Earnings Labs

Liquidity Services, Inc. (LQDT)

Q1 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Jan 31, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the First Quarter 2013 Liquidity Services Inc. Earnings Conference Call. My name is Diana, and I'll be the operator for today. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Ms. Julie Davies, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Julie Davis

Analyst

Thank you, Diana. Hello and welcome to our first quarter fiscal year 2013 financial results conference call. Joining us today are Bill Angrick, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Rallo, our Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. We will be available for questions after our prepared remarks. The following discussion or responses to your question reflects management's views as of today, January 31, 2013, and will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially. Additional information about factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included in today's press release and in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on form 10-K. As you listen to today's call, we encourage you to have our press release in front of you, which includes our financial results, as well as metrics and commentary on the quarter. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. In our press release, in our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures. We also use certain supplemental operating data as a measure of certain components of operating performance, which we also believe is useful for management and investors. This supplemental operating data includes Gross Merchandise Volume and should not be considered as substitute for or superior to GAAP results. At this time, I'd like to turn the presentation over to our CEO, Bill Angrick.

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Thanks, Julie. Good morning, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call. I'll begin the session by reviewing our Q1 financial performance. Next I will provide an update on our long-term growth strategy. I'll then turn it over to Jim for more details on the quarter, and on our outlook for fiscal '13. During Q1, Liquidity Services reported strong financial results, as we continue to grow our market share and build on our leadership position in the reverse supply chain market. We continued to benefit from large commercial and government clients placing their trust in us to handle more of their excess inventory and high-value capital asset sales, which drove strong growth this quarter. We exceeded our guidance range for adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS, while continuing to make important investments for the future. Q1 GMV was up 30% year-over-year to $233.4 million, driven by growth in the volume of goods in our retail supply chain and government marketplaces. Adjusted EBITDA of $24.2 million was up 6% year-over-year and adjusted EPS during Q1 was $0.41, up 11% year-over-year driven by improved operating margins in our core business. Despite our reduced outlook for fiscal year '13, we remain confident and focused on the execution of our long-term growth strategy to achieve $2 billion in GMV by fiscal year '16. Our 13-year history as a company has shown that by focusing on value-creating investments measured over 3- to 5-year horizon, we have been able to deliver exceptional growth and shareholder value. Our disciplined approach to this long-term investment philosophy has significantly enhanced our competitive position, client base, and financial position over the past 5 years. For example, during Q1, margins in our core business expanded year-over-year as a result of previous multi-year investment initiatives made to improve our operating leverage and efficiencies such…

James M. Rallo

Analyst

Thanks, Bill. Our strategy of bringing innovative technology to the reverse supply chain market and our efficient business model has translated into strong results for stockholders. Calendar year 2012 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization or adjusted EBITDA has improved 73.5% to a record $111.6 million. Our strong adjusted EBITDA and EPS results for the first quarter, which came in higher than our guidance ranges with a slightly less than expected gross merchandise volume, or GMV, demonstrates the operating efficiencies we have achieved across our entire business as a result of investments we have made to support our growth over the last several years. We are again in a period with vast opportunities, and our ability to capture these opportunities over the next several years will be shaped by our investments we are making over the next several quarters, the largest of which is the GoIndustry marketplace. The opportunity to further serve 75 of the Fortune 500 clients associated with the GoIndustry acquisition will acquire us to make more investments and restructure an organization that has not had any investments in the last 4 years. After 6 months of operating the GoIndustry organization and reaching out to many of our clients, we are focused on cultivating all the good team members serving the needs of our clients. Investing in changes in technology to conform the usability of Liquidity Services marketplaces onto the GoIndustry platform and restructure the organization to adopt the efficient operating model of Liquidity Services. This restructuring includes replacing senior members of the U.S. and Asian GoIndustry organization, with tenured members of the Liquidity Services team. In addition, we are closing a larger number of locations around the world than originally planned. The success of these changes will be measured starting in next fiscal year, and…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And your first question will come from the line of Colin Sebastian fro Robert Baird and Company. Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division: First off, I'm trying to reconcile the top line GMV shortfall in December with your comments on the macro environment and the softness that you're seeing here in the March quarter, if those are related. And secondly, if you could talk about the specifically what parts of the liquidation.com business are underperforming and related to that, what's the implied growth rate, I guess organically for liquidation.com in the revised outlook?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

Colin, let me answer the first part. As we indicated in our preannouncement press release, the miss in the guidance for this quarter in the top line had to do with some large sales in our Network International marketplace for some energy clients that moved into the next quarter. That had nothing to do with the retail business. The retail business performed extremely well during the first quarter. And again, those sales have moved into the second quarter. As far as the growth rate for the retail business for the rest of the year, we see a lowering of that growth rate from our prior expectations primarily related to existing clients, where their flows are lower than the flows received last year. Our new clients, which been we anticipated ramping up a little faster have not ramped up based on the forecast that we see today as quick as we anticipated. So we would expect to see low double-digit growth in the retail supply of our business for the rest of the year.

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Let me just add to that, we were out in conversations with our clients in the December time frame, I think, yes, there was relatively good optimism around the holiday season. I'd say -- I would say by and large, the broad bellwether retailers underachieved relative to initial expectation during the December quarter and in particular, the holiday season. That top line has some impact on the reverse supply chain from mature clients on a year-over-year basis. And that has more to do with the business context of retailers at large and their performance in the market versus anything specific to our business or service offerings. So that being the case, while we may not achieve our long-term target in the liquidation.com segment of our business during this particular quarter, our business pipeline remains very strong. We have signed several new contracts that are in the process of being ramped up. The other thing I would note is because of a little bit of sluggishness in the growth rate of GDP and people's results in December quarter, some of our large Fortune 500 clients are taking cost-cutting initiatives of their own and to the extent, you have those personnel changes in the supply chain area, it does affect the rollout of new programs or new initiatives such as reverse supply chain initiatives with Liquidity Services. Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division: Bill, on the existing seller product flows, that decline, do you have a sense whether just the flow of overall liquidations from those -- to companies is down or are they exploring other liquidation channels or what's your sense on that?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

The former. I think that's just the case, some people did not meet their own internal expectations shared with us which become part of our own forecasting and operational planning process. And as a result, they'll work through it. We'll continue to provide the outstanding service and continue to be a strategic partner, but we can't manufacturer their own top line growth. They have to deliver that.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Shawn Milne, Janney Capital Market.

Shawn C. Milne - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, Research Division

Analyst

I just want to go back to the prior question. Bill, I think the company has been fairly clear that part of your retail commercial growth was dependent on the clients' same-store sales growth, but is it your sense that they weren't stuffed with as much inventory as well as they perhaps monitored, or were focused more on their own inventory levels in the fourth quarter? Just trying to get around that dynamic of, some people think that if your -- the sales aren't that good at retail, you guys tend to get more and then there's the other philosophy on positive same-store sales growth, and I do have a follow-up on GoIndustry.

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Yes, I'd be -- I think the seeds for returns are planted with sales. The more volume of sales, the more the addressable market is for, the greater the addressable market is for return volume. And when sales underperform, that the addressable market comes down for us. Having said that, we have had opportunities to enlarge the flow of goods by creating new programs for products that have historically been either discarded as waste or not handled efficiently. I think in the case of some of our long-standing clients who have adopted our services and strategy, their growth sales performance came down and therefore, the activity in their returns pipeline came down owing to that top line drop. That's not a relatively new development. We think that clients, since the downturn 2009, as a general matter have been more risk adverse to holding inventory. And so that means that you may run a lean supply chain this year and this particular quarter. So having said that, we're very interested in helping our clients expand the volume of sales in our marketplace. We've got some interesting new initiatives where we're helping our clients take products and move them not only to liquidation.com but some of their own e-commerce channels, consumer channels where we are the back-end for filling those products. I think there's great interest in moving less than new goods through our channel versus recycling programs, and we're seeing more and more high-tech products come through our channel in that regard. And over the long term, yes, we see good strategic account activity in our pipeline. So I think we're very comfortable with that. Over time, we will outperform the general market and we will sustain our long-term growth rate. I'd also add that in our history, if you just look at the last 4 years, our GMV growth as a company has range from minus 6% year-over-year to plus 50% year-over-year. And there are times and quarters where we've been anywhere from single digits to over 100% year-over-year growth. And in the end, this market is moving in our direction and we are providing the broadest, most compelling value proposition and that's what will drive our results.

Shawn C. Milne - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, Research Division

Analyst

And gentlemen, just a follow-up on what that conversation was talking about. Perhaps lower growth from some of our clients would be understandable to take down your retail GMV expectations. But my understanding was that there wasn't much in your model previously, on your guidance previously for new client growth but that appears not to be true given what you've said this morning?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

No, I guess, what's -- let me be specific about the comment, Shawn. So when we do our forecast, we forecast based on clients that we've been working with for a while, and clients that are -- we consider new, which would be clients that we signed up relatively recently which may be 3 to 6 months. And so those programs are just getting underway or ramping up. As you know, you've been covering us for a while, it takes some time to years to ramp up with clients and sometimes we have clients that will ramp up in 3 to 6 months. In this case, we had been working with our clients to get forecasts of expectations of product flows over this fiscal year. And as has been in the past, sometimes those estimates are better than expected and sometimes they're not as good as expected. In this case, they weren't as good as expected. As a reminder, this quarter last year, we increased our guidance because some recent clients that we had signed up at the time had given as forecast and it turned out that they were actually better than we had been received. So our process has really been the same. When we talk about new clients and forecasting, those are clients, as Bill indicated, that are signed contractually -- clients, but they've just been added recently. So there's not unsigned clients that are moving the needle here.

Shawn C. Milne - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, Research Division

Analyst

Okay. But again to clarify, Bill just said there are several new contracts that have been signed. My understanding is given this guidance, you have fairly low expectations for those clients in this fiscal year?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

Well, I would say those expectations are lower than what they were they were before, yes.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jordan Rohan, Stifel Nicolaus. Jordan E. Rohan - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., Research Division: And perhaps I missed this on some of the preamble on the discussion before the Q&A, but I'm curious on the impact of the GoIndustry acquisition. In the prior quarter in terms of GMV out of the $233 million that you reported, how much came from GoIndustry? And secondly and even more importantly, it seems you have taken that guidance down at the mid-point by $75 million or $80 million for the last 3 quarters of your fiscal year. How much of that reduction in guidance comes from ratcheting down the expectations at GoIndustry-DoveBid, and how much comes from the core business, if you will? And I guess, while we're at it, why is it different this time in expanding internationally? A few years ago, you guys had efforts, albeit much, much smaller and different in Europe that you ended up closing down. Any reason why we should believe that you'll be any more successful in China and the other 19 countries outside of North America that you seem to be approaching now? Or is this something that has a high risk of being pulled -- cut back in the future?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Let me just address the strategic imperative for being an international business. The world's manufacturing supply chain has moved considerably in the last 10, 15 years from more developed countries, North America and Europe, to lesser developed, high-growth regions like Asia-Pacific region. Our clients, many of which are U.S. headquartered, have property, plant, equipment and supply chains in Asia. They're doing business there. They want to be serviced there. The needs of that client really demand us to be in-country in places like China. So this is clearly something that we'll look back on in a year, 3 years and be very, very satisfied with our strategic position to be a service provider in these high-growth regions. So what we're really talking about, Jordan, is a tactical set of issues around bringing on a group of 300-plus employees that are new to LSI and on-boarding them and then aligning process and execution and making sure that we fully understand where clients have recurring business requirements and where they do not, and risk adjusting and refining our process as we move forward. This business is completely different than the business that we had in Europe in 2008 and '09. That was a retail liquidation business that was regrettably acquired right before the financial downturn of December 2008 and was a case where a few of their large clients simply went bankrupt. And the business we're referring to when we say GoIndustry serves 75 Fortune 500 blue-chip clients, sells high-value equipment on a consignment basis, a commission basis, there's 0 inventory risk and is leveraging a buyer base that's already been developed for the last decade and only continues to grow. More of our buyers want to be accessing our marketplace online. We use 1,200 videos a week globally to support these sales of rolling stock, of processing equipment, laboratory-tested measurement equipment. This is where the world is going and we're leading it in this new innovative way, and therefore, we're very much convinced that this is a terrific investment for us at $11 million. If you were just to be conservative, let's say we paid $20 million for the business, in our historical acquisition filter, we would be looking to pay in the range of 5 to 6x, maybe a little bit more for our business. So the question you have to ask is, are we able to drive a $4 million EBITDA return out of this business? I think unequivocally, the answer is yes. Will it take a little longer than we initially thought? Yes it will. In the end, it's going to be very high return on capital exercise for us, more importantly very strategic to where our clients are going and need to be served. I'll turn it over to Jim.

James M. Rallo

Analyst

Jordan, I'd take the first couple of questions you had. As far as GoIndustry's performance in the first quarter, it was better than the last quarter that we had of fiscal year 2012. This is a -- tends to be a seasonally higher quarter for GoIndustry, capital assets, meaning the clients are 12-31 year-end companies and so there's a lot of capital assets that tend to move off the balance sheet before the next fiscal year. So again, I would say we actually had sequential growth in the business quarter-to-quarter. What we're not seeing in the pipeline is the kind of growth that was anticipated at the beginning of the year. So we certainly expect to be significantly under our budgeted ranges for GoIndustry that we had talked about at the beginning of the year. I would say that was more than half of -- and good segue to your second question, which was the $75 million drop in GMV, I'd say that's more than half of that number. Most of the rest is coming from, again, the retail part of the business, which I think Bill and I discussed earlier in detail what's driving that. And then there's a small little bit that you have, to be frank, which is coming from scrap, which continues to be lower than expectations, albeit not a material part of business anymore, it is obviously a part of our core business and going down. I think one point I would comment on is the scrap business continues to decline, yet our operating margins continue to improve in the core business as I indicated in my comments. The core business operating margins were 14% this quarter, where I say core, I'm only excluding GoIndustry from that number, which was a loss for the quarter. And that would be significantly higher than we've ever had in the business. So we continue to get operating efficiencies and scale as we grow the business, and the point being that we are growing the business this year just not at the rate that we anticipated. Jordan E. Rohan - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., Research Division: Just so I know, I believe the last run rate, you spoke of on a quarterly basis for GoIndustry was something in the mid to high-30s range per quarter in GMV, is that correct and does that mean that you saw something maybe in the mid-40s for the trailing quarter, the December quarter?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

That's about right -- we were expecting more than that. Jordan, we talked about doing around $185 million or so of GMV for GoIndustry this year. Jordan E. Rohan - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., Research Division: All right. So if we kind of look at that, you guys perhaps are down to $185 million minus $40 million, or about $145 million in expectations now?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

I would say somewhere around there, yes.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein, Oppenheimer. Jason S. Helfstein - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: I think we've hit a lot of this already. So maybe talk about clearly the market is discounting, what's happening. Obviously, you think a lot of this is due to GoIndustry and the market is taking a lot out of the stocks. Can you talk about your desire to take advantage of that? Clearly, you have capacity left on your buyback. And then the company is underlevered, is there any desire to add leverage? And then talk about your acquisition pipeline, should we expect you to ease up on acquisitions until you can show better financial performance out of GoIndustry?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

Well, I think the driver of managements philosophy and approach is where do you generate strategic value for your clients and high returns on investment in capital and investment of capacity and time, and in various phases of our company, we've been in heavy investment mode or integration mode or operational enhancement mode, which I call sort of a build-up phase, and then we've had various phases where we've had more of a breakthrough phase, where we're growing more rapidly than our long-term growth targets. And you toggle constantly [indiscernible] through those 2 parts of your business or philosophy as you grow our company over time and fiscal '13 is the time where we're very focused on enhancing our business. Independent of acquisitions, heavy investments in the sales and marketing organization, and the software and e-commerce platform driving our business and a global promotion of our services, strategic cross-selling. So a lot of investment going on. We have expanded geographically. This is a transformative expansion. It's not without calculated risk but the returns more than justify the incremental risk undertaken when you look at the size and scale of where our current clients have needs. And so, we're very focused on generating very high returns on our current investments. We've had the opportunity to become effectively the strategic acquirer of choice in our industry. We get presented with lots of opportunities. We're the natural consolidator people in the market who know this industry. I think I have high regard for our approach in our business model. And, yes, Jason, we'll be presented with opportunities, more in the tuck-in variety than significant transformative acquisitions, but we're very comfortable with what we have on our plate in 2013 with GoIndustry-DoveBid and NESA. Our clients are using our services in both respects to do more and more volume with us and I think in fiscal '14, you're going to see results based on the investments we've made in fiscal '13 that will be very encouraging. So we do look at acquisitions. I don't view it as a driver for the balance of 2013 but, yes, there are always situations that present themselves. Jason S. Helfstein - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: You didn't comment about...

James M. Rallo

Analyst

And on stock, I think, look, we would potentially see certainly, repurchases, as part of our long-term use of cash and I can only imagine that we'll be looking at repurchase activity in the near term. Jason S. Helfstein - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: And then just one quick follow-up, Jim. Can you just talk about if you take your annual guidance, what percent of the -- how much of GoIndustry is a drag on the, let's say, the mid-point of EBITDA guidance for the year?

James M. Rallo

Analyst

Yes, I think I hit that when I was answering Jordan's question, Jason. I mean, basically on the bottom line, most of that is coming from GoIndustry.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Andre Sequin, RBC Capital Markets.

Andre Sequin - RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Research Division

Analyst

I was wondering if you could give us a little color around the investment you're making in GoIndustry. What exactly is involved there? I mean, is it just a matter of building out a website for each of these places or is it building out a distribution center even? And kind of what timescale is involved for each location? And then secondly, you mentioned the closure of more offices than expected, and I was wondering if you could talk about what the decision process is there? Is it that you just don't need those offices or that there -- these locations aren't capable of handling the types of systems you hope to install on those locations?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Sure. In terms of the integration process, there are several areas that we're making these investments. First is creating a global sales organization on the same platform. We have put investment in Europe and in Asia in the sales and marketing organization in advance of scaling our business in those regions. We have strong client references. We have current clients in those regions, but there is a front loading of investment in sales and marketing to properly serve and cover client business opportunities. So that's one area, and I think along with the systems, the sales force automation, the tools to identify and execute sales activities. Second, I think we are focused on integrating the buyer marketplaces. We commented on the BUX platform, there is a process by which we are investing in software engineering resources to bring the GoIndustry marketplace onto our BUX platform. Again, you must front-load those expenses to do the work to develop the requirements and then to execute that. I think we have said in the past that there's some very small percentage overlap between the GoIndustry-DoveBid buyer base and our legacy buyer base. There's a lot of cross-selling opportunities with the buyer base that will be monetized as part of that integration effort. Certainly on the financial and back-office operations, rolling out a set of global financial systems where each country is integrated into one set of financials, one sort of software package to integrate financials is another area of investment. Again, you make that investment up front before you realize the synergies. Operations and customer support is another big area. We have an opportunity to consolidate customer service and operations and not need to provide it on a country-by-country basis but on a more regional basis. That's going to provide a lift in efficiency, integration of the global HR function and the leadership development function is another area of investment. That's something that we're in the process of managing, and I think because our sales organization is supporting clients in their place of business, we don't need as many physical offices and therefore targeted offices that don't provide any real strategic or operational value and a reduced -- in North America, already some of those locations will do the same outside the United States. As far as how do you identify the strategic need for a location, let's say an international location. First, we start with our client base, where are their needs, where are their facilities, where do they have recurring activity? In those cases where they do have recurring activity and they are strategic accounts, there's a high interest in maintaining those locations, whereas locations where this isn't that strategic recurring activity but more of a one-off business, that's less valuable to the company and therefore, more likely to be sunset over time and that would be the rationale and thinking around where we want to have locations versus where we're going to close locations.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Gary Prestopino, Barrington Research.

Gary F. Prestopino - Barrington Research Associates, Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Just some further questions on GoIndustry. I mean, with the shortfall in the GMV, is that a function of worldwide macro environment or is that really a function of that when you got your first look at this, you maybe did not have your people in place there and the growth was there that was not anticipated?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

I think there are 2 aspects there. One, the new organization provides their view of potential and until LSI has had experience interacting with particular business leaders or vetting information, we have a certain reliance that we place on newly acquired teams and personnel in forecasting techniques. And as we peel the onion and we have more experience with what they use as a risk-adjusted forecast, we have some risk in working with that forecast. In the current state, we have eliminated a lot of the risk of their forecasting techniques because we have either put an LSI long-tenured employee in place to lead a division or a marketplace. In fact, we have elevated experienced LSI leaders to head of North American sales, head of North American operations and head of the Asia-Pacific region. And secondly, we have more experience now working with those individual clients in those individual countries to understand what is the real timeline of plant liquidation, equipment appraisal and closure activities, and in some cases, insolvency proceedings and those are things that do affect the timing, Gary, of sales. And every country has different statutory lead-time items. So our experience continues to allow us to be better at understanding what drives a forecast for that GoIndustry business and we'll increase over time, all else being equal, the accuracy of the information and the quality of information we gather from these various outposts throughout the world. And then we're driving more use of standardized systems and process that had been in place for, in some cases, 12 years with Liquidity Services and exporting those processes to these newly acquired operational teams and locations.

Gary F. Prestopino - Barrington Research Associates, Inc., Research Division

Analyst

So do you have all the people in place that you need to have in place now, your seasoned team members?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Yes, we believe we do. In fact, we recently hired a new CFO for our Capital Assets Group, which is one of the things overseeing the GoIndustry organization. We also have added a new Vice President of Marketing, a very experienced B2B practitioner for that reason. So yes, we are making those investments in personnel, which is part of what we've been talking about.

Gary F. Prestopino - Barrington Research Associates, Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Can you give us some idea of your thought process of when this becomes breakeven to accretive?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Well, we have a phased approach. I think North America is already achieving great success in many areas. We've aligned incentives in our sales organization. We've begun to cross-train sales teams to sell our range of services. So I think you're going to see great progress in North America followed by Asia and Europe. But I think when we look at this acquisition and we look at the investment we're making, profitability will be a fiscal '14 timeline and we're very comfortable with that.

Gary F. Prestopino - Barrington Research Associates, Inc., Research Division

Analyst

Okay. So you're still comfortable you can get this back to profitability next year?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Yes.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Dan Kurnos, Benchmark.

Daniel L. Kurnos - The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst

Let me just maybe start with 2 questions. Just a high-level question here. Your goal to get to $2 billion in GMV by 2016 seems pretty aggressive and you're obviously investing heavily this year to get towards that goal. So I'm just curious if you have any sense of how long this heavy investment is going to persist, particularly in GoIndustry as you reach -- as you go towards that goal?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Well, I think you have stair step growth in the size and scale of investment activities, Dan. When you look at the size of our sales and marketing organization, it's more than doubled in the last year. However, that is the capacity that helps drive the opportunity to create $2 billion of GMV. And so one thing that's important to remember, our business is growing in fiscal '13, notwithstanding significant step function growth in sales and marketing, technology infrastructure. We'll be adding a new CIO in the near future that's going to give us global execution capabilities that we've not had in the last 2, 3 quarters. There's a lot of important investment we make every year. It's just that the step function growth that we have has probably grown. The strides in our investment are larger now and that is the essential foundational element of growth. And I would be worried if I was looking at a company that wasn't making these important upfront investments to sustain and grow a business. We are making very important investments in fiscal '13 in every functional area and we've expanded our market opportunity. For most of our existence, we've been a North American focused, Retail Supply Chain focused business with a state and local government marketplace and expertise in the Federal government. Now, we have a global sales opportunity that spans 6 or 7 major drivers of our economy; retail, energy, transportation, healthcare, technology and we're executing services that span every aspect of the surplus asset management valuation, redeployment, obviously, the asset disposition process to our marketplaces, we have more services to sell our clients, we can serve our clients in more regions, we have a very small percentage of clients that use more than one of our services or work with us in more than one region. So our growth to $2 billion is merely a function of serving the needs of our existing clients and leveraging that expansion potential while also using the strong references to be the market leader in those industry categories. So that drives the opportunity to grow on a consistent basis.

Daniel L. Kurnos - The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst

So that sort of segues into my second question, which is, you talk a lot about your existing clients underperforming based on their forecast, and that's really hurt GMV in the quarter. But you've also identified as an opportunity increased penetration with those existing clients, so I'm just curious as to what you think when we should start expecting to see that moving the needle on the GMV perspective?

William P. Angrick

Analyst

Well look, I think when you examine the clients we have, manufacturer clients that are selling equipment to us, but who also manufacture consumer goods that need to be tracked, managed and sold as an inventory liquidation service, so we see opportunities to take a relationship that has historically been related to capital asset sales and leverage it into the sale of inventory using our Retail Supply Chain Group expertise. Equally, we have Retail Supply Chain growth coming from manufacturers of finished goods that have massive supply chains and capital equipment disposition opportunities. So in both directions, we're able to penetrate those relationships and do so in more regions in the world. As far as where that growth will reveal itself, it will reveal itself within the top retailers, the top manufacturers, many of whom supply retailers, leading companies in energy, leading companies in transportation, leading companies in the healthcare and pharmaceutical space and that growth of roughly 20% a year over the next 4 years is very attainable.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the question-and-answer portion for today. I would now like to turn the call back to Julie Davis for any closing remarks.

Julie Davis

Analyst

Thank you and thanks to all the participants on our call today. As always, we will be available for any follow-up questions and questions that we did not have time for on today's call. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.