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- text: "summarize:For those of you that have not, it is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor. Non-GAAP net earnings and non-GAAP EPS, which have been adjusted for certain items which may affect the comparability of our performance with other companies. I'm very pleased with the strong start to 2021 and the positive momentum in revenue and margins we delivered in the first quarter, demonstrating the strong operating leverage in our business. Consolidated revenues increased 11.1% year-over-year in our first full quarter as a stand-alone public company. The revenue increase included same-store revenue growth of 14.8% and we reported adjusted EBITDA margin that improved to 15.4% of revenues. This is the first quarter in over a decade that the Company has delivered double-digit same-store revenue growth. Our teams in the field and our store support centers and Woodhaven are performing at a very high level and are energized and engaged. As I visit Aaron's stores around the country to support our operations team, I'm seeing a strong sense of pride and optimism about our brand and our competitive position. Our team members and customers are embracing the innovation that we are delivering and the dynamic lease-to-own market. Over the last five years, we've significantly transformed the company for the goal of continuing to provide an exceptional customer and team member experience while also driving greater efficiencies in our operating model. I'm proud to say that as of today we have a centralized decisioning platform that provides greater control and predictability resulting in a higher quality lease portfolio. We have enhanced digital payment platforms that are enabling over 75% of monthly customer payments to be made outside of our stores. We have an industry-leading, fully transactional e-commerce platform that is attracting a new and younger customer, and we have a portfolio of 51 GenNext stores that is currently outperforming our expectations with many more store openings in the pipeline. All of these initiatives are underpinned by the investments that we have made in enhanced analytics and when combined with our more efficient operations are enabling us to deliver strong revenue and earnings growth. These transformations to our business model are contributing to our outstanding performance in the first quarter of 2021. We are encouraged by the continuing improvement and the quality and size of our same-store lease portfolio, which ended the quarter up 6.2% compared to the end of the first quarter of 2020. This improvement was primarily driven by strong demand for our products, few release merchandise returns, and lower inventory write-offs. In addition, our customer continues to benefit from the ongoing government stimulus, one of the most meaningful contributors to our strong portfolio performance was centralized decisioning, which we implemented across all Company-operated stores in the U.S., in the spring of 2020. Today, nearly 70% of our portfolio is made up of lease agreements that were originated using this technology. Centralized decisioning delivers consistency and predictability in the performance of our lease portfolio. It enables store managers the flexibility to focus their time on growth-oriented activities such as sales and lease servicing. We believe our algorithms provide better outcomes for both the customer and Aaron's with the goal of having a greater number of customers achieve ownership while at the same time reducing our cost to serve. We continue to refine this decisioning across our various channels, and we expect this will continue to drive greater productivity from our lease portfolio. Another contributor to our strong performance in the quarter was our e-commerce channel, which represented more than 14% of lease revenues. Our e-commerce team has really delivered, driving traffic growth to aarons.com by 12.8% and increasing revenues by 42% in the first quarter as compared to the prior-year quarter. E-commerce lease originations increased as compared to the year-ago quarter despite the significant shift of customer activity through our online platform in March of 2020 as stores closed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, e-commerce write-offs improved by more than 50% compared to last year's quarter, primarily as a result of ongoing decisioning optimization, operational enhancements, and strong customer payment activity. Our e-commerce team continues to deliver ongoing improvements through our online customer acquisition, conversion, and servicing capabilities, which is leading to margin growth and continued positive momentum in this important channel. Our e-commerce growth in the quarter is enabled by our stores, which are not just showrooms and service centers but are also last-mile logistics hubs delivering an expanded assortment of products with same or next day delivery. Finally, our Real estate repositioning and reinvestment strategy is gaining momentum and we expect it will drive future growth. Our new GenNext stores have larger and more modern showrooms, expanded product assortment, and improved brand imaging and digital technologies. To date, we have opened 51 new GenNext stores and have generated results that are meeting or exceeding our targeted internal rate of return equally as encouraging, monthly lease originations in the first quarter. Our plan for 2021 is to plan to open in the second and third quarters. While we're excited about both the early financial results and the infrastructure we're building to accelerate our progress, we continue to maintain a disciplined approach around our execution of this strategy. We remain focused on our key strategic initiatives of simplifying and digitizing the customer experience, aligning our store footprint to our customer opportunity and promoting the Aaron's value proposition of low payments high approval rates and best-in-class service. For the first quarter of 2021, revenues were $481.1 million compared to $432.8 million for the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 11.1%. The increase in revenues was primarily due to the improving quality and increased size of our lease portfolio and strong customer payment activity during the quarter, aided in part by government stimulus and partially offset by the net reduction of 166 Company-operated and franchised stores compared to the prior year. As Douglas called out earlier, e-commerce revenues were up 42% compared to the first quarter of the prior year and represented 14.2% of overall lease revenues compared to 11.3% in 2020. On a same-store revenue basis, revenues increased 14.8% in the first quarter compared to the prior-year quarter, the first double-digit, same-store revenue growth since 2009, and our fourth consecutive positive quarter. Same-store revenue growth was primarily driven by a larger same-store lease portfolio and strong customer payment activity, including retail sales and early purchase option exercises. We believe this growth is partially a result of the government stimulus programs passed in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, the company ended the first quarter of 2021 with a lease portfolio size for all company operated stores of $128.8 million, an increase of 3.6% compared to the lease portfolio size as of March 31, 2020. Lease portfolio size represents the next month's total collectible lease payments from our aggregate outstanding customer lease agreements. Operating expenses excluding restructuring expenses, spin-related transaction costs and the impairment of goodwill and other expenses, which were both recorded in the first quarter of 2020 were down $1.5 million as compared to the first quarter of last year. This decrease was primarily due to a reduction in write-offs, store closures and the impact of the COVID-related reserves recorded in 2020, partially offset by higher personnel costs related to variable performance compensation, higher marketing expenses and an increase in bank and credit card related fees. Adjusted EBITDA was $73.9 million for the first quarter of 2021 compared with $34.7 million for the same period in 2020, an increase of $39.2 million or 112.9%. As a percentage of total revenues, adjusted EBITDA was 15.4% in the first quarter of 2021 compared with 8% for the same period last year, an improvement of 740 basis points. The improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin was primarily due to the items that drove the total revenues increase and a 310 basis point reduction in overall write-offs to 3.1% of lease revenues, including both improvement in the e-commerce and store origination channels compared to the prior year. The improvement in write-offs was due primarily to the implementation of new decisioning technology, improved operations, the benefit of government stimulus and the impact of COVID-related lease merchandise reserves recorded in the first quarter of 2020 and not repeated in 2021. On a non-GAAP basis, diluted earnings per share were $1.24 in the first quarter of 2021 compared to non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.30 for the same quarter in 2020, an increase of $0.94 or 313.3%. Cash generated from operating activities was $20.2 million for the first quarter of 2021, a decline of $36.6 million compared to the first quarter of 2020, primarily due to higher inventory purchases, partially offset by higher customer payments and other changes in working capital. During the quarter, the company purchased 252,200 shares of Aaron's common stock for a total purchase price of approximately $6.3 million. As of the end of the quarter, we had approximately $143.7 million remaining under the company's share repurchase authorization that was approved by our Board on March 3rd of this year. The Company's Board of Directors also declared our first quarterly cash dividend of $0.10 per share last month and we paid the dividend on April 6. As of March 31, 2021 the company had a cash balance of $61.1 million, less than $500,000 of debt and total available liquidity of $295.5 million. Turning to our outlook, based on our performance in the first quarter of 2021 and the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act in March, we have revised our full-year 2021 outlook. For the full year, we expect consolidated revenues of between $1.725 billion and $1.775 billion representing an increase in our revenue outlook of $75 million. We also expect adjusted EBITDA of between $190 and $205 million, representing an increase in our adjusted EBITDA outlook of $35 million. For the full year 2021, our outlook for the effective tax rate, depreciation and amortization and diluted weighted average share count are unchanged. We have also increased our full-year same-store revenue outlook from a range of 0% to 2% to a range of 4% to 6%. Similar to our original outlook, total revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the first half of 2021 are expected to be higher in the second half of 2021. This outlook assumes no impact from the expansion and acceleration of the child tax credit payments expected to begin in July 2021. Additionally, our updated outlook assumes no significant deterioration in the current retail environment or in the state of the U.S. economy, as compared to its current condition and a continued improvement in global supply chain conditions" |
