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

Rajat Gupta: Understood. Great. Thanks for all the color. I’ll jump back in queue.

Operator: And we have a question from Naved Khan from B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.

Naved Khan: Yes. Thank you and congrats on the results. I had a couple of questions. So in your Q4 outlook, I think you guys expect — you guys said that you expect OEM to be up sequentially. And I’m wondering if you’re running any campaigns that gives you that level of visibility? Or is it more of a broad-based trend that’s kind of helping this line. And the other question I had is just on the D2C Media. Just Alex, maybe can you talk about the levers that you have to kind of drive the business up from here? You said it was a double-digit grower on its own. Just give us some thoughts on — your thoughts on what you can do to kind of take it to the next level.

Sonia Jain: I think maybe just really briefly on the OEM question, given that we are part of the way through the quarter, a lot of OEMs book with us in advance. So we have upfront that we do with them at the beginning of every year, and then we have incremental sales on top of that. And so at this point in the quarter, we have pretty solid visibility into our expectations, which is informing our guidance around OEM and national revenue.

Alex Vetter: Correct. And then on D2C, a couple of answers there. First and foremost, D2C only has 1,000 dealers out of a TAM of over 10,000 in Canada alone. So there’s organic upside to grow just the share of dealers using the D2C platform in Canada. But importantly, if you look at the OEM endorsements, currently, as DI, we only had six OEM endorsements in Canada where D2C has 12. There is some duplication, but the net effect is that we have 15 OEMs, where we have a license to hunt in the Canadian market. And so, it opens up the sales aperture for that team to expand in Canada even faster than they currently are. It reminds me a lot of DI and what it looked like there, where we ran that playbook here in the US market. So I consider this to be a similar play that we’ve run and executed before.

I think the final one is that Accu-Trade continues to build momentum. We are adding features. We’re improving the onboarding. We’re seeing higher dealer utilization and the value there is overwhelming. We want to distribute this technology throughout Canada and the D2C Media team being locally entrenched with strong relationships to an established dealer base certainly gives us a distribution path for Accu-Trade in Canada. I think further on, obviously, there is an aspiration to launch our marketplace in Canada, but that will come once we’ve built up the supply side of our business in the country.

Naved Khan: Understood. And in terms of just the product, Alex, you will have Dealer Inspire product and now you have the D2C. Is there — somewhere down the line, is there scope for consolidating that or do you see one better than the other and kind of just moving every customer to that? Is that something we can expect or is that not necessarily the case?

Alex Vetter: There is a plan to align road maps and leverage more synergy between the two platforms, but we are consolidating both brands under the Cars Commerce umbrella, so that we can work directly with OEMs for inclusion in their preferred programs and then provide robust reporting analytics and support that’s North American in nature. And so that strengthens our OEM relationships and our ability to serve and support their needs, because most of them are looking for solutions that cover both geographies.

Naved Khan: Understood. Great. Thank you guys.

Alex Vetter: Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Gary Prestopino from Barrington Research. Your line is open.