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

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Charlie Wickers : Hey, Tom, this is Charlie. I’ll take the first and Brent will take the second. With regards to consolidated impact, I’ll just start with the top line. As we exited last year, international had moved from about 5% of GBV to about 8% of GBV. And so with that, it’s just kind of implied there that international business is growing pretty fast. And so from contribution to the business and contribution to EBITDA here in 2023, we still expect international to grow at a faster rate. And therefore, we’ll have a bit more of its share of marketing dollars as a result, because new bookings are on the faster pace. With that, the international business really leverages a lot of the core marketplace. And so it’s, the way to really think about it is how much are we putting against marketing for international and then what do we need from an operations perspective to support that business?

So, on a go forward basis, we’re excited about the opportunity ahead and we’re continuing to put the pedal down with regards to investment.

Brent Turner : Hey, Tom, it’s Brent. I just wanted to wrap that up by saying when we went particularly to Europe, we had a hypothesis that we could leverage a lot of the same tech investments. Operate the business in a very similar way from a unit economic standpoint, and that we would see similar levels of loyalty, similar evolutions of our market — our critical marketplace metrics, similar economies of scale. And that has played out a lot more or less exactly as we thought. There are some variances. Our international business is ahead of where we were in the US and SEO right now, I think at this time, because they’re leveraging our existing assets, they’re able to drive awareness a little bit more efficiently because our publishing asset, our blog asset, is a lot more mature and we’re able to push it.

We were able to leverage learning that we picked up during this time to share with our international operation. But growth rates are similar, unit economic profile is similar. So we’re quite pleased with the way this has played out for us.

Tony White: Okay, great. Maybe one follow up if I could, follow up on the earlier question on supply. I thought maybe I heard in the prepared remarks something about raising I don’t know if it was onboarding fees for caregivers. Forgive me if I misread that. But just curious whether that reflects maybe you guys seeing an influx of caregivers from just kind of the macro and inflationary pressures and just generally how you’re thinking about or feeling about supply in the marketplace, or rather marketplace balance, I should say kind of the balance between demand and supply. Thanks.

Charlie Wickers : Yes, Tom, I’ll try to hit that right on for you. With regards to the prepared remarks, I was referring to our provider onboarding fee, which is substantially made up of the background check cost. And beginning of last year, we switched everybody to an enhanced background check versus that being an additional optional choice that a provider could make. And with that, just the overall cost of the background checks has stepped up as a result. We think this is the right move for the business. We think it provides a layer of trust that was incremental to what we had before, and that was the primary goal there. With regards to supply demand balance, we feel like we’re in a great spot there. We don’t have any micro level marketplace dynamic that is suggesting that we’re undersupplied. Thank you. I’m showing no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to Aaron Easterly for any closing remarks.

Aaron Easterly: Thank you all for joining us today. We wrapped up a great 2022. And we’re excited about the year ahead. We appreciate you taking the time to continue to get updates on Rover and hear more of our story.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s conference. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.

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