Marshall Chesrown
Analyst · JMP Securities. Go ahead please. Your line is open
Thanks, Whitney. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy. We’ve demonstrated solid progress on our march to profitability the past several quarters. And I'm pleased to report that we generated double-digit gross margin for the first time in our history and reported positive net income of $1 million in the quarter despite the challenging macroeconomic backdrop. In 2019, we demonstrated our ability to rapidly scale RumbleON and set our sights on achieving profitability. We have taken prescriptive measures to drive gross margin expansion, gross profit per unit improvements and reduce operating expenses since then. And our second quarter results are more evidence of our ability to rationalize our expense profile and take advantage of market trends cost effectively. It's been about six weeks since our last call and even in just that short time, a lot has changed in our economy. For many customers, selling or buying a vehicle is an important component of their business or personal needs. Our online technology allows dealers and consumers to sell or buy a vehicle without ever coming into physical contact with another person. We believe this is the safest way to transact, and it certainly appears to be the way of the future. Our touchless buying and selling processes allowed dealers and consumers to buy or sell a vehicle from their business or home, complete their transaction on their phone, tablet or computer, and have the vehicle picked up or delivered without coming into physical contact with anyone along the way. There's no doubt that COVID-19 pandemic has created headwinds in the industry, but there are also tailwinds and new opportunities being created. Thus far in the third quarter, we are experiencing the highest online activity, strongest demand, and highest valuations we have seen in our history as a company. We continue to see fluctuations in market trends, but our nimble business model and fast inventory turn has enabled us to make operational changes that we believe will enable us to emerge stronger than ever. Very early on in the pandemic, we decided to reduce inventory dramatically because of macro uncertainty. Further, before the COVID pandemic proliferated across our country, our facilities were struck by a tornado destroying or severely damaging a large portion of our auto inventory located at our Nashville hub. Consistent with what others in the industry are reporting, inventory acquisition is competitive, thus expensive. Between uncertainty due to COVID, damaged inventory in Nashville and a supply and demand imbalances, we had the perfect trifecta of challenging circumstances. Off the cuff, this may sound insurmountable, but our management team's significant experience in the industry allowed us to leverage past experience to our advantage. We made quick adjustments in expense reduction and inventory sell off, and we have been able to continue to make great progress towards our near-term profitability goals. Our decision to liquidate inventory early on means that we don't have over-aged depreciating inventory on our hands today. Instead, our quick turnover has resulted in our inventory being truly mark-to-market. When valuations are moving around as they have been since March, a mark-to-market approach and fast inventory turnover is advantageous and it's key to profitability. We continue to prioritize margin expansion and bottom line improvements. So we are taking a very disciplined approach to vehicle acquisition, focusing on the highest margin inventory available. Additionally, we temporarily reduce discretionary growth expenditures and adjusted purchasing levels to align with demand and market conditions, while closely monitoring key metrics to determine when and how quickly to adjust. All of which are reflected in our Q2 margins. We also recently received our first proceeds from the insurance company for some of the losses we sustained from the tornado, which you can see in our bottom line results. Through all of this, our most important priority is the well-being of our employees and customers. We have taken several steps to provide a healthy working environment, including implementing work-from-home policies for many employees, eliminating non-essential travel and implementing social distancing policies. As such, we did not attend Sturgis this year as planned, but we hope to return in 2021. We have made prudent decisions and quick changes to our operating model and expense profile. And I am proud of our team for everything they've accomplished in the past several months, especially with all these changes occurring amid those challenging times. Our 100% online business model allowed us to quickly respond to changes in market demand and the industry landscape as we position RumbleON for sustainable, profitable growth over the long-term. At the time of the tornado on March 3, 2020, and the issuance of stay-at-home orders soon thereafter due to COVID-19, we were swift to roll back ad spend dramatically, and we did so aggressively. As it played out, not only was it a prudent idea to control spend as dramatically as we did, it also gave us another view into our true organic traffic, a rare opportunity for a young company. The results were better-than-expected and although there was an obvious slowdown, we had an accurate baseline to build from for our future ad spend as demand returns. Further, the rollback of ad spend led to massive customer acquisition cost improvements during the quarter. In Q2, our customer acquisition cost was $147, down from $428 in Q2 of 2019. In July, we began to ramp marketing spend in support of the launch of RumbleON 3.0, and early successes are being realized. The addition of thousands of vehicles listed by dealers and consumers on our site, we'll increase the amount of vehicles available, which will benefit consumers who are looking for their perfect vehicle as dealers navigate inventory scarcity. In addition to new paid ads, we expect our inventory aggregation to strengthen the organic traffic. We expect pre-owned vehicle sales to begin to increase from Q2 level as we begin to increase our brand building and utilize direct response channels to efficiently source and scale our addressable markets. Since we are not providing guidance, we want to offer some additional color about monthly trends thus far this year. We experienced what we believe was the bottom of the downturn in mid April with the largest unit sales decline and our lowest level of inventory acquisition during the quarter. Total unit sales for the month of April were down 66% from January levels. By the end of April, conditions began improving slowly and began ramping quicker as the month of May progressed. The velocity of the rebound in May and June was higher than expected. And as demand has returned, our acquisition of inventory has accelerated. In May, unit sales increased more than 22% from April's lows and we experienced a 46% increase in June as compared to April. Though, we are still below the monthly unit volumes experienced in January and February, our results for the month of June, July show our highest gross margin on units sold in our history and significant operating income improvement from prior periods. We don't believe the June and July levels of gross margin are sustainable over the long-term. However, we do expect vehicle margins will stabilize as demand normalizes. In the meantime, we will continue to take a disciplined approach to benefit gross profit per unit and continue our March towards our near-term profitability goals. While we are seeing increased demand, there is still much uncertainty in the macro environment that could impact our industry, and we anticipate the return to business as usual will take some time. As we all learned to navigate a new normal, COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the digital transformation across all industries around the world. Now more than ever, consumers and businesses are operating exclusively online. All retailers need new ways to reach customers and dealers need access to tools and technology to stay competitive in the new normal market of online transactions. RumbleON's technology was purpose built to enable a simple streamline and 100% online experience, bringing all elements of transactions online. Companies that really took a hard look at their digital strategy early on and invested in technology solutions are leading in this environment. Those who didn't need to buy or build it now and rapidly implement new technology and process. We are super excited to add the content of multiple dealers and drive increased traffic to the new rumbleon.com. With the launch of RumbleON 3.0 in the coming days, our technology platform, tools and ancillary products and services will be available to powersports dealers, enabling their digital transformation. RumbleON's dealer centric offering will improve participating powersports dealers ability to compete in online only transactions and our cash offer tool, RumbleON consumer financing, logistics, and inspection capabilities will help generate higher quality leads with a greater likelihood of conversion to sale for all dealers. We're not only bringing them high quality leads similar to the best listing sites, but we are bringing them the tools, technology and services that will give them access to online transactions. For most of them, this will be a first. We added this functionality at the request of many dealers who are struggling with the demand from consumers to transact online rather than in a showroom. Every dealer we have presented this opportunity to is excited and clearly sees the value in our approach as they’re looking to rumbleon.com to significantly improve and accelerate their online capabilities and generate incremental sales. The launch will be with powersports only. However, always keep in mind, our technology was designed to be effective with anything with even, including autos, boats and RVs, once we're ready to launch those verticals. In July, we announced that more than a 100 dealers across 29 States will participate in rumbleon.com 3.0 when we go alive and we anticipate accelerated growth quickly thereafter. Rumbleon.com 3.0 will also improve the customer experience. These franchise and independent powersports dealers maintain thousands of new and used powersports listings, which will be available on rumbleon.com, offering tens of thousands of listings for consumers in one marketplace. And we anticipate the tremendous increase in content on the site will further accelerate our online traffic, all while creating incremental monetization and margin opportunities as we continue to scale our core business. There are several ways we can monetize rumbleon.com 3.0, listing fees, vehicle acquisition fees, distribution fees, logistics, and transportation, backend technology, and support advertising and more. As we have mentioned before, we see similar business dynamics and opportunities in both in RVs as in powersports and fully intend to enter those segments when the timing is appropriate. In the meantime, the market opportunity to continue our dominance in powersports is paramount. And our automotive distribution model has incredible scalability from where we are at today. Our ability to backstop trades and consumer purchases for dealers online allows them to manage seasonality and inventory shifts much more effectively. In our early days of entering the automobile space, there were many questions around the timing of that move. Management at the time and even more so today felt that building the best distribution platform for anything with a VIN was the first step to assure our long-term business strategy is successful and we believe this will even be more valuable with RumbleON 3.0. Further, our wholesale Express business, which moved over a 100,000 vehicles in the last 12 month continues to grow and as a meaningful part of our profitability profile going forward. We are proud of our commitment to investing in software development and that ongoing investment is one thing that we never backed down from even during our tornado loss and the onset of COVID. Due to that relentless commitment to technology development, we now have the ability to buy, sell, trade and finance, not only just RumbleON own inventory, but now any dealer's inventory. Building our technology and a best-of-breed distribution platform first has led to and we believe will lead to many more strategic relationships going forward. And in fact, we continue in talks with many. For example, we recently announced a pilot program with CarGurus that not only validates the strength of our technology, but it demonstrates the agility of our business model. CarGurus is leveraging RumbleON's technology, logistics and distribution services to facilitate the testing of an inventory acquisition for dealers to source inventory directly from consumers, a 100% online. We look forward to further opportunities with them in addition to other strategic business relationships as we continue to leverage what we have built in our company's brief history. We believe there are boundless opportunities ahead of us, and this is yet another example of how we are executing on our disruptive strategy. Our proprietary technology suite has underpinned our offering since day one. We have strong relationships with dealers and our agnostic business model has propelled our rapid expansion in both power sports and automotive. From our perspective, online transactions were already accelerating rapidly, but COVID-19 has kicked the acceleration into overdrive. There are a handful of beneficiaries of this rapid industry change, and we feel our strategy and supporting technology will lead the way. Our entire team is excited like never before about the future, and management is confident, we have the team of highly experienced professionals that will make it happen, especially with the recent additions to our management team and Board of Directors. Our team is well versed in the industry we are disrupting, and the newest members of our leadership team are already participating in a big way. We believe they will be instrumental to our organization going forward. Lastly, I want to stress loud and clear that profitability is key, and we are committed to managing our business to achieve sustainable, profitable revenue growth and deliver shareholder value over the long-term. As the same goes, we are running a marathon, not a 100 yard dash. And in our short 3-year history, we feel we have barely left the starting dates. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Steve to discuss our financial results. Steve?