PLBY Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLBY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Ben Kohn: Yeah. We’re executing on the cost side of it right now. And so, we talked about the $10 million of cost that we’ve taken out this week. And so, we have to focus on what we can control. And the — as far as making a final decision on whether or not we operate it with a reduced revenue and SKU count or a JV, that is something that is ongoing in real time right now, and we’ll make that decision here in the short term moving forward. But what we are committed to doing is I’m committed to generating as much EBITDA out of the company as we can generate. We think we have a good baseline now as Lance talked about it, and we want to make sure that all of our business units are profitable. So, we know we have a high cash flow and high margin licensing business.

We have a fast-growing digital business in the greater platform that should be high cash flow and high cash flow margin. And then Honey Birdette we talked about the growth in the United States, especially generating 38% four-wall EBITDA margins in the United States on average. And so, when you add that all up and as we’ve reduced the corporate overhead and simplified the business, and we’ll continue to do that, we are focused on making sure that on a net cash basis after debt service, after cash taxes, even though we have $300 million of NOLs in some foreign jurisdictions and after CapEx that we are running this business to be cash flow positive after everything. And that is our goal is to continue to pay to build cash and continue to delever the company.

Ashley Kechter: And this is Ashley. I’ll just jump in really quickly on what Ben noted. So, as he mentioned today, we made some really hard decisions internally, which right-sized our personnel structure for playeway.com. We started earlier this — it started really in Q4 aggressively, but most aggressively in the last month or two, significantly reducing our paid media spend in Playboy. So, we’ve already started that massive reduction, which will obviously have big top line impact, but that will help us get to a position of a much significantly less losses than what we incurred last year, and that work has been ongoing and will continue as we identify the future operating model.

Operator: We have time for one last question. The last question comes from George Kelly with Roth Capital Partners. Please proceed with your question.

George Kelly: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. So, first one is just another question on the creator platform. I just want to make sure I understand all the math and everything around it. So, I thought I heard you say in your prepared remarks that you expect it to be sort of a neutral impact to cash flow this year breakeven. And so, am I doing the math right, if I take that to mean that you expect an average run rate GMV during the year of around $50 million.

Ben Kohn: That would be — it’s slightly less than that, but that would be a fair assessment that when you look at sort of what we are — where we are today at 15 with no growth and where we expect to be, that would be — that’s what we think.

George Kelly: Okay. That’s helpful. And then second question for me on Honey Birdette. You mentioned about the sort of changing pricing strategy there in 4Q. I was just hoping you could give a little more disclosure about what the revenue was in 4Q? And what kind of growth — year-over-year growth rate that was?