Earnings Call Transcript - PRG Q1 2024

Operator, Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PROG Holdings First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. Please be advised, today's conference is being recorded.

John Baugh, Speaker

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the PROG Holdings first quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me this morning are Steve Michaels, PROG Holdings President and Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Garner, our Chief Financial Officer. Many of you have already seen a copy of our earnings release issued this morning which is available on our Investor Relations website, investor.progholdings.com. During this call, certain statements we make will be forward-looking, including comments regarding a revised 2024 full year outlook and our outlook for the second quarter of 2024, the health of our portfolio, our capital allocation priorities, including our ability to continue paying a quarterly cash dividend and repurchase shares of our stock in future periods and our expectations regarding GMV for the second quarter and full year 2024. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue emphasis on forward-looking statements we make today, and we undertake no obligation to update any such statements. On today's call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS, which have been adjusted for certain items, which may affect the comparability of our performance with other companies. These non-GAAP measures are detailed in the reconciliation tables included with our earnings release. The company believes that these non-GAAP financial measures provide meaningful insight into the company's operational performance and cash flows and provides these measures to investors to help facilitate comparisons of operating results with prior periods and to assist them in understanding the company's ongoing operational performance.

Steve Michaels, CEO

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us as we report our first quarter results, which exceeded the high end of our outlook range we provided in February. Today, I'll provide insights into how our first quarter unfolded along with a few key points on Q2. As a reminder, when we issued our outlook in late February, we were emerging from a slow start to the year for retail with limited visibility into the tax refund season. Given the macro headwinds, we anticipated Q1 GMV to be down low single digits. However, we were optimistic about our strategic direction, growth initiatives, and the health of our portfolio. Our revenue and earnings beat the high end of our outlook range for Q1. I'm proud of the performance of our teams throughout the company as they helped us deliver a strong start to the year. Q1 GMV rebounded from a soft start to 2024, ending flat year-over-year for the quarter. We gained balance of share with our key partners amidst a challenging retail environment in which sales in key verticals experienced negative comps, some in the high single digits. We navigated these Q1 demand headwinds through strong execution across several sales, marketing, and technology initiatives under our strategic pillars of grow, enhance, and expand, while continuing to actively manage portfolio performance. Brian will address the portfolio in more detail, but I want to call out that our Q1 portfolio yield for the Progressive Leasing segment was slightly better than expected. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA of $72.6 million, which was 11.3% of revenue, exceeded the high end of our outlook, driven by GMV growth in the second half of the quarter, strong portfolio performance, and disciplined spending. Now, I'd like to update you on our strategic pillars of grow, enhance, and expand. Regarding our grow pillar, which focuses on business development efforts with new and existing retail partnerships, I want to emphasize that we remain keenly focused on our strategy to onboard new retailers to our platform in both the regional and national space. In the quarter, we achieved deeper integrations with existing partners, some of whom have been on our platform for many years. We believe improved productivity, driven by increases in active locations and the number of leases per location with existing retailers as well as expected pipeline conversions will enable us to deliver GMV growth in the near and long term. Also under our grow pillar, our efforts are focused on the PROG Marketplace and direct-to-consumer marketing. The PROG Marketplace allows new and repeat customers to shop when and where they want through our mobile app, driving incremental traffic and sales to our network of retail partners. We also have affiliate partnerships with other leading retailers through our marketplace, which gives our customers more choice. This channel drove significant growth in 2023, and we anticipate doubling our GMV from the PROG marketplace in 2024. In terms of direct-to-consumer marketing, key areas include the customer life cycle and personalization, which make it easy for consumers to understand and utilize the full spectrum of our products. As it relates to personalization specifically, we are investing in segmentation and automation capabilities to improve the customer experience. Our direct-to-consumer motion complements our retail partner channel GMV and deepens our relationship with new and existing retailers as we drive incremental traffic to them. Under our enhance pillar, we continue to invest in technology initiatives, which will make customer and retailer experiences as seamless as possible. For example, with direct-to-consumer shopping, we are enhancing the application experience to make onboarding more efficient and increasing shopability through better browse, search, and checkout features on the web as well as the mobile app. During Q1, we launched a refresh of our consumer-facing Progressive Leasing website. This new improved site provides a robust platform to increase content and resources to help educate shoppers about our products and to highlight and benefit our retail partners. In Q1, the PROG Labs R&D group piloted generative AI initiatives across several consumer-facing areas to seamlessly verify consumer ID, provide multilingual support, and analyze customer feedback. By leveraging generative AI for customer feedback, we can consume and analyze that information and identify actionable improvements to our offerings, which allows us to incorporate significantly more feedback into our product development cycle much faster than before. We believe these initiatives at scale will dramatically improve the customer experience and conversion rates and increase internal productivity to lower our cost to serve and drive operational efficiencies. Under our expand pillar, we are focused on our omni-channel marketing strategy to automate cross-promotional consumer journeys. This allows us to further personalize offers at a customer segment level by featuring products in the PROG portfolio that are relevant to each customer's needs. We drove incremental Progressive Leasing GMV in Q1 through customer acquisition and cross-marketing efforts with our other operations, which include our four technologies and build. We expect this GMV to ramp up throughout the year as we make strides to remove friction from our processes and optimize our funnel conversion. To summarize our strong first quarter, I'd like to highlight that we collaborated with existing retail partners on technical integrations and marketing, which helped us gain balance of share. We also made significant progress on direct-to-consumer initiatives, maintained a healthy lease portfolio and remained disciplined with spend. While Brian will provide more detail on our revised full year outlook for 2024, I'd like to provide some high-level thoughts. In terms of the remainder of the year, we expect retail headwinds in the majority of our lease book categories to persist. However, we are making significant progress across our strategic initiatives under grow, enhance, and expand, and we remain optimistic about Q2 GMV growth in the low single digits despite these macroeconomic challenges. Our updated full year revenue outlook reflects the GMV outperformance in the first half of the year. We expect our portfolio performance to remain within our targeted annual range of 6% to 8% as we continue to balance profitability with GMV growth. Finally, on the topic of capital allocation, we paid a quarterly cash dividend of $0.12 per share on March 28. Additionally, we repurchased approximately 781,000 shares during the quarter. In Q1, we generated $136 million in cash flow from operations and expect to generate meaningful cash flow from operations for the full year. Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged, and we expect to continue to fund growth, look for strategic M&A opportunities, and return excess cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.

Brian Garner, CFO

Thanks, Steve. We are pleased to report that our first quarter 2024 results exceeded our outlook on both revenue and earnings despite a soft demand environment to begin the quarter. This performance was driven by growth initiatives, resilient demand for our flexible payment solutions and our management of portfolio performance and spend levels. Beginning with the Progressive Leasing segment, as Steve mentioned, GMV for Progressive Leasing exceeded our expectations of a low single-digit decline as we ended the quarter flat year-over-year. We continue to invest in our sales and marketing motions and delivered on direct-to-consumer initiatives, which contributed to the overall results. Our gross leased asset balance at the end of Q1 2024 was down 4.7% compared to the same period last year, which was an improvement from the 5.2% decline entering the period. Q1 revenues for our Progressive Leasing segment declined 2.6% from $637.1 million to $620.6 million, primarily driven by the gross leased asset balance being down 5.2% as we entered this year, partially offset by higher 90-day early purchases. Revenue exceeded our expectations largely due to a benefit from the favorable GMV lift we experienced in the back half of Q1 and a larger-than-expected portfolio size. Q1 portfolio performance for Progressive Leasing came in better than expected, which contributed to earnings exceeding the high end of our outlook, while the percentage of customers choosing to exercise their 90-day purchase options have returned to pre-pandemic levels. For a year-over-year comparison, our gross margin of 30.5% in Q1 of 2024 was 120 basis points lower compared to Q1 of 2023. This was primarily driven by normalized levels of 90-day purchases this period compared to historic lows in Q1 of 2023. The provision for lease merchandise write-offs was 7%, and we expect our full year 2024 write-offs to be within our annual targeted range of 6% to 8%. Progressive Leasing SG&A expenses as a percentage of revenue increased slightly year-over-year to 12.3% in Q1 of 2024 from 11.9% in Q1 of 2023, driven by ongoing investments in sales, technology, and marketing. The period's results benefited from the restructuring actions taken in January as we manage costs in line with revenue expectations. Adjusted EBITDA for Progressive Leasing declined from $90.4 million in Q1 of 2023 to $74.1 million in Q1 of 2024. Adjusted EBITDA margins of 11.9% were at the midpoint of our 11% to 13% annual margin target for the Progressive Leasing segment. Pivoting to consolidated results, our Q1 2024 non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.91, exceeding the top end of our outlook, primarily due to the earnings beat and in part due to lower share count from our share repurchase program. Q1 2024 consolidated revenues declined 2% to $641.9 million compared to $655.1 million in the same quarter last year, driven by the smaller portfolio at the Progressive Leasing segment, offset partially by higher 90-day purchases year-over-year. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $72.6 million compared to $89.7 million in the year-ago period. Looking at our balance sheet, we ended the first quarter of 2024 with $252.8 million in cash and gross debt of $600 million, resulting in a net leverage ratio of 1.24x, our trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA. We remain undrawn on our $350 million revolver at the end of the quarter. In the first quarter, we paid a quarterly cash dividend of $0.12 per share, and we repurchased 781,000 shares of our common stock at a weighted average price of $31.31 per share. We have $475.6 million remaining under our recently authorized $500 million share repurchase program. To summarize, Q1 2024 financial results exceeded our outlook range with GMV and portfolio yield coming in slightly better than internal expectations. We continue to invest in GMV growth initiatives while delivering our targeted portfolio performance. Finally, we remain disciplined on spend and are on track to deliver on our full year SG&A expectations. With our healthy free cash flow generation, we were able to return capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. I would now like to touch on a few key aspects of our second quarter and revised full year outlook, which was provided in this morning's earnings release. As Steve mentioned, despite the macroeconomic challenges, we believe our GMV momentum will carry into the second quarter, and we will end Q2 with low single-digit growth year-over-year. The improving GMV positively impacts the gross leased asset balance, which is a key driver of future period revenue. Portfolio performance is expected to remain strong as we actively manage yields while balancing GMV growth. Similar to Q1, second quarter gross margins will have a difficult comparison to Q2 of 2023 for the Progressive Leasing segment with 90-day purchases normalized to pre-pandemic levels. We expect lease merchandise write-offs to increase in the second quarter compared to Q1 of 2024, driven by normal seasonality. However, as previously mentioned, we expect a full year 2024 write-off to remain within the targeted annual range of 6% to 8%. We remain disciplined on spending and are on track for Q2 as well as the full year 2024 to deliver SG&A as a percentage of Progressive Leasing revenue at a level that should be flat to last year. Our revised consolidated outlook for 2024 raises expectations on both revenue and earnings. It assumes adjusted EBITDA margins for the back half of the year that are slightly lower than the first half. Our revised consolidated outlook for 2024 calls for revenues in the range of $2.285 billion to $2.360 billion, adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $240 million to $255 million, and non-GAAP EPS in the range of $2.85 to $3.10. This outlook assumes a difficult operating environment with current trends of soft demand for leasable consumer goods, no material changes in the company's decisioning posture, no meaningful increase in the unemployment rates for our consumer base, an effective tax rate for non-GAAP EPS of approximately 30%, and no impact from additional share repurchases. Our revised outlook does not assume further economic downturn or a material benefit from an improving demand environment within our leasable categories. To conclude, I want to emphasize that we strive to meet the needs of our customers as we empower them on our financial journey by providing them with transparent offerings that include a seamless end-to-end experience. We also enable our retail partners to drive incremental sales, and we expect to deliver significant value to our shareholders. We are optimistic about our strategic efforts to drive growth while remaining committed to disciplined decisioning and spending.

Kyle Joseph, Analyst

Nice start to the year. Steve, I just wanted to backtrack a bit on GMV. Just give us a sense for the cadence in the first quarter. Obviously, it seemed to accelerate really with that in February or March. And then on your year outlook, I think you talked about low single-digit growth going forward. Is that kind of an annual, or is that just kind of the second quarter outlook?

Steven Michaels, CEO

Yes, the GMV trends throughout the quarter experienced some fluctuations. We began the year slowly in January, as the retail sector generally faced a sluggish start. There was a slight rebound in the latter part of February. Additionally, we encountered some calendar impacts in the first quarter, including a leap day in February, which is beneficial with an extra day. However, the Easter holiday shifted to March this year and fell on the 31st. This influenced the calendar positively and negatively. We did see a rebound because, as we noted on February 21 when we released our earnings, we anticipated a low single-digit decline in GMV, but we were able to get back to flat results, which we are pleased about. Looking at April, we benefit from a slight positive shift due to the Easter holiday, and this, combined with our performance so far this month, gives us confidence in projecting low single-digit growth for the second quarter. Regarding our GMV outlook, we have recently been providing our GMV projection for the current quarter, which is Q2, but not for the entire year. So, that was not a full-year commentary, and we look forward to sharing more information in July while ensuring that these trends continue and hopefully improve.

Kyle Joseph, Analyst

Got it. I have a follow-up question. Have you had any discussions with retail partners about the potential impacts of the CFTB late fee proposal? Specifically, how might this affect the POS financing world, and do they have any indications of an accelerated trade-down impact? We're currently waiting to see if and how this proposal will be implemented, but I'm curious about what your retail partners are saying regarding this matter.

Steven Michaels, CEO

There are many uncertainties in this situation, but we have insights from both perspectives. Our Vive business will be affected by this, although it's a minor segment of our overall operations. Vive is actively engaging with its retail partners, who are also in discussions with their main and secondary credit providers. If the proposal is implemented, which is still uncertain in terms of timing, it will alter the economic model for these providers. I believe it will likely lead to some reduction in credit supply at higher levels. Combined with the overall tightening and the shift towards more affordable options that we've previously discussed, we see this as a potential positive for the leasing business. However, predicting the timing remains a challenge.

Bradley Thomas, Analyst

Maybe I wanted to ask a bigger picture question and then something more specific. Maybe starting initially with just the competitive landscape, Steve, first of all, putting into context, I mean, I think your results look very strong when we look at the growth rates that we're seeing in the end markets that you play in. So that's really encouraging. But by the same token, we continue to get a lot of questions around the cross currents and competitive landscape. And I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what pressure or share gains you feel like you're seeing as you look at other lease term providers what's happening in buying that pay later? And what, if anything, is happening as you look at what's happening in the subprime and other financial alternatives space?

Steven Michaels, CEO

Yes, Brad. The market is really divided. In terms of leases, we have enterprise accounts and then the small to medium-sized businesses or regional market. The regional market has always been very competitive and remains so. We have a significant presence there, although some competitors have recently outpaced us in that area. However, we are committed to focusing on both segments and will continue to do so. Regarding other forms of supply, we expect those to be influenced by factors like delinquency trends, portfolio performance, and provisioning. We’re observing some tightening in that area. There is still strong demand for buy now, pay later options, which are quite different from our leasing activities. Our four technologies business can grow at any desired rate due to demand, but we are managing that growth for profitability. Overall, we are satisfied with our progress. In the subprime supply area, the trend appears neutral to tightening, which is positively beneficial for us, and we anticipate gaining market share in both the regional and enterprise sectors.

Bradley Thomas, Analyst

That's very helpful, Steve. And as a follow-up more specifically on the 90-day buyouts. I know that, that's been a factor that's affected comparability year-over-year and the gross margin in particular, but could you just give us an update on where that's tracking from a historic perspective? And again, how do you think that's going to play out in the next few quarters?

Brian Garner, CFO

Yes, Brad, it's Brian. I think you're correct. When we compare to last year, we mentioned in the first quarter that we reached a record low for 90 days. We expected that to normalize over time. Looking at the first quarter results, the gross margin reflects a normalized level, quite similar to the first quarter of 2019. I realize it's been a few years since we experienced a normal period, but it's effectively in line. Moving forward, our outlook incorporates a continuation of that normal trend. This will create a challenging margin comparison for at least the second quarter when viewing year-over-year, but it aligns more closely with what we would have seen back in 2019.

Hoang Nguyen, Analyst

Congrats on the call. Just a quick one for me. So in terms of GMV, I just want to dig a little bit deeper into that. I mean the raising outlook, I mean, is it more a function of increasing penetration, or you've seen sort of like slightly improved outlook from your partner? And maybe if you could dig into the cadence from March to April, I mean, did you guys see an acceleration in GMV?

Steven Michaels, CEO

Yes. Thank you. Yes, as it relates to our enterprise partners, we're not expecting a material rebound in the demand environment within 2024. But we are having success in, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, in partnering and achieving deeper integrations with our partners, which many of whom have been on the platform for quite a while. These demand pressures are causing reprioritization of projects whether that be marketing or waterfalls or a tech integration for transactional e-com card, which we haven't been able to get done to date. Those are positive ways that we're gaining balance of share within our partners. We also believe that we'll continue to add new retailers to the platform, small e-comm retailers, omnichannel retailers as well as larger brick-and-mortar with e-com as well. So we're optimistic about our ability to grow GMV, and it will be a joint impact from existing retailers as well as some new ones. As it relates to April, as I mentioned before, we started April well. Part of that is from the shift of the Easter holiday, but we're pleased with the trajectory and it gave us the confidence to predict GMV growth, albeit in the low singles, but GMV growth in Q2, and we're pleased with that.

Hoang Nguyen, Analyst

Got you. And just a quick follow-up for me. I think, I mean, one of the reasons your competitors have cited for the, I guess, faster growth in the SMB, probably the largest sales force. I guess, I mean, could you give us some color about your planned win back, I guess, in that space? Anything that you guys are planning? Just curious.

Steven Michaels, CEO

Yes, there are a lot of factors on how you create urgency and partnership in the regions. Some of it is touch points, whether that be people in stores or in the field or people on the phones, and we have that as well. Most of the regional space, the SMB space, there's multiple providers, but there could be a hierarchy, one provider could get the more applications than someone further down the stack. So it's a multipronged strategy of getting better prioritization with doors that we're already doing business in and making those doors more productive through a number of leases per month as well as adding new retailers to the platform. We have a long history of supporting regional players very well and have a lot of relationships out there. I think you should expect to see us make some real progress there in the near and intermediate terms.

Robert Griffin, Analyst

I guess, Steve, I first want to circle back on the GMV growth, really nice to see it flip here during the quarter. You gave us some great detail on the progression, but can you maybe unpack a little bit of what drove the upside? Was it ticket, volume as in more people requesting to use the Progressive product, or is it just a mix like you called out mixing up as a balance of share inside your retailers? Just trying to get a little bit better view on kind of the underlying revenue builders or building blocks of that metric.

Steven Michaels, CEO

Yes, Bobby, I'll share what I can. Ticket sales are relatively stable and not a significant factor in our story. While there may be a slight decline, it’s not the main focus. We've previously addressed the challenges related to demand and traffic. However, the current traffic shows a stronger need for flexible payment options compared to previous years. Many customers will be served by the primary providers above us, which is suitable for them if they meet the qualifications. Yet, due to several factors we've discussed, fewer individuals are being approved in the process. This situation is a bit hard to quantify as we refer to it as trading down. A larger aspect involves our partnerships with retailers to improve the approval process and ensure that retail associates are well-trained and knowledgeable about the product, guiding customers to the most suitable options. For instance, we've transitioned from what we called lease online pickup in-store to completely transactional online options that enable home delivery. These efforts are helping us gain market share, support our retailers, and strengthen our partnerships. We are satisfied with our progress, which began in 2022 and 2023, and is now yielding positive results. We look forward to seeing the future outcomes.

Robert Griffin, Analyst

That's helpful. On the vertical side, you mentioned that you're still seeing some comparable sales decline in the high single digits. Can you provide any further insights? Are there one or two specific verticals that are still underperforming? If those change, would we see significantly stronger GMV growth, or is it still a range of verticals? I'm trying to understand better, as you provided detailed information in the 10-K about the different product categories. Is there one category in particular that is having a major impact on GMV?

Steven Michaels, CEO

Well, broadly, I would say that furniture and mattresses are still a drag. As we talked about, the demand pull forward during the pandemic, those replacement cycles are longer, right? With a little bit of stagnation in the housing market, there might be not as many people moving out or household formation. So the furniture and mattress are still a little bit of a drag. We’ve seen some rebound in consumer electronics, which makes a little bit of sense because of the shorter replacement cycle. Smartphones have pretty much stayed strong throughout, and jewelry has its challenges as well, but we're looking forward to a rebound there. There are some puts and takes, but I would say furniture and mattresses are the larger drags.

Anthony Chukumba, Analyst

So this relates to some earlier questions. You mentioned gaining GMV balance sales with key retail partners and highlighted technical integrations and marketing. Can you elaborate on the marketing side, particularly what strategies were successful for you?

Steven Michaels, CEO

On the marketing side, we've been collaborating effectively with our partner marketing department, which is closely integrated with our retailers' marketing teams. They are executing joint marketing campaigns, including trip campaigns, nurture campaigns, and promotional campaigns, often partnering with other non-competitive retailers. Our retailers recognize the value of being part of the Progressive network and are actively engaging with it, as are we. This collaboration is mutually beneficial. Additionally, we are enhancing our direct-to-consumer marketing efforts, which help increase our partners' gross merchandise value by attracting both repeat and new customers to their stores and online platforms. There's significant activity happening in this area, and when the 10-Q is released, you will notice a moderate increase in our marketing expenses, reflecting positive returns on ad spend. We believe that direct-to-consumer marketing, in conjunction with our retail partner customer acquisition strategies, will be a major growth driver for us moving forward. I've also touched on the technical integrations, which involve aspects like credit stack waterfalls and e-commerce carts.

Anthony Chukumba, Analyst

That's helpful. And then just as a quick follow-up, sort of like my obligatory question. Any update on the retail partner pipeline, particularly at the enterprise level?

Steven Michaels, CEO

Yes, nothing specific other than it's a big focus of ours across the spectrum, whether it be in the long tail, the regions, the super regionals, and on the enterprise side. It's certainly part of our strategy and part of our focus, and we'll continue to work on it and look forward to hopefully announcing something someday. Thank you. I'd like to thank you again for joining us this morning and for your continued interest in PROG. Our teams did a great job and delivered a strong start to the year. We feel good about returning to GMV growth and the positioning of our portfolio. We look forward to updating you again in July with our Q2 results, and we hope you have a great day.

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's presentation. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.