Asbury Automotive Group Inc (ABG) 2017 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Asbury Automotive Group Q2 2017 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Matt Pettoni, please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Asbury Automotive Group's Second Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay later today.

The press release detailing Asbury's second quarter results was issued earlier this morning and is posted on our website at asburyauto.com.

Participating with us today are Craig Monaghan, our President and Chief Executive Officer; David Hult, our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; and Sean Goodman, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. At the conclusion of our remarks, we will open the call up for questions, and I will be available later for any follow-up questions you might have.

Before we begin, I must remind you that discussion during the call today is likely to contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements other than those which are historical in nature. All forward-looking statements are subject to significant uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those suggested by the statements.

For information regarding certain of the risks that may cause actual results to differ, please see our filings with the SEC from time to time, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 2016, any subsequently filed quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and our earnings release issued earlier today. We expressly disclaim any responsibility to update forward-looking statements.

In addition, certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined under SEC rules may be discussed on this call. As required by applicable SEC rules, we provide reconciliations of any such non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures on our website.

It is my pleasure to hand the call over to our CEO, Craig Monaghan. Craig?

Good morning, everyone. In a softening automotive retail environment, we are pleased to have increased our same-store revenue and gross profit by 2% this quarter compared to the prior year and to have achieved an industry-leading adjusted operating margin of 4.5%. Despite continued pressure on new and used margins, strong performances in F&I and parts and service have allowed us to maintain overall gross margins.

We also successfully grew our same-store used unit volumes by 6% in second quarter, further enhancing overall profitability. This quarter, our SG&A expenses were 69.5% of gross profit. This reflects continued investment in our business, specifically in digital technologies and lead management initiatives that enhance our customers' experience. David will talk more about these investments during his remarks.

Our adjusted earnings per share of $1.58 represents a 4% decrease compared to last year. However, for the first half of this year, our earnings per share of $3.16 is 5% above last year. Assuming that SAAR holds at current levels and notwithstanding continued investments in the business, we expect to deliver low to mid-single-digit EPS growth in the back half of the year.

Finally, I would like to welcome Sean Goodman to Asbury as our Chief Financial Officer. Sean joined us earlier this month, and we're excited to have him on our team.

I will now hand the call over to Sean.

Thank you, Craig, and good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to join the Asbury team and to be with you this morning.

So let's start with a high-level overview of the results for the second quarter. Revenue of $1.6 billion and gross profit of $267 million were in line with Q2 of last year. SG&A expenses were 69.5% of gross profit, 140 basis points higher than Q2 of last year.

Our floor plan interest expense totaled $6.1 million, up $1.1 million from the prior year period primarily due to increase in the LIBOR rate. And we are reporting earnings per share of $1.52 and adjusted earnings per share of $1.58, which is $0.07 or 4% less than the prior year period.

Earnings per share was adjusted by $0.06 for expenses associated with exiting our lease facility, partially offset by investment income related to the performance of certain F&I products that have now expired. There were no adjustments for the second quarter of 2016. David will provide details on the sales and margin performance for the quarter, and I'd like to take a moment to give you some color on our SG&A expenses in Q2.

SG&A expense deleveraging and the resulting impact on earnings per share was driven by 3 key factors. None of these were considered in arriving at adjusted earnings per share.

First, as Craig mentioned, we continue to invest in digital technologies and lead management initiatives. We believe that these investments will improve our customer's experience and enhance our stores' competitive position in a changing auto retail environment. The incremental expenses associated with these initiatives cost us approximately $0.03 per share this quarter. While we anticipate further investments in this area through the remainder of this year as we build out our omni-channel capabilities, we expect these investments to be ROI accretive going forward.

Second, our employee benefit costs are tracking higher than last year. We estimate the impact of these higher expenses to be approximately $0.03 per share this quarter. Initiatives are being put in place to more efficiently manage these costs in the future.

And finally, during the quarter, we had 2 notable expenses. First, a major hailstorm hit 2 of our dealerships in Plano, Texas. In addition to property damage, the storm destroyed all of our inventory, resulting in $26 million of damage. While we were insured for the majority of this, we estimate the impact of the storm and associated business interruption to be approximately $0.05 per share. And second, during the quarter, we booked a charge of approximately $0.02 per share associated with prior-period payroll taxes.

For the remainder of 2017, we expect SG&A as a percentage of gross profit to be approximately 70%. This compares to our original guidance of 69% to 70% for the full year and incorporates our digital technology and lead management initiatives that David will describe in more detail.

With respect to capital deployed, we repurchased $15 million of our common stock and spent approximately $6 million on capital expenditure this quarter. We've taken a hard at look our CapEx program, and as a result, we are now expecting CapEx for the year to be approximately $50 million, and this is $20 million less than previously announced.

Our facilities are in good condition and are well maintained, and this should allow us to hold CapEx at around the $50 million level in 2018. Note that these amounts exclude potential lease buyout opportunities that may arise. We consider these to be financing transactions.

From a liquidity perspective, we ended the quarter with $3 million in cash, $14 million available in floor plan offset accounts, $102 million available on our used vehicle line and $237 million available on our revolving credit lines. Our total leverage stands at 3x, and our net leverage ratio is 2.7x, which is in the middle of our targeted range of 2.5 to 3x.

I'll now hand the call over to David.

Thanks, Sean, and good morning, everyone. My remarks will pertain to our same-store performance compared to the second quarter of 2016.

During the quarter, we grew our used vehicle retail unit sales by 6%, increased F&I PVR to $1,522, up $85 per car, and grew parts and service gross profit by 6%.

Looking at new vehicles. The second quarter SAAR fell 3% to $16.7 million, but our new unit volume was down only 1% as we took market share in almost every brand. From a margin perspective, we experienced new-vehicle margin pressure across all segments but most notably in mid-line imports where we have a heavy sedan versus truck mix.

In this segment, our PVR declined by 21%. However, our domestic business with a higher weighting of trucks, enjoyed a stable PVR. Overall, new-vehicle margins remain under pressure, driven by aggressive dealer incentive targets and growing industry-wide inventory levels. As a result, our new-vehicle gross margin was down 70 basis points to 4.6%.

Our total new-vehicle inventory was 741 million. In an environment where inventory levels are building across the industry, we are pleased that our day supply declined by 9 days to 74.

Turning to used vehicles. We increased our unit sales by 6% in the quarter and achieved the gross profit margin of 7.5%, which was 90 basis points less than prior year. The decrease in margin was driven by a combination of aggressive new-vehicle pricing and the continued inflow of off-lease vehicles.

While our used vehicle line retail gross profit was down 6%, our wholesale gross was better by $1 million. This led to total used vehicle gross profit being backwards by only 3% for the quarter. As I have mentioned in the past, the incremental used-vehicle sales provide profit opportunities in both F&I and parts and service. We are pleased with our used-vehicle volumes for the quarter. Our used-vehicle inventory was at a 35-day supply at the end of the quarter, within our targeted range.

Turning to F&I. Our team continues to deliver strong results with an $85 per car increase along with an 8% increase in F&I gross profit.

Looking at parts and service. The parts and service business continue to perform well in the second quarter with our team delivering 6% gross profit growth. This was achieved with a 23% increase in warranty and a 4% increase in customer pay.

As both Craig and Sean mentioned, we are investing in digital technologies and lead management initiatives to enhance our business. With these investments, we are building out our omni-channel capabilities to effectively serve our customers online, over the phone or in the store, however they choose to interact with us.

Already, we have seen solid results from these investments. For example, our website traffic count has more than doubled since last year. Our online service appointments have increased by more than 150%. And our internet leads have increased by over 30% since last year.

All of the above is achieved cost-effectively with historically low advertising spend per vehicle. We are now focusing on effective lead management through the creation of our customer care team, which will operate within our marketing team and provide industry-leading support to our stores.

With our investments in digital technologies and lead management initiatives, we have reassessed our brick-and-mortar investment in Q auto and made the decision to exit the remaining 2 Q locations. With this decision, we are not decreasing our emphasis on used-vehicle sales. Rather, we are focusing our investment and resources on alternative routes to market that we believe will provide a superior return. Our attention to the used-car business is evidenced by the more than 500 basis point increase in our used-to-new ratio this quarter.

In closing, we want to thank each of our teammates for their continued dedication and hard work.

We'll now turn the call over to the operator and take your questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) And we'll now take a question from Rick Nelson with Stephens.

Welcome, Sean, to Asbury and the call. I want to ask about the low to mid-single-digit EPS growth that you're targeting from the second half. I'm curious what the inflection is that is in the business relative to what you just reported in 2Q?

Rick, it's Craig. I mean, we look at -- well, let's start with the SAAR. That forecast is based on the SAAR staying roughly at the level where it is today, somewhere around 17 million. But then as Sean mentioned in our conversation, we had a number of costs in this quarter that were unique and we don't expect to continue. If we just project through if you [will] our core business in this environment again with these investments that David talked about, we think low to mid-single digits is doable.

And if we could dig into the GPU pressures here, especially in the import segment, down 21% year-over-year, do you see those types of incentives or those types of pressures continuing with the current incentive environment and the inventory environment that you referenced?

Rick, I'll hop in here. When we talk about low to mid-single-digit EPS growth, we're assuming that margins will stay at roughly the levels they are today on both the new and used side. And I think David can give you some more color on kind of what we see more broadly happening with margins.

Rick, as I stated, our import line, we are heavy car versus truck mix, and it really is a push process with a lot of these sedans. This year has also been a year of a lot of change with the OEMs as far as factory incentives. There's been a lot of movement even within the second quarter on incentives that came up that were on the table that came off the table. So they all kind of played a factor in our import margin pressure.

Are you suggesting it worsened as the quarter progressed or got better as the quarter progressed from an incentive standpoint?

It shows in our import volume. We did pretty well in unit sales. And we were not able to achieve a lot of the incentive money that was out there. So there was very aggressive targets that were set. And even what we thought was a good performance in the quarter year-over-year with volume, we certainly missed a lot of them in incentive money.

Got it. So what strategy do you undertake now with those incentive moneys you elect not to chase them?

They change monthly as I'm sure you know and in some cases quarterly. We enter the month understanding what our targets are. And we make a decision early on in the month if we're going to chase it or if we're going to try not to. The problem is, even when you choose not to chase it, you still have to be somewhat market competitive. You still have excess inventory within the market. So it's not like your grosses or your margin's going to go up materially if you don't chase the volume.

Got it. Because you're comparing with dealers that are chasing that volume.

Absolutely.

Yes. If I could ask you about the warranty. Gross profit's up 23% in the quarter, 22% year-to-date. Are those types of growth rates, do you think they're sustainable? We still got the Takata airbag out there in a big way, I guess, and other recalls.

You know that the brands that drove most of that increase was Honda, Acura and Lexus. Honda and Acura, it certainly was the inflator campaign. It was different with Lexus. It's really difficult to predict what's going to stay. Based on what we see currently, I think in the short term, it's here to stay. And the brand mix certainly changes, but there always seems to be warranty issues out there.

We'll now take our next question from Brett Hoselton with KeyBanc.

Just carry on from Rick's question, just in terms of the incentives, on a go-forward basis, do you see the, I'd say, the format maybe of the incentives continuing? Or do you see it maybe becoming a little bit less onerous going forward?

That's a great question. I'm not sure I can answer. Some of the imports, like I said, changed in Q2 and are reassessing even going into Q3 where they're at. There's been a lot of movement even on the luxury side with how they've done it. So it's hard to interpret what changes are going to come and when.

And then on another subject, SG&A as a percentage of gross income, can you kind of talk through this quarter, but then more importantly, second half and then into '18, what do you think are reasonable expectations?

Let me start, and maybe Sean would like to add some color. I think in Sean's comments, we talked about expect something around the 70% level. One of the things that's driving that is this initiative that David talked about where we're working to expand our omni-channel capabilities. We are building out a team that essentially extends our marketing team's capabilities to manage lead and manage inbound calls. We think those are extremely important investments and will play well for us in the future. But the cost of those investments are baked into SG&A, and that's why we think it's probably running somewhere around the 70% level.

I'll just add a little bit to that. As I said in my prepared remarks, expecting SG&A for the remainder of the year to be roughly 70% of gross profit. If you look at our year-to-date SG&A expenses, they're at 69.6% of gross profits. So doing the math on there, we're pretty close to 70% for the full year period. As Craig said, we are going to be spending additional money on the digital technology, the investments in digital technology in the remainder of the year. We expect that to increase from the levels in Q1. We expect by Q4, our run rate on digital technology expenses to be around $1 million more than they were in Q2. So that will put pressure on our cost, but remember that these are investments and investments that generated attractive return, and we expect to see the benefits of those returns probably starting in 2018.

We'll now take our next question from Bill Armstrong with CL King & Associates.

A good couple questions here. You talked about the midline imports pressure on GPU. I was wondering if you could also discuss luxury. That was down about $300 year-over-year on your GPU. What do you see going on there?

It was essentially the same thing. Had we hit all the incentive money in the quarter, we would have had a substantially different PVR than what shows from the luxury perspective. It really isn't much more than that. It's luxury money that we missed.

Are we still seeing maybe also a little bit of a disconnect in the mix the luxury manufacturers are offering in sedans versus the SUVs and crossovers?

You look at the trend the last couple years, they're certainly doing the best job they can trying to catch up to it. It just doesn't seem like they can catch it quick enough. But it's directionally correct but could always be better.

Right. Understood. Just going back to the SG&A. So you're expecting about 70% in the second half, so actually that's going to go up a little bit versus Q2 even though you had some nonrecurring items in SG&A in Q2. So when we kind of look at that and mix it in, what's going to improve? Where else in the P&L are we going to see improvement that would drive the low to mid-single-digit earnings growth in the back half of the year?

Again, I come back to on the SG&A side, we did have -- let me start again. The hailstorm was quite a significant impact in our second quarter. Sean called out the number somewhere around $0.05 of costs baked in there. We did not break that out separately. We know some of our peers do. We just include it in SG&A. That will go away. But as we mentioned, there will be increasing investment in the digital initiatives. And basically, just washing those 2 things together gets us back or keeps us in roughly the 70% range.

I'll just add to that. The 2 expenses that will go away is the hailstorm, as Craig mentioned, and the payroll tax charge. Those are clearly one-off in nature this quarter. Employee benefit costs, as I mentioned in my remarks, we are putting in place initiatives to manage these costs more effectively. But given the nature of these costs, the benefit is more 2018 benefit.

Okay, got it. And then finally, the $2.9 million of real-estate-related charges, is that just -- what does that relate to? Is that Q auto? Is that something else?

No, no, it's got nothing to do with Q auto. That's -- if you're well aware, in our past, when we get the opportunity to buy our way out of a leased property, we will. And that was a charge essentially to exit a lease for a facility early.

We'll take our next question from Bret Jordan with Jefferies.

You made a comment about the growing industry inventory, sort of industry wide. And I guess do you have any feelings -- and this is sort of a big-picture question as far as how do you -- what's the pulse on the OE production trends? And I guess, is the production volume lining up with demand better if you were more SUV and fewer cars going forward? I mean, what's your take on inventory looking out?

I think it's a real mixed bag, Bret. I mean -- because with some the brands, we actually had a very low days supply, and we actually think that impacted us because we didn't have enough. And in other car lines, we have excessive inventory. We've been turning down inventory for months, and we'll continue to do it. I've seen minor production cutbacks. There's a lot talked about it, but I don't think it's an enormous amount that they've cut back. It feels like a small amount. To me, the big difference over the years is we've really widened our inventories in the sense that a lot of new models have been introduced to the market. And it really plays heavy with the day supply when you add all these incremental models into the series. So that's made it obviously a little bit more complex to control the days supply as well.

Okay. And I guess you commented that the digital tech and lead management investment cost you $0.03 in the first -- in the second quarter, but you're going to be spending in the higher absolute rate by the fourth quarter. Would we be seeing returns from the earlier investment? I mean, have you thought about how dilutive it is from an EPS standpoint in the second half of the year, just those initiatives?

I go back. When you add all these things together, it gets us back to what we said earlier. We think we can grow EPS in the low to mid-single digits. And I think that's the best way to summarize it.

Okay. And then one last question. On Q auto, did you look back and sort of figure out what that might have cost? I mean, was it dilutive or breakeven, I guess, as an initiative? Is there sort of -- can we think about a savings going forward by not being in the last 2 locations?

No, maybe I can give you some perspective on Q auto. The financial impact in the quarter was immaterial. Financial impact going forward of not having Q auto will be immaterial. The first part of your question, what was -- what did we learn. I think that's a great question. One, we made an investment in an initiative to see if we could generate an additional line of business that produced an attractive ROI. We were unsuccessful, but I don't think we regret having tried it. I think it's something that we had to try. We're much more excited about these digital initiatives that we talked about a little while ago and look forward to actually having you come and visit us one day so that we can show you those things. But I think the other takeaway from Q, just to follow up there, is I think there are 2 major learnings. One is -- it's all about where you source your inventory. And if you're gone to auction to buy a car, you're the last one with your hand up, and that's not a situation we wanted to be in. We really have come to conclusion that we can move our traded vehicles through our stores as effectively or more effectively than we can move them to an off-site location. And secondly, we learned that a lot of those buyers are going to be subprime buyers. And that without the captive finance company, running a stand-alone used vehicle operation, you are somewhat at a disadvantage. We decided strategically that we did not want to be in the business of lending money to used-car buyers. And take that all together, we've made the decision to exit the business.

We'll now take our next question from Jamie Albertine with Consumer Edge.

Welcome to Sean as well. If I may, just a housekeeping item first. Past few quarters had some settlement payments come through from VW and perhaps elsewhere. I just wanted to make sure that if there were any in the second quarter that we called those out or if they've subsided for now?

We call out everything every quarter front and center. There's nothing in there from Volkswagen.

Got it. From a lead-generation perspective, can you give a percentage breakdown of what's internally generated at this point versus where you're having to go through third parties?

It's been our focus for well over a year now. Obviously, our internal leads close at a much higher percent. We certainly do have outside third-party vendor partners, and we appreciate that relationship. But we've been growing internally at about a 30% clip our internal leads.

So are you willing to share maybe where you are as a percentage of your total conversions? How much of it's coming from internal versus third party?

So from a conversion standpoint -- and let me know if I don't get the question correctly, but we convert that lead at almost double the percent compared to a third-party lead.

Understood. If I may, quickly, on off lease. Just surprised, I guess, to hear you guys sort of called it out as a headwind. Others in the sector have been looking at as more of a tailwind in terms of supply coming back to the market, helping to bring some pricing down, but help to maybe enable conversion. Is there something with respect to the mix of off-lease that is still causing it to be a headwind? Or how should we think about the trajectory of used both unit demand but ultimately profitability for -- really, for the back half?

Yes. Jamie, I'll share some thoughts that we have. When you think of off-lease vehicles and you think of the mix back a few years ago, it's obviously weighted more car than truck, so you have that factor. And when you have that much of the influx of inventory in the market, while there's a huge benefit from a dealer perspective in acquiring these vehicles, it's also depressing the retail price. Because as everyone sits on these excess cars and they're competitive to try and turn them because everyone wants to be in a 30-day turn, that depresses the retail price. So we're seeing it on the retail side and the wholesale side as well. So while the influx is great and it's increased our CPO business -- we're actually up 7% in CPO year-over-year, it's still depressing pricing on both ends.

Maybe just a quick follow-up to that point then. Would you say of all the off-lease vehicles coming back to your dealerships that you're sending more away than you're keeping?

I would tell you that we're managing the days supply, and we're not taking more than we can sell in turn. So again, I think there's excess cars throughout the market right now. So, yes, it's fair to say we're turning back cars.

And your day supply is what for you? Sorry if I missed it earlier.

That's okay. We ended the quarter at 35 days.

35 day. Okay, very good.

We'll take our next question from John Murphy with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

This is Aileen Smith on for John. Not to beat a dead horse here but to follow up some of the questions that were asked earlier, can you give us a bit more color on the strength in domestic gross profit per unit despite the pressure that you're seeing on sales? Is that a function of the Detroit 3 being relatively more rational on their stairstep programs than some of the foreign brands? Or is it driven by better inventory management on your part or mix perhaps? And do you expect that relative strength to persist?

I'll try and answer it, and please follow back up if I miss something. Generally speaking, with our domestic brands that we have, we're weighted more towards truck than car. And on a normal transaction between a car and a truck, our PVR is double when we sell a truck compared to a car. So with that weight and that volume on the domestic being more truck, we're certainly benefiting from that. This is always an odd quarter throughout the years because, with domestic, you have that build-out. So you tend to be a little bit higher in your day supply carrying you through the summer. So we're sitting a little bit higher on domestic day supply than we would want but fairly normal for this time of year. And we're kind of comfortable with the inventory levels that where we're at. We don't see anything significantly changing. One of our domestic partners has done away with the stairstep program and gone with something different. The new program has benefited us for sure.

Great. That's very helpful. And then to piggyback on your commentary that the elevated level of model introductions are creating some oversupply in the market, can you talk about that by vehicle segment? Is it particularly acute on the crossover side as we might expect given the strength in the market? And how is it impacting your ability to sell those vehicles at attractive GPUs?

So it's not so much -- when I say it's hurting, you look at your overall day supply. But if a particular manufacturer had 14 model lines and now they have 19 model lines, you have to have a representative day supply within those model lines. Some of the model lines in the luxury segment have been added so much, there's really not much difference between one model and the next, and it really just becomes which model is hotter than the other, and then the other model, you're stuck with excess days supply. Certainly, there's been more crossover vehicles in the market. But if you think over the last 36 months, there's also been a lot of sedans that have been added to the market as well.

Okay. Great. And then, sort of one last question. Can you talk about the sustainability of your improvement in F&I per unit and perhaps some of the buckets in F&I that are outperforming relative to your expectations?

Sure. Just as a reminder, above 1/3 of our F&I PVR is finance reserve, and it's pretty stable at that, and really, our increases have been through product sales. We have a great F&I team and trainers. And with that, we think we benefited through the additional sales of product sales. We see our current rates where we're at continuing. And the only thing that would alter that over time would be if lending started to tighten up.

We'll now take our next question from (inaudible) from Morgan Stanley.

It looks like versus our estimates, there was a bit of softness around new-vehicle sales. And I just wanted to get a sense of what the read-through is to your customers? You talked about supply but -- or production, but anything from the consumer side as far as negative equity or their ability to purchase new cars?

That is an excellent question. Clearly, with the depressed values on used cars, it's certainly affecting the consumer and their trade-in value and increases the negative equity. So from that standpoint, it does become more challenging. If you're trading is now worth 15% to 20% less, you're that much worse off from a negative equity standpoint. This makes it far more challenging to transact a new car.

Okay. And then last quarter, you talked about the amount of production coming to market wasn't really sustainable. And over time, it would balance itself out. Where are we as far as what inning are we in? And when do you think we get to sort of a more stable point?

It's an interesting time of the year because you're in the third quarter, and it's always a traditional sell-down quarter of the old models before the new models come out. It's hard to predict what the next model year is going to look like. But at current pace, while there's been some pullback in production, it hasn't been dramatic. And I think the pullback of 3% in SAAR in the quarter wasn't anticipated by the manufacturers, so that only further exacerbates the inventory level.

And then my last question, just, we're towards the end of July, any sort of updates as far as sales go relative to targets and goals that you've set out?

I'll just jump in there. We see the same broad industry market data that you do. Our month in July is progressing, I think, pretty much along with what you see happening market-wide. New-vehicle sales essentially flat with what we saw last year at this time. It's pretty much in line with our expectations. We started the call saying that we felt that the SAAR would stay somewhere around current level. That's what we're planning for. So I just sum up and say we're -- I would say we're starting July or halfway through July pretty much in line with expectation. So that wraps up our questions for today. We appreciate you being with us and look forward to talking to you again next quarter.

And once again, that does concludes today's conference. We thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.