Karooooo Ltd (KARO) 2023 Q2 法說會逐字稿

I would like to welcome everyone to the Karooooo Quarter 2 Financial Year 2023 Earnings Presentation. I am Richard Schubert, the Group's Chief Operating Officer, and will present our current operating strategy while, Carmen Calisto, our Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, will present the financial results. The Group's CEO and Founder, Zak Calisto, will then answer any questions.

Karooooo management would advise all investors to review this disclaimer. Karooooo is listed on NASDAQ under the ticket K-A-R-O and has 3 operational entities that we will review. Carzuka, Cartrack and Karooooo Logistics. We are thinking beyond connected vehicles and equipment as mobility is core for all on the ground applications. Our mission is to establish the leading on-the-ground operations cloud platform.

We solve problems by digitally transforming businesses. Our fleet management platform manages safety and visibility operations for our customers. Field worker management is helping SMEs like (inaudible) and ground servicing companies deliver. Logistics and delivery platforms are helping pharmacies and supermarkets with their on-time supply chain operations, while Carzuka is providing a safe and easy-to-use vehicle buying and selling platform. We are seeing a growing demand from small and large businesses to add operational efficiencies to their organization.

Karooooo investment highlights that drive shareholder value. We are at the early stage of a large and growing addressable market, where mobility with IoT is the key for improving operational efficiencies. Our decade-long track record shows strong customer acquisition, even in challenging markets with a robust and consistent business model with large expansion options across 23 countries by tapping into the untapped network effect. We have a long-term track record with a robust balance sheet and revenue generation, with disciplined capital allocation and a strong cash position despite allocating cash for future growth. Our track record has positioned us well for accelerated growth with strong operating profits and unit economics, while our founder-led culture focuses on agile innovation.

We are at the early stage of a large and long-term growth opportunity. We strongly believe that mobility is core to all on-the-ground operational improvements, which represent over 40% of the global GDP. This offers us a massive opportunity. Within South Africa, more than 1 in 10 vehicles are connected to the Karooooo platform, while the focus in Asia and Europe is now to grow and deliver more operational value to our customers.

There are many opportunities that are right for us to disrupt at this point in time. We are able to analyze our data to understand what our customers' needs are and are adding many verticals to our platform to capitalize on our network effect, while we continue to add growing value to our customers' operations. Karooooo wins by providing a fully inclusive end-to-end IoT cloud platform that's easy to use for our over 95,000 customers. It's continually updated and seamlessly integrates with customers' third-party ERP solutions. Our expanding distribution network ensures we service customers within the shortest possible lead times.

We understand our customers' day-to-day challenges, and our on-the-ground platform solves these issues and gives them a high ROI. Our fully vertically integrated business model means we might have a slightly larger staff count, but provides full control of all aspects of the business. Our established infrastructure gives us the human resources to scale the proven track record to achieve strong growth. Karooooo is an agile and entrepreneurial culture that has proven to be resilient in challenging times.

I will now hand over to Carmen to present our Q2 financial results.

Thank you, Richard. I will now talk through Karooooo's financial performance for Q2 FY '23. Please note that all comparisons are against Q2 FY '22, unless otherwise stated. Q2 proved to be strong in terms of our financial metrics with record earnings and cash generation. Our earnings per share increased by 28% to ZAR 4.93 and our profit for the period was up 26% at ZAR 1.5 billion. We continue to generate healthy amounts of cash from operating activities and our free cash flow hit an all-time high of ZAR 1 billion. Our performance, despite economic headwinds, acts as a testament to our resilient business model that is highly cash generative.

Supported by a high customer retention rate, Karooooo continues to grow at scale with a 30% increase in revenue and a 26% increase in profit. Our strong sustainable revenue growth resulted in a 27% increase in adjusted EBITDA to ZAR 377 million. We have strong unit economics, robust operating margins, a strong balance sheet and cash position and have consistently beaten the rule of 40. In spite of our investment for sustainable growth, net cash on hand has increased to over ZAR 1 billion. Naturally, this has been supported by the improvement in Cartrack's Debtor's days to 33, which was a direct result of our constant strategic investment in internal systems that ensure our strong track record remains consistent as we continue to scale. We have a strong, clean balance sheet with ample capacity to fund growth. Our cash generated from operating activities increased by 42% to ZAR 240 million, we invested ZAR 134 million in PPE, and our free cash flow is ZAR 106 million, up over 100%.

We have strong revenue generation, earnings growth as well as cash flow, putting us in a unique position in the market. We will continue to allocate capital to acquire more customers and are focused on increasing Karooooo's presence across geographies and industries. As you can see, many other world-leading large enterprise customers rely on our solution to overcome their operational challenges. Our differentiated culture, easy-to-use platform, great value proposition and strong customer centricity continue to pioneer success amongst businesses of all sizes across varied industries and geographies.

Our customer portfolio remains agnostic, with no significant customer or industry concentration risk. Due to the nature of each business segment, we are reporting our performance broken up by Cartrack, Carzuka and Karooooo Logistics. Our total revenue has increased by 30% and sat at ZAR 859 million at the end of Q2. Cartrack grew its revenue by 16% to ZAR 753 million and operating profit by 24% to ZAR 223 million. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by 27%, and our adjusted EBITDA margin is over 50%, in keeping with our outlook for FY '23.

Carzuka's revenue grew from ZAR 9 million to ZAR 65 million, and we are seeing improving traction as a result of improved brand presence despite temporary delays in some of our expansion initiatives. Our operating profits remain negative at ZAR 6 million, and our adjusted EBITDA also negative at just under ZAR 6 million.

Karooooo Logistics continued to gain momentum through customers acquired since joining Karooooo. Revenue now sits at ZAR 41 million as compared to ZAR 28 million at the end of Q1 of this financial year. Our operating profit and adjusted EBITDA at the end of Q2 were both just under ZAR 1 million, and we believe we are on track to becoming profitable.

All segments are seeing strong traction with the benefits of our strategic investments beginning to show. We will continue to build our businesses; Cartrack, Carzuka and Karooooo Logistics. We will now focus on Cartrack, the underlying asset to Karooooo's success and ability to drive positive impact by maximizing the value of data.

Cartrack continues to have great visibility of future revenue, with subscription revenue as a percentage of total revenue increasing from just below 97% to over 97%. Subscription revenue grew 17% to ZAR 733 million, and total revenue grew to ZAR 753 million as compared to ZAR 650 million last year. Our track record of execution extends over a decade, and we have a proven ability to scale in varying market conditions. Total subscribers grew to over 1.6 million and our subscription revenue grew to a strong ZAR 733 million despite challenging operating environments.

Our realization of economies of scale and increased staff productivity favorably offset investment and our profit after tax grew 29% to ZAR 163 million. We saw record net subscriber additions of over 57,000 this quarter as compared to other Q2s to date. This was largely supported by demand of small to large enterprises looking to increase their efficiencies and future proof their businesses by digitalizing their day-to-day operations. Cartrack continued to expand in all geographies. Despite challenging environments in South Africa due to power outages, subscribers grew by 12%. Asia, the Middle East and U.S.A. grew by 25%, with strong demand coming from Southeast Asian markets in particular, where we are seeing increased brand recognition and a stronger appetite for our leading value proposition as more businesses look to digitalize their operations.

Europe saw a healthy growth of 16% and remains a region we aim to allocate more resources to in order to drive more rapid growth. Africa Other maintained its momentum with a 10% increase in subscribers. Cartrack's low cost of acquiring a customer, high customer lifetime value and retention rate as well as strong comparative benefits from economies of scale results in attractive unit economics. Our lifetime value to CAC is over 9%, and we have strong profit margins. Our gross profit margin on subscription revenue is 75%, and our operating profit margin is 30%. Whilst we remain prudent with our capital allocation, we are well positioned to materially increase investment for growth.

Cartrack continues to have robust operating margins, and our trends are in line with the long-term financial goals set out upon our listing in 2021. Research and development, as a percentage of subscription revenue, remains at 6%, in line with our long-term targets of 4% to 6%. We will be increasing capital allocation into sales and marketing to drive growth, whereby we expect sales and marketing as a percentage of subscription revenue to increase from the current 14% to be within our long-term target of 17% to 19%. We also expect general and admin as a percentage of subscription revenue to drop from 23% as we experienced increased economies of scale, whereby it will fall in line with targets of 12% to 16%.

Our adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of subscription revenue is in line with our targets of 50% to 55% at its current 52%. We are happy with the progress we have made in Q2, and Cartrack's outlook for FY '23 remains unchanged. Number of subscribers is between 1.7 million and 1.9 million. Cartrack's subscription revenue is between ZAR 2.95 billion and ZAR 3.1 billion, and Cartrack's adjusted EBITDA margin between 45% and 50%.

Carzuka and Karooooo Logistics showed good progress with strong quarter-on-quarter growth of 31% and 49%, respectively. We feel very positive about the direction of these businesses, and we'll continue to leverage Cartrack's data and analytical capabilities to pioneer innovation within both of them.

I would like to thank everybody for joining us today, and we'll now open the floor to Q&A with our group's CEO and Founder, Zak Calisto.

Good afternoon from Johannesburg. Zak Cas speaking. I'll go through the first question. It's from Alex Sklar. A really nice customer growth of 95,000 commercial customers. Can you talk about how you have positioned your sales operations to move up market? Is there any commonality in where you are having success with these enterprise customers?

Post-COVID, which is approximately now 4 months or maybe 5 months, depending which geography we're talking about, we've been actively recruiting, and we have many vacancies. And we are specifically now recruiting people to tackle large enterprise customers. We believe we will start getting momentum from about Q4 this year. We do understand that the cycle to onboard large enterprise customers is longer than SME customers. And we expect that we will start really gaining momentum probably in about 5 quarters from now given the lead times to onboard these customers and given that a lot of these customers are probably with 1 of our competitors at this point in time.

Next question, also from Alex. Can you provide some color on how the subscriber has trended in September, October? Any changes on buying behavior in the current macro?

September has been our best month ever in net subscriber additions. We've never had a month of 24,000 net subscribers. So Q3 is looking good judging by September. And if we look at halfway through October, we're quite confident with the way October is also progressing. Clearly, we still have a long way to do in terms of recruiting people and building our teams to be able to execute on our plans to accelerate our growth.

The next question is from [Willow Miller]. Any changes in customer retention given the softer macro environment?

There has definitely been a change, but it's insignificant, and I would call it nonmaterial at this stage.

What was the primary driver of Cartrack's adjusted EBITDA margin expansion from 49% last quarter to 51% this quarter?

I think a lot of it has got to do with us just retaining costs and watching specifically our gross profit margin. We've negotiated better rates with some of the suppliers. And it's really about just optimizing our cost structure.

Could the recent COVID restrictions and lockdowns in China have an impact in traction in Asia?

It could, but I doubt it. I think the whole world is over COVID. And I do not see any restrictions coming into Southeast Asia.

And then the next question from Gokul Raj. Can you speak about your competitive position in South Africa and also if the margins are similar to South Africa?

At the moment, our region that's got the best margins is clearly South Africa, purely from economies of scale perspective. But we see that Asia -- Southeast Asia will have a very similar unit economics to South Africa, specifically once we're at scale. The competitive landscape, we came to the market approximately 10 years after all our competitors. At this point in time, we're the largest and we're certainly the fastest growing. And I also believe we've got the most diversified customer base in terms of size of customers, in terms of industries.

And I think we're well positioned to continue to compete favorably with our competitors. Having said that, I do believe our competitors are sophisticated, and we cannot rest on our laurels.

Next question, [Matthew Kogut]. Do you expect continued traction and execution in Southeast Asia will be the biggest growth driver over the remaining of the year? Or could we see another region like Europe achieve an equal or greater subscriber growth?

And the reality is, Matthew, the months cover on very quickly. And we're very busy with recruitment. We're very busy on readjusting the way we go to market with our plans for accelerated growth. And the onboarding of people, the training of people, it's quite difficult in a short period of time to second guess what's going to do best because it's too short of a period.

But I certainly believe, by the time we get to FY '24, we will start getting the real momentum, and we will start reaping the fruits of what we're currently doing today. And I certainly believe that Southeast Asia will be our fastest growing region.

(inaudible), Could you please explain about the increase of almost 3x in trade payable in this quarter versus last year? Will this level be sustained?

I'm not quite sure where you're seeing that, (inaudible), but I'm quite happy to look into it. With 3x the trade payable, I'm not sure where you're seeing that. I can certainly get back to you on that. I haven't got the answer, but I don't see our debt has tripled. There could be -- if you can -- if you've got my e-mail address, you can just e-mail me, then I'll know how to respond to you, and I'll have your e-mail address to respond. You can just e-mail [Lauren], our Investor Relations, to see where you're getting your numbers from.

Another question from Matthew Kogut . How an economic and labor pressure increase the importance of value for the products set in the eyes of the potential customers? How often are these factors, the leading reason for adoption of your operations cloud?

We have many factors that drive demand for our cloud. Clearly, one is operational costs, which can include salaries and other relative operational costs. And I don't think there's any specific thing that drives that. I think just the efficiencies, the cost saving, the customer service that our customers derive from adopting our cloud that drives the value, and our value proposition is really what drives customer demand. I don't think the labor pressure is one of the aspects, but there's many aspects to it. It's not just the labor pressure. And I think, all companies, even prior to the current headwinds, they're always looking to how do they digitalize their operations in order to have less staff and achieve more and have more visibility of -- and more reliable information about their businesses.

Patrick (inaudible), what drove the big pickup in Karooooo Logistics revenue?

It's all organic growth. It's -- as we onboard customers, we are expecting Q3 even to be much stronger than Q2. So it's all going according to plan. And we foresee that Q3 will be substantially stronger than Q2. And in terms of profitability of the business, as you can see, Q2 was already marginally profitable. But we believe that the business will have approximately 5% to 7% of revenue, will end up being operating profit once we reach scale.

(inaudible) Grailing. How does the competitive environment in Europe and Asia compared to one another?

Asia more similar to South Africa, similar environment. Europe, in terms of competitive landscape, in terms of the type of customers that we're dealing with on a commercial basis, the type of commercial customers in Europe are slightly different. We have no real significant competitor in Asia at this point in time. And we believe we can compete favorably in Asia. In Europe, it's more consolidated. The market is very consolidated.

We've probably got about 5 strong competitors, very similar to South Africa, and we compete favorably in Europe.

Then Rendan Magella. Zak, congratulations on the case of the results. How far are you in the plans to improve liquidity in the shares?

At this point in time, the only way we can really improve liquidity is either by issuing shares. And at this point in time, we haven't really got any reason to go issue shares given that we've got ZAR 1 billion in our bank account. And given that we haven't got an acquisition in mind, but should we have an acquisition or should we need cash, I think the NASDAQ places as well. We've got a great financial platform to go raise capital.

In terms of selling down of shares is the other option that we will look over the next 5 years, I will probably sell some of my shares just to give liquidity to the market. However, it will be in a disciplined way, and over probably 5 years. It's not going to be 1 single tranche. And, fundamentally, I think the most important thing is that I've got to focus on growing the business. And then the current free float will be worth more. Currently, the markets all over the world, the prices are under pressure. But I think the only thing I can do is focus really on the business underlying assets. And anybody that buys our share and is thinking long term, then it's -- I think the current market is a market to take note of.

Then, (inaudible). What has been the impact of load shedding on Karooooo's operations in South Africa? How was Karooooo developed with the challenge of load shedding?

Clearly, load shedding has affected the South African economy. We've obviously got generators and everything to keep us operational, but a lot of our customers might not have. Also, we rely heavily on the infrastructure of communications. And as all South Africans know, that's also been under pressure. The load shedding has also caused pressure on the economy. So we haven't been an island. We're part of -- we're having to live within the parameters of these headwinds caused by load shedding.

Mark, what revenue target have you set for Carzuka in the next 5 years?

I think at this point in time, we're really just ironing out all our teething problems. We've got the target to get to ZAR 300 million per quarter in revenue. And once we have ZAR 300 million per quarter, then we will be in a position to really plan the next 3 to 4 to 5 years. We're not there yet. We're still busy running out a lot of startup operational issues.

When do you anticipate to break even?

Well, to break even, quite frankly, we could break even tomorrow if we decided not to grow. So it's really -- for me, the question is, when do you expect to be at scale? And I think once we're doing ZAR 300 million per quarter, then we will be able to plan it to go from ZAR 300 million to ZAR 3 billion per quarter, and -- but we just need to be a little bit patient to 1 step at the time. We've always grown organically and with sustainability. And we want to continue with that sort of the same mindset into the future.

What would you be hoping in terms of a sustainable margin?

I think we operate in a very low margins. And I think a sustainable margin will be 4% to 6% operating profit once we're at scale.

What impact is inflation, strong U.S. dollar and supply chain dynamics having in the contract business?

Clearly, with the rand under pressure, that also puts our business under pressure. And we've seen that if we've not had the U.S. dollar negativity in Q2, our results would have been better. But our operating margins will be able to weather the storm. And we know in the past that the rand overreacts. It either over-weakens or over-strengthens, and I believe just given some time, it will come back and the rand will strengthen. But I think, fundamentally, we've got sufficient operating margins to weather the storm.

(inaudible), given high inflation in Europe, what sort of return on CapEx are you looking to achieve? Given [planned] CapEx ramp up in both Europe and Asia, can you please kind of provide insight to whether we can expect adjusted EBITDA margin at the high end bottoming of the guidance level?

So we certainly are expecting -- we've given 45% to 50%. I'm personally expecting closer to 50% EBITDA margin for this year, but we're maintaining the 45% to 50%.

Given our return on CapEx, and I think our return on CapEx might weaken a bit because of our costs, but it will be insignificant and it will be materially in line with historical numbers.

In Africa, what explains a huge dispersion between subscriber growth and subscription revenue growth?

During COVID, we had a lot of non-billing customers that we stopped billing, and a lot of those customers will resume billing. Hence with the resuming of the billing, you now get the spike in subscription revenue, which was about 23%. I haven't got the numbers in front of me and where our subscribers only went up by 10%.

(inaudible), could you please provide more color on the operations performance of Carzuka?

So Carzuka, basically, we -- we've got a tremendous amount of data from our customers. It gives us good visibility where the vehicles have been, how they've been driven, and that allows us to price the vehicles where our customers get a good price for their cars. And it allows us with the small margin to be able to onboard and sell this vehicle to the next customer.

We will operate at very low margins. We're averaging margins of 12% to 15%. And I think in the last quarter, it was around 12%. And it's a volume game, and it's not about making a lot of profit out of 1 specific vehicle. Our average vehicle is about ZAR 100,000 that we sell. Clearly, we're in a very early stage of this operation. This operation will then get -- as it gets traction, and as we iron out teething problems, there will be a lot of value adds that you can solve in selling the vehicle, which we currently, at this stage, not doing.

I want to thank everybody for joining us today. And should anybody also have questions, please feel free to e-mail Lauren, and Lauren or myself or someone in our team will get back to you. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.