Upbound Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:UPBD) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kyle Joseph: Got it. Helpful. Thanks. And then just one follow-up to just kind of think about, kind of hear how you’re thinking about the Genesis. I know it’s obviously early – in the early innings there. But is that going to be reported as part of the Acima segment? Is that going to be its own segment? And just kind of how you’re thinking about it, the integration there and how it impacts the P&L really more into next year and beyond?

Mitchell Fadel: Yes. So the majority of it, Kyle, will be in the Acima segment. If you think about the two products that we have with the Genesis partnership, the general-purpose credit card, that one will be split between the Rent-A-Center business and Acima depending on where the customer was sourced originally. But then on the other product, the SMB retail product that’s going to be all flowing through the Acima segment with fee revenue.

Kyle Joseph: Very helpful. Thanks for taking the questions.

Mitchell Fadel: I think next is Anthony Chukumba.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Chukumba from Loop Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Anthony Chukumba: Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to focus on Acima. Just wanted to get an update on the retail partner pipeline, whether you’re talking sort of small and regional chains and also large national retailers? Thanks.

Mitchell Fadel: Yes. Good morning, Anthony. Some nice regional wins. We don’t talk specific names. Obviously, we will when there’s bigger names. But specific names on the regional side, the SMB side, continuing to grow, continuing to grow our marketplace as we mentioned as well. But we’ve had some good wins, some good growth. Our team out there still signing up hundreds really of retail partners every month. And again, we’ve had some bigger regional wins. So pretty happy with the growth trajectory there. On the largest accounts, it’s just such a long cycle on those, but we continue to have great conversations. The team we mentioned adding to the strategic accounts team because they’ve got so much more in the pipeline and working with a lot of big names.

And we’ve had some regional wins, not any nationwide big-box names yet, but working on a lot of them and the cycle is long, but certainly, the conversations are – that are happening are the best – in the best place we’ve been in since we started working on large accounts. So pretty optimistic we’ll have some – we’ll continue to have good regional wins and optimistic we’ll have some big national wins down the road.

Anthony Chukumba: Got it. And then, I think Fahmi testing this a little bit in his remarks. But I guess when you think about potential share repurchases, I mean, are you thinking, well, we need to get down to a certain leverage ratio before we start buying back stock? Or would you maybe think about being opportunistic with that?

Fahmi Karam: Yes. I think from a capital allocation standpoint, the priorities necessarily haven’t changed from what we’ve given you commentary in the past, especially in this environment with some of the uncertainty that we’ve talked about kind of left in the market. Our first priority is still going to be to pay down debt and opportunistically look at share repurchases as they come up. And I think we’ve been – we’ve demonstrated that ability in the past to be really good stewards of capital when we have excess capital to return that to shareholders. But the mindset we’re in now is, again, reinvest in the business first, sustain what we think is a healthy dividend, pay down debt and then be opportunistic on anything else. And we demonstrated that in the second quarter. We paid down our ABL facility by $90 million, ended it there with fully unutilized at the end of the quarter. So we feel good about what we’ve done from a liquidity and balance sheet standpoint.