Unity Software Inc. (NYSE:U) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dylan Becker: Okay. Great. Super helpful there. And then maybe one…

Jim Whitehurst: I guess, I what would say on that, Dylan, just — I mean, as we kind of exit the years, I think we, in generally, have in our mind this should be a Rule of 40 company and be that way for quite a while if that gives you a sense of kind of roughly where we see ourselves.

Dylan Becker: Absolutely. Yeah, okay. Appreciate that color there, Jim. Maybe you mentioned some of the platform investments too and Unity 6 upselling. I guess how should we think about the pricing and maybe conversion? How you’re kind of incentivizing new features within that platform as well? It’s probably more of a 2025 kind of type of story, but how that kind of fuels the commentary around kind of accelerating momentum throughout the back half of this year as well, and kind of thoughts on Unity 6? Thanks.

Jim Whitehurst: Well, I — so I’ll start, and frankly, we are resourcing both Unity 6 and Unity 7 because — well, we won’t go too far into the details of that. Please come to GDC and you’ll hear a lot more details. So, we do think that we are heavily funding our roadmap — roadmaps against our core kind of product offering, and we’ll talk more about that here in a couple of weeks at GDC. In terms of how we’re thinking about kind of pricing against that, you’re right, it’s mainly a 2025 kind of story, so it really doesn’t affect the numbers that you see this year. What I will say is we think there is a lot of organic growth in this portfolio. So, we’re not heavily reliant on just kind of raising price. I do think there’s more value we provide in our offering.

But when we look at our position in the games industry, when we talk about long-term growth that has more to do with our current product suite and kind of future offerings we can have more than pricing leverage that we haven’t really kind of laid that out for 2025 and beyond in a way that could give you a quantify entity stretch.

Luis Visoso: Yeah. Dylan, maybe just two points to reinforce some of the things Jim is saying. You saw that our core business — our core subscription business, so that’s the Editor, excluding China, is growing 18%. So, very healthy levels of growth. And when we look at engagements or new projects being started, so the engagement with the Editor continues to be very, very healthy. So, we’re very excited about that. And obviously, there is great interest in all our AI tools from our customers. So they are — Muse is now available, so they are using it and we’re happy with the progress we’re making, Dylan.

Dylan Becker: Great. Thank you, both.

Daniel Amir: All right. So, our next question is Brian Fitzgerald from Wells Fargo.

Brian Fitzgerald: Thanks, guys. In the shareholder letter and maybe this follow-on to Dylan’s question, you unpack growth reacceleration in the second half of the year. Can you parse that out a little bit? Is that just primarily from run-time fees? Is it the release of Unity 6? Or is there something else feeding into that, maybe the growth of industries like you talked about? Thanks.

Luis Visoso: Yeah. Reality is run-time fees does not have an impact in the second half or nothing meaningful. So, the reason why we are excited about and confident that we’ll see some acceleration is really back-end innovation that we are bringing across all our product lines. Jim talked a little bit about some of the innovation we’re bringing on Grow to make our product more competitive, data, performance, return on ad spending. So, we’re making a ton of interventions then there so that our business can accelerate. And it’s really that. It’s the innovation across both businesses, both in games and across industries where we expect to accelerate growth.

Jim Whitehurst: Yeah. The only thing I would say I would add is we’re in the middle of a reset and so we were pretty conservative in the first half of the year because obviously, when we are especially dealing with people, right, that gets to be very distracting. And so, we were pretty conservative in the first half of the year. But when you just kind of look at kind of the market and where we expect as we go forward is another reason you’re seeing that. It’s both, we have confidence in the back half, but it’s also, if you look at first half to back half, there’s also an assumption around a little bit more distraction right now that we will get behind us here as we finalize the reset.

Brian Fitzgerald: And it sounds like there’s growth in the Grow side of the business as well. When you talked a little bit about what’s happening sequentially and it being down, was that just kind of developer discontent with kind of how the real-time runtime fees were rolled out? And — or is it more to what you’re talking about we’re going to develop on the tool sets and make the Grow side of the business more data-informed and more competitive?

Luis Visoso: Yeah, we didn’t really see as much of an impact. There was an impact, as you mentioned, but it was not very meaningful in Q4. We are not guiding by segment going into 2024, but yes, you’re right, we’re expecting an improvement in both businesses throughout the year for the reasons that Jim mentioned.

Brian Fitzgerald: Appreciate it. Thanks.

Jim Whitehurst: Yeah. Just a little bit more on that. Just to be blunt, last year we were doing a lot of kind of integration with ironSource and Unity. And frankly, when that happens, you become maybe a little less focused on driving feature velocity. And so, I do think that level of distraction kind of put us a bit behind. That’s now behind us. We have the team integrated and we have a plan that I think we’re very confident in, closes any competitive gaps that we have. And that’s somewhat reflected in the growth numbers in the back half of the year.

Brian Fitzgerald: Excellent. Thanks, guys.

Daniel Amir: Great. Next question is Tim Nollen from Macquarie.