Hello, good afternoon and good morning to our American friends. Welcome to the AUTO1 Group third quarter 2023 results presentation. I'm Philip Reicherstorfer, the group treasurer. Before we start with the call today, I would like to update you on our investor relations team. Alex Sanger has decided after two years to pursue another opportunity in the German capital markets. We will miss him and wish him all the best. At the same time, I'm delighted that Mark Schellenberg will spearhead our investor relations efforts going forward. Mark has over 20 years of experience in the equity markets and investor relations. Welcome, Mark. As always, I'm joined today by Christian Bertermann, co-founder and CEO, and Markus Boser, our CFO. We will start with a presentation, followed by a question and answer session.
If you would like to ask a question, please raise it via the usual Zoom Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. We will then call on you to ask your question directly after the presentation. Before I hand over, I must make you aware of the safe harbor provisions at the beginning of the presentation. This will apply to any forward-looking statements made by management today. And now over to Christian.
Hi, everyone, and welcome from Berlin. Welcome to this AUTO1 third quarter earnings call. So Q3 was a very strong quarter for us. We reached a number of key goals on our journey to enable Europe's used car market on our platform. Our team executed well across our different business units and continued spearheading innovation and product development. As a result, we achieved the highest quarterly gross profit in company history and reached EBITDA breakeven ahead of plan. Keeping the current momentum going, our team is igniting growth initiatives across all units right now.
At the same time, we continue to strive for excellence by delivering the best customer experiences in the industry. We took a remarkable step forward in the last quarter, achieving our key target of adjusted EBITDA breakeven one quarter early. We reached positive adjusted EBITDA of EUR 0.5 million for the group. I'm very proud of our teams, who have pushed extremely hard for this since we shifted our focus towards profitability in Q2 of last year. Regarding other highlights, we grew retail GPU once again, exceeding our revised year-end target already by today.
Additionally, we completed the first wave of our Pan-European used car production network, leading to an in-house production share of 88% in October. We grew merchant GPU quarter-over-quarter as well, to EUR 838, putting us well above target. Total gross profit was a strong driver of EBITDA breakeven, hitting a new record level of EUR 134 million for Q3. That is EUR 11 million more than in Q3 of last year. Our EBITDA track continued its very impressive progress and crossed the zero line just three quarters after we made it our target.
Year-over-year, EBITDA improved by EUR 35.7 million. We sold 141 units in Q3, which was stable quarter-over-quarter. We achieved all of these goals by continuing to leverage our unique market position across all segments. With AUTO1.com, we are running Europe's largest used car wholesale platform, which has become an integral part of our dealer partners' everyday business. We're excited to expand and further strengthen our relationships with our many thousand partners, which combined stand for the strongest dealer network in Europe.
With Autohero, we are building the used car market of the future, making it easier than ever before to buy a car from the comfort of your home and delivering it right to your doorstep. Under our financing arm, we continue to build up a growing consumer loan portfolio, which now has a total size of more than EUR 249 million, growing 69% year-on-year, a strong future profit driver. We see a lot of potential to add more products to our platform over time, while growing strongly in each of our existing segments. AUTO1 has a unique team with a very high energy level, having the power to transform one of the largest markets in the world.
And as we've laid the foundations for strong operational leverage in the past, we are very excited to scale our business profitably from where we stand today. Taking a look at the market, conditions in the European used car market remained mostly stable overall in Q3. The AUTO1 Group Price Index shows prices fluctuating around the same level for the last couple of months, with limited variance. Used car transactions stayed mostly flat in Q3 compared to Q2 of this year. We expect the current stable environment to continue for now, with a possible slight upward trend.
There's still a strong gap to unit volumes of 2019 across all markets. However, we plan to gain market share strongly in the next couple of quarters, fueled by the superior value propositions of our products. Let's take a look at Merchant segment performance. In Q3, we sold 126,000 units to our partners, roughly stable quarter-over-quarter. Merchant gross profit came in at EUR 105 million. That is EUR 2 million more than in Q2 of this year. In line with the quarters before, we continued to focus on our cost base and improved our unit economics throughout Q3.
As a result, Merchant GPU was at a record EUR 838 in Q3, and that is the best level we have seen so far, significantly improving by 18% compared to Q3 of last year. At these excellent levels, we started to gradually invest more into supply towards the end of the quarter to position our Merchant segment for the next stage of growth. We have built an incredibly strong trading network over the past decade, and to this day, we are the European market leader. The network shown here has thousands of nodes and is the backbone of the merchant business.
The light blue dots represent a selection of dealer locations buying across Europe this year, while the dark blue and orange dots are showing the location of our purchasing branch network. As we now turn to growth, we will invest into the density of our, our network once again. On the supply side, we can serve our selling customers even better by being closer to them. In Q3, we have added 16 branches to our drop-off network already. We believe that we have the potential to add up to 1,000 additional locations across Europe, enabling us to reach even more selling customers in the future.
On the demand side, we plan to expand our merchant network substantially, driven by the superior selection, availability, and quality of our offering. Thousands of buying merchants from more than 30 countries have made the AUTO1 platform a prime destination for sourcing inventory, checking prices, or buying logistics. It is our ambition to become strong and trusted partners with all of the more than 200,000 merchants doing business across Europe today, fueling our merchant segment with continued growth. On the supply side, our WKDA car buying brands are prime assets. By today, they have a combined brand awareness of 52% across Europe and offer our selling customers the fastest, easiest, and most comfortable way to sell their car.
We continue to invest into all of our brands to push awareness and image even higher. In Germany, for instance, we're happy to announce that motorsport expert and former German Formula One driver, Ralf Schumacher, is the new brand ambassador for wirkaufendeinauto.de. As our ambassador, Ralf will feature in various TV commercials in Germany and Austria. He is an excellent match for our brand and will help us to position the easy and quick service of wirkaufendeinauto.de as a relevant option for even more car sellers.
Our merchant business has powerful built-in network and platform effects. Each transaction on our platform contributes pricing and sales data into our central AI algorithms, increasing their precision and coverage steadily. This year, our technology advantage helped us to achieve the new records in GPUs across the business. But at the same time, higher and more precise prices are leading to more sellers, in turn, generating more supply and our largest selection for our buyers, which in turn, drives, again, more buyers, resulting in a stronger demand network.
Ultimately, our unique ability to build innovative products and services for used car buyers and sellers is able to generate high market share growth and create long-term value for our customers. After hitting breakeven, we're starting the engine on that flywheel again. Let's take a look at Retail segment performance. Start with GPU. In Autohero, we achieved a new record retail GPU of EUR 1,912 in Q3, representing an increase of 73% compared to Q3 of last year, and EUR 232 more quarter-over-quarter. Our team is very focused on improving unit costs in Autohero, and this hard work is continuing to pay off.
Looking at our steady historic GPU growth track, we are well on track towards our long-term target of EUR 3,000. As a result of this very strong GPU development, retail gross profit for Autohero increased by 52% to EUR 28.9 million year-over-year, up from EUR 19 million in Q3 of last year. Units came in at 14,800 vehicles sold in the last quarter. That is a slight growth quarter-over-quarter. Over the course of Q3, we prepared our retail business for re-accelerated growth in the quarters to come. We're also happy that we completed the first wave of our in-house Pan-European used car production network as planned.
In October, we announced 3 new production centers in France, Sweden, and Austria to refurbish used cars for Autohero. Within just 2 years, we have created a strong European production footprint with our network of 10 internal refurbishment facilities and laid the foundation for future growth of our Autohero business at favorable unit economics. The additional centers increased the total production capacity by 22%, from 147,000 units to 179,000 units per year at full capacity. Internalizing the production of used cars allows us to fully control each step of the process, and that enables us to offer the best quality cars for our Autohero customers.
And as we have made outstanding progress on our in-house footprint in Q3, we have also reached our Q4 production targets already. In October, 88% of all units sold were produced internally in one of our in-house production centers. That is an increase of 12% compared to just one month ago in September. We are impressed by our production teams, who have achieved this massive ramp-up in such a short amount of time. With our recently opened production centers and continued focus on hiring, we expect the in-house share to slightly increase from current levels. We were able to decrease the production cost in our flagship facility in Berlin even further in Q3.
The production cost in our Brandenburg center has decreased by 250 EUR per unit from Q3 of last year to Q3 of this year, and is now at 630 EUR. Our production center in Brandenburg sets the bar for all other production centers in Europe. We're delighted to see that we continue to replicate our learnings and best practices from our flagship facility to our other sites, bringing the production cost of all internal production centers closer than ever to our flagship center, with now 670 EUR. External production cost remains flat at 1,110 EUR, with a slight decrease from Q2 to Q3 by around 40 EUR per unit, and that in turn confirms again our strategy to in-house production.
In addition to reaching our year-end production targets early, we also achieved our year-end marketing cost target in Q3 already. Marketing cost per unit was at 500 EUR per car delivered in Q3, which is a decrease of 55% compared to Q3 of last year, where marketing cost was still above 1,000 EUR per car delivered. We plan to keep marketing cost per unit around current levels for now. We talked a lot about cost and efficiency improvements for now, but what's most important is that our customers remain in the front and center of everything we do.
I'm very happy that this continues to result in strong customer satisfaction levels. In Q3, we achieved a high NPS of 71, which is in line with last year. Our excellent Trustpilot score of 4.6 and Google score of 4.3 across all markets are stable, and those validate these high internal NPS values by an external source. If we now zoom out a bit and take an early look on what we set out to achieve during this year and what we have achieved so far, then that comparison is looking strong. At the beginning of the year, we targeted key achievements in retail GPU growth and associated unit cost decreases, increasing profitability in our merchant segment, and finally, as the overarching target, reaching group profitability on Adjusted EBITDA by Q4 of this year.
We have delivered successfully against every one of those targets already in Q3. We increased retail GPU beyond the 1,900 EUR level, improved unit economics in retail strongly, crossed the 800 EUR level for merchant GPU, and delivered the first positive EBITDA as a public company. Going into 2024, we are more than excited to re-accelerate growth across our business segments, targeting high unit levels at the favorable unit economics we have reached by today. We will launch important products throughout the next year, which already exist today in prototype versions, and aim to benefit from the positive network effects described earlier that bigger scale enables.
Financially, we plan to move towards net profitability, driven by significant operating leverage and high growth across the business. I am now handing over to Markus, who will give you a more detailed financial update after that quarter.
Thanks, Christian. Taking a look at our usual financial overview of key KPIs for the third quarter, we achieved EUR 134 million in gross profit, our highest gross profit ever, achieving industry-leading GPUs even as average selling prices declined year-on-year. With units essentially flat quarter-over-quarter, but unit economics significantly improved, we think we've now hit the turning point in units and can take this profitable quarter as the right basis to move back towards growth. While achieving our best ever gross profit, we also reduced our OpEx base sustainably to EUR 134 million, to also achieve our first positive EBITDA since our IPO, representing a EUR 36 million year-on-year improvement in EBITDA.
Bridging the key elements toward our profitability, we achieved around half of our early breakeven beat through an improvement in our gross profit by almost EUR 7 million, primarily by improved GPUs. Growing our absolute gross profit will continue to be a key focus going forward. We achieved the other half of our breakeven move through improvements in OpEx, which we see as sustainable. Moving through the individual items, our reductions in marketing were primarily driven by the end of two large sponsorships for Autohero. The increased expense in internal logistics was partially the result of increased car buying. Employee expenses also improved by EUR 5 million, primarily the effects of decisions made in previous quarters. As a result, we have reset our cost base to a new baseline level.
As we move to growth mode from here, we will invest incrementally in sales and expanding our purchase channels, but doing so from the stronger GPU and unit economic levels that we have now achieved. Liquidity continues to remain strong, with cash and cash equivalents at EUR 545 million, actually up since the fourth quarter of 2022, even though we increased our inventory by over EUR 180 million, and also our consumer loan portfolio by EUR 21 million. As with every quarter, I will reiterate that both our inventory and consumer loan portfolios are financed through non-recourse asset-backed securitizations, and we have no corporate debt, enabling us to continue to invest in our growth.
As we go to guidance, we maintain our guidance on all KPIs except Adjusted EBITDA, where we increase our guidance from -EUR 50 million-EUR 70 million -EUR 39 million-EUR 49 million for the full year. While we are now Adjusted EBITDA break-even sustainably across the year, and as mentioned, ready to shift to growth again, we want to be cautious as we head into year-end, and specifically December, which has fewer working days due to the holiday season, and therefore inherently less profitable and a more volatile performance as dealers focus on year-end balance sheets. Therefore, while we are adjusting our full-year EBITDA guidance upwards, the implication is that we see the top end of Q4 Adjusted EBITDA to be break-even, similar to Q3, and the bottom end, a slight loss for Q4.
On the unit side, we maintain our formal full-year guidance range, but believe that merchant units will come in at the bottom end of our stated 5%, around the 560,000 range, so around 532,000-535,000, which still applies significant growth in Q4 over Q3, as well as year-on-year. Retail units should be close to the middle of the range, implying significant growth quarter-on-quarter or flat year-on-year. We will be providing detailed 2024 guidance when we report in February. As Christian mentioned, with our current unit economics, we ourselves, see ourselves now in a position to return to growth as a result of our investments in tech, branding, data, and processes. Now I'd like to turn it over to questions.
Hi, everyone-
Just one question. Sorry, sorry, Raphael. Philip, was Markus also breaking up for you a little bit?
He was.
Yes, right? He was. I mean, Markus, do you wanna go through the slide with the guidance again? Because I think you were breaking up, and it's, it's probably one of the key slides. Maybe you wanna repeat that.
Can you hear me better now? I've put on my speakerphone or my-
I think it was more like an internet, poor internet connection. I know you're in the office, but, yeah, let's try again.
Hello?
I think that... Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Okay.
So let's try this slide again, because I think that was-
Yeah
... like, a little bit of network connection.
Okay, so-
Yeah
... specifically on guidance. On guidance, we maintain our guidance on all KPIs except Adjusted EBITDA, where we increase our guidance from EUR -50 million- EUR -70 million, - EUR -39 million - EUR -49 million for the full year. While we are now Adjusted EBITDA break even sustainably across the year, and as mentioned, ready to shift to growth again, we want to be cautious as we head into year-end, and specifically December, which has fewer working days due to the holiday season, and therefore inherently less profitable and a more volatile performance as dealers focus on year-end balance sheet. Therefore, while we are adjusting our full-year EBITDA guidance upwards, the implication is that we see the top end of Q4 Adjusted EBITDA to be break even, similar to Q3, and the bottom end at a slight loss for Q4.
On the unit side, we maintain our formal full guidance range, but believe that Merchant units will come in at the bottom end of our stated 5% range, around 560,000, so around 432,000-535,000, which still implies significant growth in Q4 over Q3, as well as year-over-year. Retail units should be close to the middle of the range, implying significant growth quarter-over-quarter but flat year-over-year. We will be providing detailed 2024 guidance when we report in February, but as Christian mentioned, with our current unit economics, we see ourselves now in a position to return to growth as a result of our investments in tech, branding, data, and processes. Now, over to questions.
Hi, everyone. I am Raphael, your Zoom operator. Before we get started, we would like to review a few technical items to make sure that you can interact with us today. At the bottom of your Zoom window, you will find three buttons: Audio Settings, Q&A, and Chat. Audio Settings. Clicking Audio Settings will bring up the audio preferences for this webinar. Please make sure that the most appropriate audio device is selected here. As a viewer in this session, your microphone will remain muted, as will your video. Q&A.
Please pre-submit your questions via the Q&A icon. Click the Q&A icon, and a window will appear where you may submit your questions at any time. Once received, Philip will moderate the questions and ask the author to address management live. To that end, I will open the line for you, following to which you will need to unmute yourself before you will be able to speak. We will address as many questions as possible live during today's session, but may respond to some questions offline after the event.
Thank you, Raphael, and we will start with Catherine O'Neill from Citi. Catherine, as you have quite a number of questions, maybe you can put them into two rounds.
Catherine-
No worries. Your line is open.
Thank you. I won't ask them all. I've just pasted them all into the box for now, but,
... So yeah, the first question actually is if you could give a little bit more detail on the main drivers of that level of increase you saw in GPU, both in merchant and retail, and how sustainable these GPU levels are in Q4 and into 2024. That's the first question. The second one is on your increase in inventory and your unit guidance into the fourth quarter. 'Cause I think last time you reported, you said dealers were still sat on inventory to clear, and there were some bottlenecks on the retail side with the in-house refurbishment.
But given your guidance is now implying growth quarter on quarter in Q on units, I just wondered what you're seeing in the market that's giving you that confidence to increase the inventory as we go into the last quarter, and where we should think about inventory landing at the end of the year? And then the third question is, on the sort of unit growth and return to growth for 2024, how we should think about that with possible kind of trade-offs on the margin, if there are any? And linked to that is are you still confident on hitting free cash flow breakeven in 2024?
Hi, Catherine. Yeah, maybe I start on the GPU block. So I would say the answer is twofold. On retail, we are seeing this positive trajectory that we have been taking as a quite stable value. So we would see probably slight upside on the retail GPU for here, but we're quite happy with the level that we are at now. Maybe with slight upside on the retail side. And then I think the merchant GPU numbers were very good. So I would say this is not the level that we now would target for every quarter. Maybe slightly below that. But Marcus maybe can also add to that.
Yeah, your second question, I think, was the increase in inventory, and yeah, how we see the remainder of the quarter going and how confident we are what happens now that we think we can actually scale this. I mean, we've started to yeah, see more demand on the platform for our product, not only by the market, so I think you cannot count on the market right now. But I think that 70%-75% of the input factors that are responsible for demand are on our side. So I think we've started to yeah, go after them and set them in the right direction.
We invest into the right areas to continue to see higher demand levels, and this is why we're quite confident when it comes to going into that higher unit trajectory. And maybe this is a good segue to lead over to Markus on the 24 unit growth and free cash flow block.
Yeah. So I think just kind of maybe starting with the, with the, with the point on... I mean, I think, you know, Christian talked about the retail GPU, which I think we see as sustainable at these levels, and ones that we can both keep and over time, also grow further, even as we grow more units. I think on the merchant side, you know, traditionally, we had given this guidance of EUR 675-800 GPU, where we saw that merchant GPU. I think clearly with the last few quarters having been, you know, either above the 800 or around the 800, yeah, I think we can take that up.
But I don't think it's, you know, kind of permanently or necessarily over EUR 800, but I definitely think that range should be at least EUR 50 higher of where we will be, you know, for the next few quarters. And obviously, over time, believe that that too can go up. But I think, for now, I think the GPU we have this quarter is a short term, short term, if you will. I think Christian answered the inventory question. I think on the unit side, you know, I think a key theme that hopefully you've heard over this year is that we really wanted to take this year to improve permanently both GP, GPU, and unit economics.
I think we've done just a lot of things to our business, to move all of that positive and believe that on that basis, as I said, you know, with the commentary I made earlier on GPUs, but I think you really say that overall, we've really just taken a full step forward, in both of the businesses on the GPU. So believe that we can go to growth, with you know, with those better and higher GPUs. I think on the merchant side, we'll be providing our more you know, formal and detailed guidance, together with our 2023 results in February. I think overall, I think we think that we can get the merchant units to reach double-digit growth next year.
Also think that in Autohero, we should be able to get, you know, mid to high teens growth for next year as well. As I said, we'll provide more detail when we do our formal guidance at the beginning of next year.
... Okay, thanks. I just on the free cash flow, I just wanted,
Ah, yeah. Sorry.
Yeah, just wondered if you're, if you're still comfortable with that.
So we definitely intend to hit net income profitability over the course of next year. I think with some of the working capital movements, we don't necessarily want to nail ourselves down to specific quarters. And I think actually one of your questions earlier was, you know, inventory. But generally, Q4 actually tends to be a quarter where inventory tends to be built up, but then quite rapidly builds, you know, builds off again in the first quarter. But certainly, we expect to be or are aiming to be net income profitable over the course of next year.
Thanks, Marcus.
Thanks.
Thanks, Catherine. Over to Nick Hawkins.
Nick, your line is now open.
Yes, I just wondered whether you could make some comments, please, on how volumes have moved in your markets. We've obviously seen what you've done, but I wonder how your markets have moved in terms of volume. You've kindly provided some price information, but I'd like to know what's happened to volume.
Yeah, thank you, Nick, for this question. So, it's not that easy to have all the data just after closing, because some of the markets reported really well, like for instance, Germany and some also other markets that are bigger, and then a lot of other smaller European markets, their statistics offices are not that perfect when it comes to used car volumes. New car volumes are sometimes easier. So our view is, while not having all the data at hand, that we are seeing a slight upward trend in units year-over-year, so let's say roughly 3%. Or if we take Q3 over Q3, 3%-4%, that's our view at the moment. But quarter-over-quarter, it's pretty much flat. So this is our current view of European used car trading volumes.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Nick. And with that, to Julia Kazakova from UBS.
Julia, your line is now open.
Hello, can you hear me well? Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry, yeah, I just wanted to thank you for the presentation, and thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask about Autohero volumes for the next year. Obviously, already you've said something on this, but if you can elaborate a bit on this, do you expect this, you know, strong growth to continue? You know, any details will be appreciated. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I mean, I think as I said, I think we see growth, Autohero moving back into growth for 2024. And from where we stand right now, would expect to see mid to high teens growth in that business for next year.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Christian. Thank you, Markus. I think that actually concludes the questions as well for today. So everybody, thank you very much, and we look forward to talking to you soon, and otherwise, at the next earnings call in February latest.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
Have a good week. Bye-bye.