trivago N.V. (NASDAQ:TRVG) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
trivago N.V. (NASDAQ:TRVG) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 7, 2024
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Operator: Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the trivago Q4 Earnings Call 2023. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you the call is being today, Wednesday, the 7th of February 2024. We are pleased to be joined on the call today by Johannes Thomas, trivago's CEO and Managing Director; and Kevin Hu, trivago's Interim CFO. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management's views as of today, Wednesday, February 7, 2024 only, Trivago does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information. As always, some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking typically preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements.
Please refer to the Q4 2023 operating and financial review and the company's other filings with the SEC, but information about factors, which could cause trivago's actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. You'll find that reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures discussed today in trivago's operating and financial review, which is posted on the company's IR website at ir.trivago.com. You are encouraged to periodically visit trivago's Investor Relations site for important content. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons on this call will be against results for the comparable period of 2022. With that, let me turn the call over to Johannes to begin.
Johannes Thomas: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our Q4 2023 earnings call. The fourth quarter has unfolded as anticipated. We saw a decline in revenue in line with the trends observed in previous quarters. This decline was primarily due to lower levels of monetization and headwinds in performance marketing. Additionally, we have felt the adverse effects of low brand marketing investments in the recent years. However, these declines were partially mitigated by volume growth in our Rest of the World segment. [indiscernible] Andre and I returned to trivago about 9 months ago with Kevin providing remarkable support as the interim CFO until Robin's arrival. As a new leadership team, we continue to believe in the potential of the business.
The value proposition of trivago remains highly relevant as consumers continue to be price conscious. In the trivago brand [Audio Gap] for us. We remain confident that maintaining the business at a full year breakeven adjusted EBITDA will enable us to rebuild our branded visitor baseline and achieved a double-digit growth in the medium term. We are committed to executing our strategy to revitalize our brand and enhance our products in every aspect. Let me now give you an update on our strategic priorities. Our first strategic priority is branded growth. Within just a few months, we have assembled a highly skilled media buying team that effectively optimizes our global brand marketing investments. We have undertaken a brand refresh to enhance trivago's memorability and appeal.
By the end of Q4, we launched TV campaigns in over 20 markets and introduced new AI-powered Mr. trivago spot [ph]. We are thrilled by the progress on our team's rapid execution. While it's too early to fully assess the brand campaigns impact, initial results are promising, particularly in developed Europe and the rest of the world. The response in Americas has been mixed with North America performing better than later. We are continuously optimizing our brand budget allocation as well as our TV creative. Over time, we anticipate the efforts will enhance the efficiency of our marketing investments and expect to see the compounding effect to materialize over time. Our second strategic priority is to enhance our hotel search experience. We have travelers find the ideal hotel.
Our on-going website test has been focused on improving the visual experience of hotels and exposing more relevant content to our users. Notable efforts include AI-generated hotel highlights which we qualified and launched for 60,000 hotels. The hotel highlights provide users with key aspects to know about the hotel, helping them in selecting the one that best fits their need. We have also introduced new static search results stages, targeting our users with low travel intent. This change has led to higher user engagement and improved quality of fleets we sent to our partners. Our third strategic priority is to offer the best deal discovery experience. We have travelers find great hotel deals and better prices. Our experiments have been aimed at refining how we display and rank deals on our search results.
Furthermore, we have improved the rate accuracy on our platform by evolving our deal intelligence and rate accuracy scoring system for our partners, continuing to improve our deal exposure and rate accuracy will be focused in the coming months as we expect these improvements to foster trust and retention among our users. Our fourth strategic priority is our advertising partners we empower them to realize the full potential on trivago. In Q4 2023, we began testing the second price auction in 3 key markets. This initiative aims to simplify our option, and we anticipate that it will unlock user value by delivering more relevant search results. The initial test was successful, and we are in the process of expanding the test as we continue to see satisfying results, we aspire to roll out the second-price auction model across all markets before summer.
We don't expect this to have a material impact on our monetization in the short-term, but anticipate positive long-term effects. To sum up, we see great momentum within the organization, improvements in our products and encouraging indications from our brand investments, which sets the stage for the results in the rest of the year. We have streamlined our operations and organizational structure around our strategic priorities with the objective to drive our pace of execution and learning. As we look ahead, we are confident of showcasing our enhancements and a positive brand trajectory. With that, I'd like to pass over to Kevin.
Kevin Hu: Thank you, Johannes. Welcome everyone, to our fourth quarter earnings call. I will start with a review of our fourth quarter results as well as share some early thoughts for 2024. All comparisons for 2023 are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise stated. During the fourth quarter of 2023, we achieved revenues of €91.7 million, which was a 13% decline compared to prior year fourth quarter. The year-over-year decline was at a similar rate to what was observed in the second and third quarters of this year and with a seasonality trend, which was the same as prior year. Lower levels of monetization combined with foreign exchange headwinds negatively impacted our financials in the fourth quarter. Higher levels of competition in performance marketing channels continue to impact our traffic volumes.
We also continue to observe ad format tests and changes made in our performance marketing channels with the compliance state set forth for the identified gatekeepers in the European Union's Digital Markets Act, or DMA approaching. Diving in deeper, we see different dynamics amongst our three reporting segments. Referral revenues declined by 20% in Americas and by 14% in our developed Europe segment, while it increased by 14% in our Rest of World segment. In discussing our year-over-year comparisons and trends, I would like to draw to your attention and remind you of the strong prior year dynamics included in our comparative financials. The declines in our Americas and Developed Europe segment were largely driven by softer bidding dynamics on our platform compared to the same period in 2022 when we had benefited from upto the same period in 2022 when we had benefitted from a strong auction.
Higher levels of competition in certain marketing channels continue to result in performance marketing volume losses. Combined with foreign exchange headwinds from the weakening of the U.S. dollar against the euro compared to the same period in 2022, further led the decline. In our Rest of World segment, we continue to see growth driven by the recovery in markets like Japan where we see a strong increase in travel demand as many markets in our Rest of World segment recover post-COVID and also respond to increased marketing investments. Moving on to our operational expenses. We maintained stable operating expenses at €87.3 million in the fourth quarter. We incurred higher selling and marketing expenses compared to prior year, which was offset by lower share-based compensation costs and by lower personnel costs primarily attributed to noncore-related products that we stopped last year.
Overall, we achieved a net income of €2.5 million and an adjusted EBITDA of €7.3 million during the fourth quarter. For the full year, net loss was €164.5 million, which was largely driven by the indefinite-lived intangible asset and goodwill impairment analysis conducted in the third quarter in conjunction with our annual impairment test. For the full year, we achieved an adjusted EBITDA of €54.1 million. During the fourth quarter, we paid out a onetime extraordinary dividend totaling €184.4 million and completed a ratio change under the company's American depository share program. I'm extremely proud and would like to thank the many trivago employees that worked hard on these transactions as we successfully returned capital to our shareholders.
We continue to be well capitalized for our operating needs with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments balance at the end of the quarter in excess of €125 million. Looking ahead to 2024, the main travel trends remained solid in January, and we continue to see strong demand for the year ahead. While discussing trends observed in January 2024 compared to January 2023, it is important to note the differing dynamics observed during the first full quarter of 2023. We enjoyed elevated levels of average daily rates and higher monetization, which resulted in referral revenue gains exceeding 30% when comparing January 2023 and January 2022. These gains, however, did not persist throughout the first quarter as we trended lower by the end of the first quarter of 2023.
As a result, we do not believe a comparison of our early January 2024 results to prior year to be particularly meaningful. As a result of our previously announced strategy shift, we kicked off our new brand marketing campaign in mid-December. While it is still too early to conclude on the financial results, we are encouraged by early signals. While investments into our brand will have a negative impact on our near-term profitability level, for the full year 2024, we continue to expect our adjusted EBITDA to be at around breakeven levels. We remain confident that our brand investments will help us increase our brand traffic over time by keeping trivago on top of travelers' minds. Finally, I'd like to close by sharing an update on our previously announced CFO transition.
We look forward to welcoming back Robin Harries who will be rejoining trivago and stepping into the leadership team and taking on the role as Chief Financial Officer on April 1. I'd like to also personally thank all our trivago team that are leaning in during this transition period. With that, let's open the line for questions. Operator, we are now ready to take the first question, please.
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