Yext, Inc. (NYSE:YEXT) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Yext, Inc. (NYSE:YEXT) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript March 6, 2024
Yext, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.1, expectations were $0.07. YEXT isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Yext Incorporated Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nils Erdmann, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Nils Erdmann: Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Yext’s fourth quarter fiscal 2024 earnings conference call. With me today are CEO and Chair of the Board, Mike Walrath; and CFO, Darryl Bond. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to our future financial performance, expectations regarding the growth of our business, our outlook for the first quarter and full-year fiscal 2025, our strategy and estimates of financial and operating metrics, capital expenditures, and other indications of future opportunities as further described in our fourth quarter shareholder letter. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those related to Yext’s growth, the evolution of our industry, our product development and success, our management performance, and general economic and business conditions.
These forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made, and we undertake no obligation to revise or update any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call. Further information on factors and other risks that could cause actual results to materially differ from these forward-looking statements is included in our reports filed with the SEC, including in the sections titled Special Note Regarding forward-looking statements and risk factors in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended October 31, 2023, and our shareholder letter that was issued this afternoon. During the call, we also refer to certain metrics including non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations with the most comparable historical GAAP measures are available in the shareholder letter, which is available at investors.yext.com.
We also provide definitions of these metrics in the shareholder letter. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mike.
Mike Walrath: Thanks, Nils. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As we discussed last quarter, we have published our quarterly shareholder letter and financial commentary on our investor website and we look forward to taking your questions here today. There are a few high level themes I would call out from our letter before we dive into Q&A. First, we are pleased with the progress we made in fiscal year 2024, despite a very difficult operating environment. We believe our record profitability, increases in sales productivity, and some of the difficult decisions we made to be more focused will serve the company well in the future and drive more efficient growth. As I've talked about in the past, the recipe for efficient growth is a combination of increased sales productivity and the ability to measure qualified pipeline so that we can increase our investment in direct revenue generating roles.
We will continue to focus on efficient operations, but we have seen enough to be ready to direct more investment into direct selling and sales development to drive growth in the future. Second, we made great strides last year in shifting more of our focus to the core product offerings our customers value most and have reoriented our roadmap around our customers' highest priorities. We have also reallocated our investment in customer support, services, and success to drive customer satisfaction and value. In fiscal year ‘25, we will continue to proactively deliver value-driving innovation in our core listings, pages, reviews, and search products, customer service, and support, and deliver new product functionality in adjacent product areas that are most valued by our customers.
These include Generative AI features, including broader application of content generation technology, as well as much more robust social management and analytics features. The strength and breadth of our platform, particularly the advantage of our content knowledge graph system, as a single data source of truth for our customers across all of the product use cases will serve us well in an environment where customers want fewer partners and more ROI. We will continue to invest R&D into high potential areas such as chat and other Generative AI technologies, but these investments will be more measured and focused on customer priorities than in the past. Finally, we continue to take a conservative point of view on the market environment and the timing of uptake of Generative AI solutions at scale.
Our customers include some of the largest brands in the world and they continue to digest and optimize their technology stack after over a decade of investment. Our outlook anticipates that this trend will continue this year as uncertainty around the economy, inflation and interest rate environment continues. We believe this is prudent and will support our customers work to identify areas to do more with our platform and be more efficient. We are highly positive on the future of Generative AI to drive efficiency for the enterprise and we are seeing signs of early adoption as evidenced by increased adoption of Generative AI review response features. This week marks the two year anniversary of my taking the CEO position. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that the last two years have been challenging on many levels for our team.
I'm incredibly proud of our global team's willingness to take on the difficult tasks of reshaping the ex-operating profile, adjusting to a difficult operating environment, and recommitting the company to our customers. I believe the work has been harder than we would have anticipated two years ago, and the work will continue to finish our transformation. I'm incredibly grateful to our team for their resilience and commitment in the past couple of years and for the future. With that, I'd like to open it up for questions.
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