Corrected Transcript

22-May-2024

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Total Pages: 20

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS

Jimmy L. Sexton

Michael P. Scarpelli

Senior Finance Director & Head-Investor Relations, Snowflake, Inc.

Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, Inc.

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Christian Kleinerman

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Snowflake, Inc.

Executive Vice President-Product, Snowflake, Inc.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

OTHER PARTICIPANTS

Keith Weiss

Matthew Hedberg

Analyst, Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Analyst, RBC Capital Markets LLC

Mark R. Murphy

Brent A. Bracelin

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst, Piper Sandler & Co.

Kirk Materne

Joe Vandrick

Analyst, Evercore Group LLC

Analyst, Scotia Capital (USA), Inc.

Karl E. Keirstead

Robert Galvin

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Analyst, Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.

Raimo Lenschow

Tyler Radke

Analyst, Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst, Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Brent Thill

Alex Zukin

Analyst, Jefferies LLC

Analyst, Wolfe Research LLC

2

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

MANAGEMENT DISCUSSION SECTION

Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you for attending today's Q1 Fiscal Year 2025 Snowflake's Earnings Call. My name is Sierra, and I will be your moderator today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jimmy Sexton, Head of Investor Relations.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Jimmy L. Sexton

Senior Finance Director & Head-Investor Relations, Snowflake, Inc.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on Snowflake's Q1 fiscal 2025 earnings call. Joining me on the call today is Sridhar Ramaswamy, our Chief Executive Officer; Mike Scarpelli, our Chief Financial Officer; and Christian Kleinerman, our Executive Vice President of Product, who will participate in the Q&A session.

During today's call, we will review our financial results for the first quarter fiscal 2025 and discuss our guidance for the second quarter and full year fiscal 2025. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to our business operations and financial performance. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause them to differ materially from actual results.

Information concerning these risks and uncertainties available in our earnings press release, our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q and our other SEC reports. All our statements are made as of today based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements.

During today's call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non- GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investors.snowflake.com. A replay of today's call will also be posted on the website.

With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Sridhar.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Snowflake, Inc.

Thanks, Jimmy, and good afternoon, everyone. Before we get into it, many of you have given me a warm welcome to my new role, over the past few months, and I just wanted to say thank you.

I've been focused on three key priorities in my first quarter as CEO: listening to and learning from our customers, driving execution and alignment within our go-to-market teams, and fueling our innovation and product delivery. I have been really impressed by how the team has responded and by our overall pace of play. We have a lot of opportunity ahead of us, and there's a lot of excitement across our company to go and get it.

When I look at the Snowflake growth story, it was first driven by an amazing data product and then by the layers of collaboration and applications that we added on top to make Snowflake a true data cloud. What is exciting about AI is that it can turbocharge our capabilities and growth on all three layers. It also helps democratize access to all the amazing enterprise data in Snowflake, massively increasing our reach.

3

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

The progress we have made in AI over the last year culminating in the past quarter is remarkable. We believe AI is going to continue to fuel our platform, helping our customers perform and deliver customer experiences better than ever.

As evidenced by our Q1 results, our core business is very strong. We are still in the early innings of our plan to bring our world-class data platform to customers around the globe. And in the first quarter alone, we saw some of our largest customers meaningfully increase their usage of our core offering. The combination of our incredibly strong data cloud now powerfully boosted by AI is the strength and story of Snowflake.

I want to touch on our Q1 results and Mike will get into the details with you. I'm really proud that our team delivered a very strong Q1. Product revenue for the quarter was $790 million, up 34% year-over-year. Remaining performance obligations totaled $5 billion, year-over-year growth accelerated to 46%, and non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow margin was 44%.

Given the strong quarter, we are increasing our product revenue outlook for the year. Working through the second quarter and beyond, our priorities remain the same. I've had conversations with over 100 customers over the past several months, and I'm very optimistic. Snowflake is a beloved platform and the value we bring come through in every customer conversation I have. We are critical in helping our customers run their businesses.

For example, one of the largest US telcos relies on us to help them close their books every month. We also help a global financial service customer from their counterparty credit risk process. The art of the possible on Snowflake is really incredible.

It's also probably no surprise that AI is top of mind for our customers as well. They want to make all business data in Snowflake available to everyone, not just the business analyst. They want us to help drive clarity, value creation and reliability as they enter this new frontier.

Over the last quarter, my time spent with our go-to-market teams has been focused on driving execution and alignment. Internally, we emphasize consumption and new customer acquisition and we're developing an end-to- end cadence for both priorities. This includes developing sales motions and specific workloads such as AI and data engineering. We have more to gain as we standardize our consumption mindset and effectively execute. We expect that this efficiency will contribute to further revenue growth.

Those who know me, know that I have a relentless focus on product innovation and delivery. Teams across the company are building and delivering at an incredible pace.

Earlier this month, we announced that Cortex, our AI layer, is generally available. Iceberg, Snowpark Container Services and Hybrid Tables will all be generally available later this year. We are investing in AI and machine learning and our pace of progress in a short amount of time has been fantastic. What is resonating most with our customers is that we are bringing differentiation to the market. Snowflake delivers enterprise AI that is easy, efficient and trusted.

We have seen an impressive ramp in Cortex AI customer adoption since going generally available. As of last week, over 750 customers are using these capabilities. Cortex can increase productivity by reducing time- consuming tasks. For example, Sigma Computing uses Cortex language models to summarize and categorize customer communications from their CRM.

4

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

In the quarter, we also announced Arctic, our own language model. Arctic outperformed leading open models such as llama2-70b and Mixtral 8x7B in various benchmarks. We developed Arctic in less than three months at one-eighth the training cost of peer models.

AI is a bridge between structured and unstructured data. We see this with Document AI, customers find value in extracting features on the fly from piles of documents. We are making meaningful progress on Snowpark Container Services being generally available in the second half of the year and dozens of partners are already building solutions that will leverage Container Services to serve their end customers.

We view Snowpark and other new features as our emerging businesses. These are in the early days of revenue contribution, but we are seeing very healthy demand. More than 50% of customers are using Snowpark as of Q1. Revenue from Snowpark is driven by spot migrations. In Q1, we began the process of migrating several large Global 2000 customers to Snowpark.

Our collaboration capability is also a key competitive advantage for us. Nearly a-third of our customers are sharing data products as of Q1 2025, up from 24% one year ago. Collaboration already serves as a vehicle for new customer acquisition. Through a strategic collaboration with Fiserv, Snowflake was chosen by more than 20 Fiserv financial institutions and merchant clients to enable secure direct access to their financial data and insights.

We announced support for unstructured data over two years ago. Now about 40% of our customers are processing unstructured data on Snowflake. And we've added more than 1,000 customers in this category over the last six months.

Iceberg is enabling us to play offense and address a larger data footprint. Many of our largest customers have indicated that they will now leverage Snowflake for more workloads as a result of this functionality. More than 300 customers are using Iceberg in public preview.

Snowflake has a powerful and unique partner ecosystem. Part of our success is that we have many partners that amplify the power of our platform. They range from big organizations like EY and Deloitte, but also firms like LTIMindtree and Next Pathway. S&P Global sees us as a strong collaborator in their cloud distribution model. And companies like Observe, Blue Yonder, RelationalAI, Fivetran, Hex and Domo have built their software on top of Snowflake.

These partners bring on entirely new capabilities and unlock new use cases for us and our customers. They also often bring new customers to us. And they really care about how easy it is to build on Snowflake, how reliable Snowflake is and also about how we can go to customers jointly. Partners bring enormous power to our data cloud vision. Their success creates success for us and our customers.

To wrap it up, Snowflake is the world's best enterprise AI data platform. Combined with our collaboration capability and thriving application platform, we are driving powerful network effects that will fuel our growth. AI vastly amplifies this opportunity, both in the near and medium term.

Our product philosophy is simple. One platform with all features available. We are turning every analyst and data engineer into a sophisticated AI analyst. The magic of Snowflake is that we make difficult tasks easy. Stay tuned for more to come at Snowflake Data Cloud Summit coming up in San Francisco, June 3rd through the 6th. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Now, I'll turn it over to Mike.

5

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

Michael P. Scarpelli

Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, Inc.

Thank you, Sridhar. Q1 product revenue grew 34% year-over-year to $790 million. Our largest growth contributors included a media and entertainment Global 2000 and a large retail and consumer goods company. Smaller accounts outside of the Global 2000 were an important source of outperformance. Intra-quarter, we saw strong growth in February and March, growth moderated in April, we view this variability as a normal component of the business.

Excluding the impact of leap year, product revenue grew approximately 32% year-over-year. We continue to see signs of a stable optimization environment. Seven of our top 10 customers grew quarter-over-quarter. Q1 marked the first quarter under our FY 2025 sales compensation plan. Our sales reps are executing well against their plan. In Q1, we exceeded our new customer acquisition and consumption quotas.

Non-GAAP product gross margin of 76.9% was down slightly year-over-year. As mentioned on our prior call, we have headwinds associated with GPU-related costs as we invest in new AI initiatives.

Our non-GAAP operating margin of 4% benefited from revenue outperformance. Our non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow margin was 44%. As a reminder, Q1 and Q4 are our seasonally strong quarters for non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow.

We ended the quarter with $4.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments. In Q1, we used $516 million to repurchase 3 million shares at an average price of $173.14. We have $892 million remaining under our original $2 billion authorization.

Now, let's turn to our outlook. As a reminder, we only forecast product revenue based on observed behavior. This means our FY 2025 guidance includes contributions from Snowpark, FY 2025 guidance does not include revenue from newer features such as Cortex until we see material consumption.

Iceberg will be GA later this year. We have invested in Iceberg because we expect it to increase our future revenue opportunity. However, for the purpose of guidance, we continue to model revenue headwinds associated with the movement of data out of Snowflake and into Iceberg storage. The negative impact is weighted to the back half of the year.

For Q2, we expect product revenue between $805 million and $810 million, we are increasing our FY 2025 product revenue guidance. We now expect full year product revenue of approximately $3.3 billion, representing 24% year-over-year growth.

Turning to margins. We are lowering our full year margin guidance in light of increased GPU-related costs related to our AI initiatives. We are operating in a rapidly evolving market, and we view these investments as key to unlocking additional revenue opportunities in the future. As a reminder, we have GPU-related costs in both cost of revenue and R&D.

We announced our intent to acquire certain technology assets and hire key employees from TruEra. TruEra is an AI observability platform that provides capabilities to evaluate and monitor large language model apps and machine learning models in production. We are excited to welcome approximately 35 employees from TruEra to Snowflake, the impact of the transaction is reflected in our outlook.

6

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

For Q2, we expect 3% non-GAAP operating margin. For FY 2025, we expect 75% non-GAAP product gross margin, 3% non-GAAP operating margin, and 26% non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow margin.

Finally, we will host our Investor Day on June 4th in San Francisco in conjunction with the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, our annual users conference. If you are interested in attending, please e-mail ir@snowflake.com.

With that, operator, you can now open up the line for questions.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

QUESTION AND ANSWER SECTION

Operator: Thank you. We'll now begin the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Keith Weiss

Analyst, Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Q

Excellent. Very nice quarter, guys. And thank you for taking the question. Looking at the front page of the Investor Relations page, 5 billion queries. It looks like your query volume is actually accelerating now again. Can you walk us through some of the drivers of that acceleration? Is it new products that are driving the acceleration? Or is it the relief of optimization or just like better data sharing? So just a little bit more clarity on what's driving that acceleration?

And then on the other side, that equation. It looks like there's still pressures on like the price per query. Any indications on whether that like pressure on the price per query is coming more from the compute side of the equation or the storage side of the equation? Any color there would be super helpful.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Snowflake, Inc.

A

Thank you. Overall, as both Mike and I said, our core business is very strong and growth is coming from both new customers as well as expansion from existing customers. And as we gain more and different kinds of workloads, for example, AI, data engineering are increasing quite nicely. They're all contributing to additional credit growth. And the relationship between credit growth and cost per query is not a simple straightforward one. And we look for broad growth across the different categories of workloads that we handle, and they've all been doing really well.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Operator: Our next question today comes from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Q

Great. Thank you very much. I'll add my congratulations. Sridhar, you trained Arctic LLM with a pretty amazing efficiency. Could you walk us through the architectural difference in the product that might allow it to run more efficiently than other products out there in the market?

And Mike, is there any directional change to the $50 million target for GPU spend this year, just considering the launch of Cortex and Arctic LLM and it sounds like some Snowpark traction. Should we think of that trending a little higher?

7

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

Sridhar Ramaswamy

A

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Snowflake, Inc.

Thank you. So absolutely, we did train Arctic in a remarkably short period of time, a little over three months on a remarkably small amount of GPU compute. A lot of the training efficiency of these models do come from architectures. We had a rather unique mixture of experts architecture. These are increasingly the architectures that are driving impressive gains for all of the other leading AI companies.

But what also went into it was just an amazing amount of pre experimentation in order to figure out things like what are the right data sets, what orders should they be fed in and how do we make sure that they're actually optimizing for enterprise metrics, the kind of things our customers care about, which are things like, are these models really good at creating SQL queries, for example, so that they can talk to data.

And so we are taking very much the view of how do we make AI much better in an enterprise context because naturally, that's the place where we have the most value to add and our AI budgets are modest in the scheme of things. And so being creative in how we develop these models is something that the team comes to naturally expect. And I think that kind of discipline and scarcity, to be honest, produces a lot of innovation. And I think that's what you're seeing.

And then in terms of investments, I'll hand over to Mike in a second. But I'm comfortable with the amount of investments that we are making. Part of what we gain as Snowflake is the ability to fast follow on a number of fronts, is the ability to optimize against metrics that we care about, not producing like the latest, greatest, biggest model, let's say, for image generation. And so having that kind of focus lets us operate on a relatively modest budget pretty efficiently.

And so the focus very much now is on how do we take all of the products that we have released into production. We have over 750 customers that are busy developing against our AI platform. This is a fast-moving space, but we are very comfortable with both the pace, the investments and the choices that we are making to make AI effective for Snowflake.

Mike?

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Michael P. Scarpelli

Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, Inc.

A

Yeah. And I will add that, yes, we think we may be spending a little bit more on GPUs, but it's also people that we're hiring, specifically in AI. We talked about the acquisition of TruEra. Those people all fall into that organization. And so as I mentioned, the world of AI is rapidly evolving, and we are investing in that because we do think there's a massive opportunity for Snowflake to play there. And it will have a meaningful impact on future revenues.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Thank you very much.

Q

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Operator: Our next question today comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore. Please proceed.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

8

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

Kirk Materne

Q

Analyst, Evercore Group LLC

Yeah. Thanks very much, and congrats on the quarter. Sridhar, can you just talk a little bit about how we should think about your customers' time to value with Cortex, meaning how long do you think it takes them to start using the technology before it can start to translate into a little bit faster consumption patterns?

And then just one for Mike. Mike, can you just talk a little bit about deferred? This quarter was down perhaps a little bit more sequentially than we've seen in prior years. I don't know if there's anything onetime in nature there, but if you could just touch upon that, that would be great? Thank you all.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Snowflake, Inc.

A

Thank you. One of the cool things about Cortex AI and our AI products in general, in the context of the consumption model, is that our customers don't have to make big investments to see what value that they're going to get because they don't have to make commitments to how many GPUs that they are going to be renting, for example. They just use Cortex AI, for example, from SQL, which is very, very easy to do without a pre-commit. And this means that they can focus very much on sort of value creation.

And the structure of Cortex AI is also so that anybody that can write SQL can now begin to do really interesting things, for example, look at how often let's say, a particular product was mentioned in an earnings transcript or being able to go from other kinds of unstructured information like whether it is text or whether it is images to structured information, which Document AI, our AI product there, does.

And so we very much want to structure all of these efforts as ones in which our customers are able to iterate very quickly, take things to production, get value out of it and then make bigger commitments on top. And that's one of the benefits that you get from making the technology super easy to adopt. There's not a massive learning curve, neither is there a GPU commitment or other kinds of software engineering that needs to happen in order to use AI with Snowflake.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Michael P. Scarpelli

Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, Inc.

A

Yeah. And your question on deferred, Kirk, if you're referring to January to today, the end of the year, Q4 is always a very, very big billing quarter. Q1 is not as big of a billing quarter. So you have that flowing through on the deferred revenue. However, RPO, and you can see RPO, as Sridhar mentioned, is up 46% year-over-year. And we do have, for instance, we signed a $100 million deal this quarter with a customer who pays us monthly in arrears, so it doesn't show up in deferred revenue. We've signed a number of deals with big companies that pay us monthly in arrears that don't show up in deferred revenue, but they're in RPO.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Kirk Materne

Analyst, Evercore Group LLC

That's helpful. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Sridhar. Appreciate it.

Q

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Operator: Our next question today comes from Karl Keirstead with UBS. Please proceed. Karl, your line is now

open.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

9

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW)

Corrected Transcript

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

22-May-2024

Karl E. Keirstead

Q

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Oh, I'm sorry. Mike, could you elaborate on the comment that usage growth moderated in April? Maybe you could unpack that and explain why it usually does? And then also when I look at your 2Q and fiscal 2025 revenue guidance, it's actually pretty solid. So that would lead one to believe that whatever moderation there might be in April, it doesn't feel like it according to your guidance, rolled into May. Just curious if that's the correct interpretation? Thank you.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Michael P. Scarpelli

Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, Inc.

A

Well, what I would say is February and March were very strong. And I'm saying April was more muted. April, just as a reminder, and it really impacts you in Europe and some others that is Ascension Day or Easter holiday. And in Europe, they take a long time off that does have an impact on consumption. Remember, this is a daily consumption model. And the guidance we gave is based upon what we're seeing through our customers as of this week.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Karl E. Keirstead

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Q

Okay. And Mike, if I could ask a follow-up. You had mentioned previously, including, I think, at a conference in March that your efforts around that tiered storage side, whereby we could see some roll-off on the storage revenues could begin to impact the P&L in the April quarter. Was that the case? And would you be able to approximate what impact maybe the roll-off on the storage reps had? Thank you.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Michael P. Scarpelli

Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, Inc.

A

Sure. We did roll out to all of our customers, and we started, by the way, doing it at the end of last year, whereby depending on the amount of commitment you're making on an annual basis, you get tiered storage pricing. So in essence, you get your storage discounted from the list price of $23 per terabyte. We started rolling that out and that actually in the quarter impacted us somewhere between $6 million and $8 million. I forget exactly what that is, that is pure margin that, that impacted.

That's not to say there are other customers, big customers where we've always discounted their storage given their size. That is just the pure because of the tiered storage that's rolled out to everyone and that will continue to have an impact as people continue to renew their contracts. But storage mix as a percent of revenue has remained pretty much consistent at 11% of our revenue is associated with storage. That did not change.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Karl E. Keirstead

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Okay. And Mike, thanks for - go ahead.

Q

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Sridhar Ramaswamy

Chief Executive Officer & Director, Snowflake, Inc.

We're actually seeing growth in storage in Snowflake.

A

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Karl E. Keirstead

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Q

10

1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com

Copyright © 2001-2024 FactSet CallStreet, LLC

Attachments

  • Original Link
  • Original Document
  • Permalink

Disclaimer

Snowflake Inc. published this content on 23 May 2024 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 23 May 2024 13:31:02 UTC.