NetSuite, Inc. Q4 2008 Earnings Conference Call

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2009-02-10 18:44:16.0

Tags: Billing, NetSuite Inc., Cash Flow, Earnings, Billing Term, Obviously Expense, Operational Accounting, Personal Finance, Finance, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Tom Roderick – Thomas Weisel Partners.

Tom Roderick – Thomas Weisel Partners

You mentioned that you expect to be cash flow even in '09 and I was hoping you could perhaps walk us through some of the assumptions you're making just to get to that point. Are you assuming the stabilization in the billing terms because you did see a pretty significantly at the end of this quarter?

James McGeever

There's several levers that we have on our cash flow for break even 2009. Obviously expenses is one of them, and we're certainly looking at expense control and not looking to add additional people until we see if opportunities present themselves.

One of the levers is billing term and a lot of that is really driven by the sales comp plan and traditionally our sales comp plan has been more levered to driving revenue growth and you can add components of it in cash flow, so we're carefully monitoring that and will adjust the levels within our sales compensation plan to get back to billing terms if we feel it's necessary in order to get to cash flow break even.

Zachary Nelson

Just to add a couple of comments to that. As you know, as a company, as a management team we are primarily focused on managing the business to the top and the bottom line and we've never before given guidance on cash flow. That's a bit of an indication that we obviously know it's important, but we haven't' necessarily managed it aggressively.

That combined with the economic situation certainly in Q4 where we did see customers requesting more monthly and quarterly terms, and we were certainly open to helping them with those terms and in fact financing their purchases of NetSuite with our balance sheet. So that obviously had an impact on the cash flow, both of those elements.

As Jim said, in '09 we're going to pull some of the levers that we have certainly to more aggressively manage cash flow and as a management team we're also going to put a bogey on our own head to manage the cash flow more aggressively than we have in the past.

Tom Roderick – Thomas Weisel Partners

Can you walk us through the foreign exchange impact on the quarter both on revenue and [inaudible]? Do you have those numbers?

James McGeever

 

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