AUTO1 Group SE
XETRA:AG1
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AUTO1 Group SE
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Good afternoon or good morning to our American participants. Welcome to the AUTO1 Group First Quarter 2020 Results Presentation. I'm Philip Reicherstorfer, Group Treasurer. This afternoon, I'm joined by Christian Bertermann, Co-Founder and CEO; and Markus Boser, our CFO. We will start with a presentation followed by questions and answers.
[Operator Instructions]
Before I hand over, I must make you aware of the safe harbor provisions at the beginning of the presentation. This will apply to any forward-looking statements made by management today. And now over to Christian.
Thank you, Philip. Good afternoon from Berlin, and welcome to the AUTO1 Group Q1 earnings call. Over the course of Q1, we continued to execute well towards our goal of becoming the largest and most profitable car dealer in the EU. In a complex and challenging environment, our merchant business expanded its market leadership further with new company highs for revenue and units sold, driven in part by strong momentum in remarketing.
In retail, we achieved new records for revenue and units sold and improved gross profit per unit by EUR 300 within the last quarter. Most importantly, we delivered a new all-time high for Autohero NPS, emphasizing our relentless focus on delivering outstanding experiences for our customers.
By today, we own the largest B2B business and the biggest online retailer in the EU which we see as a confirmation of our investment strategy and the unique platform we have built over the last decade. We are confident that we are best positioned to further lever the online buying opportunity across Europe, helping this market to deliver the experiences customers deserve. However, given that we aim to be a resilient, financially healthy and long-lasting company, we are turning our eyes increasingly to the P&L of our different business segments and are making group profitability a key focus.
In the first quarter of this year, we increased group revenue to EUR 1.64 billion from just EUR 900 million the year before. We achieved EUR 124 million of total gross profit for Q1, EUR 38 million or 44% more than 1 year ago. I am proud of our teams achieving these strong results given the challenging market environment we operate in.
The start of the war in Ukraine impacted our business and consumer sentiment for the full month of March and continues to have an impact, albeit being less strong. Also, other limiting factors continue to be present throughout Q1. Omicron made capacity planning challenging, especially in refurbishment, but also impacted sickness rates in general. Used car prices stayed at elevated levels, but based on our data, did not increase further for now. Altogether, the used car market continued to be a tough environment throughout Q1.
As introduced in the Q4 earnings call, we operate on the 2 strategic goals that represent our way of doing business. First, we aim to create outstanding customer experiences. We are convinced that providing excellent customer experiences will allow us to build one of the most strongest brands in this industry, expanding our future market share and profitability potential. Second, we aim to leverage the unique platform we have built to gain market share. Growing momentum in our platform will allow us to expand our market leadership on automatic pricing and precision, reduce logistics cost per car further and leverage price differences across our markets better. We believe that these factors will directly translate into higher future market shares and increased profitability.
We continue to deliver many outstanding experiences throughout the first quarter of this year. As a result, our customers awarded us with a Net Promoter Score of 73 for April. This is 12 points higher than our NPS of 61 1 year ago and only 7 points away from our long-term target of 80 which we stated at the IPO. Major drivers of this improvement were faster delivery times, a reduction of orders delivered late, a much improved imperfection presentation as well as a better pickup experience at our branches.
Our continued success in customer satisfaction over the last 12 months is also externally captured by the combined Trustpilot score for our retail markets, increasing for -- from 4.3 to 4.6 out of 5 stars possible. It makes us proud that we are delivering experiences for our customers that they value much better than what they were used to. However, we're only serving a small fraction of the market yet.
For most Europeans, online buying is still a relatively new phenomenon. While the experience we provide is receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback for those that decided for it, a lot of European customers are for the first time learning about our offering just now. This is why we continue to invest strongly into building up the Autohero brand, with the aim to be the go-to place for buying cars online.
We have made strong progress with building awareness for Autohero in all of our markets over the last year and continued this track throughout Q1. The average Autohero brand awareness across all our European markets after just 6 quarters of brand building is now 21% with Germany leading the ranking at 29%. Going forward, we will also make our brand image a key focus area when further investing into the Autohero brand. We believe that a positive brand image will drive increased consideration of our offering, in turn leading to stronger conversion of traffic into orders and deliveries. These effects will drive down overall marketing cost per car, thus leading to much improved unit economics in Autohero over time.
Turning to our second strategic goal, leveraging our platform to gain market share. We continue to use the sourcing power of the platform we have built. In a market environment that remains constrained in overall available inventory, we purchased 179,000 cars throughout Q1. This is 36% or 48,000 cars more than 1 year ago. We used our platform to source over 21,000 units for retail, securing our base for ongoing growth in Autohero.
In the market environment, the shrunken units sold across the European Union, our platform gained market share for the fourth consecutive quarter, proving the resiliency of our business model.
In addition to our 2 strategic goals, we laid out 3 financial goals on our path to the profitable company we want to be. First, we aim to grow the number of units sold in both our merchant and retail businesses as they are a key driver of our revenue and gross profit. Secondly, we aim to grow total gross profit by a unit and GPU increases. And third, we are making our plan to reach group profitability a top priority going forward.
Units in our merchant business have grown by over 26% year-over-year to 155,000 units sold. Within merchant, remarketing grew 43% to 23,700 units sold over the last 12 months. Revenue in merchant grew 74% year-over-year to EUR 1.39 billion, and that is EUR 590 million more than 1 year ago.
In retail, we delivered 14,600 units in the first quarter, which represents an increase of 86% year-over-year. Our retail business achieved a new high of EUR 244 million of revenue, EUR 148 million more than 12 months ago. As outlined in our last call, units in retail have been impacted by a set of adverse external factors over the course of Q1. Nevertheless, we used our time and concentrated on improvements of retail GPU.
For Q1, we achieved a total gross profit per unit of EUR 718, which is EUR 300 more than 1 quarter ago. Consequently, we crossed the EUR 10 million mark of gross profit per quarter for the first time in retail. Overall, the good result in Q1 GPU makes us confident that we are well on track towards our long-term target of EUR 3,000, which will be driven by further improvements in selection, automatic pricing, a strong consumer finance offering and conversion improvements within our shop.
Our total gross profit increased by 44% year-over-year to EUR 124 million from EUR 86 million Q1 12 months ago. Besides the substantial increase in units sold year-over-year, we increased GPU in merchant by EUR 44 to a total of EUR 732 in Q1 of this year. This puts us comfortably in the middle of our medium-term GPU guidance. At the same time, our Q1 retail GPU of EUR 718 represents a substantial step-up towards reaching our '23 target of EUR 1,000.
I would like to hand over to Markus for some details on financials now.
Thank you, Christian. Our first quarter 2022 showed strong top line growth for both units and revenue. Our focused execution in Autohero enabled us to increase our Autohero GPU by around EUR 300 per car in the quarter, which, together with growth in units, led to the Autohero gross profit almost doubling quarter-on-quarter and more than quintupling year-on-year.
Merchant GPU was up 6.5% year-on-year and merchant gross profit up 35% year-on-year.
We kept adjusted EBITDA broadly flat quarter-on-quarter with a reduction in OpEx, demonstrating our increased focus on cost control while still making the necessary investments to improve our GPU in Autohero in the midterm and execute our long-term plan.
We continued to maintain a strong cash position with no corporate debt. Over the course of Q1, we increased the size of our unique-rated nonrecourse ABS facility from EUR 435 million to EUR 1 billion, enabling us to efficiently finance our inventory investments, bridging to our ending cash of EUR 654 million from the EBITDA loss of EUR 47 million.
We increased our inventory by EUR 177 million, primarily to grow our retail business. At the same time, we further grew our consumer loan business by EUR 25 million to a total of around EUR 74 million of consumer finance receivables at the end of Q1.
In total, we drew EUR 185 million on our inventory ABS to end the quarter with EUR 654 million in cash, which together with our undrawn but committed lines, gives us circa EUR 960 million of total liquidity.
Shortly after quarter end, we closed EUR 150 million consumer finance, asset-backed securitization, which is not yet reflected in the Q1 numbers, which funds consumer loans we've made since the beginning of last year and also provides runway for further consumer lending with a scalable, bank-friendly and pan-European structure.
On to guidance. We maintain our guidance across all metrics. While our Q1 and current trading provides the basis for AUTO1 to continue to gain market share, we believe that the EU used car market is in a period of uncertainty with historically high car prices and petrol prices weighing on sentiment.
We continue to be on track for our revenue guidance of EUR 5.7 billion to EUR 6.8 billion. We are also on track for the midpoint of our gross profit guidance of EUR 470 million to EUR 580 million.
On EBITDA, we believe that Q1 and Q2 will be the low of our EBITDA losses, but are executing our plan to increase profitability towards the second half of the year. We maintain our Q4 2023 adjusted EBITDA profitability target.
In units, we are still on track for the middle of our unit range of 650,000 to 770,000 total units. In merchant, we are on track to be in the middle of the unit range, but the top end would require a significant improvement in sentiment.
In Autohero, our focus on GPU and scaling the business in a financially healthy way with improving unit economics means that we are just under the middle of the range at the moment, but are continuing to work on conversion for the second half of the year.
Now over to Christian for some closing words.
Thanks, Markus. Yes, as shown in the last call, our merchant business is profitable with EUR 125 million of segment contribution for last year. It will play a key role on our track to cash flow breakeven for the group.
We're currently looking into levels representing roughly EUR 50 million of additional merchant contribution which we aim to activate near term. At the same time, we're taking a close look on the Autohero P&L with the aim to improve unit economics substantially. We believe that further improvement in GPU, lower marketing cost per unit as a result of conversion improvements and digitizing manual processes within retail operations will be the key drivers for the coming months. We aim to match our negative cash flow from investment into retail with the positive cash flow from merchant over the next couple of quarters, confirming group breakeven on an adjusted EBITDA base for Q4 next year.
Thank you, everyone, for your attention, and we will now turn over to Q&A.
[Operator Instructions]
Thank you, Rafael. With that, we will start with Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs.
I have 3, please. The first one is just on the overall environment for used car sales. Obviously, Q1 was affected by the war, which has [indiscernible] demand, especially in the markets that were surrounding the Ukraine and Russia. Have you seen any major change so far in April, May in terms of whether it's consumer demand, supply constraints, sourcing capability across your various markets? That's the first question.
Do you want me to go to all my questions? Or should I just go for...
Maybe we go one by one, Lisa.
Okay. Perfect.
So on the environment for used cars, in fact, I would say that March has been like a low point with very high level of uncertainty, and we have seen the demand coming back. I would say probably 70%, 80% of, what, the negative effect would have been in March. There's still an impact, but it's a much smaller one. Overall, if you look at market numbers, the markets that, yes, we operate in across Europe continue to be a little bit smaller than they were used -- than they were a year ago. And obviously, this doesn't create a situation where we will have a lot of additional liquidity. So overall, I would say the market condition remains stable, but we have recovered roughly 80% from the additional impact from the Ukraine war.
That's helpful. The second question is on the Autohero GPU where there's clearly been a significant improvement from Q4 to Q1. Could you talk about the main drivers of that? And how much is the in-housing of your refurbishment capacity contributing to that improvement? And if it's not contributing as yet, like what's the level of sequential improvements should be expecting for the rest of the year? You talked about like significant improvement. So just trying to size like, could we get to 800 by the end of the year or 850?
In total, GPU, yes, I think we have not yet really seen a major impact of internal refurbishment in those numbers. So you can assume that we roughly internally refurbish at the moment 1,000 to 1,200 units a month. And we expect that to go to a much higher share until the end of the year. So at the moment, 10% to 15% of our units are internally refurbished.
So the big driver of that is additional cost control at branches and at refurbishment centers. So we are -- we have just gotten smarter in detecting costly refurbishments that we are then not doing, and we have been smarter in changing the system, making sure that we are detecting high expense refurbishment before the actual process starts. And this is how we improve the system and this is how we, I would say, generated most of the effect in GPU that you see there. And now, I guess, it's step by step.
For the rest of the year, I would say it's all the other factors that haven't yet played into the Autohero GPU, which is improved selection connected with higher stock turns with it. It's a continuous increase in internal refurbishment, but it's also smart cost management of external refurbishment. It's smartly understanding and also improving the logistics cost per car, the internal one as well as the external one. And it's one of the biggest levers, obviously, conversion and therefore, connected marketing cost per car. This will be our focus for the remainder of the year, and this is why we're also positive on additional improvement in order here GPU.
And my last question is on free cash flow. Clearly, a lot of focus from investors on potential, like balance sheet risk and level of cash burn expected in the business. How comfortable -- or what can you basically tell us that makes you comfortable you can manage your sort of balance sheet risk that you wouldn't need to raise capital, which obviously will come at a very, very high cost and you could basically reach your free cash flow breakeven without having to raise additional capital? But if you could just talk about confidence you have there, what are the levers you have to get there.
Yes. So as of the end of Q1, we had, as we talked about, about EUR 655 million of cash on the balance sheet and another EUR 150 million or so of headroom in our existing facility to leverage our inventory. I talked about post Q3 end, we raised -- we issued EUR 150 million consumer finance ABS, and we used around EUR 70 million of that to refinance already existing consumer receivables. So already taking on a pro forma basis our cash up. We have around EUR 180 million left over for our existing CapEx plan, although we've spent relatively little of that, and I think we're looking at that quite cautiously.
I think the second point I would make is, we have a core profitable merchant business, which we, as a one-off, disclosed last year for being around EUR 125 million before headquarter costs of adjusted EBITDA profitability. At the same time, Christian talked about seeking to get a further EUR 50 million out of that business in terms of additional margin leverage, if you want, or operating profitability or segment profitability out of that business over the course of this year. And the remaining in terms of Autohero growth is very much in our control. And so we feel extremely comfortable with our cash position and our ability to continue to grow.
We see a lot of levers, both on the one hand, on the merchant business, as Christian already talked about, but also on the other hand, in terms of improving both the GPUs in Autohero. We've almost doubled that quarter-on-quarter as well as finding many more efficiencies in the operating model over the coming quarters.
And at the same time, I think we have built a lot of investment already, if you look at OpEx and headcount, to reach our near-term Autohero numbers. So we aim to build up like, while we fully believe in Autohero and the NPS that you've seen like with 73 is just another confirmation of the great service that we're providing to our customers. I think for us it's also important now to build this up in a financially healthy way, right? And this means improving unit economics quarter-over-quarter, also with an Autohero.
And then as Markus said, we have this unique situation that we have a cash-generating core business which we can use to fund our Autohero investments over time. And this is what we will do. So we aim to net the cash flow of the two to reach overall group cash flow breakeven in the time frame that we announced. And we think that we -- yes, we very much know what we are going to do from here to reach that target.
Thank you, Lisa. And now over to Will Packer from BNP.
Lisa touched on some of the things I was wishing to ask about, so I got to slightly change them. Firstly, you delivered healthy GPU growth. Can you just help us think through the trajectory over the course of the rest of the year for the coming quarters? As potentially used car pricing normalizes, how does that affect things?
Secondly, from Markus' comments on the outlook, it sounds like with consensus 82,000 Autohero units, that's perhaps a little bit high, and we should come down to just below the midpoint?
And then finally, can you just reiterate what you said on the EBITDA guidance for the year? Is the middle of the guidance the right way to think about it?
Sure. So in terms of just taking each of those points, the GPU trajectory, we stay with our EUR 1,000 GPU in 2023. So it will -- the kind of jumps that we saw between Q3 and Q4 and then Q4 and Q1, they're not going to be quite as great. So I would think of it as continued increases over the course of this year. We feel comfortable that we can continue to increase that GPU. But the level of those is going to taper off until we hit that EUR 1,000 for next year.
Yes. I think in terms of -- I think I spoke on Autohero units for this year. So yes, slightly below the midpoint of the 70 to 90 is lower than 82. So yes.
Third point on EBITDA guidance. Again, we stick to our guidance there. And so I think the midpoint is the right way to think about that on a full year basis.
Markus, just following up on the GPU for the merchant business and the trajectory over the course of the year.
I think we're sticking actually to what we had talked about from Q4. So it will be between -- I think we had said there between EUR 670 and EUR 800 million per merchant car.
Thanks, Will. And now over to Sherri Malek from RBC.
I just have 2. Just firstly, could you share some of your operational learning so far? Say, for example, as you ramp up refurbishment, what's going well? What are the challenges? What's currently a focus to improve? That would be helpful color.
And then also in a recession, how might your spending priorities change? Or what adjustments might you make short term?
So operational learnings. I think there's a ton of them. So we have scaled the Autohero business quite far on an annual run rate base when you compare it with what typical dealers would do. So we have learnings in every area of this business. So when it comes to inventory management, inventory holding period, how -- which signals are we using to move our cars throughout the inventory. We are learning a ton about the traffic that we are acquiring at the moment with quite a substantial amount of marketing budget for Autohero, how that converts.
We're still learning a lot about the product market fit in general. So what are things that customers are struggling with when buying a car online, what makes them more comfortable, how do we build up trust, how do we optimize our logistics network to reduce overall logistics cost per unit delivered, per unit transported already internally, how do we start or how do we modify and extend our evaluation process at the branches to perfectly inspect the car for retail. So in all of those areas, we are learning a lot. And now we're taking those learnings, and we will start improving unit economics from here, from the learnings, from the data points that we made. And I think this is partially already what got us to the EUR 718 of GPU, but this is also the base for further improvements in unit economics over the next 6 to 7 quarters in Autohero.
And yes, this is how it should be, I guess. This is how it should be, and this is also the spirit of the team. We've always been listening to our customers, always been listening to our merchant partners and just try to build a better product. And this is where all of those learnings and changes and improvements are coming from.
Markus, do you want to take the recession question?
Sure. So I think in terms of spending priorities in a recessionary environment, I think to some degree, it really reflects, I think, some of the overall levers that we've talked about already in terms of profitability, if you will. So I think point one is really to improve the profitability of the merchant business, so that we continue to have strong GPUs and able to get cash flow out of that business.
I think point two, though, is around Autohero and really thinking about efficiencies; first, just efficiencies on things like marketing. I think secondly, we spent or invested a lot in the OpEx in Autohero. So -- and think that now it's really more about focusing on how do we run through technology drive far more efficiencies from a personnel perspective and really focus more on those rather than growing for growth's sake.
And then finally, I'd say on the CapEx, we haven't changed our guidance on that. But at the same time, clearly, having spent relatively little of that on refurbishment, that's another area where I think we can potentially be a little bit more flexible on in terms of how we execute on that if that's the kind of environment we end up in.
And with that, over to George from HSBC (sic) [ Numis ].
It's Georgios from Numis. Just 1 question on the EUR 50 million merchant contribution. Can you just share a little bit more on those profit levers? Is that volume? Or is that kind of margin? Are you kind of putting pricing through the efficiencies, just anything you can share there?
Sure. So when I was referring to the EUR 50 million that we're looking into, what I was referring to is kind of on the same unit trajectory than, for instance, '21, on a fixed unit trajectory. So on the one hand, you can think of -- well, you can think of the EUR 50 million roughly like in 3 different buckets.
So the first one is, we looked at the fee structure within the merchant business. And we understood that haven't changed our fees for roughly 2 to 3 years in that, not taking into account additional costs that we were getting because of additional prices, fuel price increases and so on. So now we worked on a proposal to offset them always with the target that we're not getting more expensive on fees than our B2B competitors. So we launched this now over the course of May and this should activate a portion of that EUR 50 million.
The second one is we're looking into smart margin for consumer buying. So smart margin is really individualizing the margin per car, understanding how liquid is a car or how illiquid is the car in optimizing the margin based on the likelihood of sales. So that is a similar -- yes, if you want so, like the same direction and algorithmic optimization that auto pricing does, but just on the margin. It's something that we are quite fascinated about.
And the third one is within the merchant business, we're not sharing the financials there between remarketing and C2B. But remarketing is just much on an annual growth rate, much faster growing business than the C2B business, but, therefore, also has optimization in its P&L, if you look at remarketing on a stand-alone business, and that would form the third pillar of the EUR 50 million that we're looking into activating.
Great. That's really clear. Maybe just a follow-up just on remarketing. It looks like it's kind of growing pretty quickly again. We just interested how that proposition is developing, how dealers are engaging? How easy is it to recruit new dealers at the moment?
Yes. I mean the amount of cars that we get per active dealer is still reduced because of the overall used car environment. There's a lot of dealerships that supply into the B2B channel, just the units which they think they totally cannot sell on their own. So the amount of cars that were getting there per deal is reduced. But we have changed and optimized the product proposition for remarketing, specifically with the target also to go after medium and smaller dealerships, and that works out well. So -- the growth that we're seeing here is mainly coming from the fact that we are -- have a more active dealer base or more active dealers than we originally planned for, and this is driving the growth there. So it's more suppliers with less cars supplied per car -- less cars supplied per merchant.
Last, but not least, Andrew Porteous from HSBC.
A few questions from me. Just also here ASPs, I mean, look like there were sort of 16,700 in the quarter. Obviously, a good deal higher than they were. I'm just wondering how sustainable do you think that level is? And how much is it driven by, obviously, the pricing environment we've got at the moment?
Second question is really around inventory management. I mean, I guess on the assumption that used car pricing might normalize at some point, how would you manage inventory into sort of falling used car prices? Is that a risk and that you end up holding inventory over a period where it's perhaps depreciating more than it would normally do?
And then the last question was really about the competitive environment. I guess, we've seen Cazoo sort of pare back its ambitions in Europe, Carzam in the U.K. looks like its race is run. Are you seeing sort of easing competition? Do you think your sort of competitive position is enhanced?
Thank you. So on the Autohero ASPs, it's actually not a level that we want to keep up under all circumstances. So what I want to say with that is similar to what we could hear from the U.S. So the price environment for used cars is quite high. So what we're seeing is if we are increasing the share of lower-value vehicles, then we're actually getting an even better fit to what the audience wants at the moment. So we think that this could trend down a little bit, obviously, not in a way that it impacts our Autohero GPU target, right? So this is how we manage this one. I would think that it could come down a little bit over the course of the rest of the year, but not materially.
On inventory management, the vast majority of our cars were selling within 7 days. So the risk is really very limited there. When you look at the C2B part of the merchant business, in B2B, there is no inventory risk because it's a secured transaction. And in Autohero, we're continuously managing our inventory in a very disciplined way. So obviously, if prices are going down, then you need to manage accordingly. I think in such a situation, we are best prepared. Why? Because we're seeing the data as the first ones. So we're seeing the market moving on all fuel-type clusters and build your clusters at the same time. So we pretty much get the same picture from the data that we see in remarketing, the data that we see in C2B throughput and the data that we're now seeing since 1 year in retail. And that helps us to optimize this best.
Markus, maybe you want to want to add here from a CFO point of view.
No, I think that's right. I would just add one being the largest wholesaler, of course, I think we have the best ability to sell. And you saw that, in fact, if you look back to Q2 of 2020 at the height of the pandemic, where we were able to sell off in 1 quarter, 92% of our inventory. And obviously, at that point, margins came down, but we literally sold everything off in the thick of the pandemic when everything was shut, with, I think, 6% gross profit at that point in time. And that experience itself both colored our rated facility. So we have -- the reason we have the existing asset-backed securitization is actually because of that very detailed data analysis that the ratings agencies were able to do.
And so even in a rising interest rate environment, that continues to be the cheapest cost of capital for us. And last note I would make is I think we're very conservative in our allowances at the moment and also going forward. So I think they'll feel very comfortable with that.
I think last question was on competitive environment. I don't know, Christian, if you want to take that?
Yes. On the competitive landscape, I think nothing changed pretty much. So it wasn't so much of a focus point for us so far. And now it's neither. So like, yes, I think it makes sense in these times for everyone to concentrate on building a business that is financially healthy. This is what I would close with.
Okay. Thank you. And with that, we will close the call, and we hopefully talk to most of you over the next couple of days and otherwise latest with the Q2 announcement in early August. Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.