Global-E Online Ltd. Q1 FY2024 Earnings Call

Welcome to Global-e's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Announcement Conference Call. This call is being simultaneously webcast on the company's website in the Investor Relations section under News and Events. For opening remarks and introductions, I will now turn the call over to Erica Mannion at Sapphire Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning. With me today from Global-e are Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Ofer Koren, Chief Financial Officer; and Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President. Amir will begin with a review of the business results for the first quarter of 2024. Ofer will then review the financial results for the first quarter of 2024, followed by the company's outlook for the second quarter and full year of 2024. We will then open the call for questions. Certain statements we make today may constitute forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that relate to our current expectations and views of future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and assumptions, some of which are beyond our control. In addition, these forward-looking statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and not a guarantee of future performance. Actual outcomes may differ materially from the information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those set forth in the section titled Risk Factors of our prospectus filed with the SEC on September 13, 2021, and other documents filed with or furnished to the SEC. These statements reflect management's current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date of this call. You should not put undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Although, we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee that future results, levels of activity, performance and events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or will occur. Except as required by applicable law, we make no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise after the date on which the statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Please refer to our press release dated May 20, 2024 for additional information. In addition, certain metrics we will discuss today are non-GAAP metrics. The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute or is superior to financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operating decision making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operating decision making. For more information on the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release dated May 20, 2024. Throughout this call, we provide a number of key performance indicators used by our management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release dated May 20, 2024. I will now turn the call over to Amir, Co-Founder and CEO.

Thank you, Erica, and welcome, everyone. With the financial results of Q1, which we are releasing today, we are off to a great start of what we believe will be yet another pivotal year of growth for Global-e. GMV, revenues, and adjusted EBITDA all beat the top of our forecasted range for the quarter, with GMV growing 32% year-on-year, revenues growing 24%, and adjusted EBITDA growing 47%. These strong results manifest our team's continued execution across all elements of the business, coupled with our effectiveness in controlling costs and the fact that macro conditions during the quarter were slightly more favorable than what we initially anticipated back in February. Moreover, we remain confident in our ability to uphold our plans for the remainder of the year, as is reflected in our updated guidance for the full year of 2024. Most notably, the large client launches planned for the second half of the year are on track, and Shopify Markets Pro continues to amass merchants at the planned pace. Among other things, we believe both these factors will contribute to our ability to accelerate growth in the second half of the year. Later in this call, Ofer will review our Q1 results in more detail, and he will provide you with our guidance for Q2 and our raised guidance for the full year of 2024. But before we do that, I would like to share with you some of the exciting business developments we have seen recently. During Q1, we continued to experience strong demand for our services across all markets we operate in. Many renowned brands went live with Global-e services. In the U.S., designer brands Donna Karan and DKNY; footwear brand, Heydude by Crocs; and sports fashion brand, Golf Wang, all went live. As did Imperial Workshop, our first U.S. merchant on the Wix platform. Thanks to the combination of Wix and Global-e, all aspiring Jedi Knights can now do their essential lightsaber shopping online on the Imperial Workshop website, regardless of where they live, as long as it's not in a galaxy far, far away. During the quarter, we also launched with lingerie brand La Senza in Canada, as well as high street fashion brands, Hobbs and TM Lewin; luggage brand, Antler; and a homeware brand, Soho Home in the UK. In Europe, we launched with the French vintage style fashion brand, Louise Misha, along with fashion brands, Gerard Darel, Soeur and Caroll; and with the renowned luxury lifestyle brand, Repetto, which can now sell its iconic ballerina shoes worldwide as seamlessly and effectively as it does in France. The quarter also saw the launches of innovative fashion brand, Marc-Cain, and the online store of workwear and protective gear retailer, Engelbert Strauss, both in Germany. Moreover, we launched with the leisure brand, Pacha, in Spain, famous for its cherries logo; women's luxury fashion brand Costarellos in Greece; and the fashion brand, Rubato in Sweden, among many others. Our business in APAC continues to expand all the time as well, with examples of recent launches in the region being Infamous Swim and Carla Zampatti in Australia, Hi mu-mo by Avex and commmonsmart in Japan, DIY Watch Club in Hong Kong and more. During Q1, we also continued our efforts to expand our business with existing merchants and with brand groups. As such, we opened new markets for Adidas and Doen and went live with Infiniment, an additional brand from the COTY group. We also went live with Tap To Style, a new brand by Modes in Italy, which themselves just went live the previous quarter and with NNormal, a new Spanish brand from the Camper group. With dozens of other brands going live and with robust integration and sales pipelines, we believe we can continue on our growth path into the future, as more and more merchants put emphasis on global direct-to-consumer sales. Switching gears, I would like to update you regarding the various components of our strategic partnership with Shopify. On the direct integration side, the migration of our historical merchant base onto the new native integration is nearing completion, and the team's focus has turned now towards the continued gradual transition of all Shopify merchants onto checkout extensibility. On the Shopify Markets Pro side, merchants continue to sign up and go live, gradually amassing GMV at the planned rate. In parallel, the teams on both sides continue to work on developing additional features and capabilities, further enhancing the solution's reach. Given the large market potential on the Shopify platform and as adoption of the innovative Markets Pro solution continues to rise, we remain highly confident in our ability to capture a meaningful part of this massive market opportunity over the course of the next few years. With all these exciting developments and with many others across the entire business, we continue to believe more than ever in our ability to exhibit long-term and durable growth as we capture more and more of the vast greenfield opportunity that lies ahead of us. I will now hand it to Ofer, our CFO, to take us through the quarterly numbers in more depth, as well as present our updated guidance going forward.

Thank you, Amir, and thanks, everyone for joining us today for our earnings call. We are off to a strong start in 2024. Q1 was another quarter of fast growth and robust adjusted EBITDA as we continue to drive progress on all fronts and remain committed to delivering value to merchants in their international initiatives. I'd like to point out again that in addition to our GAAP results, I'll also be discussing certain non-GAAP results. Our GAAP financial results along with the reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings release. As Amir mentioned, we have experienced rapid growth of GMV in Q1, as we generated $930 million of GMV, an increase of 32% year-over-year, which is 3.9% over the mid-point of our guidance for Q1. We continue to benefit from the growth of Global E-Commerce, which is back to its pre-COVID long-term pattern, taking share from brick-and-mortar retail, and the continued focus of merchants on direct-to-consumer while there is still uncertainty regarding consumer demand, which remains volatile. In Q1, we generated total revenue of $145.9 million, up 24% year-over-year. Service fee revenue was $68.3 million, up 36%, and fulfillment services revenue was up 15% to $77.6 million. The higher growth of service fee revenue compared to fulfillment services revenue was mainly driven by the higher share of our multi-local offering. As reflected in our guidance, we expect take rates to stabilize at close to 16%, driven by elevated levels of fulfillment services adoption. Non-GAAP gross profit continued to outpace revenue growth. In Q1, non-GAAP gross profit was $66.1 million, up 36% year-over-year, representing a gross margin of 45.3% compared to 41.4% in the same period last year, driven by the higher share of service fee revenue and our continuous efficiency efforts. GAAP gross profit was $63.3 million representing a margin of 43.4%. Moving on to operational expenses. We continue to invest in the development of our platform to further enhance and expand our offering. R&D expense in Q4, excluding stock-based compensation, was $20.1 million, or 13.8% of revenue compared to $16.9 million, or 14.3% in the same period last year. Total R&D spend in Q4 was $23.5 million. We also continue to invest in sales and marketing to expand our pipeline while maintaining efficiencies. Sales and marketing expense excluding Shopify-related amortization expenses, stock-based compensation, acquisition-related intangibles, and amortization was $17.2 million, or 11.8% of revenue compared to $10.5 million, or 8.9% of revenue in the same period last year. Shopify warrants related amortization expense was $36.3 million. Total sales and marketing expenses for the quarter were $57 million. General and administrative expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, acquisition-related expenses, and acquisition-related contingent consideration, was $8.3 million, or 5.7% of revenue compared to $7.4 million, or 6.3% of revenue in the same period last year. Total G&A spend in Q1 was $12.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA continued to grow rapidly and totaled $21.3 million, representing a 14.6% adjusted EBITDA margin and increasing by 47% from $14.5 million, or 12.3% margin in the same period last year. Net loss was $32.1 million compared to a net loss of $43.1 million in the year-ago period, driven mainly by the amortization expenses related to the Shopify warrants and by the transaction-related intangibles. Switching gears and turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statements, we ended the quarter with $298 million in cash, cash equivalents, including short-term deposits and marketable securities. Cash flow used by operating activities was $54.3 million compared to $29.5 million used a year ago, driven by typical first quarter post-peak working capital dynamics and a $12.2 million payment of held back acquisition-related proceeds to the Flow founders. Moving on to our financial outlook and guidance for Q2 and our updated 2024 full-year guidance. For Q2 2024, we're expecting GMV to be in the range of $1.025 billion to $1.065 billion, at the midpoint of the range, this represents a growth rate of 27% versus Q2 of 2023. We expect Q2 revenue to be in the range of $162.5 million to $168.5 million, at the midpoint of the range this represents a growth rate of 24% versus Q2 of 2023. For adjusted EBITDA, we're expecting a profit in the range of $24.5 million to $28.5 million. For the full year of 2024, we are raising our guidance and now anticipate GMV to be in the range of $4.625 billion to $4.865 billion, representing a 33.4 annual growth rate at the midpoint of the range. Revenue is now expected to be in the range of $733 million to $773 million, representing a growth rate of 32.1% at the midpoint of the range. For adjusted EBITDA, we're now expecting a profit of $124 million to $140 million. We continue to believe growth will accelerate in the second half of the year, driven by large merchant launches planned for H2, which are on track, anticipated elevated volume contribution from Shopify Markets Pro, which is growing as expected, and a lower impact from Borderfree on a year-on-year comparison. In conclusion, the opportunity in front of us remains massive and we continue our journey to support merchants worldwide in expanding their direct-to-consumer business. We're focused on execution and believe we can continue to grow rapidly while further expanding cash generation in the coming years. And with that, Amir, Nir, and I are happy to answer questions you may have.

Thank you. We will now start the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Will Nance at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good morning. I appreciate you taking the question. I know you had a comment in the prepared remarks that the macro environment ended up being a little bit better than expectations in the first quarter. And I'm just wondering, if you could kind of speak to what you're seeing so far in 2Q just given some of the negative data points around luxury spending? And have you noticed any change in spending patterns over the last month and a half?

Hey, Will. Thanks for the question. Basically, we haven't seen any material changes in Q2 so far; things continue to be volatile in terms of macro conditions. We see it basically in the trading patterns, but our anticipation and what we've seen so far in Q2 and our assumption for the remainder of Q2 is that the volatility in the macro environment, in general, will remain similar to what we've seen in Q1.

That's super helpful. And then, can you just talk about the pipeline of product enhancements on the Markets Pro side, things like fulfillment and just sort of what the rollout schedule for things like that would be?

Hey, Will. It's Nir. We continue to work according to our roadmap, developing enhancements and features towards Shopify Markets Pro, and we continue to roll those out. I think over the next few quarters, we will see a gradual rollout of all the key elements that we aim towards and we expect that to continue and accelerate the growth in the coming quarters of the solutions adoption.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. So maybe first, you mentioned multiple times that Markets Pro that the merchant ramp is tracking to plan. Can you just remind us what the plan target is, whether that's in terms of the number of merchants or GMV that you're targeting for 2024 and what have you assumed in guidance for the rest of the year?

Hi, Samad. We haven't guided for specific numbers of what we expect this year on Markets Pro. In the future, as we indicated before, once it becomes a large enough business plan, we will look at more clarity specifically on Markets Pro. However, the market expectations, as reflected between different market reports, is in line with what we see today. So we are trading within the numbers that are outside in the market.

Understood. Ofer, could you help us understand how NRR performed throughout the quarter and what you've observed since then? Is it aligning with the historical trends you've noted over the past few years?

Yeah. So, hey, Samad, thanks for the question. So as you know, we provide annual NDR, NRR numbers. However, generally speaking, we can say that while, as Amir mentioned, there is volatility in consumer behavior, all-in-all, except for the lower two weeks in February, it has been around or just slightly below the numbers we usually see or the numbers we've expected for this year. So it's not at its peak and it is below average, but it's more or less in line with what we've expected for 2024.

Thanks, gentlemen. Congrats on the quarter. So I know you mentioned some commentary on the macro. I'm curious, how that relates to the top of the funnel. What are you seeing in terms of pipeline creation in deal timing thus far in 2024?

Hey, hi. It's Nir. Thank you for the question. For now, what we see here to date is that our pipelines remain strong or even stronger than what we've seen ever in the past. We are looking towards the second part of the year where we expect the launch of several large merchants that are currently in project state, as well as the signing of at least one additional large merchant. So we're quite optimistic. I don't think that we ever had a pipeline in terms of sheer dollars that was as strong as this one.

So, yeah, gross margins have been high this quarter and that is due to two factors. The first one is actually the mix of revenues. The share of service fees was higher compared to last year to the parallel quarter. And in addition, we are continuously working on efficiencies, improving processes and so on and so forth, so this contributed as well. Going forward, we don't expect, as we previously stated, we don't expect any significant expansion this year. We are happy with the level of gross margins we currently have. So going forward, we do not expect a significant increase.

Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking the questions. I wanted to ask on the guidance here just thinking about the GMV guide specifically. And when I look at the second quarter guide and the full quarter guide and a little bit of the historical seasonal pattern in GMV, it looks like a pretty heavy ramp into the fourth quarter here. So just trying to understand or maybe a bit more qualitative color in the way you're thinking about linearity and GMV ramp for the rest of the year?

This year is different from our usual expectations, and we pointed this out last quarter as well. Growth in the second half of the year is influenced by several factors. The first is the large client launches that we anticipate and are currently on track with, making this a significant contributor. In previous years, while we had large client launches, they were not all concentrated in the second half. The second factor is Shopify Markets Pro, which is gaining momentum, and we expect it to contribute more in the second half. As we mentioned, it's currently on track, so we are confident in its progress. The third factor is the reduced impact of Borderfree on our growth, which is being affected by the types of merchants on that platform, mainly large department stores. As we move forward, the share of our volume related to Borderfree is diminishing as our other business grows, and we are transitioning those merchants to Global-e, which we expect will enhance our performance once the migrations are completed. These are the primary factors driving our growth in the second half of the year.

Hi, Koji. It's Nir. The large projects are currently on track. They're already deep into the project phase to launch in Q3 and early Q4, because no one launches in November or December. So, in the next four months, in order to launch, large merchants are already deep into the integration and testing cycle. We have high confidence that it is happening. While there is always a risk of delay, we are confident based on the current status of the project that it will go as planned. We are taking a conservative approach in our guidance, and we did account for certain minor delays in order to accommodate changes in the launches.

Hi, everyone. It was a good quarter. Thank you for taking my questions. Nir, I believe you answered the pipeline question earlier, and I’m happy to note that the dollar amount might be at an all-time high. Reflecting on your Q1 business, what do the sales cycles look like? Are you still able to close deals at consistent rates, or is there anything in the macro environment that could be speeding up or slowing down those sales cycles?

Yeah. So, to be honest, I think after a slight delay sometime in mid-half last year, as of late last year or this Q1, we are more optimistic that merchants are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, and we see them willing to make commitments faster. The main change we see is on the larger project side, where we see more RFPs coming in and more interest from large merchants. If that continues, we do expect it to affect very positively our 2025 launches. So it's a pipeline that is being built now, a very strong one. And we believe that if this continues throughout the year, we will see a very positive effect on our 2025 business.

Hey, gentlemen. Thanks so much for squeezing me at the end. A lot of good questions asked and answered. Maybe first, Ofer, I know you mentioned a couple of points contributing to the gross take rate, how that will stabilize close to 16%, you mentioned. This quarter, the net take rate actually outperformed by a good amount. I was just curious if there were any callouts to attribute that to or anything that we should expect to be stickier going forward or if it was maybe more of a mix shift. And then I'll just get my follow-up in there now. I know a bunch of people asked about Shopify Markets Pro, and specifically, kind of the international rollout. Is that something just from a timeline perspective, to be conservative, we should think about international markets there, as a 2025 and beyond type of discussion?

In terms of the international rollout, I think it's also dependent on Shopify's plans. We can't commit or comment about it without being aligned with Shopify. But I do expect that if in the coming quarters we meet our targets, we will see additional markets being rolled in when I think it's much more a decision for Shopify to make.

Thank you very much, and thank you everyone for joining us today. And we very much look forward to seeing you again on our future earnings calls. Just before we adjourn, I would like to take this opportunity again to say a big thank you to all of our wonderful team members throughout the world. Your hard work and complete dedication to the success of our merchants are and will always be the key driving force behind our continued growth and success. Goodbye to you all and take care.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.