All right. Well, in that case, why don't we go ahead and get started. So thanks again for joining us here at the Raymond James TMT and Consumer Conference this year. I'm Andrew Merrick, and I cover digital media and advertising technology here at RJ. And I'm thrilled to have with me Rana Kashiv, the CFO of Groupon. Rana, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Andrew. Yeah, it's good to be here. So let's start out with the 30,000-foot view. For maybe those who aren't as familiar with Groupon, can you just kind of give a quick overview of the company and where you sit within the digital commerce ecosystem?
Yeah, happy to do it. And before I start, I'll be making some forward-looking comments. So usual caveats apply. Please refer to our ICC filings, including an AK we filed this morning for the full Safe Harbor language. So, yeah, Groupon, we are an experienced marketplace. Our mission is to deliver quality experiences at unbeatable value. Financial snapshot, we have about $1.6 billion of billings, half a billion of revenue, $70 million in EBITDA, $60 million in free cash flow. We have over 60 million active customers, 150,000 experiences on our site, over 50,000 merchants. when you when you double click into our local experiences the majority of our business comes from two verticals beauty and wellness and things to do we also have experiences across automotive and home services online services and food and drink hotels and live events but while those are smaller parts of our business. And we operate in 14 countries. Most of our business comes from North America, but we also have a nice presence in mostly Western Europe. Great. And then I know the
company has had a history to it and an evolutionary process, but undergoing a major strategic transformation over the last couple of years and now narrowing your focus. So can you give us an overview about where you are in that transformation and what are kind of the major go
forward areas of emphasis? Yeah, yeah, sure. So the current management team, we showed up about three years ago. At the time, the situation was grim. We had, you know, customers were disengaging, revenues were down double digits. We had negative free cash flow, balance sheet was challenged. Fast forward to last quarter, Q3, we reported local billings growth of 18% in our core local franchise, excluding Italy, which we exited. We have added net one million new active customers over the last four quarters, and we see real, real positive momentum across our business. What, you know, where we're going from here, we really have three themes that we're thinking about. One is a quality orientation, where we really are pushing higher quality experiences at great value. We are also double-clicking on hyper-local. This means specific vertical experiences based on category needs and geographic focuses, because what you need in Chicago is different than what you need in Miami. And last, like many companies I'm sure that people are meeting today, we're also making a big push on AI. We see it as a big opportunity across our P&L,
both on the cost and revenue side. I think we'll double-click on a few of those as we get through the course of the conversation. But sticking maybe with the management here and the strategic aspect, with this reset, now you have Dushan at the helm, who's significantly invested in the company. So I guess, how is his management style and view of the opportunity determining where
you're placing your focus? Yeah, great question. He's like a big part of the story here, candidly. he's not your typical professional CEO he's an entrepreneur he he's also a partner at Pale Fire Capital who's our largest shareholder and and he has a long history of being a successful internet entrepreneur building many internet products and and in the his later stage of his career turned to turning around existing internet companies so this is this is something that he is fully committed in and he's been the central architect that's been driving this transformation and one of the most exciting parts of our story, I think. Great. And then if we could
maybe talk about a macro question here. So we've heard some kind of mixed reviews coming out of the third quarter earnings cycle from some of the various companies, both in and outside of our coverage. How are you thinking about the holiday season in the context of your 4Q guide and just general consumer health and willingness to spend?
Yeah, so happy to make a few comments on this based on what we're seeing on our operational data. So I would say heading into Black Friday, we were seeing mixed November results. Black Friday through Cyber Monday, I was pleased to see the business picked up. And if you look at it based on our operational data, we were seeing billings growth at high single digits positive. this was driven primarily by continued strength in our core local category you know for our business it's a little different than many other econ players we still have some very important weeks left if you look at the period between Cyber Monday to end of end of December historically it's about almost 40% of our quarter so we we have a very important few weeks here people are buying experiences up and up until and through Christmas um and so you know we're we're the team is very focused on the the next few weeks and and you know we'll that will that will be a material
influence on how the quarter uh plays out I guess that's let's let's talk about that for a second I guess is there any specific factor as to why that Cyber Monday to Christmas period is is kind of a bigger deal for you guys is it something where you're just running into the gifting season you don't necessarily have to use the experience before the holidays and it's something that you can you know have as a gift that that can last for a while yeah it's exactly right like uh you
know retailers have to ship merchandise home like they shut they have they have to start getting dealing with the logistics of how you get all the all the goods out and you can buy a great experience for your loved one the night before even the morning of if you're quick um and so So we actually see almost two peaks in our business around Q4, and we do see a buildup right before the Christmas season, and it continues through New Year's.
And then maybe one more on the macro is if you could just kind of talk about how your merchants experience macro either turbulence or good times differently than the broader economy being more SMB focused.
Yeah, so we are a supply-driven marketplace, and we do drive deals for our merchants. And so to the extent the economy softens or cools, my expectation is that the experienced providers will be looking for more volume, and they will turn to platforms like us, which can show up in different ways. It can mean they run more heavy promotions. It can mean they run more frequently. It can mean that we are able to acquire some brands that we may not have been able to because they didn't need help with some discount channels. So that's how I see the supply side. And we see our business very much as a supply-driven marketplace.
And then maybe from the demand side, how are you getting new customers into the ecosystem? Is there any kind of marketing technique or channel that has been working really well for you or that you're placing a good amount of emphasis on?
Yeah, so we have recalibrated our investments in marketing towards the lower funnel, high performance channels. We have been pretty successful there. We added 300,000 net new active customers in Q3. These are high intent customers that are coming in through lower funnel marketing. We are now spending more time on mid-funnel and upper-funnel. We just launched our first brand campaign in three years, a few weeks ago. So that is where we're moving. But for the last few quarters, we've seen a lot of success through lower-funnel marketing tactics.
And then on the supply side, coming back to the point that we were making earlier, How has that merchant acquisition been either recently or over the course of the last couple of quarters? And how has AI helped that merchant addition process, either from contacts, onboarding, deal structuring, et cetera?
Yeah, sure. So we continue to get better and better at the merchant acquisition and experience piece. And so we see improving merchant sentiment. We see improving, let's say, sales efficiency. And it is being driven increasingly by us adopting AI across the entire workflow. So we now have a tool where if you, as a sales rep, go talk to a merchant, you're able to use AI to generate a preview of that deal live so that the merchant can see what that experience would look like. We are using AI to launch deals faster. We are also using AI higher up in the funnel on lead management and lead warming. And so it's still, I would say, early days for us across our company with how we're adopting AI. But we see supply as one of a major focus and a place where it can have real productivity improvements.
And then, of course, I kind of have to ask the AI question about the rest of the business being the tech conference. But where else in the business? I'm thinking of aspects like spotlighting deals or recommendation algorithms for customers, technical infrastructure. Where else is AI really kind of having an impact on your operations?
Yeah, we, as a finance guy, think about it in terms of the P&L, and there's revenue, there's costs, and then there's direct and indirect. And there's not one place across our P&L that I don't see AI having an opportunity to improve parts of our P&L. In terms of revenue, longer term, it's not a material part of our numbers today. traffic is changing and the nature of that traffic going through AI is one that many are aware of and we're very focused on. We have several investments across our product and technology infrastructure to position Groupon to be a partner to AI as they are looking for quality experiences at unbeatable value. It's one of the things that we're most excited about because if you think about our inventory, it's not commodity inventory. We have largely unique deals that we go out and contract. And especially as we make this emphasis on quality, we believe that we can be the next generation local e-commerce player for merchants and small businesses to be discoverable on AI. On the other side, that's also going to help us on the supply side. Because if we go, So small businesses are asking all the same questions they asked 15 years ago. They're saying, how do we get discovered in AI? And we believe we can be a partner to them on that. And so that is a long-term opportunity. Short-term, there are innumerable places that we see AI that could help us. For example, we have been making an investment connected to our focus on quality on reviews. And we're upgrading the way the customers can submit reviews, can give feedback. And now we expect in 2026 to introduce AI overviews, AI summaries. And we know based on some tests and also what we see going on the marketplace, that will help in driving conversion.
Earlier you noted that your two big local categories are things to do and beauty and wellness. I guess, how do those categories specifically react to either macro pressure or any kind of consumer dynamics that you think investors should keep in mind?
I'll go back to what I earlier covered. We're a supply-driven marketplace. So to the extent our things to do, our beauty categories, we see macro headwinds. My expectation is that we'll be able to improve our supply coverage in those categories, which will help us drive better value for our customers. So that is my expectation will be the primary driver of those categories in any economic cyclicality. On the demand side, if there are current customers that are in the purchase funnel that have less, let's say, money to spend, maybe they'll opt out. But at the same time, then you have full price customers who may be thinking they're looking for a deal. So the demand side, I think, is maybe a little less clear. But again, our orientation is this is a supply-driven marketplace. So we see as we get better supply, we're able to drive more business.
And maybe in some of those other categories that you called out, like food and drink, live events, and some of the ones that are farther down the tail, where do you see opportunity maybe beyond things to do in beauty and wellness? And maybe are there any structural barriers that have limited scale to date?
Yeah, so we see food and drink. Well, let me maybe just start by saying the way I think about it is things to do with beauty and wellness, we have scale, we have a leading position in the market, and we feel good that we can build on that position and further our advantage to deliver more services to our merchants and deliver more value to our customers. In terms of the others, I'm personally most excited about three, food and drink, hotels, and live events. Those are very vast categories. When you look at the percentage of those businesses in terms of our current billings or GMV, it's tiny. It really is a few percentage points for each of them. And against the market opportunity, these are very large categories. And so you hit on something – there's not structural barriers, but our core product, our voucher and our ticket, it doesn't have as high product market fit in the categories there today. This is something that – this connects to why we're talking about hyper-focus and looking at vertical-specific as opposed to a horizontal platform. How we compete and win in food and drink is going to look differently than how we compete and win in things to do. But it's okay. For example, if you think about the way food and drink plays in your portfolio, it's an engagement driver. You eat three times a day. And so we need to think about how we can use food and drink as an engagement driver, whereas we can monetize our customers in other categories. And there's different strategies and tactics that we are looking at for both. Our performance there is somewhat uneven right now, but food and drink, live events and hotels, I look at 26, 27, 28. We're pretty optimistic in our ability to reposition our offerings in those categories to drive a very different level of business than we currently see.
And then maybe sticking on that theme of more emerging initiatives, you talked about how you're active in 14 markets right now, but the majority of the business is still coming from North America. I guess how should we think about International's opportunity, the amount of emphasis that you're placing on it from a corporate perspective, and your ability to execute against that?
Yeah, so International, the consolidated reports, the consolidated numbers for International get a little obscured because we exited from Italy. And then we also sold a non-core business called Gift Cloud. And both of those were reported in our international local categories. So if you exclude those, in Q3, we actually had solid double-digit growth in billings, up 15%. And that's primarily being driven by four big countries, Spain, France, UK, and Germany. We have been focusing this transformation where the majority of our business is, so in the U.S. and those four countries, longer term, there's no structural reason why we can't take the same playbook that we've taken in each of these countries to the other countries we're in, and new countries. I don't think we are at the stage where we're actively considering expansion into new countries, but that's something that we do believe this can be a global platform that everyone can and get value from them, regardless what country you're in.
And I think in some of your investor-facing communications before, you've talked about improving platform velocity and how tech is maybe a bit of a limiting factor behind some of your ambitions. What are some of the things that need to be cleaned up? And how are you investing behind this into 2026? And kind of associated, what's the scale of the potential unlock?
So the platform monetization has been a big part of the story. and it continues to be, we have made significant investments to modernize our platform. We have a new website. We did a massive ERP implementation migration. We did a cloud migration, and there are several other services that I won't even highlight today where we've taken steps to modernize, to make it more efficient, to drive more value for our merchants or our customers. This is an ongoing initiative. we have several investments right now that we're quite excited about which we think will play out in 2026. Our application which is the majority of our of our business is still on our legacy platform and we're actively rolling that out right now to new customers in North America and our plan is to roll this out to all customers in North America in early 2026. We are also making a significant investment in a new customer data platform so that we can better personalize and target our offers to our existing customers, which we see – we tried for several years to work with our legacy infrastructure in and around our customer data and emailing, and there were significant limitations. So that's another one that we're rolling out. And the last is we are, especially connecting to AI, we are making a big investment in search and relevance and how we tag and build structured data around our very diverse set of experiences so that our customers can have more personalized offers and then can define it in a more easy way through AI. So those are three big themes on our tech platform, but we're led by a technocrat CEO, And there's very little on the tech platform which will let go unchanged by the time we're done.
Very interesting. Can't wait to see it. Then maybe the last question for me before I open it up for the floor. Outside of the tech turnaround, how else are you thinking about investment and capital allocation priorities as we get into 26?
So we still, our number one priority is to deliver against our long-term growth outlook. We believe this is a company that should be growing over 20%. And so our number one investment priority is ensuring that our core business has the resource it needs to realize the potential. So tech is a big one. We still continue to invest in the supply side, and we are adding new sales reps. We're growing across many, many dimensions on the supply side. And marketing is another big investment area for us. We've talked about for the last few quarters that we see good returns for new customer acquisition, and we're leading in heavily there. In terms of how that gets financed in the P&L, what we've discussed is we still see efficiencies in the cost side. So there's pockets of cost that still don't have the returns that we like to see. And so we feel good about keeping our cash SG&A, let's call it flattish. The run rate that we reported in Q1, Q2, and sort of indicated Q4 was around $58 to $60 million of cash SG&A. Like, that feels like a level of business that we can, you know, keep at a stable level, a level of spend, and fund the growth initiatives we need across our business. So, you know, that's still – by doing that and where the business is from a financial standpoint, it still means we generate free cash flow. And so with the excess capital in our business, we do have an open buyback authorization. And so that is something that we continue to evaluate opportunistically and is part of our investment priorities if we think about looking forward.
Anything from anyone in the audience?
Thank you for the presentation. Great update. You mentioned in the last earnings call that Chicago is the biggest city growing since the word was almost double the red, North America local. It was great to hear more about how you're able to replicate that sort of tool across more large cities over time.
Yeah, so we – this goes to the question of how we can grow our supply side, and it's all about hyperlocal. And, you know, we have made tremendous strides. We started this project. Well, I would say we actually knew we needed to go hyper-local when we first got here, but getting it structured in the right way was really something that we started early this year. And so what we've been able to demonstrate in Chicago is a playbook that we think is scalable to drive growth at that local unit economics of Chicago. And so as we look into next year, one of our key projects on the supply side is building out a repeatable, scalable playbook to take this from one city to three cities to 10 cities. In the end, we expect that every city will have a marketplace map that we will be able to say, here's what we need to go acquire for our customers. it's something that will take some time maybe but it's part of what gives us confidence that we are able to realize this long term growth outlook
anything else alright hearing none before I let you go I have to give you the question I ask all my companies but as we get into 2026 with all the things that you have out in front of you if you had to highlight one thing for investors to keep an eye on a metric to track an initiative to focus on what would you point investors toward?
Yeah, to me, right now for our business, the most important thing is our building's growth rate and seeing progress against that. Like we have, this company's come a long way and we still have a long ways to go and there's not one single thing that has been able to produce our results. But where our platform long-term, we have amazing opportunity to scale this And so the story for investors, which is around ultimately in the day free cash flow growth per share, but the way we will drive that is through operating leverage, through scaling the billings on our platform, having it flow through with attractive incremental margins on a relatively flat cost base. So if I'm sitting on your guys' shoes, for me, how the company will progress on billings growth is the most important indicator from my standpoint.
Great. Ron Akaship, CFO of Groupon, thanks for joining us.
Thank you, everyone.