William Angrick
Analyst · Stifel, Nicolaus.
So I think the big picture here is every investment that we make people, process, infrastructure is answering the question, what does it take to be a several billion dollars GMV company? And we see, with the relationships and the credibility in the marketplace, our business growing at a very robust rate for many years. And so when we look at infrastructure investment this year, we're doing all the natural things one would want to do to support a highly-scalable, reliable marketplace. We've moved into a private-owned cloud infrastructure. We built a product development team of about 8 people new this year to manage our product development roadmap which effects how buyers sign on and get permission to view and bid on assets across our public sector and commercial marketplaces. We've got an integrated sales force and cerim tool that's allowing us to cross-sell, up-sell across consumer goods and industrial categories, in some cases, within the same corporate clients. So there is a whole stream of work there that -- you don't get payback in year 1, but certainly, going to give us more scalability down the road. The other thing about this business and one of the key drivers for organic growth and margin expansion is, the longer we spend with products and client programs, the better we get in yield. And in our longer-lived programs like the DoD or other public sector agencies, we are still getting improvements of 10% to 20% year-over-year, purely on improvement or lift in the sales value realized for the same item. That's a huge cumulative and compounding factor for us in our long-term growth is the ability to harness this data that's generated from every option to use that to inform our marketing and participation of the buyer base. And that in a marketplace model, drives long-term margin expansion. And the other thing that's nice for our business is the average transaction size continues to trend up. So we become more efficient. The average ticket, if you will, processed through a B2B channel is thousands of dollars and because of the increasing trust we have from many of the largest multinational companies, they are giving us higher-value equipment to sell, which is improving the average transaction size, which drops more dollars independent of margin to the bottom-line. So we like those dynamics over time and I think, with any large retailer, Walmart or others, absolutely, we'll be improving the yield over time, empirical evidence suggest that.