SEMrush Holdings Inc (SEMR) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SEMrush Holdings Second Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions)

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Bob Gujavarty. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I'm Bob Gujavarty, VP of Investor Relations, and welcome to SEMrush Holdings Second Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. We'll be discussing the results announced on our press release issued after market closed on Monday. With me on the call is our CEO, Oleg Shchegolev, our CFO; Evgeny Fetisov; and our CSO, Eugene Levin.

Before we begin, I would like to highlight our participation in several virtual investor conferences to be held during the third quarter. We'll attend the KeyBanc Virtual Technology Leadership Conference on August 11, and the Piper Sandler Global Technology Conference on September 14.

Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigations Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, expected growth, adoption and demand for our products and features, expected investments and their anticipated benefits, industry and market trends, our competitive position, market opportunities and our guidance for the third quarter of 2021 and the full year 2021. And can be identified by words such as expect, anticipate, intend, plan, believe, seek or will.

These statements reflect our views as of today only and should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent date, and we do not undertake any duty to update these statements. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the risks and important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our final IPO prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q as well as other filings with the SEC.

Also, during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. There's a reconciliation schedule showing the GAAP versus non-GAAP results currently available on our press release issued after the market close, which can be found on our website at investors.semrush.com.

And with that, let me turn the call over to Oleg.

Thank you, and good morning to everyone on the call. I am pleased with our performance in the second quarter. Revenue of $45 million was up 58% year-over-year and up 13% sequentially. We saw strength across all our major markets, but particular strength from markets outside the United States and United Kingdom, which grew 65% year-over-year. Our paid users grew 29% year-over-year, while the average check grew by approximately 19% year-over-year.

Looking at some of the product highlights from the quarter. We saw strong traction with our Social Media Marketing tools. As I mentioned in May, we transitioned these tools to a free-to-use model with a goal of driving wider adoption.

The initial results look promising as we had over 30,000 active users at the end of June. According to G2 rankings, we are a leader in social media management, and I believe the strong adoption of our solutions is further validation of our leadership position. Many investors ask about the primary use case that drives customers to adopt SEMrush. It's an interesting question because our product offering is far broader than the point solutions offered by our competitors.

There is a wide variety of use cases, and I would like to highlight a couple of those to help investors better understand what is driving our growth. Priddy Chimney Sweeps is a contractor in the Washington, D.C. area that provides critical services related to safety, upkeep and construction of chimneys and fireplaces.

Priddy is a new service provider in a market dominated by larger brands with much larger advertising budgets. Priddy engaged with audience growth in digital marketing agency to revamp the company's digital marketing strategy. Using SEMrush tools, Ardent Growth conducted research to plan an effective site architecture issue and content strategy, that could rapidly increase previous typical [authority]. The results speak for themselves. First page rankings went from approximately 30 in September of 2019 to over 300 as of October 2020. And organic traffic increased by over 2000%. When a prospect searches for Chimney Sweep in Washington D.C. Priddy Clean is ranking third behind Angie's List and Yelp.

We improved visibility translated directly to an increase in traffic and conversions. And as a result, Priddy Chimney Sweeps revenue has grown substantially. And amid a global pandemic, which saw many SMEs struggle, the company is preparing to expand. We are focused on solutions for SMEs, but our solutions are widely deployed across enterprise customers as well.

Universal Health Services is a leading provider of hospital and health care services. UHS' corporate marketing is an internal resource supporting marketing and communication strategies and multichannel tactics for UK's corporate and its subsidiaries. In November 2019, the UHS' SEO team purchased a SEMrush license and began analyzing the state of the pilot facilities websites. Their SEO team quickly realized that facility sites were lacking content that would drive relevant traffic.

Using -- with SEMrush tool, issue of writing assistant and topic research, where SEO content teams began producing content around behavioral health and saw immediate results. With SEMrush, the team streamlined the process of creating highly effective content and grew conversions by 49% in 5 months.

With the help of SEMrush, UHS grew the number of in-house campaigns by 10x in 1 year, while also cutting costs by 60% as compared to outsourcing rework to agencies.

I would like to close with a few comments on the breath of our data assets. A few investors were confused about what data we collect and analyze.

I want to make it clear that while building the map of the Internet working on producing our insights, SEMrush collect billions of discrete data points through a combination of internal and external sources. It take the data and transform it into actionable insights for customers. However, we only collect publicly available data, which does not include sensitive nonpublic data like credit scores, financial assets and payment information. Our practices are designed to comply with identity for advertisers regulations in the United States, and with General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, in Europe.

Looking ahead, I do believe we will see a reduction in micro targeting, and it may result in less paid ad spending on the part of SMEs. Lower opt-in rates could make it extremely difficult to measure returns on paid advertising for sites that generate relatively modest traffic, which includes many SMEs. I don't believe the overall marketing budget at SMEs will shrink as it is more challenging, whatever, to reach potential customers. Rather, I believe a portion of this budget will shift to paid and organic search.

I believe this would be a tailwind for SEMrush as we offer a best-in-class solution focused on improving organic and paid search results.

With that, I would like to pass the call to Evgeny for a more detailed discussion of our financials.

Thank you, Oleg. Q2 revenue of $45 million was up 58% year-over-year and came in above our expectations. Growth was once again driven by a steady increase in paying customers and an increase in the average monthly recurring revenue per paying customer or average check. We experienced average check growth in the second quarter of approximately 19% from the year ago period as we continue to see a tailwind from the price adjustments we implemented earlier this year, that among other results led to the growth in the number of additional user licenses purchased and a richer mix of [goodwill] and business accounts.

Our trailing 12-month revenue retention was 121% as of the end of June, up from 116% at the end of March. This result reflect an improvement in churn as compared to the higher levels experienced during the second quarter of 2020.

Gross margin of 77.3% was up 170 basis points from a year ago but down slightly from the previous quarter. The year-over-year improvement was due to higher revenue and sequential decline was largely due to additional spending on third-party data and an increase in hosting fees.

Non-GAAP operating expenses of $34.3 million in the quarter were up 50% from a year ago and up 18% from the previous quarter. The growth was driven by additional headcount as well as the higher costs associated with operating as a public company. Higher public company expenses contributed to the 35% sequential increase in G&A in the quarter. I expect operating expenses to continue to grow in the back half of the year, but the growth will be more weighted to marketing and product development with G&A spending growth moderating.

Strong revenue growth and higher gross margin were partially offset by higher operating expenses and contributed to non-GAAP net income of $290,000 in the second quarter, up from a net loss of $1.9 million a year ago.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $180.8 million, up from $171.9 million as of March 31. The increase in cash was primarily due to approximately $10 million received in April from the partial exercise of the overallotment option granted to the IPO underwriters. Cash flow penetrations in Q2 was marginally positive after an exceptionally strong first quarter.

Looking ahead to guidance. I expect second quarter revenue in the range of $47.3 million to $47.7 million, representing 47% to 48% year-over-year growth. For the full year, I expect revenue in the range of $182 million to $184 million, which would represent 46% to 47% year-over-year growth. We expect to accelerate our investments in the second half of the year with a focus on marketing.

These investments will likely weigh in profitability and, therefore, expect the third quarter non-GAAP loss of $4.5 million to $4 million and non-GAAP loss of $7.9 million to $6.3 million for the full year 2021. We achieved 58% revenue growth in the second quarter and our second consecutive quarter of non-GAAP profitability. Our performance in the first half of the year clearly suggests we'll have a large opportunity ahead of us and a proven go-to-market strategy to capture that opportunity.

Our solid financial performance in the first half of 2021, combined with the resources from our successful IPO puts us in a position to make incremental investments to support growth, investments that I believe will benefit the business going forward.

With that, Oleg, Eugene and I are happy to take any of your questions. Operator, please open the line for questions.

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Michael Turits with KeyBanc.

Congratulations on another good quarter post-IPO. One very high-level question. Obviously, you've accelerated really strongly coming out of COVID with digital transformation being led by digital marketing and other front-office spending areas. How much do you think that's a pull forward that we've now seen? And how much you think this is a sustainable growth rate that we can see into the next couple of years?

Thank you. Good morning. This is Oleg. I think our strong quarter -- our strong performance in the first half of this year. This is a clear signal for us that we work in the right direction, our market is huge. We have the best opportunity.

And we are working on numbers for next year and so on. We'll reveal it a little later. Eugene, please.

I think you rightly mentioned there is some -- I would say there is some pull forward problem to say this back half of the year given how strong the first half was on the back of the reopening that we see across the board. So as you may see from our guidance, our outlook for the, say, for Q3 and for the back half of the year, I would say it's slightly more moderate as we would need to see how the situation unfold across the group in different markets.

Okay. And then Evgeny, as a follow-up, perhaps you could -- the growth in average check or revenue per customer, 19% fantastic acceleration. Perhaps you could parse that for us that you called out some impact from pricing, but can you maybe stack rank the other impacts, whether it's in terms of incremental products or incremental units? What's really driving that strong growth in the ARR per customer?

Yes. There are a number of factors which drive the average share growth. One is the continuous change in the product mix. So we see a higher share of higher priced packages. And again, following the changes in pricing, we see our new customers lending on average -- the new lending an average check, which is about 20% higher than we had last year. I think that will be the second contribution factor. And the third one, as you mentioned, is the accelerated growth in add-ons and additional usage limits such as user seats. So all of those contributed to this higher average share growth.

So there is -- we see that we provide more value which our customers take, and this is reflected in the growth of the check.

Your next question is from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan.

I will add my congrats on a solid Q2. I wanted to ask you if you could just comment on how ambitious are your plans in the social media marketing realm. And as social media channels are starting to be viewed as a more important marketing channel than the website itself for more companies out there? What is it that customers are asking you to build for them to optimize their visibility in social media?

Thank you. I will start with the midterm plans, reveal our midterm understanding of social media management tools for us. And here, it's very important for us to give functions in sites and tools for some marketers who are not so experienced with online marketing. It's very important to bring them to such marketing industry and create the right inside side, [be here]. And I think, in general, we want to give more and more value to such unexperienced audience.

But if you talk about long-term plans, Eugene, please.

This is Eugene. So In terms of overall pipeline, we definitely have a lot of features and plans. Right now, the focus is mostly to get a bigger presence to become a key player in the social media management ecosystem. Answering your question about websites versus social media presence, I think for an average business, definitely website is going to be more important for foreseeable future. But we are seeing a lot of a new generation of marketing people who start with social media.

And then later evolve into broader web presence with websites. So I think that kind of just reiterate Oleg's point about building products for entry-level markets -- marketers. And then moving forward and answering your question about other things that people ask us to build.

So existing customers definitely ask us to build products for other buyer personas. So for example, people from customer success departments who also monitor mentions and want to reply to them, especially when there are some complaints about quality of product, where things that can impact reputation. So I hope it answers the question. In the short term, focus only on market share, right, on user growth. In the long run, we'll probably start going into different buyer personas within same organizations.

Okay. Understood. Evgeny, I had just a couple of quick ones for you. One is a housekeeping item. I don't know if you happen to have or if you're disclosing where headcount ended for Q2. And then the other part of this financially the -- I'm trying to think back historically, do you have a feel for how your ARR, if you look at the sequential build in the ARR numbers, which look very strong in Q2. Has that historically been stronger in Q2 or in Q3? And if you have any high-level commentary on just maybe how we could think about that into Q3 of this year.

Right. I will start with check count -- the check count target. And we are not disclosing it, but I think we could highlight that, as many other companies, we face such new reality of remote-work approach. And I think we were prepared very well for this remote approach. I think our culture with our structure with how we build autonomous teams, how with many steams, with goals and so on, we're doing really well. And with our focus on -- that currently our focus on this. But the first, I think such a remote approach helps us. We have -- we don't see any significant difficulties. We're hiring such a remote work approach.

On the costs, and I'll stop it. Evgeny, please.

Yes. Mark, into ARR, I wouldn't be reading into it right now too much because we see, I would say, a fair amount of distortions, which are based on the say start of the COVID and post-COVID reopening, which affected seasonality. But if we look at the typical year, I'd say there would be a slowdown at the end of the year as we end December and probably the midyear as we go into the summer. I mean there, you would have some like seasonal slowdown. But again, this particular year may be different.

Just to clarify, Evgeny, is there's a slowdown -- a midyear slowdown? Do you mean it's a typical July and August because people are on vacation? Or do you mean -- are you saying...

Yes, I would say -- yes, the -- when we look at the, say, end of the Q2, that will be end of June where the vacation period starts. So that's where there will be typical slowdown versus, say, end of Q1. Or when we look at the end of Q4, that will be end of December where everybody is still in the Christmas holiday mode. That's why this period will be slower versus the end of Q3, which will be very busy. That's what I meant.

Your next question is from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler.

I want to start with the international. The international momentum has cited as one of the upside levers this quarter here that drove another quarter of accelerating growth. What's driving the success internationally? Is this just an underserved region? Is there -- is the success coming from maybe underserved market segments around small businesses, midsized businesses? And any color on the opportunity in international be super helpful, given the momentum you're seeing here this quarter.

This is Eugene. So in general, I think it's largely related to how different markets are going out of COVID, and how different restrictions are getting less strict. So ultimately, people -- a lot of people are going back to business. A lot of people can start consuming more. So that means a lot of businesses have to do more investments in marketing to attract this new demand.

I think, in general, just curve in the United States was not the same as curve in many other places. For example, in United States, vaccination started earlier than in many even European countries. So that meant that, for example, in U.S., we will start seeing this a couple months earlier than in the rest of the world. So that probably explains at least part of the discrepancy between growth rates in United States and the rest of the world.

Got it. So it sounds like pace of recovery internationally is just different, driving different momentum there. Super helpful. I guess, and as a follow-up for me. Just looking at the SEMrush app center. I know it's new, but it looks like there's about 9 add-on products ranging from $15 a month to $200 a month add-on. I know you specifically called out the success in Local Listing add-ons this quarter. But how should we think about increasing attach rates of these add-on products that provide an incremental lift to growth once we anniversary the price increase? Just trying to understand that potential of that app center as a way to drive additional add-on product revenue.

First of all, look, we are -- with very heavy restriction, what we've achieved with our approximately center. We launched it at the end of first quarter and right now this year. Very good addition there from our customers. And we have also positive feedback from vendors, from partners. And we have a good pipeline of future applications. In general, we see this addition very positive. But when we talked about attach rates, Evgeny, please.

Yes. Right now, this is very early stages of the launch. So it's more -- we look more at what our customers pay us rather than the numbers. I think it will be too early to bake in these numbers into any good forecast, if you ask me, Brent.

Seems a good interest. Yes, it seems a good interest, but a little too early to have a kind of financial impact, which leads into my last question, Evgeny. Average price per check rose 19%. Just specifically, how much of that increase was tied to the price increase versus kind of increase of add-on products?

So I'd say the largest impact comes from 2 parts. So one is the change in the mix of the lower price plants versus higher price plants. And the second largest will be coming from the, I would say, higher average share from new paying customers. I mean, the usage of add-ons also contributes. This will be the third, I would say, third, most important one.

The next question is from Tom Roderick with Stifel.

So I guess I'd love to start on kind of the value of the entire value prop here. I mean, there's been all sorts of noise about IDFA out there and the cost of various mobile advertising strategies have gone way up. So would seem to create a little bit more of a lever relative to the demand for some of your products, many of which have a little bit of a longer life in terms of generating marketing leads. Can you talk about just the broader impact that some of those marketing changes have had on the demand stream?

And then, Evgeny, you were kind of talking about spending on third-party data has gone up. I'd love to understand how the cost of that third-party data perhaps has had -- perhaps has been a ripple effect relative to some of the downstream effects from IDFA.

So this is Eugene. I'll start with the first one about broader trends that we see in advertising and how they impact future. So I think one development that we've seen in our previous quarter is that Google technically changed the time line for cookie depreciation in Chrome browser. So that was kind of positively received by the advertising industry. But at the same time, when we do surveys for our customers and we ask them on what parts they're going to increase marketing spend and what parts they're going to decrease marketing spend moving forward. Retargeting is still one of the areas where they're planning to decrease spend.

And then when we go into more kind of qualitative feedback collection, then they highlight that they're going to expand their spend on content, specifically and especially long-term marketing activities. So for example, evergreen content that ranks for a long time and can be used in years forward. And this increase is going to come to some degree from reallocation of the budget from retargeting to content marketing.

So that's kind of feedback that we are collecting from our customers. At the end of the day, I think Google extended this kind of time that brands have to adjust to a new reality, but it doesn't mean that retargeting is here to stay for a long time, and then other intrusive forms of advertising. We -- my expectation that we are going to see reallocation of resources from those things to more sustainable organic part team.

And Tom, on your question on the data cost, basically, this is a -- as we alluded to this earlier, we continue to invest into diversification of the data sources. Whenever we have a data source or whenever we source data for 1 or another product or feature, we -- usually we rely on multiple sources to avoiding users with loss of one another vendor. So that is a continuation of our investments into getting more, I would say, more data sources plus increased data quality for a number of products. This is a step-up increase. It is not connected to a growth -- with the growth of revenue.

So I expect that we will see operating leverage as we go forward. However, having said that, we may continue buying more data if we find this like suitable and attractive.

Outstanding. That's really good color on the reallocation from retargeting the content. So that's great. I hate to go back to Mark Murphy's question, but I think it was kind of a good one with respect to setting expectations on the path of the ARR journey as we go through the year. And maybe putting a finer point on it, I want to make sure I understood what you're talking about.

Just historically, again, from Q2 to Q3, were you saying that, that is kind of a flattish seasonal trend from Q2 to Q3? So if we just went back and look at last year, there was a jump from Q1 to Q2 and then from Q2 to Q3, would we expect that to be flattish at that $120 million mark, which is what filings have shown for the second quarter of last year? Or was that up? I'm just trying to get a feel for how we should set expectations for ARR. I know you don't formally guide to it, but historically, is that up single digits? Flat in Q3? Just again, sorry to kind of beat that dead horse, but would love to understand it for modeling purposes.

Yes that's absolutely worth it. So what I tried to say there, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, is that last couple of years mixed everything up. I mean, we had a typical seasonality prior to 2019. Now it's very difficult to say what's the typical or a normal quarter looks like. What I was saying is that when we're looking at, say, new demand, we would have a slower growth at the end of December and as we enter into the summer period. That's what I was trying to say.

Otherwise, I mean our return revenue will be the like staying in a solid base, which would continue to expand. So right now, we are more cautious into setting expectations for the back half of the year as we, I would say, seen a typically strong first quarter or I would say, Q1 as well. And then it's difficult to say what the back half of the year would look like.

I mean, we are seeing a, I would say, softer new demand based on everybody's going to vacation, right? So we want to make sure that Q2 is what we will get, right? But then -- I'm sorry, I'm hoping I'm giving you enough -- I'm sorry, Q3. I'm hoping I'm giving enough color there, Tom.

Well, you are. I mean part of it is -- I'm not really asking you to guess exactly how the third quarter is going to shake out. But just if you have the number for Q3 for last year. And again, I know it was a weird year because it started -- Q3 started pretty slow and then ended pretty hot for SME. So just as we get to the end of this year, it'd be interesting to know if that's going to be a tougher compare or an easier compare just relative to how last year shook out.

I would say -- yes, Tom, I think it will be tough to compare because the growth at the end of last year was strong. So we -- that will be my take on it.

(Operator Instructions) The next question comes from Brent Thill with Jefferies.

Great. This is James on for Brent. Could you guys talk about the reasons for raising the full year revenue guidance, but then not taking up the non-GAAP net loss guide, understanding that you're investing more in marketing than you originally planned? But just curious if there's any markets that you're looking to lean more heavily into on the marketing side. And just if you could talk about some of those investments, that would be really helpful.

Sure. Thank you for the question. As we have mentioned in our last quarterly call, we will be investing more into the marketing as we go into the year. And as you rightly mentioned, that will be largely -- that will be the key, I would say, investment direction where we'll be putting money into. So as we are growing our revenue, we see more room for investments, and we want to support the growth as we go into the end of the year and as we transition into 2022. There is no particular mark, which we can say we will be allocating this money on. We -- our growth is broadly distributed amongst the geographies where we're present. So it's more -- I mean it will be -- I would say it will be as evenly distributed as it was before.

Got it. And then I guess just another follow-up on the price increases. You've had a couple of quarters now, I guess, to digest those. Curious if you could just comment on how that's impacted churn and then just new customer adds and sort of what you're thinking for the rest of the year.

It's hard to say how -- what was the impact on demand and customer acquisition because so many rounding things here, and we see such softer months. And we see such a higher level of general rate now around us. And I would say it's hard to say what was the impact on new customers. And the second...

And if we -- this is Evgeny, and if we look at the churn, the churn levels were, I would say, normal or, I would say, slightly better than usual in the first half of the year. So if anything, this transition to the new pricing was very successful from what we see -- from what we saw.

The are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to the speakers for closing remarks.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us. We will look forward to seeing you at our virtual investor conference in the third quarter or when we report third quarter results. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.