Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the KAR Auction Services, Inc. Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mike Eliason, Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Michelle. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for the KAR Global third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Today, we will discuss the financial performance of KAR Global for the quarter ended September 30, 2021. After concluding our commentary, we will take questions from participants. Before Peter kicks off our discussion, I’d like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may affect KAR’s business, prospects and results of operations, and such risks are fully detailed in our SEC filings. In providing forward-looking statements, the company expressly disclaims any obligation to update these statements. Let me also mention that throughout this conference call, we will be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the applicable GAAP financial measure can be found in the press release that we issued last night, which is also available in the Investor Relations section of our website. Now I’d like to turn this part over to KAR Global, CEO, Peter Kelly. Peter?

Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everybody. I’m delighted to be here this morning with all of you to provide an update on our performance at KAR Global. So on today’s call, I plan to speak about our third quarter results. I’ll provide an update on the commercial seller volumes and what we expect to see between now and the end of next year. I’ll also provide updates on the continued growth in our dealer-to-dealer business with a focus on our digital dealer-to-dealer businesses, BacklotCars and TradeRev. I’ll provide an update on our acquisition of CARWAVE and the solid performance of our finance business, AFC, and I’ll close out with some updates relating to our cost structure. So I’d like to start with the third quarter. And there’s no question but that the third quarter was a challenging quarter and the challenges were volume related and principally tied to the commercial seller category, specifically to off-lease vehicles. These industry-wide volume challenges are tied to the disruption of new vehicle production. And I spoke to these dynamics in detail at our Analyst Day event back in September. I don’t plan to repeat all that here this morning. However, I will say that the situation remains largely as I described at that time. So in the third quarter, despite operating in an environment of very constrained vehicle supply from commercial sellers, we achieved the following results. For KAR overall, we generated $535 million in revenue, which was a decline of 10% from Q3 of last year. We generated a total gross profit of $222 million, representing 50.1% of revenue, excluding purchased vehicles. We generated $96.6 million in adjusted EBITDA. Cash generated from operations for the quarter was $57 million. Within the ADESA segment, we facilitated a sale of 586,000 vehicles, representing over…

Thank you, Peter. I have a few things to add to Peter’s commentary today. First, I would like to point out some bright spots in the current situation we are facing. We all know that the supply wholesale vehicles is constrained primarily for our commercial vehicle business. However, this has led to strong used car pricing. Gross auction proceeds are at record levels in all segments of our business. The average selling price in our commercial off-premise segment primarily OPENLANE was $21,500 in the third quarter compared to $19,400 per vehicle in the third quarter of 2020. Digital dealer-to-dealer represent BacklotCars and TradeRev at an average sale price of $10,400 in Q3 compared to $8,900 last year. And our on-premise auctions, which includes a mix of commercial and dealer consignment at an average selling price of $15,000 per vehicle compared to $13,300 one year ago. This strong pricing situation has led to higher auction fees for transaction across all of our marketplaces. The only marketplace that has been -- has seen a significant decline in fees is the OPENLANE private label programs. The high percentage of transactions being grounding dealer purchases caused auction fees per transaction on this platform to decline 20% year-over-year in the third quarter. Another positive in the third quarter was the gross profit per vehicle in the ADESA segment, achieving $274 gross profit per car sold in Q3 compared to $249 in the prior year, and this was a strong performance. This reflects a positive mix of revenue with more of our revenue coming from higher-margin auction services than other lower-margin services. The lack of commercial supply, especially off-lease vehicles reduces revenue from lower-margin services like transportation and end-of-lease inspections. I want to be clear, though, while we are very focused on improving our cost structure…

It’s John Murphy from Bank of America. I didn’t get it out. So I’m sorry, guys. I guess she turned me on and didn’t make an announcement. So just a first question. When we think about the CARWAVE acquisition, skeptic could say, hey, you’re making these acquisitions, they might be a little bit duplicative or overlapping and an optimist may argue it’s building a very significant network effect that you need to get this flywheel going. How do you think about the network effect versus the sort of the potential duplication or overlapping of customers? And how much of this do you think, Peter, is purely incremental to what the core business will be as it normalizes over time.

Thank you, John. I appreciate the call -- the question rather. Sorry for the technical difficulties there. But I guess, John, my point of view on it, I think when you’re looking at digital marketplaces -- digital marketplace businesses, the network effect is real and very, very important. And when you’re -- when you have a digital marketplace model, you really want to be #1 or #2 in your market because if you’re outside of that set that generally, it’s not as attractive a proposition. So I think scale really matters. And I think scale gets formed early on and customer habits can be quite sticky, quite persistent over time. So I think we -- I think the market has been evolving. It was an early stage of a lot of disruption, a lot of new entrants. I think we’re through that stage now in the market. I think there’s a number of players in the market. They have established customer relationships, established areas of geographical strength and those patterns are becoming more defined. So I lean heavily towards these are additive and it’s not duplicative. It’s actually more of a 1 plus -- if I just look at, say, BacklotCars and CARWAVE together, I think you combine them and you get more than the sum of the parts. Because by -- so for example, if we think of CARWAVE, very, very strong in California, but doesn’t really have a very strong buyer base outside of that market. Well, BacklotCars does. So by bringing those platforms together, you now get a new buyer audience onto the vehicles of both sellers in California, which in theory creates greater liquidity and improved outcomes for those customers and also obviously brings more inventory supply to those buyers. So I think those types of things really, really matter in digital marketplaces. And you often see sort of an acceleration of those positive dynamics over time as you get scale. So that’s kind of variety on this. And then I think the other thesis on what are these digital marketplaces doing? Are they bringing new vehicles into our industry, into a formal sort of marketplace industry? Or are they just disrupting what was happening in the traditional physical auction world? Candidly, I think I’ve been clear on this all along. I think they’re doing both. I think there’s data that says they are bringing new vehicles in and greater opportunity for businesses like us as we move in a more digital direction. But they’re also competing in some vehicles out of the legacy channels as well. And I think that will continue.

Okay. And then a second question. You made a very interesting statement that you believe that your commercial market share was consistent in the quarter. I’m just curious, I mean, that’s a great debate that whether you’re maintaining, gaining or using market share, and it’s very opaque as the denominator is difficult to call and what’s happening in the market is difficult to call on a real-time basis. How are you ascertaining that analysis? I mean, what are you doing there to figure that out? And how comfortable are you that you’re going to be able to maintain or maybe even gain some market shares as the commercial market comes back?

Yes. And I think, John, our -- again, if we go back to our Analyst Day, our thesis around commercial market share was, we’ll see a recovery in commercial volumes, and we will maintain our market share and that delivers 20, 25 [ph] results, at least as it relates to commercial volumes. So you’re right, the data sources are not great, but let me sort of give you some insight into how we do our assessment. If we look at our upstream world, obviously, we know the customers that are contracted with us at -- on our OPENLANE platform. We know the nature of those relationships, if they’re exclusive or not and most of them are exclusive. And we know if we’ve lost any customers, we haven’t lost any, right? And then we can also look at what are those customers converting at in that channel. And frankly, those conversion rates are at an all-time high, given the current dynamics. So that -- when I say maintain, we probably actually increased our share a bit because we’re selling proportionately more in that channel where we already have strong share. But then in the physical world, obviously, we know our own commercial physical volumes, right? So that’s a statistic that’s known to us. And we have insight into commercial volumes across our industries through an independent third-party data source. So we can -- we’ve got a numerator and a denominator there that we can track, and we obviously look at that very closely. I guess, John, I’ll say neither of those are perfect data sources, right? Are there some potential edge cases that don’t get caught on their data set, there are, but I think we have a pretty good picture on the industry once we do that analysis, and that’s how we can make the statement we need. On the recovery -- sorry, John, I’m confident we can maintain our share as volumes come back. I am absolutely confident on that, yes.

Then just lastly on repos because they might not be as dependent on the recovery in new vehicle production. They’re just -- they’re dependent on repos activity picking up. And I’m just curious if you can give us an update of where you think repo activity is right now, where it will go through 2022. And if that could create a little bit of relief, maybe before we’re all waiting for this production ramp to really tick in?

John, I think that’s a very good insight, and I agree with you. I do think the one commercial segment that is potentially independent of the production situation is the repossession segment. And as I mentioned to you, that is about 70% of normal, so 30% below normal and has been so for the last 12 months or 15 months. It’s been sort of stable at that level. What that means is to get back to normal, it can grow another 40% from its current level. So there’s a good upside there for our industry, if that were to happen, and I expect it will happen over time. We do track repossession assignment volume to RDN. We have seen a small uptick, 10-ish percent or so in assignments through that platform over the last 5 or 6 weeks, that I view as a positive but it’s also possible that, that might be somewhat seasonal. So I don’t want to count on that yet. But I agree with your comments that I think repo has the potential to recover sooner than other segments.

But those repo units would come directly to auction. It’s not like they would get stuck at a ground dealer like a lease good, right? I mean they would more fluidly go directly into your auctions. Is that a fair statement?

Absolutely. John, you’re absolutely -- sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off there, but you’re absolutely right. And I tried to make that point as well on Analyst Day. Repossessions -- our repossessed vehicles sell pretty much exclusively through the physical downstream channel for a whole bunch of reasons that I went into. So yes, they would flow directly to auction.

And our next question comes from the line of Gary Prestopino with Barrington Research.

Peter, with what you’ve done in the digital space at this point, do you have coverage now of the majority of the franchise dealers in the U.S. as for listing cars? And then just really the majority of dealers within the U.S. and Canada on your digital platform.

Gary, thank you. So yes, specifically questioning -- question relating to our digital dealer-to-dealer platforms. I would say absolutely, yes. We have -- well, when I say nationwide coverage in the U.S., I really mean the lower 48 states. We’re probably not as strong in [Technical Difficulty] but coast to coast in the 48 states, absolutely, we have, I would say, a strong presence in all states, and we can serve any dealer in any state, and the same is true of Canada with the TradeRev platform. So -- The short answer to that question is yes. We have full coverage. And maybe if I can just add a little bit more detail. I did speak to the fact that we saw record marketplace participation in the third quarter. I was very pleased about that, growing our number of sellers and buyers in both the U.S. and Canada to record levels in the quarter. So I feel really good about that. I would say the supply constraints that we’ve talked about in commercial also actually had a negative headwind on dealer, okay? So we track average number of vehicles posted per seller. And we saw that number a little below normal or I won’t say a little, but below normal in the third quarter relative to the prior 4 or 5 quarters. I attribute that to the fact that there’s just a real sort of supply constraint out there in the industry. Dealers are getting fewer trade-ins. And those trade-in vehicles that they’re getting, they’re more likely to want to keep some of them or more of them for the retail business. So I think I’m generally pleased with what we’ve seen in terms of the growth of our customer base and the results we delivered in the third quarter in spite of those kind of market attributes out there.

And our next question comes from the line of Stephanie Moore with Truist.

I wanted to touch specifically on the off-lease vehicles. Do you find that there might be a longer change in just dealer behavior as they’re just getting so accustomed to kind of grounding and keeping these off-lease vehicles on this near-term environment, and we might not see as much of a shift down the traditional auction channels when and if new vehicles do improve? And then can you just walk us through maybe expectations due to lower new leasing in this environment? How that could impact your model in years to come as well?

Thank you, Stephanie. So 2 questions there. Let me take the first one first. First of all, Stephanie, it is true we’re seeing record high conversions on OPENLANE. I just referenced that on one of my questions earlier. Generally, we’ve seen that conversion rate trend up over time as online became a bigger and bigger part of dealership buying and our sellers have it for selling. So viewed over multiple years, the online conversion rate has trended up. But then there was a step function change with COVID or post-COVID with this supply constraint. I do think that as production increases and prices normalize, that those very high conversions that we’re currently seeing will fall back. And my guess is they probably won’t fall all the way back to where they were pre-COVID because I do believe there is an ongoing sort of digital transformation going on, on multiple dimensions in our industry. So I think -- but I do think they’ll fall back quite a bit from where they are right now. A big part of it is really driven by the pricing environment. And when we talk about very high grounding dealer penetration today, a lot of that is driven by the interrelationship between the residual value and the market value of the vehicle because a lot of dealers -- grounding dealers get the opportunity to buy the car residual in the same way as [indiscernible]. So as those sort of 2 numbers start to move close together and often more usually, we see residual values being above market in a more normal environment. So I think that will impact the conversion rate as well. And then I’d say -- the last comment I’d say on that is, obviously, when it comes to our upstream open channel, we…

Got it. Thank you, Peter. That was a really thoughtful answer, thorough.

And our next question comes from the line of Daniel Imbro with Stephens, Inc.

I wanted to start on the CARWAVE acquisition. First, congrats on closing that deal. I think at the time of the deal, Eric, you guys said it brought you kind of the profitability in the dealer-to-dealer business, that would imply some pretty strong incremental margins of profitability at that asset for 100,000 cars. So can you provide any more color on what kind of EBITDA contribution you expect from that? And then on these implied stronger margin, is that more of a stronger gross margin or better SG&A leverage since it’s just one market.

Daniel, thank you. Daniel, I’m not going to give specific numbers here, but I’ll give you just directionally how I see it. As I mentioned, CARWAVE is performing very well in a more regional market, right, but a big one, right, California. Selling a higher-value vehicle with, I would say, strong unit economics, okay? Strong monetization of the transaction. And one of the things we really liked about CARWAVE was a very efficient cost of service and cost of delivery model. And we see a potential to leverage that more broadly, not only in our digital dealer-to-dealer channels, but potentially beyond that too. So those all contributed to a profitable and growing business. In some respects, similar sort of performance to what we’re now seeing in our TradeRev platform in Canada. So I kind of look at -- you could look at the 2 P&L side by side, they look quite similar to each other in many respects. So we see a lot of interesting opportunities in addition to the sort of network effects type situation that I talked about on an earlier answer here, an opportunity to further accelerate BacklotCars transition upmarket to higher-value vehicles, which is well underway. We’re seeing that already with BacklotCars, significant growth in the average vehicle value. Hopefully, an opportunity to further accelerate BacklotCars monetization of the transaction, which was part of our strategic intent all along. So we see it additive to that. And then really looking at this cost to serve and efficiency around the fulfillment of the transaction. By the way, BacklotCars is also very strong in that dimension. But I do think there is an opportunity to really put the best of the best together here and deliver a very good outcome, both for our customers but also for our business.

Daniel, this is Eric. Let me add to that. It really comes down, can I lower my cost to support the transaction. In Canada, the dealers typically self-inspect vehicle, eliminating the labor cost around inspection. In CARWAVE, they have a lower cost support infrastructure using an offshore resource that is very attractive to us. And I think taking those 2 platforms and taking advantage of them across the network, I’m very, very pleased with this acquisition. And as we mentioned when we did the transaction, we expected that this would put us in a profitable situation across our dealer-to-dealer digital offerings, and I’m confident that’s where we landed ourselves here early on.

Got it. And Eric, you mentioned net leverage ended the quarter at 3.2x. But you bought CARWAVE, I think, here quarter-to-date. Can you provide us on just what pro forma leverage would be when you account for the cash you spent on CARWAVE and pro forma net leverage? And then lastly, what is -- are there any leverage covenants? I mean, I think it used to be 3.5x. How are we looking there? And then how does that impact capital allocation?

Yes. We will -- we could potentially see a tick up in pro forma leverage in leverage in the fourth quarter, although I would expect adjusted EBITDA LTM to go up a little bit based upon a very low adjusted EBITDA number in Q4 of last year. And there will be additional EBITDA added by the actual, not pro forma. But in terms of our leverage calculations, I don’t expect it to be a meaningful pick up -- tick up from $3.2 billion. We’ve been building cash since quarter end as well, Daniel. And I do -- I have incurrence tests on my revolver. But my -- there’s no issue with total net leverage. My senior secured leverage is still -- I think it’s right now just below 2x, but right around 2x, and it will stay there. And that’s really the major test. And the total leverage limitation is much higher than 3.5 relative to ongoing. It could impact the future acquisition at above -- if I went above 3.5, but that’s not an issue I’m worried about.

Got it. And then just last clarifier. Peter, I think my audio cut out a little bit earlier. You’re providing some commentary on preliminary future cost cuts. Can you just repeat quickly what you said about that and then the impact to the fourth quarter. I think I heard you mention 4Q EBITDA, but it was kind of cutting out.

Okay. Apologies, I didn’t realize that. What I talked about is we have an initiative underway. We’re nearing the end of the assessment phase and we will provide more specific detail on the future call. But I think we have significant opportunities across the company. And obviously, they’ll be in this transcript. On the quarter, we didn’t provide specific guidance, Daniel, and don’t plan to. Typically, we have some seasonal effects in our industry. And based on those I would expect our EBITDA performance in the fourth quarter to be less than the EBITDA performance in the third quarter, but I’m not providing guidance beyond that.

And our next question comes from the line of Bob Labick with CJS Securities.

It’s Bob Labick from CJS. I want to start -- I wanted to start with digital dealer-to-dealer, but really kind of overall. Could you talk about maybe where you’ve been, where you are now and where you’re going with your inspection and inspection reports? And how your investment and partnership with Ravin and AI is impacting this product? And ultimately, how this impacts your volumes and your P&L?

Yes. Thanks, Bob. That’s a good question. As we think about being a more digital business and what are the sort of ingredients for success, there’s no question, the inspection report is critical. We poll our customers, but they are typically buyers, but also sellers, but for sure, buyers, it’s typically the #1 item and it makes sense that buyers are kind of de-risk. You’re looking at a screen, how can we be confident that the vehicle that’s going to show up when it’s delivered, right, given it’s a used vehicle. So we continue to invest in that. And we do have some initiatives underway right now at BacklotCars. And obviously, with the CARWAVE acquisition, we’re sort of including that in the solution design here as well to sort of further improve the condition report for these digital dealer-to-dealer platform. So there’s initiative underway on that. One of the objectives of that redesign or evolution, I should call it, of the inspection report is to also make it more to enable us to syndicate the inspection more easily across our own infrastructure. So we can push vehicles seamlessly from backlog into the ADESA marketplace and things like that. So we can flow the data without having to move the car or reinspect the car. So some work there. And frankly, leveraging some work we’ve already done with TradeRev in Canada, that’s proving to be quite successful. You mentioned Ravin. We -- our initial focus with Ravin has been more on the commercial seller side of the business, leveraging some opportunities that Ravin already had sort of -- we’re obviously a minority investor in that business. They already had some opportunities locked down with a number of commercial sellers. So we are supporting them in the delivery of that. We’ve introduced them to some new commercial customers. And we do have an initiative teed up, but not -- certainly not yet live to bring some of that AI and machine learning capabilities into other aspects of our inspection such as the digital dealer-to-dealer channel as well. But again, I’d say the focus over the first 6 months of the investment, and this is really led by Ravin themselves has been on a number of commercial seller captive finance type opportunities.

Okay, great. That’s really helpful. And then just one other quick one for me. You mentioned at the Analyst Day, piloting some physical locations running cars again. And could you just remind us what you’re up to now or how many locations you’re up to now? And is the process the same or different from pre-COVID, meaning you’re running the same number of planes, same hours? How has it impacted revenues and profitability for you?

Yes. Thanks, Bob. Good question. We are up to approximately 30 locations in the U.S. I do not have plans at the current time to expand beyond that. We are not running all the cars at those locations. We’re focusing on principally dealer consignment and repossession vehicles at those locations. So trying to maintain that focus. What we’re seeing -- and I think I don’t recall if I touched on this on Analyst Day or not, we’re seeing -- certainly, it is helping us win back some volume at those locations, okay? So we’ve seen an increase in particularly dealer consignment at those locations relative to when we are in a purely digital model. That’s contributing to our numbers. And we’ve also -- we’re not doing it exactly like we used to. It’s -- we put some additional sort of checks in place to further increase safety. And the other thing I would say is, even with running these cars in lane, what’s been interesting to me is the dealers that migrated towards digital, for the most part are staying digital. And even at these auctions where we’re running cars in lane, the majority of the vehicle selling are selling to online buyers who do not come to the sale. But other dealers who -- and it’s a smaller number of dealers who just never adopted the digital technology and just didn’t adopted, they are now sort of coming back into the lane and providing some additional buying power for those markets. So I think we view it as success, we’re trying to keep it somewhat limited, but in areas where we can demonstrate it adds value and our sellers like it, then we are obviously supporting it.

And our next question comes from the line of Bret Jordan with Jefferies.

Can you tell the time of integrating CARWAVE with Backlot? I think you said it might be a while. But as far as being able to show inventory across systems, it seems like that’s where the real leverage of the incremental volume might be.

Yes. I guess what I’d say, Bret, is certainly, we’re deep in the planning process of that right now. Owning to the way approvals work and HSR, you can’t really get into that discussion pretty close. So I think we’re having a very good, very positive collaborative discussion, a lot of enthusiasm. I don’t want to commit to a specific timeline. When we acquired Backlot, our strategy on the trade of migration was really almost akin to a hard shutdown and let’s just move it across and take some risk and the customers. That worked really well for us, by the way. But I kind of feel with the 2 platforms we have right now, we’ve got established customer bases on both platforms who really like the platforms, right? And I want to make sure that when we bring these together, we’re really giving the customer on whatever platform they are on today, a better solution going forward. So it just requires being a little thoughtful and maybe taking a little more time, but we’re moving expeditiously. I will say that, and we’re committed to one brand, one platform, one set of policies, one pricing model, all the key fundamentals like that are part of the long-term plan. So listen, I think we’re looking at, I would say, doing most of this work in the -- between now and the middle of next year would be my expectation, but I don’t want to give a more specific timeline to that.

Okay. And then on your target to 1.2 million cars by ‘25, does that assume organic growth from here or is there more to buy to get to that number?

Bret, my focus is on organic growth for sure. I think this marketplace is now somewhat stable with -- from a -- we know the industry -- we know the players. We -- these businesses are growing. We want to continue to grow them, hopefully accelerate the growth. So our focus is principally organic. There’s nothing -- outside of that I’m contemplating right now. But I never want to be closed mind to any opportunity either, but organic is clearly the focus.

Michelle, I believe you had one more person for the question, and then we’ll go -- we’ll take this question and then go to closing remarks.

All right. And our last question comes from the line of Ali Faghri with Guggenheim.

So first, I wanted to ask about your market share on dealer consignment. I mean, previously, you had mentioned some share losses in that segment. And I’m hoping you could help us quantify those. How much of that do you think also is driven by share losses maybe to digital competitors and how much to maybe other physical competitors due to your decision not to run cars through the auction lanes?

Yes. I mean, clearly, there was some share loss, and it’s tied specifically to that decision, post-COVID, not running cars, particularly when independent auctions. And then ultimately our other competitors started running cars, we did see some erosion in our physical lanes and that was the principal driver of the share loss. I guess what I would say is over the last couple of quarters and looking purely at our physical market share and using similar data sources to what I talked about, we’ve seen that stabilize and a slight increase in our share gain over the last, I think, relative to where we were I think, in Q1, I thought -- I don’t have the data in front of me right now, but my recollection is, if I look at Q1, Q2, Q3, we’ve seen a slight upward trend in our physical market share. So I think it’s stable. I think, obviously, our decision to run cars at some locations has enabled us to win back some volume there. I’ve already commented on that. So I think it’s stable and we’re focused on building it back up where we can. But obviously, growing our digital dealer-to-dealer volume is the principal driver of our 2025 plan.

Got it. That’s helpful, Peter. And if I kind of a quick follow-up here on the commercial consignment side, specifically. You had mentioned you haven’t lost any customers, but I’ve been getting some questions because there was some public news earlier this year that Volkswagen Credit had selected Manheim for their upstream or marketing. And I believe they weren’t open in customer before unless I’m mistaken. So I’m hoping you can help me square that with commentary that you haven’t lost any commercial customers.

Yes. So there was -- that was a 2020 event, Ali, so I’m talking specifically 2021. But let me just comment on that customer. Volkswagen Credit renewed its agreement with us for Canada earlier this year despite having access to other platforms and knowledge of how other platforms perform. So I felt that was a positive vote of confidence from that customer and we’re excited to continue to serve that customer in Canada. So what I’m saying, Ali, is there were no -- there have been no customer losses in the time period I’m talking about here, which is 2021.

Got it. That’s helpful. And then last one here on your spending outlook. You’ve taken out a lot of costs out of the business and are talking about potentially further cost cuts and potentially being EBITDA positive, I think, in your digital dealer-to-dealer business. But you have your digital competitors out there who are talking about spending significantly in coming years. In fact, one recently IPOed and is talking about potentially getting more aggressive on incentives to take market share in the U.S. specifically. And so I’m wondering how you can ensure that you’re going to be able to compete effectively in a backdrop where it seems like your digital competitors are planning to spend aggressively in coming years?

I think we’ll just have to watch the competitive environment, Ali, as we go. I think our trend -- if we look at our trend line, at KAR, we’ve seen those platforms go from heavily loss-making, if I go back a couple of years, our digital dealer-to-dealer platforms to, essentially, I’d say, breakeven in the current year or very close to that. So we’ve seen some very positive steps in the direction towards profitability with TradeRev profitable in Canada, CARWAVE profitable. And my expectation is that with further organic growth and some of the things we talked about, we can execute our plan and deliver. But obviously, we always watch the competition. I think dealers at the end of the day, they’re more focused on what are the results these platforms deliver for me and for my business. If you’re a seller, are these platforms delivering good values in an efficient way, with an easy process. If you’re a buyer, I’m now getting good inventory selection and on-time delivery and those types of attributes, I think they’re actually less focused on this month’s incentive. But nonetheless, listen, we’ve dealt with competition all through our history, we’ll be dealing with competition as long as we’re in business. So that’s just part and parcel of managing our business.

And Ali, let me add. Our focus is really just on providing those services efficiently. And I don’t know that anybody providing incentives have ever proven that it’s a long-term strategy to win unless you have efficient services offering that will keep a consistent cost of the transaction going forward. And that’s what we’re focused on. I don’t think anyone is out there offering a more economical transaction than we are. I think we’re very competitive on pricing right now across our digital platforms in total.

Yes.

And this does conclude our question-and-answer session. And I would like to turn the conference back over to CEO, Peter Kelly, for any further remarks.

Thank you, Michelle, and thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for your time this morning and for your questions. So I’d just like to close out just reinforcing what myself and the team here are most focused on as we move forward. I’ll start with dealer-to-dealer. We’re focused on continuing to grow our digital dealer-to-dealer volumes towards our goal of 1.2 million vehicles sold by 2025. This, in turn, will drive a significant increase in our overall profitability. To help drive this, we’re focused on increasing our marketplace participation by sellers and buyers in the U.S. and Canada as well as ensuring a successful integration of CARWAVE and BacklotCars in the U.S. If I look at commercial volumes, clearly, the current supply situation has been a challenge. However, we believe that disruption is temporary in nature and we’re focused on getting through the disruption, but also, I would say, using this time as an opportunity to reengineer our business, lowering our cost of service. And our goal ultimately is that as the volumes return, we can support increased volumes with a lower cost delivery method than we’ve had in the past and be more profitable even at lower volumes than we’ve been in the past. And most importantly, we remain focused on our customers. Our purpose at the end of the day is to make wholesale easy so our customers can be more successful. And I believe that if we do that well, our customers reward us with their business and our company will have a bright future. So, with that, we’ll end today’s call, and I look forward to reconnecting early in 2022. Thank you all very much.

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.