Melissa Thomas
Analyst · D. A. Davidson. Your line is open
Thanks, Rich. I'm excited to be in the CFO role during this important time of Groupon. During my last few years at the company, I've been motivated by the opportunity we have in front of us and the incredible team that's helping us get there. I'll use my time today to walk you through our key financial highlights, including gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, provide you with a few insights on unit trends, which we believe is an important metric to measure our success, update you on our progress with Groupon Select. And after that, we will open up the call for questions. Let's start with gross profit. In the third quarter, we delivered gross profit of $278 million. We are making progress against our key strategic priorities, particularly removing friction from the customer experience, growing membership in our Select program and expanding our open platform. Ultimately, we believe success in these areas will help us drive higher purchase frequency, conversion and gross profit growth over the long run. As we discussed with you last quarter, we expected to face persistent traffic headwinds, customer losses in North America and challenging macroeconomic conditions that would impact our European business, particularly the U.K. In fact, during the third quarter, the European economy performed even more poorly than we anticipated causing these challenges to impact the international local category, as well as Goods. In addition, the competition in our Goods category was tougher than we expected. In North America, gross profit was $192 million, down $12 million or 6% year-over-year. Q3 North America Local gross profit was $155 million, down $4 million or 3%. Q3 North America Goods gross profit was $26 million, down $5 million or 15%. Gross profit per customer on a trailing 12 month basis was $30.56, up 6% year-over-year. North America net customers declined by 870,000. This decline was expected, but it's important to note that active customers is not the only metric to measure our progress. Those of you close to the Groupon story know that we are uniquely positioned within Local, given our scale in two-sided marketplace with millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of local merchants. And our strategic initiatives are closely tied to driving this part of our business. We know that we can improve the customer experience by making our websites and mobile application more engaging and easier to use, launching new products such as Voucherless Offerings and Groupon Select and adding more high-quality supply to the marketplace. As we transition our customer base to higher quality more engaged customers, we believe that unit growth, particularly local will be a leading indicator of improving purchase frequency and conversion. Naturally, billings and gross profit per customer all remain important, but we believe unit growth will speak even more broadly to the health of our evolving marketplace. In Q3, year-over-year local unit performance for North America improved for the third sequential quarter and our expectation is for the trend to continue into Q4. In fact within the third quarter local unit year-over-year trend strengthened in each month. We are encouraged by these trends which we believe are an early indicator that our strategic initiatives are beginning to deliver. We are excited about our Select membership program and are already seeing encouraging results. To-date, we have over 260,000 members, despite a total third quarter investment that came in slightly lower than the $10 million expectation. It's still early days, but we are seeing member acquisition cost payback within six months and payback has been driven by both the recurring revenue from membership fees as well as incremental gross profit generated on membership-related transaction. For modeling purposes, it's important to remember that historically, we routinely offered order discounts and some of our merchants participate with us on these discounts. As a result, the discount associated with Select memberships are not entirely incremental. We are really excited about the early impact we are seeing on purchase behavior. On average, in the first six months post-enrollment, Select members increased purchase frequency by about 60% and average order values by about 20%. We believe these early positive results illustrate our ability to monetize the member-like behavior of our customers and demonstrate the power of our massive local two-sided marketplace. By making progress on these fronts, we believe we can unlock the potential of our financial model and deliver long-term gross profit growth and significant adjusted EBITDA. Turning to International. Gross profit was $86 million, down $12 million or 12%. Q3 International Local gross profit was $61 million, down $8 million or 11%, despite Local unit growth. Local gross profit performance was impacted by higher than expected purchases of lower priced and lower margin deals. While it can be difficult to predict consumer shopping behavior, we believe one way to offset the impact of this in the future is to continue focusing on enhancing the quality of our supply. International Goods gross profit was $17 million, down $3 million or 16%. International gross profit per customer on a trailing 12-month basis was $22.51 down 5%. While net customers declined slightly in the quarter, excluding the U.K. net customers would have been up. Notwithstanding, the transitory challenges created by the instability of the economies in Western Europe, particularly the U.K., we remain confident in our international strategy and believe we are taking the steps necessary to drive long-term growth outside of North America. We view the progress we're making in the Asia-Pacific geography, which includes double-digit billings growth, as a proof point that our international growth strategy remains solid. In the third quarter, on a consolidated basis, marketing expense was $74 million, or 27% of gross profit. Historically, our marketing expense has trended closer to 30% of gross profit. We've spoken in the past about our focus on driving marketing efficiency and our focus hasn't changed. We are also deploying marketing strategies that allow us to leverage data to better segment our customer base and personalize the overall Groupon experience. Our goal is to drive purchase frequency, particularly within the first 90 days post purchase. We know that this metric is highly correlated to customer lifetime value and we are looking at opportunities to drive it higher. To complement these efforts, we are also in the process of adapting our brand strategy to support our evolving marketplace. As part of this process, we are pragmatically evaluating our spend across the marketing funnel. SG&A for the third quarter was $198 million, an improvement of $2 million or 1% year-over-year driven by our ongoing efficiency efforts. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $50 million during the third quarter. We purchased a little more than five million shares for $15 million in the third quarter. On a trailing 12 month basis, share repurchases represented over 44% of our free cash flow. And to date, we've returned more than $900 million to shareholders through repurchases. We have a strong balance sheet and ended the third quarter with $567 million of cash and $400 million available on our undrawn revolver. This strength provides us with important financial flexibility to support a balanced approach to capital allocation. That includes our track record of share buybacks, strategic investments and product launches like Groupon Select and opportunistic M&A that can accelerate our core strategy. As we move into the fourth quarter, a very important time for us, we expect positive contribution from our conversion initiatives, which include our recent guest checkout and universal cart product launches. In addition, we expect marketing leverage to increase modestly from what we delivered in Q3. These factors along with the continued momentum in North America Local including improved performance in units give us confidence that we can drive sequential improvement in year-over-year gross profit trends and deliver approximately $270 million in adjusted EBITDA for full year 2019. Thank you for your time today. We appreciate the support of our investors and look forward to chatting with you about our progress. With that, let's open up the call for questions.