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Text: Today, we plan to start the call by educating investors about our current business and our growth strategy, followed by a discussion of the value proposition that we believe will drive business results and stockholder value going forward.
I will also provide a review of our operational and high-level financial results for the three months ended June 30, 2021.
We believe Genie Energy offers unique investment opportunity within the energy space.
Genie operates in two core parts of the energy industry, retail and renewables.
Our global retail energy businesses are asset-light operations that market and resell electricity and natural gas to consumers and small enterprises in deregulated markets, while our renewables business sells services and installs solar solutions.
Currently, our U.S. retail business is the primary driver of our profits, but we believe the other segments have tremendous potential.
Our current businesses are supported by our enterprise function, which is responsible for customer acquisition, risk management and customer care.
Our marketing and sales professionals leverage deep data analysis to identify market opportunities and efficiencies that our sales and marketing teams can then exploit through a variety of sales channels, offering green or traditional options as well as fixed and variable rate plans.
This data analysis also allows us to segment current and potential customers with specific payback periods based on product and customer type, while also enabling us to bring a higher level of customer care and retention and also offer customer reward programs.
Finally, our risk management function acquires both green energy and carbon-based supply and utilizing hedging strategies to reduce commodity volatility risk.
From the total enterprise viewpoint, we believe three key areas differentiate us from the competition and will allow us to create outsized stockholder returns over time.
First, we have derisked the company through market product and geographical diversification with retail energy operations across 16 U.S. jurisdictions, The U.K. and Scandinavia and the rapidly growing solar energy business in the U.S. Second, we differentiate ourselves from the competition through our strong balance sheet with minimal to no debt, an asset-light business model, which not only reduces our relative cost of capital that allows us to self-fund and invest in growth opportunities, such as expanding our international retail energy and domestic solar businesses.
It also provides us the flexibility to opportunistically grow our U.S. retail business through a disciplined approach to taking share in existing markets or enter new markets as conditions permit.
Finally, we believe the operational excellence we have gained in deregulated markets in the U.S. helped drive growth and profits in our European business.
Ultimately, we believe these factors provide us with competitive advantages and will help us drive higher returns on the competition.
Moving into each of our businesses, we have three reporting segments.
Two of these are emerging growth businesses, Genie Retail International and Genie Renewables, and the third, Genie Retail USA, consistently generates cash in up or down markets on an annualized basis.
Our retail energy business operates under several different names in both the U.S. and Europe.
Our core business today, Genie Retail U.S., is the largest and most mature of the three segments, generating the most revenue and highest margins and profits.
It currently operates in 15 states and Washington, D.C. under a variety of names reselling electricity from both carbon-based and green sources as well as natural gas.
This business has proven to be financially stable and has made money in a variety of market environments, which has allowed the company to remain principally debt-free and make disciplined investments in growth.
The competitive environment is fragmented with few large players and many independent small players.
We believe our competitive advantages, including our ability to self-fund expansion without borrowing, our strong risk management and trading programs that reduce commodity volatility, strong data and analytics capabilities and the depth and breadth of experience in our various sales channels.
Our current U.S. strategy revolves around opportunistically taking incremental share in our existing 16 markets.
We also plan to leverage our installed base and marketing prowess to add new products and services.
Bottom line, we believe we have market-leading capabilities that will allow us to take share, introduce and upsell new products and successfully expand into new states as conditions warrant.
With respect to our current growth investments, we've been investing in and generating customer growth with expanding margins in Genie Retail International through an established presence in unregulated markets in the U.K. and Scandinavia.
We believe this opportunity is comparable to the U.S. opportunity with a few differentiators that we believe bode well for value creation.
Between The U.K. and Scandinavia, there are roughly 60 million energy meters installed with about 80% of them in The U.K.
We initially penetrated The U.K., which has shown strong growth, expanding margins and is now nearly capable self-funding continued growth.
In Scandinavia, we initially acquired our way into filling 2019, which similar to the U.K. is starting to mature, and we'll soon have the ability to sell on future growth in Finland while also expanding into new markets, such as our recent expansion into Sweden.
Our Scandinavian strategy is to centralize our enterprise functions to efficiently manage operations and create significant operating leverage as we continue to gain scale and in the years to come, move into other markets such as Denmark, Norway and possibly others.
Finally, moving to Genie Renewables, our strategy here today is to leverage our existing geographic footprint and sales channels in the U.S. to offer a range of residential and commercial solar solutions.
We aspire to capture a larger part of the solar value chain to both drive growth and higher margins.
While we are not ready to talk in full detail publicly about these plans, we have a robust pipeline of solar installations and projects that we expect will generate meaningful revenue and profits.
We believe our Renewables segment has excellent potential, and we will provide more details as appropriate.
Today, we benefit from diversification both at the state level and with our international operations in solar business.
However, we realized that with three business segments, each of which is in a different stage of maturity, we have to prioritize growth investments and, therefore, can only take advantage of opportunities on a business-by-business basis.
Additionally, we believe that our valuation doesn't reflect the individual prospects and performance of each business as there are different value propositions for investors due to the higher growth in international energy operations and the moderate growth and cash flow generation of the U.S. retail business.
Given these factors, we have been conducting a strategic review of our businesses and are currently evaluating opportunities to unlock shareholder value by separating our international operations from the U.S. business, potentially through a spin-off to existing Genie stockholders of a new publicly traded entity as we don't believe the combined company is being valued appropriately by investors.
We believe doing so accomplishes several goals, and the rationale here is typical for companies carving out operations.
First, with a dedicated management team, the international operation can be solely focused on aggressive expansion in current and new markets through both organic and inorganic mechanisms without diluting Genie Energy stockholders.
With less internal competition for resources, it will also allow Genie to grow more aggressively in its U.S. retail business through market share gains in existing markets as well as potential expansion into new states as well as provide additional capital to expand our renewables operations as discussed earlier.
We are currently still in the evaluation process, and we'll continue to provide updates on any material progress.
Now I'll talk briefly about our second quarter business trends and results as well as provide some insight in the third and fourth quarter expectations.
Q2 was a strong quarter despite ongoing issues related to COVID-19.
We did have some moving parts in the financials due to the sale of our Japanese business and in Texas as the Governor signed review legislation into law, which is expected to provide a minimum of $1.5 million of relief.
We hope and expect the relief amount to grow as the legislature in Texas continues to discuss fair outcomes from the February storm.
In the U.S., our door-to-door marketing efforts are still not back to full strength due to government restrictions, but they are growing again.
That growth, of course, continues to be dependent on what happens with Covid.
In the meantime, our U.S. Retail business contributed strong profitability even as the second quarter is usually the seasonally weakest part of our year.
International operations revenue and gross profits increased as we continue to invest in our U.K. and Sweden operations and the Finland business recorded material profitability.
The Renewables division was still small, executed on another profitable quarter and is poised for both revenue and gross profit growth in the future.
We are excited about our potential and look forward to updating you further on the potential spin-off and other initiatives.
Now over to Avi Goldin for his discussion of our Q2 financial results.
My remarks today cover our financial results for the three months ended June 30, 2021.
Throughout my remarks, I compare second quarter 2020 results to the second quarter of 2020.
Focusing on the year-over-year rather than sequential comparisons removes from consideration the seasonal factors that are characteristic of our retail energy business.
I do want to point out, however, that the second quarter, like our fourth, is characterized by low commodity consumption relative to peak and cooling seasons during the first and third quarters, respectively.
I'd also like to point out that there are some moving parts this quarter that make an apples-to-apples comparison somewhat challenging.
For example, we acquired the part of Orbit Energy that we didn't already own in the fourth quarter of 2020.
So our second quarter 2020 results were not fully consolidated into our financials as they are in the second quarter of 2021 under Genie Retail Energy International.
On the other side, we sold our Japanese operations in early 2Q '21, which generated a gain, but we recorded minimal revenue during the quarter.
While in Q2 2020, a full quarter of Genie Japan revenue was recorded under Genie Retail Energy International.
That said, results this quarter were strong and comparable to the outstanding second quarter results we reported a year ago.
Consolidated revenue increased 28% to $98 million, the highest level for any second quarter in our history.
The top line increase was generated predominantly by Genie Retail Energy International, where revenue increased to $28 million from $5 million in the year ago quarter.
Results from Orbit Energy in the U.K. were not consolidating to repurchase the outstanding stake in the fourth quarter.
In the year ago quarter, Orbit generated $15 million in revenue.
Setting aside the impact of consolidating Orbit revenue in the current period, the international business increased revenue by $8 million year-over-year, driven by the robust growth of our business in The U.K. and Scandinavia.
Revenue at Genie Retail Energy, our domestic retail business, increased 1% to $67 million.
Electricity and natural gas consumption per meter, both increased compared to year ago quarter, which suggests that the boost in per meter consumption we've seen since the shift to work from home could have an enduring impact.
The increase in assumption was augmented by higher average sales per commodity unit, partially offset by a decrease in overall meters served.
The net meter count decreased in the quarter as churn outpaced sales.
Both churn and sales are below historical levels as the industry continues to be limited and access to face-to-face marketing channels that traditionally drive growth.
Revenue for our Renewables business was $2.3 million, a decrease from $4.6 million in the year ago quarter, when we delivered the remainder of a large solar panel manufacturing order at a very low margin.
As Michael mentioned, we are excited about the potential of this segment as we continue to expand into higher-margin renewables-focused businesses, including our community solar installations and community solar projects.
Consolidated gross profit increased 22% to $24 million, a very strong second quarter results with increased contributions from all three of our reporting segments.
Consolidated SG&A increased to $22.4 million from $16 million.
The increase was primarily at GRE International and reflects the consolidation of Orbit Energy, including Orbit customer acquisition expense, but also at Genie Retail Energy, driven by the partial resumption in door-to-door sales channel as well as other marketing spending.
Our consolidated income from operations totaled $1.4 million compared to $2.7 million in the year ago quarter.
The key driver here was again the consolidation of Orbit Energy, which, while it is nearing the ability to self fund is still losing money as we continue to invest in customer acquisition.
Adjusted EBITDA was $3.1 million compared to $3.5 million in the year ago quarter.
Although the scale is small, it's worth noting that our renewables business achieved positive income from operations and adjusted EBITDA for the second straight quarter.
Genie Energy's income per diluted share was $0.19 compared to $0.06 in the year ago quarter.
Our bottom line benefited from a $4.2 million gain on the sale of Genie Japan and an unrealized gain of $2.9 million on marketable equity investments, predominantly our investment in holdings that are mark-to-market.
Turning now to the balance sheet.
At quarter end, cash, restricted cash and marketable equity securities totaled $50.9 million at June 30, a strong increase from $41.7 million three months earlier and our highest levels in recent years.
From a working capital perspective, we have more than fully recovered from the impact of winter storm area in the first quarter.
To wrap up, our operating results were strong even compared to outstanding year ago quarter, and our bottom line results were positively impacted by the nonroutine gains I mentioned earlier.
Our balance sheet is in very good shape and provides us the flexibility to invest in the growth programs, as Michael discussed.

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qtrly earnings per share $0.19.

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