GRPN - NASDAQ

Hello and welcome to Groupon's Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. On the call today are our Interim CEO, Dusan Senkypl; and CFO, Jiří Ponrt. [Operator Instructions] Today’s conference call is being recorded. Before we begin, Groupon would like to remind listeners that the following discussion and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today, August 09, 2023 only and will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the company’s forward-looking statements. Groupon undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events. Additional information about risks and other factors that could potentially impact the company’s financial results are included in their earnings press release and their filings with the SEC including their quarterly report on Form 10-Q. We encourage investors to use Groupon’s Investor Relations website at investor.groupon.com as a way of easily finding information about the Company. Groupon promptly makes available on this website the reports that the Company files or furnishes with the SEC, corporate governance information and select press releases and social media postings. On the call today, the company will also discuss the following non-GAAP financial measures, adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP SG&A, free cash flow and FX-neutral results. In Groupon’s press release and their filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on their Investor Relations website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable measures under U.S. GAAP. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are provided on an FX neutral basis. And with that, I'm happy to turn the call over to Dusan.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Trevor Young from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. First one is just on the cost guide for the back half. Help us walk through the puts and takes on EBITDA. $15 million EBITDA this quarter, the SG&A guide of still $320 million for the full year versus $200 million here in 1H implies a big reduction in 2H SG&A, which combined with maybe some incremental gross profit in the next couple quarters would imply 2H EBITDA would potentially be materially higher than 1H. And any way to size how much reinvestment you're contemplating for marketing? Just trying to help line up EBITDA in the back half. That's my first question.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks so much for taking the questions. Two if I could, just first in terms of key learnings as you've taken over operating the business, what do you see as the biggest opportunities in front of you that you're most excited to execute against and what are some of the sort of structural challenges that you feel will likely take longer to play out in terms of realigning the business for the longer term? That would be number one. And then you talked about merchants and supply on slides 11 and 12. We'd love to get the sense of where you think you need to get scale of supply over time to sort of, to use your words, fix the supply side of the marketplace and how you think the merchant offering might need to change to sort of drive supply growth. Thanks so much.

Okay. Thanks. Thanks for questions. A lot of them on the, so I hope I remember all parts of that. First of all, we had internal discussion about low hanging fruits and one of my fellow colleagues mentioned that the low hanging fruits in our case is like low hanging berries. So I really don't see one or two or three big items which we can just change and the company will be like flying. We are touching pretty much every part of the organization, pretty much every process inside the organization. As you saw in the presentation, we have fairly big senior management team built and like every single member of the team is really rebuilding the organization part where they are managing. So that's on that part. In terms of the value proposition and how we see it going forward, what we need to change, like one of the projects which we started this quarter is experimenting with new rate cards, making it much easier to onboard on Groupon, make our, let's say, fee structure more comparable with our marketplace, which are available on the internet. So that's a major part which we will be continuing down the road. And in terms of like promotion and structure and how the deals will be different in the future, we believe that going forward as we will be decreasing the promotional spend, increasing quality of deals, we will be simply able to sell more deals, services on our website with slightly higher discount compared to list price, which will make whole business case much more viable for merchants. And having the quality deals, it will mean that also the value proposition for customers will be same or much, actually not same in my opinion, it will be much better than what we have right now.

Thank you.

We have no further questions in queue. I'd like to turn the call back over to Dushan for any closing remarks.

Okay, thank you. So thank you everyone for joining. We look forward to continuing to update you in our future conversations. And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to go to our investor relations team. Have a good evening.