Everyone, thank you for joining us. While Fred gets set up, I will just kick everything off. Before we begin, I'd like to announce that we will be referring to today's earnings release, which we sent to the newswires earlier this afternoon. I'd also like to remind everyone that this conference call could contain forward-looking statements about Destiny Media Technologies within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are based upon current beliefs and expectations of management and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Such risks are fully discussed in the company's filings with SEC and SEDAR, and the company does not assume any obligation to update information contained in this call. During the webinar, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.
The non-GAAP financial measures are presented in the supplemental disclosures and should not be considered in isolation of, or as a substitute of, or superior to the financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP and should be read in conjunction with the company's financial statements filed with the SEC and SEDAR. The non-GAAP financial measures used in the company's presentation may differ from similarly titled measures presented by other companies. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings press release. I would also like to mention that following the presentation, there will be a questions- and- answers session, during which you can submit questions by selecting the Raise Hand icon that's at the bottom of your screen.
Your questions will be posed in the order that they were received and at which point you'll be prompted to then unmute your microphone before speaking. With that, I would like to turn the call over to your host, Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer.
Thanks, Rebecca. Good afternoon, everybody. Today we have myself, Fred Vandenberg, and Allan Benedict, who leads our Business Development and Marketing teams here. I'd like to take you briefly through our financial results. There's a few things of interest, but that'll be brief. Then we'll talk about business development activities. I will touch on product development. I'll start it off, and then Allan will continue on, and he'll continue on through the marketing and the new business initiatives, sales activities. Then I'll come back and talk about things looking forward, the financial results.
To start off, we had a revenue decline by 3% this year, and this is really a function of the declining value of the euro relative to the U.S. dollar. It's, you know, whether it's caused by the war in Ukraine or other factors, it's really the single biggest impact to our revenue this year. It's really hidden some positive signs. We've, you know, we had a renewal with Universal that took effect in the third quarter with a 10% increase. We've had some positive increases in revenue in Canada and some really encouraging signs with Warner internationally and specifically in the United States. Allan will talk through those in a bit more detail. EBITDA is just over $400,000.
The graph here is just shows our revenue quarter-over-quarter and our EBITDA quarter-over-quarter for the last eight years, I think it is. That shows you a little bit of a trend. The EBITDA numbers are listed on the right-hand side of that graph, and it's really just a function of, you know, so I can show them on the same graph. Expenditures fell by 5%. That's the P&L expenditures. We've expanded our product development and engineering teams, but we've capitalized those expenditures, because we view those the things that they're working on have a long-term incremental value to Play MPE.
That's if you look at the expenditures that are on the P&L and then capitalized, they've gone up by 15%. That's really so we can more aggressively pursue revenue opportunities that we see. Before I start talking about what we did this year in terms of product development, I just wanted to give you a little bit of a high-level view of the platform itself. First, there's four main components. The initial release distribution tool, the player side, recipient side software that receives the content. It's. We have a library of music, an archive that stays there, so it's a little bit different than, you know, simple distribution tools. We have our curated lists.
Now, this is something that Allan will go into a little bit, in a little bit more detail later in the presentation, but this is really a significant component of what we do. The last thing is the global release, the global architecture. Now, when I talk about these things, I'm somewhat imprecise with certain things 'cause these components don't necessarily fit into neat categories. Like, there might be aspects in contacts, for example. There are aspects in contacts, for example, that really help in global multi-country management of releases. They are also in the, you know, the local distribution tool. This is all described in the 10-K with a little bit more detail.
I really wanted to focus in on what we did this year because I think it's significant. So starting off with product development. We launched the global architecture in the browser-based platform. Now, I use the word launched here because, you know, it's easy to say. I catch myself saying it's complete, but it's never complete. You're always going to maintain that software. It's, you know, you build a building, and you have to maintain it. I mean, that's probably a poor metaphor. But we've launched this global architecture. We've also done a lot of work on our list curation. Allan, again, will talk more about that.
We've expanded our product and design and development to and been able to use the resources that were in the global architecture to move into new products. I just wanted to touch on the global architecture a little bit. When you have a global distribution, there are just an absolute ton of features that live in that architecture that help facilitate efficiencies, economies of scale, and provide competitive advantages. I'll give you an example of one. We call it release sharing, but essentially, within Caster, so within the now launched web browser-based global infrastructure, Caster is integrated with Universal's archival system.
What happens is when they prepare a release, that release is automatically populated with all the release data, the song, the track names, the album cover art, ISRC codes, publisher information, all these different pieces of data. What happens is the distribution hubs at Universal then share that release amongst the territories around the globe. That information doesn't have to be reentered. That's done thousands of times, thousands of thousands of times a year. Calculating the cost savings to Universal is, you know, it's somewhat arbitrary or, you know, an estimate, but it's significant. But it also has a real positive impact on our revenue.
What we've seen, and Allan also will touch on this a little bit, but what we've seen is that, when ISRC codes, this is a code that tracks each song specifically and is used for royalty remittances and things like that. But that ISRC code, when it's transmitted, it actually improves your engagement with the release. Not only is this data conveyed more easily and more efficiently and saves a ton of time, but on the other side of it, you know, has a positive impact on revenue. You know, anyway, that's me starting to get down into the weeds of why this global infrastructure is really beneficial and provides Universal with some real big competitive advantages.
The real important factor here is that we've launched this architecture in the browser based platform, and that's a real big thing for the company. With that, I will turn it over to Allan to talk about our recipient lists.
Thank you, Fred. Good afternoon, everyone. As Fred alluded to earlier, a critical component of what we sell is the ability for our clients to utilize our own managed recipient lists. In most cases, these lists are required. Our customers either do not know who to send to or have challenges in maintaining the same quality of their own lists. By quality here, we mean lists that are complete, current and accurate. Filled with the right people on the right lists being delivered the right content for their use. Play MPE has several proprietary processes that help us keep these lists current, which is extremely important given the nature of the music industry.
Typically, we see roughly 30%-35% turnover of recipients due to things like, job changes, role changes, routine layoffs at radio consolidation, et cetera. Without our constant updates, recipients would become stale rather quickly. We also see that our recipient lists are significantly more active and therefore provide much greater value than any one client's individual lists. That's the case not only for our independent customers, but also all the way up to some of our largest clients. This is a very significant value that Play MPE uniquely provides. This past year, just over 74% of all releases sent through Play MPE included at least one of our own managed lists.
Thus, the more lists we create and the more active recipients on those lists, the more we're able to sell those. Active users on our lists grew by 11% overall in fiscal 2022. When it comes to recipients and recipient engagement, in the latter half of fiscal 2022, we started a couple of processes that will increase our ability to provide more lists. First, as we saw from our entry into Canada, our sales were initially to Canadian labels, but with an international target. These were labels that wanted to utilize Play MPE, not just to distribute within Canada, but to take their releases on a global scale, either to the U.S. or some of the other territories that we service.
As such, in the latter part of the year, we began to examine the structure of our lists, hoping to adapt them to this growing international market and the global reach of the music industry. We worked on bundling lists for specific genres of music such as country or rock, bundling them together to create an international genre offering. These international bundles launched commercially at the end of the fiscal year. This is really leveraging existing users on Play MPE lists, but providing an option that should increase the average sale per release. We also began working on some processes to increase the number of current Play MPE users on our lists. Right now, the majority of recipients within the Play MPE ecosystem are not curated and placed on a Play MPE list.
We believe that with these processes, we'll be able to significantly expand our curated lists and grow our offerings even further. This is an ongoing process that has already started, and we'll continue to refine and improve it as we move forward. Also with combined operations and product development collaboration, we think we can continue to grow this aspect. Metaphorically speaking, this is really like having a bigger fire hose to solve customers' problems. As our lists have grown and activity increased along the way, we've reexamined the pricing on a number of our most active and used lists to better demonstrate that value that we're providing.
At the end of the fiscal year, we launched a series of pricing increase on these lists across a handful of territories and a handful of different genres. In conjunction, we've also grown our marketing efforts this year, both in scope and in the tools that we have at our disposal. The first of those tools being a new marketing website for Play MPE that launched just recently after the close of the fiscal year. We spent the second half of fiscal 2022 designing this new site with very specific goals in mind. First of all, we wanted to better describe the value proposition of Play MPE and how we help artists and labels grow their revenue. Another key feature that we wanted to highlight within the new site are the many endorsements that we receive from current clients.
We can describe Play MPE perfectly, but there is always extra impact when a potential client sees a ringing endorsement from a successful peer or someone they've worked with in the past, or someone maybe they're even in conversation with now. We featured these testimonials in advertising before, but the new site gives us a landing page to send potential clients to directly, to view all the past endorsements over Play MPE 's history. The most beneficial improvement, though, is a more streamlined way to process potential clients and get them into the sales flow quicker.
We designed every element of the site with the new client experience in mind, to make sure they're getting to the correct sign-up page for their use case, whether that be a sender or a recipient, and that we're getting all the information needed to move them through the sales flow more quickly and more efficiently. Speaking of the sales flow, this year we've taken steps to improve and in some cases automate that process. In March of this year, we created a new internal leads funnel, to improve our lead tracking. This new funnel gives us a better analysis of which marketing channels are most effective for us, both in lead generation and conversion of those leads. While the new funnel was created in March, it does take a few months to build up enough data to display an impact.
We began to see actionable information, just around July of this year. Already we found some types of advertising partners that provide the most viable leads for us, and we've shifted our efforts for next year with that in mind. Our sales flow currently relies quite a bit on manual actions. We receive a new lead through one of the entry points, such as the websites, a partnership, client referral, direct outreach, and then from then on, the reach-out is done manually by a member of our sales team. As our lead generation has increased this year, it's taken more and more manpower to process and ultimately convert these leads.
To address this, late in the fiscal year, we began to work on an automation process, and that would allow us to have generated leads move through the flow more quickly. We believe this will raise our lead conversion percentage, once implemented, since it'll cut down on the time between a user first coming to us and the time they upload their first release. That's in the nearly final testing stages now. We're hoping to implement that rather quickly. With some staff restructuring this year, we hired a data scientist with the goal of improving some of our workflows and growing our business intelligence. This addition has already led to a number of opportunities for us.
Play MPE is a very complex tool, and sometimes that can make it difficult to describe our value proposition clearly to new users. That's especially the case for independent clients who might be thinking about a marketing campaign in this way for the very first time. We obviously do a task for our clients. That's a critical component to a successful campaign. The question is, how do we sell the value of that task and determine or demonstrate how it contributes to the client's success? In the past, we've always focused on things like client success stories, anecdotal evidence from either our users or our team's collective years in industry experience, word of mouth, glowing endorsements from current clients, et cetera. With this new analytical ability, we're able to add to our marketing and sales information from two perspectives.
The first being more objective and quantitative data to help our sales conversion. This subjective data can tell labels and artists definitively how our solution is solving a problem for them. Sometimes one they might not even know that they had originally. For example, when we compare our Play MPE managed lists to our customers' own lists, our download and activity rates are objectively much higher. We've always known our lists were strong, but even we were surprised by the gap and the difference there. As I mentioned earlier, turnover rates with recipients are relatively high due to the nature of the industry, and this data is a clear and direct endorsement of those proprietary processes that I mentioned, that we use to keep our list current and clean.
The second perspective where analytics have already played a big benefit is the information within the mechanics of the sale itself. For instance, one of the things we've learned is that the inclusion of ISRC codes, the portion of metadata that Fred had mentioned earlier, the inclusion of that metadata within the release leads to a higher download rate, which of course positively impacts label and artist revenue. This is just one example, and we believe there are dozens of ways that the new analytics department will benefit sales in the new year. After the year end, we launched an automated report designed to highlight releases that are outperforming its peers, which will help us suggest larger packages and lead to the revenue per release growing by distributing to a broader audience.
In the future, we're confident that the information provided by these analytics will lead to more automation opportunities, and that will streamline our sales and marketing processes even further. Another key aspect of our marketing strategy that hasn't quite been possible in the past couple of years has been the live events, trade shows, conferences, et cetera. Obviously, with the pandemic, all of those, I should say, were put on hold in 2020 and the majority of 2021. In fiscal 2022, we started to see events return to a live setting. These events often act as opportunities for us in a few different ways. First off, our attendance helps grow our direct connection with our clients and demonstrates that we're an ingrained part of the music promotion community.
Being active in these spaces is particularly important in new markets where a face-to-face interaction goes much further than any kind of cold or warm reach out for that matter via phone or email or a Zoom conference or anything like that. For instance, I'll mention this again a little later. One of the first Latin music events that we attended following COVID was the Latin Alternative Music Conference, or LAMC, and we've already brought on new clients directly from our attendance there and our involvement. We found that in new markets like this, the ability for an impromptu onboarding session has also led to greater activity rates rather than the either virtual or a more instruction-based process.
While a full and thorough breakdown of our business development strategy and target markets can be found by referring to our 10-K, I do wanna highlight a few key points here on this call. We began commercially charging for distributions within Canada in May of this year at introductory rates. As I mentioned when discussing our new international genre lists. Initially in Canada, our business came from Canadian clients' desire to distribute content internationally. Launching commercial pricing for internal distributions is a major step forward in the market. At the conclusion of the fiscal year, the introductory period also came to an end, and we are now at standard pricing across Canada. We also continue to make progress in the Latin market, and we're in the adoption stage thereof of the sales funnel.
This year, we entered into our first pilot agreement, and we hope to lock in more moving forward. Having clients adopt Play MPE in a new market like this is very much kind of a chicken or the egg scenario. Of course, senders are going to want their content delivered to an active user base, but recipients are only going to increase their activity with quality content available to them when they log on. As we touched on, the activity rates of our Latin lists are continuing to grow, along with many of the other managed lists here at Play MPE. We still need to build this activity even further, to separate those markets and be able to sell directly a Mexico distribution or an Argentinian distribution and so on and so forth.
One way that we've been doing this is attendance and involvement in those market events, just like LAMC, which I mentioned a minute ago. From our attendance in that event, we did see a direct increase in activity from our users as well. Over the course of this fiscal year, our list activity in the Latin market, which includes U.S. Latin stations, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Central and South America. The activity rates there grew by about 64%. In the United States this year, we saw excellent growth in major label revenue. Most notably that was led from Warner Music Group, which increased as a company by over 50%, year-over-year. A lot of that was created by a large increase from Elektra Music Group. There's also some similar deals within Warner.
This trend is not only great from a pure revenue standpoint, but it's extremely helpful in expanding Play MPE usage into new genres within the U.S. Major labels are rather unique compared to smaller entities in that they're large enough to have multiple promotion departments under one umbrella, serving separate genres. You'll have a rock department, a country department, et cetera. They usually work rather independently from each other. With usage increasing with teams working established genres, we have the leverage to try to expand those relationships and get a foot into other departments. One example of that from the past year is Atlantic Records, where we were able to use a long-standing relationship we have with their AAA radio team to get an endorsement for their rhythmic department.
Now we're seeing a steady flow of rhythm releases, which just like I mentioned with Latin, will help lead to increased activity rates on those lists and just increase the value further from there. With that, I'll pass it over back to Fred to talk about some points looking forward.
Thanks, Allan. Okay. Looking forward. I touched on this earlier, but the completion of the launch of the global infrastructure was a gigantic task and is a major accomplishment that we completed that we launched in about mid-year. What that does is, you know, while we've built up a little bit of technical debt in other areas of the platform that we need to address because we've been really focused in on this global infrastructure, we can allocate some of our development, design and development time to things that start to get really interesting and the things that I've been wanting to work on for a long time.
These are things like, whether it's a new product, like a new functionality within Play MPE that can you know, either directly generate some revenue or it's a catalyst to sales or what have you. An example is something that we expect to launch our first iteration of it later this month or at least this year. We call it super serve. It's a new way of using Play MPE. You know, Play MPE right now is where you set up a release and it goes through a curated list of recipients. Super Serve is really just taking an asset and a piece of music and sending it to a particular individual or one person maybe, or two, or whatever.
It's a really quick way to send a link to a piece of music and that's used in different ways. We're just working through the fine points of it, how it mechanically works. It's a new way to attract new users and we're thinking that it'll expand the use of Play MPE. It's a slightly different use case. Potential new users, potential new fees. Another thing that's got me particularly excited is, we've alluded to it in past calls. It's a radio monitor, digital streaming monitor, where we report on plays of like digital plays of songs and radio. You know what?
Again, I hesitate to use the word radio because that gets people thinking about terrestrial radio, but it's not that simple. It's any digital stream that's broadcast, you know, over the Internet to a broad audience. That you know we've been working on that for the last 12-18 months, and we initially didn't have a tremendous amount of resources allocated to it. It was more of a not skunkworks, but it was a technical idea that had some exploration. We've jumped over a few hurdles and technical challenges in scaling that, in generating fingerprints, matching those fingerprints. There's several really interesting complex technical issues associated with that.
We launched earlier this month a proof of concept version of that, which is, you know, just a very, well, a relatively small use of it just to see how it works, test our accuracy, that sort of thing. We'll see how that goes. That's a standalone product that we can sell to Play MPE customers, but it's, you know, distinct and can be sold outside of our Play MPE platform. There's I think some of the things that really are interesting and we're prioritizing where our staff spend their time now. We're trying to figure out what the order of development items are. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity for us to use the expanded development team to do all sorts of things.
Like, one of the, Allan alluded to the firehose of sales where one of the delineating factors is how many recipients we have on the platform. You know, our revenue generally is the number of releases times the number of recipients who are getting that and times the value that we're providing. The more lists, the more recipients you have, the more ways you can package those lists, the more revenue you're going to make. We launched some additional international distributions earlier this fiscal year. Well, when I say this fiscal year, I mean in 2023. Just, you know, this past month or two months ago, we launched an international distribution for our list.
Allan talked about it in a little bit more detail, probably said it a lot better than I am. It's really just a way of repackaging existing recipients on our platform into ways that will generate larger sales. That's not where product and engineering can help, where their help ends. It's making those lists more easily selectable. It's making recipients who are not already on our list more accessible. Maybe they get to be put on more lists. They're interested in different genres.
There's other things that engineering can help with there where one of our best referrals is where someone is promoting a song to radio, and that radio station says, you know, "Look, just send it to me through Play MPE." Well, there's technical ways we can facilitate that transaction and that communication and whether it's requests for new content from a particular artist, whether it's requests for more versions of that particular song, or whether it's requests for, you know, customers who are not even in the platform yet to send it through the platform. These are things, technical issues that we're. The list is literally endless, and it's really quite exciting that we finally have the resources.
As you know, as the years have moved on, we've adjusted our resources, but as we've grown revenue, we've added capacity to develop and I think you know the global infrastructure items for Universal was a big task. We knew it was a big task, but it was with probably some scope creep in there, it was just a gigantic accomplishment for us this year. Now it's really quite exciting to start working on all the things that you know you would think a network of activity would work on to generate engagement and reinforce that engagement.
You know, it's all the things that, you know, a traditional like a Instagram or a Facebook or any kind of social media. I mean, we're not social media, but it's the same kind of process where you can facilitate increased use and increased engagement and enhance the value. You know, looking forward, we're just gonna continue to enhance our business development initiatives. You know, things are opening up and face-to-face contact has proven to be a little bit more effective than, you know, potentially what we've been working on over the last couple of years with the COVID. It's been a hard slog.
You know, people aren't necessarily working in the office and, you know, getting a hold of people and meeting people. That's been a little bit challenging. As things open up, I think we continue to advance those business initiatives. We've made some progress in there, but I think we'll be more effective going forward. With that, I will turn it over to questions if there are any.
Great. Thank you, Fred and Allan. Now we'll begin the question- and- answer session. If you do have a question, please raise your hand by pressing the Raise Hand option at the bottom of your screen, and then your question will be called in the order that we received them. Once prompted, you can unmute your microphone before speaking. Your camera will remain off, but once unmuted, you can ask your question. If you do raise your hand, please ensure you have access to a microphone. Also, if you wish to retract your question, you can just click the Raise Hand icon again to lower your hand.
We have one question. Gerry, do you wanna go ahead and unmute? Sorry, Gerry Wimmer. Hi, Gerry. Do you wanna go ahead?
Gerry, I think you're on mute. It looks like we're having some technical challenges there, Rebecca. Is there
I think so.
Any other.
Yes. Spencer Tom, if you want to go ahead, and we can come back to Gerry.
Spencer. Spencer's on mute as well.
Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yes.
There you are.
Oh, cool. Okay, we finally got it. Fred, you're a pretty conservative guy, and you know, we've known each other for a little while, so you sound a little bit more excited about things now. I was kinda wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit. As an investor, our obvious concern is the stock price. I think all of us are looking for, or if I could speak, you know, that way, some indication that the income is gonna start to show up that will in turn impact the price.
Okay. Thanks, Spencer. Where to start? The optimism. There's probably a few things that are funneling that. The big one is, you know, as I probably mentioned during the presentation, the launch of the global infrastructure for UMG. Now again, I think we've had some technical debt from that, and that is still gonna require a lot of work. We have to move our business, the product development staff over to all these new opportunities, and we've already started to implement those, you know. We launched the international list. I think the...
We're working on things to engage those recipients, move them onto more lists, and that is just pure math. It's just going to. It's just a real function of the math of the more you have to sell, the easier you make it to sell, you're going to increase your revenue. I think there's things that we're working on that are pretty exciting. The radio monitoring. We've you know we've been working on building that out later in the year. We hired front-end, back-end engineers, product manager, marketing manager, and we're starting to work out our business case for that, like, our plan of attack for that business and branding and all sorts of things. That one is.
I know it's a useful tool. It's a matter of how quickly we can ramp up the revenue from it. There's a certain amount of fixed costs building out that platform, and operating costs, and then that's a true SaaS type of business where, you know, you have monthly fees or, you know, and that starts to get really interesting for us. We've had some staffing changes as well. You know, some of them were planned, some of them were not. I think in many of the cases, it's, you know, we really undertook a lot of staffing changes, you know, over the last few years.
With those staff, they also built teams under them that are, you know, really good, strong individuals. While some of the turnover this year was unplanned, it, you know, resulted in some really exciting opportunities for us. The data analytics one is something I think we've been wanting to do for a while, and it's a really interesting endeavor for us.
It's provided us some really key information, whether it's value that we're providing, or it provides, you know, we're building out reports to upsell, where a release, for example, with that analytics, when a release is doing well in country in the United States, if we haven't already sold it as an international package, we can then automatically turn around and, well, somewhat automatically upsell that to an international distribution. We're working on fully automating that. There's lots of things like that. Like, it's just these endless ideas. You know, the trick is not so much how do you grow revenue? It's which opportunity you take first to toggle that needle a little bit faster.
You know, we might not make the right decision all the time, but I think, you know, we've got some really smart people working on the problems, and that's I think that's what really gets me excited the most. The stock price was. Well, that's a little bit of a challenging one. I think, you know, I can go out and tell the story, you know, more broadly and put more effort into that. You know, ultimately, we're a public company, and, you know, we need to tell people what we're doing. And that's what, you know, that's what we try to do with these earnings calls. They, you know, whether we do it effectively, whether we do it to new people is a different question.
I think right now, you know, with the interest rates the way they are, you know, we're a microcap stock, and that's the last place people put money in when, you know, interest rates are a little higher and first place to leave money. I think ultimately, if we do the things that I think we are capable of doing, we will raise revenue, raise income, and that stock price will take care of itself.
You know, I'm not gonna try to absolve us of any future responsibility of going out and to tell people, but I think the priority right now is to really work on the things that are going to move the needle, so that, you know, the longer term benefit is larger.
Quick follow-up. Do you think you're fully staffed now?
That's a good question. Short answer is no. But that depends on what you're asking. Like, we're overstaffed if all we wanted to do was maintain revenue. The investments we're making now, though, is to grow. You know, I understand that there's at some point you got to answer that question. You gotta say, "Yeah, we're gonna grow, and here's the growth." You know, this is really the first time we have to work on those really interesting things that are going to toggle the needle. I think, you know, if we doubled our revenue tomorrow, I would spend more on things. Like, the opportunities are really there. We see them.
I think we would grow our expenses to chase after some synergistic opportunities that we have.
Okay. I think that's it for me. Thanks.
Thanks, Spencer.
Thank you. Gerry, do you want to try and go ahead and unmute yourself again?
All right.
Great.
There you go.
Sorry about that.
Apologize if I ask a question that was asked prior. I missed maybe some of the Q&A. First of all, has your buyback been renewed for the current fiscal year?
It has not currently yet, no.
Okay. Any reason why, considering the stock is at six-year lows?
Well, yeah. Yeah, there's reasons why. I think it's hard to buy, to be quite frank. We authorized it last year, and we were only able to buy, I think it was about 200,000 shares. It's in the press release. I don't remember. But it was hard to buy. I think, you know, people worry about how it sends the message that, you know, we don't have an ability to grow, whatever. I don't think that's true. I think people realize that, you know, we can, you know, with the cash that we have and how we're operating, that we can do both. I mean, I agree that the stock price is.
I would love to, you know, to take a bunch off the market if I, you know, if I could easily do that. Yeah, I mean, it's something to think about, I guess, but we haven't renewed again.
Yeah. I mean, the stock's at five- or six-year lows. It seems, you know, you know, you feel there's value here, and now we're at six-year low. Now the company's not buying back stocks. I just. It kinda contradicts itself a bit. But anyways, my next question is. I mean, the last. From a shareholder standpoint, the last five years, you know, you had, you know, low single-digit growth, if you look over the five years. What's gonna change now, you know. We're gonna go beyond this really slow growth period for the last five years and accelerate growth to double digits and more. We have a pretty small revenue base.
We are a public company and, you know, at least double-digit annual growth would be an absolute minimum for a public company to garner any attention. Can you give me any comments on that?
Okay, on that last statement, I'm not sure if I would agree. Maybe contextually I would. We are targeting growth. What's different now is over the last few years, we made a strategic decision to build out the global infrastructure capabilities for Universal. They have operated all these global infrastructure capabilities within a PC application, a desktop app application. We transferred all those capabilities over to a browser-based version, and in doing so, we added a lot of functionality. That process, you know, took longer than I think everyone expected. It was more involved, more complex. These are extremely complex features that are being developed. And I don't know if we're.
You know, we grew revenue that is in line with that investment, but that was a strategic decision, potentially less focused on revenue growth. You know, I think our true revenue growth is on smaller indies, you know, trying to grow internationally, rather than, you know, a global infrastructure deal. That deal is a sort of an anchor tenant, but it's. The money is gonna be made on things that we do to grow our lists, grow the things that we can sell. I think we can invest in those things now.
The other side of it is, you do need, especially with Play MPE, like with the radio monitoring product that we're working on, that's a whole different thing. You know, lots of complementary aspects to Play MPE, but radio monitoring does not have the same seeding of it. You know, you don't need to seed a particular market with content, grow recipient usage, and then have that sort of snowball over time and you know, build that market out like we're doing with Latin. There's the two things. You know, we got the new product, new service, but we are making progress with Latin as well, where you know, you seed that market with content and you grow recipient usage. Allan touched on the progress.
It hasn't been as fast as we had wanted it to be, but the reality is that, you know, that's going to take time in any event. You know, we saw it when we originally built out the platform in 2003-2008. You know, it took a while to change people's behaviors, get people to realize what Play MPE is, get people to see what music is on that platform, get people to send content. It's that effort, the lag between the effort and, you know, when you start to see revenue that I think, you know, will start to improve.
In summary, it's like, you know, the new products that we can work on now that can toggle revenue within Play MPE or provide new services and then also, you know, just that effort, that longer term effort will start to pay off. We are seeing progress in Canada. We're seeing progress in South Africa, which is, you know, a tiny market really, but we. You know, it's just a proof of concept. Then, with new genres in the United States and then Latin. Latin's a gigantic market too. It's. But we're making progress there.
Yeah. My point is, if they're not higher growth rates than what we did in the last five years. Substantially higher in the next five years or three years. The market valuation of the company is gonna be stagnated. I just wondered what are ways that you know, you and your board are looking alternatively to unlock shareholder value?
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's a different question. I think you're right. Like, you know, ultimately, what's that phrase? We might even have negative margins, but we'll beat them on volume or something like that. I mean, we're not silly. We do expect to grow our margins and produce cash positive cash flow for our investors. I think our approach has been to grow Play MPE use. You know, I think you have to cover that base of that fixed cost of providing that service. You know, there's variable costs of course, but the margins are decent.
If we can bridge that gap where we can make an inflection point for Play MPE and grow revenue, then I think you will see a tremendous increase in cash flow. That that's the basis on which you'll see shareholder value. The radio monitoring is a complementary product that, you know, is circularly reinforcing. So customers of Play MPE will, we hope to sell to customers of Play MPE and earn some money that way. It may also work in the opposite direction. You might be able to sell radio monitoring to a customer that doesn't use Play MPE, and then, you know, they'll be complementary in that aspect as well. You know, there's
It's just a natural progression of aspects of digital promotion. I think that this industry is evolving. It's not. I've said this before, but you know, we didn't evolve into the digital industry. We are evolving into. There's just a tremendous amount of opportunity out there. You know, whether it's royalty remittance, we see in South Africa, for example, you know, one of the reasons why our engagement with releases that have ISRC codes is that royalty remittance and collection in South Africa is a real problem. You know, that's down the road, but maybe we can help there as well.
My only point is that, you know, you or the board may have to consider other options to unlock shareholder value and have Destiny part of a larger organization, either by acquiring or be acquired. It's gonna be a long chug for a microcap stock. I mean, I know it's the stock. Microcaps are, you know, in the cellar right now, but your stock's at a six-year low. It's not at a, you know, 52-week low or a two-year low. It's at a six-year lows. You know, unlocking shareholder value, you know, at the pace that you've been growing in the past and the pace that you might grow in the next two years, might be a very difficult task. So I'm just saying the obvious, to be honest.
You guys are doing good things, don't get me wrong, but I don't know for sure if I should reflect it going forward for a while on a company that has $4 million revenues.
Just my opinion.
I don't think I'm in disagreement with you, Gerry. We ultimately have to unlock shareholder value. I don't think it'd be. If we cannot grow, if we do not, if we don't see a inflection point in our growth rate, then I you know we will revisit this ways to unlock shareholder value. We you know we're sitting on a little bit more than $2 million in cash. Our market cap is about $5 million. You know it doesn't take long for us to generate that much cash flow if we're not trying to grow to far exceed our market cap. So you know at some point we have to answer the question, are our efforts going to result in revenue growth?
Fair question. No question. I think, you know, ultimately, you know, we wanted to provide cash flow to investors, whether that is, you know, an opportunity to sell your shares or, you know, in a takeover or, you know, grow by acquiring. You know, we do look at acquisitions. We have, and I think maybe we need to invest a little bit more time in thinking about that as well so we can grow faster. They tend to be very expensive. We'll see. We'll look at it. I also think, you know, we've seen enough success even in the Latin market. If we continue to grow there, we will start to grow, you know, the revenue there.
I think you'll see. You know, I'd rather try to generate cash when we're twice, 3x , 4x the size for Play MPE than to give up on growth now and generate cash, if that makes any sense.
Yeah. I'll be looking for the inflection point, you know. If the inflection point's two, three years from now, you know, we'll probably be at a flat line in valuation. Unlocking shareholder value, looking at things differently, like I said, either buying or be bought, may either way. That's just how I may see it. Anyways, you can disagree or not, but I think it's a valid point. Very valid point.
Yep. Okay.
Thank you, Fred, for answering the questions.
No problem.
Thank you. That looks like that's the last question for today.
Okay. Thanks, everyone, and thanks for attending. Thanks for the questions, and I'll see you next quarter.