管理層發言
Good morning, and welcome to Vivid Seats' Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. I would now like to turn the call over to Austin Arnett.
Good morning, and welcome to Vivid Seats' Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. I am Austin Arnett, Vivid Seats' General Counsel. I'm joined today by Larry Fey, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Thomas, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the earnings press release we issued earlier this morning. The release and supplemental earnings slides are available on our Investor Relations website. Today's call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those discussed in our earnings release, most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and subsequent filings with the SEC. Today's call will also include references to adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure. To the extent reasonably available, a reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income or loss, its most directly comparable GAAP financial measure, can be found in our earnings release and supplemental earnings slides. And now I'll turn the call over to Larry.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Two quarters into the year, we are encouraged by the progress we have made and believe our strategic actions are delivering measurable results. Our second quarter results exceeded expectations as we delivered sequential quarterly growth across GOV, revenue, and adjusted EBITDA. Q2 benefited from extraordinary demand surrounding the FIFA World Cup with consumer engagement and transaction activity well above typical seasonal levels. Last quarter, we said that we expected the World Cup to generate demand somewhere between an A-List concert tour and Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour. The opportunity proved even more significant. The volume of activity was comparable to the entire Eras Tour, but largely concentrated into the second quarter rather than spread across two years. We successfully capitalized on the World Cup opportunity through our unique customer value proposition that is led by our lowest price guarantee and Vivid Seats Rewards Program.
Perhaps more importantly, we met customer expectations throughout the tournament with a continued focus on operational excellence centered around a great customer experience. Customer stress levels were understandably elevated given the high price points and once-in-a-lifetime nature of World Cup matches. While the event organizers' newly implemented ticketing system introduced operational complexity, we maintained a greater than 99.7% successful fulfillment rate for World Cup orders sold through our marketplace. This achievement reflects the outstanding execution of our award-winning customer service and operations teams. As always, every purchase on our platform is backed by our 100% Buyer Guarantee, ensuring tickets are valid, accurate, and delivered before the event. Although we don't expect every quarter to benefit from this same level of marquee event activity, these exceptional moments are an exciting part of the live events ecosystem.
Whether it's a record-setting global concert tour, a long-awaited championship run, or a major cultural event, these demand catalysts will continue to create meaningful opportunities for our business. As we look ahead, we remain focused on building momentum across our core business, executing our long-term strategy, and preparing for other seminal events like the 2028 Olympics. At the beginning of the year, we outlined a strategy focused on delivering differentiated value propositions to buyers and sellers while returning the business to sustainable growth. We will achieve those objectives by building and expanding upon Vivid Seats' core strengths, a leading customer value proposition, industry-leading seller technology, differentiated marketplace data and insights, and operational excellence. As we stated previously, we are focused on optimizing our core transaction funnel and improving the customer journey.
Throughout the quarter, we deployed foundational enhancements across our app and web experiences, designed to streamline event discovery, reduce friction, and improve conversion. We are excited about our robust product roadmap, which spans improved personalization, event discovery, seat selection, and transactional efficiency. With continued execution of this roadmap, we believe we will remain on track to return to year-over-year growth in the second half of 2026. Shifting to the seller side of our business, we are proud that SkyBox remains the leading ERP for professional sellers. Vivid Seats has a proud history supporting the needs of sellers, and we are eagerly returning to our roots as we align with sellers and deploy new capabilities. To that end, we recently launched our SkyBox broker-to-broker marketplace, which is designed to enable sellers to optimize inventory across the SkyBox network with minimal friction and expense.
While we only just launched this product, we are encouraged by the positive reception to its seamless integration with our SkyBox ERP. As we look ahead, our priorities remain unchanged. We are focused on enhancing the buyer experience through a unique value proposition, supporting our sellers, growing market share, improving profitability, and investing with discipline. The progress we've made thus far this year reinforces our confidence in our ability to execute our strategy and deliver long-term value creation. With that, I'll turn it over to Joe to walk through our second quarter financial results in more detail.
Thank you, Larry, and good morning, everyone. In the second quarter, we delivered sequential growth in GOV, revenue, and adjusted EBITDA, reflecting continued execution of our operational plan outlined at the beginning of the year. Q2 2026 Marketplace GOV was $659 million compared to $612 million in Q1 2026, reflecting quarter-to-quarter growth of $47 million, or 8%. Q2 2026 consolidated revenue was $130 million compared to $126 million in Q1 2026, reflecting quarter-to-quarter growth of $4 million or 3%. Within consolidated revenue, private label revenue grew 16% quarter-to-quarter, highlighting continued growth in the channel from the start of the year. Marketplace take rate was 15.8% in Q2 2026, essentially flat to 15.9% in Q1 2026. We continue to expect take rates to remain around 16% on a consolidated basis for the remainder of fiscal year 2026. Q2 2026 adjusted EBITDA was $12.6 million compared to $9.5 million in Q1 2026.
Adjusted EBITDA grew $3.1 million or 33%, showcasing the benefit of our operating leverage on an improved GOV and revenue base led this quarter by World Cup outperformance. We ended the second quarter with $137 million in cash. Alongside this cash balance, we are pleased to announce the renewal of our revolving credit facility, which includes an extended maturity date through August 2029. This extension reflects the continued long-term support of our banking syndicate and enhances our liquidity and financial flexibility as we pursue meaningful growth in 2027 and beyond. In terms of year-end outlook, we are encouraged by our first half results. For fiscal year 2026, we now expect Marketplace GOV in the range of $2.3 billion to $2.6 billion and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $34 million to $40 million. Our outlook reflects continued execution of our operational plan and financial strategy alongside our current view of industry demand trends.
As Larry mentioned, our results this quarter benefited from an unprecedented World Cup. We estimate that a mid-teens percentage of our Q2 GOV was generated by the World Cup, making it a significant driver of our quarterly performance. I will now turn the call back to Larry for closing remarks.
This quarter showcased what our platform can do when consumers have an extraordinary lineup of live events. We capitalized on the opportunity, supported our customers, and delivered strong results. At the same time, it's important to recognize that event cycles are inherently episodic. Our focus remains on growing our business and optimizing the elements we control to deliver long-term value creation. Operator, please open the call for questions.
分析師問答
Our first question comes from Cameron Mansson-Perrone from Morgan Stanley.
First, I wanted to ask just on the competitive backdrop and any color you'd be willing to provide on how that's been pacing this year, particularly through a recent period that between the NBA Finals and the World Cup, we've obviously seen a lot of attractive GOV opportunity in resale. And then I was also hoping you could hit on take rate and how you view that as a competitive tool, particularly within these active periods. If I look back to the Eras Tour, I think take rate dropped to the 15% range as you leaned into trying to capture as much of that GOV as possible. So curious within the World Cup framework, how you approached that and what your logic today is around take rate and policy going forward.
Yes, thanks, Cameron. On the competitive landscape, there has been a continuation of the trend we've spoken to in the past that relative to peak levels, we've seen some amount of moderation from our largest competitor. Moderate or modest is probably the operative word. There continues to be substantial activity and competitive intensity from them, even though it is off of peak levels. This year, year-to-date, we've seen several others continue to seek to fill the gap that the largest competitor has left, particularly in performance marketing channels. When you roll it up, it is a little bit better than it was at its worst, but it is still at elevated levels where it appears a priority is being placed on volume, scale, and share relative to whatever the optimal efficient frontier would be on a profitability basis. That ties into the answer on the take rate question. We've consistently seen when you have the largest events with higher price points, there's more pressure on take rate.
The Super Bowl is an annual example of that. The World Series, to a degree, is another recurring example where higher price points settle in an equilibrium with a lower percentage take rate, but still a healthy absolute dollar fee. We continue to aspire to deliver a unique and differentiated value proposition. As market levels move, we adjust accordingly. In the aggregate numbers for the World Cup, the take rate was below the broader average as we sought to compete and offer differentiated value. It wasn't quite as low as the Taylor Swift dynamic, and that's at least partially because there were more one-time customers in this World Cup group, so less lifetime value to be had, in our estimation.
Our next question comes from Dan Kurnos from Benchmark.
Larry, maybe let me ask the World Cup question a little differently. Seems like you obviously had a nice boost from it, but given what you guys are trying to accomplish in shifting traffic to an app and the differentiated brand proposition, how much did that resonate? I understand your commentary that a lot of these customers are one-time and may not be recurring, especially if they came from abroad. But in terms of the messaging you're trying to get out there, were you able to push that in the marketplace? Do you think it resonated? Were you able to shift incremental traffic as a result of this event? And do you think that you gained a little bit of momentum out of it?
Yes, we were pleased with the overall results. We outpunched our weight a bit on our share of the World Cup volume, which is exciting and implicitly indicates we were reasonably successful in getting our message out and having folks find the value proposition in the app, or at least enough folks. If everyone found it, we would have done even better. So there's still a balance of proliferating that message and turning it into broad awareness and transactions. Not only did we outpace on share of the event, we also delivered against that massive event operationally. There was a lot of chatter and many social media stories, and when I look at what we delivered from a customer experience standpoint, it couldn't have gone better. On every metric, our World Cup performance was better than the average event despite it being higher stress and higher complexity. Now we need time to play out and hopefully those folks who had a good experience will come back, but it's a good indicative example of how we see this flywheel working. If you can punch above your weight on initial customer acquisition and deliver a differentiated customer experience, you should get more than your share of folks coming back, unless something goes wrong in the future.
Got it. That's helpful. And then I have to ask just on the flip side, Larry, obviously a lot of noise coming out of D.C. Some people think there might be some expanded state-by-state regulation. Any broader, high-level thoughts as that begins to roll out would be helpful.
There continues to be elevated chatter. We talked about Maine, Vermont, and now D.C., and you see natural ebbs and flows across the regulatory landscape. In the near term, nothing that's happened makes us think there will be a meaningful impact due to a couple of reasons. The jurisdictions that have made changes are on the smaller side, and there are delayed implementations. More importantly, the process and frameworks that have been used leave some room for questioning. In D.C. specifically, they excluded primary and sports. That's an interesting starting point. Why would sports and primary be different than secondary theater shows, for example? We'll see where those move in the future. Over the longer term, we continue to believe there will inevitably be events where more people want to attend than there are seats. You need a mechanism to separate who will attend. When demand outpaces supply, price-based mechanisms have historically been the most effective pathways. They're not the only pathways, but when other pathways are used you tend to create shadow markets; demand will find its level. Keeping legitimate, transparent pathways feels like the customer-friendly way to service this market, and I haven't seen a compelling alternative put forward.
Our next question comes from Ryan Sigdahl from Craig-Hallum Capital Group.
Larry, Joe, I want to say on World Cup, I think I caught it right, 99.7% fulfillment rate in the prepared remarks. That's very, very good. There has been a lot of public controversy around one of your peers regarding fulfillment rates and consumer experiences. Do you think a highly publicized event like this with some of that bad publicity can change the narrative in a bigger, faster way for you guys, as you highlight the value, user experience, fulfillment rate, and everything else you provide? Or is it much of the same that everyone forgets about shortly after the event happens?
Thanks, Ryan. It's a great question. The bet we are making is that in this world of increased communication transparency, word of mouth and social media connectivity will spread positive experiences. If people have positive experiences, they will tell friends and recommend accordingly, especially if you're stacking good experiences: a better experience, taken care of when something went wrong, and a better price. That should spread. Historically, parts of this industry have been more transactional, which makes some sense because it's a lower frequency category and feedback isn't as immediate. If you have a bad experience ordering food delivery, you see it in the numbers quickly. In our instance, it can be six, nine, or twelve months later, and many customers are structurally not repeating. So it can be tougher in the near term to justify the investment. But that's the bet we're making. It is not the bet everyone's making. Only time will tell, but we believe it's the right thing to do and that over time it will prove to be the economically right thing to do.
Maybe transitioning that, you have some product enhancements in the roadmap. Maybe talk through what you accomplished in Q2, what's coming in the back half of the year, or into 2027?
We focused on our core transaction funnel. By that I mean someone who knows what they want to see arriving at the site, finding the show, and then having a journey that delivers the best seat at the best value relative to their preferences with no unnecessary friction. That's been the first focus: remove unnecessary text, unnecessary clicks, multiple steps, and other sources of friction across web and app. The app is a little ahead of some web improvements. Heading into the second half of the year, we get excited about the upper funnel journey as customers identify the seat they want. Price, view, relative value, amenities, and other features all matter. We want to surface the right information so customers have confidence they're making the right purchase, which should lift conversion. On the app side, it's about creating reasons to stick around and come back. We've rolled out upgraded onboarding for first-time app users to improve the welcome experience and create ongoing engagement. It doesn't need to be daily, but if customers have a monthly reason to check the app, we'll be in a better position when they're ready to buy. If they come to the app and we deliver a quality experience, we'll have a strong chance to win that business.
Our next question comes from Ralph Schackart from William Blair.
Larry, maybe piggyback on your last response on the app. Can you talk about the growth you saw in app traffic in the quarter and remind us of the strategies you have to encourage more app traffic? Any update from Q2 and your thoughts going forward to continue to drive more traffic to the app?
We believe our app value proposition is best in class. Generally, we will have lower prices available in the app than on the website. Communicating that and building awareness is easier said than done, but as folks download the app—often as part of the fulfillment journey—they need instructions on where to get tickets and will have logistics questions the day of the event. The app becomes a clear repository of information to help through fulfillment and a place to plant seeds for future events. The strategy is to build an awareness and welcoming funnel so customers know their next journey starting on the app will lead to an optimal outcome. We started that initiative in Q3 of last year and have seen compelling metrics since rolling it out. App volume growth has outpaced the broader market. We are about to start lapping those changes, so the bar is going up in Q3, but we continue to innovate and push out upgrades. If our bet is right, over time customers who had a good experience last year and earlier this year will come back in their next buying cycle, and we should see more sessions and orders coming through the app if we've delivered a quality experience.
Our next question comes from Brad Erickson from RBC.
This is Audrey Stuart on for Brad. Your new private label partner ramped better than expected in Q1. Can you provide an update on Q2 performance for this partner? Walk us through what gives you confidence in this relationship and that your rebuilt onboarding stack will enable you to add more partners from this pipeline in the near term.
We continue to see that partner outperform the expectations we had when they launched. This was a competitive win with a volume baseline our platform has driven material uplift against, which is a testament to the efficacy of our private label offering. We've pushed incremental upgrades throughout the year and have more coming in the second half, many focused on how quickly we can bring someone online and give them tools and capabilities to create a bespoke experience for their customers. We've heard a notable shift in our customers' view of the pacing and predictability of our delivery, which helps them plan. Step one is helping current customers' businesses thrive; if we do that well, we'll offer a compelling opportunity for the next wave of partners. All those leading indicators are flashing positively, and we're excited to build a pipeline and execute in an automated way. The underlying data in private label is encouraging. We also previously discussed the large private label customer loss at the end of July last year. As we sit here today, we have lapped that loss and are excited to see private label return from a substantial headwind into a growth driver moving forward.
Our next question comes from Tom Forte from Maxim Group.
Great. Larry and Joe, congrats on the quarter. I have one question and one follow-up. First, the World Cup was a great example of the universal appeal of live sports and fans' passion. Can you provide your current thoughts on your international expansion efforts?
Thanks, Tom. It was a very fun event with many memorable moments. On the international front, we continue to see reasons to believe the international opportunity is getting bigger and remains untapped potential for us. We started our journey a couple of years ago and paused some investment late last year to focus on optimizing our core transaction funnel for North America, which will directly benefit the international business. We are approaching a point in our product roadmap where, probably by the end of this year, we'll return to pushing out targeted international upgrades specific to those markets, which should re-accelerate growth in international. Sitting here today, we've built a lot of GOV internationally, we're contribution margin positive and well ahead of schedule on margin, and we've had some nice events this year such as the World Cup and Celine Dion. It continues to be an exciting opportunity and a vector we plan to deliver more against as we head into 2027.
Excellent. All right, so my follow-up is more boring. Can you give us your current thoughts on cash conversion for '26?
It remains consistent with our framework. If you look at CapEx, interest expense, and taxes, interest expense has ticked up a bit with rate expectations, offset by CapEx coming in a little lighter due to efficiency initiatives. Sum those up and it ends up in the high $30 million to $40 million range, such that you need that level of EBITDA assuming flat GOV, and then working capital growth or contraction linked to GOV will be the ultimate determinant. As we head into the back half, our continued focus on returning to growth would put working capital as a source of cash. On a recurring fundamental basis, if we deliver the GOV growth with the EBITDA guidance we're putting forward, this would be a cash-generative year.
Our next question is from Steven McDermott from Bank of America.
So World Cup and sports are getting a lot of focus this quarter, but if you look at the other verticals, it looked like concerts improved and theater stayed somewhat soft. Could you provide some color on the dynamics you're seeing in the other verticals? Thank you.
Two dimensions. Overall industry volumes in Q2 outside of the World Cup were softer. There's room for speculation: is that softness structural or did the World Cup suck oxygen out of the room? We generally believe the latter. If you are spending significant money to attend a World Cup game, it will come at the expense of other events. We'll see in Q3 and Q4 as we embark on the rest of the event calendar. Things have been relatively quiet and a little softer post-World Cup, but the jury is still out on the back half of the year, particularly the fourth quarter on-sale calendar. The second dimension is competitive intensity. We've continued to see increasing competitive intensity in the theater category, which is interesting given the nature of that competition. That is part of what you're seeing in the theater results. Another element is Vegas, which is theater-heavy. Many gambling operators in Vegas are talking about leisure travel being soft this year, particularly the lower-end consumer within the leisure market.
Overall Vegas stability has been propped up by the high end and conferences, so some of that Vegas weakness is coming through in the theater result. On AOVs, it's difficult to predict given big events. Even with 19 days of World Cup in Q3, it will have a positive effect and I would be surprised if AOV is not up year-over-year in Q3. For Q4 it's speculative: a lot depends on the roster of new concerts and on which teams make the World Series. Predicting any single quarter is filled with landmines. Over the long term, we expect AOVs will increase at inflation plus a couple hundred basis points, but single-quarter calls are challenging.
Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.