CFLT - Confluent Inc. (CFLT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-02-07 20:04:12 ET

Confluent, Inc. (CFLT)

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

February 07, 2024, 04:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Shane Xie - IR

Jay Kreps - Co-Founder and CEO

Rohan Sivaram - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Michael Turrin - Wells Fargo

Sanjit Singh - Morgan Stanley

Brad Zelnick - Deutsche

Matt Hedberg - RBC

Mike Cikos - Needham

Jason Ader - William Blair

Kash Rangan - Goldman Sachs

Pinjalim Bora - JPMorgan

Derrick Wood - TD Cowen

Presentation

Shane Xie

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Confluent Q4 and Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Shane Xie from Investor Relations, and I'm joined by Jay Kreps, Co-Founder and CEO; and Rohan Sivaram, CFO.

During today's call, management will make forward-looking statements regarding our business, operations, sales strategy, market and product positioning, financial performance and future prospects, including statements regarding our financial guidance for the fiscal first quarter of 2024 and fiscal year 2024. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements.

Further information on risk factors that could cause actual results to differ is included in our most recent Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update these statements after today's call, except as required by law. Unless stated otherwise, certain financial measures used on today's call are expressed on a non-GAAP basis, and all comparisons are made on a year-over-year basis. We use these non-GAAP financial measures internally to facilitate analysis of financial and business trends and for internal planning and forecasting purposes.

These non-GAAP financial measures have limitations and should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release and supplemental financials, which can be found on our IR website at investors.confluent.io.

And with that, I'll hand the call over to Jay.

Jay Kreps

Thanks, Shane. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. We closed fiscal year 2023 with a solid Q4, exceeding the high end of our guided metrics. Total revenue grew 26% to $213 million. Confluent Cloud revenue reached $100 million for the first time, growing 46% and non-GAAP operating margin came in at 5.3%, our first positive quarter, improving 27 percentage points. Since going public two and a half years ago, we have more than doubled our total revenue run rate and driven more than 46 percentage points in non-GAAP operating margin improvement. These results are a testament to the power of our platform and the incredible growth of the data streaming category.

Last quarter, we discussed our accelerated transition to a fully consumption oriented, go-to-market model for Confluent Cloud, including shifting our sales compensation for cloud to be based on incremental consumption and new logo acquisition, orienting our field team towards landing new customers and driving new workloads with customers and adapting product and pricing to reduce friction in landing customers and maximize the potential for expansion.

As we said before, these changes are internal to our go-to-market teams and don't change our business model or revenue model or any other customer facing aspect, all of which are already consumption oriented. We've executed some of the initial changes of our consumption transformation effective January 1, including a new compensation model and the initial rollout of new systems, metrics and measures....

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