ABNB - Airbnb Inc. (ABNB) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)
2024-05-30 20:50:22 ET
Airbnb, Inc. (ABNB)
Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference Call
May 30, 2024, 02:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Ellie Mertz - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Richard Clarke - Bernstein
Presentation
Richard Clarke
Great. Well, good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining us here for the 2:30 session. For those who don't know me, I'm Richard Clarke, I'm the analyst that covers the global hotel and leisure sector. I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Airbnb's CFO, Ellie Mertz. Thanks for joining us.
For anyone who hasn't managed to stay on one of these sessions by this stage of the conference, just a reminder that any questions you'd like me to include into my questions, please put them in the Pigeonhole, and I'll include them. As long as they're not kind of customer feedback on an Airbnb property, I can probably include them into my listings.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Richard Clarke
Some of you probably were there yesterday, but I pitched Airbnb as my best idea -- one of the best ideas on Tuesday, apologies. What I said is that this is a company that everyone should love, right? It just been up an 18% revenue growth quarter, margins are in the mid-30%s, converting more than 100% of that EBITDA into free cash flow, and then beginning to talk about optionality that could grow faster than that. So, why do you think -- not everyone does sort of love maybe Airbnb on the investment side. What do you think is maybe misunderstood at this point?
Ellie Mertz
Everyone doesn't love us?
Richard Clarke
I do.
Ellie Mertz
Okay.
Richard Clarke
Don't look at me.
Ellie Mertz
Well, first, thanks for having me. I think there's a couple of components about our core business that people probably don't fully appreciate. I think it's hopefully obvious that we have a very strong brand. We like to say that Airbnb is a noun and a verb. We have extremely high customer awareness. And I think some investors take from that everybody who's going to try Airbnb has already done so. And I think what's interesting in the underlying data that we look at is that across the world, there is relatively strong brand awareness, but there continues to be a gap around consideration, meaning a lot of people have heard about Airbnb, but they haven't yet tried it, or they've tried us once, but they don't try us for every travel experience that we have. And what this tells us is that there's a huge opportunity both globally as well as our core markets to continue to explain why Airbnb is actually much better for various types of travel and to convert some of that awareness into incremental consideration and incremental bookings. I think we'll talk about it throughout the session, but there is various aspects of our roadmap that are specifically focused on bridging that consideration gap, in particular, making sure that Airbnb is increasingly reliable, it's increasingly affordable, and that the product is extremely easy to use. And we view each of these as really nice growth levers in terms of driving the core business.
I think the second component about the business that exists today that investors don't always have an appreciation for is that, for the past decade, Airbnb has indeed been a global brand, meaning we have a presence in over 220 countries and regions across the globe. And I think when people hear that, they assume that we have covered the globe and there's nowhere else to go. And yet when we look at the data internally, what we see is that we have varied levels of penetration across the globe. And in fact, today, our top five core markets continue to be the vast majority of our business, whereas the level of penetration that we've been able to achieve in those core markets is, in many cases, an order of magnitude higher than it is in the rest of the markets. And that's what gives us the encouragement to continue to focus on new markets to really focus on and deploy our full-funnel global marketing approach and to localize because the opportunity set across a vast array of markets continues to be quite large....
Airbnb, Inc. (ABNB) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)