eEducation Albert AB

STO:ALBERT

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Unknown Executive]

Hello, and welcome to today's webcast with Albert. We have CEO, Jonas Mårtensson; Co-CEO Anne-Louise Wiren; and CFO, Katarina Strivall will present the report for the first quarter of 2024.

After the presentation, there will be a Q&A. So if you have any questions, you can send them in via the form to the right. And with that said, I hand over the word to you guys.

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

Thank you, [ Ludwig ], for that introduction and also a warm welcome from me to all of you who have tune in this morning to our conference call. And as said, I'm Jonas Martensson, the CEO of Albert Group. And with me, I have Anne-Louise and Katarina here, who you will meet later. But before getting started, I would just like to summarize quickly who we are. And Albert was founded back in 2015 as a mathematics app to be a home tutor for kids. But since then, we have grown into a leading Nordic edtech group where we have more than 6 different brands with multiple product brands sold in more than 10 markets. We are selling both to schools, B2B and to consumers, B2C, which gives us dual revenue streams, which both creates the predictability of B2B with the scalability of B2C.

And looking at net sales and our financial performance. I'm happy that we have in the quarter, delivered stable net sales despite that this has been quite challenging for us this quarter, both due to the external macro conditions but also internally since we're in the middle of the restructuring program that we announced last quarter. And that restructuring program was set -- launched in order to improve profitability and speed up the path to positive cash -- positive EBITDA in 2025. And we're also well-funded, we have more than SEK 86 million in the bank account, and that should take us to positive cash flow.

And in today's presentation, we will start talking a little bit about Albert and our strategy, then we'll go into the Q1 results, and then we look forward before we end up with a Q&A session. So as [ Ludwig ] said, please send in the questions you have, and we look forward to you answer them. But now over to you, Anne-Louise to hear more about Albert.

[Anne-Louise Wirenon, executive]

Thank you, Jonas. And for those of you who have attended this con calls before, this will be a bit of repetition, but as everyone working with learning, we know that repetition is, of course, key to learning. So therefore, we think it's important to keep this section in. And when we talk about Albert and who we are, why we exist, we do think it makes sense to start with taking a step back and talking about the problem we are here trying to be part of the solution too. And I think as most of us know, formal education today are facing challenges. We know that many kids struggle in school, especially in maths. We know that there is a lack of equal access to qualified teachers and all of these are global problems that we, as a society face together. We also know that not all kids can get the help that they need at home. Could be due to lack of knowledge or lack of time. And this, of course, together with other factors are making the school results decline.

Again, it's a global issue and also that the socioeconomic inequalities are increasing. And this was unfortunately proven again in the latest results of the PISA study that was released just before Christmas last year. And this is the reason why Albert was founded and why we exist. And we work towards our vision that is to help every child reach their full potential through fun and personalized learning. And in a more practical way, this means that we are building a learning ecosystem targeting, as Jonas said, both the B2C and the B2B market. And this is because we, obviously, the school and the home are the two most important arenas for learning for the kids. So that's why we want to tie them together. That's what we think is needed in order to achieve our vision. And this, we have been on this journey for quite a long time.

Again, as Jonas mentioned, we started off being focusing fully on the B2C, the parent side. We were a maths app. Our Albert Junior was our first product, focusing again on maths. We were present back then in very much focusing on Scandinavia, Poland and the U.K. But since 2022, we have been really accelerating this focus on building the ecosystem and both by acquiring companies, but also our organic product development. We have come to place now where we are a group of companies where we have products covering a big range of subjects and also with presence in many different markets. And as you can see, we now target, again, both the B2B and the B2C side, which we do think is key not only to achieve our vision, but also because of these giving the company a financial healthy -- a healthy financial profile because these 2 revenue streams, the B2B and the B2C, they are quite different from each other.

The B2C is a quite typical consumer SaaS revenue, meaning that it's scalable. It's quite -- you can scale quite fast, but it's capital intense. You need to invest in marketing. The contract lengths are typically a bit shorter compared to the B2B, meaning slightly higher churn, but on the other hand, you have a higher revenue per user. The B2B on the other side, it's not scalable. It doesn't move as fast. But again, the contract lengths are longer, making the revenue streams more predictable. And we can also see that given the macroeconomic climate we are in -- have been for a year or so back, that has affected the B2C side a bit more than the B2B, which is one of the reasons why we're now focusing more on the B2B. So today, we have a broad portfolio of learning products, different kinds. We have the digital apps, which is, I would say, the main part of the portfolio, but we also offer physical books, a physical hands on construction product that can be used for STEM and robotics and also films, which is a very appreciated way of learning.

We are operating under 8 strong product brands. We have global presence today. We have 3 home markets. It's Sweden, France and the U.K., but we are present in many more European countries and in the U.S. And we know that we actually make a difference. Our learning impact is proven. In a research study conducted by Sumdog, we could see that 20% of the knowledge gap between the socioeconomic strong and the socioeconomic weak students was closed by using Sumdog for 1 year. And an impact study we did in Albert last summer, we could see that 96% of the parent to Albert Junior users, they experienced that their kids knowledge was developed by using the app. So we are really here to be part of the solution to a very alarming global problem that we're facing as a society, and we have great products that really can make an impact and we are on a journey to become a leading European edtech player.

So with that said, I will leave it to Jonas to start talking about the Q1 results.

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

Thank you, Anne-Louise. And in this section, we will now start talking a little bit more about the qualitative side before going into the numbers. And as I said in the introduction, the first quarter has been very much about really implementing and executing the profitability program that should take us towards a positive EBITDA and this profitability program has these 4 pillars, focused more on B2B and maximize current business, improve efficiency and capture synergies and reduce costs. I focus more on B2B is very much what Anne-Louise said before. Our B2B business area today is profitable. And the B2C is not already there. So now as we want to be profitable on a group level, it really makes sense to focus more on B2B. And we also know that sort of the risks when investing is lower, so we have more predictability in that business area. However, we really believe that B2C is a very good way of scaling once the conditions are there.

Moving over to maximize current business. As you heard from Anne-Louise, we have a big portfolio of different products, brands and markets where we are present. Obviously, some of those products are performing better and some of those markets are performing better. So in this strategic focus right now, we really look at the one things that work well and try to maximize and monetize as much as possible on them which can be about sort of optimizing an existing product a little bit more, capturing more, taking more market share in the existing market. but it also means the strategy to choose what not to do, and we do reduce investments in future business right now or we try to do it in smarter ways in partnerships as well.

Moving over to the yellow box here. This is very much regarding, you can say, organization and ways of working in operations. And we come from now a few years of acquiring different companies. And before when we operated as a group, where we had all of these different acquired companies were operating as standalone companies with all the structures that are needed to be a stand-alone company. And we have seen an opportunity in order to try to experiment with merging B2C during 2023. And that was very successful. So now we decided to really unite the full organization, also the B2B part and I will come back to more to what this means. But fortunately, I mean, this resulted in us getting -- having a possibility to remove a lot of personnel costs and other structural costs that were coming from being stand-alone companies.

And lastly, it's more just a general cost consciousness that we strongly believe in. Being conscious about all the costs that we take on, really looking, can we utilize resources already have in the group to support more brands than getting new resources in. We're also looking at optimizing our office spaces, both due to rightsizing them for the number of people we have, but also ensuring we have cost-efficient offices. And now I will give a few examples of these things that were done during quarter 1. Starting on just before going into that, the time line for it. As we said before, the program was announced on 31st of January. And then during February and March, we took most of the actions related to executing this program. Some actions are going into quarter 3 and quarter 2 as well. But this meant that we can take most of the onetime restructuring cost in quarter 1, which Katarina will come back to you soon, but some costs will also come going forward.

And therefore, what we can expect in the results that we talked about last quarter is in Q1, we must see negative effects of this. Whereas in quarter 2, there will still be some negative effects. But significant positive effects from it. But from quarter 3 and onwards, it should only be the positive effects coming in. But now looking at some of these examples, the first one being related to focus on B2B. We have had as an ambition to have quite a balanced like B2B and B2C sales over time. But we have come from a history of having just the majority of sales being B2C and therefore, now we're very happy to see that B2B has grown to 58% of our sales in the first quarter, which is a good balance and in line with our strategy.

And this comes mainly from, I mean, that all our B2B entities. They have grown well year-over-year, and they're performing in a good way. And that comes both from, I mean, having very good loyalty and retention like especially in key markets like Sweden and Scotland, where we've been present for a long time, were very many customers renew year after year. But we've also focused a lot on winning England and U.S. as to other potential markets.

And here, we are mainly focused at bigger school groups or maths [ which ] are typically called, and here, we have landed a number of big deals during the quarter. And why we think B2B is so important is really that, I mean, the education sector is a very stable revenue source, no matter the macroeconomic climate, there's also less capital intensive to grow. And by being present in schools and in the education system is also a very good quality sign that we have good learning products that we think will also help in B2C. But talking a little bit about B2C, here has been very much regarding, I mean, maximizing and optimizing the current business. A few years ago, we launched Albert Junior in Poland and it has been outperforming okay, but this hasn't really taken off. So now in this quarter, I mean, we're focused a lot like improving the localization, both in terms of marketing, websites, the product and so on.

And we have some native Polish people on the team, and this has really proven successful. So comparing now the Easter campaign we ran in the first quarter this year with the same campaign last year, we doubled the sales in Poland. A little bit similarly, we've worked and focused on the Holy Owly Math product in France. And we launched this product back in the fall of 2023 and before that, we hadn't had a math product in France, but there was a great potential for math products in France. So here, we took the Albert Junior Math product, put it into the Holy Owly product and launched it there. And just now in a few months' time, it has grown to be the fourth best-selling B2C product in the portfolio.

I think these are 2 good examples how with very small investments really can maximize and capturing even more of the products and the markets where we are strong today. And as the macroeconomic situation turns, of course, there will be much more opportunity to scale the B2C acquisition machinery. And the last example related to the profitability program is obviously the launch of the new organization, which has taken a lot of focus in this quarter. And the whole idea, as I said before, was to go from a setup where we had a number of stand-alone companies toward being one united organization that shares the same mission, vision and objectives. And in essence, it looks like in the chart on the right-hand side, we have created one united product development organization that works with all our different products.

We found there are so many synergies because all the products they need to engage the children, they need to engage the parents and they need to engage the teachers. And these learnings can really be shared across the products. And there was also a lot of technical synergies and product development synergies here. Then we have in the 2 pink boxes here, focused on getting together like one united B2B marketing and sales organization, which more focused on the different markets. So before, we had one B2B sales organization for each product, which meant we could have dual organizations in one market. Now we put one organization for each market, and they sell all our different products and that obviously creates much better sales synergies.

On the B2C side, we had already gone into this setup in 2023. So here, there are no differences. But the B2C marketing and sales team, they work across all markets and all our different products, and it continues to work in a very good way. And to support this, we have shared finance team and shared small strategy growth in M&A team. And obviously, their role is to ensure that we have a strong long-term strategy and a short-term plan to really get the profitability. And why we did this was obviously unite the different competencies, share best practice and support, getting more simple structure where we need less management resources, and it becomes flatter, but we also think that this is really a scalable operating model, which makes it possible for us to just acquire a new product or a new brand, and we can put it into the product organization to develop and maintain it and into the sales machineries to sell it.

But then we think about the qualitative achievements in the first quarter. Katarina, will you take us into the numbers as well.

[Katarina Strivall, executive]

Yes. Thank you Jonas. During the first quarter, we carried out a number of activities focused on increasing profitability. As we have talked about, we launched a profitability program that involved some restructuring activities and restructuring costs. These costs have been charged to quarter 1 results. A smaller part of the restructuring costs will also be incurred in the second quarter results, as we see here in the time line. And the expectation is that quarter 1 result will be much tougher and negatively impacted by these activities and restructuring costs. And we expect that this would turn around going forward, and we will see the effects in the coming quarter 3 and 4 and so on. And net sales for the quarter are at the same level as the corresponding quarter of the previous year, and it's amounted to SEK 41.6 million, as we can see here and this aligns with our strategic goals of maintaining sales and prioritizing profitability and structural improvements.

We can see that acquired sales have increased by 7%, while organic sales have decreased by 8%. And we are happy to maintain sales despite the market condition and focus on the launching of the profitability program and restructuring the company. And as expected, profitability went negative, which is addressed in the profitability program in our previous communications. And the first quarter's EBITA was minus SEK 13.6 million, and it's including one-off costs related to the profitability program of SEK 2.7 million which is contributed to this and resulting in a total EBITA of minus SEK 16.4 million. And the main reason behind the lower EBITA are partly increased personnel costs, which also have been addressed in the profitability program and will decrease in the coming quarters and partly a reduction in income for the activation of research and development costs as well and the reduced capitalization of research and development cost will remain in the coming quarters but has no impact on the cash flow.

And the cash balance has increased and improved in quarter 1 this year compared to the corresponding quarter before. A contributing factor to the improved cash flow is mainly at Swedish Film invoice a substantial part in the beginning of the year. And this year, invoicing also started earlier compared to the previous year. And quarter 1 is usually a strong month in cash flow as we invoice a large portion of the annual subscription in several businesses in the group, and this decreases then in quarter -- in the second quarter. And at the end of quarter 1, we have a cash balance of SEK 86 million compared to SEK 80 million in the quarter 4 previous year. So we have a good cash balance, as Jonas mentioned earlier. And now back to Jonas.

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

Thank you Katarina. And before going to the Q&A session, I'll just take a few words regarding the future and how we view it. But before doing that, I would like to really talk about the big 4 step plan that we are on to reach profitable growth in some time. I mean, it all really started like one phase, which was up to 2022, which Anne-Louise talked about before. And here, the goal for the group was really to build a strong market position, both by investing in own product development, in marketing to build a big portfolio of paying subscribers but also to acquire companies to fill strategic product and market gaps that we had. But after some time of very rapid growth, it's sort of always very healthy to sort of stop a little bit and try to build and lay a very stable foundation, and that was the focus during 2023 where we turned from very rapid growth into more of a profit focus.

And this was everything from changing some business logic into more organization and management questions like ensuring now when we acquire companies that we can manage them in a good way and that we have leaders and teams in place for the years to come but also really to start capturing some of the synergies that we had identified before acquiring the companies. And the phase we are in right now is very much focused on reaching profitability and positive cash flow and that we would then do by both sustaining sales, but really focusing on adapting the cost structure, which before was built to grow, but now we're adapting it for profitability but it's also about optimizing the current business and focusing on B2B and consolidating a group to a united company.

And then with this in place, the long-term step here is really to grow towards the vision of becoming a leading edtech player in Europe. And we already now see a lot of opportunities both to grow our existing product portfolio into new segments or through into new market segments as well and also really on the M&A agenda where right now, we are getting approached by a lot of different companies that want to sell or be part of a bigger edtech group, and we do see this as very interesting opportunities in the future as well.

And just relating this to the numbers, as you can see here in the chart looking on the -- starting on the net sales of the green line, it was very much growing during the time where we're building a market position. Whereas then in 2023, where we move more into sort of maintaining sales to focus on profitability, it has been much flatter. On the EBITA side, the losses were big in the blue period, were building market positions since we're investing so much money in marketing, product development and acquiring companies whereas then during the red phase here, the focus will be much more on improving profitability. And right now, we are then in the shift towards the yellow where we focus on profitability. And of course, this comes with a restructuring, temporary setbacks on the profit side.

But looking forward, now in the yellow phase, reaching profitability, we will have most focused on improving profitability and just sustaining or growing sales organically a little bit. Whereas then when this is in place, it's all coming back to really profitable growth on both the top line and the bottom line. And then summing in on what we're doing now then to really reach profitability. We are addressing this from both the revenue side and the cost side. Starting with the revenue side on B2B, it is as we talked about before, we have a very strong position, especially in Scotland and also in Sweden. And here, the focus is really on creating loyalty with those customers and reducing churn. And then we set even more focusing on winning new business and new grounds in new markets like Finland, where we have been focusing in the last year, and we now start to see the catch-up effect coming.

And of course, with some of the B2B sales synergies that we talked about before, but between Sumdog and Strawbees in the U.K. and in the U.S., we already now also see proof points that is really valuable to sort of share customers and leads and cross-sell the products to our existing customers. Moving to the B2C side, we also see revenue potential here. As mentioned before, we're focusing a lot with Junior and Holy Owly, where we have the strongest positions today and see how we can get even more out of them and really capturing the full potential in existing markets, like with the example of Poland that we talked about before, which was a market where we've been in for some time, but we have captured the full potential. And we think that can go from many other markets where we are today. But we're also, I mean constantly exploring and going to new markets on the B2C side. Here, localizations are quite cheap. So we are experimenting to see if we should enter new markets in a cost-efficient way.

And on the cost side, the focus is, as we talked about in this presentation to reduce personnel costs in the new organization. We have laid off some 15% of the staff now, which will reduce the personnel cost. And we also start to see a lot of cost synergies, and they will also come going forward where we can use internal resources and share them across the group even more. And all in all, with these actions that should take us towards positive EBITDA during 2025. But we do see some additional upsides, which we haven't accounted for in the base plan, and that is that some of the business KPIs really to return to the levels they were on prerecession like 2 years ago and which we, of course, hope that things will get back to normal in some time in the future and also the M&A agenda that there are nice, well-run companies out there that are profitable.

And if we can buy some of them at a good valuation, but it could also be upsides to this plan. So being to summarize the full presentation of today. I mean, we are on a journey to profitability, which we have now accelerated with the launch and execution of the profitability program. And with the cash at hand, we should be able to both get to positive EBITDA and cash flow. And then the second one here, we are happy that the main business remains stable because this has been a challenging quarter, both externally but even more internally with a lot of restructurings that have taken focus from the management and the organization. Therefore, it's nice to see it being stable. And lastly, that we have managed to capture many synergies in the group already. And now with the new organizational setup, it would be one united company that were much more easy to capture even more. So with that, we are very pleased to present this quarter, but now we're happy and eager to hear the questions from all of you. Ludwig, over to you.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you so much for the presentation here. And as you mentioned, we go straight ahead to the questions. And the first one is your focus is on B2B. How is the B2B sales schools going?

[Anne-Louise Wirenon, executive]

Well, I can answer that. So yes, as mentioned, we are focusing on the B2B, and we can see now in the Q1 that our share of revenue coming from the B2B has increased to 58% and in general, I think that kind of summarizes that we -- it's going according to plan. For our B2B sales as well as for B2C, the focus is really on maximizing existing products on existing markets. This is also what Jonas talked about. And in Sumdog, that means focusing on the U.K. for Strawbees is the U.S. and Swedish Film, as it says in the name, it's focused on Sweden and gaining market shares there. For Swedish Film, we have our most important quarter behind us it's the Q1. And we can see that we have performing according to plan, which is nice for both Strawbees and Sumdog, we are in the middle of the most important time of the year. It's Q2 and Q3. So far, so good, but we are in very important times. Right now, this -- the pipeline looks good. So we are very positive.

And when it comes to kind of the effects we've seen given the macroeconomic climate, we don't see really an impact on total sales, but what we do see is that the sales cycle tends to be a bit longer. It takes a bit longer for the schools and districts to make a decision probably due to the uncertainty surrounding funding and knowing how much you can actually spend. So therefore, it's super important that we remain -- that we stay -- make sure that we continue to have a very high product quality, working with onboarding, engagement, user experience. So that's the big focus in the product development and also in our ways of working to secure that we continue being essential and, therefore, being prioritized by teachers and schools. But in general, it's going according to plan.

[Unknown Executive]

Can you tell more about the profitability program? How confident are you that it will give the expected results?

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

I can take that one. I mean, it's going well. I think I described the 4 pillars of the program in the presentation. It's about focus more on B2B, maximizing the current business, finding more efficient ways to operate and reducing cost in general. And I think what looked good on paper and in the planning phase has now as we started to execute as well during the first quarter and also in April turned out really well in practice as well. I'm proud of all the leaders have been driving this progress in this process because many of these things are tough in restructuring, letting go of people and so on. But it has worked out very well. We also see that the synergies and the things we hope should work out well in the new organization and started out really well as well.

And for instance, just having, I mean, one manager being responsible for multiple areas, countries, products or departments makes it very or much easier for them to really optimize the [ folder ] instead of sub-optimizing one area of its own. So things have turned out well. And then the question was how confident we are. And obviously, I mean, confidence in getting to profitability is about both the revenue and the cost side. On the cost side, things are going according to plan right now, and that's something we can really impact ourselves. The revenue side is also going according to plan. But of course, there is always a risk on the revenue side because we don't really know how the market will develop. But the assumptions we have built into the plan are realistic. And so far, it seems to go according to plan. So our confidence remains, and I think we will get there.

[Unknown Executive]

You communicated an error in the financial reporting a couple of weeks ago. Can you explain more about this?

[Katarina Strivall, executive]

Yes, of course. I can answer that question. It was in connection with preparing the annual report that we discovered a structure error in the parent company, eEducation Albert. And this error it has resulted in correcting reporting of net sales and as well as corresponding expenses and concerns revenue related to subscriptions where payments not has been made and which are booked with the corresponding expense for potential customer loss. And this error, it's for the years 2023 and 2022. And the corrections that we have made is for 2023, the net sales and corresponding cost has decreased by approximately SEK 17 million. And in 2022, the net sales and corresponding cost has decreased by SEK 21 million. And then we also have decreased the ARR with the same number -- numbers. And of course, this correction has no impact on profitability or cash flow.

[Unknown Executive]

You may be answering the next question here, but annual recurring revenue decreased by 15%. Can you elaborate on why there has been an increase there -- a decrease, sorry.

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

I can start, I mean, it depends -- I mean, partly was due to the accounting error. But if you compare apples-to-apples, I mean, the ARR follows very much the net sales and especially the consumer business here. And as Katarina said before, in the net sales year-over-year, the organic net sales has decreased and especially in B2C, and that resulted also in ARR decreases.

[Unknown Executive]

You mentioned that you have a strong pipeline. Can you describe how long it takes, on average to convert a lead into a deal to the average sales cycle, so to speak?

[Anne-Louise Wirenon, executive]

Yes. It varies quite a lot. But I would say for the bigger deals, which is the ones we really focus on whether we win a district or it has different names in different regions, but a larger group of schools. It definitely takes up to 6 months, but it can take even more from actually initiating the first contact to signing the deal. But then again, the contract values are larger, and they tend to have a longer contract lengths. But it can take quite a long time, especially for the bigger deals.

[Unknown Executive]

You talked a lot here, Jonas, about the profitability program and the organizational change where we go from independent units to a more integrated group. But how is implementation of the change going?

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

It's going well. Obviously, the leaders and the managers were preparing for this during the first quarter before we set everything live on first of April. And within all organizational changes, I mean, it's a lot of things that need to be changed since it's about people and processes and so on. So I mean we have set up new governance structures, new management and leadership teams. A lot of people have changed managers and changed teammates and so on. But this has gone very well so far. The people that we're talking to and have a lot of like surveys going out and so on, it both seems like things are getting better like in the old organization, when we work more stand-alone units, we maybe had like one person in one team, like being the only designer or the only a teacher for instance, and they lack sounding boards in the new organization, they have colleagues who share the same competence and they can share best practice with and so on. So far, everything is going actually better than expected because working with people and doing restructurings and change in general is always difficult.

[Unknown Executive]

Do you notice a reduced willingness to invest in e-learning from customers as a result of the more so to speak, stream economy in the world?

[Anne-Louise Wirenon, executive]

Should I? Yes, from a B2B side, I would say, no, not really. As I mentioned, what we do see is that the decision time tends to take -- it seems to take a bit longer now, and that's probably due to some uncertainty surrounding funding for the schools and the districts that we sell to. But of course, we know that there might be budget cuts coming and this uncertainty might lead to schools actually purchasing less, smaller number of products. But we are secure that we have high-quality products, and we really work with this engagement because the products that the teachers really use in their day-to-day work are -- we are convinced that they will continue being purchased by the schools. So it's all about really focusing on making sure we have high-quality products and that we are users, which is the teachers and the students that they use them and get the maximum benefit out of it.

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

Maybe I can add a little bit from the B2C side as well. And I mean here, really, revenue comes from having a big portfolio of paying subscribers. And our growth model is very much -- I mean, we try to attract customers, typically get them into a free trial campaign that last everything from a few weeks up until a few months and during this free trial period is about convincing them that the product is good, so they want to stay as a paying customer and then we should keep them as long as possible. And recently, I wouldn't say there are any changes at all. I mean, we started when the recession started maybe 1.5 years ago, we saw a reduction, especially in the early funnel metrics like more difficult to attract customers and to convert them from free trial to paying, whereas the ones who already were loyal users and we're reducing the products, and we're paying for it, they were staying at the same extent as before or in other words, called the churn rate.

And these KPIs have been very similar for the last 5 quarters or so. And actually, I think rather lately, we can see a slight improvement in it that it's getting a little bit easier to convert customers from free trial to paying and also that the churn rate of paying customers is going down a little bit. Still no major changes. It's not back to prerecession levels yet, but at least it's not going in the wrong direction.

[Unknown Executive]

Moving on to the last question here. Are you exploring any new markets to larger products in at?

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

Just start there. I guess the quick question is, yes. And I mean, from 2 perspectives, I mean, one is really that, I mean, we are present on a number of markets today. So I mean, our first step is to see can we do more on those markets? And the second question is, can we launch some of our other products on that specific market? Because typically, it takes much longer time to develop a new product and adapting it to a new market. So that's more for some of the strategic focus of capitalizing the full potential in all the existing markets. But we are exploring new markets probably most low hanging on the B2C side, where the localization costs are much lower.

Right now, we are running some experiments on new markets. So hopefully, we can share some exciting news in the fall as they turn out well. Because our new go-to-market approach for new markets is very much, of course, starting with some desktop studies to see that it makes sense from a research perspective, but then really running experiments, we get proof points on the customer acquisition and interest in our products and so on.

[Anne-Louise Wirenon, executive]

Sorry, Jonas, for interrupting you. I just want to say on the B2B side, that, of course, being an entrepreneurial company with a strong entrepreneurial culture, I think we always have one eye open for new opportunities. But the main focus really is on maximizing the current product on the current markets. And in all markets, we are present, we have a great growth opportunity. There's much more market share to grab. So the main focus for now is on the existing markets for the B2B.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you so much. That was the last question here. So I want to thank you all for presenting today, and I want to thank all of you for tuning in, and I wish you a pleasant week.

[Jonas Mårtensson, executive]

Thank you.

[Anne-Louise Wirenon, executive]

Thank you very much.

[Katarina Strivall, executive]

Thank you.