Mercari, Inc. (4385) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for waiting, everyone. It is time. So we would like to begin Mercari's FY 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Briefing Session. I will be the MC today. My name is [ Kyoko Kami ]. Thank you very much. Today, we would like to welcome Mercari, SVP of Corporate and CFO, Sayaka Eda, to come to the podium and go through the FY 2026 Q2 results. After the briefing session, we would like to have some time for Q&A from the press gathered here today. This session will end at 4:35. Please refrain from recording and distributing the session in its entirety. Thank you, Eda-san. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Today, we would like to take you through FY 2026 Q2 earnings briefing session. Thank you very much for joining our earnings briefing session. For Mercari, CFO, Eda. I will be taking you through the results today. This is the overview of today's agenda. First, we would like to take you through some highlights of the consolidated results. So from the beginning of the fiscal year, we have mentioned that our priority will be improving the core experience of our product, and we can see the impact from those efforts. And we also invested in marketing, and they had a positive impact. So Marketplace and US both achieved double-digit GMV growth for the first time in a while. And with respect to Fintech as well, payment and credit both also achieved high growth. So all 3 core businesses have grown this quarter. Therefore, the year-on-year growth in Q2 was 15%. And we have invested in marketing initiatives and campaigns because it is a peak season for us, but we've seen year-on-year core operating profit growth of 54%. So it grew quite dramatically this quarter. So we believe that the core operating profit or the initiatives to improve the core product, core experience translated to results earlier than anticipated, and that is why we have made upward revisions in forecasted revenue and core operating profit. This is the new forecast, the blue font is the updated forecast. As I mentioned before, we have invested in products core experience, and we've seen Marketplace's GMV grow significantly in the second quarter. So we have updated the GMV growth rate of Marketplace to 5% to 10% year-on-year. And we also made upward revisions to the core operating profit as well. Fintech, we will be continuing on with the initial or we have kept the same forecast. However, it has gone well. So as you can see above the consolidated results, our forecast for revenue is JPY 210 billion to JPY 220 billion and core operating profit has been revised upward to JPY 32 billion to JPY 36 billion. These are the consolidated results on a quarterly basis. So we've seen growth in our 3 -- steady performance of our 3 core businesses, and we have achieved record high revenue and core operating profit. This is a summary of the KPI. As I mentioned before, Marketplace, US, we've seen double-digit growth for these businesses for the first time in a while. And Fintech credit balance has grown by 41% year-on-year. So it has increased significantly. So we see a credit balance of more than JPY 300 billion. At the beginning of this fiscal year, we have mentioned that we will be creating an AI task force of about 1,100 people. And we mentioned that we will try to become more AI native. So we just wanted to give you some updates. So with respect to -- we have broken down our operational process to visualize where AI can apply, and we have specified focus areas going forward. And we also established AI governance as well. And before the task force was implemented, the AI usage rate within the company was 95% and now it's 100%. So all of our employees now use AI-powered tools to more efficiently undertake business tasks and to do so in a more sophisticated way. The development output per engineer is now 1.9x what it was last year. And we also made it possible to use natural language. So our internal AI agent enables members to analyze data through natural language input without having specialized knowledge. So we can now -- we no longer need to actually wait for the specialized analyst teams to conduct analysis. We will be able to use AI tools to conduct analysis on our own. And third quarter onwards, we would like to focus in these 2 areas, product innovation and organizational change. So through the AI task force, we will drive these initiatives from Q3 onwards. With respect to product innovation, the product direction is the same as what we introduced in the beginning of the fiscal year. But these are some examples that we have highlighted, help users buy and sell by developing an AI agent. And with respect to CS, we want to better and better respond to inquiries and do so more rapidly. And with respect to product and service development, we want to start using AI as a norm to improve plan accuracy and speed up the hypothesis validation cycle. In addition, organizational change. As I mentioned before, all of our employees are utilizing AI-powered tools now but we would like to use AI to produce a lot more output. So AI has enabled us to be more productive. And we want to utilize AI in HR, so we can better and more fairly evaluate our employees as well. And we also want to create an AI readable knowledge base through transferring and consolidating all company knowledge into one knowledge management tool. So we want one database. So this AI-readable knowledge database or tool will be used for a decision-making process. From here, I would like to take a closer look at each of our businesses. First, starting with Marketplace. As I mentioned before, we have prioritized enhancing the product's core experience. And this mainly focuses on 2 areas: safe and secure transaction environment and also dramatically improving the core experience, and we have made great strides in these 2 areas, driving high GMV growth. And also in December, we had a huge marketing initiative, Super Mercari Market Days campaign in December. So if you look at just the month of December, we saw GMV grow by 17% year-on-year. Therefore, the GMV in Q2 landed at 11% year-on-year. So we were able to achieve double-digit growth for the first time in a while. And we also saw the highest ever MAU at 24 million users in December. So the top line grew, and we also saw growth in core operating profit as well. As I mentioned before, we have actually made upward revisions based on the recent performance. This is the Marketplace results on a quarterly basis. As you can see visually here, GMV revenue in the second quarter, we've seen significant growth. So both of these KPIs, we booked record high performance results. This is the core operating profit and profit and cost composition. So you can see that the profit has increased dramatically as well. And second quarter tends to be our high season, peak season. And so we have implemented a lot of marketing initiatives, but we see those marketing initiatives bear fruit. So you can see that the profit and cost composition has been managed quite well. And in terms of core product experience enhancement, I would like to introduce some of the specific initiatives that we have undertaken. So some are big, some are small, but we have focused on creating a safe and secure Marketplace and also implementing some product initiatives. These are some key examples. With respect to safe and secure environment, we want to make sure that we can actually react very quickly. So we updated our Marketplace principles to better address items that could significantly impair the safety and security of our Marketplace. Our Marketplace is used by many people so we want to make sure that we listen to experts outside of our firm as well. And we updated our Marketplace principles based on the feedback that we received on experts in each area. We also have expansive items and hobby and entertainment items as well. We wanted to enable people to trade and buy and sell these items very safely. So we established the Mercari Appraisal Center. We offered a similar service before working with external parties, but we decided to establish our own appraisal centers to improve the security and safety. And as a result, we've seen 225% Y-o-Y increase in the number of appraised items in Q2. And we also wanted to address the customer service inquiries very quickly. So until now, it was mail-based, but we have started to offer online chat support. Of course, in this area, there are areas improvements, a lot of -- still many areas of improvement, but we have made some progress by offering chat support. And we also want to make sure that it's easier to use our service. So we improved the user and item match rate. And we also try to address user churn as well by making it more easy to relog in. And if we look at to the right, we have marketing initiatives such as Super Mercari Market Days. We saw a lot of people enter. We've done this twice before, but the third edition happened in December and it was supported and enjoyed by a large number of users. And over the mid- to long term, cross-border transaction is an area that will support our mid- to long-term growth, and we have some updates to share with you in the second quarter. Entertainment and hobby category, there's high demand for that from overseas customers. So we wanted to make sure that we have sufficient inventory and product lineup as well. In order to offer more products and more product lineup, we have an alliance with Suruga-ya. And also in Taiwan and Hong Kong, we're already providing our service cross-border, but we want more customers in these regions to utilize our service. So we've done online and offline marketing such as the Singles Day on November 11 as well. And with respect to Fintech, we've seen growth of payments, both inside and outside of Mercari. So we issued Mercards or we launched Mercards 3 years ago, but we've seen great results from Mercards. And within Mercari, we focused on usage within Mercari, but now we've seen expansion of usage inside and outside of Mercari. So as a result, we've seen a steady growth of credit balance by 41% year-on-year. And also revenue has increased by 20%, growing dramatically. Second quarter, we actively invested mainly to acquire Mercard holders and the core operating profit increased steadily to JPY 1.8 billion. So we mentioned that we are going to aim for core operating profit of JPY 5 billion to JPY 7.5 billion, and we're in line with these goals. And in order to grow -- in order to continuously grow, we want to make sure that we acquire more Mercard holders, and we will actively invest and expand the range of Merpay users in Q3. And in terms of core operating profit, we're seeing great progress in the first half, and we anticipate the core operating profit to land closer to the upper limit of our guidance. As I mentioned earlier, with the spread of Mercard, we've seen expansion of usage within Mercari and outside of Mercari as well. The total transaction value outside of Mercari increased 2.9x over the last 3 years. And Mercard was awarded first place in 3 categories of Oricon Customer Satisfaction survey. It is more and more being recognized as a card that is easy to use for many users. And this is the performance of the Fintech business. This is revenue as well as the breakdown of revenue, and this is the core operating profit and advertising costs. Every quarter, I explained this, but our core operating profit and advertising costs, of course, varies from quarter-to-quarter. We control the annual budget and in effective seasons, we will make the necessary investments. So we don't -- of course, so the advertising costs will fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter, but we will make sure to meet the annual guidance. This is the expansion of the credit balance. So the credit balance continues to grow, but you can see that the collection rates remain high. Moving on to the US business. Here, too, as we explained in the Marketplace, we focus on improving the core experience. And as such, we have seen the GMV growth rate increase. And we've also had successful marketing initiatives such as Green Friday promotion and category-specific coupons. So the GMV grew by double digits, 12% year-on-year. In the second and third quarter, US is also a high season. So we want to make sure that we continue to invest in the marketing initiatives, and we have landed at a core operating profit of JPY 600 million, and we will continue to do better than just breaking even. And in the third quarter of last fiscal year, we changed the fee model -- so the year-on-year comparisons going forward will be tougher. However, we will continue to strategically accelerate investments for top line growth and remain committed to improving our core experience and thereby achieving our full year guidance. These are the trends by quarter. So there are a couple of examples of the product core experience improvement initiatives. So we've offered discounts for bundled purchases, and we also have apparel bag shoes exchange program, POC as well. So we are taking to see what kind of features have high demand among our users. We are also improving UI and UX as well. Like Marketplace, we are testing and implementing big and small initiatives, and we're seeing this have positive impact on the results. Marketing initiatives as well, as I mentioned before, second quarter tends to be a peak season in the US as well. So we're undertaking various marketing initiatives that have done well. So this is the policy for the second half of our fiscal year. So it's the same content as I shared during the consolidated results highlights, but we're on track with our plans. And the second half onwards, we'll continue to focus on the core experience. And we'll also continue to invest in growth beyond FY 2026 with 2027 in our view. This concludes the earnings briefing session for FY 2026 second quarter. Thank you very much.

This concludes Mercari's FY 2026 second quarter earnings briefing session. Thank you very much for watching today. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]