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

Aaron Easterly: Hey, Eric, with regards to your first question, we generally view that one of the primary challenges with Rover’s business, and it has been for ten years, is educating the shadow market, which is the 90% of pet owners that historically use friends, family, neighbors when they need care for their dog when they’re out of town. So we look at these types of distribution partnerships or partnerships with people in or out of the industry as a way to have cost effective customer acquisition of that 90%. So kind of cost effectively educating the 90% of people that would otherwise not even be thinking about Rover as an option. So call it category building. Cost effectively is the primary goal. There can be some secondary or tertiary goals.

In some cases we may hope to see a little bit of increased repeat usage on a per customer basis to a degree, like something like an employer subsidizes it. We could be seeking to just make sure that we’re known as the standard and are partnered with key brands. But the primary thing is addressing a type of customer we are unlikely to get in front of directly in a very cost effective manner.

Charlie Wickers : And with regards to your questions regarding booking windows, we have seen year-to-date an increasing slightly of the booking windows, about 10%. That works out to about a day and a half to two days in terms of an increase, that puts us just above three weeks on average, from an average lead time perspective.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

Danny Pfeiffer: Hey, guys, this is Danny Pfeiffer on for Corey Carpenter. I just have two quick ones. The first is, have you seen any uptick in daytime services as more people are sort of returning back to the office. And second, on international, you grew Europe about 78%. Can you talk about any initiatives you’re planning there and maybe kind of what’s different versus US and maybe is that just starting out smaller or anything? Thanks.

Aaron Easterly: Sure. Danny the with regards to the service mix, we have seen a little bit of tick up in daytime services, but most of that gain has been in drop in, our drop in segment and our drop in service line is typically done during the day. Looks a lot like a dog walk, but can sometimes be used as a substitute for house sitting or boarding. So yes, there has been a slight notch up in what we call daytime services, but I think based on the fact that most of it’s happening in drop in, it would probably be not appropriate to say it’s a result of some massive return to work within our customer base.

Brent Turner : Do you want to talk about international? Hi, with respect to international, I think what you are seeing is probably best understood as the scaling dynamics of a pretty early stage footprint sort of growing along with the continued acceleration of travel behavior in Europe. We’ve been pretty happy with what we think is our trajectory relative to the category there and we actually think the presence of a category in Europe versus in the United States where we’re sort of going it alone, maybe helping us drive awareness and maybe a tailwind to grow for us there, more to say later as we get more conviction around that.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Tony White at DA Davison.

Tony White: Great, thanks for taking my question. Two, if I could on international one. Could you maybe just frame for us a bit how international in calendar €˜23 is kind of going to affect consolidated EBITDA profitability of the company? And then secondly, can you maybe just talk a little bit about how your international operations, how they’re tracking relative to the US at sort of the comparable point in time for the US as it relates to things like marketing efficiencies, unit economics, profitability. Thanks.