Sumit Singh
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thanks, Kelsey, and thanks to all of you for joining us on the call today. We are excited to report our first quarterly results as a public company. I want to extend special thanks to our new investors for their confidence in our team and our company. I'd also like to thank the Chewy team for the support during the IPO process. Since we've provided significant detail in the shareholder letter, I'll address a few highlights from this quarter, but will maintain my comments on trends in our business. As this is our first earnings call, I also want to take some time to share the Chewy story and tell you about our operating philosophy. After that, I will turn the call over to Mario to discuss our financial results and guidance and then we will take your questions. Net sales for the quarter grew 45% year-over-year to $1.1 billion, reflecting our focus on customer experience and the strength of our underlying business model, including growth and spending among existing customers. Q1 marked our second quarter, with greater than $1 billion in sales. Active customers grew 3.5 million year-over-year to 11.3 million active customers. Net sales per active customer increased approximately 9% from $315 dollars to $343 dollars. Autoship customer sales, as a percent of net sales, represented 67.1% of our revenue. Gross margin for Q1 was 22.9%, up 330 basis points year-over-year and the highest level in the company's eight-year history. This margin improvement is a result of our disciplined execution to improve product margin and supply chain efficiencies. Finally, our adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 1.4%, improved 530 basis points versus Q1 2018 as a result of gross margin expansion and leveraging off our operating expenses. The core inputs of our business are trending positively as we continue to innovate with a keen focus on growth and on delivering the best possible customer experience. We are pleased with our Q1 results and believe we are in the early stages of our growth. Now, turning to the Chewy story. We're on a mission to become the most trusted and convenient online destination for pet parents, offering a broad assortment of pet products, supplies, and prescriptions at competitive prices coupled with a high-touch personalized customer experience and fast, reliable delivery. There are currently more than 10,000 Chewy employees known as Chewtopians across the country, who are united by a goal to provide each customer with best-in-class service every day. From our headquarters in South Florida and Boston, to our customer service and fulfillment centers across the country, we are passionate about our work and are constantly thinking of new ways to make the customer experience even better. The pet industry is a large and growing market with approximately $70 billion in annual spend in 2017. In addition the pet care market is resilient during economic downturns, because of the nature of the pet parent/pet relationships and is experiencing a secular shift from offline channels into online. Pet humanization and the increased focus on pet health and wellness are also notable trends that are driving growth in the pet industry. The momentum of our business is rooted in innovation and we are always identifying new ways to enhance the customer experience. We are bringing customers the convenience of e-commerce along with the expertise and personalized service of the best local neighborhood pet store. From our convenient Autoship subscription program, to our personalized shopping features, to our wide selection of products including our proprietary brands, we are leveraging key opportunities to drive repeat and recurring purchases, and ultimately build brand loyalty and long-term growth. We believe our personalized, high-touch customer service is what sets us apart in the industry. Over the past eight years, we have successfully created a customer-centric culture with 24/7 access, where pet parents can reach our knowledgeable award winning customer service team at anytime to interact with a live team member in either our Hollywood, Florida or Dallas, Texas customer service centers. As part of our customer service, we create special moments that wow and delight our customers from sending handwritten welcome cards, to new customers, to surprising pet parents with hand-painted portraits of their pets. Our experiences build memories and customer engagement, which fuels long-term loyalty for our company and our brands. In addition to our high-touch customer experience, we make shopping easy and enjoyable for pet parents, and that makes finding and buying the right product an amazing start to the customer journey. We are proud of what we have accomplished thus far in 2019 and look forward to executing on our strategy for the remainder of the year. And now, I'd like to highlight a few milestones. This month marks one year, since we launched our online pharmacy Chewy Pharmacy, complementing our healthcare offerings of veterinary, which I will refer to as vet moving forward diet products. These offerings reflect our commitment to the health and wellness of pets and is another step in our mission to become the most trusted and convenient destination for pet parents to fulfill all of their pet needs. Improving pet health and wellness is a common goal that we share with the vet community. We also enjoy a deep connection with our customers and are continuing to raise awareness on pet health and preventative care by utilizing our marketing abilities. This, along with our Autoship program, helps drive increased compliance for vet prescription diets and medication benefiting pets, customers, and vets alike. To further that goal, we now offer a new product feature My Prescriptions, which is akin to a human medicine cabinet and provides customers a convenient and transparent way to view and manage all of their pet prescriptions like tracking refills and prescription expiration dates. To accommodate the growth of Chewy Pharmacy, in Q1, we launched a new pharmacy co-located within our fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona and we operate this new location under our own licenses. As we celebrate our first anniversary, we have been pleased with the customer response thus far. We are still early in the pharmacy offering and will continue to look for opportunities to deepen our engagement with veterinarians and pet parents as we expand in this area. Keeping pace, with our continued top-line growth, we opened our eight fulfillment center this one in Dayton, Ohio, which began operations last month. Growing our physical capacity and extending our delivery network is an important part of our operational strategy. We continuously improve our logistics processes and drive efficiencies every time we open the new facility. Each fulfillment center has been ideally positioned in key locations throughout the country to provide our customers with fast delivery times on their orders. Last but not least, we continue to innovate and improve customer experience through product and tech initiatives. For example, in Q1, we launched a new notifications platform, one that is more robust and customer friendly and enhances our ability to communicate with our customers with push notifications. Furthermore, our mobile app continues to be an important tech development, providing our customers with an even more convenient and personalized shopping experience. We continue to improve functionality and usability, including enhanced shipment tracking and notification, a unique Q&A feature allowing pet parents to directly engage with Chewy’s customer service, improvements in customization features and touch and facial ID functions for increased security. We have also recently rolled out improvements to the app, such as voice search and search auto complete, product searches enabled by UPC codes and enhanced Autoship management, which delights our customers and have resulted in a significant improvement in our mobile apps ranking. Product and tech innovation remain a key priority for us as we strive to make the product discovery, purchase and post purchase experience across all platforms easy and enjoyable for our customers. Now, I would like to transition to our operating philosophy. I'll note that our IPO in June was an important milestone for Chewy, but it's only one step in our journey. We believe that we are positively transforming an industry with a superior value proposition that delivers customers an exceptional and personalized care and service at the scale and convenience of e-commerce. This is a mission that will continue to require us to keep both a long range mindset as well as a maniacal focus on day-to-day execution, understanding our customer's need and then innovating, investing and flawlessly executing on their behalf to earn and to retain their loyalty. To maintain a long range focus, implies making decisions, which maximize value for customers and shareholders alike, because over the long-term these are the same. With this in mind, we have chosen to invest in building the best customer experience for our customers and to maximize our growth while keeping cash flow as the governor of our growth. We will continue to act in this manner and make big bold bets that satisfy the above criteria. Last but not least, our success and getting to where we are today has come as a result of the hard work of a talented team of which we are incredibly proud to be a part. Our team while delivering growth at scale and customer experience has also demonstrated an execution rigor that has resulted in expanding gross margins and improved operating losses, while at the same time showcasing a highly disciplined cash flow management approach. In this way, we are focused on building an enduring franchise. We will continue to be relentless regarding this. Thank you for your attention today. It has been an exciting few months and we are pleased with our Q1 results. More importantly, we look forward to continuing to strengthen our operating performance and serving even more pet parents as we execute on our long-term roadmap. Now, I will turn the call over to Mario, who will provide a more detailed review of our Q1 results and walk you through our financial outlook, which calls for continued growth and scale and improvement in EBITDA. Mario?