(EDGAR Online via COMTEX) -- Item 7. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.
The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and related notes included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. As discussed in the section titled "Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements," the following discussion and analysis contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially from those discussed below. Factors that could cause or contribute to such difference include, but are not limited to, those identified below and those discussed in the section titled "Risk Factors" included in Part I, Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year end is April 30.
This section of our Annual Report on Form 10-K discusses our financial condition and results of operations for the years ended April 30, 2022 and 2021 and year-to-year comparisons between the years ended April 30, 2022 and 2021. A discussion of our financial condition and results of operations for the year ended April 30, 2020 and year-to-year comparisons between years ended April 30, 2021 and 2020 that is not included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K can be found in Part II, Item 7, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended April 30, 2021, filed with the SEC on June 25, 2021, and is incorporated by reference herein.
Overview
Elastic is a data analytics company built on the power of search. Our platform, which is available as both a hosted, managed service across public clouds as well as self-managed software, allows our customers to almost instantly find insights from large amounts of data and take action. We offer three search-powered solutions - Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security - that are built into the platform. We help organizations, their employees, and their customers find what they need faster, while keeping mission-critical applications running smoothly, and protecting against cyber threats.
Our platform is built on the Elastic Stack, a powerful set of software products that ingest data from any source, in any format, and perform search, analysis, and visualization of that data. At the core of the Elastic Stack is Elasticsearch - a highly scalable document store and search engine, and the only data store for all of our solutions and use cases. The Elastic Stack can be used by developers to power a variety of use cases. It is a distributed, real-time search and analytics engine and data store for all types of data including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured.
We make our platform available as a hosted, managed service. Customers can also deploy our platform across hybrid clouds, public or private clouds, and multi-cloud environments. As digital transformation and cloud adoption drive mission critical business functions online and to the cloud, we believe that every company will need to build around a search-based data analytics platform, one which brings speed, scale, and relevance to the vast volumes of data being generated. During the year ended April 30, 2022, we acquired 100% of the share capital of cmdWatch Security Inc. ("Cmd"), Build Security Ltd.
Our business model is based primarily on a combination of a paid Elastic-managed hosted service offering and paid and free proprietary self-managed software. Our paid offerings for our platform are sold via subscription through resource-based pricing, and all customers and users have access to all solutions. In Elastic Cloud, our family of cloud-based offerings under which we offer our software as a hosted, managed service, we offer various subscription tiers tied to different features. For users who download our software, we make some of the features of our software available for free, allowing us to engage with a broad community of developers and practitioners and introduce them to the value of the Elastic Stack. We believe in the importance of an open software development model, and we develop the majority of our software in public repositories as open code under a proprietary license. Unlike some companies, we do not build an enterprise version that is separate from our free distribution. We offer a single code base across both our self-managed software and Elastic-hosted services. All of these actions help us build a powerful commercial business model that we believe is optimized for product-led growth.
We generate revenue primarily from sales of subscriptions to our platform. We offer various paid subscription tiers that provide different levels of rights to use proprietary features and access to support. We do not sell support separately. Our subscription agreements typically have terms of one to three years and we usually bill for them annually in advance. Elastic Cloud customers may also purchase subscriptions on a month-to-month basis without a commitment, with usage billed at the end of each month. Subscriptions accounted for 93%, 93% and 92% of total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2022, 2021, and 2020, respectively. We also generate revenue from consulting and training services.
We make it easy for users to begin using our products in order to drive rapid adoption. Users can either sign up for a free trial on Elastic Cloud or download our software directly from our website without any sales interaction, and immediately begin using the full set of features. Users can also sign up for Elastic Cloud through public cloud marketplaces. We conduct
low-touch campaigns to keep users and customers engaged once they have begun using Elastic Cloud or downloaded our software. As of April 30, 2022, we had over 18,600 customers compared to over 15,000 customers and over 11,300 customers as of April 30, 2021 and 2020, respectively. The majority of our new customers use Elastic Cloud. We define a customer as an entity that generated revenue in the quarter ending on the measurement date from an annual or month-to-month subscription. Affiliated entities are typically counted as a single customer.
Many of these customers start with limited initial spending, but can significantly grow their spending. We drive high-touch engagement with qualified prospects and customers to drive further awareness, adoption, and expansion of our products with paid subscriptions. Expansion includes increasing the number of developers and practitioners using our products, increasing the utilization of our products for a particular use case, and applying our products to new use cases. The number of customers who represented greater than $100,000 in annual contract value ("ACV") was over 960, over 730, and over 610 as of April 30, 2022, 2021 and 2020, respectively. The ACV of a customer's commitments is calculated based on the terms of that customer's subscriptions, and represents the total committed annual subscription amount as of the measurement date. Month-to-month subscriptions are not included in the calculation of ACV.
Our sales teams are organized primarily by geography and secondarily by customer segments. They focus on both initial conversion of users into customers and additional sales to existing customers. In addition to our direct sales efforts, we also maintain partnerships to further extend our reach and awareness of our products around the world.
We have experienced significant growth, with revenue increasing to $862.4 million for the year ended April 30, 2022 from $608.5 million for the year ended April 30, 2021 and $427.6 million for the year ended April 30, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 42% for each of the years ended April 30, 2022 and 2021. For the year ended April 30, 2022, revenue from outside the United States accounted for 44% of our total revenue. For our non-U.S. operations, the majority of our revenue and expenses are denominated in currencies such as the Euro and British pound. No customer represented more than 10% of our total revenue for the years ended April 30, 2022, 2021, and 2020. We have not been profitable to date. For the years ended April 30, 2022, 2021 and 2020, we incurred net losses of $203.8 million, $129.4 million and $167.2 million, respectively. Our net cash provided by operating activities was $5.7 million and $22.5 million for the years ended April 30, 2022 and 2021, respectively and cash used in operating activities for the year ended April 30, 2020 was $30.6 million. We have experienced losses in each year since our incorporation and as of April 30, 2022, had an accumulated deficit of $817.2 million. We expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future. There can be no assurance as to when we may become profitable.
We continue to make substantial investments in developing the Elastic Stack and our solutions and expanding our global sales and marketing footprint. With a distributed team spanning over 40 countries, we are able to recruit, hire, and retain high-quality, experienced technical and sales personnel and operate at a rapid pace to drive product releases, fix bugs, and create and market new products. We had 2,978 employees as of April 30, 2022.
In July 2021, we issued $575.0 million aggregate principal amount of 4.125% Senior Notes due July 15, 2029 (the "Senior Notes") in a private placement. We intend to continue to use the net proceeds from the offering of the Senior Notes for general corporate purposes, which may include capital expenditures, investments and working capital. In addition, in the past we have considered, and may continue to consider, acquisitions and strategic transactions, and we may use the net proceeds of this offering for such purposes.
COVID-19
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve and negatively impact worldwide economic activity. Efforts to control its spread have significantly curtailed the movement of people, goods and services worldwide, including in many of the regions in which we sell our products and services and conduct our business operations, negatively impacting worldwide economic activity. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has varied significantly across different industries with certain industries experiencing increased demand for their products and services, while others have struggled to maintain demand for their products and services consistent with historical levels. The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our operational and financial performance will depend on certain developments, including the duration and spread of the virus, success of preventative measures to contain or mitigate the spread of the virus and emerging variants, effectiveness, distribution and acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines, impact on our customers and our sales cycles, impact on our customer, employee or industry events, effect on our vendors, and the uneven impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on certain industries, all of which continue to remain uncertain and cannot be predicted.
Notwithstanding the potential and actual adverse impacts described above, as the pandemic has caused more of our customers to shift to a virtual workforce or accelerate their digital transformation efforts, we believe the value of our solutions has become even more evident. In addition, we have benefited from lower spending on travel by our employees due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and from holding events virtually, however we expect live events and travel costs to trend back higher in the near-term.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and in an effort to focus on maintaining business continuity and preparing for the future and long-term success of our business, we have taken precautionary measures intended to help minimize the risk of the virus to our employees, customers, and the communities in which we operate, including modifying our business practices, such as suspending employee travel, adapting employee work locations, and holding events and trainings virtually. Further, we also temporarily reduced the pace of investments in our business in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the first quarter of fiscal 2021, but began to gradually increase our investments in our business in subsequent quarters. We intend to continue to make additional investments in the business in fiscal 2023. We continue to monitor the major impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and make changes in our business as appropriate, in response to such impacts. See "Risk Factors" included in Part I, Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of additional risks.
Key Factors Affecting Our Performance
We believe that the growth and future success of our business depends on many factors, including those described below. While each of these factors presents significant opportunities for our business, they also pose important challenges that we must successfully address in order to sustain our growth and improve our results of operations.
Increasing adoption of Elastic Cloud. Elastic Cloud, our family of cloud-based offerings is an important growth opportunity for our business. Organizations are increasingly looking for hosted deployment alternatives with reduced administrative burdens. In some cases, users of our source available software that have been self-managing deployments of the Elastic Stack subsequently become paying subscribers of Elastic Cloud. For the years ended April 30, 2022, 2021 and 2020, Elastic Cloud contributed 35%, 27% and 22% of our total revenue, respectively. We believe that offering Elastic Cloud is important for achieving our long-term growth potential, and we expect Elastic Cloud's contribution to our subscription revenue to increase over time. However, we expect that an increase in the relative contribution of Elastic Cloud to our business will have a modest adverse impact on our gross margin as a result of the associated third-party hosting costs.
Growing the Elastic community. Our strategy consists of providing access to source available software, on both a paid and free basis, and fostering a community of users and developers. Our strategy is designed to pursue what we believe to be significant untapped potential for the use of our technology. After developers begin to use our software and start to participate in our developer community, they become more likely to apply our technology to additional use cases and evangelize our technology within their organizations. This reduces the time required for our sales force to educate potential leads on our solutions. In order to capitalize on our opportunity, we intend to make further investments to keep the Elastic Stack accessible and well known to software developers around the world. We intend to continue to invest in our products and support and engage our user base and developer community through content, events, and conferences in the U.S. and internationally. Our results of operations may fluctuate as we make these investments.
Developing new features for the Elastic Stack. The Elastic Stack is applied to various use cases by customers, including through the solutions we offer. Our revenue is derived primarily from subscriptions of Enterprise Search, Observability and Security built into the Elastic Stack. We believe that releasing additional features of the Elastic Stack, including our solutions, drives usage of our products and ultimately drives our growth. To that end, we plan to continue to invest in building new features and solutions that expand the capabilities of the Elastic Stack. These investments may adversely affect our operating results prior to generating benefits, to the extent that they ultimately generate benefits at all.
Growing our customer base by converting users of our software to paid subscribers. Our financial performance depends on growing our paid customer base by converting free users of our software into paid subscribers. Our distribution model has resulted in rapid adoption by developers around the world. We have invested, and expect to continue to invest, heavily in sales and marketing efforts to convert additional free users to paid subscribers. Our investment in sales and marketing is significant given our large and diverse user base. The investments are likely to occur in advance of the anticipated benefits resulting from such investments, such that they may adversely affect our operating results in the near term.
Expanding within our current customer base. Our future growth and profitability depend on our ability to drive additional sales to existing customers. Customers often expand the use of our software within their organizations by increasing the number of developers using our products, increasing the utilization of our products for a particular use case, and expanding use of our products to additional use cases. We focus some of our direct sales efforts on encouraging these types of expansion within our customer base.
We believe that a useful indication of how our customer relationships have expanded over time is through our Net Expansion Rate, which is based upon trends in the rate at which customers increase their spend with us. To calculate an expansion rate as of the end of a given month, we start with the annualized spend from all such customers as of twelve months prior to that month end, or Prior Period Value. A customer's annualized spend is measured as their ACV, or in the case of customers charged on usage-based arrangements, by annualizing the usage for that month. We then calculate the annualized spend from these same customers as of the given month end, or Current Period Value, which includes any growth in the value of their subscriptions or usage and is net of contraction or attrition over the prior twelve months. We then divide the Current
Period Value by the Prior Period Value to arrive at an expansion rate. The Net Expansion Rate at the end of any period is the weighted average of the expansion rates as of the end of each of the trailing twelve months. The Net Expansion Rate includes the dollar-weighted value of our subscriptions or usage that expand, renew, contract, or attrit. For instance, if each customer had a one-year subscription and renewed its subscription for the exact same amount, then the Net Expansion Rate would be 100%. Customers who reduced their annual subscription dollar value (contraction) or did not renew their annual subscription (attrition) would adversely affect the Net Expansion Rate. Our Net Expansion Rate was slightly below 130% for the year ended April 30, 2022.
As large organizations expand their use of the Elastic Stack across multiple use cases, projects, divisions and users, they often begin to require centralized provisioning, management and monitoring across multiple deployments. To satisfy these requirements, our Enterprise subscription tier provides access to key orchestration and deployment management capabilities. We will continue to focus some of our direct sales efforts on driving adoption of our paid offerings.
Components of Results of Operations
Revenue
Subscription. Our revenue is primarily generated through the sale of subscriptions to software, which is either self-managed by the user or hosted and managed by us in the cloud. Subscriptions provide the right to use paid proprietary software features and access to support for our paid and unpaid software.
A portion of the revenue from self-managed subscriptions is generally recognized up front at the point in time when the license is delivered. This revenue is presented as License - self-managed in our consolidated statements of operations. The remainder of revenue from self-managed subscriptions is recognized ratably over the subscription term. Revenue from subscriptions that require access to the cloud or that are hosted and managed by us is recognized ratably over the subscription term or on a usage basis for consumption-based arrangements; both are presented within Subscription - self-managed and SaaS in our consolidated statements of operations.
Professional services. Professional services is composed of consulting services as well as public and private training. Revenue for professional services is recognized as these services are delivered.
Cost of Revenue
Subscription. Cost of license - self-managed consists of amortization of certain intangible assets. Cost of subscription - self-managed and SaaS consists primarily of personnel and related costs for employees associated with supporting our subscription arrangements, certain third-party expenses, and amortization of certain intangible and other assets. Personnel and related costs, or personnel costs, comprise cash compensation, benefits and stock-based compensation to employees, costs of third-party contractors, and allocated overhead costs. Third-party expenses consist of cloud hosting costs and other expenses directly associated with our customer support. We expect our cost of subscription - self-managed and SaaS to increase in absolute dollars as our subscription revenue increases.
Professional services. Cost of professional services revenue consists primarily of personnel costs directly associated with delivery of training, implementation and other professional services, costs of third-party contractors, facility rental charges and allocated overhead costs. We expect our cost of professional services revenue to increase in absolute dollars as we invest in our business and as professional services revenue increases.
Gross profit and gross margin. Gross profit represents revenue less cost of revenue. Gross margin, or gross profit as a percentage of revenue, has been and will continue to be affected by a variety of factors, including the timing of our acquisition of new customers and our renewals with existing customers, the average sales price of our subscriptions and professional services, the amount of our revenue represented by hosted services, the mix of subscriptions sold, the mix of revenue between subscriptions and professional services, the mix of professional services between consulting and training, transaction volume growth and support case volume growth. We expect our gross margin to fluctuate over time depending on the factors described above. We expect our revenue from Elastic Cloud to continue to increase as a percentage of total revenue, which we expect will adversely impact our gross margin as a result of the associated hosting costs.
Operating Expenses
Research and development. Research and development expense mainly consists of personnel costs and allocated overhead costs for employees and contractors. We expect our research and development expense to increase in absolute dollars for the foreseeable future as we continue to develop new technology and invest further in our existing products.
Sales and marketing. Sales and marketing expense mainly consists of personnel costs, commissions, allocated overhead costs and costs related to marketing programs and user events. Marketing programs consist of advertising, events, brand-building and customer acquisition and retention activities. We expect our sales and marketing expense to increase in absolute dollars as we expand our salesforce and increase our investments in marketing resources. We capitalize sales commissions and associated payroll taxes paid to internal sales personnel that are related to the acquisition of customer contracts. Sales commissions costs are amortized over the expected benefit period.
General and administrative. General and administrative expense mainly consists of personnel costs for our management, finance, legal, human resources, and other administrative employees. Our general and administrative expense also includes professional fees, accounting fees, audit fees, tax services and legal fees, as well as insurance, allocated overhead costs, and other corporate expenses. We expect our general and administrative expense to increase in absolute dollars as we increase the size of our general and administrative functions to support the growth of our business.
Other Income (Expense), Net
Other income (expense), net primarily consists of interest expense, gains and losses from transactions denominated in a currency other than the functional currency, and interest income.
Provision for (Benefit from) Income Taxes
Provision for (benefit from) income taxes consists primarily of income taxes related to the Netherlands, U.S. federal, state and foreign jurisdictions in which we conduct business. Our effective tax rate is affected by recurring items, such as tax rates in jurisdictions outside the Netherlands and the relative amounts of income we earn in those jurisdictions, and non-deductible stock-based compensation.
Results of Operations
The following tables set forth our results of operations for the periods
presented in dollars and as a percentage of our total revenue. The period to
period comparison of results is not necessarily indicative of results for future
periods.
Year Ended April 30,
2022 2021 2020
(in thousands)
Revenue
License - self-managed $ 76,964 $ 67,994 $ 53,536
Subscription - self-managed and SaaS 721,806 499,345 338,634
Total subscription revenue 798,770 567,339 392,170
Professional services 63,604 41,150 35,450
Total revenue 862,374 608,489 427,620
Cost of revenue (1)(2)(3)
Cost of license - self-managed 1,548 1,386 948
Cost of subscription - self-managed and SaaS 176,656 121,127 84,819
Total cost of revenue - subscription 178,204 122,513 85,767
Cost of professional services 53,990 38,541 36,923
Total cost of revenue 232,194 161,054 122,690
Gross profit 630,180 447,435 304,930
Operating expenses (1)(2)(3)(4)
Research and development 273,761 199,203 165,370
Sales and marketing 406,658 273,877 219,040
General and administrative 123,441 103,833 91,625
Total operating expenses 803,860 576,913 476,035
Operating loss (1)(2)(3)(4) (173,680) (129,478) (171,105)
Other income (expense), net
Interest expense (20,716) (185) -
Other income (expense), net (3,393) 7,949 1,963
Loss before income taxes (197,789) (121,714) (169,142)
. . .
Jun 21, 2022
COMTEX_409020380/2041/2022-06-21T17:17:02
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