Pinterest, Inc. (PINS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Pinterest, Inc.'s 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I would now like to introduce Benjamin Silbermann, the company's President, CEO and Chairman of the Board.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our 2020 annual meeting of stockholders. In accordance with our bylaws, I will act as Chairperson of the meeting, and Christine Flores, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, will act as secretary of the meeting and record the minutes. Now let me introduce the other members of our Board who are present at today's meeting. Michelle Wilson, Leslie Kilgore, Fred Reynolds, Jeremy Levin, Evan Sharp. In addition, we are joined by the following members of the Pinterest team, Todd Morgenfeld, our CFO; Christine Flores, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary; and Jane Penner, our Head of Investor Relations. [ Diane Gin ] and [ Laura Young, ] representatives from Ernst & Young, our independent registered public accounting firm, are also present and will be available to respond to appropriate questions later in the meeting. We are also joined by Trish Hodson, the Inspector of Elections. I will now turn the meeting over to Christine Flores, who will conduct the formal portion of this meeting.

Thanks, Ben, and hello, everyone. Thank you again for joining us today. I'm Christine Flores, General Counsel of Pinterest. Today's virtual-only meeting is a live audio webcast. We believe it's important to engage with our stockholders, and we hope that this virtual meeting will maximize participation regardless of location. In addition, having a virtual meeting enables us to reach a larger audience while reducing our costs and environmental impact. Thank you very much to those who are participating in our meeting today. I'm going to cover the formal business of today's meeting, which is described in our Proxy Statement for the meeting. After voting on these matters, we will announce the preliminary voting results and adjourn the formal part of the meeting and open things up to a Q&A session. Broadridge Financial Solutions, our proxy service provider, has indicated by affidavit that the Notice of Internet Availability of the Proxy Materials was mailed to all stockholders of record at the close of business on March 25, 2020, the record date for this meeting. That affidavit, together with copies of the Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials, the Proxy Statement and the proxy will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. Trish Hodson has been appointed as the Inspector of Election. She has signed an oath of office promising to execute faithfully the duties of the Inspector of Election. The oath of office will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. The Inspector of Election has determined that a sufficient number of shares entitled to vote at this meeting are present in person or by proxy to constitute a quorum, and we may proceed with business. Before we move to the formal business of the meeting, I'd like to call your attention to the rules of conduct, which are in place to ensure a fair and orderly meeting for all stockholders. You can access the rules of conduct in the meeting materials section of the meeting website. If you've already voted by proxy and do not wish to change your vote, your vote will be cast as previously instructed and no further action is necessary. If you already voted by proxy but want to change your vote, or if you are a record holder and wish to vote, please have your control number in hand and go to www.proxyvote.com to vote or recast your vote. This is the same website referenced in all of our proxy materials. It is now 8:34 a.m., and the polls are now open. The first item of business is the election of the 3 directors as set forth in Proposal 1 in the proxy statement; Jeffrey Jordan, Jeremy Levine, and Gokul Rajaram have been nominated by our Board of Directors to serve as Class I directors until our 2023 annual meeting of stockholders or until their respective successors are duly elected and qualified or their office is otherwise vacated. The Board recommends that you vote for the election of each director nominee. The second item of business is Proposal 2 in our Proxy Statement to ratify the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for our fiscal year ending December 31, 2020. The Board recommends that you vote for the appointment of Ernst & Young. Before we vote, are there any questions for the Ernst & Young representatives here today. We have received no further questions, so we will move on to the third item of business. The third item of business is our say on pay frequency vote described in Proposal 3 in the Proxy Statement, which is an approval, on an advisory basis, of the frequency at which we will hold our stockholders vote on executive compensation referred to as our Say-on-Pay Vote. The Board recommends holding an annual Say-on-Pay Vote. I'll pause to check if there are any questions related to the proposal. Having received no questions, we will continue on. It is now 8:36, and the polls are now closed. Based on the preliminary review of the votes, the Inspector of Elections has informed me that all director nominees have been elected. And each of the other proposals has been approved according to the Board's recommendations. We plan to publicly announce the official voting results in a Form 8-K after all the verifications have been completed by the Inspector. This concludes the formal business of the meeting. Before I turn it over to Jane Penner, our Head of Investor Relations, to moderate the Q&A, I would like to remind you that some of our comments today may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to the risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings. We may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our Investor Relations website located at investor.pinterestinc.com for more information. Only confirmed shareholders as of the record date are permitted to ask questions. Questions can be asked by typing in the box provided on today's virtual meeting platform. Due to time constraints, a shareholder may be permitted no more than 2 questions. While we will try to answer all questions asked, we may not answer all questions during this meeting, but we will post answers to all appropriate questions submitted that are relevant to our business on our Investor Relations website following the annual meeting. Thank you in advance for your cooperation, and I'll turn it over to Jane now.

Thank you, Christine. Our first question is what are some of the initiatives to increase mail users, particularly in the U.S.? It seems to be a segment that is holding back the company from incredible user growth, engagement and ARPU. Additionally, do you ever see the possibility of partnering with such a network as HGTV or DIY? I see a lot of compatibility or comparability and increased content in video with this sort of partnership, which could also lead to ad revenue.

Sure, Jane. I can take that. Let me start off by saying that we're quite happy to have a user base that's 2/3 women, given that they tend to be the financial decision-makers in many of our most important categories such as home, food, apparel and beauty. That said, if the question implies, the fact that 1/3 of our users are men suggest that Pinterest could potentially attract a significantly larger population. And we're working on improving the relevance of the recommendations. So we make sure that when somebody joins, male or female, they get content that's highly relevant to them as well as expanding the utility of the tool, so we can move into new use cases. The second part of the question is really about content and partnerships. We don't have any partnerships with HGTV or DIY to talk about today. But I'll say that we're open minded. And we are focused on bringing more inspirational content, especially video content onto the platform. So nothing to announce, but we're not against going and doing partnerships. It feels like the right strategy going forward.

Thanks, Ben. The second question is aside from an increase in advertising, how is Pinterest planning to target and draw in more international participations?

Yes, this is a great question. Historically, we found that when Pinterest is useful to people, we tend to grow through word of mouth. And that's grown the vast majority of our usage, both in the U.S. and internationally. And so the question of increasing international participation has often come down to how do we make the product more useful for international users? This is an effort that we've invested a lot into. That includes efforts like product localization, content understanding, acquiring international content, and more recently, in making the Pinterest app both easier to use and more performant for all users, including those who might have slower internet speeds or different devices. In February, for example, we finished the global rollout of Pinterest Lite and then across 2019, we improved the speed of home feed loading by 20%. So a lot of these core features to make the product literally work better internationally have been fueling really strong international growth.

Thanks, Ben. The next question is what is your long-term sustainability and employee satisfaction goal?

Sure. I think there are two questions there. I'll start with employee satisfaction. Pinterest's business really relies on our ability to attract and retain really talented people in a very competitive marketplace. So we benchmark our compensation levels. We monitor new-hire acceptance rates. We regularly have employee engagement surveys. We look at attrition. And that Pinterest has placed a special focus in building a workforce that's more representative of our customer. And as part of these initiatives, we set annual public goals around making sure that our hiring practices or hiring is representative. So that's really on the employee front. There's another question about sustainability. I mean here, while Pinterest take steps to work with local communities and to watch our environmental footprint, we have yet to articulate a long-term sustainability plan, and that's something that we will be doing in the future.

Great. Next question is, what was the reason for the COO announcement for leaving? Will the CFO continue to hold the role of COO for the long term?

Yes. So as many of you know, our COO, Francoise, departed, and Francoise played a really important role in growing our global advertising business, including helping to scale our international expansion of our ads offering over the past year. The new consolidated financial and business organization under one leader, we believe, will allow for much faster execution. Todd is a strong combination of operations, experience, financial rigor and overall business acumen, and I'm confident that he's the right person to lead this function.

The next question is, please discuss the company's plans for cash. Please discuss the company's plan for the credit facility and whether the company plans to draw down on the facility. Does the company plan on any security or capital raise that could be a dilution to shareholders?

Thanks for the question. As we mentioned on the last earnings call, we're continuing to grow our investments and intend to position the company for long-term success. We continue to see real opportunities in content, engagement, shopping and expanding our advertiser platform. At the same time, we want to be prudent in the current environment, so we've made some adjustments to areas like travel, events and marketing spend. There's no change to our focus on the long-term potential, vision or strategic priorities of Pinterest, and therefore, we continue to invest in all these long-term opportunities, specifically in areas like product and engineering. And we have a strong balance sheet to support that with $1.7 billion in cash and equivalents and a $500 million undrawn revolver at the end of the first quarter. We don't currently have plans to tap into the revolver at this time or to raise new capital as we just took the company public last year.

It appears at this time that there are no additional questions in the queue. And so I'd like to turn the meeting back over to Ben.

Well, seeing as there are no additional questions, this concludes today's meeting. I want to thank everyone for attending and for your interest in Pinterest on behalf of our Board and our leadership team. I'd like to thank you for your continued support.

Thank you. This concludes today's meeting. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.