Avis Budget Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CAR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Healy: Great, that’s super helpful. And I just wanted to ask just on the capital allocation front, clearly buyback has been a successful lever, you’ve sold, but the environment has changed a little bit in terms of maybe assets out there, that are out there that are distressed. As you look at kind of the landscape, is there any facets of the business where you look at things and say, hey there might be some strategic transformational M&A out there that might fit us, maybe even in the mobility space or the auto remarketing space or retail space. Like are those things, you know what I would say, relevant in your thought process or are you guys looking at 2023 and just saying, hey, we’re just going to keep running the same playbook that we’ve done in the last couple of years and putting those things a little bit off to the future. Just I’d love to think about how you are thinking about that?

Brian Choi: Yes, John. I think we’ve been consistent in saying that we won’t be formulaic in terms of share repurchases. As we look at the free cash flow that we generate, we look across like all platforms in terms of where we can reinvest that. So yes, M&A is one of them. Obviously, reinvesting in ourselves has been a significant portion of our free cash flow usage, and we think that will continue this year as well. And given rising interest rates and just general macroeconomic uncertainties, we’re focused on corporate debt pay down and fleet equity contribution as well. So when it comes to M&A, we’re always looking. We do look at adjacencies. And as opportunities arise, we’re not going to be shy about acting proactively, but that’s something that we evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

John Healy: Understood, thanks guys.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Diego Ortega of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Diego Ortega Laya: Hi, good morning. I had a very quick one in terms of average fleet age. So do you have a metric for that in terms of months or miles? And how does that compare versus history and how long do you think you can extend that? Thank you.

Joe Ferraro: Hi, this is Joe. Let me try to answer that the best way I can. Over the pandemic, obviously, the car rental companies had to increase the hold periods on their cars. We did a whole lot to try to reduce that in the second half of this year, as I mentioned, in the amount of cars that we sold. And so we — I had to say on average, is our age increased tremendously over the previous past pandemic, I would say it really hasn’t. And as far as mileage, we have — we’ve developed technology a while back that we in time called mileage optimization. And basically, the technology allows us to deploy a car to a customer based on their anticipated mileage needs. And over the years, as that starts to learn and get smarter, we’ve managed to reduce our monthly per unit mileage a little bit over time, which helped our over mileage attrition.

And as I said before in our earlier commentary, we spent a lot of time these past two quarters exiting higher mileage cars at pretty high gains, I would think, to get our fleet back in line so that we have a fleet size that’s right for the time of year and also a product that’s commercially acceptable to our customers. And we keep getting new cars in, which is going to obviously help the per unit mileage and the overall mileage of the average — health of our cars and the average mileage of our fleet.

Diego Ortega Laya: Got it. Thank you.

Joe Ferraro: Thanks.