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J.P. Morgan 42nd Annual Healthcare Conference 2024

Jan 10, 2024

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Good morning. My name is Lisa Gill, and I head the Healthcare Services Group at J.P. Morgan. With me this morning, it is with great pleasure that I have GoodRx. With us is Scott Wagner, who is the interim CEO, as well as Karsten Voermann, who is CFO. Karsten is gonna read a quick, safe harbor, and then we're just gonna do a fireside chat. So with that, Karsten, I'll pass it over to you.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Thanks so much, Lisa. We appreciate the invitation. With respect to the safe harbor, before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's fireside chat will contain forward-looking statements. All the statements made that don't relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking, including statements regarding our plans, strategies, goals, objectives, our market opportunity, and our anticipated financial performance. These statements aren't promises or guarantees, but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors, which may cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For additional information, we refer you to the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, as updated by our 10-Qs through September 30, 2023.

We may also reference certain non-GAAP metrics, which are reconciled to the nearest GAAP metric in the company's earnings press releases, which are on the Overview page of our IR site. Thanks, and back to you, Lisa.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Great. Great. Thanks again, everyone, for joining us this morning. Scott, you know, it's been roughly a year since you took this interim role. Can you talk about what has maybe surprised you at GoodRx? You know, what are the things that you're most looking forward to when we think about the future opportunities?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah. No, thanks for the question. What's exciting or what surprised me over the last 9-10 months? Well, GoodRx has this really important value proposition, which is we save people money on prescriptions, and over the history of the company, GoodRx has saved people $65 billion, $15 billion just in last year alone. So there's like a big fundamental value. And for those of you who have tracked the company over the last maybe two years, there were certainly some choppiness that, you know, maybe led to my entrance at the company.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

We've all been ruthlessly focused on what I call driving prescription savings events, and there's been three ways we've been doing that.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... the first of which is really leaning in with our retail partners to make sure that we're being distinctive for them, that they're making money, and that we're driving incremental, basically, traffic and value. The second is taking the fundamental benefit of GoodRx, which is this, it's called a cash discount card, but really an off-commercial funded plan, and bringing it closer together with commercial plans-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... called Integrated Savings , which we've done a bunch of those partnerships and launches really over the last eight days. And then bringing GoodRx savings to brand drugs. And those three things are, you know, nicely working.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

They're starting to show up in the results. In the third quarter of last year, the company returned to growth. We just announced our fourth... pre-announced our fourth quarter results, so that's stacking incremental growth year-over-year, was, I think, a little bit above 6%. So the nice thing is, the things that we're working on reinforce the value prop-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... and they're turning into good business for us.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

You know, as we think about the numbers, and maybe we'll spend a minute talking about the pre-announcement this morning-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

... when we think about what you were talking about on the third quarter, fourth quarter coming in better than expected, kind of preliminary 2024 looking better than expected, I think you talked about mid-single-digit growth for 2024?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Correct, yes.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Can you maybe talk about what were some of the elements of the higher fourth quarter versus your expectation as we were exiting the third quarter?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure. Thanks for the question, Lisa. Yeah, I think there are three elements that I'd point to. Number one, we saw better volume, and that volume was driven by, among other things, some seasonally related illnesses coming in a little higher than we had expected. We didn't include them or contemplate them in our forecasting, and they manifested particularly in December, so we're grateful for that. Number two, we saw generally more volume, both as a result of our direct contracting efforts with retailers and more broadly. And then finally, on the rate side, we had some fourth quarter specific benefits associated with some of our customer contracts as well. So all of those three things really helped propel our prescription transactions offering forward in the fourth quarter.

As we anticipated, based on the indications we gave for 2024 as well, we expect that overperformance to continue for a while into the future.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Is it the same three key drivers, or how do we think about the new Integrated Savings playing into that updated guidance that you gave today for 2024?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure, I think we may both comment on this one. I know Scott will be eager to, too. But the ISP program, which we started really in earnest running last year with Express Scripts, and now, of course, we've added Caremark, Navitus, and MedImpact are in it as well. So that's really become a much bigger program. We're super excited about it because it's so SAM expanding. Historically, we've gone direct to consumer and acquired consumers one at a time, effectively through our marketing efforts. Now we can aggregate demand and pull in large numbers of consumers, potentially all at once. So we're pretty excited about that. That said, we're also early in this year, so it's a little early to have a perfect bead on how the year will evolve.

So when we look at 2024 broadly, the trends that I think continue from third quarter to fourth quarter, to get specific about your question, are, number one, the volume that's coming in higher, we'd anticipate will continue to, 'cause when volume comes in higher, that generally gets us more MAC, more users. And once folks start using us, given that 80%+ of our transactions are repeats, we just keep those folks, and they carry forward into the future, which is exciting.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Great.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I think, you know, said differently, our largest shareholder is sitting in the front row, so that may have even been a nice planted question. The results that we've just delivered really don't have anything to do with Integrated Savings.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

The programs that we're now live with-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Caremark, ESI, MedImpact being the three largest ones, you know, they went live January first, for the most part.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I think the nicest thing about these for me are they absolutely meet a need in, you know, frankly, in the world.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

That is, wow, as plans get more complicated, as frankly, drug costs, either more drugs get pushed off benefit or copays go higher, it's very clear there's a big and expanding need for an ancillary service. It's pretty much recognized by employers, plans, people, and that's kind of the need we're meeting.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting to me, when you think about high-deductible health plans, and more than 50% of Americans are in high-deductible health plans, and you look at the fact that part of the benefit, you have to have the same deductible for pharmacy and medical. And so initially, people are paying out of pocket for all of their pharmaceuticals, because to reach that average deductible, which is nearly $3,000 in the United States today. So my understanding is that when I think about that Integrated Savings program that you have, and what companies like ESI and Caremark were trying to solve for, is exactly this.

And so, as I think about the ramp of people signing up for that, and you said, you know, it primarily starts in January of this year-

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Mm-hmm.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

I would assume that it goes with a benefit plan year. Is that the way to think about it?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yes, generally.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

100%.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

So how should I think about how that rolls on? So is it the Caremark sells it to an employer, and then that employer offers it to the employees, and do they have to opt in, or are they immediately all part of this plan? How does it work from a mechanic-

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

How's it working? Let me go first-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

and then you might want to pick it up.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Okay.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

So, you have the gist. It is introduced by, let's use Caremark as the example-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... to their corporate plans. Now, again, this is pretty early, and we signed these agreements, you know, as a measure of a couple months ago.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

And so they're not introducing it to everybody in their universe. And each PBM's a little different, Caremark being probably the broadest coverage around it. But then, once somebody is either opted in or opts themselves in, then every time a member in their plan goes and, you know, is redeeming a prescription-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... they're getting a check against GoodRx. Now, so the economics and how is this gonna roll out? So right now, it's number of lives being offered and number of, you know, script events at the point-of-sale counter.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Okay.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

The evolution of this, I think, will continue to have to invest in retail because our CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, retail partners of the chain need to make sure that this is working great for them, too.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I think as it continues to evolve and roll out, you know, I would hope that this becomes a little bit more of a structural part of people's plans.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Again, I just want to make sure that I understand this.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

So it's not materially different than the GoodRx from the consumer side. It's just more tied to your actual benefit that you have within your health plan.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah, the economics of it are substantially identical from a revenue perspective. Meaning, as folks come in, whether they're folks who we acquire directly-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... or who are aggregated in, through these ISP offerings, in either case, when the check happens at the pharmacy counter for the ISP folks or the direct-to-consumer folks show up with a GoodRx card, the app, or other things, the way the transaction routes across our backplane of PBMs and our direct contracts works identically, which means at a nominal level, the revenue on a claim is substantially similar, too. So this is, this is basically our core business, the way it's historically worked, but pointed in a new direction that allows us to aggregate demand much more efficiently, number one. And number two, because there's still significant numbers of folks who don't even know you can save on prescriptions, it ends up being hugely SAM expanding. We did analyses through last year.

Obviously, before you bring many new PBMs on, you check to make sure things are working great.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

What we found is the overlap between our directly acquired consumers and these is very, very small, I can't stress that too much, both in terms of people and actually the kinds of scripts they're filling. This is, for us, very attractive.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

When I think about overall prescription volume-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Mm-hmm.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

You've outperformed the market, generally speaking. So when we think about those volumes, and we think about those trends, and we think about the trends in cash pay, you know, what are some of the things that we need to think about from an investment perspective? And, is this continued opportunity for you to outperform? Do we think of you as going more towards normalization when we think about what utilization trends look like in the U.S.?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... Yes, I can jump in on this one. I think historically, you've seen us grow faster than market. If you can, if you define market as cash pay, I think cash pay itself is also something that's looking like a more and more attractive market, too. I think over the last few months as well, certainly all the data we're looking at suggests that we continue to be a growing share of that pie. So from that perspective, we're coming back to the point where we have consistently grown faster than the market as a whole, and I think that's fundamentally driven by some of the changes we've made on the marketing side and various other efforts on our part.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

And if I, if I could, I'd maybe just framing cash pay-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... and then relative to GoodRx. So, you know, roughly, we'll do, a little under 100 million prescription fills associated with GoodRx a year. Like, it's a pretty good number. And we're high 30% share of what's called cash. But back to the fundamental trends-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... that you just laid out in terms of higher deductible plans, higher copay, more drugs with less benefit, right? The tailwind broadly would sit in the space that we'd call cash, but it's almost a bad label for it. And what we're starting to do now is bring cash even a little closer to funded plans through ISP. So I think from an investor perspective, when you ask that question, what gives me comfort, again, particularly as a non-healthcare guy coming into this, is, oh, wait a minute, the fundamentals of how and where healthcare gets delivered in the country kind of are tailwind.

Now, in the value chain, there's obviously a bunch of swirling and arm wrestling that seems to happen all the time, but, but fundamentally, there's tailwind that we're serving and lean on, and that gives me a lot of comfort.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Just coming back to ISP, and when we think about 2024, and, and you said so early on, you know, not really a lot in the number, but how do I think about what that market opportunity looks like? And, and how much do you think that you potentially can capture in 2024?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure. So Scott briefly touched on some of the variables. I think the two key ones are the number of people or lives who benefit from it through their employers and the PBMs we work with. And the second dimension is the conversion rate, meaning the-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... the proportion of the time that the GoodRx price is lower, and we win the transaction, the prescription, effectively. So when I think about those two variables, on the first one, in many cases, our PBMs are having employers opt out, particularly new employers who are being sold by the particular PBMs. So that means from the perspective of acquiring lives, we're relatively well-positioned, we think, and, we're pleased with the trajectory we're seeing. With respect to the conversion rate, I think that's where more data will be helpful to us, but on that dimension as well, given that we have the experience of running this program last year, we feel like we have a decent line of sight. I'd actually argue a pretty good line of sight on what we should expect there.

That said, fundamentally, the employers who take offers like ISP, particularly the ones who are opting in, tend to be the more forward-thinking employers who have better benefits anyway. So the conversion rate may not be as high as it would be for just some random, directly acquired consumer, and likely won't be as high, in our view, relative to some directly acquired consumer because the relative richness of the plans being higher from the sponsors who are most eager to adopt ISP early.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

That's probably the best way of putting it.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

And so as we think about when you're you give guidance and you give us updated numbers, please correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think you're gonna break this out for us. Is that the plan to give us some KPIs around this as we think about it rolling out throughout 2024?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah, as we get to our normal guidance time, I think we'll anticipate, number one, we'll provide more indicia around the first quarter and potentially 2024. And we'll also have more line of sight at that point on the ISP program. Again-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... now we're at nine, we're 10 days into January, but that's eight real days 'cause one of them was New Year's Day, and one of them is today, and I don't have a ton of data from today yet. So I think we're really looking forward to being able to share more concrete realities around the fourth quarter call.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

We'll give people an indication. You know, if you're building a model and tracking GoodRx-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... there, there's really two revenue lines that we will continue to be providing, you know, sort of metrics and thought around. One is we call it the marketplace, but is the combination of script fills in the marketplace and then Manufacturer Solutions -

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... which are their special brand deals, and I'd kind of encourage everybody to just think in those two blocks.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Okay, perfect.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Okay.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Can you spend a few minutes just talking about GoodRx pricing and, you know, how they compete, whether it's in insured versus the traditional offering or ISP? Is there a meaningful difference between the traditional and ISP?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Certainly not for our, from our revenue standpoint-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

No

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... and how the economics work, they look exactly the same. So speaking selfishly, for, you know, and on behalf of investors, everybody would be agnostic to GoodRx having, you know, an individual walk in on a GoodRx sort of branded and generated transaction and traditional cash-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... versus ISP. If you're an investor, you're agnostic and thrilled to have them both.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Just to, again, asking a lot of questions around this-

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

That's okay

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

... but when we think about the ISP pilots that you had and think about the mix between branded and generic drugs, has that been consistent with non-ISP GoodRx users, or have you skewed more towards branded drugs because of the cost of the branded drug?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

It's our marketplace offering broadly, to use the taxonomy that Scott just laid out, between our brand drug support Manufacturer Solutions -

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

offering, and our prescriptions fills in both our prescription transaction and our subscriptions offering, have always been very oriented towards generics on the prescriptions marketplace side, and we continue to see that generics are extraordinarily dominant in that prong, in that marketplace prong.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

That's because that's 90% of the volumes in the U.S. today, right? Are basically generic.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

It is. The brand, although again, the brand opportunity is big!

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Specifically for brands. You know, this will be an anecdote, but it's indicative of the opportunity here, where I was sitting with a brand owner of a big pharmaceutical company and their head of market access. It's a drug that's going off benefit and competes with generics. We pulled up the site, and they didn't know what the cash price of their drug was. Something popped up, and it was about $800. They both said: "Oh, why is that $800? I don't want it to be $800." It's like: "Well, we can work with you.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Which, you know, in our parlance, that's Manufacturer Solutions , which is great. If you wanna be under the price of the generic you're competing with, gosh, you can buy this down on GoodRx and actually have, you know, an ability to put your drug at a price point that people, individuals, want to interact with.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Do you see a lot of opportunities like that?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I do. I do. I do. And again, it—that's how we've probably shifted. Shifted may even be the wrong word. We're honing the focus of our Manufacturer Solutions effort.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Because if you think about a brand owner or a brand steward of a drug, what GoodRx really brings that's unique is we're a marketplace for people looking for a drug at a price point. And so anybody with a brand drug that maybe competes with another brand, maybe competes with generics, and you really care about the end price, we're kind of uniquely suited to be the vehicle by which you can translate that price to people. So yeah, I do. It's actually the thing that kind of coming in, I was most excited about.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I'm a little frustrated by the fact that if I could get every market access person in this room, there's a set of drugs-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

They're all, they're all here.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I'm trying! Like, but you, you really could take, you know, probably about 125 brands and be like: "This is a no-brainer." And so that's, you know, just the work that you have to do to go get in front of people and actually get it, get them to structure real programs.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Karsten, you talked earlier about cannibalization between the two programs, ISP and traditional GoodRx. Did you put a number around that? You said it was very small as far as the number of people.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah. I think from an overlap perspective, both the quantum of people and the medications have really low overlap. So we'd historically talked about it being in the single-digit %, so very, very low.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

You know, there's been a lot of talk at this conference around transparency, and there's new pricing models in the marketplace. CVS came out with something called CostVantage. There's expectations that other drug retailers could move more in that direction. We have PBMs that are offering transparent business models, transparency to their customers. Can you talk about if there's any impact on GoodRx as we start to think about some of these new cost-plus type models?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah. We'll, we'll definitely tag team that one.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah, I think broadly, I love the way you started that, which is transparency is the theme. That helps us, right?

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

The things that, the minute anybody talks about what does this cost, and value, okay, that helps GoodRx.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

So CVS specifically and CostVantage, that actually is the way that we are interacting with CVS on a whole bunch of direct drugs. So it actually fits in with how we, as GoodRx, are not only working with GoodRx, but now working with retail.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

So in some ways, CostVantage, that's good. Now, you know, I don't know if you wanna give some more thoughts on it-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah, I think-

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... but it actually fits in line with the trend, you know, on how we're actually approaching our retail partners.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah, I think this, broadly speaking, Lisa, it goes to the question of what the landscape looks like and, and narrower, the competitive landscape. And as we think about that, you know, over the years, we've seen a variety of different entities try and compete with us. Like, Cuban came out with some announcements at one point, and I think folks were sort of worried about that. Before that, Amazon came out with announcements. They used to drop them on, somewhat ironically, on the same day as our earnings dates usually, which was interesting. But the reality is neither one has had an impact.

Even expanding the aperture from there, when we look at what GoodRx offers, meaning the breadth, meaning entire formulary that's out there, the reach, meaning you can use GoodRx in 70,000+ pharmacies, it's not some weird mail order thing, and the pricing. When you combine those three factors, no one else can come close to what we do, and they haven't historically been able to, period, come close to what we do. The competitive dynamic and the competitive question set that at least I get receded because of that, because I think folks are beginning to understand that it's all three variables matter. If you don't have a full formulary like Cuban, kinda isn't that competitive. If you don't have availability like Amazon, kinda isn't that effective.

Frankly, if you don't have the right price points, that doesn't work either. And because GoodRx has that combination, that's a big reason that we're the number one referral from healthcare providers. Even our competitors have referred to us as the Kleenex of prescription discounts in healthcare provider offices, which I take as a compliment.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

When I think about, you know, these transparent models and cost vantage, you talk about, you know, your pricing advantage, you talk about the breadth of where you can pick up the script, et cetera. When I think about drug retail, and I think a lot of people know that I've followed drug retail for a long time, you've had this cross-subsidization for a very long time, where they were cross-subsidizing branded and losing money on branded and making a ton of money on generics. That probably created more opportunity for you to be able to have a better price. If that cross-subsidization changes where, you know, they have the better price on branded and bring down their pricing on generic, does that impact your model in any way?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah, it would certainly, you know, I'd say, move the pieces.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Okay.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

But I don't think it fundamentally changes the value prop-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

No

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... which is a benefit relative to whatever your insurance is. All right?

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

So back, you know, coming at it differently, which is, oh, is there something relative to somebody's deductible, copay or uncovered drugs?

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

-that's the solve? The retail cross-subsidization, which, you know, I'm now, boy, more up to speed than ever I thought I would be on it, has really messed up each of the pieces. Like, it's-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

It has, yes.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

It's crazy. If that gets cleaner, I actually think it helps, and I think we're now starting to... The programs that we have in place.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... in some ways are starting to clean up some of that cross-subsidization, like, at a little level. But, like, when we're going into-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... Walgreens or CVS, for example, we're super focused on helping them hit margin and target and incremental traffic goals that in some way, in our, you know, little contribution to the world, is like cleaning up some of that cross-subsidization. Yeah.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

No, that's helpful. You know, it appears you'll end 2023 with MAC growth in the low single digits for the year. How do you approach MAC growth and how might that look, you know, with ISP partnerships coming online next year?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure, yeah. Just to give a relative perspective on this year and last year, we talked about obviously mid-single-digit growth, and that mid-single-digit growth is sort of at the nominal level. I think when you think about it, though, we've talked over the last few quarters about various things we've done in the business. Like, for example, shuttering our VitaCare offering, which contributed mid-single digits of dollars last year, and will increase our margins, we believe. We've also talked about things like moving away from the Kroger Savings Club program within our subscriptions offering, which will also cost sort of mid-single digits, millions of dollars, and focusing more on point-of-sale rebates as a marketing tool, kinda like coupons for users, first-time users to use GoodRx. All of those things are effectively impacting revenue.

So if you look at sort of growth net of those things, we believe the growth rate on a like-for-like basis is even higher. And in connection with that, taking it to max, we also see, based on that reality, the potential for acceleration in our MAC growth relative to what you've seen from us in the past.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

We talked a little bit about competition earlier. You know, everyone loves that Amazon headline, right?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Mm-hmm.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

When I think, though, from a PBM perspective, there's one PBM, one large PBM, that has their own price-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Mm-hmm

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

... transparency tool. When I think about the competitive landscape around price transparency tools and, and those that you work with versus, you know, those that have their own, can you maybe talk about the differentiated value proposition that convinces them not to build their own offering? So, you know, if I think about this, right, the two other PBMs actually have more volume than the third one that has their-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Tool

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

...transparency tool. So-

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

It's a weird. I mean, again, sorry to, like, state this with a high-level statement, but that, the whole dynamic of that is kind of weird. Like, the fact of, oh, their own price transparency tool, but why and where? What is it trans- and as a-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... you know, as a purchaser of all sorts of plans, the dynamic and interaction, you know, as a consumer of healthcare plans and other companies when we were, you know, negotiating-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... and dealing with them every year, if a PBM's bringing forward their own price transparency tool, a little bit of it is, well, wait a minute, why isn't this in the, in, you know... What, what, what is this different than what I'm getting regularly? Now, there's a whole bunch of other tools that, as you know, sit, like, at the retail counter-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... that, honestly, if you think about it from a patient or even a pharmacist standpoint, add no value and probably consume more energy in the system that are attempts to deal with this cross-subsidization.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Right? They're not actually adding consumer benefit, and they're actually adding more work at the pharmacy counter. They're just trying to steer-

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... marginal economics. So they're a little weird. I think from GoodRx's standpoint, if we approach retail and say: Wow! Well, we're gonna create ways that you're making money.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

There's a great patient benefit. It actually cleans up a lot of work at the counter and ends up in a better spot.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

And, Lisa, just to add one quick thing there. I think when you look back at the history of some of the PBMs we're working with now in the context of ISP, they tried that too. Like, there was a product called, and I think I'm gonna get this right, called Right Price, that launched in, I think it was 2020 or 2021, and it was a PBM-specific offering to offer discounts at cash to their existing sponsors and their employees. That PBM stopped offering that and now works with GoodRx for all of these services. And I think that's pretty telling, that empirically in the market, folks have tried before at the PBM level to do this independently, and it hasn't been as successful as working with GoodRx has proven to be for them, and of course, for us.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

If, if I understand it in a very simplistic way, if I'm a single PBM and I'm offering price transparency or offering discounts the way that you are, I can do it off of the contracts that I have. The difference with GoodRx is that you have access to far greater number of contracts and the opportunity to be able to accumulate a better price by looking at multiple pricing sources rather than a single pricing source?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

So yes, and we're able to have an incremental benefit as opposed to the structure of a whole plan. So again, if you're managing the profit pools of plan design there, right? Like you're really, I think, trying to protect a lot of price points, so the cannibalization on your own is probably really hard to do. And our ability as GoodRx to be a consumer-focused, event-driven value prop, which is somebody has a specific drug need at a specific point in time relative to their plan, and we're able to get them that discount.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I think that also makes it a much cleaner individual and patient experience.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Okay.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Does that make sense?

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yes.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Another really big factor here, too, just to jump in on Scott, is brand absolutely matters here.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Meaning, when an employee goes to HR department and says, "The portion of the benefits burden passed to me is getting bigger each year, but when I have to fill a prescription, I use GoodRx?" They say, "I use GoodRx." The HR folks then go to their PBMs and say, "What the heck's going on? My employees. You're charging me more every year. I can't really lower copays because they help to defray the cost of the overall pharmacy benefit. My employees are using GoodRx. This is a mess. What do I do?" And so the whole ISP program, its gestation came from employees pulling through employers through PBMs because we have, de facto, the best brand in this space.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

So ignoring the contracting side of it for a second, the dominant variable for us is people know who GoodRx is, and we draw people in.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's helpful. So on the direct contracting side with pharmacies, has been a path to drive incremental volumes for both GoodRx and for the pharmacy. We touched a little bit on this, but can you walk through the benefit, not just for GoodRx, but also to the pharmacies? Is it just simply volume, more front-end traffic?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah, you wanna, you wanna go?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Yeah. I think, the direct contracting is a really exciting, aspect of our business for us because what it's really allowed us to do is partner up in ways that Scott alluded to earlier. For example, ensuring that pharmacies have the appropriate margins that they want. In some cases, being able to share upside with pharmacies, to the extent that we both meet targets that are useful to them and to us. So what it's done is it's originally came out of the issues we had with one retailer in specific, and in the "don't waste a crisis" reality, we said: This gives us a real opportunity to partner up with other retailers in ways we haven't historically. And that's worked out for us exactly as...

Well, maybe better than we hoped it would, is probably the right way of putting it, because it's made the relationships incredibly symbiotic. And the biggest pharmacies are ones that we've worked with, as we've talked about in the past, like CVS, Walgreens, et cetera. So we're super excited about that prospect, I think is, is probably the best way to characterize it, and we anticipate that while it's not going to be a majority of our volume anytime soon-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... we see it as essential to making sure that the dialogue with the pharmacies is open, continuous, transparent, I'll use that word again-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

... and that we make sure we're in a win-win.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Oh, can I-- I'll just add a story to-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yes, that'd be great.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... reflect how this you know is rolling. When I walked into the company and I said, "Hey, tell me how this interaction with retail works. I would assume we have data APIs flowing back and forth, and it with, on certain categories, every retailer's like: Do you want to be high? Do you want to be number one? Do you want to be low? What's your margin target? Do you want to be better than somebody else or not?" And the reaction was, "Well, we kinda do that." And it's like, "Well, that's an opportunity.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

That really is when we talk about direct contracting; it's getting to that point. With one of the major retailers in the fall, it was nice because they... There were two different stories in this, one of which is, they came and said, "You know what? We'd love to, like, bump our margin a little bit." And within 48 hours, we had a meaningful incremental margin delivery to them, which, you know, was changing some pricing that they asked for. Cold and flu season came up, and they said: We wanna, we wanna win cold and flu. Immediately, you know, we worked with them very quickly, put that into place, and then they totally popped traffic, which I think is that dynamic, and how really we should be working with every retailer on an ongoing basis.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

You talked a little earlier when you talked about the $800 story when we talked about manufacturing services.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Mm-hmm.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

But when we think about the manufacturing solutions, you've been clear on your focus on scaling that side of your business, and also as part of, as it relates to restructuring, right? There's some restructuring that's going on in that business. You've deprioritized less profitable sides of the business, including VitaCare. I think you-

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Mm

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

... mentioned that, Karsten.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yep.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Where are you in the evolution of the offering, and where is the team's effort really focused these days?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah, thanks. It's, it's pretty early. So for everybody around, you know, manufacturing solutions is a, about a $100 million revenue business for us. It started about three years ago-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Right

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... with the realization of, wow, we have over 10 million plus users a year, $15 billion of savings, all this prescription transactions. Boy, there's other models that say you should be able to run a direct marketing advertising business around that. And really, the last three years, I think, were a big experiment that shows that there's value because it ended up producing $100 million of revenue in a pretty short period of time. That if you look at other healthcare ad businesses, like a Doximity-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... we got to that number faster. That's not a us versus them thing, but it's a nice way to track, hey, is there, is there fundamental value here? Now we really are at what I'd call the first stage of V2 of its evolution-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... which is, okay, we've figured out what we do really well, and who does it apply to? Now we're showing up to those people and brands with a structured offering that hopefully can scale. It's still, it's still in early days, but it's, you know, refining and honing in on what we do well, and that's what we're gonna build a business on.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

We only have about a minute left together, but I just want to talk about cash flow for a minute. I mean, you are a cash flow generating business.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

We have it, which is nice.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

What are the key capital deployment priorities at this point?

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Sure, I'll do this one really quick to make sure we have room for more. But at this point, we have deprioritized certainly M&A, as we've talked about in the past, and I think we're evaluating, given we're in a net cash positive position, net of debt, and debt costs are increasing, exactly how we'll use that. So more to follow, but yeah, I think at this point we've deprioritized sort of M&A, and we see margin increasing over time, as we've talked about, both historically and forward-looking, and that margin correlates with cash flow, so.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

I think I need to say this. I mean, we've, you know, it's in the filing. We've bought a bunch of stock-

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Yeah

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... over the last quarter. For those of you who might have followed even my career and background, buying back stock when you, when you generate a lot of cash, doing so at the right time is a really good way.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Mm-hmm. Yeah

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

... to create shareholder value, and we're certainly attuned to that. Not only, let's call it not only that dynamic, but the ongoing opportunity that provides going forward.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

I know we're out of time, but Scott, you know, there's a lot of things that you're working on. What do you hope people will appreciate 12 months from now that maybe they don't appreciate about GoodRx today?

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Yeah. That it's actually not a... It's actually a reasonably simple story. And there was a lot of chuckling around that 'cause, boy, there could. But, if one believes that the dynamics of plans, you know, push more deductibles up, co-pays up, drugs up benefit, then this is a consumer-oriented way to add real value to people in the world that's kind of unique in healthcare. And the things that we're working on are supporting that in a way that hopefully we can take, you know, $15 billion of annual savings, and I think there's ways to grow it to $30 billion plus. And, you know, that's what we're working on.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Great. Well, thank you very much, everyone.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Thank you.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Thank you.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

So nice to meet you.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Thanks, everybody.

Karsten Voermann
CFO, GoodRx

Thanks, Lisa.

Scott Wagner
Interim CEO, GoodRx

Appreciate it.

Lisa Gill
Managing Director, JPMorgan

Thank you very much.

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