Earnings Labs

Etsy, Inc. (ETSY)

Q2 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 2, 2016

$69.81

+10.36%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+8.89%

1 Week

+8.26%

1 Month

+8.42%

vs S&P

+7.56%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcomd Etsy’s Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference may be recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference, Jennifer Beugelmans. Ma'am, you may begin.

Jennifer Beugelmans

Analyst

Thanks, Esther, and good afternoon, and welcome to Etsy's second quarter earnings conference call. Joining me today are Chad Dickerson, CEO, and Kristina Salen, CFO. Before we get started, just a reminder that our remarks today include forward-looking statements relating to our financial performance and results of operations, business strategy, outlook, mission and potential future growth. Our actual results may be materially different. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which are described in our press release today and in our 10-K filed with the SEC on May 5, 2016. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our beliefs and assumptions today and we don't have any obligation to update them. Also during the call we'll present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release which you can find on our Investor Relations website. A link to the replay of this call will also be available there, and if you'd prefer to access a replay via phone, you can find that information in the press release as well. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chad. Chad?

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital. Your line is now open

Thanks, Jennifer, and good afternoon to everyone joining. We’re excited to talk with you about our second results, which included 39% revenue growth year-over-year, 23% year-over-year GMS growth, which was an acceleration compared with the first quarter and 246% adjusted EBITDA growth that resulted in 16.5% adjusted EBITDA margin. Our vibrant community expanded almost 1.7 million active sellers and 26.1 million active buyers. Based on our strong performance to date and our expectations for the reminder of the year, we’re raising our 2016 guidance. Kristina, will provide you with more color on our financial performance and updated outlook after my remarks. Before providing some detail on our progress during the second quarter, I want to take a moment to reflect on Etsy’s evolution over the past 11 years and our long-term plans for the future. Etsy began as on online marketplace that connected thoughtful consumers with creative entrepreneurs around the world. Today, our business is so much more in our marketplace. Over the past five years, we expanded Etsy’s business from a simple marketplace to include a seller services platform that helps our community of creative entrepreneurs making money by following their passion. We now offer a robust suite of high impact seller services tools and other features that address our sellers pinpoint. In the second quarter of 2016, eight seller services represented 55% of Etsy’s revenue and we believe we have exciting opportunities ahead to introduce additional services to support Etsy sellers in new ways. Etsy buyers tell us that they come to Etsy to find products that they can’t find anywhere else. In a world where most retailers are competing to provide commodity goods at the lowest price with the fastest shipping, Etsy’s unique inventory and our vision for a more human, personal and global approach to commerce…

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Thanks, Chad, and hello to everyone. Just to note, unless I say so, all comparisons I'll be referencing here are on a year-over-year basis. Let's start with GMS. During the second quarter of 2016, the Etsy marketplace generated $670 million in GMS, 22.6%, driven by growth in active sellers and active buyers. At the end of the second quarter, Etsy had almost 1.7 million active sellers, up about 12%. As a reminder, an active seller is one who has incurred at least one charge from us in the past 12 months. At the end of the second quarter, we had 26.1 million active buyers, little over 20%. Also as a reminder, active buyers are those who have bought on Etsy at least once in the past 12 months. [indiscernible], roughly 64% of our visits come to us from the mobile device, which is up 400 basis points from last year, continuing to outpace the rate of growth on desktop[ph] . Slightly more than 47% in the GMS came from a mobile device, also up 400 basis points. During the second quarter, our conversation rates increased in desktop, mobile web and mobile app. In addition desktop conversation rate [indiscernible] similar to overall mobile conversation rate and therefore the gap between mobile visits and mobile GMS remained constant when compared with last year. As a reminder, we measure the change in mobile gap by considering the early change in present mobile GMS with the early change in [indiscernible]. We narrow the gap in mobile GMS at a faster pace than mobile visit. Overall, the peak progress was made in mobile. Year-over-year mobile GMS grew 34% and accelerated compared to last quarter. Etsy's international business continued to expand, with international revenue growing roughly 54% in the second quarter and we achieved healthy marketplace…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Heath Terry with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Heath Terry

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Great, thanks. Kristina, you touched on the impact that end country sellers had on the quarter, can you give us a sense of sort of where you’re in terms of building out that network? Are we second inning, third inning here in terms of the impact that we could reasonably expect that to have on the business? And then when you - when you’re thinking about sort of guidance for this year, clearly given the acceleration that we saw in Q2, the guidance that you’ve provided implies pretty significant deceleration, is there anything beyond just sort of pragmatism behind that that we should be thinking about in terms of maybe putting into context?

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Sure, Heath. So just a clarification on your first question, when you said end seller, you meant GMS between local buyers and sellers, like UK seller to UK buyer?

Heath Terry

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Exactly, the initiative that you guys have had in the five countries?

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

So in the UK, as we mentioned we’re above 50% of our GMS generated in the UK is between local buyers and sellers and we’re super excited about that. So when we look at our other key focus countries, Australia, Canada, France and Germany, none are close to that 50%, so we’re still in early days in other countries. I would say, Australia is probably the closest, but it’s where the UK was a couple of years ago. So I wouldn’t want to walk away with the assumption that we have this type line rolling in over the next couple of months. But I think what it points to is, a long-term opportunity to drive growth in those category. With regard to guidance, I think you’re right. On the revenue, you pointed to a deceleration in the second half from the perspective of revenue growth. I think there’s a couple of things that - first of all we’re super excited about 40% revenue growth in the first half of this year and we don’t want to kick away from that great achievement. But historically as you know Heath, we’ve seen deceleration in revenue growth was moving to the second half of the year. Our guidance does not extrapolate the first half into the second half and that’s because - just as a reminder, what report our revenue growth guidance assumption [ph]. And what you’ve seen in the first half and - move us to increase on our assumption the second half and what are those things. Remember underlying our growth with the assumption that the piece of the narrowing of the mobile gap will continue as it had in 2015. Whereas, you just saw in the most recent quarter, we were able to sustain and gain that gap, we didn’t…

Heath Terry

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Got you. Thanks Kristina, that’s really helpful.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open

Thanks, Heath.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital. Your line is now open.

Andrew Bruckner

Analyst · Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital. Your line is now open

Thank you and great quarter. I’m looking if you can talk a little bit about what you’re seeing on the mobile front in terms of mobile visits and mobile GMS, the gap closing there and if there’s any initiatives that you’ve done or if it’s just kind of behavior on the whole? Thank you.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital. Your line is now open

Thanks, Andrew for the question. So I think it’s really important to understand that when you’re narrowing that gap with mobile visits and GMS, it’s really the accumulation of a lot of different types of work. We talked about the work that we’ve done in sign in and search and Checkout and other areas of the business. So it’s really - and I mentioned that we do it in conversion increases across the board over the past year. So I think our mobile success has largely been due to many of those initiatives on the core buyer experience really resulting in a great mobile experience for buyers and for sellers. And Kristina, did you have something to add there on the numbers?

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital. Your line is now open

I just wanted to point out that we’ve highlighted since the beginning with regard to narrowing gap, as it won’t be a straight line up into the right, it’s a long-term strategy and we feel like we’re still in the early innings of narrowing that gap. Indeed, we’ve only narrowed it a little bit over the past few quarters, so it’s really a long game as opposed to something we expect every single quarter in narrowing that gap.

Andrew Bruckner

Analyst · Andrew Bruckner with RBC Capital. Your line is now open

Understood, thank you.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open.

Mark Kelley

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

Hi, thanks for taking the question. I guess, now that you’ve added FedEx as an option for shipping labels, can you talk about how expect that to impact the growth for that segment in isolation. Maybe there’s something you can drawn from when you added the seller services categories in the past, like adding PayPal and direct check out. And then second, the real pay issues as I know is not impacting much if anything, but is there a way for us to think about what percent of transactions use that service? Thanks.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

Sure, on the FedEx point, we just rolled out that this quarter. It’s - really our goal with sellers is to provide and buyers regard as much choice as possible and that’s only in the U.S. So we don’t expect any significant contribution from FedEx.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

And I would just add to that, just to underscore. We don’t expect FedEx to have anywhere near the impact of some kind of integration like something like PayPal for example. FedEx is just - it’s a great partner, but it’s one of many shipping label services that our sellers could use.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

And the second question is about?

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

Transactions.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

So in Etsy, we run transactions through PayPal and through Direct Checkout and PayPal is embedded in Direct Checkout, so our credit card transactions run through real pay and that’s why we had the issues that we described with the credit card transaction.

Mark Kelley

Analyst · Mark Kelley with Citi. Your line is now open

Great, thanks.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Michael Costantini

Analyst · Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Hi. This is Michael Costantini on for Brian. Chad can you please expand a little bit more on the group conversion rates are seen on both desktop and mobile in the quarter. Specifically what change did you make, and did you make these changes globally and how should we think about that in terms of impacting buyer growth and GMS for buyer looking ahead.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Sure as I noted in my remarks we have seen conversion increases across the board, on all platforms, desktop, mobile web and mobile apps. And it is really our success there as really just varies focus product development and improving the core experience, everything from sign in to browse to search we talked about exploratory search a couple of quarters ago but that is still going quite well and finally with Checkout. So the mobile experience as well as the desktop on the mobile apps and mobile web, have all improved and we continue to improve that day after day after day. It is really in baseball term it is really about having a lot of basics consistently and that’s what we have been doing over the past year.

Michael Costantini

Analyst · Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open.

Tom Forte

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

Great, thanks for taking my question and great quarter. So when you talk about PayPal being a tough comparison or when you talk about adding FedEx to your shipping options, is what make PayPal tough comparison that you are seeing both increased adoption and your better economic on PayPal versus some of your other payment options and then is it possible than to the effect that if you could get higher conversion rates for FedEx and higher price point with that also could then over time be beneficial to your shipping color services?

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

So I think it is helpful Tom, let’s take a step back before we dive a little deeper and just remind everybody this relative size of these revenue bucket. So remember that direct check out is the largest of the seller services, mode of listing is a solid number two and shipping labels is distant three and then shipping labels were called at, it is booked net of the cost associated with the writing the shipping labels, typically we received volume discount from our partners and we are passing nearly a 100% of those savings on to our sellers. Shipping labels is a welcome seller service, adds great value to our sellers and tone of time and money. They are also with the 100% increment in margin which as a CFO, I love the business. From funds contribution perspective these are direct check out businesses just significantly larger than shipping label.

Tom Forte

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

Then one other quick follow up then. You talked historically about percent of listings that are dodged and animated, as the rates to gage [ph] effective currency changes, can you access that number?

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

It hasn’t changed materially from what we have discussed previously which is the high single digit low, low double digit percent of our GMS is a non-U.S. dollar denominated good. In other words -

Tom Forte

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

Great thank you.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

Already the transactions on our platform, our U.S. dollar denominated good, even if the seller is located in another country she chooses to list her items in US dollar term or the most part.

Tom Forte

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open

You’re welcome.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of James Cakmak with Monness Crespi Hardt. Your line is now open.

James Cakmak

Analyst · James Cakmak with Monness Crespi Hardt. Your line is now open

Hi thanks, first one, can you just tell little bit difference of promoted listings how that is trending I know there is adding more inventory there, there is other things we can do on that front and then secondly since Amazon handmade has come on board, obviously you guys are growing favorably through that, can you just talk about the growth and the selection and improvements in collection that you have seen even with greater competition in this space. Thanks a lot.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · James Cakmak with Monness Crespi Hardt. Your line is now open

Our timing and promoted listings and I’ll hand it over to Chad to talk about handmade. So promoted listing, I think it is important to note that even though we did expand inventory in the quarter that was really a secondary driver from listings growth. What is really growing promoted listings growth is improvements in click through rate and that points to some of the improvements that Chad had talked about in his remark in order to make promoted listing more relevant to a buyer starts. So we are very excited about those improvements in promoted listings and handmade, Chad.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · James Cakmak with Monness Crespi Hardt. Your line is now open

Yeah in Amazon handmade, we haven’t seen any impact to date; our market place is be off 35 million unique items in the market place. So we are really - we feel great about the scale of our inventory. And also just as a remainder our surveys have told and we have reminded investors that more than 50% of our sellers selling other platforms but for that group, the multi-channel sellers Etsy is their largest source of sales.

James Cakmak

Analyst · James Cakmak with Monness Crespi Hardt. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · James Cakmak with Monness Crespi Hardt. Your line is now open

You’re welcome.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open.

Darren Aftahi

Analyst · Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open

Thanks for taking my question. Can you talk more about the machine learning, excuse me, the machine translation and the impact its having on your cross border transactions and secondly beyond on the cost side of the equation, the second half of the year, beyond increase assumption in marketing, what other kind of big items are increasing first half to second half, that kind of gets to lower margin, what you are turning to in the first half of the year, thanks.

Chad Dickerson

Analyst · Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open

Yes, thanks for the question. So as I mentioned Etsy’s is very much a technology company and one of the things that we are doing is really exciting, we have been doing for some time is machine translation of listings in order to increase inventory in the market place. Kind of give you example of how that works, if a French seller is selling and they want to sell to English speaking seller, the machine translate the French listing so that it shows up in English to other buyers and we do machine translation of messages and that sort of thing. So machine translation really allows us to do is that, increase with the inventory for non-English speakers but it also allows us to conduct transactions between people we normally wouldn’t be able to conduct transactions. So underneath the machine translation, we have a machine learning framework that we use to update the dictionary to use Etsy’s specific terms. So it just one of many things that we have done again. I spoke earlier about the many things that we have done to drive growth and I think that increasing the inventory for machine translation is one of the things that help us do that and it is very technology perspective is very difficult, we are really proud of that.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open

And with regard to crossing expenses in the second half, Chad, I point you first towards our bedded assumptions at revenue decelerates through the second half of the year. Revenue growth excuse me, I talked about at the beginning of this call. Our incremental revenue is high incentive to margin plus first half relative to the second half, probably the biggest driver is revenue assumption. I’d also point you to the number of hires to look at the biggest delta that seen our, because our margin guidance in the second quarter versus what we delivered, but first thing I’d communicate is that our revenue growth exceeded our guidance and again our revenue growth hangs in this margin. The second thing I would say is, where we had expected a number of hires to be evenly phased through at the quarter, listed and payments towards the end of the quarter. And so will be bringing all those hires into the third quarter, the fourth quarter and we also have said that we expect to tire at similar phase during the second half as we did in first half. By the way most of those hires will come in third quarter, hiring really does slow down as we move into the holiday season. And then finally the last thing I would had like the point we do expect to marketing expense gross to accelerate compared to the first half. In the first half marketing expense growth was roughly 19.5%, we are going to accelerate from there as we move into the second half, these are the three things I would focus on the revenue growth rate, assumptions around employee hires and when they hit and third assumptions around marketing expense growth.

Darren Aftahi

Analyst · Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open

Great thank you.

Kristina Salen

Analyst · Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open

You’re welcome.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our Q&A session. Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program, you may all disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.