Truecaller AB

STO:TRUE B

Earnings Call Analysis

Truecaller Q2 2024: Record User Growth but Decline in Ad Revenue

Truecaller reported a strong user growth in Q2 2024, adding 14 million monthly active users to reach 397 million monthly users, the highest since 2018. Despite this, net sales fell by 12% year-on-year to SEK 456 million, largely due to a 22% decline in ad revenues influenced by the Indian Premier League's lower advertising spend. Subscription revenues grew robustly by 29%, and Truecaller for Business saw an all-time high growth driven by new pricing strategies. Apple's iOS 18 update is anticipated to further boost iPhone user engagement and subscription conversions.

User Growth Milestone

Truecaller celebrated a remarkable achievement in Q2 2024 by closing the quarter with an average of 397 million monthly active users (MAUs), marking a 12% increase year-on-year. This growth is significant, as the company added 14 million new MAUs—its strongest user growth since 2018. The daily active user (DAU) base also grew at a similar rate, reaching 325 million. A strong DAU to MAU ratio of 82% reflects high user engagement, indicating that users find the service increasingly relevant in their daily lives.

Revenue Performance Overview

For this quarter, Truecaller reported net sales of SEK 456 million, reflecting a 12% year-on-year decrease. However, this was the third highest quarterly net sales recorded. The year-on-year drop can be attributed to underperformance during the Indian Premier League (IPL) season, where advertising revenue decreased. Adjusting for just the IPL effects, ad revenues saw a more manageable decline of 3%. The impact of currency fluctuations, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, further pressured revenue, with an estimated SEK 15 million hit this quarter.

Strong Subscription Growth

One of the standout features of Truecaller’s financials was the commendable growth in their subscription revenues, which rose by 29% compared to last year, driven by a 60% year-on-year increase in iOS subscription revenue. This increase is particularly notable as it outpaced the general user growth, with paying subscribers up by 18%. The drive towards subscription growth is enhanced by focused marketing efforts in higher propensity markets, such as the U.S. where subscription revenue grew by more than 65% year-on-year.

Truecaller for Business Shines

Truecaller for Business achieved record revenue growth this quarter, showing strong demand for the B2B services. The company has introduced new pricing structures aimed at enhancing revenue per account and saw a relative revenue growth increase of 17% compared to the previous quarter. The successful rollout of verified business services created additional revenue streams, proving beneficial as they expand their product offerings.

Ad Revenue Challenges

The company faced a significant challenge in advertising revenue, which dropped by 22% year-on-year. Excluding IPL effects, this equated to a smaller decline. The subdued advertising environment continues to present headwinds; however, Truecaller remains focused on monetization optimization, including efforts to increase ad impressions available for roll out, potentially setting the stage for future recovery as market conditions improve.

Innovation and Future Opportunities

Truecaller is showing promise in evolving its product capabilities, particularly with the upcoming launch of Apple’s iOS 18. This update introduces live lookup features for caller ID on iPhones, allowing Truecaller to match their functionality on this platform with that on Android. Expectations are high that this enhancement will drive user growth and improve subscription conversion rates, with iOS 18 anticipated to provide a significant boost upon its release in September.

Cost Management and Profitability

The company managed to maintain a solid EBITDA margin of 36%, improving from Q1 2024. With a robust business model and high operating leverage, Truecaller is poised to weather temporary revenue fluctuations. Their efficient handling of exposés like the increase in operating costs due to new staff incentives will be closely monitored as they navigate the ad market's challenges. Despite hurdles, they are confident in sustaining profitability and continuing investments into growth initiatives.

Strategic Focus and Future Guidance

Looking ahead, Truecaller remains committed to strengthening its recurring revenue streams. The management anticipates these recurring items could soon take on a more significant share of total revenues, nearing SEK 500 million on an annualized basis. The continued focus on expanding their user base in international markets, particularly Colombia and Nigeria, showcases long-term growth potential, as these areas presently display impressive user engagement and growth trajectories of around 40% annually.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Welcome to the Truecaller Q2 Presentation for 2024. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Alan Mamedi, and CFO, Odd Bolin. Please go ahead.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Thank you, [ Robert ]. Welcome, everyone. I'm Alan Mamedi, I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Truecaller. And with me, I have our CFO, Odd Bolin. We are here to announce our interim report covering the second quarter of 2024. Today, we'll start with overall highlights from the quarter and then walk you through our financial performance in detail. We will then cover some developments on the product side before wrapping up and opening up for questions.

So let's get started with the highlights of the quarter. We closed Q2 with an average of 397 million monthly active users and an increase of 12%. Average daily active users grew to 325 million, an increase of 12% as well. This brings us to a strong DAU to MAU ratio of 82%. This is the strongest absolute user growth we've seen in a quarter since 2018. We closed the quarter at SEK 456 million in net sales, a 12% decrease year-on-year. This is, however, the third highest quarterly net sales ever. But as you know, we have tough comparison quarter and excluding effects related to IPL, our revenues grew.

Our EBITDA landed at SEK 165 million at the end of the quarter, a 31% decrease compared to the same quarter last year due to lower ad revenues mainly related to effects related to IPL and larger investments in user growth. That said, we continue to operate with strong profitability and continue to have a solid cash flow with SEK 213 million in net cash from operating activities before tax payments. This quarter, we saw the strongest user growth since at least 2018 and added 14 million monthly active users. Our investments in our targeted focus markets are paying off. In Colombia and Nigeria, for example, we grew our user base substantially with an annualized growth rate of approximately 40%.

Consumer subscriptions continue to develop well. The growth of our subscriber base continues to outpace the relative growth of our total user base. This quarter, we hit an all-time high in terms of quarterly revenue growth in absolute numbers. We also saw increased conversion rates, which demonstrates that our strategic efforts are effectively driving sustained revenue growth. More specifically, on iOS, our focus on subscription is showing strong results with subscription revenue growing at more than 60% compared to the same period last year. Our initiatives to drive subscriptions on iOS have yielded strong growth, especially in markets with higher propensity to subscribe. Our efforts focusing on driving subscriptions in the U.S. are also showing good results and revenue from subscriptions in the U.S. grew by over 65% year-on-year.

Our enterprise offering, Truecaller for Business also had an all-time high revenue growth this quarter. We continue to see strong demand for our B2B offering and the volume of messages we deliver in partnership with Tanla, continues to grow. During the quarter, we introduced new pricing for Truecaller for Business, and this has started to impact revenues, revenue and average revenue per account positively. Overall, our quarterly relative growth is outpacing annual growth for both recurring revenue streams, indicating accelerated growth.

During the quarter, Apple also announced some exciting things that we will be taking advantage of to our product for iPhone, Apple's upcoming iOS 18 capabilities will enhance our caller ID and blocking features. These updates will bring Truecaller's caller ID functionality on par with Android, which is something that our users have been requesting since we started the company. With the changes that we will be able to make, there is a potential to expand our iOS user base and increase our subscriber conversion more quickly. iOS 18 is expected to launch in September and the full live lookup capabilities are expected later this year or in the beginning of 2025. Overall, these changes represent a major opportunity for Truecaller to grow and monetize our iPhone user base. We'll cover everything in more details in the coming slides.

We continue to see strong user growth, and we closed Q2 at an average of 397 million monthly active users, which is up by 41 million from the same period last year. Our daily active user base grew at the same relative rate of 12%. We ended the quarter with 325 million daily active users, which is an additional 36 million from the same quarter last year. We also continue to see strong retention and are proud that 82% of our monthly active users use Truecaller on a daily basis. We see this as an indicator of our product stickiness and the growing relevance of our services. Now over to Odd.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Thank you, Alan. So it's time to, as always, take a more in-depth look at our financial performance this last quarter. We'll do the same procedure as last quarter. We start with our revenue development. Even though net sales decreased by 12% compared to the same quarter last year, this was still our second best quarter since the end of 2022, and our third best ever in terms of net sales. The quarter we compare with Q2 2023 was a very strong quarter with a substantial positive impact from advertising during the Indian Premier League in Cricket. This year, advertising during the IPL was very different, which impacted the revenue growth figures quite substantially. We discussed the anticipated effects after the Q1 report in May, and we will get back to this subject pretty soon.

Now excluding effects from IPL, ad revenues were marginally lower than in Q2 2023, Currency effects impacted net sales also somewhat negatively this quarter, mainly due to weaker currencies in some of our largest markets in the Middle East and Africa region. The effect, we cannot quantify it precisely due to the indirect nature of our currency exposure, but we are talking about a few millions Swedish krones this quarter, approximately according to our estimate, SEK 15 million on the revenue side.

Subscriptions continue to develop strongly with increased conversion and an all-time high in ARPU. Truecaller for Business also continues to develop well compared to last year, strong intake of new customers and new partnerships with telco resellers continue to drive part of that growth. Business messaging also increased volumes and was an important driver year-over-year.

Now we'll look in some more detail in terms of 3 different revenue streams. Starting with ads as usual. Our ads revenue decreased by 22% compared to the second quarter last year. Excluding the effect from IPL, we estimate that ad revenues declined by only 3%. The general demand in India outside of IPL continued to be soft, and it has been evident also in the public reports from other advertisers with a similar advertising offering when reported price per ad continued to come down. This holds true for all players working with third-party programmatic ads, where we have information. During times when demand decreases, suppliers, such as ourselves, have increased supply to contract to decreased demand. On a market level, this has further decreased pricing, which is pretty obvious in our numbers. We continue to improve our platforms for tech improvements and the growth of the user base. We continue to optimize for revenue per user rather than pricing on fill rates, and we continue to increase impressions available for monetization within the existing ad slots. These improvements help us marginally now, but more importantly, when demand bounces back, they will generate a good return.

Our strategy to focus on strengthening our subscription offering with more advanced features continues to pay off. Our recurring subscription revenues grew by 29% compared to last year. And the growth compared to Q1 was at an all-time high when it comes to absolute increase in revenues. The relative increase compared to Q1 was 10%, which we're very happy about. An important driver of revenues from subscriptions is our growing footprint in iOS, where the conversion rates and willingness to pay substantially higher than an Android. As Alan mentioned, our efforts in the U.S. on subscriptions is trending strong, but we also see strong traction in, for example, Latin America, and this contributed to ARPU reaching an all-time high this quarter.

As for subscriptions, the revenue growth for Truecaller business accelerated and the quarterly growth of revenues in absolute numbers was at an all-time high with the strong contributions from both verified business calls and business messaging. The relative growth compared to Q1 was 17%. In Verified business, we continue to see many positive things happening, net additions of customers, longer contracts and higher pricing plans that we introduced during the quarter and that will gradually impact our revenues over the next 12 months. We're growing revenues as well as a number of customers. Growth has increased with successful new reseller partnerships. During Q2, we also rolled out new packaging and price plans, which gradually will increase revenues per customer, like I said. Volumes within business messaging continued to grow and contributed to the growth in revenues year-over-year.

Let's briefly go back to the IPL issue since it's an important revenue driver in the Indian digital ads market and had a substantial impact on our revenue comparison this quarter. This is due to the magnitude of the event and the fact that we are a preferred platform for partners doing performance marketing to attract new users, for example, Fantasy Cricket League. 2023 was a very strong year in terms of IPL ads spending, and our IPL revenue grew by 100% from 2022 to 2023. In 2024, IPL-related revenue came back to the 2022 level. The primary reason for this is the change in GST rules in India, which has created a substantial uncertainty as to the viability of the business model of many Indian fantasy gaming companies. However, not all companies allowed this to impact their spending this year. Our largest customer during IPL in 2023 spent as much during 2024, but many other spenders disappeared almost completely.

In addition to the demand decrease, the IPL started earlier this year than last year, which meant that approximately half of IPL spending came in Q1 this year, while almost all of the spending came in, in 2023 ended up in Q2. All in all, IPL-related revenue in Q2 this year came in approximately SEK 85 million lower than we saw in Q2 2023, which resulted in this 22% decline of total ad sales. But like I said, when excluding this IPL effect, ad revenues were just slightly lower, 3% from last year. As mentioned, we've accelerated revenue growth for our 2 recurring revenue streams, consumer subscriptions and Truecaller for Business. Even so, we're still quite early in the development of both these offerings, and we continue to see a lot of potential here. The 2 recurring revenue streams together grew by 33% and constituted about 27% of net sales. So they are now making up more than 1/4 of our total overall revenue and is close to SEK 500 million on an annualized revenue rate. And business going forward is straightforward. We want to see and we will see continued growth and we will increase the recurring revenue streams share of total revenues and thereby adding stability and diversification to the overall revenue mix.

We continue to have an exciting pipeline for our subscription offering, both when it comes to features and packaging and targeting as well as looking at new partnerships. We see potential in a continuation of higher ARPU and increased conversion. At the end of the quarter, we included fraud insurance in the premium offering in India to further enhance our offering and to safeguard our users work before, during and after calls. For our Software-as-a-Service offering Truecaller business, we are growing steadily, but the potential continues to be very large. We started to reprice verified business customers gradually during the spring, which means that new customers are coming on to higher price plans when they join us, while older customers will gradually be adopting the new price plans and packages.

Gross revenues grew quarter-over-quarter, but declined year-over-year due to the lower IPL revenues from ads. The gross margin development continues to be stable at the 75%, 76% level. Small variations between quarters are due to factors such as the balance between different sales channels, as well as balance between different methods of verifying new users.

Now time to move the focus to costs. Truecaller has a robust business model with a very high operating leverage, as you know. But efficiency is key in order to deliver solid margins. I think generally, we continue to do a reasonable job in managing our overall cost base. From the start of Q2, the annual salary review increases staff costs. The overall number of employees continues to be under control. And during the present challenging ad market conditions in India, we only recruit very critical resources. The new incentive program that we started after the AGM this year will increase costs somewhat starting from Q3. As you know, part of that incentive cost depends on the share price at the end of the quarter. So there could be variations up and down.

Late Q4 last year, we started to increase investments in targeted growth markets. This is mainly digital performance, digital performance marketing efforts and preloads to boost growth in targeted geographical regions, where we see long-term revenue potential and an ability to further boost our user base as well and also continued diversification of our geographical mix. These investments are quick and easy for us to turn on and off depending on where we see the best results. We are pleased with the results we get so far out of the investments, and we expect to continue to do investments at about the similar level as in Q1 and Q2 going forward. But of course, we continuously fine-tune where we get the best long-term return on investment.

As we have previously stated, our tax rate is a combination of the Swedish corporate tax rate and the Indian corporate tax rate and that we have expected the tax rate to increase somewhat. This quarter, the tax rate was approximately 25%. And for H1, the first half of the year, it was 24%. For the longer term, we think about 25%, 26% tax rate at a reasonable level, but with possible variations in between quarters.

EBITDA decreased compared to Q2 last year due to the decrease in ads revenue, with our high gross margins, any change in revenue has an immediate effect on the bottom line. As you're all well aware, EBITDA margin was 36%, which is an improvement compared to the first quarter this year. Excluding incentive costs, the margin is about 39% during the second quarter. We continue to deliver margins above our long-term financial target, although we have a muted ads market and have increased our investments in long-term growth.

Cash flow. Our cash flow conversion continues to be strong, and the cash flow creates opportunities to continue to give money back to our shareholders through buybacks and future dividends as well as continuing to invest in growth and scan the market for potential M&A. After our first dividend of approximately SEK 600 million, we decreased our cash balance, but we continue to be in a very favorable position with no debt and the SEK 1.1 billion in cash and short-term investments. We continue to generate cash at about the same rate as we have been doing buybacks. During the quarter, we canceled 7.5% of our outstanding shares from the buybacks we've done so far. And we received a new mandate to do buybacks up to 10% of the now outstanding shares. The Board made a decision to start utilizing that mandate, and we bought back some shares during the quarter. With the new mandate, we can buy back up to a bit more than 28 million shares.

Now lastly, on our financial targets. We grew revenues rapidly in '21 and '22 as see the [ roller work ] with a strong market and strong demand for ads, but since 2023, the challenging digital ads market has put a temporary break on our overall revenue growth. The strong growth we continue to see in subscriptions and Truecaller for Business has not been able to make up for the shortfall in ad revenue growth. The [ jury ] is still out there as to whether we will reach our medium-term growth target of 45% annually since it covers '21 to '24. However, the growth targets were set in a very different macroeconomic environment. And we are confident that once digital ads demand in India bounces back, which we're sure it will, we will get back on an overall growth trajectory. On our EBITDA margin, we continue to deliver about 35% even with our increased investments, and even though this target really doesn't may take effect until 2025. Now with that said, I'll give the word back to you, Alan.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Thanks, Odd. Let's move on to our quarterly product update. The 3 areas we'll cover are the product offering in a core product offering, Truecaller Premium and our [ ad tech ] capabilities and Truecaller for Business. We continue to work on making our core services smarter, safer and more efficient. By investing in AI and machine learning, we have improved our caller ID, message ID and spam detection, making it easier to identify unwanted calls and messages. Thanks to these investments, we've identified a lot more spammers, especially in India, where the volumes of spammers that we identified grew by over 100% compared to Q2 last year. We've also made great progress in fighting fraud this quarter. Using feedback from our users, we've enhanced our algorithm to better detect suspicious calls. We rolled out this improved model in India, where we saw the number of fraudulent callers identify and grow by more than 100x. We'll soon roll this out to other markets as well.

We continue to improve the user experience. And in the second quarter, in-app engagement grew by 25% compared to last year. We made it easier for users to give feedback on unknown numbers through comments, vote, survey and name suggestions. And these efforts are growing well. In the second quarter, the number of users sharing insights grew by 1.5x year-on-year. This shows our biggest strength. Our global community of hundreds of millions of users whose feedback keeps improving our service are critical. As more people compute, our algorithms get smarter and the quality of our data gets better as our active use base grows.

On iPhone, we continue to improve the user experience to make our app the best it can be. In the second quarter, we redesigned the home screen for easier navigation and search, updated the in phase to better educate users about the app and added new features that makes it easier for users to give feedback and help improve the service. We made progress in monetizing the iPhone app using both free and premium models. Adding ad inventory with higher CPMs and driving more engagement has supported ads revenue growth. The inventory that we added during the quarter is scaling well with ad revenues growing by over 90% year-on-year from a low base.

On the subscription side, our targeted efforts and experiments are paying off with subscription revenues from iPhone users growing by more than 60% compared to last year. These initiatives are especially successful in markets where people are more likely to subscribe. What we're also very excited about is that at the end of the quarter, Apple announced the introduction of live lookup capabilities with iOS 18. With this coming change, we'll soon be able to offer users a caller ID functionality on par with Android, something that has been requested by users since we started the company and something we have discussed with Apple. The upcoming changes on iOS provides a significant opportunity for us to expand our iOS user base and increase the subscription conversion. The new version of iOS is expected to be released in September with the full release of live lookup and and we are expected to follow in the near future.

Overall, we see these changes as very positive for our potential to accelerate growth and monetization on iPhone. As a teaser, here's a sneak peek of what our team is working on behind the scenes with these upcoming changes in IOS 18. [Presentation] Fantastic. So the way Truecaller works for iPhone now is that the app relies on a local database on the device for number search results, unlike the cloud-based system used on Android. This restriction meant that we could only show the top 1000-or-so spammers for a specific market without advanced call routing systems to iPhone users. Now Apple is changing its system, and this will allow us to improve our caller ID for iPhone to work just like it does on Android, as you saw in the video. With this change, when an iPhone user searches for a number or receives a call from an unknown number, Truecaller will be able to perform a live lookup on the cloud, utilizing the billions of data points that we have developed from user contributions and machine learning. Even with the previous limitations, iOS has been an important driver of our subscription revenue growth. The changes Apple is making will likely boost this even more. Today, iPhone users make up about 7% of the overall user base. Even with this small user base, we have seen that the conversion rate premium is more than 5x higher compared to Android users. iPhone users accounts for 40% of our subscription revenue and revenue from a subscriber on iOS is 80% higher than on Android.

With all that said, we're extremely excited about the opportunities that this update provides for the future. Beyond what we offer on Android and iPhone, we continue to work on creating a broader ecosystem and expanding our services beyond just mobile apps. At the end of the quarter, we released a beta version of the app for Android smartwatches. This will let users identify and manage calls directly from their wrist, and we plan to roll it out more widely in the coming weeks. As more people start using smartwatches, this app is expected to improve our user retention and make the app more useful.

Moving on to our progress on consumer subscriptions. During the quarter, we simplified our pricing strategy to offer just 2 plans worldwide, premium and premium family. We adjusted the prices for these plans based on how likely people in each market are to buy subscriptions to strike the right balance between conversion and monetization. We rolled out the new pricing gradually during the quarter and have already seen many people adopting to the new plans. Overall, our consumer subscriptions are doing very well with revenues growing on both iPhone and Android. And in total, subscription revenues are growing by 29% year-on-year. The number of paying users is growing faster than the total user base at 18%, showing that our premium features are becoming more valuable as we improve our offerings.

During the quarter, we also made progress in ensuring subscribers are protected throughout their mobile communication before, during and after suspicious activity, as Odd mentioned. At the end of June, we introduced fraud insurance for annual plan subscribers in India. This insurance launched in collaboration with HDFC ERGO, one of India's top general insurance providers, covers losses from fraudulent calls or messages. This new feature supports our commitment to safer mobile communication by compensating premium users for financial losses from mobile scams.

On the advertising side, we continue to focus on enhancing ads monetization through focused initiatives on the supply and demand side. We also continue to invest in our in-house ad tech to optimize the delivery of ads and to improve our targeting capabilities. Our efforts to improve our capabilities have scaled well and we continue to deliver meaningful impact for advertisers. For example, Make My Trip, one of India's top online travel platforms, engaged us to support their user growth. Using unique insights into user behavior, we developed a target audience interested in travel and placed these ads strategically within the app to increase visibility and attention. We carefully monitored how each ad placement performed and adjusted them to maximize their effectiveness. This ensured that Make My Trip was able to drive awareness and engagement with the right audience. The campaign resulted in significant installs for Make My Trip, which surpassed the benchmarks expected.

We also, during the quarter, started to roll out to a certain amount of our users, our interstitial ads and parts of that also being our video ads, and we've been optimizing that to see how it can scale in the future. So far, the numbers that we're seeing are very encouraging, and we're looking forward to gradually over the coming quarters, roll that out to more users with a frequency that is accepted by our community. Truecaller for Business had a standout quarter, achieving record revenue and acquiring numerous new customers for the verified business product. We introduced new packaging and pricing to deliver greater value, resulting in an all-time high in average revenue per account. We also saw a lot of upgrades among existing customers to higher pricing tiers.

On the product side, we expanded the offering as we completed the new product Verified Campaigns, which will launch in the third quarter. This new service empowers marketing teams to engage customers with personalized display units during and after the call, leveraging the Verified Business called screen for targeted offers and life cycle communications. Business Messaging, our service delivered in partnership with Tanla continues to see growing volumes in the number of messages delivered. Revenue from business messaging grew by 50% year-on-year, driven by higher message volumes and adjusted pricing strategies.

The introduction of rich media capabilities is gaining traction with real-time call-to-action click insights, helping brands measure their campaigns performance effectively. In parallel, we continue to improve the messaging experience on the consumer app to grow adoption of business messaging, which will enhance the potential market for this product.

And now to wrap things up, we continue to grow our user base and saw the highest quarterly user growth since at least 2018. We are especially happy to see user growth develop positively in the markets that we have chosen to invest in. While our ad revenue comps were impacted by the strong IPL period that we saw last year and the timing of IPL this year, we're proud that our recurring revenue streams, subscription and Truecaller for Business are performing very well. The quarterly absolute growth for these 2 streams reached an all-time high, indicating accelerated growth. We're also very optimistic about the upcoming changes to iOS, and we have said this a few times. But we've already made great progress in improving monetization of iPhone before this announcement and with the limitations that we've had in the past. The changes will enable us to deliver a significantly better experience for our users on iPhone and ultimately allow us to accelerate growth and monetization even further.

Finally, we're proud of our profitability, which creates continued opportunities for growth investments as well as dividends and buybacks. As always, a big thank you to our users, the great partners that we work with and the phenomenal Truecaller team across the world. And now we're happy to take your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Stefan Gauffin from DNB.

[Stefan Gauffin, analyst]

Yes, hello. So you met expectations on advertising overall. But I was a bit surprised by the weak CPM, but this was compensated for by a record number of ad impressions of 16.5 per DAU per day. So I just want to see how you think about this? What is the limit of number of ads per day? Do you measure how customers react to this? And yes, how much is accepted by users? And then just on the new promises implemented for Truecaller for Business, what are the magnitude of these? And what are the outcome from companies where you have renegotiated terms. Are you seeing that they accept new prices? Or how should we think about this?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes, I can answer it and feel free to pitch in, Odd. On the advertisement side, I believe there are much more room for us to show ads to our consumers without annoying them. And that we have seen in the past, and we've done several trials to see where do we reach the bar. And so far, we haven't been able to do that. So I wouldn't be concerned about that. And for us, as a product-first company, we always look at that for anything else. When it comes to revenue per user on advertisement in regards to CPM, I think it's a hard metric to look at because we do have a lot of supply, and we can adjust that supply depending on the demand, which obviously impacts the CPMs. So it doesn't give a fair picture of how things are going. And at the same time, we're also growing our user base in other parts of India where the CPMs are lower, but we're also growing in markets where CPMs are higher. So there's a mix of a lot of components that makes it hard to come to a certain conclusion on that question. But in general, I would say the ads market looks pretty stable. And I think we've had a fantastic quarter in terms of the things that we can have an impact on and the focus that we've had and actually being able to execute at speed on these things, such as recurring revenue streams with Truecaller for Business and subscription, user growth, et cetera.

Now on the Truecaller for Business, we've had few customers or a lot of customers actually who have renewed their packages. And I don't think this has come as a surprise to anyone because every single company is revising the price plans every single year. So this becomes quite natural to the fact that there's an annual sort of adjustment to the price plan. And we haven't seen any pushback or like lost any important customers because of that. In fact, I do believe that the way we have priced Truecaller for Business in the past was relevant for the products we were offering back then. Today, Truecaller for Business offers much more than we didn't charge for historically.

[Stefan Gauffin, analyst]

And the magnitude of the price increase.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Substantial.

[Stefan Gauffin, analyst]

And indication.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Very substantial...

[Stefan Gauffin, analyst]

Substantial. Okay.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

We haven't gone out with anything specific because it could potentially impact the business, although maybe marginally, but we don't want to be out with a number that is set in stone, but it's very substantial.

[Operator]

The next question comes from John Karidis from Deutsche Bank.

[John Karidis, analyst]

I'll go one at a time, if I may. Firstly, a housekeeping point. My line broke when Odd was talking about the negative FX impact on revenue. Will that SEK 15 million in...

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Approximately SEK 15 million In revenue. Okay. And remember... You remember that, that is an estimate. Our best estimate as...

[John Karidis, analyst]

Yes, yes. I know. I know it's an educated guess, but I also remember that you're very highly educated. So that's SEK 15 million. And what was it in the first quarter, please?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Quite a bit less. This is actually one of the largest effects we've seen. It's not very large compared to our revenue, but this is actually one of the largest that we've seen.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Okay. And is it a fair guess to say that it's actually disproportionately impacting the ad revenue rather than subscription or Truecaller for Business.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Yes. Like we said, it's primarily from certain markets in Middle East and African region. And I'm sure you can figure out which these markets are just by looking at how certain currencies developed both last year and this year.

[John Karidis, analyst]

I just wanted to confirm that. Secondly, I don't really care about CPM. I look at ad revenue per user. And I haven't adjusted for the headwinds that you just talked about. So without adjusting for those, the ad revenue per user, both in the first quarter and the second quarter was about between 10% and 15% down year-on-year. So I wonder if there was a sort of second leg down in the first half of 2024?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

I wouldn't say that. It has more to do with our ability to get the fill rate that we want, which is an ongoing work. And sometimes it goes up a little bit, sometimes it goes down. Over time, we have been able to increase our fill rate. But over those 2 quarters, we have not been fully successful doing that as we have been historically. So I wouldn't say it has anything to do with the market demand in general. And I wouldn't say it has anything to do with our outlook as such.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Okay. And finally, maybe for Alan, maybe for Odd, whatever you wish. This ad market sentiment has been subdued for what, 6 quarters now at least. So I for one I'm coming up against investor skepticism that it will ever recover, it might be some sort of structural change. So is it possible to try and give us some tangible, tangible reasons why you think it will recover. So I'm not trying to figure out when, but I just want as much comfort as you can give me that it will recover one day, please.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Well, I think, John, that you're right, like it's been 6 quarters now, and it becomes quite tiresome to always say the same thing. But what we're seeing is basically the same, we're seeing the same things as our colleagues in the industry are seeing as well. And there are certain verticals that are still not spending money on advertisement the same way they used to do a year ago or so. And the question is when will these verticals start spending again. to more of normal levels? I don't know when that will happen. But I do know that there are ways to sort of improve this through other types of partnerships, which we've been working on during the last 2 quarters. So it's hard to say. And therefore, it's important for us to make sure that in the coming years, that our diversification of revenue streams are so good and so strong that we don't need to care about these seasonal effects or these unexpected changes in a certain industry, basically. I wish I had a better answer, but that's what everyone is seeing.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

I think I can add, John, that if you believe that the Indian ad market will continue to stay behind, for example, the U.S. in terms of what share of total advertising goes through digital advertising and how much digital advertising makes up of company revenue in general, if you believe that, of course, you can believe that we are at a steady state level at this point. But if you believe that India will follow the same route as we've seen, first of all, in the U.S. and then secondly in Western Europe, then I think it's pretty obvious that the growth rates and the growth trajectory we saw before this downturn in the market that has lasted now for 6 quarters will continue.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Is it possible to name a few verticals, Alan, the ones that are not spending, please?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes. I mean, it's everything from car manufacturers to phone manufacturers to certain FMCG companies. And these shouldn't come as a surprise because that's what we're seeing in these companies when we read the news basically.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Predrag Savinovic from Carnegie.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

Starting with Truecaller for Business, when did you start rolling out the price update? And to what extent has this driven the revenues in the second quarter? And when do you think this matures fully? Which quarter will we see the largest financial impact? Is that from Q3?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

We started rolling it out during the second quarter this year, meaning that new customers start with the new price plan. Old customers have existing contracts that will have to be finalized before they go into the new price plan. Many of our customers are on longer time lines here, 6 to 12 months. So the full effect will be seen during this year or beginning of next year, but it will happen gradually over the next couple of quarters as people move from existing contracts to new contracts under the new price plan.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

Okay. That's very clear. And then on growth investments that you've done so far this year, I think you always suggested that you were opportunistic about this, which could basically mean that you could continue doing potentially some outsized investments also for H2. Is that a fair assessment? Or how along on that front?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

What we've said is that we're opportunistic within the framework set by our focus on certain growth markets. Like we said, those markets in Western Europe, in particular, Nigeria, Colombia and the U.S. and, to some extent, regions centered around Nigeria and Colombia. We've had good results so far. We're happy with what we've seen. We've seen very good MAU rate growth in both Colombia, Nigeria and some [indiscernible] countries. We've seen good revenue increases in the U.S. based on the efforts we've done. And as for now, we intend to continue at about the same level as we've had during the first 2 quarters.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

Okay. And then could we get an update on video ads in terms of ramping these and launching and when they can become a larger share of the total inventory?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes. As I said last quarter, we should expect to see some impact later this year, probably end of the year and because the inventory is far from the size that we see on current banner ads. And that's what we've been focusing on to get engagement and impressions up inside the app where we believe we can show ads, video ads. And we've reached to some degree, those levels that we're satisfied with to start testing this. And that's what we've been doing this quarter in Q2 with interstitials and which is a mix of video ads and other types of interstitial ads. And right now, it's only limited to a certain percentage of our users with a certain frequency. Now we're testing this, and we're changing these frequencies and so forth on a day-to-day basis to find a spot that we think makes sense before we can scale things up. But at the same time, we're also learning. Some of our ambassadors are giving us great feedback on where it doesn't make sense or where we shouldn't. And sometimes, that also requires us to do an app update, for example. So I would say we're on plan. We're executing according to plan, and it will take some time. It will take a couple of quarters before we start seeing a larger impact on the ad revenues from these type of ads. And now just recently, we also introduced rewarded video ads to watch a video to unlock, for example, some of the Truecaller premium functionalities. So this is also something that we're testing out right now with the video ads format.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Bharath Nagaraj from Cantor Fitzgerald.

[Bharath Nagaraj, analyst]

Just a follow-up on the previous set of questions, which came in. Is it possible that some of the sectors you are not spending on digital ads are not spending on Truecaller only, but they are doing so on other more relevant platforms for themselves, maybe that delivers them higher conversion? Are there any like stats that you can provide? Because I think you said you did user interface improvements and a number of other improvements as well. So just trying to understand the click-through rates for your ads in general, have they improved at all because of these initiatives?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes. It's a good question. So I think for some verticals, if we look into, for example, mobile manufacturers, what we've seen is that they have started to spend for some time, more money on e-commerce businesses, like an Amazon or a Flipkart where they have sponsored products basically when you search for a phone. But at the same time, we have also seen that they continue to spend on our platform. And this shift didn't happen at the same time. So I don't see them cannibalizing our business in any way, but I do see that their spending is less in general. But some of the ad spends that they've done on other platforms have moved over to e-commerce businesses. The difference between us and other ads platforms are the reach that you can get instantly. So you cannot advertise on Facebook or Google and reach 300 million people to show your new smartphone, for example. That's where Truecaller is quite unique. And that's also where we continue to see these spendings, but the levels are lower. I would assume that's what you were thinking about, but...

[Bharath Nagaraj, analyst]

Yes, yes, yes. That certainly helps. The second question I have is around, is there any further color on the latest updates with regards to the telco bill in India and the CNAP service trial that I think happened like last year by some of the local telcos. Any updates on how this might impact your future user growth rate numbers in the country?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Well, we've been following this, obviously, and we've also been following what the media says, we haven't seen any impact at all. In fact, I mean, you can see the Q2 numbers. We continue to grow. And we believe that if CNAP gets rolled out all over the country, we do expect Truecaller to continue to grow. In fact, there has been other markets in the past and also the last 12 months that have introduced and rolled out CNAP type of products in the network while Truecaller has continued to grow in the same pace or in many cases, even faster.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Jesper von Koch from Redeye.

[Jesper Henrikson, analyst]

First, regarding the opening of iOS and the enabling of caller ID, does this mean that you will focus more on general user growth in the U.S. rather than only going for subscription growth?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

It's a good question, and it's also a strategic question, which we're asking ourselves. Because we're spending money to acquire customers in the U.S., we are focusing on the return of that investment, which means that we're focusing on converting to subscribers. And I would say that most likely, that will continue.

[Jesper Henrikson, analyst]

All right. And then just a second one. If you know if you'll be able to [Technical Difficulty] ads on your after-call screen on the new iOS like you do on Android?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

We will not be able to do that. However, for verified business customers, we will be able to provide a similar experience on iOS, where you see that it's a verified business from Truecaller, et cetera.

[Operator]

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to Alan and Odd for any closing comments.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

All right. Thanks for all the great questions. And thank you, everyone, for listening in, and we look forward to seeing you at our next earning calls. Thank you.