• by Les Luchter , March 1, 2023

Prescription drug discounter GoodRx, which began February by agreeing to pay a $1.5 million fine from the Federal Trade Commission for sharing customers’ personal health info with ad platforms, ended the month Tuesday afternoon with the release of its 2022 earnings report showing revenues of $766.6 million -- a 3% increase from 2021’s $745.4 million. The company’s guidance for 2023 projects revenues from $780 million to $790 million, and increase of 2% to 3%

During a 75-minute earnings call, neither company representatives nor 12 financial analysts asking questions brought up the FTC fine in particular or privacy issues in general. (The company is also facing a class action suit over the issue.)

What GoodRx refers to only as the “grocer issue,” however, was mentioned 36 times. When its deal with a “key grocer” (which Barron’s and others have said is probably Kroger) folded, there was a concurrent loss of $30 million in revenues during the 2^nd quarter alone.

GoodRx’s deal with that ”key grocer” -- which had previously accounted for 25% of its volume -- was renegotiated during the third quarter, and the company has been slowly climbing out of the hole since.

One key has been to reduce sales and marketing expenses as a percent of revenue.

Those expenses in the fourth quarter declined 2% from the previous quarter -- at 46% of revenues, down from 50% of revenues a year earlier.

Chief financial officer Karsten Voermann said GoodRx now has “a more refined view of marketing,” but added that the company is exploring making new marketing investments soon, “as consumers have fresh deductibles in the start of the year.”

“We continue to do marketing, albeit…as efficiently and effectively as we can,” stated co-founder/co-chief executive officer Trevor Bezdek.

The company’s other co-founder/co-CEO, Doug Hirsch, stating that GoodRx’s competition is “the 70% of Americans who simply don’t know that prices vary” from pharmacy to pharmacy, cited an “incredible opportunity…to educate consumers and guide them to better outcomes."

In response to a question from Barclays’ Steve Valiquette about competition, Hirsch dismissed any impact from Amazon’s new RxPass.

“Amazon has focused over the course of many years, actually, to really get into the space and try to drive change,” he said. “We have seen no evidence of growth in volume, and we've seen no impact on our business. And I just want to be pretty clear about that.

“This latest program is for a subset of drugs, but we don't see it as necessarily more compelling than some of the previous offerings they had out there.”

The company said it had doubled the number of transactions by “fully registered” or “fully engaged” users during the second half of the year. Hirsch added that such users can now download the GoodRx app for access to a “visual representation of your actual medicine cabinet….Then we can do exciting things to drive engagement and adherence like push notifications for refill reminders or pricing changes."

Also, Hirsch announced, Sam’s Clubs has now joined GoodRx’s roster of participating retailers.