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Hello, and good morning from Belen. Welcome to the AUTO1 Group First Quarter 2024 Results Presentation. I'm Philip Reicherstorfer, Group Treasurer.
As always, I'm joined this morning by Christian Bertermann, our Co-Founder and CEO; and Markus Boser, our CFO. We will start with the presentation, followed by questions and answers. [Operator Instructions] Before I hand over, I must make you aware of the safe harbor provisions at the beginning of this presentation. These would apply to any forward-looking statements made by management today. And now over to Christian.
Thank you Philip. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the AUTO1 Group Q1 Earnings Call. Q1 was a very strong quarter for us. We continue to maximize value for merchants and consumers when buying, selling or financing their next vehicle with us.
Growth investments we launched towards the end of last year had a massive impact on the business in Q1. We achieved our highest-ever adjusted EBITDA of EUR 17 million and returned to solid unit growth. Our result was driven by strong performance of our merchant business on both units and GPU and by a meaningful total gross profit increase in retail.
Group gross profit hit a new record level of EUR 163 million for Q1. That is EUR 31 million more than in Q1 of last year. Total unit sales were 164,000 compared to 147,000 in Q4. We are excited about the progress we made on profitability, improving our EBITDA by EUR 42 million on a year-on-year basis, but also about the performance of our new merchant finance product, which continues to grow at a very fast pace. We look forward to executing our customer-centric strategy across all business units for the remainder of the year and feel that we have strong momentum on our side.
We continue to leverage our market position through our best-in-class technology product. With C2B buying, we offer private consumers a dense network of local branches where they sell their vehicles to us for the best Europe-wide price. Our remarketing solution lets our B2B partners access the highest Europe-wide price for selling their wholesale inventory and AUTO1.com, is our merchant buying platform that is available in more than 30 markets and our merchants have access to more than 30,000 cars 24/7.
AUTO1.com Merchant Financing is our latest in-house financing solution, supporting our partners to grow their business through the simplest solution on the market. Only 6 months after launch, our Merchant Financing portfolio already has a total size of EUR 85 million. Autohero is the most promising technology-enabled used-car retailer in Europe. We operate Autohero in 9 markets, offering thousands of used cars of all makes and models, which are reconditioned in our own used-car production center network across Europe.
With Autohero consumer financing, we are building a consumer loan portfolio, which has grown double digits to more than EUR 296 million in size. We are convinced that our financing products will become a major source of profitability in the future. All of our products and services are developed in-house, creating a unique integrated platform with strong network effects.
Let's zoom in at the performance of Merchant in Q1. We made great progress in Merchant in the first quarter. We sold 147,000 units for our partners, representing an increase of 12% quarter-over-quarter. Units sold in C2B have grown from 120,000 in Q1 of last year to 133,000. This is an increase of 10% year-over-year. In addition, we sold 14,000 units via our remarketing channel.
Merchant GPU was EUR 881 in Q1, which is an increase of 15% year-over-year. We achieved record merchant gross profit of EUR 129 million, that is EUR 25 million more than in Q4, and 21% more than in Q1 of last year.
As part of our growth strategy, we focus on increasing the number of buying merchants on our platform by launching new products and technology improvements. We increased the number of buying merchants to 24,600 in the first quarter compared to 22,900 in Q1 of last year, reflecting an increase of 7% year-on-year. The average basket stayed roughly stable year-over-year with 6 purchased vehicles per quarter on average compared to the same period last year.
Collecting and implementing feedback from our merchants is a core principle of our customer-centric strategy. We go to great lengths in order to truly understand our customers' needs and user experience and build products for our partners based on their input. We continuously collect feedback through several channels, one of them being in personal events. I recently attended one of our dealer events in Germany, and it was extremely motivating to speak to our partners, learn about their needs firsthand, and to see our very talented account managers engage with their partners to be successful together.
Merchant Financing, one of our newest products is the result of dealer feedback and catering to their needs. Our in-house solution enables dealers to conveniently finance vehicles they purchase on AUTO1.com with one click on our platform. We launched it in October of last year and already grew the portfolio to EUR 85 million. We financed a total amount of EUR 175 million merchant sales since inception, a nearly sevenfold increase from EUR 6.7 million in October to EUR 45.6 million in March. The average interest rate of that portfolio is higher than 10%, with a diverse customer base so that no single merchant represents more than 1% of the portfolio.
The digital offering is currently available to select dealers across Germany, France, Spain and Austria with more than 800 merchants already financing their purchases, enabling our dealers to build larger inventories with merchant financing, and as a result, buy and sell more vehicles, deepens our relationships with our partners. We believe that merchant financing can become a really big and profitable business in the future, contributing strongly to partner loyalty.
If we zoom out a bit, our Merchant Flywheel is in full effect now. Putting our partner dealers front and center of everything we do has resulted in powerful network and platform effects. More demand gives us more buying power, leading to a larger selection for our partners, which in turn gives us the opportunity to grow even more demand. The densification of our branch network and merchant financing are just 2 catalysts of the overall Flywheel effect. Our digital platform is facilitating this Flywheel helped by AI pricing, the vast set of transactional data and our proven matchmaking technology.
Given our strong momentum, we are now raising our merchant GPU guidance to a new range of EUR 800 to EUR 900. Since IPO, we either have consistently hit the midpoint or outperformed our GPU guidance, starting with EUR 620 to EUR 650 at IPO, already in Q4 of '21, we were raising it to EUR 675 and EUR 800 on the upper bound.
In Q4 of last year, we raised the minimum of the range to EUR 725 before the update of today, increasing the midpoint of the range by 34% in just 3 years is a testament to our team's outstanding work and the progress we've made so far.
Let's switch to retail. In Q1, our retail business grew strongly in GPU and gross profit year-over-year, while accelerating unit sales quarter-over-quarter. Retail GPU was EUR 1,956, representing an increase of 45% year-on-year. Retail gross profit climbed to EUR 34 million, which is 35% more than in Q1 of last year and EUR 4 million more than in Q4. Autohero delivered 17,100 units compared to 15,700 in Q4, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 9%.
I'm happy about the continued progress we make with Autohero. It is still very early days for our retail business, having started it only 4 years ago. We continue to see great progress towards profitability, which remains a requirement before scaling units faster. They are very bullish on Autohero, as our possibly biggest opportunity ahead and remain fully committed to our long-term GPU target of EUR 3,000.
Convenience is one of the key drivers of customer satisfaction in retail, directly impacting sales conversion, promised and realized delivery times are a key input factor of overall convenience. And as such, we started to optimize with strong focus since Q1 of last year. Coming from a level of over 16 days, we successfully reduced first to a little over 15 days in Q2 and then to 13.9 in Q3 and further to 13.1 days in the current quarter, our fastest value to date.
To boost even more, we recently launched Express Delivery. We are now operating 16 Express Delivery hubs across Europe, enabling us to offer [ 3-day ] only delivery to customers within a 250-kilometer radius of these hubs. We currently show Express Home Delivery on a quarter of checkouts only, and we aim to increase this share throughout the year to drive up sales conversion further.
To conclude, I would like to give an update on our AI efforts. As a technology company, we are convinced that product investments are the best investments for future growth. We have already invested into our AI pricing technology for years and talked about that frequently in our shareholder letters. As of Q1, we are able to price 89% of cars offered to us through AI pricing. This is 62 percentage points more than in Q1 of '21. We remain convinced that our AI pricing capabilities from an important competitive advantage. We have started to work on several AI-driven initiatives that will increase our competitive modes further. AI recommendation algorithms, for instance, improve the quality of vehicle suggestions we make to our customers, both in merchant and retail significantly improving customer experience and conversion. We will improve our car evaluations through AI-powered damage detection in the future, substantially reducing our cost of evaluation while improving quality at the same time.
Other possible use cases are checking documents as part of our credit underwriting process or supporting our customer service personnel outside office hours, just to mention a few. I'm excited to fully embrace AI with our company and believe that it will add significant competitive advantages and above industry profitability in the long term.
I'm now handing over to Markus, who will give you a detailed financial update.
Thank you, Christian. Q1 was a terrific quarter for us, where our investments and demand generation over the past few quarters coupled with the previous investments and improved supply as well as ongoing optimization of our platform have really paid off. We increased total units by 4.2%, coming close to our all-time high, though with slightly lower revenue due to declining ASPs, reflecting the overall market trends as per our AUTO1 price index.
Our continued improvements in merchant GPU combined with maintaining a significant Autohero GPU gains we've seen in recent quarters further brings us to an all-time high of EUR 993 GPU for the full firm. While we generally limit our quarterly financial KPIs to gross profit, GPU and adjusted EBITDA, I'd like to highlight that our significantly improved profitability enabled us also to publish our first ever profitable net income quarter once adjusted for stock-based compensation and other one-off items.
Turning to our usual quarterly bridge of profitability. You see the impact of the operating leverage that comes from both our higher GPU, but also the increased efficiency in our operations so that OpEx per unit further declines with increased scale. By improving our gross profits by close to EUR 30 million and keeping most of our other costs under control with marketing, logistics, employees and other, each increasing in low single digits, we were able to achieve EUR 17 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q1.
Our adjusted EBITDA now exceeds our leasing interest in its CapEx expenses, resulting in significant positive operating cash flow for 4 movements in our net inventory and portfolio investments.
We maintained a strong balance sheet in Q1 with no corporate debt. With EUR 541 million of cash, we continue to have a robust balance sheet with a further EUR 370 million of headroom to finance more inventory. With positive adjusted net income, we are now generating positive free cash flow in our selling and buying core business before captive finance investments.
The overall reduction of cash by EUR 7 million was driven by our investments into our captive finance portfolios, which we grew by EUR 75 million. Inventory declined by EUR 26 million as part of our usual Q1 sell-down of inventory. By way of reminder, we financed our inventory through a EUR 1 billion nonrecourse and rated asset-backed securitization program that ensures our access to the lowest cost inventory financing. Lastly, we increased our captive finance portfolio by EUR 75 million to EUR 382 million in total, driven by an almost EUR 50 million increase in the Merchant Finance portfolio to EUR 85 million, which continues to grow strongly.
In addition, we further increased the consumer loan portfolio by EUR 27 million to EUR 296 million. We continue to be on track to get a rating on this portfolio in Q3, which we expect will substantially reduce our cost of capital.
As we turn to our guidance, we maintained our guidance on group units, both 540,000 to 595,000 units in merchant and 70,000 units in retail.
At the profitability level, however, we increased our guidance to EUR 570 million to EUR 650 million of gross profit for the full year from EUR 565 million to EUR 625 million. We also increased our full year EBITDA guidance from breakeven to EUR 20 million to EUR 40 million of EBITDA for the full year. We expect that Q4 EBITDA will be around breakeven, given the usual seasonality that we face at that time.
Overall, we are very proud of the results we achieved this quarter, which demonstrate the power of our platform and the ongoing opportunity for growth. To summarize, we've proved the ability to generate strong profitability and cash flows through growing our Merchant segment, benefiting from operational leverage, exponential growth in our new merchant finance products, quarterly growth in Autohero while locking in the significant GPU gains we've achieved, thereby making significant strides in attacking the massive retail market opportunity.
In total, achieving positive cash flow in our operating business enables us to continue to invest to become a dominant force in the EUR 700 billion market for used cars in Europe. With that, I'd like to turn it over to questions.
Hi, everyone. I'm Eveline, your Zoom operator. [Operator Instructions]
Thank you, Eveline. And we will start with Pete-Veikko Kujala from Morgan Stanley.
It's Pete from MS. A few from me, please. So firstly, what level of equity are you using for the merchant loan business at the moment? I think Markus indicated this a little bit. But I'm just trying to reconcile the financial liabilities with the different ABSs that you have?
Then secondly, can you give any kind of color on the GPU contribution from merchant financing that you did in Q1?
Then thirdly, should we -- or how should we expect the consumer loans to behave once you receive the external rating? Should they remain on the balance sheet? Or are you going to [ offload ] some of them or all of them, any color on this would be helpful. And then lastly, any kind of color that you can give on seasonality for the year that we should keep in mind?
Let me, I think, take those questions. In terms of the equity, so in our asset-backed -- in our ABS for the merchant loan, we've effectively got an 80% loan-to-value in that facility. But for Q1, we achieved much less than that in Q1, partially because it's still an extremely new portfolio, and we only launched the product, as you know, kind of end of October and partially also just because of the cut-off signs from when we report, coupled with the fact that Easter happens once every 10 years exactly on the last day of the quarter. So for this particular quarter, we ended up with lower or higher equity using your way of looking at it, but lower loan-to-value than we would otherwise normally achieve.
In terms of the GPU contribution, it was relatively minimal in Q1 from finance -- from Merchant Financing specifically. So I think we expect that to continue to improve or contribute more over the course of this year.
With respect to the consumer loans, with this first rating, we would expect them to remain on the balance sheet. So they would continue there, but the cost of refinancing would obviously go down significantly, and we would also expect to release some capital as a result of doing once we get that rating and then putting that into a separate portfolio.
And then maybe finally for the seasonality. I mean, I indicated that a little bit in my -- in the guidance. So specifically Q4, and I think we've talked about this in the past, it tends to be a less -- a weaker quarter. Q1 -- so Q1 and Q3 tend to be the stronger quarters with Q2 and Q4 tended to be the weaker quarter with Q4 in particular, being the weakest quarter in the year.
Thanks, Pete. And the next question is from the line of Yulia Kazakovtseva at UBS.
I had a question about Merchant GPU in 2025 and beyond that. So given the upgrade in the guidance, how should we think about 2025? Do you expect it to be like higher than EUR 900 probably? And then beyond that, where do you expect this to settle in the long term?
So I think -- Yulia, thank you for the question. With the corridor of EUR 800 to EUR 900 that we put up, this is our view from where we are today, also for the coming years. And if you take the midpoint, then I think this will be a reasonable assumption.
Well, in that case, I guess our presentation was very clear that seems to answer all the questions. So thank you very much for attending. And I think we have calls scheduled with a lot of you over the next couple of days anyway, and otherwise speak latest at the Q2 results.
Okay, thank you everyone.