Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Very pleased to have with us here the team from ACV Auctions, George Chamoun, CEO, and Bill Zerella, CFO. My name is Rajat Gupta, member of the Automotive Equity Research team at J.P. Morgan. Thanks, George and Bill, for being here.
Thank you, Rajat.
Maybe, George, if you want to just spend like a couple of minutes to maybe just go over last week's results, any quick update on the backdrop, the industry. Maybe you can throw in latest thoughts on tariffs and recent developments would be helpful just to kickstart, and then we can go deeper.
Yeah, certainly. I'll start, Bill, and you can chime in a little bit.
Okay.
A quarter was we really delivered strong results, middle of our range for revenue, exceeded EBITDA. I think we delivered that all with lots of noise around the industry. I think at the end of the day, we've proven that regardless of the market conditions, we've been able to do a good job of guiding our investors and analysts on the right expectations. I think we came into the expectations this year with really the right mindset as related to dealer wholesale. Regardless of what's going on in the market, we continue to take share. We've been consistently taking share, both because our core marketplace is strong, but also the additional value-added services, which hopefully we'll talk about today, are also growing in interest both on the supply and demand side. So far, so good. Do you want to add in some more?
Yeah. I mean, we had record revenues for the quarter, which grew 25% year -on -year. Adjusted EBITDA actually grew over 200% year -on -year. Just a lot of leverage in the business model. As George said, we ended up just a little bit over the midpoint of our revenue range, but exceeded our EBITDA ranges. It was a good quarter. We maintained guidance for the full year. I know a lot of investors were concerned about kind of our viewpoints, but frankly, the assumptions that drove our initial 2025 guidance, we think remain intact. We were pretty happy with the results and, again, kind of steady as it goes.
Awesome. Thanks for that, Color. You just mentioned share gains, stayed consistent there. Could we double-click on that a little bit? Last year, third quarter surprised everyone. You had a massive share gain quarter. Fourth quarter and first quarter have been a little slower than that, but on a 12-month average, it's been consistent with your long-term guidance. Talk to us about some of the volatility in the share gains. What causes that? Do different market backdrops mean different levels of share gains for you? How should investors think about the consistency of the share gains? Or we should not just think about quarter -to -quarter and just take it on a 12-month basis is the best approach?
Yeah, we've been trying to consistently say looking at it over an annual basis makes more sense. If you noticed in Q3 of last year, we took a credit for doing well, but we kept it in a humble way, saying there will be quarters where we're over the mid-teens or will be quarters that will be a little under the mid-teens. I think what we've noticed is that when you just look at the overall data in the marketplace, new, used, trade-in, what's truly dealer wholesale, you try to get to a certain percentage, whether that percentage is 15%, 13%, 18%, it's not perfect. I don't think on the quarters where we had 20% market share gains or 13% that we or our competitors did anything differently. I think these quarterly three this is just trying to figure this out in three-month periods.
We had two quarters last year where we were under 15%, and we had two quarters last year where we were over 15%. Does that mean we really did anything different or our competitors really did anything different in those two quarters? I don't think so. I think what's happening is we're growing pretty consistently, and I think until we would broadcast if we're growing faster or slower. At this point, I think just sort of steady can be sort of my message.
Understood. Just one last one on more near-term stuff, on the guidance. You maintained it. Obviously, there's a lot of noise around tariffs. Do you feel very comfortable with that range and enough flexibility in your model, either on the growth levers with some of the products that you have or on the cost side that irrespective of what happens in the backdrop, unless it's a draconian recession or something, that you feel comfortable maintaining that range?
Yeah. The basis for our guidance and the reason why we maintained it was that we expected the wholesale market to be flat or flattish this year, which means it could be marginally up, it could be marginally down. Our guidance reflects that. If the market is marginally down, then unless we can offset with more share gains, we would end up at the lower end of guidance and conversely at the higher end of guidance if the market does a little better. There are levers that we can pull, and we've done that in the past. We've been very disciplined in terms of managing our cost structure. If things are looking like they might be a little more towards the downside, we can try to defer some expenses and try to do our best to maintain our EBITDA guidance within our ranges.
So far, we've been pretty successful in executing the business from an operational standpoint every quarter since we've gone public. Absent some major macro disruption, our view at this point anyway is that we can still stay within our guidance ranges, which is why we maintained.
Understood. That's clear. Looking long-term, maybe an easy question here. Just on network effects, your business model seems like a clear candidate to benefit from network effects. What do you view as the key positive feedback loops that help your business? Where are we in terms of harnessing the power of these loops, and how do you see the company leveraging that over the next few years?
Yeah, if you look at how we have communicated our network effects from really our IPO to now, we've been articulating both the benefits of having more supply, more demand, but also more data, and why having additional data then helps us build new products. You've seen our reinforcing flywheels a few times over the years that we've discussed. Rajat, I think what we're finally seeing this year is the benefits of those reinforcing data and products are starting to come true. We were evangelizing that they would become true someday. We would have products to help us predict the value of a consumer car. We would have products to help us predict the value for a dealer's wholesale.
We've now gotten to the point that not only do we have SaaS products that allow a dealer to buy more cars from consumers, allow us to give a guarantee for a vehicle that's going to be transacted in our marketplace. These are the benefits of the million-plus inspections we're doing a year, the 1,000-plus rooftops that we have all their data, their retail data, their wholesale data, their recon data, the ability for us to build large language models that really could take all this data and make predictions. I mean, to the fact we're now predicting the retail price of a car in the next 30 days, which is just incredible.
When you think about the typical marketplace, more supply, more demand, we have those benefits, and you're probably starting to see that in our data where once we get to 300-plus units in one territory, we start to grow a little bit faster. You have your typical marketplace dynamics, but then with us, you also have this element of data and additional products and value add that are also making us stronger. I think what we've been communicating for several years now, we're starting to see the fruits of that labor.
I want to double-click on some of those things. I do want to get into the products in a little more detail. As you are on this growth trajectory that you have, what's a potential gating factor for growth from a company-specific lens? Is it more balancing supply-demand sides of the marketplace that you mentioned? Is it just training, scaling, inspector network? What's the limiting factor to growth for the company X macro?
At the end of the day, it's getting the trust from dealers and soon commercial companies that they can trust the supply that they're giving to us that at the end of the day, we're going to get the yield, we're going to get the demand for their wholesale. There's just continually bringing the right product mix and value add and getting additional case studies. You're seeing every week, every month, we're constantly out there going, "Here's the next dealer who's now shown they're doing better with ACV than they did one of the other legacy auctions." First, it's trust. The more you can get the supply side to trust us while you continue to build the demand side because you just got to keep working both sides at the same time.
I would say what's changed is initially the only way we won supply was just getting a trial on wholesale and just over time winning more wallet share, sort of one car at a time. Now you're seeing us go after bigger deals, go after larger groups. I think we've reached a new paradigm for the business. Hopefully, we'll see those results over the next few years. It just won't be in one month or one quarter, but where we can now give a broader value-added service play. We can price all your wholesale, we can help you price all your retail cars, but we really need x% of your wholesale volume to deliver these products. That type of bundling is this next phase of our business. So far, so good.
To your point, we still need to convince a dealer or a commercial partner that they can trust our marketplace.
Right. Makes sense. On the products, you've had a wide range of products launched last year, set to roll out over the next six to twelve months, Clear Car, Guaranteed Offers, Project Wiper, Virtual Lift 2.0. Max obviously has undergone some change. Could you talk to us about one or two offerings amongst these that excite you the most and likely to have the most direct benefit to the P&L in the near term directly or indirectly? Just level set for us the addressable opportunity, growth expectations, competitive landscape for these products, or maybe the one or two that you want to point to.
I'll pick one. If we have time, we'll go to two.
Yeah, sure.
Okay. If I had to pick one, it would be our ability to predict the price of a vehicle, the wholesale price, the retail price, because it's our ability to predict. This team, we have a great leader who has an incredible team, dozens of data scientists on this team. That team is the nucleus. That's the data that's feeding Clear Car. It's the data that's feeding ACV MAX. It's the data that's feeding Project Wiper. It's the data that is powering our Guaranteed Offering, which is now nearly 10% of our cars sold in ACV. We charge an additional fee. If I had to pick one, which is always tough to pick one, but if you pick one, I would say our ability to predict based on the condition of that asset. It's not just mileage, it's not just year, make, and model.
We could have two Ford F-150s, one with lower mileage, one with higher mileage, and we would predict the one with the better condition with higher mileage at a higher value. That wasn't really easy. The industry wasn't able to do this before. Look at Clear Car as a way to do this on a website. ACV MAX is a way to do this in an inventory management tool. Project Wiper is going to be this drive-through station. At the end of the day, they're all the same thing. They're all, and to oversimplify it, it's a little more complicated than that, but to oversimplify it, we've got this incredibly rich data that allows us to predict wholesale, retail, hopefully soon reconditioning and other capabilities that we think is very unique because there could be another product we develop.
There could be products other companies want to develop around our data set. We have dealer groups who want to launch pure play, new offerings to buy cars from consumers. We have third-party marketplaces who want to go buy cars from consumers. We're really starting to get, we have many companies coming to us. It's not just because we've built hardware and software. It's because at the end of the day, this data structure and the fact that we invested in machine learning and large language models way before anybody was talking about this, it should pay off very significantly to us.
Got it. That's helpful. In terms of, so it's more indirect benefits that you're going to start to see on the P&L.
The direct benefits, again, I figure how much one example, and Bill will also chime in. If you just pick the guaranteed sale, we give a guarantee to a dealer, we charge an extra small fee for it. Those cars have 100% sell-through in our platform. The benefit is for those specific vehicles, we're going to get a little bit higher of a fee. We have 100% sell-through. That means we don't have to put in additional time, energy. We didn't waste the time of our inspectors. Buyers show up on a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday sale when these cars are launched, and we average 10 bidders a car. The direct benefit is more demand. The direct benefit is higher revenue and higher margin per car.
That's just kind of going deep on one specific area, but you're seeing that come out as we improve our margin. Any more you want to share about that?
Yeah. Actually, guarantee sales are potentially significant in terms of the impact on the financials. The way to think about this is our conversion rates, which are very similar to the industry, would average, say, 55%-60%, maybe even 65%, depending upon seasonality since it changes over time, which means you have got 40%-45% call it of cars that do not transact. We incur inspection costs to inspect those cars in order to get them posted on our marketplace, and we do not earn any revenue. In a No Reserve Sale, as George said, 100% of those cars transact, which means you are generating that incremental volume. The RPU associated with every unit last quarter was about $840 at 55%, call it roughly blended margins last quarter. That is an increment to our P&L revenue and margins. In addition, we are basically leveraging fully those inspection costs.
No incremental inspection costs. We've already inspected the car. The last point is that, and again, we're no different than any other auction in this regard. There'll be times when you'll have transactions where there's a difference between the bid and the ask, but it's close enough for our team to work with the buyers and the sellers to bring them both together. We'll typically throw a few bucks in the pot in terms of our fees. In a No Reserve type sale, every car sells, we get full fees. There's no negotiation because every car sells. The highest bidder wins. It actually ripples through our financials in a very positive fashion. To the extent that becomes a bigger portion of our revenue streams, that could be more material over time.
Yeah. Incrementally, [audio distortion] seems pretty attractive. Maybe last point on Guaranteed Offers. Yeah, it kind of flew under the radar over the last couple of years, it seems like.
Definitely.
Yeah, on purpose, I guess. Can you reassure investors that obviously we've had CarOffer that went through some challenges with somewhat of a similar approach? If you can reassure investors that we might not get caught off guard again with that, what's different in your approach? Obviously, you have the inspection, but just anything else that you want to add?
Yeah, certainly. So we've been doing this. We kicked it off about four years ago, and we've been growing it incrementally a little bit. It's actually been within our numbers. Kind of it was a small percentage of our base. We didn't plan on broadcasting it until it got to close to 10% of our volume. We thought it was just noise up until this point. There were periods of time in the last four years where it maybe was a little worse or a little better, but we've been able to predict these wholesale values generally within $100. There are quarters we were predicting it within $5. There's quarters where we're predicting it within $40. I say $100 to give myself enough room because there were a couple of quarters that we were as high as $100. We've gotten really good at this.
If you look at the ACV culture, we do not typically broadcast things until we are really good or we say we are in beta, one of the two. This is an area where we now have very little risk because of several reasons. We have our data profile. The dealer has to give us multiple cars. We take the gains and the losses plus our fees. When you hear us say the dealer on average is getting $800 more per car over the guarantee, that meant let's say they gave you five cars, a few make more than $800, a few of them maybe made less, but they netted out $800 more. Another thing to keep in mind is we are not actually giving the wholesale value. It is a number lower than the wholesale value.
It's really the ability for that seller to go into this No Reserve Auction lane to get 10 bidders per car. Look at it as almost like the golden ticket. Do you want access to 10 bidders per car? No one else in the world has 10 bidders except our Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday sale. It sounds a little riskier to investors and probably what it is, but when you start something four years ago and you build a bunch of data science and other people around it, you do it slowly and you know what you're doing and you have bundling as part of the model as well as this little hedge because the value we give is lower than the wholesale number, it's a really good model for us and our dealer partner.
Yeah, I would just add two other points. These algorithms are adjusted daily and actually can be modulated even hourly if we wanted to, depending upon the volatility that's happening in the marketplace. Second, these guarantees are for a very short period of time, typically no more than 48 hours. We are really kind of bracketing the risk. It is something obviously we have paid a lot of attention to internally for the very reason why you asked this question, which is to ensure that we do not get to a place where we are losing money. Actually, the performance has far exceeded our internal expectations in terms of the accuracy.
Understood. That's very clear. Thanks for all that color. One more question. On the last earnings call, you talked about working with OEMs and the trade-in platforms. I'm wondering if this could potentially transform into a partnership for off-lease vehicles as well. I don't want to go into commercial a little more deeper, but just curious why that market has been historically a little tougher to crack despite off-lease volumes transacting in a digital format well before the pandemic as well.
The way the off-lease initiatives work is there's a private marketplace where cars are typically sold at one of the two primary competitors we have in that area. Either the consumer keeps it, the dealer keeps it, it gets sold in this private marketplace, or it goes to an open auction. What we are talking to a few companies about, we'll see if we get a trial or not this year. We might get a couple of trials, is they put us between the private sale and the open sale before it gets sent to a physical auction. It is not that we're not talking to a couple of the captives. We might get one or two trials. When you hear us say it's the fourth leg of our commercial strategy, it's because the other three legs were just getting more traction faster.
It's not that there's zero traction. It's that rental car companies were moving faster, fleet companies were moving faster, repos were moving fastest, if that's the right way to say it. Those three categories. You mentioned OEMs, which are different than the captives. OEMs would be brand new to us. We are working right now in a very, very small sample with OEMs, ironically, in Europe, where they're using our AI and technology to price cars via trade-in. We are starting to talk to some of those OEMs also launching us in the U.S. and other places as at least, let's call it early stages. Nothing I can announce yet, but where that fits in the ecosystem is the OEM wants to either put a trade or it could be company cars, which technically kind of is like that off-lease type category.
There are a few other categories. I think the good news is we're not at zero. We're starting. We probably have, I don't know, a few hundred cars a month going through our platform in this sort of OEM captive category. We're learning. We're growing great relationships. Maybe it's a few thousand, but it's not a big number. Our technology is growing in its capability. The heart of your answer to this, if one of these companies wants a way to take photos of a car, have the consumer go around and describe the vehicle, or have the dealer do a self-inspection, come up with the recon estimates, come up with what to do with the vehicle, I think over the next year to three years, we're going to show we have the best product in the world.
Again, these are the newest areas of our business. It will take time for us to make some of that volume material. It's a little bit easier to get repos, rental car companies just to give us some cars. There's less for us to build out in that category to make a difference and start getting some volume.
Understood. Do you want to move into commercial? Another business, just like Guaranteed Offers went from under the radar to 10% of volumes, looks like the commercial business is probably at the cusp of inflection at some point. Talk to us how the launchpad has been progressing. When can we start to see things inflect here to get to your midterm 15% target? Any key learnings, challenges since you started building this with Auto IMS, the land that you have, any update there would be helpful.
Yeah, certainly. The key thing that you've seen us talk about is this ability to do a reconditioning estimate. Auto IMS says, "Here, we're giving you these 20 cars." I'm sorry, not Auto IMS. The actual commercial consignor is going through Auto IMS and saying, "Here's 20 cars." We have to go back and say, "What's the condition? And then what's the reconditioning cost for those 20 cars?" They either approve or disapprove those recon costs. If they approve it, you go ahead and you provide that recon. If they don't, they don't. That back and forth was what we didn't have, which you've heard us talk about. Getting access to Auto IMS was step one. Now having this ability to recondition the vehicle. We will have a first version of that live by July.
Deployable, we're saying by Q4. Software will be done in July. We'll actually go, and this is kind of quick, but we're going to turn around and open up our first greenfield. We're saying by Q4. What does that mean? We have a top 25 market where we've rented land. We didn't have to go buy a company. We have a small reconditioning facility. We're paying rent. We have a limited amount of teammates there. Think not a huge, huge team. We're going to inspect vehicles and a few other roles. Whether it's a bank, a fleet company, rental car company, we can have cars assigned to this location. That's going to be a really big day for ACV because now we don't have to buy a company to go into this commercial category.
As we've told you all, we'd like to have 40 locations across the country to get to 80% of the population. We could go do that organically, which is really a big deal. We'll have one open by the end of this year. Our goal is to open up a second location by early next year. That's all part of our mindset. If we can get these things to break even within 12 months, we'll go at a certain velocity. If we can get it to break even within nine months, we'll go even faster. If we get them to break even within six months, we'll go even faster.
Based on whether or not it takes us six, nine, 12 months to get to break even, sometime by early to mid next year, you'll all be asking, "Okay, how fast are you going to go?" We're going to see how fast it takes us to get to break even. That will help us decide if we're doing a couple of these years or we're doing more. We're not going to do anything crazy until we have that proof. If you ask me a guess, I think that range I'm giving you is I think we'll get these things to break even between 6-12 months. That will inform the model, and we'll move accordingly.
Understood. That's very clear. Since we have like three, four minutes left, just wanted to open it up to the audience. Anyone there? The back?
Just on the guaranteed pricing, is there a natural limit to the percent of your total volume that you think that would be applicable for?
It's typically going to be cars that, it's a great question. I don't know. I mean, at the end of the day, really, it would be a dealer being comfortable running a car on our No Reserve Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, being guaranteed a percentage lower than the wholesale value, but a good amount, and just letting it go. One of the questions earlier is, anyone else in the world doing this? An example would be like Barrett-Jackson when we're watching TV. For a million-dollar cars, they're running on no reserve. For our industry, this whole car auction, it is kind of newer. We think it's the best way to sell a car. Hands down. Our data shows it. We're willing to guarantee it. There's an adoption to this.
We do got to get dealers to adopt it and realize you don't have to have somebody sitting there going, "Did I get 98% of wholesale value or 101% of wholesale value and 103% on this car and rerun it?" I mean, some of these dealers move cars to three different auctions in two weeks, and they don't get the price, and they move it again. Some of these behaviors are old. You're basically trying to get folks to know, "Let these things go, and buyers will show up." I don't know yet what the upper limits are, but it's just change management and changing perception of the old ways versus the new ways. Our data is showing we're getting over wholesale average for these cars. We're getting more than market on average because buyers love to show up.
I don't know how to answer your question yet, but I'll think about it.
Any other questions?
Yeah, I'm just curious whether you think the bundling strategy of getting these new products to get adoption in exchange for kind of guaranteed or pseudo-guaranteed volume into your wholesale auction is the right endgame structure if you really achieve kind of amazing product-market fit or in kind of intermediary step to drive adoption and get the products out there?
I've been trying to think of good examples, sort of parlays of other companies. The one I've been using today is not a great example, but I can't think of a better one. I'm sorry. If you think about Amazon Prime, we paid a small fee to get a pretty valuable service. That unlocked an incredible experience. It's an experience that many of us, when we're shopping anywhere else, we compare every other e-commerce site, everything else we do, to the Amazon experience. Our SaaS and data services, whether we're getting $500 a month or $1,000 a month, I mean, the revenue is important. Also keep in mind, we're getting all their data. We're getting their sold transactions. We're getting their recon data. Then we're helping them buy more cars. We have some dealerships buying three cars a day off the curb.
That's three more cars. That's 25-30 more cars a month, at least. In some cases, 40 more cars a month more than they were buying. That means they're going to retail 15-20 more cars a month. That means they're going to wholesale 15-20 more cars. When you think about the role of that software and that data, it's really important to that dealer. It's making that dealer operate better. It's giving us more data so I can help them more. Yeah, there's also the SaaS revenue stream. I don't really know how else to, I needed one of these days to think of, maybe Rajat will help us think of another company that has had a similar analogy of where, yeah, the fee, whatever Amazon was charging for Amazon Prime was relevant then and is still relevant today.
The end experience was the key differentiator. At the end of the day, that's really what we're delivering. I think we're going to deliver the best experience for sellers, the best experience for buyers that's broader than what any local auction company can do. I think that's really important.
Awesome. I think that's a great way to end. So thanks.