Thank you for standing by. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Aterian update. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during that time, simply press star, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad, and if you'd like to withdraw that question again, press star one. Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Ilya Grozovsky, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development. You may begin your conference.
Thank you for joining us today. On today's call are Arturo Rodriguez, our CEO, and Josh Feldman, our CFO. A copy of today's press release is available on the investor relations section of Aterian's website at aterian.io. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that the remarks on this call today may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, that are based on current management expectations. These may include, without limitation, predictions, expectations, targets, or estimates, including, regarding our anticipated financial performance, business plans and objectives, future events and developments, and actual results could differ materially from those mentioned. These forward-looking statements also involve substantial risks and uncertainties, some of which may be outside of our control, and that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements.
These risks and uncertainties, among others, are discussed in our filings with the SEC. We encourage you to review these filings for a discussion of these risks, including our annual report on Form 10-K, filed on March 28, 2024, and our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q. These are available on the investor relations portion of our website at aterian.io. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. These statements are made only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise them for any new information, except as required by law.
This call will also contain certain non-GAAP financial measures, including Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA margin, which we believe are useful supplemental measures that assist in evaluating our ability to generate earnings, provide consistency and comparability with our past performance, and facilitate period-to-period comparisons of our core operating results. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures and definitions of those measures are included in our earnings release, which is available on the investor portion of our website at aterian.io. Please note that our definitions of these measures may differ from similarly titled metrics presented by other companies.
We are unable to provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA margin to net income margin for the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure on a forward-looking basis without unreasonable efforts, because items that impact the GAAP financial measure are not within the company's control and/or cannot be reasonably predicted. With that, I will turn the call over to Artie.
Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to welcome you to this conference call to discuss the recently announced leadership changes and updated financial outlook for Aterian. I will briefly discuss these changes and then pass to Josh, our new CFO, who will discuss our updated guidance. At the end, we will open up the call to take a few questions. As you may have seen in our press release, we have made some important leadership changes. I am honored to take on the role of Chief Executive Officer after serving as Aterian's Co-CEO and CFO. Joe Risico has resigned from the company, and after a well-deserved break, he will pursue new opportunities. Over the years, Joe and I have enjoyed a remarkable partnership.
The amount of hours and work we've put into Aterian has been nothing short of tremendous, and the strategic decisions we have made together as Co-CEOs has significantly strengthened Aterian's trajectory. Joe will consult with us for the next few months during a transition period, which I'm truly grateful. I would like to take a moment to express our deep gratitude for Joe, for his partnership, passion, innovative ideas, and relentless work ethic. Now, what changes? As of today, I don't believe anything. The mission we laid out last year to focus, simplify, and stabilize the company remains unchanged. We still believe the company's path to profitability and growth revolves around, one, a focused and stable, profitable portfolio and a simplified business model. Two, an omni-channel strategy. Three, reigniting growth through organic product launches. And four, focused accretive M&A.
These initiatives have been the cornerstone of our strategy since being appointed Co-CEOs and will continue to guide Aterian's future. Along with our solid balance sheet, we believe we have the liquidity necessary to execute on the organic missions. In fact, we are starting to see the positive results of our efforts. Our revised second quarter guidance reflects this progress, demonstrating our commitment to achieving Adjusted EBITDA profitability and showcasing the hard work of our incredibly talented people worldwide. While we still have a lot of work to do, we believe we're on the right track. Finally, I'm thrilled to introduce Josh Feldman, our new Chief Financial Officer, who has been an invaluable part of our team as Senior Vice President of Finance. Josh joined me as my right hand in finance back in 2022-...
has been instrumental in partnering with the team to strengthen our balance sheet and drive our mission of focus, simplify, and stabilize. He's undoubtedly the right individual to take on this critical leadership role at Aterian, given our current trajectory. Congratulations, Josh, on this well-deserved promotion. And with that, over to you.
Thank you, Artie. I'm honored to step into the role of Chief Financial Officer for Aterian. Over the past few years, I've had the privilege of working closely with our exceptional team, and I'm enthusiastic about the opportunities ahead. As already mentioned, we have updated our guidance for the second quarter, ending June 30, 2024. We now expect net revenue to be in the range of $23 million-$26 million, an improvement from our previous range of $20 million-$23 million. Additionally, we anticipate adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of -$1 million to breakeven, better than our earlier projections of -$2 million to -$1 million. The improvement in our guidance is primarily attributed to the strong performance of our seasonal dehumidifier business. Since May, demand for our dehumidifiers has surpassed our initial projections.
This increased demand, along with maintaining a healthy average sales price, has contributed to an upward revision in our Adjusted EBITDA guidance. Although this season is still in its early stages, we are excited by the initial trends we are seeing. Our cash balance as of June 30, 2024, is expected to be between $17 million and $18 million, with borrowing under our credit facility at about $10 million. This is compared to the cash balance as of March 31, 2024, of $17.5 million, and credit facility balance of $9.4 million. All of these improvements highlight the progress we are making towards our financial goals and the strength of our strategic initiatives. We continue to believe that the company will be Adjusted EBITDA profitable in the second half of 2024.
As part of our continued efforts to reduce our general and administrative expenses to achieve our goal of Adjusted EBITDA profitability, we are pleased to announce the appointment of UHY as our independent registered public accounting firm. We are confident that this partnership with UHY will be successful and look forward to working with them for many years to come. We would like to extend our gratitude to Deloitte for their dedicated service and contributions over the past five years. They have been a great partner, and we thank them for their professionalism and expertise. Finally, I want to thank Artie for his continued leadership and guidance. I look forward to working with him and the rest of our team as we continue to drive our mission forward. With that, I'll turn it back to the operator to open up the call for questions.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you'd like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Your first question comes from Alex Fuhrman with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks very much for taking my question. Congratulations, Josh, on the well-deserved promotion. Artie, you guys have done a really good job here over the last couple of quarters, narrowing the EBITDA loss, even as revenues have moved lower. This quarter certainly stands out in that you're now guiding to a smaller loss and higher revenues. You know, is the higher revenues primarily, it sounds like, due to that demand for dehumidifiers? And can you give us a sense of, is that what's driving the better-than-expected EBITDA in the quarter? And can you just expand on that a little bit more with the dehumidifiers?
I mean, was that weather driven or just, you know, doing a better job with executing on marketing or supply chain?
Hey, Alex, thanks, thanks for the kind words. I'm gonna let Josh handle that one.
Yeah. So I think it's hard for us to just specifically attribute to weather, but it probably played a factor in it. But I think our efforts on our marketing tactics have really contributed to the higher demand in dehumidifiers. And again, it's early in the season, but we're hoping this continues into Q3.
Great. That's really nice to hear. And then can you just talk about what you're seeing in terms of customer acquisition, how that environment has gotten for you, as you work to be more surgical with your marketing?
Maybe grab that. So, Alex, it's a good question. I think in some aspects, you know, we've been talking about focus, simplify, and stabilize for almost a year now. And I think some of the improvement we've been seeing around our marketing and some of our tactics, so I don't want to get into some details, but I don't want to give away some of our secret sauce. A lot of it is because we're a lot more focused, and we cut down our SKUs. We're really, you know, down to a lot of our core SKUs outside of oils. We're down to less than 50 SKUs.
And I think, you know, when you do that, and you rally the team around, like, a real focused strategy about executing on those SKUs and those brands, you end up realizing that, you know, there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit that you start executing on. So I think it is a combination of some of that strategy that we've laid forth about getting down to the best SKUs, getting down to lesser accounts on Amazon, and really focusing and rallying the team around that. We have done some marketing tactics, as Josh alluded to. I rather not get into details now. We'll probably talk about it a little bit more when we deliver the final Q2 results in August, but I think it is a combination of these things.
So, you know, I really want to put a lot of credit to all the work the team's been doing overall, not only just the marketing team and the revenue team, but also the supply chain team, because a lot of this focus around the whole organization has allowed us just to execute better.
Okay, thank you both. That's really helpful.
Thank you, Alex. Thank you.
If you would like to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question comes from Marvin Fong with BTIG. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Congratulations to you both, and Joe, good luck to you if you're out there listening. So, just wanted to expand on the prior question, just about, you know, obviously calling out the dehumidifiers, you know, maybe take this opportunity to discuss anything else and, you know, and that you saw in the quarter product-wise, you know, did anything else, any other product lines or SKUs kind of perform well or underperform? And then my second question, just about freight rates, I guess, you know, they've come up pretty significantly. You talked about staying focused on EBITDA positive for the second half of the year.
Is there, is there anything about freight rates that we should be concerned about, or have you kind of brought in the, the bulk of your inventory already? Thanks.
So I'll let Josh handle the first one when it comes to the quarter sales, and I'll handle the freight one. So maybe Josh, you want to step in on the first one?
Sure. So as we said, really, the overperformance in the quarter does relate to the dehumidifiers. The rest of our products have been selling as expected. And you know, we'll report more when we release Q2 earnings.
Yeah, and I think, Marvin, to the freight, yeah, freight has gone up. Yeah, we've been doing that. I think fortunately, this time it's been, you know, I think not as bad as it was a few years ago, number one. Number two, I think a lot of the things we put in place back from the experiences we've had back in 2021 and beyond, we've diversified our freight portfolio in a lot of ways. We use multiple vendors.
We still have a great partnership with Amazon, so we've been able to not only find boats, which has been great, I know that's been difficult for some companies, but at the same time, we've been able to sort of hedge a little bit of the rates that some people who only are paying on the spot rate have been fully impacted by. I think what we feel and what we believe, we think rates will come back down starting in early fall, maybe late summer. So I do think that we have a little bit of concern, but I'm not too concerned.
But frankly, you know, where the bulk of the freight rates are will hit us into Q4 is on kind of our smaller SKUs, so you do put a lot more of hand blenders and kettles in a container than you do dehumms. So fortunately, the bulk of our dehumms have been already in the country, so we missed some of those rates. So I think in some aspects, some of the hedging that we've done in the sense of having multiple vendors, the timing of our products are helping us avoid a major impact here than perhaps in the past we haven't. But yeah, it is something we watch and certainly something we will consider watching.
I know rates come down a little bit over the last two weeks, but we'll continue to watch that, and we'll continue to action other plans as necessary to avoid getting the full brunt of the impact.
Mm-hmm. That's great. Thanks for all the color, and congratulations again. Thanks.
Your next question comes from Brian Kinslinger... I'm sorry, Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you so much. Two questions. First question is, can you provide any update on the international expansion you recently discussed, how that's going? And then second, I think you have discussed renewed interest in M&A, given the balance sheet is solidified, so any updates there as well on what you're seeing? Is it an expensive market? Are you seeing better valuations? You know, how should we think about M&A in the next couple of quarters?
Thanks, Brian, for those. I'll grab those, Josh. So for the first part, listen, I think long term for Aterian International plays, I think there's a lot of opportunities. As I would say, as we've been working all internally about focus, there's still a lot of opportunities in the U.S. I think, you know, Walmart has continued to do some really incredible things in driving traffic to it, to the portfolio of access, the way to purchase between its retail stores and Walmart.com. I think you saw recently in the news that Target Plus is starting to step up its game with some of its partnership with Shopify and trying to attract more brands.
So I, as much as I wanna do international, and we will do international in the future, I do think there's still a lot of wood to chop here in the U.S., Brian. So I, you know, I wanna say, yeah, it's gonna play long term for us for sure, but I think there's still a lot of short-term wins in just North America. As we've seen it, as we've announced in the past, we've worked with MELI and have been doing expansion into MELI. I think recently we're looking to get even a few more products than from the original launch, and I think we'll be able to announce more of that as we enter Q2. I mean, when we report Q2, sorry, in August.
So I do believe that because there's so much opportunity still in the U.S., I want the team to focus there, and the team is focusing there. But certainly international is still gonna play, and we'll be opportunistic. I think we, you know, as we get later in the year, I'll have a better update on some of the things we're trying to do there, but for now, I think the initial focus is still North America for all intents and purposes. And I think for the second piece on M&A, listen, I said in my prepared remarks, M&A is still part of the strategy. You know, Joe was focused on that.
We're all gonna. We were planning to add a few heads around that to sort of drive the strategy a little bit, you know, maybe a little bit faster, and to let the team focus on other areas that have been kind of carrying a load, which always, I don't think that changes. There's a lot of opportunity, big and small. I think multiples have gone up a little bit, but I still, depending on what you're looking at, could be anywhere from 2 to 5. And certainly, I think, you know, we don't have anything, we don't have anything I could talk about right now, but certainly I hope that, you know, as we continue to progress and perform and improve our numbers, that, you know, and sometime in the future we'll have some good news around that.
But certainly still part of the strategy, just unfortunately I don't have anything concrete to report on right now.
Great. Thank you so much.
We have no further questions in our queue at this time. And with that, that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.