Progress Software Corp (PRGS) 2025 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Progress Software Q4 2025 earnings call. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. Mike Micciche, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you, Sheri. Nice to have you back. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Progress Software's fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year 2025 financial results conference call. With me this afternoon are Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO; and Anthony Folger, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before we get started, let me go over our Safe Harbor statement. During this call, we will discuss our outlook for future financial and operating performance, corporate strategies, product plans, cost initiatives, our integration of ShareFile and Nuclia and other information that might be considered forward-looking. Such forward-looking information represents Progress Software's outlook and guidance only as of today and is subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially.

For a description of the factors that may affect our future results and operations, please refer to the risk factors in our SEC filings, particularly the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q. Progress assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements included in this call.

Additionally, please note that all the financial figures referenced in this call are non-GAAP measures, unless otherwise indicated. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP figures in our earnings press release, which was issued after the market closed today. This document contains additional information related to our financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025 and the full year of fiscal 2025, and I recommend that you reference it for specific details.

We've also provided a slide presentation that contains supplemental data for our fourth quarter and fiscal year and provides additional highlights and financial metrics. Both the earnings release and the supplemental presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progress.com.

Today's call is being recorded in its entirety and will be available for replay on the Investor Relations section of our website shortly after we finish.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Yogesh for his prepared comments.

Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our Q4 and fiscal year FY25 results. Fiscal year '25 was Progress's strongest year-to-date, driven by a combination of share file and the strong performance of our overall product portfolio, especially during the second half of the year, which was increasingly propelled by our customers' AI projects.

This resulted in annual revenue of $978 million up 30% year over year, and earnings per share of $5.72 up 16% on fiscal year '24. Our business got stronger throughout the year, as evidenced by the fact that we exceeded the midpoint of our original revenue guidance from last January by approximately $14 million and beat our operating income guidance by 6%.

We continue to meet our customers' needs in an AI-driven business world by investing and innovating across the products they rely on. This is demonstrated by our 100% net retention rate and 2% year over year ARR growth to $852 million which now represents over 87% of our total revenue. For the fourth quarter, revenue finished at $253 million up 18% year over year, right in line with our most recent guidelines.

Earnings of $1.51 were well above the high end of guidance thanks yet again to excellent expense discipline and consistent execution. As Anthony will discuss in detail, cash flow remains strong, and we continue to both pay down our debt and make opportunistic share repurchases. Our balance sheet is in excellent shape and we remain flexible and and well capitalized to execute M&A as we carry out our total growth strategy.

Looking ahead, the high end of our initial guidance for FY26 is $1 billion a very exciting milestone for Progress with unlevered free cash flow of nearly $320 million at the midpoint. Our confidence in the FY26 guidance is a result of the momentum in our business during the second half of FY25, which I mentioned earlier. And our expectation of continued investment in AI projects by our customers.

Our AI product innovations are leading our customers to recommit to us as they see us as a trusted partner in their journey. Before I talk more about this, let me provide an update on our ShareFile and Nuclear acquisitions. During fiscal year '25, we completed the integration of ShareFile, our largest deal so far, which is proving to be one of our best acquisitions, as you can see from our results.

He passed every milestone and met every goal on or ahead of schedule. We also acquired and fully integrated nuclear Agentic RAG technology, which has been extremely well received by customers and is adding significant functionality and value to our products. In addition to outstanding products and technology, ShareFile and Nuclear have brought us many new, very talented team members with significant and cutting edge expertise.

Let me also quickly recap some other highlights from the fourth quarter. Our investment in innovation and R&D continued across our product lines as we enhanced our offerings, delivering dozens of new AI capabilities in addition to the usual upgrades and features. To list just a few, we launched Progress Agentic RAG, an industry leading product to help organizations leverage generative AI with confidence.

We introduced the industry's first generative content management system with built-in RAG capabilities infinity. This innovation introduces native multilingual Agentic RAG based AI technology to deliver dynamically generated user experiences driven by a site visitor's prompts and online activity. We launched an enterprise grade agentic UI generator that leverages our market leading telere and Kendo libraries to automatically generate multi-component brand style page layouts from simple language prompts.

This UI agent delivers robust business functionality and works right inside the developer's IDE of choice. We launched Automate MFT, a new cloud native file transfer solution that is helping customers reduce total cost of ownership by up to 50% compared to traditional products. To highlight the impact of our solutions are having on our customers' AI initiatives, let me provide a recent example.

A Fortune 50 agriculture and food company was struggling to leverage the extremely large volumes of structured and unstructured data stored across its enterprise. This data is stored in hundreds of different sources in nearly 1,000 different formats and contains invaluable business information gathered over several decades. They leveraged our rogress data platform to unlock value by creating a single unified view of all the information and gained relevant, accurate, and actionable insights worth tens of millions of dollars.

This demonstrates the impact and relevance of our products in a world where Gen AI is making it critical for organizations to get their arms around their data and ensure that AI delivers fact-based answers that they can rely upon. In other important news from Q4, the US Department of Defense Chief Digital and AI Office added Progress Federal Solutions Group to the Trade Winds Solutions Marketplace.

Which is the DoD's list of pre-approved providers of AI products. This designation allows DoD customers to rapidly procure and deploy a progress data platform bypassing the usual government procurement processes. It underscores our commitment to delivering scalable, secure, and innovative AI solutions that help government agencies achieve their AI objectives.

During the fourth quarter, we also announced our expanded presence in Costa Rica. Building on ShareFile's existing footprint, we opened a new facility that serves as a center of excellence for tech support, customer success, sales, and corporate functions. This new center strengthens our ability to support regional growth in US time zone and creates new opportunities to deliver value to our customers.

Internally, our excellent expense control and operating performance continues to benefit from our own adoption of AI to increase productivity and drive efficiency. Across engineer, our teams are using AI in every phase of development, whether it is to write PRDs, generate code, create QA tests, establish test environments or create education and tech support content.

This has enabled us to accelerate product innovation as well as improve the quality of customer tech support while containing costs. Our finance, HR, sales, communications and marketing teams are increasingly using AI in a variety of ways to improve the quality and increase the quantity of their work. Speaking of our teams, I'm very proud to say that for the fourth year in a row we experienced very low voluntary attrition rate just 6% for fiscal '25.

Once again, this industry leading metric reflects the positive inclusive culture of our team and our ability to retain critical talent, maintain continuity, and keep turnover related expenses down. And the Boston Globe in its recent list of top places to work ranked Progress number one among large software companies in the region just last month.

Now let me touch on our commitment to our total growth strategy and the M&A outlook. As ever, there are many opportunities for progress to look at among the literally thousands of software companies. However, the right targets for us are infrastructure software vendors with solid technology and a strong, stable install base of costs, and over the past few quarters, few such assets have come to market.

Selectivity, patience, and discipline continue to be the hallmarks of our M&A strategy. And we will evaluate all opportunities whether they are an outright purchase from founders, VCs, or P/E sponsors, or a divestiture as long as it fits our strict criteria. Our corporate development team remains active, and as I mentioned earlier, we feel very good about our ability to finance the next deal and execute well.

We got off to a quick start to FY26 and held our annual sales kickoff in Atlanta during the very first week of December. Over 650 of our sales, field engineering, and customer success professionals gathered in person to learn about our latest product offerings, both to market initiatives, and to review key objectives for FY26 and beyond.

Our business momentum and particularly our AI innovation work created an extremely high level of excitement in our sales teams about the opportunity in front of us, and it's hard to overstate the energy and excitement among our teams who returned ready to hit the ground running.

To conclude, from an operating, financial, and strategic perspective, we're thrilled to be carrying steady momentum into and are excited about the year ahead. I want to congratulate the entire Progress team for an incredible year in fiscal '25, and as always thank them for a job well done.

Let me now turn it over to Anthony for his prepared remarks, and then we'll be happy to take questions.

Great, thanks, Yogesh, and good afternoon, everyone. We're very pleased to share our outstanding Q4 and full year 2025 results, closing out a very successful year for Progress.

Let's get right into the numbers, starting with ARR, which we believe provides the best view into our top-line performance. We closed Q4 with ARR of $852 million approximately 2% pro forma year over year growth. For clarity, our pro forma results include ARR from acquired businesses in all periods presented. This growth in ARR was driven by multiple products including ShareFile, OpenEdge, WhatsApp Gold, and our devtools products.

And consistent with prior quarters, our net retention rate remains strong at 100%. In addition to growth in ARR and solid net retention, Q4 revenue was $253 million up approximately 18% year over year. Our revenue strength in the quarter was broad-based without outperformance, coming from Open edge and ShareFile, both of which performed better than our internal expectations.

For the full year our revenue was $978 million up $224 million or 30% over the prior year. That growth is entirely driven by a full year contribution from ShareFile. Reflecting on 2025, we believe we made the right investments in our products keeping them mission critical in an AI-driven world. And this is validated by our strong customer retention and consistent ARR growth across multiple products throughout the year. A demonstration of the resilience in our portfolio.

Turning now to expenses, total costs and operating expenses were $156 million for the quarter, up 16% over the year ago quarter, and $593 million for the full year, up 30% compared to fiscal 2024. The year over year increase for the quarter and for the year was entirely driven by the inclusion of a full year of ShareFile activity.

Operating income for the quarter was $96 million for an operating margin of 38%, exceeding our internal expectations. Earnings per share was $1.51 which was $0.16 above the high end of our guidance range. This better than expected performance in operating margin and DPS was the result of strong top-line execution coupled with excellent cost management across the business.

Turning now to a few balance sheet and cash flow metrics, we ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $95 million and debt of $1.4 billion for a net debt position of $1.3 billion. Our net leverage ratio at year-end was approximately 3.4 times, which was slightly better than where we expected to be with the ShareFile integration now complete.

DSO for the quarter was 73 days, up 6 days compared to the year ago quarter. Deferred revenue was $425 million at the end of the fourth quarter, up approximately $21 million year over year and $44 million sequentially, reflecting strong fourth quarter top line performance.

Adjusted free cash flow was $62 million for the quarter, and $247 million for the year, an increase of 16% over the prior year. And we also continued to return capital to shareholders, repurchasing $40 million in stock in Q4 and $105 million for the full fiscal year 2025. We ended our fiscal year with $202 million remaining under our current share repurchase authorization.

Okay. Now we'll turn to the outlook. And before getting into the numbers, I'd like to highlight the following items. First, we will continue to focus on ARR as a key metric and we expect ARR growth generally consistent with the 2% growth we saw in fiscal year 2025. Also, our 2026 outlook assumes minimal revenue impact from the timing of multiyear contract renewals.

And as a result, we expect annual revenue growth similar to our ARR growth. Second, we expect to aggressively repay the revolving line of credit that we used to partially finance the ShareFile acquisition. We've modeled $250 million of repayments for fiscal 2026, which would improve our net leverage ratio to approximately 2.7 times by year-end. As a reminder, in July of 2025, we upsized the capacity of our revolving credit facility from $900 million to $1.5 billion.

Finally, we expect to roll our 2026 convertible notes into our revolving credit facility when those converts mature in April of 2026. With $900 million of unused revolver capacity today, together with our aggressive debt repayment plan, we'll have more than enough capacity to absorb $360 million in principle and continue executing our total growth strategy.

With all that said, for the first quarter of 2026, we expect revenue between $244 million and $250 million and earnings per share of between $1.56 and $1.62. For the full year 2026, we expect revenue between $986 million and $1 billion, representing between 1% and 2% growth over 2025, an operating margin of 39%, adjusted free cash flow between $260 million and $274 million and unlevered free cash flow between $313 million and $326 million.

Finally, earnings per share are expected to be between $5.82 and $5.96 per share. Our guidance for full year EPS assumes a tax rate of 20%, the repurchase of $20 million in progress shares and approximately 44 million shares outstanding.

In closing, we're excited to deliver a great fourth quarter results, capping off a strong 2025. With the product investments we've made and the ShareFile integration complete, we believe we're well positioned to execute our strategy and deliver solid results throughout 2026 and well beyond.

With that, I'd like to open the call for Q&A.

(Operator Instructions)

John DiFucci, Guggenheim Securities.

And nice job here guys on this quarter. And as usual, the execution is really -- is impressive and especially seeing ShareFile here. I guess I have a bunch in my mind. I'm going to go high level right now because you guys see the market. You see what's happening to all of software, especially applications. And Yogesh, you've been in this for a long time. And I knew you've got a business, and that's meant to be a compliment, I've been around a while, too. And you've been a business leader for a long time. But I first knew you as a technology leader.

And I'm just curious your perspective because right now, there's this fear out there on AI. You talked a lot about it in your prepared remarks and especially for application. So I want -- like broadly speaking, for software, how do you think this evolves? And I know there's no real like no one really knows right now. But how do you think what do you think it evolves for software and in that context for progress?

Yeah. Absolutely, John. Thank you. And it is fascinating to see sort of the level of hype, if I may call it that, that has led to the level of fear around the disruption of software in the business world. You said specifically, let me start with applications, even though that's not our business. I have yet to speak to a CIO of any meaningful size business who realistically is planning to write their own ERP, like their own financial systems, like their own HR system, right, their own whatever right?

So I think in the end, businesses are in the business of whatever business they are in and the tools they use is an applications they use to run their business basically are a means to an end. And so unless they are technology companies themselves, I really don't see a lot of that today. Now obviously, over time, things will get different. I think what can happen is that you can get new competitors come to market with offerings that are, let's say, similar to the applications that are available in the market today. But then the question is how hard it is to do three things: one, get your data out of, let's say, a Salesforce or a ServiceNow or whatever and move to the new offering, whoever that is, by the way, and they're not going to be free either.

So the question is how much effort will that be? So, even more importantly, what risk will that create for the business we have seen historically when people have tried to move from one ERP to another. I mean, I remember, John, a long time ago when SAP was pointed to by Fortune 50 companies, the reason why they were going to miss results for quarter and the year because their implementation of SAP was going like a disaster. Right?

And they were trying to move from some ERP to SAP and being a manufacturing company, that was the heart and soul of the business. So I think that there is a risk involved and the question is, can the risk be minimized. And then last but not least, what does it take to get the employees in the company and the organization retrain them a new system. So I think these are real hurdles. So I actually think that the yeah, at least in the near term, in the near term, in my mind, is next one to three years, are, to be honest, way overblown.

And from a progress perspective, it's even more fascinating because we sit inside our environment in our software is helping people run their environments well, govern their environments as well, get access to the data, leverage that data for business-critical work, do their workflows internally, manage their content, deliver digital experiences. And all of those that are becoming AI-enabled, but it doesn't mean that people won't want to do that, right? People will still want to have digital experiences. They just want to be able to have AI natural language interface and easy to build those and easy to connect them to existing data. Which we do today, right?

So I think as long as we continue to invest in our products, we will see continued success in the market. And it's interesting that we have a footprint out in the world that ranges from fundamental design of ASIC companies to people who manufacture machines to build chips to chip manufacturers themselves to everywhere up and down the tech stack also. And we're seeing interesting things happening there where they are using our products more because their needs are growing.

So whenever a business grows and sometimes the financial industry goes, sometimes manufacturing goes, sometimes chip industry goes. It doesn't matter which one it is. Right? For us, it is -- as industries grow, as certain sectors grow because we are so broad based. And we are, by the way, in large companies and extremely small and midsized companies as well.

We are actually quite well, in my mind, broad-based and hedged that way that I expect us to continue to do well, which is why I am excited about progress, which is why we basically think that our growth this year will reflect what it was last year that our ARR organic will continue to grow at a 2% rate. It all is a reflection of how we feel and how I feel about our business.

Thank you very much for that perspective, Yogesh, it sounds, if I could -- just as I was listening to you talk, it sounds like there's a lot of complications here that you can't just gloss over. But one thing sounds clear is that software companies, including progress are going to have to embrace AI and help customers leverage it. But thanks a lot.

Absolutely, John. You're absolutely correct. And that is why we as well as others are, I think, doing it aggressively.

Fatima Boolani, Citi.

Yogesh, I wanted to drill down into the same line of questioning writing on John [Coals] a little bit the last time you had a conversation around, hey, how does Progress insert itself in the monetization path of AI because clearly, there has been a lot considered and deliberate investments in your entire portfolio as it relates to AI and AI enablement. I think one of the things you said very clearly was this should show up maybe more imminently or more materially visibly in net retention rates.

And so when I kind of look at the trajectory of the 100% net retention rate level, as you've kind of pretty consistently put up for the last four for five quarters. I wanted to ask you why we haven't seen maybe more of a meaningful uptick in that -- in terms of the monetization manifesting in that figure, especially because you gave some very clear examples of how you are at the nexus of transformation for a lot of your customers. So any incremental detail around that would be very helpful. And I have a follow-up for Anthony, please.

Sure. Happy to. So I think -- and I'll share my view and Anthony in fact if you want to chime in as well. I think that in terms of net retention rate growth and increasing it over 100% means there's meaningful expansion across the broad customer base. And I think that even today, vast majority of investment in AI is limited, to be honest, a relatively small number of tech companies.

A lot of other companies actually are doing things that are more around trying to leverage infrastructure that is already being built by others and so on. So they're spending money on data centers, we are spending money on things that are truly bottom level. And in the business space, in the business community, I don't see yet a spend that is taking place to the same level that I expect as time goes on. So I think it is early. This is sort of like, it reminds me of the Internet pipeline where everybody was saying, let's lay down dot fiber as fast as we can. And then we'll figure out how to leverage it.

And if you noticed, right, it took Amazon a decade, to then really start getting into its stride after that. And people forget that what Amazon's trajectory was earlier. And then, of course, Amazon has been unbelievable over the last 20 years. So I think that it is just -- it takes time, and I think people always underestimate the short-term time it will take, but then they also underestimate how quickly it accelerates when it actually does accelerate.

I appreciate that nuance perspective Yogesh. Anthony, maybe a more tactical one for you. You very specifically mentioned that from a revenue growth perspective in fiscal '26, you are not going to see as much of a material impact from multiyear contract renewals. I'm wondering if you can translate that into how we should think about free cash flow and free cash flow linearity and seasonality over fiscal '26. And maybe if you can also sneak in some commentary on some of the 4Q free cash flow performance that maybe it was a little bit like from the seasonality side relative to where some broader expectations were.

Sure. So I guess maybe the second part of that question first. Q4 was a great quarter in terms of cash flow. Q4 was all a quarter where we had a significant beat on bookings. And a lot of what we do in the quarter is back-end loaded.

So as we sort of worked our way through year-end, we saw a pretty significant uplift in cash flow for the quarter and also for '26, right? I think a lot of the beat when a significant beat in bookings happened back-end loaded, a little bit of benefit in '25, but really where we thought it was in '26. And I think you can see the growth in free cash flow in '26, certainly outpacing growth in revenue or margins.

And so I think we feel pretty good about sort of an acceleration that we're starting to see in terms of free cash flow. In terms of the linearity, I don't know that it's going to be any different. I think ShareFile is I would say, less subject to seasonal fluctuations than the rest of our business would have been just because of the nature of that business. And so I wouldn't expect material differences in the seasonality or the linearity of our free cash flow from where we've been historically.

(Operator Instructions)

Lucky Schreiner, D.A. Davidson.

Great. Congrats on the quarter and some impressive results here. It looked like your SaaS revenues had a pretty strong sequential increase. And I guess I was wondering what drove that. Was there anything to call out? And maybe translating that to guidance I assume you're not baking in similar strength on the SaaS side. Would you say it's roughly a similar mix in 2026 as in 2025 in terms of the different revenue lines.

Yeah. Lucky, it was a very good quarter. Q4 was a really strong quarter on the SaaS line. I think sequentially, you can see the move up and I think there was a lot of strength in ShareFile and there was a lot of strength in some of the other products, some of our other SaaS offerings. So both of those combined were really what led to the uptick. I guess I would say this, as we look forward to 2026, ShareFile is growing well, but it's a single-digit grower. It's not a significant outlier with the rest of our business.

So I don't -- I wouldn't want to leave anybody with the impression that ShareFile or SaaS generally is sort of driving outsized growth. It's a little bit better than the rest of our business, but it's not so dramatically different. So Q4 was a pleasant upside surprise for us on the SaaS side. I think we're probably looking for in '26, something that's a little more consistent with the annual results, right? So sort of a steady up and to the right growth trajectory as we go.

Got you. That makes a lot of sense. And then maybe for Yogesh, a little bit of another philosophical question. You guys look at a lot of private companies, right, with your growth strategy, and I feel like you might have a unique vantage point here. Have you noticed any notice any change in retention rates of the targets of the software companies that you're looking at acquiring as there are these overhanging fears of AI start-ups disrupting fundamental software businesses. I'm just curious if you've noticed any change in retention rates at some of the companies you look to acquire?

To be honest, Lucky, yeah. And I mentioned that it's tough to find really good quality companies. I think one of the challenges, I think smaller companies are facing is that the customers are questioning whether they will make it and they're trying to decide whether they should switch to somebody larger or something like that. So there is a bit more of a turn some of the businesses we have seen that have had exposure to the federal government that has been significantly larger as a proportion of their business.

I think they have seen challenges as well. So yes, we are seeing softening in their both gross and net retention rates. And again, look, from our perspective, we want to buy a business that is a solid business that we believe we can sustain the 100% net retention rate going forward. And so we continue to be very selective in what we look for, and we continue to make sure that whatever we buy is a good quality business. There's a lot of stuff that's available cheap, but it doesn't mean it's a good business to have.

I think that's why you guys have been so successful so far. So I appreciate that context.

Ittai Kidron, Oppenheimer.

This is Nolan Jenevein on for Ittai. I just kind of want to double-click a little bit on operating margins. It was a really strong quarter for operating margin. But you're kind of guiding for roughly flat next year, it feels like you still have a lot of initiatives going on that seem to be favorable to operating margins. So I just kind of want to double-click, what are the sort of implicit assumptions for operating margins next year in terms of the fundamental puts and takes?

Yeah, sure. So I guess maybe the one thing I would point to is when you look at 2025 and sort of look back at the year, coming into the year, I think our initial guide was something like 37%, maybe 37.5% as an operating margin. And I mean we just blew that away, right? I think we were able to integrate ShareFile more quickly and at a much lower cost than we expected. And we ended up getting to our target margin a lot faster. And so we end the year with roughly 39% margins, which is pretty much where we were at prior to ShareFile.

And so I think the -- to me, sort of the upside or the positive in this is that the ShareFile integration and the execution around it was fantastic. I think the team did an absolutely outstanding job got us to our target margin a lot faster. And ultimately, as we look out into we're already at our target margin. That gives us an ability to make investments in other areas in the business. We acquired Nuclia.

We continue to make investments in AI, smart investments, we think they are going to continue to propel us forward. And I think those are the dynamics. Those are really the puts and takes. But I think really the positive there is getting to that target margin in '25, a lot more quickly. was just a really -- a lot of upside and a big positive for us.

I'm showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Yogesh Gupta for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Shari, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you in the near future. Have a good night.

This concludes today's program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.