Thank you. Good morning, everyone here in Australia, and good afternoon and evening for our U.S. investors. This is Louise Lambeth, Head of Investor Relations for Redbubble Group. Welcome to this investor call following the release of a business update provided earlier today. With me on the line, I have Redbubble CEO, Michael Ilczynski and CFO, Emma Clark. The key information for today's update is contained in the ASX announcement provided earlier today. Please note that the preliminary financial results and strategic and operational metrics are from internal management reports and have not been subject to audit review. Michael and Emma will speak shortly, and we will then open up the lines for questions. This session is also being recorded. Before we start, I would like to call your attention to the Safe Harbor statement regarding forward-looking information in our ASX release.
That Safe Harbor statement also applies to this investor call. I will now pass on to Michael.
Thank you, Louise. Good morning or good afternoon to everyone. Thank you all for taking the time to attend this session. Redbubble Group released the trading update to the market earlier today in accordance with the company's ASX continuous disclosure obligations. We would like to take this opportunity to provide some additional context and answer any questions that you may have. I'll be providing a summary of what we experienced over the peak holiday period and in the second quarter, walk through how we responded to the trading environment, the impact on the business, and why we are updating our FY 2022 outlook. I will then pass to Emma, who will discuss the preliminary financials and revised outlook in more detail. Finally, I will outline the strategic and investment decisions that we are making in the business before opening the lines up for Q&A.
First half underlying marketplace revenue, which excludes masks and is on a paid basis of $283 million, down 5% year-on-year on both a floating and constant currency basis. The underlying revenue performance in the second quarter was just below our expectations, which overall we were pleased with, given we experienced strong competition for customers during the second quarter, and this was particularly felt through the peak holiday period. The increased competition impacted both organic unpaid demand, mainly the acquisition of new customers through unpaid channels, as well as our paid marketing acquisition costs. The increased CACs continued what we saw in Q1 as the impact of iOS 14 and the IDFA changes resulted in increased broad-based, less targeted spend across the marketing landscape.
This spend came from both online and more traditional offline retailers and was predominantly larger names with strong established brands. Many of these companies invested heavily in both brand and acquisition spend both on and offline during the period. We responded to these changes in the landscape by increasing our promotional activities and total paid acquisition spend. These actions across both businesses, Redbubble and TeePublic, positively impacted our revenue results, but at a lower contribution margin. This, in combination with our decision to absorb increased shipping costs over the holiday period, impacted gross profit and GPAPA, which is gross profit after paid acquisition margins. This flowed through to the bottom line, resulting in lower EBITDA in the quarter and the half. Despite our performance at the GPAPA level not being where we'd hoped, I was really pleased with how the teams reacted to a pretty challenging period.
From a revenue perspective, the half for the group is still up 60% on two years ago, the last pre-COVID half the business had. There are a number of real positives in the half that I will speak to later that reinforce the potential for the business, the work we need to do to capitalize on this potential. Given this opportunity and our significant cash balance, in the second half, we'll be continuing to invest in our technology platforms, in particular to enable future growth. Due to the combination of the first half result, our revised revenue outlook and our decision to continue investing in the second half, we're updating our FY 2022 outlook across both marketplace revenue and EBITDA. I'll now pass on to Redbubble Group's CFO, Emma Clark. Emma.
Thanks, Michael, and hello to everyone. Please be aware that unless otherwise stated, the financial results discussed are on a delivered basis. However, they are preliminary and have not yet been subject to audit review. I will quote growth rates on both a floating and constant currency basis as I normally do. However, this may sound a little repetitive as FX ultimately has had minimal impact on the half-year numbers, and so therefore the rates are almost the same. In the first half of FY 2022, Redbubble will report gross transaction value of AUD 381 million. Year-on-year, this was down 14% and also 14% on a constant currency basis. However, compared to two years ago, GTV has grown 64%.
First half reported marketplace revenue is expected to be $288 million, down 18% year-on-year and also 18% on a constant currency basis. Excluding masks and on a paid basis, which is how we disclose underlying numbers, marketplace revenue will be $283 million, down 5% versus prior year. As we had flagged in previous outlook statements, we had expected that first half revenue growth would likely be negative due to the cycling of strong prior year numbers, which were driven by COVID-related lockdowns and mask sales. We did see strength in the largest geographic and product category being North American apparel sales, which represents over 40% of total sales on the platform. This geographic and product category grew 10% in the second quarter and 7% in the first half.
However, this was offset by weaker year-on-year performance in categories such as European homewares, which were down 25% in the first half. Compared to two years ago, marketplace revenue has grown 60%. The second quarter's revenue profile did differ from previous years, with some holiday spend being pulled forward into October as customers responded to media reports of potential supply chain constraints and shipping delays. The Thanksgiving period was weaker than expected, with a portion of this weakness offset by longer last order by dates, which effectively extended the peak sales season. However, the reported revenue numbers came at a higher than anticipated cost on both the gross margin and paid acquisition lines. In the first half, Redbubble is expecting gross profit of AUD 108 million, down 25% year on year and 25% on a constant currency basis.
Gross margin came in at 37.5% for the half and 36.1% for the second quarter. While product mix manifesting as a combination of lower mask, higher apparel, and lower homewares and artwork sales acted as a slight headwind to margin, the main drivers were increased shipping costs that were not passed on to customers and the extension of promotional activities over the quarter. While we are not anticipating running increased promotional activity through the second half, we do anticipate that shipping costs will continue to be a headwind to margin and together with uncertainty over the overall inflationary environment in the near term, we anticipate overall margin to be closer to 38% than 40%. On a two-year basis, gross profit has still grown substantially and was up 63% for the half.
Further down the income statement, we have continued to see higher paid acquisition costs, and this will be 15.5% for the half after remaining elevated at 16.1% in the second quarter. Entering into the holidays, we had expected the challenging digital market environment to continue as the entire industry continued to adapt to the IDFA privacy changes. Even so, this is higher than what we were expecting, and as Michael mentioned earlier, was driven by stronger competition from both online and offline brands. That being said, even at these levels of paid acquisition spend, the business still maintained positive unit economics and each dollar of revenue is on average a positive contribution towards GPAPA.
Unfortunately, at the group's current revenue scale and with an expected EBITDA margin in the mid-single digits, a 2% reduction on margin and a 3% increase in paid acquisition costs will result in EBITDA generation falling by the same amounts. On a preliminary basis, the first half EBITDA is expected to be AUD 8 million compared to AUD 48.8 million in the first half of last financial year, and AUD 4.3 million in the first half two years ago. EBITDA margin for the first half will therefore be 2.8%. Finally, we recorded a total of AUD 143 million in cash at the end of December, providing the business with a strong balance sheet.
This represents an all-time high, while some of this will be paid out to artists and facilities over the current quarter, the business will still be holding a significant amount of cash, providing continuing strategic flexibility, including the funding of near-term growth investments. Looking ahead, Redbubble expects FY 2022 marketplace revenue to be slightly below FY 2021 underlying marketplace revenue of AUD 497 million. This will still represent solid growth on the AUD 350 million achieved in FY 2020. We remain committed to our midterm aspirations and the investments that will be required to deliver upon our growth objectives. As such, in the second half, we will be continuing to invest into the business, which will increase our operating expense run rate. We will be funding these investments out of our existing cash reserves.
The combination of the decreased first half EBITDA, continuing headwinds on shipping costs and customer acquisition costs, and the increased operating expense investments, the EBITDA margin as a percentage of marketplace revenue is now expected to be negative low single digits% for the current financial year, with the margin expected to expand over the medium term in line with top-line growth. I will now pass back to Michael.
Thanks, Emma. It's important to emphasize that we remain committed to our mission to create the world's largest marketplace for independent artists. The Redbubble Group is uniquely positioned to capitalize on its medium- to long-term growth potential and emerge as a significant company in what are very large and growing addressable markets. When we spoke in October last year, we had flagged that while there are definitely many uncertainties ahead, as our various markets move towards a post-COVID normal, some early data points we saw gave us confidence for our business over the medium- to long-term. My confidence in the tremendous upside potential remains unchanged, and I'm confident in the strategy that the business has embarked on. Viewed across the longer term, as I said, first half marketplace revenue has grown 60% since first half FY 2020 or 68% on a constant currency basis.
The business is now substantially larger and we are working towards furthering our scale to build resilience and improve profitability. While the first half had some challenges, as Emma mentioned, the fact that we saw year-on-year growth in North American apparel, our largest product geo segment, gives us confidence that we are going to stabilize and trend back to ongoing growth. We were encouraged to see an increase in our repeat rates, with 45% of first half marketplace revenue coming from repeat customers, up from 40% in the first half last year. We've talked before about the importance of increasing loyalty and repeat rates and of driving customers to become members, and we saw in the second quarter a good uplift in both membership sign-up rates and the percent of marketplace revenue generated from members versus a year ago.
We also saw mobile apps, again, an area we have flagged that we would focus on growing, increase to 14.3% of Redbubble's marketplace revenue in the second quarter versus 12.6% in the second quarter last year. From an operations perspective, our supply chain logistics and customer service teams saw significant improvements in last order by dates, on-time delivery percentages, and customer satisfaction relative to last year. We will expand on these highlights at our full half year update in February. These highlights reinforce the strategy that we have is right. We need to continue with it with a focus on customer engagement, retention, and loyalty.
Looking to the medium- to long-term, we remain confident of the business's unit economics. Every dollar of revenue, whether from organic or paid channels, is contribution margin positive, emphasizing that by investing to grow to drive scale, we will drive improving levels of profitability from this scale and the operating leverage inherent in the business model. The company is well capitalized with a strong cash balance of AUD 143 million at the half, an all-time high, and we will be continuing to fund near-term investments from these cash reserves to expand capabilities and capacity across the group. These resources will focus on improving our technology platforms, the artist and customer experience, and our brand in order to enable this future growth.
It is a clear and well-defined strategy with multiple growth levers, and given our strong cash balance, our decision to continue investment reflects the upside potential that can be unlocked by pursuing this opportunity. Across the group, teams will continue targeting initiatives that will expand and scale the business towards our medium-term aspirations, which remain unchanged, to grow GTV to more than AUD 1.5 billion, to grow Artist revenue to over AUD 250 million, and to produce marketplace revenue of AUD 1.25 billion per annum. With that, EBITDA margins will expand over the medium term with this top line growth. With that, we'll now open up the lines for questions.
Your first question comes from Aryan Norozi from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Hope you're well. Just the first one for me, just around your medium to long-term aspirations, you've obviously reiterated the top line piece, but just around your margins, EBITDA, you previously quantified it at 13%-18%. This time it's qualitative. Can I just confirm that there's no change around that 13%-18%, why you're thinking about things, or is there any change in thinking in the business, please?
We confirm no change to those EBITDA margins at that level of, top-line scale.
Perfect. Just in terms of the marketing costs, it's about 10.5% in the second quarter. If I have to break it down in terms of one-off or recurring versus non-recurring, how do I think about that and where should I keep that settling sort of over the next 12, 18 months as the market digests these IDFA changes, please?
Yeah. Look, I think it's probably fair, Aryan. It's not necessarily one-off. I mean, obviously, as we came out in October, and we talked about the experimentation we had been doing as part of our response to those IDFA changes. They were one-off in nature. What we really saw in the second quarter was just a massive increase in competition, which drove CACs up. Now, in looking at, and obviously, coming out today, we've also, you know, looked at what's happened in January month to date as well. We can say that those CACs have come back down after the peak holiday season, but it just highlights to us that it is a continuing volatile environment. It's very hard to predict. You know, prudently, we would say that there will continue to be volatility in that over the remainder of the half.
Therefore, there will be periods potentially of stronger competition and periods of weaker competition. We've effectively, you know, thought that there will probably be. It won't be, you know, previously we said it was 12.5%, around 12%. It's clearly going to most likely be higher than that for the half and hence, some of the reason behind the change to our guidance.
Perfect. The gross margins, the 38% you flagged, are you talking about the second half?
Yeah, pretty much actually for the second half and the year. As you can see, the first half was 37.5% anyway. What we're effectively flagging is that what we've seen in the last half, we're likely to see something similar in the second half for shipping margins.
Within that gross margin, were there any pressure points around rising input costs like cotton prices, which that's sort of well flagged in the industry. Has there been any sort of change embedded in those results from that?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a really good question, and I know it's obviously an area of focus for everybody 'cause there's so much media on it at the moment. As we discussed in the October update, you know, we had a couple of fulfillers come to us, only three or four out of obviously quite a large number, and request some price increases, but nothing further than that. That remains the case. We would expect that there will be continuing pressure on prices as we go through the second half, both from, as you say, an input perspective, but also a labor perspective. We will monitor those as they come in and, you know, decide at the time how much of that can we pass through to customers versus how much of that is absorbed by the business.
Is the guidance that you've sort of made for the full year factoring in input cost pressure, or is that just factoring in a continuation of freight costs being elevated, and promotional intensity sort of being high but easing off after Christmas?
Yeah. Largely the latter two, but what I would say is, based on where we sit with our supply chain at the moment, it also does incorporate our views on overall, inflationary pressures within the margin line. So the 38% is total margin, not just the, like, the shipping component of it, if that makes sense.
Sorry, it incorporates the input, rising input costs as well.
Yes. What we would expect to see in terms of rising input costs at the moment and what we would expect to do with rising input costs.
Yeah. Perfect. If I can squeeze one more in, please. Just around the hiring, could you give us an update around how many heads you've hired so far and how many more you need to do for the rest of the year and just headcount perspective, please?
Sorry, I was on mute. My apologies, Aryan Norozi. We'll talk about the more specific numbers at the full half-year results. What we had flagged when we spoke in October that like, I think like a lot of organizations, you know, our hiring hadn't come along as fast as we'd hoped, particularly in the first quarter. That impacted it. While it had a positive impact on OpEx, it impacted our ability to make changes. As we move into the second half, we're revamping a little bit our employee mix, so we'll add some additional contractors. Our hiring is coming along better.
That's why we're in some ways more confident in our employee position, but also in the OpEx ramp in the second half.
That's perfect. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. The next question comes from Anna Guan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple of follow-ups from, I guess you guys' earlier comments and previous questions. Just firstly, Emma, in your opening commentary, you mentioned something around, extended peak selling season, particularly off the back of Thanksgiving. I think I only caught part of it. Can you just, help me understand that a little bit more please?
Of course. Not a problem, Anna. What I said was that the actual Thanksgiving peak season, which is normally that sort of four or five days across the Thanksgiving weekend, was weaker than we had expected. Some of that weakness was offset by the fact that this year we had extended last order by date. If you recall, going back 12 months to holiday season the year prior, there was a lot of challenges with the ability to ship product. At that time, some of the shipping carriers had put in caps. We had to run really early last order by dates, which compressed that particular holiday season. We knew coming into this particular holiday season that those conditions didn't exist, while there's still uncertainty around COVID and there's some COVID impacts. The shipping carriers had not put on caps.
you know, we had made some improvements in our systems that meant that we could also run longer last order by date. Instead of closing off, say, the first week of December, we're able to close off a lot in the second week of December. What that did was that gave the customer shopping on the platform those extra days to be able to continue doing their Christmas shopping and know that they would get their thing before Christmas.
The net-net really is more of a neutral impact from a top-line point of view.
Slightly down, I would actually say, Anna, to be honest. The weakness across those sort of four or five days is only partially offset by the extension to last order by dates, not fully. I mean, obviously, we're talking primarily about changes due to gross profit margin and paid acquisition costs. You know, I wanna be very clear that revenue is slightly below what we would have ideally liked to have seen for the quarter as well.
Yep. Gotcha. My second question is around shipping. Obviously, you guys called out that as one of the two factors driving the slightly lower margins. Are you guys able to quantify that?
Not specifically. Sorry, Anna. We don't disclose shipping margin separate to product margin. That's considered to be commercially sensitive, which is why I reiterated that the overall margin is gonna be closer to 38% than 40%, so that you guys can encapsulate that impact without me having to disclose detail that we shouldn't disclose.
Yep. No, that makes sense. Just lastly,
Sorry, Anna. It's probably worth just adding because it goes to importance is with the shipping margin, when we saw those increased shipping costs, it was a deliberate decision by us not to pass those through to customers. You know, we had flagged, we talked about both in our August results and in our October results that our medium-term objective is to decrease shipping margin. We know that lower shipping margin helps lower shipping costs to customers, helps with conversion, and particularly helps with repeat rate. That was a decision that we you know that we made as we were flowing through.
Yep. That makes sense. Just lastly, Emma, I think you kind of answered part of the question, but I just wanna get a sort of a summary comment from you guys. I'm just trying to understand what's changed in the implied second half 2022 guidance versus, I suppose, the previous guidance. Obviously, you mentioned earlier, you are pretty much assuming the lower CapEx to partly continue throughout the rest of the year and also, logistics headwind to continue into the second half. Is there anything else that's changed, in that implied second half versus the previous update you guys gave out?
You've captured correctly, other than CapEx, we're assuming continue at a somewhat inflated rate, albeit not as aggressive as what we saw through the second quarter for the rest of the next half. The one missing piece is that revenue is slightly down. The prior guidance said that revenue would be slightly above the prior year's underlying revenue, and we've obviously changed that guidance to be slightly below prior year's underlying revenue. There is a decrease to revenue, small decrease to revenue.
Yeah, just the operating leverage that comes with it.
Absolutely. 100%.
Okay. Excellent. Thanks very much, guys.
Thank you. The next question is from Tim Piper from UBS. Please go ahead.
Morning team. Thanks. I'll just ask a couple of questions and then jump back in the queue. Just firstly around the fulfiller network. We're obviously hearing some commentary from U.S. companies around labor shortages disrupting distribution centers, et cetera. Is it fair to assume that, you know, the print-on-demand industry largely dodged that bullet in that seasonal demands would peak through November, December? Or are you starting to hear some of the fulfillers come up against capacity constraints now, due to labor?
Yeah. Thanks, Tim. No, your summary is correct that most of the fulfillers in the network were able to navigate through the holiday period quite well, which is why, you know, we talked about being able to extend those last order by dates. The model works better. And obviously now is a relatively lower period, you know, traditionally as we come off the seasonal high. So those who are having some labor challenges, there's obviously less demand, at least coming from the likes of us. So yeah, your summary is right. But in general, the network has avoided some of those pressures.
You're not seeing anything that could be a headwind right now?
Look, not at the moment. I mean, it's pretty uncertain. We've gotta be clear. It's pretty uncertain. No, right now, the network's in reasonable shape.
Okay, great. Just a second one on, I guess, the quarterly run rate of revenue through the second quarter. You called out the pull forward of demand, and then maybe a slightly lower than anticipated sort of Christmas and November, December. Are you confident that that has been a bit of a one-off in terms of pull forward? Like the exit run rate of this quarter going into the second half, I mean, is that captured in your lower guidance on the revenue line? Have you seen enough trading now to be confident that it was just a pull forward, and not so much a drop off in demand?
Yeah. Thanks, Tim. As we said before in coming out today, we obviously have not just looked at the half and that quarter. We've also looked at the first two weeks of January. In terms of all of our guidance updates, they actually incorporate what we're seeing so far for half a month in January as well. In terms of the changed profile within the quarter, you know, which I obviously called out previously, that is quite different to prior years. As I said, we believe it's driven by obviously all of the media attention and the supply chain concern. I would categorize that more as a one-off. What it does highlight to us as a business is just the predictability of prior patterns at any point in time is not necessarily there at the moment.
I know we came out in October and said, you know, we were seeing a return to more normalized patterns. The holiday quarter actually had quite a different profile. Because of all these macro events, and so therefore it just underscored to us that there is just that continuing unpredictability in sort of the shape of sales over a year at the moment.
Okay. Got it. Just one last one on your product mix. You called out a couple of categories there, like apparel, strong apparel growth in the U.S. and the decline in, I think it was homewares in Europe. I mean, are you typically seeing this as economies reopen? Is that what's driving it? The product mix changes that you're seeing, how much impact has that had on your gross margin step-down quarter-over-quarter?
Yeah. Thanks. Emma can probably comment on the gross margin, which it has, it's had a little bit of an impact. You know, masks were really high margin. You know, clothing's a little bit lower. It had a little bit of an impact, but not much. I think your broader point that what we saw, if we go back a year ago, we had some real COVID winners. We saw that homewares, wall art, they really took off. They grew, you know, way over 100% year-on-year. Then obviously now, but you know, apparel was okay but not as strong as those were a year ago.
We get to now, and as we said, we see our more traditional areas, which is, you know, apparel's been a, you know, one of the core areas for Redbubble and TeePublic through its history, actually growing quite strongly. Those areas that really took off during COVID, like homewares and wall art and masks have come right back down. They're still quite a bit up on where they were two years ago. Definitely they've come, you know, they've come back down, which we expected would occur, you know. To be honest, that's the pattern that we expected would occur, you know, through this time. You know, the positives of having that diversified product portfolio has, you know, has really helped us overall.
You know, continues to be something that we'll add to. When we come out in February, we'll have the full breakdowns like we normally do for each product, each product set. That will come out in February as normal.
Yeah. I think what we're simply flagging here is in terms of changing our guidance, we already had expected that product mix to swing in our prior guidance, so it's not necessarily a divergent factor in terms of updating guidance today. Therefore the impact of it in terms of the, what we're actually saying that's different is minimal.
Okay. Understood. Thanks for taking the questions.
Thank you. The next question is from Owen Humphries from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Good day, guys. A couple quick ones from me. Just around the artist margin. I just noticed in that second quarter bursting up to almost 31%, which is record high. Can you just talk me through the dynamics behind that?
We'd have to look at how you've calculated that, Owen, because we don't. The numbers I've got in front of me don't show such a big swing in artist margin. You've gotta keep in mind, the bridge between gross transaction value and marketplace revenue also incorporates taxes. There's been movement in taxes as well. Obviously when we go through the full half at February, we'll provide all of that breakdown so that you can calculate all of those percentages. I would say that that's not what's happened. There's not been a big increase in artist margin in the quarter.
Okay. I'll go back and have a look. Just around the GPAPA margins, obviously your historical range has been around that 25%-27%. That's kind of the target. Obviously a low point at the moment and you explained that. Just understanding what your views are over the medium term around that target range.
Yeah. Thanks, Owen. Look, we definitely expect those GPAPA margins to come back up, you know, for two things. One, with scale. We know that scale helps our positioning. Two, with the work that we can do to improve gross margins, working with the fulfillment network as we scale to reduce input costs, working to reduce, to improve our shipping costs. We talk a lot about shipping margin, but the other way to attack that area is to actually reduce our shipping costs through better routing, through different arrangements with our logistics providers, et cetera. So, you know, we've talked about investing in our technology platform.
One of the areas where we will and are investing in is our supply chain logistics network, so that we can more proactively drive that gross margin. Gross margin is, you know, such a huge driver of the business. Every percentage point that we can proactively improve there goes straight through to the bottom line. That's a big focus for us. Thirdly, on our marketing spend. You know, as you know, all of our marketing spend at the moment is paid acquisition. We've talked about moving forward, we do wanna start to invest in our brand.
That will add to that in the short term, but at the same time, we really believe that in the medium term, that's going to actually reduce our reliance on paid acquisition. We think it's really important that over the medium term, we build our brand so that we can increase our organic customers, increase the percent of customers coming through organic channels because they know our brand, because they love the proposition of Redbubble and TeePublic, and that will reduce our reliance on our paid channels.
We still remain when we look at our models and our plans, you know, really confident and committed in those medium-term EBITDA margins, which require our GPAPA margin to be, you know, frankly, to be better, a lot better than where it was this half.
Yeah. I would just add a point to this. One is that, you know, the year of where we had the sudden growth 'cause of COVID actually demonstrated that. We've actually, you know, we've demonstrated that step up the top line, hold everything stable for a period of time and, you know, this thing grows off EBITDA very, very quickly. We've been very clear that we're going into an investment phase at the moment, and we're in one. Therefore, the challenge with that at our current scale is it only takes small, you know, movements as I highlighted on growth margin and paid acquisition, and they flow straight through to a relatively low EBITDA margin. But none of that actually.
You know, if we were to, you know, hypothetically have another AUD 200 million on the top line and, you know, being at more like AUD 700, you know, those unit economics come back really quickly. We're very confident in our ability to deliver that over that medium term.
Good one. Thanks. Just on the OpEx base of AUD 32 million for the quarter. I know the second quarter's normally a bit higher than the other quarters. It sounds like you're still hiring. Is that the new base now between, you know, AUD 32 million-AUD 35 million per quarter?
Obviously not giving precise forecasts at that level of detail, Owen, but I would think, you know, historically, as you yourself point out, that second quarter does tend to be slightly higher than all of the other quarters. I would expect even in an investment environment for that to be the case. There's still to be a little bit of seasonality in it, so I expect it to step back slightly off that.
Good one. Just a last quick question from me. AUD 143 million of cash on hand, so very well capitalized. You've put the business now into kind of just slightly negative EBITDA for this year. What's the board and your views, I guess, around EBITDA profitability over the next couple of years?
Sorry, I was muted again. I hit the wrong button. Apologies, Owen. I think in terms of our EBITDA margin, our cash balance, the board, myself, the management team of both businesses, we're really aligned on the potential for the business. That cash balance gives us tremendous strategic flexibility, you know, primarily to invest in ourselves, primarily to invest in our platforms, in our capability and in our brands to go after that scale that Emma talked about. It's really clear. Like, it's really clear the operating leverage in this business. We saw it on the upswing last year. Unfortunately, you see it, you know, you see it if we miss slightly on revenue with a couple other hits, you see the reverse.
We know the operating leverage in the business. Our job is to drive that scale. Our number one focus is to invest in the business. We've got a really good cash reserve that enables us to invest in the business to go after that scale. Then obviously beyond that, the cash balance does give us, you know, more strategic flexibility beyond just investing in ourselves, whether that's, you know, potential M&A or other activities. Our number one focus is to invest to drive scale over the medium term.
Good one. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. The next question comes from Paul Mason from E&P. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. A bunch of questions have been asked, so I've just got one, which is in terms of the cash balance and the growth versus the EBITDA. It sort of sounds like basically the main source of that is probably a build up in payables to your artists or to other suppliers. Is there anything else that sort of helped that along besides you know the AUD 8 million of EBITDA and then sort of maybe delayed payouts to suppliers? Or is that basically the explanation for the buildup?
Yeah. Hey, Paul. We always see a seasonal buildup in cash at December thirty-first. In terms of any 12-month period, it's usually our highest point of cash, because as you can imagine, we've obviously received the increased flow of customer sales on the platform for November and December, but haven't yet paid out all of the suppliers. That generally happens in January. It comes down. We always have a cash outflow, obviously, in Q3 as a result of that. I think the point that we made, you know, when we were talking earlier on the call was that we know obviously about these seasonal trends. They're actually quite predictable. You can look back at our prior year cash balances to see how it normally moves.
You know, we're obviously gonna have still a substantial amount of cash.
Post all of those payouts probably settles back down somewhere between the range of AUD 100 million-AUD 110 million. So that's obviously still a quite decent cash balance and gives us that continued strategic flexibility to invest as we need to. Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Joseph Michael from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Thanks for your time this morning. Just a couple from me. So firstly, just on the medium-term targets, just to clarify, previously you had the comment in there that you can grow marketplace revenue at a CAGR of 20%-30%. Is that still part of the guidance?
Oh, hi, Joe. Yeah, look, absolutely. That's our goal when we look over the medium term for this business to be growing at 20%-30%. We genuinely believe that that's possible between the markets that we're playing in and the growth that we think that our sector is going to achieve and the growth that we believe we can drive ourselves. I think it's really important, you know. You know, that's not gonna be linear. You know, that's not the way that these things work.
What we're really clear on is, you know, where we need to invest over these next couple of years in order to, you know, to go after and get to that growth. You know, as you said, we can see the green shoots of our strategy in terms of the need to focus on investing in our brands, the need to focus on driving members, the need to focus on our apps, need to focus on repeat rates, loyalty, customer retention, et cetera. Yes, we absolutely believe that sort of growth over a medium term is possible. That's the growth that we saw in the business pre-COVID, obviously off a smaller scale.
That's the growth that we believe we can achieve once we get back to some, you know, to restabilizing our baselines, putting the investment we need to, and start seeing the investments we're making actually show up for artists and customers.
Okay, great. Then the next question I had was just around CACs, and I know we've sort of talked about this quite a bit, but just trying to understand, is this a sort of structural issue with performance marketing? Is it you know, is the cost of acquiring customers just gonna be you know continue going up? And is that sort of lack of visibility going to remain? Or do you sort of see this as more of a one-off issue and at some point everything recalibrates and kind of rebases?
To be honest, it's a really critical question. I think for us to say that we know exactly when this plays out would be, you know, wrong. We think that this, you know, uncertainty that's in the digital marketing landscape is sort of, you know, chaos. It does feel chaotic at the moment and will continue for a little bit. You know, it has to normalize out over time. You know, there are a lot of players similar to us who are working hard to get back to being able to, you know, target audiences much more effectively.
What we saw in the second quarter was, you know, because of some of the IDFA changes, the inability to target as accurately, particularly from some of the big brands, that a lot of the responses just put more spend into much more broad-based audiences. That just drove up the CACs for everybody across the market. You know, I'm sure, as you know, as in for us, that has to, you know, almost by definition, impact everybody's profitability. Whether that's a strategy that other players, you know, that there's larger customers who effectively drive the market, whether that's something that they'll repeat in the future, I think is a reasonable question because it must have impacted everybody's profitability.
You know, we would expect that ability to, you know, to target audiences more effectively than we can than all players can at the moment and the impact that's having on behavior, you know, will normalize out over time. You know, we don't expect it to return to normal in the next three months. That's, you know, for sure. I think that's why we've tried to be really explicit with our, you know, with our outlook for this, you know, for this half moving forward, that we expect that this, you know, some of this behavior to continue.
One of the reasons why we're saying that our marketing costs, you know, are likely to remain elevated versus what we'd experienced last year.
Okay, got it. Just one last question just around sort of customer retention. I think at the last update, you said something like seven out of 13 loyalty experiments you were running were showing positive retention signals. Just wondering if you could give us an update on those loyalty experiments. Are you still seeing, you know, higher retention from some of those initiatives?
Look, thanks for the question. Look, that, again, that's probably an area we'll talk in more detail in February. You know, that as we spoke in August and October, that was really our first you know our first crack you know under this kind of you know test and experiment concept that we ran through the middle of last year. Those experiments that did instantly you know sort of show a real clear positive uplift, we've continued with in the businesses where that occurred. The other ones, some of them just showed a positive uplift, but were at a small scale.
Part of our planning for calendar year 2022 that we're in at the moment, which ones of those we'll repeat but at a much larger scale, which ones of those we'll embed as ongoing business. I think, you know, overall, you know, what we wanna emphasize is that concept of, you know, driving loyalty, driving retention, driving repeat rate is one of the areas of importance for the business. Again, we're seeing some, you know, very small green shoots. We've got a lot of work to do here. We've spoken a lot around the fact that there's no silver bullet. There's no one thing we can do. There's lots of
There's lots of different things we need to do to drive that. Part of it is investing in our brand, part of it's investing in the experience, part of it is lowering shipping costs over time to customers, that customers experience, and part of it's increasing our, you know, increasing our quality and the customer, the end customer experience. We've got a lot of work to do in a lot of areas, but I think that continues to be the positive for us, is we can see all of the improvement opportunities. Our job is to get out there and go after them. Great. That's all I had. Thanks, Michael.
Thank you. The next question comes from Chami Ratnapala from RBC. Please go ahead.
Hi, Michael and Emma. Thanks for taking my question. I just had a quick question in terms of the lower CACs that you talked about, specifically looking at the first two weeks of January. Are you able to provide any commentary on the competitive environment, particularly looking more at the third quarter? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Chami. Yes, what we've really seen is the competitive intensity has come off in the first two weeks of January. As Michael said earlier in the call, you know, a lot of the response to these privacy changes has been lots of big brands just throwing lots of money in over holidays, extending promotions, you know, spending a higher amount to acquire those customers with a high intent to spend. That has all, like, we would seasonally expect the CACs to come down sort of November, December to January anyway, but obviously they were higher than we expected during that period. They've come back down at the moment to within what we would consider to be, you know, a normal range for January.
I think the thing I just wanna continually highlight is we don't know how long it persists at that exact level for. Because it is chaotic, it can move around quite a bit even within a month. So far, the first two weeks would say actually much more sort of in terms of, what we had said previously for guidance as opposed to the elevated levels. We've not assumed that that remains by six months.
Right. Thanks for that, Emma. With that 12%-15% guidance, I mean, are we sort of still talking to that? I mean, how would you sort of look at that guidance? Would the next probably 4-5 months be a better indicator to a sort of comeback to that?
Yeah. Two things to answer that question. One is it comes back into the prior answer about those midterm aspirations. At that level of scale, we obviously had that range within marketing, and we've been pretty clear that we're not moving away from any of those midterm aspiration targets in terms of margin and percentages. We definitely still believe longer term that that's the range. I think what we're also trying to be very clear about is in the short term, it's going to be higher than that.
Thanks for that.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Michael for closing remarks.
Thanks very much. I just wanna say thanks again for everyone joining us for this update today on short notice. I will remind you that we will be speaking again at our scheduled half year results release in early February, providing a complete and audited set of financial statements, as well as a much expanded strategic and operational discussion at that time. Thanks again for your attendance, and we'll now close the call.