Q2 2023 Bird Global Inc Earnings Call
Greetings and welcome to the blurred Baird Global second quarter 2023 earnings Conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation.
Anyone should require operator assistance during the conference. Please press star zero on your telephone keypad.
As a reminder, this conference is being recorded it is now my pleasure to introduce your host tailored child's Investor relations. Thank you. Sir you may begin good morning, everyone. With me today are Michael Boston, Yoshi birds, interim CEO , and CFO and Stewart Lions Burns President.
Where are we begin let me remind you that all statements made on this call that do not relate to matters of historical fact are considered forward looking statements under the U S Federal securities laws, including statements regarding our current expectations for the business and our financial performance.
Our neither promises nor guarantees and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the historical experience present expectations.
Ascription of these risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward looking statements on this call can be found in the risk factors section of our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st 2022.
And our other filings with the SEC.
On this call management will also reference non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA adjusted operating performance by profit before vehicle depreciation and free cash flow, which we view as important in assessing the performance of our business a reconciliation of each non-GAAP measure to the most directly comparable GAAP measure.
He is available in our earnings release on the company's Investor Relations page at IR Dot Burgard Dot com.
Growth percentages that follow are in comparison to the same period in the prior year, except as otherwise specified.
I'll now turn the call over to Michael.
Thank you Taylor and thank you all for joining today's call.
I'll start by briefly addressing my new interim CEO overall.
I joined bird in January of this year as CFO , because I saw the enormous opportunity to change the landscape of transportation and a market with hundreds of billions of dollars of Tam.
Today as I step into the interim CEO role I am more convinced than ever that the bird platform is the best solution to support the evolving transit and climate initiatives of all cities and I'm well aware of the unit economics and potential for profit in this industry.
I am excited to partner with Stuart and our leadership team as we strategically grow the company and mature birds operations.
In my expanded role I will focus on executing against our mandate of acting as a trusted partner to the cities in which we operate managing expenses to support the operations of the business and asset efficiency, which includes leveraging our two most important assets the bird team and our vehicles.
Of course these mandates are all driven by our mission to provide clean affordable transportation alternatives for the <unk>.
Tumors communities and cities, we serve as well as making a profit where we operate.
Going forward Stuart Ni are keenly focused on our riders and the value our vehicles provide.
The engineering and field teams are engaged to ensure we have our vehicles at the right place at the right time and with the right functionality.
We are a tech enabled company, but our success will also come from ensuring that our field partners in riders have a seamless experience with bird.
Over the last six months, we've made many strategic changes to improve how we operate.
And we will continue to refine our approach.
I am confident that we will continue to show progress across all metrics as we bring a renewed focus on operational excellence within the markets in which we operate.
Let me now turn to our second quarter performance.
Rates from the quarter include adjusted EBITDA improvement of 96% year over year.
Opex reduction of almost 90% right profit margin before vehicle depreciation improvement of 10%.
And gross margin improvement of 75%.
Revenue as expected is down 28% year over year, primarily due to exiting a number of unprofitable and regulatory challenged market in 2022.
We are tracking with our internal plan, but we are taking this pivot in management to reassess our financial plan and as such will be temporarily suspending guidance.
Turning now to our first mandate of being a trusted partner to the cities. We serve during the quarter. We were pleased to announce a number of new market.
Spansion in existing markets and renewals.
Markets worldwide.
We also benefited from both organic and paid consumer Activations, which resulted in significant spikes in ridership across certain markets demonstrating how birds model can scale.
I will let Stewart walk you through this thanks, Michael I also joined Vert Global in January of this year after running bird, Canada for four years.
<unk> Canadian business has been increasingly profitable since shortly after we launched in 2019, and we are fortunate enough to dominate the Canadian market, whether it is judged by the number of rides number of cities or scooters.
In Q2, we increased our number of rides in Canada by 43% year over year, our Canadian revenue by 41% year over year and increase our profitability in that region. Thus demonstrating that the shared electric scooter business can be profitable at scale.
Subsequent to the quarter, we were chosen to exclusively serve the people of Montreal, and Paw patrol and <unk> and we also expanded into Regina and Saskatoon and now we operate in over 20 Canadian cities from coast to coast.
In the USA by the end of Q2, we provided almost 85 million rides since 2019 with almost $6 5 million in the first half of this year alone.
From a regulatory perspective, we've secured renewals for our micro <unk> operations in 30 markets across the country, including the Los Angeles, Nashville, New York City, Orlando and Seattle.
We are particularly excited to be working with the city of Dallas again, while we were brought in as part of the city's new micro mobility program to provide eco friendly transportation.
Our new approach to operations is beginning to bear fruit as key markets are starting to show increases in rides per vehicle per day, and overall revenue and profitability. We have also begun to more closely focus on local partnerships on a city by city basis. For example in Q2, we were the exclusive E scooter partner.
The NFL for the 2023 NFL draft in Kansas City.
The rise in Kansas City increased by 724% during the draft weekend. In addition to making E scooters available to attendees bird strategically located new parking spots around the city to expedite local travel during the event peak ridership just prior to the event was up 1500 <unk>.
<unk> versus the same powered the prior week.
<unk> reflect the power of <unk> platform, and our ability to generate ridership at the local level as we engage with partners cities and writers were really pleased with the scale. We are seeing from events like this.
Moving onto Europe , we renewed permits in cities across the continent, including Austria, and in France, Italy, and Spain, including places like Vienna, Vichy Rome in Malaga.
<unk> is a great example of how we expand our operations in key markets in that city, we doubled our fleet size increase their operational area by 250% alongside a 120% increase in the population served.
And bind the company altogether is approaching close to $200 million rides worldwide. Since we began operations and we're extremely proud to partner with cities to help to provide fun and environmentally friendly ways to get around.
Michael back to you to discuss the results.
Sure.
I'll cover our second initiative of managing expenses in support of the operations of the business.
Suffice to say, we are making strong progress there as the quarter highlights demonstrate.
Looking at asset efficiency, we are leveraging our two most important assets.
As our vehicles, we continue to improve our supply and demand match with the demand base vehicle drop model and our vehicle deployment rate nation.
This ensures our vehicles are at the right place and time to meet demand.
We're also focusing efforts on repair and supported vehicle functionality and extending the average life of our vehicles.
This is importantly, maximizing rise and lifetime value of the vehicle.
Next quarter, we'll begin reporting on how we're progressing on these important metrics.
Second is our team.
Which we call the bird family, including the employees and fleet managers.
I'm very proud of their performance as we transform the company. We will continue to build trust communication and conviction throughout the organization as we scale.
Yeah.
Turning now to the numbers free cash flow was negative $1 8 billion.
This remains in line with our goal of becoming sustainably free cash flow positive business.
Total revenue came in at $48 $3 million down.
Down, 28% or down $18 $4 million year over year.
Our core sharing business declined 23% year over year due to the decrease in rights, which declined 39% from the second quarter of 2022 and.
In large part due to unprofitable markets that we exited.
Q2, consolidated gross margin reached 40% up 75 points from last year and ride profit margin before vehicle depreciation reached 57% up 10% from 47% last year due to lower cost of sharing.
Adjusted operating expenses decreased 50% year over year to $28 million.
Compared to $56 million last year.
As a percentage of revenue Q2, adjusted operating expenses were 58% of revenue compared to 84% in the same period a year ago.
Our net loss came in at $9 3 million and adjusted EBITDA saw a substantial improvement from negative $28 nine last year to negative $1 2 million.
We ended the quarter with total cash and cash equivalents of $11 7 million.
Including $6 8 million in unrestricted cash.
Looking to the back half of the year. We are pleased with the progress we are making and the new markets and renewals that we expect will fuel our growth. While we are in a time of transition and we believe that we are well positioned to execute against our mandate and the company is now streamlined to achieve sustained cash.
Cash flow profitability.
I'd like to thank our employees and our partner cities for their collaboration and of course, we are incredibly grateful to our riders around the world, who support our mission and literally drive our path forward and.
And with that I will turn the call over for Q&A.
Thank you at this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question. Please press star one on your telephone keypad.
Confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You May press star two if he would like to remove your question from the queue for participants using speaker equipment. It may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys, one moment, please while we poll for questions.
It appears that there are no questions at this time I would now like to turn the floor back over to Michael <unk> for closing comments.
Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for listening to our earnings results as we have.
As we have mentioned in our earnings call. We are pretty we are.
Happy and confident with the results and look forward to updating you as we make progressions on our plan.
This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation you may disconnect your lines at this time.
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