Hi, and welcome to Needham's Growth Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I'm really pleased to have Zoom with us today in our fireside chat. We've got CFO Kelly Steckelberg. Welcome, Kelly. How are you doing?
Hi, great. Thanks for having us today.
Excellent. So yeah, if any of the audience has questions, you can submit them via the Online tool, and I'll do my best to get those in at the end. We're starting a few minutes late, but we've got a hard stop at about 40 minutes after the hour, so thanks for joining us. Let's start, Kelly, with kind of how we got here, looking at last calendar year through your October quarter results. Can you maybe summarize just some of the key drivers you saw in 2023 for the business, and any shifts that played out during the year?
Yeah. So yeah, we've had a really interesting year, I would say, in terms of rounding out. We were on a January year-end, as you all know, so coming to the end of fiscal FY 2024, and very excited about the trends that we've seen in Zoom Phone. It continues to be a growth driver for sure. Also, really interesting shift in our business to the overall platform and adoption. That's really exciting. As a reminder, we talked about this on the call, where we've seen a year-over-year growth of 330% of customers that are on a Zoom One bundle, including Zoom Phone. So that really highlights, you know, all the investment we've continued to make in the platform and the customer adoption there, and that's really important because we know that customers with more than one product are more retentive.
Yeah.
So, you know, really looking to the future of them adopting and leveraging more of our products. And then, you know, so that's mostly on the Direct side. On the online side, where we've seen progress this year is certainly in the overall, in the churn numbers, really, you know, getting back to historic lows that we saw before the pandemic. Really focusing on getting that segment of the business stabilized on a dollar basis, and we're not quite there, but we're very, very close.
Yeah.
Lots of great initiatives on that side of the business, including new features and functionality, improvement in the website and the buy flow, and then of course, some price increases a year ago, and then also some that were more recently announced.
Wow, great. So, maybe unpacking that a bit on the Enterprise side. So, you're seeing more traction with the bundle that includes Zoom Phone, Meetings collaboration. What else is included there in that bundle, Kelly?
Yeah, so we have different bundles, different levels, depending on the features and functionality that are right for the organization. But they can include things like Whiteboard-
Mm-hmm
... which is, you know, our answer to some of these other products that became very, very popular and common during the pandemic, especially.
Yeah.
We also have the Scheduler, which is our version of Calendly, which is really helpful to be embedded into the platform itself. And then, of course, a product we don't talk about nearly enough, but Zoom Team Chat, and that is our chat product, which comes included with our meetings product. And this has been a really important strategic focus for us over the last year or so, especially with the growth of Phone and also, when you, when you think about being highly retentive, right? Chat is one of those products where people have a lot of data, things that they store and then-
Yeah
... feel very attached to.
Yeah.
That really can help for the long-term retention rates as well.
If I recall, there were some new features came out to make the chat more persistent, right? Is that the right word, that it's, it, it-
Yeah
... you don't lose it when you end the meeting.
Yeah. Yeah, so what you're talking about, when you talk about chat for Zoom, we have our In-Meeting Chat, which, like, exists here, okay? There's a chat that, you know, all the attendees in the meeting can access. So what you're talking about is, we created something now called Persistent Meeting Chat, so that when you leverage your chat during a meeting, it can be a very useful way to interact in a meeting, to do polling, or just to ask people questions, and to not lose that rich content now. It can persist after the meeting, and it rolls-
Yeah
... into our persistent chat, which is the never-ending chat that we also have. So what it does, it becomes a channel in there based on the meeting title, and then it lives there. And that's been a really great way to help people, you know, maintain and preserve this rich content-
Sure
... during meetings, but also to expose them to our persistent chat product that we also leverage.
Yeah, I'm sure you can plug that into workflows and things. For companies, they define different jobs and processes-
Yeah
... and you can be a bigger part of that, and obviously, yeah.
It's, you know, so interesting you bring that up because I did FY 2025 planning with my team yesterday, and we're helping, without naming names, but you can probably guess, we're taking, as a finance team, an active role in ensuring that Zoom Chat is integrated into some workflows with some of the vendors that we work with very closely.
Yeah.
Because there is an opportunity for back and forth. There's a couple different vendors that we're working with this on, in flows-
Yeah
... that we as a finance team use.
Right. Finance, yeah.
Yeah.
Makes a lot of sense. And then that, that's great. And then on the online side, what are some of the tactics that you're using to try to reduce churn there? Without giving us any secrets, but maybe just-
Yeah, yeah
... approach to how you improve that.
Yeah. I mean, first of all, we, at the beginning of the year, if you remember, we increased the price for Pro Monthly, and what that did was drive adoption of more of our annual plans, which is great. We love that. And so that always obviously helps, you know, preserve and improve retention. We also have made countless, honestly countless improvements to the website itself.
Mm
-and how we interact with customers, improving the buy flow so that the completion rate is better. And then even when customers do come to cancel, we make it very easy for our customers to cancel. They can do it on the website. We don't hide it, 'cause we want them to come and go-
Yeah, yeah
... as they need it. But we do now prompt them and ask them, why do they want to cancel? And, you know-
Yeah
... doing very natural tactics, which is talking to them about, is it, is it value? Is it price? And, and exposing potential other opportunities for them, depending on what their response is, and we've seen that have a very positive, impact on retention as well.
Yeah. Sounds like it. Important data to collect, obviously, to-
Yeah
... feedback in. I recall you're also doing something a while back around local currencies. Have you seen, have you implemented-
Yes
... that around the globe as well?
Yeah. So we've not only added the number of currencies in which we offer our plans, but also the payment types, including now in-app purchases, which is, you know, a, a very streamlined approach and lets people purchase in Google or Apple. And all of those we've seen have improvements on our conversion rates.
Great. Excellent. That's great progress. On the gross margin front, you continue to make some nice progress there, up another 100 basis points on what's a, you know, pretty a massive amount of business you guys are doing.
Yeah.
Is that primarily from the kinda the cloud infrastructure optimization or other parts of COGS, like, you know, telecom, PSTN interface? What's, what's-
Yeah
... what are your levers there that you're working on driving-
Yeah
... margin?
Yeah, so COGS is a constant area that we are working on to seek optimization. And what we saw mainly in FY 2024 that contributed to that is continued movement from traffic from the cloud to our own co-located data centers.
Sure.
This, you know, if you've been following the story for a while, you remember that pre-pandemic, you know, we were 95% probably in our own colos of our traffic. Probably the only thing that was sitting in the cloud at that point was Zoom for Government.
Okay.
And then, during the pandemic, we went, you know, we flipped to, like, 99% of our traffic was in the cloud for a period of time.
Wow. Yeah.
The DevOps team has done an amazing job working very diligently on now bringing that traffic, as they can in a reasonable manner, timeline.
Yeah
... back into our colos, and they're doing that very effectively. Also, you know, looking around what's the capacity in our colos and making sure that it's being optimized. Now, you know, we have indicated that we do, when we look forward, I'm not giving guidance today, but just as a reminder, you know, going forward, we are investing very heavily in AI, both in terms-
Sure
... of compute capacity as well as headcount, and that is, you know, potentially gonna have some impact on our gross margins. The team is doing everything they can to build capacity in our colos to ensure that, you know, like, the capacity we're using for meetings is as efficient as possible to make room for compute AI, and So the way, the approach we're taking is we start with any, any new AI features, generally any new features that get introduced, they typically go to the cloud first, 'cause we-
Right
... are not sure of the capacity it's gonna take, and we wanna make sure there's enough room, right? So that we can support it initially.
Developer flexibility-
Yep, exactly.
You know, infinitely, right? Yeah.
Yep, exactly. But as we start to understand then the scope of that, then the team works very quickly to start bringing that in-house, and that's actually happening already, for example, with meeting summaries, which is probably our most popular AI feature today. Some of that compute, I should say, is coming back into our own colo, so that's great.
You're looking, you're getting in the GPU cluster, customer-
Yeah
... as well, with everybody else.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lastly, on the OpEx side, you guys have been able to bring down OpEx. I think you haven't touched R&D much, but you've seen some optimization on the sales and marketing and G&A front. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah. So, I think this week, as Zoom has brought back a lot of memories, which was a year ago, we were going through the process of making that very difficult decision of having our own Reduction in Force.
Yeah.
We made the decision at that time, as you remember, to reduce our headcount by 15%, and that, while very difficult, was obviously the right decision for the company. We've managed to continue to execute, and we chose to cut to 15% with the idea that we could then reprioritize some of that spend-
Sure
... and with the goal of coming back to around a 10% decrease by the end of the year, and that's almost exactly where we're gonna end up by the time we get to FY 2024. So that's the, the benefit that you've seen rolling through our operating expenses, as you said, you know, in the, in the areas of, of G&A. G&A and COGS, we always strive to be as efficient as possible.
Sure.
And then on the sales and marketing side, also see that. We have continued to reinvest in R&D, as we, you know, believe that's really important for the longevity, you know, and the future growth of this company, to maintain that level of commitment to increasing our platform, and we will continue to do that. But yes, we really think it's the reduction and the decision there. And it's not just the reduction in headcount. We also made a very concentrated effort to focus on program spend, looking at ROI of marketing events, you know-
Sure
... spend just across all areas of the business.
Yeah. And your freemium product is a big part of your marketing engine, I imagine, as far as-
Yes
... leads on selling, and so you-
Yeah, well, and even more than on marketing, you know, we've enjoyed such an immense benefit of brand awareness during the pandemic that would have taken us years and millions upon millions to acquire had we not had that. And so now focusing in more on product marketing, on ensuring that customers and prospects understand the breadth of our platform. They often know Zoom, but making sure they know that Zoom is more than just video communications. That we have this full platform of Phone, of Contact Center, Whiteboard, you know, Events, et cetera.
Yeah.
That's how we've been able to focus in and really be thoughtful about how we're investing those dollars.
Yeah. And so, I know you're not guiding, as you said, and with respect to 2024, you've said you're making great progress on stabilizing online, and what have you commented on the enterprise growth rate you generally think you can try to achieve here in the near to medium term?
Yeah, we haven't commented on that. The only indication that we've given at all on the previous... I'm just gonna restate what I said on the last call-
Yeah
... which was, you know, in looking for FY 25, right now, probably the best indicator or one of the indicators we think you should take into account is our exit growth rate for the year.
Mm.
So looking at the Q4 FY 2024, this quarter exit growth rate, what does that look like? You know, we are not assuming at this point in time that the economy is improving.
Yeah.
I don't necessarily, sitting here today, think that the economy is worsening from what we're seeing, but I don't think it's improving either.
Yeah.
And, you know, continuing to experience back-end loaded linearity and deals, high levels of deal scrutiny, all of those things we do not expect to change in the near future. And then the other thing as a reminder is, you know, we had a lot of interactions with our customers this year who had their own reductions in force, and getting them right-sized in their spend.
Yeah.
The team did a really good job of, you know, first of all, maintaining logos and focusing as much as possible on maintaining spend. Meaning, if a customer had reduced headcount and didn't need potentially all the meetings licenses that they have-
Yeah
... taking that and taking the opportunity to upsell them into the bundles, as we talked about earlier.
Yeah.
And that, I think the team's done a really good job because that gets us situated that even though, you know, if they, if they were just moving from meetings to bundle, that would typically be an upsell, at least we're preserving the spend.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Getting us situated with a more retentive SKU, because there's more products as well as a higher dollar SKU, to the extent that those, you know, customers eventually start to grow again, they're growing in a higher SKU.
Sure.
Now, we know that the majority of our customers had the opportunity for a renewal event during this past year in FY 2024, but not all of them. So I, I do expect that in FY 2025, we are going to see more discussions with our customers about getting right-sized, and that that's gonna continue to work its way through the system in FY 2025.
Yeah. And how long are these contracts typically? Remind me?
They're anywhere from one to kind of five years.
Okay.
The average ends up being around three.
Okay.
So I mean, the reality is, we know that the majority had the opportunity to renew in FY 2024, which is good, meaning we've addressed the majority of them.
Yeah.
However, it does indicate that if you're an average of a three-year with an out of a five-to-seven, we could see this trickle through in FY 2025 and even into FY 2026, to a lesser extent.
Interesting. Wow! And regarding go-to-market, as you think about the strategy for 2024 and upselling, are you making many changes in the go-to-market motion, channels, these sort of things?
Yeah.
Or are you guys pretty much where you think you need to be on GTM?
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a really good point. So, as a reminder, we did a, in conjunction with the reduction earlier this year, we did a pretty significant reorganization in the sales team.
Right.
Graeme stepped into being our Chief Sales Officer.
Right.
We have a new leader in Europe and a new leader in ANZ.
Yeah.
So I think that from a personnel perspective, we're in really, really great shape. We do have and are planning to continue to invest more in channel. That certainly is an opportunity for us. We've made progress, I would say, in the U.S. around our Phone channels.
Sure.
But as we move into Contact Center, that's a whole different set of relationships that are needed with the SIs, for example, and working on building those, and then building on, on both of those tenets internationally is really important for us. So that is, I think, probably the... We will continue to add sales capacity. We're continuing to add sales specialists in the area of Contact Center, especially-
Yeah
... is important for us. So those are probably the primary areas that we'll be continuing to add. I wouldn't say we're readjusting or reorganizing the way that we did this year, but just more of the same for next year now.
So those channels can take on more of the Pro Services, the heavy lifting that are required on Contact Center, like
Yeah. Yeah, and it's not even just the Pro Serve, it's the actual expertise that, when, you know, CIOs or heads of IT are making a decision around a very technical system like Phone and Contact Center, they will often turn to someone who has expertise in the area.
Yeah.
And these SIs are often helping, especially large organizations, go through their digital transformation journey. And so this, you know, Deloitte, PwC, organizations like that, really have big practices built around this. And we historically have not—I mean, we, we work with all of them. We work with them on a customer basis, we work with them on other services, but we haven't really engaged with them in this way because meetings is a different thing, right?
Yeah.
Meetings are a much more straightforward decision.
Yeah
... that they typically aren't engaged on. But we've seen the value they can bring, and so are really working on building out those relationships.
That's great. So it's a relatively new practice for you then, going into the-
Exactly
Five or whoever, however many there are now.
Yeah.
All right, great. Let's shift gears to kind of R&D and innovation and new products. I know we're all excited about your new AI product strategy. It seems very disruptive to package that with your paid product.
Yeah.
Kind of walk us through what you're really excited about in 2024. There's a lot there, but let's dig in.
Yeah. So we are... I mean, obviously, AI is one of our top priorities and has been for the back half of FY 2024, and will continue into FY 2025. And as you say, we made some very important decisions this year. One of them is to include the, I would call them, like, the baseline AI features into our-
Yeah
...products for no additional cost. We have seen tremendous adoption already in the first kind of three months of those products being available. This includes things like Meeting Summary, which does an amazing job of not only capturing the notes of a meeting, but also the true sentiment of the meeting.
Right
... which is a large improvement, a vast improvement over our historical transcription, which was more just a word by word.
Right.
It could be very difficult to read through. This is much easier in terms of really understanding a meeting if you're catching up. Also, in meeting, the feature of Catch Me Up, where if you-
Yeah
... you join late, you can just chat that into the chat, the meeting chat, and it'll tell you-
Yeah
... it'll give you a real-time summary of what's happened before you joined the meeting. So it's a very-
That's cool.
Yeah, it is. It's very, very powerful. And then-
When we're done here, we can have a meeting summary of us talking about meeting summaries.
Yes, I think that's exactly right. That's exactly right. I mean, it's, I always joke, but it's true. Like, there's gonna come a day where we're gonna walk into in-person meetings, and people are gonna ask to have it be a Zoom Meeting so that they can turn on AI summary-
Yeah
... and not have to take notes.
Yeah.
Then walk out of the meeting with a great file that they can, you know, use to have captured the meeting, et cetera.
Yeah.
And-
Are you using those now? You know, what's been your experience?
Oh, we use it all the time.
Yeah.
You know, especially, like, for things like Eric's staff meeting, it's always on.
Yeah.
Because, you know, it's probably one of the most important meetings of the week, if not the most important meeting of the week.
Yeah.
You know, we all have very busy schedules, and so ensuring that everybody has access to that information, it's invaluable.
Yeah. So that's your baseline AI, that you're-
Yeah. Yep, and then, you know, right now, we are still just considering what other opportunities are there to potentially monetize AI in the future. And we, this is, you know, in early stages. There are no plans, but I think you could envision things like is... Are there premium AI features that, that come at some point?
Yeah.
you know, the other decision we made that I just wanna reinforce for everybody, is we made the decision that we do not use any customer data for training our models-
Right
... and, you know, don't anticipate that's changing at any point in the future. But we do have customers that want to leverage, they want to leverage their own data for their model-
Right
... in certain situations. And so that also creates a monetization opportunity in the sense that you could cordon off their data in a way-
Yeah
... that starts to leverage some of the models. And the other area that I just wanna remind everybody is we're taking a federated approach to AI, which means that we're leveraging not only, you know, ChatGPT, but also the models from Anthropic, from Meta-
Yeah
... and our own AI model. And what that does is it gives us an opportunity to... There's a blog from maybe, I don't know, six weeks ago now, that XD, our CTO, wrote, that really shows how this federated approach is differentiated and is producing, you know, amazingly, you know, responsive, accurate results at a fraction-
Yeah
... of the cost. Of what he's doing in that blog, he's using ChatGPT as a proxy for Microsoft's results, and comparing it against that.
Mm-hmm.
I think it's just really interesting to see what the potential is here, and how federated can be a very powerful and cost-effective way to approach this solution for our customers.
Yeah, I remember reading that blog. It was a lot about, kind of optimizing the use case for the right, with the right AI tool, rather than-
Yes, that's exactly right.
... 100% in on, you know-
One
... their partner. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
That's great.
Yeah, and that's how you get the cost-effective. 'Cause you can take the query first to the cheapest model, if you will, the most cost-effective model, see how the result comes back, and if it's good enough, great, you serve that up. And if not, then you just keep going through the models to get the most accurate in a very timely way, but also leveraging that cost-effective nature.
Mm. Great. So outside of AI, I'm sure Contact Center is a big investment right now. That's a tall task. It's a long set of features to try to push that up into the enterprise, and I'm sure you guys are starting small and practical at the outset.
Yeah.
Kind of walk us through your Contact Center product rollout.
Yeah, yeah. So Contact Center is exactly as you say. When it was released, we knew that there was, you know, a product there that was, you know, has a head start because it's based on the infrastructure and the platform that all of Zoom is built upon. So it was, when it was released, it was natively integrated with voice, video, and SMS, and it had some of the APIs that are needed built into it. Over time, we've continued to add features and functionality, like native integration with email, which is now available, integration with some of the social channels, which some of them are available, some are still in beta.
Yeah.
Now we're moving on to some of the features and functionality that are really important, which include things like PCI, which is the ability to safely take a credit card in a call center environment.
Gotcha.
Also, PII Redaction.
Right.
Similar, right, all in the same vein of, now how do you conduct business with your customers in a, in a way that is safe and secure for them?
Yes.
Those are all really important features and functionality for us to be able to, you know, start engaging on like, I keep saying, like, those 5,000 or 10,000 seat deals.
Yeah.
Those are on the roadmap for release in, you know, the next six months-ish.
Cool.
So I think that's gonna be really great timing for us. Yeah, so that by the time we start coming to the end of FY2025 , FY 25, that we'll have the opportunity to be really well-positioned to compete for some of those large deals, you know.
Yeah.
We're really proud of the progress we've made already. You know, over 700 customers on Zoom Contact Center, and we've had some wins against other legacy cloud providers in this space, which I think is really cool to see.
Yeah.
The fact that it's, you know, Zoom Contact Center is the most modern Contact Center solution out there, and really is being built from the beginning with AI at the forefront.
Sure. Yeah.
Which is different than-
Than others.
Yeah, exactly. These other legacy providers, you know, on-prem, I think it's gonna be very difficult for them to leverage any of these AI capabilities. And then, the existing cloud, you know, competitors are having to figure out how do they weave that into their product as well, versus-
Yeah
... we get to start really right out of the gate.
Are you taking on a monetization approach, are you selling on a seat basis with AI as a tool set for a seat, or are you-
Yeah
... are you looking at bots and, you know, how, how would you think about monetizing when there isn't a seat?
Yeah. So we have Zoom Contact Center, which is priced on a per-seat basis, and that is a license for a, you know, a Contact Center agent.
Right.
And we started out there with a very price disruptive at $70 a seat. We have since then announced that we have tiered pricing, adding in more of these features and functionality, depending on, you know, the organization and what their needs are. And there's now three tiers that are, like, $70, I think $99, and $149. So that's how you're gonna continue to see that monetization grow. And then, we have a, an additional, a separate SKU called Zoom Virtual Agent, and this is what's-
Right
... grown out of our Solvvy acquisition.
Right.
It is exactly a virtual agent, and it's there to, you know... We use it internally, for example, for our Zoom online Contact Center, and it handles approximately 90% of the queries, which are simple things like, you know, resetting password. And that is priced on a query volume basis-
Got it
... because it's not, it's not an individual, right?
Right.
It's based on the value that it's bringing, and-
Yeah
... we've seen that be very effective. I think the other advantage that we have when you look across this, those marketplaces, we're totally agnostic whether our customers wanna buy a Contact Center seat or a virtual agent seat.
Right.
We don't care, 'cause it's not cannibalizing anything from us. It's all greenfield at this point.
Yeah.
And-
But good numbers.
Yes, it's a different thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're stuck with seats, and a-
Yeah
... big revenue stream now. Anything else on the innovation side, Kelly, you'd point out that you're excited about in 2024? I mean, you guys made some great progress in Rooms and Whiteboards. I, you know, I was out there at the EBC. Blew my mind what you guys are doing.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, thank you for saying that. You know, we continue to focus absolutely on Rooms and, you know, hybrid work, which we believe is the-
Yeah
... the future, and how do we ensure that employees continue to stay engaged, whether you're in the room or working remotely? Events, very important. You know, we've seen the ability... For those of you that went to Zoomtopia or have attended Zoomtopia remotely, it's the same. We believe that Events, the future of Events, is going to continue to be hybrid-
Yeah
... and that's a really important strategy. And then, of course, there's the whole productivity in terms of email and calendar and Docs, which is aimed at really building the ecosystem where you spend your day, the operating system where you spend your day at being Zoom. And, you know, Docs is in really early stages, but excited. Same, same, right? The opportunity to really think about those productivity tools with AI from the beginning, not AI being layered on later, but being included from the initial stages of the, you know, concept and development of those. So excited to see what comes from that.
A lot of exciting things coming up. That's really great. And can you touch on the competitive landscape real quick? Any changes there? I mean, it's, you know, you guys have the best product, I think, in the world. And, you know, Microsoft's a big incumbent, and it's almost irrelevant after that, it seems. Is that any updates?
Yeah. I mean, we, first of all, we don't, you know, take any competitor for granted, ever.
Yeah.
you know, I think when you look across, starting with meetings, there's still market share sitting out there that we, we're always focused on, on taking. When you look at, you know, Webex still has $1 billion of revenue-
Yeah
... that still presents opportunity.
Sure.
When you look across-
Still out there.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny to think about that, but it's true. And then when you look at Phone, both on-prem, you know, there's still-
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're early in this cloud journey. And then, of course, when you look at some of the incumbent cloud providers that we've, we've clearly overtaken in terms of our, of our seat count, but that doesn't mean just because we've overtaken them, doesn't mean that we don't wanna continue to, to grow and, and continue to take more market share, which is what we're focused on.
Yeah.
Then, you know, Contact Center, we're very happy with the early indications of the desire for the product. We just know we have some gaps yet that we need to really be able to compete, and that's why we're working as quickly as we can on bridging that.
Yeah. Well, it's important to realize where you are to execute. That's great. And lastly, just any thoughts on capital allocation? You know, M&A, there's lots of-
Yeah
... you guys have been, you know, had your engagement with Five9 years ago, and, you know, any update there in terms of-
Yeah
... company's mindset on-
Yeah
on capital allocation and M&A, including M&A?
Yeah. So, you know, our number one priority is returning and accelerating growth in the business, both direct and online. And to that end, we have really focused on looking for, you know, organic. We talked, we talked about, you know, earlier the ongoing investment in R&D, continuing investment in sales and channel, and inorganic possibilities. So our corp dev team is constantly looking for opportunities. You know, we look through, as a reminder, we look through three lens. We look through what is our--what would our customers get, so what would the product be? What's the culture, as an indicator of potential integration success, and then valuation. And, you know, valuation started out, I think, last year at a more attractive rate than where they ended the year, for sure.
Yeah.
But we keep looking, and we appreciate very much the flexibility that the cash on our balance sheet gives us.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we have historically successfully executed a buyback. We did $1 billion in, you know, 2023, FY 2023, to offset the majority of, or I guess, more than all the dilution for that year.
Sure.
We would reconsider that as it makes sense. The balance right now is, you know, if we found a significant, a transformational M&A transaction, we would really prefer to leverage cash for that.
Yeah.
As historically, we've really preferred not to take on debt.
Yeah.
At this point in time, where our stock is, I'd rather use cash if possible.
You bet. Yeah, makes sense. You know, and Five9, you know, talked about being in play. Does that come on your radar? I'm sure.
Yeah. I mean, we know them well. We constantly stay in touch with them, but we're not in active talks to have a discussion with them, as we've previously stated.
Fair. Excellent. Well, anything you wanna wrap up with, Kelly, before we sign off here?
First of all, thank you for having us today. We appreciate starting off the year with everyone, and, you know, as we're in the middle of FY 2025 planning, we're excited about the amazing platform that we have, the customer love that we have, and the amazing Zoom team that we have. We've been through a lot of transition as a company and as an organization in FY 2024, and I feel like they were all, while difficult, as I said before, good decisions that we've made for our company and that we're better situated as we come into FY 2025 now because of it.
Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining, Kelly, and-
Yeah
... I'll see you soon.
Great to see you. Thanks, everybody. Bye.