Truecaller AB

STO:TRUE B

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Hi, everyone, and welcome who's listening in. I'm Alan Mamedi, and I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Truecaller. I'm joined by our CFO, Odd Bolin. We're very excited to announce our interim report for the first quarter of 2022.

So I will start with presenting financial and business highlights for the quarter. I will then provide an update on some of the exciting things we have worked on during the quarter to continue to improve our product offerings. And Odd will then walk you through our financial performance. Finally, I will wrap up with a summary of the quarter, and then we'll open up for Q&A. So let's get started with the highlights of the quarter.

We had an outstanding quarter and closed Q1 with an average of 310 million monthly active users, a 40% increase year-on-year. Average daily active users also grew to 248 million, an increase of 18%, which gives us an engagement of 80% of our monthly active users being active on a daily basis. Our net sales continues to grow, and we closed the quarter at SEK 398 million, 116% increase compared to the same quarter in 2021. We also had a strong adjusted EBITDA of SEK 181.4 million and an adjusted margin of 46%. We continue to maintain a strong financial position with SEK 122 million in net cash from operating activities. We are extremely proud to be a high-growth tech company and intend to move forward with strong profitability, great margins and very strong cash flows.

And we're excited to be on Sensor Tower list of the top 20 most downloaded apps in the world this quarter. We also achieved an incredible milestone of 80% DAU to MAU engagement ratio this quarter, which shows just how important our app is in the daily lives of our users. We're very proud of being one of the very few companies in the world with this growth and reach.

And also, we saw a very strong growth in advertising this quarter. This growth was driven by user growth in various markets, combined with improvements in ads revenues per user. We made some very encouraging progress on Truecaller for Business by onboarding some major logos such as SBI, India's largest bank and the e-commerce giant, Flipkart. We also made good progress in growing Truecaller for Business in other markets like South Africa, Egypt and Israel. And we also announced an exclusive partnership with Tanla to provide business messages through our platform and product, which helps businesses reach users with more enriched B2C messages.

Lastly, we finalized our acquisition of CallHero this quarter. We've been receiving questions from investors and analysts on what CallHero does, and we're excited to provide a sneak peek of the CallHero experience in a few minutes.

Now to growth. Our user base continues to grow. Majority of user growth is driven by strong organic growth, but we're also seeing our investments in user acquisition start to see upcoming markets that are strategic -- of strategic importance to us. We closed Q1 at an average of 310 million monthly active users, which is up by 39 million from the same period last year or a 40% increase, as mentioned earlier.

Our daily active user base is also growing at a healthy pace. We closed the quarter at an average of 248 million daily active users which is up by 37 million from last year or an 18% increase. We continue to see solid engagements. And in Q1, we had 80% of our monthly active users being active on a daily basis.

Now to the products. And as a product-first company, we continuously invest in developing our offering to further improve the user experience. As usual, let's recap the product offering for those who are new to this company.

There are 2 main areas where we focus on from a product perspective. One is our Consumer product, which is available on iPhone and Android. Truecaller is used by over 310 million users every month, and we're proud to be the leading global platform for phone number verification and call blocking. Consumers use our product in order to have a safer and more efficient calling and messaging experience. It's their go-to product for their communication needs basically.

The other side of this is our business product that we call Truecaller for Business, which allows businesses to verify through a KYC process and become verified businesses on our platform in order to increase trust in their communication but also to prevent impersonation. They can also integrate their calling and messaging experience directly into our product so that they can grow their business more efficiently through features like Call Reason and much more.

As an example, as a consumer, which Truecaller installed on your phone, you can rest assured that when your medical insurance company is calling you, we will verify that it's actually them and the reason why they're calling it or your bank or a delivery company and so on. This enables businesses to become more efficient, save time and, of course, save money.

Now let's get into the highlights of our product updates. So some of the highlights we have this quarter, which are on a similar theme as our previous report are the consumer product itself, our machine learning initiatives and our ads and enterprise products. I will also be sharing a little bit about our acquisition of CallHero.

We'll always stay focused on improving our core offering every day. Following the launch of our app Version 12 on Android, we continue to develop the features that were rolled out at the end of last year. We continue to deliver technical enhancements to improve speed and performance. And there has also been very good traction on the adoption of features that we rolled out in our Version 12. The user adoption of Video Caller ID, for example, grew by over 150% since the end of the previous year.

We also introduced additional messaging capabilities in the first quarter to continue to improve the core communication experience for users. We introduced a new way of sending messages called Urgent Messages, which the recipient can read and respond without having to unlock their screen. So this makes the messaging experience much more efficient and urgent when needed.

We continue to develop Smart SMS, a much loved feature of our app. The Smart SMS categorize as the most important messages in a dedicated tab. We rolled out advanced machine learning models that automate spam SMS detection based on user feedback globally. These models are fully automated based on community feedback. And this ensures that every user has the most relevant experience regardless of where they are.

One of the most popular features of Smart SMS is smart cards. When a message is categorized as important, Truecaller highlights relevant content from lengthy SMS messages and summarizes the most relevant information into easily digestible smart cards. We improved the artificial intelligence behind smart cards during the quarter, so that Smart SMS messages get delivered to the most -- with the most relevant information to the user. These machine learning initiatives are done without compromising user privacy and all of this magic happens locally on your device.

In the previous quarter, we were excited to introduce opportunities for users to leave feedback on unknown numbers in the form of comments and up and down votes. This quarter, we have expanded comments to cover over 30 additional languages, empowering even more users to report their own experience while further enhancing our spam detection capabilities.

We also introduced additional engagement points for users to provide input through a dynamic feedback system. This is expected to drive significant improvements to the ad's ability to provide the most useful information. And over time, this will strengthen our contextual search capabilities which will enable the app to provide relevant information even without a specific name, but more on the calling experience.

We also strengthened our presence on the web and desktop by improving the search experience on our website. This provides a more consistent experience across Truecaller regardless of the device you're on. Searching for a number on the Truecaller website provides just as much information as on the mobile app, such as call activities, spam reports and opportunities to leave feedback. Our web presence also increases the accessibility of its services and now allows anyone to conduct a limited number of searches on their computer or a feature phone, where we see a big increase of adoption.

On the AdTech side, we have progressed very well and integrated more demand partners into our re-architectured auction setup. This enables us to operate in a more flexible and efficient way while improving our revenues. Besides that, we deployed a new performance-driven ad unit with the goal of improving yield per ad opportunity and better return of investment for performance advertisers during the year and beyond.

Now demand for Truecaller for Business continues to grow across a wide range of industries. Key customers onboarded in the first quarter include a number of leading brands in India. Some of them are here on the screen, the State Bank of India, which is the largest state-owned banking and financial services company in the country and amongst one of the largest banks in the world as well. Also, Flipkart, which is a subsidiary of Walmart and one of the top e-commerce players in India that also became a new Truecaller for Business customer came on board in the first quarter. The need for Truecaller's business-facing solution remains apparent in markets beyond India as well with the addition of new businesses -- business customers from South Africa, Egypt and Israel across diverse industries.

The first quarter also marked our entry into business messaging through the establishment of an exclusive reseller partnership with Tanla, as I mentioned before, which is the leading player in the CPaaS space. The partnership aims to help businesses reach out to their customers using our messaging channel instead of the traditional SMS channel and with this, we can provide rich media and engaging content. This experience is expected to drive improvements in click-through rates for businesses sending messages on our channel.

In our Q4 report, we talked about the success of launching our self-serve portal where businesses could go into our website and sign up directly which in December stood for around 35% of our direct sales. We also mentioned that the demand from our reseller partners increased to a level which required us to start working on a reseller portal. I'm happy to announce that in Q1, we finalized that product and launched it so that our resellers can now onboard new customers using our reseller portal. It has in a very short period of time being widely deployed, enabling resellers to handle all services on behalf of their customers more efficiently.

Next, we want to share an update on our recent acquisition of call here. First, I want to play a short video that showcase the CallHero products.

[Presentation]

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

And they're joining Truecaller. The work to integrate CallHero into the Truecaller app progressed very well in the first quarter. When the integration is finalized, there will be a feature inside the Truecaller app that we call Truecaller Assistant. The screenshots that you see on this slide are from the CallHero app prior to the acquisition and not what it will look inside the Truecaller app. That will remain a secret for now.

The CallHero app itself has been sunsetted. And now all the focus is on getting the juicy stuff into the Truecaller product. And we look forward to sharing more in the future -- in the future reports and earnings call.

Now over to Odd to talk about our financial performance.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Thank you. Okay, a little bit time to look a little bit deeper into the financial performance this quarter. As usual, we start with the revenues. I'm happy to say that we are -- we see a very strong development. Revenue growth is mainly driven by our strong growth in advertising, which is an effect of the sustained growth in the user numbers in many different geographies, combined with the continued growth in revenue generating ad impressions per user.

CPM being the revenue per shown ad has increased by 39% compared to the first quarter in the previous year. As Alan also said earlier on, we see a continued positive trend for our B2B offering, Truecaller for Business, which is growing nicely, both when it comes to customers as well as revenue. We continue to see solid potential to grow further from here with more users and further improvements of our AdTech platform and to continue to scale Truecaller for Business.

Then look at into our different revenue streams in some more detail. I'm happy to say that we see solid growth in all 3 of them, not only in ads and Truecaller for Business, but also subscriptions. For ads, the investment we have made is -- are paying off and income increased with 132% compared to the same quarter last year. When looking at this graph, it is important to remember though that the Q3 and Q4 usually are the seasonally strongest quarters in advertising. Although this quarter, we had some help from the Indian Premier League in cricket season has started late in the quarter -- in the first quarter this year.

On the supply side, we continue to see user growth which contributes to the overall availability of ad opportunities. We're also working steadily with continued optimization of ad space utilization aimed at increasing both the fill rate and the rates. On the demand side, we continue to increase our advertise -- advertising base while making it easier for advertisers to use our services without intermediates which has a positive effect on our profitability while driving fill rates.

Revenue from consumer subscription has developed nicely, and our average income per customer, the ARPU, annual revenue per user is increasing as we grow in markets with higher price levels. The strongest growth was in -- was in markets outside of India and also on the IRS platform. Revenues from other sources, which mainly is Truecaller for Business increased to SEK 20 million. Demand for these services has proved to be very high in several areas of these markets because many companies have a need to maintain a secure channel of communication with their customers.

A number of customer sign-ups is showing strong growth in India and other markets. And as you know, our services are sold through our direct sales and through partners. We continue to invest in the offering. And this quarter, we achieved -- launched a new reseller portal as Alan described, to facilitate further growth. We also established an exclusive distribution partnership with Tanla, which further strengthens our product with instant messaging capabilities for businesses.

Our gross margin continues to be high and compared to the same period last year, it has increased with 6.5%, percentage points, to 78%, which is driven by -- primarily by increased sales via partners that have a lower fee, lower commission as well as a larger share of direct sales where we have a gross -- higher gross margin.

If we then return to OpEx, we grew our staff expenses as we grew with the company. And this quarter, we also have an effect of SEK 3.4 million from the long-term incentive program that we introduced last year. Other external expenses increased mainly due to increased investments in data and user acquisition to support our long-term growth, organic growth. There's also an increase in investments in marketing and due to being a listed company on the stock exchange.

As we have talked about earlier, we expect to continue to increase our investments in growth-focused securities such as data and user acquisition, preloads of our app in our new smartphones and marketing to support our long-term organic growth.

Looking at EBITDA. Our adjusted EBITDA increased to SEK 181 million during the quarter compared to SEK 54 million last year. So it's an increase of more than 3x. The EBITDA margin increased by 7 percentage points year-over-year to 46%. And I'd also like to highlight this quarter the fact that EBITDA margin grows at a much faster rate due to the strong operational leverage we have in our business model.

The business model and our strong performance generates solid cash -- solid cash flows. And this quarter, the net cash flow from operating activities was SEK 122 million. And our cash conversion ratio was 67%. We have a very strong financial position at this time. We have almost SEK 1.5 billion in cash and short-term asset funds, which we can use for strategic investments and other growth initiatives going forward. If opportunities arise, we can proactively take advantage of the fact that many other tech companies might encounter financial difficulties during -- due to the market volatility that we see right now.

Then quick look at the financial targets, which we started -- which as stated as an average between 2021 and 2024. We can conclude that with our strong performance, at this point, we're well ahead on all the metrics. But we, at this point, see no reason to change any of our financial targets. We stick to the ones we have.

And with that, I conclude the financial part of the presentation and leave the word back to Alan for some final words before we open up for Q&A.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Thank you, Odd. So to summarize this and to wrap up, we had a strong start in 2022 in terms of growth and profitability with growth in net sales of 116% year-on-year combined with a 45.5% adjusted EBITDA margin. Strong revenue growth with a slower increase in OpEx resulted in a very strong profit margin exceeding our long-term financial targets.

We've always been a product-first company, and we'll always stay this way. We invested a lot in the products of our core offering and continue to invest in the AdTech platform and Truecaller for Business.

Lastly, we're proud to be in an incredible position with a solid -- with solid financials, strong cash flow and strong organic growth, even in a time of uncertainty. We will continue to take advantage of our strong position and find opportunities to continue growing.

And with that, we're happy to open the floor for questions.

Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Akhil Dattani of JPMorgan.

[Akhil Dattani, analyst]

I've got a couple of please, if I may. Maybe if I can start firstly with your very strong revenue performance this quarter. If I look at relative to maybe where we might have otherwise expected your numbers to be, a lot of the outperformance seems to have come from a very strong CPM rate. And I guess I was just looking for a little bit of color in terms of how we can or should extrapolate that.

It means that last year, Q1 was quite -- well, seasonally or not was by far the weakest quarter of the year. So I guess I'm trying to understand, when we look at what was a very strong Q1 2022 performance, how should we think about that? Is Q1 will be seasonally weak? Is it not? To what extent can we extrapolate what has also been a very good performance this quarter. So just some color there would be very useful.

The second thing, I guess, I was interested in the comments you both made on M&A. Obviously, you talked about the fact your business has been very resilient. You've had very strong financial performance in both revenue and EBITDA this quarter and you said that puts you in a strong position should opportunities materialize. I just wondered if there was a generic comments or whether you're specifically at this point, seeing opportunities that are let's say, looking interesting to you and if they are, if you could just give any sort of very high-level comment around that?

And then the very last piece of it was just to understand a little bit more around macro effects that we're seeing at the moment. Obviously, there is a lot of volatility in the market. And I guess I was trying to understand the obvious areas are inflation. So obviously, if there's any comments there. But I guess more broadly, I'd love to understand as to whether you're seeing any sort of impact operationally.

And I guess the one area I thought maybe you might would be either the advertising space. Are you seeing any like, let's say, less willingness to advertise from companies that they're trying to find ways to cut costs? And/or are you seeing any sort of impact on them entering B2B where companies are so distracted by what's going in the market that there's a bit of impact in terms of the commercialization of B2B? So those are my 3 questions.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Right, that was a lot. Let me try to cover it, Akhil. But good questions. So you're right. Usually, Q1 is the sort of calmest quarter. There is a seasonality to how growth works and also revenue growth. What we did see this quarter was slightly higher than expected. And comparing to last year Q1, it was definitely much higher. And I think it's a combination of many things that we've done on the AdTech side improving things. And hopefully, we can continue to create these new base levels. But it's -- it's -- when we compare Q1 with Q4, we're slightly above Q4, which, of course, we didn't expect. But as I said, I think this is connected to many of the initiatives we're doing, both on the AdTech side, but also on the product side, improving the product itself, which creates more engagement.

And you're right, CPM levels were slightly higher as well than before if you compare them which is also an indication of the things that we're building on the AdTech side that they're maturing a bit more. So -- it's hard to say what to expect going forward, but we continue to invest. We know what we need to do. We're early in this phase. But given that we are also early in this phase, but we know what to do, we're still sticking to the financial targets that we've given in the past when we went public.

And on the macro side, so we're one month into this second quarter. So far, we haven't seen any trends that would indicate a negative sort of a decline in the economy. So far, everything looks normal for us, and we're very thankful for that.

I don't know, do you want to cover the M&A piece?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Sure. Obviously, if there were anything that we were pursuing at this point, I wouldn't be able to speak about it. But generally speaking, again, I can say that there are opportunities out there that we are potentially interested in that we would be interested in evaluating. There is -- there are companies that may have technologies that we are interested in, there are companies that may have a market presence in areas where we will be interested. But that is a continuing -- continuous process. We started doing that already before the IPO, and we will continue doing that for the foreseeable future, looking at different opportunities, but I can't be any more substantial than that, fortunately.

[Operator]

The next question comes from the line of Predrag Savinovic of Carnegie.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

Quite reassuring figures you posted today. Well done with that. First, I'd like to just ask something or circling back to something you discussed previously, Alan, which is with regard to the growth of our, say, the increasing adoption of cloud communication, virtual numbers, cloud-based contact centers, et cetera. You have previously pointed out that this improves the demand for Truecaller generally. Can you discuss why this is the case in your words? And also on that topic include how that also might affect the Truecaller for Business, but mostly interested in the core functionality?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes. You just reminded me that I didn't answer one of Akhil's questions, which was around Truecaller for Business and how we see that if that might be affected by the macro trends. We don't think so. We haven't seen any trend so far either. Given how much value Truecaller for Business provides to our businesses and given the costs compared to everything else in these large businesses that we have as customers, I don't see any reason why this would be a priority given the high-value returns to their customers.

Now on your question, Predrag, if I understood you correctly. So what we're seeing is an increased need of, for example, creating virtual numbers that our users create like a new number that they can use when they enter a building to receive an OTP, for example. Instead of giving their own personal number that might be connected to different banking services. We also see an increase interest in, for example, the assistance service that we're building. And all of this is actually connected to cloud telephony sort of infrastructure.

Now long term, we believe that not only will it provide value to our customers, but we also believe it's a second leg to stand on. So we've become less dependent on OEMs and manufacturers in that sense if something would change basically over time. And at the same time, it enables us to do things on the iOS platform that was not possible in the past. I don't know if I answered your question, Predrag.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

No, that's very clear. Then on to the inorganic investments in the quarter. If you could share with this figure, is that representative with how much you believe user acquisition will be for the coming quarters? Or if you're going to increase that spending?

And then as a follow-up to that, on the mile growth, how much would be attributable to inorganic? And I know this is still early days, but if you have any reflections on the users that come in from this channel with retention rates compared to your core users, if you will?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Sure. Well, we are continuously growing the investments we do in growth-related activities like user acquisition and marketing. So you should expect to see that increasing over time, not necessarily quarter-by-quarter because it's also a question of building the confidence and building the team and taking opportunities as they arise. But over time, it will continue to increase quarter-over-quarter in general.

So the first quarter numbers are not necessarily the same numbers as you're going to see over the rest of the year. We intend, and we have been very clear about the fact that we intend to increase our investments in these areas. So we'll do that, as we manage to build the company, build the teams and see the opportunities that give us the right return on those investments. What was the second part of the question?

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

How being part of organic...

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Yes, sorry. Well, the lion's share of our growth is going to continue to be organic. We used user acquisition to a large extent in order to seed new markets, to reach -- to take them to a threshold where organic growth takes over. Once we see the organic growth start for real once we reach those thresholds in terms of our hit rate in the different markets. Organic growth is continue -- will continue to be much higher and much more substantial and user acquisition growth that we see. So user acquisition is primarily exceeding tool that we have in new markets.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

And then just one final -- another one to your -- a housekeeping question on working capital for the quarter, the driver behind that there is some buildup here and then also just on tax, which is around 20%, 21% this quarter and what your best guess going forward on this ratio would be?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Right. Yes, working capital has increased somewhat, and that's mainly due to Truecaller for Business, of course, where we see that as we onboard ever larger customers, they do ask for some more generous payment terms. And given how the business is performing and given that they actually do pay us when they -- when we agree, we have accepted that in certain cases, and that has had a certain impact on our working capital. So that is the main reason for that.

Tax rate, we don't have any more benefits to take advantage of when it comes to tax, we have to pay tax as we make profits now. We are paying some tax in India. Most of the taxes are in Sweden, but some tax in India where tax rate is higher than in Sweden. So we will see tax -- the overall tax rate for the company being slightly above what you see in Sweden only. Precisely, where we're going to end up is not that easy to tell at this point, but slightly above what we had as a tax rate in Sweden.

[Predrag Savinovic, analyst]

Okay. Fantastic. And just one final that I thought on the self-service portal, Alan, it sounds as if the demand on the enterprise product is so high, you can really onboard all your customers that want to be onboarded. Has this removed that kind of bottleneck? And is the user experience from a business that is onboarded through the self-service portal, the same as it's, say, one of your partners or you would do it yourself?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes, absolutely. I mean it has reduced 90% of the friction, more or less for businesses signing up directly. And for -- and for CPaaS partners like resellers, it has definitely increased the efficiency when they onboard new customers as well. So a lot of the manual work has been sort of automated.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the line of Yemi Falana of Goldman Sachs.

[Yemi Falana, analyst]

Firstly, thanks for your update on product enhancements. Are you noticing any step changes on the iOS ecosystem or any kind of changes in user behavior across the iOS ecosystem, any further traction there would be interested to know about?

And secondly, on the B2B side, obviously, you signed some quite significant contracts with some fairly scaled players in recent weeks. How should we think about growth through the kind of last 9 months of this year, given those much bigger contracts and presumably bigger customer numbers and higher volumes?

Thirdly, finally, just on the M&A side. The cash generation of the business means that you have built up quite a reasonable cash reserve at this point. How do you think about kind of cash flows and equity financing of deals from here? Yes, that's all for me.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

So on your first question regarding iOS, we've done a couple of releases since last year with fairly big improvements. In parallel, we're also building the product from scratch, so rewriting the whole product to get rid of legacy. But what we're seeing now, I mean, at least the last quarter, we've seen much higher engagement due to the fact that we have picked some of the hygiene stuff like start-up time, improvements with call it integration to show more results and so forth. What we can see is more frequent engagement inside the product. We've seen more shares in social media from iOS platforms. Users using the iOS platform. So in general, I think we're seeing a positive trend there, but it's still in the early phase. And I think the bigger sort of engagements, we'll hopefully see once we get the fully rewritten product out with digital assistant be integrated into it. Yes.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

M&A. Well, with the valuation we have today, it would be crazy to use equity unless we have -- simply put, we have plenty of cash. We have a revolving credit facility if need be and I really can't see why we would raise any new or use equity for any sort of financing purposes, considering where the valuation is today.

[Yemi Falana, analyst]

That's clear. And maybe just one quick follow-up. What's the time line on that kind of bigger iOS to launch or product rollout? And secondly, just on the profile of B2B growth through the back end of this year?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

So the iOS product is going to happen this year. We don't want to give a date, but it's going to come, hopefully, fairly soon. On the B2B side, we're not giving out any estimates on predictions and so forth. But we are seeing a good traction. It's a fairly seamless process to onboard new and large enterprises due to the fact that they see the value more or less instantly and the processes takes just the integration process takes more or less 5 minutes. So it is a fairly easy thing to do.

And what we have also seen is a bit of a FOMO in the market. When one player in a certain industry comes on board, then it's much easier to get the other ones on board. What we've seen in some of the other markets outside of India, is fairly large and large businesses coming on board, and it has been fairly easy for us, I would say, in the sense where we have 40% to 50% penetrated -- market penetration on smartphones, then it's more or less a household brand, and it makes the selling process easier for us. That's why we're -- some of the markets that I mentioned like Israel and so forth, these are markets where we are very known.

But it's going to be -- it's a fairly new product, and we're building out the team. We have a fantastic team in place that is working on this. So we'll have to see how things goes over time, but we're optimistic.

[Yemi Falana, analyst]

Very helpful. Congratulations on the quarter.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Thank you.

[Operator]

We have one further question in the queue so far. [Operator Instructions] And the next person is John Karidis at Numis.

[John Karidis, analyst]

If I may, I'll just ask my 4 questions 1 at a time. So working backwards from the -- what you have reported for advertising revenue and CPM, it sounds like the number of monetized impressions per DAU per year is somewhere around 4,400. Where I'm sitting, I don't really know how much higher this can go and over what time. So is there anything you can help me to try and sort of benchmark where you are and where you can get to on this particular metric, please?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

I'm not going to sort of comment or confirm your calculation, John. But what we have said is that we do see that there is quite a bit more potential left from where we are today. Our fill rates and our run rates are not -- well, they're still far from 100%.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Right. But sort of relative to -- if there are any comparable apps and sort of the number of monetized impressions that you think they have, are you sort of halfway there, 3/4 of the way there? Where are you relative to what you consider to be benchmark apps when it comes to monetized impressions? I think that was an issue that you brought up during the presentation of connected analysts at the IPO.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Yes. I think that was connected to several -- a couple of factors. One was delivery rates and caching and these kind of things. Many of these things we have obviously improved during the past couple of quarters. I think it is sort of a science. Honestly, it's a combination of many things that we do, even though, as Odd said, we do have a lot of room left on the sort of fill rate side but it can also be improved in connection with yield optimization, which one of the new ad units that we've launched in Q1 will definitely improve that.

So there's a lot of unturned stones here. And there is no simple answer even if I would give you the whole -- even if I could give you the whole picture, it would take us quite some time to go through it. But I mean we have an underlying growth of the user base as well, which continues to be pretty strong. And then on top of that, many other things. So what I can say is that there is definitely room for growth.

[John Karidis, analyst]

On user growth, and this question sounds harsh, given the financial results that you reported. Based on the MAU numbers that you gave us, the restated MAU numbers, I think the growth in period average MAUs in the first quarter of 2022 was actually less albeit by, I think, 600,000 or 700,000 than it was a year ago. And I can't really understand why that would be the case given that presumably also this year, unlike last year, you invested in user acquisition and your growth potential globally is still massive. Can you help me rationalize that, please?

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

Well, if you look at the absolute numbers, we're actually growing quite steadily. There is not really a decline if you look percentage-wise, it's always going to be hard for us to beat the previous quarters in that sense. I mean the larger you've become, the sort of the percentage might be skewed if you don't look at the absolute numbers. So I mean we grew with around 10 million active users in Q1, similar in the quarter before and so forth. If you look at Q1 last year, we also grew at around 10 million.

Now because still 90-plus percent of our growth is organic, what we do on the user acquisition side will not move the needle for us, but it will help us seed markets where we see a pretty good growth happening, and it helps us accelerate the time till the market flips into exponential growth. So I think that is important to sort of keep in mind.

What we have seen in Q1 is actually a much strong growth outside of India compared to the growth we saw in India. So I think we're seeing some positive trends from our side of the table.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Sure, Alan. I mean just for the record, I wasn't, of course, talking about relative growth. I was talking about absolute growth, 10.2 versus 10.8 last year. But I hear what you say.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

I just want to -- you're right. And I mean the reality is also that when most of it is organic, it means that there could be many other factors. It's not predictable per se that we go and spend more money to make it grow. It's going to be hard to actually grow as much as we do from an inorganic perspective that would cost like millions of dollars every month just to do that or almost per day, honestly. But -- so there are always certain seasonalities that happens. You should -- or you should look at is how we're growing year-over-year basically.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Understood. And then sorry, I have just a few numbers questions, if I may. Just going back on to the working capital outflow. Odd, forgive me, the working capital outflow was more than double the Truecaller for Business revenue that you reported for the quarter. Can you sort of try and give us a little bit more detail as to why that was, please? Just to explain that working capital outflow.

[Odd Bolin, executive]

That's just a temporary effect. The fact that we have onboarded a number of new large customers and they will pay us within 45 to 60 days rather than 30 days.

[John Karidis, analyst]

Right. So okay, fine. I'll go back to Alan and get my brain around this. And then lastly, in terms of the LTIP, SEK 3.4 million, in the quarter. I don't really know whether we should assume that per quarter going forward or there's a specific phasing of this particular cost item within labor costs. That means that it exists in a quarter, but not necessarily every quarter. Can you help us there a bit, please?

[Odd Bolin, executive]

Yes. It's an IFRS cost for the auction program, the warrant program that we have. And it may change somewhat. But as a baseline, you can look at it at the same level as we had this quarter.

[Operator]

And as there are no further questions in the queue, I'll hand the floor back to our speakers.

[Alan Mamedi, executive]

So we -- thank you. We had a couple of questions that came in from one shareholder.

So the first one is we see a stronger growth in downloads in April. Could you please put some geographic color on the start of Q2?

So a good question. We have seen, as I mentioned before, in Q1, we saw a higher growth outside of India, and we continue to see that in April as well. So we'll see how this goes over the quarter.

The second question is, is it possible to estimate what kind of revenue the new Tanla deal will generate in 2022?

We are not going to share any numbers as of today. So unfortunately, not.

The third one and the last one is what requirements do you need to be able to make Truecaller for Business successful in other countries than India? Where do you see the most potential for Truecaller for Business outside of India?

And this goes back to what I said earlier that where we have a strong penetration in -- the markets where we have strong penetration in becomes much easier for us to do the upselling because basically, if a lot of people in your markets is using Truecaller then it's given in some way. So I think an easy way to look at this, if you want to check your own numbers, just go into app and you can see which markets are we growing in? Which markets do we have strong penetration in? And I would say many parts of Middle East, Africa, and a couple of other countries as well in other regions where we have a pretty good penetration. But we're doing this in our speed. And so far, I think we have customers in over 20 different markets. And this has been mostly thanks to the self-serve portal that we set up last year because it makes it easier for us to -- for our potential customers to come on board instead of us trying to find them. But we're working on scaling this business. And I guess that was the last one.

So thank you, everyone, for listening in, and see you in the next quarterly report.