Earnings Labs

Karooooo Ltd. (KARO)

Q2 2024 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 12, 2023

$49.85

+0.02%

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Transcript

Carmen Calisto

Management

Hello, and welcome to Karooooo's Fiscal Financial Year 2024 Q2 Earnings Call. On behalf of Karooooo, we'd like to thank you for joining us today. I'm Carmen, the Group's Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer; and together with Hoeshin, our Group Chief Financial Officer, we will be taking you through our strong business updates and financials. All investors are advised to read through the disclaimer. We will be reviewing all three of Karooooo's business units in today's webinar, namely Cartrack, Carzuka, and Karooooo Logistics. Karooooo continues to believe in our mission to be the leading operations cloud and we see how we are helping to set the path for tomorrow for operational businesses with our platform. Industry-leading customers consult with us on how to improve their operations and tackle their day-to-day challenges. And our ability to think beyond connected vehicles and equipment has been pivotal in delivering a cloud that connects an entire operation in one place to achieve real business impact. Despite the varying macroeconomic environments we encountered, digitalization, ESG and compliance continue to be strong drivers for demand of our platform. Our platform offers the flexibility customers need to digitalize their operation at their own pace, and in a way that makes sense for them. Whether it is digital forms that facilitate workers and drivers to complete their workflows effectively via mobile app, coaching solutions that generate success and provide accountability, risk management tools that enable quick resolutions and full audit trails, automated carbon emission reporting and progress tracking or detailed productivity reporting for optimized operations, our platform fits into an operation for success. Additionally, customers can integrate with their existing tools such as fuel card providers and ERPs to further curate insights that suit their needs. By partnering with our customers to understand their operation and help tackle…

Goy Hoeshin

Operator

Thank you, Carmen. I will now talk through Karooooo's financial performance for quarter two FY '24. Please note that all comparisons are against quarter two FY '23 unless otherwise stated. Our quarter two performance has gained momentum, building from our solid start of the year and demonstrating growth across various financial metrics. As expected, after substantial investment for future growth, in quarter two, Karooooo's total subscription revenue increased by 17% to ZAR860 million. Operating profit increased by 13% to ZAR247 million and earnings per share increased 14% to ZAR5.61. Our profitable SaaS business model continue to bolster our cash flow generation ability. Net cash from operating activity increased by 26% to ZAR304 million. This healthy cash generation will continue to support our future cash outflow required for investment and future growth. All segments continue to see strong traction with the benefits of our strategic investment beginning to show. Our consistent results extend our track record of growth at scale, profitability and cash generation ability. After paying a dividend of $26.3 million and investing ZAR87 million in the development of the South African Central Office, our net cash on hand stood at ZAR651 million. Debtor's turnover days improving to 29 days alongside with prudent provisioning to weather off strong economic headwinds in some of the market we are operating. We have strong unit economics, robust operating margins, unleveraged balance sheet and a strong cash conversion. We remain confident that our track record of success, especially our ability to generate healthy cash flow is sustainable. Our earnings per share increased by 14% to ZAR5.61. The increase is the result of positive revenue growth and improved profitability despite our prudent and strategic investment for growth. We will now focus on Cartrack, the underlying asset to Karooooo's success. Cartrack continued to prove its ability…

A - Zak Calisto

Analyst

Myles, sometimes, these words are a bit of jargon and so data-as-a-service is currently what we do do, the way I understand it. And we basically take raw data, push the data through the IoT devices into our cloud. We obviously then work with data and keep intelligent business reports to our customers. So in our opinion, a great portion of our subscription revenue model is already data-as-a-service, which we obviously offer it is as a software-as-a-service. And so I think, either I'm not understanding your question or that's my answer. The next question comes from [indiscernible] I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing your name correctly. So apologies Sebastian if that's wrong. Can you expand further on the decision to shut down Carzuka in South Africa. Will there be any costs associated to closing this division? So, basically we have one lease that it comes to closure during this financial year. So there is no real material costs. We've got in contract at this point in time about 500 vacancies open and the majority of the Carzuka staff, we will transition into Cartrack. So there is no major costs. Clearly, these costs could have a slight impact on Cartrack initially but that’s been planned and it'll be phased, I think by the time we get to FY '25, these costs won't be weighing us down. So I think, the reality is we've been losing -- losses -- operating losses of approximately ZAR50 million a year and we see this loss disappearing and it will reflect positively in our earnings next year, although I do believe that had we spent enough effort in the last 12 months to really put our shoulders beyond Carzuka, we would have been much further. But we've been in long discussions with our partners, which is…

Zak Calisto

Analyst

And I want to thank everybody for joining us today, and look forward to talking to you again in three months' time. Okay, bye-bye.