Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) (NASDAQ:CART) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

And so we see them using our data to optimize our operations. Then once you have kind of predicted what’s on the shelves, you also need shoppers to find the items inside the store. And that’s why we have planograms for – that represents 75% of orders on the platform, so that when the shoppers arrive in the store, they are able to find the item with max efficiency and be able to increase the found rate. And then finally, I mentioned receipt data in the letter because once you are done completing this order and you found the items, sometimes it happens that shoppers could make a mistake. And with receipt data, we are able to tell them in real time now because we can analyze receipt data, hey, actually, you missed this item, hey, you might have switched this item into a different order and allow them to self-correct on the spot.

And so the combination of all of these technologies is really what gives us massive leadership and results in found rates and shelf rates that again, at an all-time high since the pandemic. So, we are really proud of this system and continue to improve upon them quarter-after-quarter.

Ron Josey: That’s great. Thank you, Fidji.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Tom Champion with Piper Sandler. You may proceed.

Tom Champion: Good afternoon. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about affordability and how you are productizing deals within the platform and the product. And I guess, maybe beyond that big picture, could you talk a little bit about your view of the consumer and the range of outcomes you are contemplating for this year? Thank you.

Fidji Simo: Yes. Thanks. So, on affordability, we obsess over it, and that’s why you are seeing results like our savings increasing 20% year-over-year to $4.75 on items per order. And that’s a metric we track really carefully because we want to make sure that when customers come to the platform, we give them a variety of ways to get a deal. And so when you are talking about productizing deals, there are actually a variety of deals, and it’s a lot of different products that you have to built to do that. One is loyalty programs. So, a lot of retailers offer a lot of deals to our loyalty programs. And quarter-after-quarter, we integrate with the loyalty programs of more and more retailers, which allows us to surface more deals.

We have retailer-funded deals where they are going to offer, for example, $10 off a particular order to attract customers to them. So, that’s also a platform that we have built recently and allows retailers to actually put their own funds to attract delivery customers. We are also digitizing the weekly flyer. If you look offline, a lot of people end up looking at the weekly flyer in a paper form before they go to the store to kind of figure out what are the deals that they want to not forget when we get to the store. We are digitizing that so that people benefit from that experience. And then finally, we also have CPGs that are coming in and finding specific deals on their specific product, and we have a format called Stock Up and Save, which is actually an ad format where CPGs can come and like basically give a deal for people to buy more of that particular product and get a discount for higher quantities.

We also look at savings in terms of delivery options and providing more affordable delivery options light pick up and no rush. So, that’s the people who value price of our convenience can have the great benefit of our service as well. And so all of these had adds up to really making it share like the service quarter-after-quarter becomes more affordable and that is reflected in the fact that if you look at our demographics, a couple of years ago, it was – we were very highly concentrated in terms of demographic, whereas right now, we actually map to U.S. population pretty closely. And that’s something we are very proud about because that means that we align with the entirety of the TAM. And then finally, you asked me for my view on the consumer, I would say we have seen quite a resilient consumer.

I would say, on the lower end, we certainly see that people are with lower income are trying to stretch their budget, trying to make their dollars go faster, and therefore, we do a lot more planning when they think about grocery shopping. And as a result, we want to make it as easy as possible for them to get the best deals to be able to shop multiple retailers if they want to combine different deals and really see us as a place that helps them meet their budget and their family needs in the best possible way and really meeting consumers however they want to shop. So, that’s been really the focus.

Tom Champion: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Steven Fox with Fox Advisors. You may proceed.

Steven Fox: Hi. Good afternoon. Just one question from me on the Uber relationship, I guess from a financial standpoint, how would you expect it to ramp? And what should we think about in starting to see some financial benefits from it? Would it be mainly focused on seeing better subscriber growth or user growth that translates into your business? My understanding from this morning’s call is that Uber would basically be using their own couriers to be able to advertise on their space within your channel. So, can you just sort of give us a sense directionally how we should think about this helping your business or earnings over, say, the next two quarters to six quarters. Thanks.

Fidji Simo: Yes, absolutely. We are not going to obviously guide specifically here because we have not even launched the service. But I can tell you at a high level, we are getting an affiliate fee from Uber on orders that we send to them. The deal is positive unit economics day one for us, which we are excited about, but we are also going to be investing on top of that to ensure success of the service and adoption. But we are not really looking at the restaurant business specifically. What we are really looking at is, how each deal can help our business overall by making Instacart an even more engaging app, a more frequent use case by getting us more Instacart Plus subscribers. And so we are going to really be looking at all of these metrics and in fact, driving adoption in a way that actually strengthens the entire business, not just get us a restaurant business, but really get us a more engaged customer across all of our services.

So, that’s what we are excited about. And we will – in terms of ramp ups, we will have to launch to see that.

Steven Fox: Great. I appreciate that clarification. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Rob Sanderson with Loop Capital Markets. You may proceed.

Rob Sanderson: Hi. Good afternoon and thank you for taking my question. Many of my near-term questions have been asked and answered, but I wanted to ask about smart cards. What are grocers looking for in terms of proof points to expand deployments? Are they looking at an ROI calculation, or are these just more experimental proof-of-concept stages at this point? And what would be a reasonable expectation for when we can think about deployment to maybe 5% of stores. Is that something that could happen like in a 3-year timeframe, is that realistic? And does the hardware costs have to come down meaningfully to think about things like 5% penetration? Thank you.

Fidji Simo: Thanks Rob for the question. So, in terms of what grocers are looking at, it’s exactly the same as the things we have been obsessing over, which is do consumers love the product. And is that changing their behavior? And the answer so far, based on what we have seen is a resounding yes. We have seen consumers absolutely love using the cart. We hear a lot of anecdotes saying that consumers are like seeking the stores that have carts deployed. We have certainly seen that in Schnucks. Schnucks also gave us a data point that I put in the letter saying that people who use the cart end up having larger baskets than other carts and that is a very big driver, as you can imagine, of grocers wanting to adopt that because that allows them to a higher basket size of consumers that can skip checkout and have an experience that is a lot more engaging and can create competitive differentiation for them.

So, we have been really obsessed over the consumer reaction, very encouraged by it, and that’s why you are seeing us really for more fuel on Caper and seeing retailers very excited to deploy that. In terms of ramp-up, I would say we – as you have seen in the letter, we are in many pilots with the largest grocers, whether it’s Kroger, Wakefern, Schnucks, the list goes on. And so we expect to have thousands of carts deployed by the end of the year. And then I think it really depends on kind of how those deployments go, but it could scale to many more. We are not guiding to a specific timeline because there are a lot of announce. But we think that we have everything that we need to be able to scale these costs. In terms of cost, we will work to get the hardware cost down in the future, no doubt.

But that’s not really the main blocker to deployment. I would say that a big part of the business model for Caper is going to come from advertising. And that’s another reason why we tell is really excited about Caper Carts because it becomes a completely new incremental line of business for them of having advertising inside the store on the screen of Caper Carts and a source of revenue for us that can justify putting more of the cost out there.

Rob Sanderson: Thank you, Fidji.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Ross Compton with Macquarie. You may proceed.

Ross Compton: Hi Fidji. In your S-1, you estimate that the Enterprise segment drove an estimated 20% of company GTV in 2022. And I think what’s really interesting is your model, given the economics are similar on marketplace enterprise, you are agnostic to where the demand comes from. I was wondering if you would share how enterprise is evolving where there is more grocers kind of into the online space and are required to adopt your technological tools to kind of compete against Whole Foods and others. Do you see this kind of rising tide lift all boats and even though an order might not occur on marketplace, you kind of win economics on the enterprise tools. Thank you.