Welcome to the Nazara Technologies conference call hosted by ICICI Securities. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Jayram Shetty from ICICI Securities. Thank you, and over to you, Mr. Shetty.
Hi, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Nazara Technologies Conference Call. On behalf of ICICI Securities, I would like to thank Nazara Technologies for giving us the opportunity to host this call. From the company, we have with us Mr. Akshat Rathee, co-founder of NODWIN Gaming, Karandeep Singh, CFO of NODWIN Gaming, Anupriya Sinha Das, Head of Corporate Development. With that introduction, let me now hand over the call to Anupriya Sinha Das for opening remarks.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. In this call, we will discuss Nodwin Gaming's acquisition of Freaks 4U Gaming. We are pleased to have with us Akshat Rathee, the co-founder of Nodwin Gaming, and Karandeep Singh, the CFO of Nodwin Gaming, who will provide valuable insights into this acquisition strategy. Nodwin is a material subsidiary of Nazara. Please note that we are in the silent period, and we will not be addressing any questions on this quarter's guidance and beyond. I would now like to hand over the call to Karandeep to talk about the details of the deal. Over to you, Karan.
Thank you. Thank you, Anupriya, and good morning, everyone, or good day, wherever you're calling in from. So on the 29th of January 2024, Nodwin acquired 30.5% stake in Freaks 4U Gaming by investing EUR 8 million, and we also got a board seat to get a very closer view of their operations. For context, Freaks 4U was founded in 2011. It's a global full service company specializing in esports and gaming. It's domiciled in Germany with headquarters in Berlin, but it has offices across Europe, Asia and North America. Very recently, which is on the 28th of June, Nodwin Singapore, our international arm, signed agreements to acquire the balance 86.49% for EUR 30.3 million, which is circa INR 271 crore through share swaps.
So as we complete this transaction this week, NODWIN's share in Freaks 4U Gaming will immediately increase to 57%. NODWIN continues to hold exclusive rights to acquire the balance 43%, which is with the founders who continue to run the company, Freaks 4U Gaming. Freaks 4U Gaming's strength in the PC gaming and publisher support services very complementary to NODWIN's capabilities in mobile gaming. The integration of Freaks 4U Gaming's capabilities, along with its presence in developed markets, will serve as a substantial revenue driver for NODWIN. This strategic alignment will complement NODWIN Gaming's strong execution capabilities in emerging markets, enabling the establishment of a margin-expanded global delivery model, and that's a very pioneering achievement in the esports sector.
For people who are interested, Freaks 4U Gaming generated revenues of EUR 36.9 million in the calendar year 2023, EBITDA also at EUR 8.8 million. These are unaudited numbers. But recently, based on some actions that the Freaks 4U Gaming management team has taken to optimize their cost base and the potential synergies with NODWIN Gaming, we are confident of consolidating a profitability through revenue company in FY 25. I would like now to invite Akshat, the co-founder and CEO of NODWIN Gaming, to please share his views on the strategic fit of this acquisition. Over to you.
Thanks, Karan, and thanks, Anupriya. Hello, everyone. I've had the privilege of going and talking to some of you at different times of some of our events. Some of you who've not had the opportunity and we've not had the opportunity to meet you, please be my guest to come to one of our large things that we do. Anupriya will coordinate. It's always nicer to see us in action of what we do. We do great things in India like Comic Con. We do great things in India like the BGMS, which is on Star Sports, and we have very large IPs like NH7, et cetera. So please come to one of our large ones, and then we'll be able to always have a great chat with you.
And that's a great segue to understand what we are trying to go ahead and build, right? So, as Nodwin expands, on something that I've often talked about, which is called timeshare of mindshare of people, that's a very important metric for us. As you know, Nodwin is not a platform, right? It's not a destination. It's not a website. It's not an OTT platform. It's not a social media network. It's none of those. Nodwin is house of brands, where our IPs and our brands are looked forward for a lot, by a lot of people, brands, publishers, communities, and they engage with us across the network of what Nodwin builds. Whether it is our influencers that they are watching on Instagram or whether our content that's being watched on Amazon Prime, like Playground, or our c hess tournaments that are out on YouTube, or BGMS that is on Star Sports, or, merchandise that's available, or tickets that are available on Insider and BookMyShow.
So we, we have a very diversified, community strategy across the world. And as Nodwin keeps on expanding, in other acquisitions that you're looking at, think of Nodwin's growth as two parts. It's always been a very important metric for us. Our Prime Minister called it the Global South. I think it's a, it's a good metric, because that's where the growth of people is. So everything from Indonesia, Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, UAE, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and parts of Central Asia, are all the growth part of the world, which is there.
But the revenue for us and, and for most of the world sits in Korea, Japan, China, Europe, America, and, and that's the diversified strategy which we have. We would love to keep going and, making acquisitions in the north that drive revenue, and acquisitions in the south that drive delivery and excellence and, and margin, contributions. For Freaks, as one of the best ones in the world, top companies in the world in gaming and esports with offices in Taiwan, in Germany, in, the US, it helps us go ahead and drive the North revenue, part. And, it also helps that we have announced acquisitions in, in, Turkey, in the Middle East, which helps us in delivery centers or any, revenue that comes in. And, and we'll keep on driving this.
Timeshare of mindshare, and this North-South investment and development strategy is very, very central to what we are going to be building. So everything that we do, we have done in the past, and we'll do in the future. Some of you will have more conversations with us. This, this kind of context is extremely important for us to go ahead and broad base our conversations on, because that's call it vision, mission, call it whatever, but this is, this is the way we want to go ahead and move our company forward with the blessings of all the investors in Nazara, Krafton, Sony, et al., et cetera. That's the overall vision of why we are doing this.
Specifically, on a conversation on Freaks, I think, like every other gaming sports company that is across the world, it's gone through its time of pain and suffering. I think a lot of those were built out of valuations that were not sustainable, especially in the losses that were there. And to us, not losing money is an important part, so that's the reason we've taken a certain amount of time. And we'll keep on taking that time. Thing is that it really well. Sometimes, we want to go for a walk, sometimes we want to run, sometimes we want to crawl, and sometimes we want to just pause and just look at the landscape there, because we are looking at an inflection point on stage, which is there.
Choosing partners, choosing different people who will join this Nodwin village, it's important to go ahead and vote, judge very, very carefully of what they will do, how they will contribute, and how they will give continuity to us as we go forward. So just those overall guidances in terms of why we are building, who we are choosing, how we are choosing, where we will be making those investments is an important conversation to have. In terms of going forward, I'd love to go ahead and take some questions, because I think there are a lot of people out there, and I think, Anupriya, is that okay? Should we take some questions?
Yeah, sure. Sure.
Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask questions may press star and one on their touchtone phone. If you wish to withdraw yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants, I request you to use only handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management will be able to address questions from all the participants in the conference, kindly limit your questions to two per participant. Should you have a follow-up question, please rejoin the queue. We will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Jinesh Joshi from Prabhudas Lilladher Private Limited.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And my question is on the revenue profile of Freaks. Now, if I look at 2023, we reported revenues of about EUR 27 million. And in 2022, we were at about EUR 38 million. So can you highlight the reason behind the decline in revenue in 2023? And also, if you can just talk about what is the Q1 revenue run rate so far, and how should we think of growth from here on?
I'll answer the overall question, and Karan can be specific around it. So, context is... Thanks for the question. The context is important here. So Freaks 4U was predominantly in 2022, you know, it was the high time of the COVID pandemic.
It was nearly at the end. There was a surge, the froth that was there because of what was happening in, in the world, gaming, everything was very frothy. At that time, they were driving a lot of revenue that was being built out of their capacity that they had expanded in, in Germany and in other parts of the world, and revenue was coming in. But that revenue was costless, and against that revenue, there was a huge amount of capacity in people that were built. That's why you people lost that were there. In Europe, specifically France and Germany and other parts of the world and other parts of Europe, firing people is a very long-term exercise.
So they carried a lot of fixed costs at that time, and even the fixed cost, their revenue expectation at that time that they, they should be able to go ahead and do it was close to EUR 50 million, and they didn't do EUR 50 million, they did lesser. Because of that, they lost money, and that created knock-on effects of stress that comes in 2023, and then on to 2024. As for us, the quality of revenue becomes really important for them, right? As a company, they hold IPs like 99Damage, 1PV, Prime League, VALORANT Challengers DACH League. They also hold Freaks 4U Germany, et cetera.
So they have that capability of some great IPs, and they also work as a very strong agency for brands and publishers to go ahead and run again in Taiwan, in Germany, in France, in the US. That part of the business was, is the one that had margin-accretive value. So pairing for us to go ahead and make that investment into the company, it was very important that we look at a roadmap of profitability and this. And if you've looked at some publicly facing announcements Freaks has made, they had to lay off people for, I think, two rounds of layoffs that they had done on and around the first time we made that investment and also very recently.
Some of those are the analogies of what we've been asking to go ahead and put them to put in the chart of sustainable business [inaudible].
What is the [inaudible] run rate, and what kind of growth can we expect? If you can just highlight that bit as well.
I don't think I'm able to give forward-looking guidance on the with their platform, I will give Karan.
Yeah, I don't... Thank you, Akshat, for giving all the context and, hi. So I, like Akshat said, I don't think we will give any guidance, but I can, as I called out in my introduction, I think we're looking for a profitable revenue consolidation into Nodwin as we complete the transaction. I think more details can follow as we go through the year. But for now, we can give you that this is a healthy company, which is a profitable company that we need to consolidate.
One last question from my side. I think, Freak got incorporated in 2011, and if I heard you right, you mentioned that in 2023, the EBITDA loss was about EUR 8.8 million. I understand the reasons which, Akshat, cited, but going ahead from here on, what can be the steady state EBITDA that, one should look from Freak?
Yeah, like, like I said, I don't think I'm gonna give any numbers, but there are potential synergies that we'll be exploiting between the two businesses, which should be margin accredited. We are now, you know, launching the Global Delivery Platform, which is something that you guys are aware that India is the pioneer in that, but nobody's pioneered it in esports. That's something we're looking to do. All of those ideas, you know, between the skills they have, the capabilities they have, the skills and capabilities Nodwin has, will be, you know, born to bear in our numbers in the quarters to come. So, no specific numbers, but definitely huge amount of, you know, opportunities that we'll be exploring as we work our way.
Sure. So just one follow-up. I'll tweak the question a bit. Globally, I mean, esports companies, typically in the Western world, what kind of EBITDA margin do they make? If, if you, if you can share that.
Oh, I can go ahead and give that answer. And this is... Please take it, partially at a pinch of salt, partially as a joke, and partially true. In the Western world, in gaming and esports, every company loses money. Okay. That's been one of the problems with the industry at large, and, and, and we've seen this, right?
One of the reasons, I want to go ahead and build Nodwin in a way which is very different than everyone else, and, and with God's will, we've been able to go ahead and do it, is the Western world was predicated around building the gaming and esports world around losses. And that's why you've seen the stacks in the US have failed. You've seen companies that have been in Europe and America have failed. Europe and America unfortunately built a model around frothy loss-making, and that's fine. There are time and place for everything. I think the Asian way, it has been to go ahead and do it much more sustainably, and, and that's been one of my driving factors in life. It's... I want to go ahead and do it a little differently.
We want to go ahead and say that an Indian company can be one of the top companies in the world, and we can go ahead and build it sustainably, profitably. There are ways to do this, right? And unfortunately for the Western world, all of these companies lose money. And you can look at comparables everywhere in the world, the Goldman Sachs everyone can assume are putting out reports that they're setting all these companies.
Sure, sir, I have more questions, but I'll get back in the queue. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Deep Shah from B&K Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity, and thanks for that initial vision that you laid out for the company. So two questions. One, if you could help us better understand... Does this acquisition help us bridge any capabilities gap, or it is more of a way to expand our geographical presence? And second, in terms of your overall vision for Nodwin, where would you think that the last five years, from when we started as a part of, say, the Nazara family, we've reached today, right? What would you think? What was your vision, where you are today? And how do you see that, whether you see that today, the way BGMS could be on Star Sports, you see a lot more events becoming that large.
The last five years, how have they been, and what do you think the vision for the next three years is? The earlier question on the capability versus geographical reach. If you help us with this, it will be very useful.
Thank you again. Appreciate the question. Very, very insightful question. I'm, you know, I think I've done a couple of podcasts, and I've done a couple of shows just on those two topics. The short answer to that is, and I'm happy to link them so that you have a much more detailed one-hour answer, one-and-a-half-hour answer on those. The short answer to the first question, which is that when you want to go build this, it's a mixture of everything. There is not one binary answer that you want to go out and have. Do we get capabilities? Yes. What other kind of capabilities we get? We get a great delivery location in ... We get a great technologically high-end, triple-A-rated production facility for Esports in Europe, right?
There are studios, there are locations that are there. It's just like some of you visited our location in Gurgaon, which is there. It's phenomenal. We've got some of these great locations that are there across the world. So we've got that. Why is that important? European publishers, the people who have a lot of money for the European market, want to go out and do activities there. Where do they do them? They need a place which is there, right? The further logistically you are, the more, disconnected both from language and from players and from community you are. So the further you are, the worse it is, is it there? So we've got that facility now in the heart of Europe, in Germany, very there in Berlin. Good city, cool city to go out and do.
So you get a great capacity, which is there. You also get capabilities that come in, the capability becomes the people. So as Nodwin makes investments, when you saw, we invested into India, we've invested into a couple of other companies like Comic Con. One of the big tenets for us that we try to do is to keep the founders with us. Now, why are founders important? A founder mentality, it's just not, "Hey, get this company." No, they're gonna burn out, and then they go away. To me, a burn out is a bad word, because you earn, and then the person wants to go out. You want founder mentality in Nodwin, because we like to go out and have founders go on something called missions.
Missions, because we are all gaming company, are activities founders want to go out and do when their main mission is complete. You don't want them to leave. You want them to be excited about doing another mission. And as an example right now, one of the Freaks 4U downstream founders is a guy called Haenisch. He was the founder of the Freaks 4U office in France. The Freaks 4U office in France is no longer operational for us. It is not something that is value accretive, but we didn't want to get rid of him. We gave him a mission that we have these four missions that are there, and he said: "I'd like to go ahead and set up the Central Asia." Central Asia, for us, is Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan are all very strong growth markets that they're looking at.
They're all, all indicators around economy, people, youth, government, are great, which is there. You've already started seeing some of the announcements coming in. They're very small, but they've started coming from us. He's now become the head of Central Asia. Our Turkey founder has gone, and one of the Turkey founders has gone and taken over our Middle East division. So you wanna be able to create missions out of this, right? So you get a great founder who's built a EUR 40 million company at one time and have the ability to go out and go on to these big missions. We will keep meeting in the future because the Nodwin journey is not right now, right?
NODWIN is not here to say, "Hey, we build a unicorn or whatever." Our long-term vision, our long-term vision is to build a billion-dollar revenue company, to be one of the largest youth media companies in the world. And for us, if we have to go out and do that, we need the ability to go out and inspire founders and build something called a founder circle in, in the company that allows us to go and have that. So we get both capability and capacity out of this. And as far as your second question goes, which is where were we five years ago to today? I think we've, we've always liked to put our head down, and get some stuff done. It's...
We were. We started an industry, sector in India, which I often joke about the fact that the first time we ever created a thing, I got returnable mouse pads as sponsorship, and I often let that sink in, returnable mouse pads. I had a tournament for which a brand gave me mouse pads and said, "When the tournament is finished, please give the mouse pads back." And I had to pay salaries, I had to pay people, I had to go out and make it, make the event happen, and that's where we are, and now we are sitting with our revenue, which are there. So it has taken us a long time to go out and build this. I think we are in phase III out of VI of the roadmap we have built out.
We've been blessed with great investors, which is there, and we'll continue. We will continue to that phase VI, which I talked about, to try and build a billion-dollar revenue company for the largest youth media company in the world. We'll see where we go.
Right. Thanks, thanks for that elaborate answer there. It's quite an enterprising mission that you're out to. So if, you know, I could just add a follow-up, that when you say move on this phase III to VI, and, and- That, that's quite a vision out there, very. How do we think about individual events or IPs? So is it that you, you get one successful somewhere and then you replicate that? Or is it more of you do many things, some of them work, some of them don't work, and then what works, you further double down on them. So how- Is it, is it very linear? Is it very spray, and then you figure out, okay, whatever works, let's just take this ahead. How does that work when you evolve from, say, phase III to IV and V, towards your field?
We all—there's a little bit of investor in all of us. I run my own family office. I've been an entrepreneur multiple times over. The short answer to it is nobody knows, but we, we still know what kind of... You know, I think the journey is very contrarian answer for me, and I know I'm trying to answer that question, but it's a contrarian answer. I think my experience set is trying to understand what doesn't work. In a blue sky, in a blue ocean strategy, you know, I don't know what works, but I started understanding what doesn't work, right? So what do we do? In our common language, I use a grassroots angel, VC, PE kind of a strategy for IT.
At any given time, right now, for example, we have our community management team trying out about 40 different games. We are trying our community spread across 27 different languages, which we are trying out. We are also testing out about 30-35 different communities in India. So the northeast of India behaves very differently than the south of India for the games they like, amount of time they spend, amount of language in the language that they communicate with their communities, the tonality of the language, the kind of stars they like, the kind of jokes they make, the kind of nuance of gaming, which is there. You want to test everything. You want to test, hey, is MOBA doing well? Is this fighting game going to do well? Is shooting going to do well?
Now, you add the complexity of trying to do this across the world. So what do we do? We test out with every given time. Sometimes you hear us investing in growth kind of thing. What are we doing there? We are testing out IPs. We are testing out communities. We'll do a small tournament. We'll put a INR 5 lakh prize, so we'll do something in a college. And if it's successful, we've seen the right kind of traction, we'll go ahead and increase that to a INR 50 lakh investment, and we'll test against that. If that works out, then we'll make a INR 2 crore investment against it, and we'll test out against that. And we have failure rates across the board, just like startups, right? We have failure rates of 60%-70%-80%.
At the earlier stages, reducing down to about 30%-40% at the large stages of investment. But we have failures all across because nobody knows the right answer. But we know that if we keep this, our finger on the pulse to youth across the world, we will get the right answers. For example, this is not a forward-looking statement, but one of the cool things that we found out, that gamers across the world like and, sneakers. So we will now look to do something in sneakers and pickup, because it's an important thing to go ahead and look out for. Right now, whether it is a music event, whether it is an influencer, whether it is a sneaker lineup, whether it is a launch drop, which is there, maybe it's a festival. I don't know what the final answer is.
We'll experiment against all of them. Whatever we go ahead and try and do, we need to go ahead and run it through this cycle that I may say, which is large. Some of them will go ahead and pop, like how BGMS has popped or NH7 has popped. And that's great. When sometimes we'll have to go ahead and acquire large behemoths because they already have those IPs, because between a build and buy decision, it's each cheaper, the better, and we get people to go ahead and run it when we acquire a large enough IP. But most of the times, we are, we are incubating most of these things out from our ecosystem. I know, long answer to your short question.
No, no, it, it is very useful, and, and all the best. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead. Mr. Jain, I have unmuted your line. Kindly proceed.
Yes, yes. Thank you. Basically I have couple of questions. If you could share, what is the dilution we have done on the Singapore subsidiary in the share swap for this transaction?
Karan, you wanna take that one?
Yeah, Rahul, you want to finish your questions? So we'll definitely have some noting down.
Sorry.
I said you had a couple of questions. You want to finish your questions? I'm noting your, your questions.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. That is question number 1. Second thing is, why we are not taking the entire 86% right away as a part of the transaction, and why 43% would come much later? And any reason for the valuation, jump that has happened versus the December round? There's a significant jump. So does that reflect the traction that has have come in, in the business in the last 6-month basis? Those are my questions. Thanks.
Thank you. Thank you, Rahul. Akshat, let me just kick it off, and then you can please jump in. First on the dilution, we have a minimal dilution. We continue to hold a significant majority, upwards of 75%, you know, in Singapore. Just context around that. It's a small dilution that we've done to kind of, you know, get the share swaps completed. Why 86% is not done right away? I think Akshat had answered this question. I think we want the founders to continue to be invested in, you know, running the operations, contributing to the larger [uncertain].
So which is why we've done a staggered, you know, approach to kind of, you know, take shares enough for us to kind of, you know, consolidate and grow our company with, with an exit to their existing investors. But the founder shares, you know, at the right point in time, we have the right to, you know, convert them, and make them as Nodwin shareholders. So that has been done, with some, you know, thought in mind so that the founders can continue to operate, the company that theirs is, and it sends a very strong message to everyone, across the com- you know, the clients they have and the employees they have.
The last part, I think this is, you know, I don't think there is a, there is any point of view in terms of, you know, the jump or, or drop in the valuation. I think this is just, I think you should look at this as, a joined up idea between what we invested initially and what we've got now. I think together, you know, this gives us your EUR 38.3 million, EUR 30.8 million went up front. And it was a, you know, it was, you know, it was just kind of... We took about six months to get closer to the business, understand the business, and that's why we were able to put a fair market value to it.
It, as you can see, is about, you know, a very, very prudent, you know, split between cash and stock that we've done here. So there is no specific answer on the up and down on the valuation. I think it's a complicated view that you should look at.
Yeah. So just one clarification. So that this EUR 30 million, which is the consideration, this is towards 86% or towards incremental 43%?
No, this is for the 86%.
Basically, and this share swap and the cash share swap would happen, so they will get the NODWIN Singapore's stake right away? Or only part of it will go to them right away because they're saying that the gradual 43% would come with no incremental outgo at a later date. Is that the understanding?
That is correct. The value has been fixed now, but there are some underlying, you know, performance targets that we've kept in mind. But what we are highlighting today or what we communicated today, is the total value. There is no additional outgo that is gonna go for the acquisition of the balance 43%.
Basically this is the maximum. If they are not achieving the KRAs which we have defined, the actual outgo could be even lower than what we have just identified.
Yeah, but yeah, it could be potentially, but, you know, that's something we-
I hope not.
Yeah. I hope not, because we want to remember, I want to inspire these people to go out and do great things. So your question is, your statement is valid. This is the maximum. It might be lesser, but I hope this covers the entire scope. The other one little bit that I wanted to go also add in terms of the question that you have asked. It's important to go and put context to why we are going and getting this done with them at this stage right now. The people who have swapped over right now, as you can see, the founders are still holding their stock because they are deliverables.
We want to have some of the best investors in the world in the space that we have as part of our capital. So the people who have swapped over right now are some of the most well-known investors in Germany and in Europe that come to our capital, right? So the construction that comes in also gives us the pedigree of investors that come in into Nodwin, who not only believe our values in the stock swap, but also believe in the story going forward. As you know, when you build this village that you're there, you not only need founders, you need great investors, and we've been blessed with them. So our ability to go out and swap in great investors, to go out and give them the value of an Indian growth story is also very important. It's a small context as well.
Right. Right. And since these investors are coming at a Nodwin Singapore subsidiary, for them, the cash out opportunity would be an internal sale eventually, or you have plans for even this Singapore subsidiary to become public at some point?
Very strong forward-looking statement. God will, will, will... Which is that, you want, we want to go ahead and say it's a liquidity condition, right? We've always defined it as a liquidity condition. And suffice to say that whether it's an internal sale, whether it's a buyout, whether it's a listing, whether it is sell out the whole company, whatever, every liquidity condition is acceptable. We like to go out and find that because who knows what happens in the future, right? My job is to build. You build a great thing, someone will build value up, and then you'll see.
Right. Right.
And also, Rahul, just to add, I think the fact that these people are coming on our capital, I think they are interested in building Nodwin. They're, I think, you know, that, that's an important message also, that they are looking at, you know, joining hands with Nodwin and building Nodwin as, as, as upfront, you know, as a global youth media company. We all like- they all like the vision and, and the building, the focus here.
Right. Just last bit on the business side of it, you think, there are kind of things which Freaks does, and we could do more of that in India at some point, which could be an added stream of opportunities for us?
Of course, 100%. That's the one of the big reasons, right? I think, I think maybe he has not come in, so I'll go ahead and take 1 minute to go ahead and explain. Why. See, I'm not going to call it racist, but Indian, like, you know, when outsourcing started, outsourcing was always a bad word, right? Like, and India will look down on call center executives, et cetera, right? While margin was being depleted, as India has gone through the call center industry, where we've got more and more value-added services, now we've got cynical, et cetera, that have been also built out on the back of that.
Same as China's industry, it started off as knockoffs, and now they make BYD, and they make rocket ships also, which is, I think, evolutionary for us, speaks into like a triple A company. It's looked at by the world, sitting in the Western world, as a triple A company. Not really. It's looked at as an efficient, solid company, but not, not super cool. You understand? We get it done, we are efficient, we are profitable, we are, we are all of those, but we are not considered sexy, if I have to go ahead and use the word without any negative connotations. It's just not considered. Freaks is considered really cool to go ahead and do this, et cetera.
When you bring in that capability and, and that pedigree to go ahead and say, "So then you can now sell that, that vision and that capability of being really cool," but you can deliver it with Indian costs or Turkish costs, whatever, while keeping the top layer as manufactured there. That's added value. That's the reason. One of the big things that happens is we bring the Freaks nomenclature, the Freaks capability of selling, the Freaks coolness of things to go ahead and do, with the cost structures that will come out and the profitability that come out of.
So essentially, you're saying that this element of,
Sir, I would request to kindly rejoin the queue for follow-up questions, please. There are others who are waiting for their turn.
We can off it. Why don't you drop us a mail? We'll happily go ahead and have deeper conversations in this. Happy to help you. Happy to answer.
Sure.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Abhishek Kumar from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Hi, Akshat. Good to hear you again. Many of my questions have been answered. I just wanted to build upon your comment that most of the global, you know, Esports companies are losing money, and your vision of, you know, turning this into a profitable company. You know, one, you know, my understanding is whatever little understanding I have of Esports, it's a very, you know, on-site centric, if we can use that word. You know, you need to host the tournaments or the events, et cetera, in those localities. So when we talk about global delivery model for a very physical sort of event, which element of the delivery can be, you know, done globally from low-cost locations, et cetera? Essentially, what are the margin levers that we will have, you know, to turn this into a profitable company?
Thank you. Super question, Abhishek. As always, I, I love having this chat with you. So let's look at any typical event, right? It doesn't matter what you want to go ahead and program. If it's an Esports event, as you said, traditionally, it was all about being on location, which is very important, right? If you want to go ahead and cater to a German fan, you have to be in Germany. If you have to cater to a Mexican fan, you have to be in Mexico. If you have to be engaging to an Indian fan, you have to be in India. So location, let's just say, venue, is a cost, which is there, which I don't think changes at all.
And I'll stop here and bring another vector, which is that most startups, when you go ahead and do, when you invest into multiple companies, et cetera, predicate their entire building out of where they are. Nodwin is based out of Gurgaon because I live in Gurgaon. Nazara is based out of Mumbai because Nitesh lives in Mumbai. You know, founders go through, and the initial employees you will find are from Mumbai or Gurgaon, and most of these Esports companies got their initial employees where they started from, in and around the city. But Esports is fundamentally a Western phenomenon, so most of these people come in from the Western world. So this is the second vector that comes in.
And the last one that I'll go ahead and bring in to go ahead and complete the trifecta is the cost of everything is also the delivery of languages. So think of, like, the Football World Cup happening in Brazil as an example. It's watched by 4, by 3 billion people. But 3 billion people are broadcasted by 295, I'm throwing this word, 29 5, broadcasters. Not 295 broadcasters put out this. Doordarshan, for example, when it wants to cover the Olympics, doesn't go to the Olympics in Japan or now in Paris to go ahead and do this. They get a feed, a centralized feed, and then put up a studio at a certain location in maybe Doordarshan, Prasar Bharati in Delhi.
In that studio, they put in analysts and people to go ahead and commentate in their local language to them. So the way Esports broadcast works, especially for the multitude of languages that we are doing, for example, there is an Esports World Cup that we are doing along with Freaks. The Freaks team is going and getting a central video feed from Riyadh, which is then being broadcasted by us in 30 languages, approximately. The feeds are going to 30 different studios of Nodwin venues, which are delivering all of this across the world. Instead of doing all of this out of Germany, now we are doing it across the world. The biggest cost lever is always people, because high-cost people always cost you more. Physical locations will always cost you physical locations, right? That's...
Think of it like that, that's part of the marketing cost that you need to go ahead and do. The cost of delivery, the cost of technology, and the cost of manpower, especially at management levels, to go ahead and make sure that this pipeline, graphics, lower thirds, video bitrates, encoders, broadcasters, commentators, analysts, are the ones that cost the most, if you especially try to fly them to new locations. And that evolutionary change is what is happening in esports for us. And we become the center of it because we've always focused on the growth languages of the world.
No, understood. That's very elaborate. One follow-up, you know, that means the media rights of esports, and I feel, I've always felt, you know, that is the one vector for scalability that we need to track. The media right value has to go and across languages, across geographies. I just wanted your comment on the scenario in India today, as far as the esports media rights are concerned. Are we seeing, you know, any improvement or any offtake? We know the BGMS is there, but in terms of... It doesn't reflect in the revenue growth as far as the media rights are concerned. Just your view on the trajectory, or the outlook, of media rights, especially in India, of esports.
So, we are, I'll answer this question as, as calling it, one of those black swan events. Not been having a black swan event every year in the revolution. Thank God we have a 6-engine plane, where one engine fails every year. Sometimes BGMI gets banned, sometimes PUBG Mobile gets banned, sometimes Free Fire gets banned, and now the entire media rights, entire media industry in India has collapsed. Right? We are now looking at a duopoly at best, but, we are there. And anytime when a, when a monopoly or a duopoly kind of exists. But earlier, when four years ago, when media rights were being tracked by us extremely actively, we had, ten, fifteen, market player.
There was MX Player, there's Loco, there's Rooter, there's YouTube, there's Twitch, there's Amazon miniTV, there's Netflix, there's Jio, there's Vodafone, there was many number of others. And there's Hotstar, there's SonyLIV, and so on and so forth. All of that was propped up by the valuations that came out of the pandemic, and then the crash happened. As companies move towards profitability as a metric finally, their ability to go out and acquire content and their ability, more importantly, to sell that content became a very important, you know, critique. And you're seeing that experiment actually being done by the largest ones, which is Jio also, right? Jio has increased its data prices because they want to fundamentally increase the JioTV prices.
So if you look at now that as a conjunction of JioTV prices going up and JioCinema prices going up, and also the OTT prices going up, X into Y actually increases the value that is there. And ad supports is actually falling very, very high. That's why we are having non-ad model being tried out right now. So the ability to go ahead and have media rights increase is based on media buyers. Remember, we are not the destination. So unless there is a solid competition that will happen for this churn that will happen, we will have, and we, we have those partnerships, right? I'm glad to the fact that our CEO and one of my closest friends, Sidharth Kedia, has now become the head of Jio, and he will work with him.
PVR is another place that we made public announcements that we are working with it. Even, Amazon miniTV carries Playground for us. YouTube is one of our big partners with stuff that we do. So it's not that they've, they've all gone away, but I consider it a black swan event across the worldwide media industry. Content is being questioned by a lot of people. So, I think it'll, it'll be okay, I think it should stabilize, but, I can't drive media value, in a storm.
Understood. Thank you. That's, that's very helpful, and, and all the best. Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you. A reminder to all the participants to kindly limit their questions to two per participant. Should you have a follow-up question, please rejoin the queue. The next question is from the line of Manan Poladia from MKP Securities. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hi, Akshat. Congratulations on the acquisition. So my first question is on the strategy with respect to acquiring Freaks 4U, Ninja, et cetera, and like you said about being a global cost center, right? But so far we've seen the esports companies, like you yourself said, be loss-making all across Europe and the Western world. We even saw the FaZe Clan take a really huge dump, right? So I'm just curious about how we're changing that, how we intend to make this a profitable entity very soon, and what exactly are the levers that we want to drive, except the ones that you just mentioned?
Most of this has been answered, and I'll also get Karan to go ahead and complete this answer because he's driving that with me. But the short answer to this question is, look, how do you drive profitability? You either drive it by revenue, or you drive it by reducing costs. For us, whenever we make that investment, which is there, we never want cost... We never want to be negative, right? So we have a conversation. We have to sit down and have a conversation with the founders, and like, why are our costs high? And you have that conversation, and there's, like, people capacity, fixed costs, et cetera. And you, and you go through it like a fine-tooth comb, right? What you think it took us, no, not what you think.
It took us this long between December and now to have those conversations with Freaks people, and they wanted to go ahead and make that change, that it is now going to be profitable. Then you go ahead and rationalize the kind of revenue that will come in, the margin that is coming, where it's going to come from, what do you want to build, what do you want to build together, right? That's for a revenue group, company like Freaks. And the other part which is there is, where does Freaks outsource to? Let's just say, fine. They say, "Okay, no problem, Akshat, we believe in you." We want to outsource. Where do you want to outsource? ... a German person, where, where does most German people sit outside Germany? In Turkey, right? That's where the capability center comes in.
We don't wanna be, unfortunately, because of the time zones and the language issues, which is that you can't really outsource German out of India. It won't work. English, you can go out and outsource to India, but German, you can't outsource to India, so you wanna go ahead and find that piece, which is there. Same thing for if you're going to outsource Arabic, where do you outsource to? Again, Turkey, very good place to go ahead and outsource. Egypt, another one. Same thing for French. So you wanna look at those vectors of time zones and locations and low-cost centers that can go ahead and serve a certain language community, as such.
Between those, which is manpower and the ability to go ahead and generate in-house capability and capacity to go ahead and execute the revenue that comes in across the group, across the world, you wanna make that profitable model. Because even if you look at FaZe Clan and, and we like, we really like those people, they went from a pure thing of influencers being the value creator, right? The influencer business, unfortunately, independently, does not create value. It creates fame, but it doesn't create value. And if fame was value at a time, it was creating that value, but by the time the stock crashed, value was not being defined as fame. So you--that's why you want multiple engines in there.
You want fame, you want profitability, you want revenue growth, you want distribution, you want diversity, diversification, and between all of them, you have the capability of building value.
Right. That, that's a great answer. Thank you. I have a second question on the India piece. So we've seen a lot of competition also come in recently, right? Like BGIS or something that went to Tesseract. Historically, from what I know, we've been doing most of the flagship events for BGMI across the country. I just want to know your view on how this competition affects us and what are the odds of us taking, say, I think Krafton does about 4 or 5 flagship events a year, right? How many a year are we targeting to take in our pie?
I think Krafton is both our investor, our client, and our partner. I think, it's, it'd be better if we look at this not as, us versus them. Remember, Nodwin has a very strong... Not only have an IP division, we also have a white label execution division. So as in the case of example of Krafton's work, and that Krafton's work was done by Nodwin, right? You want to have your own IPs, but you want to be able to go ahead and work with your investor partners to go ahead and execute their IP delivery. Same thing with Riot. Riot, gives us their exclusive license for India to go ahead and conduct Valorant in India. But we also white label, go ahead and produce for them.
White label agency work is both a market building, margin building and, relationship building tool for us. It allows us to go ahead and keep on running more work, which is there. So if you look at the number of tournaments of Krafton, done by Krafton, but executed by Nodwin, and Nodwin tournaments done by Nodwin and noted there, between both Krafton and Nodwin, we have 80% market share, 90% market share. Which is great, right? Like, I, I'd rather be a, a duopoly with my biz rather than be a monopoly. And as far as the competition goes, no, look, it's been forever that we've been a company that has, held the market share, predominant market share in India. We have companies like Sky and Tesseract and Esports Club and whatever.
I think over time, the big question that always happens for any of those, and if you're an investor in one of them, think like that investor. Where will you get an exit from? How will you get an exit? Where will the value be created, which is there? That's why the founder of The Esports Club, the second, third largest, company, joins Nodwin, right? We've always made sure that we let our work, our value, our revenue, our growth, drive our value-creating prospects, which is there. Our competitors change every two years, one and a half years. There's always going to be five competitors. As long as they change every two, three years, it's fine.
Right. That sounds quite fair. I just wanted to ask one last little follow-up. We're doing, I think, something called the Nodwin LAN that's coming up, right? Is that something that's a Krafton event that we're executing, or is it something that we've built as our own IP?
NODWIN LAN that is happening, is currently happening out for VALORANT. It is the VALORANT championships that is happening in our studios in Gurgaon. Please come.
Right.
It is... We are working with Riot on that game a bit.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that. All right, that makes sense. I think... Thank you. That answers all my questions.
Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments. Over to you.
Thank you, everyone, for joining the call.