Qurate Retail, Inc. (NASDAQ:QRTEA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Next question comes from the line of Karru [ph] with Jefferies.

Unidentified Analyst: Just following up on Carla’s margin question. So if I heard it correctly, Parsing come through that we’ll see that continued improvement we’ll see product margin, we’ll see freight rate or fulfillment costs coming down but just not at the same pace that we saw in the third quarter. Is that the correct way to translate that?

Greg Maffei: I mean, I think over time — I mean, third quarter, obviously, on fulfillment piece, there was a lot we worked through there and a lot on a year-over-year basis. We still feel kind of that we’ve still got room to go, especially on the balance of the year, right? And then as you get into kind of this time next year, hopefully, we’ve kind of normalized at a lower kind of cost per unit basis. So we feel good about the kind of Q3 rolling into Q4. And then obviously, over time, that’s going to work its way through.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And just on the customer count here, when I was taking my notes you had talked about the rate of decline had moderated and you’ve seen the biggest turn from the low end of your customer base, where you’re talking about your lower-end customers? Or are you talking to folks who occasionally shop? And I guess in that line, what do you see from your lower-income customers these days?

David Rawlinson: Yes. So when we said we’re seeing the biggest churn from the lower end of our customer file, we were talking about customer frequency. So it’s purchase the customers who purchase the least frequently where we see the highest churn. In terms of customer demographic by income, I’d say generally, one, keep in mind, we have a higher-than-average income customer, who is even more different than the average when it comes to wealth because of where they tend to be at the stage in their life when they come into our platform. So that customer is a bit insulated — and they’ve also been a little bit insulated by some things like student loan repayments where they’re affected in a number of ways, sometimes because they’re helping kids sometimes because they’re younger and still have certain student loans are probably less affected than the average than the average customer.

So we see some of the benefits of the installation from our core customer and their performance. In some of the less wealthy customers we definitely see more impact of the economy.

Unidentified Analyst: And just a point of clarification. Paying down the revolver here, that will free that up. That’s fungible. You can use that to redeem the loss, correct?

Ben Oren: I think it’s fair — it’s Ben Oren. I think it’s fair to say that the 2024 and ’25 notes will be dealt with cash on hand and revolver over time I’m not going to talk about what the pace of that is but that’s probably the best expectation.

Operator: The last question comes from the line of Hale Holden with Barclays.

Hale Holden: I just had 2 questions. it was — David, it was great to hear you throw that marker out for flat revenue growth in 2 when you set that earlier this year, at least my impression is things have slowed down a little bit. So maybe you could talk about puts and takes on how you keep that flat despite maybe a slower macro environment.

David Rawlinson: Yes. Thank you for the question. I’d say a couple of things. I don’t think I said flat revenue growth for 2024. I think I said stable revenue growth through 2024. The way we think about stable is plus or minus a few points on flat so I would say we got to stability in Q3 on the top line. The reason why that’s important is we’re doing a lot of cost and margin work and if you see the type of declines in revenue we had in, say, 2022, it’s hard to do enough of that work for it to show up on the bottom line. I think given our project Athens transformation in the way it’s shaped as long as we have relative stability on the top line, we should still be able to achieve our free cash flow and OIBDA growth objectives which we continue to have continue to have real confidence in.