Item 1A. Risk Factors
Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. Investors should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the section titled "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and our consolidated financial statements and related notes, before deciding to invest in our Class A common stock. Unless otherwise indicated, references to our business being harmed in these risk factors will include harm to our business, reputation, customer growth, results of operations, financial condition, or prospects. Any of these events could cause the trading price of our Class A common stock to decline, which would cause our stockholders to lose all or part of their investment. Our business, results of operations, financial condition, or prospects could also be harmed by risks and uncertainties not currently known to us or that we currently do not believe are material.
Risks Related to Our Business, Industry and Technology
If our platform fails to perform properly due to defects, interruptions, outages, delays in performance, or similar problems, and if we fail to develop enhancements to resolve any defect, interruption, delay, or other problems, we could lose customers, become subject to service performance or warranty claims or incur significant costs.
Our operations are dependent upon our ability to prevent system interruption. The applications underlying our edge cloud computing platform are inherently complex and may contain material defects or errors, which may cause disruptions in availability or other performance problems. We have from time to time found defects and errors in our platform and may discover additional defects or errors in the future that could result in data unavailability, unauthorized access to, loss, corruption, or other harm to our customers’ data. These defects or errors could also be found in third-party applications or open source software on which we rely. We may not be able to detect and correct defects or errors before implementing our products. Consequently, we or our customers may discover defects or errors after our products have been deployed.
We currently serve our customers from our POPs located around the world. Our customers need to be able to access our platform at any time, without interruption or degradation of performance. However, we have not developed redundancies for all aspects of our platform. We depend, in part, on our third-party facility providers’ ability to protect these facilities against damage or interruption from natural disasters, power or telecommunications failures, criminal acts, public health issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and similar events. In some cases, third-party cloud providers run their own platforms that we access, and we are, therefore, vulnerable to their service interruptions. In the event that there are any defects or errors in software, failures of hardware, damages to a facility, or misconfigurations of any of our services, we may have to divert resources away from other planned work, could experience lengthy interruptions in our platform, and also incur delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. Our customers may choose to divert their traffic away from our platform as a result of interruptions or delays. Disaster recovery arrangements, including the existence of redundant data centers that are designed to become active during certain lapses of service, may not function as intended, and any disruptions to our service could harm our business.
We design our system infrastructure and procure and own or lease the computer hardware used for our platform. Design and mechanical errors, spikes in usage volume, and failure to follow system protocols and procedures could cause our systems to fail, resulting in interruptions on our platform. Moreover, we have experienced and may in the future experience system failures or interruptions in our platform as a result of human error. For example, in January 2021, an undiscovered bug in a software update caused a platform interruption that affected many of our customers, resulting in service level agreement claims. In addition, on June 8, 2021, we experienced a global platform outage due to an undiscovered software bug caused by human error. The outage was triggered by a valid customer configuration change and has resulted in customers reducing or removing traffic from our platform and service level agreement claims. While these customers have returned traffic to our platform, not all customer traffic has returned to pre-outage levels. Any interruptions or delays in our platform, whether caused by our products or our data centers, third-party error, our own error, natural disasters, the effects of climate change (such as drought, flooding, wildfires, increased storm severity, and sea level rise), or security breaches, or whether accidental or willful, could harm our relationships with customers, reduce customers’ usage of our platform, cause our revenue to decrease and our expenses to increase, and divert resources away from product development. Also, in the event of damage or interruption, our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that we may incur. These factors in turn could further
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reduce our revenue, subject us to liability and cause us to issue service credits or cause customers to fail to renew their customer contracts, any of which could harm our business.
The occurrence of any defects, errors, disruptions in service, failures involving redundant data centers, or other performance problems, interruptions, or delays with our platform, whether in connection with the day-to-day operations or otherwise, could result in:
•loss of customers;
•reduced customer usage of our platforms;
•lost or delayed market acceptance and sales of our products, or the failure to launch products or features on anticipated timelines;
•delays in payment to us by customers;
•injury to our reputation and brand;
•governmental inquiry or oversight;
•legal claims, including warranty and service level agreement claims, against us; or
•diversion of our resources, including through increased service and warranty expenses or financial concessions, and increased insurance costs.
The costs incurred in correcting any material defects, errors, or other performance problems in our platform may be substantial and could harm our business.
If we are unable to attract new customers, in particular, enterprise customers, and to have existing enterprise customers continue and increase their use of our platform, our business will likely be harmed.
To grow our business, we must continue to attract new customers, in particular, enterprise customers and generate revenue from those new customers. To do so, we must successfully convince potential customers of the benefits and the value of our platform. This may require significant and costly sales efforts that are targeted at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers. Sales to enterprise customers may involve longer sales cycles as a result of customers requiring considerable time to evaluate our platform, requiring participation in a competitive purchasing process, having more formal processes for approval of purchases, and more complex requirements. These factors significantly impact our ability to add new customers and increase the time, resources, and sophistication required to do so. In addition, numerous other factors, some of which are out of our control, may now or in the future impact our ability to acquire new customers, including potential customers’ commitments to other providers, real or perceived costs of switching to our platform, our failure to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel, our failure to develop or expand relationships with potential customers and channel partners, failure by us to help our customers to successfully deploy our platform, negative media or industry or financial analyst commentary regarding us or our solutions, litigation, and deteriorating general economic conditions. If we fail to attract new customers, particularly enterprise customers, as a result of these and other factors our business will likely be harmed.
In addition, our ability to grow and generate incremental revenue depends on our ability to maintain and grow our relationships with our existing enterprise customers so that they continue and increase their usage of our platform. If these customers do not maintain and increase their usage of our platform, our revenue may decline and our results of operations will likely be harmed.
We charge our customers based on the usage of our platform. Most of our customers, including some of our largest enterprise customers, do not have long-term contractual financial commitments to us. In addition, most of our current customer
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contracts are only one year in duration and these customers may not use our platform in a subsequent year. In order for us to maintain or improve our results of operations, it is important that our customers, in particular, our enterprise customers, use our platform in excess of their commitment levels, if any, and continue to use our platform on the same or more favorable terms. Our ability to retain our largest customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including customer budget constraints, customer satisfaction, changes in our customers’ underlying businesses, changes in the type and size of our customers, pricing changes, competitive conditions, the acquisition of our customers by other companies, governmental actions, or the possibility thereof, and general economic conditions. Because many of our largest customers’ minimum usage commitments for our platform are relatively low compared to their expected usage, it can be easy for certain customers to quickly reallocate usage or switch from our platform to an alternative platform altogether. In addition, they may reduce or cease their use of our products at any time without penalty or termination charges, even after they have expanded usage in prior periods.
We base our decisions about expense levels and investments on estimates of our future revenue and anticipated rate of growth. Many of our expenses are fixed cost in nature for some minimum amount of time, such as colocation and bandwidth, so if we do experience slower usage growth on our platform it may not be possible to reduce costs in a timely manner or without the payment of fees to exit certain obligations early. If any of these events were to occur, our business may be harmed.
In addition, many of our customers have negotiated and may continue to negotiate lower rates for their usage in exchange for an agreement to renew, expand their usage in the future, or adopt new products. As a result, in certain cases, even though customers have not reduced their usage of our platform, the revenue we derive from that usage has decreased. If our usage or revenue fall significantly below the expectations of the public market, securities analysts, or investors, our business would be harmed, which could cause our stock price to decline.
Our future success also depends in part on our ability to expand our existing customer relationships, in particular, with enterprise customers, by increasing their usage of our platform and selling them additional products. The rate at which our customers increase their usage of our platform and purchase products from us depends on a number of factors, including our ability to grow our platform and maintain the security and availability of it, develop and deliver new features and products, maintain customer satisfaction, general economic conditions and pricing and services offered by our competitors. If our efforts to increase usage of our platform by, or sell additional products to, our enterprise customers are not successful, our business would be harmed. In addition, even if our largest customers increase their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time. In addition, because many of our products endeavor to deliver increased efficiency and functionality, the successful sale of an additional product to an existing customer could result in a reduction of the customer's overall usage of our platform.
If we fail to forecast our revenue accurately, or if we fail to manage our expenditures, our operating results could be adversely affected.
We cannot accurately predict customers’ usage or renewal rates given the diversity of our customer base across industries, geographies and size, and ability of customers to allocate usage, among other factors. Accordingly, we may be unable to accurately forecast our revenues notwithstanding our substantial investments in sales and marketing, infrastructure, and research and development in anticipation of growth in our business. If we do not realize returns on these investments in our growth, our results of operations could differ materially from our forecasts, which would adversely affect our results of operations and could disappoint analysts and investors, causing our stock price to decline.
We receive a substantial portion of our revenues from a limited number of customers from a limited number of industries, and the loss of, or a significant reduction in usage by, one or more of our major customers would result in lower revenues and could harm our business.
Our future success is dependent on establishing and maintaining successful relationships with a diverse set of customers. We currently receive a substantial portion of our revenues from a limited number of customers and from a limited number of industries, such as media and entertainment. For the year ended December 31, 2021, our top ten customers accounted for approximately 34% of our revenue and our top five customers accounted for approximately 22% of our revenue. It is likely that we will continue to be dependent upon a limited number of customers for a significant portion of our revenues for the foreseeable future and, in some cases, the portion of our revenues attributable to individual customers may increase in the future. In addition, changes to our customers’ business may cause our revenues attributable to individual customers to increase, including any impact from merger and acquisition activities, internal business reorganizations leading to operational and
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decision making changes, and corporate structure changes such as subsidiary consolidation and reorganization that may arise in the future. The loss of one or more key customers or a reduction in usage by any major customers would reduce our revenues. For example, on June 8, 2021, we experienced a global platform outage due to an undiscovered software bug caused by human error. The outage was triggered by a valid customer configuration change and resulted in customers, including some of our largest customers, reducing or removing traffic from our platform and service level agreement claims. While these customers have returned traffic to our platform, not all customer traffic has returned to pre-outage levels. If we fail to maintain existing customers or develop relationships with new customers and across different industries, our business would be harmed.
Component delays, shortages or price increases could interrupt our ability to complete the construction of our servers to meet the usage needs of our customers.
Our business is dependent upon the timely supply of certain parts and components to construct our servers. We rely on a limited number of suppliers for several components of the equipment we use to operate our network and provide products to our customers. Our reliance on these suppliers exposes us to risks, including reduced control over production costs and constraints based on the then current availability, terms, and pricing of these components. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted, and we expect will continue to result, in disruptions and delays for these components and the delivery and installation of such components at our co-location facilities, in addition to pricing increases. For example, throughout 2021, a global shortage of microchips has resulted in supply constraints for a number of electronics firms, including manufacturers that supply the components to construct our servers. If our supply of certain components is disrupted or delayed, there can be no assurance that we will be able to obtain adequate replacements for the existing components or that supplies will be available on terms and prices that are favorable to us, if at all. Any disruption or delay in the supply of our hardware components may limit capacity expansion or replacement of defective or obsolete equipment, or cause other constraints on our operations that could damage our customer relationships and harm our business.
Our limited operating history and our history of operating losses makes it difficult to evaluate our current business and prospects and may increase the risks associated with your investment.
We were founded in 2011 and have experienced net losses and negative cash flows from operations since inception. Our limited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our current business and our future prospects, including our ability to plan for and model future growth. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and difficulties frequently experienced by growth companies in constantly evolving industries, including companies in the technology sector, including the risks described in this report. If we do not address these risks successfully, our business may be harmed.
We generated a net loss of $222.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, and as of December 31, 2021, we had an accumulated deficit of $510.9 million. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels and manage costs in future periods in order to become profitable; even if we achieve profitability, we may not be able to maintain or increase our level of profitability. We intend to continue to expend significant funds to support further growth and further develop our platform, including expanding the functionality of our platform, expanding our technology infrastructure and business systems to meet the needs of our customers, expanding our direct sales force and partner ecosystem, increasing our marketing activities, and growing our international operations. We will also face increased compliance costs associated with growth, expansion of our customer base, and the costs of being a public company. Our efforts to grow our business may be costlier than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our increased operating expenses. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including the other risks described herein, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications and delays, and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, our business may be harmed.
Further, we have limited historical financial data and operate in a rapidly evolving market. As such, any predictions about our future revenue and expenses may not be as accurate as they would be if we had a longer operating history or operated in a more predictable market.
If our security measures, or those maintained on our behalf, are compromised now, or in the future, or the security, confidentiality, integrity or availability of our information technology, software, services, networks, communications or data is compromised, limited or fails, our business could experience a materially adverse impact, including significant costs and disruptions that could harm our business, financial results, and reputation.
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Our business is dependent on providing our customers with fast, efficient, and reliable distribution of applications and content over the internet. We transmit and store our customers’ information, data, and encryption keys as well as our own; customer information and data may include personally identifiable data of and about their end-users. Maintaining the security and availability of our platform, network, and internal IT systems and the security of information we hold on behalf of our customers is a critical issue for us and our customers, and we may expend significant resources, fundamentally change our business activities and practices, or modify our operations in an effort to protect against security incidents and to mitigate, detect, and remediate actual and potential vulnerabilities. Attacks on our customers and our own network are frequent and take a variety of forms, including DDoS attacks, infrastructure attacks, botnets, malicious file attacks, cross-site scripting, credential abuse, ransomware, bugs, viruses, worms, and malicious software programs. For example, during 2021 we experienced DDoS attacks of increased size and severity that caused us to invest resources into improving our systems, and we expect to continue to be subject to DDoS and other forms of attacks in the future, particularly as they have become more prevalent in our industry. Malicious actors can attempt to fraudulently induce employees or suppliers to disclose sensitive information through spamming, phishing, or other tactics. Similarly, supply chain attacks have increased in frequency and severity, and we cannot guarantee that third parties and infrastructure in our supply chain have not been compromised or that they do not contain exploitable defects or bugs that could result in a breach of or disruption to our platform, systems and networks or the systems and networks of third parties that support us and our services. For example, in December 2021, the Apache Software Foundation publicly disclosed a remote code execution vulnerability in its Log4j 2 product (Log4j), an open-source component widely used in Java-based software applications to log and track error messages, which affected large amounts of systems worldwide. While we have identified and remediated all known Log4j vulnerabilities in our systems, we expect to continue to encounter vulnerabilities and potential attacks related to open source libraries integrated in our systems. Ransomware attacks, including by organized criminal threat actors, nation-states, and nation-state-supported actors, are also becoming increasingly prevalent and severe and can lead to significant interruptions in our operations, loss of data and income, reputational harm, and diversion of funds. Extortion payments may alleviate the negative impact of a ransomware attack, but we may be unwilling to make such payments, or unable to make such payments due to, for example, applicable laws or regulations prohibiting such payments. In addition, unauthorized parties may attempt to gain physical access to our facilities in order to infiltrate our information systems. We have in the past been subject to cyber-attacks from third parties, including parties who we believe are sponsored by government actors. Since our customers share our multi-tenant architecture, an attack on any one of our customers could have a negative effect on other customers. These attacks have significantly increased the bandwidth used on our platform and have strained our network. If attacks like these were to occur in the future and if we do not have the systems and processes in place to respond to them, our business could be harmed. Future or past business transactions (such as acquisitions or integrations) could expose us to additional cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, as our systems could be negatively affected by vulnerabilities present in acquired or integrated entities’ systems and technologies. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic and our remote workforce poses increased risks to our information technology and network, as more of our employees work from home, utilizing network connections outside our premises.
Security incidents, whether as a result of third-party action, employee or customer error, technology impairment or failure, malfeasance or criminal activity, or hostile state actors, could result in unauthorized access to, or loss or unauthorized disclosure of, customer information or data, litigation, indemnity obligations, and other possible liabilities. Incidents involving customer information have in the past resulted in pricing and other concessions, decreased customer usage and terminations by affected customers, and similar security incidents could occur in the future that result in pricing concessions, indemnity obligations, and other possible liabilities related to such unauthorized access, loss or disclosure, including litigation. Further, certain of our insurance policies and the laws of some states may limit or prohibit insurance coverage for punitive or certain other types of damages or liability arising from gross negligence or intentional misconduct of us and our suppliers and we cannot assure you that we are adequately insured against the risks that we face.
In recent years, cyber-attacks have increased in size, sophistication, and complexity, increasing exposure for our customers and us. In addition, as we expand our emphasis on selling security-related products, we may become a more attractive target for attacks on our infrastructure intended to destabilize, overwhelm, or shut down our platform. For example, we have had security incidents in the past that have tested the limits of our infrastructure and impacted the performance of our platform. The costs to us to avoid or alleviate cyber or other security problems and vulnerabilities are significant. However, our efforts to address these problems and vulnerabilities may not be successful. Any actual or perceived significant breach of our security measures could:
•lead to the dissemination of proprietary information or sensitive, personal, or confidential data about us, our employees, or our customers—including personally identifiable information of individuals involved with our customers and their end-users;
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•lead to interruptions or degradation of performance in our platform;
•threaten our ability to provide our customers with access to our platform;
•generate negative publicity about us;
•result in litigation and increased legal liability or fines; or
•lead to governmental inquiry or oversight.
Additionally, applicable data protection laws, privacy policies and data protection obligations may require us to notify relevant stakeholders of security incidents, including affected individuals, customers, regulators and credit reporting agencies. Such disclosures are costly, and the disclosures or the failure to comply with such requirements, could lead to materially adverse impacts, including, without limitation, government enforcement (for example, investigations, fines penalties, audits, and inspections), additional reporting requirements and/or oversight, restrictions on processing sensitive information (including personal information), litigation (including class claims), indemnification obligations, monetary fund diversions, interruptions in our operations (including availability of data), financial loss, negative publicity, a loss of customer confidence in our services, breach of contract claims, and other similar harms.
The occurrence, or perceived occurrence, of any of these events could harm our business or damage our brand and reputation, lead to customer credits, loss of customers, higher expenses, and possibly impede our present and future success in retaining and attracting new customers. A successful security breach or attack on our infrastructure would be damaging to our reputation and could harm our business.
Additionally, our contracts may not contain limitations of liability, and even where they do, there can be no assurance that limitations of liability in our contracts are sufficient to protect us from liabilities, damages, or claims related to our privacy and data protection obligations. We also cannot be sure that our insurance coverage will be adequate or sufficient to protect us from or to mitigate liabilities arising out of our privacy and security practices, that such coverage will continue to be available on commercially reasonable terms or at all, or that such coverage will pay future claims.
Similar security risks exist with respect to our business partners and the third-party vendors that we rely on for aspects of our information technology support services and administrative functions. As a result, we are subject to the risk that cyber-attacks on our business partners and third-party vendors may adversely affect our business even if an attack or breach does not directly impact our systems. Our ability to monitor these business partners’ and third-party vendors’ security measures is limited, and these business partners and third-party vendors may not have adequate security measures in place.It is also possible that security breaches sustained by our competitors could result in negative publicity for our entire industry that indirectly harms our reputation and diminishes demand for our platform.
If we fail to adapt and respond effectively to rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards, changing regulations, and changing customer needs, requirements, or preferences, our products may become less competitive.
The market in which we compete is relatively new and subject to rapid technological change, evolving industry standards and regulatory changes, as well as changing customer needs, requirements, and preferences. The success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to adapt and respond effectively to these changes on a timely basis. If we are unable to develop and sell new products that satisfy our customers and provide enhancements, new features, and capabilities to our platform that keep pace with rapid technological and industry change, our revenue and operating results could be adversely affected. If new technologies emerge that enable large internet platform companies to utilize their own data centers and implement delivery approaches that limit or eliminate reliance on third-party providers like us, or that enable our competitors to deliver competitive products and applications at lower prices, more efficiently, more conveniently, or more securely, such technologies could adversely impact our ability to compete. If our platform does not allow us or our customers to comply with the latest regulatory requirements, our existing customers may decrease their usage on our platform and new customers will be less likely to adopt our platform.
Our platform must also integrate with a variety of network, hardware, mobile, and software platforms and technologies, and we need to continuously modify and enhance our products and platform capabilities to adapt to changes and innovation in
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these technologies. If developers widely adopt new software platforms, we would have to attempt to develop new versions of our products and enhance our platform’s capabilities to work with those new platforms. These development efforts may require significant engineering, marketing, and sales resources, all of which would affect our business and operating results. Any failure of our platform’s capabilities to operate effectively with future infrastructure platforms, technologies, and software platforms could reduce the demand for our platform. If we are unable to respond to these changes in a cost-effective manner, our products may become less marketable and less competitive or obsolete, and our business may be harmed.
Moreover, our platform is highly technical and complex and, for example, our delivery products rely on knowledge of the Varnish Configuration Language ("VCL") to utilize many features of this platform. Potential developers may be unfamiliar or opposed to working with VCL and therefore decide to not adopt our platform, which may harm our business.
Failure to effectively develop and expand our marketing and sales capabilities could harm our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our platform.
We have historically benefited from word-of-mouth and other organic marketing to attract new customers. Through this word-of-mouth marketing, we have been able to build our brand with relatively low marketing and sales costs. This strategy has allowed us to build a substantial customer base and community of users who use our products and act as advocates for our brand and our platform, often within their own corporate organizations. However, our ability to further increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our edge cloud platform will significantly depend on our ability to expand our marketing and sales operations. We plan to continue expanding our sales force and strategic partners, both domestically and internationally. We also plan to continue to dedicate significant resources to sales, marketing, and demand-generation programs, including various online marketing activities as well as targeted account-based advertising. The effectiveness of our targeted account-based advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future. All of these efforts will require us to invest significant financial and other resources and if they fail to attract additional customers our business will be harmed. We have also used a strategy of offering free trial versions of our platform in order to strengthen our relationship and reputation within the developer community by providing these developers with the ability to familiarize themselves with our platform without first becoming a paying customer. However, these developers may not perceive value in the additional benefits and services we offer beyond the free trial versions of our platform and may choose not to pay for those additional benefits. Moreover, some existing paying customers may choose to convert to the free version of our platform. Most trial accounts do not convert to paid versions of our platform, and to date, only a few users who have converted to paying customers have gone on to generate meaningful revenue. If our other lead generation methods do not result in broader market acceptance of our platform and the users of trial versions of our platform do not become, or are unable to convince their organizations to become, paying customers, or if paying customers choose to convert to the free versions of our platform, we will not realize the intended benefits of this strategy, and our business will be harmed.
We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel, including sales representatives, sales managers, and sales engineers, with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth. New hires require significant training and may take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Our recent hires may not become productive as quickly as we expect, if at all, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. In addition, particularly if we continue to grow rapidly, new members of our sales force will have relatively little experience working with us, our platform, and our business model. If we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, our sales personnel do not reach significant levels of productivity in a timely manner, or our sales personnel are not successful in acquiring new customers or expanding usage by existing customers, our business will be harmed.
The markets in which we participate are competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our business will be harmed.
The market for cloud computing platforms, particularly enterprise grade products, is highly fragmented, competitive, and constantly evolving. With the introduction of new technologies and market entrants, we expect that the competitive environment in which we compete will remain intense going forward. Legacy CDNs, such as Akamai, Limelight, EdgeCast (part of Verizon Digital Media), Level3, and Imperva (for security), and small business-focused CDNs, such as Cloudflare, StackPath, and Section.io, offer products that compete with ours. We also compete with application and API security vendors like Akamai, Cloudflare, Imperva, Amazon Web Services and F5 (Shape), with cloud providers who are starting to offer compute functionality at the edge like Amazon’s CloudFront, AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as traditional
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data center and appliance vendors like F5, Citrix, A10 Networks, Cisco, Imperva, Radware, and Arbor Networks, who offer a range of on-premise solutions for load balancing, WAF, and DDoS. Some of our competitors have made or may make acquisitions or may enter into partnerships or other strategic relationships that may provide more comprehensive offerings than they individually had offered. Such acquisitions or partnerships may help competitors achieve greater economies of scale than us. In addition, new entrants not currently considered to be competitors may enter the market through acquisitions, partnerships, or strategic relationships. We compete on the basis of a number of factors, including:
•our platform’s functionality, scalability, performance, ease of use, reliability, security availability, and cost effectiveness relative to that of our competitors’ products and services;
•our global network coverage and availability;
•our ability to utilize new and proprietary technologies to offer services and features previously not available in the marketplace;
•our ability to identify new markets, applications, and technologies;
•our ability to attract and retain customers;
•our brand, reputation, and trustworthiness;
•our credibility with developers;
•the quality of our customer support;
•our ability to recruit software engineers and sales and marketing personnel;
•our ability to protect our intellectual property; and
•our ability to identify opportunities for acquisitions and strategic relationships and successfully execute on them, including our acquisition of Signal Sciences.
We face substantial competition from legacy CDNs, small business-focused CDNs, cloud providers, traditional data center, and appliance vendors. In addition, existing and potential customers may not use our platform, or may limit their use, because they pursue a “do-it-yourself” approach by putting in place equipment, software, and other technology products for content and application delivery within their internal systems; enter into relationships directly with network providers instead of relying on an overlay network like ours; or implement multi-vendor policies to reduce reliance on external providers like us.
Our competitors vary in size and in the breadth and scope of the products and services offered. Many of our competitors and potential competitors have greater name recognition, longer operating histories, more established customer relationships and installed customer bases, larger marketing budgets, and greater resources than we do. While some of our competitors provide a platform with applications to support one or more use cases, many others provide point-solutions that address a single use case. Other potential competitors not currently offering competitive applications may expand their product offerings, and our current customers may develop their own products or features, to compete with our offerings. Our competitors may be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards, and customer requirements. An existing competitor or new entrant could introduce new technology that reduces demand for our platform. In addition to application and technology competition, we face pricing competition. Some of our competitors offer their applications or services at a lower price, which has resulted in pricing pressures. Some of our larger competitors have the operating flexibility to bundle competing applications and services with other offerings, including offering them at a lower price or for no additional cost to customers as part of a larger sale of other products. For all of these reasons, we may not be able to compete successfully and competition could result in the failure of our platform to achieve or maintain market acceptance, the market for our edge cloud platform may grow more slowly than we anticipate, any of which could harm our business.
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If we fail to maintain and enhance our brand, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our business, results of operations and financial condition may suffer.
We believe that maintaining and enhancing our brand is important to continued market acceptance of our existing and future products, attracting new customers, and retaining existing customers. We also believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase as competition in our market increases. Successfully maintaining and enhancing our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, our ability to provide reliable products that continue to meet the needs of our customers at competitive prices, our ability to maintain our customers’ trust, our ability to continue to develop new functionality and products, and our ability to successfully differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. Additionally, our brand and reputation may be affected if customers do not have a positive experience with our partners’ services. Our brand promotion activities may not generate customer awareness or yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incurred in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, our business may be harmed.
Acquisitions, strategic investments, partnerships, or alliances could be difficult to identify and integrate, divert the attention of management, disrupt our business, and dilute stockholder value.
On October 1, 2020, we completed the acquisition of Signal Sciences. We may in the future seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. The pursuit of potential acquisitions may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur various expenses in identifying, investigating, and pursuing acquisitions, whether or not such acquisitions are completed. In addition, we have limited experience in acquiring other businesses and we may not successfully identify desirable acquisition targets or, when we acquire additional businesses, such as Signal Sciences, we may not be able to integrate them effectively following the acquisition. Acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities or the incurrence of debt, which could adversely affect our operating results, may cause unfavorable accounting treatment, may expose us to claims and disputes by third parties, including intellectual property claims, and may not generate sufficient financial returns to offset additional costs and expenses related to the acquisitions. We may also incur significant, and sometimes unanticipated, costs in connection with these acquisitions or in integration with our business. In addition, if an acquired business, such as Signal Sciences, fails to meet our expectations or we do not realize sufficient value, our business may be harmed.
Further, it is possible that there could be a loss of our or any acquired company's key employees and customers, disruption of either company’s or both companies’ ongoing businesses or unexpected issues, higher than expected costs and an overall post-completion process that takes longer than originally anticipated. Specifically, the following issues, among others, must be addressed in combining any company’s, including Signal Sciences’, operations with ours in order to realize the anticipated benefits of the acquisition so the combined company performs as the parties hope:
•combining the companies’ corporate functions;
•combining their business with our business in a manner that permits us to achieve the synergies anticipated to result from the acquisition, the failure of which would result in the anticipated benefits of the acquisition not being realized in the time frame currently anticipated or at all;
•maintaining existing and new agreements with customers, service providers, and vendors;
•determining whether and how to address possible differences in corporate cultures, management philosophies and strategies relating to channels, resellers, and partners;
•integrating the companies’ administrative and information technology infrastructure;
•developing products and technology that allow value to be unlocked in the future; and
•evaluating and forecasting the financial impact of the acquisition transaction, including accounting impacts.
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Failure to address any of the above listed issues could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations and financial position. In addition, at times the attention of certain members of our management and resources may be focused on completion of the acquisition and integration planning of the businesses of the two companies and diverted from day to day business operations, which may disrupt our ongoing business and the business of the combined company. For example, certain members of our management team and other personnel have spent significant time on the acquisition and integration of Signal Sciences.
We have previously been and may in the future be involved in class-action lawsuits and other litigation matters that are expensive and time-consuming. If resolved adversely, lawsuits and other litigation matters could seriously harm our business.
We have previously been and may in the future be subject to litigation such as putative class action and shareholder derivative lawsuits brought by stockholders. We anticipate that we will be a target for lawsuits in the future, as we have been in the past. For example, on August 27, 2020 and September 15, 2020, we and certain of our officers were named as defendants in putative securities class action purportedly brought on behalf of holders of our Class A common stock. These two securities class actions were consolidated, and on December 21, 2021, the consolidated class action was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice. On December 28, 2020 and February 2, 2021, certain of our officers and directors were named as defendants in shareholder derivative actions. These two shareholder derivative actions were consolidated, and on January 3, 2022, the consolidated derivative action was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice. Any litigation to which we are a party may result in an onerous or unfavorable judgment that may not be reversed on appeal, or we may decide to settle lawsuits on similarly unfavorable terms. Any such negative outcome could result in payments of substantial monetary damages and accordingly our business could be seriously harmed. The results of lawsuits and claims cannot be predicted with certainty. Regardless of the final outcome, defending these claims, and associated indemnification obligations, are costly and can impose a significant burden on management and employees, and we may receive unfavorable preliminary, interim, or final rulings in the course of litigation, which could seriously harm our business.
Health epidemics, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have had, and could in the future have, an adverse impact on our business, operations, and the markets and communities in which we, our partners and customers operate.
The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted, and may continue to adversely impact, many aspects of our business. As certain of our customers or potential customers experience downturns or uncertainty in their own business operations and revenue resulting from the spread of COVID-19, they have and may continue to decrease or delay their technology spending, request pricing concessions or payment extensions, or seek renegotiation of their contracts. In addition, a portion of our revenue is related to usage of our platform in connection with live events, such as sporting events, that have continued to be impacted. Usage of our platform fluctuated following the implementation of preventative measures to contain or mitigate the outbreak of COVID-19, and we cannot predict how usage levels will continue to be impacted by these preventative measures. There is no assurance that customers will continue to use our platform, or to the same extent, as the COVID-19 pandemic begins to taper off or when it has ended. As a result, it has been difficult to accurately forecast our revenues or financial results, especially given that the near and long term impact of the pandemic remains uncertain. Our results of operations could be materially below our forecasts, which could adversely affect our results of operations, disappoint analysts and investors, or cause our stock price to decline.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many state, local, and foreign governments have put in place restrictions in order to control the spread of the disease. Such restrictions, or the perception that further restrictions could occur, have resulted in business closures, work stoppages, slowdowns and delays, work-from-home policies, travel restrictions, and cancellation or postponement of events, among other effects that impacted productivity and disrupted our operations and those of our partners and customers. For example, we experienced delays in the ramping of new traffic due to travel and data center restrictions in South Asia that delayed network build outs and the timing of customer code freezes, each affected in part due to COVID-19-related issues. In addition, our suppliers have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced the availability or resulted in delays, and may continue to reduce the availability or result in delays, of parts and components to us. Our offices have remained temporarily closed since March 2020, and we have taken other precautionary measures, such as instituting protocols and guidelines for Fastly-related travel and shifting to hosting virtual Fastly-sponsored events in lieu of in-person events. We may take further actions that alter our operations as may be required by federal, state, or local authorities, or which we determine are in our best interests. While much of our operations can be performed remotely, certain activities such as expanding and maintaining our network of POPs around the world often require personnel to be on-site, and our ability to carry out these activities has been, and may continue to be, negatively impacted if our employees or local data center personnel are not able to travel. In addition, travel restrictions have affected our ability to conduct audits of our data centers and facilities,
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requiring us to use alternative procedures to the standard on-site visit. Any inability to complete these audits could affect our compliance certifications and cause customers to reduce or cease using our services. In addition, for activities that may be conducted remotely, there is no guarantee that we will be as effective while working remotely because our team is dispersed and many employees and their families have been negatively affected, mentally or physically, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Decreased effectiveness and availability of our team could adversely affect our results due to slow-downs in our sales cycles and our customer ramping and onboarding process, delays in recruiting and onboarding efforts, delays in our entry into customer contracts, delays in addressing performance issues, delays in product development, delays and inefficiencies among various operational aspects of our business, including our financial organization, or other decreases in productivity that could seriously harm our business. Moreover, our finance organization’s ability to ensure that we comply with the requirements of Section 404 may be impaired in the future, including the ability of our registered public accounting firm to issue an attestation report on management’s assessment of our internal control over financial reporting. Furthermore, we may decide to postpone or cancel planned investments in our business in response to changes in our business as a result of the spread of COVID-19, which may impact our ability to attract and retain customers and our rate of innovation, either of which could harm our business.
In addition, while the potential impact and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy and our business in particular may be difficult to assess or predict, the pandemic has resulted in, and may continue to result in, significant disruption of global financial markets, and may reduce our ability to access additional capital, which could negatively affect our liquidity in the future.
The ultimate duration and extent of the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic depends on future developments that cannot be accurately forecasted at this time. These developments include the severity and transmission rate of the disease, the emergence of new variants, the actions of governments, businesses and individuals in response to the pandemic, the extent and effectiveness of containment actions and vaccines, the impact on economic activity and the impact of these and other factors. We do not yet know how businesses, customers, or our partners will operate in a post COVID-19 environment. There may be additional costs or impacts to our business and operations, including when we are able to return to our offices and resume in-person activities, travel, and events. In addition, there is no guarantee that a future outbreak of this or any other widespread epidemics will not occur, or that the global economy will recover, either of which could harm our business.
We may not be able to scale our business quickly enough to meet our customers’ growing needs. If we are not able to grow efficiently, our business could be harmed.
As usage of our edge cloud computing platform grows and as the breadth of use cases for our platform expands, we will need to devote additional resources to improving our platform architecture, integrating with third-party applications and maintaining infrastructure performance. In addition, we will need to appropriately scale our processes and procedures that support our growing customer base, including increasing our number of POPs around the world and investments in systems, training, and customer support.
Any failure of or delay in these efforts could cause impaired system performance and reduced customer satisfaction. These issues could reduce the attractiveness of our platform to customers, resulting in decreased sales to new customers, lower renewal rates by existing customers, the issuance of service credits, or requested refunds, which would hurt our revenue growth and our reputation. Even if we are able to upgrade our systems and expand our staff, any such expansion will be expensive and complex, and require the dedication of significant management time and attention. We could also face inefficiencies or operational failures as a result of our efforts to scale our cloud infrastructure. We cannot be sure that the expansion and improvements to our cloud infrastructure will be effectively implemented on a timely basis, if at all, and such failures would harm our business.
We may have insufficient transmission bandwidth and colocation space, which could result in disruptions to our platform and loss of revenue.
Our operations are dependent in part upon transmission bandwidth provided by third-party telecommunications network providers and access to colocation facilities to house our servers. There can be no assurance that we are adequately prepared for unexpected increases in bandwidth demands by our customers, particularly when customers experience cyber-attacks. The bandwidth we have contracted to purchase may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, including service outages, payment disputes, network providers going out of business, natural disasters, networks imposing traffic limits, or governments adopting regulations that impact network operations. In some regions, bandwidth providers have their own services that compete with us, or they may choose to develop their own services that will compete with us. These bandwidth providers may become unwilling
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to sell us adequate transmission bandwidth at fair market prices, if at all. This risk is heightened where market power is concentrated with one or a few major networks. We also may be unable to move quickly enough to augment capacity to reflect growing traffic or security demands. Failure to put in place the capacity we require could result in a reduction in, or disruption of, service to our customers and ultimately a loss of those customers. Such a failure could result in our inability to acquire new customers demanding capacity not available on our platform.
The nature of our business exposes us to inherent liability risks.
Our platform and related applications, including our security solutions, are designed to provide rapid protection against web application vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks. However, no security product can provide absolute protection against all vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks. Our platform is subject to cyber-attacks, and the failure of our platform and related applications to adequately protect against these cyber-attacks may allow our customers to be attacked. Any adverse consequences of these attacks, and our failure to meet our customers’ expectations as they relate to such attacks, could harm our business.
Due to the nature of our applications, we are potentially exposed to greater risks of liability for product or system failures than may be inherent in other businesses. Although substantially all of our customer agreements contain provisions that limit our liability to our customers, these limitations may not be sufficient, and we cannot assure you that these limitations will be enforced or the costs of any litigation related to actual or alleged omissions or failures would not have a material adverse effect on us even if we prevail.
Our dedication to our values may negatively influence our financial results.
We have taken, and may continue to take, actions that we believe are in the best interests of our customers, our employees, and our business, even if those actions do not maximize financial results in the short term. For instance, we do not knowingly allow our platform to be used to deliver content from groups that promote violence or hate, and that conflict with our values like strong ethical principles of integrity and trustworthiness, among others. In the past, we have removed customers from our platform who we believed took positions conflicting with these values, and we may continue to do so in the future.However, this approach may not result in the benefits that we expect, and our employees or third parties may disagree with our interpretation of our values, or take issue with how we execute on our values, which may result in us becoming a target for negative publicity, increased scrutiny, lawsuits, or network attacks, in which case our business could be harmed.
Our growth depends in large part on the success of our partner relationships.
We maintain a partner ecosystem of companies who build edge applications to integrate with our platform. We are dependent on these partner relationships to amplify our reach and provide our customers with enhanced value from our platform. Our future growth will be increasingly dependent on the success of our partner relationships, including their development of useful applications for our platform. If those partnerships do not provide these benefits or if our partners are unable to serve our customers effectively, we may need to allocate resources internally to provide these services or our customers may not realize the full value of our platform, which could harm our business.
Moreover, our partners’ business partners may not completely align with our core values and therefore may do business with companies that we otherwise would not. Our association with these companies could damage our brand and reputation and potentially harm our business.
We operate in an emerging and evolving market, which may develop more slowly or differently than we expect. If our market does not grow as we expect, or if we cannot expand our services to meet the demands of this market, our revenue may decline, or fail to grow, and we may incur operating losses.
The market for edge computing is in an early stage of development. There is considerable uncertainty over the size and rate at which this market will grow, as well as whether our platform will be widely adopted. Our success will depend, to a substantial extent, on the widespread adoption of our platform as an alternative to other solutions, such as legacy CDNs, enterprise data centers, central cloud, and small business-focused CDNs. Some organizations may be reluctant or unwilling to use our platform for a number of reasons, including concerns about additional costs, uncertainty regarding the reliability, and security of cloud-based offerings or lack of awareness of the benefits of our platform. Moreover, many organizations have
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invested substantial personnel and financial resources to integrate traditional on-premise services into their businesses, and therefore may be reluctant or unwilling to migrate to cloud-based services. Our ability to expand sales of our product into new and existing markets depends on several factors, including potential customer awareness of our platform; the timely completion of data centers in those markets; introduction and market acceptance of enhancements to our platform or new applications that we may introduce; our ability to attract, retain and effectively train sales and marketing personnel; our ability to develop relationships with partners; the effectiveness of our marketing programs; the pricing of our services; and the success of our competitors. If we are unsuccessful in developing and marketing our product into new and existing markets, or if organizations do not perceive or value the benefits of our platform, the market for our product might not continue to develop or might develop more slowly than we expect, either of which may harm our business.
The estimates of market opportunity and forecasts of market growth may prove to be inaccurate, and any real or perceived inaccuracies may harm our reputation and negatively affect our business. Even if the market in which we compete achieves the forecasted growth, our business could fail to grow at similar rates, if at all.
Third-party market opportunity estimates and our growth forecasts are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may not prove to be accurate. The variables that go into the calculation of our market opportunity are subject to change over time, and there is no guarantee that any particular number or percentage of addressable companies or end-users covered by our market opportunity estimates will purchase our products at all or generate any particular level of revenues for us. Even if the market in which we compete meets the size estimates and growth forecasted, our business could fail to grow for a variety of reasons, including reasons outside of our control, such as competition in our industry.
Usage of our platform accounts for substantially all of our revenue.
We expect that we will be substantially dependent on our edge cloud platform to generate revenue for the foreseeable future. As a result, our operating results could suffer due to:
•any decline in demand for our edge cloud platform;
•the failure of our edge cloud platform to achieve continued market acceptance;
•the market for edge cloud computing services not continuing to grow, or growing more slowly than we expect;
•the introduction of products and technologies that serve as a replacement or substitute for, or represent an improvement over, our edge cloud platform;
•technological innovations or new standards that our edge cloud platform does not address;
•sensitivity to current or future prices offered by us or our competitors;
•our customers’ development of their own edge cloud platform; and
•our inability to release enhanced versions of our edge cloud platform on a timely basis.
In addition, because substantially all of our revenue from usage is recognized during the term of the relevant contract upon usage, downturns or upturns in sales contracts are not immediately reflected in full in our operating results.
If the market for our edge cloud platform grows more slowly than anticipated or if demand for our edge cloud platform does not grow as quickly as anticipated, whether as a result of competition, pricing sensitivities, product obsolescence, technological change, unfavorable economic conditions, uncertain geopolitical environment, budgetary constraints of our customers, or other factors, our business would be harmed.
We expect fluctuations in our financial results and key metrics, making it difficult to project future results, and if we fail to meet the expectations of securities analysts or investors, our stock price and the value of your investment could decline significantly.
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Our operating results, including revenue, gross margin and net income, as well as our key metrics, including our DBNER, NRR and LTM NRR, have fluctuated in the past and are expected to fluctuate in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, our past results may not be indicative of our future performance and period-to-period comparisons of our operating results and key metrics may not be meaningful or accurately measure our business. In addition to the other risks described herein, factors that may affect our operating results include the following:
•fluctuations in demand for or pricing of our platform;
•our ability to attract new customers;
•our ability to retain our existing customers;
•fluctuations in the usage of our platform by our customers, which is directly related to the amount of revenue that we recognize from our customers;
•fluctuations in customer delays in purchasing decisions in anticipation of new products or product enhancements by us or our competitors;
•changes in customers’ budgets and in the timing of their budget cycles and purchasing decisions;
•the timing of customer payments and any difficulty in collecting accounts receivable from customers;
•timing of new functionality of our existing platform;
•our ability to control costs, including our operating expenses;
•the amount and timing of payment for operating expenses, particularly research and development and sales and marketing expenses, including commissions;
•the amount and timing of costs associated with recruiting, training, and integrating new employees;
•the effects of acquisitions or other strategic transactions;
•expenses in connection with acquisitions or other strategic transactions;
•our ability to successfully deploy POPs in new regions;
•general economic conditions, both domestically and internationally, as well as economic conditions specifically affecting industries in which our customers participate;
•the ability to maintain our partnerships;
•the impact of new accounting pronouncements;
•changes in the competitive dynamics of our market, including consolidation among competitors or customers;
•significant security breaches of, technical difficulties with, or interruptions to, the delivery and use of our platform; and
•awareness of our brand and our reputation in our target markets.
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Additionally, certain large scale events, such as major elections and sporting events, can significantly impact usage of our platform, which could cause fluctuations in our results of operations. While increased usage of our platform during these events could result in increased revenue, these seasonal and one-time events could also impact the performance of our platform during those events and lead to a sub-optimal experience for some customers. Such annual and one-time events may cause fluctuations in our results of operations as they would impact both our revenue and our operating expenses.
Any of the foregoing and other factors may cause our results of operations to vary significantly. Furthermore, if our quarterly results of operations or our guidance fall below the expectations of investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the price of our Class A common stock could decline substantially, and our business could be harmed. For example, the trading price of our Class A common stock declined significantly after we provided our guidance for the first quarter and full year of 2022 on February 16, 2022 in our earnings release furnished on Form 8-K, which did not meet the expectations of securities analysts who followed our stock. We cannot assure you that our operating results or projected operating results will meet the expectations of market analysts or our investors.
Our pricing models subject us to various challenges that could make it difficult for us to derive sufficient value from our customers, and we do not have sufficient history with our pricing models to accurately predict the optimal pricing necessary to attract new customers and retain existing customers.
We generally charge our customers for their usage of our platform based on the combined total usage, as well as the features and functionality enabled. Additionally, once our product is purchased, customers can also buy a combination of our add-on products. We do not know whether our current or potential customers or the market in general will continue to accept this pricing model going forward and, if it fails to gain acceptance, our business could be harmed. We also generally purchase bandwidth from internet service providers and server colocation space from third parties based on expected usage from our customers. Moreover, if our customers use our platform in a manner that is inconsistent with how we have purchased bandwidth, servers, and colocation space, our business could be harmed.
We have limited experience with respect to determining the optimal prices for our products and, as a result, we have in the past changed our pricing model and expect that we may need to do so in the future. As the market for our products matures, or as new competitors introduce new products or services that compete with ours, we may be unable to attract new customers at the same price or based on the same pricing models as we have used historically. Pricing decisions may also impact the mix of adoption among our customers and negatively impact our overall revenue. Moreover, larger organizations may demand substantial price concessions. As a result, in the future we may be required to reduce our prices or develop new pricing models, which could adversely affect our revenue, gross margin, profitability, financial position, and cash flow.
Our sales and onboarding cycles with customers can be long and unpredictable, and our sales and onboarding efforts require considerable time and expense.
The timing of our sales with our enterprise customers and related revenue recognition is difficult to predict because of the length and unpredictability of the sales cycle for these customers. In addition, for our enterprise customers, the lengthy sales cycle for the evaluation and implementation of our products may also cause us to experience a delay between expenses for such sales efforts and the generation of corresponding revenue. The length of our sales cycle for these customers, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new enterprise customers, or with existing customers that are moving additional traffic onto our platform, can take several months. As the purchase of our products can be dependent upon customer initiatives, our sales cycle can extend to even longer periods of time. Customers often view a switch to our platform as a strategic decision requiring significant investment and, as a result, frequently require considerable time to evaluate, test, and qualify our product offering prior to entering into or expanding a contract commitment. During the sales cycle, we expend significant time and money on sales and marketing and contract negotiation activities, which may not result in a completed sale. Additional factors that may influence the length and variability of our sales cycle include:
•the effectiveness of our sales force, particularly new salespeople and sales leadership, as we increase the size of our sales force and train our new salespeople to sell to enterprise customers;
•the discretionary nature of customers’ purchasing decisions and budget cycles;
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•customers’ procurement processes, including their evaluation of competing products;
•economic conditions and other factors affecting customer budgets;
•the regulatory environment in which our customers operate;
•integration complexity for a customer deployment;
•the customer’s familiarity with edge cloud computing platforms;
•evolving customer demands;
•selling new products to enterprise customers; and
•competitive conditions.
Given these factors, it is difficult to predict whether and when a customer will switch to our platform.
Given that it can take several months for our customers to ramp up their usage of our platform, during that time, we may not be able to generate enough revenue from a particular customer or that customer may not increase their usage in a meaningful way. Moreover, because the switching costs are fairly low, our customers are able to switch from our platform to alternative services relatively easily. As a result, actual usage could be materially below our forecasts, which could adversely affect our results of operations, disappoint analysts and investors, or cause our stock price to decline.
If our platform does not achieve sufficient market acceptance, our financial results and competitive position will suffer.
To meet our customers’ rapidly evolving demands, we invest substantial resources in research and development of enhanced products to incorporate additional functionality or expand the use cases that our platform addresses. Maintaining adequate research and development resources, such as the appropriate personnel and development technology, to meet the demands of the market is essential. If we are unable to develop products internally due to inadequate or ineffective research and development resources, we may not be able to address our customers’ needs on a timely basis or at all. In addition, if we seek to supplement our research and development capabilities or the breadth of our products through acquisitions, such acquisitions could be expensive and we may not successfully integrate acquired technologies or businesses into our business. When we develop or acquire new or enhanced products, we typically incur expenses and expend resources upfront to develop, market, promote, and sell the new offering. Therefore, when we develop or acquire and introduce new or enhanced products, they must achieve high levels of market acceptance in order to justify the amount of our investment in developing or acquiring and bringing them to market. Our new products or enhancements and changes to our existing products could fail to attain sufficient market acceptance for many reasons, including:
•failure to predict market demand accurately in terms of functionality and a failure to supply products that meet this demand in a timely fashion;
•defects, errors, or failures;
•negative publicity about our platform’s performance or effectiveness;
•changes in the legal or regulatory requirements, or increased legal or regulatory scrutiny, adversely affecting our platform;
•emergence of a competitor that achieves market acceptance before we do;
•delays in releasing enhancements to our platform to the market; and
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•introduction or anticipated introduction of competing products by our competitors.
If our platform and any future enhancements do not achieve adequate acceptance in the market, or if products and technologies developed by others achieve greater acceptance in the market, our business could be harmed.
Beyond overall acceptance of our platform by our customers, it is important that we maintain and grow acceptance of our platform among the developers that work for our customers. We rely on developers to choose our platform over other options they may have, and to continue to use and promote our platform as they move between companies. These developers often make design decisions and influence the product and vendor processes within our customers. If we fail to gain or maintain their acceptance of our platform, our business would be harmed.
We rely on third-party hosting providers that may be difficult to replace.
We rely on third-party hosting services such as Amazon Web Services ("AWS"), Google, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud providers that facilitate the offering of our platform. Some of these third-party hosting services offer competing products to ours and therefore may not continue to be available on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. These providers may be unwilling to do business with us if they view our platform as a threat. Any loss of the right to use any of the hosting providers could impair our ability to offer our platform and harm our business until we are able to obtain alternative hosting providers.
If we do not or cannot maintain the compatibility of our platform with third-party applications that our customers use in their businesses, our business will be harmed.
Because our customers choose to integrate our products with certain capabilities provided by third-party providers, the functionality and popularity of our platform depends, in part, on our ability to integrate our platform and applications with third-party applications. These third parties may change the features of their technologies, restrict our access to their applications, or alter the terms governing use of their applications in a manner that is adverse to our business. Such changes could functionally limit or prevent our ability to use these third-party technologies in conjunction with our platform, which would negatively affect adoption of our platform and harm our business. If we fail to integrate our platform with new third-party applications that our customers use, we may not be able to offer the functionality that our customers need, which would harm our business.
We provide service level commitments under our customer agreements. If we fail to meet these contractual commitments, we could be obligated to provide credits for future service, or face contract termination with refunds of prepaid amounts, which could harm our business.
Most of our customer agreements contain service level commitments. If we are unable to meet the stated service level commitments, including failure to meet the uptime and delivery requirements under our customer agreements, we have in the past and may in the future be contractually obligated to provide the affected customers with service credits which could significantly affect our revenues in the periods in which the uptime and delivery failure occurs and the credits are applied. For example, as a result of platform interruptions in January 2021 and June 2021, certain of our affected customers with whom we have service level commitments were entitled to receive service credits. We could also face customer terminations with refunds of prepaid amounts, which could significantly affect both our current and future revenues. Any service level failures could harm our business.
If we fail to offer high quality support, our business may be harmed.
Our customers rely on our support team to assist them in deploying our products effectively and resolve technical and operational issues. High-quality support is important for the renewal and expansion of our agreements with existing customers. The importance of maintaining high quality support will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. If we do not help our customers quickly resolve issues and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to maintain and expand our relationships with existing and new customers could suffer and our business could be harmed. Further, increased demand for customer support, without corresponding revenue, could increase costs and adversely affect our business. In addition, as we continue to grow our operations and expand internationally, we will need to be able to provide efficient customer support that
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meets our customers’ needs globally at scale and our customer support team will face additional challenges, including those associated with delivering support and documentation in multiple languages. Our failure to do so could harm our business.
Risks Related to Employees and Managing Our Growth
The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy.
To execute our business strategy, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel. Competition for executive officers, software developers, sales personnel, product managers, and other key employees in our industry is intense. In particular, we compete with many other companies for software developers with high levels of experience in designing, developing, and managing cloud-based software, as well as for skilled sales, operations, and security professionals. In addition, we believe that the success of our business and corporate culture depends on employing people with a variety of backgrounds and experiences, and the competition for such diverse personnel is significant. The market for such talented personnel is competitive. This competitive situation has become exacerbated by the increase in employee resignations currently taking place throughout the United States, in part as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is commonly referred to as the “great resignation.” We have experienced significant unwanted employee attrition which we believe has been due to such competition, and we may continue to experience unwanted employee attrition in the future. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do and can frequently offer such personnel substantially greater compensation than we can offer, including, in some cases, large equity packages and cash incentive bonuses. In addition, prospective and existing employees often consider the value of the equity awards they receive in connection with their employment. If the perceived value of our equity awards declines, experiences significant volatility, or increases such that prospective employees believe there is limited upside to the value of our equity awards, it may adversely affect our ability to recruit and retain key employees. Moreover, we face significant competition in hiring and attracting qualified employees in all aspects of our business, and the recent move by companies to offer a remote or hybrid work environment may increase the competition for such employees.If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our ability to maintain and enhance our platform, develop and deliver new products, fix bugs, support our existing customers, attract new customers, respond to competitive pressures, and otherwise execute our business plan would be harmed.
We rely on the performance of highly skilled personnel, including our senior management and other key employees, and the loss of one or more of such personnel, or of a significant number of our team members, could harm our business.
We believe our success has depended, and continues to depend, on the efforts and talents of senior management and key personnel, including Artur Bergman, our Chief Architect and Executive Chairman and Joshua Bixby, our Chief Executive Officer. There have been, and from time to time, there may continue to be, changes in our management team resulting from the hiring or departure of executives and key employees, or the transition of executives within our business, which could disrupt our business. Some of our executive officers and members of our management team have been with us for a short period of time and we are continuing to develop key functions within various aspects of our business. We are also dependent on the continued service of our existing software engineers because of the complexity of our platform. Our senior management, including Mr. Bergman and Mr. Bixby, and key employees are employed on an at-will basis. We cannot ensure that we will be able to retain the services of any member of our senior management or other key employees or that we would be able to timely replace members of our senior management or other key employees should any of them depart. The loss of one or more of our senior management or other key employees could harm our business.
Our past rapid growth may not be indicative of our future growth and, if we resume growing rapidly, we may not be able to manage our growth effectively.
We have experienced substantial growth in various aspects of our business in prior periods. For example, as of December 31, 2021, December 31, 2020, and December 31, 2019, our revenue was $354.3 million, $290.9 million, and $200.5 million, respectively. In addition, we are expanding, and expect to continue to expand in the future, our international operations. For example, from December 31, 2020 to December 31, 2021, our edge network increased from 40 to 51 markets and from 25 to 31 countries that are outside of the United States. We have also experienced significant growth in the number of customers, usage, and amount of data delivered across our platform. This growth has placed and may continue to place significant demands on our corporate culture, operational infrastructure, and management. Although our business has experienced significant growth
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in the past, we cannot provide any assurance that our business will continue to grow at the same rate, or at all. Overall growth of our business depends on a number of factors, including our ability to:
•address new and developing markets, such as large enterprise customers outside the United States;
•retain our existing employees in this period of "great resignation";
•recruit, hire, train, and manage additional qualified engineers and product managers;
•recruit, hire, train, and manage additional sales and marketing personnel;
•maintain and enhance our corporate culture;
•expand our international operations;
•establish more mature organizational designs and structures, with more skill, technical and leadership depth with experience scaling and expanding global businesses;
•implement and improve our administrative, financial and operational systems, procedures, and controls;
•attract new customers and increase our existing customers’ usage on our platform;
•expand the functionality and use cases for the products we offer on our platform;
•provide our customers with customer support that meets their needs;
•successfully identify and acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our products, such as our acquisition of Signal Sciences; and
•recruit experienced leaders and strategists to facilitate successful acquisitions and integrations.
We may not successfully accomplish any of the above objectives. We expect to continue to expend substantial financial and other resources on:
•sales and marketing, including a significant expansion of our sales organization;
•our infrastructure, including POP deployments, systems architecture, management tools, scalability, availability, performance, and security, as well as disaster recovery measures;
•product development, including investments in our product development team and the development of new products and new functionality for our existing products;
•acquisitions or strategic investments;
•international expansion; and
•general administration, including increased legal and accounting expenses associated with being a public company.
These activities will require significant investments and allocation of valuable management and employee resources, and our growth will continue to place significant demands on our management and our operational and financial infrastructure. There are no guarantees we will be able to grow our business in an efficient or timely manner, or at all. If we fail to manage the growth of our business and operations effectively, the quality of our services and the efficiency of our operations could suffer,
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which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. If we are unable to return to our prior level of growth, our business will be harmed.
In addition, our past rapid growth may make it difficult to evaluate our future performance. Our ability to forecast our future results of operations is subject to a number of uncertainties. If we fail to achieve the necessary level of efficiency in our company as it grows, or if we are not able to accurately forecast future growth, our business would be negatively impacted.
If we cannot maintain our company culture as we grow, our success and our business may be harmed.
We believe our culture has been a key contributor to our success to date and that the critical nature of the products that we provide promotes a sense of greater purpose and fulfillment in our employees. Any failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our ability to recruit and retain personnel and to effectively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives. As we grow and develop the systems and processes associated with being a public company, we may find it difficult to maintain these important aspects of our culture. The recent increase in employee attrition we have experienced in part due to the ongoing “great resignation” has adversely affected our corporate culture, particularly now that our workforce has been fully virtual since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, while we have historically benefited from having a dispersed workforce, as we have grown and our resources have become more globally dispersed and our organizational management structures have become more complex, we have found it increasingly difficult to maintain these beneficial aspects of our corporate culture. In addition, we may seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products or technologies with differing corporate cultures that could be difficult to integrate. If we fail to maintain our company culture, our business may be harmed.
Risks Related to Our Financial Position and Need for Additional Capital
Seasonality may cause fluctuations in our sales and operating results.
We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience in the future, seasonality in our business, and our operating results and financial condition may be affected by such trends in the future. We generally experience seasonal fluctuations in demand for our platform. For example, we have some customers who increase their usage and requests when they need more capacity during busy periods, especially in the fourth quarter of the year, and then subsequently scale back. We also host certain large scale events, such as major elections or sporting events, that may be seasonal or one-time which can cause revenue to fluctuate between the periods in which these events occur and subsequent periods. Since we have built our network to handle seasonal capacity fluctuations, we may not be able to reduce our capacity in a timely manner, and as such sustain more costs. We believe that the seasonal trends that we have experienced in the past may continue for the foreseeable future, particularly as we expand our sales to larger enterprises. To the extent we experience this seasonality, it may cause fluctuations in our operating results and financial metrics, and make forecasting our future operating results and financial metrics difficult. Additionally, we do not have sufficient experience in selling certain of our products to determine if demand for these products are or will be subject to material seasonality.
Our current operations are international in scope and we plan on further geographic expansion, creating a variety of operational challenges.
A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally. For the year ended December 31, 2021, the percentage of revenue generated from customers outside the United States was 27% of our total revenue. As of December 31, 2021, our edge network spans across 51 markets and 31 countries that are outside of the United States. Additionally, we have employees located throughout the world. We are continuing to adapt to and develop strategies to address international markets but there is no guarantee that such efforts will have the desired effect. As of December 31, 2021, approximately 19% of our full-time employees were located outside of the United States. We expect that our international activities will grow over the foreseeable future as we continue to pursue opportunities in existing and new international markets, which will require significant management attention and financial resources. In connection with such expansion, we may face difficulties including costs associated with, varying seasonality patterns, potential adverse movement of currency exchange rates, longer payment cycle difficulties in collecting accounts receivable in some countries, tariffs and trade barriers, a variety of regulatory or contractual limitations on our ability to operate, adverse tax events, reduced protection of intellectual property rights in some countries, and a geographically and culturally diverse workforce and customer base. Failure to overcome any of these difficulties could harm our business.
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Our current and future international business and operations involve a variety of risks, including:
•changes in a specific country’s or region’s political or economic conditions;
•greater difficulty collecting accounts receivable and longer payment cycles;
•potential or unexpected changes in trade relations, regulations, or laws;
•increased regulatory inquiry or oversight;
•more stringent regulations relating to privacy and data security and the unauthorized use of, or access to, commercial and personal information, particularly in Europe;
•differing labor regulations, especially in Europe and Japan, where labor laws are generally more advantageous to employees as compared to the United States., including deemed hourly wage and overtime regulations in these locations;
•challenges inherent in efficiently managing an increased number of employees over large geographic distances, including the need to implement appropriate systems, policies, benefits, and compliance programs;
•challenges to our corporate culture resulting from a dispersed workforce;
•difficulties in managing a business in new markets with diverse cultures, languages, customs, legal systems, alternative dispute systems, and regulatory systems;
•increased travel, real estate, infrastructure, and legal compliance costs associated with international operations;
•currency exchange rate fluctuations and the resulting effect on our revenue and expenses, and the cost and risk of entering into hedging transactions if we chose to do so in the future;
•challenges related to providing support and developing products in foreign languages;
•limitations on our ability to reinvest earnings from operations in one country to fund the capital needs of our operations in other countries;
•laws and business practices favoring local competitors or general market preferences for local vendors;
•potential tariffs and trade barriers;
•limited or insufficient intellectual property protection or difficulties enforcing our intellectual property;
•political instability or terrorist activities;
•exposure to liabilities under anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws, and similar laws and regulations in other jurisdictions; and
•adverse tax burdens and foreign exchange controls that could make it difficult to repatriate earnings and cash.
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If any of the above risks materialize, it could harm our business and prospects. In addition, our limited experience in operating our business internationally increases the risk that any potential future expansion efforts that we may undertake will not be successful. If we invest substantial time and resources to further expand our international operations and are unable to do so successfully and in a timely manner, our business may be harmed.
Our ability to timely raise capital in the future may be limited, or may be unavailable on acceptable terms, if at all, and our failure to raise capital when needed could harm our business, and debt or equity issued to raise additional capital may reduce the value of our Class A common stock.
We have funded our operations since inception primarily through payments received from our customers, sales of equity and debt securities, and borrowings under our credit facilities. We cannot be certain when or if our operations will generate sufficient cash to fully fund our ongoing operations or the growth of our business. We intend to continue to make investments to support our business and may require additional funds. Our future capital requirements may vary materially from those currently planned and will depend on many factors, including our growth rate, market acceptance of our platform, the expansion of sales and marketing activities, strategic transactions, as well as overall economic conditions. For example, on October 1, 2020 we acquired Signal Sciences for an aggregate purchase price of $759.4 million, consisting of approximately $223.0 million in cash and 6,367,709 shares of our Class A common stock, including 896,499 shares which are restricted as they are subject to revesting conditions. The aggregate purchase price reflects the value of the net shares issued, which excludes the above mentioned shares that are restricted.
We may need to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. Additional financing may not be available on favorable terms, if at all and any additional financing will need to be in compliance with the terms of our Credit Agreement, dated as of February 16, 2021, by and among us as borrower, the lenders from time to time party thereto, and Silicon Valley Bank as a lender, the issuing lender and the swingline lender, and as administrative agent and collateral agent for the lenders ("Credit Agreement"). If adequate funds are not available on acceptable terms, we may be unable to invest in future growth opportunities, which could harm our business, operating results, and financial condition. Furthermore, if we issue additional equity securities, stockholders will experience dilution, and the new equity securities could have rights senior to those of our Class A common stock. Any debt financing we secure could involve additional restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. If we were to violate such restrictive covenants, we could incur penalties, increased expenses and an acceleration of the payment terms of our outstanding debt, which could in turn harm our business. Because our decision to issue securities in future offerings will depend on numerous considerations, including factors beyond our control, we cannot predict or estimate the amount, timing, or nature of any future issuances of debt or equity securities. As a result, our stockholders bear the risk of future issuances of debt or equity securities reducing the value of our Class A common stock and diluting their interests.
If our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies prove to be incorrect, our results of operations could be adversely affected.
The preparation of financial statements in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States ("U.S. GAAP") requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in the consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, as provided in the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Critical Accounting Policies.” The results of these estimates form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities, and equity and the amount of revenue and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. Significant assumptions and estimates used in preparing our consolidated financial statements include, but are not limited to, those related to revenue, accounts receivable and related reserves, fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed for business combinations, useful lives and realizability of long-lived assets including our goodwill and intangible assets, income tax reserves, and accounting for stock-based compensation. Our results of operations may be adversely affected if our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ from those in our assumptions, which could cause our results of operations to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the trading price of our Class A common stock.
Current and future indebtedness could restrict our operations, particularly our ability to respond to changes in our business or to take specified actions.
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Our Credit Agreement with SVB contains, and any future indebtedness would likely contain, a number of restrictive covenants that impose significant operating and financial restrictions on us, including restrictions on our ability to incur additional indebtedness, grant liens, pay dividends and make distributions, transfer property, make investments, and take other actions that may otherwise be in our best interests. In addition, our Credit Agreement contains a financial covenant that requires us to maintain a consolidated adjusted quick ratio of at least 1:25 to 1:00 tested on a quarterly basis as well as a springing revenue growth covenant for certain periods if our consolidated adjusted quick ratio falls below 1.75 to 1:00 on the last day of any fiscal quarter. Our ability to meet these financial covenants can be affected by events beyond our control, and we may not be able to continue to meet those covenants. In addition, a breach of a covenant under our Credit Agreement or any other current or future credit facility of ours may result in a cross-default under any such separate credit facility. If we seek to enter into one or more additional credit facilities in the future we may not be able to obtain debt financing on terms that are favorable to us, if at all. Holders of our existing debt have, and holders of any future debt we may incur would have, rights senior to holders of common stock to make claims on our assets. In addition, the terms of our existing debt do, and the terms of any future debt could, restrict our operations, including our ability to pay dividends on our Class A common stock. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms that are satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and to respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business may be harmed.
We have identified three material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, and if we are unable to remediate and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting in the future, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, and the market price of our Class A common stock may be seriously harmed.
As a public company, we are required to maintain internal control over financial reporting and to report any material weaknesses in those internal controls. For example, we are required to perform system and process evaluation and testing of our internal control over financial reporting to allow management to report on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 9 ("Section 404"). Our independent registered public accounting firm also needs to attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. We designed, implemented, and tested internal control over financial reporting required to comply with this obligation. That process is time-consuming, costly, and complicated.
As further detailed in Item 9A in this report, we and our independent registered public accounting firm identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018, some of which were newly identified in the year ended December 31, 2021 and one was originally identified in prior years and remains partially unremediated for the year ended December 31, 2021. The material weaknesses related to the lack of sufficient qualified accounting resources, lack of timely and complete identification of internal-use software costs for capitalization, and a system implementation of our stock plan administration system. We previously reported a material weakness in our Annual Reports on Form 10-K for the years ended December 31, 2020 and December 31, 2019.
The process of implementing an effective financial reporting system is a continuous effort that requires us to anticipate and react to changes in our business and the economic and regulatory environments and to expand significant resources to maintain a financial reporting system that is adequate to satisfy our reporting obligations. We continue to evaluate and take actions to improve our internal control over financial reporting. To remediate the material weakness related to a lack of sufficient, qualified finance and accounting resources commensurate with the complexity of the Company's operations and financial reporting requirements, we will continue to hire, retain and oversee qualified finance and accounting resources to support the Company, including external advisors when appropriate, and add enhanced quarterly reporting of the remediation measures and process to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors. To remediate the material weakness in internal control over financial reporting during the quarter ended September 30, 2021 related to our accounting for internal-use software costs, we will continue to enhance our process and expand our review controls to ensure complete and timely identification of internal use software costs subject to capitalization, implement additional training of finance, accounting and other Company personnel involved in this process, and work with qualified external advisors to support these efforts. To remediate the material weakness in internal control over financial reporting during the year ended December 31, 2021 related to the design of controls for system implementations associated with a migration of our stock plan administration system, we will update the design and review of controls for system implementations, continue to leverage internal expertise in systems implementation for the design of controls, and work with qualified external advisors to support these efforts.
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We cannot assure you that the measures we have taken to date and plan to take will be sufficient to remediate the material weaknesses we identified or avoid the identification of additional material weaknesses in the future.
If we fail to remediate our existing material weaknesses or identify future material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, if we are unable to comply with the requirements of Section 404 or assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, or if our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an unqualified opinion or expresses a qualified or adverse opinion about the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports and the market price of our Class A common stock could be negatively affected. Moreover, any failure to remediate the material weaknesses, or the identification of new material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, could result in material misstatements in our financial statements that may continue undetected and cause us to fail to meet our reporting and financial obligations or incur significant additional costs to remediate the material weaknesses, each of which could harm our ability to raise capital on favorable terms in the future or otherwise have a negative impact on our financial condition. In addition, we could become subject to investigations by the New York Stock Exchange (the "NYSE"), the SEC, and other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.
We may not be able to successfully manage the growth of our business if we are unable to improve our internal systems, processes and controls.
We need to continue to improve our internal systems, processes, and controls to effectively manage our operations and growth. We may not be able to successfully implement and scale improvements to our systems and processes in a timely or efficient manner or in a manner that does not negatively affect our operating results. For example, we may not be able to effectively monitor certain extraordinary contract requirements or provisions that are individually negotiated by our sales force as the number of transactions continues to grow. In addition, our systems and processes may not prevent or detect all errors, omissions, or fraud. We may experience difficulties in managing improvements to our systems, processes, and controls or in connection with third-party software, which could impair our ability to offer our platform to our customers in a timely manner, causing us to lose customers, limit us to smaller deployments of our products, or increase our technical support costs.
Our financial results may be adversely affected by changes in accounting principles applicable to us.
U.S. GAAP are subject to interpretation by the Financial Accounting Standards Board ("FASB"), the SEC and other various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret appropriate accounting principles. A change in these principles or interpretations could have a significant effect on our reported financial results for periods prior to and subsequent to such change, and could affect the reporting of transactions completed before the announcement of a change.
Market practices with respect to these new disclosures are continuously evolving, and securities analysts and investors may not fully understand the implications of our disclosures or how or why they may differ from similar disclosures by other companies. Any additional new accounting standards could have a significant effect on our reported results. If our reported results fall below analyst or investor expectations, our stock price could decline.
Risks Related to Laws, Regulations, and the Global Economy
Failure to comply with United States and foreign governmental laws and regulations could harm our business.
Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local, and foreign governments. If we do not comply with these laws or regulations or if we become liable under these laws or regulations due to the failure of our customers to comply with these laws, we could face direct liability or delivery of content by our platform may be blocked by certain governments. In certain jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than those in the United States. For example, in June 2020, China passed a national security law for Hong Kong that imposes criminal liability for the violation of content regulations, it is currently not clear how broadly such legislation will be interpreted or applied in relation to our customers or our business, and additional developments in our understanding of the application of this law could cause us to remove our POP from Hong Kong. Noncompliance with applicable regulations or requirements could subject us to investigations, sanctions, enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, fines, damages, civil and criminal penalties, injunctions, or other collateral consequences. If any governmental sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business could be harmed. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and an increase in professional fees. Enforcement actions and sanctions could harm our business.
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If the United States government prohibits our current or potential customers from doing business with us, whether through policy, regulations or laws, we could face direct liability or our delivery of content by our platform may be blocked. For example, in the current environment of economic trade negotiations and tensions between the Chinese and the United States governments, the United States government has expressed concerns about the ability of companies operating in China to do business in the United States or with United States companies. As a result, we could lose the ability to contract with current or potential customers and usage of our platform may decrease by affected customers, which could harm our business and reputation. For example, our largest customer during the year ended December 31, 2020 had strong business ties to China and significantly reduced its usage of our platform. We believe this was in response to various actions taken by the United States and other governments against them. Even in the absence of new restrictions or trade actions imposed by the United States or other governments, our customers that operate in China, target China as a market, or that have strong business ties to China, may take actions to reduce dependence on our platform, which could harm our business.
We are subject, or may become subject, to governmental regulation and other legal obligations, particularly those related to privacy, data protection, infrastructure, and information security, and our actual or perceived failure to comply with such obligations could harm our business, by resulting in litigation, fines, penalties, or adverse publicity and reputational damage, and other adverse consequences that may negatively affect the value of our business and decrease the price of our Class A common stock. Compliance with such laws could also result in additional costs and liabilities to us or inhibit sales of our products.
We receive, store, process, collect, generate, use transfer, disclose, make accessible, protect, secure, dispose of, transmit, and share personal information and other data from and about actual and prospective customers and users, in addition to our employees and service providers. In addition, our customers use our platform to collect personally identifiable information, personal health information, and personal financial information from their end-users. Our handling of data is subject to a variety of laws and regulations, including regulation by various government agencies, such as the United States Federal Trade Commission ("FTC"), and various state, local, and foreign agencies. Our data handling also is subject to contractual obligations, internal and external privacy and security policies, guidance, industry standards, and other obligations that govern the processing of personal information by us and on our behalf. Additionally, we are, or may become, subject to various other laws and regulations around the world with respect to the internet related to, among other things, content liability, security requirements, critical infrastructure designations, internet resiliency, law enforcement access to information, net neutrality, data localization requirements, and restrictions on social media or other content, any of which can have a material impact on our business.
Domestically, states have also begun to introduce more comprehensive privacy legislation, including data breach notification laws, personal information privacy laws, and consumer protection laws. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) affords consumers expanded privacy protections. The CCPA gives California residents, among other things, expanded rights to access and require deletion of their personal information, opt out of certain personal information sharing, and receive detailed information about how their personal information is used. The CCPA also allows for statutory fines for noncompliance (up to $7,000 per violation), as well as a private right of action for data breaches that may increase data breach litigation. It is anticipated that the CCPA will be expanded substantially on January 1, 2023, when the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (“CPRA”) comes into effect. The CPRA among other things, establishes a new California Protection Agency to implement and enforce the CPRA, which could increase the risk of enforcement actions.
The CCPA marks a trend toward more stringent privacy, data protection, and information security legislation in the United States.Privacy, data protection, and information security laws have been proposed at the federal, state, and local levels that, if passed, could increase our potential liability, increase our compliance costs and adversely affect our business. For example, recently Virginia passed the Consumer Data Protection Act and Colorado passed the Colorado Privacy Act, both of which differ from the CPRA and become effective in 2023. Additionally, several states and localities have enacted measures related to the use of artificial intelligence (“AI") and machine learning in products and services. The laws and regulations relating to privacy and data security are evolving, can be subject to significant change and may result in ever-increasing regulatory and public scrutiny and escalating levels of enforcement and sanctions. In addition, the United States or foreign jurisdictions may establish new laws or regulations regarding the internet or online services. These new laws and regulations may affect our products and infrastructure, which could cause us to incur substantial costs to comply, expose us to regulatory scrutiny, criminal or civil liability, require us to fundamentally change our products or operations, or otherwise have an adverse effect on our business. If we become subject to new privacy, data protection, and information security laws at the state level, the risk of enforcement action against us could increase because we may become subject to additional obligations, and the number of individuals or entities that can initiate actions against us may increase (including individuals and state actors).
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In addition, an increasing number of foreign laws and regulations apply to privacy, data protection, and information security.For example, the EU GDPR, the U.K. GDPR, Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais or “LGPD”) (Law No. 13,709/2018), Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (“PIPEDA”) and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (“CASL”), and China’s Personal Information Protection Law (“PIPL”) impose strict requirements for processing the personal information of individuals.European legislative proposals and existing laws and regulations apply to cookies and similar tracking technologies, electronic communications, and marketing.In the EU and the UK, regulators are increasingly focusing on compliance with requirements related to the online behavioral advertising ecosystem.It is anticipated that the ePrivacy Regulation and national implementing laws will replace the current national laws that implement the ePrivacy Directive that governs electronic communications.Compliance with these laws may require us to make significant operational changes, limit the effectiveness of our marketing activities, divert the attention of our technology personnel, adversely affect our margins, and subject us to liabilities. Furthermore, there is a proposed regulation in the EU related to AI that, if adopted, could impose onerous obligations related to the use of AI-related systems that may require us to change our business practices. Under the EU GDPR and U.K. GDPR, government regulators may impose restrictions or injunctions on data processing, and fines of up to 20 million euros (£17.5 million for the U.K. GDPR) or 4% of annual global revenue, whichever is greater.Further, individuals may initiate litigation related to our processing of their personal information.
Certain jurisdictions have enacted data localization laws and cross-border personal information transfer laws, which could make it more difficult to transfer information across jurisdictions (such as transferring or receiving personal information that originates in the EU). Existing mechanisms that may facilitate cross-border personal information transfers may change or be invalidated. For example, absent appropriate safeguards or other circumstances, the EU GDPR generally restricts the transfer of personal information to countries outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) which the European Commission does not consider as providing an adequate level of protection of personal information, such as the United States. The European Commission recently released a set of Standard Contractual Clauses (“SCCs”) that are designed to be a valid mechanism by which entities can transfer personal information out of the EEA. Currently, the SCCs are a valid mechanism to transfer personal information, but impose obligations onto parties relying on them such as to conduct transfer impact assessments to determine whether additional security measures are necessary to protect the transferred personal information. Moreover, due to potential legal challenges, uncertainty exists regarding whether the SCCs will remain a valid mechanism for transfers of personal information out of the EEA. In addition, laws in Switzerland and the UK similarly restrict transfers of personal information outside of those jurisdictions to countries such as the United States. Certain countries outside Europe (e.g. Russia, China, Brazil) have also passed or are considering laws requiring local data residency or otherwise impeding the transfer of personal information across borders, any of which could increase the cost and complexity of doing business. If we cannot implement a valid compliance mechanism for cross-border data transfers, we may face increased exposure to regulatory actions, substantial fines, and injunctions against processing or transferring personal information from Europe or other foreign jurisdictions. The inability to import personal information to the United States could significantly and negatively impact our business operations, limiting our ability to collaborate with parties that are subject to such cross-border data transfer or localization laws, or requiring us to increase our personal information processing capabilities and infrastructure in foreign jurisdictions at significant expense.
The scope and interpretation of the laws that are or may be applicable to us are often uncertain and may be conflicting as a result of the rapidly evolving regulatory framework for privacy and internet issues worldwide. For example, laws relating to the liability of providers of online services for activities of their users and other third parties are currently being tested by a number of claims, including actions based on invasion of privacy and other torts, unfair competition, copyright and trademark infringement, and other theories based on the nature and content of the materials searched, the ads posted, or the content provided by users. Moreover, our global platform outage in June 2021 has increased our public profile and resulted in more frequent interest in our company by regulators.This outage, or any additional outages, may draw additional scrutiny or focused legislation from regulators.
As a result of the laws that are or may be applicable to us, and due to the sensitive nature of the information we collect, we have implemented policies and procedures to preserve and protect our data and our customers’ data against loss, misuse, corruption, misappropriation caused by systems failures, unauthorized access, or misuse. If our policies, procedures, or measures relating to privacy, data protection, marketing, or customer communications fail to comply with laws, regulations, policies, legal obligations, or industry standards, we may be subject to governmental enforcement actions, litigation, regulatory investigations, fines, penalties, and negative publicity which could cause our application providers, customers, and partners to lose trust in us, and have an adverse effect on our business, operating results, and financial condition.
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In addition to government regulation, privacy advocates, and industry groups may propose new and different self-regulatory standards that may apply to us. Because the interpretation and application of privacy and data protection laws, regulations, rules, and other standards are still uncertain, it is possible that these laws, rules, regulations, and other actual or alleged legal obligations, such as contractual or self-regulatory obligations, may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our existing data management practices or the functionality of our platform. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines, lawsuits, and other claims, we could be required to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or modify our software, which could have an adverse effect on our business. Preparing for and complying with these obligations requires significant resources and may necessitate changes to our information technologies, systems, and practices and to those of any third parties that process personal information on our behalf.
Any failure or perceived failure by us or third parties upon whom we rely to comply with laws, regulations, policies, legal, or contractual obligations, industry standards, or regulatory guidance relating to privacy or data security, may result in governmental investigations and enforcement actions (including, for example, a ban by EU Supervisory Authorities), litigation, fines and penalties, additional reporting requirements and/or oversight, orders to destroy or not use personal information or adverse publicity, and could cause our customers and partners to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business. Our obligation to assist our customers in their compliance with laws, regulations, and policies, like data processing and data protection requirements under the EU GDPR and U.K GDPR may also result in government enforcement actions litigation, fines and penalties, or adverse publicity.
Future laws, regulations, standards, and other obligations or any changed interpretation of existing laws or regulations could impair our ability to develop and market new functionality and maintain and grow our customer base and increase revenue. Future restrictions on the collection, use, sharing, or disclosure of data or additional requirements for express or implied consent of our customers, partners, or end-users for the use and disclosure of such information could require us to incur additional costs or modify our platform, possibly in a material manner, and could limit our ability to develop new functionality.
If we are not able to comply with these laws or regulations or if we become liable under these laws or regulations, we could be directly harmed, and we may be forced to implement new measures to reduce our exposure to this liability. This may require us to expend substantial resources or to discontinue certain products, which would negatively affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, the increased attention focused upon liability issues as a result of lawsuits and legislative proposals could harm our reputation or otherwise adversely affect the growth of our business. Furthermore, any costs incurred as a result of this potential liability could harm our operating results.
Our sales to highly regulated organizations and government entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks.
We sell to customers in highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare, as well as to various governmental agency customers, including state and local agency customers, and foreign governmental agency customers. Sales to such entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks. Selling to such entities can be highly competitive, expensive, and time-consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that these efforts will generate a sale. Government contracting requirements may change and in doing so restrict our ability to sell into the government sector until we comply with the revised requirements. Government demand and payment for our offerings are affected by public sector budgetary cycles and funding authorizations, with funding reductions or delays adversely affecting public sector demand for our offerings.
Further, highly regulated and governmental entities may demand shorter contract terms or other contractual provisions that differ from our standard arrangements, including terms that can lead those customers to obtain broader rights in our offerings than would be standard. Such entities may have statutory, contractual, or other legal rights to terminate contracts with us or our partners due to a default or for other reasons, and any such termination may harm our business. In addition, these governmental agencies may be required to publish the rates we negotiate with them, which could harm our negotiating leverage with other potential customers and in turn harm our business.
The success of our business depends on customers’ continued and unimpeded access to our platform on the internet.
Our customers must have internet access in order to use our platform. Some internet providers may take measures that affect their customers’ ability to use our platform, such as degrading the quality of the content we transmit over their lines, giving that content lower priority, giving other content higher priority than ours, blocking our content entirely, or attempting to charge their customers more for using our platform.
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In January 2018, the Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, repealed the “network neutrality” rules adopted during the Obama Administration, which barred internet service providers from blocking or slowing down access to online content, protecting services like ours from such interference. The 2018 decision was largely affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, subject to a remand to consider several issues raised by parties that supported network neutrality, and in November 2020 the FCC affirmed its decision to repeal the rules. Petitions for reconsideration of this decision are pending. President Biden supported restoration of the network neutrality rules during his Presidential campaign, and such action is supported by the current Democratic FCC commissioners. In addition, a number of states have adopted or are adopting or considering legislation or executive actions that would regulate the conduct of broadband providers. A federal court judge denied a request for injunction against California’s state-specific network neutrality law, and as a result, California began enforcing that law. Trade associations representing internet service providers appealed the district court’s ruling denying the preliminary injunction, and the appeal was denied on January 28, 2022.This decision could be appealed to the full court of appeals or the Supreme Court, or the parties could return to the trial court for further proceedings to determine whether a permanent injunction should be granted. We cannot predict whether the FCC order or other state initiatives will be enforced, modified, overturned, or vacated by legal action of the court, federal legislation, or the FCC.
To the extent network operators attempt to interfere with our platform, absent network neutrality rules, attempt to interfere with our services, extract fees from us to deliver our platform, or otherwise engage in discriminatory practices, our business could be adversely impacted. Within such a regulatory environment, we could experience discriminatory or anti-competitive practices that could impede our domestic and international growth, cause us to incur additional expense, or otherwise harm our business. At the same time, re-adoption of network neutrality rules could affect the services used by us and our customers by restricting the offerings made by internet service providers or reducing their incentives to invest in their networks. Such actions could limit or reduce the quality of internet access services and have an adverse impact on the quality of the services we provide to our customers.
We are subject to anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering and similar laws, and non-compliance with such laws can subject us to criminal and/or civil liability and harm our business.
We are subject to the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the United States domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the United States Travel Act, the U.K. Bribery Act, and other anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in the countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws have been enforced aggressively in recent years and are interpreted broadly to generally prohibit companies and their employees and third-party intermediaries from authorizing, offering or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments, or benefits to recipients in the public or private sector. As we increase our international sales and business and sales to the public sector, we may engage with business partners and third-party intermediaries to market our platform and to obtain necessary permits, licenses, and other regulatory approvals. In addition, we or our third-party intermediaries may have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or state-owned or affiliated entities. We can be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of these third-party intermediaries, our employees, representatives, contractors, partners, and agents, even if we do not explicitly authorize such activities.
While we have policies and procedures to address compliance with such laws, we cannot assure you that all of our employees and agents will not take actions in violation of our policies and applicable laws, for which we may be ultimately held responsible. As we increase our international sales and business, our risks under these laws may increase.
Detecting, investigating, and resolving actual or alleged violations can require a significant diversion of time, resources, and attention from senior management. In addition, noncompliance with anti-corruption, anti-bribery, or anti-money laundering laws could subject us to whistleblower complaints, investigations, sanctions, settlements, prosecution or other enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, significant fines, damages, other civil and criminal penalties or injunctions, suspension or debarment from contracting with certain persons, the loss of export privileges, reputational harm, adverse media coverage, and other collateral consequences. If any subpoenas or investigations are launched, or governmental or other sanctions are imposed or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business could be harmed. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense costs and other professional fees. Enforcement actions and sanctions could further harm our business.
Changes in our effective tax rate or tax liability may harm our business.
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Our effective tax rate could be adversely impacted by several factors, including:
•Changes in the relative amounts of income before taxes in the various jurisdictions in which we operate that have differing statutory tax rates;
•Changes in tax laws, tax treaties, and regulations or the interpretation of them, including the Tax Act;
•Changes to our assessment about our ability to realize our deferred tax assets that are based on estimates of our future results, the prudence and feasibility of possible tax planning strategies, and the economic and political environments in which we do business;
•The outcome of current and future tax audits, examinations, or administrative appeals; and
•Limitations or adverse findings regarding our ability to do business in some jurisdictions.
Should our effective tax rate rise, our business could be harmed.
We could be required to collect additional sales taxes or be subject to other tax liabilities that may increase the costs our clients would have to pay for our offering and harm our business.
An increasing number of states have considered or adopted laws that attempt to impose tax collection obligations on out-of-state companies. Additionally, the Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. et al ("Wayfair") that online sellers can be required to collect sales and use tax despite not having a physical presence in the buyer’s state. In response to Wayfair, or otherwise, states or local governments may adopt, or begin to enforce, laws requiring us to calculate, collect, and remit taxes on sales in their jurisdictions. A successful assertion by one or more states requiring us to collect taxes where we presently do not do so, or to collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently do collect some taxes, could result in substantial tax liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as penalties and interest. The imposition by state governments or local governments of sales tax collection obligations on out-of-state sellers could also create additional administrative burdens for us, put us at a competitive disadvantage if they do not impose similar obligations on our competitors and decrease our future sales, which could harm our business.
Historically, we have not collected such taxes from our customers and have therefore recorded such taxes as general and administrative expenses. We expect that these expenses will decline in future years as we continue to implement our sales tax collection mechanisms and start collecting these taxes from our customers. However, delays in implementing our sales tax collection mechanisms and changing tax laws could result in us incurring additional expenses that we may not be able to pass onto our customers.
Adverse tax laws or regulations could be enacted or existing laws could be applied to us, which could adversely affect our business and financial condition.
We operate and are subject to taxes in the United States and numerous other jurisdictions throughout the world. Changes to federal, state, local, or international tax laws on income, sales, use, indirect, or other tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations, or ordinances on multinational corporations are currently being considered and have recently been proposed by the United States and other countries where we do business. These contemplated legislative initiatives include, but are not limited to, changes to transfer pricing policies and definitional changes to permanent establishment that could be applied solely or disproportionately to services provided over the internet. These contemplated tax initiatives, if finalized and adopted by countries, may ultimately impact our effective tax rate and could adversely affect our sales activity resulting in a negative impact on our operating results and cash flows.
In addition, existing tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations, or ordinances could be interpreted, changed, modified, or applied adversely to us (possibly with retroactive effect), which could require us to pay additional tax amounts, fines or penalties, and interest for past amounts. The additional tax obligations could relate to our taxes or obligations to report or withhold on customer taxes. We could take steps to collect customer related taxes, but if we are unsuccessful in collecting such
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taxes from our customers, we could be held liable for such costs, thereby adversely impacting our operating results and cash flows. Further, if our customers must pay additional fines or penalties, it could adversely affect demand for our services.
On December 22, 2017, President Trump signed into law H.R. 1, “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018,” informally titled the Tax Act, which significantly revises the Code. The Tax Act, among other things, reduces the corporate tax rate from a top marginal rate of 35% to a flat rate of 21%, limits the tax deduction for interest expense to 30% of adjusted taxable income (except for certain small businesses), limits the deduction for net operating losses carried forward from taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017 to 80% of current year taxable income, eliminates net operating loss carrybacks, imposes a one-time tax on offshore earnings at reduced rates regardless of whether they are repatriated, eliminates United States tax on foreign earnings (subject to certain important exceptions), allows immediate deductions for certain new investments instead of deductions for depreciation expense over time, and modifies or repeals many business deductions and credits. Notwithstanding the reduction in the corporate income tax rate, the overall impact of the Tax Act is uncertain and our business and financial condition could be adversely affected. In addition, it is uncertain if and to what extent various states will conform to the Tax Act. The impact of the Tax Act on holders of our Class A common stock is also uncertain and could be adverse. More recently, on March 18, 2020, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act ("FFCR Act"), and on March 27, 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act ("CARES Act") were each enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The FFCR Act and the CARES Act contain numerous income tax provisions, such as relaxing limitations on the deductibility of interest and the use of net operating losses arising in taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017. In December 2020, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 ("CAA") was signed into law. The CAA included additional funding through tax credits as part of its economic package for 2021. The Company evaluated these items in its tax computation and determined that the items do not have a material impact on the Company’s financial statements as of and for the year ended December 31, 2021. Future regulatory guidance under the FFCR Act, the CARES Act, as well as under the Tax Act, or other executive or Congressional actions in the United States (including, for example, if the Made in America tax plan released in March 2021 were to become law) remain forthcoming, and such guidance could ultimately increase or lessen the impact on our business and financial condition. It is also possible that Congress will enact additional legislation in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, some of which could materially impact our operations and financial results. We urge our stockholders to consult with their legal and tax advisors with respect to this legislation and the potential tax consequences of investing in or holding our Class A common stock.
Our ability to use our net operating losses to offset future taxable income may be subject to certain limitations.
Our net operating loss ("NOL") carryforwards could expire unused and be unavailable to offset future income tax liabilities because of their limited duration or because of restrictions under United States tax law. Our NOLs generated in tax years ending on or prior to December 31, 2017 are only permitted to be carried forward for 20 years under applicable United States tax law. Under the Tax Act, our federal NOLs generated in tax years ending after December 31, 2017 may be carried forward indefinitely, but the deductibility of such federal NOLs is limited. It is uncertain if and to what extent various states will conform to the Tax Act.
In addition, under Section 382 of the United States Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the "Code"), a corporation that undergoes an "ownership change" is generally subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its pre-change NOLs to offset future taxable income. We may have experienced ownership changes in the past and may experience ownership changes in the future as a result of subsequent shifts in our stock ownership (some of which shifts are outside our control). Furthermore, our ability to utilize NOLs of companies that we have acquired or may acquire in the future may be subject to limitations. For these reasons, we may not be able to utilize a material portion of the NOLs, even if we were to achieve profitability.
Our international operations may subject us to potential adverse tax consequences.
We are expanding our international operations and staff to better support our growth into international markets. Our corporate structure and associated transfer pricing policies contemplate future growth into the international markets, and consider the functions, risks, and assets of the various entities involved in the intercompany transactions. The amount of taxes we pay in different jurisdictions may depend on: the application of the tax laws of the various jurisdictions, including the United States, to our international business activities; changes in tax rates; new or revised tax laws or interpretations of existing tax laws and policies; and our ability to operate our business in a manner consistent with our corporate structure and intercompany arrangements. The taxing authorities of the jurisdictions in which we operate may challenge our methodologies
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for pricing intercompany transactions pursuant to our intercompany arrangements or disagree with our determinations as to the income and expenses attributable to specific jurisdictions. If such a challenge or disagreement were to occur, and our position was not sustained, we could be required to pay additional taxes, interest, and penalties, which could result in one-time tax charges, higher effective tax rates, reduced cash flows, and lower overall profitability of our operations. Our financial statements could fail to reflect adequate reserves to cover such a contingency.
We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could impair our ability to compete in international markets or subject us to liability if we violate such controls.
Our products are subject to the United States export controls, including the Export Administration Regulations administered by the United States Commerce Department, and economic sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States Treasury Department ("OFAC"), and we incorporate encryption technology into certain of our products. These encryption products and the underlying technology may be exported outside of the United States only with the required export authorizations.
Furthermore, our activities are subject to the United States economic sanctions laws and regulations that generally prohibit the direct or indirect exportation or provision of products and services without the required export authorizations to countries, governments, and individuals and entities targeted by the United States embargoes or sanctions, except to the extent authorized by OFAC or exempt from sanctions. Obtaining the necessary export license or other authorization for a particular sale may not always be possible, and, even if the export license is ultimately granted, the process may be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. Violations of the United States sanctions or export control laws can result in significant fines or penalties, and possible incarceration for responsible employees and managers could be imposed for criminal violations of these laws.