NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTCT) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jean Bua: So the sales force has – as you know, we have long-term relationships with all of the carriers. And – as Anil mentioned, the change in the budget was a surprise showing up in probably actually even in the later part of September in our quarter. What the sales force believes is in talking to each of our sales – each of our customers and going through a detailed list of carriers, they believe that the projects have either been delayed or they’ve been rightsized at this point. Q3 has historically been a larger quarter recently, and that has been mostly due with budget flushes. And I think the question of whether it will be in our Q3 using a 2023 remaining budget or budget flush or in our Q1 is something that we’re dealing with and the timing right now. And your question is, could it slip further out of fiscal 2024? At this point, the sales force doesn’t see that and they have significantly changed what their original expectations were.

Anil Singhal: I think one more thing to add, James, to what Jean is saying is that we have seen this dynamic play out. There has been times where Q4 has been bigger than Q3. And because many of our carrier customers are – are using – their fiscal years are starting in January. So when these kind of things happen, sometimes the budgets instead of going – we have the opposite impact, instead of using budget flush for in the last – in the December quarter, we are in – our projects are funded by the new budget coming in the new fiscal year. So we have seen that with a couple of big carriers in the past, and that’s what we are anticipating this time depending on what happened with Q3.

Jean Bua: Yes. And just to be clear, in case I wasn’t when I said Q1, I’m thinking Q1 calendar year. So Q1 calendar year is our Q4. And as we’ve discussed in the past, Q3 gets the customer’s budget flushes and Q4 is the last quarter that our sales teams can get into accelerators into their commissions and other incentive compensations. So they usually have a high incentive to try to close those deals using the New Year’s budget in our fiscal Q4.

James Fish: Helpful color, guys. Can you guys just walk us through how you’re thinking then about gross margins? As they were pretty strong this quarter, obviously, – we don’t have the RFP projects going on, but how are you thinking about gross margins versus OpEx for the back half of the year? It seems like despite the revenue headwind for this current quarter, that you’re embedding actually a fairly massive sequential uptick in OpEx of about $20 million to $25 million. I guess, really the core of my question is why wouldn’t cost stay kind of near these levels, excluding the ENGAGE conference that you guys just hosted?

Jean Bua: So in Q3, we see the gross margin probably approaching 78%, 79% and Q4 being closer to 80% or higher. Operating expenses are flat in Q3 year-over-year due to the ENGAGE event, some head count additions and most of that has been offset by the change in variable incentive compensation. When you go out to Q4, we would see that there would be a decrease in operating expenses mostly due to the change in variable incentive compensation, such that for the full year, we would anticipate that our full year operating expenses could be down on a year-over-year basis by as much as 5%.

James Fish: Got it. Thanks guys.

Jean Bua: Thanks, Jim.

Operator: Our next question will come from Kevin Liu with K. Liu & Company. Your line is open.

Kevin Liu: Hi, good morning. Just wanted to touch on the service provider business. As while, you mentioned cable as an area of weakness. So I was curious what percentage of your business that’s represented either over the first half or last year? And then what are some of the types of projects that are being delayed where we can look for those to come back potentially?