Bill Angrick
Analyst · Baird. Your line is open
Thank you, Julie. Good evening, and welcome to our Q4 earnings call. I'll review our Q4 performance and provide an update on key strategic initiatives and today's developments regarding our DoD Surplus contract re-compete. Next, Mike Sweeney will provide more details on the quarter and full year results. Finally, Jorge Celaya, will provide our outlook for the current quarter. Although our Q4 and fiscal '17 consolidated results were mixed, we are pleased with the performance of our state and local government marketplace, our GovDeal segment and our retail supply chain marketplace our RSCG segment. Our GovDeal marketplace reported year-over-year GMV growth of 15.8% in Q4 and 17.5% in fiscal '17. We signed over 300 new agency sellers during Q4, including the State of Ohio, City of Boston, Orange County, Florida and Lake County, Illinois and we continue to expand the geographic reach of this marketplace throughout the United States. During Q4, GovDeals completed over 54,000 auctions for client agencies ranging from vehicles, heavy equipment, helicopters and airplanes. Our RSCG segment continued to grow the topline organically with GMV up 18.4% year-over-year in Q4 and up 11% year-over-year in full-year fiscal '17. Of note, we've increased adoption of our consignment model with many clients, which results in lower capital requirements and higher margins on GAAP revenues. Our Liquidation.com marketplace saw strong performance in buyer participation, GMV per completed transaction and overall site conversion. Our RSCG team continues to expand our returns management offering, to solve the needs of both retailers and manufacturers. We're developing new capabilities to expand our work in the processing, handling, refurbishing and sale of product returns, which is well-suited to the rapid growth of online retailing, which is fueling higher product returns industrywide. We've expanded our sales team and recently signed new multiyear returns management service contracts with both retailers and manufacturers. Our sales pipeline remains strong and we expect the business to grow organically during fiscal year '18. Our Capital Assets Group or CAG segment business reported a realized unexpected headwind in Q4 due to seller project delays across all verticals as well as in our energy vertical due to Hurricane Harvey. Our DoD Surplus and Scrap contracts results continue to be hampered by lower volumes and declining value of assets received compared to historical trends, which continues to drive down margins. While we saw less client sales activity among industrial accounts in our CAG segment during Q4, overall trends in our sales pipeline remained strong and we expect the business to improve sequentially from Q4. Our strategy in fiscal year '18 and beyond remains focused on the long-term growth of our commercial and municipal government marketplaces on a global scale, while capturing operating efficiencies as we complete the integration of our marketplace platform and business functions under our LiquidityOne transformation program. We expect strong organic GMV growth in our commercial and municipal government marketplaces in fiscal '18 and continue to be encouraged by the expansion of our customer base and service offerings. Overall during fiscal year '17 we signed approximately 3.000 new commercial and government sellers and added approximately 185,000 new registered buyers to our marketplaces, pushing total registered buyers to nearly 3.2 million. Our growth initiatives are focused on building density in our target verticals by expanding relationships with leading sellers, buyers and partners, expanding our flexible service offerings including our full-service, self-service and retail returns management offerings and enhancing our buyer experience through our LiquidityOne e-commerce platform. To support our future vision, we are completing the buildout of new infrastructure and capabilities to support our sellers and buyers. We're also simplifying and streamlining our organization to drive efficiencies, which should improve earnings results in fiscal year '18. During Q4, we consolidated leadership in the sales, marketing, operations and executive teams across the U.S. and Europe within our CAG segment. Streamlining of our technology, human resources and corporate support functions has extended into Q1 '18 and is consistent with our goal of driving increased productivity throughout our organization to benefit our sellers, buyers and shareholders as we advance our vision of building the world leading marketplace for surplus assets. During Q4, we continued to advance our LiquidityOne transformation initiative. We are excited by the early product-related benefits of our new e-commerce platform, which went live this past summer within our energy marketplace. The new LiquidityOne backend system enables a real-time view of transaction activity and trends within the marketplace. We've begun to experience benefits from system improvements such as being able to quickly adapt marketing and operations activities to match current seller and buyer demands and improve lotting activity to drive maximum value for sellers. The mobile responsive design of our new platform enables users to seamlessly access account information, allows our sellers to upload assets for sale, and enables buyers to search, bid and pay for assets on any device type. When this functionality is implemented across our entire network of marketplaces, the combined impact will create a distinct and powerful advantage that allows our customers more choice in how they transact with us and drives a more efficient business as we strengthen our processes, service offerings and overall value to our sellers and buyers. The next phase in our transformation process is the launch of our new commercial self-service marketplace AuctionDeals.com. This will support the expansion of our self-service model to small and middle market commercial companies in addition to our traditional focus on large Fortune 1000 organization. Additionally, our new AuctionDeals marketplace mirrors the technology of our GovDeal marketplace and its launch will support a logical transition of GovDeals on to our new LiquidityOne platform during the second half of fiscal year '18. The remaining CAG marketplaces are expected to launch on our new platform this summer and our RSCG marketplace will launch by early fiscal year '19. Following the migration of our marketplaces on to our new e-commerce platform, we anticipate an overall increase in productivity across our sales, marketing and operations area as well as increased participation from our sellers and buyers, driven by our enhanced services. Lastly, we anticipate launching a new consolidated marketplace by early fiscal '19, which will serve as a single marketplace to search, find and buy any asset from all of our sellers. The power of a single unified marketplace will drive increased traffic from our buyer base through more efficient marketing strategies and will provide our buyers with a more efficient method of sourcing our global supply of available assets from the most recognizable sellers across the globe. We exited Q4 in a strong financial position to pursue our growth initiatives with $94 million in cash and zero debt. Next, I'd like to update you on our DoD surplus usable non-rolling stock contract, which represented approximately 10% of our GMV in Q4. Today, the defense logistics agency conducted a field bid for the non-rolling stock property stream that we currently operate under a one-year extension through December 14, 2017. The new usable surplus contracts were bit today in two separate regions. The new contracts required bidders to submit a fixed bid as a percentage of the original cost of the property. We were outbid in both regions and our expectation is that the DoD non-rolling stock usable property stream will transition to new contracts. The bids we submitted for both regions were approximately 40% higher than our current pricing levels. The apparent high bidder elected to bid an amount that was approximately 80% higher than our current pricing levels. Liquidity Services' long-standing philosophy is to focus on opportunities that leverage our strengths to provide value to our clients and deliver attractive returns on our effort and investment. Given that the new terms of the usable contracts are far more onerous than our current contract, bidding any higher by Liquidity Services would have been damaging to shareholders. As we have previously noted, the new contract imposed -- imposes higher costs and risk than under the current contract. For example, under the new contract, there is no termination for convenience option for the contractor, rendering it a take or pay contract, which means the contractor is obligated to pay the fixed bid rate for up to six years regardless of any changes in the volume or mix of property referred by the DoD. Even small changes in the property, volume or mix could result in significant operating losses under the contract terms. Moreover, the requirements of the new contract result in higher operating costs versus the status quo, including a requirement to pay for all property every 30 days, independent of sales volumes, a 72-hour asset removal requirement from DoD facilities at the contractor's cost, significant power storage charges for failure to timely remove property, shipping cost to move the property to the contractor's warehouse, secure warehousing requirements, reduced credits for shipment discrepancies and a lower guarantee property stream. Failure to identify and remove restricted property from the contractor sales channel also results in contractor penalties equal to 50% of the item's original cost. We are proud of our award-winning work and relationship with the defense logistics agency for the past 17 years, supporting the sales of usable surplus property to hundreds of thousands of small businesses and we look forward to continuing to provide services to the DoD under our scrap contract and in other areas of mutual interest. Since the inception of our work with the DoD in 2001, Liquidity Services has significantly evolved. Today there is limited strategic overlap of the DoD Surplus program with the rest of our business. Given the complexity and unique contract requirements in the DoD Surplus property program, there is limited overlap between buyers of the DoD Surplus property and the rest of our property. Neither do we rely on the DoD contracts to attract and retain other municipal government agency clients or commercial clients. Moreover, we continue to add other federal government agency sellers to our business on mutually rewarding business terms. As we wind down the DoD surplus contract, we're looking forward to reducing the complexity and cost of our operations and focusing our efforts on continuing to grow our state and local government, commercial capital assets and retail supply chain segments. During fiscal year '18, we expect to benefit from growth in our GovDeals, CAG and RSCG segments due to anticipated higher sales activity and greater adoption of our existing and new value-added services. We also expect to see improvements in our energy and industrial verticals following realignment efforts within the CAG segment completed during Q4 and continued investments in sales and marketing, partially offset by the lingering effects of Hurricane Harvey. In closing, continued investments in our people, processes and platform will enhance the value we bring to clients and drive our transformation. As we begin to harvest the investments we're making over the next few years, we are excited about the tremendous potential to grow our business. Liquidity Services is committed to driving innovation and significant value creation for our customers and shareholders as we execute our long-term growth strategy. Now let me turn it over to Mike Sweeney for more detail on Q4 and full year fiscal '17 results.