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

Joe Ferraro: Yes, well, listen, we’ve been managing fleet here, and certainly, I have for a long period of time, and we are keenly aware of both close in and longer-term patterns that we might see. We have systems that help us understand what they could be based on reservation demand and trend and what holidays look like and what peak period summer travel might be. I think if you had asked me, we are going in with a cautious amount of optimism and we’re going to keep the fleets as the way I see it tight for a number of reasons, as we said earlier. Fleet costs are higher, interest costs are higher. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. And I believe our success over the past years has been our ability to react whether it be 2020, react to the fact that we needed to get out of cars and get out of cars in a very, very quick fashion and sell them in the ways we did through the channels that we had or as we did last year to react and say, what the peak is going to be bigger than we actually thought and is there an opportunity to have more fleet.

The beauty of it is, we have terrific relationships with our OEM partners. We deal with all of them. We have a large array of vehicles coming in that are both gas and EVs and we’ve been able to sell cars in the last two quarters and allow us to go into January with a fleet size is at the right level. And I do believe that gives us a tipping point to say, should demand get up, come up, we could react and should it go down, we could certainly react. So I’m pretty positive where we are with our fleet size and I think we have the experience and technologies at our disposal to ensure that, that goes on throughout the rest of the year.

Christopher Stathoulopoulos: Okay, thank you.

Operator: Thank you. At this time, I’d like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Ferraro for closing comments.

Joe Ferraro: Sure, thank you. So to recap, we reported our best yearly earnings in our company’s history. Our team continues to deliver in every business metric, including enhanced revenue generation, diligent fleet management and stringent cost control. These efforts were highlighted by the Americas reporting over $3.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA during the year and International achieving historic fourth quarter and full year results. Most importantly, I really want to acknowledge and thank all the employees for their continued and tireless efforts in helping us achieve these results, and I’m excited for what we accomplished in 2023 with this same level of intensity and thank you all for your time and interest in our company.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This concludes today’s event. You may disconnect your lines at this time or log off the webcast and enjoy the rest of your day.