Home / Transcripts / Trend Micro Incorporated (4704) · February 18, 2020

Trend Micro Incorporated (4704) Earnings Call Transcript

February 18, 2020

Tokyo Stock Exchange JP Information Technology Software earnings 71 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator operator
#1

We're sorry to have kept you waiting, and now the time has come so we would like to begin the Trend Micro Fourth Quarter Financial Highlights Presentation. We must first apologize for the fact that our CEO, Eva Chen, is not present here. Because of the corona virus we have seen the situation changing, and also because of the guidelines within the company for overseas trips, we have forbidden overseas travel for personal purposes. And we deliberated the possibility of Eva Chen participating, but it was decided that through a video conference system she will be participating from overseas. Now we have our CFO, Mahendra Negi, who will be talking about the FY 2019 4th quarter financial highlights. And then from Eva Chen, we'll be hearing about the situation of 2019 as well as future strategy. And then Mr. Omikawa will be talking about the overall business situation in Japan. And we have the presentation handouts not handed out yet to everybody, but this will be uploaded to our website later on.

Mahendra Negi executive
#2

[Interpreted] This is Negi speaking. This is the actual results of the fourth quarter, I'm having difficulty with presentation. I'm sorry for the delay. This is the actual results. We have a 4% increase in net sales and minus 1% for operating income, and you may think that this is less than what we expected. However, if you look at the pre-GAAP net sales, then you can see that there is a 9% growth. And it is -- for the first time, we are over JPY 53 billion, and it's excluding foreign exchange impact, plus 12%. But post-GAAP numbers are like this. We will be going into the details later on, but we believe that the fourth quarter results had been better than anticipated. This is our results as opposed to the annual forecast, and you can see that it's a 98% progress of forecast and 99% progress of forecast in terms of operating income. And if there were no fluctuations in the exchange rate then we should have been able to have 100% attainment, but anyway, these are the results for the yen-denominated results, and then this is the dollar-denominated results. As for net sales growth by region, excluding FX, then we can see that we're seeing growth. It's minus 4% in North America, but for pre-GAAP, we will see that the numbers have been positive. And in regard to this slide, this is in comparison to past numbers, and if we have constant currency then this is the growth rate. And we've been explaining about this but there is a peak there. This is the acquisition of TippingPoint that is reflected. And last year, we had this peak because of the cycle, and now we've gone down in the third and fourth quarters, and now we're seeing recovery at this point. This is the sales by segment. We have the consumer and enterprise both combined here, and both show positive growth. And there's -- it seems like it's negative numbers for North America, but we will be explaining about this later on, and you'll see that the results have been positive here as well. As for enterprise sales in the form of hybrid infrastructure protection and also the user protection, we have seen that in the fourth quarter, both have seen double-digit growth. In the hybrid infrastructure protection, we have seen anticipated double-digit growth. Meanwhile, for user protection -- in antivirus measures taken, we are seeing growth because with the cloud security on Office 365 we have that reflected as well. We have a major deal here. And later on Eva Chen will be explaining about XDR. XDR is the next-generation response on our part for devices. And we have seen because of major deals, double-digit growth here. This is the percentage of share by region. This is the pre-GAAP results, and if we exclude the FX impact, as already mentioned, in all regions we have seen positive results. And we've seen it's 5% in Europe, and we have especially high growth in Europe and EMEA. So we have quite a high growth rate in this area. And then for the enterprise as well as the consumer market. If we look at the pre-GAAP results, then we see that there has been growth in both and it's 12% growth in -- that we can see in enterprise and the consumer also shows growth. And one reason is because of the end of service of Windows 7 and also because of the growth in the mobile channel that we see good results. As for the North American region update, in this slide you can see that we do not give estimates of each region, but in regard to the situation of North America, we have a temporary situation so we have this slide prepared. This is the last slide. And for the third quarter, what we anticipated, and what the actual results in the fourth quarter, we were looking at 15% to 20% growth from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. And ultimately, we were able to grow 32% quarter-over-quarter and 6% year-over-year growth from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. So we have seen good growth here. And in the enterprise market, unfortunately we are continuing to see negative results. As for the outlook of 2020, overall we believe it will be flat. But for the enterprise business, there will be negative results. There will be increase in the enterprise business, but a decline in the consumer business, so that overall it should be flat for 2020. This is the deferred revenues. In the previous meeting, we mentioned about the FX impact leading to a decrease here, and there may be some FX impact but the major impact here is, as already mentioned, the enterprise sales has been good. And if it concentrates in December, then the deferred revenue area became large. Although this was not posted on the balance sheet, this number has increased. And this is the deferred revenue by region. Meanwhile, for the expenses, you can see that the biggest element is the salaries. The reason why this has increased is because, in regard to salaries, this is the sales before deferred revenues. And so there is a linkage to the salary and bonuses that's reflected. And on the upper side, as the stock prices go up, we see an increase in this area. And for selling and marketing, this has increased because there has been major events and this was concentrated in the fourth quarter, like in the case of the last year. So each quarter, this has increased. And as for the cloud area in green, this has increased and this is because of the SaaS-related expenses, and this will continue to increase from here onwards. Meanwhile, for pre-GAAP net sales, if we look at the profits, we have set a record in our company here. And we have the bonuses for employees that have been taken into calculation. And the reason why the salaries have increased is because the pre-GAAP increase that we see here. As for cash flow, the reason why this is negative is because of the uncollected accounts receivables. And this should be resolved with the turn of the year, and we have increased by 153 persons. There was a Cloud Conformity, a cloud company that was acquired in October. This accounted for 50 persons and also research and development. As well as for the customer-facing area, we have increased personnel. And we have the highlights and low lights. As for the Q4 highlights, as already mentioned, the enterprise business has seen double-digit growth. And in North America, we have seen pre-GAAP year-over-year growth turn positive. And furthermore, in the consumer business, in Japan, focusing on mobile, we have seen growth. [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Lowlight, negative 1% of operating income. And the sales is deferred, but the cost is not really deferred, and that is impacting negatively the operating income. SaaS back-end cost is increasing, as I mentioned before, and these are some of the lowlights. Looking at the full year numbers. We have been announcing this every quarter, so I don't have any additional comments except for the dividends, which you may be interested in. Sometimes when we speak to our investors, we say that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And sometimes the investors feel some concerns, but this is going back all the way to 2005. At constant exchange rate, the revenue is increasing steady over time. Although we don't know exactly what would happen tomorrow, our business model is very stable. And this is the dividend. Payout ratio is the same at the 70% of net income. And after-tax negative impact of TippingPoint related amortization is added, JPY 160 per share, pending approval at the shareholders' meeting. This is the planned dividend. This is lower by 2% compared to the previous term. Last year, it was JPY 163. This is due to loss on exchange rate. And yen-based the dividend is stronger than the American dollar-based dividend. Moving on to shareholder compensation. Last year, we conducted share buyback, 99% of our company's cash flow is basically returned to our shareholders in the form of dividends, 95% of the profit. We don't conduct shareholders -- share buyback every year, but if there is excess cash, we do consider share buyback. And if you combine share buyback and dividends, as you can see we are returning a high level of cash to our shareholders. For FY '20, this is the outlook. 5% growth is expected in Japan and the flat growth in North America and the Europe. And the JPY 118 to JPY 120 is used, so basically flat growth. And in Asia, we expect about 10% growth. Salaries and cloud usage cost is expected to increase. I'm sure that Eva will talk about SaaS and our focus on SaaS, which means that SaaS back-end costs will further increase. So cost will increase due to salary increase and cloud-related costs and the profit is expected to be flat. Now ordinary income is supposed to be showing a negative growth, 5% growth in net sales, but the flat growth in operating income due to increased expenses. The reason we have minus 3% for order income is because of interest income is expected to reduce according to [ doxa of our ] expectations, there may be some changes in the financial instruments, and that we expect a negative growth of 3% for ordinary income. That's all from me. Thank you.

Eva Chen executive
#3

I'm really sorry that I cannot be there in person for this meeting because of the Corona virus. So Trend Micro, like many other companies, have restricted the air travel and since that, so I decided not to fly, also complying to the company policy. So excuse me for making this presentation from Macau this time. So I'd like to talk about Trend Micro's strategy, how are we going to grow? We believe our growth opportunity come from a strategy we call it Cloud Accidents. Let me clear what is Cloud Accidents? And what is the current situation in the digital transformation? I think in past 10 years, we've been talking about all this cloud, big data, AI, and there's a lot of transformation happen in digital world where smart factory, smart car are starting to boom, but unfortunately, this type of digital transformation also introduced a lot more risk, higher risk for the over or [ company ] enterprise organization operation. Actually, 73% of the organization have better reach than last year. [Technical Difficulty] So -- sorry, I don't know where the connection broke, but we were talking about... hello? Are we back?

Operator operator
#4

Yes.

Eva Chen executive
#5

Okay. I'm sorry. I don't know where we broke, look like we still need 5G in the future. So I think most of these risk are related because of [ lack of ] visibility and connectivity across environment because [ cutting ] operate in different organization, and therefore, they don't have the overall visibility of company's cyber security standards. And therefore, we believe our strategy is by securing connective work through what we call Cloud Accidents. Cloud Accidents has twofold. The first one means that, we want to enable our customers, empower them to have securely delivered application from the cloud in a multi cloud environment. We will talk about multi-cloud environment later. And the second fold of this Cloud Accidents means that Trend Micro ourselves, we need to be able to deliver more agile, more scalable solution for our customers, which is following a [ dagol ] operation and deliver constantly innovation to our customer. That's Trend Micro, ourselves, need to be Cloud Accidents. So with this strategy, I'm very excited to introduce that Trend Micro's new product portfolio that we are going to introduce and focus on in 2020. We look at the current environment, multi-cloud migration and new cloud-native application deployment, is what our customers are facing right now. They might be using Microsoft Office, that's one cloud, but they have a lot of server. Marketing, server, web server, running on AWS, for instance. And therefore, they have multi cloud environment. [ they decouple ] continue to deploy over this cloud native applications. And therefore, as we can see the number, by 2020, 90% of the software development is going to be following a DevOp environment, DevOp process, which means it constantly updates in the cloud. And therefore, by 2023, at the least, 99% of the security's fault is customer's fault. What do we mean by customer's fault? Misconfiguration, multi cloud and very complicated environment caused miscommunication -- misconfiguration and user behavior that you cannot foresee and also by the lack of total visibility. So that's why we introduced 2 major product portfolio. The first one is what we call Cloud One. Cloud One is a security service platform for all the cloud builder. They are building their cloud application, and therefore they need a best cyber security, cloud security platform, and that is going to be from Trend Micro. Trend Micro has been delivering workload security, container security and last year -- end of last year, we introduced application, cloud application security through our acquisition of Immunio. And this year, we continue to introduce file storage security: Conformity, which is cloud configuration management and cloud compliance scanning. That is through our acquisition with the Cloud Conformity company and lastly, we also innovate from our TippingPoint solution, and we move our IPS to cloud IPS. We are introducing cloud IPS solution. So overall, Trend Micro has the most complete cloud security portfolio, and we integrated it to enable customers cloud migration, cloud native application deployment and cloud operation excellence. And all of this is through our Trend Micro's Accidents because this whole Cloud One platform is all cloud native, it's SaaS-based platform, and is the most [ in defensive of its type ] cloud security service. And very often customer -- or people might ask, this security solution will be offered by the cloud infrastructure provider, but as you can see in the middle of this cloud there's Microsoft as well, VMware, Google, Google Cloud, AWS. Trend Micro's advantage over the cloud infrastructure provider is multi-cloud -- multi-cloud solution. Customers always have different applications in different clouds, but they need to have a overall cybersecurity visibility and control. And that's what Trend Micro's Cloud One can provide for our customers, multi-cloud solution. So that's why we are very excited about our first solution steps, Cloud One. Next on -- and actually, you can see Trend Micro's just the server, the cloud workload security, we are the most advanced, and it's the high score by Forrester research. And also, we already own the largest market share for cloud security work alone, but and especially, this market is a growing market, almost 40% year-on-year growth margins. And I believe with all this complete Cloud One platform, not only we cover just the cloud workload market but also cloud security, Cloud Conformity, all these different area. So we believe our strategy of Cloud One can brought Trend Micro into the real cloud security #1 company in the world. So next, we're talking about the other sets of solution. Once customer's application are all in the cloud, they provided all this solution for their employees and for their customer. That means that the service moving to the cloud, the user become more mobile. You cannot lock your user behind the firewall anymore. Plus, the extended network because of smart cars, smart factories, smart hospital, smart banking, all of this, there's a lot more operation is outside of the IT environment. And therefore, this makes the future enterprise or future organization facing the challenge of the visibility. How are we going to do the visibility and security? We see that the rapid expansion of this, the central visibility and detection and response is the strong demand, strong request for the customers. Because too many tools alert and too long to detect, and therefore, 88% of organizations will increase their spending on detection and response in the next 18 months to address cross layer visibility gap. I'd like to especially mention cross layer visibility gap, because in the customer environment today, we cannot just focus on endpoint in the server. If you want to have overall visibility, you need to have cross layered action and Trend Micro is the only cybersecurity company that have all the solutions from cloud, network, IoT servers, endpoint, e-mail. We have not only a sensor, but also the solution, and we can connect them all together, correlate all this information and give customer a total visibility. That's the power of Trend Micro XDR. So Trend Micro, the XDR, we can enable customers to have a unified visibility, detection and investigation. And what they see is not just millions of log, it's actionable. It can be prioritized and customer will have fast response whenever they have an incident. That's Trend Micro. And Trend Micro are delivering this through our Cloud Accidents. We have the data lake, we have the expert security analysis, the AI engine in the cloud, and the global threat intelligence, and all these solution are SaaS-based and can support on-premise. I especially want to mention this, in this space actually, about 50% of the customer are still totally on-prem. 20% of the customer right now is all SaaS. And in the middle, there's 30% of people that was using hybrid. When the customer wants to move from on-prem to Saas, usually they need to move through the hybrid environment, which means some of operations still on Prem and some of the security already on SaaS. And that is what Trend Micro's advantage is, because our competitor in on-prem -- Symantec, McAfee -- they don't have SaaS solution. And our another new generation competitor like Qualtrics, Cylance, they don't have any on prem solution. Trend Micro is the only company that can provide both on prem -- we have all the knowledge or the experience of supporting the on-prem environment -- and we have the best SaaS-based cloud solution. And therefore, we can be the best one to help our customer move from on-prem through hybrid onto the SaaS solution. So that's our XDR another -- I would call, the advantage, the hybrid environment that Trend Micro can provide. So I think I've been talking about all this customer count in the past few years, but this will be my last year that I talk about this customer -- new customer count in different product sets because we will move to a more consolidated solution. And therefore, our number that we will be watching is, how can we help our customer move from on-prem to SaaS. And this line of the SaaS customer action is what we are watching, and as you can see, in 2019 our line crossed the on premise customer, and we continued to grow our SaaS-based customer. Why is SaaS-based customer so important? We do find that: first, each customer we introduced the SaaS solution, we have higher win rate. And we have faster time to close the deal. Customer easier to deploy the solution, easier to test the product. And once they are on SaaS, they actually are much more sticky. They can be a steadier revenue stream. And also, most importantly, personal appeal, is because our employee would have immediate -- we can see that immediate feedback, immediate problem that customer is facing and quickly deploy a new solution for our customers and solve their security problem. So I think this is the best solution. And ultimately, we win by customer using our product to successfully solve their cybersecurity problem. So internally, we actually track and change our own employees incentive program to looking at how SaaS deployment [ instance ] growth because we believe the more customers deploy on the cloud and we can faster track the customers' feedback, we can better innovate and continue to provide the best cloud security for our customer. So that's our cloud excellence strategy. Thank you.

Akihiko Omikawa executive
#6

[Interpreted] I would like to talk about the status of our business in the fourth quarter. In FY '19 in the Japanese market, we declared our plan. And according to the plan, we would like to provide this report. I'll begin with the domestic enterprise and the domestic overseas consumer business. Hybrid infrastructure protection, HIP. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the actual gross sales over time. The numbers are a little bit small, but this should give you an idea about the numbers, and there are some highlights and low lights that I would like to share with you. As Mr. Negi mentioned, HIP is growing fast outside of Japan, and in Japan it's showing a 24% growth year-on-year. And in terms of a new user, it's a growth of 44%. Deep Security and TippingPoint sales are pretty good for Japan. And if you could turn to the graph on the right-hand side, you can tell the positioning of size of Japan based on the numbers that was given to you during the financial presentation. Especially for Deep Security, as Eva-san mentioned, SaaS business gross sales year-on-year growth is 30%. Specifically, mid-sized companies, medium business with employees of somewhere between 100 and 500 employees. In this segment, Deep SaaS, [ it ] security or the SaaS-type security is growing very strongly. Number of customers, of course, is increasing year-on-year by 25%. There are some low lights as well. Public cloud, Deep Security, yes, this is selling, and it's solid, but still, including AWS, although the numbers are not really published within the public cloud maybe it's less than 30% or 20% Deep Security attach rate. When the product is used internally, it's difficult for us to estimate, but looking at AWS alone, Deep Security penetration is single digit. It's still very low. This means that on the cloud security, how important is how rare it is, it has to be really explained to our customers and partners. And this is somewhere -- this is a place where we can do a better job. TippingPoint in Q4, of course, we had a big deal or big deals, IBM Proventia end of support, switch. This is happening over time, step by step. So these customers are migrating to TippingPoint. We have created a very good migration tool, which was well received, and we have gained some big business there. However, when it comes to the number of customers for TippingPoint, it's just about 3 digits. In other words, Tipping Point sales was not very strong in the past. And it was handed over to Japan. Compared to the Western countries, the penetration rate of our TippingPoint products is still very low. Further, sales reinforcement is needed for the TippingPoint IBS. Deep Discovery is growing, showing positive growth, but it is not growing as fast as we had expected. So this discovery, how it can be utilized, should be told as a marketing story in a better way. So that's one of the lowlights. Moving on to user protection. As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, these are the numbers, gross sales for user protection in total. This is a big market in Japan, and the growth is quite slow, but steady. We have not seen a negative growth over time. So this is 5% growth year-on-year in terms of gross sales and 16% growth in new customer gross sales. For endpoint user protection, we have something a little bit different. Store cost system and off-line PC, industrial control, security products. For example, Trend Micro's Safe Lock and Portable Security, we have been selling them for more than 10 years now. And the sales of these products have picked up by several millions of -- several hundreds of millions of yen. So this is a new endpoint segment for us. And the cloud-type security service for small and medium-sized enterprises, whereas [ faster business ] security is showing positive growth, steady on a quarter-to-quarter basis and it's 90% growth year-on-year. And again, customer is also increasing every quarter. Cloud Edge, increasing 61% year-on-year in terms of number of customers, especially showing a very strong growth in small customers with less than 100 employees. We have a big market, and we're showing a strong growth. But when it comes to MB, employees between 100 and 500, this is where the competition is quite tough. So our market penetration or market share is quite low in the MB segment. We need to strengthen our efforts in terms of how we approach MB and how we select the right partners. Cloud Edge is also growing. And we're working with Otsuka as well as entity, East and West. We need to find more big partners. And this is where efforts are being made to identify more partners. Gmail [ cast called office ] security for Office 365, we are capturing more and more customers, but Office 365 does have a big number of users, but our touch rate forecast is only about 5% or 6%. We need to approach our customers more and continue to work closely with our customers so that we can increase the attach rate from the current 5% to 6% to a bigger number. This is another challenge that we're facing. Moving on to consumer, global and Japan. The highlights have been already covered. Windows 7 EOS is a major factor in Q4. PC sales increased in Japan as well. So the performance was better than expected, and the sales through mobile phone agencies is growing on a continual basis, as you can see to the right. Every year, our sales -- gross sales through mobile phone device agencies is growing. Home network security is sold by Amazon in the U.S. and over the several months we captured several tens of millions of users at the global level. There is no promotion being done. The customers are definitely registering. And we would like to figure out a better promotion in FY '20 to further expand the sales. Lowlights include the fact that in the mobile phone distributors, the price for device and services were separated, and we could not really capture as many customers or users as we wanted. So this is one of the lowlights. And for the global business, we need to do a better job of selling the home network security-related products. As you can see on the bottom right, our box plus OEM router. This is a home network security business. And as you can see, compared to the previous fiscal year, we are seeing a big growth, big jump, it's a good trend. I'd like to close off by explaining about IoT. After Q4, for IoT what we have for the ICs or OT network solutions that have been announced. And from the top, we have prevention and detection & persistence, and for prevention and detection we have our conventional products and also for persistence, we have the Safe Lock and Portable Security from the past, but we also have Edge IPS, Edge fire and OT defense console, which we built together with TXOne Networks and we have announced the sales support efforts here. We announced this in Q4. We had carried out POCs before that. And in Q4, we have been able to get an order from 1 company, and now from here onwards we'll expand this. So that in the factory area, in the industrial control systems at the very bottom layer, we will be able to have a new area of security covered through these shipments. And second, from last year we have been involved in a partner program for IoT and IIOT. We're pushing this forward. And we have for Raspberry. There's a lot of Android deployment in the factories, and we have this version to experience IIOT. And we have quite a lot of implementations of IIOT solutions taking place. There's also the logo of Trend Micro IoT security ready (sic) [ IoT-ready security ], and there are 7 companies that have already registered here. And with logos, the products are being shipped. And if there's any vulnerabilities, there are going to be patches applied to protect. And there are also hands-on seminars that we're moving forward with. Recently with Tokyo Electron Devices, there was the TXOne solutions included in agency network, and we have started shipments here. We're also carrying out a great deal of educational activities, and we have with NTT DOCOMO starting from spring this year, there is going to be efforts made in the area of 5G. And we have the DOCOMO open Innovation Cloud and we will have A 301, real-time remote surveillance. And in the open innovation cloud, we have the VNFS, the virtual network function suite to offer a safe and secure environment. These have been announced and commercial operations on these will start from spring this year. That has been the update. Thank you very much.

Koichi Habara;Investor Relations executive
#7

[Interpreted] This was actually 1,000 units.

Hideaki Tanaka analyst
#8

[Interpreted] Thank you very much for the explanation. My name is Tanaka of MetLife UFJ, Morgan Stanley Securities. There are 4 points that I'd like to ask. First, in regard to cloud conformity, what its impact. I think on Page 30 to Page 33 of the report, you've described the impact, and at the end of the fiscal period, this came about, but what was the impact here? And when we look at the new fiscal year, for goodwill or the operating loss, what is the kind of impact that is envisioned here? On an annual basis, it should be several billion yen of goodwill and the acquisition took place in October. So it's about JPY 900 million?

Unknown Executive executive
#9

[Interpreted] Please let me explain. In regard to Q4 the cloud conformity impact has been seen in 2 places. One is goodwill. There's about JPY 200 million impact. And for the -- there were delinquencies in the loans for the acquisition of Cloud Conformity so that there was a total JPY 400 million impact in Q4. As for fiscal 2020, in P&L there should not be a major impact. The biggest aspect will be the depreciation of goodwill, and it should be about JPY 1.2 billion per year impact that will be observed.

Hideaki Tanaka analyst
#10

[Interpreted] For example, on Page 33, if we look at point #7, there was a mention about sales of JPY 300 million and there was mentioned about an impact of JPY 1.65 billion. What about for the new fiscal year's net sales? When we consider costs and so on, besides goodwill is there going to be a JPY 1.6 billion or JPY 1.7 billion impact? Or do we consider that this could be ignored?

Unknown Executive executive
#11

[Interpreted] The biggest impact will be goodwill. And there's -- other than that, it would be salaries. And it's a 50-employee company. And in regard to Page 33, it says about negative JPY 1.65 billion [ was it ] the various fixed costs and so on. And also there were expenses incurred during the acquisition. And for running costs, it should not be that great. In regard to this area, I don't understand everything, but this talks about the numbers when goodwill is included. But if we exclude the goodwill, the PL did not have a major negative result. As already mentioned, it will be the depreciation of goodwill that will have the biggest impact.

Hideaki Tanaka analyst
#12

[Interpreted] I see. The second point that I'd like to ask is about the very good results in pre GAAP. What about the sustainability of this after a year? Was it because -- is it going to be explained that it was because of a onetime, big deal? So what about the sustainability of this kind of pre GAAP results?

Unknown Executive executive
#13

[Interpreted] As we said, we had a bitter experience in the past. So in regard to the big deals in Q4, we can't always assume that, that will be the case afterwards. So we're only looking at 5% increase in net sales. We don't believe that double-digit growth will continue.

Hideaki Tanaka analyst
#14

[Interpreted] In regard to Q4, was there something especially large for the pre-GAAP results? There were several big deals. If you're successful, then this will not have a negative impact?

Unknown Executive executive
#15

[Interpreted] Yes. In 2018, in the fourth quarter, we had this situation. And whether we can get big deals or not is difficult to anticipate in terms of timing. And so if it's delayed, then this may inconvenience people. So in regard to big deals, there are things in the pipeline, but we don't know when they can be achieved. And so on a selective basis, we may assume that we'll get 3 deals out of 10 deals in the pipeline. So we're not going to anticipate that we'll get all the deals pending.

Hideaki Tanaka analyst
#16

[Interpreted] Third point. Eva-san explained about the cloud IPS solutions. When it comes to TippingPoint, there was the IPS, and do you believe that there will be steady growth here? For investors, it seems like the other vendors have large top line growth compared to Trend Micro, but can Trend Micro secure the numbers?

Unknown Executive executive
#17

[Interpreted] If we look at just the IPS market, there is a double-digit growth from Tippingpoint acquisition. We didn't believe that we would just grow with IPS. There is the IPS, but there's also SQ1 in next-generation technologies. Meanwhile, when it comes to the IPS in the cloud, in the case of TippingPoint, we have IPS, but for the in-line forecast processing, Trend Micro did not have a strength there, but when it comes to the cloud, there are dedicated chips and on the cloud side, for the massive amount of data to be processed. When it comes to cloud IPS, we believe that we can grow our market share. So with Cloud One, we intend to focus on our sales efforts. So in just hardware, we don't believe that TippingPoint sales will increase, but we're looking forward to what we can grow in sales on the cloud.

Hideaki Tanaka analyst
#18

[Interpreted] Finally, on Page 39 of the report. We understand that Mr. Wael is leaving the company. Is it because of the difficulties in the North American market that led him to resign? Or was there some background that you can explain for his retirement from the company?

Unknown Executive executive
#19

[Interpreted] Well, that's fantastic. You read up to Page 39, there is no such case that Wael has left, but 2 years ago, we made an announcement about the venture investment. And there is also the next-generation MSP, and in the MSP area we wanted to enter it because when we talk about the exterior, in terms of keeping custody of the data and putting out solutions, we would need to know what is happening. And so therefore, when it comes to MSP or the SOC methods, we decided to start a company. Three weeks ago, from external venture capital, we have increased capital and we have holdings of 37% of the shares, and we'll be focusing there. So Wael will be focusing there, he will be a director there. And it's mainly focused on Trend Micro products, and so Wael wanted to focus there to avoid a conflict of interest. And so therefore, he has retired from his position as a Board Director and will be focusing in that area.

Operator operator
#20

[Interpreted] Any other questions?

Hiroko Sato analyst
#21

[Interpreted] Sato, Jefferies Securities. I have 3 questions. Going back to what Tanaka-san mentioned, pre-GAAP U.S. fourth quarter, and it seems that number has finally bottomed out. And can we really believe that the number has bottomed out, because you didn't make it twice. In the first quarter, do we see another negative number? Or is this really bottoming out?

Unknown Executive executive
#22

[Interpreted] As I mentioned before, the full year outlook is a positive. And there may be some ups and downs between different quarters, but we believe we will have a positive result for the U.S. For TippingPoint, not quite, and the other segments are doing better. TippingPoint next refresh cycle will happen maybe 2 years down the line. We don't know exactly, but looking at the waves of a refresh cycle. In 2020, we don't expect the TippingPoint go through the refresh cycle.

Hiroko Sato analyst
#23

[Interpreted] So outside of TippingPoint, XDR, Deep Security will do better in 2020. So hybrid is doing better recently and for Endpoint, the numbers have been flat for a long time, but now you're showing a 9% growth. Is this mostly from the U.S.?

Unknown Executive executive
#24

[Interpreted] In terms of user protection, this is Cloud App Security, large deal in the U.K., this is Europe, and also large XDR deal from APAC. So -- and the user protection. For hybrid infrastructure, we have Deep Security deals from the U.S. as well.

Hiroko Sato analyst
#25

[Interpreted] I see. If that is the case, guidance for this fiscal year, considering that U.S. has bottomed out, the sales is flat in both U.S. and Europe and only 5% growth in Japan. There is Olympics and also there's virus and remote access is really booming. But this year's guidance seems to be very, very weak. It has to be extremely conservative. Looking at pre-GAAP numbers, I expect a higher number for net sales. And also in the third quarter, pre-GAAP was quite weak. And half of the pre-GAAP was based on SaaS, and SaaS contracts are usually 1 year, not multiyear, but single year contracts. So my concern was, so pre-GAAP, you have these numbers, maybe half of this is coming again from SaaS, or is it not the case? Is it coming from something else, aside from SaaS?

Unknown Executive executive
#26

[Interpreted] Olympics and virus. When you say virus, are you talking about corona virus?

Hiroko Sato analyst
#27

[Interpreted] Well, Olympic and hacking, and also I'm talking about the Corona Virus, and it's really pushing up the marketing and the remote access. So the demand should grow. And 5% growth in Japan seems to be too weak.

Unknown Executive executive
#28

[Interpreted] Well, Eva is properly participating online, and she was saying the same thing. Participating online, working from home is becoming more common, which is a positive factor for our business. That's one way of thinking about it. But looking at what's happening really, in reality, you were talking about positive factors, and they may be real, but we have to look at our consumer business, and also volume business. SaaS is increasing, but on-premise is decreasing, as Eva mentioned in her presentation, and this is something for us to consider. So we cannot really expect the situation to continue from 2018 (sic) [ 2019 ]. We don't want to apologize again. So we believe that this number that we have presented is better.

Hiroko Sato analyst
#29

[Interpreted] I understand. My third question is actually very simple. The more people shift to cloud and SaaS, maybe the smaller your profit will become because you have to make more cost and the profit will shrink, and you have to pay more salary and for mobile outsourcing. That's the cost structure of Trend Micro as far as I can see. So this means that the more cloud business you do, the less profitable you will become. Well, this is my question to the analysts, actually. There are some SaaS companies that are running deficits with a high market cap, very high market cap. So do you prefer that as an investor or analyst? Do you really ignore the profit in that case?

Unknown Executive executive
#30

[Interpreted] Well, putting that aside, as I mentioned before, in terms of profitability yes, SaaS business has lower profitability. But we have to -- we are doing SaaS business, not because we want high valuation. But as Eva mentioned, we have to really look at what's happening in the customer's environment, and we want to be able to respond quickly to what the customers need. And if there is a security issue, the customers want to have them resolved very quickly. Currently, we have to spend time asking about the pain points. Sometimes the customers cannot explain and sometimes we misunderstand. It's like a prescribed medicine and the patient not really taking the medicine. But we have been doing a pretty good job so far, but with SaaS, we can be more efficient. So we want our customers to migrate to SaaS, not for the valuation, not for the monthly service fee, but with Saas, we can provide more fundamental solution to the customers' problems. And if we are successful in this, we can be profitable too. Deployed instance was shown in the presentation by Eva today, we have been using the word "customer success" for the last couple of years, because if the customers use this more then that is better for us as is KPI. If the product is used by the customer and the problem can be solved, it will lead to increase in revenue. And if a customer is satisfied and they use more, our profit will increase. So we're not trying to figure out how to achieve higher profitability rate. We are really focusing on customer success first. And for Saas, we have a number of resources deployed, as shown on the slide today. Pre-GAAP profit was the basis for the bonus payment before, but we have changed our KPI too because, as you have mentioned, if we -- the SaaS business is successful, the employees get lower bonus, smaller bonus. That is not good. That is stepping on the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal at the same time, it doesn't work. So in the beginning, we may have to sacrifice some profitability, but if the customers continue to use more and more of our product, profit will come. So profit may be generated later, but we're not expecting to run deficit forever.

Hiroko Sato analyst
#31

[Interpreted] One last question about the salaries. 153 headcount increase, and half of them came from the acquisition. So hiring is about 50, I think, it's coming from Trend Micro headquarter. Japanese engineers were offered with early retirement options or programs, or -- I think it was called next job something.

Unknown Executive executive
#32

[Interpreted] Well, it wasn't called early retirement.

Hiroko Sato analyst
#33

[Interpreted] Right, some kind of encouragement package. I think that was the name. So has there been some kind of a replacement cycle of employees in Japan in the last 12 months? So did you get better or more suitable engineers and sales reps?

Unknown Executive executive
#34

[Interpreted] Our intention was not to offer early retirement program. Maybe some of the employees wanted to do something that is not related to Trend Micro and we also have a welcome back program as well. So if an employee leaves the company, and they want to come back, we can offer a position. So in order to increase the mobility of our employees, this is what we did. When we hire people, are we doing a good job of that? That's another question, another problem. And it's true. In Japan, it's more difficult. Population is declining, and fewer people are studying computer science, which means that we have to think about hiring more from developing countries. We have some form of internship program in São Paulo, Brazil and Bangalore in India. And once this program is successful, we want to send people, many people from these programs to various countries. If the hiring is difficult in developed nations, we will start hiring from other countries. And in terms of internship in Japan, we are getting people from Taiwan and China as well.

Akihiko Omikawa executive
#35

[Interpreted] Well, it seems like you like this type of question. But if you like the early retirement plan, I think that, that's a good system. It's an option. And this is something that the employees have as an option. So I personally think that it's a very good system we have available. And you may feel that it's a negative thing, but I think that actually it's a good system. Are there any other questions?

Satoru Kikuchi analyst
#36

[Interpreted] My name is Kikuchi of SMBC Nikko. And I'd like to ask about hiring. In regard to your policy, it seems that hiring had slowed down at one point. And once again, it seems to be more active. Is that the impression? Or is the same pace maintained?

Unknown Executive executive
#37

[Interpreted] I think that things are at the same pace. For this particular period, and there was the intern system that increases people, but the salaries are not that high. Perhaps you're worried about the salaries becoming too high, impacting profits. There is fluctuations, but we don't believe that the salaries will suddenly increase very rapidly. At the second half of the previous fiscal year, there was an increase but what about the next fiscal year's first half, it's not going to impact things that greatly, because in the past, if we see pre-cap growth, then hiring increased, and then things got tougher later on so that the hiring slowed down. So -- well, normally, we should avoid that situation but sometimes we may have that cycle happening to us. But when it comes to salaries, there is SaaS-related human resources that we have to secure, and there's also the cases of the security operations center, where we have to prepare PPO. But recently, from the past 2, 3 years we have big deals that we've been getting. And there are more cases where we have larger buyers dealing with us, because people are now aware of what Trend Micro can do. So if that means that we have to increase more people to access that area, then we believe that, that kind of investment is warranted.

Satoru Kikuchi analyst
#38

[Interpreted] I'd like to ask about dividends. On Page 37 of the report there is the ideas about goodwill that is explained. And apparently, goodwill will increase slightly, but when it comes to that goodwill -- when the system for a goodwill started, this was because of the increase due to TippingPoint. And looking at the report, it seems to be limited just to the subject of TippingPoint. But what is the case now?

Unknown Executive executive
#39

[Interpreted] When it comes to depreciation of goodwill, in the case of TippingPoint, there was a cash flow generated. And why do we have to depreciate goodwill. But we decided to work on the cash flow. Meanwhile, in the case of Cloud Conformity, the cash flow was negative. So we cannot use the same method as in TippingPoint. And so since the cash is not flowing in for the case of the depreciation of the goodwill of Cloud Conformity. But the reason why we're doing the depreciation of goodwill here is because for the Japan Accounting Association purposes. In the case of TippingPoint, we had a different situation. For Cloud Conformity, they were generating losses. There are risks, but we believe that it was acquired at an appropriate valuation. So you may be wondering about the depreciation. But if there is cash flow generated in the future, and there is the depreciation of the goodwill that undermines profits, then we may apply the same method as TippingPoint. But the goodwill situation is different.

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