Groupon Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 7, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: The company reported 12% year-over-year global billings growth, with North America local up 20% and international local up 15%, keeping it on track to exceed 20% billings growth by FY27.
  • Positive Sentiment: Groupon generated $25 million in positive free cash flow and completed a proactive refinancing to simplify its capital structure and enable more offensive use of capital.
  • Positive Sentiment: Traffic from AI-driven search, though still small, is growing at a double-digit rate monthly—management sees it as a meaningful tailwind and is investing in platform and AI partnerships.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company raised its full-year billings guidance to 7–9% growth (up from 3–5%), citing strong momentum and multiple levers for long-term value creation.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Effective September 1, Yuzhi Ponnarat will become COO and Rana Kashyap will step in as CFO, highlighting management’s focus on internal leadership development.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Groupon Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 3 speakers on the call.

Operator

Hello and thanks for joining us for our second quarter 2025 earnings call. It's a pleasure to be with all of you. Yesterday, after the market closed, we released our earnings and posted our earnings commentary on our investor relations website. Today, my plan is to make brief opening remarks and then open up the call for questions, both live from our analysts and several that were pre-submitted in advance. For more details on our quarterly performance, I encourage you to read our earnings commentary. In addition, I encourage you to review our press release, which contains more detail on our fourth quarter and full-year results. I am pleased to report another strong quarter of accelerating growth. Global billings grew 12% year over year, marking continued acceleration in our growth trajectory.

Operator

This was driven by strong performance in our core local category, with North America local billings up 20% year over year and international local billings, excluding Italy and GiftCloud, up 15% year over year. Combined, our core local category, excluding Italy and GiftCloud, grew 19% and now represents nearly 90% of our billings. This validates the scalability of our marketplace transformation playbook and keeps us on track toward our target of accelerating global billings growth to over 20% by 2027. We generated strong positive free cash flow of $25 million, demonstrating our ability to drive profitable growth while investing in our platform and team. We also announced a proactive refinancing that meaningfully simplifies our capital structure and eliminates constraints, putting Groupon in a position to play offense. Our hyperlocal strategy continues to deliver strong results.

Operator

Our North America enterprise brands had an exceptionally strong quarter, with 26 brands generating over $1 million in quarterly billings, representing 53% year-over-year growth. North America things to do delivered strong double-digit growth for the sixth consecutive quarter, demonstrating market leadership during the crucial summer season, with particular strength in amusement parks, parks, water parks, and multi-attraction tour passes. On the leadership front, I am excited to announce that effective September 1, Jiri Ponrt will assume the role of Chief Operating Officer, and Rana Kashyap will become our next Chief Financial Officer. Both have been instrumental in our transformation since joining in early 2023, and these changes reflect our commitment to developing leaders from within as we build toward our next chapter of growth.

Operator

Looking ahead, we are raising our full-year billings guidance from 3% to 5% to 7% to 9% growth, reflecting the strong momentum we are seeing across our business. We see multiple levers driving accelerating growth and remain confident we are building the foundation for sustained long-term value creation. We are still in the early innings of a large opportunity to build a hyperlocal experience marketplace that combines trust, curation, quality, and unbeatable value with the network effects and unit economics of modern marketplaces. I would like to thank our team for their dedication and hard work that have made this progress possible. This journey has not been easy, and their continued commitment to our mission and to our transformation has been really great. With that, let's open the call for questions.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Dusan. Our first question is from Sean Patrick McGowan from ROTH Capital Partners. Sean, you can now unmute your line.

Speaker 2

Hi, can you hear me okay?

Speaker 2

Yes, we can.

Speaker 2

Great, thank you. You mentioned in the commentary that you issued yesterday that you're seeing AI-generated traffic or searches. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on that? Is that incremental? You think you're getting incremental traffic and business from that, and what is it that makes that more valuable?

Operator

Thank you, Sean, for the question. Based on how we currently review, we believe that the traffic coming from AI is more incremental, and I really see AI traffic as a tailwind to us. We are spending a lot of resources on building the platform in a way that we are a great partner for AI-driven companies. I'm a big believer that the traffic is moving and people are changing behavior, and they will be using AI more and more. I actually see Groupon positioned very well in this because we have a very, very unique offer, and we can be a gateway for many merchants to be part of this AI economy, as to call it. Yes, we are growing with pretty much zero base last year because this is extremely developing. Overall, we see it as a positive trend with really very, very strong double-digit growth every month.

Operator

At the same time, this is a new field which is not always easy to measure, and there are no standards in general. We see on the market various numbers from different types of companies. I would like to emphasize that still it's a small part of our traffic, but it's the type of traffic which we believe will grow significantly and will grow also in terms of impact on overall Groupon performance.

Operator

Thank you. Do I have a chance to ask another question at this point? I don't know what the deal is.

Operator

Yeah.

Operator

Okay. If you could talk a little more generally about the efforts that you've been making over the last couple of years to get merchants more engaged and, you know, and then to see more repeat business. You know, can you talk a little bit about progress there?

Operator

Yeah. You know, we are talking about the merchant relationship and the way how we are doing the sales pretty much since I joined Groupon. We have different views and different angles how we are looking at it. In general, I consider Groupon like an amazing platform for merchants in general because we are a performance-based platform. It means that we are getting paid only when merchants are getting paid. This is very important when you are advertising on our platforms. Typically, you have to pay for traffic, and then you hope that you will be able to optimize. In general, our long-term positioning is very strong with merchants. We are still in the process of transformation of our sales force to be partners to merchants.

Operator

We are now looking on Groupon not as one marketplace when one size fits all, but internally we are talking about like triple-digit number of micro-categories on Groupon. We want to understand one by one, understand how the economy for merchants works, and then be their partners and helping them to create campaigns which will make sense both for merchants, but also for marketplace. This applies actually across the board. We were in our commentary talking about very strong performance in the national enterprise segment. What I was describing works both with small businesses, but at the same time, it works with large national enterprise partners where sometimes the discussion is even easier and faster because they really understand performance. They understand how much they are paying with other marketplaces or advertising platforms which they are using.

Operator

When we understand their needs, then we can be a great partner for them. Also, I would say that in the last 12 months, we made huge progress on understanding what's going on on the platform. Right now, and we are starting with these like large partners, we can come to them and explain and show them what the data are showing about the incrementality of the business, like whether customers coming from Groupon would come to their either websites or properties without Groupon or not, show them the behavior, how they were making the decision process. These data are actually very positive in the way how we are presenting and showing Groupon value. It helps us grow the business with merchants more.

Operator

Thank you. I'll jump back in the queue.

Operator

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Our next question comes from Robert Brooks from Northland Capital Markets. Robert, you can now unmute your line.

Speaker 2

Hey, good morning, team. First, I just want to congratulate Rana on moving to the CFO role and Jiri Ponrt taking over the COO role. Kind of piggybacking on the AI questions, it was really interesting to hear that the AI-powered search has shown strong, strong signs of growth, albeit off a small base. Two-part question. First, of that notable growth that you've seen so far, is that mostly just these AI search engines sort of organically picking up your deals, or have you made intentional enhancements to your listings to try to pick up this traffic? Second, just wanted to hear how you plan internally to further accelerate that traffic coming from this channel.

Operator

Yeah, internally, we are looking on AI together with SEO because, as you know, Google is significantly changing the behavior of the search result pages, how we are looking and putting more and more content and keeping the people much more on their website versus sending them to us. What we see in SEO is that we have pretty much steady performance, which actually is a great win because there are plenty of companies which are really facing headwinds right now because the traffic goes down. What we see is that we have declining traffic. However, people are making and spending a little bit more time in decision-making on Google, for example, and then coming to Groupon, and they have simply higher conversion. In the SEO part, which also partially includes AI through these AI snippets, we are holding steady, which I consider great results.

Operator

We see the part where people are starting their search in AI engines, being it Perplexity, OpenAI, and others. We are investing into our platform so that Groupon is providing proper results so that they can directly link us as a source, show the recommendation when you would be discussing what I can do with my kids over the weekend, that Groupon is included. This part is growing, and I see this trend of moving people towards AI search as very strong, and it just accelerates. How we look at it from the mid-term and long-term perspective, yes, we are investing into our platform so that our platform is a good citizen and partner in this AI world.

Operator

We plan to be part of the pilot program, for example, with OpenAI, so that as they will be developing their product, it will be even possible to book Groupon experiences and deals directly through AI agents. This is, in my opinion, the direction where AI is heading. It will take some time, but I expect that it will be really like an executive assistant for people where they will be using voice, talking, discussing with AI what to do. E-commerce players who want to be really playing an important part in this ecosystem need to support it so that it's easy for AI platform to do the booking, do the orders, and find all the relevant information. This is one of the internal focuses of Groupon to play really well.

Operator

Maybe last remark on this, I believe that we are positioned very well also from the perspective that we have unique inventory. There are many companies which pretty much have commodity inventory which you can buy on other places, but Groupon has unique deals which are not available anywhere else, typically on the internet. At this point, it's a major, major advantage for us to be, even, I would say, a preferred partner for AI companies in certain segments.

Operator

Appreciate that detail. Just to confirm, it seems like the uptick in traffic that you've seen so far is sort of a mix of just organic and enhancements that you've made to the platform.

Operator

I would say that in SEO, we can maintain our numbers because of the new platform which we have, which is able to provide better and better results from Google. There is the part focusing on what you can get internally in ChatGPT and others, which is, I would say, additional technological development which our platform is capable of providing right now. That part is the growth which we were talking about in our commentary. This part, although starting with a very low and small base, it's growing 50% month over month.

Operator

Got it. The next one for me is, you guys talked about how you mentioned, yeah, over 200 micro-categories within the North American local segment where you feel you can execute your go-to-market strategy. Could you just provide some context on that? Like maybe what would be helpful is how many micro-categories did you feel you successfully pursued within second quarter that were reflected in second quarter results?

Operator

We are trying to improve across the board. However, it will be a long-term process. We were mentioning that we are really in the beginning in many areas. If we do a deep dive, we have a category manager in some segment, and we really understand the merchants, we understand their economy, we understand really in depth what customers are asking for, then it allows us to accelerate. We have several categories that I believe we were mentioning. For example, the airport parking. We were mentioning categories which maybe you would not expect on Groupon, like oil exchange, for example, where we work very closely to have proper supply on one side.

Operator

At the same time, we are in the product, and again, thanks to the better platform which we have now available, we can start customizing the user interface so that it includes features which are important for the decision-making process. To give you a very simple example, there are categories where the image is not important at all. When you are, for example, deciding on the oil exchange, the picture is a very small part of the decision-making process, while there are categories where you need to know how the place where you will go looks like, how it will be, the feelings, emotions. We are able to go on that level both with merchants, but right now also with the consumer to customize the user experience. This will be pretty much a never-ending process.

Operator

There are many marketplaces which really focus on one category, and it's much easier for when we have, as I said, right now internally, our structure shows 200 categories. This is by far not the final number. We may end up with less or more, but it will take time really to go deeper and deeper. We have several categories which we pre-selected and focus on them to prove the concept, where we have very good results, but then we will probably improve pretty much each of them to a certain level and do iterations.

Operator

Awesome. That's super helpful. Just one last one for me, with the refinancing that you guys did interquarter, that obviously allows you to step back into your buyback. Just curious to hear any thoughts on when that might make sense for you guys to do it or maybe triggers that you would be looking for to then step in to start to repurchase shares.

Operator

Maybe I can take this one, Jiri, I look at this through the lenses of value creation. We are here, and our main responsibility is to grow value for our shareholders. I believe that we are in a very good position, and we want to maintain going forward an optimal and resilient balance sheet. Right now, I see two areas which we are looking into. First, as you mentioned, is share repurchases. Right now, we have an existing share buyback authorization in place, which has $245 million available for repurchases. While buybacks will always remain an important consideration, we will deploy capital here only when it represents a really highly attractive use of our funds. The second part to the story is M&A opportunities. During my career, I led dozens of acquisitions, and I understand both the opportunity and the risk associated with inorganic strategies.

Operator

While we will remain open to strategically aligned acquisitions that enhance our market position and capabilities, we will do it only with discipline to make sure that it brings value. Both share repurchases and M&A opportunities are something which we are looking into very deeply, and we want to make the right decisions here.

Operator

Appreciate the call. I'll return to the queue. Congrats on the call.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Bobby. Looks like we have a follow-up question from Sean. Go ahead and unmute your line.

Speaker 2

Thank you. I appreciate that. Any update on the progress you've made in kind of re-engaging the cohort that you felt like you lost late last year in the tech conversion?

Operator

My answer would be very similar to what we were answering last earnings. We don't publish any specific numbers, but based on the overall results of the company, you can see that we were able to achieve some meaningful improvements here. Overall, we are very happy both with the acquisition of new customers and growth of new customers, but also the cohort of existing customers is performing well.

Operator

Okay, thank you. If I can ask a couple of questions about Italy, does this settlement with Italy put, you know, in your opinion, a final end to that whole thing? Are there any other, you know, countries kind of looming in the wings there that might have something to say? Would you rule out restarting the business, the local business in Italy now that this tax thing is settled?

Operator

Thank you, Sean. I will answer that. First of all, the settlement agreement is now on a verbal agreement. It's not in writing. It has to go through various approvals through various statutory bodies in Italy. If it's approved, then yes, it means that our troubles in Italy about these two cases, tax cases from 2012 and 2017, are over. To your second question, if we will be thinking about reopening Italy, generally, what we see is that we are doing very well in international business, which was not the case a couple of quarters ago. Certainly, we will think all options, including reopening Italy.

Operator

Okay, thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Sean. We will now move to written questions. A question for Dusan. You may have answered a bit of this already. Which initiatives are spurring the most growth?

Operator

I don't see it as one single initiative. I know that there are many people who love this question, and I'm answering it in the same way for the last two years. This is plenty of smaller initiatives which simply add up together, and this is done by the complexity of Groupon and the number of verticals which I was talking about today in questions regarding the micro-categories where simply we need to take it one by one. I think in the past, when the company tried to have a one-size-fits-all approach, I don't think it was the right strategy. I can simplify it into the three parts which are pretty much most important for each marketplace. On the demand side, we have a new platform, MobileNext, powering plenty of our traffic. We were able to improve the platform so that it's running and supporting our marketing activities.

Operator

The new platform and marketing engine behind it is a big enabler of what we are doing and the results which we are achieving right now. That marketing engine, it's not just the performance marketing, but pretty much all channels. We were discussing today SEO and AI, which are a tailwind for us versus headwind for many other companies. At the same time, we are able to do huge progress in marketing, in display marketing. We are growing and doing plenty of not only experiments because we have very significant traffic already coming from resources with influencer marketing. We are moving here, thanks to the platform and the marketing engine, up in the funnel. That's why we were talking about the plan to run in Q4 and Q1 next year, the small brand campaign. On the supply side, there were several questions to this.

Operator

I see it the way that every quarter we are getting better and better in smaller steps in managing the supply side. I'm answering it in a very wide open way. By talking about managing the supply side means understanding who are the merchants which we need to get on the platform, how the deals which we need on the platform should look like, what is the value which we should be providing as a Groupon. There are multiple strategies with a micro-category approach to understand risk businesses and profitability. However, also the last several earnings calls, I was talking about this hyperlocalization strategy where the teams are focused on smaller areas. They understand it. This is a mix on the supply side of both these approaches.

Operator

Last year, we were fighting with multiple headwinds from our platform migrations, and it was a huge lesson for me, for the whole company, I believe. This year, we do much better, and we focus on mitigating impact and making sure that whatever we do, it takes longer than what I would love to see. At the same time, the platform is not causing headwinds which we were fighting last year.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dusan. Looks like we have a follow-up question from Robert Brooks from Northland Capital Markets. Robert, please unmute your line.

Speaker 2

Hey, thanks for letting me jump back on. Just a quick one, I just feel like it might be helpful to remind the investment community of the dynamic between billings growth and revenue growth and how you see those two starting to converge here over the next few quarters. Could you just remind us on that dynamic?

Operator

Yes, Bobby. What you see is that we are growing, especially in local business, billings much faster versus revenue. This gap is very similar to what we described in the previous quarters. Roughly half of that is related to our take rate and, sorry, to our redemption, which influences take rate, which is our people are really enjoying our deals, and we are proposing and pushing them to do it because we believe that, and we see it on our data, if the customer is using and redeeming our voucher, it's increasing their lifetime value because they are coming back to our platform, buying new deals, and they are becoming our loyal customers. This is one part.

Operator

The second part is a mix of take rates due to our increased enterprise deals, and also, you know that we had very good things to do season, which is generally the line of business which does not have such high take rates as, for example, home services and beauty or other categories. Those two factors, higher redemption and a mix of categories and a mix of enterprise versus core local, is what's contributing to the difference between our billings and revenues.

Operator

Got it. Thanks. That's helpful.

Speaker 2

If there are no other questions, this concludes our call for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining. For additional information, please go to investor.groupon.com.

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