GoodRx Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:GDRX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
GoodRx Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:GDRX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 29, 2024
GoodRx Holdings, Inc. reports earnings inline with expectations. Reported EPS is $0.08 EPS, expectations were $0.08. GoodRx Holdings, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the GoodRx Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Whitney Notaro, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Notaro, you may begin.
Whitney Notaro: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to GoodRx's earnings conference call for the fourth quarter and full year 2023. Joining me today are Scott Wagner, our Interim Chief Executive Officer; and Karsten Voermann, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call will contain forward-looking statements. All statements made on this call that do not relate to matters of historical facts should be considered forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements regarding management's plans, strategies, goals and objectives, our market opportunity, our anticipated financial performance, underlying trends in the business, our value proposition, our potential for growth, collaborations and partnerships with third parties, including our integrated savings program, our hybrid retail direct and PBM contracting approach, anticipated impacts of the deprioritization of certain solutions under our pharma manufacturer solutions offering and our cost savings initiatives, expected impact of the wind down of Kroger Savings Club, the amount, timing and benefits of our new share repurchase program, the expected impact of the macroeconomic environment on our business, and the expected impact of recent outages disclosed by UnitedHealth Group.
These statements are neither promises nor guarantees, but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors. These factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Factors discussed in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements made on this call. Any such forward-looking statements represent management's estimates as of the date of this call, and we disclaim any obligation to update these statements even if subsequent events cause our views to change.
In addition, we will be referencing certain non-GAAP metrics on today's remarks. We have reconciled each non-GAAP metric to the nearest GAAP metric in the company's earnings press release which can be found on the overview page of our Investor Relations website at investors.goodrx.com. I'd also like to remind everyone that a replay of this call will become available there shortly as well. With that, I'll turn it over to Scott.
Scott Wagner: Thanks, Whitney, and thanks to everyone joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter results. Today, I'd like to highlight the meaningful progress we're making on our key priorities, and then Karsten will take you through our Q4 '23 financials and expectations for Q1 and full year 2024. I'd like to start by framing the fundamentals of what we do. The critical and growing consumer needs we serve and the importance of the GoodRx value proposition, which is saving people money on prescriptions. Over the history of the company, GoodRx has saved consumers approximately $70 billion. And just last year, we saved consumers approximately $15 billion. There's big fundamental value here. And while healthcare is highly complex, the role GoodRx plays is pretty simple.
Consumers today are facing rising healthcare costs with plans continuing to increase patient out-of-pocket costs, like deductibles and co-pays and increasing gaps of drug coverage with narrower formularies. We believe these market coverage trends are stronger than they've ever been, and we don't expect them to change. Think about how Medicaid redetermination alone has limited access to funded benefit plans. We believe this reality makes GoodRx, an essential part of the American healthcare system is a trusted solution for consumers to access affordable medications in the U.S. Healthcare providers recognize this which is why we've become a fundamental resource for them and why more than 80% of healthcare professionals refer their patients to us.
In 2023 alone, over 25 million consumers use GoodRx to achieve approximately $15 billion in prescription savings, making GoodRx, one of the leading consumer-driven digital healthcare experiences. For those who have been following both GoodRx and the industry in recent years, short-term movements in the industry value chain have created some confusion about our prospects. We believe the market tailwinds are increasing, patient out-of-pocket costs are growing. GoodRx is scaled. Our users, our HCP advocacy are growing too, making us confident in the strength of the GoodRx value proposition and our ability to grow our business. Our financial results continue to improve as we focus on helping our industry partners in the value chain, benefit proportionally from the value that GoodRx creates for our 25 million-plus consumers annually.
In Q4, we continue to see positive momentum in the business, both financially and operationally. Consistent with the preliminary Q4 results we announced in January, our Q4 year-over-year adjusted revenue growth accelerated to 7% up significantly compared to our Q3 growth rate, and our Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin was 29.1%, up 220 basis points year-over-year, with adjusted EBITDA growing 15% year-over-year. This financial performance is the direct result of our efforts throughout 2023, specifically in three areas: first, leading into our relationships with retail partners; second, bringing the fundamental benefit of GoodRx to commercial plans through our integrated savings program for ISP; and third, bringing GoodRx savings to brand drugs through our pharma manufacturer solutions offering.
These all reinforce our value proposition and are showing up in the results. We expect adjusted revenue to continue to grow into Q1 and for the full year 2024 as well. We anticipate adjusted revenue to be about $800 million for 2024 with adjusted EBITDA of approximately $250 million. Karsten will go through our outlook in more detail in a bit. I will say I'm confident our priorities are the right ones to deliver the growth we're expecting in 2024 and to drive shareholder value over the long term. There are three areas of the business I'll highlight today. First, we've been focused on strengthening our retail pharmacy relationships and accelerating the continued success of our hybrid model, which includes retailer direct and PBM contracting.
As a reminder, our retail direct approach is where leading pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens as well as smaller grocers and pharmacies work closely with us to create consumer value while executing against joint revenue and margin targets. In the fourth quarter, our contracting efforts with retailers were a driver of top line performance as we continue to sign direct contracts with new pharmacies and expand the drugs covered by direct contracts within pharmacies. Today, we have retailer direct contracts with most of our largest retail pharmacy partners and our directly contracted medication volume makes up a growing minority of our overall prescription transaction volume. It's important to remember that GoodRx drives volume and traffic for pharmacies.
We do this in two ways. First, we estimate that between 20% and 30% of all prescriptions in the U.S. go unfilled each year due to price. By offering lower price points, pharmacies can fill scripts that patients would otherwise walk away from. Second, in 2023 alone, we've invested over $200 million in advertising and promotion related marketing, almost all of which is focused on increasing the number of GoodRx users, and which ultimately drives incremental prescription volume to pharmacy. Pharmacy's proprietary affordability solutions, by definition, only impact their customers, while in contrast, GoodRx has the ability to drive incremental retail prescriptions and people into their stores. This is one of the reasons pharmacies have been so receptive to locking in multiyear contracts with us.
I also want to emphasize that as part of these retail direct contracts, GoodRx offers discount card pricing agreements that provide retailers define margins and are informed by acquisition cost-based pricing in a number of key retail pharmacy partners, including CVS Pharmacy. We've seen other large pharmacies work with us to use a combination of pricing models, and that's worked out very well for both of us. We welcome the broader movement to cost-plus reimbursement models in both funded benefit plans and off benefit as it's a great way to align economics between pharmacies, payers and consumers. Critically, we believe that our retail direct contracting strategy, which takes a cost aligned approach positions us well for sustainable growth in a market with evolving pharmacy reimbursement models.
We estimate that over 3/4 of GoodRx users have some form of insurance coverage. That means consumers are comparing prices against co-pays, not exclusively comparing prices between pharmacies. For uninsured users, the opportunity for greater patient affordability is relative to usual and customary cash pricing, which is generally substantially higher than GoodRx pricing. If there were a scenario where a more cost-focused pharmacy reimbursement model reduces drug price disparity across retail pharmacies, which we don't believe will ultimately be the case since each pharmacy uses pricing strategically to attract different kinds of consumers. We see this trend overall as neutral to GoodRx given we will still be able to deliver significant savings benefit to consumers.
Our second priority has been to hone our growth plans for our core prescription transactions offering, which includes extending the GoodRx benefit to commercial insurance programs or funded plans. We've done this through our integrated savings program, or ISP, with PBM partners like CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, MedImpact and Navitus who aggregate demand for our prescription discounts. The early traction we're seeing for ISP so far in 2024 is encouraging and its contribution to Q1 revenue is reflected in our growth expectations. ISP is generating incremental year-over-year revenue which is manifesting in line with our expectations. As we mentioned in the past, we believe there will be some level of ramp to the volume that comes through ISP and we're still in the very early days as we work with PBMs to add more types of prescription transactions to the program and to ensure acceptance at retail.
Also, while our PBM partners market these programs to be over 60% of eligible lives in the U.S. that they cover, we're working in parallel with them to educate and inform employers about these programs and accelerate the number of lives we can onboard. Along with increasing lives, we believe we can inflect conversion as well, given we've historically been able to increase GoodRx discounts and lower pricing over time in our non-ISP, direct-to-consumer offerings. As we do so in the context of ISP, we believe we can beat patients' co-pays more often. Given that ISP is incremental to our direct-to-consumer offering and any evidence of cannibalization has been minimal, we remain focused on accelerating its growth. Based on our learnings from last year, we expect our ISP relationships to create some incremental seasonality with higher revenue during the first half of the year and contributing less revenue in the latter part, since more claims are likely to be routed through GoodRx while consumers are in the deductible phase of their health plans.
That said, our growth expectations are predicated on how ISP has performed for the first few weeks of this year. And if we're successful in driving more types of transactions, and more lives to the program as we help drive more employer sales, we may achieve incremental lift in the coming months and during 2025's patient deductible reset period. We'll update everyone if we see this manifesting. Third, we're focused on scaling our pharma manufacturer solution bills. In Q4, we continue doing the work to build our pipeline and believe we've set ourselves up for year-over-year growth in the first quarter and FY '24. We've been leaning into our access and awareness solutions that we believe will accelerate 2024 growth. And as we mentioned in the past, in 2023, we prioritized deal quality with a focus on foregoing one off deals and instead creating standardized go-to-market programs that we expect to scale sustainably.
Our restructuring in this offer, including rationalizing vitaCare is essentially complete, and we're on track to deliver our expected margin accretion in 2024, which Karsten will speak to in more detail. With that, I'll hand it over to Karsten.
Karsten Voermann: Thank you, Scott. I'll speak briefly to our 4Q '23 financial results, which were consistent with the preliminary Q4 results we announced in January before turning to guidance. In summary, during the fourth quarter, adjusted revenue exceeded the guidance range we provided on our Q3 earnings call in November and adjusted EBITDA margin was in the upper end of the guidance range we provided. Total revenue and adjusted revenue for the quarter increased 7% year-over-year to $196.6 million primarily driven by organic growth in prescription transactions revenue. Prescription transactions revenue grew 11% year-over-year to $143.9 million, an acceleration from Q3 growth which was partially driven by quarter-specific favorability related to certain client contracts, which also slightly increased PTR per MAC.
Subscriptions revenue declined 6% to $23.1 million due to the wind down of Kroger Savings Club. Kroger Savings Club revenue was over $1 million less in the fourth quarter of 2023 than in the prior year period. Gold subscription count was up both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. In Q4, gold revenue was $21.5 million, and the related sub count was 694,000. We expect the continued wind down of Kroger Savings Club subscribers from now to July and given the relative subscription fee is much higher for GoodRx Gold than for the Kroger subscribers, the wind down should be more impactful to subscription plan count than revenue. Pharma Manufacturer Solutions declined 2% year-over-year to $24.4 million driven by our restructuring of the offering, which included shutting down vitaCare.
The prior year quarter included over $2 million of revenue related to vitaCare, whereas in 4Q '23, there was essentially 0. Net loss was $25.9 million compared to a net loss of $2.0 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. Adjusted net income was $31.1 million compared to $27.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA increased 15% year-over-year to $57.3 million. The primary driver of the year-over-year increase was higher adjusted revenue, along with our cost discipline, increased marketing efficiency and the actions taken to restructure pharma manufacturer solutions, including the deprioritization of vitaCare. Adjusted EBITDA margin was up 220 basis points year-over-year to approximately 29.1%, which was on the high end of our guidance range.
We generated net cash provided by operating activities of $15.9 million compared to $31.9 million in the prior year period. Our capital allocation priorities are unchanged, and we'll continue to focus on high-return investments and maximizing value for shareholders. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we ended the quarter with $672.3 million in cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet and $661.8 million of outstanding debt. Significant uses of cash last quarter included approximately $78 million of share repurchases at approximately $5.53 per share on a blended basis. And as we've discussed on prior calls, a nonrecurring approximately $45 million of spend on withholding taxes related to the delivery of shares to our co-founders related to a 2020 equity grant which was defrayed by shares we withheld.
Our revolving credit facility is untapped, except for letters of credit and had $90.8 million of unused capacity as of December 31, 2023, representing total liquidity of $763.1 million. This month, we extended the maturity date of our revolving credit facility to July 11, 2025. Recently, our Board of Directors approved a new stock repurchase program to repurchase up to $450 million worth of Class A common stock. Now turning to guidance. Our outlook for Q1 revenue and adjusted revenue is $195 million to $198 million, which represents 6% to 8% year-over-year revenue and adjusted revenue growth which includes our current estimate of the impact of recent outages disclosed by UnitedHealth Group that we believe at this early stage despite lasting a couple of days has likely not had a material impact on our financials.
We expect adjusted and GAAP revenue to be identical in the first quarter because we believe the third quarter 2023 adjustment to revenue in relation to the Pharma Manufacturer Solutions restructuring related to vitaCare, with solely onetime and nonrecurring. For the full year 2024, we also expect revenue and adjusted revenue to be identical at about $800 million representing about 5% growth on an adjusted basis. The anticipated adjusted revenue growth rate is tempered by approximately $15 million of top line impact associated with the deprioritization of vitaCare as part of our pharma manufacturer solutions restructuring as well as the wind down of the Kroger Savings Club. Our continued investments in consumer incentives will increase contra revenue by approximately $10 million.
In aggregate, this $25 million of top line impact is absorbed in our full year $800 million revenue and adjusted revenue guidance. We thought it might also be helpful to provide our current expectations for our prescription marketplace and pharma manufacturer solutions offerings in 2024. As a reminder, our prescription marketplace is made up of prescription transactions, subscriptions and other revenue. We expect our prescription marketplace contribution to our implied 2024 adjusted revenue growth to be about $25 million to $30 million. The expected growth includes the impact of the previously mentioned headwinds related to increasing contra revenue in the sunsetting of the Kroger Savings Club. This also reflects the current ISP network footprint execution we have today, and we are working to optimize both.
We expect Pharma Manufacturer Solutions to contribute about $10 million to $15 million to our implied 2024 adjusted revenue growth. This implies a year-over-year growth rate for that offering that exceeds the growth rate of the digital pharma ad spend market, which has been in the low teen percentages. As part of the restructuring of our pharma manufacturer solutions offering, we discontinued vitaCare, which contributed approximately $8 million of adjusted revenue in 2023 and is not contributing to 2024. Considering that, we're pleased with our anticipated 2024 Pharma Manufacturer Solutions growth. As a reminder, our Pharma Manufacturer Solutions offering has some seasonality to it and so we expect 1Q '24 revenue to be slightly below 4Q '23 revenue.
Based on what we've seen historically, we expect there to be seasonality in some quarter-over-quarter variability for our business more broadly. But given our scale relative to very large TAMs for a prescription marketplace and our pharma manufacturer solutions offering, we're confident in the growth trajectory. From a margin perspective, during the last couple of quarters, we've delivered adjusted EBITDA margins in the high 20% range, and we continue to expect to be in the high 20% range again for the first quarter, potentially up to 30% and to achieve around $250 million of adjusted EBITDA for the full year, up 15% from 2023. With that, I'll now turn it over to the operator for Q&A.
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