Liquidity Services Inc (LQDT) August 2026 Conference Transcript

Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here. We're delighted to welcome Bill Angrick, founder and CEO of Liquidity Services. Hi, Bill.

Thank you, Gene, and the three-part advisors team. We've got a really interesting business that is a 27-year overnight success story that we founded in the mercurial times of late 90s but liquidity is a marketplace platform driving value for a variety of corporate and government sellers and small businesses and users and consumers and we do this through our own proprietary software algorithms which take advantage of the data we generate and our transactional e-commerce platform. We're very differentiated from traditional e-commerce in that everything that comes through our marketplace has an original owner that no longer needs that asset. So we're selling used equipment. We're selling consumer returned goods. We're doing this around the world. We're doing it at scale. And we're the leader in this vertical. And I think in the era of AI, having a differentiated lane in e-commerce has never been more important we sell one of one items each item has a sort of a unique provenance chain of custody images and descriptions that make it essential for buyers to be on our platform to do their diligence to complete the transaction to do the financial settlement and that gives us tremendous retention and conversion and on the other side of that we utilize answer engines and organic traffic to drive a continuous interest in this circular economy platform that we operate we have a prestigious roster of clients that have been with us for many years selling everything you'd see in In the industrial supply chain, anything you'd see in any municipal setting to maintain and power cities, roads, bridges, first responders, port authorities, power generation and water utilities, publicly funded universities. in our marketplace, whether it's been in your home, your line garden, your own fitness center, your business, any IT asset, it's all flowing through this supply chain that we handle, and we have tremendous buyer liquidity and rules that eliminate fraud for sellers and buyers. So we're the most compliant, scaled, two-sided marketplace for used equipment and inventory in the world. And we're continuing to find significant growth in this market we serve. Of course, we built the business the old-fashioned way. We delivered value to our first customer. They had a good experience, and they came back a second time. And through that process, we were building both sides of the marketplace. As we moved into multiple verticals, we became a marketplace of marketplaces. We make markets in everything from used vehicles, IT assets, consumer household and lawn and garden goods. industrial factory and production equipment, semiconductor equipment, equipment feeding the data center, equipment used to manufacture biopharmaceutical and health care products and services. So we love the idea that our investment in technology and software can be extended into so many interesting markets, providing over time a really strong compounding of knowledge, a compounding of process, a compounding of machine learning to grow and benefit both sellers, buyers. And of course, everything we sell a few years ago might have been tagged to be discarded as waste. So we're finding ways to increase the GDP of all of these supply chains by keeping items in full production and use as opposed to being recycled or broken down and put in landfills. We try to keep things simple. We're a founder-led organization that has some key pillars that have allowed us to grow from $100,000 in seed capital to a business that is approaching $2 billion of gross revenue transacted on the platform annually. The first pillar is recovery maximization. People sell with us because they want to realize more value than selling it in the local auction, on Craigslist, on Facebook. And that recovery realization is created through better asset descriptions, better trust. the wider and broader buyer base we bring, and the competitive element of dynamic pricing on the platform. So we've been able to consistently improve recovery, and in doing so, we benefit our sellers and we benefit our shareholders because we're taking a share of that gross sales value as our revenue. Increased volume. We leverage the fixed investment in our software, our marketplace platform, our operational processes with more volume. And as we continue to grow, we've seen increasing scale benefits of that volume being pushed through the same platform. You know, EBITDA margins are accretive as we grow to where we've been. And as I mentioned, we touch a lot of interesting markets, all of which provide the ability to collapse more of what the world's doing and the used equipment and circular economy marketplace onto this transparent digital platform that's faster, more transparent, more compliant. And it's been designed as a multi-currency, multi-lingual platform. and we're really just getting started in our international expansion in the municipal and industrial supply chains and in our software solutions, which we can talk about in a moment. Service expansion, we're a service business. We're not liquidity services, technology, or software. We're liquidity services because people hire us to solve a problem for them, and we want to make it easy to do business with us. So we have multiple pricing models, multiple value-added services. We allow sellers to configure those services in a manner that helps them solve their supply chain needs, not what's good for us. So we keep that open, agnostic view of how you want to do business with us because that's what allows us to have a very strong curated experience for our sellers and what's given us a very high net promoter score. For those that I've met in one-on-one, we talk about our strongest sales organization is our current client base who refer us again and again to their peers, solving the same needs in public sector, private sector, supply chain arenas. Expense leverage, we leverage our fixed costs, we leverage our R&D, we leverage our learning curve, our data. We have 16 billion of completed transactions. All of that is leveraged to make us more efficient over time, and AI is a friend of ours. It's allowed us to automate a lot of very manual tasks related to getting one-of-one snowflake items that have no other period, get them described accurately, put online with structured data that feeds the answer engines, feeds organic traffic, makes it easy for us to use our algorithms to find out. You browse this item, well, someone like you bought these five other items. You should be seeing those in your feed. So there are lots of ways to leverage these fixed investments in a marketplace business model. I think the interesting part of our business is all the industries we touch with the same solution. and we have a market-leading reputation based on our past performance track record in these industries. So we come into every engagement with a proven performance record. People don't have to take it on faith that they'll get great results. We can show them others who've realized great results. That's one of the benefits of being in business as long as we have. When we started, that wasn't necessarily the case so we're really interestingly leveraging that across multiple verticals for for example real estate you know we started this business and still largely today are selling personal property vehicles equipment inventory but many of our clients own a lot of real estate and asked us to solve that need for them and we said sure it's an asset can be described we can market to a large buyer base we can collect the money from the buyer we can validate you know that they meet whatever terms and conditions you have as a qualified buyer and as we stand here you know we're selling major real estate assets on the platform in in the city of miami florida we're selling the county courthouse which is ground zero one of the best development sites in all of Miami, arguably one of the hottest growth markets in the world. And that agency, that government entity, wanted us to handle the sale. And if you have a chance to check it out, it's a 1920 Greek revival, not Greek, Art Deco building. Al Capone's trial was there back in the day for tax evasion. It's got a lot of tremendous history, and we've got a very strong buyer appetite for I think the reserve price on that asset is $30 million and will be paid a commission on the sale. And it's, as you would imagine, very accretive to our bottom line because there's not much more cost to sell a $30 million office building as there is to sell a $10,000 used pickup truck. A little bit of a different data room, but it's a very interesting, similar process. So the power of the model and the power of the trust we built is quite important as we scale. Buyers come to us for a few reasons. One, to save money. Two, to get on-demand access to these assets. These assets aren't in a supply chain somewhere waiting for inputs to be completed and then shipped through our port system and subject to tariffs. So if you want that asset and it's on our marketplace and you are the high bidder, you pay us, we settle, you get the asset. So in a lot of periods, that's quite valuable when you need a piece of equipment to maintain whatever your business plan is. And we've been able to do that successfully for a long time. Markets get to set the price. there aren't artificial reserve prices market forces dictate fair prices and we have a meaningful investment in buyer facing customer service so if you need a human being to walk you through how to use the system you can reach somebody we handle the financial settlement with our buyers so they're using you know our our rules and and extensions to make payment whether that's wire, ACH, credit card. We handle all of that. We can close the transaction faster. We get better documentation than our sellers would typically have for things like sales tax, VAT tax collection for international transactions, and that's a value for our buying customers. Sustainability was sort of a day one obvious goal for us. It continues today. The board-level mandates for people to be frugal and responsible stewards of the environment, utilize your property plant equipment in a responsible way we help them do that. Big market, very fragmented market. We have a mix of Fortune 500 companies in the industrial retail supply chains. We've worked on very high-profile projects and programs across not only North America, but Europe, China, Asia Pacific, we handle very capital-intensive industry requirements. So these are people spending billions of dollars a year with 15-, 20-year NPV calculations on how they're making a return on an energy project or a new factory or a fleet of assets. and that's great because they're always looking for efficiency and they'll be taking a tranche of their pipeline of assets or their portfolio of assets and selling in our marketplace, replacing with new. So there's a continuous recurring flow of assets with these clients and we've continued to grow as you've seen society and business change. More people are buying online. That's continuously growing, both on the consumer side, but also on the B2B side. And we have a very search engine friendly marketplace. Our structured data is well suited to being picked up in search engines and answer engines and bringing people back to our auction lots. We aren't a business where you could outsource, you know, buying, you know, a high-value piece of equipment through a chat bot or an agent like a hotel room or a plane ticket. So we bring people back to the platform where they can conduct their due diligence, settle, and get their post-sale pickup instructions. We have continuous innovation touching public sector, private sector. That's driving the need to continue to invest in the future around vehicle fleets and industrial supply chain assets. That allows us to take those items that are displaced to market on a regular basis. And there's still great value to be realized by the next tier of buyers. and we talked about sustainability just as a nice tailwind for everybody our business model you know it's pretty straightforward we thought about what makes sense day one to help create a great place for clients to bring us their business and and the first principle was let's align our success with our sellers we don't get paid upfront project management fees or minimum listing fees we only get paid when the asset sells in the marketplace and we actually in fact collect the money and out of that gross proceeds we retain our commission and we remit the remainder to our sellers sellers over the years have asked us to do more for them solve points of friction or make this an easier process so we got into handling the money because we could get collection and settlement done faster than they could buyers thought it was much more convenient for us to be that clearing agent so we provided payment services and collection services we provide for shipping and logistics for the assets sold through third parties a large network of full truckload less than truckload carriers rigging companies dismantling companies so great ecosystem that benefit from our marketplace through picking up their shipping business they share that revenue with us but also they refer business to us so that's kind of a nice adjacency for us 83 percent roughly of our total gmv is consignment so we get paid a commission on the gross sales value the other 17 percent where we have a quote purchase model or profit sharing arrangement will take title at some point to the asset as clients are trying to meet some other stated goal for example some of our clients have socks rules particularly in the retail category where the asset can't leave their physical supply chain without an invoice long you know in the tooth rules that they created for various reasons, and our view is sure, we'll take title, but we'll create a pricing model that delivers the same economics to us. These assets are being sold in weeks, not months, so we don't have inventory risk in the classic sense of, okay, market conditions change, what if we're holding it? No, we're setting the market. We're creating the pricing for these assets, and so if we have to take title, we're giving our client a strike price based on end market prices and then building in you know our gross profit to be uh neutral to a consignment deal and again we make it easy to do business with us we're happy to do that we have some industrial supply chain clients typically in a heavy industry that for various reasons might want to close a deal by the end of a reporting period for tax or other business reasons and in that respect we'll say can you give us a purchase model arrangement and we'll agree to do that in limited circumstances but overall what we've seen is that our clients have migrated to the consignment model increasingly over time and that's been a win-win value prop we also provide through one segment machinio and software solutions a two two things we provide a software to host auction websites for clients so machinio started life as a classifieds marketplace industrial equipment dealers around the world we're having difficulty you know getting ROI out of major search engines, and Machinio created a very curated marketplace with structured data to provide the taxonomy for every industry vertical to properly display the equipment available, and then present that to buyers using this industry-specific search engine. Buyers found it saved them a ton of time and began using it. Interestingly, the business was acquired by us in 2017, founded in Chicago, and at the time we thought had really cleverly used software and data-driven data analytics to give a better value to these industrial sellers of equipment. The business created an annual subscription pricing model. Dealers loved it, signed up. They're getting 10x the return on search engine marketing budgets. And so we aggregated $20 billion of used equipment on the Machinio platform all around the world, 50%, U.S., 50%, rest of the world, and built a 4,000-strong recurring revenue customer base using the platform. then our customers asked for more and we began providing the full digital stack of how dealers could manage their business so we provide a website we provide customer management software inventory management software email management and digital marketing support services all on this stack using a mobile responsive website so we've increased our average revenue per user and we've created a much deeper integration with these global equipment dealers. And in the next year or so, we plan to introduce transactional services on the Machinio software platform that will give us a fee opportunity to help them go to that last mile. So right now we connect the buyer inquiries with the dealer customers and then they complete a transaction offline in the future state. We'll collect the money from the buyer, we'll settle the transaction, and we'll be paid an associated fee for that. So we think that's a really interesting use of our auction software and a growth opportunity for Machinio. And then I'll just put one note in where we're experimenting with auction software is in the retail vertical. We've launched a direct-to-consumer auction platform called Retail Rush. And what Retail Rush is is a preview to what we're going to be offering our business buyers who buy truckloads of returned goods off our B2B platform, liquidation.com. But every one of these buyers, once they buy a truckload, they have the same problem. Well, how do I resell this to consumers efficiently and make money? Well, they do it a lot of different ways. You know, they might have something on eBay, Facebook, Craigslist. They might have, you know, a booth at the flea market or the neighborhood farmer's market to try to find these consumers. We say, you've got a better way to do it. We'll give you the software. We'll give you the software tools to scan and list items and use all the pricing archives we have on what things should be valued at and how to list them with the right information, photographs. We're giving them computer vision, AI-assisted tools. Do that in a very automated way. So effectively, we're equipping our business buyer customers with the software to make them more successful reselling what they buy from us. And our pricing model for Retail Rush will be a subscription fee for the software and a transaction fee, light transaction fee, not unlike a franchise fee you'd have for using the software and the brand. So I think that's an interesting way to utilize our software to build out a stronger network of buyers and recurring revenue. A lot of our businesses had notable growth and even record performance in this last quarter. You see the jump in D2C, GMB. That's partly due to retail rush. Just generally, we're finding ways to connect more of our volume with end users using our D2C channels. GovDeals has had tremendous buyer participation. Overall, 6.4 million registered buyers, very healthy growth there. gov deals, which ties its fortunes to the taxing authority of public sector agencies. States, counties, local municipalities have budget to buy property, plant, and equipment to provide services. They're always replacing that or upgrading that equipment over time, and they bring those items to our marketplace. But it's really fascinating what's sold on this marketplace. We already talked about a $30 million office building downtown Miami. After the New York Knicks won the NBA championship they had a parade in the city you know two million people crammed downtown New York it was a beautiful thing for that city all the signs on that championship parade were provided by the city in New York's orange and blue after the event they started to list and sell on gov deals because they're New York City's a client the first sign a simple street sign maybe three inches tall 12 inches wide, just plain text with blue and gold, blue and orange, excuse me, sold for $31,000. So a lot of insights there. One, we have a very liquid, thick, competitive buyer base. And two, there's just a tremendous untapped demand for nostalgia. And that result far exceeded anyone's expectation. I think we have another dozen of these signs to sell. So it's a really powerful example of how we make markets. No one would have predicted that, but once you create reputation with millions of customers, there's serendipity that happens on the platform. So GovDeals continues to expand in Canada. It's about 20% of the current market, and we're displacing homegrown direct sales solutions, local mom and pop auction houses with our digital scaled GovDeals business. And in addition, we're expanding into the real estate vertical, a lot of real estate to manage and sell within these state and local governments. Retail. Retail has been an industry-wide solution for the top 50 e-commerce retailers, omni-channel retailers who all have a common cost of doing business. When you sell online, you're dealing with about 30% of what you sell is returned. So our job is to reduce the loss that they incur from touching these returns, shipping these returns, sitting on them. And while they're unsold, they're not appreciating in value. They're typically depreciating. So with our marketplace and our logistics support, we can get these assets listed quickly and sold in weeks. and recover that capital so that these clients can redeploy in full margin areas. And that's something that everyone agrees on. So people that might be fierce competitors in the forward supply chain all have come home to our marketplace as an industry solution to manage the valuation, transportation, and sale of returned goods. And we don't see any end in sight to the growth of online retail or the returns issue so there's a lot of tailwinds helping us grow we sell everything you'd see in your home your business your backyard your fitness center your workshop you know work at home offices every IT asset you know flows through this returns marketplace in our RSCG segment our CAG segment has taken the GovDeals playbook and taken it to the most capital-intensive industries, energy, semiconductor, healthcare, automotive, consumer packaged goods, all of these industries make things and have both the production equipment to produce those goods and then rolling stock essentially to deliver the goods to the end consumer or to bring them to market. Energy is a little bit unique in that you can have very remote, you know, multi-decade power generation projects where those assets are highly valued and prized with global clients around the world. So we regularly sell million-dollar pieces of equipment out of CAG. More recently, we've expanded into the yellow iron-heavy equipment business. and all that construction equipment that's used to build things roads bridges real estate developments now data center developments all that equipment is typically dealer owned and those fleets will sell a portion of that equipment every year and for the dealers like the big caterpillar dealers they're selling trade-in product to make way for new product to be sold and we're increasingly getting a share of that market we we took it from zero to 100 million dollars in about two years and we think this is a billion dollar plus business for us over time we talked about machinio already extensively i'm going to keep us moving forward the trends are reflecting our progress in building a leading solution uh you know we're a rule of 2015's top-line growth, net revenue would be our direct profit. You'll see that in the face of the press releases by segment. And we want our EBITDA margins to be 20% or more of our net revenue. And, you know, as you grow scale and you have that, remember that RISE acronym, you know, expense leverage being, you know, you get a lot of leverage in a marketplace business model. So as we pour more volume onto the platform and we get more efficient pricing, as we automate the operational tasks of listing and selling and marketing assets using AI and machine learning, we're becoming more efficient, cost efficient as we grow. And then here's the mix of consignment versus purchase, 83% consignment, GMV mix, so 60% public sector, and that's bumped up a little bit because of the government real estate, and we didn't necessarily start with the idea that it's going to be a big real estate market, but they've been taking advantage of the relationship, so if they have success with vehicles and airplanes and airport authorities, and they own a lot of real estate, they look at GovDeals as a trusted solution to try that, so that moves the needle over time on the GMB, and a little reconciliation there. The other thing to note about our business is really high cash flow conversion, so this is a debt-free business, $200 million plus of cash, generating free cash flow on a consistent basis. We've got an asset-like model, So call it $7.5 million of capex a year. And we're always doing research and development. So we're not trying to max current profits. We're investing for the next several years to continue to grow. We've declared milestones along our journey. The current milestone declared was $2 billion of GMB and $100 million of EBITDA. And we're well on our way to doing that. all because of a strong result for our clients for the millions of items they're selling every year. So we're excited about our positioning, well differentiated in the circular economy with a very strong past performance record. We're getting a lot of our business from our happy clients referring peers to us. We don't have to add any buyers to take this to a $5 billion plus GMB business. You know, the purchasing power of our buyers, who are largely business buyers, would be measured in hundreds of billions of dollars of purchasing power. So we're really well suited to take this next, you know, several years and double or triple our business. And we're becoming more of an international play because we've architected a system to help cross-border, you know, buyers you know find what they need and pay for and settle on the platform so we're excited about what we've been able to do thus far in 2026 and more importantly where we're going in the future so let me pause now uh i've been here all day i might see some of you in one-on-ones but if you have any questions i'd be happy to take questions yes yeah yeah we've actually taken bid deposits already yeah we yeah we're in the vast majority i think you know almost 100 of the time collecting the money for these auction transactions in the rear uh yeah and you know but but we you know one important uh strategic decision is when to say no and and stay close to what you know and and stay focused we've done quasi businesses so for example we have some cities and agencies that sell licenses on our platform you know to operate a taxi or a liquor license we've had municipalities sell leases to government-owned facilities through an online auction so very interesting use case so you might own an airport authority with a concession right businesses come in they bid for the right to have that concession for five years not unlike FCC licenses in the federal government so there are a lot of creative uses for the auction pricing model yes sir we like the ladder we've been doing disciplined buybacks since we've been public in 20, you know, 2006. And, you know, it's, it's both, um, one evidence that we're doing something right because we have, you know, capital allocation decision. We have a lot of cash to invest. Um, two, that we're good stewards for our investing partners. Um, I'm our largest shareholder. I don't like to be diluted. Why would you want to be diluted? So I think you have to balance long-term incentive alignment with your your talent be a great place to work and and be a strong engine of ideas and retention of that talent but not dilute public shareholders or any shareholders so that's typically the reason for the targeted buybacks we have better use of cash than dividends on M&A and feel that we're a good acquirer, and I would be surprised if we didn't have one or more excellent opportunities on the acquisition front in the near term. Okay, Gene has done a great job with us. Thank you very much.