Hims & Hers Health, Inc. (NYSE:HIMS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Hims & Hers Health, Inc. (NYSE:HIMS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript November 7, 2022

Hims & Hers Health, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.09, expectations were $-0.1.

Operator: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Hims & Hers Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Lisa, and I’ll be your operator today. Now I’ll turn the call over to Christine Greany from The Blueshirt Group to begin.

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Christine Greany: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Hims & Hers Health Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. On the call with me today is Andrew Dudum, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; as well as Yemi Okupe, Chief Financial Officer. Before I hand you over to Andrew, I need to remind you of legal safe harbor and cautionary declarations. Certain statements and projections of future results made in this presentation constitute forward-looking statements that are based on our current market, competitors and regulatory expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially. We take no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement after this call, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise.

Please see our most recently filed 10-Q and 10-K reports for a discussion of risk factors as they relate to forward-looking statements. In today’s presentation, we have certain non-GAAP financial measures. We refer you to the reconciliation table contained in today’s press release available on our Investor Relations website for reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and related information. You’ll find a link to the webcast and Investor Relations website at investors.forhims.com. After the call, this webcast will be archived on the website for 12 months. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Andrew to begin.

Andrew Dudum: Thanks, Christine. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. I’m proud to share the results of another record quarter as we continue on our mission to make health and wellness more accessible than ever before. The power of our trusted brand, innovative technologies and seamless customer experience continue to lay the foundation for a robust and consistent growth. After a very strong first half, business trends further accelerated in Q3. Revenue, which was predominantly driven by recurring online subscriptions, grew 95%, reaching $145 million. For the third straight quarter, we saw sequential growth in the number of net new subscriptions, up 174,000, to nearly 1 million subscriptions. We are building tremendous scale, which had a meaningful impact on the bottom line.

During the quarter, adjusted EBITDA loss was a relatively modest $6 million. Even more exciting is the adjusted EBITDA guidance we are providing today, which anticipates our transition to profitability beginning in Q4. We have been on this path since inception, and it is particularly gratifying to see this organically materialize. The underlying strength of our model and ongoing momentum across the business gives us confidence that we can operate profitably on a go-forward basis while continuing to invest for growth. During the third quarter, growth was driven by multiple offerings, strong consumer adoption of the Hims & Hers platform and record subscription growth. Underpinning these incredible results is our transformational business model and world-class teams who are executing with critical precision.

This is evident across the business, from the creativity and increased reach of our marketing campaigns to the speed of innovation across our expanding compounding capabilities and strengthening infrastructure. The muscle we are building has not only enabled us to drive growth and build scale at unprecedented levels to date, but will continue to pay dividends for years to come. The underlying strength of our model and accelerating momentum has allowed us to double down on our business. We continue to see success in our traditional marketing channels and continue to successfully scale investment in the long-term development of our brand and technology platform. Each of these has been a critical part of our success in 2022. We expect these investments will continue to drive traffic and long-term tailwinds in the quarters ahead.

It is clear there is tremendous white space in front of us as we redefine how individuals think about their own health and wellness by offering a superior level of care and product breadth at incredible value. As we seize this opportunity, we are building a best-in-class foundation that we believe will compound over many years. From day 1, we have acted with discipline to establish building blocks that we can leverage as we scale. And equally important, we’ve harnessed key learnings along the way. Now at a time when others may be pulling back or fully hitting the brakes on new investments, we are taking advantage of marketplace opportunities to continue building long-term foundational elements throughout our business. In 2022, we’ve been expanding our bench with the addition of top-tier talent to support our growth.

This includes key hires in R&D, fulfillment, communications and finance. In the third quarter alone, we brought on our first Chief Communications Officer and a new VP of Fulfillment Operation. Amidst an incredibly dynamic and volatile macro environment, we are operating and investing from a position of strength. Key to our consistent execution is our ongoing focus on our 3 key growth pillars: brand, technology and experience. Since founding the company, we have made every decision with at least one of these pillars in mind, and the success we’ve experienced thus far in ’22 and in the third quarter specifically is a testament to that model and focus. Our ability to win in this challenging environment is the direct result of building each of these aspects of our business into a uniquely defensible pillar of our success.

Let me now update you on each of these, starting with our brand. The third quarter was a continuation of the strategy we have utilized throughout all of 2022 to build greater brand awareness and brand equity. We are thoughtfully deploying marketing dollars principally toward efficient customer acquisition and long-term development of our brand. These conversations through numerous high-impression media placements create trusted relationships with a variety of consumers at a formative time in their lives, which we believe paves the way for us to become a trusted partner throughout their health and wellness journeys. As other companies across the landscape continue to decrease their marketing investments, we have seized a significant opportunity to capture mind share, generate high ROI and further deepen the relationship people have with our brand.

This year, we have doubled down on high-profile opportunities that focus on specific demographics and extend our reach to new audiences. As a result, we’ve been able to accelerate the momentum behind our brand. During the quarter, we saw multiple initiatives begin to yield some exciting results. On the Hims side of the business, we launched campaigns with the NFL during prime time games on Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights. And on the Hers side, we added moments around leading programs on Hulu. The increasing size and significance of these campaigns speaks to the strength of our brand platform, particularly as we gain a deeper understanding of our customers and how to best engage with them. This confidence also resulted in the signing of a new celebrity partnership that will begin in early 2023.

I’ll leave you with just that teaser for now and look forward to sharing details after the launch. Turning now to the progress we are making on technology. We continuously seek to engage with our customers in more personalized ways and do so via multiple platform technologies. Following the successful rollout of our Hims & Hers apps on iOS in Q1, we launched on the Android platform in Q3. Engagement on iOS thus far has been robust, and we are pleased to note that early response to the new Android offering is extremely positive. We have been energized by the early reads of higher conversion rates and increased engagement across our mobile platforms. Whether it’s through our websites or mobile apps, we are proud to be a trusted place for our customers to engage with health care providers, become educated about their conditions and find sustainable solutions that improve their day-to-day wellbeing.

Building these capabilities improves our ability to personalize interactions with our customers and also gives us deeper and growing insights into how to best attract and serve them on an ongoing basis. With the launch of our Android platform and expansion of more care entry points, we have meaningfully improved the sophistication of our routing technologies. These improvements expedite the speed with which we’re able to connect customers to the appropriate individuals to address their questions. This provides a more seamless experience as well as increases the efficiency of our customer service operations. As the breadth of treatments, conditions and care options continue to expand, this intelligent routing platform will become an integral part of the delivery of great care.

We’re also continuing to build defensible capabilities to support more personalized prescription treatments on our platform. Notably, we are building the teams and technology that will enable us to expand our product portfolio and leverage compounding capabilities to deliver groundbreaking personalized solutions across our categories. This past quarter, we took possession and fully moved into our new 25,000 square foot Arizona pharmacy, which should further help scale many of these investments. You can expect to see us bring an increasing number of proprietary products to the marketplace. And when we deliver this kind of innovation, we expect the end result to be a more sticky customer. Looking now at our third pillar, experience. We have found that once customers are on the platform, not surprisingly, one of the most important parts of their experience is the relationship and quality of the health care provider they are engaging with.

I am incredibly proud to say that this is another aspect of our business that is improving dramatically as we scale. We have developed a strong reputation within the medical community which values how we operate from both a clinical and regulatory perspective. This is enabling us to attract quality physicians to our platform from those other digital platforms as well as brick-and-mortar health care. There are a number of key factors that attract health care providers to Hims & Hers. First and foremost, we’re providing them with the tools to achieve significant impact with patients, which is incredibly empowering. We do this through a user-friendly EMR platform, mobile apps that allow for ease of access and predictive clinical education to support improved decision making.

We believe access to great health care requires great providers. As such, we will continue to invest in our clinical experiences to empower and attract the best medical talent in market. In short, investments across brands, technology and experience, a model which we think of as our company’s consumer adoption flywheel, are not only driving the incredible results you see today, but we believe are also setting us up for tremendous growth over the long term. This business was founded to solve what I believe to be one of the most significant challenges in this country, access to affordable and excellent health and wellness solutions. We are operating across large and untapped TAM, which requires that we remain incredibly disciplined. We will continue to invest in our brands, technology and world-class experiences, and our investments will continue to be highly targeted with clearly defined goals in mind.

I’m incredibly proud of the growing number of individuals we are able to help on a daily basis. Given the momentum we are seeing in the business and the scale benefits we continue to realize, we are raising our 2022 guidance and now expect to eclipse $515 million in revenue this year and become adjusted EBITDA profitable beginning in Q4. This is gratifying for us as a young company, and I couldn’t be more appreciative of our teams who have gotten us to this point and will continue to propel us forward. Now I’ll turn the call over to Yemi to discuss the financials and provide more details on our outlook.

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Yemi Okupe: Thanks, Andrew. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I’ll start by providing additional color into our third quarter financial performance, talk through the additional transparency pertaining to our cost structure that we are now disclosing and expand upon Andrew’s comments regarding our outlook for the remainder of the year. The compounding effect of investments and strong execution across each of our pillars, brand, technology and customer experience, resulted in continued momentum and record performance in the third quarter. Revenue grew 95% year-over-year to $144.8 million, representing an 8-point acceleration in year-over-year growth relative to the second quarter. Revenue growth accelerated despite lapping the close of the Honest Health and Apostrophe acquisitions at the end of the second quarter and start of the third quarter of last year.

Our online channel was the most significant driver of growth in the quarter. Online revenue grew 94% year-over-year to $139.8 million and continues to be driven primarily by the expansion of our subscription base. In the third quarter, subscriptions on our platform increased 174,000 quarter-on-quarter to 991,000, representing an 80% increase from the third quarter of last year. While our traditional longer-tenured core offerings such as Men’s Sexual Health and Hims & Hers continue to drive the majority of our revenue growth, we are seeing the balance shift as several of our more recent offerings continue to scale. Online revenue generated per subscription in the third quarter was $141, up $9 relative to the prior quarter. This increase was driven by higher user adoption of longer-duration subscriptions as well as changes in product mix.

We believe our ability to continue building brand equity and trust among consumers over the last several quarters has been instrumental to our success in expanding the number of users on our platform and the amount of revenue generated per user. In the third quarter, wholesale revenue increased 136% year-over-year to $5.1 million. This represents a decline of $1 million relative to the second quarter. The primary drivers of this are seasonality trends as well as delayed inventory purchases from our partners. We expect revenue for our wholesale channel to expand slightly in the fourth quarter. Third quarter gross margins expanded over 200 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 79%. Margin expansion can be traced to a few key factors. This includes continued efficiency gains in our operations, increased fulfillment volume from our affiliated pharmacies and a higher mix of online channel revenue.

Notably, our supply chain continues to remain durable, and we remain confident that our increasing scale and actions taken in the second quarter of this year are sufficient to avoid any material disruptions. This quarter, we have started to provide additional transparency into our operating cost structure, which can be found in our 10-Q filings going forward. Before diving into dynamics across the components of our cost structure, I’ll take a moment to provide additional clarity around how to interpret the three line items. First, operations and support represents the cost of our operations team, encompassing supply chain management, fulfillment of orders and customer support services. Second, technology and development includes costs related to the operation and enhancement of our digital platform as well as the development of new products and services.

Lastly, general and administrative costs related to corporate functions such as finance, human resources, legal and other general corporate costs. The components of marketing costs remain unchanged from our prior disclosures. Turning now to additional granularity on expenses. Marketing as a percentage of revenue in the third quarter was 54%, representing a slight increase over the second quarter. When excluding stock-based compensation, marketing as a percentage of revenue was 53%, which is in line with our commentary last quarter. A significant portion of our incremental investment went towards scaling new channels, which we believe carry both near and long-term benefits as we bring new consumers to the platform and build long-term brand equity.

As such, we expect to continue investing in the development of our brand in the coming quarters and years. That said, we have hit a critical mass of spend required to see benefit from newer channels such as TV and digital video. We expect to see leverage on marketing spend in the fourth quarter, as we highlighted earlier this year. Operations and support costs as a percentage of revenue came in at 15%, both including and excluding stock-based compensation. This represents a slight decrease from the second quarter and 200 basis point improvement from the same period last year. Historical efficiency gains in this channel have come from a shift toward fulfillment via our affiliated pharmacies, better rates from several suppliers as a result of greater scale and leverage on overhead.

Technology and product development costs represented 6% of revenue in the third quarter and 5% when excluding the effects of stock-based compensation. Over the midterm, we expect investment in this area to expand as we continue to launch new capabilities on our platform as well as continue to evolve products across each of our categories. General and administrative costs for the third quarter were 18% of revenue. This represents a 17-point improvement to the same period last year. While there may be some quarter-to-quarter fluctuation in the efficiency of this line, our expectation is that we will continue to gain leverage in this area over the long term. Excluding the impact of stock-based compensation, G&A costs were 13% of revenue in the third quarter.

We narrowed our adjusted EBITDA loss in the third quarter to $6.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin was negative 4%, representing an improvement north of 200 basis points quarter-over-quarter and 900 basis points year-over-year. Margin improvement was driven by gross margin gains as well as continued improvement within our overall operating cost structure. Our cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments balance increased $3.4 million in comparison to the prior quarter to $198 million as cash flow from operations exceeded our investment in capital expenditures. As a reminder, we expect to take $13 million in the fourth quarter for earnouts related to M&A activity from last year. We are very excited about the performance of the business in the third quarter.

It is the result of superior execution over several quarters across multiple areas of the business. This is driving a powerful economic model with compounding benefits that includes the following: first, the capability to assess our operations end-to-end and identify ways to capture efficiencies and benefits from economies of scale. Second, an ability to reinvest a portion of those efficiency gains across each of our pillars. For example, long-term development of our brand and continued execution in our traditional channels continue to materialize in our results. Innovation in our technology platform and products combined with a delightful experience are attracting new customers and driving platform stickiness. Each investment is assessed against a rigorous capital allocation framework.

As a reminder, this includes strong payback periods of less than 1 year and ability to drive long-term growth while capturing unit economic benefits from greater scale and the potential for high ROIs on longer-term investments. All adherence to these rigorous standards enables us to leverage benefits and key learnings to enable a self-reinforcing loop. With that context, I’ll walk through our outlook for the remainder of the year. As a result of strong momentum from the third quarter, we are increasing our outlook for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the remainder of 2022. Starting with revenue. We anticipate revenue in the fourth quarter to be between $159 million and $162 million, which will result in full year revenue for 2022 of $519 million to $522 million.

This outlook reflects year-over-year growth of 88% to 91% for the fourth quarter and 91% to 92% for the full year. Last quarter, we mentioned that if we continue to successfully scale our investments, we could generate positive adjusted EBITDA as early as the fourth quarter of this year. Despite macroeconomic uncertainty, our strong performance, combined with learnings obtained throughout the year, have resulted in one of the highest levels of momentum that we have seen in our history. Shifting to our EBITDA outlook. In the fourth quarter, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $0 million and $2 million, reflecting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 0% to 1%. For the full year, this resulted in an adjusted EBITDA loss between $18 million and $20 million.

That represents a margin of negative 4% at the midpoint, reflecting a year-over-year improvement of over 7 points. We are pleased that strong execution throughout the year has placed us on a path to generate positive adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2022. Given the immense opportunity ahead of us, we expect to continue to lean into strategic investments that meet the standards of our rigorous capital allocation framework. However, our expectation is that we can do so while maintaining profitability as the benefits from our investments and efficiency initiatives continue to compound. We are entering an incredibly exciting period in the history of Hims & Hers as we see a clear path to continue scaling our platform in a profitable and sustainable way.

I’d like to thank our customers, partners and employees for helping us deliver these outstanding results and a thin line of sight to such an important milestone. With that, I will now turn it over to the operator for the Q&A portion of the call.

Operator: And we’ll go to Daniel Grosslight, Citi.

Q&A Session

Daniel Grosslight: Hi guys. Congrats on a strong quarter and thanks for taking my questions. I know you’re not guiding to 2023 just yet, but it would be great to get your thoughts on how you intend to balance growth and profitability next year. Obviously, you’ve had a tremendous bet of top line growth this year and now you expect to be adjusted EBITDA positive. For 2023, is that positive EBITDA sustainable? And how much do you have to kind of titrate growth down to sustain positive EBITDA?

Yemi Okupe: Sure, I’ll take that question, Dan. This is Yemi. Hitting the second part of the question first, we do expect to remain profitable for the foreseeable future going forward. So this marks a new — or Q4 will mark a new moment in our history where we do expect to generate profitability on a go-forward basis. With that said, we still have an immense growth opportunity ahead of us. And so we’re viewing profitability more as an output, meaning that there’s no objective function to get to a certain margin percentage. But really, what we expect to do is, as we continue to scale, as we continue to receive benefits from greater efficiency, greater economies of scale, and as a result of that, we’ll see some natural expansion over time.

With that said, we’re not giving any additional outlook to 2023 at this moment. We’ll provide that on the next call. But we’ll just reiterate the commentary that we’ve given historically in the past where we do expect to maintain at least a 30% growth rate over the course of the next several years.

Daniel Grosslight: Yes. That’s helpful. Okay. And as I look back at your presentation when you first went public, you noted there were future opportunities in sleep, fertility, diabetes, cholesterol. I’m curious if any of these are 2023 opportunities. Or are you thinking those are a little bit further out?

Andrew Dudum: I’ll take that. I think those are categories we’re really excited by, and we’ve actually started to see some of those patients trickle in through the mental health platform on Hims & Hers that we launched in the last year and have been scaling quite dramatically. I think, at the moment, from a category standpoint, we have three to four categories that are growing exceptionally robustly, triple digit, mid-triple digits or more. And so I think there’s a lot of excitement around deepening our expertise and personalizing the breadth of products within those categories, better segmenting those customers, better serving those customers. And I think that’s really where a lot of the investment is today. So we mentioned in the prepared remarks our new 25,000 square foot pharmacy in Arizona, investments in compounding personalization.

And so I think you can expect a lot of those types of initiatives and product innovation to come out in the new year just because the size of those TAMs and the speed at which those markets are growing within our business are really where we’re placing our focus.

Operator: Next we’ll hear from Jonathan Young, Credit Suisse.

Jonathan Yong: I guess, just given the strong revenue growth and the margin expansion here, do you guys see any other areas where you can drive further efficiencies? Or is it really just about driving that top line scale at this point?

Yemi Okupe: Yes, I can start there. Thanks for the question, Jonathan. I think, as we mentioned, we continuously look for opportunities end to end to extract additional efficiencies, whether that’s negotiating with suppliers or even just looking through various mechanisms for how do we do things better. I think you can expect us to continue to do that. With that said, just given the immense opportunity ahead of us, as mentioned in response to the prior question, our objective function is not to rapidly necessarily expand margins. There’s still opportunity ahead of us, but rather have that be more of an output as we continue to rapidly scale our offering and continue to innovate and make the overall platform better and generate a better customer experience.