Manhattan Associates - Earnings Call - Q1 2021

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon. My name is Jeff, and I'll be your conference facilitator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Manhattan Associates first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and then the number one on your telephone keypad.

If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Also, as a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, April 27th. I would now like to introduce Mr. Eddie Capel, the CEO, Mr. Dennis Story, the CFO, and Mr. Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations of Manhattan Associates. Mr. Bauer, you may begin your conference.

Michael Bauer (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates' 2021 first quarter earnings call. I will review our cautionary language and then turn the call over to Eddie Capel, our CEO. During this call, including the question-and-answer session, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Manhattan Associates.

You are cautioned that these forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, are not guarantees of future performance, and that actual results may differ materially from the projections contained in our forward-looking statements.

I refer you to the reports Manhattan Associates files with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our projections, particularly our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2020 and the risk factor discussion in that report, as well as any risk factor updates we provide in our subsequent Form 10-Qs.

We note in particular that uncertainty regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our performance could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. We are under no obligation to update these statements. In addition, our comments include certain non-GAAP financial measures in an effort to provide additional information to investors.

We have reconciled all non-GAAP measures to the related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation scheduled in the Form 8-K we submitted to the SEC earlier today and on our website at manh.com. Now, I'll turn the call over to Eddie.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us as we review our first quarter results and discuss our updated full year 2021 outlook. Manhattan Associates is off to a strong start for the year, reporting record Q1 total revenue of $157 million and adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.43, both exceeding expectations.

Our business pace continues to be solid, with broad revenue outperformance across our solutions driving top-line revenue growth and earnings leverage in the quarter, while simultaneously driving our increasing investment in the business. Our team continues to execute well, and our business momentum is accelerating. Underscoring this strength and the growing demand for our cloud solutions, we achieved record bookings in Q1, with our RPO increasing 108% over the prior year and 36% sequentially to $421 million.

With our forward revenue visibility improving and the inherent leverage in our model, we'll be increasing our 2021 guidance across the board. Equally important, our pipeline continues to grow nicely, with about 90% of the pipe consisting of cloud opportunities and net new potential customers representing about 40% of that demand. Much of our success is bolstered by delivering the most innovative technological advancements in our industry.

Our solutions are mission-critical to our customers and our end markets, and now, with the need for modern, adaptable, scalable, and resilient supply chain, inventory, and omnichannel solutions never more apparent, we're in the early stages of extending our mind and wallet share. Additionally, the secular tailwinds are numerous.

Digital transformation of businesses, brick-and-mortar stores shifting to an innovative multi-function facility concept, the insatiable desire to get as close as possible to the end customer, creative inventory management strategies, and shorter fulfillment timelines are just some of the significant drivers that are aligning customer demand with our product strategy.

Our unified platform is industry-leading and provides our customers with solutions that are scalable, versionless, and extensible, and this enables our clients to be adaptable and provide unmatched customer experiences.

Now, with Manhattan Active Omni just entering its fourth year in the market and Manhattan Active Warehouse Management about to reach its first anniversary and on pace for innovation set to accelerate on the heels of nearly $90 million invested in R&D just this year alone, we are strategically positioned for long-term sustainable growth.

On the sales front, competitive win rates remain strong at about 70% as our commitment to innovation keeps Manhattan Associates atop the industry. In Q1, about 25% of our cloud and license deals were from new customers. From a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing, and wholesale drove more than 80% of our bookings in the quarter and drilling in a little bit, the sub-verticals are pretty diverse as well, including apparel, department stores, food and beverage, industrial, as well as durable and non-durable goods.

Our services group executed extremely well in Q1, conducting over 100 go-lives and with demand for expertise remaining high, we anticipate our services revenue will return to growth in Q2 and we continue to aggressively hire talent to meet the forecasted demand. Now, let me provide, if I can, just some quick updates on our product portfolio, starting our Point of Sale solution.

Q1 was a pretty positive quarter for POS, both with respect to go-lives and new customer signings. While early, pipeline opportunities are growing following a pretty quiet year in 2020. Now, on the go-live front, we've got a number of implementations currently in flight, including a well-known specialty retailer that during the quarter went live Point of Sale application in a pilot store and feedback from the store associates has been extremely positive, with commentary on its ease of use, speed, and responsiveness.

The retailer has started rolling out the system across their store fleet and will be complete in a few months. Then they'll turn their attention to activating the rest of our Manhattan Active Omni suite, including Enterprise Order Management and Store Fulfillment.

When it comes Point of Sale customer signings, we're happy to announce that we've got three additional projects that have been signed and kicked off in the last quarter. These include a well-known global apparel brand that will first Point of Sale application here in the U.S. this summer and then plan to roll out the solution to their fleet of stores worldwide.

This customer is already live on Enterprise Order Management and saw the true sales and service advantage from having a unified order Point of Sale application. that same advantage proved attractive for a long-time Manhattan Active OMS customer in Canada, who will roll Point of Sale solution across their fleet of apparel retail stores by early fall. Finally, we've also kicked off a project at a well-known sports apparel and footwear customer.

This global brand will start by Point of Sale to enable endless aisle capabilities in their stores, enabling their store associates to use mobile devices to capture orders for customers when a size or a color isn't available at that particular location. Once Point of Sale usage will be an extension of an existing Manhattan Active Omni functionality that is already deployed at that particular customer.

While the pandemic seemed to cause many of the store systems or much of the store systems' activities to be put on hold, third-party integrators and industry research firms are now beginning to indicate that planned Point of Sale are again showing signs of picking up and because we are able to continue to invest heavily Point of Sale application throughout the pandemic, we believe that we're very well-positioned for the inevitable need for a replacement Point of Sale and store systems in general.

Now, turning to supply chain, Q1 was another good quarter for our Transportation Management application. Just in recent weeks, we received word from Gartner that for the third year in a row, our application was one of the very few to be included in the Leaders quadrant in the recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems.

We've been able to maintain this important industry designation because of our continued investment in innovation within TMS and also the high levels of customer satisfaction that we garner with our customers.

The TMS market continues to be an active one for us as customers either move older on-premise deployments of TMS to the cloud or adopt a new TMS for the very first time, and generally speaking, cloud TMS customers or cloud TMS allows smaller customers to benefit from the power of a leading TMS solution.

Now, speaking of supply chain applications in the cloud, we continue to see very favorable response from our Manhattan Active WM application. Launched almost a year ago now at last year's Momentum Conference, the number of Manhattan Active WM projects has surpassed two dozen. Our professional services team across North and South America and Europe remains quite busy preparing for a summer full of Manhattan Active WM go-lives.

Additionally, our sales pipeline remains strong across both existing Manhattan WMS on-premise customers looking to go cloud-native and with opportunities with net new customers.

Q1 was also a nice quarter for our Demand Forecasting and Inventory Optimization solutions as we continue to see both existing and new customers choose our cloud-based solutions to help them optimize their inventory levels across the enterprise. Finally, our product teams are hard at work preparing for our upcoming Momentum Connect 2021 conference in May.

Like last year, we'll be virtual, unfortunately, but we're planning again to make some really important product announcements. For a number of years now, our product strategy has been centered around two key ideas: migrating our best-in-class functional capabilities to a truly cloud-native architecture, and secondly, delivering unified applications within our three main areas of focus: omnichannel, supply chain, and inventory.

At this year's conference, we'll announce yet another large step forward in making that vision a reality for our customers. So that concludes my business update and with that, I'll pass it over to Dennis, who will provide you with an update on our financial performance and discuss our outlook for 2021. I'll close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before moving to Q&A. So Dennis, take it away.

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

Thanks, Eddie. I would characterize our first quarter execution as an all-rounder. We delivered strong financial performance from top line to bottom line with across-the-board solid growth, profitability, cash flow, and balance sheet results. Here's a key summary of financial highlights with growth rates on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted.

As Eddie mentioned, Q1 total revenue was $157 million, up 2%. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.43, up 8%. GAAP EPS was $0.35, and overall performance was driven by our cloud revenue in the quarter. Q1 operating income totaled $36 million, up 12% year-over-year. Adjusted operating margin was 22.7%, up 200 basis points, and our GAAP operating margin was 16.2%. Q1 cloud revenue was $27 million, up 54%. License revenue was $7.8 million, down 19%, as our end markets are predominantly choosing our cloud solutions.

Q1 RPO was a record performance at $421 million, up 108%, in case you forgot from Eddie's comments year-over-year, and up 36% sequentially. At our current full-year outlook of $450-$550 million, we are on track to exceed our $500 million midpoint. Further, cloud momentum is fueling our services pipeline and revenue growth opportunity. Q1 services revenue exceeded expectations, totaling $80 million against an $87 million comp in Q1 2020.

More importantly, services revenue was up 13% sequentially over Q4 2020, with our growth outlook accelerating for the balance of 2021. Our Q2 services revenue forecast is $83-$85 million, up 17% year-over-year and for Q3 and Q4, our forecast calls for 20% year-over-year growth. Maintenance was up 1% on cash collections. The important point here, like license revenue, we do expect second-half attrition on customer conversions to cloud, which will positively impact our RPO performance.

Our hardware team delivered a solid $6 million in sales, up 56% year-over-year. So let me turn to cash and cash flow. Another strong performance. Q1 closed with cash on hand totaling $197 million with zero debt. Operating cash flow was $40 million, up 3.5× year-over-year and our Q1 free cash flow margin was 25%.

Our current deferred revenue balance totaled $123 million, up 8% over Q4 2020, and 17% year-over-year on cloud billings. Also, we invested $27 million in share buybacks in Q1, and our board raised our buyback authority to $50 million. That's the result summary. I'll cover some additional financial updates and guidance, and then turn the call back to Eddie. Our cloud revenue outperformance was mostly driven by positive deal timing, overages, and renewals. Overages and renewals can be lumpy on a quarterly basis.

For Q2, we expect cloud revenue to be roughly up 46% compared to Q2 2020. For the full year, we are raising our previous cloud revenue estimate of $108-$110 million to a range of $111-$113 million, equating to 40% growth at the midpoint. As frequently mentioned, remaining performance obligation, or RPO, is the leading proxy for our cloud revenue.

While we updated our RPO outlook to exceed $500 million midpoint for 2021, going forward, our intention remains to guide RPO on an annual basis as bookings can be lumpy, primarily based on sales cycle timing and the number and relative value of large deals and product mix from quarter-to-quarter. Furthermore, on flow-through from RPO to cloud revenue, some customers have longer implementation cycles associated with large projects requiring a multi-year annual subscription ramp built into the contract.

These revenue ramps are common for larger cloud deals, and with larger opportunities becoming more prevalent in our pipeline, we expect RPO growth to accelerate first, followed by a gradual steepening ramp in cloud revenue growth, providing us with very good visibility into future subscription revenue.

So all said, we are confident in our ability to achieve the high end of our prior $450-$550 million RPO outlook for 2021. As discussed in our previous Q4 earnings call, we expect license and maintenance revenue attrition to accelerate in 2021, estimating license revenue to be in the range of $20-$25 million for the full year, which represents a 41% year-over-year decline.

For Q2, we anticipate license revenue to be approximately $6 million, and Q3 and Q4 to be about $4 million each quarter. For maintenance revenue, we continue to target approximately $35 million per quarter throughout 2021. We expect the attrition impact will manifest itself for the most part in the second half of 2021.

Our consolidated subscription maintenance and services margin for the quarter was 50.9%, driven by revenue performance and cloud operating leverage. We expect Q2 consolidated subscription maintenance and services margin to be about 52.6%, improving 40 basis points over prior expectations.

Given the strong demand, we anticipate costs to tick up slightly in the second half on hiring and performance-based comp, with second-half margin to be about 51.1% compared to our prior expectations of 51.5%. For operating income and margin, we are increasing our full-year 2021 guidance 50 basis points, resulting in a midpoint of 21.5%, and we remain confident in our ability to make strong progress on achieving the Rule of 40 over time.

On a quarterly basis, we anticipate adjusted operating margin to be 22.5% for Q2, 21.2% in Q3, and 19.4% in Q4. Regarding taxes, our adjusted effective income tax rate was 21.5%. We expect our Q2 and full-year 2021 adjusted tax rate to be 21.5%, down from our prior expectations of 23%. The lower tax rate will benefit pro forma adjusted EPS by roughly $0.03 for the full year.

Our GAAP effective income tax rate was 9.9% for the quarter, driven by excess tax benefits on restricted stock vesting. We expect our full-year 2021 GAAP tax rate to be about 20%. Regarding our capital structure, in Q1 2021, we repurchased approximately 214,000 shares worth roughly $27 million. For the second quarter and full year, we estimate our diluted shares outstanding to be 64.8 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity.

Also, for CapEx, we estimate for 2021 to invest about $6-$8 million at this time. So that completes the core financial update, turning to increased 2021 guidance. For total revenue, we are raising guidance from our previous range of $595-$625 million, which represented 4% growth at the midpoint, to a new guidance range of $625-$640 million, targeting 8% growth at the midpoint of $632 million.

As a reminder, this includes $22.5 million of revenue compression, equating to 4 percentage points of growth driven by license and maintenance attrition. For Q2, we expect total revenue of $154-$159 million, or 15% growth at the $157 million midpoint. As we account for continued license attrition, we expect Q3 and Q4 midpoint total revenue growth to be approximately 7%-8%.

For adjusted earnings per share, we're increasing our previous guidance range of $1.44-$1.59 to $1.60-$1.70, with a midpoint of $1.65, up from our previous midpoint of $1.52. For GAAP earnings per share, our guidance range is $1.10-$1.20, with a midpoint of $1.15, up from our previous midpoint of $1.04. For Q2, we expect adjusted EPS to be $0.42-$0.44. As previously discussed, for operating margin, we are raising our target range to 21%-22%. For Q2, we expect an operating margin range of 22.3%-22.7%.

In summary, our underlying growth fundamentals are strong, excluding license and maintenance, which are line items negatively impacted by our cloud transition because they are attriting. At the midpoint of our Q2 and full-year guidance, our pro forma total 2021 total revenue growth is 23% for Q2 and full-year 17%. So thank you. That covers my financial update, and I'll turn the call back to Eddie.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Terrific. Thanks, Dennis. So we're very pleased with our strong start to 2021 and record results. While we continue to operate in a pretty turbulent global macro environment, we're confident in our ability to help deliver success for our customers and drive long-term sustainable growth for Manhattan Associates.

Many of our customers and prospects are in the early stages of their digital transformation and even their move to the cloud. With our industry-leading innovation, technical, and domain expertise, and the world's most talented and seasoned supply chain commerce employees, we believe that we are best positioned to help the industry modernize, which in turn creates a really exciting opportunity for Manhattan Associates. So with that, Jeff, we'd be happy to take any questions.

Operator (participant)

Absolutely. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask your questions, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, that's star one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Terry Tillman from Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Hey, good afternoon, everyone, and congrats on the strong quarter here in Q1. Eddie, maybe my first question's for you, and then Dennis had a question for you. But hearing about Point of Sale, that seems like forever ago when we were hearing about the early kind of success and the pipeline building.

What I'm curious about is, it's good to hear about some new deals starting to flow again and then projects moving forward. But could you maybe educate us on kind of what the Point of Sale kind of opportunities look like? When you land one of those, from a size and scale perspective, how does that compare to the OMS and WMS business and is the pipeline activity continuing to build as we move into the second half of the year?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. It certainly seems that interest is picking up in the market, Terry. We're seeing that interest pick up. As I mentioned in my prepared comments, industry analysts and the third-party integrators and so forth seem to be indicating that after a gap year of 2020, where the store spent a large part of the time closed.

As they reopen and emerge, really, as multi-function facilities, buy online, curbside, boutiques, galleries, return centers for products that bought online, and so forth, the systems that they have in place today don't support those capabilities very well, as well as all of the cross-selling and upselling that certainly retailers want to do and manage, maximize the inventory they have across the network. So there certainly seems to be some forward momentum there.

The position that we're in with Point of Sale being sort of an extension of our Omni or order management suite of solutions seems to be being pretty well received in the market. Again, heard from my comments that most of our customers are seeing one or the other go first on that roadmap because there's a real strategic advantage for them.

With regard to the size of the opportunity, the market's large, as we know. We know the game, as it were, has moved from being a hardware game to a software game, and that's where the critical mass is beginning to build. I don't know that I'm going to be able to give you a, and I don't want to give you a specific ASP of Point of Sale as it relates to order management and warehouse management.

Suffice to say, it's a huge opportunity, particularly when customers and retailers have a large store network. I mean, I guess I would just say that it certainly would not be unusual for a Point of Sale opportunity to be in the same ballpark as a material WMS program or a material OMS program.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

Okay. That's great to hear. I guess maybe, Dennis, for you, in terms of we were looking for $50 million of additional RPO in the quarter. You did over $100 million additional RPO. So what I'm curious about is it's a two-part question. One, what are you seeing in terms of commitments?

Are these still these kind of long-term, kind of multi-year commitments? Did anything change in duration? Then secondly, that was a big beat. I'm curious, was it a volume and velocity of deal activity, or did it benefit from some especially large deals? Just looking for a little bit more color on the beat there. Thank you.

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

In terms of duration, no change. We're still hitting right at the five-year mark, given the mission-critical and strategic nature of these solutions, Terry, and what I would tell you is a pretty diverse spread of bookings across the customer. There wasn't any material concentration of one customer in the pool of deals that we closed in the quarter. Good volume and good velocity and good diversity as well.

Terry Tillman (Managing Director)

That's great. Congrats.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thanks, Terry.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink from Baird. Your line is open.

Joseph Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Hi, everyone. Just stick with the RPO bookings. Obviously, it doesn't happen without a good product, but Eddie and Dennis, I'm wondering, a lot of thematic topics around the WMS category right now, be it new WMS pairing with robotics and automation, new WMS to manage pretty tight labor constraints in the industry, SKU complexity with e-commerce.

Are any of these factors you think driving maybe increased awareness or ultimately would be kind of pipeline growth for you more than the others or is it really just a combination of new product, embrace of the cloud, these thematic things all kind of happening at once?

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

I think you've done a great review of some of the drivers there, Joe. But the top of the list is more immediate access to innovation. We've talked about it before, but honestly, I feel like it's head and shoulders above the other drivers with so many things changing in supply chain, obviously digital transformation continuing to accelerate.

All those other things that you talked about are factors, but the need to be flexible, agile, and meet ever-changing business needs drives the need to get your hands on new innovation quickly. That, I think, is the number one reason. There's no question that the challenge finding IT talent and so forth puts pressure on our customers' organization. So having us manage the solutions and so forth is helpful to them as a corollary to it, but access to innovation would be number one.

Joseph Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. That's helpful. Then, Eddie, a lot of your prepared remarks were discussing just expansions at existing accounts across the full suite of omnichannel capabilities and I would imagine eventually that'll lead across in the supply chain, across the entire kind of unified platform. Is it possible to give any maybe quantification?

I don't know if it's now revenue retention, maybe some sort of cohort analysis, just a general sense what you're seeing with existing customers maybe a few years ago and kind of how their spend with Manhattan is evolving?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. I wouldn't say there's any major change in terms of our ability to cross-sell and upsell across the suite of solutions. To be honest with you, Joe, we've had great customer retention worldwide over the years. We generally refer to it as maintenance retention. Still, it's true that a large percentage of our new software sales in every given quarter comes from existing customers.

But the good news is, with all of that said, still a healthy number of new logos coming into the family. So I think a great balance there as we continue to drive innovation into the marketplace. We certainly expect to be able to continue that cross-sell and upsell, and especially as we introduce new products to the marketplace and we saw a little bit of that in the last quarter with Point of Sale, one of our more recent product introductions.

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Joe, I would say also 25% of our software was net new customers in the quarter and if you look at our pipeline, 40% of the pipeline is made up of net new customers as well. I think that goes to Eddie's story about the importance of innovation. From a retention point of view, it's early days from a renewal point of view, but we're basically at 99%-100% on cloud renewal retention.

Joseph Vruwink (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Interesting. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Joe.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Yun Kim from Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Yun Kim (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you. So another super congrats on another strong quarter, Eddie, Dennis, and Mike. So Eddie, it's good to hear that Point of Sale is coming back, which I take it that some parts of the retail vertical is coming back.

So can you update us on where we are in terms of the retail vertical coming back from the depths of COVID early last year? Then also, can you update us on the competitive landscape in that retail vertical because I believe certain vendors did take a step back when the retail vertical did slow down last year?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Well, certainly in terms of the journey of retail coming back for us over the last, shall we call it, 15 months. During 2020, in the real depths of the pandemic, there was still a fair amount of activity. We saw that first Q2 was pretty turbulent, but there was a fair amount of activity on the WMS side. Direct-to-consumer shipments were increasing. Obviously, the need for speed was there and so forth. So we sort of felt a fairly healthy amount of activity in WMS.

The larger strategic Manhattan Active Omni projects went a little quiet last year, maybe for obvious reasons. There were smaller point projects with curbside and BOPIS projects and ship-from-store projects and so forth, but the big omnichannel projects seemed to wane a little bit. We're seeing that pick back up.

Then, again, for obvious reasons, with many stores closed, store systems projects. It was a bit of a gap year in 2020. Again, we're starting to see Point of Sale and store systems projects begin to pick back up kind of across the board. I'd say that's sort of been the journey across the solution suite over the last 15, 12, or 15 months.

In terms of the competitive landscape, it hasn't changed a great deal, frankly. Really, competitors remain the same. They remain as active. There's some terrific competitors out there, and it keeps us sharp and on our toes and keeping innovating.

Yun Kim (Managing Director)

Okay. Thanks for that. Then Europe showed another strong sequential growth. Can you just talk about what kind of trends you're seeing there and whether or not we can continue to expect this positive trend out of Europe for the remainder of the year?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

The services business was particularly strong in Europe in Q1. We're starting to see, just like here in the U.S., frankly, things begin to open up. Direct-to-consumer growing has been growing over the last 12 months. So I don't think there's anything really very different in Europe that's happening here. It's pretty positive across the board.

There are a couple of spots in APAC that are a little slower than we might like. Australia is pretty strong, but Japan's a little flat. Frankly, China's a little flat, but there's smaller parts of the business, and we certainly expect those to cycle back up in the next couple of three quarters.

Yun Kim (Managing Director)

Okay. Great. I have one for Dennis. Very strong cash flow for Q1, especially. So it looks like the cash collection was especially strong in the quarter. Was there a one-time thing that drove that cash collection, or is this some sort of a trend that's emerging as you start to have higher mix of subscription billings and moving away from license deals?

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

No one-time trend. What we have as a company that's super focused on, as part of our DNA on cash, it was a record cash collections quarter for us, and really underpinning that is really the growing subscription business.

Yun Kim (Managing Director)

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

Period. Yeah. 25% free cash flow margin.

Yun Kim (Managing Director)

Yep.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Yun.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Chappell from Benchmark. Your line is open.

Mark Chappell (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hi. Thank you for taking my question, and congratulations on the quarter, guys.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Mark.

Mark Chappell (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks, Dennis. Eddie, a question for you on Active WM. Granted, I know it's still early, but could you address whether you're seeing a different set of competitors with that solution than you did with your traditional on-premise products? Also, too, if you could just address your Active WM win rates and whether they're above the 70% average for all your products.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. So the pretty short answer is, Mark, nope. Competitors are pretty much the same today as they have been over the last, well, even longer than this, but let's call it a couple of three, four, five years. So same competitive landscape. In terms of the win rates, I don't have that right off the top of my head, but certainly they're strong.

There probably might be a tick above the 70% and we feel pretty good about where we are. I think we've talked about this before. Generally, when we don't come in first, often it's a pricing challenge and so forth, but still feel pretty good about the win rates.

Mark Chappell (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Great. Then in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that the company was benefiting from a couple of secular tailwinds, many of which you've mentioned in the past. But this time you brought up something called creative inventory strategies. I was wondering if you could just clarify that a little bit more for us.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Sure. I mean, really, with an acceleration of buy online, pickup in store, curbside pickup, and ship-from-store, it throws off traditional inventory strategies. So because you don't know, it's much harder to predict and forecast what the impact of those strategies are going to be on a store's inventory strategy. You're not relying on walk-ins anymore.

So it requires, frankly, creative and sophisticated, A, forecasting strategies, and over the long term, integration with an order management system so that you get a much better handle on what those more creative fulfillment strategies are going to look like across the store network and how they feed back into Inventory Optimization.

Mark Chappell (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you. Helpful. Nice job in the quarter. Thanks, guys.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Mark.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Your line is open.

Brian Peterson (Managing Director)

Good evening, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the question. So congrats on a really, really strong RPO this quarter. So maybe a follow-up to Terry's question, but just you talked about the duration, Dennis. I know you hit on that, but is there any commonality into what you're displacing or how you're thinking about sales cycles? It was just such a big step up. I'm just curious, maybe what changed and kind of how did that trend versus your expectations?

Dennis Story (EVP and CFO)

I don't think there's any trend. If we look back, my answer to that, Brian, would be if you think about particularly Manhattan Active WM, which drove a healthy amount of the bookings and, of course, the resultant RPO, it's about three-quarters since we released, or it certainly was at the end of the quarter.

The first quarter, most folks were figuring out what it was, what it looked like, and so forth, and then we began to enter into sales cycles, and we really started picking up some sales cycle momentum for Manhattan Active WM in kind of Q4 and again in Q1, so no big change. There've been a couple of questions around competitive landscape and secular trends and so forth.

No big changes there, but I do think it has taken just a little while to build momentum for an awareness and everything else in the solution.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Brian, we're almost equally split on conversions and net new customers on MAWM. As Eddie mentioned, we're already over two dozen. We've closed over two dozen deals there, so.

Brian Peterson (Managing Director)

All right. So off to a pretty good start with that, just three quarters in. But maybe a higher-level one, Eddie, just I don't want to take away your thunder for momentum next month, but just thinking about the innovation over the last several years, Point of Sale is obviously a new product, but we've seen a lot of innovation on the WM side.

I'm just curious, as we sit here today, how much of your product efforts are really focused on enhancing your existing product offerings versus potentially building out things that are adjacent to the portfolio?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. So there's really sort of three prongs of attack. We have plenty of ideas for new innovation inside of our existing solutions. We really do, so we'll continue to innovate into our existing solutions, no question.

We are certainly continuing to build out our product footprint with new products and the ability to be able to cross-sell, upsell, and obviously help our customers, and then the third bucket is the real creative and innovative unification of the solutions, okay? Because there's a level of unification and flat-out capability that we can deliver to the marketplace through a component-based set of microservices-based solutions that could not be done before, so unification, new innovation into our existing solutions, and footprint growth.

Brian Peterson (Managing Director)

Thanks, Eddie.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Thank you, Brian.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Zgutowicz from Rosenblatt. Your line is open.

Mark Zgutowicz (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. Two quick ones. In terms of outside North America pipeline, curious where your sales capacity is relative to perhaps levels you'd like it to be, perhaps in Europe. Then speaking to APAC, sort of what's sort of the status there? What are the limitations in terms of moving the needle in APAC?

Then, Eddie, perhaps maybe looking through your POS telescope, just curious if you have any incremental sense of yet on the pace of retail store reopenings, sort of relative to the last quarter or so. Are we still seeing sort of a slow and steady pickup, or is it perhaps speeding up a bit? Just anything incremental in the margin there? Thanks.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Well, so first of all, just in terms of kind of overall dynamics and so forth, Europe is about 20%-25% of our pipeline, number one. In terms of sales capacity, we are not capacity-constrained. We do have a couple of open spots in Europe. Frankly, we say this a lot, but we've always got a few open spots for domain experts in our field, both Europe, APAC, and in the U.S., but we're not capacity-constrained.

In terms of APAC, of course, APAC represents about 6%-7% of our revenue, and it's very important to us. It's certainly very important to our global customers and so forth, but it also represents a pretty diverse set of countries like Japan, China, Singapore, and Southeast Asia, and Australia spread across that 6%-7%.

Honestly, we, like many others, talk about APAC as a region, but boy, it is pretty diverse in and of itself. So there's no, again, no particular sales capacity issue there and country by country, almost, there are kind of different dynamics going on. I think we all know that Australia and New Zealand are in pretty good shape. Things are pretty open, and business is flourishing reasonably well there, whereas some of the other countries are struggling a little bit, struggling a little bit more.

Then with regard to your second question around looking through the Point of Sale telescope, I think you called it, and what we're seeing in terms of store openings, obviously, Europe is opening up a good bit more from a trajectory perspective now, particularly in the U.K.. Here, obviously, we're pretty much fully open across the board. In the spots that are not, I think retailers are definitely feeling like it's pretty close by and beginning to feel the need for adaptation and modernization in those stores.

Mark Zgutowicz (Senior Research Analyst)

Super. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Certainly, Mark. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of David Robinson from William Blair. Your line is open.

David Robinson (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for taking my question. I guess just a quick one around kind of the secular tailwinds that you've been experiencing. I guess given the increasing demand across the product portfolio and the amount of pilots that you guys have been able to put into play and potential customers further understanding the importance of omnichannel and cloud-based supply chain solutions due to COVID, have you experienced any shortening of the sales cycle or any acceleration there, or has it stayed about the same?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. So broadly speaking, no, the sales cycles have remained about the same. However, in the last 12 months, we have seen somewhat what I would call smaller point projects go faster, right? So when we were in a situation where stores were closed, and retailers wanted to use those stores as ship-from locations, we saw some ship-from-store projects accelerate.

We saw some buy online, pickup in store, some curbside pickup projects where our customers came to us and said, "Listen, we got to be live in days." We've referred to in a couple of previous earnings calls, I think, some examples where, frankly, we turned on a dime and had buy online, pickup in store solutions up and running with an existing customer, of course, in literally six or seven days.

Even in situations where it was a new customer who needed a curbside pickup program, zero to live in six weeks. We did see some of those small programs have very short sales cycles. Overall, David, nothing honestly has really changed at a higher level and more strategic level.

David Robinson (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. I guess just to kind of build upon that, has there been any kind of discussion or change in sales strategy as you've seen kind of the success of being able to sell those small products that obviously can lead to larger ones in the future? Is that kind of similar as well?

Eddie Capel (CEO)

Not really, David. We've got a reasonably broad portfolio in the supply chain space, and there are certainly some of our solutions that are considered tip of the arrow. If you think about the Distribution Management side, sometimes Slotting Optimization projects or Labor Management projects on the transportation side, look at Transportation Procurement or Transportation Modeling engagements, which would be considered tip of the arrow for TMS.

Same is true of omnichannel and some of the ones that we've talked about. But that really isn't a big change, a bigger change for us. I have to say that since we're focused largely on Tier 1 and Tier 2, usually those companies have put a lot of thought into these transformational programs and intend to take their time with the sales cycle, but engage in larger initiatives with us.

David Robinson (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Great. Thanks for taking my question.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

My pleasure, David. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

That concludes our Q&A. Now back to Mr. Eddie Capel for final remarks.

Eddie Capel (CEO)

All right. Very good, Jeff. Thank you very much. Appreciate it, and thank you, everybody, for taking the time to join the call today and get an update on our Q1 2021. As I said, we're excited about the quarter, but even more excited about our go-forward opportunity, and we'll look forward to speaking to you about three months from now with our Q2 update. Thanks again. Appreciate it.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.