David Schwarzbach
Analyst · Evercore ISI. Please go ahead
Thanks, Jeremy. We entered the fourth quarter with considerable uncertainty around the impact that rapidly escalating COVID cases would have on our business. Notwithstanding broad-based shelter-in-place orders and increased restrictions, we continued to see impressive year-over-year improvement in revenue retention. In addition, paying advertising locations further increased from the third quarter to reach 520,000 in the fourth quarter, a decline of just 8% year-over-year. As a result, net revenue reached $233 million, a 13% year-over-year decline. Our revenue performance, combined with continued expense management, enabled us to deliver $21 million of net income and $60 million of adjusted EBITDA. This represents a 26% adjusted EBITDA margin and demonstrates the potential leverage in our model. Our lower-than-expected expenses were principally the result of lower than forecasted headcount. We have increased our operational focus on hiring outside of the Bay Area. With nearly an entire year as a fully remote organization, we are confident in our team's ability to maintain productivity who are working from home. As a result, we plan to continue operating with a more distributed workforce, which we believe will enable us to expand our presence in lower cost markets and reduce our real estate footprint. During the fourth quarter, we reinitiated our share repurchase program. As of February 9, we had deployed $49 million to repurchase approximately 1.6 million shares at an average price of $31.34 per share. We currently have approximately $220 million remaining under our share repurchase authorization. We plan to continue our share repurchase program, subject to economic and market conditions. Our cash balance increased modestly from the third quarter to $596 million at the end of the fourth quarter. Turning to our outlook, we anticipate first quarter net revenue will fall between $220 million and $230 million. In addition to ongoing COVID-19 related headwinds, it's important to recognize that our first quarter net revenue is typically lower than our fourth quarter due to seasonality. On the expense side, we plan to invest in our growth initiatives. This includes increasing our product investments as we focus on opportunities in Self-serve and our Services category. While we have gained efficiency in our local sales channel, we intend to invest selectively in our Multi-location sales team and in performance marketing to support our Self-serve channel. As a result, we anticipate that first quarter operating expenses will increase from the fourth quarter with first quarter 2021 adjusted EBITDA between $20 million and $30 million. Turning to the full year, we expect 2021 net revenue between $985 million and just over $1 billion at $1,005 million. We expect overall economic activity to increase in the second half as the virus abates and the economy recovers but do not anticipate a full recovery for the US economy before next year. We expect 2021 adjusted EBITDA will fall within the range of $150 million to $170 million reflecting margin improvement from the first half to the second half. With our planned investments in our products and engineering team in 2021, continued execution on Home & Local Services monetization and a strengthening US economy, we are focused on achieving mid-teens percentage annual revenue growth in 2022, as well as adjusted EBITDA margins exceeding 20%. Given the structural improvements to our business model driven by our transformation, we see significant opportunity for margin improvement over the long-term. I also want to mention that we have introduced new key metrics in our Q4 and full year 2020 shareholder letter to reflect the transformation we have made to our business, as well as what we believe will be the key drivers in our next phase of growth. We've provided three years of historical data in the shareholder letter and look forward to reporting on them in our first quarter earnings call. In closing, we believe we're very well positioned as the economic recovery continues. We look forward to building our revenue momentum and strengthening margins as COVID recedes later this year. With that, operator, please open up the line for questions.