Hi, thank you all for coming. My pleasure to introduce Liquidity Services. Bill Angrick is CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder. Jorge Celaya, CFO. Bill, you want to start?
Thank you, Jean, and welcome. Pleased to be with you here in New York and give you a quick update on who we are. Liquidity Services has been a pioneer in the circular economy marketplace for nearly 25 years, and we have the e-commerce platform, the buyer liquidity, and a set of services to help any organization around the world monetize inventory and equipment in their supply chain. Circular economy is a very nice differentiation in e-commerce. We help the seller community, whether they be a government agency, e-commerce retailer, or an industrial manufacturing firm, capture more value out of the equipment they already own. We know that there is a deep pool of buyers that would love to have access to used equipment and return merchandise if they knew where to find it. Thus, we have created that platform to attract that buyer base.
Sellers have been able to utilize this at scale around the world through a single one-stop solution. You look at the representation of our buyer and our seller community, we're the best in the world at what we do, and we're a market leader in every industry vertical in the economy. We're very mission-driven, and I think our sellers embrace that. We exist to help benefit sellers, buyers, and the planet, both from a financial perspective and from a sustainability perspective. I think corporate boards around the world are looking for ways to meet their OKRs on being a better steward of the environment, and we help them achieve that. For buyers, buyers are looking to trade down and save money, especially in periods of economic volatility and uncertainty. Every asset we have is available right now.
It's not subject to going through a port or being subject to export rules and tariffs, so we're very convenient for the buyer community. We've built the business really the old-fashioned way. We have a great value proposition. We attracted each individual customer to get more money on a net recovery basis using our marketplace, and we've allowed buyers to benefit from accessing this material and equipment through a convenient online experience. Both you as an investor, me as a business manager, we do a lot of things online now. We've been able to save money on travel and expense, and that's helped fuel interest in a cloud-based marketplace. We grow our business through increasing the value recovered on what we sell, sell it for more money, and we do that through enriching the asset descriptions and having more buyers compete for the assets.
We do that by allowing sellers to move all of their volume online and add new sellers to the platform, and that volume helps benefit both sellers and buyers. We handle all of the pre and post-value added services, so that service extension and expansion helps us satisfy our sellers and grow our revenue base. We are leveraging this research and development in our tech platform across multiple industry verticals and multiple geographies to help grow the business. Sellers are here to capture more value, convenience. We think the emergence of our circular economy marketplace and our Asset AI is going to continue to transform how organizations manage and sell in every industry vertical. Today, using software and services, we help the buyers quickly assess what's available to help them in their business, what is a profit opportunity for resellers.
About half of our buyer base are end users who will use that equipment in their business, and they'll use the savings to grow their business and hire more people and market their services. The other half are resellers. They buy from us and resell for a profit. We use that engine of opportunity to attract and grow the buyer side. We have a number of environmental and economic growth opportunities for the markets we serve. We benefit the communities we serve. We have a lot of philanthropic interaction with where we have employees. We have about eight distribution center hubs and corporate offices in the United States and Canada. We have presence in Europe and Asia. We have a very transparent, trusted platform and governance structure that is highly coveted by government sellers and Fortune 1000 publicly traded sellers.
We're the safest, most transparent place to transact, which insulates our sellers from waste, fraud, and abuse. Large fragmented global market, lots of runway for us to continue to leverage our buyer base and the liquidity. We're about a $1.6 billion GMV run rate today. We have individual verticals alone, which will be a billion dollar GMV for us, such as the heavy equipment industrial category, yellow iron construction equipment, vehicle fleets. In the commercial sector, we're leveraging this buyer base that we've already built across lots of new sellers using our tech and software, which is a differentiated position from full-service auctioneers. Lots of tailwinds continue to help support the need for our service. We know that as more commerce shifts online, there's a higher volume of returns in the retail industry. We know that buyers prefer to search for, find, and buy equipment online.
We're the most well-indexed, highest organic search marketplace because of the fresh content that we serve through our auction platform, so that's helping benefit us. There's tremendous product innovation and product obsolescence that results in a cascade of inventory and equipment flowing into the circular economy. That's not going to abate anytime soon. That includes technology obsolescence of consumer products, which creates a need for a liquid marketplace to handle less than current technology. And both sides benefit from extending the useful life of these assets. We're circumventing the landfill system. None of this needs to be idle in a corner of a warehouse. There's someone who's willing and ready to buy that asset if they know where to find and buy on our platform. On the seller side, the culture and history of Liquidity Services is to align ourselves with successfully completed transactions.
Other than our machine marketplace, which is a recurring revenue ad model, we do not make money until our sellers have successfully completed transactions. We align with maximizing GMV. We collect a share of revenue or profit on completed transactions. About 80% of our GMV is on the consignment pricing model. For the other 20% that is on purchase, that is really to serve the needs of strong historical customers who have a variety of end-of-quarter, end-of-year reasons to have a purchase order. In the retail segment, where a Sarbanes-Oxley rule requires that we take a flash invoice when the returned merchandise leaves their fulfillment center or their physical store, we add value for things like shipping and logistics, payment collection. We do not run a bank. We do not run a shipping company.
We have affiliate partners that are integrated through our APIs into our marketplace, and we provide transparency on shipping costs and take a share of that revenue once the transaction is booked and completed. We also have a lot of opportunity to sell software and services. We think we're in the inception of a boom in what I call asset AI. Everything that goes into our marketplace is sort of like a snowflake. It's been owned by a particular seller for a certain period of time and has a certain user history, a certain provenance. The task is capturing that unique story using software and computer vision so that that next owner can quickly assess its value. We can do that at scale with the most effective process, we think, in the circular economy and use that as a value add for sellers and buyers.
We continue to grow the business on the Machinio listing side. Machinio, unlike the other parts of our business, is a classifieds marketplace. Machinio uses software to catalog and organize the global supply of used machinery. It creates a buyer-facing discovery process that is more expedient and relevant than major search engines. We get paid by the seller on an annual revenue subscription basis to list their entire catalog. For us, it serves as a beautiful upper funnel of leads, knowing who the sellers are, what their sentiment is, what their listing prices are, and we can feed that flow of information into our auction marketplace. The marketplace has continued to support our North Star of Rule of 40 growth. We look at profitable growth as imperative.
We're growing organically in the 10%-20% top line, and we will give guidance on GMV, that gross merchandise value transacted, which is the true economic activity in our marketplace. We will focus you on direct profit as our net revenue, which neutralizes whether it's a consignment or purchase model transaction and even dog growth. The business has benefited from that network effect of more supply in the marketplace, attracting buyer activity, more transaction volume, and leveraging our fixed costs to grow the business. We have three principal segments that we break out in every quarterly release. The largest segment currently is our GovDeals segment, which serves state, county, and local municipalities that use our service and our marketplace as a one-stop solution for everything in their supply chain.
We provide our software tools to these agency sellers and train them to capture that information of what they have to sell. It's every infrastructure asset you can imagine: vehicles, equipment to maintain roads and bridges, the IT equipment inside your business functions within government. It's every asset that's used in power generation, managing ports, managing telecommunications. All of that equipment is depreciated and sold at some point, and it flows into the GovDeals marketplace. The flow is largely self-directed from the agencies. They get to set the auction duration, a reasonable reserve price, the starting bid price using a lot of data analytics support that we provide. It is very convenient for the government seller. It empowers them to take control of the process.
In the end, they get higher net recovery because we're able to offer them a very effective commission rate based on our software-enabled services. This business is both a very well-established business, having done this for over 20 years. We're the market leader, yet we're only about 15% penetrated in the overall opportunity in the public sector space. Twenty years in, we're still finding huge municipalities in parts of the United States that are coming online. For example, New York City is a new client. The state of New York is a new client. We're densifying the entire sort of upper northeast of the United States on this platform. There's tremendous growth there. We're also handling not only the personal property assets, but now the real estate assets for government clients.
These could be buildings, pieces of land, warehouses, or judicial foreclosed real estate, which is handled largely through the county sheriff system. Crazy enough, a lot of those tax lien sales occur in person in the county courthouse. We have to show up with a sealed envelope and a check to participate. We are thinking, "We might have a better opportunity to do that digitally. We might save you some time and grow the buyer base if you move that digitally to GovDeals." We are well along in growing this base. By the way, real estate is a $4 billion opportunity. We have about $150 million of real estate being transacted right now online. We think that could be a billion-dollar vertical. The retail supply chain group represents about 20% of our GMV.
We have leveraged this two-sided marketplace to create an industry-wide solution for retailers to manage returns. If you're in online retail, you're going to be dealing with about 30% of your sales coming back as return goods. It is a significant cost of doing business. Our job is to reduce that supply chain cost of returns. How do we do that? We provide the liquid buyer base to quickly recover value. We provide the logistics solutions to move those return goods out of the way, out of your store, out of your fulfillment center, which is largely mechanized with robots doing the work. There aren't people to look through open box returns. We need to get it out of the way. We get it listed and sold quickly.
We give our retail clients the same option to use our software to list and sell direct or use a fully managed service where we do the listing for our clients and charge a higher commission as a result. The volume of returns continues to explode. Customers are buying pretty much everything for their house, their business, their workout facility, their lawn and garden online. It is resulting in a lot of challenges for retailers to manage this process. Our solution fills that void perfectly with incredible buyer liquidity and the supply chain logistics support to reduce the friction of getting those products moving out of the way and sold. The buyer base continues to find more value buying returns in light of inflation headwinds and even challenges with potential export tariffs.
The trade down to buying used is a very nice tailwind for our retail business. Finally, the capital asset group or CAG segment is the remaining 20% of our GMV. We're doing the same thing for industrial, capital-intensive corporate sellers as we do for the government. This is largely a consignment business. They use our software to list on our platform. We're a one-stop solution. We sell everything from the manufacturing and production equipment around the world for these clients. We sell the vehicle fleets that deliver the product or the service or the fuel to the end consumer for these clients. We give them a single pane of glass and platform to manage all of their activity across a multinational organization in a uniform manner with trackable metrics. We prevent waste, fraud, and abuse by having a very compliant, audit-ready system.
If you have assets in the Asia-Pacific region or in the Middle East and you're concerned about Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or who's going to be handling the money, we take all of that risk off the table by using this end-to-end software and auction marketplace platform. Our business continues to benefit from what I would say constant cyclical innovation and repositioning of products and services. There's always something happening where you're sunsetting one set of assets, refreshing your technology supply chain, your industrial supply chain, and there's a ready buyer base to take whatever is no longer needed by our corporate clients in our CAG segment. One other note I would make is domestically, we have really leaned into the heavy equipment construction vertical, seeing the great success that we've had in the government arena.
We've brought on all of the name brand dealers who sell and lease heavy construction equipment, and that business is growing rapidly. It's a very strong value proposition. We're giving our clients more convenience, and they're paying about half the commission rate as they would pay to a full-service auctioneer to manage and sell this equipment. That business, we believe, is a billion-dollar category in the commercial segment for Liquidity Services, and we're just reaching a $100 million run rate. We think there's a 10x growth opportunity for commercial heavy equipment. Outside of the transaction marketplace, we have our Machinio software solutions business. First, the Machinio marketplace is a global marketplace. 50% of the revenue-paying customers are outside the U.S., so it scales really well outside the U.S. Sellers are looking to get qualified buyer leads for their equipment. They want to set the price.
They want to set the terms. We give them the opportunity to create their own listings on Machinio. We've also added a sales office in China because there's more used equipment in China than North America and Europe combined. That's a nice growth opportunity. The reason we call this and software solutions is our recently acquired Auction Software acquisition is going to be reporting through this segment. Auction Software is a very unique business. It provides a white-label auction platform services to organizations of all sizes, and it's giving us an opportunity to have a platform play in providing all the software tools that our business buyers need to resell to consumers what they source through our Liquidation.com platform.
We're going to be networking that group of reseller customers who are going to be licensing the Auction Software platform to create a large consumer marketplace for these returned consumer goods. Much like Etsy is a place for people to set up shop to sell homemade goods, we're going to be doing that for returned merchandise. We're very excited about the growth of Machinio and now the Auction Software solution that we acquired. On a financial result basis, again, solid, profitable growth is our core culture and mission. We've funded the business through free cash flow for the entirety of our history. We've never really carried any debt. We try to balance multi-year important investments to create the next opportunities with current cash flow and results. We run the business in a very steady, balanced scorecard approach.
We're not trying to necessarily maximize current quarter results. We're trying to maximize market share and market leadership so that we can capture the next several billion dollars of GMV. In terms of some of the year-over-year trends, we had some margin compression in our retail supply chain group owing to the mix of goods being less valuable in the current period versus the prior period. As you would see from GMV and direct profit, we continue to expand our growth, and we think we're going to leverage that into higher EBITDA and cash flow going forward. We have a mix of about 80% consignment, 20% purchase. With respect to purchase, we really do not have inventory risk because it's more arbitrage. We set the rate card to meet the seller's accounting requirements to have a purchase invoice by knowing what the buyer is going to pay.
We work back, adding our margin in, and create that strike price. We do not hold inventory. We are really turning things over measured in days or weeks, not quarters. Very high velocity, high throughput marketplace. The buyer side of our marketplace is very powerful for us. We could grow our business by 3x with our current buyer base. There is so much liquidity available. $3 billion-$5 billion of liquidity is measured by the amount of working capital those buyers have to play. We are a very diversified business across these three segments. We are the most diversified we have ever been. What we are doing now is cross-pollinating our buyer base through a unified tech platform.
If you're buying construction equipment on GovDeals, the next week you'd be buying construction equipment from Caterpillar or from a corporate user who's got some % of their fleet they no longer need. We're finding ways to cross-pollinate our tech platform and our buyer base to grow all of these segments. Some non-cash comp expense and limited CapEx. We're going to spend in the range of $5 million-$6 million of annual CapEx a year. Most of the EBITDA less CapEx is going straight to free cash flow. You'll see that other than the December quarter where we have some bonus payouts, we're generating really good cash flow. We have neutral working capital requirements because we don't collect a lot of receivables. We don't have a lot of inventory. We're generating essentially a float as we grow.
We collect the money from the buyer, and that fuels our free cash flow. With respect to use of capital, you may note that we have zero financial debt on the balance sheet, nearly $140 million of cash. We've been the acquirer of choice in this very niche circular economy marketplace. Legacy founder-led businesses come to us because they know we'll take great care of their associates and their customers. We've had several tuck-ins that have been very successful. Machinio was a great example. We bought a business named Sierra Auction in January of 2024. That's been very effective in helping us grow both the GovDeals and commercial markets in the Arizona, Nevada, California markets. I mentioned the Auction Software business, a founder-led business, giving us great access to engineering talent in the Dallas, Texas, and Chennai, India markets, fueling further growth and research and development.
We think we're well positioned to define the standards for Asset AI to help our clients capture the right information in a highly automated way that'll enhance the descriptions and the ultimate value realization. Auction Software and that team will play a vital role there. We're always looking, and we have a great pipeline of tuck-in ideas. I think you're going to see the evolution of our business from an investment perspective increasingly build out the heavy equipment marketplace, both organically and through acquisition in the commercial space, the online real estate marketplace, which we think is poised to continue to digitize. We have a strong foothold in the government sector for real estate, which is a really nice differentiation. We think we'll have international expansion.
We know that there's a tremendous signal of demand outside the U.S. through Machinio, which is $20 billion of used equipment listed. We have a multinational, multi-currency configuration for our AllSurplus and our GovDeals platform. That has broad application outside of the U.S. We are looking forward to growing in those areas. Thank you for your attention. Jorge, our CFO, and I are happy to answer any questions in the rear.
Yeah. Are there any instances where buyers and sellers could bypass the marketplace and just deal with each other directly? How do you manage that risk?
There are a couple of elements to that. Machinio is designed to put the buyer and the seller in contact directly with one another. Machinio, as a classified platform, plays no role in collecting the money or even vetting the buyer.
There is a demand for sellers to generate leads, and we're doing it better than Google. They pay us very good money. It's a high-margin, high-growth business. We're happy to do that in that one arena. The other part of our business, that would have been a day-one question. We start an auction business. You're using our platform as opposed to some other way to sell for a reason. You have a higher conversion rate, higher net sales value. A lot of sellers kiss a lot of toes before they find a prince, so to speak. We vet our buyers. We know your tax ID number, your DUNS number. We will collect a bid deposit to make sure you're financially capable to perform. We handle all the buyer-facing customer service.
All our sellers need to do is use our software, use what we are now calling Asset AI to get the right description on the platform. At that point, we take over. We merchandise the assets across 5.7 million registered buyers. We collect the money from the buyer. We remit the proceeds net of any commissions or logistics costs that we handle on behalf of the seller. The seller gets an accurate accounting, whether there's any VAT tax or anything else. That buyer and seller experience, starting from the first auction to now like $13 billion of completed GMV, is exclusively happening on Liquidity Services. Of course, there are other places to transact. You can buy a truck from a local dealer. You can go online and find something on Craigslist or eBay. The world is full of digital channels.
The question is, what's the certainty of closure? What's the convenience? And how much time do you have? Our government agency sellers and a lot of the corporate staff they work with, they're stretched very thin. Corporate America has hollowed out a lot of the corporate back office in the last four or five years. They're trying to do more with less. We step into that. We provide very elegant software, a one-stop solution so they can move everything through a single platform to take a lot of that burden off of their hands and give them a better outcome.
Given the growing value of the network that you're describing, could there ever be over maybe 10-15 years an opportunity to shift more of the revenue to a subscription model?
Is it about more of the nature of the transactions to be chunky such that that would be economically?
We have a platform play in a couple of respects. First, we like collecting commissions because you can collect like 10x the amount of economic value for a commission versus just paying for a lead. The question is, how do you grow and expand the activity on your platform so that you have a greater share of the economy essentially transacted by Liquidity Services? When I say economy, circular economy transact. We want to be the final arbiter of value in the circular economy. We want everyone selling everything in the supply chain that's not new on our platform. That's a great differentiation. We're not selling commodity items you can find on Amazon or Alibaba.
Everything that we sell has had a prior owner, has some provenance of being used. That is a great point of differentiation. How are we a platform play? Machinio is a platform. It is giving every dealer in the world a place to move all of their equipment using software, and it is updated hourly every day. Now that it is on the platform and we know the seller's listing price, we are funneling leads and tracking all that information. We are able to evaluate the age of the listings. Are they getting liquidity through their negotiation process? If not, we can move them into a transactional platform and convert a $10,000 annual subscription to a $100,000 commission for that one seller. You get a 10x uptick. We love that. There is a continuum. There is the full auction experience, and then there is the classified experience.
What about in between? What if the seller lists at $150,000? You get nibbles in the auction marketplace at $90,000. How do you close that gap? You can use software on Machinio to close that gap with make-and-offer negotiation tools where we collect the money from the buyer and we facilitate agreement on price. It is not auction, it is not classified, but there is a take-rate opportunity in between for us. Instead of maybe 12%-15% in the full auction, it might be 5%. $20 billion of used equipment sitting in the classified Machinio platform, maybe we can start to peel off a couple billion where we get that make-and-offer tool and have a 5% take rate. That is a $100 million revenue opportunity just on the Machinio platform. Another example is the Auction Software platform opportunity.
If you give this community of millions of businesses that are reselling for profit, give them the tools to be successful reselling in our circular economy niche. We're the Shopify slash Etsy of the circular economy. Now, Etsy exists to help creators make money. We exist to help small business resellers make money by buying the stuff that everyone's returned that, frankly, needs someone to kind of sift through it and categorize it, repackage it, and sell it. There are a lot of people that need that extra source of income, the reseller community. These are small kitchen table entrepreneurs looking to make money. They're paying 15% to eBay to resell to consumers. We can give them our auction software platform. They might be paying 5% commission. They keep more money. We have an integration with our buyer community that we're already serving.
That's a big platform opportunity. That's a billion-dollar GMV opportunity. Again, you think about it, we're willing to take a lower take rate. Why? Because it's a more scalable, high-margin business. I think as you see the evolution of retail over time, you're going to see more of it be in these asset-light services and less in sort of purchase model where you're booking 100% of the GMV as GAAP revenue.
Lastly, for the users that are using kind of the marketplace to resell, would you ever want to capture the economics to where that is finally ending up, or is that too small compared to the opportunities you're looking at today?
I think we're going to do both.
If you think of a franchise operation, you want to be eating your own pudding in the sense of, we're going to sell you, look, use our software and resell down in Georgia returns. We're going to set up some of our own resell activities on the same platform to validate that it's a great margin enhancement opportunity. We may have essentially like an affiliate of resellers covering the entire United States. For every one of those consumer listings, we're going to create a cross-listing marketplace where buyers go to find the great deals and consumer returns. Yes. Final question because I think we're about out of time.
We did the second one. Can you go through important metrics or product and then market mix? In addition to that, maybe you can touch on one-time transactional revenue that can happen across different segments.
I want you to look at the last earnings press release, which breaks out by segment, GMV, revenue, and direct profit. That's done every quarter. You can see the trend lines there. We're happy to talk to you further about any nuances or questions by segment, but I think that's a good place to start. You had a question. I don't want to cut you off. Did you still? Yeah. Yeah.
If you have time, can you talk about how you attract sellers to GovDeals? What is that?
Yeah. Beautiful. I would say not only for GovDeals, but every segment, one of the greatest things we've done is we've been doing this for 20 years. We've satisfied these sellers. They all work on continuing professional education. They attend industry conferences, supply chain best practices conferences.
We're typically at 100 conferences a year on a stage like this talking about pain points in managing and selling either used equipment or return goods. We're often presenting case study examples alongside our clients to a room full of prospects like this. That has created a lot of goodwill and trust. Our strongest source of new clients is our existing customer base, quite frankly, through that process. Enterprise salesforce, heavy dose of thought leadership through industry associations. We're also on national cooperative contracts where government agencies can order our services right off the cooperative contract without doing an RFP, which is another huge advantage of earned trust in doing what we do. Thank you for your time and enjoy the conference.