google on the AdWords and AdSense model and on Facebook with businesses that are looking to produce ads on the Facebook platform using Shutterstock images. So both of those obviously given the growth in the platforms both on Google and Facebook are important relationships. And we continue to want to be in those environments where our customers or potential customers are going to use images to drive their businesses and consumption of their products and services. Great. Thank you. And our next question comes from Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Thank you. I'm wondering if you can make any comments kind of on customer trends and then sales to the same customers in terms of how much more you're getting per customer? And then secondarily, if you can talk a little bit about with a higher mix of enterprise customers, does that at all affect your gross margins? Thank you. So on the latter part of your question, gross margins are really unaffected as a result of the fact that the contributor royalties are generally similar across the platform when you average all of the different types of customers on each platform. So that is not an impact. As it relates to customer growth, it's been very stable, if you would, in the 14% to 15% annually. And the revenue per customer was essentially flat year over year. That was attributable primarily to a higher mix to enterprise, but also a higher mix to some lower price subscriptions versus our 7.50 image per month product. And what we're looking for is not just the revenue per month, but obviously the lifetime customer revenue and that lifetime value. And so we believe that the new products have a greater stickiness. Obviously, not everyone needs 7 50 images a month, not everyone is an enterprise customer. And so we'll continue to test those over time. Retention is steady and and it's also in line with our past couple of years. Thank you. And our next question comes from Lloyd Walmsley with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Thanks. A couple if I can. First as you shift more to the workflow side, are there any metrics then, first, as you shift more to the workflow side, are there any metrics you can share around uptake of Shutterstock Editor and kind of comment on how you plan to monetize that longer term? Are there much higher spend rates from users who adopt the Editor? Or is there going to be a long term monetization through just other ways through Editor? And then if you second one, if I can. Looks like you're testing some lower priced subscription tiers that we've seen in the wild. If you can just give us a sense for how much of that in your test seems to be pulling people in who would ordinarily have bought a la carte versus kind of people down shifting from higher priced tiers? Any color you can share there on those tests? To start on Editor, Editor is just the beginning of our workflow product and we plan to build that out further. We're not disclosing any specific metrics on Editor, but we have said that people that use Editor do buy more photos from us, and it increases engagement. And we will continue to try to increase engagement. On the lower price subscriptions, we're just moving to where the market is. We saw we see other segments of customers that are willing to buy from us on lower volume packages, and we're going to offer those lower volume packages to them when it makes sense. Okay, thanks. And our next question comes from Blake Harper with Loop Capital. Your line is open. Hi, thanks. John, I wanted to ask you if you could address what you think is the end market size of the microstock market right now? Is there deflationary pressure that you see given large supply? And just to follow-up on what you said there about some of the pricing implications that you're seeing. It's hard to just break out Microstock. In fact, Microstock has had several definitions over the years. I can tell you that businesses of all sizes have not decreased their need for imagery. Every business needs imagery to sell their product or service and we're increasingly becoming the place that people go to get those images. We will also continuously become more of a place that people go to work on those images and we will be more in the workflow of all of these businesses. Look, today, we have 1,700,000 customers. Those are mostly businesses. There are tens and tens of millions of customers out there that could be buying our product and our goal is to get them. Okay, thanks. And then one more if I could. Could you just give us an update on the Adobe Photoshop plug in, if the kind of uptake or usage there? And then also if you have any further plans to do something similar with some of the other Adobe Creative Cloud applications as well? We plan to plug into every single place that a person would need an image. We'll do this with our API. We'll do it actively where we partner with the company and we'll allow other companies to integrate with our API directly. You mentioned 1, Adobe, that is just one of our connectors. We plan to be everywhere. A business needs an image. Okay. Thanks, John. Our next question comes from Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Your line is open. Good morning. John, I was wondering if you could give us maybe a little bit more color on the reacceleration comments. I think you called out specifically moving to an end to end platform, but any more color you could add just in terms of services you would offer or a product hold that the current platform has today? And then second just for Stephen, can you give us a sense of what FX headwinds may be in the 2017 guidance? Thank you. I'll start. If you look at 2016 was a year of replatforming a lot of the company, a lot of the way that we work on our products, a lot of the way that we develop our products and a lot of the code that our products get launched on to. 2017 is going to be the year that we build on that technological platform and we continue to innovate on behalf of the customer. We're not going to give much detail about our products. We're the only public company in this space and we're going to continue to innovate and deliver for the customer every day like we do. So as it relates to the FX impact on guidance, we're just looking at where rates finished out the year in 2016 and looking at the impact on 2017 of those rates being flat. And so effectively, we're looking at a couple of points of impact, but that's already incorporated within our guidance. Okay. Thank you. And our next question comes from Aaron Kessler with Raymond James. Your line is open. Great, thanks. A couple of questions. One, can you just update us maybe on the video growth in terms of number of images or rough revenue percentage and how video is tracking? 2nd, just on royalty rates, I've been hearing that those may be coming down for some of the competitors, Your thoughts on what you're seeing from a royalty rate perspective? And 3rd, can you just remind us what the cap software was for 2016 in total? And just for 2017, if you're finishing up the tech platform in Q1, why would that be so high for the rest of the year? Is that for some of the newer products you talked about? Thank you. Maybe I'll start on video. Video is an important part of our offering. Video is growing faster than the company is growing, both on the customer and on the contributor side. Video is still a complicated thing to use. And as we get better with our workflow efforts, we plan to make video easier and easier to use for customers. Today, it's very difficult. And we've proven with Editor that we can make simple transforms of imagery a lot easier for the customer and we plan to do that with video as well. In terms of the capitalization of software, for 2016, it was about capitalization of labor as it relates to building of our product. That was about $18,000,000 in 2016. We expect a similar level in 2017. And to answer the question that you had with regard to the platform being finished out and then going to customer facing functionality and features, that is what is keeping the cap labor at basically a similar rate. What we have been doing is kind of building that foundation, which allows us to now build the better features and functionality to drive customer consumption of our products. So we expect that we'll continue to have that rate for 2017. Got it. And just any quick thoughts on the royalty rate that you're seeing from some of your competitors, any changes there? I think that what we're trying to do is drive both the best contributors on our to keep them on our platform, sustain their contribution of great quality imagery to drive our customers to continue to use Shutterstock and that has been a successful model. We see the royalty rate as fair and our contributors deem it the same. So we look at it from the outcome of the behaviors of both our customers and contributors. We see what competitors are doing, but we don't think that just cutting a single side of the marketplace is an effective mechanism for long term profitable and sustainable growth. Got it. Great. Thank you. Okay. Given that there's no other questions, we appreciate everyone's time today and we look forward to speaking with you soon. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program and you may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.