Edgio (EGIOQ) Risk Factors

The market for our services is characterized by rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards, and new product and service introductions. Our operating results depend on our ability to help our clients deliver better digital experiences to their customers, understand user preferences, and predict industry changes. Our operating results also depend on our ability to improve and expand our solutions and services on a timely basis, and develop and extend new services into existing and emerging markets. This process is complex and uncertain. We must commit significant resources to improving and expanding our existing services before knowing whether our investments will result in services the market will accept. Furthermore, we may not successfully execute our initiatives because of errors in planning or timing, technical hurdles that we fail to overcome in a timely fashion, misunderstandings about market demand or a lack of appropriate resources. As prices for our core services fall, we will increasingly rely on new capabilities, product offerings, and other service offerings to maintain or increase our gross margins. Failures in execution, delays in improving and expanding our services, failures to extend our service offerings, or a market that does not accept the services and capabilities we introduce could result in competitors providing more differentiation than we do, which could lead to loss of market share, revenue, and earnings.

Companies, organizations or individuals, including our competitors and non-practicing entities, may hold or obtain patents or other proprietary rights that would prevent, limit or interfere with our ability to make, use or sell our services or develop new services, which could make it more difficult for us to operate our business. We have been and continue to be the target of intellectual property infringement claims by third parties. Companies holding Internet-related patents or other intellectual property rights are increasingly bringing suits alleging infringement of such rights or otherwise asserting their rights and seeking licenses. Any litigation or claims, whether or not valid, could result in substantial costs and diversion of resources from the defense of such claims. In addition, many of our agreements with clients require us to defend and indemnify those clients for third-party intellectual property infringement claims against them, which could result in significant additional costs and diversion of resources. If we are determined to have infringed upon a third party's intellectual property rights, we may also be required to do one or more of the following: - cease selling, incorporating or using products or services that incorporate the challenged intellectual property;- pay substantial damages;- obtain a license from the holder of the infringed intellectual property right, which license may or may not be available on reasonable terms or at all; or - redesign products or services. If we are forced to litigate any claims or to take any of these other actions, our business may be seriously harmed.

Our services and solutions are highly complex and are designed to be deployed in and across numerous large and complex networks. Our global network infrastructure has to perform well and be reliable for us to be successful. We will need to continue to invest in infrastructure and client success to account for the continued growth in traffic (and the increased complexity of that traffic) delivered via networks such as ours. We have spent and expect to continue to spend substantial amounts on the purchase and lease of equipment and data centers and the upgrade of our technology and network infrastructure to handle increased traffic over our network, implement changes to our network architecture and integrate existing solutions and to roll out new solutions and services. This expansion is expensive and complex and could result in inefficiencies, operational failures or defects in our network and related software. If we do not implement such changes or expand successfully, or if we experience inefficiencies and operational failures, the quality of our solutions and services and user experience could decline. Cost increases or the failure to accommodate increased traffic or these evolving business demands without disruption could harm our operating results and financial condition. For example, supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, increased demand, and political unrest (among other reasons) impact, and will likely continue to impact, our ability to procure equipment for upgrades, replacement parts, and network expansion within our expected price range or in extreme cases, at all. Global supply chain issues also affect our ability to timely deploy equipment, such as servers and other components required to keep our network up-to-date and growing to meet our clients' needs. Such delays in procuring and deploying the equipment required for our network could affect the quality and delivery time of services to our existing clients and prevent us from acquiring the network equipment needed to expand our business. Also, from time to time, we have needed to correct errors and defects in our software or in other aspects of our network. In the future, there may be additional errors and defects that may harm our ability to deliver our services, including errors and defects originating with third party networks or software on which we rely. These occurrences could damage our reputation and lead to the loss of current and potential clients, which would harm our operating results and financial condition.

A relatively small number of clients typically account for a significant percentage of our revenue. For the year ended December 31, 2022, sales to our top 20 clients accounted for approximately 73% of our total revenue and we had two clients, Amazon and Verizon, which represented more than 10% of our total revenue. As of December 31, 2022, Amazon, Verizon and Microsoft represented more than 10% of our of our total accounts receivable. In the past, the clients that comprised our top 20 clients have continually changed, and we also have experienced significant fluctuations in our individual clients' usage of, or decreased usage of, our services. As a consequence, we may not be able to adjust our expenses in the short term to address the unanticipated loss of a large client during any particular period. As such, we may experience significant, unanticipated fluctuations in our operating results that may cause us to not meet our expectations or those of stock market analysts, which could cause our stock price to decline.

Our once innovative and highly valued content delivery service has become commoditized in its current form and we are often in a multi-CDN supplier environment, where our clients can route traffic to us, or away from us, within seconds. This naturally results in on-going price compression. Simultaneously, we invest significant amounts in purchasing capital equipment as part of our effort to increase the capacity of our global network. Our investments in our infrastructure are based upon our assumptions regarding future demand, anticipated network utilization, as well as prices that we will be able to charge for our services. These assumptions may prove to be wrong. If the price that we are able to charge clients to deliver their content falls to a greater extent than we anticipate, if we over-estimate future demand for our services, are unable to achieve an acceptable rate of network utilization, or if our costs to deliver our services do not fall commensurate with any future price declines, we may not be able to achieve acceptable rates of return on our infrastructure investments, and our gross profit and results of operations may suffer dramatically. As we further expand our global network and services, and as we refresh our network equipment, we are dependent on significant future growth in demand for our services to justify additional capital expenditures. If we fail to generate significant additional demand for our services, our results of operations will suffer, and we may fail to achieve planned or expected financial results. There are numerous factors that could, alone or in combination with other factors, impede our ability to increase revenue, moderate expenses, or maintain gross margins, including: - continued price declines arising from significant competition;- increasing settlement fees for certain peering relationships;- failure to increase sales of our services;- increases in electricity, bandwidth and rack space costs or other operating expenses, and failure to achieve decreases in these costs and expenses relative to decreases in the prices we can charge for our services and products;- failure of our current and planned services and software to operate as expected;- loss of any significant or existing clients at a rate greater than our increase in sales to new or existing clients;- failure to increase sales of our services to current clients as a result of their ability to reduce their monthly usage of our services to their minimum monthly contractual commitment;- failure of a significant number of clients to pay our fees on a timely basis or at all or to continue to purchase our services in accordance with their contractual commitments; and - inability to attract high quality clients to purchase and implement our current and planned services. A significant portion of our revenue is derived collectively from our video delivery, cloud security, edge compute, origin storage, and support services. These services tend to have higher gross margins than our content delivery services. We may not be able to achieve the growth rates in revenue from such services that we or our investors expect or have experienced in the past. If we are unable to achieve the growth rates in revenue that we expect for these service offerings, our revenue and operating results could be significantly and negatively affected.

Laws and regulations that apply to communications and commerce conducted over the Internet are becoming more prevalent, both in the United States and internationally, and may impose additional burdens on companies conducting business online or providing Internet-related services such as ours. Increased regulation could negatively affect our business directly, as well as the businesses of our clients, which could reduce their demand for our services. For example, tax authorities abroad may impose taxes on the Internet-related revenue we generate based on where our internationally deployed servers are located. In addition, domestic and international taxation laws are subject to change. Our services, or the businesses of our clients, may become subject to increased taxation, which could harm our financial results either directly or by forcing our clients to scale back their operations and use of our services in order to maintain their operations. Also, the Communications Act of 1934, as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the "Act"), and the regulations promulgated by the FCC under Title II of the Act, may impose obligations on the Internet and those participants involved in Internet-related businesses. In addition, the laws relating to the liability of private network operators for information carried on, processed by or disseminated through their networks are unsettled, both in the United States and abroad. Network operators have been sued in the past, sometimes successfully, based on the content of material disseminated through their networks. We may become subject to legal claims such as defamation, invasion of privacy and copyright infringement in connection with content stored on or distributed through our network. In addition, our reputation could suffer as a result of our perceived association with the type of content that some of our clients deliver. If we need to take costly measures to reduce our exposure to the risks posed by laws and regulations that apply to communications and commerce conducted over the Internet, or are required to defend ourselves against related claims, our financial results could be negatively affected. Several other laws also could expose us to liability and impose significant additional costs on us. For example, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has provisions that limit, but do not eliminate, our liability for the delivery of client content that infringe copyrights or other rights, so long as we comply with certain statutory requirements. Also, the Children's On-line Privacy Protection Act restricts the ability of online services to collect information from minors and the Protection of Children from Sexual Predators Act of 1998 requires online service providers to report evidence of violations of federal child pornography laws under certain circumstances. There are also emerging regulation and standards regarding the collection and use of personal information and protecting the security of data on networks. Compliance with these laws, regulations, and standards is complex and any failure on our part to comply with these regulations may subject us to additional liabilities.

We are subject to stringent laws and legal requirements that regulate our collection, processing, storage, use and sharing of certain personal information, including the EU's General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR"), Brazil's Lei Geral de Protecao de Dados Pessoais ("LGPD"), and in the United States, the California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA"), among others. GDPR specifically imposes strict rules regulating data transfers of personal data from the EU to the United States. These laws and regulations are costly to comply with, could expose us to civil penalties and substantial penalties for non-compliance, as well as private rights of action for data breaches, all of which could increase our potential liability. This could also delay or impede the development or adoption of our products and services, reduce the overall demand for our services, result in negative publicity, increase our operating costs, require significant management time and attention, slow the pace at which we close (or prevent us from closing) sales transactions. Furthermore, these laws have prompted a number of proposals for new US and global privacy legislation, which, if enacted, could add additional complexity and potential legal risk, require additional investment of resources, and impact strategies and require changes in business practices and policies. We expect that we will continue to face uncertainty as to whether our evolving efforts to comply with our obligations under privacy laws will be sufficient. If we are investigated by data protection regulators, we may face fines and other penalties. Any such investigation or charges by data protection regulators could have a negative effect on our existing business and on our ability to attract and retain new clients.