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spk00: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining the Kazoo and Ajax OneCall and webcast to discuss Kazoo's first quarter results, which we released this morning and can be found on the Ajax website at ajaxcap.com forward slash investor relations and on Kazoo's website at kazoo.co.uk forward slash investors. We appreciate everyone joining us today. With me on the call is Alex Chesterman. the founder and chief executive officer of Kazoo, and Stephen Marana, chief financial officer of Kazoo. Before we get started, I would like to remind you of the company's safe harbor language, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. Management may make forward-looking statements, including guidance and underlining assumptions. Forward-looking statements are based on expectations that involve risk and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially. For a further discussion of risks related to our business, See the filings of Capri Lisko with the SEC. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Alex Chesterman, the founder and chief executive officer of Kazoo. Please go ahead, Alex.
spk02: Thank you for joining us today. We're pleased to be hosting our first earnings call and excited to be speaking with you about our record financial results this quarter. In the first quarter, we continued our rapid growth trajectory demonstrating the strength of our market-leading brand and fully integrated model in the UK. The record growth we've achieved is further proof of our compelling business model, with a comprehensive digital retail offering, strong brand positioning, and vertically integrated end-to-end platform, as well as the significant opportunity ahead as we execute our plan to transform the online car buying experience across Europe. I'll begin today's discussion with an overview of Kazoo's mission and why we're well positioned for continued long-term growth. After that, I'll discuss our first quarter performance and outlook, and we'll then turn the call over to Stephen to walk you through our first quarter financial results in more detail. Over the last couple of months, we've shared with many of you our mission at Kazoo, which is quite simple. We are pioneering the shift to online car buying across the UK and Europe, a $700 billion market with less than 2% digital penetration. By leveraging data and technology to improve selection, quality, transparency, convenience, and flexibility, we're providing consumers with confidence and peace of mind and enhancing the overall car buying experience. Used car buying is the single largest retail market in Europe, worth over $700 billion annually, with very low online penetration, lagging almost all other retail sectors. The market is highly fragmented and ripe for digital transformation, with no player having a market share of more than 5%, and with online penetration accounting for less than 2% of transactions. Given these market dynamics, We launched Kazoo in 2019 to make buying a car as simple and seamless as purchasing any other product online today. Over the past two years, our world-class team has built a powerful data and technology platform alongside critical physical infrastructure and a market-leading brand to create a world-class online car buying proposition. We own, recondition, store and deliver our cars, allowing consumers to simply and seamlessly purchase, finance or subscribe to a car entirely online. I'd like to highlight some of the key competitive strengths that will enable our continued growth. First, our comprehensive end-to-end platform and market-leading proposition is delighting our customers. We have a world-class consumer NPS of approximately 80, and a Trustpilot rating of 4.7, with 93% of our users rating their experiences either excellent or great. Second, we've developed unique capabilities with a market-leading technology platform, a team of data analysts, and an infrastructure network of vehicle preparation centers, customer collection centers, and car delivery transporters, underpinning our growth and profitability. Third, we've assembled a world-class team with a proven track record of accomplishments, including public market experience. Our senior team has been assembled from some of the leading digital consumer retail businesses across Europe. Finally, we have significant expertise in identifying and executing game-changing strategic deals. Over the past 12 months alone, we've made four acquisitions and signed a number of commercial partnerships to accelerate our growth, and enhance our proposition. As a result, we now have five vehicle preparation centers with the ability to recondition hundreds of thousands of cars a year. We have 17 customer and service centers open across the UK. And we're the leading consumer car subscription player in Europe with over 6,000 subscribers across the UK, France, and Germany. And now have the team in place to execute on our European expansion plans. Our ability to create a transformative consumer experience, a highly recognizable and trusted brand, and a world-class team within one of the single largest retail markets that's ripe for disruption has allowed us to create one of the fastest growing businesses in Europe. Taking all of this together, we've built a powerful business model with a clear pathway to long-term sustainable growth. Turning now to our first quarter performance, Our results reflect our continued rapid growth trajectory as we leveraged our branding and unique platform in the UK, which we're in the early stages of replicating across Europe. Our first quarter sales increased a record 481%, driven by strength in vehicle sales, which increased 373% to nearly 10,000 cars. Our retail GPU increased to £143 through our improved buying mix, higher stock terms, and greater finance attachment rates. During the quarter, we agreed to a $7 billion business combination with Ajax, which remains on track for completion in Q3. We also successfully completed three acquisitions that will accelerate our strategic initiatives and enhance our customer proposition, including Grover, which has accelerated the launch of our subscription service in the UK and France, Smart Fleet Solutions, which has enhanced our refurbishment capabilities in the UK, and Cluno, which has accelerated our entry into Germany and further European market expansion. We opened four additional Kazoo customer centers in the UK during the quarter, bringing the total in operations to 17. Our plans for expansion of the full Kazoo proposition in Germany and France by the end of the year remain firmly on track, and we could not be more excited about the future growth prospects across Europe. And of course, we're delighted to have announced five new independent non-exec director appointments. Dan Ock, Duncan Patton Brown, and Wojcicki, Moni Mannings, and Luciana Berger, who will join our board following completion of the business combination. Our strong performance this quarter is further proof of our compelling business model and the tremendous opportunity to grow our business through multiple diversified leasings. As we look to the second quarter and beyond, we have tremendous opportunities to continue to grow our share in this large and highly fragmented market. In conclusion, we are highly confident in our ability to deliver on our growth and profitability targets over the long term. Our recent acquisitions will enable us to bring our vehicle reconditioning fully in-house in the UK by the end of June and to launch the full Kazoo proposition in France and Germany by the end of the year. We're hugely excited by the growth opportunities that lie ahead and our business combination with Ajax will provide us with the capital required to continue to pioneer the shift to online car buying across the UK and Europe. Since the end of the period, our growth has continued to accelerate. We sold our 25,000 retail vehicle this month, while continuing to drive further improvements to GPU, and we remain on track to achieve revenues approaching $1 billion in 2021. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our team that's now over 2,000 strong and who put the customer first in everything we do. Whilst we're incredibly proud of our first quarter results, we're still in the very early stages of transforming the car buying experience, and we look forward to continuing our mission to deliver the best selection, quality, transparency, convenience, flexibility, and peace of mind to our customers. Now, I'll turn the call over to Stephen to review our first quarter financial performance in greater detail.
spk01: Thank you. Thank you, Alex, and good morning, everyone. During the quarter, our revenues increased 481% to £113.9 million, up from £19.6 million in 2020. As Alex mentioned, This strong performance was the result of our record vehicle sales this quarter, increasing 373% to 9,762, as well as the improvement in ancillary revenues as we grew finance attachment rates. Retail GPU increased to £143 in the quarter, up from a loss per unit of £287 in Q1 last year. This marked our second quarter of positive GPU. And we expect GPU to continue to grow quarter on quarter going forward as we improve all areas of the buying, refurbishment and selling process. Our gross profit was 3.7 million pounds, a 3.3% margin. This compares to a gross loss of 0.5 million or a negative 2.8% margin in the first quarter last year. Our cash position remains strong. with cash of £117 million on hand at the end of March. Finally, on our full-year expectations, we are reiterating the full-year 2021 outlook provided in our investor presentation on 29 March. We continue to expect revenue for the full year of around £700 million, with total vehicles sold in excess of 40,000.
spk00: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.
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