DealerTrack Holdings TRAK
July 22, 2008 - 10:25am EST by
devo791
2008 2009
Price: 16.25 EPS
Shares Out. (in M): 0 P/E
Market Cap (in $M): 692 P/FCF
Net Debt (in $M): 0 EBIT 0 0
TEV (in $M): 0 TEV/EBIT

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Description

Investment Thesis
DealerTrack is a high quality transaction services and subscription software business serving auto lenders and dealers.  They are the overwhelmingly dominant market leader in their core business of credit application processing, have 95%+ recurring revenues, possess 30% EBIT margins with very high incremental margins, require negligible capital (doing 45M+ in TTM FCF on less than 40 M in invested capital), have been growing very rapidly (organic growth of 15 – 20%), and have significant growth opportunities ahead of it.  The CEO, Mark O’Neil, has done an impressive job of building the business over the last 7 years and has quite the track record, having co-founded and built the very successful CarMax until his departure in 2000.  Most importantly, the company is very misunderstood by the market and as a result is selling at a bargain valuation of 9.2x cash earnings and 6.5x EBIT.
 
Overview - Transactions
 
DealerTrack’s core business, ToolKit, is the dominant credit application processor for auto loans with a financing network of 22k+ auto dealers (over 90% of franchised dealers in the US) and 650+ auto lenders.  Transaction revenues are around 60% of revenues, of which at least half of is generated by ToolKit.  A significant portion of the remaining transaction revenues would also appear to be tied closely to the credit application process, such as the reselling of credit reports and their nascent eDocs/eContracting product where they aim to similarly convert the handling of loan contracts from a heavily paper-based one to an electronic process.
 
This is a very young business as DealerTrack was created by JPMorgan Chase, Americredit, and Wells Fargo in 2001 to transform the processing of auto credit applications from a time-consuming paper-based process to a faster, easier, and more accurate electronic process.  To give you an idea of how rapidly this business has developed, DealerTrack’s volumes have grown from under 7 M transactions in 2002 to 92 M transactions in the trailing 12 months.  Around 60% of the industry’s volumes are now processed electronically, with the remaining 40% (smaller credit unions and local banks) gradually moving away from their legacy paper-based processes. 
 
Having created the business, DealerTrack dominates the market with around 60% market share.  There is essentially only one other competitor, RouteOne, a similar platform created by the big 4 captive finance companies (GMAC, Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota).  DealerTrack is particularly dominant when you consider that an estimated 1/2 to 2/3 of RouteOne’s business comes from its founding captives (it may even be higher as the big 4 do over 20% of auto loans and RouteOne is generally estimated to process the applications for ~25% of auto loans).  Excluding RouteOne’s owners, I believe that DealerTrack has around 80% of the electronic market compared to around 20% for RouteOne, leaving ToolKit in a particularly strong position to capture incremental growth from the roughly 40% of loan applications that have still not converted to electronic processing.  Furthermore, the captive financing companies have been losing market share in recent years, which also bodes well for TRAK’s future growth.
 
Overview - Subscriptions
 
The company has used the relationships that they have formed with auto dealers in the ToolKit business to diversify and offer an integrated suite of subscription software products.  As evidenced by credit application processing, this is an industry that has been very slow to adopt new technologies.  Ten to fifteen years ago, the only technology that existed within an auto dealership was one of the legacy dealer management systems (DMS), principally ADP and Reynolds & Reynolds.  A DMS is essentially the heart of a dealer’s back-office operations and aids with functions such as vehicle sales, inventory, general ledger, parts inventory and invoicing, payroll, and personnel management.  Over the last ten to fifteen years, a wide array of small software vendors have introduced new products for dealers, and apparently the result is that outside of the core DMS systems, much of the software used by dealerships is not integrated which results in poor workflows, repetitious data entry, etc.  Importantly, the DMS providers, for the most part, have not strayed from their core offerings. 
 
Over the last few years DealerTrack has bought a number of small companies in this area with the strategy of offering an end-to-end, integrated solution for dealers that covers the full spectrum from DMS, finance and insurance (F&I), desking, aftermarket sales, inventory analytics, etc.  The process of selling the auto dealer industry on their strategy is still in the very early innings, but I think it should gain significant traction over time due to the obvious benefits.  Asbury Automotive Group, one of the largest dealership groups in the US with 93 locations, has already bought into DealerTrack’s strategy.  They are in the process of implementing Arkona (DealerTrack’s DMS) in all of their locations, with the intention of standardizing on DealerTrack’s product suite over time.  This relationship with Asbury is a particularly strong selling tool for the company, and should help to accelerate their sales momentum.  Although they have assembled their product portfolio through acquisitions, their integrated strategy has created significant synergies as well, and has thus been able to drive strong organic growth.  Organic growth in their subscriptions business was 47% in 2006, 29% in 2007, and even in a terrible environment grew 24% organically last quarter.
 
Strong organic growth
 
The most appealing aspect of DealerTrack is the significant runway for growth that I believe the company has ahead of it.  While the company has certainly had significant acquired growth over the last few years as they have assembled their product portfolio, the organic growth has been equally strong.  In 2006 and 2007, organic growth was 34% and 22%, respectively.  Even with a significant pullback in subprime loan volumes that took place industry-wide in mid-Q4 2007, the company was able to drive 18% organic growth in Q4, and 13% organic growth in Q1.  Absent the cyclicality in the industry, I believe that organic growth is currently around 15 – 20%.  This strong growth is being fuelled by a number of drivers which I expect will persist for a while.
 
The biggest and most dependable source of growth should be in the core credit application processing business, ToolKit.  As mentioned earlier, only 60% of applications in the industry are processed electronically, so there is still 40% of the market to go after.  With at least 80% share of the market excluding the big 4 auto captives, TRAK is uniquely positioned to win this business.  Furthermore, I believe this is the sort of industry that can and should achieve 95 - 100% penetration in a reasonable amount of time.  As dealers are increasingly making use of ToolKit to submit credit applications to lenders, their desire to go through the laborious, error-prone paper-based processes diminishes.  The result is that more and more credit unions are now calling on DealerTrack to sign them up for ToolKit because the auto dealers that they commonly deal with have been putting pressure on them.  I think it will eventually get to the point where if you are a credit union or local bank that refuses to go on an electronic system like ToolKit, none of the dealers are going to bother with the effort of sending you credit applications, which should ultimately drive the electronic penetration pretty close to 100% in a reasonable amount of time.  The fact that electronic processing is already 60% penetrated and the ToolKit business is still growing rapidly is a good sign that this should ultimately be the case.  The opportunity to add another 35 – 40% of the market would more than double the size of the ToolKit business by revenues (especially since these lower volume lenders would generate higher revenues per transaction) at very high incremental margins (an incremental transaction is 100% margin).
 
Another product that I think has significant potential is their eDocs and eContracting products.  The current contribution from this product is relatively insignificant.  As mentioned earlier, the idea here is to make the processing of the loan file electronic, in the same way that ToolKit has made the processing of the credit applications electronic.  The dealers and auto lenders that I have spoken with all seem to agree that this product is an obvious need for the industry and will ultimately attain widespread use.  This is also a very large potential market that could be as large as the ToolKit business.  With ToolKit they receive around $1.60 - 1.70 per credit application and auto lenders will typically look at 2 - 3 apps for every prime loan they write and 6 - 10 apps for every subprime loan.  With the loan contract processing product, they aim to realize a $4 – 4.50 transaction fee from the lender for each loan contract in addition to recurring subscription fees from the auto dealers.  They already have 35 – 40% of the lender base on-board for the product (including one major captive), but they think that they need at least one more major captive to really open the floodgates.  Once they hit that tipping point it would essentially force all of the dealers to adopt the system, which should allow for pretty rapid growth similar to what we have seen from ToolKit over the last 7 years.
 
The company has a number of subscription products that have particularly nice growth potential as well.  The one that I think is worth singling out is Arkona, their DMS, since DMS systems are such a significant portion of a dealer’s IT spend.  The DMS market alone is $2.5 B and when Arkona was acquired a year ago it only had revenues of $14 M.  My understanding is that the dominant DMS providers (ADP and Reynolds & Reynolds) have been slow to innovate, which has given DealerTrack the opportunity to break into what has been a very stable, consolidated market with two entrenched competitors.  DealerTrack’s proposition of a simplified and integrated IT infrastructure is pretty appealing and I think will prove to be very compelling, and has already resonated with at least one of the major dealership groups in the US.
 
Finally, in addition to the Arkona and eDocs/eContracting products, the company has a number of other early stage products that each have the potential to be very large.  The most important ones are: their independent dealer initiative, which extends the Toolkit product into independent used car lots; an accessories solution, which is a difficult-to-create electronics parts catalogue that is still close to a year from being ready; aftermarket selling tools; and a sales leads network.  The abundance of opportunities like these is what gives me confidence that the growth runway ahead of DealerTrack should be very long.
 
While the company has not spoken much about it yet, I believe there is also a significant international opportunity here in all of their businesses.  They obviously have quite a bit on their plate right now within the North American market, but I think that over the next few years management will likely start looking into the potential that exists here as well.
 
Cheap valuation because it is misunderstood
 
Backing out $221 M in cash (which is 37% of the market cap), the company trades for only 9.2x cash earnings and 6.5x EBIT, which I think is a great price for a high quality business with 15 – 20% organic growth prospects and a long runway ahead of it.
 
The largest reason I believe the company is misunderstood, is because of one-time costs they have baked into their guidance and which have not been explicitly broken out of their reported numbers.  The midpoint of their guidance for 2008 is 68.7 M in EBITDA, but in this number they have included 7 M in one-time litigation costs.  The litigation concerns a patent infringement lawsuit that they originally filed against RouteOne in January 2004, and which is finally going to trial this summer.  These litigation costs are clearly one-time in nature (especially since RouteOne is essentially Tookit’s only competitor!) and actually represents decent upside potential for the company should DealerTrack win an injunction to shutdown the RouteOne platform or force them to pay royalties to license the key patents that they believe have been infringed upon. 
 
Furthermore, the company’s EBITDA guidance includes around $14 M in stock option costs.  Ordinarily companies that guide to a “non-GAAP EBITDA” figure that have unusually large stock option costs, simply exclude these costs from their guidance.  For some reason TRAK doesn’t, even though they do exclude stock compensation from their cash net income figure (it’s interesting to note that the company would trade at 5.3x EBITDA if you excluded those stock-based costs).  The stock compensation costs are very inflated due to grants that were made at significantly higher prices.  Roughly speaking, around half of the cost is from options that were struck around $34 and the other half is from restricted shares that were granted around $30.  Based on my estimates, the actual economic cost going forward should be closer to $6 M, which is a lot closer to what you would expect from a company based outside of the major technology centers like Silicon Valley.  The GAAP costs should actually start ramping down next year (although sell-size analysts never bother to account for this in their estimates) as the restricted stock expense accrual in particular goes from $8 M to $1 M (i.e. there will be a $7 M reduction in expenses, and even if they granted the same number of shares again for next year it would still be around a $3 – 4 M reduction).
 
I have used the $6 M cost in my figures, and so my EBIT figure for 2008 is 26% higher, with an additional $15 M ($7 M + $14 M - $6M), than the company’s guidance of around $57 M.  Additionally, because the litigation costs have begun ramping last quarter, and the year over year increases in stock comp have also been substantial, these two items combined have made EBITDA growth look dismal in recent quarters.  While EBITDA growth used to consistently exceed 35% year-over-year, in Q4 it was only +3% and last quarter it declined by 9%.  If you strip out these misleading costs, however, you can see that the EBITDAO growth which has also consistently exceeded 35% has only slowed down to +16% in Q4 and +18% in Q1.  Analysts on the conference call even stress the ‘margin erosion’ even though the margin declines are less than 200 bps from ~35% EBITDAO margins, which is pretty impressive performance considering the cyclical pressures on high incremental margin revenues over the last couple quarters.
 
I should point out that I suspect the company will have to at least slightly lower their estimates again next quarter considering the poor auto sales in recent months, however, I think this is well known and far more than accounted for in the current valuation.
 
The second major reason I think the company is misunderstood is because it is simply lumped in with the other “auto stocks”, which have been sold off indiscriminately in recent months as auto sales have been poor (even worse in people’s eyes, the company is not just tied to auto sales, but the financing of auto sales).  DealerTrack, however, is much different from the automotive dealer groups.  Around 35 – 40% of the business is particularly recurring as it is generated by monthly subscription fees with an average contract life of 30 months.  The remainder of the business, which is tied to transaction volumes, really isn’t that volatile.  Auto sales simply don’t fluctuate much from year, and historically don’t exceed +/- 10% in a given year (and it’s not like 2007 was a peak year either, 2008 will be the 3rd consecutive down year).  The percentage of sales that are financed or leased also doesn’t change much from year to year, with the cash pay portion of the market around 8-10% each year. 
 
The reason why auto dealers are far more influenced by auto sales is because a) their margins are only 2-4%, b) they can experience gross margin pressure in a downturn (in addition to the obvious G&A deleveraging), and c) they almost universally have fairly leveraged balance sheets, even excluding the floor-plan financing.  On the other hand, DealerTrack has 33 – 35% EBITDA margins in a capex-light business and no debt (there is over $5/share in cash on the balance sheet).  TRAK’s potential earnings volatility is not even close to what is possible for the auto dealers.  Finally, given all of the concerns over short-term economic impacts, I think people are forgetting that this is still a very high organic growth company as well (unlike dealers which grow/shrink with the economy and must do acquisitions to grow the business).
 
Catalysts
 
Finally, I think there are a number of catalysts that may drive the share price higher over the next few quarters.
 
-          In March 2008, the company announced a $75 M share repurchase program.  This amounts to 12 – 13% of the shares outstanding.  I think it is highly likely that the company has repurchased shares during Q2, if not fully used up the authorization.  In their Q1 earnings release, they specifically stated: “While we have not yet been able to repurchase stock during the past month due to legal restriction, we remain committed to repurchasing stock in the open market and expect the $75 million stock repurchase program authorized by our Board of Directors to begin shortly.”  They also went so far as to point out that they could easily complete the program and still have plenty of cash left over to fund all of their initiatives (it’s only 1/3rd of their cash).  Furthermore, I think that the recent declines in the stock price have also increased the likelihood that the company has completed a significant buyback this quarter. 
 
I think this is particularly important because if a substantial share repurchase has taken place this quarter, I expect it to be unusually accretive to the cash EPS that Wall Street bases its earnings estimates on.  The reason for this is that the current yield on their cash balances is extremely low ($5.4 M in interest on $221 M in cash), and so the earnings yield differential is pretty substantial (7% on the stock vs. 1.5% on the cash).  Even if the company lowers their EBITDA guidance (which seems to be likely), their cash EPS guidance could potentially increase with a buyback.  Last quarter when they lowered their guidance the stock actually increased over the subsequent few weeks.
 
-          As I mentioned earlier, litigation and stock compensation costs are particularly elevated in 2008.  Starting in Q3 of this year, the bulk of the litigation costs will be behind them and this will start to make year over year comparison look a lot better.  As for stock compensation costs, the headwinds here should also be behind them in 2009, and as I explained before they should even see some reductions in these expenses in 2009.  In the same way that these costs have masked their strong performance thus far in 2008, I think it is going to make their growth in 2009 look especially impressive relative to the temporarily depressed 2008 results.
 
-          The lawsuit against RouteOne.  The timing of this event is obviously uncertain, but the trial is currently set for this summer, so we shouldn’t have to wait too long for results.  There’s obviously big potential upside from this (with no downside) should they win an injunction to shutdown RouteOne, or simply license out their key patents in exchange for a recurring royalty stream.
 
-          Auto sales will eventually rebound after 3 consecutive down years.  This may take another year, but I suspect by 2010 the economy will finally be a tailwind for the company instead of the headwind that it currently is.

Catalyst

1) In March 2008, the company announced a $75 M share repurchase program. This amounts to 12 – 13% of the shares outstanding. I think it is highly likely that the company has repurchased shares during Q2, if not fully used up the authorization. In their Q1 earnings release, they specifically stated: “While we have not yet been able to repurchase stock during the past month due to legal restriction, we remain committed to repurchasing stock in the open market and expect the $75 million stock repurchase program authorized by our Board of Directors to begin shortly.” They also went so far as to point out that they could easily complete the program and still have plenty of cash left over to fund all of their initiatives (it’s only 1/3rd of their cash). Furthermore, I think that the recent declines in the stock price have also increased the likelihood that the company has completed a significant buyback this quarter.

I think this is particularly important because if a substantial share repurchase has taken place this quarter, I expect it to be unusually accretive to the cash EPS that Wall Street bases its earnings estimates on. The reason for this is that the current yield on their cash balances is extremely low ($5.4 M in interest on $221 M in cash), and so the earnings yield differential is pretty substantial (7% on the stock vs. 1.5% on the cash). Even if the company lowers their EBITDA guidance (which seems to be likely), their cash EPS guidance could potentially increase with a buyback. Last quarter when they lowered their guidance the stock actually increased over the subsequent few weeks.

2) As I mentioned earlier, litigation and stock compensation costs are particularly elevated in 2008. Starting in Q3 of this year, the bulk of the litigation costs will be behind them and this will start to make year over year comparison look a lot better. As for stock compensation costs, the headwinds here should also be behind them in 2009, and as I explained before they should even see some reductions in these expenses in 2009. In the same way that these costs have masked their strong performance thus far in 2008, I think it is going to make their growth in 2009 look especially impressive relative to the temporarily depressed 2008 results.

3) The lawsuit against RouteOne. The timing of this event is obviously uncertain, but the trial is currently set for this summer, so we shouldn’t have to wait too long for results. There’s obviously big potential upside from this (with no downside) should they win an injunction to shutdown RouteOne, or simply license out their key patents in exchange for a recurring royalty stream.

4) Auto sales will eventually rebound after 3 consecutive down years. This may take another year, but I suspect by 2010 the economy will finally be a tailwind for the company instead of the headwind that it currently is.
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