Earnings Call: Q3 2022

Nov 8, 2022

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of Acast's results for the third quarter. After the presentation, we will open up for a Q&A session, and you are able to post your questions in the message board below at any time. With that, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Ross Adams. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to listen to our third quarterly report of 2022. In case you're new to our calls, I'm Ross Adams, the CEO of Acast, and based normally out of New York. Our CFO, Emily Villatt, based out of Sweden. We will take you through the numbers for the past quarter. Before we get into them, I'd just like to repeat a few things from the Capital Markets Day that we held in early October. As I said then, and very much holds true today, the overall opportunity for podcasting is massive. We all know the total addressable market is huge, and the medium itself is still under-monetized. We at Acast have established a unique position in our markets and have a unique ability to leverage our technology to solve the friction points of the industry at scale. We have made heavy investments to date and can now focus our business, and we'll deliver profits in 2024. Let's not forget that we are well-financed and have a strong balance sheet. While the macro context and capital markets are volatile right now, which of course impacts us just like any other company out there, the fundamental growth levers we see for our business are strong. We have a healthy business, a fantastic culture, and very exciting prospects for the years ahead. We built from the ground up the infrastructure needed for podcasters and advertisers to meet and transact, and that included being first to market with dynamic ad insertion for podcasts, which changed the game and made it so much easier both for podcasters to monetize and for advertisers to buy podcast space. We essentially turned an analog medium into a digital one, and that made Acast an attractive place for podcasters to be part of. We quickly grew our portfolio of shows into the thousands. Alongside the growth of our podcast portfolio, we've also been focused on getting more advertisers all around the world to spend with Acast more often. Throughout the past year, nearly 2,500 different advertisers have brought ads on Acast shows, which is the result of a lot of effort from our global sales teams. We work hard to consistently grow our network of advertising partners and to educate the market on why this is such an effective media channel. Podcasts are expected to reach a market of $4-$6 billion in the next three years. When we look at the number of people listening to podcasts and the total time they spend listening every week, the investment from advertisers should be much, much higher than it currently is. The exciting thing is that this means there's a huge opportunity to move more advertising dollars from other forms of audio into podcasts as the industry continues to scale and grow. Acast is uniquely positioned to do this and to take market share in the years to come. Our offering puts podcasters first and makes them as much money as possible through advertising. It's a win-win for podcasters and advertisers alike. It's why so many creators are coming to Acast and why so many advertisers trust us with their investment. When we went public in June 2021, Acast was home to just under 30,000 podcasts, and by the end of the third quarter this year, this number was 88,000 with more than 1.3 billion listens per quarter. We've invested and worked hard to increase our podcast network, which is clearly paying off. Our churn is very low because we really are the best at what we do, getting podcasts out there into the world, helping podcasters grow on a global scale and making them as much money as possible. During the quarter, we announced that we're in the process of reducing our cost base, and we will put a lot of focus on improving our internal efficiency going forward. At the same time, we see great potential to also increase ad sales through what we call the head, the heart, and the tail. The head is simply made up of those big shows, well-known shows that command the most revenue, mostly in the form of direct sales. There are a smaller number of them, but they're disproportionately successful. They're the shows the big advertisers and the big agencies want to be associated with first. Of course, we have the heart, and this is where we see huge potential. These shows are attractive to smaller advertisers like SMEs that want to access the podcast medium but may have fewer resources. These shows are, and their audiences are typically come with higher ROI for advertisers. The larger shows are great for reach and scale, but these shows right at the heart offer outstanding engagement and ROI for advertisers with a truly dedicated listener base. Our opportunity here is how we automate and scale selling these shows. The main point I want to make is that we have huge potential to increase the revenue from each of these three groups. Here, the purple lines are a representation of where shows are not being monetized. If we look at how we stand today, you can see that our revenue is very much centralized around media agencies and big brands buying our biggest shows, that head. They buy directly through our sales teams and also via programmatic, but we have a lot of exciting opportunities to improve and work on how we sell across the board, and we think this is incredibly exciting. Even if we weren't increasing the number of podcasts and therefore our total ad inventory, we'd still be able to grow our revenue from where we are today by selling across more different podcasts and thereby increasing sell-through rates. As I said at the start, the opportunity here is massive. How do we increase that sell-through rate? Well, let's take a closer look at some of our innovations for advertisers and how they help us offer the industry's most innovative ad targeting opportunities. First up, in Q2, we began rolling out our Conversational Targeting capabilities. We're using AI here to transcribe hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes to enable better, more granular targeting, all while respecting listener privacy, and the uptake from advertisers so far has been promising, and it includes a number of big well-known brands from banks to healthcare. Until now, podcasts and their advertising space have mostly been tagged in relation to their genre, meaning two very different shows might be tagged and presented to potential advertisers in the same way just because they cover similar topics. With Conversational Targeting, advertisers are now able to target specific conversations within podcast episodes. That means they can align themselves with conversations that differ from the podcast genre or the episode's overarching theme. Throughout the year, we'll be introducing new capabilities. Keyword Targeting is the next innovation on the horizon and will allow us to go even deeper and help advertisers to be even more granular in their targeting, offering the ability to target towards or, of course, away from any episode where specific keywords are mentioned. On one hand, this brings innovative new levels of hyper-targeting, a brand being able to target every mention of itself across all podcast episodes as an example, or to advertise against competitor mentions. On the other hand, it gives greater reassurance to brands of brand safety, allowing brands to explicitly target away from episodes mentioning specific keywords. Keyword Targeting also offers the potential to think about ad inventory in a completely new way. An advertiser might choose to own the first mention of specific keywords in future episode releases as an example. Aside from all of this rich first-party data, we continue to work with well-respected partners such as Nielsen to power third-party data audience segments, targeting audiences at a listener level. We have our curated collections, and these are collections of podcasts with similar audience demographics packaged up together so that advertisers can reach more of these types of listeners when they want to, but at scale, and there are more than 40 of these. The acquisition of Podchaser further strengthens our advertising offering at a show level. Podchaser provides trusted, transparent data for advertisers and marketing professionals to more efficiently find and reach engaged podcast audiences. To summarize, we have made smart investments in our ad technology and ad capabilities to bolster the competitive advantage of our advertising products, creating value for our advertisers. With that ambition in place, let's look at our performance for the quarter. In Q3, we saw revenues grow by 21%, with a gross margin of 35%, and the adjusted EBITDA margin improved by eight percentage points to -23% compared to the second quarter of this year as the company reached an inflection point and now moves towards profitability. Even in a more challenging macro environment, we are moving towards profitability in 2024. In Q3, we announced our acquisition of Podchaser. As a reminder, Podchaser is the world's largest, most comprehensive and most authoritative podcast database. We think it's a really strong acquisition for both our podcasters and our advertisers alike. For Acast, this acquisition strengthens our position as the world's largest independent podcast company. Podchaser is a vital asset in our mission to continue driving innovation and our position within the open podcast ecosystem, and that will happen in three key ways, through discoverability, dollars, and data. Firstly, enhancing discoverability. Podchaser will allow our podcasters' shows to be more visible to more listeners, helping drive their growth and monetization goals. Secondly, dollars. Podchaser's SaaS-based structure adds additional revenue to strengthen Acast's own business model. Thirdly, rich advertising data. Our advertisers will benefit from superior performance metrics, enabling them to be more efficient or efficiently reach their valuable audiences. This, combined with our own Acast Insights, gives us the richest pool of data in the industry, giving advertisers even more options to spend. All in all, it's a move that we believe will set both companies up for long-term success. Moving on to recent events. We've always known and talked about our power and scale in the U.S. This past month, that was proven as we joined Podtrac, the leader, in podcast measurement, who placed us at number two in its first ever U.S. sales network ranker. This increased transparency and insight into the industry's players, as it massively helps facilitate analysis and planning for ad buyers so they know where best to spend their dollars. In this past week, we announced yet another way we are helping podcasters diversify their monetization options and are helping more money flow into the industry. In an exciting, innovative new deal, Amazon has purchased all of the ad inventory across Acast shows streamed on the Amazon Music platform and will deliver those shows ad-free to members of its Prime and Amazon Music Unlimited subscriptions, which results in revenue for the creators in question. This is just another example in the long list of partnerships that we've formed and are forging with our key partners in the industry, helping on our mission to monetize as many podcasts as possible. I'll now hand over to Emily to talk you through the financial performance in more detail. Thank you, Ross. All right. In Q3, the number of shows that we have on our platform reached 88,000, with the listens reaching over 1.3 billion, and this represents, as you can see here, a record quarter. Listens grew by 48% compared to Q3 of 2021 and have thus been unaffected by the current macroeconomic context. This means that we are continuing to build a very strong supply side in our marketplace. The average revenue per listen or ARPL of 0.24 SEK for the quarter has reduced compared to Q3 2021, but that is simply a result of our listens growing faster than our revenues at present time. The ability for average revenue per listen to grow over time remains, and the more, of course, that we grow our listens, the greater our capacity is to service future demand. When it comes to net sales, all segments contributed to net sales growth of 21%. FX did contribute significantly to the tune of +13%, and the acquisition of Podchaser contributed 2% in net sales growth. This means that on an organic growth basis, we achieved 7% organic net sales growth, and this reflects a growing podcasting ad market. I should note that towards the end of the quarter, we did see an encouraging recovery in our advertising sales with July and August having been months with slower growth and then us picking up pace towards the end of the quarter. When we look at our geographical segments, we saw reported net sales grow by double digits across the board. Europe has seen steady net sales growth during the year, including in Q3, and delivered 22% net sales growth despite the current advertising sentiment. EBIT or local contribution margins from Europe improved to 16%, which is encouraging. North America delivered net sales growth of 16%. I will note that North America was particularly impacted by FX and had single-digit organic net sales reduction when eliminating the contributing factors of Podchaser and FX. Podchaser contributed +4 million SEK in net sales and -5.5 million SEK in contribution losses. The end of the quarter, again here in North America, saw a pickup in momentum, which was encouraging. Other markets delivered 36% net sales growth and a marginal reduction in contribution profits. I'll note here as well, and we'll get to this later on in the presentation, but the profit contribution or EBIT figures here have not been adjusted for the one-off costs related to our staff redundancies. More on that later. Moving on to the gross margin. In Q3, we did see gross profits increase by 16% compared to Q3 2021. The gross margin in the period rebounded to 35%. If we look at the gross margin over time, it is now at a more steady level of 35% in Q3 2022 compared to the unusual dip that we had in the prior quarter. It's good to be back at those levels. When we look at our operating expenses, they grew from SEK 149 million to SEK 215 million in Q3 of 2022 compared to the same quarter last year. Here, of course, it can be noted that FX impacts our cost line just like it does the top line, and we note the increasing FX rates in pounds and US dollars compared to the SEK. That, of course, impacts our OpEx as well. Geographically, our operating expense increases have been focused in North America, and if we look by cost category, the cost increase was focused on product development as well as sales and marketing. As we've spoken about previously, our heavy investment period that the company has gone through has now come to an end and a reduction in the workforce of around 15% was announced in Q3. In Q3, one-off costs of SEK 8 million related to the restructure were posted in our Q3 figures, and we anticipate some further one-off costs to come through in Q4. This reorganization will realize annualized cost savings of around SEK 77 million based on average staff costs for FTE of SEK 1.1 million and a reduction of 70 staff. This cost reduction, combined with the growing podcasting ad market, means that we are moving towards profitability. Our adjusted EBITDA margin in Q3 of 2022 was a negative 23%, which compares to a negative 16% margin in the same quarter last year. I do know that the adjusted EBITDA margin reached an inflection point in Q2 of this year and is expected to improve moving forward, subject of course, to the usual seasonality that we see in ad sales. Quarter-on-quarter, we improved our adjusted EBITDA margin by eight percentage points from -31% to -23%. The same can be said for our EBITDA result and our operating result for that matter. The message is the same for all profitability metrics. We reached peak loss in Q2 and are now firmly moving towards profits in 2024. The path towards profitability is underpinned by our cost reductions announced in Q3, as well as continued growth in the podcasting ad market, albeit from a lower baseline. The operating cash flows in the quarter were impacted by the losses, as well as a negative impact from changes in working capital. As our operating results now moves towards profitability, operating cash flows are expected to follow a similar trend, albeit with working capital fluctuations impacting individual quarters. If we look at year-to-date operating cash flows or the last twelve months, we see that our operating cash flows have been slightly better than our operating losses. I also know that the cash balance as at the end of Q3 was over SEK 900 million, capturing all operating, financing and investing cash flows and the outflows related to the acquisition of Podchaser. I reiterate that we have the funds available to take us through our organic growth plan through to profitability. Over to you, Ross. Great. Thank you, Em. After the reporting period, we announced that for the first time ever in podcasting, advertisers can leverage their own first-party data to target high-value audiences across the Acast marketplace. We've created a bridge between the media buyer and podcast content supply that effectively enables brands to use the first-party insights they already have to serve more relevant ads in podcasts. It's a massive first for the industry that not only drives revenue for brands, but creates a more enjoyable experience for listeners and ultimately increases monetization potential for podcasters. Our first-party data solution comes to market as advertisers continue to prepare for the anticipated death of the cookie and restrictions on use of mobile identifiers, which will require them to rely on their own first-party data. Our Acast+ podcast subscription offering continues to grow. Many more creators from many of our markets are starting up their offering to fans, now able to offer bundling, to paying listeners via one-time payments for content such as special collections or episodes. In summary, Acast's strong business model has shown that even in the face of macroeconomic headwinds, we have shown growth and progressed our technology innovation to continue advancing our position as the world's largest podcast company. That concludes our Q3 earnings call. Thank you very much for listening. Now over to Q&A. Great. I remind the audience to post your questions in the message board below on your screen. The first few questions come from Dennis Bergby at Carnegie. Could you please comment on the recently announced deal with Amazon Music, and how should we think of this deal from a financial perspective? Does it include any one-time upfront contributions? I'll pass over to the financial stuff to Em in a second, but I think, you know, the Amazon deal is a fantastic deal. You know, Amazon buying basically all of the listens on Amazon Music and buying all the ad sorry slots across their listens on their Amazon Music player. You know, Amazon Music is a fairly new entrant into podcast listening. If you think about, you know, Apple, they've been there for 15 years or so, and you think about the likes of Spotify have been there for 7 years. You know, Amazon launched a couple of years back, and this is clearly a move to help grow their listenership of Amazon Music. We provide podcasts to every single platform, no matter where you choose to, but this is a great deal for us. Em, do you wanna comment on the financials? I mean, we haven't disclosed the details of the deal, but in terms of payment terms, I'm very happy with the deal that we have set up with Amazon and including the way that the money flows. Okay. Great. Second question from Dennis: How has the organic growth progressed throughout the quarter? We have read that July was very soft in terms of digital ads. Do you expect any considerable changes to the usual seasonality patterns in Q4, given the slowdown in advertising demand? In terms of how we traveled through the quarter, you're correct. We saw a similar pattern to what has been reported in the industry. A softer July followed by a stronger August and then a further pickup in pace in September. The phasing of our organic growth throughout the quarter has followed that of patterns seen in digital advertising and other players. Good. One more question, strong development in new shows. Do you see any particular trends with regards to geography or size, given the large sequential increases we have seen over the past two quarters? I mean, we haven't seen any, you know, different kinda trends, you know, markets changing. You know, the largest markets are the ones that will grow the quickest. You know, U.S. is a huge market for podcast growth as well as the likes of, you know, key markets in Europe as well. You know, we're very pleased with the growth of shows, and it highlights that, you know, creators are happy and also creators are hearing more around Acast being able to monetize their content. You know, we're pleased with that growth. Good. We have a question from Richard Kramer. Can you lay out the economics to Acast of your relationship with Amazon and the upfront purchasing of inventory to support ad free podcasts? Does the revenue rely on listening on Amazon Music? When you think about onboarding the large opportunity beyond leading brands, how do you see. I think these are several questions, actually. So should we stop there at the Amazon Music? Yeah. Yeah. Do you wanna come on? This deal operates like an ad deal. Effectively what Amazon have done is that they have bought the inventory on listens that are coming through their Prime subscriptions. Instead of inserting ads into those ad slots, they are using that space to have no ads, and therefore they're creating this ad-free environment for their Prime subscribers. It operates like an ad deal, and you'll know from our disclosures previously that our ads are typically a 50/50 split with the creators. Again, we're aligned in our incentives. We're making money, and the creators are making money, and the dynamics operate as if this were an ad. Okay, next question. When you think about onboarding the large opportunity beyond leading brands, how do you see RPL trending, especially with SMEs maybe not paying the same premium CPMs? Over time, we have a distinct opportunity to continue to increase average revenue per listen. The reason it has declined in this quarter is simply because listens have grown faster than revenues. There are some premium brands, of course, and independent podcasters that carry high CPMs. It also depends on what ad product we are selling. We're selling host-read sponsorships that typically comes with a higher CPM than a regular ad buy or ad sold via the programmatic channel. Over time, as you recall from our capital markets day our sell-through rate, so the level of inventory that we sold in 2021 was 28% of our total portfolio. As we increase that sell-through rate over time, that increases our average revenue per listen and improves the monetization of our portfolio as a whole. Good. Last question from Richard. What can you do to turn around the underlying decline in U.S. sales excluding FX and acquisitions? How much visibility do you have after one month of Q4 and into the holiday season? Do you wanna comment on U.S., and I'll talk through seasonality in Q4 for us? US is, obviously, a very exciting opportunity for us. We've signed some fantastic content and continue to attract great content. You know, if we look at kind of the macroeconomic environment and the downturn in advertising revenue in general, you know, we really noticed that in North America in the kind of July and August, but saw it pick up into September. Those are the only signals we can really give you. We were, you know, pleased to see the pickup in North America in September. In terms of the Q4 and the visibility that we have, I will say that it is. We're seeing quite short sales cycles right now, so a short amount of time between a booking and delivery of those ads. That means that it's too early to call Q4. Of course, everyone in the industry is keen to see how budgets are placed in 2023 and see how those dollar budgets are coming through into 2023 as well. It's too early to call Q4. Good. Thank you. We have a few questions from Derek Laliberty at ABG. First one being: What type of impact on overall sales should we expect from the new agreement with Amazon? Do you think any other distributors or podcatchers will follow in these footsteps? I think, you know, like I said earlier on, Amazon are a relatively new player to podcasting, and they're obviously hoping to grow their market share. This has no impact on our ability to fulfill advertising campaigns at all. You know, it's geared towards their Prime and Music Unlimited subscribers. And obviously, those who aren't paying for one of those services will be serving ads against. We can still serve ads against those users on their platforms that are their free users. Yeah. All right. Another question from Derek Laliberty. In broad terms, what should we expect in IAC from the restructuring in Q4 versus Q3? Items Affecting Comparability. Yes. Yes. In terms of one-off costs, we did have SEK 8 million of one-off costs related to the restructure in Q3, and we expect some further one-off costs to come through in Q4. We will wrap up this program by the end of Q4. The underlying cost base that we're stepping into 2023 with will be visible from Q1 2023 onwards. As noted as well in the report, we estimate that the annualized cost savings from this program will be around SEK 77 million. I didn't actually answer Derek's second part of his question around Amazon, so I'll answer that now about will others follow, and do similar deals to the likes of what Amazon have done. You know, our BD department works, you know, very hard on partnerships, but it's too early to say if others will follow. It's a very new deal. Let's see. Good. We have a question from Anders Egsvang. Can you comment on the recent quarters with high growth in number of podcasts on the platform? What has created this uptake in growth in the recent quarters? Well, I think we've focused since the beginning of the year actually on, you know, our podcast growth, the head, the heart, the tail. We believe there's an exciting opportunity with the heart and of course the tail, and you know, how we start to, you know, really automate the Acast machine. And so it's just the hard work we've put in making us a very attractive place. The more marketing, you know, and PR we get around us being fantastic for monetizing shows that the more shows are likely to talk to join us, and you're seeing that in the results with 88,000 shows now. We're very pleased with that. But it's a lot of hard work that goes into that. Good. Our next few questions comes from Emily Johnson. Any color on current trading in October, November? How much visibility do you have on Q4 at the moment? Visibility on, clearly we have a good visibility on October and November, but we've also noted to Richard's earlier point that we are experiencing short sales cycles. It is too early to call how the Q4 picture will look but we're following this of course day-to-day. We're also following how the budgets are laid in 2023. We need a little bit more time to get more visibility on the full picture of Q4 and then how marketing budgets are laid for 2023. Good. RPL was down in the quarter, but you said that it was because there were many more new listens in the quarter. On a like for like basis, i.e. only on the listens that you monetize and ignoring the dilutive impact of new unmonetized listens, how is RPL trending? RPL, the underlying dynamics of how our revenue is built up has seen a similar pattern. If you go back and look at the slide building up our revenues from the Capital Markets Day, the story in those slides showed that we had significant listens growth. We have had stable and increasing pricing over the years, and revenues historically have grown faster than listens. In essence, what we have done is that we've been able to attract really commercial and valuable shows, and we've become better and better at monetizing them, which has been fueled by increasing demand in the ad market and the proposition that we have. Now, those underlying fundamentals have continued. We haven't seen material changes in either pricing. That means that revenues growing slower than listens is driving the reduced average revenue per listen. What you can infer from that is that sell-through rates have continued to go down, but the other dynamics have remained the same. Over time, of course, the better we are at attracting listeners and podcasters, the greater the capacity we have to service future demand as that comes back. CPMs have been quite stable, and sell-through rate has declined somewhat, simply as a result of the very strong growth in listens. Thank you. One more question from Emily. Can you talk through the EBITDA bridge into 2023? Are there other pockets of savings outside the SEK 77 million that you've already flagged, or does your EBITDA improvement come from holding the rest of the cost base flat while growing revenues? Clearly we're looking at all of our costs, and all businesses go through budgeting exercises during the autumn. We operate the zero-based budget at Acast. That means that we build the budget from scratch, and we look at every single piece of cost that goes into it. Of course, we have gone through them and announced our cost savings programs related to staff, but we're being very diligent in terms of how we operate our discretionary cost line as well. We should record that we have welcomed the team at Podchaser, so that represents a new set of staff members coming into the business. They also have great prospects for growth and reaching profitability over time. We are very comfortable with our goal of reaching profits in 2024. If the market changes out there in 2023, then we will continue to adapt and review how we're pacing. Great. One more question. 10% of revenue's now programmatic. Can you remind us how the economics of programmatic differs to the other 90% of the business? Is that 10% skewed towards a certain part of the podcast distribution or evenly across head, heart, and tail? The dynamics of the way the programmatic ads work is that they're similar to a direct ad buy in terms of the splits with creators. We operate typically a 50/50 split with the creators when it comes to programmatic sales. The beauty of programmatic distribution is that they can both be targeted to our larger shows, but they can also be distributed across that part and take. Regardless of where those programmatic ads are distributed, we typically take a 50% take rate. Good. One more question from Anders Ekswang. Out of curiosity, are you experiencing any advertising agencies or social media agencies beginning to look into podcast advertising as a channel to work with and to offer their clients an alternative to, for example, decreasing effectiveness in other channels? It's a good question. I mean, I think if you look at, you know, especially in downturn and you look at advertiser media schedules, they'll be looking at the media that converts best from an ROI perspective. Podcasting has out and out proved that it is fantastic for ROI, and one of the best mediums you can use for ROI. While normally traditional advertisers would turn back to traditional media, they're still looking for the most effective media out there. Therefore, we'll start to see more opportunities and advertisers who are seeking ROI and choosing podcasting as a medium. You know, there's still a lot of new advertisers who've never tried podcasting before, so, you know, there's still education processes that happen. Very much so, you know, we expect to see some interesting opportunities, as you know, different sectors start to peak in the likes of recessions. Yeah, it's a space to watch. Great. There are no more questions posted at the moment, so I guess I'll just leave it to you for some final words, Ross. Yep. Thank you very much for joining us. Of course, you can listen to this earnings call as a podcast after this and, you know, follow us on our investor channels as well. We'll be speaking to you next quarter. Thanks very much.