Cars.com Inc. (NYSE:CARS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Gary Prestopino: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Doug Arthur from Huber Research. Your line is open.

Doug Arthur: Yes. Good morning. Thank you. So, can you unpack the 8% growth in the dealer business line in Q1? How much was – if you are generally speaking, was from D2C, which I think you closed in November and how much – what was the growth rate at DI?

Sonia Jain: Yes. So, I think we talked a little bit about D2C’s impact at the time we bought them. So, they are particularly in the beginning of this year before we lap the acquisition, they are going to be contributing a couple of points of our year-over-year revenue growth. We are moving a little bit away from our traditional Dealer Inspire year-over-year growth metric. Part of the reason for that is we are now a lot more focused on selling at a platform level as opposed to individual product, sort of individual branded level. But I think if you went back and you tried to do an apples-to-apples comparison on that, you would find that the year-over-year growth is fairly consistent with what we have seen in prior years, which is basically a double-digit growth rate.

So, generally, one of the takeaways should be for Q1 and Q1 revenue growth as we saw improvement across all areas of the business, marketplace, the solutions side of our business and the media side of our business.

Doug Arthur: Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Marvin Fong from BTIG. Your line is open.

Marvin Fong: Great. Good morning. Thanks for squeezing me in here. Sorry, I hopped on the call a little bit late, but I did see, so ARPD was down sequentially, and I understand that we only had a partial quarter of D2C contribution less in the fourth quarter. But could you just help us understand like what ARPD have been up sequentially if we exclude D2C. That’s my first question.

Sonia Jain: No, it’s a great question, Marvin. D2C is a little bit of a – while it’s a great revenue growth and it’s margin accretive, it is a little bit of a drag on ARPD, they don’t, but it’s a business that really isn’t – is selling websites and website up-sells and increasingly now also our Accu-Trade product in Canada. If we pull the D2C out of the mix for Q1, we probably would have been flat to slightly up sequentially on ARPD.

Marvin Fong: Great. Super helpful. And then just a question on Accu-Trade, I mean I think when we last kind of talked about the mice when you guys got a FordDirect you said it would take a couple of quarters to kind of get that all set up. So, should we expect sort of the timing of that to sort of start hitting soon? And should we kind of think about the adoption and the dealer count for Accu-Trade kind of being a nice little bump, or do you kind of expect to kind of see the same level of increases that we have been seeing? Thanks.

Alex Vetter: Thanks for the question, Marvin. We have actually started to see the pickup with Ford dealers specifically, about 20% of our new sales were coming in our Ford dealers, which is disproportionate to the number of Ford stores in the total TAM. So, we are seeing the first signs of that acceleration happened due to the OEM endorsement, and we expect that to build not only with Ford dealers, but hopefully other OEM endorsements as well.

Marvin Fong: Great. And if I could just maybe slip in one more here, really great to see the strength in advertising or OEM and National, and I appreciate what you kind of said about the commitment from. I know you guys did a great campaign with Tesla recently. I mean how much of this is so tied to EVs, there is obviously a sales issue there and inventory turn issue or would you attribute it more to just kind of a broad-based demand from that customer base? Thanks.

Alex Vetter: Specifically on the EV issue, we think it’s a consumer education challenge, which is why digital platforms like Cars.com, we think are perfect for Elon and Tesla as well as other OEMs, right. The consumers have a lot of questions prior to purchase, and they need information, which we have. And so we have added things like driving range and battery life to our content around EV so that consumers can see what each model can reliably generate in terms of time to recharge and distance and to reduce range anxiety. So, we think the problem with EVs is largely educational. We think car companies need to invest in platforms that provide that independent third-party objectivity to help them develop confidence to go to the physical store and drive the product.

So, that’s number one. I think number two, in general, we are pleased with the OEM progress. We are far from declaring victory. We think this opportunity is tremendous because the amount of time consumers are spending on our platform comparing makes and models. The OEMs that tap into that experience and talk to shoppers while they are in the active shopping are going to take outsized share because they are tapping into retail demand.

Catherine Chen: Operator, do we have any more questions on the line?

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call over back to you, Catherine Chen.

Catherine Chen: Great. Thank you. Thanks everyone. On a final note, I encourage you to read our inaugural corporate social responsibility and community action report, which is an illustration of who we are at our core. It’s located on our Investor Relations website. We are also continuing our investor engagement and will host meetings at the following May conferences. First, the Needham Technology, Media and Consumer Conference on May 14th, the Barrington Virtual Spring Investment Conference on May 16th, the JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference on May 21st and finally, the B. Riley Institutional Investor Conference on May 22nd. Thanks for joining the call and we look forward to seeing many of you soon.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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