Bird Global, Inc. (NYSE:BRDS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

We’re going to reallocate some of the vehicles that we have from those markets that we’re exiting. We’re going to hibernate some of those vehicles during the winter months and also move them to other new market opportunities like in the Middle East and ahead of the World Cup over there. You also heard about our strategic pillar. I think Shane talked a bit about that and how we’re focused on improving our vehicle fleet efficiency through better supply-demand matching, our deploy rates and extending the life of our vehicles. So when you think about that context, I would say net-net we should have enough vehicles on hand to support our remaining city portfolio and capture near-term opportunities. So you can expect that we’re going to be much more prudent with our CapEx spending going forward, and that our focus will be more on driving greater asset efficiency and balancing that with CapEx for new vehicles.

I hope that helps, Tom.

Tom White: Yes. That’s good. Maybe one more follow up for you. I want to make sure I understand the breakage revenue stuff. So this is deferred revenue that I guess the accounting rules say that you can recognize some of that over time, even if consumers don’t actually kind of take the rides. But thus far, you haven’t been recognizing any of that as revenue. But you’re now going to start doing that. And, I don’t know, maybe help us like understand, like, how much could that potentially offset the negative restatement to revenue kind of going forward from the wallet issue you talked about?

Ben Lu: Yes, sure, Tom. This is actually a rather technical accounting question that you’ve provided, so I’ll try not to be too technical with it. The way I tend to characterize this to folks who are not familiar with breakage revenue, think of it as a gift card, right? If someone gave you a $50 gift card, you want to purchase $45, you have $5 remaining on your gift card, there’s a probability that whether you or others just never use that remaining balance, whether it’s because you lost it, you threw it away or forget to use it, but probability is that there’s a significant portion of those people will never redeem the remaining portion of their gift cards. This is very similar to what we have. We have what we call preloaded wallet balances.

So when you do a ride, you want to put in $5, $10, et cetera. And then we run probability across our wallet balance to see what’s the probability that someone’s ever going to make a transaction within their wallet? And over time, whether we do it one year, two year, et cetera, you look at data and you start realizing that we have $67 million wallet balance here in the U.S. The probability of that is, and you said what’s the chance that someone’s going to make a transaction within that wallet balance? And if the probability suggests that a portion of it will never be touched, that’s what we look at what we will call a — what I called a one-time true up to our revenue. So you’ll see a pretty meaningful bump up in our revenues next quarter because of this true up.

We’re obviously working with our auditors to estimate what that magnitude would be. But you can say it’s a pretty meaningful portion of that $67 million. And then on a go-forward basis, just like in that gift card analogy I mentioned, we’re going to continue to book a certain percent of our revenues as breakage revenues, meaning the revenues that we can recognize from the wallet as part of our deferred revenue balance. It’s a little early for me to say what that number is, because that’s something that we’re still working with our auditors, but I would say high level, Tom, industry average is that breakage revenues are somewhere in the 5 — I would say maybe 5% to 8% range on a go-forward basis. But we still need to finalize that with the auditor, so don’t hold me to do that yet.