Autodesk Inc (ADSK) 2021 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q3 Fiscal Year 2021 Autodesk Earnings Conference Call.

(Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

(Operator Instructions)

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Simon Mays-Smith, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thank you.

Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, operator, and good afternoon.

Thank you for joining our conference call to discuss the results of our third quarter of fiscal year '21.

On the line is Andrew Anagnost, our CEO; and Scott Herren, our CFO.

Today's conference call is being broadcast live via webcast.

In addition, a replay of the call will be available at autodesk.com/investor.

You can find the earnings press release, slide presentation and transcript of today's opening commentary on our Investor Relations website following this call.

During the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements about our outlook, future results and related assumptions and strategies.

These statements reflect our best judgment based on currently known factors.

Actual events or results could differ materially.

Please refer to our SEC filings for important risks and other factors, including developments in the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting impact on our business and operations, that may cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today.

If this call is replayed or reviewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information.

Autodesk disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

During the call, we will quote a number of numerical growth changes as we discuss our financial performance, and unless otherwise noted, each such reference represents a year-on-year comparison.

All non-GAAP numbers referenced in today's call are reconciled in the press release or the slide presentation on our Investor Relations website.

And now I will turn the call over to Andrew.

Thank you, Simon, and welcome, everyone, to the call.

First off, I hope you and your families are remaining safe and healthy.

And before jumping into our third quarter results, I would like to thank again our employees and the families and communities that support them as well as our partners and customers for their sustained commitment during uncertain times.

That commitment was reflected in our execution and demonstrated the resilience of our business model this past quarter.

Together, they enabled us to deliver strong Q3 results with billings, revenue, earnings and free cash flow coming in above expectations despite the volatile macroeconomic conditions resulting from the pandemic.

I'm pleased to see the acceleration of our SaaS business model, the secular shift to cloud underpinning it and the competitive opportunities it brings.

We have many miles of opportunity ahead of us.

Our enterprise customers are undertaking their own digital transformation, and by enabling that transformation, we are becoming a strategic partner rather than a software vendor.

These strategic partnerships are broader than in the past with our customers expanding their Autodesk product portfolio.

Our third quarter results reflect this trend as our enterprise deal activity with large customers accelerated.

We closed some of the largest transactions in the company's history, including a 9-digit deal.

I am proud of our team's execution, which positions us well entering the fourth quarter with a strong pipeline of deals.

In the third quarter, we also saw the ebb and flow of the economic impact of the pandemic.

As you know, our transition to the cloud means we are able to monitor the usage patterns of our products across the globe and see the positive correlation between increasing usage level and new business growth in those regions.

China, Korea, Japan and most of Europe saw usage levels rise above pre-COVID levels.

While usage trends in the U.S. and the U.K. have not yet returned to pre-COVID levels, they have stabilized in the U.S. and growing sequentially in the U.K.

In line with the usage trends, our new business remains impacted by the pandemic.

But the diversity of our revenue stream and customer base is helping us deliver strong results.

Now as you know, Scott has decided to take on the next challenge in his career by accepting the CFO role at Cisco starting mid-December.

Scott has played a huge role in driving the business over the last 6 years, helping Autodesk successfully navigate the business model transition.

We are sad to see him leave, but we are also excited for him.

Thank you, Scott, for your many contributions to Autodesk, and I wish you continued success in the next chapter of your career.

Scott is leaving behind a strong team to ensure smooth operations while we look for his replacement.

We have started the search process, and it is my top priority in the near term.

Now I'd like to turn it over to Scott to take you through the details of our quarterly performance and guidance for the year.

I'll then come back to provide insight into our strategic growth drivers.

Thanks, Andrew.

I'm leaving Autodesk with mixed emotions as I'm excited about what lies ahead for me but also sad about leaving my colleagues at Autodesk.

The last 6 years have been the most fun and rewarding of my entire career as we've transformed the company from a traditional license revenue model to a cloud-based recurring revenue model.

That transition is now complete, and I leave knowing Autodesk is well positioned for the future with leading positions in attractive markets and accelerating momentum.

Looking at the quarter's results.

Several factors contributed to our outperformance across all key metrics, including strong enterprise deal activity, healthy subscription renewal rates, digital sales, a sequential improvement in new business trends and foreign exchange rates.

Total revenue growth came in at 13% as reported, 14% in constant currency, with subscription plan revenue growing by 24% and operating margin expanding by 3 percentage points.

We previously told you that we extended payment terms for customers impacted by the pandemic.

The normalization of payment terms, combined with improving business trends and strong cash collections in Q3, helped drive healthy free cash flow of $340 million.

Current RPO, which reflects committed revenue for the next 12 months, was up 16%, a slight improvement on the rate of growth we saw in the second quarter.

Total RPO was up 21%.

We again benefited from the diversity of our customer base.

Business softness in certain areas like the U.S. and parts of Europe was offset by strength in other areas.

Digital sales continued to drive double-digit billings growth through our online channel supported by accelerated growth in our cloud-based Fusion offerings.

We're developing broader strategic relationships with our enterprise customers with multiyear commitments.

As is typical for most enterprise agreements, the 9-digit deal Andrew mentioned is a 3-year commitment billed annually and do not have a meaningful impact on our revenue or cash flow during the third quarter.

The run rate business with our partners also continue to perform well.

While we're seeing the traction of our transition to the named user business model, it results in a subset of our customers optimizing their installed base by reducing the number of named user seats needed after they take advantage of our 2-for-1 trade-in program.

I'm pleased to report that these overall trends are in line with our expectations.

As we've said in the past, in aggregate, the transition to the named user model is a revenue-neutral event for us but enables us to offer more value to our customers in a similar way as other SaaS providers.

Our net revenue retention rate remained within the 100% to 110% range we laid out in our guidance.

Our product subscription renewal rates remain strong, reinforcing the critical nature of our products to our customers.

As in the prior quarter, approximately 40% of the maintenance customers who came up for renewal converted to subscriptions.

Our maintenance renewal rate declined sequentially, which was expected as we are nearing the end of our maintenance program.

Industry collections remained a stable share of our total business in Q3.

As anticipated, multiyear payments were down year-over-year, but we saw modest sequential improvement in the share of multiyear payments across each geography as customers continue to make long-term investments in our products.

And finally, during the third quarter, we spent $196 million to buy back 800,000 shares at an average price of $231 per share.

Year-to-date, we have repurchased 2.12 million shares at an average price of approximately $186 per share for a total spend of $393 million.

Now let me turn to our guidance.

We are raising the low end of our full year guidance range to a range of $3.75 billion to $3.765 billion, bringing the midpoint growth rate up to 15% year-over-year.

We're also raising our non-GAAP operating margin outlook to the upper end of our prior range, a 4-point improvement from last year.

Our fourth quarter performance will benefit from the strength of our third quarter results, but the business environment remains uncertain given the current wave of COVID cases.

We expect product subscription renewal rates to continue to be very healthy.

Churn on our maintenance offering will likely accelerate as we enter the final stages of ending our maintenance offering.

And we expect our net revenue retention rate to remain between 100% and 110% for the quarter.

Our pipeline entering the fourth quarter is strong, but we've assumed that new business and multiyear contracts will continue to be under pressure.

The narrowing of our billings and free cash flow outlook range is primarily driven by moderating assumptions around multiyear and the uncertainty presented by the current environment.

It's a testament to the strategic value of our products to our customers and the resiliency of our model that we're still expecting to report 15% revenue growth despite the current economic headwinds.

Looking out to our fiscal year 2022, we expect an improving macroeconomic environment as we exit this year will result in accelerating growth in new business over the course of fiscal '22.

Given our subscription model, revenue growth will lag the improving sales environment.

As we've said in the past, the path to fiscal '23 will not be linear.

We expect our fiscal '22 revenue growth to be low to mid-teens and free cash flow growth to reaccelerate to approximately 20%.

We're confident in our fiscal '23 free cash flow target of $2.4 billion as we will benefit from improving business momentum in fiscal '22 that will provide a tailwind to our revenue and free cash flow growth.

In fiscal '23, we'll also benefit from the renewals of our fiscal '20 transactions when we restarted multiyear payments for a part of our business.

Beyond fiscal '23, our continued investment in cloud products and a subscription business model, backed by a strong balance sheet, give us a robust foundation and platform for double-digit growth.

And now I'd like to turn it back to Andrew.

Thank you, Scott.

Our strong performance in Q3 once again demonstrates the advantages of our diverse customer base, resiliency of our employees, the power of our SaaS offerings and the strength of our business model.

At Autodesk University last week, we hosted approximately 100,000 customers and partners and made a series of product and partnership announcements as well as our acquisition of Spacemaker, which closed yesterday and offers industry-leading functionality to architects.

Spacemaker will enable us to support design professionals much earlier in their workflow by harnessing AI to rapidly create and evaluate options for a building or urban development.

Through automated data capture, smart design, decision support and collaboration functionality, Spacemaker enables users to quickly generate, optimize and iterate on design.

It also offers a fundamental shift in how we imagine and build cities in the future and the time needed to evaluate various possible options.

I encourage you to check out the demo from last week that is available on our website.

We also announced the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform, which unifies our AEC cloud offerings and the data held within them, to enable a connected project ecosystem across design and construction.

Underpinning the Autodesk Construction Cloud is our common data environment, Autodesk Docs.

This provides seamless navigation, integrated workflows and project controls and enables a single source of truth across the project life cycle.

Autodesk Build, Quantify and BIM Collaborate bring together the best of PlanGrid and BIM 360 with new functionality to create a comprehensive field construction and project management solution.

For our design customers, BIM Collaborate Pro extends the capabilities of BIM 360 design on the new platform to create a more seamless exchange of project data between design and construction.

During the quarter, Morgan Sindall, a leading construction group in the U.K., committed to Autodesk as their strategic platform partner.

As Lee Ramsey, Morgan Sindall's Digital Design Director said, "I researched all the marketplace solutions.

Autodesk stood out for me.

Autodesk Construction Cloud provides greater integration between different roles and functions, allowing data to be shared across projects, silos to be broken and a vast amount of efficiency to be gained."

The breadth of our AEC business has underpinned its resilient performance and enabled it to be a net beneficiary from secular and cyclical trends.

Despite many construction projects being interrupted, delayed or navigating new ways of working because of the pandemic, we are still seeing year-on-year growth across all our construction offerings.

Our cloud-based products enable our customers to navigate the cycle today and to be more efficient and sustainable for tomorrow.

Our office-based solutions continue to do well, while our field-based solutions improved sequentially, boosted by several competitive wins.

Customers continue to choose PlanGrid to digitize their processes because it is easy to use and they only pay for what they need.

This quarter, our BIM 360 product set records for both worldwide weekly average users and projects.

We also continue to see adoption with our larger customers and within the infrastructure industry.

During the quarter, one of the world's leading professional services firms, which serves clients in the infrastructure and building sectors, increased its investment with Autodesk.

We have been partnering together for over 15 years, and the renewal of our Enterprise Business Agreement enables this firm to expand its use of BIM 360 and PlanGrid in order to adapt faster to industry changes and create new markets for its services.

In another instance, Japan's largest homebuilder, Daiwa House Industry Company Ltd., renewed its Enterprise Business Agreement with us.

The company is making key investments in BIM and has selected Autodesk to be a strategic innovation partner to achieve its goals for digital transformation, design for manufacturing and industrialized construction.

The company is adopting BIM at all levels of the organization and has made a commitment to adopt additional Autodesk products, including BIM 360 Docs and Design and PlanGrid.

We are thrilled to be working with Daiwa House at the forefront of industrialized construction.

Our cloud-based platform is also propelling growth in manufacturing by enabling the convergence of design and make.

On the commercial side, our market-leading cloud-based platform, Fusion 360, enjoyed another quarter of accelerating subscriptions, growing scale of deployments and adding competitive displacements to end the quarter with over 120,000 subscriptions.

At AU, we introduced several extensions of Fusion 360 that further encourage adoption and usage of the platform by adding specialist functionality.

As a reminder, extensions offer expanded tools and functionality that can be added on demand to the core Fusion 360 offering.

This kind of functional flexibility and cost effectiveness enhances the value of our platform for designers, engineers and manufacturers.

We also announced exciting partnerships with Sandvik Coromant and Rockwell Automation.

With Sandvik Coromant, a metal cutting tools and services company, we took the first step to realize a shared long-term vision of accelerating the automation of manufacturing processes by making tool data and manufacturing recommendations available to users of Fusion 360.

With Rockwell Automation, a provider of industrial automation and information technology, we combined factory layout capabilities available in our industry collection with their factory simulation tools.

Together, these solutions will help our mutual customers digitally design and commission factories in less time and with greater efficiency.

This quarter, we also announced the acquisition of CAMplete, a leading provider of post-processing and machine simulation solution.

CAMplete bridges the gap between CAM programming and shop floor machine tool operations.

It allows manufacturers to digitally simulate and verify the machine code that drives the production equipment before running it on the shop floor.

This will enable our customers to identify potential problems in a digital environment at the programming phase that could otherwise scrap work or damage machine tools in production.

During the quarter, a large multinational defense, security and aerospace company with an extensive global supply chain chose to increase its investment with Autodesk through an Enterprise Business Agreement.

To stay at the forefront of its industry, the company is using innovative manufacturing methods to save time and money and has set a target to 3D print approximately 1/3 of the components in its new jet.

As it radically changes the way it designs and builds, the company has selected Autodesk as a key strategic partner.

The adoption of our products is also driving change throughout its supply chain, which must adopt new ways of working.

With Fusion 360, it now has access to our advanced manufacturing solutions to help it realize its business goals.

In education, we continue to expand our footprint.

Tinkercad, our fully browser-based product development platform for aspiring designers, now has over 30 million users worldwide.

Fusion 360 on Chromebooks is experiencing rapid adoption at high schools and universities and is replacing entry-level browser-based CAD/CAM with professional-grade, career-accelerating Fusion 360.

For instance, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne has now switched to Fusion 360 across multiple departments, including biomedical engineering, systems engineering and mechanical engineering.

Beyond our industry-specific results, we are seeing early adoption of our Premium subscription plan, with customers taking advantage of the enhanced subscription offering at renewal.

Many of our multiuser customers who are transitioning to the named user model are finding great value in the Premium plan due to its advanced user analytics, single sign-on capabilities and enhanced support.

For example, Scheuch, a leader in the field of innovative air and environment technology, decided to commit to a long-term investment in Premium this quarter, primarily due to SSO and user management capabilities.

They see Autodesk as a strategic partner as it continues to harmonize its global IT infrastructure.

Let me finish by updating you on our progress monetizing noncompliant users.

We continue to be sensitive to the short-term economic pressure faced by our customers but remain optimistic about the long-term opportunity as we demonstrate the value of our cloud-based platform to our customers.

For example, in China, a customer which left us to try a lower-cost competitor quickly returned due to AutoCAD's superior functionality and invested further in Autodesk by purchasing collections for the first time to focus on growth.

Our efforts to educate our customers about the benefits of staying compliant with our subscriptions are yielding results.

We are able to convert them to paying users in a customer-friendly manner.

During the quarter, we closed 8 deals over $500,000 with our license compliance team.

In closing, we continue to build a strong Autodesk for the long term.

Our early and sustained organic and strategic investment in critical capabilities like cloud computing and cloud-based collaboration, combined with a successful transition to a SaaS business model, give us significant competitive advantages and confidence to grow in the double-digit range in the foreseeable future, and we have multiple drivers that make us confident in our fiscal '23 free cash flow target of $2.4 billion.

With that, operator, we would now like to open the call up for questions.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Saket Kalia from Barclays Capital.

Okay.

Great.

And Scott, congratulations on the next step.

You'll certainly be missed.

Thanks, Saket.

Andrew, maybe first for you.

A lot to talk about, but one of the questions that I feel like we got a little bit, especially during the month of October and November, were what potentially higher infrastructure spending spurred by the government could mean for Autodesk.

And of course, we don't know what that looks like yet, or frankly, even if it will happen, but I was wondering if you could share some of what Autodesk maybe saw during the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act as perhaps a frame of reference.

Does that make sense?

Yes, Saket, that makes sense.

First off, let me start the question by being super clear.

We don't have any kind of projections around stimulus or the impact of stimulus on our business in any of our models, all right?

That's stuff that we leave out because one does not want to leave themselves exposed to the vagaries of governments.

However, if we go back to '08 and '09, and I think it's important to remember this, one of the narratives out there about Autodesk in '08 and '09 is Autodesk is so exposed to the housing market.

Oh, my gosh.

And the reality was that Autodesk revenue recovered well -- significantly faster than the housing market did, and that was because of the distributed nature of our work and our customer base and the projects and the sectors that we cover.

Infrastructure spending and stimulus spending, that then absolutely helped because it created a pipeline of projects that were new, but we were already recovering before some of the stimulus showed up.

And I think it's important to recognize that.

If you look at what the impact might be if we actually see some of this show up and we actually see some important stimulus, obviously, it's going to increase the project pipelines of our customers.

And that's always good for us.

And it could see more adoption of our portfolio.

It could be really good for the construction portfolio.

But again, Saket, I want to make it super clear, we don't model that kind of stuff in our outlook, and we're not expecting it to hit our numbers.

Yes.

Saket, the only other comment that I'd add on top of that is, look, let's say an infrastructure bill does get passed.

It will take some time for that bill to turn into real projects and for those projects to get put out to bid and for that then to downstream, start to drive our business.

So even if that were to happen, let's say, early in the new administration, I wouldn't expect it to have a material impact on fiscal '22 anyway.

Got it.

That's super helpful.

Scott, maybe for my follow-up for you.

Thanks for the early fiscal '22 guide.

It's very helpful.

I guess with 20% free cash flow growth next year and that target of $2.4 billion in fiscal '23, it looks like that acceleration in free cash flow that we're seeing here in fiscal '21 is going to -- actually in fiscal '21 and '22 is going to continue into '23.

Can you just talk a little bit about some of the drivers that might contribute to that?

You touched on this a little bit on your prepared comments.

So I'm just wondering if you could double-click on it once more.

Yes.

Sure, Saket.

The -- and by the way, you were one of the ones that got it right, actually, as I recall, looking at your preview note for what to expect on fiscal '22.

And as you know, we've been running multiple scenarios.

I've been probably driving my team crazy running scenarios over the last 9 months.

And in each case, we run it not just for the impact to this fiscal year and next fiscal year, out through fiscal '23 to even fiscal '25 and beyond.

So to have a good sense of how the model responds to a variety of different scenarios, that's part of what underpins our confidence in fiscal '23.

But if you step back and say, what are the drivers behind that, I mean, I'll start with the biggest driver.

You've seen our renewal rates stay steady through this process.

And in fact, even modestly, we saw a sequential increase in renewal rates.

But given the size of our renewal base, that's a big driver longer term.

And we talked about the net revenue retention rate kind of staying in that 100% to 110% range even during the pandemic.

So if you take a big renewal base with a high renewal rate and a 100% to 110% net revenue retention rate, that drives a lot of growth.

Add to that what we're seeing in cloud and the cloud product's acceleration overall.

We still have a pretty significant opportunity to convert nonpaying users out in front of us.

And we've built the leading portfolio -- product portfolio in construction.

So there's a -- and we've talked again today about the success of our manufacturing business and where we're headed there and some of the traction we're beginning to get with Fusion 360 and the way we're monetizing that with some of the extensions.

So there's a lot behind that.

That's what drives our confidence not just in this year and some of the early view I gave you of fiscal '22 but then how that ramps up out through fiscal '23.

I think there's 2 other quick things that I'd like to add to that.

We do -- we're seeing a modest improvement in economic activity right now that Andrew talked about.

Certain countries are back to pre-COVID levels, but it's not consistent.

Our expectation is that we will see continued economic improvement through next year, but that will -- I doubt it's going to be a straight line, right?

I think that will be more pronounced in the second half of next year, which means the year will be a bit more back-end loaded.

And that linearity effects not just revenue.

It also affects when we collect cash.

A lot of the sales of that momentum in the second half of the year will turn into fiscal '23 free cash flow.

And then one other item that I want to get on the call so that you can build it into your model.

We do see a cash tax impact year-on-year this year to next year of about $50 million to $60 million as our profitability has improved fairly significantly.

So you add all those together, that's what underpins our confidence, the early view of fiscal '22 cash flow and our confidence in the $2.4 billion in fiscal '23.

Our next question comes from Matt Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets.

Congrats on these numbers in a really difficult situation.

I will also offer my congrats to Scott.

It's been great working with you.

Obviously, we'll miss you at Autodesk, but congrats and best of luck.

Andrew, I wanted to ask about the 9-figure, 3-year renewal deal.

That is super exciting.

I guess I'm wondering, can you give us a bit of history on how that customer has grown to this level and maybe the opportunity for other enterprise deals of this caliber given your sort of extended platform these days.

Yes.

So we actually broke records a couple of times during this quarter.

So these deals are becoming more of the norm than not in our quarters.

And I want to tell you what essentially underpins all of these.

And I think it's important and it kind of -- it's the same dynamic in all of them.

Our customers look 3 years out.

They look at what they're trying to do internally transformationally with digital transformation or with the transition to BIM or with the transition to the cloud with Fusion and other things associated with that.

And they ask themselves, okay, what are they going to need in an EBA in order to drive and maintain that expansion without coming back and renegotiating the contract with us again.

That's what's powering this, a strategic discussion about what are the long-term adoption requirements of these customers.

So for instance, a customer might see themselves expanding more into industrialized construction and applying both Inventor and Revit more broadly in their process, and they want to make sure they plan for that, or they're going to see expansion of Construction Cloud deeper into their processes.

So they're planning for that.

They're saying, well, I'm using this much Construction Cloud this year.

I'm going to use this much next year or the year after that, the year after that.

So this is what is driving these kinds of deals, this discussion about the 3-year expansion of usage of our portfolio in these accounts.

And it's not just usage across users.

It's usage across breadth of portfolio.

Otherwise, you couldn't see deals of these size coming through.

That's the dynamic that plays out in almost all of these deals that we're seeing.

Makes sense, Matt?

Got it.

Yes.

No, that's super helpful.

And then maybe just to double-click on the SaaS side.

I mean, Andrew, you talk to executives every day.

And I guess I think we're all excited about the prospects of the vaccine.

On those conversations though, in a post-COVID world, I mean, do you get a sense that -- you've always had a lot of success with 360 SaaS today.

But do you think we could see even a bit of a slingshot effect as part of these larger deals as customers really effectively race to embrace SaaS potentially for the next pandemic at some point?

Yes.

I actually think it even goes beyond pandemics.

It's like once you got a taste of it, you want more of it is what's going on, too, okay?

Because remember, some of these customers, they were not broadly deploying our SaaS solutions prior to the pandemic.

And what they're seeing now is, you know what, this stuff is important.

I need to get on it, and I need to prepare for the future, and this is how I'm going to drive my digitization.

So we're absolutely going to see continued growth in these SaaS platforms.

It's interesting that you mentioned the vaccine and things like that because what we're seeing when we talk to executives right now is everybody doesn't see a change in the time line of how this pandemic is going to play out.

But all of us, what we're seeing is increasing reduction in uncertainty.

It starts with vaccine conversations and then more than one vaccine.

And then it goes into, hey, the U.S. election is getting less uncertain.

Who's going to be the President is less uncertain.

So there's this progressive building of uncertainty being removed.

And customers are getting more and more comfortable about looking at their second half investment scenarios for next year, and SaaS is in every one of those conversations, okay?

And I think as long as we continue on this trajectory of uncertainty being removed, you're going to see people being increasingly comfortable with how they feel about the second half of next year.

Our next question comes from the line of Philip Winslow from Wells Fargo.

Congrats on this great quarter.

And Scott, obviously, it's been a real pleasure working with you not just at Autodesk but going back to Citrix.

And we'll definitely miss you, my friend.

Thanks, Phil.

I got a question for you in terms of the AEC portfolio.

Obviously, very diversified in terms of the sort of the stages of, call it, building from design, planning, actual construction.

And so I guess sort of a 2-part question here.

What are you seeing in sort of that portfolio right now and into Q4?

And then when you are thinking about next fiscal year, how are you expecting sort of the ebbs and flows of that portfolio to play out?

Yes.

Actually, Phil, you're pushing on an important competitive differentiator for us.

The breadth of capability we have across the entire AEC cycle and the way we're integrating that information in the cloud is fairly unique, all right?

And what we're seeing -- and this is something that I think you'll see progressively again and again.

Right now, a lot of people are talking about digital twins, and that's the vocabulary that's out there.

Obviously, we haven't used that vocabulary very often.

But what's going on right now is BIM -- 3D BIM is the original digital twin, all right?

And this whole discussion around digital twins and AEC and things associated with it is accelerating the dialogue around if I want to do digital twins, I got to do BIM because there's no digital twin without a building information model.

And you're going to see a continuing ongoing acceleration of the usage of BIM upfront in our portfolio, but then what we've layered on top of it is a couple of critical things that make the entire portfolio more valuable.

You may have noticed we emphasized this notion in the new Construction Cloud platform around a common data environment and all the things that go along with that common data environment.

That common data environment is not just SaaS-based.

It's also ultimately going to be ISO compliant, and it's going to allow us to move that building information data all the way through the entire process.

So you're going to see more and more adoption of what's in Autodesk Build, all the way through from the preconstruction planning cycle to the construction site.

And that's a pretty powerful differentiator for us.

But the one last thing I want to mention to you, and we talked about this at AU, and I want to make sure you paid attention to it, was the rollout of Tandem, Autodesk Tandem.

And what was Tandem?

So Tandem is -- if digital twins start with BIM, Tandem is a way to bring BIM data together from multiple places, from our BIM models or our BIM information from other third parties that are building controller information perhaps from other BIM-based data from other types of applications and bring it into a single aggregated view in the cloud that updates dynamically as the building project progresses.

This puts us at the forefront of bringing the power of BIM to create digital twins to the ability to create digital twins in the cloud that actually represent the final state of the project no matter where all that project data comes from.

So we're pretty excited about this progression and what it means for the company.

And I think you're going to see a lot of interest and uptake in the approach we're taking.

That's awesome.

That's super exciting.

And an equally as exciting question for Scott, long-term deferred revenue.

The -- how are you thinking about that next year?

Obviously, the guidance for this year is hanging out in the mid-20s, but how are you sort of modeling that when you think about cash flow for next year and the year after that?

Yes.

I think for next year, it stays in that range, Phil, and I don't want to get into doing too much forecasting of fiscal '22 until we get to the Q4 earnings call.

And obviously, we can give you more detail at that point.

But what we're seeing this year is kind of moderating assumptions around multiyear.

And of course, that's what drives a lot of that long-term deferred.

And so you see the sequential trend there in long term.

It hasn't fallen off the floor.

It hasn't fallen off the desk and onto the floor.

The multiyear rates are still there, but they're not as robust as we have seen historically in maintenance.

I think ultimately, it returns to that level.

But frankly, I don't think the moderating multiyear that we see this year is a big negative in a sense that given our renewal -- the strength of our renewal rates, we'll continue to get that -- collect that cash.

We'll just collect it in the subsequent 2 years instead of collecting all 3 years upfront.

And we'll collect it without the 10% discount that we put in as an incentive for those multiyear transactions.

So think of it kind of settling in where it is for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, I think there's probably a little room for it to run.

Awesome.

And congrats again on a great quarter.

Thanks, Phil.

Thanks.

Our next question comes from the line of Heather Bellini from Goldman Sachs.

Great.

And Scott, I will echo my congratulations and to you as well, Andrew, for the company's execution in this challenging macro environment.

I wanted to ask 2 questions.

One, if you can share with us kind of, I mean, the competitive positioning in construction given your pricing model and how you might see some of the competitors responding.

So if you could spend some time on that, maybe a little bit more on the differentiation, if that's gotten even wider over the course of the pandemic.

And then also, if I look at your growth in Asia Pac, you can -- that was the best region in terms of growth.

How far behind do you think the Americas is from the recovery and the solid growth that you're seeing in APAC?

All right.

So let me start with the competitive positioning on the construction.

You're absolutely right, Heather, that the pandemic actually gave us an opportunity to lap our competition a bit.

The slowdown definitely took the wind out of certain parts of the market.

However, we didn't slow down.

We continued to invest, and we put quite a bit of money into rolling out the unified platform.

So what you see with Autodesk Build, which is what we're going to lead with in every new deal, we're leading with Autodesk Build over and over again, and we're going to lead internationally, and we're going to lead in the U.S. with this, is a comprehensive project management and field management application that goes from design all the way through to site management, site execution and layers on the analytics associated with Construction IQ and some of the predictive skills, all built on top of Autodesk Docs, all right?

So this is a pretty significant change.

That platform is highly competitive.

As a matter of fact, it's differentiated in numerous ways because of its end-to-end capabilities.

In terms of pricing models, here is what's unique about it, Heather.

I think it's very important to remember this.

No one, no one in the industry is more flexible with the way we deliver these applications in Autodesk.

So if you want to buy named users and deploy named users, we got named users for you.

That's our primary deployment model for most of our applications.

If you want to pay based on project turnover, you can do that.

If you want to pay based on usage and consumption, you can do that.

This flexibility is heavily coveted by our customers.

And in fact, I think this flexibility has been part and parcel of what's allowed us to continue to expand the usage of the Construction Cloud even during what's happened over the last year.

So I think technologically, we're now competitively differentiated because we took the pandemic at the time to double down on the platform unification and get it out there.

And business model-wise, we're differentiated.

So we're feeling we're in a pretty strong competitive position as we head into the recovery next year across all the various markets.

We love that we have tough competition in this space.

We think it's good for us.

We think it's good for our customers, but we're feeling really good about where we're at.

Now with regards to the Americas versus APAC, right, here's what I'll say.

Usage ramped up fairly quickly in Asia Pacific.

And like we said earlier, it's definitely above pre-COVID levels in a lot of places, not everywhere, but in a lot of places.

The U.S., in particular, just seemed to have stalled, all right?

Usage hasn't fallen back.

It's ramped up a little bit as time goes on, but it's not seeing this kind of surge.

I think we should just kind of hold tight for a while and see what the levering out of the uncertainty does right now for the usage in the U.S., all right?

Between the election results, between the good news about vaccine, between the potential that people see about stimulus in their project pipeline, I think we might start to see a change.

So it'll be interesting what we can talk about on the next earnings call.

But I think the unwinding of uncertainty matters a lot in our markets.

Our next question comes from the line of Jay Vleeschhouwer from Griffin Securities.

Andrew, starting with the 9-figure deal, returning to that subject.

It's especially interesting when we consider that once upon a time, a $100,000 deal was a big deal for Autodesk.

So you're obviously now many orders of magnitude beyond that.

But the question is, to the extent that there are now, as we understand, additional 8-figure deals in the pipeline, how are you thinking about your license management and customer success requirements and capacities that you need to invest in and ramp up to support, which is obviously going to be a larger propensity for these kinds of deployments?

And then returning to AU for a moment.

You made some interesting remarks last week having to do with some additional new possible opportunities for the company in manufacturing software, supply chain, even smart products you alluded to.

Maybe talk about how seriously you mean to pursue those new things.

And then for Scott, first, thank you for the last 25 quarters.

And as your going-away question or multipart question, Andrew earlier parsed the usage data by geo.

Could you do the same thing by perhaps stand-alone versus collections and perhaps even by vertical in terms of what you're seeing in the usage telemetry there?

All right.

So it's a classic, Jay, multipart question.

All right.

So Jay, let me start with the license management piece.

This is something we take particularly seriously.

And I'm really glad you asked about it because the license management and the ability to manage these licenses is actually a value-add to our customers.

They want to manage this investment in Autodesk asset as an enterprise asset, all right?

And it's super important in the space that we do this.

One of the reasons we've been moving so quickly to retire legacy models in our user base is because that actually holds us back from delivering best-in-class license management for our customers.

Every customer, every maintenance license is still out there.

Every multiuser license that's still based on the old desktop paradigm versus what we want to do in the cloud paradigm is holding us back from deploying the systems in a way that help our customers manage these things holistically.

The good news is that our EBA customers get a totally different dashboard on how they use our software, and they're able to get more per user usage analytics and more data in terms of understanding our customer base.

But this investment in the sheet of glass that our customers look through in terms of managing their relationship with Autodesk is something we've been doing ongoing for years.

And you look for it to accelerate as we retire the last of these legacy business models and start unifying everything on a stack that really provides a high level of control to our customers and a high level of fidelity about what their actual usage is.

This -- we believe this is a value-add of the portfolio, and you'll see us continue to invest in this.

Now with manufacturing investments, I think you want to just pay attention to what we're doing with Fusion and the areas we're targeting because we think these are important areas that we want to pay attention to.

We've integrated certain types of technology in the Fusion.

We want to augment and supplement and extend those so that Fusion is a professional-grade solution surrounded by other professional-grade solutions that tackle significant growth markets inside the manufacturing vertical.

Our first angle of attack within the convergence of design and make and merging advanced manufacturing methods with advanced modeling methods, I think you're going to see us attack the convergence of mechanical engineering and electrical components inside designs.

We've already started doing some of that thing, and we're going to do it in a uniquely cloud way.

We're going to do it with uniquely underpinnings of cloud compute.

And we're going to do it in highly differentiated ways but also in ways that respect some of the tools our customers are using today.

And Jay, I'll jump in on the second part.

And I guess thank you for the congratulations on my 25th Autodesk earnings call.

If I get this right, it's your 125th Autodesk earnings call, so a little bit of a difference there in terms of history of the company.

I'd like to congratulate you as well.

It's interesting, when you look at this, right, we're seeing less of a differential by vertical and more of a differential by country.

So in other words, the country X is seeing nice robust growth.

We see that in both the AEC and the manufacturing side.

If it's continuing to be somewhat flat and stable, we see that again by vertical.

So it's -- I'd say the better differentiator in usage is more how is the region performing, how is the country performing than it is within that country, is it AEC or manufacturing.

The industry collections versus stand-alone, what I -- I'll just reiterate what I said in the opening commentary that industry collections continues to be a stable share of our overall business.

So we're not seeing a significant mix shift there.

We had -- early on, we had seen a mix shift of the new sales more towards LTE.

And we talked about last quarter that reverted back to the mean, where it had been historically.

So we're not seeing a significant mix shift at this point either way.

The last thing that I'd add because I know the detail of your spreadsheets, and you're probably -- you probably already got everything laid out here.

But to give you a sense on our new business growth, and in particular, product subscription new business growth from a unit standpoint, no question we've been impacted by the pandemic, more so in new business units than in other places.

That new business grew sequentially from Q2 to Q3.

And it's our expectation those units will grow again from Q3 to Q4.

So just to give you a sense of how things are performing.

Our next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick from Crédit Suisse.

Great.

So congrats all around, guys.

Particularly for Scott, best of everything, especially in your next chapter.

And the topic for both of you, I wanted to ask you about innovation.

The sheer amount of innovation on display at Autodesk University this year was, I guess I'd just say, overflowing.

So Andrew, for you, the easy question, what excites you the most?

And my parting gift for you, Scott, maybe a little more complex, how should we think about the pace of innovation going forward?

Because you've always talked about high single, low double-digit spend growth, but we're below 7% year-to-date.

So should we think about spend growth accelerating meaningfully to the high end of your range to recapture the tremendous opportunity ahead?

All right.

So Brad, I love this question.

Innovation is absolutely hypercritical to everything we do.

We believe we are powering a lot of transformation and a lot of dialogue in the industry right now.

We are delighted to see our competitors start to talk like we've been talking for years.

And I think that's a sign of the kind of innovation we're putting into the market.

Here's what I'll tell you I'm really excited about.

I am excited about the merger of SaaS, cloud compute and machine learning and this transformational power for our industry, all right?

This is what gets me up every morning right now in terms of what we're going to be able to deliver for our customers.

When we get more and more of their processes in the cloud, when we're computing more and more with their data with ever-decreasing compute cost in the cloud and layering on machine learning, we are going to be able to provide our customers with insights and productivity enhancements that are simply beyond anything they've imagined right now.

And it gets me extremely excited to be part of driving that change into the industry and what it means.

Now I can talk about the individual technologies that play into all that.

There's lots.

But if you talk at a high level about what gets me excited, it's that.

And one thing I think is before -- as a segue to Scott answering his question, I think it's important for you to know that next year, we're probably the largest R&D spender in our segment, all right?

And I just want you to think about that after all the discussions we had going to the business model transformation to all of a sudden be talking about a world where nobody -- probably nobody is spending as much in this space on R&D as Autodesk is.

I think that is a fundamental change and a lot of innovation comes from that much spend.

Scott?

I'm not sure what to add to that, Andrew.

I think you said it exactly right.

We're in a fortunate position, Brad -- and thanks for your kind words, by the way.

But we're in a fortunate position in the model where we can both grow spending and increase margins year-on-year.

And so if you look at the midpoint of the updated guide for this year, for fiscal '21, it implies just short of an 8% growth in total spend.

So the cost of goods sold plus OpEx.

Looking ahead, on top of that, we've invested pretty significantly and grown our investment in R&D, headcount for R&D, for sales capacity this year and some of the areas that Andrew just touched on earlier in Jay's question about building out our internal systems and our internal infrastructure.

So we've invested quite a bit in innovation already this year that will obviously carry on into next year.

And we've made a handful of not large but strategic acquisitions to continue to fuel that innovation.

So we -- I think long term, targeting double-digit revenue growth is somewhat dependent on us continuing to invest on the R&D side of things.

And I feel really good about the position we're in to be able to both drive that investment and increase margins out through fiscal '23.

Our next question comes from the line of Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley.

Excellent.

Scott, would it be out of line to try to convince you to stay at Autodesk?

I mean it's a lot more interesting than like a networking company.

No.

I think the first...

It sounded like [I should have tried harder], Keith, keep him.

Exactly.

He's a good one.

You should have tried harder to keep him.

On the quarter, 2 things that I wanted to just get a little bit more color on.

One is kind of like the pace of recovery that you guys are seeing and expecting.

It seemed like earlier this year, you might have thought it was going to come a little bit faster given what you're seeing in Asia Pac.

Maybe that's spreading out a little bit.

But with the turn in like the current RPO figures this quarter, it looks like you guys are really actually -- the whole business is turning a corner here.

So one, can you give us kind of your latest thinking on the shape of the recovery and kind of what's assumed as we look into FY '22?

And then carrying on, on kind of that total spend commentary, a lot of companies that we talked to saw expense savings this year due to COVID and lower T&E spending and just were able to sort of garner efficiencies in their overall business, some of which they need to give back in the year ahead as we get into a more normalized environment.

Is there a big component of that in the Autodesk business that we should be thinking about when we're modeling margins into FY '22?

Yes.

So Keith, I'll start, and Andrew, you can add color to it.

In terms of what we're seeing, we are seeing recovery.

Andrew alluded to it and gave some of the specific countries where we're seeing recovery already and where we're a level of activity that's above pre-COVID rates.

I think someone earlier highlighted APAC.

APAC has been quite strong for us from that standpoint.

We're seeing Continental Europe recover nicely as well.

The -- our expectations for Q4 is that we'll continue to see a modestly improving economic environment.

And as we look at it next year, I think we will continue to see improvement.

I'm not sure it's going to be a straight line improvement, especially given kind of the current wave, but we'll continue to see improvement.

And I expect by the second half of the year, that we'll see some pretty good recovery in economic activity that clearly will benefit us.

So think of next year as being a little more back-end loaded.

And I think that's part of what you see with the early look that we've given you on what revenue growth looks like this year.

Q4, again, midpoint of the guide has revenue growth at about 12%, and op margin for Q4 will be about in line with the full year at about 29%.

And I think looking at it next year, you'll see both of those grow.

Revenue growth will increase from there, and op margin will increase from there.

On the specific COVID spend savings, I think we've had the same savings that everyone has had.

Obviously, T&E, travel expense has been a big savings for us.

But as we look at -- and events have gone more virtual.

I think that will continue.

We've had modest amount of savings from the operations of our facilities or our offices.

As we look at next year though, I don't expect it to be a significant year-on-year headwind.

Travel, of course, will return, but we're going to build the budget such that I don't expect it to come back anywhere near to where it was in, let's say, calendar 2019 or in our fiscal '20.

I think if nothing else we've learned, you don't have to be face-to-face with a customer to get that final agreement.

You don't have to be face-to-face internally to get things done the way we need to get them done internally.

So I think we'll continue to see ongoing savings in T&E.

It'll step up from this year, certainly, but it's not going to be a significant headwind for us on spend.

Our next question comes from the line of Adam Borg from Stifel.

Scott, of course, congrats on the new role.

Just on some announcements coming out of AU and talking a little bit more about Autodesk Build, you mentioned how you're leading with that going forward.

You do have a big installed base on BIM 360 and PlanGrid.

So I was just curious kind of what the migration path looks like for those -- those assets to Autodesk Build.

And maybe just quickly as a follow-up, on the Spacemaker acquisition, any commentary, Scott, on expectations for inorganic revenue growth.

Yes.

All right.

So let me start with the migration path.

So for PlanGrid, for those customers that migrate from PlanGrid and ultimately migrate onto Build, it's actually not a heavy lift because of the way we built the application.

PlanGrid's huge innovation and huge value-add to the whole stack is the mobile experience.

They're really good at it.

So what we did is we basically used the PlanGrid experience and the PlanGrid team as the mobile experience for Build.

So the move from PlanGrid to Build as a progression is not a heavy lift.

Now you're right.

We have a long tail of customers that are on BIM 360 Field, BIM 360 Next Gen Field.

Those customers over time are going to be migrating to Build at a pace that makes sense for them.

But what we've done is we've created environments that allow them to ship during -- as projects sunset and they go into new projects.

We've got a whole master plan with our customer success organization and construction on how they move over time.

We're not going to force anybody to move ahead of time, but we've got a well-crafted plan for how we move these people.

It's more of a heavy lift for people that are on BIM 360 Field, less of a heavy lift for people who are on BIM 360 Next Gen, which is where Docs -- BIM 360 -- Autodesk Docs was built off of, and it's a much smaller lift for PlanGrid customers.

And Adam, to your question on Spacemaker, I'm super excited with the technology.

And I don't know if you got a chance to see it demoed at AU.

But if you didn't, I highly recommend you go take a look at it.

This is a -- it's obviously tremendously exciting technology and some super talented people that we picked up with the Spacemaker acquisition.

Impact financially is going to be nominal.

It'll actually be slightly dilutive, and that's built into our expectations for next year.

There's another effect that I probably should have mentioned earlier, and I want to make sure I get it out on the call though.

The one thing that will change next year, and that's a slight headwind to us in terms of revenue growth year-on-year, we have -- almost all of our products are already ratable, right?

There's a couple of really small products, one, Vault that we've talked about in the past that did not get over the hurdle to get away from upfront revenue recognition.

We've continued to work on that front.

We've continued to do things that incorporate much more cloud-based functionality.

And I think in the first part of next year, Vault will flip from upfront rev rec to full ratable rev rec.

And that looks like it's about a point of growth.

Again, already built into the kind of the early view that I gave you of the low double -- low to mid-teens revenue growth for next year.

The impact of Vault is built into that.

Obviously, it normalizes in fiscal '23, but once it becomes ratable, the compare points are equivalent.

But that's one, if you're building your model in that level of detail, think about that being a bit of a headwind that's already built into the early view that I've given you on fiscal '22.

Yes.

I'll make one more comment on Spacemaker just because I kind of forgot to segue to you on that.

But Spacemaker represents that perfect convergence of SaaS, cloud compute and machine learning into solving real-world problems for our customers.

I think you're going to see the impact on our business accumulate over time as the technology expands and as it connects itself deeper with Revit and other parts of the process.

One of the things I love about the Spacemaker team is they have this philosophy about making multiple constituents more successful with their objectives.

And that's the building owner, the developer, making their investment more profitable.

That's the city, making sure that the impact on infrastructure is managed and controlled.

And they also have -- a big customer or a big stakeholder in this is the environment and helping architects and city planners make more sustainable decisions in real time for how things are built.

It's the perfect example of how all these things come together to change the way people make design decisions and ultimately [go] decisions.

The look for its impact to expand over time as that team starts hooking into other parts of our process, builds out their existing products and inevitably starts moving into other parts of the organization, which we always see with acquisitions like this.

Yes, there's absolutely a lot of synergies that we see with Spacemaker coming in.

Our next question comes from the line of Steve Koenig from SMBC Nikko.

Scott, best of luck to you, and thanks for all the hard work you've done with us over the years.

Definitely appreciate it.

Yes.

Thank you.

Cool.

So I'll just ask one question.

Andrew, you had some pretty open, transparent communication with customers this last quarter in terms of the letter that was written.

And just in terms of looking at what those customers were asking for, they were very clearly asking for accelerating the road map in architecture and engineering design, which we -- doesn't seem like we've talked a lot about on the call today, hasn't been a focus.

And if I read between the lines in that communication, the customers also seemed a bit frustrated with the transitions they've been going through from maintenance to subscriptions to collections and now to named users.

And it just seems like there's a little bit of dissonance between what they're asking for and what I'm hearing from you on the call today, and I'd love to get your thoughts on how -- why is that -- why is there that maybe misperception gap?

And what are you guys doing about it?

Steve, there's absolutely no dissonance, all right?

One of the things I think I've said consistently in the communication, and I'll take you back to the communication, is we started investing in the road map for Revit well ahead of these communications, all right, from these customers because we made a deliberate choice to invest in construction and not in Revit functionality for architects.

So these customers are going to fairly quickly start to see changes and additions to Revit from the investment we made actually at the end of last year.

And I think you're missing something completely.

We just spent several hundred million dollars on the architecture segment of our space, all right?

Spacemaker is squarely targeted at design and architecture, and the founders of the Spacemaker are architects, all right?

This technology is right on the X. And like I said, we just spent a lot of money to do this.

And this is right in the X. It's something we've been looking at for a while.

So no, there's no dissonance here in terms of where we're focused and where we're -- with regard to the migration, look, you got to be -- we started this migration with 2 -- something under 2 million maintenance customers.

Most of those have come along with us.

We never expected that all of them were going to come along with us happily.

And what we've done is we've reached the end of the tail with some maintenance customers that are more frustrated with the changes than not.

But at the same time, we've added millions of other customers that weren't able to afford some of our solutions before because of the upfront cost of these solutions.

So yes, maintenance customers that have been with us, they've seen lots of transitions.

They're not done yet.

We haven't retired all those models yet.

But remember, we started with less than 2 million of those.

We're over 5 million of subscribers right now.

A fraction of those are from that maintenance base.

We have to remember, let's look at the big picture here as well as the small picture.

I understand and I emphasize the frustration of those customers that started on maintenance and journey with us, but we have reached so many more customers, so many more architecture firms, so many individual architects, so many people that couldn't afford Revit, so many people that couldn't afford that extra seat of AutoCAD, so many high-growth companies that as they add seats, they're actually spending less over 5 years than they would have with us, adding fees in the perpetual model.

That's a big story, and it's transformative for the industry in terms of how much value people are able to get now.

So let's make sure we stay focused on the big picture here.

Cool.

Well, I appreciate your thoughts, and thanks again for the open communication.

Good luck to you, Scott.

Thanks, Steve.

This is all the time we have for Q&A today.

I would like to turn the call back over to Simon Mays-Smith for closing remarks.

Thank you, Gigi, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

We're looking forward to seeing many of you at conferences over the next few weeks.

Please do reach out to us if you have any follow-ups on anything from this call.

So this concludes our call for today.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call.

Thank you for participating.

You may now disconnect.