Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Nathan Feather, Morgan Stanley's small and mid-cap internet analyst. Pleased to be joined today by Josh Silverman, Etsy's CEO, and Lanny Baker, Etsy's new CFO. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Now, before we begin, quick housekeeping item for important disclosures. Please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And with that, let's begin at a little more high level. Interested to hear for both of you, what are the one or two things you think investors most underappreciate or misunderstand about the Etsy story?
I guess I would say, first, thanks for having us. I appreciate it. I know we're up against Anthropic. This is where the cool AI story is happening. I appreciate you guys being here with us. I remember back early in my tenure when Etsy was doing about $2 billion of GMS, and Amazon Handmade had just launched. And the conversation was, Etsy can't possibly compete with Amazon Handmade, and we're about as big as we can be at $2 billion. And we said we think we're going to do $10 billion of GMS one day. We compete with a lot of people, and we're not scared of the competition. And here we are today doing a little over $11 billion of GMS. And there will always be new competitors who come and go.
But the conversation is, again, Etsy as big as it can be, and can it stand up against the competition? We are very confident that we can be much bigger than we are, and we can compete very effectively against a ton of people. And we're very prepared to prove that to the world. The other thing I would say, if you allow me two things, is we all attend a lot of conferences where we hear of all the things that can go wrong in the world, from bioterror and trade wars and supply chain lockups and physical wars in various fronts around the world. And as bad as those things are, I look at them and I see Etsy is remarkably resilient to so many things. And we've seen that the current macro is tough for Etsy. The current macro is tough.
And even in this current macro, last year Etsy still grew revenue and produced $750 million of free cash flow. And so when times are tough, Etsy does OK. And when times are good, Etsy does phenomenal. And I think the resiliency of our model to do well under so many different situations is something I hope people consider.
That's a great starting off point, and one more thing before we dig into the specifics. Lanny, it's now been about two months since you've joined. Interested to hear what your initial impressions have been and where you plan to spend the bulk of your time as you really get settled.
Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here. We've had a great day. I really appreciate it. I would just pick up on what I think is misunderstood about this. It is really hard to build a two-sided marketplace of the size, the scale, the profitability, the value, the brandedness that Etsy has done. And that's an enormous accomplishment. It's also, I think people underestimate just how much more we can do with this platform. The position that Etsy has is so unique around, it's so differentiated around special and around these personal expressions of, I care about this thing or I care about this person enough to look for something that's really unique and different from the rest of e-commerce. And Etsy just owns that in a way that I think is really potent.
And when you combine that with what's happening with AI, I think the sort of opportunities are wide open. What I've found as I've joined this company, I would say three things that really struck me. Number one, it's an extraordinarily analytical culture, cast in Josh's image, for sure. But this is a company where top to bottom, everybody is numerate and data-driven and analytical in all decision-making, which I feel really comfortable in that environment. The second thing I have found is this is a company that is run really efficiently. You can see that in our margins. You can see that in revenue per employee. But as I've gone through and inspected various different pockets of spend and turned over things, everything that should be managed is centrally managed. Everything that's carefully evaluated is carefully evaluated.
Things are negotiated to the fine part of the fingernail to get the best deal for Etsy. So it is a really efficiently and well-run business. And the third thing is we are really focused kind of top to bottom on getting back to GMS growth. And so my role as a CFO coming into a company that's already very analytical and really efficient is to help on that third mission. And that is making sure that we have the resources, that we have the right budget, the right planning, the right measurement frameworks, the right investment frameworks to underwrite all the things that we need to do to position the company to accelerate growth and then sustain it at a rate that's higher than the e-commerce growth rate in the long term.
So I'm spending a lot of my time understanding where we've been, where we are, and where we want to go. And it's great coming to a company where I'm not by any stretch the only person with that mindset. The whole company is in the same mind frame.
OK, great. Very helpful. And a touch on macro, we've seen some divergent, to say the least, signals around consumer discretionary spend over the past few months. What's the latest you're seeing in consumer health and behavior across your marketplaces? And then especially given the condensed holiday season, how did those trends through 4Q and first quarter today?
So through the fourth quarter, we saw some headwinds in the global macro. I mean, obviously, the holiday season was shorter. And I think that played against us where our lead times are longer than others. A shorter holiday season was a particular headwind. And we have continued to see. I'm not updating guidance, but as of our most recent earnings call, that consumers continue to feel really stressed, that they just feel like groceries still cost a lot, rent costs a lot, gas costs a lot, and they don't have extra money to spend on discretionary goods. And Etsy is at the discretionary end of discretionary.
And I know I talked to some people who say, "Hey, actually, the macro looks really good, and everything looks, you know. I think we just went through an election, a presidential election, which was in most ways a referendum on how people feel about the economy." And I think that the message came through pretty loud and clear that most people don't feel good. Well, whatever numbers we may look at about the macro, most people don't feel a high level of consumer confidence. And that presents some challenges for highly discretionary products like Etsy. That said, there's a lot that is under our control. And so we've been investing in tracks of work I'm incredibly excited about to really differentiate Etsy and to show what we are that's different and special. I think there's a lot of trends.
The macro trends are tough around people feeling like discretionary goods are under pressure. I think the idea that people are going to want more self-expression, they're going to want the ability to differentiate themselves from others. They're not going to want to just be a cog in this global supply chain. I think that stuff really portends very well for us over the medium term. I'm sure we'll talk about AI. I think the trends in what's happening in GenAI are going to be particularly beneficial to Etsy and unlocking a lot of opportunity for us. I'm really encouraged. While the current trends have been challenging, our economic model allows us to continue to drive very strong profitability and cash flow even during really challenging macro. I'm really encouraged by where I think we can go in the years to come.
Let's shift over to the micro side. You all did a lot of foundational work in 2024, making a decision partway through the year to emphasize longer duration product development. First off, bring us into your thought process. What led to that decision? What impact did it have on Etsy marketplace and GMS? And looking forward, what did those investments enable you to do this year that you couldn't have done otherwise? And a third one, if I may, to what extent do you expect those investments, along with other factors, to enable GMS to reaccelerate in 2025 and beyond?
Great. OK, how about if I take the first part of that and you take the third? So if I take us back through 2024, we kicked off the year in 2024 and planned the year as we normally plan the year. And most of our product and engineering effort has historically been focused on near-term conversion-driving efforts, things that very directly and immediately lead to growth. And as we got through January, February, and March, a lot of the things that are really driving growth right now have to do with deals and discounts. We're in an incredibly promotional environment. And what's working is helping our sellers put things on sale with an ending date, for example, and having signals for buyers around this sale ends sooner.
And as we look at the roadmap of things, it just didn't feel like inspiring work that was going to really underwrite a great, highly differentiated future for Etsy. And it looked like it was going to be a tough year anyway. That is not a macro in which we are going to thrive. And things that really emphasize cheap is not an environment that plays to our strengths. And we felt that there's tremendous things we can do to really better differentiate Etsy. So around about April, we made the decision, let's really lean into the initiatives that really differentiate Etsy. And we have a lot of ideas of things we've been dying to do that we think can do that. Some examples, let's really invest a lot more time and effort driving people to the app. We know we're underpenetrated in the app.
And we know that when people adopt the app, their lifetime value goes up. That requires taking our mobile web experience and putting a lot more friction on it to say, hey, you really should be using the app. And that's going to cost us some in terms of near-term GMS. But in getting people onto the app, we believe that's a really good long-term investment. We think that the discovery experience on Etsy could be so much better than it is. We've really optimized the Etsy experience for search. We've optimized every pixel on Etsy to drive conversion. And while that's nice for near-term conversion, what it means is we're serving the people who arrive at Etsy already knowing exactly what they want.
Let's free up screen real estate and create really exciting browse experiences, discovery experiences that can trigger new shopping missions that you didn't even realize you wanted, to expose you to things Etsy sells that you didn't know we sold, and to teach us more about your interests. So for the second half of last year, we spent a lot of time iterating on our UI to collapse the amount of the screen real estate that's focused on recommendations based on things you've bought most recently, very conversion-driving recommendation, to free up space for a lot more discovery and browse-based experiences. That's all opportunity cost, right? We're spending a lot of time to free up screen real estate that's not driving conversion. But now, as we enter 2025, we've launched some really cool, exciting discovery experiences. I would encourage you guys to check them out.
If you go to the home screen on Etsy right now and you scroll down, you'll see, for example, something we call Spaces. But it's like, here's really cool, interesting trends. And you can swipe left and go from one trend to the next. And then as you swipe down, you'll just see an infinite scroll of really cool things in that trend. And it's going to allow us to understand so much more about our customers and over time deliver so much more of a personalized experience like Instagram does, like TikTok does. These are all things that Etsy has every opportunity to do because we are home of creativity like those folks are. Another thing we did last year that I'm really excited about is we've been wanting for some time a quality score on Etsy. Search has historically been focused on relevance.
You type in a keyword. We look at the thousands of search results we have that are relevant to that keyword. We rank them based on most likely to sell. We have so many very near neighbors that are almost identical in terms of conversion rate. Why don't we invest in a quality score where we can rank what is the seller's likelihood to ship on time? Does she consistently get five-star reviews? Does she charge a reasonable price for shipping? What's the quality for photography? Instead of matching you only with things you're likely to buy, we can match you with the thing you're most likely to love. That introduction of a quality score took some of our most productive squads, the squads working on search, and put them on something that was not going to drive any near-term GMS.
They've got to invent a quality score. They've got to figure out how to marry that with the lexical relevance in a way that doesn't hurt conversion. And we've got to build a dashboard for sellers so they can understand that quality score. All of that's a lot of time and effort with the goal of simply not hurting conversion. And I'm incredibly proud of the team that we got there. And by the end of the year, we'd launched a quality score in a way that didn't hurt conversion. We have a dashboard for sellers that sellers are logging into and using all the time.
And now, instead of having our sellers spend their time keyword stuffing their listing to try to get ranked higher in search, they're actually saying, "We're telling them the best way for you to improve your ranking in search is lower your shipping prices or ship on time more often." Or we're creating a real race-to-the-top dynamic around quality that's already resulting in fewer one and two-star customer reviews. So even higher percentages of our customers are really happy with the purchase experience. And I think over time, we can really build that dynamic. So we laid some really foundational tracks of work last year that we're only beginning now to be able to bear the fruit of. And we're going to be leaning even more into them as we go through the year. And as we enter 2025, we've rebalanced our product and engineering teams again.
So we've taken some of our squads and put them back on that near-term conversion-driving, let's call it growth hacking work that we've historically been so good at while we keep some other squads continuing to work on these tracks that are more around differentiation and quality.
Connecting that all to what we anticipate in our outlook for this quarter and for this year is that the first quarter will, for all the reasons Josh just described, resemble what we saw in the fourth quarter. There was month-to-month variation throughout the fourth quarter. But if you zoom out a little bit and adjust for days and holidays and things like this, the trend across the quarter was pretty consistent. It was consistent through the early part of this year when we gave our outlook for this year. What that outlook for the first quarter of this year reflects is we moved away from some of that short-term conversion-driving work. That'll be a bit of a GMS tax, if you will, in the near term.
As we go beyond this quarter, we think we're set up for better GMS comparisons and performance later in the year, and we're set up for really three basic reasons. One is the comparisons get easier later in the year. Never a great reason, but it's true. Secondly, the work that we have, as Josh just described, turned back up and dialed into to increase the frequency of our experimentation around those conversion-driving levers. That is building quickly through the first quarter, and as we get into the later part of the year, we'll see that start to stack and perform as it has for Etsy for years and years, and finally, some of the work that we did on the foundation, which it won't pay off. That's long-term work. It's not going to be an instant payoff in the second quarter or third quarter.
But really important work that we're doing in changing, as Josh just described, the way we're interacting with consumers, the kind of shopping experiences, the functionality and performance of the app and its design. Those things will start to benefit us as we get later in time.
Great. That's really helpful. Also want to spend a minute on tariffs and de minimis, certainly topical. How are you thinking about the potential impacts on Etsy for, let's say, China-specific trade actions and then more broad-based ones?
Great. Yeah. So let's start narrowly scoped on what's true today. So true today is tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. Less than 5% of GMS on Etsy is U.S. buyers buying from Canada, Mexico, and China combined. And of that less than 5%, the vast majority of that is products that are less than $800, which is below the de minimis. So for the tariffs that have been enacted so far, we think there's effectively no impact to Etsy. And I do think that stands in contrast with so many of our competitors who source so much of their product, not just from Asia, but from literally the same factory in Asia. You're picking your supply chain these days. You can go to one of four different mass merchandisers, if you will, but it's actually just the same product produced in the same factory.
And you're just getting it fulfilled through one or another supply chain. I think that's something that's truly different about Etsy. And I think the resiliency to these near-term tariffs may be a proof point around that. More broadly speaking, I don't think a trade war is good for anybody. And to the extent that it causes inflation, to the extent that it reduces consumer confidence, that's not good for Etsy. So we're certainly not up here gloating about it. I'm not rooting for it. We think allowing more trade between our sellers and buyers across all of our countries would be helpful.
All right. Now, something a little bit more fun. AI and a lot of the developments we've seen on the technology side. So how are you thinking of the potential to integrate GenAI features into the marketplaces? And in what areas are you utilizing GenAI and GPU-enabled technology today?
Love it. So much to talk about here. So first, I would say this is not new to us. We've been really leaning into advanced AI since 2016. When I joined the company in 2017, it was about three years from the time the first white paper was published in any new field of ML research until it was live on Etsy. That today is a matter of a few months. So Etsy is a very sophisticated ML team that is near the frontier of much of the work. And there are so many applications. That frontier is moving so fast now that you've got to pick your battles. But let me divide the world briefly into areas that we can do the same thing we've always been doing, but more efficiently, and then things that it's enabling us that just simply weren't possible before.
I think the headline is, I think we have more to benefit than almost anyone because Etsy's data are so unstructured, because we have 120 million listings that just don't map to a catalog. The ability of GenAI to add context and structure to things, to understand it in a way that humans do, is more beneficial to Etsy than almost anyone. But of course, it's helping us in customer support already, making us more productive. I want to take all of the gains in productivity and customer support and put it back in availability so it's even easier to access customer support on Etsy. Of course, it's helping us. Of course, our developers are using it as a productivity tool to make our software developers more productive. Of course, we're using it in fraud in a way to identify bad actors, those needles in a haystack, even better.
It's very helpful. We're seeing that benefit in gross margin. Interestingly, we're seeing a real benefit in our performance marketing because the ability to apply advanced machine learning to the data feeds we're giving to places like Google and Meta and help them figure out the best ad to show to any customer at any time is very helpful in driving efficiencies there. All of those are things we've always done, but it's helping us to be more efficient. Then there's things that didn't even feel possible before that are uniquely Etsy questions. For example, how artisanal is this product really? That's a question that's actually very important on Etsy. I don't know that many people worry about that. But at Etsy, it's very important.
So we've launched an algorithm that can look at this item and say, oh, this item is a coffee table made by a carpenter. The skills that would be required to make this coffee table are the following. One of them is the ability to join wood. And the way that the wood is joined in this coffee table is particularly hard, meaning it is a uniquely artisanal and crafty product. The ability to, as we think about things like Q-scores on Etsy, to understand what are truly the most artisanal and what feel more mass-produced is very helpful on Etsy. How unique is this item really? That's another question one might ask that GenAI can help. Another area where GenAI can really help us is in organization. Etsy is magical when you know exactly what you want.
For example, one of the very common entry points to Etsy is weddings. One of the most effective places is when people have a very specific idea. For example, cake toppers, an example I think I used when we were together. But that's a really common entry point for Etsy, cake toppers. My hunch is many of you don't know what that is. I didn't either. It turns out that's when you're looking for figurines to put on the top of your cake to represent the two people that are getting married. And Etsy is fantastic for that. We have artisans who will craft it so it looks just like the two people getting married. We used to just take a keyword and give you a set of search results. And that's all it is. GenAI can now give us context.
When someone enters cake toppers, GenAI can understand they're planning a wedding. This is in the context of a wedding, and by the way, the wedding is near, so things like invitations, engagement rings, those kinds of things are not relevant, but for someone looking for cake toppers, tablescapes, place card holders, bridesmaid gifts, that's the kind of other things you'd want to be recommending, so the ability to organize an almost infinite long tail of things into an understandable universe and take people on a journey with context with GenAI, I think is going to be incredibly helpful to Etsy, and I'm super excited for us to be investing in it.
That's great. On the flip side of that coin, some of these GenAI and GPU-enabled offerings through the hyperscalers are quite expensive. How are you thinking about the investment needed to meet your product roadmap? And as you plan that investment, how are you evaluating the potential ROI or revenue incrementality?
I would break the investment down into two pieces. One is the bandwidth and the compute. And the other is the people. And on the bandwidth and compute side, I think there's a really long history in technology of more performance getting increasingly less expensive over time. And I think you're already seeing that play out. The performance standards that you're able to get for the same price point today versus where they were a year ago are phenomenal. And so I'm really optimistic that the price curve on acquiring that technology and being able to use it will enable us to expand our TAM and do things like Josh said that we've not been able to do before, meanwhile becoming more efficient in the rest of our operations.
The place where we reinvest some of those benefits is in the talent on our team to be able to bring into Etsy leading-edge AI, ML talent and kind of at the forefront. We're fortunate in that Etsy has a really unique problem, as Josh described, with our inventory. It's got a really well-known brand name that people can imagine being much bigger and applied across a larger surface area of e-commerce. We've got a great culture to recruit against as well. We'll be looking for talent. We're currently actively engaging with talent. Over the years, we've been a company that has a pretty good hallmark of being effective at attracting and retaining talent. From a cost perspective, I don't think you'll see any big change in our P&L in the near term. These are manageable expenses.
In terms of measuring the ROI, it's about getting the right talent that helps us drive revenue growth.
OK, great. And we'll open it up for audience Q&A after this one. So if you have any questions, raise your hand. But first, after effectively doubling the Etsy.com buyer base over the course of COVID up through 2021, you haven't been able to hold on to nearly all those gains. With that being said, customer growth did decline slightly in 2024. I guess, where do you see the softness within the buyer base over the past year? And how do you return to consistent customer growth?
Yeah, great. So we, as of our most recent quarter, had about 89 million active buyers. Our all-time high was 92 million at the end of 2023, really coming through the end of the COVID and the supply chain lockup, so we were down about 2.6% from that, and it's really not been any one cohort that turned out to be a bad cohort or that is declining. We're just seeing a little bit less spend across each of our areas. It really feels like macro pressure and everybody just spending a little bit less. That said, we still acquired about 6.9 million new buyers last quarter, which is up about 25% from what we were acquiring pre-COVID, and we reactivated almost 10 million buyers last year, and that's against a pool of about 100 million lapsed buyers on Etsy.
The great thing about our lapsed buyers, people who haven't shopped in the past year, is when you talk to those people, as we do all the time, they love Etsy. They just haven't thought to come back to Etsy. It's a consideration challenge. I take a lot of heart in the fact that only one out of every three women in the United States is our largest and most penetrated market. Only one out of every three women shopped on Etsy in the last 365 days. We've got something for one out of every three women. We've got something for the other two-thirds for sure. Only one out of every 10 men shopped on Etsy. I think there's tremendous opportunity to reactivate the lapsed buyers, continue to grow new buyers, and most importantly, drive more frequency from our existing buyers.
On the frequency side, I think we've done a phenomenal job of getting you to the thing you want if you arrive at Etsy already knowing what you want. We've done a great job. We've made tons of progress there. That means for many of our buyers, Etsy is the place I go. When I've looked everywhere and nobody has it, I come to Etsy and we've got you covered. We can do so much more than that. We can get you at the beginning of the journey. Instead of, I can't find cake toppers anywhere else, aha, of course, Etsy is going to have my back. It's, I'm planning a wedding. What can you do for me? We have so much we can offer to those people. That's the next big prize for Etsy.
Great. Any questions from the audience? We'll keep going on my list here. I want to also touch on a real strength in the business, which has been Depop. Grew GMS an impressive 31% last year. How are you able to turn around growth at that asset, reaccelerating well above industry levels? And on top of that, you made a fee change last year, dropping some seller fees, introducing a new buyer fee. Can you talk through the impact that has had on supply and demand?
Yeah, absolutely. So first, credit to Kruti and her team. So Kruti Patel Goyal has been with Etsy for quite some time. She, along with Rafe and several other people at Etsy, went over to Depop two, two and a half years ago to turn it around. At the time, growth had completely stagnated. And if we look at last year, Depop grew 31% year-over-year in a market where our competitors, most of them, were flat to down. In the U.S., Depop was up 60% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. It was the highest quarter of growth of any time that we've owned Depop. So Depop is absolutely gobbling up market share and doing fantastic. How did they do it?
They really leaned into a great customer experience that's really app-first, that is really discovery-based, where they've done a wonderful job of showing you a bunch of different things you didn't ask for, learning your taste, becoming ever more personalized so they can delight you more every single time you visit, and learning how to market the business even more effectively. What I find so exciting about that is those are things that at Etsy, core Etsy, we also think are huge opportunities for unlock. So Kruti, we've just named her as our new President and Chief Growth Officer. She's coming back to the core marketplace. And I think the opportunity for her to take a lot of those learnings. I don't think the app on Etsy is as great as it can be. I don't think it's as Gen Z as it can be.
And we certainly don't think it's as discovery-centric as it can be. Kruti has led so much change and learned so much there. I think bringing her back and giving her ownership over the product and marketing at Etsy, I think she's going to bring a lot of that magic. And I'm really excited for that. In terms of the seller change, one of the changes that the Depop team made last year was to remove seller fees and add a buyer fee instead. That's had the intended effect of growing listings by 20%- 30%, which has also been helpful to GMS. I think it's also helpful for competitive positioning of Depop that it's hard for anyone to undersell them in terms of their value prop to sellers. So that's free. That's a pretty good deal.
What they're seeing is a lot of buy-sell activity on Depop, which is also really encouraging. Sellers are buyers and buyers are sellers. That's always a great cycle. It's really great to see what's been happening at Depop.
Right. Really encouraging. Now, moving over to the cost side, EBITDA margin has varied in the 27%-28% range or so over the past few years. What are the major margin puts and takes over the course of 2025? And do you believe Etsy can return to 30% or higher consolidated EBITDA margin? And if so, what do the paths available look like?
Sure. You know, I think as you look at the profitability of this company, Etsy has shown an ability to hit 30% and deliver high 20% EBITDA margins even at a time when, as Josh described, the macro has been against us and GMS has been coming down. I described earlier a company that I think is really efficiently run. You can look back at the flow-through rate of revenue growth down to the bottom line, and this company has delivered over and over and over again the kind of incremental flow-through in the 40%, 50%, even higher range that you can see from well-run two-sided marketplaces, so I have a lot of conviction about the strength of the profitability of the business in the future. Right now, the emphasis is on driving growth.
The best path to driving margin expansion from here will be reaccelerating GMS growth and driving revenue growth. And so that's where our primary focus is. So for this year, as we're thinking about it, our intention is to keep marketing spending about even with revenue in terms of marketing spending as a percentage of revenue. We'll keep it about even with where it was last year. We think we can make some shifts in the allocation of marketing dollars within there to get a little bit more efficiency and a little bit more return on it. But we'll keep it about even relative to revenue. Now, in large part, we don't set a fixed marketing budget for the year. We really spend according to return thresholds that we adhere to as clinically as we can.
And if we see opportunity to spend more money up to those return thresholds, we will certainly turn it on. And if we don't see an opportunity to spend, we may decide to pull back. But that's kind of what we're expecting from a margin perspective this year. You should think of marketing being kind of even with where it was last year. We will step forward on the product side. And we will invest a bit more. We'll get some deleverage on the product side relative to revenue this year. And that's exactly matching what Josh described in terms of our product priorities. You should expect that gross margins will be pretty consistent with where they were at the end of 2024 throughout 2025. Some folks have sort of anticipated an increase in gross margins throughout the year. I don't see that right now.
I think we'll be able to hold the levels of gross margin that we've supported at the end of last year. Then there's leverage on the G&A side where we don't need to grow G&A as fast as the top line. We can continue to keep those numbers under real tight control. For the first quarter of this year, our EBITDA margin outlook is 25%-26%. That brackets roughly where we were last year. It's pretty much in line with where we were last year. We think that as you look at the rest of this year, we think margins will be stronger in the second half of the year. That's kind of natural if you look at the pattern of our GMS breakdown seasonally and the fixed cost of the business.
So high margins, high cash flow generation, more than $1 billion of cash and investments in the balance sheet. How would you frame your capital allocation philosophy as you come into the business, Lanny? And you have some maturities coming up on convertible notes as well. Interested to hear how you plan to approach those.
I'd say the overarching thing is we want to maintain the flexibility to be able to invest in the business and seize opportunities that come our way. We think it's appropriate, given the profitability of the company and the leadership of the company, to have some level of leverage to enhance the equity returns. Over the last three years, we've bought back $1.7 million worth of stock. Last year, we bought back, we had, if you look at free cash flows, $700 million. And we bought back a little bit more stock than that even. So we've been pretty purposeful about returning. We feel good about the capitalization of the company. We're generating really strong free cash flows. And we don't think the equity values the long-term opportunity ahead of us.
And so we're buying back stock pretty aggressively to deliver that back to shareholders, to shrink the equity base, to offset SBC, and all those things. Your last question about the converts. We've got some time. And we've got a lot of flexibility given the cash that we have on hand. I think my anticipation right now is that we will refinance a portion or all of those converts as they come due or sort of anticipation of them. But I think we're comfortable with the level of leverage that we have right now.
OK, great. Really interesting conversation. Josh, Lanny, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
Thank you.