Wix.com Ltd. (WIX)
NASDAQ: WIX · Real-Time Price · USD
75.58
-0.09 (-0.12%)
Apr 27, 2026, 2:40 PM EDT - Market open
← View all transcripts

Analyst & Investor Day 2023

Aug 10, 2023

Joe Pollaro
Head of Investor Relations, Wix.com

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to our 2023 Analyst and Investor Day. I'm Joe Pollaro, Head of Investor Relations at Wix. I will quickly share our legal disclaimer. During this Analyst and Investor Day, we will make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions. Please consider the risk factors included in our materials and most recent Form 20-F, that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we will comment on non-GAAP financial results and key operating metrics. You can find reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results in the appendix of the presentation materials that we've posted on the Investor Relations section of our website, investors.wix.com.

With that out of the way, I want to share a bit about how we pulled together the materials we are presenting today. The 15 months since we held an event like this have been eventful, to say the least. We have all been through a dramatic shift in the macroeconomy, which prompted us and many other companies to make some difficult decisions. At the same time, this adversity forced us to refocus on what was most critical to fuel continued sustainable growth in a profitable way. What has emerged is not only the strong financial results we've reported the last couple of quarters, but also some of the most innovative products we have released. We have introduced many product improvements and will focus today on the most groundbreaking advances, which we believe will have a profound impact on Wix's future.

We will also share the latest updates to our business performance, growth drivers, financial results, and outlook for the future. With that, I want to welcome our Co-founder and CEO, Avishai Abrahami.

Avishai Abrahami
Co-Founder and CEO, Wix.com

Thank you, Joe, and welcome, everybody. Thank you for being with us here today. I just want to take a minute and remind everybody that the vision of Wix is to create a place where any business or a community can create their dreams online. Last year, in Analyst Day, we've committed to 2 main things. The first one was to improve our free cash flow, and the second one, to show and generate the return on investment in our partners' business. Today, we're going to revisit that and show you where we are. First, let's talk about the cash flow. I'm happy to say that we are ahead of our plan. A year ago, we generated $32 million in free cash flow, coming off a very challenging year. This year, we are estimating over $200 million in free cash flow, increasing our margin to 13%.

This is ahead of a 3-year plan that we presented last year. Lior Shemesh, our CFO, will share an update on our plans later on. I'm happy to say that our investment in the partner business have been showing great returns. 45% year-over-year in the number of partners, 36% year-over-year in partners' revenues. We invested a lot, we're seeing great rewards coming from that, Nir, our COO, will share more details about where we are and where we believe we are heading. I believe that the success that we've seen now in the partner business is still only the beginning. Last week, we released Wix Studio. Wix Studio is an end-to-end platform for agencies and freelancers; I believe this opened the door for us for many new opportunities and many new product innovations to come in the future.

Wix Studio already combines top-of-the-art account management for multiple websites managed by an agency, ability to share between agency, strong editing capability, and a very impressive AI. All of that create a very unique offering, and in a few minutes, you're going to see a lot more details about this product. Last year, we also shared with you the driving growth of the market, where SaaS CMS is taking a bigger and bigger share of the overall addressable market. This year, we continue to see that trend, and SaaS CMS, as a group, are now almost 40% of all CMS sites, and Wix have been a big part of that growth of the SaaS CMS. In fact, last year, we've been the number 1 in SaaS CMS. We're taking about 30% of the overall market size. A lot of it is created because of our investment in partners.

In the chart in front of you, you can see comparison between Wix to WordPress, right? WordPress is mostly being built by agencies that build websites for other people. By allowing them to use Wix as an alternative, you can see that trend where they move more into Wix and bring new customers into SaaS CMS as compared to legacy CMS systems. One enables this growth is our product innovation. Every time we add capabilities to Wix, we make it that we have a bigger addressable market, and then we can start doing marketing into that market and bring new customers and open that. The initiative in partners is the thing that we did last. Before that, we did the commerce thing, and in front of you, you can see how each one of that product initiative improves and increase our addressable market.

Today, we're going to share with you more about Wix Studio. Wix Studio is our product for designers and agencies. This will be shown with Michal Bignitz and Gali Erez, who lead that project. Next, we're gonna share with you more about AI. That will be shared with Elad Gad, who heads our AI and Data Science department. This is one of the things that I'm very excited about, as I believe it creates a lot of new opportunities for Wix and ways to enhance our users, make them do things better and faster. Next, Nir Zohar, our President and COO, will present our business performance and the opportunities we believe we have in growth. Lior Shemesh, our CFO, will present our financial models into 2025. With that, I want to hand it over to Michal.

Michal has been with us for 11 years, and she's been heading, in the past, many of our most successful projects, and now she's heading Wix Partners. Michal?

Michal Bignitz
VP of Partners, Wix.com

Thanks, Avishai. Hi, everyone. I'm Michal Bignitz, VP of Partners, and I'm super excited to be here today to share a major opportunity for our partners. This is one of the biggest things we've ever done at Wix, and we know it will be a game changer for us as a company. Mostly it will be a game changer for our partners, 'cause it will let them be more successful than ever before. Before we dive deeper into what we've been working on, I want us to take a quick look back and explain how we got here. Partners have been with us since day one and have always been at the center of our attention. Over the years, we built our relationship and worked closely together to get their feedback and understand their needs to extend our platform accordingly.

Today, with all that experience in mind, we know exactly what they need to achieve new levels of success. This is what Wix Studio is all about, being the ultimate platform for agencies and freelancers. In the last year, our top priority has been to build a platform that gives them everything they need to deliver high-end website in a hyper-efficient way for any type of business, all the way to enterprises. I'm thrilled to share with you Wix Studio.

Speaker 10

Leave limitations at the door and step into your studio. One end-to-end web creation platform for your agency to deliver exceptional work with absolute efficiency. Design intuitively with built-in responsive behavior and create unique layouts with a revolutionary grid. Weave in code-free interaction to bring life to any site. Dive deeper into your creation and build signature experiences with custom CSS. Use Responsive AI to adapt your designs for any device in an instant. Develop bespoke widgets, deploy them across multiple sites, and sell them on the app market to unlock new revenue streams. Say yes to any project with robust, native business solutions and extend them with hundreds of APIs for any client need. Collaborate with your team right on the canvas to make things click.

Track, manage, and scale from one unified workspace to an entire world of infinite possibilities, so that with every client handover, you deliver brilliance and smash deadlines. Wix Studio.

Michal Bignitz
VP of Partners, Wix.com

As you saw, we have so many new capabilities, and that was just a glimpse. Coming up, we are going to take you step by step into the new advancements and features we've built. The best way to start is by inviting my partner in this journey, Gali Erez, the head of the Studio Editor, to take us through the creation experience. Gali has been at Wix for nearly nine years and leads Editor X and Wix Studio Editor products. She's a true mastermind behind the development of this amazing product.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

Thanks, Michal. Our vision for Wix Studio was to create something fully intuitive, inspired by the Wix Editor, and layered with the deep design control and advanced capabilities of Editor X. I truly believe we are redefining how our partners can build websites. To dive deeper and show you more about some of the newest capabilities, I want to share with you the brief demo we shared with our own partners last week. With me now is the head of the Wix Studio product team, Nir Sadeh, and Yoav Abrahami , the head of Wix Code products. Nir and I are gonna start with an overview of the editor and its new design and editing experiences, and then Yoav will jump in to talk about the exciting development opportunities on Wix Studio. Now, let's see the platform in action.

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

Thanks, Gali. Hi, everyone. For the purpose of this demo, we created a site for a modern art museum. Our site needs to make a great first impression, so we start with a bold hero and some scroll animations to make it really exciting. In the next section, we wanted to showcase all the exhibitions that are going on, so we use the detail layout, allowing visitors to scan a lot of content at once with a custom cursor on top. For this section, we use the classic layout to highlight one of the shows. Here, we put together a custom reveal for a lecture series that's coming up. We wanted a convenient way for visitors to read the latest news about the museum. We used slideshow and connected it to the CMS to update content dynamically.

Lastly, we wanted to close the site with a strong reference to the brand, so we used the museum logo in a global section that applies on all pages. Our site is also fully responsive. Our design fits perfectly on every screen size. Let's get started.... Welcome to the Wix Studio Editor. As you can see, we've got a spacious canvas for you, with the least amount of distractions possible. At the top, you can jump between desktop, tablet, and mobile, add additional screen sizes, and even change your default editing size. On the left, you've got different panels that help you throughout the creation process. You can add all the elements you need to the canvas, control the layers of the site, add and manage pages, control global sections, edit your site styles, install Wix Business Solutions, integrate and work with our CMS, and add custom code.

On the right, you've got the Inspector panel. This is a contextual menu that lets you control every aspect of the element, like size, position, and design. That about covers the environment. Now let's talk about the new design experience on Wix Studio. Gali, take it away.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

Let's do this. The canvas is made specifically for a designer's way of working. I want to start showing you how we can build on it. Let's take the first section. Nir, can you help me out with this one?

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

Sure.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

Great. We already have a few elements placed on the canvas, and now Nir is going to start working on the composition and design. Now, notice in the Inspector panel on the right, how the elements are adjusting in pixels, as though he's creating a static composition, like a poster or an image. It's super intuitive to design with. If you'd like to work more precisely, you can also add specific measurements. The real magic is that we are making a responsive site behind the scenes. Nir, how is it going?

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

Working on it. A few more tweaks, and I'm done.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

Great. Take your time. On Wix Studio, the elements you add scale proportionally by default, even though I'm editing them in pixels. Without doing anything, it just fits every screen size. Yes, even your client's. This changes everything. There are many ways to make your site responsive, and Wix Studio is all about layers of control and letting you design in your preferred way. Sometimes you want to create more complex relationships between elements that result in more intricate behavior. Let's see an example in the slideshow. Here, all the elements are connected to the CMS, and all the descriptions have different lengths. We need a way to make sure they work on every screen size, no matter how long the text is. We're going to change the responsive behavior from Scale proportionally to Wrap.

Now it's going to wrap inside the text box as the screen size gets smaller. If you want to make more customizations, you can also click on these three dots in the Inspector and turn on Advanced sizing and tweak the CSS properties directly. For those of you who prefer to put your focus on design and less on the math, instead of doing all of this manually, I'm excited to share that you can do this using Responsive AI. Let's look at another section and see AI in action. With just a click of a button, we can make the section responsive for every screen size. Now, to explain that in a bit more details, our AI model is analyzing the section. It's applying the most suitable layout and responsive behaviors element by element. Responsive AI is a real time-saver, and it's a gamechanger for your workflows.

Nir, you want to show them the next big thing we've got?

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

Sure thing. We know how important animations and interactions are for creating unique experiences. With Wix Studio, you get tons of them, no code needed. Scroll animations, loop animations, hover, entrance, all to make your site really stand out. Now let me show you how intuitive it is to add them to your site. Let's recreate the scroll animation on the main title. I'll select the main title, head to the Interactions tab. Here you can see all the interactions you can apply. I'll add a scroll animation. For each animation type, there's a wide selection of presets you can start from. For scroll animations, we've got grow, slide, blur, and many more. On our example, we want the title to move from its design to its new position. For the animation, you can also adjust the properties.

On our example, let's change the angle to 90 degrees, so it will move sideways. Let's change the distance to 100% and the animation area from the middle of the screen's height to 75%. That's it. I've got the animation that I was looking for. Of course, that was just one example. There are so many ways you can use all these animations. Wait, there's even more. On Wix Studio, the world of CSS is open for you. In this section, we combined a no-code scroll animation with CSS blur effect. Let me show you how to add this effect. I'll head to the Code panel and go to the CSS panel. Here, all I have to do is paste in the snippet I want. You can paste code from anywhere or get super creative and write your own.

Now, for the final step, I'll select the image and apply the class I wanted. Done. The possibilities here are truly endless. We can't wait to see what you come up with. Let's move on to talk about layouting. Gali, take it away.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

In all the sections we've worked on so far, we've been pretty free form. Sometimes, though, you have a very defined structure in mind, for that, we created Section Grid. We took all the power of the CSS Grid and turned it into a hyper-efficient and intuitive tool. Let's take a look at the layout we created. As you can see, we've displayed a lot of content here about the upcoming events and the exhibitions at the museum. Now, I want to move to the editor and show you how we built it. I'm going to start by creating the structure. Starting with a blank section, I'm going to split it into two. I can easily drag to resize and change their proportion. Next, I can split this cell, and I'm going to keep splitting the cells in any way that I'd like. That's all it takes.

I've got the layout that I want. To add content to the cells, I can just drag it and make all the adjustments as usual. Now, let's fast-forward and bring in the final content. Once all the content is in there, if I want to move around between the cells, I can just multi-select them and click swap. If I want to tweak the design, I could head to the Inspector panel, and I can change any property. For example, here I can add some gaps. This is the setup we had in the original site, but I can actually go pretty wild here. I can increase the spacing.

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

Whoa.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

Yep, I can add section background.

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

It's better.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

Cool. I'm happy you like it. Now I can go ahead and also change the shape of the cell. Not only is Section Grid super helpful while working on the design, it also makes it really easy to structure content across screen sizes. Let's move on to tablet. I got a more equal grid, and on mobile, I chose a totally different layout. I used the rows layout instead of the collage. This whole new experience was built to make your life easier. You can play around with it until you come up with your ideal layout. As we said earlier, on Wix Studio, we give you layers of control. If you want to get in-depth with it, you can go over to the Inspector, and then you can switch to the advanced CSS Grid. It lets you control the layout in a very detailed way.

Nir Sadeh
Head of Product, Wix.com

Gali, before we get to the final section of our design demo, I think we should address how we've been working together this whole time. On Wix Studio, you can work on the same site at the same time with as many people as you want. You can see who's working with you up here, but there are many more collaboration tools we believe you'd love. For example, you can leave live comments to one another, and you can save any asset and theme to a library and share it with your team. We also wanted to give you a straightforward way to collaborate with your clients. When they want to add their own content to the site, either during the design process or after you've handed it over, they can use our Content Mode feature. It's a safe way to let clients make changes without affecting the design.

You can also control the permissions your clients have and what they can edit on the site. Your client can click on a section and update any content, like the date of the exhibition. All the style decisions would stay the same.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

We've got the layout and design for our homepage ready to go. We've covered the highlights of the Wix Studio Editor, and I wish we could show you everything the platform is capable of: AI content and AI image generators, global sections, horizontal stack, text mask, but there's even more. This museum needs more complex functionality. This site uses the combined power of Wix Bookings and Wix Stores. I want to show you the product page in the editor to demonstrate the extreme freedom and flexibility it provides. For example, you can select from a range of pro galleries to get the layout you want. You can customize any element within the product page using the same editor experience. Add both third-party and native apps.

Here, we're going to use our native review widgets, and since we're talking about Wix Studio here, everything works responsively, and you can adjust the behavior as you like. What if we want to go even deeper and add specific logic to the business solution? For that, we're going to need custom code. In the museum site, we applied packaging fee for fragile items, plus a 10% discount on all the guided tours for museum members. Now, to show you how we did it, there is no one better than Yoav Abrahami, our Head of Code Products.

Yoav Abrahami
Head of Wix Code Products, Wix.com

Thanks, Gali. Hi, everyone. After working closely with developers, we learned that we needed to give you the best developer experience and tools to create better and faster. Let me introduce you to the new Wix IDE, based on VS Code, a professional dev environment. You can see here all the project files, backend, pages, public, and styles. Using the Wix IDE, we will implement an SPI to extend the functionality of a Wix business application. An SPI is the reverse of an API, where we define the structure, and we call your code to customize the business logic. What I'm about to show you is just one example of how we expose hundreds of APIs and integrations across all Wix Business Solutions, giving you the freedom to answer any client brief.

Let's start with the packaging fees. We'll open the coding panel, go to Packages and Apps, and under Custom Extensions, we will add a new additional fees extension. We'll just name our extension, and we'll get started. Now, let's head back to the IDE, to the backend folder, SPIs, e-com additional fees. In this file, we'll add the SPI implementation. This will iterate over the products in the cart and identify words like glass or ceramic. Those products will be categorized as fragile, and additional fees will automatically be added before checkout. That's it. Once we publish the site, the integration is done.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

I love how we've added more openness to the platform, Yoav. Now let's show them how we set the members discount.

Yoav Abrahami
Head of Wix Code Products, Wix.com

To set the members discount, we first connect to the museum CRM to see if the person logged in into the site is actually a member of the museum. To do that, we call the CRM APIs through the museum API gateway. To save time, I have already added and configured the booking pricing provider SPI. I'll open the booking pricing provider under the SPI folder. For this integration, let me show you something new and exclusive for Wix Studio. I am excited to announce the new AI code assistant in the Wix IDE. The AI was trained on Velo examples, documentation, and best practices to be able to create idiomatic JavaScript code for the Wix platform. I'll insert a prompt asking the AI to call the museum API. We've sent our request to the AI code assistant, and it's thinking. Let's take a look at the response.

You can see that the AI assistant doesn't only generate the code, it also explains every part of it. I'll take this code and add a bit of my own logic to quickly apply a 10% discount to verified museum members. I'll paste the code here, and done.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

This is so cool. AI can really speed up the productivity of developers.

Yoav Abrahami
Head of Wix Code Products, Wix.com

Exactly.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

You know what? I think it's the perfect time to talk about one of the most exciting developments, Wix Blocks.

Yoav Abrahami
Head of Wix Code Products, Wix.com

Absolutely. Actually, this one is personal for me, because 7 years ago, when we started Velo, our original vision was to create a tool that allowed developers to easily bring their apps to the Wix App Market. Now with Blocks, I am happy to announce that this vision is finally a reality. Blocks is the first platform combining UI builder, database, cloud backend, and a pre-configured dev environment, creating a fully managed runtime. You can use Blocks for any type of site, from e-commerce, restaurants, booking, and more. For example, you can develop your own business verticals, such as real estate or vacation rentals, an app that tailor's content for specific users, or even create engaging games. In fact, we can already see some amazing apps that our partners have created with Blocks.

Blocks fulfill the vision of empowering you to focus not only on building, but also on selling your applications on the Wix App Market. Coming back to the museum, I've created a block to dynamically indicate if the museum is open or closed at a given time. We can implement this block not only on the homepage, but on multiple pages and across different sections and reuse it for other clients that require similar functionality. I believe that with the combination of the Wix IDE, AI code assistant, and Blocks, we have a unique developer offering as part of Wix Studio.

Gali Erez
Head of Wix Studio, Wix.com

That wraps up our Wix Studio product demo. Now that you've got a glimpse of the new web creation capabilities that await you, I think it's a great time to head back to Michal.

Michal Bignitz
VP of Partners, Wix.com

Thanks, Gali. That was amazing. This demo showed us the different layers of control that Wix Studio provides. Partners can create super intuitively while still maintaining deep control and precision. On top of that, AI is a major player in the new Studio editor, both for designers and developers, as well as having more robust capabilities and openness of the platform. Okay, we talked about the advancement in the editor, but when we say that Wix Studio is a platform dedicated for agencies and freelancers, we mean the entire platform, from creation to management and growth, with everything surrounding it: support, education, and community. We know that one of the biggest challenges agencies face is managing all aspects of their business as they continue to grow.

Alongside the Editor, we've been working on a totally new workspace, one place with more capabilities, where partners can manage their project, team, and clients at scale in a much more efficient way. Let's take a look at what we've created for them. Many of our partners manage hundreds of sites, we added capabilities that let them easily view and find the site they are working on. Predefined views, filters, custom views, and even export the list of sites to CSV. Having many sites means many premium plans, we built a totally new subscription tab that supports multiple plans and highlights the most important information, like upcoming renewals, unassigned subscriptions, and more. To work more efficiently, we added the ability to create and share reusable assets. Now partners can create their own templates and blocks and reuse them within the workspace.

As Yoav said, they can also sell blocks in the App Market to monetize their creations. Now, I can't talk about managing at scale without mentioning support. Tracking and managing support tickets across a company can be a lot. We created one centralized place to view all tickets, open new ones, and manage all their support history. Moving on to updates. For partners, it is crucial to be the first in the know. We created the news center, a place where they can read all about new releases, betas, and updates. Collaboration is a huge part of our partners' day-to-day, and this is why, with Wix Studio, they can have multiple workspaces under the same account. For example, a freelancer working with a few agencies on a regular basis will be able to see all of their workspaces under a single account.

When switching between workspaces, all their projects, assets, and settings switch accordingly. The last thing I'm going to show you is what I believe is one of the most crucial part of an agency's business, the relationship with their clients. One of the highlights of any project is the moment it's finally handed over, but at the same time, the transition should be smooth. To allow our partners to provide the most professional experience to their clients, we build a client kit, where they can add helpful resources, either made by themselves or pre-made from our library. Once they are ready to hand over the site, the kit will be added to their client's dashboard and will be available for them at any time. Those were just the highlights of the workspace, and obviously, there's a lot more.

Educational resources, team management capabilities, site reports, revenues opportunities, and a brand-new mobile app to manage projects and leads on the go. With everything we've built, managing its scale, working efficiently with the ability to add a personal touch to the relationship with their clients, I truly believe our partners will have everything they need to reach new levels of success. Okay, we covered so much today, the creation experience, dev capabilities, the new workspace. It's just the beginning. We have a full roadmap ahead of us for Wix Studio, a roadmap that will continue to be shaped and impacted by our partners. I hope that what I showed you here today did not only blow your mind but also explain why we believe Wix Studio is the future of our agencies and freelancers are going to create and manage projects for their clients.

Thank you, back to you, Avishai.

Avishai Abrahami
Co-Founder and CEO, Wix.com

Thank you, Michal. The core value of Wix is deriving from the ability to review friction when our users try to build a website or their business online. AI brings tremendous amount of opportunity to reduce that friction even further. For me, personally, AI is even more exciting. Prior to Wix, my job was creating advanced algorithms, including AI, so this subject excites me even more than the average person. Our journey into AI started in 2016, where we released ADI, using AI to help our users create websites. Of course, this first version was very naive compared to what we can do today. Today I'm gonna show you a lot of what we already have running on Wix, enabling our users to do incredible things and a bit of what is yet to come.

We believe that we can use AI to help our user achieve mostly two big goals. The first one is the ability to create content. It can be visual content, it can be layout and design or interactions of the website, and then, of course, to operate the business, including the marketing side of their business. In addition to that, of course, at Wix, we look at opportunities to become more efficient using AI. Let's take a look. The most important part of our funnel is when the user come to Wix and create the first website. We are now releasing, we just announced, a new way to do site creation, fully empowered by AI. How does it work?

You come to Wix, and then AI agent will interview you on what kind of website you want to build, how it should look, how it should feel, and help you create the content and the visual. In fact, ChatGPT generates the text, which will generate the layouts and the visual content, and from that, will create a unique website built for your business. This is not us filling a template with text. This is really building a website that is unique and built specifically for your business. We believe that we can generate fantastic results from that, and in fact, this is the first time I've seen the head of our studio actually looking at websites generated by technology and saying, "Wow, they look great!" OpenAI ChatGPT is available this November within Wix. We call it AI Text Creator.

We took our knowledge of what should be written in a website and how to use ChatGPT efficiently, combine it, and package it, so our user can actually describe what they want to be said in a certain area of the website, and ChatGPT will create the content for them. We did the same thing when we allowed ChatGPT to help you create content for your website, but this time for the whole website with our template, AI Text Generator. You can actually create the whole content and fill a template of a website with the content you desire. One of the hardest things actually to do is when you design something on Wix, and you want to change the design, how to completely redo the layout. Again, we're using AI to enable you to do that.

You just click; we're going to offer you alternative layouts that fit your design. Product description. Well, if you have to upload a lot of products to an e-commerce site, it can be very tedious and hard. We, with our product description product, we allow you to use ChatGPT to write the description for the products, making it much simpler, and most of the time, better. Another AI-based functionality is our ability to create recommendation that fit a certain user on an e-commerce site, again, based on AI. Another place where it's very important to enable our users to be more efficient is the ability to add new content to the website. It can be in the form of a new section or a new page.

We now are working on enabling our users to do that, again, with AI, to have the layout and design and the text all generated by AI. Let's think about how much data access. We've now added to our media capabilities the ability for user to describe an image and have AI generate that image. That is so nice. In addition, if you want to edit an existing image, we've created a set of tools to remove the background and allow you to and automatically enhance an image. This is one of the most important things we have for our users, because a lot of the time, the quality of image they take is not good enough as to what they want to put on the website. I think those are very helpful for our users.

In addition, they can use our object eraser to remove unwanted parts of an image that they have. If you took a photo, something you don't want, they can use the object eraser to remove that. To help our users market and operate their business, we have some exciting new products. The first feature to share is auto-generated video trailer. Right? If you have a video of your business, we now take it and using AI, make it into a short clip that you can use as an ad, you can post it on TikTok, on Instagram, or you can just use it as a commercial on YouTube. Coming soon, we have a way for you to generate campaigns and email campaigns to do automatic marketing, again, based on AI. A tricky part, if you ever tried, is actually to find a good name.

Again, do that with ChatGPT, enable you to find cool names and domain names for your business. This is really me. One of the most exciting things we're about to release is AI business assistant, where you can have a conversation with an AI that knows your business and understand what you need. This AI recommends what you can do, and you can ask it to do things for you. For example, the AI can tell you, "Well, you have a class on Wednesday, but you don't have enough participants. Do you want me to create a campaign to bring you more users? It could be an email campaign, it could be a Facebook campaign, it could be a Google campaign," right?

All you have to do is say, "Well, yeah, I do want that, or no, I don't want that." You can ask the AI to do something else for you. The whole concept is that the communication between you to the website and to your business has become much more natural, and I believe that this is a complete game changer, and now our users will interact in the futures with their business. I think it's best way to say it is that, you know, ChatGPT is a really nice thing, but ChatGPT that knows and understand your business is simply amazing. For the next part, I want to invite Hila Gat, who heads our AI and Data Science. Hila has been heading the team for eight years now, and probably the most interesting thing about Hila is that she is practically a genius in mathematics.

I believe that's not her strongest characteristic. When it comes to leading a team of professors and PhDs and scientists, the hardest part is to make them practical and to make them communicate well. This is where the true power of Hila is. With that, Hila?

Hila Gat
Head of AI and Data Science, Wix.com

Thank you, Avishai. The AI team is a dedicated team founded in 2015. Our core areas of focus are research and development of AI models. For example, developing a model to automatically analyze the site layout to create a responsive version of the site. This work is done by our data scientists. To deploy, maintain, and monitor AI models in production, we are using our own in-house machine learning platform built by the AI engineers. Quality data collection and data analysis for AI models is done by the data experts. For example, collecting websites with complex structures, analyzing and labeling their layouts in order to train our responsiveness models. At Wix, we have a unique working method where we integrate AI data scientists into the product and engineering teams.

The data science and AI organization at Wix is working as a core team, yet they are not isolated from the product groups. In fact, the data scientists collaborate and work with the traditional engineering teams directly helps incorporate AI into products. In this way, we create AI squads. They are a combination of both engineering, as you can see on the right, AI specialists on the left. For example, here on the left, we have the AI team, which has all the professional AI knowledge and experience with advanced models. Here we have the E-com product team, who are experts in developing solutions in the E-com domain. Let's assume we have an AI-based feature that Wix is planning to develop for E-com. Now we have an AI data scientist and data experts assigned to work with the E-com group.

Together with the E-com group, these AI data scientists form the E-com AI squad. This kind of cross-functional collaboration between AI data scientists and our product organization allows for faster, more efficient integration of AI into the product, but also enable every product team at Wix to continuously learn more about build and deploy AI. To sum up, there are three key benefits of this working method. First, all product teams learn about AI and are able to more rapidly, efficiently, and creatively deploy new AI tools. Second, this structure connects our AI team to real problems. The group is not living with some data science team in the cloud. They are connected with our engineering team, building products that add value for our customers.

Finally, this cross-functional structure really magnifies AI influence across the organization, as a significant number of our engineers are now working on AI-related projects, all collaborating with the AI team. Now I'm going to speak about AI for both production and research. I'll start with production. At Wix, we research and develop AI models for production. We have over 200 models in production. These generate billions of predictions. We use a combination of out-of-the-box models like ChatGPT, as well as internally developed models to solve real users' problems. Also, we do long-term research to work on unique problems for Wix users. We'll touch upon that later. It's also the place to mention that we collaborate with top AI companies like OpenAI, IBM, and Google X.

For example, we've done a research collaboration with Google X using transformer-based language models already in 2020. Just now we are in the middle of a collaboration with IBM Research on NLP problems for customer care. To start, we'll focus on production before sharing some details on research. Regarding the types of models we use in production, broadly, we can divide it into two types of models: pre-trained out-of-the-box models and models we develop and train internally. An example of a pre-trained model is ChatGPT that you have all heard of. This model was trained with a massive amount of data by OpenAI and is available to the use of the public to solve many tasks.

When it comes to pre-trained models, our work with OpenAI to incorporate GPT into our text editor is a great example of how our expertise and long history in data science and AI allows us to quickly and thoughtfully integrate new AI models into our products. We have been working on AI projects since 2015, and we have been experimenting and working with OpenAI in the past 2 years. Because of this work and our cross-functional AI squads method, we were able to release our GPT text editor to a group of our partners already in November 2022, the very same month ChatGPT was released to the public. It was later released to all of our English users.

While we were using GPT as a pre-trained model, it is important to note that we were using our own data to tune it and optimize the results to our specific user needs. At Wix, we also develop our own models. A great example of a unique Wix use case not addressed by other out-of-the-box models is what we saw in the Wix Studio presentation around responsifying a website. To understand why we develop our own AI models rather than just use pre-trained foundation models like ChatGPT, let me explain why some use cases require a different approach than prompting an LLM. Creating text with LLM, like ChatGPT for our text editor, is based on a model where text is both the input and the output.

To address this complex problem of responsifying the website, we needed a model that could ingest a website full of design, content, and components with different functionalities, then detect the site layout and output the right Wix component to create a responsive site. In many of our internally developed models, inputs are some combination of Wix's visual and spatial components and Wix's data, and not just text or images. The beauty of our AI team here at Wix is that we are set to use both these pre-trained and internally developed models. For use cases where a pre-trained model like ChatGPT works well, we leverage those models to enhance our products. On the other hand, for other projects, for example, those which require a unique type of input data, we create our own models.

Our nimble AI and product teams are constantly testing, learning, and adapting our products to include whatever new AI innovation can help our users, focusing on what's important to them, running their business. At Wix, we developed something we call our Wix Machine Learning Platform. This platform is the gateway for all Wix engineers to access AI models and use in their projects. This is effectively a command-and-control hub where we can monitor all the models serving in production. This tool allows us to deploy, train, and monitor models in production at scale. We've developed this platform for a few years, and it's a key success factor to efficiently and quickly give our AI squads the ability to deploy a combination of pre-trained and internally developed models. As Avishai mentioned, and you can see here on the left, we have a lot of user-facing models.

We also work on models behind the scenes. We want to make sure we are not only using AI to create better products, but also to drive efficiencies, better security, and generate smart insights to help us run the business. I won't get into the details of all of these models, but you can see we have AI embedded into every aspect of Wix. To touch on a few examples of how we use AI models to drive internal efficiencies at Wix, we embed AI into self-service support solutions like our AI chatbot, AI-driven article recommendation, and knowledge-based search to reduce our needed interaction with a human and streamline our customer care efficiency. Additionally, we have a large care organization that addresses important issues when self-service care solutions aren't sufficient. We use AI in order to ease their work and make it more efficient.

For example, we use AI to automatically summarize calls and suggest answers to agents. Using these models, we have already saved thousands of agent hours per month. These efficiencies are meaningful because they save significant time and increase agent productivity. Higher agent productivity will allow us to hire fewer care agents as we scale revenue, which increases the incremental margins of revenue. Related to security and payments, we have incorporated AI models to better detect fraud, recommend relevant payment providers, and many more. Finally, I also want to speak for a moment on the AI research side. We also work on long-term AI research internally in Wix. We don't usually publish our research, given the proprietary nature, but we recently decided to publish a research project which addresses layout generation using diffusion models, which we believe is valuable to the research community.

The problem is complex, as it requires us to apply diffusion models to the natural representations of layouts, which consist of a mix of discrete and continuous attributes. For example, a discrete attribute is a type of a component, like a button or an image, while its size and location are continuous attributes. This research is a great illustration of how we're tackling longer-term research problems that are relevant to Wix product. This paper will be presented at the ICCV conference in Paris, which is a top-tier AI conference. This kind of AI research at Wix is helping solve extremely hard problems, and we're showing you this today because it represents the strength of our team and our commitment to embedding AI into our product.

The combination of having the same teams working on both research and production, together with our special work methodology that I presented earlier, makes our department unique, and this is why the best people in the industry wants to come and work with us. With that, I will turn it back over to Avishai.

Avishai Abrahami
Co-Founder and CEO, Wix.com

Thank you, Hila. You had a chance now to glimpse into a lot of the things we do at Wix. I believe we have a super strong team to guide us in going forward. For me, it's very exciting because you've seen, and it can actually do a lot of things for our users to make them better and get their results from Wix to be better. On the other hand, there are a lot of things we can do to make Wix more efficient. With that, I want to move over to Nir, our President and COO, to talk about business performance and growth drivers. Thank you.

Nir Zohar
President and COO, Wix.com

Thank you, Avishai, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I would like to take us through our business performance and show how everything that was mentioned before ties back into our business, into the performance of our cohort, as well as our future growth. Today, we'll cover the self-creators, we'll cover the partners and together explain how they tie together to the future growth pillars of Wix. I want to kick it off with starting from self-creators. This is something we've done also last year, and I kind of want to pick up from where we left. We broke the two big segments of our business, the self-creators and partners, and dove into them so we can show each one of them and how they behave separately. I'll start with self-creators, which is already a very big, stable part of our business.

It's highly profitable, and that's something that Lior will cover later when, when he talks about the business models. I want to show a little bit of the cohort behavior that is specific to the self-creators and what you've seen there in the past few years. This graph I'm going to show you now correlates to what we've always showed you in terms of, of the cohorts, but it relates to the amount of bookings, annual bookings we get from any cohort over time. Any point on this graph is, is the actual bookings the following years as the cohort progresses over, over many years. I'm starting with, with 2016, very mature. You can see that it's, it's a very flat line in the, in the sense that it is very stable and consistent.

As we go forward, you'll see 17 and 18. You can also see, by the way, that the last point in the graph is always 2022, which is the full year we have. That's also a year when, when we see more of a decline because of the macroeconomics and all of the headwinds of last year. The dotted line is what we project forward based on the first half of 2023 for us to have throughout the full year. You can see 18 here and 19, and here we're getting to where things change and, and shake up a little bit.

As we go into 2020, which is the first COVID cohort, you can see how it suddenly jumps up in value in the starting point, which correlates to everything we spoke about in the kind of the surge we've seen in demand throughout COVID. 2021 will be similar, but it's slightly a lower volume , obviously. Then 2022, which is this pink dotted line, is actually where we come off of COVID, and we're starting seeing the macroeconomy change, a lot of headwinds and, and general post-COVID fatigue in the market. Lastly, this white dot, only one data point for now, is 2023, projected on what we've seen after the first half of the year.

The thing is, one of the remarkable things here is that even though it is not COVID-related anymore, it is already higher than 2022, which is something we find very encouraging. Zooming in into this starting point of all of these self-creator cohorts that I've just showed you, it is very clear that 2023 is already positioned to be one of the best non-COVID cohorts we've ever had, with a starting point that is already higher than 2019, our last pre-COVID cohort. We're estimating that 2023, if continues to behave according to all of the data and the statistics we have in hand, will produce over $550 million over the next 5 years. Obviously, there's a few things that are driving this behavior, for the self-creators.

One of it is the increase in the average revenue per subscriber. This has been produced due to a shift into higher-priced subscription packages over time. More commerce users and commerce websites generate GPV that also drive the ARPS higher, as well as obviously, the improvements and expansions we do to the product, increasing conversion and removing blockers and allowing more functionality that always produces more, more ARPS. And lastly, when we look at the behavior of growth for the self-creators over a longer period of time, over 4 years, basically trying to normalize the pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID numbers that we already have, we're seeing that the 4-year CAGR is at 40%.

This, and what I've showed you in the previous slides, actually leads us to believe that the growth of self-creators will re-accelerate as the macroeconomy gets better, as well as all of those in AI initiatives that both Hila and Avishai mentioned before will take effect. I want to move on now to the second part of our business, the second segment of our business, the partners business. Here I'm actually going to spend some more time because we're very excited about it. We think that there is a ton of potential to make it at least as big and even bigger than the self-creator piece of our business over time, and also very, very profitable. The unique thing about the partners cohorts, is that they actually behave in a very different manner than the self-creators.

Let me try to explain. What you can see here is the same kind of descriptive graph for a cohort, but a partner cohort. Unlike the self-creator cohort that has a small decline over time and then stabilizes, partner cohorts actually keep on increasing in value and in revenue and bookings over time. It is true for the 2016 long cohort, but also for 17 and 18 and 19, and obviously for 20, which again, with the COVID, you see the significant jump, as well as 21. Here you see something which is actually more remarkable, and that is, even though 2022 is slightly slower than 2021, it's not really in a significant decline.

It's important to stop here for a second and explain that, because you would have expected maybe like self-creators, for them to be for 2022 to go slower than the COVID cohorts. In fact, when I add 2023 to the mix, it is even higher. Before I jump and talk more about those, that 2023 and what's driving it, you have to remember, most of our investments into the partners started in 2019. Investments into product, investment into marketing, investment into customer care and service. That's the main reason why, even through the post-COVID years, we're actually seeing elevated numbers, and in fact, 2023 is already and definitely is going to be the best partner cohort we've had in our lifetime as a company. What is driving that compounding growth?

Why do the cohorts behave like that, unlike the self-creators? Well, first of all, for the obvious reason, that we are increasing the amount and the number of partners that continue to come and join our platform and utilize Wix as the go-to platform to build websites for their own clients. You've seen the significant growth over the, over the, the past three years, but we can also see that partners are building more and more websites. Now, you may notice that the growth of the number of websites is actually slower than what I just showed you in the previous slide in terms of the growth of the amount of partners. That makes sense because of the nature of their business.

There's a lagging effect between when the partners join us and the cadence in which they bring in more clients, build more, more projects, raise more projects and more websites over time. It actually means that the fast growth that we've seen in the number of partners is going to translate in the future to even faster growth of websites, which is another factor that is going to compound the growth of these cohorts. Partners sites also have higher GPV. They are more prone to be e-commerce websites, and when they are commerce websites, they actually run at a higher rate of GPV than the self-creator websites. Today, the GPV of the partners is 43% out of our total GPV. As the whole volume of GPV on Wix is growing, the share of the partners within it is actually growing even faster.

The other thing that is notable and noticeable about the partners is that they have a higher rate of adoption of business applications, which means that it drives more business applications and business solutions revenue. They add more Google Ads, they advertise more, they send more email marketing, in general, they are driving more business functionality through the websites, which also means that that translates into better monetizations of those partners' websites. The other remarkable thing I find is that partners' net revenue retention is even higher, even in 2022. In this graph, you can see the layering of the cake of the revenues from each year, one on top of the other.

You can see that even in 2022, a year that is obviously, we've, we've seen so much headwinds from the, from the economy, the, the NRR was still 116%, which we, we deem as, as a very positive sign. As a result, the revenue of partners obviously continues to grow very, very meaningfully, and this is even before we start to see any kind of effect for Wix Studio, which has just been launched. In terms of how does everything I just spoke about translates into the future? How do we think about the future growth of Wix and what's going to drive it? First, and we just discussed it, partners. Wix Studio is just being released and being launched for the first time.

We deem it to be the best-in-class products out there, and we believe that it will contribute to that compounding growth that I mentioned by adding more partners, having more sites per partner, and helping them monetize better on their websites. The other pillar of that, the significant growth in the future, is how we think about reacceleration of the self-creator segment. Global economy recovery is gonna be a big driver to that once it starts to happen. AI products and the innovation around them is going to be driving both conversion, monetization, and retention over time. We believe that all of that together can drive self-creators back to a double-digit growth in years to come.

Lastly, the business solutions, which is a layer that covers both sides of the business and both of these segments, that's gonna help us drive more GPV as business applications get adopted more and as we introduce more and more functionality and offerings for those two segments. With that, I would like to hand it over to our CFO, Lior, who's going to cover the financial aspects as well as the financial future that we see attached to these segments. Lior?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix.com

Thank you, Nir. Now that you've heard about the exciting product innovation from Avishai and Hila, and the incredible partner opportunity led by Wix Studio from Biggy and Gali, all driving durable and compounding growth, as Nir just outlined. I'm now going to put all of it together and explain how these growth drivers are translating into profitability, which we expect to continue to increase over the next couple of years. Importantly, I will show you how we are going to achieve the Rule of 40 in 2025 with the current run rate of growth and expenses, and without counting on further growth. Today, we'll talk about the very impressive margin expansion we've achieved so far. By successfully aligning cost and growth closely, we've driven significant margin improvement from 2022 to 2023.

Free cash flow was just 2% of revenue in 2022. It is anticipated to grow to 13% of revenue in 2023, while margins continue to accelerate on a quarter-over-quarter basis. This means we are on track to generate an incremental of $180 million free cash flow in just 1 year, which demonstrates the success of the operational efficiencies we've implemented over the past year. In fact, continued leverage from these completed cost actions, along with focused alignment of cost with growth, keeps us on track to achieve, and in some cases, exceed, the profitability targets we put out last May during our Analyst Day. We are now expecting to generate about 19% free cash flow margin in 2024, which is ahead of the 15% margin we expected last May.

We are still on track to generate approximately $500 million of free cash flow in 2025 or approximately 25% of revenue under various scenarios. It is a testament that we have been pulling the right levers to successfully control what we can and generate increased cash flow and align cost with actual growth. The $500 million of free cash flow, or 25% free cash flow margin, is the primary driver of our ability to achieve the Rule of 40 in 2025. I'll walk you through exactly how we plan to get this $500 million of free cash flow in a few minutes. We are not only focused on ramping free cash flow generation, we are also committed to prudent share dilution management and increasing our free cash flow per share going forward.

Assuming $500 million of free cash flow in 2025, along with disciplined share count management going forward, this implies that we'll generate more than $7.5 of free cash flow per share, up significantly from approximately $3 of free cash flow per share we are on track to generate in 2023. Let's start by looking at the significant margin improvements we've made over the past year and why I believe we can sustain and build upon these improvements in order to reach our 2025 profitability targets. As you can see, over the past year, we have meaningfully expanded gross margin through operational efficiencies and scale. The main drivers of these efficiencies have been better optimized hosting costs and infrastructure efficiencies, which we continue to pursue. Lower support headcount, partially due to efficiencies driven by AI-powered technologies like chatbot.

AI has helped us streamline many internal processes like customer care, while maintaining the same high quality of service to our users. Lastly, improved gross margin in our Wix Payments business. We expect margin in our payments business to continue to improve as more merchants increasingly adopt Wix Payments. As a result, both creative subscription and business solution non-GAAP gross margin have improved over the 6 quarters, and we continue to expect this improvement to continue through the rest of 2023. In fact, creative subscription non-GAAP gross margin is expected to finish 2023 higher than we anticipated last May, as our efficiencies have accelerated profitability. Total non-GAAP gross margin is expected to improve to approximately 68% for full year of 2023, up from 64% in 2022. Moving to our operating cost structure.

As you can see, we've expanded operating margin over the past year as a result of two main drivers: lower headcount, due to more disciplined allocation of resources and related overhead costs, and meaningfully lower acquisition marketing spend, as we shifted our marketing strategy to focus on high-intent user while maintaining stable quote bookings. These actions have driven significant operating leverage, with non-GAAP operating expenses anticipated to total of 56%-57% of revenue in 2023, down from 66% of revenue just a year ago. The expansion of gross margin and operating leverage have resulted in a significant acceleration in free cash flow generation.

We expect to finish 2023 with more than $200 million of free cash flow, or approximately 13% of revenue, with an exit free cash flow margin of 15% in Q4, as profitability accelerates in the second half of the year from a very strong first half. This compares to $32 million of free cash flow, or 2% of revenue, in full year 2022. Strong execution of our business strategy and continued operating leverage from the cost efficiencies executed over the past year will allow us to not just sustain but build upon these margin improvements in the coming years. Now that we've reviewed the profitability improvements we've made, I'd like to update our financial model through 2025, including roadmap to achieving Rule of 40 in 2025.

First, I want to make it clear that achieving a minimum free cash flow margin of 25% is the key to reaching our Rule of 40 targets in 2025. This 25% free cash flow margin is what I am going to focus on today. To achieve a minimum free cash flow margin of 25% in 2025 under various growth scenario, we will continue to align expenses to growth. This means that if growth slows and is lower than what we are seeing today, we will realign costs to match this lower growth in order to still achieve our 25% free cash flow margin target. If growth accelerates above what we are seeing today, some of the additional revenue growth will flow through to the free cash flow and result in a free cash flow margin accelerating above our 25% target.

Bottom line, under various growth scenarios, we are committed to achieving a minimum free cash flow margin of 25% in 2025. While there are many ways to get to this 25% in 2025, I want to walk you through one potential scenario of how we get there. At the steady run rate of current growth and expenses we see today, we are on a clear, leaner path to achieving a minimum free cash flow of 25%, or $500 million free cash flow in 2025. Let me show you how we will do it. Let's start with that $200 million-$210 million of free cash flow we expect for 2023.

On top of this, more than $200 million of free cash flow, we expect to receive approximately $450 million of incremental revenue through 2024 and 2025, assuming go forward growth rates remain stable. I want to emphasize that this is assuming that the growth rates of the second half of 2023 remain steady through 2024 and 2025. This does not assume a macroeconomic recovery that would accelerate sales creators growth, which Nir touched upon, and this does not assume any outperformance of our partners business that would cause growth to accelerate. To the cost side. We expect to incur an incremental of $175 million of variable cost related to revenue across 2024 and 2025.

Like our revenue growth, this additional revenue-related costs assume that we continue on our current non-GAAP gross margin trajectory. with a minimal margin expansion in the next 2 years. These minimal gross margin expansions will come from continued leverage from the headcount efficiencies we completed earlier this year. We also expect to incur an incremental $80 million variable operating expenses throughout 2024 and 2025. This assumes that our current fixed operating cost base remains stable, with a modest increase in fixed cost over the next 2 years as we generate leverage from the fixed growth investment completed over the past couple of years, primarily related to the build-out of partners. Finally, we expect to realize $60 million of other cash changes in 2024 and 2025, primarily driven by increasing deferred revenue and working capital.

The combination of these components clearly demonstrate how we can reach $500 million of free cash flow or 25% free cash flow margin in 2025 from the $200 million-$210 million of free cash flow expected in 2023, assuming current growth rate and run rate expenses. Now, let's turn to the details of our updated financial model. From 2023 to 2025, we expect to generate approximately $1 billion of free cash flow. We expect 2024 and 2025 growth margin and operating margins to continue to increase from 2023 levels, with free cash flow margin reaching approximately 19% in 2024, and free cash flow margin reaching 25% in 2025, as I just demonstrated.

Remember, that although we are guiding to 13% of free cash flow margin for the full year of 2023, we expect free cash flow margin to accelerate in the second half of 2023 compared to the first half, and actually expect to exit the year with an exit rate of 15%. We also expect profitability to accelerate through 2024 and anticipate exiting next year at a free cash flow margin higher than 19%. Additionally, I'd like to highlight that our long-term free cash flow margin target is now 35%, compared to approximately 30% in the last year's model. This is a result of lower operating expenses, now less than 45% of revenue, compared to less than 50% of revenue last year. Moving on to the financial model of our Self-Creators, which has been a durable, profitable business for years.

Both creative subscription and business solution non-GAAP gross margin are anticipated to reach the high end of the targets we set last May. Additionally, we expect to generate more than 10 points of leverage on non-GAAP operating expenses compared to last year plan, driven by lower marketing costs and benefits of the cost efficiencies we've implemented over the past year. As you can see, our Self-Creators business has shown steady profitability, with free cash flow margin of 25% expected already this year. We anticipate Self-Creators free cash flow to increase to approximately 30% in 2025. In our Partners business, we are expecting meaningful scale and more profitability improvements compared to Self-Creators, as the growth investments made over the past years will drive significant leverage over the next couple of years.

Creative subscription non-GAAP gross margin for Partners in 2023-2025 is now anticipated to be higher than what we outlined last May. 2023 creative subscription gross margin of 75% is well ahead of the May 2022 plan of 73% creative subscription gross margin in 2025. Business solution gross margin is lower than last year model, due to much higher adoption of more business application with lower gross margin. non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be meaningfully lower than previously anticipated in our May 2022 model. 10 points of leverage of non-GAAP operating expenses versus last year's plan, driven by the cost efficiencies implemented over the past year. As a result, we are expecting the path to profitability for our Partners business to be accelerated by one year.

In addition to driving towards a minimum 25% free cash flow target for 2025, we are also committed to achieving GAAP profitability in full year of 2025. To do this, we are focused on carefully managing share-based compensation at Wix. Through lower headcount and hiring activity, as well as transitioning away from option awards in favor of RSUs, we are expecting to continue to decrease our stock-based compensation expenses every year, and expect share-based compensation to decline from 14% of revenue expected in 2023 to 12% of revenue in 2025, which is very similar to the downward trend of our OpEx.

Now that I've walked you through how we'll get to $500 million of free cash flow in 2025 and $1 billion of free cash flow from 2023 to 2025, let's now talk about what we plan to do with the cash. First, we will prioritize funding internal operational needs based on our growth and aligned with our profitability targets. Second, we will look at potentially accretive M&A opportunities. Third, we will deploy any excess cash above a minimum liquidity level to repurchase shares. Since 2021, we've completed $500 million of share repurchases and repurchased nearly 4.5 million shares. These repurchases, in combination with more prudence around headcount growth and dilution management, helped lower our share count in 2022.

We remain focused on managing share count and reducing dilution going forward, which we will do partially through more share repurchases, as well as continued control of headcount growth. To complement our 3-year growth and profitability plan, Wix's board of directors has recently adopted a comprehensive 3-year share repurchase plan. With this board-authorized plan, we expect to deploy 50% of future free cash flow for share repurchases through 2025. As a reminder, we are still subject to Israeli court approval in order to execute on this board-authorized plan. This 3-year repurchase plan reflects our view that our stock is undervalued today, and that our strategy will create significant shareholder value over time. This share repurchase plan represents a material reduction in share count, which underpins our expectation of meaningful free cash flow per share growth from 2023 to 2025.

Increased free cash flow generation, continued focused dilution management, and execution of this board-approved share repurchase plan will enable us to achieve more than $7.5 of free cash flow per share, up meaningfully from the more than $3 per share we expect to generate this year. Finally, I'd like to summarize all of the profitability milestones we are on track to achieve in 2025. $500 million of free cash flow, 25% free cash flow margin at a minimum, reaching the Rule of 40, positive GAAP net income, stock-based compensation declining to 12% of revenue. With that, I'm encouraged by the incredible progress we've made towards these goals over the past year, and I'm fully confident in our ability to achieve these milestones in 2025. Thank you, and now I hand it back to Joel.

Joe Pollaro
Head of Investor Relations, Wix.com

Thanks, Lior, and we appreciate you all joining us today. You're welcome to join a live Q&A session with management that we will hold on Thursday, August 10th, at 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time. The instructions to join are in the press release we issued earlier today. You may also submit questions in advance at ir@wix.com. Thank you again for joining.

Powered by