Planet Labs PBC (NYSE:PL) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Will Marshall: Well, I’d say fundamentally nothing has changed. The need proposition in agriculture and these other sectors remains the same. It is mainly the economy that is affecting there. There’s been a lot of pressure on the ag sector in particular, which was our biggest part of our Commercial segment and that’s had its challenges. However, our data fundamentally can enable improved crop yield, decrease in fertilizer use and other things and inputs, as they call it, which actually can yield meaningful improvements in profitability for that multi-trillion dollar sector. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be doing that long-term. So the fundamentals of that, and I would say the same in other commercial sectors, like insurance and other things, they’ve been less weighed on this.

I would say that there’s still a lot of work for us to do as well on solutions, right? So we are building solutions. We have some, we mentioned in the Swiss Re example how adding the extra Planetary Variable at land surface temperatures, enabling and reinforcing their ability to do parametric agricultural insurance. That’s the kind of thing we need to do to enable the customer to get immediate value without having to have complex understanding of geospatial data, right? So the more we do that, the more that opens up markets. But fundamentally, the effect is because of the economy and nothing has changed about our outlook about those sectors being very strong long-term.

Trevor Walsh: Got it. Okay, that’s helpful. Ashley, maybe just a couple of last quick ones for you, if I can. The acceleration in new customer logos was great in the quarter. Can you provide just any – was there anything in particular that you think kind of helped to achieve that? I mean, I know you’ve been talking about greater efficiencies around your go-to-market processes, so I’m assuming that kind of helps. But was there anything else just out of the ordinary in the quarter that also can kind of contribute to that metric?

Ashley Johnson: Nothing that jumps out at me as being out of the ordinary, I would say that we have an incredible global commercial organization that has been building these relationships and really educating the market on the opportunity for Planet to drive value with these end customers. And some of these sales have taken time, but the team’s been persistent and it was great to see them bring in some new logos because obviously, land and expand is a core part of our sales motion. So while we typically expect to see the majority of our growth in any given year coming from expansions, just by the nature of the way these deals tend to progress, it was interesting to see that last year was much more balanced between new business and expansion business. And that just speaks to more opportunity in front of us.

Trevor Walsh: Great. And then lastly, the NDRR number, it looks like and I’m just looking on the slide deck, so we’re working on the same sheet of music. It looks like the kind of delta between the pure NDRR number and the one with winbacks is essentially converging. It’s coming together. Does that make the winbacks kind of less meaningful as a kind of a separate call out? And is that essentially happening less and less as the numbers would sort of dictate? And is that – or is this more just – is that something I guess you’ll continue to sort of report and look into kind of on a quarterly, yearly basis?

Ashley Johnson: I’ll tell you that nothing would make me happier than for that metric to become obsolete because the two numbers converge, because that would tell me two things. One, that we’re getting renewals in on time, so we don’t need to report winbacks. We get renewals at the point of when the contract ends. And two, that would speak to just continuity of the business with the end customer. And as you know, there’s some sectors of the market we serve where the work with our data tends to be more seasonal. And so that can sometimes lead to gaps between when a contract expires and when the customer focuses on the renewal. That doesn’t speak to the data not being valuable, but rather just the periodicity being having somewhat spikes in peaks and valleys.

And as we are driving more solutions and really educating our customers on more ways that they can be using our data to drive elements of their business, we should see less of those peaks and valleys and more on time renewals across all of our contracts. So we’ll keep reporting it as long as it’s relevant. But as I said, nothing would make me happier than to not need to report that number.

Trevor Walsh: Got it. Okay. Thanks all. Appreciate the questions.

Will Marshall: All right.

Operator: Thank you for your question. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham & Company. Your line is now open.

Ryan Koontz: Great. Thanks for the question. Ashley, first, just a little bit of housekeeping on the gross margin, step down in Q1 if you can bridge us there. I heard you mention the 300 bps of impact from third-party solutions kind of selling through your channel, as I understood. And then you talked about a 500 basis point hit from the accelerated depreciation. So my question is, what is that 500 basis point hit relative to? Is it relative Q4 or maybe your plan of record before? So maybe kind of just walk us through that that bridge, if you could.