First Time Loading...
B

Bikeexchange Ltd
ASX:BEX

Watchlist Manager
Bikeexchange Ltd
ASX:BEX
Watchlist
Price: 0.26 AUD -5.45% Market Closed
Updated: May 17, 2024

Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2024-Q3

from 0
D
Dominic O'Hanlon
executive

Excellent. Thanks, Kent. Appreciate that. Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for attending today. We appreciate you taking the time. It's our BikeExchange's Q3 business update. So we'll give you an idea of what happened in our quarterly results. I'm sure that most of you know that this will be our last presentation to the ASX because we were in the process of delisting the business, which should be completed during the month of May, so not very far away now. But we're going to continue to update our shareholders as we always have. It will just be in a different format from now on. So for those that are coming along for us -- coming along with us for the ride, we look forward to continuing to update you.

Today, in attendance, I'd like to introduce myself, Dominic O'Hanlon, I'm the Chairman of the Board of Directors; Ryan McMillan, who is on the call today and also Kyle Ferreira, both on the call from Germany, our CEO and our CFO, respectively. So welcome, guys. Thanks for giving your time up today as well, and let's get underway.

So BikeExchange is a global marketplace that is changing the way the customers find, research and buy a bike. There's been a significant investment in technology in our platform over the last year. There's a lot of exciting things to talk about today, which Kyle and Ryan will be giving you an update on. But for those of you who don't know the story that well, what we do is we take inventory from bike stores and distributors and publish that inventory to millions of users online. And our biggest market in the world is Germany, hence, Ryan and Kyle being in Germany today, but we also operate in a number of other countries around the world.

I'm going to hand over to Ryan now who can take us through a summary of the latest quarter, but also give us a little bit more in terms of our operational updates. Thanks, Ryan.

R
Ryan McMillan
executive

Thanks, Dom. In today's presentation, we'll take you through our Q3 performance in more detail, but here in advance, the key takeaways. So in this quarter, we have cut our EBITDA loss by 50% and generated a positive EBITDA pre-corporate overheads, setting the business up well for profitability once delisted and corporate overhead is reduced. We're now live in 3 markets with our AI consumer platform and about to go live in the final 2 key countries, setting the business up to convert a higher percentage of the $700 million of off-line product inquiries that are generated by the site annually on page to drive transactional revenues.

We've transformed our North America business, eliminated material losses and now have a promising marketplace and logistics business in the U.S. And we've achieved a 20% net revenue growth of 19% reduced cost base, an achievement that we've made for the past 7 consecutive quarters. We now have a simple business model with a narrower, more specific focus and ownership of critical technology IP.

K
Kyle Ferreira
executive

I just want to go through some of the strategic initiatives for the remainder of 2024. So as you can see here on the right, the results from our last 7 quarters demonstrate the turnaround that Ryan was talking about earlier. You can see in the line graph that BEX has improved its EBITDA position by 72% over the last 7 quarters and reduced our net cash used in those operating activities by 80% over the same period. The path to recurring profitability is really centered on 3 key strategic pillars in 2024. The first is conversion optimization. So with the new consumer storefront rolled out across all markets, BikeExchange will increase conversion of the $700 million consumer inquiry that's running through the sites today. That's really going to drive our e-commerce revenue.

The second is completing the development of our own tech platform that will incur significant cost savings once complete and extend our revenue model. We, for the first time, own our tech stack end-to-end and have that IP. The final pillar is the recently announced delisting from the ASX, which will take place on the 29th of May this year. And this is going to have further positive benefits to both cash flow and EBITDA, positioning the business to recurring profit.

I'm now going to hand back to Ryan to take us through some of the Q3 highlights.

R
Ryan McMillan
executive

So BEX is outperforming the majority of players in the bike industry, both in retail and manufacturing, posting transactional revenue growth, net revenue growth and gross revenue growth up 9%, 20%, and 24%, respectively, after a challenging period throughout the bike industry. So again, like in the last 7 quarters, it's been achieved by -- so this is based on the position where it's got a positive EBITDA pre-corporate overheads, it's cut half EBITDA burn rate overall and, importantly, reduced the net cash used in operations by 40% quarter-on-quarter. We've also launched a new AI consumer platform in 3 markets and focus on driving the conversion through site performance in a much improved customer experience.

K
Kyle Ferreira
executive

In terms of the P&L results for Q3, on a total operations basis, the revenue growth of the group was 6% compared to the prior corresponding period. And that's really been underpinned by e-commerce and 3PL. On a continuing operations basis, the core business, which excludes Colombia and Consumer discontinued operations had a total revenue growth of 20% over the same period. Our contribution margin is up from 83% in Q3 of last year to 84% in the current quarter as we really continue to focus on that high-margin growth. Total costs were down 19% and EBITDA from all operations, as Ryan alluded to earlier, is up by 50% -- 54% from a loss of $2 million in Q3 or a loss of just under $900 million in Q3 '24. On a cash basis, the EBITDA loss before share-based payments was $840,000 for the quarter.

Just to recap some of the key corporate developments ahead of the ASX delisting. So we successfully completed the ANREO and placement announced in February this year, bringing the total raised ahead of delisting to $2.65 million. There is a small balance of shortfall post close of the offer that we are able to face over the next 2 months. So if there are any shareholders on this call that have appetite to increase holdings, please reach out through e-mail at the end of this presentation, and both Ryan and I were happy to take meetings. The company completed its unmarketable share buyback with 115,000 shares bought back. The number of holders after completing this buyback is approximately 330 and the number of shares on issue after cancellation of those shares is 19,073,000.

The final development is that ASX delisting and the issue of shortfall shares to the Director, Andrew Ryan, was approved at our EGM last week, and the date of removal from the official list is closed of trade 29th of May 2024. I guess close out with moving forward, BEX will release all future disclosures and half year accounts post-delisting under the Investors section of our corporate website, and we'll make available an unlisted trading platform to holders of shares. So there is a link on this presentation as well as in the announcements to that website.

R
Ryan McMillan
executive

I'll now take you through the next couple of slides in terms of our outlook and the pathway forward. So recently in the quarter, we've actually just launched our Holland and Belgium sites. These are very big bike markets in Europe. We've got a lot of optimism now for new functionality that we bought in Reserve & Collect, where consumers can actually reserve bikes online and purchase in-store, creating new transaction type and new revenues. We've got Australia and the U.S.A. launching very soon. The U.S.A. is coming in the next working week and Australia launching shortly thereafter. And from there, we're actually really focused on honing in on driving improved conversion on the site.

And that is about making more transaction -- taking more transactions on page per customer that we have on the actual platform. Whilst we've launched in other markets, BEX has also spent quite a bit of time optimizing site performance on mobile and desktop, meaning each market launch can now take advantage of excellent technical and SEO performance from day 1. Here on this slide, you can see the huge performance increase that you can see of the difference between the old consumer platform on the left is the U.S., Australia, and the old shop front from bikeexchange.de. Sort of ranked at the bottom 25th percentile, 47th percentile in Germany, and 53rd percentile. You can see with the new site, all 3 platforms are up in the 94th percentile in terms of site performance.

And it's going to be a combination of the improved site performance, a much improved consumer experience and best-in-market technology, which, from our perspective, has a huge potential upside for BEX to optimize and grow into. So there's a lot of room for BikeExchange to really drive out and improve both technologically and through customer experience to drive more sale transactions on page. And we've got $700 million worth of sales that we're generating each year. These were sales that were in the past going offline to a local bike dealer. The aim is that we can maximize the percentage of those sales that are happening on page and driving BikeExchange revenues through that.

And so the remainder of FY '24 is really about 2 things: technological execution and marketplace execution. So from a tech perspective, it's really about launching, iterating and optimizing what we have got and scaling our business through technology. From a marketplace execution perspective, it's really about connecting in the right sellers, getting the right products and prices on page and then driving marketplace performance through our marketplace and health metrics. So here, we're talking about things like conversion rate, we're talking about average order values, and we're talking about commissions that we're taking on page and the like. So these are the 2 key areas that we're focusing on business.

I'll now pass you across to Dom to wrap it up with a summary of the quarter. Thanks, Dom.

D
Dominic O'Hanlon
executive

Thank you both. I appreciate that. I was just saying to myself, but no one else could hear that the reality is that for 7 quarters now, we've been talking about our improvements in profitability and our financial operations and what we've been doing to control our costs and grow our revenues. So I think I'd just like to focus on the excitement of what's coming, and that excitement is all around the technical digital disruption that we're bringing to this industry. And if you think about where people can buy a new bike, traditionally, they've gone into a local bike shop, a local bike dealer, and that local bike shop or bike dealer has only got limited stock, only carries a small range and generally tries to sell something that it's got in stock to a consumer.

Since COVID and since people have got a lot more online, people are demanding the product that they want. They want to compare products side by side. They want to really see the best price they can get. They want the color that they can -- that they most want. They want the features that they most want, and they just can't get that range by going to a local bike store. Similarly, they can't get that range by going to a brand because if you go to the giant website or you go to the specialized website, you're only going to see products from that one brand. What BikeExchange is able to do is to connect thousands of retailers with millions of customers and provide access to a global inventory from all of these different suppliers in a way that is just currently not available.

And if you look at the growth that we believe is achievable in this business and delisting the company having an operational focus on e-commerce gives us an opportunity to not only do what we're doing and do it better, but also help us to expand into other new markets. With the tech stack we've got, there's no reason why we couldn't start opening in other countries in a much more cost-effective way than we could have done in the past. I personally believe that the ultimate end game on this, as it has been for me many times in the past, is an acquisition. I believe that the business will set itself up to disrupt much, much larger companies than what we are and that, that disruption will end up leading to some sort of M&A activity at some point.

And as I said before, I've done that a number of times now and looking forward to doing it again and creating shareholder value. So for those that are coming along for the ride or for those that want to actually participate in what's left of the shareholding that's available, please do reach out. And we look forward to keeping you abreast of our exciting developments as we move forward. I think that sort of wraps it up for today. Kyle, we don't have any Q&A function today?

K
Kyle Ferreira
executive

We do, Dom. So I think if anybody has got any questions, there is a chat that you can post us into that I'm monitoring now or you can come unmute and ask that question, so we might just give everyone a minute.

D
Dominic O'Hanlon
executive

Yes, I appreciate that. Anything incoming?

K
Kyle Ferreira
executive

No.

D
Dominic O'Hanlon
executive

Doesn't sound like it. All right, well, we will wrap up for today. Again, for those that are, hopefully, everyone that's on the call today is coming along for the ride because we're very excited about the operational efficiencies that we're going to be able to drive once we're delisted and focusing on our core operations rather than worrying about all the admin that's required to the ASX listed, and we look forward to keeping you abreast as we grow and execute our plans.

Thanks, everyone, for your time.

K
Kyle Ferreira
executive

Thanks, everyone.

All Transcripts