GoodRx Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:GDRX) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript May 10, 2023

GoodRx Holdings, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.07, expectations were $0.06.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the GoodRx First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s call, Aubrey Reynolds, Senior Manager of Investor Relations. Ms. Reynolds, you may begin.

Aubrey Reynolds: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to GoodRx’s earnings conference call for the first quarter 2023. Joining me today are Doug Hirsch, our Chief Mission Officer; Trevor Bezdek, our Chairman; Karsten Voermann, our Chief Financial Officer; and Scott Wagner, our Interim Chief Executive Officer. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that this call will contain forward-looking statements. All statements made on the call that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including without limitation, statements regarding management’s plans, strategies, goals and objectives, our market opportunity, our anticipated financial performance, the impact of the grocer issue on our business, underlying trends in our business, our potential for growth, collaborations and partnerships with third parties, and the expected impact from macroeconomic environment on our business.

These statements are neither promises nor guarantees but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors. These factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Factors discussed in the Risk Factors section of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, as updated by our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2023, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements made on this call. Any such forward-looking statements represent management’s estimates as of the date of this call and we disclaim any obligation to update these statements, even if subsequent events cause our views to change.

In addition, we may also reference non-GAAP metrics, which are reconciled to the nearest GAAP metrics in the company’s earnings press release, which can be found on the Overview page of our Investor Relations website at investors.goodrx.com. I’d also like to remind everyone that a replay of this call will become available there shortly as well. With that, I’ll turn it over to Doug.

Doug Hirsch: Thank you, Aubrey. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We started GoodRx 12 years ago, because we were passionate about helping consumers access and afford the care they deserve. We are so proud that the company we built has become a service that millions of consumers rely on. Since those early days, much has changed, and our business has evolved into something bigger than Trevor and I ever dreamed. We’ve saved Americans over $55 billion on their medications and our team has launched entirely new business lines, including pharma manufacturer solutions, which enables us to make brand drugs more accessible, and GoodRx Health, which we believe offers some of the best and most trusted online health content.

It’s been both exciting and rewarding to build a business that enables us to help even more people in more ways. Trevor and I love what we do, but we also recognize that an important part of expanding our impact includes generating gross margins and profitability. We’ve always known that there would be a time when there would be others better equipped than us to run and grow a large public company. And I’m proud to say that we found that person in Scott Wagner, who has agreed to step in as our Interim CEO. Scott brings more than 25 years of experience running and scaling consumer technology companies that are leaders in their field, including public companies, and has the knowledge and expertise needed to enter the next phase of our company’s growth.

In 2012, Scott stepped in as Interim CEO at GoDaddy, and went on to become President, COO, CFO, and then CEO. During his tenure, he took the company public, nearly tripled revenue to approximately $3 billion, grew the business profitably and managed over 7,000 employees. Scott also has experience working with our sponsors, Silver Lake, Francisco Partners and Spectrum Equity. I’ve been working alongside him for the past two weeks and have already seen him put his breadth of experience into action. Trevor and I are excited about what Scott’s new perspective will bring. It’s no secret this past year has been rough. Our results have disappointed us as well as our stakeholders. And we believe the time is right to have someone lead the company who has extensive experience running and growing public companies.

We truly feel this is just the beginning of what GoodRx can accomplish. We love GoodRx and wanted to succeed more than anything else. Trevor and I are remaining at the company and are committed to supporting Scott and the business. I have taken on the role of Chief Mission Officer. And I’m so excited that I get to focus on doing what I love most, evangelizing the company’s mission to external parties. Whether it’s physicians, manufacturers, pharma or other partners, I will spend my time talking about all the amazing ways we aim to make healthcare affordable and convenient for Americans. I will now pass the call over to Trevor.

Trevor Bezdek : Thank you, Doug, and good morning, everyone. As Doug mentioned, we recognize the challenges both our business and our stock performance have faced over the past couple of years. We are still recovering from the impact the grocer issue we had on our core business. We haven’t driven product innovation forward as quickly as we planned to and our pharma manufacturers solutions offering has faced continued macroeconomic headwinds with the spending delays and reductions we discussed in our fourth quarter earnings call in February, which have contributed to uneven execution to-date. We don’t take this lightly. And we understand the importance of bringing in someone at this juncture who can drive the business forward faster.

We are incredibly lucky to have Scott on board. He has extensive experience transitioning businesses from founding teams into highly successful public companies. He’s already identified ways to improve and potentially grow the business, accelerate our long-term plan and platform expansion, and drive efficiency and margin. We are confident that this move is coming at the right time. Our business remains very attractive. We have a core prescription business that endured an unexpected disruption over the past year, but it’s fundamentally a category innovator in a large growing market. We believe our pharma manufacturer solutions efforts are delivering compelling ROI to customers but still in the early days. We need to continue to build scale and repeatability.

We believe this leadership transition will accelerate our growth and performance and reflects our enthusiasm about the opportunity for GoodRx over the years to come. In my new role as chairman, I’ll continue to leverage my deep network of industry relationships, and extensive knowledge of the healthcare industry to support Scott. With our overall healthcare strategy, strategic partner relationships and product innovation, I get to focus on supporting the business structure and strategy, the stuff I love. Before I turn the call over Scott, I want to discuss the highlights from this quarter, which we view as evidence of our strong value proposition and our very underpenetrated TAM, deep competitive moat, and incredibly loyal consumer and prescriber users with whom we have a 90 NPS.

There are four key areas where we saw the most success in Q1: One, our hybrid strategy; two, our engagement efforts; three, our recent ability to rapidly adjust consumer pricing which is driving more volume for us; and four, our collaboration with Express Scripts. First, we began implementing a hybrid approach, where we formalized relationships with our retail pharmacy network to ensure stability and mutual success for all parties. The early success we’ve had with this strategy has led us to increase the number of retail pharmacy partners we’re directly contracting with, as well as the proportion of claims associated with direct contracts. It has allowed us to understand their needs better and more deeply engage with these retailers. We believe we are creating incentives to encourage greater use of GoodRx and drive incremental volume through these retailers.

Second, as we work toward creating more meaningful direct consumer and provider relationships, our engagement efforts continue to play a critical role. As of the end of the first quarter, we are pleased that the proportion of prescription transaction from fully registered consumers has continued to increase after doubling in the second half of 2022 and that over 450,000 prescribers have engaged with us and Provider Mode since its launch. Third, we have found innovative ways to be able to rapidly adjust consumer pricing through point of sale discounts to optimize around demand elasticity on a per medication basis. We’ve increased our total spend on consumer facing discounts from $24.7 million in all of 2022 to $10.9 million just in 1Q ’23. We believe that much like consumer product brands who leverage coupons, our ability to catalyze user behaviors are highly effective.

And fourth, our PBM partners can benefit from the increased retailer network stability our hybrid strategy creates, and we are innovating the ways to do even more with them. A prime example is our Express Scripts integrated saving collaboration, Price Assure powered by GoodRx, which is one of our most exciting new initiatives. Early performance indicators across this innovative program continue to show promising signs. And we can report we saw greater than expected momentum via the Express Scripts program, particularly towards the end of the quarter. The Express Scripts collaboration helps remove the need for consumer education on prescription savings, and provides more transparency and price awareness automatically across the healthcare system by allowing eligible users to automatically receive GoodRx discount prices as part of their pharmacy benefit.

It’s built right into their card, with no action required on the consumers’ part. Express Scripts continues to educate and enroll plan sponsors across the balance of their commercial book of business. We believe this program opens up a significant new segment of the prescription savings TAM for us and we are seeing great early results. We can say definitively we’re reaching more consumers through this partnership, driving greater savings and improving awareness and affordability. We aspire to broaden our reach further through arrangements with additional PBMs. We believe our pharma manufacturer solutions platform has great potential based on the feedback from clients and the ROI those clients are achieving, but it operates with different pacing and it’s more nascent.

We are still building out our execution abilities in this offering with respect to our product investments and learning how to predict outcomes more accurately. We are also working on increasing our synergies across GoodRx Health and Provider Mode to drive awareness. I will now turn the call over to Scott.

Scott Wagner: Thanks, Trevor. First, I’d like to take a minute and applaud Trevor and Doug for all they have accomplished over the last 12 years. Under their leadership, GoodRx grew into a leading digital healthcare platform, serving over 7 million consumers a month. Trevor and Doug are smart, creative people, who have built a category-defining company. I’ve got an incredible respect for both of these guys, both what they built at GoodRx and who they are as people. I’m thrilled to be here and to contribute to the next leg of the GoodRx journey. As Trevor and Doug mentioned earlier on the call, I’ve got a bunch of experience helping companies deliver growth at scale, while building exceptional customer experiences. Personally, I really enjoy building companies and doing so the right way, companies that do unique and valuable things for their customers, that continue to innovate and grow to deliver attractive financial returns and have high performing teams.

I’m excited to join GoodRx, not just for what the business is today; but more importantly, for what it can be, and for how I can help right now. There is a lot to like about the GoodRx of today. GoodRx has a unique value proposition as the leading prescription savings marketplace. GoodRx has a true brand, loved by both patients and healthcare professionals alike, with Net Promoter Scores approaching 90. That’s pretty incredible. GoodRx plays a unique role in the prescription ecosystem, providing value to patients, providers and manufacturers alike. There is a lot of opportunity here. GoodRx has a huge TAM with interesting opportunities to expand from the discount card space to serving a larger portion of both Medicare and commercial plans. GoodRx has demonstrated product market fit with pharma partners, building a meaningful business from scratch in a really short time period.

We believe this business has growth because it’s incredibly useful to customers and manufacturers alike. GoodRx is unique in that it touches a vast array of constituents across the healthcare ecosystem spanning patients, providers, retailers, PBMs and pharma manufacturers. This ecosystem-wide foundation is our basis for further expansion. It’s also clear that GoodRx can do some things differently. I believe we need to do a better job of identifying and prioritizing the things that matter and are most impactful. We also have to evolve our execution against these opportunities, making sure that we execute with quality and with urgency and meet our commitments to each other in the company and to all of you. I’ve been around the block a bunch, GoDaddy being the most visible but also before that with the private equity firm KKR, leading businesses from one stage of evolution to another.

While not driven by a playbook per se, there is a combination of strategic insight, execution and team alignment that can help here. As I jump in as Interim CEO, there is a couple of key areas that I plan to drive and focus on with the team. First, making sure that, we have the strongest network relationships and retail pharmacies strategy possible; two, honing our short and medium term growth plans for the core prescription business and aligning teams and resources behind it; three, scaling our pharma manufacturing solutions efforts, there is a lot of goodness here. We’ve got a very unique capability in branded pharma that can benefit both patients and manufacturers alike. While our offerings in this area are nascent, we believe early proof points have been extremely positive with pharma customers, being really strong valued given our high intent audience that spans both patients and healthcare professionals.

It’s particularly valuable for the awareness and access solutions that they’ve been promoting. We’re going to lean into these high ROI solutions, and focus on driving further product innovation, expanding our brand reach with existing partners as well as landing more lighthouse brands with new manufacturers. If we get this right, I’m confident we’re going to be able to turn manufacturer solutions into a larger and more profitable business over time. Finally, we’re going to put our combined efforts against our biggest opportunities, make decisions, and then execute with quality and with urgency. For the investors on the call, I’m a big believer in transparency. GoodRx has experienced some uneven performance over the past 12 months, and no one likes that.

We need to get up to a place where we can provide clear ranges of growth and profitability to our investors, deliver against those ranges consistently barring any external and exogenous events, then lay out longer term plans and milestones over a three plus year period of time. Right now, our financial expectations represent our team’s best thinking. As I dig in more with the teams, I’ll be open with everyone on my thoughts on what our and your financial expectation should be for GoodRx with a focus on building multiyear value, while hitting our short-term commitments. With that, I’ll turn it over to Karsten to discuss the quarter in more detail and our priorities going forward. And I look forward to both working with and speaking with everybody in the months to come.

Thanks. Karsten?

Karsten Voermann: Thank you, Scott. We recognize everything is going to be focused on what’s to come. So I’ll provide short commentary on the first quarter, and then get to guidance before turning it over to the operator for Q&A. In summary, during the first quarter, we exceeded guidance on revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin with those coming in at $184 million, $53.2 million and 29% respectively. Going into more detail, total revenue for the quarter decreased 10% year-over-year to $184.0 million as I mentioned. Prescription transactions revenue growth was down 13% year-over-year to $134.9 million, but up quarter-over-quarter by 4%. MACs declined 5% year-over-year to $6.1 million, but increased 3% quarter-over-quarter.

PTR volume excluding the grocer involvement previously discussed grocer issue has continued to grow consistently, is up 3% sequentially and 16% year-over-year for 1Q ’23. The year-over-year declines were largely driven by the grocery issue. Our PTR also benefited from unexpected one time contributions as we expanded our efforts to ensure our network counterparties were adhering to the contracts we have in place, which resulted in unanticipated revenue gains of approximately 1% in our PTR offering late in the quarter with essentially 100% flow through to adjusted EBITDA. Our pharma manufacturing solutions revenue declined 13% year-over-year in the first quarter to $20.4 million. Our focus is on signing deals with high levels of recurring revenue potential.

So we did not do deals with one time customers as we did in 1Q ’22. We’re pleased with the trajectory we have achieved and the quality of campaigns we’re running. We remain very optimistic about this offering long-term. Turning to subscriptions, subscriptions revenue grew 26% year-over-year to $24.1 million as the Gold membership fee increase implemented in the first half of 2022 more than offset the negative impact from Kroger Savings Club, and related reduced marketing of the program and price increase related to Gold user churn. We ended the quarter at 1.0 million plans, down 16% year-over-year. Cost of revenue were $16.7 million, or 9% of revenue versus $12.3 million, or 6% of revenue in 1Q ’22. The increase in personnel costs related to consumer support and allocated overhead from the vitaCare acquisition primarily drove the year-over-year increase.

Product development and technology expenses were at $32.9 million, or 18% of revenue, which compared to $35.0 million, and 17% of revenue in 1Q ’22. Decrease in absolute dollar is primarily driven by a decrease in payroll and related costs and higher than expected level of capitalizable labor based on our quarter end analysis. Sales and marketing expenses were $78.5 million, or 43% of revenue versus $93 million, or 46% of revenue in the first quarter of 2022. As we have discussed, we’re proactively managing marketing spend in the current environment and finding ways to leverage our brand while getting higher return on each dollar invested. I’d like to take a moment and delve deeper into one aspect of our marketing program, point of sale discounts for consumers.

POS discounts allow GoodRx to take control of the amounts consumers pay in a rapid targeted manner that is similar to couponing by consumer packaged goods companies. This enhances our ability to fulfill our mission on medication affordability. We can deploy this tool against specific medications and to drive specific behaviors, including, for example, our engagement efforts. Last year, we disclosed in our 10-K, we spent $24.7 million on these efforts, and we believe we’ve been able to continue to make the spend effective at scale. POS discounts are one of the many tactics at our disposal to help secure great pricing for our consumer in what we believe to be an extremely targeted and effective manner. This then contributed to our ability to drop sales and marketing expenses as a percent of revenue in mid-2022 even as their use of POS discounts grew.

In the first quarter we spent a total of $10.9 million, $9.5 million of which is included in sales and marketing, and $1.4 million of which was contra revenue, meaning that instead of hitting OpEx, it reduces revenue and also reduces our growth rates. That is similar to the contra revenue accounting treatment of coupons in the CPG space. The P&L geography of contra revenue versus sales and marketing expense for our POS discounts has no impact on adjusted EBITDA. General administrative expenses were $29.6 million or 16% of revenue versus $31.9 million or 16% of revenue in the first quarter last year. The decrease is primarily driven by a decrease in stock-based compensation expense related to the co-founders’ awards granted in connection with our IPO.

Net loss of $3.3 million compared to net income of $12.3 million in the first quarter of 2022 and was impacted by lower sales volumes related primarily to the grocer issue, integration costs related to vitaCare and fluctuations in our quarterly estimated tax provision, partially offset by lower sales and marketing expense. Adjusted net income was $29.5 million, compared to $41.3 million in the first quarter of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA decreased 18% year-over-year to $53.2 million which was ahead of expectations and up 7% quarter-over-quarter. Given the PTR offering has very little incremental cost per transaction, the impact on our PTR volume from the grocer issue, and to a lesser degree, pharma manufacturer solutions revenue, were the biggest drivers to the year-over-year performance.

Adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 29% was down 290 basis points year-over-year, while improving 200 basis points quarter-over-quarter. We generated net cash provided by operating activities of $32.3 million compared to $30.1 million in the prior year period. Our capital allocation priorities are unchanged and we will continue to focus on high return investments and maximizing value for shareholders. Our balance sheet remains strong and we ended the quarter at $761.1 million in cash on the balance sheet and $665.3 million of outstanding debt. Our revolving credit facility had $90.8 million of unused capacity, representing total liquidity of $851.9 million. Now on to guidance. Our outlook for revenue is $185 million to $188 million for 2Q.

And for the full year, we expect total revenue of $750 million to $775 million. Both of those numbers are net of anticipated POS discount contra revenue of $1 million to $2 million for the second quarter and around $10 million for the full year. As we said earlier, the portion of POS discounts that our contra revenue reduces revenue and our growth rate versus traditional sales and marketing expense treatment. The POS discount contra revenue amounts were not included in our prior guidance numbers, given their evolution. It has no impact on adjusted EBITDA, since the value ascribed to contra revenue would otherwise hit S&M expense. We have reduced our pharma manufacturer solutions outlook for the coming few quarters as we aim to ramp up a series of large programs, which have been either recently implemented or are in our late stage pipeline, a material portion are pay-for-performance providing upside for us.

We believe our customers have been very pleased with them, but they are less predictable for us than our historical flat fee deals, which contributes to us lowering the bottom end of our annual guidance range. To provide context, our pharma manufacturer solutions offering is still nascent. While we believe early proof points have been strong in terms of customer satisfaction and ROI, our product innovation and delivery processes are still in early stages. Manufacturer solutions revenue was less than $20 million in 2020. Since then, we have learned and progressed as we grew the revenue to 5x that amount through 2022. We have increased the types of clients we work with and the offerings we sell to them. We believe that we are now in a position to put energy and resources behind the deal constructs that work the best for our clients and ourselves.

For example, in terms of clients, we found focal points in women’s health and diabetes. And on the offering side, we are focused on a couple of areas. First, driving prescriber usage, a newer growth vector for us, where we’ve seen Provider Mode MAUs double since December 2022 and where we are leveraging over 450,000 providers, who have engaged with our Provider Mode offering since its launch, already resulting in multimillion dollar contributions to pharma manufacturer solutions revenue. Also on the offering side, we have seen increasing number of pharma manufacturers interested in creating cash solutions for branded medications, leveraging our direct, bottom of funnel consumer marketing capabilities. One example is our dot com point of sale solution, which provides savings of $200 for consumers.

Overall, we believe that our pharma manufacturer solutions pipeline is robust. And we’re very excited about the long-term potential of this offering. But we’re in the early innings. Predicting the timing of when we can close and deliver on some of the lumpier, large deals is tricky for us. We’re also more focused than ever on recurring revenue, which means we’re forgoing potentially multimillion dollar onetime revenue deals that we took in the past. We believe a highly sustainable and highly valuable pharma manufacturer solutions business has to be founded on a growing base of repeat usage. Moving on to second quarter guidance by offering, we expect prescription transactions revenue of approximately $132 million to $134 million net of the anticipated impact of POS discount revenue reductions of approximately $1 million to $2 million.

Our expectation for PTR per MAC is to show a modest decrease over the coming quarters, as we focus even more on driving volume with retailer pharmacies through our hybrid model. And we experienced the seasonal impact of more consumers potentially hitting their deductibles, impacting our Price Assure Express Scripts collaboration. We expect subscription revenue of approximately $23 million to $24 million in the second quarter, which at the top end is relatively flat quarter-over-quarter as we’re nearing the anniversary of their fee increases implemented last year and expect to see less churn in future quarters. We expect pharma manufacturer solutions to return to sequential growth in the second quarter with revenue of approximately $26 million, up 27% quarter-over-quarter.

Finally, we expect other revenue to be approximately $4 million in the second quarter. As we mentioned in our last call, we continue to have additional marketing investments we anticipate making in the coming quarters and will remain opportunistic as we structure the timing of those investments. As a result, we expect our adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the mid-20% range for the second quarter. With that, I’ll now turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from a line of Stephanie Davis with SVB Securities.

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Operator: I’m showing no further questions in queue at this time. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.