Good afternoon and good morning to our American friends. I'm Philip Reicherstorfer, Investor Relations at AUTO1, and welcome to our inaugural earnings release and presentation about six weeks after IPO. Today we'll present to you the Q4 and full year 2020 financials and our official guidance, but before Christian Bertermann, our CEO and co-founder, is going to give us a quick operational update, followed by Markus Boser, our CFO, who is going to discuss financials and guidance. After that, we'll have the opportunity to answer some questions. If you want to ask some questions, you will find a question mark on the left-hand side of your screen. If you push the question mark, you can write down a question and send it over to us, and we will go through the questions at the end of the presentation, and with that, over to Christian, our co-founder and CEO.
Yeah, thank you, Philip. Also, a very big and warm welcome from me to everyone. I want to start this presentation by giving you a brief reminder about the huge opportunity we have in front of us. Our mission here at AUTO1, wait for the slide to come up. Thank you. Our mission here at AUTO1 is to build the best way to buy and sell cars online, and this mission represents, just as a quick reminder, a unique opportunity to invest, so we're operating in one of the largest markets globally, the EUR 700 billion used vehicle market in Europe, and that market is now moving online at an increasing pace. We are already the number one company in this market.
We have built a unique platform that combines strong brands, our own pricing and fulfillment technology, and the largest automotive data set for this market that makes all of this possible. And we are very well on our way to build the leading online car retailer with Autohero. As a quick reminder, on the next slide, this is what we do. This is how our platform is working. With AUTO1, we have created a platform that creates superior customer experiences for everybody that uses us, be it for buying or for selling their cars. We are buying from consumers and dealers. You can see that on the left-hand side via our C2B brands like wirkaufendeinauto and AUTO1 and remarketing in a fast, easy, and reliable way. And then we're selling that inventory online to private consumers via Autohero or to our partner dealers via AUTO1.com.
The AUTO1 platform, which you can see in the middle, is the operating system of the European car market. It enables everybody to trade with each other fully digital and on transparent prices. With AUTO1, we've successfully connected the European automotive trade across borders. At the heart of our company, we truly believe in innovation as the driver of great customer experience. Innovation matters to us every day and every minute. I want to give you a quick update on how we use innovation in our different business units to quickly adapt to the COVID environment that we found ourselves in after March last year. In our C2B business unit, where we are sourcing all cars from private consumers, we introduced our new service, Sell From Home.
Before Sell From Home, you would only give us a few data points on your car, like make, model, age, or mileage, and we would have given you a quick but sometimes imprecise quote. With Sell From Home, we completely redesigned our C2B sourcing product. Now customers can fully enter their complete car data online. And as a result, selling your car is now even easier. You don't need to leave your home to get a binding price for your car. Our online prices are now very precise, and the whole transaction is fully contactless. Our customers in C2B are now happier than ever before, and this is why we rolled out our Sell From Home solution to all of our purchasing markets, which you can see on the right. And also financially, on the next slide, Sell From Home is a very interesting product.
Because getting a binding price is now possible directly from your home, we're seeing two times more online shows than we saw offline shows before. And at the same time, our drop-off conversion also more than doubled as we agree on the final price already online while you are still at home. And this increase in drop-off conversion is a strong driver of customer satisfaction in the C2B business. Also in our merchant business, we pushed growth through innovation. In remarketing, we launched the AUTO1 EVA app, which stands for Digital Evaluation. For the first time, a true native app that runs on iOS and Android and improves the speed and precision of our partner dealers' evaluations. They love the new app because it's faster, it's more digital, and it has a much improved user experience. As a result, our remarketing business is growing strongly.
On the next slide, we saw 30% unit growth throughout last year, while in the not-so-much COVID-impacted Q3, we saw even 64% growth. Remarketing is a real growth driver for us and perfectly complements our inventory for partner dealers and Autohero. At the same time, on the next slide, our merchant gross profit per unit has seen record values throughout 2020. Our Q4 achievement of EUR 721 also shows that we're able to repeat the level of Q3. This development is a reflection of improvements in our auto pricing technology as well as smart inventory management, and of course, in Autohero, on the next slide, there's news and innovation everywhere. We started our market introduction campaigns in late Q4 of last year. We used TV a lot, but also other channels like YouTube and Facebook.
You can see some of the examples of the ads that we used here on the screen on the left. We're also present now more and more in European soccer. As I said, you can see the results here on the right. We increased the number of sessions on the Autohero platform almost 10x year on year. We're very happy with those initial results, and we can now say that we successfully introduced Autohero across Europe. We also delivered a complete new platform experience for Autohero in Q4. Our cars are presented completely immersive now. Almost all of them have a 360-degree outside and inside video available, and it's really as if you were standing right in front of your new car. The site features a complete new mobile experience, a transparent and digital purchase flow, and a brand new customer account where you can control your order.
We can see the response from our customers on the right. They almost spent double the time on the site with the new platform, and together with the almost 10x more sessions that we have seen on the previous page, we can say Autohero is in hyper-growth mode. You can also see that in our numbers for units delivered. We grew them 77% year on year, and we're keeping our growth track for Autohero this year in a fast pace. I'm sure that you have seen our ad hoc news from yesterday. We're now expecting Autohero units delivered for Q1 to be coming in at a corridor between 7,200 and 7,900 units. We do this hyperscaling while keeping NPS at a healthy level north of 50. As we're building out our Autohero delivery fleet, we are expecting that NPS to grow steadily.
With home delivery, we're getting a 27% higher NPS rating, according to German data, than with pickup. And that rounds up the very positive outlook that we have for Autohero. Now let's go over to Markus for some detailed financials.
Thanks, Christian, and welcome, everybody. 2020 was a transformative year for us at AUTO1, which allowed us to demonstrate the financial success and resilience of our business model while we laid the foundations for our IPO, providing us with the capital to execute on our growth ambitions. We increased the number of remarketing units sold by 30% year on year as a result of our attractive offering, as described by Christian. Additionally, Autohero cars sold really took off this past year, going to an impressive 77%, as we've already seen. However, the ongoing lockdowns in Europe impacted our most sizable business, the C2B business, when viewed on a year-on-year basis. Nonetheless, a combination of our Sell From Home digitization, growth in remarketing, and in Autohero enabled us to grow the top line in the fourth quarter over the third quarter, despite the lockdown situation in Q4 throughout Europe.
On the gross profit level, focused pricing and purchasing has enabled us to drive up the gross profit margin by 20 basis points to 10.1% in 2020, despite the hit in Q2 at under 7%, with the average gross profit per unit increasing to EUR 625, up from EUR 556, again, despite the impact of Q2. OpEx declined on a full year basis by EUR 102 million, highlighting our agile expense management and ability to remain flexible. Improved gross profit margins and stringent expense management resulted in a dramatically improved profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis, even in this corona-struck year.
While Q4 has seen lower adjusted EBITDA margins, primarily driven by investments in Autohero, both in terms of marketing and people, as well as investments at the HQ level, our adjusted EBITDA of EUR -15 million on a full year basis, up EUR 45 million from the EUR -60 million in 2019, also on the back of two adjusted EBITDA positive quarters, with adjusted EBITDA margin reaching up to 2.1% in Q3. Next page, please. Our strong adjusted EBITDA resulted in 2020 of EUR -15.2 million as a result of active OpEx management, permitting us to compensate for the effects of the COVID-related lockdowns across Europe on gross profit. In March of last year, we rapidly took measures to reduce costs across our entire OpEx positions.
In particular, we reduced employee costs by EUR 36.7 million, aided by furlough programs to support branch personnel where drop-off locations needed to remain closed due to the imposed lockdowns. Moreover, we reduced marketing expenses by approximately 35% year on year, proving that our brands are strong even without paid advertising. Internal logistics also decreased as a result of fewer sales, given that these are largely unit-dependent. Other expenses decreased mainly thanks to lower equipment and office expenses. We turn the page, and we've continued to proactively manage our inventory throughout the year. During the first COVID lockdown, we stopped purchasing cars for roughly two months, selling our inventory down quickly, given the huge uncertainty.
Since then, we focused on restocking to support the ongoing growth in Autohero and our merchant business, while at the same time ensuring that even as the merchant business normalizes and Autohero grows massively, we continue to have the best-in-class inventory days of sale at 23. Turn the page. In terms of operating cash, we significantly improved that. As you can see from the boxed area, we generated approximately EUR 15.9 million in operating cash during 2020, proving the resilience and the success of our business model also in difficult times. Our improved profitability on the back of reduced operating costs, as well as EUR 38.7 million from de-risking inventory, significantly aided our cash position. Other cash flow changes mainly relate to interest and tax expenses, which are also significantly lower than in 2019. Notwithstanding the challenges of 2020, we continue to invest in the business, primarily in Autohero.
Overall, we are very proud of our positive cash flow from operations during a difficult year and believe it shows our executional excellence even in Q2, which had the impact on our business peak around the COVID restrictions. In Q2, as you know, we received a further EUR 255 million proceeds from convertible bond sale, with which we reduced our asset-backed loan to zero. These changes combined led us to a strong cash position at the end of the year of EUR 157.3 million. If we look forward and pro forma for the IPO, we significantly strengthened our balance sheet, making it a key element to enable us to continue our goal of being the number one online used car player in Europe.
Through IPO, at the beginning of February 2021, we gathered approximately EUR 971 million of net IPO proceeds and repaid EUR 232 million to the convertible bondholders for the cash-settled portion of the convertible. The convertible bond is now fully repaid. This results in a pro forma cash position of EUR 896 million, excluding any other cash changes in the period since January 1st. Following the closing of our innovative asset-backed securitization at the beginning of January, we had EUR 186 million under the new facility, given the inventory level at the end of January. In addition, we have another EUR 299 million in additional commitments, meaning that our total available capital is as high as almost EUR 1.4 billion. This amount of firepower allows us to fully focus on scaling our business and on creating the best experience for our sellers and buyers alike.
We wanted to highlight a key achievement in the early months of Q1, which was the closing of our new innovative asset-backed securitization facility, which is fully available since January 29th. Under this new facility, we're able to borrow up to 90% loan-to-value of eligible inventory at below 2% interest rate. This ensures that we can grow our inventory to fuel the growth of Autohero in the future. As the facility is investment-grade, rated privately by two renowned rating agencies, it allows us to easily increase the commitment in the future should the needs arise. Lastly, a key feature of this first-of-its-kind facility for used cars is non-recourse, only secured through the inventory held. A fraction of the risk is retained by us through the junior tranche committed by AUTO1 Group.
At the same time, the flexible revolver structure of the facility allows us to optimize the cost of carry, permitting us to fund the facility with more junior notes to put our excess cash to the best use possible. We look to the next page. In terms of outlook, next page, please. For 2021, we will focus on delivering six key objectives: the first three in Autohero and the second three in our merchant business. We have three focus areas for Autohero. First, we want to continue Autohero's strong unit growth and continue to deliver on units. Second, we would like significant increases in the Autohero brand and building that brand, as we discussed during the IPO, to get to our 50% brand recognition for people looking to buy cars. Thirdly, we want to maintain the Autohero GPU at the current levels.
Around the merchant business, we also have three focus areas. First, we want to move C2B back into growth territory. Second, we want to continue the very strong growth that we've seen in our remarketing business, and finally, maintain a strong GPU level above full year 2020, but below the record years the second half of 2020, mainly because of the dilutive effect of the much higher remarketing growth within the merchant business. We go to the next page, so in this, our first post-IPO call, we want to take these six key objectives and the model guidance we provided at the IPO and translate that into the following financial guidance for 2021. Overall, we expect between 592,000 and 638,000 units across the group. In the merchant segment, we expect to sell between 560,000 and 600,000 units.
In the IPO perspectives, we indicated that for 2021, the merchant segment should sell 580,000 cars based on the lockdowns ending at the end of Q1. The extension of the lockdowns adds, therefore, some risk, as we see a dampening effect for people who need to drop off their cars, either by our drop-off centers or for offline centers. As a result of that, we've widened that range, but still believe that we can achieve the 580,000 for the year. In Autohero, we've seen a very positive development in Q1 as per our ad hoc yesterday. We therefore believe that we will now sell 32,000-38,000 units in Autohero for the full year 2021, compared to the 29,000-plus units we had as per the IPO perspectives.
Based on these unit numbers, we believe we will generate between EUR 3.8 billion and EUR 4.2 billion of revenues for 2021 and EUR 360 million to EUR 410 million of gross profit, both significant enhancements on 2020. Given our strong investment into Autohero and the brand building and operations, we see a decline in the Adjusted EBITDA between -2% and -2.5%. All in all, we believe that we are very well positioned to deliver a strong 2021 and growth thereafter, and with that, we can open up to Q&A.
Thank you, Markus and Christian. I will start on the merchant side, where we got a couple of questions around how much lockdowns are baked into the forecast and what are the assumptions on reopening and how that is going to impact the business.
Maybe I start off in terms of the forecasts. So there's clearly a large amount of uncertainty right now overall with lockdowns continuing. At the bottom end of our range, of the 560,000-600,000 units in the merchant business, at the bottom end of that range, we are assuming the current level of lockdowns through to the end of Q2 and then without a big, if you want, sort of catch-up thereafter so that it remains effectively as it is today in terms of demand.
At the top end of the range, we're assuming that the lockdowns would largely be over in the next month and a half or so and that we also see then a big catch-up effect thereafter because we do see that a lot of people are postponing the purchase of new cars or changing their cars as a result of the lockdown, and that would enable us to get to the top end of the range.
Yeah, just if you look at the market data for the first two months in Europe, then we believe there should be a catch-up effect in the second half of 2021. So we are bullish, but I think our guidance range bakes in all possible outcomes there.
Okay. Great, and just on the Merchant question, one supplementary question. The Remarketing revenue per unit Q4 has gone up quite a lot. Any particular driver, or is this just the market as they come?
I think there's no particular driver other than it often ends up being a result of a country mix. And I think we've seen kind of more growth in some of the countries that have higher revenues per unit than in others. I think it was almost more that we had an abnormal situation on that in Q2, sorry, in Q2 and Q3 rather than that Q4 is something different.
Okay. I think with that, let's talk about Autohero. And I think just about every complex of questions I'm seeing here starts with the 32- 38,000 range for 2021, Christian, Markus. I think to a lot of people, that feels conservative, and they kind of want to understand, are there particular reasons for that guidance, or are we facing any constraints in the business?
Yeah, Markus, I can also go first. So no, we don't really see constraints. But I think also when we did the process, what we said is we want to make sure that we scale in that sense responsibly with the NPS requirement that we set out of 50+ for all of our markets, not just as a group. And at the same time, we also want to make sure that we're not overloading processes by scaling too fast in between. And yeah, to have discussion, I think this is why we accept guidance like we said it. And I think we're on a very good track. But on the other hand, we also want to make sure that we are meeting customer expectations when it comes to delivery times, we are meeting our refurbishment times, and we're not overloading the organization anywhere too much.
Yeah. A lot of people have asked kind of quite specifically where we are in terms of the refurbishment rollout and what our current status is on that.
I think in terms of on refurbishment, I think we were quite clear a month and a half ago during the IPO that this is something that we're so we're looking at that very actively. We are guided that we wanted to spend up to EUR 80 million on CapEx over the next three years. We're looking at that in a very focused way. I think we'll update the market as and when we have that. At the same time, I think one of the reasons why we guided to the flat Autohero margins or perhaps taking a step back, I think in terms of refurbishment capacity, we clearly have a lot of refurbishment capacity, and that is not a constraint on growth. I think for us, it's really around optimizing the costs around that.
I think that's why we had focused our margin expectations over the next year to give us a bit of time to do that. We'll make sure that we update the market when we have updated plans around that.
I think related to the CapEx, quite a lot of questions just around the status of the matchbox trucks. How many do we have? How many do we expect?
That's easy. We manufactured close to 50 of them, and they will now slowly hit the road. We're very good on track here to complete our first order of almost 100 trucks until the end of the summer.
Okay. And the other complex around Autohero in 2021, there's a lot of questions around marketing. Can you talk about marketing plans, spend, or timing in 2021? And also, I guess supplement to that, is the EUR 200 million to 2023 still the plan?
I think from a financial perspective, and maybe Christian can give a little bit more color, and I think he's done so a little bit in his part of the presentation. I think at the moment, we are still sticking to our EUR 200 million over the next three years marketing plan, and we're not giving any kind of 2021 specific guidance on marketing. I think we're very happy with the success that we're having so far. I mean, obviously, you saw the success with Autohero, and that's from marketing that we've delivered in line with current guidance. Obviously, we're keeping, I think, a very close eye on the situation to make sure that we can continue to deliver, but there's no change in our guidance.
I think we feel comfortable with the number that we set out or with the budget that we set out for now, so it's going quite well, but I mean, we're gathering data on the effectiveness and efficiency and also on the awareness that we're creating for the Autohero brand every day, and I think we will be a lot smarter in the next 90 days, but for now, we really want to stick with the number that we set out.
Okay. And then there are also a couple of questions around read-through on Autohero unit numbers beyond 2021 and whether you feel the current guidance is sufficient or the IPO guidance was sufficient.
Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, it is sufficient. We're not changing that right now. I mean, if you take a look at our full year guidance, effectively, that implies just mathematically around the sort of give or take 50% or so quarterly kind of growth. And if you kind of just continue to do that over the next couple of years, we pretty much hit exactly our full year or our 2023 guidance. And so therefore, we're sticking with that.
Okay, and then one other question complex is around Autohero and whether we see any changes to the gross margin profile in 2021 because we now have more transactions and higher numbers, but also more refurbishment.
No. So we are sticking to our guidance, which was essentially around the EUR 250 per car, which is what we've achieved over the last few quarters. I think in that guidance, we'd anticipated that we were going to grow the business very fast, which we've done. And so therefore, I think we can continue to grow at the achieve the units that we forecast here with the same GP per car.
Yeah. And then obviously, we got some very smart analysts and investors out there who understand more about the web than I do, who do quite a lot of scraping of our web pages. And we have heard all kinds of numbers of how many cars we have in inventory on Autohero. And I think today, the bid offer range is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. Is there any insight we can give on that?
So that's a very wide bid offer range. I think, well, let me take a step back. I think we're currently thinking about what the metric is that we want to deliver out around this. And we'll do that as part of our Q1 results. Obviously, there are various ways of measuring it in terms of what you consider on the platform for how long and when and so forth. So we're coming up with the appropriate metric, which we want to then discuss in Q1. Broadly, though, I would say in terms of just as a snapshot, the truth on that lies somewhere in the middle of those two numbers.
Yeah, and I think there was also one question that somebody said, like, you have 1,000 cars and Cazoo has like 4,000. Yeah, this is simply not true, so we have way more, and I think we're scaling fast. If I look at Cazoo, I just looked at the web page; it's 3,400, so I think we're much larger than that.
I think, Christian, there are some questions as to whether we have sufficient inventory or whether we are facing kind of a potential bottleneck there at the moment given the external markets.
Bottleneck. Oh, I mean, look, we're buying between 560,000 and 600,000 merchant cars per year, and who has per year, and who has followed us, who has followed us closely in the IPO process, still hopefully remembers this piece that there's a lot of retail inventory in our funnel that we can source from, and we will tap into this inventory step by step. I think it will take us some time because we also want to make sure like you also are driving up step by step the price level and the data analytics that you have around sourcing. I think this is getting much, much more efficient, but for now, we don't have any constraints at all when it comes to sourcing inventory.
Okay. And I think right now, kind of final question I see, is there any geographic trends that are worth highlighting?
Actually, not so much. I think the order of our countries follows pretty much in line with the market size. So we're scaling them roughly to the same extent. Some are faster than the others. But I think broadly, the assumption that you can take is that it goes by market size.
I think that takes us through all the various question blocks that we had. So I think with that, maybe just one final question I see coming up here. Any impact on the timing of our finance offerings from the faster Autohero growth?
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's consumer financing, which I'm assuming that's what it is referring to as opposed to our financing. So on the consumer financing front, I think as we talked about in the IPO, we have a pilot project in Germany. We're very happy with how that's going. We are and have been expanding that increasingly since the IPO and now and still working on that. We have a fully functioning product. Now, what we really need to do is kind of fully integrate it into really the consumer purchase funnel. But already, what we can see is that by doing it ourselves and integrating it into the process, it really enables us to get a much higher attach rate than otherwise. But I think the two are unrelated. The consumer finance product is one that we're working on as well.
But the faster Autohero growth shouldn't impact the rollout of that.
Okay, and then maybe, Christian, anything you can say about Cazoo, Cluno, Aramis Group, and obviously, there's a number of IPOs expected to come to the market. Do we see any changes in our competitive position?
No. No. I mean, for now, we don't see it. I think what is important to say around Cluno, these businesses where you are renting out cars on a midterm basis are essentially businesses that target the new car market, right? So they're leasing or renting out new cars. And yeah, now I already said it. I mean, this model is present in the market. It's called leasing. There's also full service leasing, including then the repairs and the insurance and the tax and everything. So you can book it like that. But I see the value proposition towards the customer. This is also something that we look at and that we might test someday. But in general, the competitive landscape didn't change for us right now. I think we are very well on our way to position Autohero as the leading European brand for buying cars online.
And that is good. And then you will, yes, I heard there's the Aramis IPO coming. That will be interesting to see how an incumbent with a lot of physical infrastructure will be received on the market.
Okay, well, I think with that, we have gone through all the questions, so thank you very much for your interest, and I guess we kept it short and sweet, and lastly, we will see each other at the next earnings call, and let's see whether my cat is still getting involved as well, so thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.