This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk02: Welcome to WISH's second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. I would now like to turn the conference over to Randy Schrago, WISH's vice president of investor relations.
spk00: Please go ahead.
spk04: Hi, everyone, and welcome to WISH's second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I am Randy Schrago, Vice President of Investor Relations, and joining me today are our CEO, Vijay Talwar, and our CFO and COO, Vivian Liu. Today's prepared remarks have been prerecorded. There is also a slide deck that has been posted to our IR website, which is available for your reference. Once we have finished with Vijay and Vivian's remarks, we will hold a live Q&A session. The remarks made today include forward-looking statements that are related to, among other things, our financial expectations, business and turnaround plans, the turnaround timeline, consumer experience and engagement, expectations regarding merchant relationships and strategic partnerships, the potential impact of our strategic marketing and product initiatives, including ad spending and the rebrand, and the anticipated return on our investments and their ability to drive future growth. Our actual results may differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements if certain risks materialize or assumptions prove incorrect. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which are described in today's earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our beliefs and assumptions today, and we disclaim any obligation to update them. Also during the call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial numbers and metrics. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP results is included in today's earnings release, which you can find on our investor relations website, and which is also filed with the SEC. A replay of this call will be posted to our investor relations website. I'll now turn the call over to our tuition CEO, Vijay Talwar.
spk07: Vijay Talwar Thank you, Randy. I would like to thank everyone for joining our second quarter 2022 earnings call. I will start the call by providing a high-level overview of our corporate rebrand, and then I will share some progress highlights around two of our three foundational business pillars, improving the consumer experience and deepening our merchant relationships. After my comments, Vivian Liu, our CFO, and our newly appointed COO will discuss our third foundational pillar, achieving operational efficiencies. She will then share our second quarter numbers in more detail and provide our third quarter financial forecast. I will then provide some closing remarks before opening up the call to your questions. An important part of my role as Vicious CEO has been to focus on our turnaround and rebuild a strong foundation for the company. This has entailed improving and fixing many operational aspects of the company. But another very important part of my role has been to focus on transforming Vish's corporate culture to one that embraces innovation, challenges the status quo, and enables us to consider where we can take this company over the next three years. Today, I would like to start by discussing the rebranding of Wish, part of our first pillar of improving customer experience, which is beginning in earnest this month. The rebranding will highlight many of the fundamental changes that we have made at Wish in recent months, including the new consumer experiences, our enhanced customer service, faster delivery, better on-time delivery rates, our new pricing strategy, and the overall increased consistency of the new Wish marketplace. We will begin rolling out our rebrand in stages, starting in August, incorporating a new logo, a new design, and new imagery. The rebrand will be supported with a multi-channel advertising campaign that is planned to run in our largest markets beginning in August and running throughout the holiday season. In recognition of all the changes underway at Wish, we have also taken the opportunity to re-evaluate our mission as a business. Our new mission statement, Bargains Made Fun, Discovery Made Easy, more accurately reflects our renewed focus on helping value-oriented consumers. discover listings of new products while having fun in a frictionless and convenient way. Once we are successful in making discovery easy and bargain shopping fun, we believe it will in turn create a positive word of mouth among our consumers, ultimately resulting in higher sales growth. Our investments in the consumer experience have resulted in continued improvement in our net promoter scores from March through June. Further, we have seen impressive gains in our consumer feedback scores gathered by one of our larger advertising partners. They provide a score on a scale of zero to five, with five being the highest. Based on the feedback they've received from people who have likely made a purchase from ads, They have observed our consumer score improving from below two in 2021 to a high of 4.7 in 2022. This effectively moves us from among the lowest performing merchants to among the highest in less than a year. Our marketing team has been diligently testing for additional consumer marketing channels. Our plan is to diversify our marketing spend to balance our traditional media outlets like TV and radio with newer platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. This will have much greater appeal among our target Gen Z and millennial consumer base. As we continue our path to improve consumer experience, I'm excited to announce that we have completed a soft launch on Android of our revamped women's fashion offerings. The new experience balances function and inspiration by introducing filters, style feeds, and much, much more. We are happy to report that early fashion buying trends were better than we even anticipated. We saw the number of transactions and GMV for fashion increase, and our transactions amongst Gen Z consumers increased by double digits. We plan to build on the success with a much broader ramp up of women's fashion from mid-August to mid-November. We plan to eventually have over 2,000 new fashion merchants onboarded and over 150,000 fashion SKUs available to consumers to choose from. Our second pillar is deepening our merchant relationships. During the second quarter, We continued with the invite-only process for onboarding our new merchants, while also raising greater awareness about our wish standards program. The program has already started to have positive impact on the business, leading to a reduction in customer refund rates. We continue to be diligent in our removal of merchants who violate our policies and do not consistently deliver a good customer experience. Starting in Q2, we rolled out a new commission structure to bring greater clarity and a more competitive commission rate to our merchants. This change was first implemented in Europe in Q2 and will be deployed to the rest of the world, including U.S., in Q3. In the second quarter of this year, we began a monthly survey of our merchants to better understand their needs and garnered their overall sentiment towards WISH. The initial findings for our merchant NPS survey indicate that merchants value the ease of onboarding, our global customer traffic, and our logistics support. We will continue to survey our merchants to learn more about how to make WISH an even better marketplace for their businesses. At this time, I would like to turn the discussion over to our CFO and COO, Vivian, to discuss our third pillar as well as our financials.
spk01: Thank you, Vijay. Before discussing the financials, I'd like to share updates on our third pillar, which is about achieving operational excellence. Recognizing the importance of timely delivery to our buyers, we have invested in our logistics and shipping services. As a result, we were able to register an on-time delivery rate of 94% this Q2 and 18% improvement year-over-year. In early 2021, our time to door was on average three weeks, which put us at a disadvantage among our peers. Improving our time to door has been a strategic priority of our new management team. Over the past 12 months, our efforts have led to a double-digit improvement in time to door. Our goal is to roll out a 15-day time to door initiative in all major markets for WISH in 2023. I would also like to take a moment to discuss our business development efforts to globalize our merchant base outside of China. We believe that over the long term, it is important to diversify sources of products from other countries in Asia, North America, Europe, and South America. As such, we are accelerating our investment in select countries to expand our sourcing capabilities and to shorten the distance between merchants and the buyers. Through new merchants, we're adding variety and the depth to the core categories on our platform, such as electronics, fashion, home decor, and hobby products. I would now like to discuss the financial results for the second quarter of 2022. I will also provide adjusted EBITDA guidance for the third quarter and additional information on the revenue trend throughout the month of July. Our Q2 adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $58 million, an improvement over a loss of $67 million from Q2 2021. compares favorably to the loss of $90 million to $100 million that we had previously forecasted FQ2. The more favorable EBITDA outcome was mainly driven by lower than expected added spend, employee-related expenses, and outside services. In addition, certain operating expenses were delayed as we continue to evaluate our spend plan for the second half of 2022. We maintained a reduced level of ad spend through March of Q2, but it began to ramp up in the month of June. The relatively low level of ad spend in Q2 continued to impact our user metrics and the financial performance. We had 23 million monthly active users and 20 million last 12 months active buyers in Q2. A 74% and a 62% decline respectively year over year. Total revenues were $134 million, a decline of 80% year over year. This revenue decline was across core marketplace product boost, and logistics. It's important to call out two major drivers for the revenue decline. First, the low ad spend. Ad spend in Q2 was just 11% of that in Q2 of last year, which was the main reason for the revenue decline. Second, we continued to simplify prices for our buyers throughout Q2. While the price changes reduced our GMV and revenues in the near term, we're confident that they bring our practices more in line with industry standards, improve user experiences, accelerate other volume and revenues over time. Q2 gross profit was $42 million, a decline of 89% year-over-year. Gross margin was 31% versus 59% in Q2 2021. Gross margin performance was driven by a decline in marketplace profitability mainly due to the rollout of the aforementioned price changes to all geographies. as well as the lower margin logistics business contributing a higher percentage of total revenues. Total operating expenses were $133 million in Q2 2022, a reduction of 73% year-over-year. Operating expenses were 99% of revenues for Q2 2022 compared with 76% of revenues in Q2 2021. Lower ad spend outside the services and the reduced employee headcount accounted for a majority of the reduction of operating expenses. We will continue to focus on operational efficiencies to drive EBITDA and the cash flow upside. Our Q2 free cash flow was negative $67 million, a significant improvement from a negative free cash flow of $205 million in Q2 2021. As compared to Q1, we also saw a $79 million improvement in cash used in operating activities due to cost efficiencies and favorable changes in working capital. We ended Q2 with a solid position of $947 million in cash, cash equivalents, and the marketable securities. Now turning to our outlook for Q3 2022. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be a loss in the range of $110 million to $130 million for Q3 2022. Q3 EBITDA loss is expected to be higher than that in Q2 for three reasons. First, we plan to increase our ad spend in Q3 to coincide with the holiday selling season. Second, we will be investing more to drive WISH's global rebranding. The rebranding efforts will ramp up throughout Q3 and Q4. Third, the changes to simplify prices for users are now implemented globally. Higher ad spend, rebranding investment, and the price changes all drive long-term benefits in buyer acquisition and retention, but lower EBITDA for the quarter when the initiatives are first implemented. As a reference point, Our estimated revenues in July 2022, the first month of Q3, were down approximately 14% relative to our revenues in April 2022, the first month of Q2. However, this decline does not necessarily represent the expected revenue performance for the entire quarter. July was the first month after the full implementation of price changes. And therefore, the revenue decline in July relative to April was anticipated. But I'm very excited to share that our order volume in July increased over that in April. We expect our total order volume to improve in Q3 versus Q2. We're cautiously optimistic that we are starting to see the success of turnaround reflected in more operational metrics, such as higher order volume and reduced refund rates after we have observed improvements in our NPS score since last Q3. Finally, I would like to remind everyone about two notes. First, our ad spend has been capped at a much reduced level since July last year. The headwinds in the economy plus our price changes also created a downward pressure on our top-line performance during the first half of 2022. Our financial focus this year to date has been EBITDA and cash flows. Both registering material improvements year-over-year. Second, for the second half of 2022, we expect to restart the flywheel with continued operational improvements, higher ad spend, and strategic initiatives, such as relaunch of the fashion category. Once the flywheel restarts, higher transaction volume should result in increased merchant and vendor payments. creating favorable operating cash flows through the change in working capital. We're cautiously optimistic that we may start to experience such benefits in Q3. Now, I will hand over the call to Vijay for his closing remarks.
spk07: Thank you, Vivian, and congratulations on your recent promotion as well. While we have made many fundamental changes to the operations of Wish during the year, we cannot ignore the global macro environment which has changed dramatically in the past six months. Governments around the world are tightening money supply and raising interest rates to tamp down inflation. As a global e-commerce marketplace, we are not immune to the changes in consumer spending habits, particularly among the lower income households that shop on our marketplace. There has been a slowing of consumer discretionary spend due to higher energy prices, increased food costs, and an emerging recessionary environment. While these macro forces are at play, we remain committed to increasing our spending plans and deploying the fundamental changes that we have made to our pricing strategy. These elements will impact our growth plans for the second half of 2022, as I shared in March of this year, this is an 18 to 24-month turnaround effort, and we will continue to make progress toward that timeline. While we cannot ignore nor can we influence those global macro forces, we remain laser-focused on improving and fixing the many operational aspects of our business and reaffirm our commitment to successfully executing our turnaround plans. Before I wrap up a call with some closing remarks, I would like to note some corporate governance changes that occurred today. Peter Szuliski, the founder of Vish, has resigned from the company's board of directors. Peter served as the chief executive officer from the company's inception in July 2010 through February 2022. Since inception, he served as chairman until April 2021 and then as a director until now. Without Peter's vision and legacy, we would not be here today. Under his leadership, Wish grew from a small challenger brand into a leading global marketplace. On behalf of the entire board and Wish's management team, I would like to thank Peter for his contributions and dedicated service to the company. Peter has converted all his high-voting Class B shares into WISH Class A shares. As a result, we now have a single class structure with voting rights parity for all WISH shareholders. In conjunction with Peter's resignation, the board of directors has elected Larry Kushcher as an independent director to WISH's board. Larry is the CEO of A Place for Mom, a healthcare service company. Larry has more than 20 years of experience driving transformation and growth with data and technology companies. I'm very excited about Larry joining the board. Here at WISH, I want to acknowledge a number of employees that have recently been promoted internally into new and or expanded leadership roles. Vivian Liu, our CFO, will also serve as Chief Operating Officer as part of a new COO role She will lead our global logistics and merchant operations. Devang Shah has become our new chief administrative officer. In this role, he will lead both our legal and HR teams, including recruiting, which is a big focus for us right now. Tarun Jain has been given an expanded role as both chief product officer and chief customer officer with clear accountability for customer service and net promoter score. Jerry Lewis has been promoted into a new role as our interim CTO, where he will lead our technology and engineering teams. Mauricio Monaco has been promoted to a new role as our chief merchant officer. Mauricio will lead our merchant and logistics product and strategy. I would like to thank these recently promoted individuals for their hard work and determination that enables our turnaround progress. To close, I'll leave you with these final thoughts. First, a concentrated effort to rebrand the company and tell an exciting new story about Vish is the result of our dedicated employees who believe in our turnaround strategy. Second, our relaunch of the women's fashion category on our marketplace has begun to attract new customers and drive growth. Third, we have continued to make progress in reducing delivery times and removing friction from our customer experience, which has resulted in improvements in net promoter score, in consumer satisfaction, and refund rates. The entire team at Vish has made great strides to transform the culture of Vish into a more collaborative company that is based on transparency, fairness, truth, and a shared mission. Bargains made fun. Discovery made easy. I'm pleased with the progress we're continuing to make as we journey back into profitability. None of this would be possible without the amazing team we have. Thank you all for your hard work and commitment. Vivian and I are happy to field your questions.
spk02: Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you have a question at this time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes to the line. Doug Anmuth from J.P. Morgan. Your question, please. Hi.
spk05: Thanks for taking my question. You've got Wesley on for Doug. Just kind of thinking back to the last quarter, you guys had noted, you know, revenues were down 30% in April relative to January, and, you know, then they were down again 14% relative to April. I guess just how did things trend through the rest of the quarter as you navigated some of the macro pressures, you know, kind of what were some of the biggest headwinds? And then, you know, kind of just to follow up on that, what are you seeing now that's kind of given you the confidence to kind of restart and reaccelerate the flywheel in the back half? Thanks. Okay.
spk01: Thank you for the question. So first of all, as I mentioned, although July revenue declined about 14% relative to April, we actually saw the volume increase materially relative to April. And we do expect the volume momentum to continue for the rest of the quarter. So without providing a specific revenue guidance for the entire quarter, we feel pretty good about where we are heading in terms of trend. As mentioned earlier, The turnaround first started with the NPS, you know, refund rate, and we have been seeing improvements in those metrics for a while now. And the next metrics follow should be volume, right? And now we start to see the volume improvements for actually a couple months now. And then after that, we expect to see benefits from revenue and, you know, cash flow, and last but not least, and profit eventually. So you mentioned the macro economic headwinds. Yes, you know, the inflation, the recession is having an impact on everyone, right? And we are in the same boat with, you know, but we're not only one feeling the pressure. And I would say we are confident about stepping up investment at this time because we are very excited and encouraged by the green shoots we have seen so far, and we are ready. And the holiday season is coming, and we, you know, the operational improvements are, you know, we have seen a lot of, implemented a lot of improvements in the operations, and we've seen the green shoots, and we're ready to go back and restart the flywheel, and that's why we are, you know, increasing our ad spend into three throughout to four. So, Overall, I feel very good about how Q3, Q4 is heading, but I will let Vijay add additional color as well.
spk07: Yeah, I think from a biggest headwind standpoint, it's probably fair to call out some regional differences as well. So we did mention last quarter as well that we saw some pressure on the European business. This quarter, we continue to see that pressure, which I think was aggravated by the change in currency as well. And so that caused a little bit of pressure for us. overall. But, you know, overall, the underlying trends are much more positive, right? So when you talk about the confidence, you know, A, we talked about NPS last quarter, but now seeing that translate into orders increasing, seeing the on-time delivery rate being at 94%, seeing sort of, you know, green shoots in terms of customer retention, all of these give us confidence that we want to move forward. Plus, we're obviously heading into the biggest a time period from a retail calendar perspective, and we want to make sure we take advantage of this holiday season. So we are being aggressive going into the holiday season. And last but not least, we've had a pretty good sort of test and learn kind of environment from a marketing standpoint as well. So making sure that we're getting our, you know, return on investment from the marketing dollars and how we want to optimize that. And quite honestly, how much we want to diversify so that we're not dependent on any sort of one or two channels for that as well. So all of that kind of comes together.
spk05: Got it. Thank you.
spk02: Thank you. And as a reminder, if you have a question, please press star 1-1. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Laura Champagne from Loop Capital. Your question, please.
spk03: Thanks for taking my question. It's about the EBITDA beat that came from lower ad spending. What drove you to cut the initially planned? I remember the last conference call we talked about you stepping up ad spend early in June versus August. Was it just that you weren't seeing the results you expected? Was advertising more expensive or were there just issues delivering that you had not previously anticipated?
spk07: Yes. So Laura, if you remember what we talked about, honestly, is originally we talked about the fact that starting last year, July, we cut, they're going to cut ad spending and we were really not going to pick up ad spending till August of this year. Then we talked about the fact that we're starting to see some green shoots, especially with the customer feedback. And we thought about pulling that forward a month or two. So even when we talked about pulling it forward, it would have been pulling forward mostly into July, which obviously is not in the quarter numbers and a little bit into June. But the June numbers are small. And I think this is one of the reasons we pulled forward. Because any time you start to increase ad spending, what you have to do is you have to have a nice ramp up. Otherwise, you really impact your return on that investment. So we did plan on it. We didn't execute maybe as much as we wanted to in June. So maybe we're slightly behind. So it didn't change anything in April or May. We maybe were slightly behind because, again, you have to ramp that up in a fiscally sort of responsible way. And that sometimes takes a little bit longer. And so we've had a lot of learnings that came out of June as well as in July. So we feel like we are very well set for the original strategy, which was to ramp up in August. Had we not had those, call it 45 to 50 days of learning, we would have probably been in a little bit more trouble. But we are more or less executing to the plan that we had laid out. So we did increase a little bit in June, a lot more in July, and then you'll continue to see month-on-month increases between now and the end of the year.
spk03: And you did make a comment in passing about recruiting being an important part of what you're up to right now. What type of talent are you bringing into the company, and should we see a material step up in G&A expense as a result?
spk07: Yeah, so first thing I want to remind everybody that on March 1st this year, we announced that we are laying off about 15% of our workforce. I would just say that we started out, I mean, we read a lot more about that in the news today, but we started out probably six months ahead of everyone else. That said, we did kind of manage the headcount much more closely for the last six months because we wanted to manage the expenses with the potential sort of ramping up of, you know, orders and revenue and that piece of it. So we have just more recently started to get more aggressive from a recruiting standpoint. Most of the recruiting is actually focused on our tech talent and our product management talent as well as a little bit on data, on the data side as well. So it's mostly, you know, high-powered, you know, technology sort of related talent. And that's really what we're focused on. While we are looking to add more, I think net-net we will still be down in terms of number of people end of this year relative to end of last year because we're starting from a base that's significantly lower and then also we didn't replace a lot of the talent in the first half of the year to manage the cost down. So while there may be a slight uptick, the reality is it's not something that we are overly concerned about because we've managed that number pretty well and we continue to be really careful on where we're adding headcount.
spk03: Understood. Thank you.
spk07: Honestly, it's just a good time to be recruiting right now.
spk03: Makes sense.
spk02: Thank you, Laura. Thank you. And once again, if you have a question at this time, please press star 11. And our next question comes from the line of Tyler's admin from Credit Suisse. Your question, please.
spk06: Hey guys, uh, this is Tyler. Um, so two questions for me, um, on slide 16 in the deck, um, it shows, you know, regions where you have, you know, your merchants and, uh, obviously most of them, you know, are still based in China at this point. Can you update us on what percent of these merchants, you know, are based in China versus U.S. and the rest of the world? And then just secondarily, you know, one more on the, you know, advertising spend, you know, in the back half. Are you seeing any pressure, you know, on performance ads, you know, given, you know, the current environment and kind of how do you think about, you know, breakdown in, you know, performance marketing versus brand advertising as you continue to ramp in the back half.
spk01: Yeah, thank you for the question. This is Vivian. I will take the first part of the question and let Vivian address the second one. First question, so we have started to diversify our merchant base, I would say, since a year ago. And we made a lot of progress in terms of recruiting merchants from outside of China. If you look at the merchant count, the distribution of the merchant count in China versus outside of China, it has changed, I would say, materially. We didn't move the needle. I think roughly it's still more than 60% in China, but that percentage has improved from diversity standpoint materially in the past few years. Now, what we are working on is the GMV distribution. So the Chinese merchants still come to the platform with very price-competitive merchandise and, frankly, good value proposition. And that's why they still contribute a very high percentage of GMV on the platform, despite it being a smaller percentage in the population. So our next step is really to focus on helping, you know, bring the next layer of diversity from the product standpoint and, you know, the GMV contribution standpoint. And it really helps the new merchants to be more successful on the platform. And that's our focus. And as I mentioned, we have doubled down the efforts, right? And there are a lot of initiatives going on to bring that to fruition. And we probably update the investor community once we have more. But, you know, it is a very high priority for us as a management team. I love that you covered the second part.
spk07: Yeah, the second question is really more about the performance marketing side of the business. Here's what I would say on that. So keep in mind that we had pullback marketing, you know, in the magnitude of 80 to 90% year on year for the last two or three quarters. And what that means is if you look at our 2023 spend, even our planned spend, what we were planning to spend in the first half of the year relative to the second half of the year, it's a massive difference. So when you look at the growth rate in our overall marketing budget, we are probably the exception to the rule. As the economy has come down, there's probably a lot more companies who are pulling back on marketing. We're kind of doing the opposite. And that puts us in a very unique position. So we are in a position now where we're spending significantly more than we did or plan to spend in the second half of the year than we did in the first half. And we're doing it at a time when the overall environment is a little bit less competitive. So I think it's a very, it is the right time for us. We're also finding that, you know, consumers overall are looking for, you know, lower prices and trading down because, you know, their dollars are stretched in terms of the external environment. So, again, attracting sort of the right consumers at our price points is, you know, this is the right time to do that as well. In terms of the second part of the question, in terms of performance marketing versus the overall marketing or brand marketing, we will continue to be heavily focused on performance marketing. You know, the only difference is, you know, for the first couple of quarters, we were really not doing much on the brand side, so we were probably 90%, 95% focused on performance marketing. That might, for the back half of the year, look more like 75%, 80% instead of 90%, 95%. But overall, disproportionate amount of money will still be spent on sort of digital marketing and performance marketing. But we are putting some significant money, both including on TV and radio, on the rebranding effort that we're doing, which starts in the middle of August. So that's kind of how the overall picture kind of breaks down.
spk06: Awesome. Thank you.
spk02: Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to management for any further remarks.
spk07: No, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Bye, everyone.
spk02: Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation at today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.
Disclaimer