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

Ben Oren: I would say we’ve designed this from the beginning to be able to do well in a wide variety of macro environments. We don’t need strong growth in our most relevant categories to be able to deliver. In some ways, the macro environment in Q3 wasn’t great. We think on a sales basis, we grew better than the discretionary general merchandise data suggests that the categories we play in grew. So we haven’t had the benefit of a great macro environment. So far and looking into Q4 and first half of next year, we think we can deliver in anything that’s foreseeable if we end up in a deep recession, obviously, that’s a different situation. But I think we can continue to execute and have good free cash flow and OIBDA performance and a variety of macro environments. We are not promising this on a substantial improvement, certainly in the overall macro environment.

Hale Holden: Great. And then I think one of the — I’d have to check my notes but one of the other numbers you gave was a 16-minute improvement in viewership on a daily basis. And I was wondering if you could help give us some context on where average length of viewership was versus kind of historical norms because that seems like a really strong improvement metric?

David Rawlinson: Yes, it was. It was 15% improvement in viewership for the quarter. We think that has a lot to do with some of our — we think that has a lot to do with some of our programming. We think we’re in — we think we’re bringing people into a lot of the special events. I walked through some of them in the context of our script. And so we think it also just shows stability in the file. We think it shows a lot of stability and our ability to continue to bring people back. And keep in mind that also that’s a linear channel measurement. And so that’s not including some of the growth that we’re having in our digital platforms. And so we feel very good about being able to continue increasing viewership.

Shane Kleinstein: All right. Thank you for your attendance and interest in today’s earnings announcement. We look forward to, as we said, to seeing some of you next week in New York. And with that, operator, I think we’ll close the floor.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.