About Eddie Capel
Eddie Capel, executive chairman of Manhattan Associates, stated on the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call that the company surpassed $1 billion in total revenue and achieved records in RPO, operating profit, free cash flow, and earnings per share. He said the company does not expect tariffs to have a direct impact on its business, describing any effect as likely modest. Capel noted that the company signed its first Manhattan Active Supply Chain Planning customer and that a large-scale store technology replacement cycle is emerging. He also said the company remains cautious on the global economy, with about 10% of customers reducing planned services work.
In earlier remarks, Capel described the company’s cloud-native, microservices-based solutions as versionless and updated every 90 days. He said legacy technology architectures are incapable of unifying processes like distribution and transportation. Capel also stated that retailers are seeing a smoothing of holiday demand, with sales promotions starting earlier and lasting longer, and that longer advertising periods are expected to help drain down inventory. He characterized the company’s consistent investment in research and development as unmatched in the industry.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Eddie Capel's recent appearances.
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Transcript (7 segments)
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Jon0:01
Major retailers joining us. Eddie Capel, I'm curious what you're seeing your customers doing adjusting to this demand environment that's shifted so quickly. We're seeing the impact of that in some of these results. Your own results, you beat on the bottom line, I suppose, but investors not necessarily taking that in stride.
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Eddie Capel0:27
Well, you know, a couple of body blows this morning, maybe Jon. For us, six straight quarters of record revenue and beat on the bottom line as well. Up 17% year over year. So we feel pretty good about that. We're here for the long term. We are intrinsic innovators in innovation, that's the service that we provide to our customers. From an inventory perspective, we've seen that global mile focus, getting inventory from the offshore manufacturers through the ports, into the country. We started to see that ease, the costs start to normalize and so forth. So retailers, manufacturers, branded companies, spending much more time focused on loyalty of their customers, making sure that they can deliver on the promise that they've made for this particular holiday season, and that's what we're here to help with.
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Jon1:30
That's kind of what I'm wondering about, is the amount of discounting that's going to be necessary to get enough consumer demand going to work down that inventory, right, so that they'll be a reordering process through Q4. And how that's working at a time Adobe projected we're not going to see the same kind of demand spike around Black Friday, Cyber Monday that we traditionally do. Are you seeing that kind of evening out of demand, playing out in a supply chain that's already got, as you mentioned, all that inventory to digest?
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Eddie Capel2:07
Plenty of inventory to digest. I think we are going to see sales, promotions start early. We're going to see a smoothing this particular season. I don't think we're going to see quite the peak and spikes we would normally see on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It'll start sooner, and last longer. And you'll see those prices get more aggressive as the season goes on to make sure the inventory can be drained out. But at the same time, we have to make sure we maintain loyalty and resilience for our customers. Making sure that we meet those customer promises is going to be super, super important.
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Jon2:48
Do you have insight, Eddie, into whether your customers are doing the same things that they normally do to sort of stimulate that demand when it comes to discounting? That's when you see, potentially the likes of Google through search, Meta, Facebook, through those ads benefit at least for a while, right, because you've got to generate some consumer interest to move that inventory. But I guess the concern is, if there's not that demand spike, do advertisers continue to lean into doing that? Is your sense that your customers are trying to generate that demand in the same way they usually do?
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Eddie Capel3:30
I think we're going to see longer advertising periods. I think the ads are going to start sooner and last longer. In order to be able to drain down the inventory we now have on hand that was in such scarce supply last year, you're going to see that ad demand be more consistent over a longer period of time.
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Jon3:53
I guess we'll see if it's consistent at the levels that Alphabet showed, which...
