Qurate Retail Inc (QRTEA) Q2 2019 Earnings Call Transcript
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Qurate Retail Inc (NASDAQ: QRTEA)
Q2 2019 Earnings Call
Aug 8, 2019, 8:30 a.m. ET
Contents:
Prepared Remarks
Questions and Answers
Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Welcome to the Qurate Retail 2019 Q2 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Afterwards we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded August 8. I would now like to turn the conference over to Courtnee Chun, Chief Portfolio Officer and Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Courtnee Chun -- Chief Portfolio Officer and Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
Good Morning. Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that this call includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in the most recent form 10-K and 10-Q filed by our company and QVC with the SEC. These forward looking statements speak only as of the date of this call and Qurate Retail expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in Qurate Retail's expectations with regard thereto , or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.
On today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted OIBDA adjusted OIBDA margin and constant currency. Information regarding the comparable GAAP metrics along with required definitions and reconciliations including preliminary note and schedules one through three can be found in the earnings press release issued today, which is available on our website.
Today speaking on the call we have Qurate Retail, President and CEO, Mike George; Qurate Retail Group CFO, Jeff Davis; Executive Chairman, Greg Maffei.
Please note, we have also published slides to accompany the earnings release. These slides are also available on our website. Now, I'll hand the call over to Mike George.
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. Courtnee, and good morning everyone. We're making good progress against the priorities we outlined on our last call, our second quarter results were highlighted by improved performance at QxH and QVC International relative to the first quarter, including sequential net revenue and OIBDA margin improvement at QxH, and double-digit year-over-year OIBDA growth at QVC International in constant currency. These gains were partially offset by further performance deterioration at Zulily. We're working aggressively to address these issues at Zu, though we do anticipate that they will persist in the near term. We also improved free cash flow relative to Q1 due to disciplined inventory management and more favorable working capital timing. Additionally, we resumed our share buyback program purchasing nearly 12 million shares of stock for $153 million from May 1st to July 31st. While our Q2 results declined year-over-year, I am encouraged by the resiliency of our QxH business and our ability to generate high levels of OIBDA and free cash flow in a dynamic and highly competitive environment. Going forward, we remain focused on evolving the QVC and HSN brands, building on our collective strengths in the power of our model here in the U.S. and globally capturing our targeted synergies and stabilizing Zulily. I'll focus my comments on strategic and operational execution and then turn the call over to Jeff for more detailed financial review.
Starting with QxH, despite a slight decline year-over-year, we are pleased with the sequential improvement in operating results. The improved sales trend reflected a moderation in the sales decline from on-air Products relative to Q1. Please see the definition of on-air, off-air and digital-only sales in the presentation posted on our website. We drove year-over-year on-air sales gains in several areas; culinary and garden strengthened due in part to Easter driven demand shifting out of Q1. Beauty returned to growth, although that category remains highly competitive. Accessories growth accelerated, while apparel softened, reflecting in part a weakening clothing cycle across retail. On the off-air side, we saw growth in categories like home decor and beauty where we feature more curated and differentiated assortments and in our digital-only business we pulled back on lower margin national brand offers in areas like household and electronics. As a result of these actions, we saw nice gains in overall off-air and digital-only product margins, highlighting our focus on winning in digital through curation and differentiation. We remain pleased with TV viewership and digital engagement at both QVC and HSN, which speaks to the relevance of our brands. TV viewership grew driven by enhanced programing and improved channel placement and expanded distribution of our secondary channels QVC2 and QVC3 each received more than 8 million additional homes as of June 30 and HSN2 reached an additional 19 million homes. While TV viewership doesn't correlate directly with sales, we do see it as a positive indicator of overall engagement with our brands, especially at a time when TV viewership more broadly is declining. Our digital engagement also continued to grow as the number of digital visits and sessions across our websites and apps increased, reflecting the power of our TV broadcast to drive traffic to our digital properties bolstered by continued growth in performance marketing.
Particularly encouraging, viewership of our live TV programing on our own web and app platforms continues to grow rapidly. This strong engagement translated into healthy customer activity. On a trailing 12-month basis, our total customer count, retention , and number of items purchased remained strong and stable and we grew the number of new customers in both Q2 and the last 12 months. Looking forward, we continue to focus on bringing together QVC and HSN in a way to capture the best of each brand separately while harnessing the power of both brands together and we'll continue to leverage our core differentiators and lean into our strategic priorities, which are first being the best at product curation and discovery, which has always been the core of our success. In today's world, we need to further increase product differentiation, expanded variety and be faster to market with new and undiscovered curations. And we continue to strive for the best value while also enhancing our delivery promise to meet customers rising expectations.
Second, winning in digital, which is about delivering our unique value proposition around curated product discovery, storytelling and live experiences across all the platforms consumers engaged with today, creating new purchase opportunities and attracting new generations of customers. We've evolved into one of the largest e-commerce and mobile retailers in the US and we're leveraging all of our platforms to grow digital faster by delivering highly engaging curated video rich shopping experiences rather than by competing directly with transactional e-commerce companies on their terms.
Let's take a closer look, starting with being the best in product curation and discovery. We generated strong performance from unique proprietary and limited distribution brands in the second quarter including AnyBody and Breezies in intimates, Josie Maran [Indecipherable] and Beekman 1802 in beauty, Valerie Parr Hill and Northern Lights in home decor, Curtis Stone, Kitchen HQ, Temptations, Rastelli Market Fresh, Kansas City Steak in culinary and Diane Gilman in apparel. We're continuing to expand our proprietary brand capabilities by building out our D3 design, development and discovery organization. We're increasing our offerings from kitchen HQ which has become a key contributor to HSN's culinary growth. In beauty, we're excited about the September launch of Carmindy Beauty our first proprietary beauty brand, which was developed in coordination with Batallure Beauty. We're establishing strategic vendor partnerships that leverage our integrated merchandising team. We've seen success with brands shared across HSN and QVC including Beekman 1802, Dalton, and Tweak'd by Nature and Beauty, Teeter Inversion, Sleep Number, FitBit and Bose in home and fitness. We're excited with launch of outerwear line at HSN this fall [Indecipherable] QVC with Capital Garment. As part of our ongoing commitment to bring customers more discoveries, increased product differentiation and incubate new products, we launched The Big Find, a nationwide search for the next big brands in beauty, fashion and jewelry. This month select groups of entrepreneurs are joining us in four cities [Indecipherable] products to panels of merchandise leaders from across our company. We anticipate that shows and entrepreneurs will launch their products in QVC and HSN beginning this Q4 and through 2020.
It's one of many ways we can build on our legacy of launching or fostering many of the most successful entrepreneurial brands in the marketplace including IT cosmetics. Philosophy Bare Essentials, Spanx, Andrew Lessman and Diane Gilman. We continue to expand our curated digital-only assortments which complement and extend our current on-air assortments. For example we've curated a unique assortment of crafting items at QVC.com that appeals to our customers leveraging the success of HSN's on-air crafting business. Our second priority is to win in digital. Broadcast TV is an amazing platform to attract viewers build relationships and aspire immediate purchases. Additionally, it is a powerful marketing vehicle to drive traffic to our digital properties, the consumers can experience the full range of our offerings and content. We're programing strategically across our six networks, our five broadcast networks and our digital-only Beauty iQ Network to maximize both video and digital audiences creating joint events across H&Q in categories like culinary and fashion that deliver the -- traditionally deliver higher viewership and can create a multiplier effect on overall audience size while opting a counter-programing strategy in lower viewership categories like electronics and household. And we now have one QxH leader overseeing the programing and planning teams across QVC and HSN to identify and capture these opportunities. We continue to focus on developing compelling and engaging programing that can draw large audiences. For example, QVC and HSN joined together for the first time this year for our Beauty with Benefits event to support cancer and careers, the event which was aired on both our broadcast and digital platforms and amplified across social media and influencer networks, attracted over 3,000 new customers and exceeded our sales call. As we've discussed on prior calls, we've been strategically increasing our marketing spend, which totaled 1.3% of QxH net revenue in Q2. Marketing spend drove approximately 25% of our new customers with the remainder coming in organically. Our business model, buoyed by the power of our TV reach, enables us to spend conservatively on targeted marketing initiatives to yield attractive returns. I'd also note that QxH's performance marketing is diversified across a variety of channels including affiliates, comparison shopping engines, paid social display and email. This approach reduces our dependency on any one channel and allows for more flexibility in how we target high value prospects.
Additionally, we're focused on building strong niche audiences on social media networks. We now have more than 10 new content series across the QVC and HSN YouTube channels focused on beauty, culinary, fashion and lifestyle. We're also advancing our influencer strategy leveraging customers, hosts and guests and other proven personalities. In Q2, for example we introduced QVC's customer advocacy program called QCrew, which is designed to activate our most-passionate customers as ambassadors for our brand, leveraging their own social media networks. We're also tapping into the trust and influence of our hosts and other personalities through initiatives like -- like getting real and new YouTube series featuring personnel relatable to videos about our host lives outside of QVC. The Sloane Series and Beauty iQ and David Venable's recipe series Half Homemade are additional examples, Further high profile guests are attracting audiences across both our social networks and their's including Jamie Foxx for Prive Revaux, Ryan Seacrest for Polished by Dr Lancer, Farah Merhi for Inspire Me and Jill Martin for G.I.L.I Home. As a result of all these digital efforts and leveraging our networks, these powerful marketing channels, we continued to increase the mix of our revenue generated e-commerce platforms. In Q2, e-commerce revenue was 55.5% of QxH sales, nearly 200 basis points year-over-year and our customers are especially gravitating to mobile, which now represents 68% of e-commerce orders up 400 basis points year-over-year. I do want to take a minute to showcase one recent success story that kind of brings together our ability to execute against both these product curation and digital priorities. Rachel Hollis as a best-selling author, podcaster, social media influencer and motivational speaker. In May, we launched our exclusive fashion collection with QVC only on digital, a line designed to empower women with beautiful and wearable style for every day, it was developed by Rachel and our teams. leveraging our proprietary D3 capability. The digital-first launch included a strong social component driving impressive new customer acquisition with 80% of new customers in the 25 to 44 demo. We're continuing to launch new Rachel Hollis products digitally and are preparing for an on-air launch later this year and we're really pleased with this blueprint and [Indecipherable] to future brands. And we are excited last week to announce the appointment of Leslie Ferraro to the newly created role of President of QxH effective September 16th. Leslie brings a really impressive 17 year history with a Walt Disney Company, most recently has co-chaired Disney consumer products in interactive media and President Disney Consumer Products where she established a proven track record of driving innovative customer-centered strategies. Leslie's primary focus will be to advance QxH's growth strategies by leveraging the power, video, storytelling and curated retail experiences across new and next-gen platforms and as we invite new customers to join QVC and HSN. Leslie will work closely with Mary Campbell, our Chief Merchandise Officer of QRG and our Chief Commerce Officer of QUS and Mike Fitzharris, our President of HSN. So to quickly summarize QxH results, our sequential improvement in revenue and OIBDA as well as our strategic and operational progress demonstrates downgoing [Phonetic] relevance of the QVC and HSN brands and platforms. We continue to engage viewers and visitors, attract new generations of customers and deliver high levels of OIBDA and free cash flow. That said, we are hesitant to commit to a specific timeline for returning to revenue growth, as we are operating in an increasingly uncertain macro environment including unknown tariff impacts while also driving at the same time numerous innovations in our business model to enhance product discovery and win in digital. We will remain focused on pursuing these strategic priorities carefully balancing revenue, OIBDA and cash flow levers to drive meaningful cash flow and delighting current and prospective customers.
I'll turn now to QVC International where we saw continued constant-currency revenue growth and a double-digit OIBDA gain led by strong performance in Japan . Our European markets were mixed in part due to the challenging macro environment, but we did see solid growth in Italy. Among the highlights across international were positive results from our product margin improvement efforts including disciplined, promotional and inventory management actions that reduced clearance. We're also seeing improvement from our increased focus on more targeted promotional activity, rebalancing of categories and brands and improved TSV margins. Looking forward, we're focused on building momentum at QVC International through a set of growth priorities that are largely aligned with what I shared for QxH. International is looking to capitalize on successes from the U.S., in areas like performance marketing and expanded digital assortments. We're also being purposeful about where international can take the lead on key innovations and social and digital discovery, especially as it relates to further elevating our online store experience and customer communities. And additional exploring opportunities to evolve the international operating model to pursue growth opportunities in a more leveraged way across markets. Turning to Zulily, our challenging results reflect further erosion in the acquisition of new and reactivated customers, as marketing cost require new customers continue to rise. We also saw increasing pressure on the existing customer base. Due to lower purchase frequency from existing customers along with ASP erosion and lower average [Indecipherable] value.
We're also continuing to see headwinds from sales tax collection [Indecipherable] which we expect to continue to most of the year. The Zu Team is focused on enhancing its core customer promise and is making strategic changes to its customer experience to return to growth. Concerted initiatives are under way to improve the assortment of fresh quality products that are launched in fewer but more curated events, increased overall customer engagement and conversion. We're also focused on creating a more fun and engaging shopping experience on our website and app and reducing order to delivery times. As we see these headwinds and marketing spend efficiency, we have chosen to maintain our marketing return requirements. And as a result, overall marketing spend declined 10% which further compounded our customer acquisition and sales pressures. But we are accelerating experimentation across alternative marketing channels to TV marketing which while still early have shown positive indicators. We're also committed to maintaining vigorous cost disciplines to address the lower volumes. In sum, we're diligently focused on key initiatives to reinvigorate the customer experience, and we believe we're taking the right actions at Zulily to stabilize the business over time and eventually return to growth. At Cornerstone, excluding improvements, which we closed in Q4 last year, we realized a modest sequential net revenue improvement. Overall, Cornerstone continues to face a highly competitive environment across home and outdoor as well as pressures from ongoing sales tax collection. Frontgate has been most impacted by these challenges but we are seeing some signs of improvement. Garnet Hill and Grandin Road showed modest sequential gains. Ballard Designs continues to deliver solid growth supported by the success of its retail stores and design studios and we do see retail expansion remaining an exciting opportunity for us. Near term, Cornerstone is focused on improving its overall assortments, reducing promotional activity and executing expense control. Longer-term initiatives include deploying a new customer journey platform that will enable us to better connect the impact of digital marketing spend and catalog circulation. customer [Indecipherable] driving the Ballard Retail Store opportunity and optimizing the distribution network.
I'll stop there and turn the call over to Jeff for the financial discussion.
Jeffrey A. Davis -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Mike and good morning everyone. I'll now provide an overview of the second quarter financial results for our business segments beginning with QxH. QxH revenue decreased 1% led by a 3% decline in ASP, partially offset by a 1% growth in unit volume. The sequential improvement from first quarter results was driven by improved trends in our, on-air business. Adjusted OIBDA dollars declined 1% and margin rate was flat versus last year, but improved sequentially from Q1, the flat margin rate primarily reflects favorability from reduced TV distribution commissions and part due to the accounting treatment for certain renewed HSN carriage agreements as well as renegotiated rates at HSN and growth in off-air sales, offset by warehouse, freight and inventory management expenses. The warehouse pressures are mainly related to our multi-year multi-phase fulfillment network optimization plan. The initial phase will reduce our US fulfillment center footprint from nine to seven facilities. By 2020, we expect to improve customer delivery times and labor productivity and reduce transportation and fix cost. However, in the short term we absorbed approximately 15 basis points of [Indecipherable] and quarterly incentive payments and approximately 35 basis points from reduced productivity during the ramp-up and retrofit of certain facilities. We expect the productivity headwinds to continue through the back half of the year. Additionally, freight costs reflect higher freight rates , particularly from US Postal Service and unit growth at lower ASPs. While higher freight rates are not anything new, we were less successful offsetting these rate increases with pack factor improvements or the number of items we ship in the same box due to the ongoing fulfillment network optimization plan.
We expect these rate pressures to also continue through the year but begin to moderate in 2020 as new fulfillment center begins to realize increased pack factor along with the benefit we realize from reduced shipping distances. And while inventory management reduced overall OIBDA margin by 25 basis points, led by liquidations and cost associated with clearing ingenious design brands at HSN, inventory obsolescence was favorable by 20 basis points for the quarter. Finally on QxH, we realized a cumulative run rate cost synergies of $87 million through June 30th. Moving to our international business unit and constant currency, International delivered another solid quarter with revenue up 1% on a 7% ASP increase which was counterbalanced by a 5% decline and unit volume. Japan had strongest performance across the markets with double-digit growth across four key product categories, strong demand generated from its TSV replay and expansion of destination tune-in programing. Italy realized improved results while Germany and UK posted mixed results in the quarter. Adjusted OIBDA was up 10% and margin expanded 140 basis points from gross margin improvement, fulfillment leverage, lower fixed cost and reduced losses associated with our former France operation.
Turning to Zulily, net revenue declined 13% led by the continued challenge and new customer growth, lower spend within existing customer base and lower ASP. Adjusted OIBDA declined 76% and margins compressed 510 basis points versus last year with a top line erosion accounting for 320 basis points of the margin rate decline. While we are encouraged by increased product margins, there were several factors beyond the revenue decline, which more than offset this favorability. first, fixed expenses; connected with the expansion of the technology related headcount and a charge for recent workforce reductions, which I'll discuss in a moment. Second is freight cost, unit economics deleveraged when ASP declines and freight rates increase and finally warehouse expenses as a percent of net revenue have increased due to increased wages and benefits and the deleverage of fixed costs.
Going back to my earlier mention of the recent workforce reductions, Zulily made a strategic decision to reduce the number of daily events from 150 to 100 which will allow better focus on each daily event on the quality, unique product finds and personalized shopping experiences the Zu customer expects. As a result, Zulily streamlined their operations eliminating positions primarily in its merchandise and studio operations but remains focused on increasing their investment in technology, user experience and other areas to help support speed and agility.
Wrapping up with Cornerstone, excluding the improvements catalog business that was close to Q4 of 2018, revenue declined 3%, adjusted OIBDA was down $5 million. The OIBDA performance principally reflected the impact of lower revenue and gross margin pressure from promotional activity, partially offset by lower selling, general and administrative costs, Garnet Hill, Grandin Road, Ballard Designs, delivered sequential improvement over Q1. While we've seen improvement in Frontgate, the turnaround was taking longer than anticipated due to ASP deleverage, a soft outdoor furniture season and overall competitive pressures.
Before I discuss capex and free cash flow, let me take a moment to address the ongoing tariff situation. The three tranches in effect to date cover approximately 10% of Qurate cost of goods sold. Through our mitigation efforts, we believe these tariffs had a limited impact on our results. The recently announced fourth tranche will cover an additional 40% of our cost of goods sold with over 80% from vendor source products and the remainder from direct imports. Of our total exposure, approximately 30% is in electronics with the rest spread fairly evenly across apparel, accessories and the remainder of our home categories.
Teams are taking actions to mitigate the cost impact in collaboration with our vendors including shifting product sourcing from China, sharing the cost burden across the supply chain and increasing retail prices where necessary. I it's too early to predict accurately, what effect the tariffs may have on sales demand. However, this is a dynamic situation we are continuing to monitor and we hope trade actions between U.S. and China deescalate.
Moving now to capital expenditures and cash flow, capital expenditures were approximately $106 million on a cash basis in Q2. For the full year, we anticipate capex to be approximately $370 million to $390 million, which is below our initial estimate of $410 million to $425 million. As a reminder, the total increase over 2018 is primarily due to the US fulfillment network optimization and continued technology and commerce platform investments. Free cash flow increased modestly versus last year and substantially recovered versus Q1 from improved working capital, primarily associated with reduced inventory levels and accrued sales return reserve. QVC's total net debt to adjusted OIBDA ratio as defined in our credit agreement was 2.4 times as compared to maximal allowable leverage ratio of 3.5.
With that, I'll now turn it over to Greg.
Gregory B. Maffei -- Chairman
Great. Thanks, Jeff. Looking at the corporate level issues. I want to briefly revisit our green energy investments, including wind and solar. These green energy investments are very attractive financially and will continue to be a part of our strategy. The assets were invested and generate losses, which appear on our P&L under the share of earnings loss of affiliates, however, we are able to generate material tax benefits, both through these losses and tax credits associated with these investments. Other issues in the quarter, we sold our investment in FTD resulting in a $34 million book income tax benefit in Q2 from the tax laws. We expect approximately $100 million tax benefit at the end of 2020 when our long-term tax receivable is collected. From the period of May 1st through July 31st, we repurchased 11.9 million shares of Qurate Retail for $153 million. This compared to 9.6 million shares bought in Q2 last year. As a reminder, we will be holding our annual Investor Meeting on November 21st in New York. The link to register for this event is on our homepage of our website. We appreciate your continued interest in Qurate Retail.
And with that operator, I'd like to open it up for questions. Thank you.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Yeah, thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question from Edward Yruma with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Edward Yruma -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
Good morning and thanks for taking the questions. I guess first last call you signaled that you were suspending share buybacks given kind of the volatility in the business obviously you restarted that. I guess what changed in terms of the speed by which we're able to inflect the trajectory the business, kind of what gives you the confidence to do more share repos going forward. And then as a follow-up, I know that there were some issues that kind of resulted on the operational side as merging your merchant organizations I think at the end of last year that impacted the first quarter, are those issues behind you? Thank you.
Gregory B. Maffei -- Chairman
On the first one I would say we, as we expect are going to be opportunistic on our share buybacks, we had increasing confidence during some of the results of the quarter as Mike and Jeff outlined and I would note there was a substantial pull back in the share price during the quarter, which made share repurchase a more attractive option.
Mike do you want to handle the second part?
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. On the challenges with integration, especially around the merchant function. I do think we're largely past it, the things have now been working together for several months, still some work to do to get all the processes working smoothly and of course with buying lead times, it takes a bit of time for all of that to show up in the results. So now I we still feeling a little bit of pressure from that in our numbers probably, but I think we're largely past the biggest challenges associated with integration.
Edward Yruma -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
Great. Thanks so much.
Operator
We'll take our next question from Oliver Wintermantel with Evercore ISI.
Oliver Wintermantel -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Yeah, good morning guys. Thank you. Just a question regarding Zulily, if you could maybe walk us through -- I know you provided the details there but I think it's still a little bit unclear what really drove the deterioration over the last, I would say, two or three quarters in the Zulily business, if you could maybe try to explain what drove that and how you -- how you're trying to fix that?
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks, Oliver. I would say at a high level, I would point to two things. Clearly the most proximate cause was that this is a business that really worked well on bringing in new customers through Facebook marketing, now as a channel we were having huge success with a year ago and drove the kind of strong level of new customer adds and growth we enjoyed last year, we've just seen a dramatic sort of increase in cost or decrease in efficiency of that channel such that we just have struggled to get the kinds of marketing returns we need and so we're both bringing in fewer new customers for every dollar spent and spending fewer dollars and this is a business that still needs to bring in a lot of new customers every year. So a fair amount of pressure on the customer acquisition front. We're obviously working hard to find new acquisition channels that will work for us. Some amount of experimentation that haven't yet cracked the code on that, but we'll obviously you have to stay after that. We've chosen not to kind of give up on our return on marketing spend requirements to stabilize the sales, is it something that would be a healthy spend. That's the biggest issue.
I think the second issue is that in some ways [Phonetic] probably some of the success we had in marketing last year mask the fact that, I think, we haven't made as much progress as we would have liked to have made in this continuing to evolve overall customer experience. So just website isn't as fresh as it needs to be, Tim [Phonetic] is working on a number of things as we speak, some new innovations in the website store experience. We haven't had as much success bringing in delivery times as we had hoped for and so we can see when those delivery times are really lined, we get a lot of customer satisfaction at the long tail of those delivery times. And so we need to move faster on some of these more experiential aspects of the brand, which I think are causing a little bit of burn out with existing customers. So those are the two big factors we have to get more effective forms of marketing spend at the front end and just kind of be sensitive to the burn out risk with existing customers through freshness in product, freshness in the web experience, better service levels and a number of initiatives under way on all those fronts and good news is, I do think it's the customer base still loves the brand, still purchases frequently, but clearly we've seen a pretty big erosion in that rate of purchase and need to work it aggressively.
Oliver Wintermantel -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Got it , thanks. And maybe as a follow-up to that, maybe bigger picture question regarding the portfolio of your -- of your brands or businesses. If you, if you look at hurdle rates in regards to Zulily or Cornerstone, is there anything that you would say we give these businesses another year or whatever the hurdle rates are and look for the opportunities then, or if there is within the portfolio if you think that there is, is there any need for further acquisitions in the near term? Thank you very much.
Unidentified Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, I would say on the acquisition front, we're certainly open to something compelling coming our way. But our view is we're focused on the businesses we have and will take a really just extremely attractive scenario for us to consider acquisitions at this stage, we got to get the current portfolio cleaned up. We're happy with the portfolio of businesses we have , we've got a couple both Zu and Cornerstone are different kinds of turnarounds, so we need to -- we need to see that work. Again, we're never going to say never to looking at any opportunity either acquisition or divestiture. But I would say our focus is on getting these businesses to work and to get back to growth. And I think that is absolutely doable.
Oliver Wintermantel -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Got it. Thanks very much. Good luck.
Unidentified Speaker
Thank you.
Operator
We'll take our next question from Alex Fuhrman with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.
Alex Fuhrman -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group -- Analyst
Great, thanks very much for taking my question. Curious with Zulily struggling a little bit here. Is that brand still helping to bring new customers to QVC and HSN. Just curious if you're still getting that, that strategic value. And then, if I remember correctly, I think you've been doing some today's special values that you've been cross marketing on Zulily, are you still doing that, are you still seeing any response to that, just would love some more color on how you're continuing to use the different assets in your portfolio to drive customers to QVC?
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
We do think we're getting those strategic benefits, so it doesn't outweigh the performance pressures we're seeing. But on the customer acquisition front from Zulily, we've tried to kind of pivot with where we see the performance. So last year as Zulily was really growing we were focused on keeping new customers on the Zulily platform, less so [Indecipherable] trying to get them to migrate to QxH, a little bit of cross marketing but not heavy. This year we've as Zu has struggled, Zu still has a lot of traffic and visitors but as they've struggled more to monetize that we put a little more focus on that crossover customer. So as an example in the daily emails that go out Zulily customers we do feature the QVC today's special value, [Indecipherable] featuring the HSN today's special and other ways to sort of market the QVC HSN brands to very large and engaged Zulily customer base. We're also doing more cross marketing with our proprietary card program. So, as you may recall we put the QVC proprietary card and launched Zulily equivalent at Zu and are in the process of converting HSN card to one on the QVC platform that's going to enable us to do some interesting cross marketing through our proprietary card programs across the brands, then a little bit of that it too. But I think there is more to be done. So not a massive benefit, but certainly additive. Lets us speak to a wider range of visitors and potential customers every day.
Alex Fuhrman -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group -- Analyst
Great, thanks. That's really helpful. Thank you, Mike.
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you
Operator
We'll take our next question from Eric Sheridan with UBS.
Eric Sheridan -- UBS -- Analyst
Thanks for taking the question, Mike. I wanted to just check in and sort of get a better view of sort of how your own thoughts on digital marketing and performance-based advertising continue to evolve as both a stimulant of individual transactions and at the top of the funnel as sort of a growth driver for users and buyers coming into the platform broadly, what have you learned since you made some of the changes you did late last year, how those would have continued to evolve and then maybe a second quick one if I can, just you highlighted mobile shopping and you continued to talk about it over the last couple of earnings calls. What have you seen as the mobile shopper continues to evolve with all of your various properties on a global scale? Thanks so much for the detail.
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks.. Thanks, Eric. On the first one on performance marketing, we will continue to be in the high experimentation mode, as you know from the numbers kind of modestly increase in performance marketing every quarter. I guess a pretty tight set of return metrics to that spend, has to kind of pay back within a year and we are focused on sort of needle in the haystack of how do we find customers that could become really great core QVC customers as opposed to one and done. It would just doesn't fit our model and so we're kind of restoring [Phonetic] our return requirements to in particular focus on those potential customers who could become super users of the brand and we are finding that we can do that. That's I think the most encouraging thing to us. We're gating our spend, so that we do meet these return requirements but we're finding that the overall average value of these customers, a little -- is a little below our total average. There are pockets of these digital customers, especially those who come in on more engagement platforms like social media, media marketing that are coming into the ecosystem and becoming pretty high value pretty high frequency customers right away. So we think it is working as another way to tell our story, get people into the ecosystem and then get them energized about all the things that we have to offer. So, really encouraged by that. Our limitation is really just the fact that if we overspend then we see the returns dropping. And so we're trying to do this as a long-term strategy, be surgical about who were going after, bump it up every quarter and help sort of build the customer file but the fact that a quarter of our new customers are coming in through paid marketing a pretty good levels of quality continues to be encouraging for us. On mobile, I think we've just been surprised by how much that platform now dominates the consumer experience. So for years now, we've been very much in a mobile first mode, all of our design work is done for mobile screens, we are kind of continuing to sort of rebuild the whole digital platform to be more mobile friendly so we're in the -- in the sort of final phase of that work as we speak, which is launching a new checkout platform that's much smoother, faster on digital and especially our mobile and that's just in the kind of roll out phase. We can present a lot of great video content on the go. And so I think across of all the benefits of mobile [Indecipherable] The most important one for us is how we enable that great hidef video experience so that will be standing in the Starbucks line, she can not just learn about the TSV but you could watch a couple of minutes of the TSV program live and so we're quite pleased with the results both on mobile web and on app and continue to innovate against both and with our Zulily brand that's also a business that's been amazingly successful on mobile, and especially on app and it's another kind of [Indecipherable] winning at Zulily is to reduce our dependency on email marketing and the way to get Zulily customer into our ecosystem is to get her using our app as Zulily has a very high app usage rate [Indecipherable] any other e-commerce brand and we're going to continue to invest in getting a great app experience and kind of more customers and prospects at Zu.
Eric Sheridan -- UBS -- Analyst
Great. Thanks, Mike.
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you.
Operator
The next question comes from Tom Forte with DA Davidson.
Tom Forte -- DA Davidson -- Analyst
Great. Thanks for taking my question. So from Mike first Leslie sounds like an excellent hire, so congratulations there. I want to talk a little about over the top for QVC and HSN, to what extent is it driving viewership and how should we think about the shopping habits for consumers who are engaging via Roku Amazon Fire Apple TV and over the top in general? Thanks.
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Tom, and thanks on Leslie, we are thrilled to have her on our team. So really exciting for us. I would say we're still in a kind of early learn mode on over the top, we've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of viewership we're getting especially on Roku and Amazon Fire growing rapidly, but Roku continues to be by far the industry leader, what we'd like about the platform is we can present a full experience. So today, if you have the QVC app on Roku you'll see all four of our networks simultaneously along with a lot of short-form content and long-form content and we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to market and push activity to the Roku customer to get her to engage with us and we expect in the not that distant future there could be more of a video shopping app generally that includes not just access to the QVC networks, but the QVC and HSN network. So it's a way to get folks into an environment that could be more interactive, have the full experience available. So there's a lot we'd like about it and as I said, we're pleased with the amount of viewership we're getting. I think we still have a lot to learn about how to convert that viewership into sales. So that's by earlier going [Indecipherable] to study their viewing patterns, their behaviors and make sure we're getting that the conversion. We think we will, because again, that's essentially a fully featured TV experience so we believe over time we should be able to get that, get that to convert to sales at the same rate, but it's a little early to read that. So more to come but happy with where we are, pleased with the amount of growth and the amount of engagement.
Tom Forte -- DA Davidson -- Analyst
Thank you, Mike.
Operator
And we'll take our last question from Jason Bazinet with Citi.
Jason Bazinet -- Citi -- Analyst
Thanks. I just had a question on Amazon Prime Day, what impact does that have to your business from that, I think it rolled out in July. And this move from Amazon to one day shipping on prime customers has that or do you expect it to have any sort of impact on your business? Thanks.
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah [Indecipherable] interesting, we see really no impact. We've not -- generally speaking we've not taken the approach of using it as a data, successfully market or promote to our customers, but there is -- there is sort of more people in the e-commerce ecosystem on that day so typically, you might see a little more traffic, but we've been pleased that we've ever seen it hurt our business either sort of immediately on the day or in the following days. We have [Indecipherable] aggressively capitalized on it either but I would say clearly neutral to us. I don't see their move to one day shipping as having much impact on us. We are very open about the fact that if you need it in one day or if you needed it in two days, we're not the best place to come. We're not getting that impulse purchase and some of this kind of OK with the typical three to five day delivery times that we have. So we really haven't seen, what we've learned over the years is that, we need to get it to the customer in a reasonable period of time and we'll see a falloff if we have a tale of slow delivery times, but if we'll get to her in that three to five days that seems to be sufficient. And that doesn't appear to be changing a whole lot and haven't seen any sort of direct impact from the move to -- the move to one day.
Jason Bazinet -- Citi -- Analyst
All right, very helpful. Thanks.
Unidentified Speaker
So thanks everyone. I think that was the last question. We continue to appreciate your interest and support in Qurate and we look forward to talking to you on the next call, and seeing you at the Investor Day. Thank you.
Unidentified Speaker
Thank you.
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 49 minutes
Call participants:
Courtnee Chun -- Chief Portfolio Officer and Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
Michael A. George -- President and Chief Executive Officer
Jeffrey A. Davis -- Chief Financial Officer
Gregory B. Maffei -- Chairman
Unidentified Speaker
Edward Yruma -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
Oliver Wintermantel -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Alex Fuhrman -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group -- Analyst
Eric Sheridan -- UBS -- Analyst
Tom Forte -- DA Davidson -- Analyst
Jason Bazinet -- Citi -- Analyst
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