Acast AB (publ)

STO:ACAST

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Unknown Executive]

Good morning, and a warm welcome to Acast presentation for the first quarter of 2024. Our CEO, Ross Adams; and CFO; Emily Villatte, will present the results and development for the quarter. [Operator Instructions]

I would like to hand over to our CEO, Ross Adams.

[Ross Adams, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to listen to our presentation for our first quarter of 2024. My name is Ross Adams, CEO of Acast and based in New York. But today, I'm in our sunny Stockholm office with our CFO, Emily Villatte. We'll take you through the numbers and events for the first quarter of 2024.

If you're new to Acast, I'll briefly introduce our positioning and how we create value. Acast is the market-leading independent global infrastructure platform in podcasting. We're uniquely positioned at the center of the podcasting value chain, collecting advertisers with podcast creators to monetize their content and their highly engaged audiences.

Acast is essentially an interconnected ecosystem, bringing together creators who produce compelling content to attract listeners using their creativity to build a loyal audience base. That high-quality content attracts audiences who are eager to consume it.

And we've previously called these our listeners. And so this is just an important language evolution, acknowledging that our podcast has an audience beyond relevant, both as the interest in multichannel podcasting grows, while we continue to encourage audience first buying behaviors amongst advertisers.

And a sizable and engaged audience is highly attractive to advertisers. Hey, when they know they can effectively reach their target audiences at scale through the work done by our creators. And we are uniquely positioned at the center of this podcasting value chain connecting advertisers with highly engaged podcast audiences across the globe and then sharing the advertising revenue we generate with the podcast creators on our platform.

The master portfolio of nearly 125,000 podcasts, generating more than 1 billion listens per quarter. Around 2,700 advertisers in the form of both global brands and smaller companies reach these listeners with effective and creative advertising campaigns via Acast's marketplace.

On April 25, Acast celebrated its 10-year anniversary, reflecting on our company history and what we have achieved so far. We take great pride in our position as the leader in driving innovation and shaping the podcast industry.

We were the first to introduce Dynamic Ad Insertion to the space, which enabled podcast advertising beyond just ads baked into the content forever, thereby allowing podcasters to monetize their entire back catalog with up-to-date relevant advertising.

This didn't just start Acast journey, but it effectively created the podcast advertising market that we know today. Today, DAI is the industry standard that allows the continued acceleration of the industry. Since our introduction of Dynamic Ad Insertion, we have maintained our position as a pioneer in the podcast industry through innovations, including being the first in programmatic ad buying, our self-serve ad platform and our first-party data targeting solution for advertisers.

Our leading technology, combined with local market investment has helped us to gain market dominant positions in the U.K. and Sweden, while also establishing a sizable presence within the U.S.

Since Acast began, we have served more than 37 billion ads globally and paid more than USD 350 million directly to creators around the globe. For the first time ever, we participated in Podtrac’'s monthly podcast publisher ranking in March. The results showed that we, by far, have the largest podcast network globally.

Podtrac’'s U.S. ranking also revealed that we hold a strong position, #2 in the U.S., which is the world's largest podcast advertising market, thanks to our reach exceeding 20 million monthly unique listeners within that region. What we've achieved so far is incredible, but we remain fully committed to keeping our first mover position.

This is reflected in our continued innovations, including harnessing AI to improve both creator and advertiser efficiency as well as increasing our expertise in multichannel ad campaign [ spanning ] video, social, live events and more.

We are not only continuing to drive tech innovation, but we also take great pride in fostering and growing our relationships with podcasters of all sizes and types around the world. These range from some of the biggest podcasters like Marc Maron, former President, Barack and Michelle Obama and news publishers shows to those hosted by emerging creators.

The common thread is that they all choose Acast as their partner to find and grow their audience and earn revenue through working with advertisers of all sizes. Now let's turn to our developments during the first quarter 2024.

Our team's hard work and commitment continues to pay off, and we've managed to increase our sales growth compared to the previous quarter while maintaining the strict cost control shown over the past year. This quarter, our sales grew by 25% to reach SEK 413 million compared to SEK 331 million (sic) [ SEK 333.1 million ] last year.

The organic growth was 23% when adjusting for FX. We have maintained a solid momentum in North America, which has been the key driver of growth in the quarter. Our gross margin came in at 39%, which reflects a 3 percentage point increase compared to a year ago, again, showing a healthy positive underlying development to our business.

In combination with -- we maintain cost control. It allowed us to achieve large EBITDA improvements also in this quarter or a minus 4% EBITDA margin, which can be compared to minus SEK 61 million a year ago. The positive development reflects that we are on track to deliver against our target of positive EBITDA in the full year 2024.

When it comes to new product developments, we launched an update to our AI-based Predictive Demographics capability in March. The first version of Predictive Demographics was released in 2023 and is an industry-first language modeling capability, analyzing the language spoken within a podcast to predict the characteristics of its likely audience.

The new update enables more precise audience targeting across 3 million English-speaking podcasts globally by adding information regarding which listeners are parents in what country they live and their level of education within the model. Thereby, the technology improves podcast advertisers targeting capabilities when building data-driven campaigns.

Since we launched Predictive Demographics in October, 84% of Podchaser's clients have used the Predictive Demographic data. We see the launch as another important step towards improving audience first buying for advertisers, which thereby allows us to scale sales across our ad inventory.

The update not only reflects that we continue to build on Podchaser's innovative technology, but also shows our sharp focus on continuously increasing the scalability of our business. We consistently keep adding new large creators and publishers to our stable. In Q1, we welcomed The Telegraph, one of the world's oldest and most well-respected news organizations to Acast. Its popular podcast include the daily shows, the 2-minute briefing and Ukraine, the latest among many others.

Acast is now home to all major publishers in the U.K. with The Telegraph joining the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The FT, The New Statesman, Tortoise Media and the Daily Mail. Furthermore, we are also pleased to announce that we welcomed another major global publisher, CNN to our network within the quarter.

Additionally, higher ground, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s media company launched its new Ways to Win podcast with Acast in March. The show began with a mini-series during March Madness, one of the biggest sporting events of the year in the U.S. and the premiere starring Barack Obama discussing his NCAA March Madness bracket selections.

All of these additions clearly reflect that we continue to strengthen our position among significant news publishers and creators. And it's a clear testament to the value we generate through our platform and well-known creators across the world choose and stay with Acast.

I'll now hand over to Emily to walk you through our financial performance for Q1 2024 in more detail.

[Emily Villatte, executive]

Thank you, Ross. Let's step into the details of our numbers. And for usual, we will start by having a look at listens. Listens declined by 12% in the quarter compared to same quarter last year, where the decline is due to the iOS17 update that we have mentioned over the past quarters. And this update basically changes how podcast listeners are measured.

We believe that the impact from the update is now in full effect and that we have reached a new baseline for our listens. Our average revenue per listen, which reflects our monetization of each listen, continues to develop positively with us posting a 42% growth to our ARPU in Q1 of '24, illustrating that the decline in listens in fact, did not put a cap on our ability to continue to monetize our portfolio.

Our net sales growth amounted to 25%, reflecting a step-up quarter-on-quarter, but also compared to a year ago. The organic growth was 23% when adjusting for FX, as Ross mentioned. The growth improvement was primarily due to a strong quarter for our North American team, whilst our other markets continue to also post solid growth, and we'll have a look at our markets and segments in just a second.

I'm glad to report that we have maintained the underlying gross margin we had in the previous quarter amounting to 39% or so in Q1 of 2024. The outcome reflects a 34% growth in gross profit compared to Q1 of 2023 and a 3 percentage point improvement to the gross margin compared to the same quarter last year, a number I'm happy with.

As we've discussed over the recent quarters, we've had a positive gross margin development over the past quarter, driven by contribution from Podchaser. And there's also a product mix effect coming into play this quarter. And as a reminder, we have a high gross margin on pre-produced ads versus host-red sponsorships.

Looking at our segments. In the first quarter, we had North America taking the lead on sales growth, growing by 48% year-on-year. The favorable development stems both from an improved sentiment among advertisers during the period, whilst we also see positive returns from the investments that we have made into the region.

We saw more steady, but still solid growth in Europe at 16%, where the ad market environment remains a bit more challenging compared to North America. But other markets grew by healthy 20%.

Importantly, we see local profitability improvements across the board. Our continued focus on cost efficiencies has also had effect this quarter, and our costs remain under good control with total OpEx being down 1% compared to last year's level. We ended the quarter with total staff and consultants of some 382 persons, reflecting just a minor increase compared to the balance for the year and 2023.

And we continue our measured investments primarily in North America, where we currently are experienced the greatest revenue traction. So we're balancing our cost control with some measured investments. Now let's look at -- let's have a look at EBITDA. And here, the combination of our continued sales growth, gross margin improvement and strict cost discipline has resulted in another quarter with large EBITDA improvements comparing the same quarter last year.

And I want to highlight that our business is, of course, subject to the quarterly seasonality as we are in an advertising business, which explains the difference between the positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4 versus the small loss that we are seeing now in Q1.

But as you can see on the right-hand side, looking at EBITDA on a last 12-month basis, we continue to deliver large improvements. And this is all showing that we are on track to deliver on our profitability target of positive EBITDA in the full year of 2024.

The operating cash flow in the quarter amounted to negative SEK 15 million and last year, I'd like to remind you, both in Q1 and actually in Q4, we had some large positive working capital effects, which explains a large part of the difference between this quarter and Q1 last year and the fluctuation quarter-on-quarter.

And there are often some fluctuations to working capital. But the bottom line is that over time, we've become better at driving down our DSO, whilst maintaining our DPO at steady level. On a rolling 12-month basis, it is clear that our bottom line improvements have also had a great effect on our cash flow developments and by the end of the quarter, we held SEK 734 million in cash, reflecting a robust balance sheet. Ross, back to you to wrap up.

[Ross Adams, executive]

Thank you. So to summarize the first quarter, we have had a good start to the year, reflected by solid sales growth performance, primarily driven by our operations in North America [indiscernible] sentiment among advertisers has been better during the quarter. There are variations between geographies with some advertising markets more affected by the macroeconomic context.

Still, we keep improving our position through continuously attracting new advertisers and creators to our platform while also launching innovative technologies. Our financial development reflects that we are on track to deliver positive EBITDA in 2024, which together with our solid balance sheet, gives us a very good foundation to keep fortifying our industry-leading position.

That concludes our comments on the Q1 results. Let's start the Q&A. [Operator Instructions]

[Unknown Executive]

So the first question is from Derek Laliberte at ABG. On the exceptional growth in North America in Q1, how much would you say is driven by your recent efforts in the market and how much is related to a stronger market?

[Ross Adams, executive]

It's a good question. The end market sentiment in the region was better during the period, while we also saw positive returns on our previous investments, which resulting in 48% growth for North America in the quarter. The European ad markets are, however, still subject to kind of that uncertainty though. [indiscernible] is certainly a better ad market and our recent efforts.

[Unknown Executive]

The next question is also from Derek. What should we expect in terms of number of listens and the development over the course of the year given iOS17?

[Emily Villatte, executive]

I mean we haven't guided on listens previously. I think we're happy to -- that the iOS update has concluded, and we're comfortable that we're now at the new listens baseline. And what happened in the quarter, if I get to add some nuance is that with the full quarter effect from iOS17, the listens decline from that uptake was a little bit higher than what we posted in the quarter, which means that we also had a bit of underlying growth in our listens portfolio from the 125,000 shows that we have on the platform.

So we're happy that we have a new baseline, but we haven't been too specific on guiding on listens. I think it's important to note as well that the listens drop did not cap our ability to monetize our portfolio. So we continue to sort of grow into our suit and continue to improve monetization, which is driving up average revenue per listen.

[Unknown Executive]

On operational expenses, should we expect the level to remain relatively stable at SEK 190 million to SEK 195 million per quarter in 2024?

[Emily Villatte, executive]

That's very specific range, Derek. We -- as we've said, we have both had a strong focus on cost control, and we've also made some very measured investments into the business. And I think it's reasonable to assume that with the strong momentum that we have in the U.S. that we would continue to capitalize on that momentum, we don't give sort of a quarter-by-quarter OpEx guidance.

[Unknown Executive]

Can you elaborate a bit on the demand situation in your 3 main markets?

[Ross Adams, executive]

I guess if you look at America, and the sentiment, a little stronger than Europe. So 2 of our main markets sitting in Europe and 1 sitting in the states, and they reflect some of the results we saw in Q1.

[Unknown Executive]

Then we have some questions from Andreas Joelsson at Carnegie. The first question is, just curious on the ad revenue trends versus the non-ad revenue trends. As the non-ad revenue comes with a different business model, is it reasonable then to assume it is more stable between the quarters?

[Emily Villatte, executive]

Yes, it is. So non-ad revenues are, I think, all not as seasonal as advertising. So the advertising revenues are bigger in Q4 and come down in Q1. But some of the non-ad revenues actually increased quarter-on-quarter. So they take a slightly larger share in Q1, which also helps our gross margin. And that sort of goes into our product mix as well. But I think you're right, Andreas in assuming the non-ad is more stable quarter-on-quarter.

[Unknown Executive]

What are your plans on the cost side? Any additional need for further investments in the U.S., for instance?

[Emily Villatte, executive]

We will continue to have a look at the developments in each of our markets, and we're happy to see solid growth in Europe of the markets and even stronger growth in North America. And we'll continue to assess the situation and see how we invest further. We don't see any dramatic changes in the near term in the cost line or investments. But we will continue to reflect and assess the situation as we go.

[Unknown Executive]

So the third and final question from Andreas [indiscernible] Positive EBITDA for 2024. But what about cash flow? Can you say anything on the trends that you see and any indication when it could turn to positive numbers?

[Emily Villatte, executive]

What we saw during the last year was a great effort to drive down our DSO whilst maintaining our DPO at a steady level. And this helped us get to, I would say, a more normalized working capital level. So we saw a boost from working capital in 2023. I do not expect the same boost to working capital as we will get to a point where it is difficult to continue to drive down this so much further. Of course, we're always working on this.

So I would say that the working capital fluctuations on a 12-month basis should be stabilizing this year. We look historically, rolling 12-month EBITDA has been tracking better than rolling over last 12 months cash flows. And that was the case in 2023. And I think we won't get the same sort of uptick from working capital in 2024, but it's a positive development.

So -- and I think it's good to remind ourselves as well that cash flows have consistently, I think, been outperforming expectations from the market if we look back over the last 2 years. So bottom line is, I have a solid cash position, and I have business that is moving towards profitability. So that makes me feel very good about our profits.

[Unknown Executive]

That was all of the questions. Now back to you, Ross.

[Ross Adams, executive]

Great stuff, and thanks, everyone, for listening in. For those of you who missed, we recently published our annual report, which includes an updated ESG section. I'm glad to report that we managed to reduce our CO2 emissions by 72% in 2023, reflecting our commitment to being a responsible and sustainable business that delivers value to all stakeholders.

So please to take a look at that. Looking forward, for our stakeholders, we have an annual general meeting coming up on May 21st. The Q2 report will be released on 26th of July, and we formally invite you to join us for that presentation. Don't forget to follow us on investors.acast.com, our Acast blog or listen to our financial results as a podcast, of course. If you want to receive company data continuously into your inbox, please subscribe to press releases, news and financial reports on our Investor Relations website. Thank you, and goodbye.