Gartner Inc (IT) — Q2 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for Gartner's second quarter 2020 earnings call, and hope you are well. Joining me today on the call are Gene Hall, Chief Executive Officer; and Craig Safian, Chief Financial Officer. The call will include a discussion of second quarter 2020 financial results and our updated outlook for 2020 as disclosed in today's earnings release. In addition to today's earnings release, we have provided a detailed review of our financials and business metrics and an earnings supplement for investors and analysts. We have posted the press release and the earnings supplement on our website, investor.gartner.com. Following comments by Gene and Craig, we will open up the call for your questions. We ask that you limit your questions to one and a follow-up. On the call, unless stated otherwise, all references to EBITDA are for adjusted EBITDA, with the adjustments as described in our earnings release. All growth rates in Gene's comments are FX neutral unless stated otherwise. Reconciliations for all non-GAAP numbers we use are available in the Investor Relations section of the gartner.com website. Finally, all contract values and associated growth rates we discuss are based on 2020 foreign exchange rates unless stated otherwise. As set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, certain statements made on this call may constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can vary materially from actual results and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those contained in the company's 2019 annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q as well as in other filings with the SEC. We encourage all of you to review the risk factors listed in these documents. Now, I will turn the call over to Gartner's Chief Executive Officer, Gene Hall.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. The COVID-19 pandemic will have a permanent and dramatic impact on business, leadership, and society. Leaders face more simultaneous challenges than ever before – health and safety risks, sustained macroeconomic dislocations, shifting customer expectations, regulatory changes, combating racism and strengthening social justice, cybersecurity risks, and more. Gartner is the best source of the timely and relevant insights, advice, and tools that empower leaders across every major enterprise function to achieve success with their mission-critical priorities. With our forward-looking research and our ability to be agile in supporting our clients through ongoing uncertainty, demand for analyst interactions is up almost 30% year-over-year. Clients and non-clients alike continue to leverage our Coronavirus Resource Center as we plan for the reset. With the challenging macroeconomic conditions, we're seeing an uptick in leaders accessing our cost optimization content. And with the ongoing fight for social justice, we're seeing significant engagement with our diversity, equity, and inclusion resource center. This resource center aggregates much of our broadly relevant HR insights on diversity, inclusion, and engagement, along with critical tools and webinars and makes them publicly accessible. We recently reinforced our own commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social equity. Consistent with our research advice to clients, we increased the level of programming engagement of our employee resource groups – women, pride, mosaic, and veterans at Gartner. We reinstated our charity match program to empower our associates to have even greater impact through the organizations they choose. We established a cross-functional executive council on diversity and inclusion and we published our corporate social responsibility report outlining actions we've taken to improve our operations and support our clients. Gartner remains strong as we continue navigating global uncertainties. Our second quarter results reflect our unique value proposition across all major functions of the enterprise. I'll share a few highlights and Craig will give you the full details in a moment. For the second quarter of 2020, total revenues were down 8% year-over-year. However, excluding the impact of our Conferences business, revenues were up 6% year-over-year, and we drew improvements in EBITDA and free cash flow was up 71%. We continue to calibrate our cost reduction programs. We strategically paused spending in March to protect profitability and conserve cash. We've restored some of the spend in targeted areas. We remain committed to full-year margins of at least 16.1%. Research, our largest and most profitable segment, is the core of our value proposition. We continue to make a significant global impact through our Research business. Total Research revenues were up 8% over this time last year. And while the selling front remains challenging, we did see modestly better trends in June than in the first two months of the quarter. Global technology sales, or GTS, serves leaders and their teams within IT. GTS represents more than 80% of our total Research contract value. Global business sales, or GPS, serves leaders and their teams beyond IT, including HR, finance, legal, sales, supply chain, marketing, and more. GBS represents about 20% of our total Research contract value. In the second quarter of 2020, both GTS and GBS drove similar contract value growth performances of around 7%. In GTS, we saw strong performances across many regions and sectors, including countries in Asia, Latin America, and Europe and industries including retail, services, and technology. In GBS, year-over-year contract value was up across every practice area except marketing. As I mentioned last quarter, our Conferences segment was significantly impacted by COVID-19. Because of government mandates and health concerns, we were unable to hold any destination conferences during Q2. To prioritize the health and safety of our attendees, partners, and associates, we have decided to cancel our in-person conferences for the remainder of 2020 and pivot a subset of these conferences to a virtual format. Gartner Virtual Conferences will provide attendees a flexible way to gain unparalleled insights and advice and accelerate their learning without the need to travel. We'll monetize these conferences as we perfect the virtual format. Looking to the long term, we expect the future to be a combination of in-person and virtual conferences. We continue to expect Conferences will be an important contributor to our overall business. Gartner Consulting is an extension of Gartner Research and provides clients with a deeper level of involvement through extended project-based work to help them execute their most strategic initiatives. Consulting revenues were down year-over-year in Q2, but we had strong results in contract optimization. In summary, we continue to have a strong value proposition across all major enterprise functions. Our clients are facing more disruptive change than ever before. And Gartner is the best source for the cost-effective, relevant insights that will empower leaders to succeed amid ongoing uncertainty. We continue to have a vast untapped market opportunity. We know the right things to do to capture that opportunity in thriving or uncertain times. Looking ahead, we expect to come out of this recession strong and well positioned to drive long-term, sustained, double-digit growth in revenues, earnings, and free cash flow for years to come. With that, I'll hand the call over to our CFO, Craig Safian.

Thank you, Gene. And good morning, everyone. I hope everyone remains safe and well. Second quarter results were ahead of our expectations due to a modestly better demand environment and strong cost management execution. We had a successful bond offering during the quarter which allowed us to reduce maturity risk without increasing our annual cash interest costs this year. As we've gotten more clarity on the economy and gauged our business performance over the past several months, we've resumed backfilling roles and making selective growth hires. While we continue to manage our costs carefully, we remain focused on positioning ourselves to rebound strongly when the economy recovers. Second quarter revenue was $973 million, down 9% as reported and down 8% FX neutral. Excluding Conferences, our revenues were up 6% year-over-year FX neutral. In addition, contribution margin was 67%, up more than 300 basis points versus the prior year. EBITDA was $192 million, up 4% year-over-year and up 6% FX neutral. Adjusted EPS was $1.20 cents and free cash flow in the quarter was a very strong $322 million. Research revenue in the second quarter grew 6% year-over-year on a reported basis and 8% on an FX neutral basis. Second quarter research contribution margin was 72%, benefiting in part from the temporary cost avoidance initiatives we put in place last quarter. As the macro environment improves, we will take a balanced approach to resuming growth spending and incenting our associates who are the core of our business. Total contract value was $3.4 billion at June 30, representing FX neutral growth of 7% versus the prior year. Global technology sales contract value at the end of the second quarter was $2.8 billion, up 7% versus the prior year. The more challenging selling environment that began in March continued in the second quarter and had an impact on most of our reported metrics. Client retention for GTS was 80%, down about 260 basis points year-over-year, while retention for GBS was 100% for the quarter, down about 470 basis points year-over-year. GTS new business declined 14% versus last year. We ended the second quarter with 12,381 GTS enterprises, down slightly from last year. The average contract value per enterprise continues to grow. It now stands at $223,000 per enterprise in GTS, up 10% year-over-year. Growth in contract value per enterprise reflects the combination of upsell, increased number of subscriptions, and price. At the end of the second quarter, we had 3,089 quota-bearing associates in GTS or a decline of 4% year-over-year. We expect to end 2020 with more than 3,100 quota-bearing associates, a slight decline from the end of 2019. We entered this year with a large bench which we have now fully deployed. For GTS, the year-over-year net contract value increase, or NCVI, divided by the beginning period quota-bearing headcount was $58,000 per salesperson, down 48% versus the second quarter of last year. Despite the challenging macro environment, GTS contract value grew in nearly all of our 10 largest countries and was up double digits in Brazil, Japan, France, and the Netherlands. Contract value grew across all sectors except for transportation, which was down modestly. The smallest enterprises we serve saw double-digit contract value growth through the strong efforts of our mid-sized enterprise sales teams. Across our entire GTS sales team, we sold significant amounts of new business in the quarter, to both existing and new clients. New logos continued to be a significant contributor to our contract value growth. Finally, despite some net churn in clients, we continue to see increased spending by retained clients on average. This speaks to the compelling client value proposition we offer in both strong and challenging economic environments. Global business sales contract value was $643 million at the end of the second quarter. That's about 20% of our total contract value. Contract value growth was 7% year-over-year as reported and 6% on an organic basis. Contract value growth in the quarter was led by supply chain and the human resources practice. All practices positively contributed to the 7% contract value growth rate for GBS, with the exception of marketing. Our consulting business saw lower growth during the second quarter, generating revenues of $97 million. Labor base revenues were $69 million, down 13% versus Q2 of last year or 12% on an FX neutral basis. Labor base billable headcount of 796 was up 3%. Utilization was 59%. Backlog at June 30 was $99 million, down 10% year-over-year on an FX neutral basis. As we've detailed in the past, this part of the consulting segment is highly variable and we face continuing tough compares as we move through the year.

I guess the short version of the question is to quantify modestly better results. Contract value looks pretty good to me. The commentary sounds positive, lots of pockets of good growth. So, just any help kind of reconciling that language with a fairly modest increase to the full-year revenue guidance at a point in the year where I would think it's early enough in the year where you'd see the benefits? So, would love any quantification on what modestly better in June means and any other considerations that could be a headwind other than just the generally uncertain environments and the point-in-time revenue decline.

Hey, Jeff. It's Gene. So, we can't really quantify the difference, but what I'll tell you is, if we look at kind of the performance during the quarter, June was definitely a trend. It was a better selling environment than the previous couple of months. And so, that's kind of what we said in our remarks. And I think we can't quantify it any more than that.

Absolutely. The way I think about it is obviously we have the experience from March and April, which we talked about in the last earnings call. You saw the Q2 experience. And so, what I'd say overall is, from a new business perspective, I think we were modestly better than what we experienced in March and April. When we talked about new business being down in the 20-ish range year-over-year; as you saw, GTS was down 14%, and GBS was down 8%. So, new business definitely outperformed our expectations from that perspective. Retention was a little more challenging than we had seen in March and April. And so, again, we've sort of dialed those two new updates through our exploration skew and normal trending of bookings and new business for the balance of the year. The one thing I would add, though, is that – I think I made this comment in the prepared remarks – there's certainly more risk on the non-subscription pieces of the research business. Obviously, we've got great forward visibility on the subscription run out and feel really good about those numbers. But because of the macro environment, there's definitely more uncertainty on the non-subscription pieces.

And then last, just GBS, if you'll permit a favorable question about GBS, it's been a while. I guess I was surprised at how resilient it's been and how little it decelerated year-over-year. And I know you've been saying forever that it's a bigger opportunity than GTS. But I was thinking there's less cost optimization research in the library, less tenured staff, the marketing challenges you're working through. So, I don't know if you were equally surprised by that, but would love any additional color on I guess the relative GBS performance.

Basically, we've been saying for a long time, as you mentioned, that the value proposition in GBS is really the same value proposition in GTS, meaning that we identify clients' mission-critical priorities and we help them with those mission-critical priorities. And every function has priorities that are just as important. They're different by function. Again, you're not worried about cybersecurity in HR, but you may be worried about building a more effective diversity and inclusion program. And it's just as important to the HR leaders. And so, our research is focused on what are the mission-critical priorities that these leaders are going to face and helping them to address those mission-critical priorities in the best and most cost-effective way you can. That's been kind of what we've been saying all along. And I guess you kind of see it there in terms of what's going on with GBS.

Craig, you beat the 2Q EBITDA guide by $30 million and raised the full year by the $10 million FX benefit. And I know you sort of look at things on a full-year basis and maybe spending was just a little bit lighter than you thought in 2Q. Is that the reason for why the full-year guide wasn't raised by the $30 million? And I guess just in conjunction with that, the ramp down in margin guidance in the second half of the year seems like a lot. So, just help us understand the big ramp down in margins in the second half.

The way to sort of read the phasing and what's been going on, obviously, in March and April, when we really didn't know how bad or how deep or how broad the macro impact was going to be from the pandemic, we very quickly put the brakes on lots of spending across the board. And it was the right thing to do. We had to make sure that we were taking a balanced approach to the balance of year, that we were maintaining liquidity, maintaining flexibility, all of that stuff. And so, you really saw that start to flow through primarily in Q2. And some of the Q2 performance or overperformance was driven by revenue being modestly better than expected. And a lot of it was driven by us avoiding more costs than we had initially dialed in. Where we sit today is trying to find that balance between making sure that we're delivering on our financial commitments and delivering on our EBITDA and other targets, but also making sure that we are investing in the business and restoring expenses that we think are extraordinarily important for us to get through this year and, more importantly, serve as sort of a jumping-off point when there is a recovery.

Craig, maybe I'll follow up on that last point. So, can you just – Craig and Gene both, I guess, I should say. Can you help us think about what determines when you bring the cost back on? Is it really demand-driven and seeing the near-term opportunity for that? And I ask from this perspective. It's commendable given the margin performance of the last few years to maintain the margin target for this year. But I think one might argue, given that a lot of investors are looking at this as sort of a throwaway year, that if there are opportunities to bring them back this year, even if you were to have margins below that target, but that improved the pace of recovery into next year that that might be a wise decision. So, just how are you thinking about what's the factor that determines when you bring the investment back in business? Thank you.

If you think about the way that we have – Craig described this a bit earlier, which is, we didn't know how bad or how deep the downturn was going to be. So, we put on a pretty hard hiring freeze, very, very selective hiring, everything else frozen, that included research analysts, that included salespeople, product development, etc. And so, as we've seen kind of how our performance is and how the market is, we want to make sure we maintain, to your point, the right number of analysts, the right sales capacity, the ability to develop and introduce new products, etc. So, we're basically bringing back that capacity, so that we're very well positioned, especially beginning in 2021 to re-accelerate growth. There are some expenses that we don't need to bring back, and that will be like travel expenses. Today, we're lucky, in that as an information services company, we can work with our clients – we're doing very, very well working with our clients remotely. And so, our travel expenses have dropped dramatically this year. That doesn't hurt our future growth or anything like that. It sort of goes with the environment. And so, for the things that really affect future growth, like research, sales, product development, that's the places that we are making sure we have the investments in place. And that's reflected in the forecast. For the things that kind of go with the environment like travel or the reductions in our Conferences business, that's the other category.

And Gary, I guess the one thing I'd add is, I think we can do both, which is manage for profitability and great free cash flow performance now, and also make sure that we're making those targeted spend, so that when there is a recovery, as Gene and I both mentioned, we're ready to rebound very quickly with it. So, it's not an either/or for us, we think, in this environment. We can do both.

Your GTS sales force account has declined 3.7%. And your GBS sales force account declined 9.2%. Can you provide more detail around your outlook for sales force hiring between these two segments and where you see headcount growth coming back faster?

Let me cover the numbers and then Gene can talk about the strategy and how we're thinking about headcount growth. So, a couple points, and I'll cover first GTS and then GBS. So, with GTS, as you mentioned, headcount growth is down about 4% year-over-year. Our intention for the balance of the year is to get that number back up well over 3,100 frontline quota-bearing people. So, we expect to exit the year over 3,100 people, which would put us down a little bit on a year-over-year basis. And part of the reason why it's not up necessarily or I would say optically is down is we actually exited 2019 with a pretty significant bench. So, people on our payroll who were either in training or had just graduated from training, who weren't yet in territory, and over the first six months of the year, the team did a really good job of making sure we got all those people deployed. And so, our selling capacity is actually in pretty good shape because we've now deployed that bench and have them out there on the frontline selling. And so, we'd expect our year-over-year headcount growth to be down modestly, our year-over-year, as we exit 2020. But from a selling capacity perspective, we feel in pretty good shape. From a GBS perspective, we hit the brakes there hard. We did a lot of work around territory optimization, and we also froze hiring there when we were doing our cost avoidance and cost reduction programs. Our expectation is to get back to about flat for the full year for GBS. And so, while down 9% year-over-year now, we would expect to end 2020 in roughly where we ended 2019, which was – we ended 2019 with 869. So, think in that neighborhood is our target for where we want to end from GBS headcount perspective.

So, it's clearly a work in progress. But we've done some pilots, as we've mentioned before. Those went very well in terms of understanding how clients feel about it. And what we found is that attendees still want to go to conferences. And in this environment, virtual, they're very happy to go to. And so, we think we can get really good attendance at conferences. With exhibitors, one of their best sources of clients is conferences. So, they're very interested in working with us to find ways that work for them as well as the attendees. And I feel very good that we will find some of those things as we experiment throughout the remaining months of the year. Looking to the future, actually, this whole move to virtual will be good for us because we're kind of seeing that, in the future, there's probably going to be a mix of both in-person and virtual conferences, and we'll develop those virtual conference skills during this period.

So, you've mentioned a couple of times the spending to position for a recovery. I wanted to ask, functionally, from a planning standpoint, what's the timing you're assuming for recovery? Are we thinking third quarter 2021?

I'll start and then Gene can follow up. So, we're not pegging any sort of timing for recovery as it stands right now. We're obviously watching the markets and watching everything going on just like you and everyone else on this call is doing. And so, there's no pinpointed time for recovery that we're planning around. I think what we want to make sure we do is, number one, continue to deliver great value to our clients who do really need us. And so, we don't want to do anything that degrades our ability to do that now. At the same time, we also don't want to make short-term decisions around reducing expenses that impinge upon our ability to actually rebound when there is a recovery. And so, again, what we're talking about now is not specifically when we pivot and when there is a rebound, but really about making sure that we have ample capacity from a selling perspective, from a servicing perspective, from a research analyst perspective, etc., so that when there is a rebound, we are poised to take advantage of it.

And then, the 6% to 7% growth that you're seeing in Research on a combined basis, GTS and GBS for contract value, is that a good way to think about the type of contract value growth that we can continue to see in this type of an environment until we see the recovery?

As we talked about a little bit earlier, we do expect, based on the running out or extrapolating the math that we have seen in the second quarter that contract value will continue to decelerate. As we talked about last quarter, based on everything we see today, we don't think it will be anywhere near what we experienced in the last great recession, back a little over a decade ago. But with these sort of trends, we will continue to see, until there is stabilization or recovery, some glide down on the contract value growth. As we talked about, the contract value is holding up really, really nicely, both on the GTS and GBS side, both being around 7% for the quarter, but we would expect some continued modest degradation in those contract value growth rates if current trends continue.

I was hoping just to follow up quickly on the Conferences questioning a bit earlier, specifically as it relates to virtual versus in-person conferences. Is there anything you can say about how you're thinking about profitability differences between those two types and whether or not, in 2021 or 2022, to the extent that you get to a situation where you're holding more hybrid type conferences, if those could potentially be as profitable or even more profitable than what you've historically done in the years prior?

Andrew, as I said, we're kind of at the early stage with virtual conferences. The pilots have been successful, in the sense that we know that clients will come to them, we know clients – and the same kind of numbers are larger even than with in-person conferences because you don't have to travel. And we know clients rate them very highly. And we know they're less expensive to hold than destination conferences. In terms of the whole financial equation, we're still figuring that out. And so, I think it would be premature to kind of say we've got that figured out yet. I don't know, Craig, you want to add to that.

No, I would have said the same exact thing.

I know it's tough to give guidance in this environment, but you did give us some color for the rest of the year. So, we do appreciate it. But if we keep on going at current trends and assumed you hit the guidance for the year, when do you think you'd hit the bottom in terms of contract value growth and roughly what rate would that be?

You're right. It is tough to guide in this environment. So, thanks for the prelude there. So, we don't guide on contract value. And we're not changing that policy now. I think the way to sort of think about it is we're obviously now comparing our business trends to what was a normal year a year ago, first half of 2019 and second half of 2019. So, if the economy doesn't recover or we don't see broad-based recoveries around the world, when we get into 2021, we're now comparing to pandemic-impacted results. And so, you would expect, at that point, if we continue at current course and speed with sort of – this sort of retention result and this sort of new business pacing, that the contract value growth would stabilize. I'm not going to peg a number where we think that is, as we've talked about. We do believe that, based on everything we're seeing, the trough is a lot higher than it was during the last downturn for us. But that's as close as you're going to get us sort of pegging a number on it. But, again, I think the thing that, as we look at the business, and it is tough out there, but our teams are doing a really fantastic job of sort of cutting through the tougher selling environment. And the sheer volume of new business that we're writing is really great. Yes, it's less than we did a year ago, but we're bringing on new logos, we're growing accounts, we're adding new seats, we're adding new subscriptions, doing that across the board. And so, again, I think if we have another 12 months of this, you would see the contract value growth stabilize because we'd be comparing to a similarly impacted period when we get 12 months from now.

I'm going to stick out a little further and talk about 2021 since you kind of opened up the discussion. You had mentioned, given the rate of contract value growth and the lagged impact, that we'd see some sort of margin decline in 2021. Again, just assuming you kind of hit your guidance at the end of the year, what kind of magnitude are we talking about? What would the impact be next year?

So, Jeff, we're not going to guide for next year. All we're saying is, we would expect when there is an economic recovery for our contract value to rebound. And as you know, there's a lag between when that revenue comes, and so we're going to make sure that we scale our business and invest in core things in relation to the contract value, not necessarily the accounting revenue run out. And so, in doing that, that can create some margin headwinds. That's what we're really saying about 2021. We fully expect to recover, we fully expect to return to growth. But because of the lag in the revenue recognition on the subscription-based business, we could see some modest margin headwinds.

I just wanted to ask if you could help us just break down GTS productivity a bit more. It's obviously been getting incrementally worse by the quarter. And this quarter obviously was down quite a bit as you've reported. But just curious, how much of that was more one-time type roadblocks versus improvements? Gene, you talked about client activity being good and so forth. Can you just help how we should assume that should start trending up?

Let me give you a little color around it. So, if I think about GTS, the kind of deceleration that's going on, there's different components of it. One is that we sell new enterprises. There's clients that have never been a client of Gartner. That amount of business actually is about, for GTS, about the same year-over-year. So, we're not just seeing a deceleration in our ability to sell to new enterprises who've never been with Gartner. We saw about a third of the deceleration is from enterprises that left Gartner. They used to be with us and they left us. Another third is from enterprises that stay with us, but historically have grown, but they didn't grow. So, it looks like deceleration because instead of buying another seat or two, they actually stayed flat. Whereas in past years, that's a significant part of growth. And the last third is clients who might have four seats and they go to a less expensive – looking for seats, but use a less expensive seat. So, downgrade. So, going from one seat that had a higher service level to a lower service level. And so, what we're really seeing is new business with clients with new enterprises flat year-over-year. A little uptick in lost enterprises, which is about a third of the difference if you look at contract value growth. And then, the other two-thirds from existing clients not growing that would have grown before or from clients that are still with us, same number of seats, but choose, for one of the seats, a lower service level, which obviously looks like a reduction in contract value. And my interpretation of it is people see a lot of value. Most of the deceleration is not due to clients leaving us more than they did before. There's some of that, and that's not the biggest piece of it. The biggest piece is we're not getting the upgrades, the growth we would have gotten from additional seats with existing clients. And secondly, some clients are – rather than giving up seats, downgrading the service level but keeping the seats because of the value they see.

So, within the Research segment, about 10% of the research revenue, roughly, falls into the non-subscription category. And that's made up of a couple of different revenue lines. One is our online businesses, Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp. And then, there's some other non-subscription type research services that fall into that category as well. Last quarter, we talked about an expectation that that would be down about 10% to 15% year-over-year. That's sort of what the implied guide reflects as well for the balance of the year for those businesses. And so, about 10% of research revenue and down about 10% to 15% for the balance of the year.

Your GTS sales force account has declined 3.7%. And your GBS sales force account declined 9.2%. Can you provide more detail around your outlook for sales force hiring between these two segments and where you see headcount growth coming back faster?

So, as you heard today, excluding the impact of Conferences, our company revenues were strong. We have an unparalleled value proposition across all major enterprise functions. Our clients are facing more disruptive change than ever before. And Gartner is the best source for the cost-effective, relevant insights that empower leaders to succeed amid ongoing uncertainty. We continue to have an advanced untapped market opportunity and we know the right things to do to capture that opportunity in thriving or uncertain times. Looking ahead, we expect to come out of this recession strong and well positioned to drive long-term sustained double-digit growth in revenues, earnings, and free cash flow for years to come. Thanks again for joining us. And I look forward to updating you again next quarter.