Camplify Holdings Limited (CHL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Firstly, I'd like to start with an acknowledgment of the country. I'd like to pay our respects to the traditional owners, the elders past and present and value their care and custodianship of these lands. Camplify Holdings is a proud Newcastle originated company built on the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi people. Today, I'll present to you our H1 FY '25 results. My name is Justin Hales, the CEO and Founder of Camplify. I will walk you through our high level strategy and key deliverables for CHL in H2 FY '25. Firstly, I would like to note that during our trading update at November AGM, CHL provided a number of unaudited trading metrics, including cash flow and revenue. As a result of just recently completed half year audit review, a number of minor issues were identified in relation to the reconciliation resulting from migration of accounting systems and processing issues. As a result of these processes and rectification, CHL has made a number of changes and improvements internally to address these and ensure we are in an improved position moving forward. These changes include a change in our CFO. Andrea MacDougall has stepped down from the role of CFO, will be taking an operational role in the business. Karl Trouchet will be Interim CFO. Karl has been a CHL Board member for 7 years as an experienced ASX listed CFO. We will begin the search for a permanent replacement. Working with our auditors, we have reviewed internal processes and personnel changes and made changes to improve our reporting and systems. A further update to our team, we have made changes to our technical team. CHL is in the final stages of appointing a new CTO with a view to improve our platform, enabling us to achieve our core objectives. These changes provide CHL with an improved structure and team, enabling strengthening in the development of a software platform. Today I will announce CHL has begun the search process for a new Board member joining our Board, with a view to complete this in the second half. CHL will look to add a Director with significant experience in the insurance industry. Let me provide you with an update for H1, that Karl will walk you through the details. In H1 FY '25, CHL recorded the following. GTV of $65.35 million compared to $87.52 million PCP. Revenue of $19.95 million compared to $24.2 million PCP. A takerate of 30.53% compared to 25.65% PCP. CHL recorded a loss of $6.8 EBITDA for the period. CHL revenue was impacted by the following key outcomes during the period: a reduction in TAP bookings in Australia of $6.3 million GTV and $1.9 million revenue in line with expected reduction in government bookings, impact of PaulCamper trade in Europe as a result of macroeconomic conditions and platform issues down $1.5 million revenue. CHL also ceased operations of van sales as a business decision based on the softening of the Australian RV sales market and a push towards Chinese product in market. This reduction in revenue was $1.8 million PCP. CHL's costs were impacted -- an increase in marketing spend to 27% of revenue versus 15.5% PCP due to the requirement to retain customers and recover the PaulCamper markets in the period. Increases in Australian marketing in Q1 as consumers tightened their spend during that period. Employee benefits were 42% of revenue versus 39.1% PCP related to a cost-out program and reduction in the workforce. I will now hand over to Karl Trouchet to provide more detail on our financial statements.

Thank you, Justin. Starting off with our GP margins. Our gross profit margin has also seen a decrease to 58.4% in the first half from 61.4% in the previous period. This result was directly related to the increased cost of insurance and a delay in passing on increases in member pricing due to a change in the CHL insurance product model, which will be delivered in the second half of this year. Looking at our marketplace performance, our standout performance in terms of growth was New Zealand. New Zealand contributed its -- continued its strong growth with revenue growth of 21.7% versus the PCP to $2.2 million. This was driven by bookings growth of 7.8% and fleet growth of 41%. The U.K. has achieved $1.7 million in revenue and a growth of 23.4% versus the PCP. The Australian market saw a revenue decline from $17.1 million to $13.43 million. This was driven by a reduction in the TAP revenue of $1.9 million as a result of a reduction in government bookings; the strategic withdrawal of van sales, which was $1.8 million due to the soft RV sales market; and a slower start to [Technical Difficulty] due to expected bookings in -- sorry, in the Australian market with booking values reducing on average from $1,708 to $1,404. This is in line with well reported changes in the Australian economic conditions. The PaulCamper countries, which include Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, revenue was recorded at $2.25 million, a decrease, which was due to the impacts of the platform migration and macroeconomic conditions. That was a decrease of $1.5 million in revenue. We saw total fleet achieved at 34,071 units, which was a growth of 15.9%, with membership numbers hitting 5,345. Total bookings declined by 14.7% due to the reduction of TAP in Camplify and a reduction in trade in the PaulCamper countries. The average global booking amount reduced from $1,693 to $1,570 during the period. Retained hirers grew in all regions with global retained hires at 29.1%. Marketing expenses increased significantly versus the PCP with H1 FY '25 coming in at 27%, up from 15.5% previously as a result of recovering the PC markets -- sorry, PaulCamper markets while still resolving technical issues in the half. Customer acquisition costs in PaulCamper increased as conversion rates were reduced. PaulCamper owner cost of acquisition increased to $118 as owner acquisition channels increased. Hirer cost of acquisition was recorded at $57. Camplify owner CAC was recorded at $145 and hirer of CAC of $24.95. Our employee benefit costs were above our expectations, mainly driven by one-off costs as part of our cost reduction program. As mentioned previously, employee benefits as a percentage of revenue increased to 42% of revenue. This cost-out program has now been completed with the total consolidation of team and reduced head count globally. Overall takerate has increased across the business to 30.53% compared to 25.65% previously. This increase in takerate has been driven by increases in membership sales and a continued global improvement in AER sales. ANZ recorded AER upgrades at 55% of customers and the newly rolled out AER program in Europe has seen AER upgrades at 39%. These changes are now seeing PaulCamper takerate begin to grow, increasing from 18.2% to 19.33%. Future bookings GTV, excluding TAP, as at 31 December was recorded at $25.2 million versus $26 million in the previous period. Just a reminder that future bookings are bookings where the deposit has been paid, but revenue not yet recognized as the travel has not yet commenced, and this is only for the Camplify regions. It is only a point in time measurement. CHL's closing cash balance was $12.5 million and we have outstanding debts to be collected from government clients of $6 million. As we come into our traditionally higher second half of the year, we expect cash and bookings to build.

Thank you, Karl. Moving on now to our focus of H2 FY '25. Moving into H2, Camplify will now focus on the key outcomes of improving performance of PaulCamper; stabilization and profitable growth in Camplify countries; financial controls, cost management and reduction; technology improvements to increase efficiency and marketplace performance; the rollout of our new membership backed insurance program. As outlined for the period, PaulCamper was impacted and reduced revenue by $1.5 million. CHL has taken the following steps to have a positive impact on this business unit. Technology improvements, including improving payment systems, resulting in significantly increase in our paid booking conversion rates. Improving SEO doubled our organic traffic and increased our SEO performance to a 2-year high. Improving our owner and user experience and improving our hirer to owner experience. Improvements in our systems have allowed us to increase levels of activity with positive clients -- with prospective clients, including rolling out promotion codes in Europe, implementing improvements in automated ticket resolutions, implementing reputation management activities. In December, CHL also launched our AER program in PC countries. Since implementation, we've seen over 39% of customers upgrade to a higher level of protection to a second or third tier of coverage. This was a key outcome of the platform migration work. This change allows us to increase takerate and revenue on a per customer basis. CHL now believes we are in a much stronger position in the PC markets and are working on further business development to improve our position for the upcoming season, expecting improvements in results of these markets in the second half. During the half, CHL implemented a cost reduction program and we have now seen a normalized operational cost of $3.35 million annually realized by the business. These savings will be reflected in the H2 period. CHL has leveraged technology to focus on improvement of our marketplace performance in Camplify countries. Leveraging technology allows us to reduce marketing spend, reduce and stabilize team growth and see improvements for our customers. Some of these changes have already rolled out into the platform, including more automation using AI ticket management. This has reduced manual work and now sees over 9% of customer tickets being resolved in ANZ by AI systems. This has increased customer satisfaction and reduced manual employee tasks. Implementation of affiliate marketing and discount codes. This has increased the ability to run promotions and build customers. The main technology area I want to focus on is the improvement of customer conversion and our hirer conversion funnel. In January, CHL implemented a number of conversion improvements, including a new search algorithm into the Australian business. These changes have seen customer conversions from traffic to requests increase from 2.5% to 3.4%. These changes have, as a result, seen considerable increases in conversions and strongly reduced our hirer CAC. These changes have been now rolled out globally and will continue to be implemented during the quarter. Moving on to membership and insurance. Insurance has always been a challenge for CHL in all countries. It is a critical part of our customer solution with us. However, it has been -- has presented some core issues and challenges with suppliers and the pathway for customer acquisition. CHL is pleased to announce a major project of implementation of new insurance offering that will be delivered in Q4 FY '25. Let's do a quick review of our current status. CHL currently has a well-established program in ANZ. We have been providing membership since 2017. This program currently has 5,116 members with billings on a full year for FY '24 of $8.29 million. CHL can only presently partially recognize this revenue and has an average GP of 14% on these products. CHL in H1 introduced PaulCamper Camper+ product for Germany. We now have 229 members with an additional 221 members currently reviewing quotes to move on to that product. As we come closer to the season, we expect this to grow. We also have 8 insurance providers relationships globally with various providers. In Q4, CHL will be launching our new member-based insurance solution. This is backed by a mutual driven captive. It allows us an opportunity to significantly increase our member numbers, reduce our costs and have a membership first acquisition model for RV owners. We will have 3 membership tiers: personal cover for customers seeking non-rental solutions, flexible membership for new marketplace low rental customers and Camplify premium members for heavy marketplace users. These membership levels will be bundled with a number of member benefits, including discounts and special offers. To assist us with the development of these products, John Myler has been retained as a key adviser to the company. John has extensive experience in the insurance world, including roles as the CEO of Auto & General, CEO of RACQ Insurance and the CEO of Allianz Worldwide Partners. How does this change impact our business? CHL sees a slight increase in total risk exposure based on historical trade. However, risk is now capped through the excess of loss reinsurance. GP margins increase from 14% to an estimated 28%. Current billings will move from an FY '24 level of $8.29 million to a fully annualized billings of $10.09 million based on current member levels. These changes provide us with a retail member offering. Customers can now start their journey with Camplify as a member first with full insurance with their RV allowing us to nurture them onto the marketplace. This reduces our owner customer acquisition cost through the leveraging of channel partnerships. While these changes are focused on at the moment in ANZ, we have built a global solution, that, combined with our existing insurance statuses, including our MGA status in Europe, allows us to create an offer for every country we operate in and future potential countries. To allow Camplify to get these products to market, I would like to announce we've agreed to a partnership with Everything Caravan Camping. This agreement sees ECC actively market our products to their membership of 400,000 RV owners in Australia over the next 12 months. It enables our member first acquisition strategy with a strong focus on nurturing customers with an ROI achieved on RV owners from day 1 of acquisition. Adding this to CHL has already rolled out a dealership program with 6 dealers signed up in Australia. We will continue to develop this funnel over the next 6 months. Over the next 6 months, CHL will continue to further develop its technology stack supporting our objectives of improving our EU markets; strengthening our position in Camplify markets; reducing operational costs, notably marketing and employee benefits; increasing members through the rollout of our membered backed insurance offering. Despite the challenges of the first half, CHL remains in a strong position. We are confident in achieving improved outcomes in the second half of FY '25. We remain on track with our 3 to 5 year objectives. Our insurance project will be the culmination of 3 years of work towards a significant growth in members and positions us well to be a global insurance provider. I will now open up for Q&A.

So there are a couple of questions that have already come through. So firstly, a question around cash flow positivity. So I think a couple of key points. Number one, we've obviously had a cost-out program in the first half and we've seen a decline in some of the markets through that period. H1 for us is traditionally lower in terms of performance. And if you look at last year's numbers with a normalized PaulCamper before the migration, we saw a loss of $3.3 million, I believe. So second half now that we've gone through those reductions and we're seeing an uptick in performance, we're certainly looking forward to having a positive second half. A question around GTV. The reduction in GTV in Australia, that was mainly driven through those 2 key points of the reduction in temporary accommodation and also the ceasing of van sales. So they had impact on both of those 2 items. We saw in the first quarter that it was certainly a softer market in Australia than what we had previously seen. But then we started to see things pick up in the second quarter. And so we ended up round about flat for the period in terms of normal trade from a marketplace rentals perspective. What is the look through balance sheet position? When does the government receivables land? So we've already started to receive some of that cash. I believe we now have, I think, $3.4 million outstanding from the government. Obviously, that continues as we invoice them, but we've certainly seen some of the cash flow into the business already. Germany has clearly struggled, particularly with the platform migration delays leading into summer. What is the plan here to return the market to growth? Additionally, marketing, et cetera. So I think our actual objective in Germany is to reduce the marketing spend from a customer acquisition perspective on the hirer side. But we feel as though we're in a much better position to do that now as we've done significant work in our SEO. Our SEO rankings in Germany are excellent. Our organic traffic has improved significantly post the migration. We've done a lot of work around customer retention and particularly on the owner's side. And we're doing more and more work on conversion. So the issues that we saw in this period, we feel as though the technical issues are complete now. Certainly, that's the indication that we've got from our customers. Major ones around payments, et cetera, have all been resolved. We'll continue to constantly tweak the platform and look for ways that we can improve customer conversion, particularly in the European markets. And that's an ongoing process with our team. And we're really actively managing that and monitoring those stats as we continue to see that play out. But certainly, early indicators looking into the season are looking a lot more positive than where we were last year during that migration period. So we certainly are a lot more buoyant for the season than what we had been. Just a question here around how we're seeing revenue in PaulCamper in January and February. So yes, certainly seeing an improvement in our key metrics. So we certainly think that coming into that season that we're going to be in a better position than what we have been. I think that there's just been a couple of key things happened in the German market. Number one, it was a heavily contested market also this time last year with -- a number of large fleet operators had been expanding massively. Two of those fleet operators have exited the market now. So there's less competition in the market. And we're also -- we've just had an election in Germany. So that's post now. The weather will start to improve in the next few weeks into that market. So we will start to see that season warm up literally and we'll be in a good position. We've also got lots of vehicles coming onto the platform. We're just finalizing some key relationships with a number of large suppliers to bring an additional -- over 1,500 vehicles onto the platform coming into the season. So we're positioning ourselves well in that market. And we still have work to do, but we're certainly seeing and expecting a much better result. Cash flow. Can I clarify again, do we expect to see positive cash flows in the half? I think certainly what we've seen obviously is a cost-out program and a seasonally lower period. So we're now focused on a reduced cost base, more operationally efficient in terms of where we are. We feel as though we can reduce our marketing spend compared to that period. We'll have lower employee benefits, and we're coming into high season. So we're certainly expecting cash flow positivity in the half. Talk to the market demands in the Australian market. Q2 better than Q1. Future bookings stable. What is the catalyst in the market? And CHL markets to return to solid growth? Yes, we certainly saw in that first quarter, and we did call it out at our AGM as well, that we had seen particularly the September, October period much reduced to where we expected it to be at in the Australian market. And you can see that it reflected in the booking values on average. We saw that start to improve in sort of the key December period. And now January, moving forward, we've seen that improve compared to that first quarter. So we now head into our busiest time of the year, which is the Easter period in the Australian market. So I think most tourism businesses have called this out. And now with reduction in interest rates and slightly improving, more stable macroeconomic conditions, we feel as though we've got a really good opportunity in the Australian market to return to growth. We've also had really solid improvements in our customer awareness generally across the Australian market from a brand perspective. So we'll continue to work on hirer acquisition. And now we have this opportunity to ramp up our fleet acquisition through our membership program. That will also help stimulate our hirer position. So we're definitely feeling confident about that market moving forward. Future bookings up 10% at the time of AGM. Now minus 4% in the year. What is the expectation of revenue growth in H2? Certainly -- as I mentioned previously, future bookings are a measure in time. It depends a lot on when the season is happening, from December holidays, January holidays, Easter holidays. So if you look forward now to where we are in terms of Easter versus last year, Easter is later in the second half than it was in last year. So we had an earlier Easter period. And that does affect when people book for the Australian period from a future bookings perspective. So we do expect people to be booking closer to travel date, which is later in the year than it was last year. So that has an impact on future bookings, particularly in Australia, which is our biggest market, and also in New Zealand, which has a big impact on future bookings. Touch on once-off costs. What were they in the cost-out program? So they were particularly around reduction of administrative costs, costs of software subscriptions, agreements in PaulCamper. So they had some reduction. As well as employee benefits. So we dramatically reduced our workforce. There's once-off costs that are associated with that. We now have a stable workforce in terms of what we need to run the business, and we have more predictability in terms of the normalized nature of operational costs into the second half. Insurance costs. We also had -- Karl mentioned our GP margin there had declined, and that was driven by insurance. So we had an increase in insurance cost during that period of both repairs and policy. Moving into our new model, we have more control of costs. We also have a lower cost of operation from our insurance products, particularly in the Australia, New Zealand market. And we'll now be able to introduce some changes to those membership billings, which then allows us to increase those GP margins. And now I've highlighted that change in that GP margin, in particular in that membership program, which has a positive impact on our costs moving forward and also an increase in our revenue. How's the competition in PC? I think I've already highlighted that. There's a question around 2 operators merging together and becoming bigger. That happened around about a year ago. There was the merger of Yescapa and Goboony in Europe. It hasn't affected our PC markets. It's actually just kind of reduced our competitors in Germany because we now really have 1 competitor as opposed to 2. We haven't seen any major changes from them. The major change we have seen is the reduction of 2 major fleet operators in that market. They grew super faster after COVID. They had a huge amount of fleet on platform. So I think across the 2, there was around about 5,000 vehicles that were available for rent. Those operators have now shut down as they -- the cost of vehicles at the interest rate they were paying versus the sale of those vehicles in a softer market has meant that those operators have closed down. So that presents an opportunity for us coming into the season to be able to capitalize in that market. Booking days dropped as a result of length of stay or daily rates? It's primarily length of stay. So we have had shorter stays. And we called that out once again at the AGM that we saw in that first quarter in particular that customers weren't staying for 10 days. They might have only been staying for 8 or 5 days as they started to tighten their belt in that period. And so moving forward, we expect to see some normalization between the 2 so that we can see an opportunity particularly in the Australian market as consumer spending perhaps returns back to some positivity around domestic holidays in Australia. So last question that's come through. Gross margins were below 60%. What's the increase in cost of sales? Any plans for improvement? So once again, that's all around our insurance program. So we had increase in the insurance cost. We didn't pass on those increases in costs to members as we now have a new insurance plan. And so we wanted to tie all that together with the launch in the Q4, which is coming in the half. So we'll have a positive impact in terms of sales of insurance to existing members, as I highlighted, from $8.29 million to over $10 million. And then we'll have a lower cost of operations of that insurance product as well. So a really good swing in our favor in that period. Sorry, one last question. Any new initiatives around the Rent a Tent acquisition to increase bookings? Yes. So we definitely have -- the Australian market has been very -- we've seen a lot of our festivals being reduced. That's actually changing now. There seems to be a lot more festivals happening in the Australian market, and we're working with lots of festival providers. We certainly saw a dip in the first half around those, and now we're seeing a positive swing in the second half. We're also working now with some other insurance companies and government providers around some other disasters that are happening right now, playing out right now. So there are opportunities for us to increase our temporary accommodation and programs and emergency response programs as well. So we're very positive around our B2B models that we have provided. So they're the final questions. Thank you very much. Appreciate you joining the call today. And I look forward to giving you another update, particularly around as we see the launch of our insurance product into the Australian market towards the end of May. Thank you very much.