Zuora - Q4 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon, and welcome to Zuora's fourth quarter of fiscal 2022 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 session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Luana Wolk, Head of Investor Relations for introductory remarks.

Luana Wolk (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Zuora's fourth quarter fiscal 2022 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Tien Tzuo, Zuora's Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Todd McElhatton, Zuora's Chief Financial Officer. Robbie Traube, our President and Chief Revenue Officer, will also be joining us for the Q&A session. The purpose of today's call is to review our fourth quarter results and provide a financial outlook for the upcoming first quarter and full fiscal year 2023. Some of our discussions and responses today will include forward-looking statements. As a reminder, our actual results could differ materially due to several factors. You can find information regarding those risk factors in the earnings release we issued today and our most recent filings with the SEC. Finally, we'll be referring to several non-GAAP financial measures, and reconciliations to GAAP measures are included in our earnings release.

For a copy of our earnings release, links to the SEC filings, a replay of today's call, or to learn more about Zuora, please visit our investor relations website at investor.zuora.com. Now I'll turn the call over to you, Tien.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

Thank you, Luana, and thank you everyone for joining us. Welcome to Zuora's fourth quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. We had an outstanding quarter. We continue to innovate and deliver value to our customers. In Q4, we beat guidance for subscription revenue and non-GAAP loss from operations. We saw continued momentum with a strong upsell motion as well as a record-breaking quarter signing on new logos. Not only did we deliver top-line growth, but we also saw growth in our bottom line. Fiscal 2022 marked our first year that we were free cash flow positive. This was a big year. We started the year with ambitious goals around ARR growth and dollar-based retention rates. Today, when I reflect on the quarter and the year, I am thrilled to share that we delivered.

I'm also excited to share that Silver Lake, a global leader in technology investing, is partnering with us by way of a $400 million investment into the business. The undeniable momentum of the subscription economy and the clear leadership we hold in the space was the catalyst to this relationship. This investment allows us to pursue new initiatives such as potential targeted acquisitions and other opportunities to broaden our product offerings and enable our customers to deliver exceptional subscriber experiences. I could not be more thrilled about the partnership. With that, let me share some additional details about our results for the quarter and the year. At the start of the year, we said that the biggest opportunity in the subscription economy lies with large companies, both enterprise incumbents and the fastest-growing disruptors. This year, we saw that this was absolutely the case.

These companies are recognizing that recurring revenue business models, those that focus on building ongoing relationships with their customers, offer a faster path to growth. In fact, our latest Subscription Economy Index report, which analyzes anonymized and aggregated data of long-term Zuora billing customers, just launched, and this time it found that subscription businesses continue to outpace the S&P 500, growing 4.6x faster over the entire past decade. While some have wondered whether the stay-at-home growth phenomenon was temporary, our data shows that overall, subscription economy businesses are holding on to their pandemic subscribers and accelerating into the new year. All this continues to create a tailwind of opportunities for us as these companies turn to Zuora to help them on their subscription journey. For example, in fiscal 2022, we brought on automotive leaders like Suzuki Motor Corporation, who's powering international connected car services.

In fact, today, 12 of the top 15 largest auto manufacturers are now Zuora customers. Disruptors like Gusto, just one of many Zuora customers who are scaling and preparing for future IPOs. We've brought on established global technology leaders like Hitachi, global manufacturing companies like Luxottica, the company behind eyewear brands like Oakley, Gucci, and Prada, or Kyocera, a Japanese multinational ceramics and electronics manufacturer, and HMD Global, better known for making Nokia mobile phones, who chose Zuora this year to help them transform and embrace new customer-centric business models. In fact, in Q4, our continued focus on large companies resulted in eight deals over $500,000 in annualized contract value or ACV, four of which were over $1 million. We added a net 27 customers this quarter with average contract value over $100,000, ending the year at 747 customers.

This year, we said we would accelerate our innovation and execute our multi-product strategy. We delivered. Our multi-product strategy has become our critical differentiator. Why? Because more and more, as companies look to monetize their digital services, billing is only one piece of the puzzle. Ultimately, they need to manage the entire quote to revenue process to shape the broader subscriber experience. Now, this is showing up in how companies are buying our software. In fact, in Q4, 18% of our first-time customers purchased our entire suite, including our market-leading Zuora Revenue product. As a result of the successful integration between Zuora Billing and Zuora Revenue, we really saw an acceleration in the demand this year for Zuora Revenue. As our second major product beachhead, bookings for Zuora Revenue nearly doubled in fiscal 2022.

This quarter, we launched real-time revenue, an enhancement to help our customers dramatically reduce their time to close the books. We've already turned it on for 20% of Zuora Revenue customers who are now processing transactions in real time. I'm also incredibly pleased to share that independent research firm MGI Research ranked Zuora Revenue as the number one solution in this year's automated revenue management report. That's why we saw new customers like ADTRAN, provider of telecommunication networking equipment, turn to Zuora Revenue to automate their previously manual processes of revenue recognition. We also had a financial and investing media company purchase Zuora Billing along with Zuora Revenue to help them scale their subscription business. This all tops off a year of innovation that we are extremely proud of.

Fiscal 2022 was a year of numerous launches, including Unified Monetization, CPQ X, Central Revenue, new APIs and new software development kits, a brand new user interface in a universal custom payment gateway development kit, just to name a few. We invested heavily in engineering talent to support our fast pace of innovation, including nearly doubling our engineering capacity this year, and we delivered. Now, shifting to our go-to-market strategy. This year we said we would accelerate growth while increasing our dollar-based retention rates with a land and expand motion. That is exactly what we did. We said we would get to 17% ARR growth by the end of the year, and we surpassed this objective. Last quarter, we got to 19%. In this quarter, we reached 20% ARR growth.

We are making great progress towards our fiscal 2025 target of achieving 25%-30% ARR growth. We said we saw a $450 million upsell opportunity just within our install base, and that by going after this opportunity, we would take our dollar-based retention rate to 105% by the end of the year. Well, we surpassed this, delivering 110% in Q4, a full five percentage points ahead of our goal for the year. In fact, in Q4, we handled $21 billion in usage volume, bringing us to $75 billion for the entire year. In fact, that is more than the GDP of over half of the world's countries.

Finally, as we laid out in our go-to-market strategy this year, we said that systems integration partners would become an important driver for the business, and that's exactly what happened. In Q4, we marked a record quarter for partner-influenced bookings, growing over 20% year-over-year. These firms continue to build out Zuora practices and bring us into larger deals, helping us accelerate further into the enterprise space. We also grew the number of globally certified consultants with their SI partners over threefold year-over-year, and more than one-third of our customer go lives in the quarter involved a system integrator partner. All in, it has been a momentous year for Zuora, and it has us more excited than ever about the opportunity that lies ahead.

We see the subscription economy continuing to expand into new industries and across new business processes where we can expand our footprint. After a transformational year, we are now in a fantastic position. We've got what I believe is the best management team in the business, who along with our ZEOs, are executing on our plan, and we are accelerating. Now we have the capital and the partnership with Silver Lake to be able to lean in to the opportunity even further. I'll turn the call now to Todd to review our financials, but let me give a shout-out to all our ZEOs around the world and everything we've accomplished this year. We are now a very different company than how we started off. With that, I'll turn it over to you, Todd.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Thank you, Tien, and good afternoon, everybody. Our discussion today includes non-GAAP financial measures. You can find details in today's press release, which includes a reconciliation table of selected GAAP to non-GAAP measures that reflect the adjustments made to both our current and prior year results. As we close off a year of transformation at Zuora with strong results, I am proud of what we have accomplished, and I'm excited to have Silver Lake as our partner on the journey ahead. I'm happy to report that we finished the year by exceeding expectations for subscription revenue and beating guidance for non-GAAP operating loss. At the beginning of last year, we outlined our plan to increase our pace of innovation and accelerate our go-to-market efforts to better serve our customers.

Today, as we close off fiscal 2022, Q4 gives us yet another proof point that our strategy is working. This quarter, we closed several multi-product deals. We delivered strong growth in the enterprise space with great go-to-market execution and meaningful contribution from our SI partners. We reached a new quarterly record for overall bookings, and we're free cash flow positive for fiscal 2022. Let's review our top-line performance for the quarter. Total revenue was $90.7 million in the fourth quarter, up 14% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $77.3 million, up 19% year-over-year, driven by overall improvement in our go-to-market execution. Subscription revenue represents 85% of total revenue, the highest level since our IPO. Professional services revenue was $13.4 million, a decline of 6% year-over-year.

This is consistent with our strategy to drive more services work to our system integrator partners and supporting our plan to improve our mix towards more recurring subscription revenue. As a result of our success in driving professional services to our SI partners, non-GAAP blended gross margin was 66%, an improvement of 120 basis points year-over-year. Non-GAAP subscription margin was 80%, a 20 basis point improvement over the prior year. As a reminder, this includes the additional costs associated with our move to the public cloud. Non-GAAP professional services gross margin was negative 11%, driven by an intentional step-up in investments related to training our SI partners and the timing of projects due to year-end and holiday schedules. We have significantly increased partner certified consultants this past year, which has fueled contribution for partner sourced and influenced deals.

Looking ahead, our objective is to run the services at or near breakeven. Non-GAAP operating loss was $0.6 million in Q4, compared with an operating loss of $1.8 million in the prior year. This was driven by top-line growth and improved gross margins. This resulted in a non-GAAP operating margin of -1%, an improvement of 160 basis points from Q4 of last year. Our fully diluted share count at the end of the quarter was approximately 144 million shares using the treasury stock method. Moving on to some of the key metrics for the quarter. In Q4, we maintained our dollar-based retention rate of 110%, a strong improvement of 10 points year-over-year, and ahead of our 105% that we guided at last year.

At the end of Q4, customers that spent at or above $100,000in ACV reached 747 customers, an increase of 27 customers sequentially. This continues to represent 94% of our business. Large enterprises continue to gravitate towards Zuora for our expertise and product portfolio. We closed eight deals with ACV of $500,000 or above, flat year-over-year. Four of those deals had ACV greater than $1 million versus two a year ago. This is a testament to our strong go-to-market motion and success with our system integrator partners. The large multi-year new business activity also is evident in our total remaining performance obligations or RPO, which grew 30% year-over-year. Turning to billing transaction volume, our systems processed $21 billion of volume in the quarter, representing 25% growth year-over-year.

Processed billing transaction volume is not indicative of our revenue growth rate because our customers gain efficiencies as they scale. Now, looking at ARR growth and free cash flow. In Q4, our ARR growth grew to 20% year-over-year, 3 points ahead of our 17% ARR growth objective for this fiscal year that we announced at our Investor Day last year. This was driven by another strong quarter of upsells and record new business. We continue to focus on our objective to reach 25%-30% in ARR growth by fiscal 2025. I'm happy to report that free cash flow was $7.6 million for the quarter, allowing us to reach our goal to be free cash flow positive for the entire year. We continue to invest in the business to foster sustainable growth while tracking our progress towards a Rule of 40.

Total CapEx for the quarter was $2.7 million. We assess our real estate needs, considering what the future of work is going to look like and our location strategy, we made the determination to reduce our Bay Area footprint by over 60%. As a result, we incurred a non-cash impairment charge of $12.8 million. The space reduction will allow us to further reinvest in R&D and go-to-market initiatives, which generate more leverage and growth. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $215 million in cash and cash equivalents, an increase of $12 million over the prior quarter. Fiscal 2022 was a transformational year for Zuora.

As we close off the year, I want to acknowledge the amazing work of our ZEOs, who made these results possible by keeping laser focused on our strategy. Now, let's turn to our financial outlook. As noted on prior calls, we continue to accelerate our investments in go-to-market and product development initiatives. Turning to guidance for Q1 and fiscal 2023. As a reminder, our first quarter ending April 30 has 3 fewer days compared to the prior quarter. Our free cash flow and EPS guidance does not include the impact from the Silver Lake investment. We will update the free cash flow and EPS guidance after the Silver Lake investment closes.

For Q1, we currently expect total revenue of $91 million-$93 million, subscription revenue of $77 million-$78 million, non-GAAP operating loss of $1 million to break even, non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.02-$0.01 per share, assuming a weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 128.8 million. We expect to be free cash flow positive in Q1. For the full year, we're raising our outlook. We currently expect total revenue of $402 million-$406 million, subscription revenue of $338 million-$340 million, non-GAAP operating loss of $2 million to break even, non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.07-$0.03 per share, assuming a weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 132.8 million.

For the full year, we expect ARR growth of 21% or higher, a dollar-based retention rate of 112% or higher, and we expect to generate free cash flow in the range of $14 million-$17 million. To close off, we are extremely excited about Zuora's future, our partnership with Silver Lake, and what fiscal 2023 will bring. With that, team, Robbie, and I are happy to take your questions, and we'll turn it over to the operator.

Operator (participant)

At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Andrew DeGasperi with Berenberg. Your line is open.

Ally Yaseen (Equity Research Associate)

Hi, this is Ally on for Andrew. Thanks so much for taking our question. I took a look at your Subscription Economy Index report, which you mentioned earlier, and that definitely shows some positive data about subscriptions in 2022 and 2021, and continued momentum amid pandemic recovery. Would you be able to elaborate on how that contributes to the way that you think about your growth targets moving forward? Also, how does that impact how you think about your TAM and overall market growth?

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

This is Tien here. Thanks for that question. You know, we're pretty excited. This is a report, as you know, that we publish twice a year, and then we've been doing it for five or six years in a row. The exciting thing is, if you look at over the last decade, subscription businesses as represented by what we see through our system grew at over a 4.6x rate than just traditional businesses. It really, really speaks to this is where the growth of the economy is. This is where companies are going. This is where the puck is going, if you will. It tells us that we have a really long runway. It also tells us, and it's informed our go-to-market strategy. We believe that the exciting part of this marketplace isn't large companies, both incumbents and disruptors.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

We think that every day, every quarter, every month we look, there's another company in another industry that's shifting to the subscription economy. If you look at what we've done over the last year in terms of building a go-to-market organization, building an innovation machine that really satisfies and helps the best companies in the world win in the subscription economy, this is exactly what we've done. We feel good about our long-term trajectory, and we also feel good about the numbers that Todd laid out for this upcoming year.

Ally Yaseen (Equity Research Associate)

That's great. Thanks a lot.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Joseph Vafi (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. Terrific end to the year here, and it's nice to see growing momentum in the business. Maybe we could just drill down a little bit in the thought process on the Silver Lake investment. I mean, clearly a premier investment shop and they're probably seeing some attractive aspects to your business. But you know, what do you think you're gonna do with some of those funds? You know, is it gonna be more on M&A or kinda more pedal to the metal on perhaps internal initiatives? And then just kinda the thought process in general about taking the investment in the first place and then all the follow-up.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

Yeah, this is Tien here. Thank you for the question. I'm incredibly excited. I mean, this is, you know, the preeminent technology investment firm, and they invented the whole concept of technology investing. I think they were the only or the first firm that just solely invested in technology companies, you know, back in the nineties. You know, you see their name associated with Airbnb, with Dell, with Unity, with VMware, with Twitter. Here's a company that I would say, you know, believed in the subscription economy. You know, these days everybody's seen it, but they certainly bigly believe in the subscription economy. They liked what they saw. They liked the leadership position that we had. They did their due diligence, they looked underneath the hood, and they're excited about our path ahead.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

We're really excited about having their network, their expertise in their capital, if you will, on our side, really to help us lean into the opportunity ahead. You know, as you can imagine, M&A or acquisitions will certainly be a big focus of ours. You know, we doubled our engineering team this last year. We're innovating at a faster pace than ever. But I would say when I talk to our customers, they have an insatiable appetite for more, right? More technologies, more solutions to help them build great subscriber experiences, to help them build new business models, monetize their digital offerings. We're excited about having Silver Lake on our side to really meet this growing demand.

Joseph Vafi (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

That's great, team. I mean, it sounds like you had a great bookings quarter again this quarter, and I know you're more focused on the enterprise, and you had some large deals. How would you characterize the kind of breakdown of enterprise versus, you know, maybe pure subscription players, in the quarter in terms of new logos?

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

We see pretty healthy distribution. I'd say if you look at what we do, it's technology companies, it's media companies, it's manufacturing companies, emerging verticals. I would say within the technology space, we continue to power disruptors. I think we talked about Gusto being one of the companies that we sign on. If you look at, you know, the SaaS companies that have gone public over the last two, three, four years, we power just so many of them, and that continues to be an important part of our business. Look, I think more and more, if you think about the phrase that I think Marc Andreessen used, "Software eats the world," every company is becoming a technology company. I think what we're seeing is a parallel path where call it software as a service, the business model is eating the world.

Every company is waking up to become a Subscription Economy company. Maybe, Robbie, what would you say you saw in the quarter?

Robbie Traube (President and CRO)

I mean, team, I think in terms of what we're seeing, you know, looking in the quarter, the technology we have is totally differentiated in the way that the customers need it and the way they get value out of it. Look, the market, as we can see, is really attractive, it's growing. We've got still the same thing, the CRM players, you've got the ERP players, and you've got the sort of more best-of-breed smaller companies below that. I think what we're seeing is that they're just not enterprise ready, right? If we go into CRM, they can't handle the complexity and the scale. You know, and I, you know, I've said it before, team, the fact of the matter is, you know, to buy cheap, buy twice, and that essence of it, I think it's something that we've really seen.

We're replacing competitors, and especially in Q4, definitely the top end, we've seen replacement where they could not scale, they could not meet the complexity. Also the bottom end, same reason, scale in particular. We had good Q4, and that's what we're seeing as we go enterprise overall.

Joseph Vafi (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

That's great color, Robbie. Thanks. Maybe just one for Todd. I know your gross margin was up a bit year over year despite the kinda move to the public cloud. You know, it'd be kinda interesting to drill down in that additional public cloud cost a bit, and perhaps kinda get more to, you know, what, you know, what that investment means in public cloud and, you know, what perhaps a more apples to apples gross margin expansion might have been. Maybe I'll just have one more follow-up.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Okay. Hey, thanks, Joe. On the cost of goods sold for the subscription business, for the entire migration during the year, we ended up spending about $3 million, and almost half of that was in the fourth quarter. Next year, we kind of expect the overall margins to hold relatively constant. We've still got some other areas that Sri is gonna invest in to give us greater efficiencies over time. I would kind of expect to stay flat year-over-year, but then as we kinda go out between our 2025 guidance, we see ourselves going up, you know, maybe 100 basis points a year. As we also talked about, we would expect the overall services margins to be closer to break even next year.

That will give us a little bit of margin acceleration at the gross margin level for fiscal 2023.

Joseph Vafi (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

That's great. Then just one more. I know you mentioned that you're gonna reduce your Bay Area real estate footprint by 60%. I just assume a lot of your team is gonna work virtual and, you know, how are you feeling about that transition? Ultimately, you know, what would that potentially mean in terms of, you know, reduced real estate costs? Thanks a lot, guys.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

I think the primary place where we've really looked at where we were out of whack with where people were was in the Bay Area. The second thing that I would say is, you know, I think what we're seeing is, you know, what we're really talking about is we're giving people the ability to be flexible. What we're seeing is people are coming into the office for specific things, and that's usually to collaborate. If you're gonna be in a Zoom meeting all day, there's no sense in coming and sitting in the office and, you know, going to traffic an hour each way to commute. Hey, do that at home. For example, like my team, we're putting earnings together. Everybody's been here for the last couple of days. The engineering teams, when they've got certain things going on.

The sales teams here, you know, during their QBRs, during closes, during certain things they're collaborating on. I think we're seeing more and more of that. I think the last thing I would say is we've been very thoughtful this year and as we move forward about what does our location strategy look like. I think you're gonna see us a little bit more distributed. Sri's done a really good job as we've increased our engineering capacity, doing that in more cost-effective countries. You'll see us moving some of those roles or adding those roles, not moving, but adding those roles in places where we can get a better return on our investment.

Joseph Vafi (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for that color. Great job, guys. Thank you.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Thanks, Joe.

Robbie Traube (President and CRO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Luv Sodha (SVP and Equity Analyst)

Hey, Tien, Todd and Robbie. This is Luv Sodha on for Brent Thill. Thank you again for taking my questions. Maybe first one for Tien and Robbie. Could you maybe comment on the overall demand environment? We've heard, you know, some commentary about the pull forward in demand within software. Are you seeing any of that? What's the appetite like among your customers for continuing to, you know, buy software?

Robbie Traube (President and CRO)

Yeah, maybe I can take that. The only thing is we had, as you can see, a really great Q4. It was as we predicted, as we had looked at the business as a whole, really good spread across our focal areas. I'm not seeing it in any way as a pull forward. This is as we expected to do, and when I look overall at pipeline, and I look at that aspect, we feel very good about where we are and also how we executed in Q4.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

I mean, the only other thing I'd add, Luv, is, you know, we're continuing to see building of the pipeline. When Robbie's talked about, you know, inbound demand from like RFPs, RFIs, that's also remained strong.

Robbie Traube (President and CRO)

Yeah.

Luv Sodha (SVP and Equity Analyst)

Got it. One quick follow-up for Todd, if I may. You know, dollar-based net retention maintained at 110%. How do you think about the pathway to 112% or higher over the course of the next year? Any comments on churn?

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Maybe I'll start with your last question. You know, we feel really good about our customer retention. Matter of fact, our churn levels, as we've talked about over the last year, have really been kind of hovering around their all-time lows. We credit a lot of that to the infrastructure and investment that Robbie has put in place over the last quarters. The customer success team, I think, has had a tremendous impact on helping us there, along with some of the improvements in product. We feel really good about that standpoint. I would tell you is, you know, we feel good about being able to increase, the dollar-based retention to that 112% plus, DBRR that we talked about.

What I would say is, going back to Analyst Day, you know, we saw a $450 million opportunity for cross-sell and up-sell. If anything, as we've added new products and added new logos this year, we're seeing that expand. We're seeing a very balanced add again. You know, I think this is maybe the third quarter in a row where we continue to see nice growth in usage. But just as important, it's very balanced with also getting really good take-up of the new products. I've talked about this in the past, it's kind of like the three legs of the stool. We're retaining our customers, we're selling them new product, and got more usage going through the platform, and all of those things are helping us drive dollar-based retention.

Luv Sodha (SVP and Equity Analyst)

Got it. Perfect. Thank you.

Robbie Traube (President and CRO)

Thanks, Luv.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Chad Bennett with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.

Chad Bennett (SVP and Software Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking my question. A couple for me just drilling down on the last question on net expansion. I just maybe even qualitatively, Todd. You know, I think kind of we're in a period where you know that pricing and volume would potentially be a tailwind for us going forward relative to how we changed how we sold and all that stuff and got over the hump on the deals that were a headwind. Was that the case this quarter in terms of pricing and volume uplift on renewals? How did that play out relative to your expectations?

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

I think to your point, you know, as we've seen during this last year, we didn't have some of the situation where customers had purchased more volume than needed. That certainly helped us from a standpoint as what we're seeing the consistency of add-ons. Again, super balanced between volume, and you've seen the volume on the platform through 25% of the transactions that went through. We're seeing nice volume there. You know, that's continuing to give us a nice lift on the up-sell and again, the new product take-up.

Chad Bennett (SVP and Software Research Analyst)

Okay. Just on the net expansion, you know, the 110%, which clearly was above what you were targeting heading into the year. I mean, you effectively lopped off, you know, a bad quarter, right, a year ago and on a trailing basis, and I assumed you replaced it with a good quarter. I mean, is there anything we're missing on the net expansion side that, you know, would, you know, why net expansion wouldn't have maybe even improved from last quarter?

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

No, I think the thing you probably need to keep in mind, if you go back to our Q4 last year, it was the first quarter where we really started to reaccelerate. Our Q4 at that time was the biggest quarter we'd ever had for upsells, and still was a fantastic quarter when we look back at it historically. It's a really tough compare. That, you know, 110% growth or that 110% expansion is leveraging off a really strong Q4 a year ago.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

Good. Fair point.

Robbie Traube (President and CRO)

This is...

Chad Bennett (SVP and Software Research Analyst)

Go ahead.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

Yeah. I think just to, you know, we've taken the net dollar retention from a low point to 110%. You know, every quarter might be a little bumpy, but we're committed to continue to rise that, right, based on what Todd signaled for the upcoming year.

Chad Bennett (SVP and Software Research Analyst)

Okay. Maybe last one on the guidance, Todd. Subscription guidance, you know, effectively, if we look at, you know, kind of the midpoint, I guess. You know, from a growth rate standpoint, I think you did, you know, 18%, close to 19% this year subscription growth the year that just ended. I think the midpoint we're kinda at the same kinda level of growth. I do recall that you had some upfront things that hit subscription last year. Just kinda, you know, kinda how we should think about that and maybe the impact of those one-time upfront deals in the quantification, if you could.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Yeah. Thanks, Chad. When I think about last year, I'd say a couple things. First of all, one of the things we really wanted to do was get people focused on the ARR growth. It's the best forward-looking metric in the subscription business. That's one of the things that we always talk to our customers about. You know, the bookings happen now, and it takes, you know, two, three, four quarters until that starts showing up on the subscription revenue line. We feel really good. We exited 20% growth. You did mention, and you know, rightfully so, as we look through the year, we talked about the migration that we've had of customers moving off of our on-prem product into Zuora's on-cloud revenue offering.

When we've done that, we've benefited from some one-time benefits as they've, you know, done their final renewal on their term license. Those are some benefits that we won't get. That's maybe a 1.5-point or so of impact that is headwinds year-over-year. The other thing I would keep in mind is we probably got a little, maybe a 1.25-point of headwinds of currency as we move into the year. Overall, we feel really good about exiting the year, you know, at that 21%+ ARR growth.

Chad Bennett (SVP and Software Research Analyst)

Got it. Thanks much.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Joshua Reilly with Needham. Your line is open.

Joshua Reilly (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the Silver Lake investment. I'm curious, how did the investment and relationship come about? You mentioned potential acquisitions. Can you give us any color on whether that could be like a single larger transformational deal, or should we expect potentially a series of smaller deals over a longer period of time?

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Hey, Josh, it's Todd. Maybe I'll start with that, and if Tien wants to add any color, he can jump in. I think the relationship really came about. Tien and I have been talking about for quite some time as our growth started accelerating, what did our balance sheet need to look like? What did we need to do to really help accelerate the growth? We talked about the strength that you're seeing in the subscription economy. One of the things that we felt really strong about is, you know, we wanted to strengthen the balance sheet. As we started looking at different options, you know, we were introduced to the folks at Silver Lake, and we spent some time with them, and we really liked them.

When we took a look at their industry knowledge, the capacity that they have to assist us, whether it be in M&A or analysis or product strategy, and their partner ecosystem that they opened up, it really became compelling. As we started talking about, you know, what the balance sheet needed to look like, one of the things that they offered us that was really compelling was, you know, the ability to get $400 million, but to take that down in tranches. The first tranche we take down at $250 million, and then we can take down the next $150 million over 18 months. That certainly gives us a lot of flexibility. We feel really good about the relationship.

We feel like Silver Lake is gonna be a great partner and really be able to help us accelerate our growth rates to get to those 25%-30% rates. From a standpoint of M&A, I think, you know, Tien mentioned it earlier. Our customers just are having an insatiable demand. There's lots of areas that are adjacent to us. I think, you know, at this point, I'm not wanting to kinda go through what we're looking at, but I think we see a lot of opportunities, and especially having a really strong balance sheet in this volatile period, we think will turn out to be very helpful to us as we look to go through M&A.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll just add to that. I mean, that's absolutely right. I mean, we obviously have a roadmap that we're excited about. Look, I think the big picture is this. I think the big picture is our business is going really, really well. We have what, you know, in my biased view is the best management team in the industry, we've got the best product, and we've got a customer base that I would say many other companies are envious of, and they view us really as a strategic partner. They're hungry for us because of our expertise, because of our innovation, because of our leadership to give them more. Our roadmap is really based on, you know, close dialogue with our customers.

We think there's a lot of white space in what they need in order to build fantastic subscriber experiences and monetize business models. You know, we don't have anything to say right now about size of transactions or anything else, right? We're gonna be led by our customers, with our new partner, Silver Lake, by our side.

Joshua Reilly (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Then, just to follow up on that, are there priorities for investment beyond acquisitions that could be used with the funds from the convert? Could that ultimately lead to accelerating growth investments here that are not currently factored into guidance? When you adjust after the deal closes, could that make an adjustment beyond interest expense?

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

No. At this particular point, we feel really good about the operating margin. I think on the bottom line, we expect there to be $10 million-$10.5 million of interest and amortization, and then we're still finalizing the accounting on what the warrants will look like. Once the transaction closes, we'll give you the final guidance on the bottom line. That's what I would expect the only changes to be.

Joshua Reilly (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. That's super helpful. Thanks, guys.

Todd McElhatton (CFO)

Thanks, Josh.

Operator (participant)

There are no further questions. I'll turn the call back to CEO Tien Tzuo for closing remarks.

Tien Tzuo (Founder and CEO)

Well, thank you. Thank you today for joining us. I would like to say a big, big thank you to all our ZEOs across the globe as we close the chapter on a fantastic FY 2022 and look ahead towards a strong FY 2023. Our people are ultimately what makes Zuora an incredible place to be, and I am proud of what we've accomplished together, not just in Q4, but the entire fiscal year. I really like the position we're in, and fiscal 2023 is shaping up to be another exciting year. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.