America’s Car-Mart, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRMT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

If you sort of like think about that continuum I just mentioned, prices have come down nearly 20% but are still 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels. I think our pricing and the vehicles that we’re selling is a function of what’s available in the marketplace and the fact that prices are still very much elevated from pre-pandemic and we’ll participate. And I think for those customers in the lower end of the credit spectrum that becomes accretive to our volume.

Operator: And our next question comes from Vincent Caintic from Stephens.

Vincent Caintic: I guess, first, I wanted to delve in on the inventories and your sense of approximately when do you — what’s the, I guess, plan for working through that and maybe some stats like the average days on inventory right now. Because I would think that — well, maybe some of this inventory came before used car prices we’re starting to climb but maybe we’re now in a favorable environment. So perhaps it’s a mix issue or a matter of time.

Jeff Williams: Yes. We’re running about 55 or 56 days of sales in inventory. We did take $15 million out of the investment during the quarter and we’re right around the corner from tax time. So we have the opportunity to be smart with our pricing in our credit during tax time and minimize any negatives that you might otherwise see from prices floating down a little bit. So we’re trying to manage the inventory car by car and our mix is better than it was. We’ve got fewer dollars out there and think that we can make it through the next 6 or 9 months with moving through our inventory and efficient and effective way and utilized tax time to work through inventory one car at a time without any kind of major disruptions.

Vincent Caintic: Okay. And then second question, just around the — so you highlighted some of the pressures for the gross profit margin. And the second part that you were discussing about the 200 basis points related to quality challenges, the wholesaling of course, if you could go through that in more detail what’s driving that? And how much of an impact is that going to be going forward? Or is the business changing that to be?

Jeff Williams: Yes. That, again, as mentioned in the press release, that related to us having a lot of cars designated for retail. But then due to some capacity issues and some cost issues, we weren’t able to get those cars processed in retail conditions. So we ended up choosing the wholesale avenue lane for that product. And then we had some other challenges in the wholesale area that we are considering to be a transitional challenges that we’ll work through over time. We’ve probably got another quarter or so of some wholesale challenges. We consider those to be temporary and something that we can work through and we’ll work through over time.

Vincent Caintic: Okay, great. And last one for me, just sort of used car prices, the indices has started to decline. Any sense for kind of the sensitivity of your gross profit margins or how quickly that would turn over and start to accrete to your margins?