Motorpoint Group Plc (MOTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

For our full year results for FY '23. We'll just skip straight into the agenda, which is -- we'll cover some highlights from last year. Chris will update us through the year's financial highlights and ESG update. And then back to me for a strategic update and outlook. So having finished the year in March, we remain the U.K.'s leading omnichannel used vehicle retailer. And we continue to invest for our significant profitable and long-term growth going forward. Just a quick reminder of what our focus is, we have 2 channels, Motorpoint, which is our retail business and then Auction4Cars, which is our wholesale business. And Motorpoint sells cars, mainly under 4 years and 30,000 miles, big cars and commercial vehicles. And the sources of those are through part exchange for customers, through the usual channels and also Sell Your Car, which is our C2B channel. And then Auction4Cars sources from the public, whether it be a part exchange or Sell Your Car. One thing to always remember with the company, is our focus on our people and our Virtuous Circle model continues to be at the forefront of what we do. We fundamentally believe a happy engaged workforce drives outstanding customer satisfaction. And that then leads to long-term shareholder value. So we continue with that model, whether the trading cycle is good or not so good and that's very important to us. Just to recap on FY '23. So the results obviously are dramatically different to the previous year, partly because of the investment levels that we're making. But also I think it is important to look at the headwinds that we suffered in FY '23. So well documented and continued new vehicle shortages. We used to be a 0 to 2 business. We're now a 0 to 4 business, but that market still remains around 35% lower than the peak, still about 20% lower than the previous year in FY '22. I think one of the key things going forward but also had an impact in FY '23 is that a rising interest rate environment for used cars is very bad, given that the cost of financing the vehicles that we hold in stock rises dramatically. We received lower finance commission from our lenders despite increasing the customer rate to 11.9%. We received less commission and obviously, increasing the finance rate to 11.9% reduces customer affordability, which is impacted by that increased APR. So a triple whammy, which is a negative for our business. And obviously, we're taking steps to respond to that. A one-off in FY '23 was also the well-documented fall in EV values. I think EVs are now normalizing as a channel. And so previously, they were maybe a niche product and they're now becoming much more mainstream. The used car market is the level playing field and therefore, EV values are having to align more like petrol and diesel vehicle pricing, rather than the major premium they were previously. So we see that continuing. There is now stability in that product and we are now profitable in EVs as we sit here today. So how do we respond to that? Well, we want to be on the front step. We will prepare for the worst in terms of the consumer environment. What it may become with a continued rise in interest rates predicted. But given the investments we've made and the market share growth that we've achieved, we're now going to be more selective where we invest and particularly around customer experience. We want to make sure that we can integrate the sales channels, from the customer being online to offline, to be in in-store or at home. We want that to feel as seamless as possible to customer. Making sure that we use data to support our buy and sell and the marketing activity. And I've learned quite a few things in the last couple of months around using different ways of looking at our data and we have a massive amount of data, as you can imagine but making sure we use that in the right way. And certainly showed me a few things. I got rid of some of my pre-assumptions in the last few months. And continuing to make sure we get technology enhancements that either drive our volume of sales or make us leaner going forward. So that will be a total investment reduction of around GBP 8 million, some of it capital, some of it revenue. And mainly caused by pausing the store rollout and focusing on some of that technology spend to make sure it's well allocated on what we think makes an impact. Vehicle shortages we do see it to ease. There is supply around at the moment. We don't see that particularly changing. However, sometimes when supply is okay, it means demand is falling. So clearly, there's a challenge there for us. But we do expect, as I say, being prepared for the worst and we are expecting macro conditions to remain difficult throughout this financial year. And it's important to us to be able to emerge from this predicament with a leaner business and ready for the market to recover. Just in terms of the progress we've made on our major KPIs through the year. Our stated objective of growing our market share has proven successful, growing to 3.5% and continue to grow revenues. And our e-commerce revenue is also up. But as you can see, the units are declining. Clearly, not as much as the market. We've outperformed that dramatically. However, we don't like to see our volume shrink, as you can imagine. And we continue to source more cars from customers, which is pleasing because they are a cheaper channel for us. And you can see the strategic investment rising from GBP 1 million to GBP 6 million. And that will come back down now as we pause the new store openings. We did slip into a small loss given the headwinds that we talked about. But our expenditure levels are being aligned in accordance with that. As you can see, the customer acquisition costs falling. So that's the result of the falling marketing spend as we get better at allocating our every pound that we have available. Cash improved to GBP 5.6 million and we continue to focus heavily on our customer experience, as I mentioned earlier and good to see that staying at around 84%. I think anything over 80% or around 80%, that number is acceptable to us. We believe price leadership will continue to be very important, particularly given the environment we expect. And therefore, it's very important for us to make sure that we can compare positively to main dealers and used car specialists. As you can see on here, we are cheaper in all 3 of those examples, various different products against various different competitors. I think the important thing for me is, making sure that we are as cheap as we need to be to get the right run rate and to beat our competition and secure that customer. So some of the gaps on here are quite large. We will be using data and are using data to improve our margin and make sure that we are moving the cars through the system at the right margin, at the right pace and that's the key thing for us. Continued openings of new stores in the previous year as well. So we've opened in 3 markets. In Edinburgh and Coventry, we've been seeking properties in those areas for a long time. Both of those were former dealers. Ipswich was also a former car selling space. And I think it does show that as the contraction in the volume of dealers continues, then we will see opportunities going forward. So we don't expect to not open any sites going forward, just pausing for the time being until the macro environment has more clarity on where it's headed. In terms of the pipeline that we have, we've got none planned to be opened for further part of the year. We do have 1 location secured, which we can open when we're ready. But we are targeting a national share of our market at 10% at maturity of these locations and as we continue our rollout post the pause that we're doing now. But we think we have a proven model. When we go into a market, we take share. Our brand resonates with customers. It's a big part of their monthly expenditure is a vehicle. And making sure we can make a difference to that is something we're very passionate about and leads us to win in the markets when we enter those markets. That comes through on this slide, which is the investment in our branches and our brand in the new branches. You can see here, we've grown our market share in every area, which is great. Our brand awareness has also grown in the markets, as you can imagine, where we've opened new stores. So growing our market share from 1% to 3% in those markets is very important. And obviously, we'd expect to see that now rise in line with the ones above, in the different cohorts, the longer we're in town, the more that we grow. And usually, it takes 2 change cycles for our brands to grow to the levels that we see at the top line where customers have pretty much bought twice from us and are now very much talking about us and the average cycle to change a car remains at around 3.5 years. So you can see why that takes quite a long time to build in terms of market share. Now I hand you over to Chris to go through some financial highlights.

Okay. Thank you, Mark. So let's take you back to the highlights slides. So I think you've seen already seen these numbers in Mark's section. So revenue up round about 9%. You can see the big fall in the profitability measures. It's largely around the gross profit, the gross profit margin coming down but expenses under good control. As you can see expenses, now we've got a run rate of decreasing expenses year-on-year as we realign the business to match what's going on in the wider market. What was really pleasing though to see, a return to positive cash at the year-end. So GBP 5.6 million, so a big swing from where we were a year ago. So that is pleasing. And so I'm comfortable with cash at year end being under control. So just looking at the profit and loss account. You can see there, record revenue and that to a degree was helped by both vehicle mix, with more expensive vehicles and also price inflation. However, as Mark said before, we did increase our market share quite significantly from 3.1% to 3.5%. We have 2 new stores and Ipswich opened successfully a few weeks ago. We see a loss before -- loss before tax was down, reflecting strategic investments, supply constraints in the second half, maintaining price leadership, the higher interest costs and then also the fall in EV values, which really impacted the final quarter of roughly between about GBP 2 million to GBP 2.5 million of our gross profit. So that was a shock but as Mark said already, that seems to have flowing slowly through. So back to a bit more normality now from an electric vehicle perspective, which is really good news. So despite new store additions, we expanded digital and marketing team, that said the head count fell down to 794 at the year end from 928 a year ago. And that's mainly around the retail teams where we're seeing some benefits particularly in automation and merging sales and customer assistant roles. But also in the back office areas as well where we've got automation efficiency, so starting to see improvements coming through. That more affected the second half of the year. So we'll see the full year effect coming through in FY '24 of those. So that is pleasing. Marketing costs, as Mark mentioned before, we've seen the cost of acquisition come down, spent GBP 14 million in the year just gone. It was GBP 19 million in the previous year. That was influenced by the fact when we reopened post COVID in that April '20 -- April '21 here, then we went quite heavy with marketing to support the volume that was out there. Much more targeted marketing. We're getting much better information now, seeing return on investment, what works, what doesn't work. Whereas, I think probably a couple of years ago, we were a little bit more blind in terms of -- more of a scattergun approach. So that's pleasing. I'll talk about ESG in a minute but energy consumption on a like-for-like basis is down 7.3%, it's mainly electric and gas and water was down 15.4%. And that's for the total business. So like-for-like would have been a further improvement in terms of the store space. We've got a small gain, [ GBP 0.3 million ], which is income related to the finalization of the sale leasebacks that [ we did ] at the beginning of the year at Stockton and Peterborough. Then you can see finance costs pretty much doubles -- doubled in the year and that's clearly reflecting the rise of interest rates that we're all aware of. There's an IFRS numbers in there of about GBP 2 million but there's about GBP 5.1 million of pure sort of facility borrowing costs, which was up by [ GBP 1.8 million ] previous year. So you can see the interest rates is really hampering the finance cost line. So from a fixed asset perspective, we've got growth in fixed assets due to the new openings that we talked about, a couple of major refits we did at Burnley and Newport, which I guess most of you know, are 2 of our older stores. So they're looking really good and not relatively expensive either in terms of what we've done. So we're pleased with the outcome of those as our customers, which is really good. Intangible assets has grown by about GBP 3 million and that's a lot of the software, website development that we've alluded to earlier. The assets held for sale, the GBP 9.2 million was the previous year and that came through in May at the beginning of this year. So those will be sold and leased back. Inventory drop, quite significant, partly due to supply constraints in Q4. And again, as we talked about earlier, we're starting to see that return. So more of a normal supply chain. We're not there yet. But what we have seen is the stock improve. Stock days has improved from 54 to 51 days in stock. So certainly pleased on that and that continues to be one of our key KPIs in terms of how we really manage the business because that affects pretty much the whole thing through buying, supply chain, channel support and how quickly you can sell a vehicle through particularly [indiscernible]. We've got significant headroom in our stocking facility availability. So it's probably a record, it went up to GBP 195 million, back end of the previous year, largely because of the significant rise in inflation. Clearly, that's more under control now. So we've got some headroom there should we need it. Receivables change just reflects onto the timing of finance commissions at the year end and payables reductions, the draw down in the finance stocking facilities. Pleased to say that the loan extension that we have with our bank, Santander, GBP 35 million, which is GBP 29 million RCF, GBP 6 million bank overdraft, which was due to expire in May '24. That now runs out to June '26. We've got the option of 2 1-year extensions as well if we both agree on that. So pleased with that. And largely on the same term, we've got a slight change in one of the covenants. But yes, so that's secured now [indiscernible] one of those, which is really good. Okay. On to the cash flow. So we can see we moved from the GBP 21.2 million debt. That obviously excludes some of these liabilities to a closing cash of GBP 5.6 million. Largely because of the working capital improvements around stock and the financing facility. But we've also got GBP 9 million of the GBP 9.7 million of the proceeds from the sale and leaseback, which has come through as well. And then finally, ESG, quickly go through kind of the -- some of the bullet points on that. I'm personally really pleased with the progress on ESG this year. What it does feel like to me is that ESG activities are starting to ingrain into the business. As Mark mentioned, Motorpoint's DNA, both from an office perspective but also [indiscernible] stores and [indiscernible] centers. So I think that's really good. And I think that's part of the reason why we were able to see things like reduced electricity, reduced [ cans ], reduced water. I think people are just becoming a lot more focused and conscious of what's going on in the market. So that's really good. I think also we've got a much better sort of governance process now. So we introduced in the Plc, the ESG Board Committee just over a year ago, so that's operational. And then we've got an exec committee as well that meets quite regularly through the year. So we've got a nice cycle in there, a nice flow of routine. Rolling out EV charge points. EVs, we sold 137% more than we did in the previous year. So I'd expect that to rise going forward. We have got energy champions across the business as well. We've got a new workplace communications platform, a bit like Facebook, if you like, within the business. So that people can share ideas and talk about what works, what doesn't work. And again, that's developing interest across the business, which is really good. I think the other point, just to make is we've got much better visibility now on data awareness and measurement. And as you know, when you look at some of the annual reports coming out now, some of the measurements that will require as part of [indiscernible] statements and its disclosures, there's a lot of information that's required. So we work very hard on that and that's really helped. And we've also done ESOS audit, event-based audit in terms of energy management. So we've got a number of recommendations for that, which hopefully will continue to reduce consumption in various areas as we go forward. And then pretty much zero waste to landfill again, which is negligible. ED&I is getting much more focus in the business as well. In actuality, now engaged -- we've got a specialist who is working with us on ED&I measures and what we can do better. Talked about workplace. We've got new information security officer in place. We've got a new third-party helping us -- to help in safety, so raising the bar there as well. And then also we're quite a bit a Real Living Wage Employer and we chose to bring forward the pay increases from March to January '23 as a result of that. Okay. Thank you. So I'll hand you back to Mark.

Thanks, Chris. So we're just going to go through our strategic update and outlook now. Our progress on our strategic targets will be limited going forward in terms of FY '24. And making sure that we are investing in the areas that give us the best near-term returns given the short-term headwind we envisage. But if we go through the first aspect of our strategy, which was to upscale our e-commerce capability, we now have a fully recruited internal digital team, a big increase in digital sales leads and a lot more information coming through around things like the marketing effectiveness of our digital spend and that's working very well for us. We've now internalized also our SEO and content teams that will have a long-term benefit to the business, increasing our organic leads, which means we can spend less on customer acquisition. We've opened a digital and tech hub in our Manchester store, lots of that team are based in that area. So it's great for them to have a space where they can collaborate and helps us to attract the best talent. We've already mentioned data a few times but our data science is increasingly driving our decisions around customer acquisition, pricing and stock allocation. And as I said earlier, surprised me with some of the things and patterns, some of the patterns that we see and some of the decisions we've taken to improve the business going forward, which will have a benefit in the short, medium and long term. And obviously, we spent a lot of time improving our website, the aesthetics of the website and the content capability are dramatically enhanced from where they were a year ago. And I think it's important that we have a website that's acceptable to customers to generate leads. And that is primarily the function of that website, when we've seen customers given the opportunity to have to buy digitally, entirely online customers, particularly seem to prefer to secure the vehicle online and then complete the purchase on us in a store. So we're seeing a return to probably pre-Covid behaviors from our customers. Just continuing on the digital capability, what have we actually done? So has a new home page using lifestyle imagery, the navigation is easier, much better content. We have a new headroom footer, which is the top and bottom of the homepage, which enhances the look and feel, builds trust with customers and making sure also that the search results that they're requiring are much more presented in a much better way, so we've upgraded that page as well. We continue to improve -- make improvements to the search capability. So there's a lot more sort and filter options to customers. We played around with how we list vehicles to see what's more effective in terms of how we sell the vehicles and what vehicles sell. We've advertised for the first time to customers the previous price and the new price because, as you know, we reduce our prices if the car isn't selling. We will reduce price and therefore, showing the customers the reduction in the price maybe increases their appetite to purchase the vehicle. We're also building a wish list and vehicle comparisons tools just to make sure customers have full visibility and transparency on the product they're actually buying and they're able to compare to other cars that we have in stock but also create wish lists to make it easier for their journey when they come back to the website. We spell out our proposition a lot better around choice, value, service and quality. And we do that through showing better imagery of the cars. So again, making sure we present our product in the best possible light. We've improved our checkout journey for customers and that includes the post-purchase experience, making sure that customers prior to collection have done as much of their administration because there is administration buying a car, as much of that has been done prior to them arriving in store, which, therefore, means we can have a smaller team in store because customers have completed most of the work online prior to visiting us. And we've also then improved things like how we present finance and to make sure that we're very clear on what we're doing on the finance and how that works for customers, still some customers don't quite understand the difference maybe between a PCP or a Hire Purchase product. In terms of stuff coming through, so still work being done with our engineering team and our product team, a product detail page on how we actually present the vehicle when somebody clicks on the vehicle offer a list of vehicles, they go into the specific vehicle they're looking at our page is about to be launched in the coming weeks, which will have much better look and feel but also improve cost action for customers and much more clear messaging in terms of cost, finance and inquiry and putting as much information on that page as possible to make sure customers have as much or all of the information they need when they're trying to make the decision. In terms of the store pages, so when you pick on one of our branch pages, that look and feel will also be approved. Currently, we're spending money to drive customers away from that page because it's not a very well-built page. That will obviously be eliminated as we upgrade that page with a much better SEO benefit going forward and including a new store location map and also building new stock-led functionalities. So when we don't have something in stock, customers will be able to receive alerts when that car is now in stock as we go forward. In terms of customer acquisition and retention. We have -- we've launched a customer experience project. We've sold cars broadly the same way for quite a long time in terms of our sales process. We look in to connect that experience back to what customers actually want, which is quite an interesting project that we're doing, listening to customers as much as we possibly can and make sure that we align our process to be much more what the customers want rather than what we think they want. And we have a customer board, which has been introduced to make sure we're listening to customers in terms of their pre- and post-purchase experience. So how can we improve that. And there's always something that we can do better and making sure that we involve customers in that journey is really important. And that part of those projects have launched already and we've seen an increase in customer retention up 11% from FY '22. So we're pleased with that. As I mentioned, we upscaled our e-commerce capability and that continues. Our brand proposition was revamped at the end of last year. So a focus on our quality and also unbeatable prices. So the campaign being -- there's no car, like a Motorpoint car generates that trust in our brand and also the way that we use that messaging is not just about the quality, it's also about "There's no car like a Motorpoint car" because it's the best value in time. We've opened 6 stores since October 2021 and 3 since the start of last year. Our brand awareness in those markets, as I mentioned earlier, increases and that ultimately leads to growth in our market share in those markets, which helps our national market share growth overall. And as you can see, our spontaneous awareness in those new markets more than doubled by 117%. We continue to use CRM as that customer base builds. We do dramatically more and much better communications with our customers. So that generates more inquiries, more leads than it has been in the past but making sure we've got that improvement in conversion is really important and very, very low unsubscribe rates as well because we're basically targeting the customers with what we think they want to listen to. In terms of our wholesale channels, we have Auction4Cars, as you know, and also Sell Your Car, which is our customer acquisition channel. That's fully automated, over 5,000 cars acquired from customers. There is a balance to that. We can drive that number up even more but we can also then get caught out with vehicles with customers where we pay too much for that vehicle. So we're obviously cognizant of not acquiring a car and then losing a lot of money on it. We want to make sure we acquire the car at a similar cost to what we can acquire through other channels. And being mindful of that, we have increased our cars acquired from customers to now 23.8%, that's an increase of a 1/3. So again, focusing on that channel, making sure that we're acquiring the vehicle but at an appropriate price is important. We've refreshed the Auction4Cars website and the brand and redefined as a proposition around value, transparency and service. It's been well received by our wholesale customers. We still have lower fees than the main auction channels, albeit we have increased those. And I think we were too cheap at one point and we've increased those fees to be something where we can generate more revenue from. But the process has been dramatically easier for customers now, given our digitized administration process. So that was probably part of the business, which was still quite paper-based and quite administratively intensive. That's been dramatically improved with investments in the technology team, which has improved efficiency and also leads to cars being sold quicker on that wholesale channel and therefore, reducing days in stock, which on a wholesale car can be very important. So even a couple of days can have a big impact on the margin we generate from that car. As you can see there, the self-service registration is another example of the tech team getting involved. So rather than be a manual process that's now automated and is done automatically within a few hours. So using technology is making us quicker and simpler for us but also for our customers, an important strand. In terms of our continuing to automation, so as you can see, Chris mentioned earlier, the head count reduction, we see that coming down a bit more and making sure that the digital capability and new stores are also making -- being productive and making sure that we're getting our focus on driving our volumes and increasing our leanness to the right balance. As Chris mentioned also, we've merged our salesperson and customer service assistant roles. So our sales people now hand over all of our vehicles and that will continue. And our outbound payments, which is basically refunds to customers for deposits or small payments like that, was quite administrative. We've now made that fully automated. Again rather than going into an accounts' team and somebody managing, processing that, that is now fully automated. Similarly, payment reconciliations, which again is a benefit for our administration functions and stock loading. So lots of automation has been improved there. So ingesting data into our system rather than manually keying it. And also similarly, our integration with our main finance lenders around the customer finance and proposition has been dramatically slicker as well. So working very hard with our partners in that area. It means that we do less administration and they can support us back as well. We implemented a new telephone and web chat system, which gives us dramatically better [ MI ] but also our ability to distribute the calls means that we need less people at the center and we can distribute calls and generate leads much more efficiently going forward. And also our improvements for our customer journey, I mentioned a little bit earlier, around self-serve, so reducing that customer time in our stores on handover. We continue to make progress in our preparation function as well. So improving our quality and identification of any issues on a vehicle, a new quality control application, which has helped us to reduce our time to prepare vehicles by just over a day and that will continue to be a focus for us, with stock turn -- days in stock is a really important measure for us, particularly if we see any depreciation in used car values, which we are expecting to probably be an issue as affordability challenges continue. And a procurement review across the company is realizing savings in other areas as well. So real focus on cost and a real focus on efficiency whilst also trying to improve our volumes. In terms of outlook, we continue to see that price leadership, we believe, is absolutely the best way forward for us, making sure we are the cheapest in the market, giving our customers the best value as well as the best choice and service as well. We do have a strong track record of resilience in a downturn. The business has always done well in periods where the economy has been into a downward cycle. But we're obviously very conscious that we need to prepare for what may happen, and therefore, we're efficiently managing our cash resources as you'd expect. In terms of the macro environment of inflation, rising interest rates and consumer uncertainty, we do see that impacting the market, did certainly in the next 12 months in the near term. We see headwinds continuing with potentially interest rates rising to [ 5.5% or even 5.75% ]. That does have an impact on our business. We have a higher borrowing cost for the stock that we hold. We have a lower commission share from the finance that we sell and we also, therefore, that passes on to the consumer through affordability challenges for consumers. I think as an example, we always try and get a monthly payment for a vehicle under GBP 99. It's now a struggle to get it under GBP 119 due to vehicle price inflation and then the APR increases that we've had to pass through to customers. So affordability is a real challenge, I think, for the consumer going forward. Growth in new car sales, however, will start to ease supply challenges. So supply has been a problem for a couple of years now. The market still remains quite subdued at probably 35% lower than the [indiscernible] than it was at the peak. However, we do now start seeing -- expect to start seeing that improve as new car registrations have been on an upward trajectory for 6 months or so. That will come through, it's just a question of when and in what form. The short-term rental market still remains relatively flat. But the leasing companies are taking some stuff. So we will see that product come through into the channels. What we don't know, is it 6 months, 12 months, is it 18 months but clearly, it's a positive indicator going forward. Our investment in technology has created lots of efficiencies that I mentioned. We have lowered our nonstrategic costs and the business will be leaner. And as the market recovers, we are dramatically better positioned than we otherwise would have been for that technology spend. And some of it, you don't need to spend twice. So we have made changes. We've integrated processes. We've made ourselves leaner and we will benefit from that going forward to help us become a much more profitable business going forward. In terms of our short term, as I mentioned, we will align our cost base depending on what the market does but we're in a good position to be able to take advantage of that market but also being mindful of conserving cash, as I mentioned. But fundamentally, the business is in good shape. We're in a better place than we were a few years ago in terms of our cost base and our efficiency. And as volumes recover, we will emerge a dramatically more profitable business and more successful for the long term. Okay. Thank you.