Cars.com Inc. Common Stock

team is working hard to accelerate penetration of these valuable subscription products. Moving to media products, VIN performance media is also off to a promising start, with early adopters seeing significant increases in leads, interaction, and website transfers for their promoted inventory. Our proprietary machine learning model, when matched against our in-market audience, not only promotes the right VIN to the right shopper across media channels, but also powers in-demand features like targeting advertising to move aged inventory. And finally, I'd like to highlight the Q1 performance of our number one most recognized marketplace brand, Cars.com, which consistently delivers a large and engaged in-market audience to dealers and OEMs. More than 28 million average monthly shoppers visited Cars.com during the first quarter to research and shop for the right vehicle. Consumers trust and rely on our unique resource they find on our marketplace, like our new affordability report, to steer them to the best vehicle for their budget and lifestyle. They also increasingly use tools like Gear Garage and the new Car Hub, which continue to drive strong repeat traffic to our marketplace, keeping us connected to consumers through their car ownership journey. Building strong organic relationships with consumers has been an enduring hallmark of Cars.com for over 25 years, and we're committed to delivering more innovative content and technology to capture in-market audiences at scale. In closing, focusing on our platform strategy helped us advance our product roadmap, accelerate to high single-digit revenue growth, and meaningfully improve profitability in the first quarter. Our strategy is working as intended, propelling sustainable growth with a durable and well-rounded product portfolio that addresses our customers' most pressing needs. We have immense opportunities ahead, and we're excited to show you what we think this business can do as we simplify car buying and selling for everyone. Now, Sonia will lead the discussion of our first quarter financial results. Sonia?

Thank you, Alex. We started the year on strong footing, delivering solid revenue growth and an adjusted EBITDA margin that exceeded our guidance range. Revenue was slightly above $180 million in the first quarter, an 8% increase over the prior year, and the best quarterly growth we've seen in over two years. Both dealer revenue and OEM and national revenue were up year over year across all product categories. Dealer revenue grew 8% year over year to $162 million, driven by contributions from repackaging, the acquisition and continued growth of D2C, and continued product penetration. OEM and national revenue was $15 million, up 13% compared to the prior year. We benefited from additional OEM investment as they seek to raise consumer awareness amid rising inventory levels. Now turning to expenses. For the quarter, total operating expenses were $167 million compared to $155 million a year ago. Product and technology expenditures increased $4 million year over year as we enhanced marketplace features, further augmented our product portfolio, and invested in our back-end systems. As a reminder, unlike the earnouts associated with our other acquisitions, the D2C earnout runs primarily through G&A, as it was deemed compensation expense under GAAP. And in the period, we expense $2.8 million associated with the earnout. Adjusted operating expenses were $155 million, $9 million higher than the same period last year, primarily related to the aforementioned investments in technical talent and software to support our platform and product roadmap. and a $3 million increase in depreciation and amortization. Net income for the first quarter was $0.8 million, or one cent per diluted share, compared to $11.5 million, or 17 cents per diluted share, in the prior year. The change in net income is primarily attributable to earn-outs associated with our acquisition. I'll also note, in our comparison, net income in Q1 2023 was elevated due to the outsized change in the fair value contingent consideration of our acquisitions. Meanwhile, adjusted net income for the quarter was $28.7 million, or 43 cents per diluted share, compared to $26.2 million, or 39 cents per diluted share, a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $53 million, while adjusted EBITDA margin of 29.2% exceeded our guidance range. we're pleased with our year-over-year margin expansion of 270 basis points, which resulted from the strong flow-through of nearly two-thirds of our revenue growth to adjusted EBITDA. Moving to key metrics for Q1, we ended the quarter with 19,381 total customers, down slightly quarter-over-quarter due to what we believe are temporary budget cuts by some dealers in response to declining profitability. Nevertheless, we expect to grow full-year dealer count as we work to win back these customers and expand into new accounts based on our strong value proposition. Unit economics continued to strengthen as ARPD reached $2,505 for the first quarter, up 5% year-over-year from positive repackaging contribution and AccuTrade growth, partially offset by lower ARPD from B2C customers. While AccuTrade customer satisfaction scores are strong, It does take time for dealers to implement and ramp utilization of the tool across their dealership. We're actively exploring ways to accelerate this learning curve over the next several quarters and believe it is a significant opportunity for us in the near future. And we do expect to keep growing our ARPD over time as we cross-sell additional products into existing accounts, sign up new customers in higher-tier marketplace packages, and improve overall retention through enhanced value delivery. Now turning to our balance sheet, net cash provided by operating activities totaled $33 million year-to-date. Free cash flow remained strong at $27 million, roughly $5 million higher year-over-year, driven primarily by improved adjusted EBITDA and favorable working capital, partially offset by one-time cash costs and timing of interest expense. During the first quarter, we repurchased 500,000 shares for $9.5 million, We also repaid $10 million of debt and reduced total debt outstanding to $480 million as of March 31, 2024. This brings our total net leverage to 2.2 times, down from 2.3 times last year, and comfortably within our target range of 2 to 2.5 times. Altogether, we have ample liquidity of $226 million, including $31 million of cash-in-cash equivalents and $195 million of revolver capacity as of March 31st, 2024. As discussed in our earnings release, we also recently amended our existing credit facility in a leveraged mutual transaction, replacing both our current term loan and revolving loan with a new $350 million revolver maturing in May, 2029. We borrowed $80 million on the new facility at closing effectively extinguishing outstanding balances on the current term and revolving loan, eliminating the need for any required amortization ahead of the maturity date. This all-revolver structure bolsters our financial flexibility, adding $75 million of incremental liquidity and allows us to pursue the best return on capital, whether through organic growth or additive acquisitions or separately through returning capital to shareholders. We enjoy strong free cash flow conversion and will look to deploy our capital in a manner that drives incremental shareholder value. Looking ahead, we will continue buybacks under our remaining share repurchase authorization of $110 million, and we will also remain committed to paying down our debt. In addition, we anticipate making additional earn-out payments in Q2 related to certain acquisitions. I'll now conclude with our guidance. In the second quarter of 2024, we expect to deliver revenue in the range of $181 to $183 million, or year-over-year growth of 7% to 9%. Guidance reflects continued strength in dealer revenue, driven by increased adoption of products like Dealer Inspire and Accutrade. OEM and national revenue growth is also expected to accelerate. benefiting from what we perceive as a more competitive sales environment that necessitates OEMs increasing their marketing and advertising directed to in-market shoppers. As a reminder, our Q2 revenue guidance also benefits from last year's repackaging initiative, which began in March of 2023. We expect to deliver second quarter adjusted EBITDA margins between 27.5% and 29.5%. an expansion of 150 basis points year over year at the midpoint of the range. This guidance reflects additional investments to support our marketplace brand and product development initiatives, as well as timing shifts of certain investments from the first quarter to the second quarter. For the year, we are reaffirming our guidance ranges of 6% to 8% revenue growth, as well as adjusted EBITDA margins between 28% to 30%. With a growing and differentiated product portfolio, efficient marketplace flywheel, which feeds our platform strategy, and asset-light business model, we are poised to deliver on our goals and look forward to updating you on our progress throughout the year. And with that, I'd like to open the call for Q&A. Operator?

We will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchstone phone. you will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by the two. If you're using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from the line of Rajat Gupta from JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I had one clarification on the second quarter guidance and then another broader question. So, seasonally, if you look, you know, at second quarter versus the first quarter, EBITDA is always up. Typically, you know, you also guide it to higher revenue sequentially. If you're curious, like, why does the midpoint imply, you know, a step down in EBITDA, I know you mentioned some OPEX shift, some spending shift from 1Q to 2Q. Maybe if you could quantify how much was that, and is there anything else to keep in mind? when it comes to, you know, the seasonality this time around. And I have a follow-up. Thanks.

Okay. Thank you for the question. It's Sonia. No, you're right. Historically, Q1 has typically always been, you know, a quarter with a little bit higher investment, particularly given the timing of events. Just given performance that we saw in timing of a couple investments, some of the investment we were originally planning for Q1 shifted into Q2. Nothing material in terms of how that would change our outlook for a full year. We still believe we're very much on target. And if you kind of take the two quarters together, you can see that we're pacing really well against that target. It's literally just a little bit of a shift in a couple areas.

Got it, got it. So you mean like combined the first half OPEX was tracking in line with what you had initially anticipated? Is that the right way to think about it?

That's the right way to think about it. Take it as a first half versus individual quarters.

I understand. That's helpful. And then just further on, you provided some helpful guidance around dealer account trajectory for the full year. I'm wondering if you could tie that with expectations for ARPD as well, and where do we stand from a product attachment perspective? What incremental initiatives are in the pipeline? to improve the monetization, you know, our sense is that, you know, as some of the dealers come back to the platform, that should be, you know, further accretive to RPD, or are you having to, like, work with them on pricing, you know, to get that retention back in any way? So I'm just curious, like, how should we, you know, commingle those two, you know, as you think about, you know, the count and, you know, the RPD through the course of the year? Thanks.

Sure. Great question. Well, first of all, I'll address the last part of your question, which is we don't think price is the lever we need to pull to win dealer adoption, meaning that we're not going backwards in terms of our pricing to win dealers back. In fact, we're seeing dealers that canceled last year due to our pricing action are now engaging with us again. In fact, inbound dealer inquiries to the company, meaning dealers raising their hand, contacting us, are up 20%. year to date. So we're seeing dealers realize that our value is fantastic and they need help moving inventory. I think a lot of the other initiatives that are going to continue to drive ARPD growth are things like integrating AccuTrade and Credit IQ into dealer websites. We think we can help dealers reduce third-party expenses by giving them both trade-in and online financing tools that can sit natively on their website and be integrated and then protect the dealer's data, which is a big initiative for us to help dealers control their own first-party data and information. And then we're testing also things like an independent dealer offering for smaller dealers, an entry point for them to be on our marketplace or with our website solutions. And that will, like, it pulls down ARPD because we're going to be selling smaller dealerships with smaller inventory size. But that's not going to take away from the value upside we see with larger franchise dealers and growing spending there. Cross-sell remains a big priority for the business.

So we can expect ARPD to – is it fair to assume that 1Q is a low point for ARPD as well as dealer count? Or is that more like –

Our plan calls for us to grow both, right? We want to reliably grow dealer count, and we want to make incremental gains on ARPDs. So we're seeking to do both.

Got it. Great. Thanks for those clarifications, and I'll get back to you.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Tom White from Davidson. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Good morning. Alex, I was hoping you could just share a bit more color on what you're hearing from local dealers as it relates to their priorities for marketing investments this year and maybe for the next couple of years. On one hand, rising inventories would suggest that dealers need to find incremental sources of demand. But I guess on the other hand, a lot of the dealers we talked to we're talking about prioritizing their own direct digital spend like search and social. We've heard dealers say that sort of thing for years. And you guys have been able to grow dealer count and your peers have been able to grow kind of paying dealer count despite that kind of chatter from dealers. But I'm just curious if you can comment on, are you seeing any kind of significant change on the part of local dealers to engage with platforms like yours You know, particularly as they're undergoing kind of a broader digital transformation of their operations kind of more generally. And then I have a quick follow-up.

Sure, Tom. Great question. First of all, as you know, I mean, there isn't a retailer out there, not just auto, but any retail category that wouldn't want 100% of their traffic just to come straight through their own front door and not have to rely on channels to generate growth. That said, as much as I understand why people want that, the consumer need for independent third-party research is a non-negotiable for the consumer. The consumer has proven over 25 years that they reliably are seeking out trusted, independent, objective meta data and advice before they enter the retail auto market, and so the regardless of the industry desire to put more investment to get traffic to come directly to them, we see through data that our third-party research marketplace platform is extremely durable. I think second to that point, because we power over 7,000 dealer websites, we see the disproportionate amount of money that dealers are spending on other channels to generate traffic and leads. And without exception, the cars.com marketplace is the most efficient traffic that they're buying that converts at a much higher rate than all their other traffic sources combined. And so the bigger macro trend we see is that dealer profitability challenges are waning, meaning that dealers are experiencing with rising inventory levels and pricing coming down on cars, their overall profitability is challenged. And when you interrogate their marketing mix, it, universally supports dealers need to be featured on these marketplaces because it's far more cost effective to generate sales.

Great. That's interesting. Did that answer your question, Tom?

Yeah, it did. Thanks. Just a quick follow-up, if I could, on OEM and national. You guys had some encouraging things to say there, I guess, in the prepared remarks section. about interactions with OEMs and the impact of rising inventories. And I guess growth accelerated in the quarter, and it looks like it's going to accelerate a bit in the second. But I don't know. I guess, do you guys have confidence that this line item can return to kind of pre-pandemic levels of revenue kind of in any way? reasonable time frame here, or is there any risk that OEMs have, you know, kind of maybe moved their focus when it comes to brand spend to kind of like the latest shiny object, you know, be it social or connected TV or TikTok, just trying to understand like the, you know, the long-term kind of trajectory for this line.

Tom, ironically, it's a little bit of the same answer in that you know, manufacturer marketing and advertising spend is largely agency-led, and agencies and OEMs, again, want all car buyers to go directly to their brands and buy a car without any outside influence. And we do not believe that that is realistic, nor is it a map at all to the consumer behavior that overwhelmingly shows that research online is is fundamental to the car shopping journey, and you're not going to bypass that channel. And so as OEMs become more confident that they've got to be in front of shoppers while they shop, where they shop, we do think OEM can return to pre-pandemic levels. I think your question on timing is probably the more difficult one to answer in terms of You know, we were pleased with OEM results in Q1. We saw not only strong upfront, but we saw an increase in scatter dollars as well, which is more reactive to market conditions. And so we're really pleased with the progress in the quarter and even the continued momentum in Q2. But it's also been hard to predict the OEM channel reliably over the last few years, but we think we're on a very healthy growth rate right now.

Great. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it. Thank you, Tom.

Your next question comes from the line of Nived Kan from B. Reilly Securities. Your line is open.

Hi, great, thanks. So a couple of questions from me. Maybe just to put a final point on this due to account. It's good to hear that you expect the account to be up as we exit the year. But if I have to think about the trajectory, do you think that the count might start going in the back half versus the first half, meaning second quarter? How should I think about that trajectory? So that's one. And then the other question is on active trade, actually. I think I've seen the fastest sort of sequential addition in the last quarter versus in any of the previous three quarters. I'm wondering what kind of is driving that acceleration. Is it just some seasonality, maybe the NADA show or something else, or are you just kind of seeing increasing traction with AccuTrade?

Well, maybe we can start. Thanks for the questions, Navid. Maybe we can start with your first one on dealer count. You know, I think in our prepared remarks, we talked a little bit about how we saw really strong new sales in Q1, some of the strongest we've seen in the last couple of years. I think we're also pleased to see retention starting to improve. So for the month of April in particular, marketplace was up from a dealer account perspective, which we think our you know, promising green shoots as we think about the rest of the year and give us a lot of confidence in being able to deliver that full-year dealer customer growth that we were referring to. So that, hopefully that helps give a little bit of context on what we're seeing right now. I think in terms of AccuTrade, you know, Last year, we spent quite a bit of time focused on our marketplace repackaging and expanding dealers' access to the platform by adding more to our marketplace packages. That's behind us. That's allowed for a lot more focus and intentionality when it comes to the cross-sell. So I think you see some of that come through. And I think AccuTrade was really one of our hits at NADA this year. So we're excited about the potential in front of us with that business. It's hugely accretive to EBITDA and ARPD, and I think also provides dealers with a lot of value relative to other platforms out there. I don't know, Alex, if you want to...

more cycle time was spent in the first quarter helping the dealers that bought Accutrade use it and be successful with it than there was really focused on growth. So the fact that our sales motions have been focused on dealer engagement and we're getting steady growth, as soon as we nail the onboarding and utilization experience, we should be able to scale this business to very healthy rates in the future.

Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Gary Prestapino from Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning, Alex, Sonia, Catherine. Several questions here. First of all, Alex, in terms of what happened with the dealers in Q1 where you had some attrition there, was that attrition mainly related to, say, one- to two-point dealerships that were not in major metropolitan areas and independents as well? I'm just curious as to see where that attrition is coming from.

The segmentation wasn't vivid in any shape or size, Gary. I wouldn't say that the churn we experienced was dealer-specific, either geo or size of store. We really felt it was more reactionary pressure to macro cutbacks of the whole expense-based, meaning our sales force was hit with a lot of just, we're canceling everything right now to reassess. What's been good is that now that we're getting face-to-face time with those customers to show them the metrics that they're walking away from, like website traffic, phone calls, or even leads to their CRM, dealers are starting to realize that this is oxygen for their business. And so we did have a nice start to Q2 in dealer count. But most of the cancels in Q1 we think were just knee-jerk reactions that weren't specific to us, but more wanting to take out significant cost.

Okay. And then in terms of AccuTrade, when you say generated, you said 622,000 appraisals in the quarter. Is that correct? Correct. how many of those appraisals in general turn into an actual transaction, or do all of them?

Well, they don't all turn into transactions, Gary, I can assure you that, because dealers are giving customers offers on their cars, and so a much smaller percentage of those actually convert to inventory. But it allows the consumer to know that this dealer is somebody they can trust, and if they do and when they do want to sell that car, the dealer's willing to give them a data-driven value that's market-driven. So there's still value in even just conducting the appraisal and providing the consumer utility. Importantly, what we are starting to build is intelligence that allows us to see the inventory that's appraised and where else in the dealer network that vehicle appears. So if the dealer who appraised the car doesn't buy the car, we can start to show that dealer who did, and what retail price point they're now retailing that vehicle back in the open marketplace. So our use of data here is improving every day to help dealers understand opportunities won and lost, but ultimately dealers are showing that they're buying far more cars using Accutrade than anything else that they've done or used in the past.

It's still a big number. I mean, you're talking about You had 1,000 dealerships at the end of the quarter, right? So that's 622 appraisals per quarter per dealer. That's still pretty big.

That's right. And that includes that we've got dealers who haven't really appraised many vehicles at volume. And so our internal KPI is that we know if we can get a dealer to appraise their first 100 vehicles, their degree of satisfaction and success with the platform is dramatically higher and their retention is secure. So that's why we're focused on that first 100 days and that first 100 appraisals.

And then can you put any statistics or stats or anything about VIN performance media? I think you mentioned it had a solid quarter of growth. Are there any statistics you can share with us there?

It's still fairly early innings. We're seeing, generally speaking, a lot more consumer engagement with dealers who use VIN performance media, and that typically manifests itself across search interaction with vehicle detail pages, transfers to the dealer's website, and we see them showing up in their leads at a greater rate. But we'll probably come back as VIN performance media continues to grow and adoption continues to increase. We can come back with some more concrete information.

Okay, that's good. And then the Marketplace Repackaging Initiative, at the end of the year, you had about 70% of the dealers had opted for upper-tier packages. Has that changed precipitously by the end of this quarter?

No material change in the mix.

Okay. And then lastly, credit IQ. How is that? You had about 11,000 dealers at the end of 2023. Has that increased at all?

I don't have the number offhand, modestly, because of softness in dealer count, which has been a key opportunity to grow dealers. The big focus there now is rolling out that technology on dealer websites, Gary, which will increase the volume. And what's been exciting about that is now lenders are wanting to talk to us more about things we can do directly for them, now that they know we're able to put their offers not only on our marketplace, but in front of shoppers on dealer websites. And so now that the distributional strength of our platform is better understood by lenders. The level of conversations we're having with lenders about doing more is also increasing with their understanding of our broader capabilities. So stay tuned on that front. We hope to have some exciting developments there. Okay, thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Doug Archer from Uber Research. Your line is open.

Yeah, good morning. Thank you. Sonia, can you unpack the 8% growth in the dealer business line in Q1? How much was, generally speaking, was from D to C, which I think you closed in November, and what was the growth rate at DI?

Yeah, so, you know, I think we talked a little bit about D2C's impact at the time we bought them. So they're, you know, particularly in the beginning of this year, before we lap the acquisition, they're going to be contributing a couple points of our year-over-year revenue growth. We're moving a little bit away from our traditional dealer-inspired year-over-year growth metric. Part of the reason for that is we are now a lot more focused on selling products at a platform level as opposed to individual product, sort of individual branded level. But I think if you went back and you tried to do an apples to apples comparison on that, you would find that the year over year growth is fairly consistent with what we've seen in prior years, which is basically a double digit growth rate. So generally one of the takeaways should be for Q1 and Q1 revenue growth is we saw improvement across all areas of the business, marketplace, the solution side of our business, and the media side of our business.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Marvin Fong from BTIG. Your line is open.

Great, good morning. Thanks for squeezing me in here. Sorry, I hopped on the call a little bit late, but I did see, so ARPD was down sequentially, and I understand that we only had a partial quarter of D to C contribution in the fourth quarter, but could you just help us understand, would ARPD have been up sequentially if we exclude D to C? That's my first question.

No, it's a great question, Marvin. D2C is a little bit of a, you know, while it's a great revenue growth and it's margin accretive, it is a little bit of a drag on ARPD. It's a business that really is selling websites and website upsells and increasingly now also our Accutrade product in Canada. If we pulled D2C out of the mix for Q1, we probably would have been flat to slightly up sequentially on ARPD.

Great. That's super helpful. And then just a question on AccuTrade. I mean, I think when we last kind of talked about the nice thing you guys got at Ford Direct, you said it would take a couple of quarters to kind of get that all set up. So should we expect sort of timing of that to sort of start hitting soon? And should we kind of think about, you know, the adoption and the dealer count for AccuTrade kind of seeing a nice little bump? Or do you kind of expect to kind of see the same level of increases that we have been seeing? Thanks.

Thanks for the question, Marvin. We have actually started to see the pickup with Ford dealers specifically. About 20% of our new sales we're coming in our Ford dealers, which is disproportionate to the number of Ford stores in the total TAM. So we're seeing the first signs of that acceleration happen due to the OEM endorsement. And we expect that to build, not only with Ford dealers, but hopefully other OEM endorsements as well.

Great. And if I could just maybe flip in one more here. Really great to see the strength in advertising or OEM and national and appreciate what you kind of said about the commitment. You know, I know you guys did a great campaign with Tesla recently. I mean, how much of this is sort of tied to, you know, EVs? There's obviously a sales issue there, an inventory turn issue. Or would you attribute it more to just kind of a broad-based demand from that customer base? Thanks.

You know, specifically on the EV issue, we think it's a consumer education challenge, which is why digital platforms like Cars.com, we think, are perfect for Elon and Tesla, as well as other OEMs, right? The consumers have a lot of questions prior to purchase, and they need information, which we have. And so, you know, we've added things like driving range and battery life to our content around EVs so that consumers can see what each model can reliably generate in terms of time to recharge and distance and to reduce range anxiety. So we think the problem with EVs is largely educational. We think car companies need to invest in platforms that provide that independent third-party objectivity to help them develop confidence to go to the physical store and drive the product. So that's number one. I think number two, In general, we're pleased with the OEM progress. We're far from declaring victory. We think this opportunity is tremendous because of the amount of time consumers are spending on our platform comparing makes and models. The OEMs that tap into that experience and talk to shoppers while they're in the act of shopping are going to take outsized share because they're tapping into retail demand.

Operator, do we have any more questions on the line?

There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call over back to you, Catherine Chen.

Great. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. On a final note, I encourage you to read our inaugural Corporate Social Responsibility and Community Action Report, which is an illustration of who we are at our core. It's located on our Investor Relations website. We're also continuing our investor engagement and will host meetings at the following May conferences. First, the Needham Technology, Media, and Consumer Conference on May 14th, the Barrington Virtual Spring Investment Conference on May 16th, the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media, and Communications Conference on May 21st, and finally, the B. Reilly Institutional Investor Conference on May 22nd. Thanks for joining the call, and we look forward to seeing many of you soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.