John Kett
Analyst · Stephens Inc. Please go ahead
Thanks, Arif. Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. In our first 4.5 months of being a stand-alone public company, we have made significant progress on our short-term priorities, including building out our necessary teams and functions and continuing to enhance our product and technology offerings to buyers and sellers. We are also making good progress on our six key strategic initiatives. I'm very proud of our teams, and I thank all of them for their hard work and dedication. Turning now to our third quarter results. We generated 11.3% revenue growth, and a 13.1% increase in adjusted EBITDA. On an organic basis, excluding the impact of our DDI acquisition, foreign currency, and a non-cash revenue adjustment revenue growth was 9.8%. This quarter we benefited from higher revenue per vehicle as well as higher volume. Our international business continues to drive strong results led by Canada, where we have had success with customer wins and enhanced service offerings. Before I review the progress on our key initiatives, let me spend a few minutes discussing the volume shifts we mentioned in Q2 that were incorporated in our outlook provided at that time and continue to be reflected in our outlook for 2019. As we said last quarter, our outlook reflects known volume shifts and buyer fee changes announced in Q3. While we do not discuss customers on an individual or name basis, there have been some volume shifts, which include a top three customer who is shifting about 30% of their volume away from IAA to diversify their business. This shift is substantially complete has played out as we expected and should be completely finished by the end of the year. While we've had some key customer wins as well, this year we have lost more share than we've gained. Insurance customers are motivated by a number of different factors, when deciding how to allocate or diversify their business across their salvage partners. Proceeds, pricing, product offerings and service levels, catastrophe management and customer relationships, including changes in claims organizations are just some examples. I am confident in our ability to drive share and additional volume over the medium to long-term. I also believe our sharp focus on driving innovation through the expanded products and services we are bringing to the market will further strengthen and differentiate the value proposition we offer to buyers and sellers. We are fully committed to having a best-in-class digital marketplace and are making great strides with both new and enhanced products and services that we've delivered for buyers and sellers and continue to aggressively pursue additional enhancements. We are in the middle of our budgeting process for next year, but as Vance will discuss, there will be an impact to anniversarying this shift in volume next year, resulting in revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth in 2020 potentially falling somewhat below our longer-term targets. Having said that, we still feel confident in the longer-term outlook for organic revenue and EBITDA growth that we previously provided. We will provide our formal outlook for 2020 on our Q4 call. Now, I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about some of the key innovative product services and initiatives that set us apart in the market. Those include IAA Loan Payoff, IAA 360 View and our Buyer Digital Transformation initiative. Loan payoff digitally connects insurance companies and automotive lenders to enable more efficient document sharing and processing of loan payoffs. With more than five million vehicles deemed a total loss each year and growing and approximately 60% to 70% of them having vehicle loans, better managing this traditionally manual time-consuming process is a significant benefit to insurance customers. Loan payoff is demonstrably reducing cycle time, by an average of 19 days so far and generating significant economic value for our insurance provider partners. Reduced cycle time means less vehicle depreciation, faster receipt of proceeds, lower processing costs and higher customer satisfaction, which results in less policyholder churn, along with other savings for insurers. Our recently announced acquisition of DDI and our strategic partnership with Dealertrack provide additional tools and lender relationships to further accelerate and enhance the use of loan payoffs. We are very excited about this innovative product and the positive impact it is having for our insurance provider partners. The next new product 360 View provides buyers an online interactive 360-degree view of both the exterior and interior vehicles in high-quality video with detailed imagery providing a more accurate visual of the vehicle. This improved merchandising helps build buyer confidence, drives higher bids, all these results in higher proceeds for sellers. We are really pleased with the results we're seeing. To date, we have seen a proceeds increase when using 360 View, by approximately $300 to $600 per car on average. The third topic, I want to talk about, is our Buyer Digital Transformation initiative. Over the last couple of years, we have developed and brought to market several new key pieces of functionality. IAA Timed Auctions, Buy Now, IAA AuctionNow and 360 View, are all examples of recently implemented solutions for digital buyers to dramatically enhance and improve user experience and engagement. We've also completed our full U.S. rollout of AuctionNow, our significantly enhanced auction platform and we are pleased with the results that we are seeing. AuctionNow drives a superior buyer experience through features like improved auction monitoring, new bidding features, enhanced auction reminders and improved vehicle imaging and merchandising that is producing an increase in buyer bids and ultimately driving increased proceeds that benefits our sellers. We will continue to innovate our auction platform and additional enhancements around the way. We plan to provide a more detailed update on buyer digital transformation in early 2020, as part of our review of margin expansion opportunities, but expect to be substantially complete with the rollout by the middle of 2020. And these are all part of our progress on our six key strategic growth initiatives. I've already discussed the progress that we're making on buyer digital transformation and loan payoff, which are key components of our initiatives to broaden our service offerings, deepen our strategic seller relationships and expand margins. I'd like to talk a little more now about what we're doing on another really important initiative, growing our international buyer network. We continue to have considerable success, increasing both our international buyer network as well as our overall sales to international buyers. We currently have buyers in approximately 136 countries; offer our website in six different languages and our call center support 13 different languages as well. In this past quarter units sold to international buyers, were up 22% versus the prior year. However, we know we have an opportunity to further expand our international buyer network and increase our sales to these buyers. Our strategy to achieve this consists of the following four parts. First, we're going to continue to build brand awareness through in-country seminars that educate potential buyers on the salvage auction process. Second, we're strengthening our marketing alliances internationally through relationships with established local partners and agents and utilize satellite bidding offices selectively. As an example in Poland, we now have 10 satellite bidding offices in major cities. And as a result, units sold in that country year-to-date are up more than 25%. Third, we're going to target specific countries with strong growth opportunities through focused digital marketing. By delivering a country-specific curated content and leveraging social media channels, digital advertising and search engine optimization, we are focused on increasing brand awareness and expanding our buyer base. And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, we are utilizing our technology innovation to create a better buyer experience. Through new merchandising technology like 360 View, Timed Auctions and AuctionNow, we are providing better vehicle data and a more comprehensive visual display of vehicles, allowing all buyers the opportunity to conduct more thorough research, which in turn increases buyer confidence and raises bidding and buying levels. We expect this momentum to continue as we roll out additional innovative products and enhancements. In addition to the initiatives that I've just mentioned, as we have discussed, we will be laying out our margin expansion plan by early next year. We will be providing more detail on our key initiatives, including the margin improvements that we expect. So, in summary, I am pleased with the early progress that we have made as an independent public company and the focus our organization has on delivering innovative products and technology, as well as enhanced service levels to drive a better buyer experience and improved outcomes for our sellers. We feel good about our position going forward, given that we operate a leading global marketplace in such an attractive industry with company-specific margin opportunities that we intend to capitalize on to drive shareholder value. Thank you for your interest and support. And I will now turn the call over to Vance to discuss our financial performance in further detail. Vance?