Earnings Labs

Karooooo Ltd. (KARO)

Q4 2024 Earnings Call· Thu, May 16, 2024

$49.85

+0.02%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+0.15%

1 Week

+5.53%

1 Month

+17.93%

vs S&P

+14.87%

Transcript

Carmen Calisto

Management

Hello and welcome to Karooooo's Financial Year 2024 Q4 and Full Year Earnings Call. On behalf of Karooooo, we would like to thank you for joining us today. I'm Carmen, the Group's Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, and together with Hoeshin, our Group's Chief Financial Officer, we will be taking you through our key business updates and robust financial performance. All investors are advised to read through the disclaimer. We will be reviewing all three of Karooooo's business units in today's webinar, namely Cartrack, Carzuka and Karooooo Logistics. Please note this is the last earnings call in which we will report on Carzuka as a standalone segment as its remaining operations are integrated in supporting the Cartrack operations. Karooooo remains committed to our mission of being the leading operations cloud. Our focus is to simplify the lives of operators and maximize the scale and efficiency of their operation. Our innovative platform goes far beyond connected vehicles and equipment to centralize and unify an entire operation into one single place. We continue to help customers conquer complex challenges around safety, compliance, productivity, service delivery, cost management, fuel, maintenance, routing, resource allocation, driver and worker retention, and more. Our platform leverages our large data scale AI and data analytics to offer customers pragmatic insights that simplify problem-solving to ensure successful implementation. We are helping to pave the benchmark and future of efficiency, safety and impact for operational businesses and continue to believe we have a large runway for growth. We have comfortably met our financial year outlook targets in all categories and continue on our over 10-year track record of strong growth and financial performance. We ended the financial year with over 1,972,000 subscribers, Cartrack subscription revenue of ZAR3,523 million and an operating profit margin of 30%. We continue to focus on…

Goy Hoeshin

Operator

Thank you, Carmen. I will now talk through Karooooo's financial performance for quarter four FY '24. Please note that all comparisons are against quarter-four FY '23 unless otherwise stated. Financial year '24 has been an exciting year for us. We delivered record subscription revenue and earnings while maintaining our momentum of growth and demonstrating our financial discipline. Our consistent strong result further extend our long-standing track record of scalable growth, providing us with multiple levels for continued expansion. In this quarter, our subscription revenue up 18% to ZAR935 million and on a year-to-date basis up by 17% to ZAR3,536 million. Operating profit up by 25% to ZAR296 million and on a year-to-date basis up by 18% to ZAR1,043 million. Earnings per share up by 45% to ZAR6.81 and on a year-to-date basis up by 24% to ZAR23.85. We will maintain our robust business model with our focus remain on growing our subscription revenue as we continue our investment to scale the business. Earnings for this quarter were ZAR215 million and our free cash flow was ZAR161 million. Our free cash flow has remained positive despite our investment in the development of our new South African central office. Up to this quarter, we have invested ZAR263 million in this development. Our results were achieved through strong financial discipline as we continue to make strategic investment for sustainable long-term growth. Our high cash conversion demonstrates our focused capital allocation and we will remain focused in this approach. Our earnings are benefiting from our robust economies of scale. Karooooo's earnings per share in this quarter grew by 45% to ZAR6.81. The increase is the result of positive revenue growth and improved profitability despite our prudent and strategic investment for growth. On a year-to-date basis, our earnings per share accelerates to ZAR23.85. Karooooo Logistics…

A - Zak Calisto

Analyst

A question from David Eborall. Congrats on the results, Zak. You announced in February that you -- your company will be buying back 1 million shares, but only 50,000 purchased this quarter. David, the first thing is we said up to 1 million, not 1 million. But I get your point. Are you planning to buy the 1 million shares? David, we continue to plan to buy shares, so we will definitely do that. And what's only allowed us to buy in the region of about 50,000 shares was really the strict SEC rules to buy shares on the open market so that we've got quite severe limitations given our low liquidity. But we rely heavily on being able to buy blocks and our broker has reached out to our investor base and we bought two very small blocks and we weren't able to buy any and none of the other investors with sellers. Next question from Alex from Stifel. Can you comment if anything changed throughout fiscal Q4 in terms of linearity of subscriber editions and now have subscriber editions tracked thus far in fiscal first quarter? We see a very, very good Q1 at this point in time. It's public knowledge that we've surpassed 2 million subscribers now, and we are expecting to have a good Q1 in this quarter. And I think last year it's very much in keeping with our outlook. And, given the outlook we're giving for this year, we certainly believe we'll definitely meet it. But so far, the first two months of the year have been very encouraging. Another question from Alex from Stifel. Looks like the subscriber count guide implies a step up in quarter ads from about 60,000 this year to 80,000 throughout fiscal year 2025. So what gives you the…

Zak Calisto

Analyst

I want to thank everybody for attending, and I'll -- we'll speak again at our Q1 results. Thank you. Bye-bye.