00:00 Speaker A

Supply chain technology provider Manhattan Associates reporting second quarter results earlier this week boosted by demand for its cloud services. Joining me now is Eric Clark, Manhattan Associate CEO and president. Good to see you, Eric. Thank you for joining us. Before I sort of dive into your numbers, I do want to talk about tariffs and the trade war because obviously, your clients are sitting at the intersection of all of those cross currents. What are you hearing from clients right now as to sort of how they’re navigating the tariffs?

01:06 Eric Clark

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. And what we’re seeing is early days when these tariffs were announced right after Liberation day, lots of customers maybe went into a little bit of a pause mode to try to predict what was going to happen or to try to understand the uncertainty. Since then, I think people have understood that this isn’t going to be quick, and some of these deadlines are going to move. And it’s going to take some time. So the forward leaning companies are really getting back to their strategies and executing their strategies. And I think it’s not too dissimilar to what we’ve seen with other supply chain disruptions like COVID and bridge collapses, et cetera. While there’s a little bit of a pause in the beginning, I think it very quickly confirms the fact that supply chain is mission critical software. And this is not an area that companies are going to pause or delay for a long time. This is an area that they consider not only mission critical, but strategic.

02:49 Speaker A

At the beginning of the year, we were also seeing not just some contracts being paused, but the opposite in some cases, right? Orders coming in to try to sort of front run the tariffs to build up inventory. Is that inventory now? Has it been worked down? Are we how, in other words, I guess right now, how would flows compare to normal conditions?

03:34 Eric Clark

Yeah, it varies across industry, and, you know, what we’re seeing from our customers is they’re trying to be prepared for whatever might come next. And from a software perspective, that’s what we do. You know, we can help them be prepared and make sure that they can react and have their correct strategies and agility so that they can do the things that they need to do in real time.

04:21 Speaker A

And so when it comes to your business, I know that a lot of the contracts that you all sign are sort of longer term contracts, right? Have you seen any disruption to that? Have you seen any of your customers sort of pulling back on spending amidst all of this?

04:49 Eric Clark

You know, it’s interesting, as you mentioned, we announced earnings earlier this week, and we had a strong Q2 and a strong first half. It was a beaten raised quarter, and with really strong margin expansion. And when you look at, you know, the difficult and uncertain macroeconomic environment, the past three quarters at Manhattan have been our strongest bookings, sales quarters in the history of the company. So you can argue that all three of those quarters were, if not challenging, at least changing macro environment, and we continue to do well from a bookings performance. And not only that, but new logo bookings has been the strength of our bookings performance. So we’re able to actually go out there and take market share from our competitors. And you know, that also gives us opportunity to continue to expand and cross-sell into those customers in the future. So we’re feeling really good about the commitments that our customers are making and that customers in the supply chain space are making with their supply chain software.

06:23 Speaker A

And Eric, would you say I think sort of during the pandemic, we all paid a lot more attention to supply chains than we ever had, of course, because they were affecting us directly. But there was also a lot of discussion about how antiquated the systems were, both the actual physical infrastructure, but also sort of the things that you help people do now, right? That that stuff was sort of obsolete in many cases. Where are we now? And how much further does supply chain modernization need to go?

07:24 Eric Clark

Well, I think we’re in the early days of supply chain modernization. And at Manhattan, I think we’re rated a leader across our product portfolio, and I think we’re really the only true cloud-based SAS provider across the supply chain space. And that’s why we continue to have high win rates in the market, and that’s why we continue to drive that expansion with these strong bookings quarters. Again, I point to with this uncertainty in the market, it is confirming the fact that this is mission critical software and confirming the fact that this needs to be part of the strategy. And that’s why people are really leaning into the modern technology that we can offer.

08:43 Speaker A

Eric, thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

08:50 Eric Clark

Yeah, thank you.