Mercari Inc

TSE:4385

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Unknown Executive]

It is time, so we would like to begin Mercari's FY 2022 Second Quarter Earnings briefing. In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, this session will be streamed live. We would like to begin by introducing the presenters today. President, Fumiaki Koizumi; and CFO, Sayaka Eda. Koizumi will start the presentation. Thank you.

[Fumiaki Koizumi, executive]

Thank you. Thank you for joining the live streaming of Mercari's FY 2022 Second Quarter Earnings briefing. Today, myself and CFO, Eda, will be presenting. I would like to first explain how we have strengthened our management structure. And after that, CFO Eda will take you through our financial results.

So jumping right in. With respect to strengthening the management structure, as we announced last November, from January this year, 2022, we have strengthened our management structure to support further growth of the entire Mercari Group. With this change, we will strengthen alignment between the global businesses and Japan region's businesses as well. So Mercari Japan's CEO, Tamonoki, has now become the Senior Vice President of Global Expansion. And John Lagerling, the Mercari U.S. CEO, will also serve as the Senior Vice President of Global Strategy. So he will be fulfilling both roles. And so we have strengthened the global expansion team. Yamada was overseeing the Japan region business, but in order to accelerate synergy of our operations in Japan, as you can see here, now Aoyagi -- Naoki Aoyagi has been appointed as Senior Vice President of Japan.

So with respect to the Japan businesses, we will continue to accelerate synergy and also focus on global expansion.

The next page is the new organizational structure. In response to the changes I've described, the CEOs of each company have also changed. So Merlogi, Mercoin, those are new businesses you see here, but we will need to work even more closely, so we want to fortify the Japan region as well.

Moving on, we would like to tell you about the ESG committee we have established. As we mentioned in the sustainable -- sustainability report issued in the summer last year, in order to ensure that our senior executive committee, which discusses and makes decisions on group management can spend ample time to deliver on ESG issues, we established the ESG committee in December last year. As such, we can examine each management decision from the ESG viewpoint to balance our business and ESG initiatives.

Our businesses has a high affinity with ESG. We're trying to create a circular economy, and this is core to our business. So we hope to implement ESG initiatives more swiftly. And our CEO, Yamada, will chair the committee and group company CEOs and ESG officers from each entity will meet 4 times a year to drive execution plans and monitor the progress of each undertaking. And here is the list of the second quarter initiatives. We basically had 5 topics. So here are some examples of what we have done.

At the top, you will see that SBTs as well as other initiatives for the user environment. and also security as well. The third point, though, the local empowerment, this is actually connected to Mercari shops. And I would like to give you a detail example of our initiative in this area. So in terms of Mercari shops we launched last October, but we already have welcomed many businesses onboard, and many of them are from rural areas. So that's something that we found out after starting. We've seen that 60% of shipments are actually from rural areas, so we believe that the EC penetration in rural areas was quite low. But through Mercari Shops, we are able to increase EC penetration, help revitalize the economies in these regions.

So for example, a company that is selling produce from Yamagata Prefecture opened their first EC, Mercari Shop has sold JPY 10 million in 1 month. So we are seeing more and more of the successful case examples. And we are working closely together with local governments, 5 to be exact. And this morning, we just signed another cooperation agreement with Yamagata. So we hope to continue to sign more closely with local communities to help revitalize these communities.

Next, we would like to give you an overview of the financial results. The CFO of Mercari, Eda, will take it from here.

[江田 清香, executive]

Thank you very much. This is the financial results, and I will take you through them. Here are the progress and performance highlights for the second quarter. As a group, as Koizumi mentioned, we have strengthened our management structure and actively hired employees to create the business foundations necessary for Mercari Group's sustainable growth. Compared to the fiscal targets we announced last year in August, Mercari JP and U.S's GMV growth rate and Mercari JP's adjusted OPM fell short as of the end of the second quarter. But at the moment, we have not made any changes to these targets. We will continue to focus on building a safe and secure usage environment. And the entire group is undertaking various initiatives, including identity verification and relevant products.

With respect to each company, Mercari JP booked record high GMV again and continues to grow rapidly. We have made enhancements to personalization and web to build a service that is easy and safe to use for all age groups. With respect to Merpay, the credit business we have been focusing on since last year, more specifically, the fixed amount payments have grown steadily, surpassing JPY 35 billion in outstanding debt. And we give out credit based on unique criteria, including Mercari's usage history and AI technologies. And we believe this is an area that will continue to grow.

Marketing activities have captured high demand during the holiday season worked well in the Mercari U.S., resulting in higher MAUs and the GMV grew by 17% year-on-year. The MAU in December was record high, reaching 5.3 million. The Mercari Shops operated by Souzoh was made available to all individual and corporate business operators on October 7. And after the full roll out, we have continued to see healthy growth in the number of shops and listed items. And in order to provide business operators a selling experience, we actively undertook marketing campaigns.

We established Merlogi in October last year as a subsidiary that will provide logistics services in order to ensure continuous and stable growth of Mercari. And in the second quarter, we also began a POC using Mercari Post as a place for collecting shipments. Mercoin is continuing to obtain crypto-asset-related licenses. Last week, Kashima Antlers updated its management vision on the occasion of the club's 30th anniversary.

With respect to the second quarter KPI summary, the consolidated net sales increased 44% year-on-year, landing at JPY 37.5 billion and operating losses was JPY 2.6 billion. From this fiscal year, the accounting policies of the shipping fees for Mercari US has changed, and the shipping fees are now booked as growth rather than net. So excluding this impact, the net sales for the consolidated quarter increased by 22% year-on-year, ending at JPY 31.6 billion. The Mercari JP GMV grew steadily by 15% year-on-year during the high season, and the adjusted OPM was 26%, the same as the previous quarter.

Merpay users for this quarter was 12.14 million, and the GMV for Mercari US grew 17% year-on-year and MAU grew 21% year-on-year to 5.12 million. To delve deeper into the financial highlights. As mentioned before, in addition to the continuous growth of the 3 key business pillars and the impact of the change in accounting policy of Mercari US sales recognition, the consolidated net sales increased 44% year-on-year to JPY 37.5 billion. Excluding the impact of the change in the accounting policy, the GMV grew 22% year-on-year to JPY 31.6 billion. More over, we have proactively invested in the future growth of each business, therefore, we have recorded operating losses of JPY 2.6 billion.

We have aggressively hired employees from the end of 2020 to prepare for future growth. So the number of Mercari Group's employees increased by 60 -- Mercari's employees increased by 62 from the end of the first quarter to 1,891 in the second quarter. We will continue to hire top caliber talent, mainly focusing on engineers.

Now moving on to take a closer look at each company. With respect to the Mercari JP, GMV and MAU by conducting, for example, invitation campaigns, we have seen an increase in new users and CRM initiatives also revitalize existing users. Souzoh user base has steadily expanded and the MAU increased 13% year-on-year to 20.45 million. As a result, the GMV in the second quarter was record high and landed at JPY 226.8 billion.

On the other hand, as a result of the state of emergency ending in October last year, people have started to go out rather than work at home. So the number of listings and purchase frequency decreased. Those are the key reasons. Therefore, the GMV for the quarter was lower than expected, increasing by 15% year-on-year.

Mercari JP's net sales increased 15% year-on-year, ending at JPY 21.8 billion. We proactively invested to expand our user base. Therefore, the adjusted OPM was down 7 points ending at 26%, the same as the first quarter. We will continue to invest in order to achieve sustainable growth.

There are no major changes to the Q-o-Q cost structure. However, year-on-year, the ad spend has increased as a result of the active promotions we conducted to acquire new users. With Mercari JP, we are continuously improving our products so that a wide age group can use our service easily and safely. One such improvement is personalization. This fiscal year, we want to improve the ARPU. As such, we have developed the ability to personalize in real time and suggest products that are more pertinent for each user. In 2019, we were only showing recommended products on the time line based on view history. But since then, we have continuously made investments. And by the end of 2021, we could show recommendations by, for example, combining brands and categories to optimize recommendations for each user. As a result, we have seen more users purchasing products shown on the home screen, and the accuracy of our personalization is steadily improving.

We are also continuing to make improvements to our web service, so it can become a second gateway after the app. Our user base is diversifying with young as well as middle age and elderly users. So in order to improve the UX, we are adding functions that were previously only available on the app. More specifically, we have enabled keyword suggestions during search, the ability to sort by recommended order and coupons can now be used on the web as well. So we are offering more diverse payment options.

And like the app, users can look at recommended products on their home screen, so personalization is becoming more enhanced. As a result, we have seen more new buyers purchasing via the web. And the ratio of the GMV from the web has also increased from 3% to 8% over the last 2.5 years. So web users is steadily on the rise.

Furthermore, from December 23, 2021, at the end of the year, as a first step to entering the NFT business, we have begun working with Pacific League marketing and started providing Pacific League Exciting Moments beta version, which allows users to purchase video content. We would like to draw on our group synergy to create an open marketplace. But in order to make NFTs more accessible and familiar to more people and to democratize NFTs, we want to start by selling digital content.

Currently, we are only selling such content on the primary market, but in the future, we would like to utilize blockchain technology to manage content and enable resell.

Next, moving on to Souzoh. Souzoh made Mercari Shops available to all businesses, including individuals and companies on October 7. And since the full roll out, it has been doing well. A limited number of functions are currently available, but we have undertaken TV commercial campaigns to raise awareness among businesses and to enable people to experience selling, so the number of shops as well as listings, which impact future sales, are increasing gradually.

To continue to create a selling experience, we will make further improvements to functions and actively implement marketing initiatives. In order to further expand Mercari Shops, we will be providing capabilities that will enable businesses to set up standalone websites for their online shops outside of the app, and businesses will be able to manage and operate the shops inside and outside the app using their smartphones.

As for Merpay, we will continue to focus on 3 areas: Payment, Credit and Growing Wallet. With respect to the Credit business, we began focusing on last fiscal year, fixed amount payments have steadily increased, and the outstanding balance has surpassed JPY 35 billion. We will raise a limit of liquidated fixed amount payment receivables so that we may grow even further. With Merpay, we will continue to establish and expand the revenue base by focusing on the credit business. We are providing the appropriate amount of credit to users based on Mercari usage history and AI technology. In doing so, we aim to realize a high collection rate and to create a safer, more secure environment for our users.

Moving on to Mercari U.S. The marketing campaigns we launched to capture the holiday season high demand performed well. We gained many new users in a single month of December and saw record high MAU of 5.3 million. Both MAU and AOV increased. And as a result, the GMV in the second quarter was $308 million and the MAU increased by 21% year-on-year. Due to the PPF adoption in the middle of last fiscal year, net sales increased by 22% year-on-year. However, the adjusted OPM decreased as a result of the increase in ad spend and personnel costs due to active hiring.

As indicated in the second hand holiday report we announced last year, demand for secondhand items during the holiday season is increasing year after year. As such, we conducted online initiatives to acquire new users and reactivate existing users by focusing on high-demand categories. These included daily campaigns and coupons. These performed well and the MAU increase, which ended up being a major GMV growth driver for the second quarter. There is still little impact to the GMV at the moment, but we have seen same day delivery Mercari Local and deferred payments we are offering together with Zip contribute to higher unit prices and new user acquisition.

We also rolled out new marketing initiatives. To raise awareness and expand the user base, we tied up with Sing 2 last December and aired TV commercials. Moreover, we created our first pop-up store in San Francisco in December during a limited period of time, and this enabled customers to experience the convenience of our service and learn about the positive impact reselling can have on the environment.

Lastly, here is the summary of the focus areas for the second half of the year. For the group as a whole, since we have strengthened our management structure starting January 1 this year, we would like to promote global expansion and cooperation between our businesses in Japan to generate synergy. Regarding Mercari JP, while keeping an eye on the efficiency of our investment, we will conduct marketing campaigns and implement off-line and product initiatives to capture more of the 36 million potential listed -- listers. We will create a business structure that will enable future growth and also create a safer, more secure environment for our users.

With Merpay, we will continue to create a safer and more secure environment for our users and also to help the credit business grow, we will improve profitability and expand our user base by improving our product and undertaking marketing initiatives. And regarding Mercari U.S., we will continue to simplify listing on Mercari Local, and we will continue to actively invest in marketing as well and strengthen our CRM initiatives so that we may continue to grow.

And this concludes our FY 2022 second quarter earnings briefings. Thank you very much for joining us today.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]