Jennifer Beugelmans
Analyst · Maxim Group. Your line is open
Thanks, Chad, and hello everyone. Just a heads up, the comparisons I'll be referencing to are on a year-over-year basis unless specially noted. Let's start with GMS. During the first quarter of 2017, Etsy's generated $719 million in GMS, up 14% driven by growth in active sellers and active buyers. At the end of the first quarter Etsy had over 1.8 million active sellers up about 12%. Also at the end of the first quarter Etsy had nearly 30 million active buyers up about 19%. Both of these metrics demonstrate that our community of buyers and sellers continue to grow at a healthy rate. Roughly 66% of our visits come to us from a mobile device this quarter, this was up approximately 300 basis points and continues to outpace the rate of growth on desktop. Mobile GMS represented approximately 51% of our overall GMS up roughly 400 basis points and accounted for more than 50% of our overall GMS for the first time. During the first quarter, conversation rates on desktop, mobile web and mobile app increased for the sixth consecutive quarter and our aggregate conversion rate across all devices also increased. Mobile conversion rate improvements allowed us to slightly narrow the gap between mobile visits and mobile GMS. With that said because the mobile web business makes up a large portion of our overall visits they are still a bit of the headwind for us. This is because mobile web is the lowest converting device. Since the beginning of 2015, we made a series of product improvements and enhanced the buyer's journey, we have seen an improvement in our aggregate conversion rate. Mobile web conversion improved at a greater rate in desktop and mobile apps during 2016. For your reference, mobile web converts at about half of desktop and mobile app converts at about 1.3x desktop. As we continue to make enhancements to the mobile experience, we expect to continue our progress in narrowing the mobile gap. Etsy's international revenue grew 35% in first quarter. Percent international GMS was 13%, up a 180 basis points compared to last year. International GMS grew approximately 21% and accelerated year-over-year for the fourth consecutive quarter. During the first quarter, total revenue was $96.9 million, up 18% driven by growth in seller services and to a lesser extent growth in markets revenue. Seller services revenue was up 24% and represented 55.7% of total revenue. Seller services growth was driven primarily by revenue growth in Etsy's payments, formally direct checkout. Our promoted listings revenue was lower than anticipated this quarter, we're refining our algorithms and have recently added additional inventory. We believe both of these enhancements will allow us to continue to drive revenue growth in this seller service. Markets revenue grew 14%, primarily due to growth in transaction fee and to a lesser extent growth in listing fee revenue. Gross profit for the first quarter was $62.2 million up 15% and gross margin was 64% down 170 basis points. During the first quarter, we recognized 1.3 million related to our Google shopping tool for sellers, however this revenue is not expected to be significant through the remainder of 20107. Last year's gross margin was positively impacted by gift cards revenue of $1.7 million. Excluding these high margin revenue items gross margin would have only decreased marginally compared to last year. Turning now to operating expenses. Etsy's first quarter operating expenses was $64.3 million, up about 36%. Total operating expenses as a percent of revenue grew to about 66% in the first quarter compared with approximately 58% last year and 63% in the last quarter. The increase in operating expenses as a percent of revenue is primarily due to an increase in employee related expenses and marketing expenses associated with our brand campaign. Marketing expenses totaled $23.5 million, up 48% representing 24% of total revenue versus 19% last year and roughly 28% last quarter. The increase in marketing expense as a percent of revenue was driven by brand marketing expenses, and to a lesser extent digital acquisition marketing and higher employee related expenses. Digital acquisition marketing expense, which excludes brand marketing related spend on digital channels such as YouTube and Facebook, increased 26% year-over-year and continued to generate strong returns for Etsy and a positive ROI based on our global attribution model. Product development expenses totaled $18.1 million, up 48% representing nearly 19% of total revenue compared to 15% last year. The increase in product development expenses was driven by higher employee related expenses including additional expenses resulting from the acquisition of Blackbird technology. G&A expenses totaled $22.8 million, up about 19% driven by higher employee related expenses and partially offset by lower professional services expenses and stock compensation expenses related to the acquisition of ALM. G&A expense represented 23.5% of revenue in the first quarter and remained flat compared to last year. G&A as a percent of revenue has decreased each year since 2014 when it was nearly 27% of revenue to 23.6% in 2016. Headcount at the end of the quarter grew to 1,062 people compared with 1,043 as of December 31, 2016. During the first quarter Etsy's net loss was $421,000 and earnings per share were breakeven compared with earnings per share of $0.01 last year. Etsy's net loss this year includes interest expense of $2.1 million related to our Brooklyn headquarters, a $2.8 million foreign exchange gain and an income tax benefit of $1.1 million, all primarily non-cash. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $9.7 million. This resulted in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 10%, compared with 18% in the first quarter of 2016. Adjusted EBITDA this quarter was impacted by higher employee related expense and the increase in marketing as a percent of revenue. During the quarter, we recorded net cash divided by operating activities of $3.3 million, this compares to $2.8 million in the first quarter of 2016. The year-over-year increase in net cash provided by operating activities for the quarter was mainly due to revenue growth. As of March 31, 2016, we had cash, marketable securities, and short-term investments totaling approximately $276 million. As we noted in our press release our new management team will be reviewing our guidance. Josh, I and the rest of the team will be rolling up our fleets and reviewing our forecast and we plan to provide guidance in conjunction with the announcement of our second quarter 2017 results. Thanks for tuning in today, we look forward to sharing more in the coming quarter and with that I'd like to turn the call back over to Valarie, to open up for Q&A.