NetScout Systems (NTCT) Q4 2019 Earnings Call Transcript
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NetScout Systems (NASDAQ: NTCT)
Q4 2019 Earnings Call
May. 02, 2019, 8:30 a.m. ET

Contents:

  • Prepared Remarks

  • Questions and Answers

  • Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:


Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to NetScout's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2019 results conference call. At this time, all parties are in listen-only mode until question-and-answer portion of the call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Andrew Kramer, vice president of investor relations, and his colleagues at NetScout are on the line with us today.

[Operator instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Andrew Kramer.

Anil Singhal -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Andy. Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us. Let's begin on Slide No.6 with a brief recap of our quarterly, and full-year non-GAAP results. Today's results were fundamentally consistent with the preliminary results we reported in early April.

Our fourth quarter revenue of $235.2 million was approximately $15 million lower than we expected, primarily due to a delayed revenue recognition on the largest phase of a service assurance project at an international mobile operator. Unfortunately, this customer's implementation schedule progressed slower than originally planned, and we were unable to backfill this given the ongoing spending challenges facing our service provider customers. Nevertheless, excluding the since-divested HNT tools revenue from last year's fourth quarter, we generated overall organic revenue growth of 3% driven by an 8% underlying increase in the enterprise customer segment driven by strong growth in DDoS security and relatively stable service assurance revenue. We successfully absorbed the top-line shortfall to deliver fourth-quarter diluted EPS of $0.66 due to higher gross margins, lower operating costs, and a lower tax rate.

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Despite falling short of our top-line ambitions in fiscal year 2019 with full year revenue of $911.5 million, our diluted EPS of $1.38 was above the midpoint of our original targets, due in part to the proactive initiatives we implemented to reduce costs, and tightly manage spending earlier in the fiscal year. Overall, we made important progress during the past fiscal year on multiple fronts, which we believe will set the stage for generating better and more consistent results going forward. Let's move to Slide 7 for some further perspective into this. As you know, NetScout's topline has been negatively impacted over the last couple of years, largely as a result of reduced carrier spending, especially at our two largest tier-one customers.