Vroom, Inc.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 3 Mar 2021

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Vroom Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. I’ll now turn the conference over to Allen Miller. You may begin.

[Allen Miller:]

Thank you, Senedra. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us on Vroom’s fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer; and Dave Jones, Chief Financial Officer.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Thanks, Allen. And thanks to everyone for joining Vroom’s fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. I’d like to start by thanking all of our employees, investors, and board members for all of their hard work and support in building a great customer-centric public company. I could not be prouder of our team and all that we accomplished in 2020. First and foremost, we had a very successful initial public offering and follow-on raise, adding capital to our balance sheet so that we can continue to build an outstanding company. We doubled and extended our floor plan financing with Ally Financial, enabling us to scale our supply and meet our increasing demand. We also launched a series of preferred lending agreements with JPMorgan Chase, Ally Financial, and Santander Bank, providing attractive lending alternatives to our customers across the credit spectrum. Operationally, we added a new reconditioning partner to expand and diversify our resources, and also added a total of 14 strategic reconditioning facilities in the year, providing Vroom with quality reconditioning capacity for 2021 and beyond.

[Dave Jones:]

Thanks, Paul, and good afternoon, everyone. E-commerce units sold in the fourth quarter, increased 25% sequentially from Q3 and increased 74% year-over-year, to a new quarterly record for Vroom at just over 11,000 units. This was driven by increased consumer demand, higher inventory levels and increased marketing spends. Total listed vehicles which includes coming soon inventory and sales pending inventory, increased to about 16,000 units at the end of Q4 from about 12,000 at the end of Q3, and we’re currently at about 14,500 with approximately 46% of those vehicles available for sale. We are estimating 14,000 to 14,500 e-commerce unit sales in the first quarter of 2021. The mid range of that guidance would imply an accelerating 29% sequential growth quarter-to-quarter and 80% year-over-year growth. Again, as Paul mentioned, we’re expecting triple digit growth in e-commerce units for the full year of 2021. At the end of the quarter, we had 19 Vroom reconditioning centers around the country, including our proprietary Vroom VRC. These 19 facilities provide us with capacity to recondition more than 2,000 vehicles per week. We’re confident that we currently have the capacity to meet our full year 2021 targets. And we’re continuing to work with our reconditioning partners on expanding the number of VRCs, which gives us the benefits of a widely distributed reconditioning network. We anticipate expanding to 25 to 30 VRCs in 2021. As a reminder, we added 14 in 2020, despite the difficult COVID environment. At 30 VRCs, more than 50% of all U.S. households would be within 100 miles of one of our VRCs. We measure the quality of the reconditioning production at each of our VRCs at the VIN level. We utilize voice of the customer feedback to measure daily delighted scores from our customers, quality scores from our employees on the ground at each reconditioning facility and net promoter scores by location. We are pleased with the current quality of production at each of the 19 VRCs.

[Operator:]

And your first question comes from Zach Fadem with Wells Fargo.

[Zach Fadem:]

Hey, guys. First question for me, on the triple digit unit outlook for the year, which would imply about 70,000 e-comm units and the pretty meaningful step up in gross profit per unit. So considering where you’re expecting to start in Q1 for both units and GPU. Could you walk us through the cadence for how these metrics are expected to build particularly at the gross profit per unit line?

[Dave Jones:]

Yes. Zach, it’s Dave. Thanks for the question. Yes, you’re right. Obviously, as we said, we’ve got some of these bottlenecks that we are continuing to deal with in Q1 and more importantly, we’ve got some of that aged inventory that we have to continue to deal with. So I think Q1 will be suppressed to a certain extent in terms of gross profits per unit, but obviously we expect as, we’re confident that as our throughput increases as a result of the investments that we’re making, we’re going to be able to turn that inventory faster. And both unit economics and customer experience will improve. And so I think you’re right on. We would expect that gross profit per unit would improve sequentially during the year as those initiatives take get traction. And so that’s why we’ve given guidance to $1,750 to $1,850 for the full year which would obviously imply ascending gross profit per unit during the year.

[Zach Fadem:]

Got it. Thanks, Dave and – sorry, did you finish? Sorry.

[Dave Jones:]

Yes. Yes. Go ahead.

[Zach Fadem:]

Okay. And then operationally, when you’re sourcing cars from customers, could you talk about how you decide whether a car will be sold through the retail channel or the wholesale channel and how that informs the prices that you’re willing to pay for a trade in? And then to what extent is this process improved with CarStory in order to maximize your gross profit per unit on both the retail and wholesale side?

[Dave Jones:]

Yes. I guess, there’s two answers to that. And part of it is very simple and part of it is more complicated. We have retail criteria, right? And so we sell as an example, we typically retail vehicles that have less than 70,000 miles and are six years older, younger. So that’s kind of the first gates to get through in terms of how we decide whether a vehicle is retail or wholesale. And so we have a much more expansive criteria list than that, but those are kind of the main gating items. And then from there, it gets more complicated because a substantial majority of the vehicles that we are appraising and acquiring are done really through technology, right, through AI and so that one allows us to scale the business. We obviously, we couldn’t have enough buyers to buy ever to appraise the number of vehicles that we appraise every year. So the technology really comes into play. And that’s exactly, the point of the CarStory acquisition. They’re really experts in the industry. They’ve got the best industry data. And so as you can imagine, we can use that data to help us buy much better than we have in the past. We also think that we’ve more than doubled the number of data science and engineers – data scientists and engineers that we have available to us now. So we think there’s an acceleration of a lot of the projects that we had on the list around improving the buying process, managing inventory, everything we’ve always been addicted to data, as you know. And so this was – we think CarStory pluses that for us.

[Zach Fadem:]

Got it. Really appreciate the color.

[Operator:]

And your next question comes from Daniel Powell with Goldman Sachs.

[Daniel Powell:]

Great. Thank you. Just wanted to dig into a little bit of the puts and takes around GPU in the fourth quarter. And then coming into the first quarter, I understand there’s some seasonal depreciation dynamics that may have been a bit more severe than you were expecting, but in terms of the bottlenecks, just thinking about the unit guidance that you gave in the e-commerce channel for 4Q and sort of coming in at the midpoint of that versus coming in a good bit softer on the GPU guidance would imagine not all of that with sort of seasonal depreciation surprise. So just curious to hear sort of what the solutions are, and sort of what you’re putting in place so that those sales functions, bottlenecks? Don’t sneak up on you again.

[Dave Jones:]

Yes, Daniel, thanks. Yes, if you think about – if you separated into sales and sales support functions, right. So coming in and in the middle of the range on our top line as we were exiting Q3, we talked a decent amount about some challenges we had just in the sheer staffing around sales support. And so as we got our arms around that in Q4 that improved pretty drastically. And so I think it allowed us to hit our unit guidance for the quarter. But there was more demands there still during the quarter that I think we could have processed if we were further ahead of that. Like Paul and I mentioned, we have literally tripled the number of people that we have in that organization. We’re turning up a completely separate organization in the second half of the year. So we don’t have those issues again. But so that’s how we think about it from a top line perspective. I think, we’re really confident that we’ve got the solution there at the top of the funnel. We talked about seasonal depreciation in gross profits per unit. And I think, when you look at the data, there was call it 3.5% seasonal depreciation in Q4 of 19. And we were probably almost double that in Q4 of 20. But having said that, we expected some of it, I think the more significant impact on our gross profit per unit in Q4 was really from the bottlenecks, which caused our inventory to age a bit. And then, it causes us to have to lower prices on that inventory to get it to move or to take it to wholesale auction. So that’s really where we found the downward pressure on gross profit per unit in the quarter.

[Daniel Powell:]

Got you. Got you. And then as we sort of look at the earning season that’s passed, and some of the comments coming from the listing sites, just curious, as you all have seen your branding efforts start to get out there and participating in the superbowl what have you? Have you started to notice any conversion improvements coming through those third-party listing sites where maybe historically your early stage brand was not converting as well as maybe peers?

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes. I’ll take that one, Daniel. And I think your thinking is academically spot on, right, as you’re – as people are on third-party listing sites and making selections of brands, not surprisingly consumers tend to choose brands that they’ve heard of. And as we build our brand we start to see improvements not only in third-party websites, but also direct traffic to our website, which as you know, convert significantly better. So what I’d say is, that’s an ongoing trend from since we – from the time that we started turning on our brand advertising on a nationwide basis and not related specifically to a Super Bowl event. but we expect that decision around the Super Bowl was to do exactly what you’re talking about. As people understand one that we exist; two, exactly what we offer; and three, that what we offer is actually very appealing to them direct traffic and indirect traffic converts better. And yes, we’re starting to see that, that’s what puts us in the position to predict triple-digit growth in our e-commerce business.

[Daniel Powell:]

Great. Thank you, both. Appreciate the color.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes.

[Operator:]

And your next question comes from Sharon Zackfia with William Blair.

[Sharon Zackfia:]

Hi, good afternoon. I was hoping you could talk about kind of the embedded agility in the model. And I guess what I’m thinking is that with the sales support function in particular, it seems as if you would have a good read on how that was ramping. And so I guess, I’m wondering how quickly you can turn off new vehicle acquisition. So, as to mitigate some of that gross profit hit that we’ve seen in this quarter, if there’s some learnings there. And then secondarily, just the thoughts on liquidation, I understand sending it to wholesale. But have you analyzed the potential benefit of just offering a consumer a really good deal?

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes. I’ll start off.

[Dave Jones:]

Yes, go ahead.

[Paul Hennessy:]

I was just going to say in terms of the agile model, and now laser like focus and prediction of here is the output of individuals and getting ahead of that. As we mentioned, we think, we’re in very good shape about truly understanding, the human requirements to convert on the sales side, the human requirements to convert through the sales operation side and/or have been in our adjusting our business to make sure that we get that right too and which again – which informs our confidence of being able to grow aggregate gross profit dollars, more than more than 200% on the year. So, you live through that kind of experience of the disappointment of having, gosh, having all the demand we need, having the inventory we need, and not being able to get the output that we’d like. And I think the – the answer is we are laser like focused on fixing that problem on a permanent basis hence the perpetual investment in both human capital and then quick, fast follow technical expansion, so that we can ultimately lower the need for incremental humans. So, we feel very good about that. And as far as giving retail customers a great deal, yes, I think that’s something that we think intensely about, and we’ll – that’s a lever in our business that we will have been and we’ll utilize as appropriate. So, we’re just not liquidating at wholesale.

[Dave Jones:]

Yes, Sharon. I would just add to that. And you mentioned turning off vehicle acquisitions. The cycle time, as you know, is fairly long, right? So just, if you use random numbers, we – it takes a, call it, a week to get a vehicle into our reconditioning facility, six days to recondition it. And then it gets – then it’s listed and it’s listed for a period of time. So, our normal days to sell, which takes into account the entire cycle time is, call it, 60 days to 70 days. And you saw in the quarter, we were at about 77 days. So, because of the cycle time, I think, it’s difficult to turn off acquisitions to manage it that quickly. Now, having said that too, I think, cycle times in the industry in terms of vehicle pricing are usually not very dramatic and much longer – a much longer curve than what we saw during 2020. So, as I mentioned, we bought inventory in Q3 that we would recondition and sell in Q4, and there was pretty dramatic changes in the pricing environment. And so it was the unfortunate equation of buying high and then selling into a softer pricing environment in Q4. Again, that what I’ve seen those cycles are usually not as dramatic in the industry. But obviously, it was a pretty dramatic year. So anyway, again, I think, car story probably pluses us here as well with enhanced abilities to analyze the data and just make improvements in our inventory management strategy as well.

[Sharon Zackfia:]

Thanks.

[Operator:]

And your next question comes from Ron Josey with JMP Securities.

[Ron Josey:]

Great. Thanks for taking the call to the question. Two questions, please. So Paul, I just want to ask about the investments that we’re hearing around sales and support, and I definitely hearing, you’re still building this out to get ahead of the curve, but just wondering as you bring the logistics O&O long hauls like in-house, thoughts about maybe, bringing that in house as well, that meaning the sales and support side. And then on the long-haul decision, can you just talk about the benefits you see there? I think we saw higher NPS scores with last mile. and so just talk to us about the decision to bring long-haul in-house as well. Thank you.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Sure. We have been very satisfied with our existing third-party sales team. and so scaling that was a natural, they convert well. They treat our customers like they are their own. And so with that level – and by the way, and our customers love that experience. So, we don’t have any burning desire to blow that up and say that we would do that better. In terms of the sales support role, processing transactions itself, we do the vast majority of that ourselves. We will continue to do the vast majority of ourselves and as Dave articulated, and we get help to scale. And so I think our hybrid model provide the agility that we need for something that ultimately, right with an e-commerce platform will need a lot less of both on the sales side and the sales support side. So, we like our – again, our hybrid approach with Vroom tight management over and delivery of great service. For the long-haul question, here’s how we think about it. It delivers better experience, because we take on more predictability in the network. When they are our trucks, they come and go at our back-end call, and we get to control, the entire journey from hub to hub, and then with the last mile from hub to customer. And so predictability is great for customer and great for company. and in that predictability and more cars on our own long-haul trucks, it starts to drive efficiency. So instead of every single vehicle being one off, we get the efficiencies and economies of scale by putting five, six, seven, eight cars on a truck that are all headed to a particular region. So, again, we love anything that drives better customer experience and better efficiency and unit economics for the business. And so long-haul was a natural follow on to last mile. And the combinations of that again, efficiencies at scale outstanding customer experience.

[Ron Josey:]

Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes. My pleasure.

[Operator:]

And your next question comes from Nat Schindler with Bank of America.

[Nat Schindler:]

Yes. Hi, guys. Just a couple of questions. One, I think this is just to clear this up for everybody, because it’s not sales, because as you said, you’re very comfortable with the sales function that you’re doing through third parties. And it’s not delivery that is going everything down, it’s customer support. And I’ve gotten multiple questions from investors, actually what that would actually be. So, if you could walk through what are the exact processes that you are doing too slowly in order to get the sales that you think you could have gotten? And then secondly, I would – I want to go and compare to your closest comp out there and look at this quarter inside the e-commerce looks roughly the same as Carvana 3Q 2017, about the same number of units about the same GPU. At that point, they were growing with about 133% in units. What were they – what is different about then and them and now, and you. And I know there’s a lot of things have changed over those years and the competition has changed and we are in the midst of COVID still. But can you just walk through, what do you think the differences are and what were they doing differently then? Finally, one look a little bit at your triple-digit growth projection for next year. How much of that is – well, how much benefit will you likely see it from a stimulus check that is going through the market and how that affects growth? And I know this is a really hard one, because it’s actually telling you to then start projecting something on kind of 2022, how much of a difficult comp if we don’t see that in the following year, which seems likely would in effect.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Okay. I’ll – let me take those one at a time. And I’m going to give you a sense rather than walk through a very detailed, what’s end-to-end process for sales support. But here’s what I think, you will understand. As we – as customers move from a – I’m interested in that vehicle, I put a deposit on a vehicle, I’m qualified for lending of that vehicle. Then you’ve got to actually complete the transaction. So, in some instances, consumers need a proof of documentation. There are signatures involved, there are wet signatures involved in some cases in our process. There are verification of payoffs of loans. There are verification of lease arrangements from if someone’s trading in a lease car. There is a lot of human and intensive manual steps and procedures that are required to complete the transaction. And because that’s a manual process rather than a press button get deal in this space, as well as any kind of connectivity into DMVs and things like that, anything that is manual and requires, high touch human interaction that’s where the amount of deals slows the business. And let me add more contexts as well. As we’ve increased our purchases from consumer cars, I would say significantly in doing so, that requires the same amount of work and manual work, paperwork, wet signatures, et cetera, calling of banks, paying off of loans, et cetera, as a sale. So whether we’re buying or selling when both of those go north, and both of those have gone significantly north in terms of total transactions in our business, you need a lot of sales support folks doing that until such time as full automation, which as I mentioned, we’re working on. So that’s like – that’s where the bottleneck is. That’s where you’ve heard, we’ve tripled the amount of people that are doing that and we think that we’re in very good shape as we continue to invest in that area. On the second, what was different with Carvana, approaching four years ago, that’s a tough one to take on. We are – as you said, we are in an entirely different place. They were – they were growing, I think you’ve said at 130% of that time, what I’ll remind you is pre-COVID, we were growing at 150%. So, I think that as our world normalizes, as our inventory normalizes, our ability to scale faster will happen. And I think that that’s why we’re projecting triple-digit growth this year and we’re very pleased with that growth. As far as stimulus checks, whether it’s tax season, whether they’re stimulus checks, when consumers have more money, they often have turned to use cars as a way to either secure, important transportation, take advantage of an opportunity of a used car or just treat themselves. So, stimulus checks are positive to our business. And what I would say is, what’s much more important is broadly folks having jobs stability in the market, a more normalized world as it relates to COVID, that’s really environment that we believe will do very well. And because of our growth rate, we should be growing through tax seasons and growing through one time or now maybe, two time macro events like stimulus checks, building a slow and steady and again, triple-digit growth business. So that’s how we think about your broad and deep question.

[Nat Schindler:]

Okay. And just finally, just a little bit on that stimulus check thing, if you obviously, tax rebates come in the kind of Q1, early Q2 period that creates seasonality, stimulus check coming in at a similar time. Should we look for a kind of a mega seasonality?

[Paul Hennessy:]

Well, again, I don’t know the timing of all of those events. We tried to guide to the best of our ability on what we think is going to happen both in the immediate quarter, but also on an annual basis. And so that that’s contemplated whether those show up in the end of Q1 or whether those show up in early Q2 that’s contemplated both in our guidance for Q1 and our annual guidance.

[Nat Schindler:]

Great. Thank you.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Sure.

[Operator:]

And your next question comes from Rajat Gupta with JPMorgan.

[Rajat Gupta:]

Hi, good afternoon. Good evening and thanks for taking my questions. Just going back to the fourth quarter GPU versus your original guidance, could you help us bridge how much of that disconnect roughly $300 versus guidance was due to just a higher than expected seasonal depreciation environment versus how much was it due to liquidation? And the same for 1Q like how much impact is embedded in that guide due to just liquidating inventory? And I have a couple of follow-ups. Thanks.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes, sure. So, I guess, here’s what I thought about Q3 expectations versus actual Q4 performance. So, we expected Q3 vehicle gross profits to go from about $1,300 to about $1,240 in Q4. So, our expectation for seasonal depreciation Q3 to Q4 was let’s call it $65 per unit. And I think that’s consistent, we may have – I think we were on the lighter end in terms of expectation, it’s somewhat difficult as you can imagine to actually quantify, how much seasonal depreciation was in there. What I would say is, you had significant appreciation in Q3, which therefore affects the Q4 depreciation as well. So anyway, we expected $1,300 of vehicle gross profit per unit, we wound up with $878 of vehicle gross profit per unit. So it was about a $424 difference. So if we say $65 of that was what we expected, the normal depreciation you’re left with was about $360 per unit. And then some piece of that is – accelerated, but more than expected depreciation and the balances as a result of moving aged inventory. And so, that breakout is kind of tough to get, but that’s how we quantify it anyways. So we think call it $350 is somewhat related to the extra depreciation. I would tell you the majority of it though is really from the liquidations, because I don’t think that the extra depreciation in Q4 was like terribly significant. And then I think, as we look at Q1, it’s – again it’s a little bit difficult to tell, how much are we going to be de-price aged units versus units that are fresh. I think it’s much easier to see, we’re expecting a similar loss in the wholesale gross profit per unit that we saw in Q4 as we get through that. So I think the retail would probably be similar as well, so hopefully, that’s helpful, and you said you had another question.

[Rajat Gupta:]

Yes. Just related to that. Thanks for that clarification, but I’m just surprised that you’re having to liquidate so much inventory even on the retail side, just because I mean, I understand that some of it is aging. I mean, at the same time demand is just really strong here. And it seems like you’ve also raised your shipping fee by roughly $100. So curious as to like, why the need to cut pricing so much in order to just get the inventory out, because you clearly have the capacity to ship the 11,000 cars or the 14,500 cars in 1Q. So if demand is so strong, why is – why are we – what is the need to cut pricing so significantly that is impacting the first quarter GPU?

[Dave Jones:]

Yes. So I think the – the way to think about it is, it’s obviously – it’s a depreciating asset, right. So – and there is – we have competition in the market. So if we’ve got inventory that has aged and we’re selling against fresher inventory that was purchased at different times, it just becomes difficult for those economics to work. I think it’s easier on unique vehicles to the demand higher sell price. But when you’re retailing 15,000, – 14,000, 15,000 units a quarter, they’re not all unique, a lot of them are run of the mill inventory. And so you’re competing against dealers and other online players. And so, I think when that inventory ages you have to decrease the price of it we purchased it in a different environment and you have to adjust that price to the current environment. But a great demand, demand is strong, and so, we’ve got that dumped into the Q1 guidance. In terms of the shipping fee, we changed that to $699 in mid-February. We’re a nationwide business, and so we’re shipping nationally. And as we’ve talked about for couple of quarters now the shipping charges from the carriers in the industry has just gotten more expensive, and so, that’s the rationale. We haven’t seen any impact to conversion from raising that shipping price. And then the way we think about that going forward is at a greater scale, we start to now think about variable pricing on shipping, where consumers can look at a vehicle if it happens to be closer to them, we can offer a smaller shipping charge, if it’s vehicle that’s far away and they just have to have it, then we’ll charge them a little bit more for shipping. So, that’s how we think about it going forward.

[Rajat Gupta:]

Got it. Just one last one for me. I mean, so, I mean today as where the inventory stands today, I mean, what percentage of that would you say is aged more than what you would like. And by what time of the year are you expecting this backlog issue to resolve? I mean the reason I ask that is because, I mean, there are a lot of underlying positives in terms of – you’ve increased your sourcing from consumers, your reconditioning costs that are lower than before, your inbound logistics costs are lower than before. So, I mean, it looks like once these backlog issues are clear, I mean, you should see a significant tailwind just on your underlined GPU level. So – and even with the 200% guidance for the year, it doesn’t look like you are going to get to what you should be entitled to. So, like how long does this – are these backlog issue is going to take to care out? That’ll be all. Thanks.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes. And then, I think we’ll have to wrap up with this question. I think that the backlog issues are well at hand as I shared. And in terms of the inventory situation, look, we’ve got import in Q1 within in my prepared remarks, material improvement in gross profit in sequential quarters after Q1. So I think you’re connecting all the right dots. This is a Q4, Q1 issue for both the inventory situation, but also for the backlog, which is what’s going to allow us to accelerate both unit economics and top line e-commerce unit sales.

[Rajat Gupta:]

Got it. Thanks for all the color and good luck.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Yes. Thanks.

[Operator:]

And that is all the time we have for questions today. I’ll now turn the conference back over to Paul Hennessy for closing remarks.

[Paul Hennessy:]

Great. Thank you; and thanks everyone for joining the call and special thanks to all the room employees that, yes, that continue to keep the trains running on time. Thanks, and we’ll talk soon.

[Operator:]

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.