Coursera, Inc. (NYSE:COUR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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That’s a very different proposition than what we were able to say six months ago. So I would — and now how might that show up? Well, we measure that as bookings, but you wouldn’t see it except insofar as you would see number of Enterprise customers, you might see bigger buys or it could be NRR where existing customers can roll — government customers can roll this out to bigger populations, because the language accessibility is higher. And then at some point, that will show up in ARR, just the revenue that shows up on the Enterprise segment. So on the Coursera for Government side, it’s kind of that sequence of leading indicators. The second would be Coursera for Business. Not so much focused as Coursera for Government on the non-English speaking, but there’s a lot of businesses where the primary language is spoken is not English or at least many other employees in different countries with global operations don’t speak English at all or don’t speak English as a primary language.

And the businesses would much rather have one set of courses that teach us something in the same way with the same basic concepts but just in different languages. And so, we are seeing attractiveness in Europe and other parts of the world where businesses are saying, hey, this is pretty nice, one set of courses for a global workforce. That would show up in the same kinds of metrics as what I was saying for Coursera for Government. And then you mentioned Consumer and I think there might be a bit more of a lag and I think we have to unlock it with payment systems and international sort of localized discovery and to some degree, paid media is, we are mostly building paid media in North America right now and seeing a good return. We would have to kind of ramp that up and figure out how to get good returns on that paid media, but that will show up faster once we get the payment capabilities in place and we kind of figure out the recipe of who do you market to, what’s your message and what payment systems back it up.

But when we do — if we do figure that out, that will show up as Consumer revenue on a much quicker timetable.

Ryan MacDonald: Thanks again.

Operator: We will take our final question from Taylor McGinnis with UBS.

Taylor McGinnis: Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just one for me. On the Enterprise, can you maybe talk a little bit more about how budget discussions are going and some of the competitive dynamics? Is there a line of sight to stabilization? Are trends there worsening? I am just trying to get a sense of whether revenue growth could begin to stabilize in the teens or trends are pointing to the potential to dip closer to the single-digit. And then the second part of it is that maybe from like a mixed standpoint is C4B reaching a point where you could see a more favorable mix shift in the future, maybe towards some of the other areas that have been more durable?

Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. Great question, Taylor. So I will start with your mix question, because obviously we got started with Coursera for Business, which is facing the biggest headwinds before Campus and Government. It is now getting to the point where Coursera for Business is still the biggest, but the other two which are growing faster are becoming big enough that it’s affecting the growth rates. And as we go into 2024, if we sustain those and we expect that we will, and when I say those, when we — if we can sustain the non-business Campus and Government verticals with higher growth rate, we do expect the overall Enterprise growth rate to start tilting up because of those other verticals. And then more specifically to, yeah, well, what about Coursera for Business?

It’s still pretty tough out there and it is pretty competitive. And budgets and teams are seeing compression and general competitive, competition is pretty intense. There’s a lot more — we see a lot more competition in Coursera for Business than we do in Coursera for Campus or Coursera for Government, in fact, a lot more competition. But at the same time, it doesn’t look as bad in certain dimensions as it did last quarter. We don’t know if this is the bottom or exactly, where we are heading with it, but it could look — it doesn’t look great and it could look worse as we sort of look at how it’s turning out in Q3. And Ken, I don’t know if you would like to add anything to that.

Ken Hahn: Hi. No. I agree entirely. I think we are — the mix comment is exactly right and we do continue to see growth in both the other newer verticals. And I think that stabilizes us next year and calling the bottom is always dangerous on the C4B so I’d be hesitant to call bottom. But we are seeing good signs and we have a number of initiatives, as Jeff laid out earlier, around translation trends. So there are good things happening, we will see how the macro goes. But it’s competitive and it doesn’t feel terrible is what I would say.

Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah.

Ken Hahn: I wouldn’t reverse things saying overly negative.

Jeff Maggioncalda: There’s one other thing I will — I certainly referenced in the script, I will put a little bit more color on it here. COVID was a shock that immediately caused businesses all around the world to increase their learning and development budgets as people went home and companies wanted to show support and give them something productive to do in the early stages of COVID. We are seeing something different, but I think, potentially very big that’s brewing which is generative AI. The number of companies who are starting to say, you know what? This generative AI is going to change a lot of jobs that my company and my CFO and CEO are asking me, Head of HR or Head of Learning and Development, what am I going to do to teach people these new skills and tools to unlock productivity gains that could potentially create more value for my customers and create more productivity for the company.

We are definitely hearing a lot more interest in organizational transformation and upskilling and reskilling associated with the potential benefits of unlocking generative AI. And that might be a trend back to provide a little bit of an offset for the headwinds that we have been seeing in Coursera for Business in 2023.

Taylor McGinnis: Awesome. Really appreciate the additional color and congrats on the upside in the quarter.

Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. Thank you.

Ken Hahn: Thank you, Taylor.

Cam Carey: Thank you, Taylor. That wraps the Q&A. A replay of this webcast will be available on our Investor Relations website with the transcript in the next 24 hours. We appreciate you joining us.

Operator: And that concludes today’s presentation. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.

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