Wix.com Ltd. (WIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

And I'm really excited to have with us today the Wix team. We have with us today both CEO and CFO, Lior and Nir. We are going to have mics that are going to go around at the end, so we will have audience Q&A. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. And with that, Lior, Nir, thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you for having us.

It's a great pleasure.

Right. So I did want to start the stage with just an intro question for each of you. And Nir, I'll start with you. Wix has made significant strides in both the Self Creators side of the business and the Partners segment over the past year. So could you just provide an overview of the Wix strategic focus and how that's evolved over the past year? And any key inflection points that you would like to call out and where the focus really is for 2025?

Yes, absolutely. So as always, when you're talking about strategic view, it's more of a multiyear view rather than one singular year. And I think back in 2019, I think, was the first time that we came out and started talking about our intention to put a lot of emphasis and investment into our Partners business. And lots of things happened in between. COVID obviously surprised all of us in 2020. It kind of derailed us a little bit on the progress just because we had to redirect a lot of resources to deal with needs of all of the new customers we were getting because of the pandemic. But even so, I think we managed to put the investment in the right place. We managed to release the right products. We released Editor X. It wasn't a huge success as we hoped for but it did serve a big deal in teaching us what's the right thing to do in order to deal with partners and agencies. And it was late 2023, which kind of leads us to 2024 that we released Wix Studio. And it was clearly and without a doubt, the best product release we've had ever in the history of the company. By the way, a lot of it is probably based on trial and error and what we learned from Editor X over the past few years before that. And I think in 2024 was still mainly focused on cultivating that success because we only opened up Wix Studio to the crowd in October of '23. So most of '24 was about establishing it, stabilizing it, making it, growing its brand and expanding it. Throughout 2024, we also started thinking that since now we have such a great success, such a great home for that audience of the partners, we want to go back to what Wix is for the self-creators and essentially try to replicate the success we've seen in basically launching this whole new offering with Studio for the partners to find a way to replicate that for the self-creators. So naturally, Avishai spoke on our earnings about these 2 big products coming in 2025, their development, their planning already started well into 2024. And hopefully, and luckily, we're going to be able to put them in the hands of our customers very soon and start also reaccelerating the growth on the Self Creators side of the business.

Great. And I definitely do want to dig into those new 2 product opportunities within self-creator. But before we do, Lior, just a financial question. Wix achieved a 28% free cash flow margin in fiscal '24, which combined with the revenue growth that accelerated to around 13%, placed you guys above a Rule of 40, and that was well ahead of your initial target. As we get into 2025, you're targeting a Rule of 45, including a free cash flow margin slightly above 30%. We've talked about how the Self Creators business has been a 35% free cash flow generator. And you've said over time, you could see the opportunity for Partners even being higher than Self Creators. So how do we think about the longer-term free cash flow generating potential for the business?

So definitely, we are ahead of plan in terms of, I think that we show a great ability in order to expand the margins. I think that it's important to mention that in the last couple of years since we actually reduced cost and become like a much more efficient company, we delivered most of the expansion of the margin through growth, meaning that we left the company in terms of number of employees quite stable. By doing that, we created a lot of leverage, meaning that most of the top line actually going down to the bottom line. I definitely see that from Partners' point of view, I believe that long term, we'll go to about 35% to 40% of free cash flow. Definitely Self Creators around 35%. We are almost there. So I think that the right way to do that in the future is, Nir spoke about the new products and so on, deliver more growth actually to accelerate the growth and by doing that, also to expand the free cash flow margin and to get to that.

Great. And before we dig into the product portfolio and the fundamentals, I do want to address a key question that was coming out of the recent earnings, which is ultimately, how do I gain confidence in the accelerating bookings growth in the back half of the year against a harder year ago compare. And qualitatively, you guys have spoken to some of these things like Studio and AI benefits just becoming bigger offsets to the pricing headwind. But I do think investors are still struggling with how do I get a better understanding for these underlying drivers to model in what optically looks like a pretty high bar for the initial 2025 guidance. So I was thinking of maybe adjusting it in 2 different questions. First, for just the growth of the subscription side. Fiscal '24 premium subscriptions did decline by about 1% but part of that was just the pricing churn. So one, is there any context you could provide in terms of what growth might have looked like ex in the pricing churn? And then second, once we have the pricing churn behind us, we have things like AI accelerating the conversion of free to paid. What is the growth outlook on the premium subs? You guys are definitely focused on that higher-value customer. Does that mean we're in this more low single growth environment? Or do the benefits of AI actually push it faster?

So I think that it's 2 different questions. I will start with the guidance. I will let Nir talk about the premium. It is his favorite subject. But if we talk about -- if we're thinking about the guidance, let's go back to 2024. I mean it was the same question around, okay, we started the year with about 10% growth in terms of booking. And we said that we are going to see acceleration in the second half. And we actually guide for 16%. We end up with 18%. And it was the same question, how are you so -- what is your confidence about achieving that? So I think the answer is the same. Yes, we did increase pricing in the first quarter. Second quarter growth was about 15%, going up to 18% but it was all about the product, meaning that when we launch a product as any other SaaS company, for example, AI, which increased conversion by 13%, the effect of it over the financials takes time because you need to capture more and more cohorts that actually affected by the increase in conversion. So if you ask me how confident I am on the fact that we can accelerate growth in the second half of the year. First, we are talking about 1 to 2 points between H1 to H2. This is exactly what you expect from a SaaS company when deliver and introduce new products to behave. So it's got to do with the fact that we are going to see much more impact on the second half of the year from those different AI tools, which increase conversion, Studio getting more, much more traction, again, getting more impact on the second quarter, many features, many announcements that we have already tested. Like, for example, one of them is improve retention, and we do see the effect of it in testing. It will be launched soon. So I pretty much understand exactly where we are getting. So I'm very confident and feel very safe about the fact that we are going to see this 1 to 2 point acceleration between H1 to H2. I didn't take into consideration those new 2 products that we are going to talk later on because for those one, I don't know.

And I think going back to that net subs number, the simple answer to your question, which is had we not had the price increase and therefore, not had the churn associated with it, what would be the growth number? I don't know exactly but it would have been a positive x amount of subs on the net. But I think the key thing here is to understand, and this is a challenge that we know that as a team, we need to solve for is that when we went public back in 2013, the net subs KPI was a great descriptive KPI for our business. It has not been such a KPI for a very long time. Because if you take, for example, the -- even if you take 2024 as a good example, when we did pricing -- the price increase in 2024, we said in the past, whenever we raise prices, we were looking, first off, what is the price -- your subscription -- what is the price point of your current subscription coming from and not to raise it too much because we don't want to create too much of an uplift. But it meant that over a longer period of time, over a decade, when we raised prices, we prices, we get too many different price points in the catalog. And we said enough to that, we want to clean it up. First of all, it's a little bit unfair that he's paying 40% less than you are. Why for the same service? And secondly, it just makes the price increase mechanism and dynamics very complex and becomes more complex over time. So when we did these kind of matching of prices, for some of those subscriptions that were very old, the increase was very significant. Suddenly, it's up by 50% or 60%. Naturally, that's where you're going to see more churn. For us, it doesn't hurt us so much because eventually, they were paying very little to begin with. And it's a good example why this KPI is it's not a good way to measure our business. Now saying that something doesn't -- isn't a good way to measure the business is not enough. I think our challenge is something we were going to try to solve for in our upcoming -- our next Analyst Day, which we hope is going to be later this year, is to come back to the investor community and say, guys, this is not a good KPI. Here is a good alternative of how to measure that's going to make sense, help modeling and will be the way we look at the business. And we'll try to figure out what's the best way to go about it.

Got it. Yes, I definitely understand that any sort of like the volume number in subscriptions is really not the way to look at it, especially as you're delivering more value. And one of the things that we have seen growing really nicely is that average bookings still per subscription. But just the mix shift towards higher tiers, more of the business solutions attached, just overall higher retention and higher quality customer has allowed that ABPS metric to grow 13% over the last year. So the question is, how durable is this kind of more double-digit growth in the pricing as we look forward?

Well, let's start by figuring out why we see the increase in ARPU. Yes. So I think there are a few reasons for that. The first one is, obviously, we see more and more different shift in terms of our customers, meaning more mature businesses. So they start buying the more expensive package because it's a business, and then buying using payment solution, using Google Ad automation, buying Google Workspace and so on and so forth. So by doing that, they actually increase the ARPU. And we see that all over. We see like many businesses that they start many of them, by the way, they're already coming with already a mature business, especially when it's used by Partners. Let me give you an example. Partners is responsible for about 30-plus percent of our revenue. But in terms of GPV, it's more than 50%. So it means that the mix of customers totally different. And this is one of the reason why we see the continuous increase in ARPU. Another reason, yes, we do a price increase historically every 2 years because we provide much more value to our customers, okay? You cannot do it without providing more value. We're providing more capabilities, how to manage their business, how to boost their business. So obviously, we are -- we don't charge separately for every feature but we do intend to increase pricing every time that we see that we are providing much more services. So this is one of -- those are the main reasons why we see the continuous improvement in ARPU. And by the way, I believe that it will continue also in the future, meaning that we'll see a portion. I mean, if I need to average price increase. So in average, it's about 5% every year. We're going to see the result of increase in ARPU as a result of price increase. But the rest of it is definitely from the fact that we see more businesses buying much more services on Wix and therefore, increasing the ARPU.

Great. And I really want to switch focus and really get into some of the product opportunities that you guys have, which is really exciting when we're thinking about the shift in the reallocation and focus back towards the Self Creator side of the business. So I think it would be great to walk through the 2 products that you guys plan to roll out this year, maybe at a higher level. What are some of the use cases that you're looking to get at? And any initial thoughts on monetization? And how does the rollout kind of build your confidence in returning to that segment to the double-digit growth?

Well, obviously, I cannot go deep into the products before they've been released. So you'll have to sit tight and wait for them. I can say that the first one is coming relatively close. We said the spring, and winter is almost over. I do think what you're going to see is that both of them are aimed to in essence, expand our top of the funnel reach and that by doing so, also expanding our TAM and also kind of reviving, rejuvenating the whole Self Creator experience on Wix. When you think about it to some extent, the Wix Editor for a long period of time, at least until Wix Studio was came to life, had to house 2 very distinctly different audiences, the professionals and the self-creators. Now when you're trying to push different capabilities, one that is very advanced, one that where you want to really simplify stuff, it's hard to create the right balance where it's an excellent experience. I think that by separating Studio and giving an excellent experience for the professionals in one place, we opened up the opportunity for ourselves to now give an excellent experience also for the Self Creators. So I think we have a good experience today for the Self Creators on Wix. I'm convinced that it can be much, much, much better. And I think those 2 products, both the one that's coming up soon in the spring and the one that's going to come later in the summer are going to try and cover both of these different areas, which is expanding the top of the funnel but also creating a much better experience once you go into the funnel on the Self Creator side.

And just in terms of expanding that TAM, I think Studio has also expanded the addressable base of users for Wix as well. So how would you characterize Wix' penetration into that partner TAM today? And what it could look like over the next couple of years?

Well, obviously, it's a little bit hard to really quantify the TAM of the Partners business. It's very, very big. But it's a little bit hard to quantify, I think. But when we look at -- when we look at kind of the best blue ocean that we can look at is essentially the WordPress.org ecosystem and the people who are using that ecosystem in order to cater for the needs of their customers. It's a very, very, very big ecosystem. I would assess that we are still at the kind of the single-digit market share, which is why we believe there's so much more room for growth and a long runway ahead of us on the Partners side.

And one of the questions I often get asked is we see in the headlines, a lot of the disruption that's going on in the WordPress ecosystem. Have you guys benefited from that at all? Or do you have the opportunity to adjust go-to-market to accelerate any of those share gains?

I mean, obviously, watching those fights from the sidelines is sometimes quite amusing, especially it's very vocal and emotional. But in all honesty, at the end of the day, I don't think that an agency owner really determines how they're going to cater their and how they're going to fulfill their next project based on a publicized fight between these figures on X. I think that the way to really get traction is to build the -- and strengthen the brand of Studio as the go-to platform for professionals and gain their trust by doing a good job by improving our quality there, our performance, resilience of the product by adding more functionality and missing design capabilities that they're asking for, and this is obviously the path we're threading. Automattic is a good company but it's not a massive company. It's not as if because they're fighting now everyone is going away. These people are using the open source version of WordPress. And in order to convince them that they should use Studio instead, we just need to continue building trust and the right products for them. And by the way, I think we covered a ton of ground in a very short amount of time, Wix Studio is out there for about 1.5 years. It's a very short amount of time in the lifetime of products and also -- already, we're seeing so much traction.

Yes. And to your point, it hasn't been that long, and you guys have done a lot of work to get the developers and the designers more comfortable with moving their website building to Wix from open source. Is that a hurdle that you think has largely been overcome in your view? Or do you think there's still more to do in order to reduce some of that friction?

Well, there's always more to do. I'm sure there's always a lot to do. Some of it, I know because we're getting feedback. It's -- but it's -- I think every product has like this kind of -- the big leap of faith, which is the first generation where you're building something, which is almost completely new or that it makes a real big difference. And then you have to incrementally improve it over time. There's still more to be done there. I think there's more opportunities around AI for the professionals is essentially a great efficiency tool in various areas, whether it's on the content -- the textual content side or the visual content side or on writing code, adding more components and CSS code from the internet and incorporating it into our website. So I think as we add more and more functionality there and solve more -- unlock more opportunities for them, that's also part of the expansion in a very natural way.

And on the Partners -- or the Studio side, as you mentioned, the product launched in October of 2023. Any sort of early reads on those first renewal cohorts of customers, how that compares to some previous cohorts of partners? And then just given the healthy reception that we've seen in the product thus far in the market, kind of how do you plan to take it even to the next level?

First of all, I think the great news is, and it's early because it's just now renewing -- getting the early renewals of the first round. It's actually renewing better than Partners on the equivalent comparable cohorts, which is great news and something that makes us very confident that we should pursue this path. There's -- obviously, there's going to be more effort that is going to be done on marketing this year than in 2024. You have to remember that 2024 was still early stages of the product. So -- and we're still trying to make sure that we are -- we got it right. So the ramp-up of the marketing was slower throughout 2024. And we're going to spend more on it in 2025 in order to benefit even further in terms of the growth that can be had for Studio and for Partners in general.

Great. I'm going to ask another question, and then I'm going to open it up to the audience for any. So you referenced that the pricing action in 2024 actually came in much better than you expected. You were having a better reception from customers willing to pay those higher prices and the value that they saw. You also noted that 2025 guidance doesn't contemplate any sort of price increases. So just given the customer reaction that you guys saw with the most recent price increase, does that increase your confidence to be able to raise prices in the future? And how should investors just think about the cadence of price increases given the velocity of innovation that we're seeing?

Sure. So I think we kind of think of it a little bit the other way around, so to speak. The fact that it was well received doesn't mean that we said, "Okay, now well received, let's raise prices again." But as Lior mentioned before, the thing that unlocks price increases from our mind is the fact that we've added enough additional value to the product that justifies the idea that I can go back to you and say, you need to pay more for the same subscriptions we've had for the past 2, 3, 4 years, whatever. And I think what does resonate well with us is that this philosophy and how we articulate that to the customers is indeed well received to the point that they're willing even at better rates than we expected to accept the price increase. And I think from that standpoint, we've had a cadence of roughly every 2 years of raising prices. We will continue every year, by the way, to look at what we've done, what we've added, what are the -- what's happening around us, what our competitors doing, what's happening in the general space of the Internet. There's a study that is being done every year and presented to us as a management and then with a recommendation. And then we figure out what -- when do we want to do it next. The fact that it's done every year doesn't mean that we raise prices every year. We just want to look and be informed every year. I think then when we feel that the time is right instead of the added value that we compiled into the platform and put in the hands of our users, that will be a good timing to consider whether we want to raise prices again.

And what are some of the key KPIs or numbers that you're looking at in order to see, okay, this is really we're driving the incremental value. How do you measure that?

Well, I think, first of all, we look at what we've added in quality, not necessarily in quantity in terms of added functionality over time. We look at what else are -- what are the -- when we release products, especially the ones that are free add-ons, we look at how much usage they have because the fact that I say, oh, I put in 20 new releases and then it justifies the price increase, if nobody is using them, then maybe it's not that justified. But we have a very tight tracking of everything and what is being used and what is being adopted. That's where we get the confidence to say, okay, if I raise the prices for you, we will say, okay, that makes sense because I'm doing so much more now with the platform than I did 2 years ago.

Great. Do we have any questions from the audience? One here.

Can you just explain what advances Studio achieved versus prior offerings? Some examples maybe?

Sure. I think -- again, I think it's -- Studio ended up being a very -- offering a very wide array of curating to the needs of what we knew our partners and our agencies need. A lot of it was also obviously based on talking to them and getting feedback. A lot of it was based on Editor X, which was the previous designer-oriented solution that we got a lot of interesting pushbacks about, and we wanted to understand how to fix it. And the -- first of all, the Studio platform allows a lot of advanced functionality that doesn't exist on Wix. It's a responsive platform that allows the website to adjust to different screen sizes automatically. By the way, that's an easy interesting example because when we did that on Editor X, we let the designers do everything on their own, and that was actually too complex for them or at least it took too much time from them. And they said, no, no, give us something that does it automatically but allow us to fix it and play with it if we want to. So the assumption that they want to control everything was the right thing but they also want to do enough automation to save time because they are agencies and they want to be able to produce websites and projects quickly for their clients. The other thing that we incorporated aside from creating a much more sophisticated Editor that is geared up for professionals is we also understood that the back office needs to look different. The back office and the workspace for a small business on Wix that has one website and runs its business on it needs to be very oriented to what's happening on the business. But when you're an agency and you have many, many websites that are actually units that you deliver to clients, your back office needs to be completely different. You want to manage your client list through your back office, and it cannot be the same environment. So we've added a lot of different capabilities there as well, access to understand what are the customer care calls associated with each website separately because it allows you how to give a better service for your clients. Some workflow management when you're handing over a project to your client, some feedback tools so you can get feedback tools that can be drawn directly on the website between you and your clients, so you'll understand and what needs to be changed for them to be successful. Capabilities around creating what you call Wix Blocks, which is basically creating your own component that you can write but then curate but within the Wix native environment. And it's a long list of things but it was a complete different offering that was 100% geared towards someone who's running an agency or essentially running someone who's building websites for others for a living.

I would just add to that, that on top of the things that just -- Nir, just mentioned, for an agency in terms of its -- the commercial aspects, it's really hard because then when they build the website, they charge like a one-time fee. Then they need to chase after the next customer and so on. We now also offer them a revenue share program. In a way we're making agency to become like a SaaS model, meaning that we are sharing for lifetime the revenue that we are getting from their customers, new customers bringing to Wix for subscription, for our profit on GPV for everything that they sell using Wix. In that way, we're actually looking at them as a partner, and they are kind of generating much more revenue than they used to generate in the past. And this is kind of the complete part of both commercial but also a great product.

Any more questions?

How is AI fitting into this? Are you using AI yet to enhance this web development?

So we're using AI in so many different areas of our products, both within the editors themselves just to simplify and enhance experience around creating content. So let's assume that you're building an e-commerce store and now you want to upload a whole bunch of products into a catalog and you need to create a product description for all of them and then you want to create images for all of them. So all these different capabilities are incorporated both on the Wix side and the Wix Studio side. On the Wix side, we also have a very popular AI site generator, something that actually helps you build your own website using AI. We were pioneering with it back in 2016 when we introduced ADI, our artificial design intelligence, and now it's basically a much more sophisticated, less naive version of it that is based on modern models. And we've just started -- added an AI agent to the users to the business -- that the business owner can add to their own website that can converse with their clients and help them be more kind of be a multiplier for the business owner. It's another example. We just added another AI capability that is an adviser to the business owner, basically helping them market their business in a better way and just gives them either ideas or actually performs the functions for them. So we have -- really, we have AI incorporated in so many different areas of our business. Some of it is facing the business owners. Some of it is facing their own customers. Some of it is on our side in terms of efficiency and customer care. So we have a very big and very effective data science team for a very long period of time. So AI has played a great role in enhancing our business in the past few years.

Great. Well, that just about brings us on our time. Lior and Nir here, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really excited to look forward to everything in 2025.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Elizabeth.