While the world was watching NVIDIA last night, Remitly (RELY) also reported strong results with the stock up over 19% as I write (down from over 21% in pre-market).
Here are highlights from their press release:
Fourth Quarter 2023 Highlights and Key Operating Data
(All comparisons relative to the fourth quarter of 2022 )
- Active customers increased to 5.9 million, from 4.2 million, up 41%.
- Send volume increased to $11.1 billion, from $8.1 billion, up 38%.
- Revenue totaled $264.8 million, compared to $191.0 million, up 39%.
- Net loss was $35.0 million, compared to a net loss of $19.4 million.
- Adjusted EBITDA was $8.2 million, compared to $7.5 million.
Full Year 2023 Highlights and Key Operating Data:
(All comparisons relative to the full year 2022 )
- Send volume increased to $39.5 billion, from $28.6 billion, up 38%.
- Revenue totaled $944.3 million, compared to $653.6 million, up 44%.
- Net loss was $117.8 million, compared to a net loss of $114.0 million.
- Adjusted EBITDA was $44.5 million, compared to $(13.6) million.
2024 Financial Outlook
For fiscal year 2024, Remitly currently expects:
- Total revenue in the range of $1,225 million to $1,250 million, representing a growth rate of 30% to 32% year over year.
- To remain in a GAAP net loss position for 2024 and for Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $75 million to $90 million.
Here’s the transcript from the call.
The concerns on the call last quarter were all about their marketing spend. It’s always high, but it was especially high for Q4, and CEO Matt Oppenheimer explained that since people sending money for the holidays makes Q4 seasonally high for them, they wanted to strike while the fire was hot. They did, with a record number of customer adds in the quarter.
They reported that they now routinely recoup their cost to acquire new customers in under 12 months. They had a record number of new customer adds in Q4 and maintain a 95% retention rate for their customers across time.
While not giving specifics, they indicated that they are expanding their offerings to include other cross-border transaction needs. From the prepared remarks on the call:
This long-term view of our customers provides us with many levers to enhance lifetime value, and we are experiencing LTV improvements as customers have increased their transaction activity, particularly for digital receive options, and we have also been decreasing transaction costs. Third, we see significant opportunities to expand into more geographic markets. Our global network consists of more than 5,000 corridors, and we have plans to increase our reach to thousands of additional corridors, while increasingly benefiting from diversification. We will use the same disciplined corridor expansion strategy and our targeted approach that has served us so well to date.
While our customer base today is primarily customers who regularly send home to family and friends in developing countries, we believe over time, we can better serve a broader set of customers who have cross-border financial needs. Fourth, we believe there are enormous opportunities to deepen customer relationships by leveraging the unique technology platform we have built and continue to build to efficiently scale new features and products to the millions of customers we serve today and to make our offerings even more attractive to other customers that have cross-border financial needs.
On their partners and network:
This now includes strategic partnerships with some of the largest banks and telcos, including M-Pesa in Africa, Alipay in China, BDO in the Philippines, and Elektra in Mexico. As a result of these investments we have made to enhance the quality of our network in the fourth quarter, we were able to disperse more than 90% of transactions in less than one hour, even as we onboarded a record number of new customers where the risks of delays are higher. Our direct integrations also allow us to disperse funds rapidly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which would not be the case if we exclusively relied on intermediary payment networks. This outcome is critically important to our customers who are often sending money for immediate needs, so a reliable and fast service is of paramount importance.
It’s a crowded space, but they’re taking share and growing quickly. Not sure how many are still in this, but the call and presentation were strong and are worth your time to understand the company.
I trimmed my position last month, but with today’s 19% pop, I’m at just under a 7% position.
JabbokRiver