Cars.com Inc. (NYSE:CARS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Vetter: Sure, Rajat. Thanks for the question. I think what’s exciting about the business is that, we’re sitting at a point in time where our growth vectors are very diversified in many. I think let’s start with just dealer count. We’ve got less than 20,000 dealers in a domestic TAM of 40,000. And then even with the addition of D2C Media in Canada, we’ve got now 1,000 dealers in Canada with a TAM of close to 10,000 dealers that we can go after there as well. Importantly, even though we repackage and reprice this year, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t additional opportunities to keep doing that in future years. And certainly, we think OEM obviously have bounced in the quarter, which is exciting to see. We’ve asked for investor patience as we retool that business, and we got a nice bounce in it in third quarter, and we see tremendous upside in OEM spending over next year as well.

I think the big area of untapped opportunity is now bringing our digital solutions to the OEMs as well. 50% of new vehicle sales have a trade-in, yet most OEMs do not have a trade-in solution for their customers as they want to offer on their Tier 1 websites, and we see continued adoption from OEMs wanting to outfit their dealer networks with tech. So, we’ve got a lot of opportunity for growth, whether it’s product, pricing, packaging, but certainly, the market share alone is a reason to believe. Sonia, I don’t know what else you’d add?

Sonia Jain: No, I think you covered it really well. I think dealer customer growth continues to be a vector for us. And then I think importantly for marketplace, repackaging this year, it was kind of a two-pronged initiative. We did take price, obviously, which you’ve seen reflected in our ARPD, but we also put in place the packaging structure that we can leverage going forward, as we think about how to advance more of the platform value in a bundled context and platform context, as opposed to point solutions, which are a little harder to increment quickly.

Rajat Gupta: Got it. Just to follow-up on Alex’s comments on the OEM revenue now stabilizing and a big opportunity. Is there any way to like size that? How you anticipate that progressing beyond the third quarter? You gave some guidance for the fourth quarter, that will be sequentially up. But like how should we think about that run rate into next year? And just relatedly, presumably, that has higher incremental drop-through to the bottom line versus the dealer business. If you could add more color on that would be helpful.

Alex Vetter: Yes. Certainly, the OEM revenues are some of the highest margin revenues that the business enjoys and it’s been on a multi-year slide with the inventory shortages, and now that inventory levels are blossoming again, there is an opportunity for us to expand this line of the business, which has positive top line and bottom line implications. I think that said, OEM revenues tend to be very choppy, unlike our highly recurring sticky dealer subscription business, which you can reliably predict from quarter-to-quarter. The OEM revenue comes in lumps and seasonal needs for urgency by the OEMs to ramp up something in a period. And so, it is a little bit harder to predict without the reoccurrence of that revenue, but we definitely see big upside in OEM spending close to $20 billion being spent domestically by OEMs and advertising, yet 90% of those dollars are going to people that aren’t in the market to buy a car.

And so, we see tremendous upside in our go-to-market, which is part of why we’ve rebranded as Cars.com, Commerce Media so that OEMs know that we can actually help them facilitate transactions at the retail level.

Sonia Jain: And I think we’ll also be able — we’ll be in a good position to share more detail, right, when we give our 2024 guidance in a couple of months around how to think about the shape of OEM revenue evolving. But I do think, and I think you probably got our takeaway as we were really pleased to see kinds of that sequential improvement and turning the corner a little bit, so to speak, on OEM performance and their — the attractiveness they see in our audience.