Credit Acceptance Corp (CACC) 2015 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Credit Acceptance Corporation fourth-quarter 2015 earnings call.

Today's call is being recorded.

A webcast and transcript of today's earnings call will be made available on Credit Acceptance's website. At this time I would like to turn the call over to Credit Acceptance's Senior Vice President and Treasurer, Doug Busk.

Thank you, Tricia. Good afternoon and welcome to the Credit Acceptance Corporation fourth-quarter 2015 earnings call.

As you read our news release posted on the investor relations section of our website at Credit Acceptance.com and as you listen to this conference call, please recognize that both contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control and which could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements.

These risks and uncertainties include those spelled out in the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking information included in the news release. Consider all forward-looking statements in light of those and other risks and uncertainties. Additionally, I should mention that to comply with the SEC's Regulation G, please refer to the adjusted financial results section of our news release, which provides tables showing how non-GAAP measures reconcile to GAAP measures. At this time, Brett Roberts, our Chief Executive Officer, Ken Booth, our Chief Financial Officer, and I will take your questions.

(Operator Instructions)

Our first question comes from the line of Kyle Joseph with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Afternoon, guys. Congratulations on a good quarter and thanks for taking my questions. I just want to get your thoughts to start on competition, given broader macroeconomic volatility. Have you seen any pullback in competition and what's kind of your outlook for 2016?

The best way to get a sense for the competitive environment for us is to look at volume per dealer. The volume per dealer for the quarter increased by 3.8%. That's less than an increase we saw in prior quarters of the year but we did have a tougher comparison as the fourth quarter of the prior year we started to grow the business.

Beyond that, I think as long as there's capital available to the market we'll continue to see lots of competition. It is very competitive right now. It has been for some time, but in terms of an outlook it's really hard to say. I would look for much of a change until capital dries up for industry.

Got it. Thanks. That's helpful. And then in terms of your collections forecast, it looks like the forecasted collections came down a couple basis points for some of the vintages. Is that primarily driven by the term extension or is there anything going on in terms of frequency or severity you guys want to highlight?

I think at a high level we provide our initial forecast for each of the last 10 years. We update that forecast every quarter. For 8 of the last 10 years we've had a positive variance against our initial forecast. The only two years were the variance was negative were 2006 and 2007 that were affected by the financial crisis and those are probably noteworthy just because the variance, even though it was negative, was very small given the change in the environment that we experienced. Recently we saw a few basis point moves for a few of the years, positive move for 2015, but in total the total cash flows really didn't change by much versus our forecast.

Got it. Thanks. And just lastly, can you talk to us about what you're seeing from the ABS markets in terms of sort of new issue spreads you guys are seeing and your outlook for your cost of funds?

The conditions in the ABS market aren't dramatically different than we saw in the latter part of 2015. Investors are being selective. There is definitely some tiering going on in terms of public versus 144A, prime versus sub-prime and then tiering based on the financial strength of the sponsor.

We did our last deal in August of 2015, had an all-in rate including issuance fees of about 3%. It's a little difficult to tell but if we were to access the 144A market today and do a similarly structured fixed-rate deal, we'd think we'd be right in the 3.5% range. So little more challenging environment, but things are still getting done. The 3.5% issuance, since it would likely be a small portion of our overall debt and is less than our overall weighted average cost of funds, would have a minimal impact on our overall cost of funds.

Great. Thanks very much for answering my questions.

Thank you. David Sharp, JMP Securities. Your line is now open.

Yes, thanks for taking my questions as well. First one relates to the dealer count and I guess it's a follow-up to the question on competition. It's still a very strong year-over-year growth in active dealers.

Should we be viewing this is largely a function of just the maturation of all the sales people you've added over the last few years or are you finding there are a lot of new dealers who are coming onto your system because they can't get deep sub-prime borrowers financed?

It's a combination of the two. We have a very small market share currently. There's a lot of dealers out there that could use our program and benefit from it that don't have it currently. We would like to think we have lots of room to continue to grow our active dealer count. We made some progress on that this quarter.

Is the year-over-year growth rate you've been delivering in calendar 2015 a level that you think is sustainable this year?

I think it's difficult to predict short-term growth rates either in dealers or unit volumes. If you look at our long-term track record, when we've had capital we've been able to grow the business pretty nicely and we hope that, that will continue but again, it's hard to predict the future.

Got it. Got it. Shifting to the revenue side in pricing, I might not have caught it, is there an average yield for this quarter?

There isn't one disclosed. We typically disclose that in the 10-Q. Our GAAP revenue for the quarter was about 25.5%. Our adjusted yield was about 24.7%.

Okay. And just, Doug, so I'm clear, is the 24.7% comparable to the 25.8% last quarter?

The GAAP number -- you're referencing 25.7%, which was the GAAP yield in the third quarter last year. The 25.6% GAAP yield is comparable to that number.

Okay. Got it. Got it. It looks like the advanced rate came down sequentially, noticeably effectively raising pricing. Is that anticipation of kind of a lower collection multiple going forward? I mean, is that -- should we be viewing that as effectively an effort to maintain the existing effective yield in unit economics or should we be viewing that as an absolute price increase?

No. We didn't change prices during the quarter. The lower advance rates just reflects the lower forecasted collection percentage.

Okay, so relatively flattish yield should be the outlook. And in the last question is on the operating leverage side. It looks like it's another quarter in which G&A held pretty steady under $10 million. Based on everything you know about initiatives internally for 2016, should we still be looking at $40 million or less on an annualized basis as a reasonable target?

It's a little difficult to say. I think it's obviously we've benefited from operating leverage over time as the business has grown. If you look back at our historical results, you'll see that, that operating leverage is lumpy. Some periods we make a lot of progress, some periods less so. We think there is still opportunity for operating leverage in the business going forward, but I think the timing of that is very difficult to predict.

Okay. Fair enough. And then just last question. The provision expense on the GAAP basis comparable to last quarter, basically the under performance of some pools for level yield accounting, were they concentrated in any particular vintage?

I think that the provision is not something we really focus on internally. We tend to focus on the adjusted results in that way you don't have to worry about the provision expense. We don't view it as a real expense.

As we've talked about in the past, if you're cash flow forecast overall doesn't change at all you can still record a provision. The larger number you report or the more it's going to go around in future periods so we just look at the adjusted numbers internally and we don't pay a lot of attention to the provision.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Christopher Crum with Aylstone Company. Your line is now open.

Hi. Yes on the buyback, how many shares did you repurchase in the quarter?

We bought back 464,000 shares at a cost of approximately $85.5 million.

And was the repurchase authorization unanimous from the Board?

Yes.

Okay. And then I guess the final question, I noticed that Donald Foss sold $100 million worth of stock. Just kind of wondering why he would authorize a repurchase at the Board level and sell personally?

I don't know that he sold $100 million worth of stock.

He filed a form144.

That's a new information to me if he sold $100 million worth of stock. But regardless, the decision of any individual can buy or sell stock can be very different than for the Company. We look at share repurchase as something we done for a long time. It's really a way to get -- to deploy excess capital, similar to a dividend.

We do -- our policy is to buy it back only when the Board believes it's below intrinsic value but that's a different criteria than what an individual might need cash for or diversification. There's lots of reasons an individual might sell that would necessarily reflect the Board's decision.

Thank you.

Thank you. Robert Dodd, Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. If I can look at the allocation or spread between dealer loans and purchase loans, obviously, I mean purchase loans ticked up a bit in the quarter positively on forecast collections and spread. Dealer loans moved a little bit the other way. The overall mix, obviously the spread ticked down a little bit, 30 basis points in October versus in the fourth quarter versus where in the third.

Is that a function of the mix that you're doing at the moment more purchase loans versus dealer loans in the fourth quarter and then does that itself has any connection to the increased term that the average purchase loan maybe has a longer term than a loan you guys would originate directly?

We do a little bit more purchase business now. It's still low relative to where it's been historically. As we've talked about in prior calls, we just view that as a different channel for us. We do prefer the portfolio program because of the alignment of interest it creates because it's significant piece of the dealer's profit is paid out over time based on the loan performance.

It sets up a situation that's unique in our market where the dealer, the customer and Credit Acceptance succeed together so we do prefer that program. Having said, that there are dealers that for one reason or the other aren't interested in our traditional portfolio program, and so in recent periods, we began to view that as a separate channel that we want to take advantage of and that channels been growing.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Lucy Webster, Compass Point. Your line is now open.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. My first question, can you talk about maybe the sort of average age of the vehicle behind your managed portfolio or just do you have exposure to a certain age within the sort of aggregate used vehicle car part that you can talk about?

We don't disclose the average age of our vehicles. What we try to do is boil every aspect the loan structure, consumer bureau application and vehicle information down into one number and that's the forecasted collection rate on each loan. We publish that when we book the loan and every quarter thereafter. We try to just take it up a level and give you the most important number.

Okay. And then my other question was about so the sort of 3,400 in new dealers that you added over the course of this year. I'm just wondering can you talk about or give us any color on what's in that new active dealer number? It just seems like if you have over 9,000 active dealers at the end of the year, what do you guys think about sort of your total addressable market in terms of potential new dealers going forward given there's obviously a finite amount of used car dealers in the US?

I mean, there are about 60,000 used car dealers out there. We did business with a little less than 7,000 of them last quarter. So obviously we have, whether you look at our market share in terms of percent of sub-prime or deep prime consumers that finance a vehicle, or in terms of dealers, we have a very small share of the market. At some point, that will start to be a concern but I think were a very long way from that being an in issue for us.

The other thing I'd point out is neither our active dealer number nor the number of dealers in the United States is a static number. There's lots of turnover in both of those numbers. So we think we have room to grow our dealer base and grow our business for the foreseeable future.

Great. That's all for me. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Randy Heck, Goodnow Investment. Your line is now open.

Hi, Brett, Doug. Really, really terrific quarter and thanks for taking my call, or my questions. I'm guessing that people are going to again wonder whether the declining spread in the business is something to worry about. I was hoping you could just talk about what that means in terms of the absolute spread between your advance rate in your estimated collections, how that's less important than the estimated return on the capital employed with a given advanced rate.

Well, I think this spread in the most recent period is probably as low as it's been since 2007 and yet in the fourth quarter of 2007, I believe you earned it something like $0.40. This quarter you earned $4. So how do we get from $0.40 to $4 when the spread is the same? And then I have a couple follow-up questions.

I think you raise a good point. I mean, in the spread as it's presented in the table just the forecasted collection rate minus the advance rate is lower than it had been. The way it's presented it's about where it was in 2006 and slightly higher than 2007. Taking one minus the other works pretty well if the forecasted collection rate is about the same number. It doesn't work quite as well if the forecasted collection rate declines.

If you just want to look at that table a slightly different way and take the forecasted collection rate divided by the advance, you get a slightly different trend. What you would see is that 2014 and 2015 have a more favorable relationship between those two numbers than 2006 and 2007. Still the point that people seem focused on it's declined over time and you have to remember that some of the periods we're comparing it to, 2009, 2010, 2011, we had very limited levels of competition during those periods following the financial crisis.

So it's kind of an unusual period to compared to and I think you also have to keep in mind that during the same periods, the after-tax returns that we were reporting were unsustainably high. I think in 2010 our after-tax unleveraged return was 17%, almost 18%, so the spreads have come down. The return has come down as well.

We weren't expecting 18% unlevered after-tax returns to continue forever, but we made a decision, like we do every period, to price to create the best combination of volume and profit per unit. That's the same way we've priced historically and so what you saw this year the spreads came down a little bit, but the volume was very, very strong and the blended result is one that we're very happy with, particularly given where we are in the competitive environment.

We do expect at some point in the future the competitive environment will change. We may have an opportunity to price more conservatively at that time but we'll continue to price based on what the market gives us and the results up through this quarter I think speak for themselves.

Okay. Yes, I noticed your return on investment capital actually ticked up this quarter versus the third quarter, which I think it's been a while. Okay.

The other thing to point out there, and this is probably obvious is, the other thing that's changed the look at the period covered table from 2006 til today is our expenses are obviously a lot lower. Our expenses as a percentage of capital were over 15% 2006 and they were under 7% this past quarter and right around 7% for the year.

Okay. Yes, that's very helpful. Just a follow-up. The other questions that I hear are generally, well what's happening to credit quality? What about this big provision and what about the 10 basis points here or 20 basis points there?

Can you just discuss how the cross-collateralization of loans by each dealer diminishes or dilutes the impact of changes in collections, not to mention changes in things like repossession values of cars and dilutes or diminishes the impact to your bottom-line number?

Right. The advantage to our model is if we -- we have had a pretty good history of having positive variances against our initial forecast, but if there are negative variances, those are shared with the dealer 80%/20% so if we miss our collection forecast by $1 million, $800,000 of that goes to dealer hold back in the impact to us is only $200,000. So as we saw during the financial crisis, when we had some negative variances it really had very little impact on our profitability because of that 80%/20% split and that risk sharing arrangement we have with the dealer.

The other thing to keep in mind is when you look at the forecasted collection percentages, you've got to ask yourself what's a material number? And I would argue that all the numbers on the page with the exception of maybe 2009 when we had a 750 basis point positive variance, they were all immaterial.

We'd like to have a positive variance there. It's a nice surprise to see some extra income coming through from a positive change in your forecast, but it's not really a break driver of our overall financial results.

As an example for the quarter, we had some negative numbers in the table. I think the total change in our forecast really to just the collection line, forgetting about the 80%/20% split and the hold back, was just a little bit over $6 million. Is that a big number?

The total forecast is almost $5 billion, so it's about a 13 basis change and 80% of that was born by the dealer. So none of the numbers in the table are really that considering that they are all very small. We'd love to have a 750 basis point positive variance every year but obviously our forecast to be very accurate if we continue to have that kind of performance.

So we're positive for the last eight years. We're happy with that and we don't really see much concern there.

Okay. Again, great year and good luck this year.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Henle with DLH Capital. Your line is now open.

Good evening. Could you guys just spend a minute on the sales force and obviously relative to dealer growth that was -- that's been great in this quarter and in prior quarters. I'm just curious, have you been tweaking the commission rates and do you continue to do that? Are you still fine-tuning that and can you spend a little bit of time on how you feel about the sales force and retention of the sales force?

I think we made good progress there as we've talked about in prior calls. We grew that sales force very rapidly and we experienced some growing pains with that. We had turnover that was higher than we would of liked. We had more new hires than we would have liked that didn't perform up to our expectations but that's gotten a lot better now. We've done a lot of fill in. We've gotten better at hiring the right people. We haven't change the incentives since fourth quarter of 2014. We changed the base salaries but the incentive pieces remained the same for quite a while.

Have you ever disclosed the retention rate for the sales force or not?

No.

You haven't. Okay. And last question, was there any change in the stated length of loan in fourth quarter versus third quarter?

It was very, very, very modest. In the press release we compared the term of a loan in the fourth quarter of 50.4 months to 49.7 months for loans assigned in the first nine months of 2015 so that doesn't directly ask your question about the third quarter but it will get you in the ballpark.

Okay. Thank you. That's it for me.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Rowan with Janney. Your line is now open.

Good afternoon, guys. Just wanted to go back quickly to the conversation of hold back and negative variance and how any type of negative variance affects the dealer. I'm just curious, with a couple of negative marks in the last couple of quarters, are your dealers bearing any type of real brunt to their hold back and when do you foresee that you may get some type of pushback from the dealers who are getting smaller and smaller hold back checks?

I think if you look at the table, eight straight years we've had a positive variance there, so I don't think there's any negative ramifications to be concerned about with the dealers.

Okay. And then, are you aware of any platforms out there that are ready to go, kind of waiting to be operational now that your cap system has lost its patent? I don't believe that your -- the royalties that you receive on that are material but I just wanted to know kind of competitive, which one of your competitors are --have platforms up and running and which ones do you think will try to get something up and running?

I don't think that we have good visibility to that question. There's thousands of lenders that are willing to write a sub-prime loan. I don't think we'd have visibility in terms of how many of those thousands have systems that are out there or have systems that are planned. We just don't have that good of visibility.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions comes from the line of Sanjay Singh with Bloombergsen. Your line is now open.

Hey, Doug, Brett. Congratulations on a great year. I had a question I wanted to ask you on the purchase versus dealer loans programs. But before that, I looked through the filings. I follow them all the time. I haven't seen any $100 million sale of stock by Don Foss. That's just incorrect.

But if you can talk a bit more, Brett, because we been wondering about this issue of obviously the purchase loans don't have the same alignment so how do you think of those loans and mitigating risk while taking the opportunity there?

It's a good question. I think we've been doing it for a long time so I think we're comfortable with our procedures there. You have to be a little bit more careful about the dealer that you do business with. You have to be a little bit more conservative about your collection forecast. You have to have some different risk management procedures in place, but we've been doing it for a long time.

We've had positive results, as I said. We like the portfolio program better, but the we -- purchase business is still good business. It's priced to achieve a very high return, and were happy to do more of it.

Got you. So there's no sort of limit in your mind as to how big it would be or is there -- how do you think of that?

There'd be a limit their but again, the portfolio program is been a more popular program by a large margin so that's not something that we spend a lot of time thinking about just because -- it's something we will address if it ever becomes a concern in terms of its size.

Got you. Right. Historically, you've talked about I think in the last little bit like a leverage ratio of 2 to 2.5. Obviously, you're willing to increase a little bit here because of the and in the buyback. Anything you can add to that in terms of how you think of the leverage ratio in light of what stock is right now? Would you want to be at the higher end because you think stock is cheaper or you just going to play it by ear?

We don't really look at the debt-to-equity ratio as a strict limit. The way we do it as we run financial projections where we assume that the capital markets close for a period of time and we look at what the impact would be to our originations and we select a scenario where we're happy with the worst-case scenario, where if the worst happens and there's no capital available that we can still live with those results. So that's more how we do it.

You're right, we have been kind of between 2 to 2.5 to one overtime. We're currently break the middle of that range so we're comfortable where were are. In terms of share buybacks, we will continue to apply the same thought process we have in the past. First priority is capital that can be used in the business and when we have excess capital, we think about buying back shares if the price is attractive.

Got you. Thanks. Great work.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Our next question comes from the line of Moshe Orenbuch with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.

Great, thanks for taking my question. Kind of a follow-up on the competitive dynamic. Couple of the large players this quarter talked about slowing down in the sub-prime. Cap One said that they've been flattish for a long time and kind of went down and then sent under consumer also. You referenced kind of a reversal, something that would cause a retreat of capital. What sort of thing could cause that? Do you think it's starting? Could you just maybe amplify on that whole discussion a little bit?

I think it's hard to say. It's been different each time. In the mid 1990s capital moved away from the industry because industry-specific concerns, which in retrospect turned out to be right.

At other times it's been more macro issues that have caused capital to leave the industry. I think it's really hard to say. Each time it's been a little bit different. But eventually I think if companies don't perform and if loan performance and profitability is not there for the industry, that would certainly be one reason why capital might decide out but there could be other macro reasons as well.

But you're not feeling that you're at that point yet here?

I don't think that's happened yet.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Lucy Webster with Compass Point. Your line is now open.

Hey, guys. Sorry if I missed this. Have you ever talked about what percentage of dealers you are working with today are eligible for hold back payments?

It would be all the portfolio dealers.

Yes.

Now --

(Multiple speakers) where they have to -- you have to compute at least 100 loans?

There is. They have to, on the portfolio program, they have to complete 100 loans before they're eligible for dealer hold back. You know the problem with answering your question is for those dealers sort of around 40, 50, 70 you can't say definitively that it won't be eligible for dealer hold back at some point.

Okay. Understood. Thank you.

With no further questions in queue, I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Busk for any additional or closing remarks.

We'd like to thank everyone for their support and for joining us in our conference call today. If you have any additional follow-up questions, please direct them to our investor relations mailbox at IR@CreditAcceptance.com. We look forward to talking to you again next quarter. Thank you.

Once again, this does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation.