Hello and welcome to the presentation of Adtraction First Quarter Results. If you have any questions, please post them online, and you'll get some answers after the presentation.
Let us jump straight into the first quarter. The big story here is that E-commerce looks better. We're showing growth that is supported by Adrecord's growth, but we're also seeing organic growth. The finance market has been challenging. We've seen negative growth rates throughout the quarter. Adtraction remains profitable. This is a big focus of ours. We need to deliver profits every single month. That's how we run the company. We're also delivering very strong cash flows. We've done a number of things to try to improve the cash flow throughout the year.
The Adrecord migration has been finalized from an organizational point of view. Everyone from Adrecord knows what they're doing, what their goals are, and we're very happy with that process. Clara Loan was divested March 31 last year, and of course, that still impacts our growth rates. We see an impact on the growth rates for Q1 because of Clara Loan. Our focus is to get back to growth. This is the number one goal for our entire company this year. Speaking of growth, we said in the last quarterly report that we expected to return to growth in the second quarter. The reason we said this was because we saw a positive trend with good performance in E-commerce, stable performance in finance, and actually positive growth rates in March. Something happened in April. We saw a drop in performance for our finance campaigns, and we are no longer comfortable guiding towards growth in the second quarter.
I will say that the second half of April looks a little bit better than the first half of April. I think that this development may be due to temporary effects in April, but we're not comfortable sticking to our growth forecast. If we look at April, we're seeing similar growth rates as in Q1. We think that we're going to do things differently in 2025 versus 2024. A big thing that's happening is that we have a new offering. We're doing different service levels called Basic, Growth, and Premium. If you've looked at our website, you know that we've talked about those levels for a while, but this year we're going to implement those service levels both for existing and new customers. This is, of course, a big project.
We have a lot of customers, but this is something that we will focus on implementing now that we've integrated Adrecord. We have a new organization. Last year we made a lot of improvements on the tech team and on the commercial side. Adtraction has a local presence in 12 different markets. We have new country managers in five of those markets, and they are, of course, eager to implement their ideas and strategy and deliver great results. I am very confident in our current organization.
Adrecord will be fully integrated in the second quarter. There is still traffic running on Adrecord's platform. That will be migrated to Adtraction's platform before the end of the quarter. As a matter of fact, that is expected to happen fairly soon. Once that has happened, Adrecord's platform will be shut down.
There's no more Clara Loan in the base numbers for Q2, so we will not talk about that starting from the next report. I would also like to say, I would also like to say something about tracking. I think that we are working with a beautiful business model, a great business model. The reason I say that is that brands pay based on the value that they receive, and partners get paid based on the value that they deliver. Now, this assumes that we have functioning tracking and a good tracking. We've had that since we started the company in 2009. We've continuously improved and updated our tracking model in response to regulatory and technical changes. I think that over the past 18 months or so, we've seen a more challenging tracking environment.
This is mainly related to privacy things and cookie consent and some settings that certain brands do related to these things. The net effect is that we're losing some sales, and this is not good. We're looking again at our tracking model, and we should expect an update of that fairly soon. I think it's important for all participants in the value chain that tracking is working correctly. Needless to say, it is important for Adtraction because we want to sell. It's very important for partners to be fairly compensated for their traffic. Actually, I would argue that it's important for brands also because if tracking is not working properly, then brands will not make correct budget allocation decisions.
Just let me be clear here. Our tracking is working, but we are losing some sales, and because of that, we will do some updates, and that's happening fairly soon.
We're also implementing a new CRM system, and the basic idea here is that we want to improve our account management. We want to improve our sales processes, and we want to improve cross-border collaboration. The reason that I mentioned this is that this is a big project. It's a bit of investment also, not a huge investment, but it's going to cost us something, and we expect great results from this effort. The new CRM system will be in place towards the end of Q2.
Going into 2025, I think most people expected stronger markets and a stronger macro environment. I would say that there's more uncertainty about that now. There's more uncertainty about that now, but I think the general expectation is for markets in Europe to grow going forward.
Adtraction also has a new board of directors, or at least half the board of directors is new. Max Heger has been on the board since 2021. He's now stepping up as Chairman of the Board. He's been a shareholder since 2018. Markus Bjernvall has been on the board since we started the company. Markus is one of the founders, and his current title is Head of Platform. Arash Hakimi works for NEA Partners. Nia owns 7-8% of Adtraction, and Arash also has a private holding of 50,000 shares. Arash has been super helpful to us and helping us with investor relations, investor meetings, and investor presentations throughout the years. We're very happy to have him on board.
Pelle Pettersson is also joining Adtraction. He is an E-commerce expert. He's a digital marketing expert. He founded a company called OmniArch a couple of years ago, and he's already proven to be a very useful and good-speaking partner to us. We would like to welcome Arash and Pelle to our board of directors.
I would also like to stop for a second and talk about Adtraction's management team. I will not go through this in detail. I would just like to highlight basically two things. The first thing is that Adtraction's management team has been on average 13 years at Adtraction, which is a fairly long time. Even if you exclude the founders from this group, Markus Bjernvall, Christian Longberg, and myself, the management team has worked around 10 years for Adtraction on average. We have a very experienced team. We know what we're talking about.
The second thing that I would like to highlight, and as you can see on this slide, is that the management team is very exposed to the success of Adtraction. We do own a lot of shares, and we have a strong interest in the continued success of Adtraction. Continued success for Adtraction means growth, profitability, and cash flows. Let us talk about those things.
In Q1, we did not show growth. This has been the story for a while here. We saw sales drop by around 3%, and we saw gross profit drop by 5%. Obviously, some of this is related to Clara Loan, and I promise you we will soon stop talking about Clara Loan because that will no longer be on our books starting next quarter. Profitability in Q1 was around SEK 11 million EBITDA. That's the same as last year and exactly the same margin as last year.
Cash flow from operation were very good. We actually saw a growth of more than 1,000%. Of course, we cannot continue to deliver operational cash flow that's stronger than our EBITDA. That's simply impossible to do over time. What is happening now is that we are implementing processes to improve our cash flow and to make sure that partners can be paid quicker. As a result of that, we're moving cash flows between quarters. Andreas will talk more to this in his section of the presentation.
If we zoom out, I think we can see a couple of things in the sales graph. The first one is that we grew for many years. The second one is that there was a significant drop in 2024. Now you could possibly argue that things have stabilized. I think we can see the same picture if we look at gross profit, growth, drop, stabilization.
We are focused on growing our business going forward, and then there's a couple of reasons why we think that this is possible. I think the main reason is that only 10% to 15% of total commerce in Europe happens online. So there's actually still a migration going on from offline to online, and there's a structural growth happening for E-commerce. Our customers are exposed to the structural trend, which means that Adtraction is exposed to this structural trend. It's not difficult to find forecasts for the European market indicating that we saw a drop in 2022 to 2023, and then that growth is expected going forward.
If you listen to Adtraction's presentations before, you will know that we like to talk about Google, and we think that it's a risky proposition for E-commerce companies to spend too much of their budget on Google. This is risky because Google is a monopolist that behaves like a monopolist. Google can change prices at their will. They can shut down traffic at their will, and they can close down accounts at their will. There's no doubt that Google is a great service, but it is indeed a risky proposition to put all of your eggs in one basket here. We are suggesting to work more with partner marketing.
I am not the only person in the world who's saying that Google is a monopolist that behaves like a monopolist. A judge in the U.S. found that Google is running a search engine monopoly. Another judge found that Google is running an ad tech monopoly. The latter here is fairly new. You can read about that, but it's pretty clear that Google is doing some pretty bad stuff. The European Commission agrees. The European Commission says that Google is running a monopoly for a Google Play Store, and Google is running a monopoly when it comes to search.
We think it's a bad idea to put all of your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is an illegal monopoly, which is the case with Google. The question is, how will we grow? How will we grow at Adtraction? Before, we talked a lot about M&A, we talked about opening up new markets, and we talked about organic growth. These things are still relevant. As you know, we do a little bit of M&A here and there. We did acquire AdRecord last year. We acquired AdService in 2023. Obviously, we have been hoping to do more than this, but the market simply has not been there. It has also been a while since we opened up the new market. The last market that we opened up was Italy in 2022.
We still want to open up new markets, but we want to do that when the timing is right. As you know, we have been not showing organic growth in 2024. We still think that there is a lot of stuff to do, and growth can be viewed through a different lens and described in a different way. Let us talk about that a little bit. The main case for growth is to grow with our existing base. This is actually what you are seeing for E-commerce in the first quarter.
We're growing organically for our existing base. We're finding new partnerships to our existing customers. We're adding new partners constantly, and this results in growth in a good market. We also want to increase market shares, of course. That means that we need to win accounts from competition, but above all, it means that we need to add more companies into the wonderful world of partner marketing. We're constantly working. We're trying to win new business.
We want to grab that Google budget for the reason that I just explained. It is not wise to spend 60% of your budget on Google. Move some of that to Adtraction or some other partner marketing company. That is a safer choice, I would argue. Of course, we're still interested in M&A when opportunities arise. This was just a different way of illustrating what it is that we're doing.
We are not sitting idly by waiting for opportunities. We are working hard to achieve growth. In my opinion, it's a no-brainer to engage in partner marketing. The main thing here is that brands only pay for actual results or actual value is perhaps a better way of putting it. Brands also reach partners that they couldn't reach without us and therefore reach consumers that they couldn't reach without us. The case for partner marketing is strong. If I were contemplating running a partner marketing campaign for my E-commerce company or my finance company, I would look for three things. I would look for optimization. That is, how can I make sure that I get the right volume at the right price? How can I make sure that the quality I get is the right one?
That means the quality of partners and the quality of traffic that they send. How can I make sure that I work with the right partners in terms of distribution? How can I make sure that I reach the right consumers? Of course, Adtraction has some answers to all of this. We work with active partnership management. That means that we identify the right partners, we set the right volume expectations, and we help find the right pricing.
We work with quality partners. If you look at our partner base and compare that to basically any other network, you will find that we have a much smaller number of partners. You will also find that the average quality of our partners is much higher. The reason is that we continuously scrutinize our partner portfolio and reject partners that do not live up to our quality criteria. Smaller network, but much better.
Finally, we are all about local presence and European reach. Because we are locally present in our key market, we can work with the right partners. This is the reason that brands should choose Adtraction. You also know that I like to talk about the number of employees. In some way, this is a reflection of the underlying dynamics in the business. What's happened here, just looking back a little bit here, what has happened is that we have grown for a long time. In Q1 2023, we acquired Adservice. As a result of that combination, some people chose to leave our group.
In 2024, we did some restructuring, and the number of employees was further reduced. In Q4 last year, we acquired AdRecord. Of course, the number of employees increased slightly. In Q1, we have hired a few people primarily in Europe. The cost base is stable, and it has been stable for a while. With that, I will let Andreas talk for a little bit.
All right, thank you. We start looking at the numbers for the first quarter, starting with the net sales. It is at SEK 282 million, and that is a negative growth of 3%. Looking at gross profit, it is SEK 54 million, and that is a negative growth of 5%. If we here exclude the vertical other and only look at the core business, we are at par with last year. You can also see that we have not disclosed the acquired versus organic growth. This is due to the migration of the customer base from the AdRecord platform to Adtraction, which makes it hard. As a proxy, we did say in the fourth quarter that Clara Loan and Adrecord is roughly the same size when it comes to gross profit, and you can use that to make some assumptions.
When it comes to EBITDA, it's SEK 10.6 million. It's the same as last year and an EBITDA margin of 3.7%. Like Simon said, we have a stable cost base. Looking forward, that is also what we expect with a slight decrease in the second and third quarter due to some seasonality effects with vacation pay. When it comes to the adjusted net result per share, it's at SEK 0.49, and that also is at par with last year. Looking at the vertical, starting with E-commerce, we can see that we're definitely moving in the right direction here. It's SEK 32.6 million in gross profit, and that gives us a 10% growth. We're also growing on seven out of our 12 markets.
Looking at finance, it's at SEK 20.9 million. That is a 14% decrease. We can see more general negative growth across markets here. Of course, we are working really hard to turn this around. In the other vertical, we can see the effects of that divestment of Clara Loan. We have SEK 0.4 million in gross profit left here. In the Nordics, SEK 40 million in gross profit. That is a 5% decrease. Also here, if we exclude Clara Loan and other, we can see a growth of 2%. We're growing on two out of four markets, those being the bigger ones in Nordic, Sweden, and Norway. In Europe, we have SEK 13.5 million in gross profit. That's 7% negative growth. We paint two different pictures here. We can see growth on most of European markets within E-commerce, and the opposite is true for the finance vertical.
Looking at the cash flow from a longer perspective, we can see that we have had really good results in the operating cash flow in the last three quarters. We are working very hard, continuously improving the working capital. Effectively, we have also shortened the cash conversion cycle, which means that partners also will be able to get paid faster, being able to reinvest in our platform. We expect the partner payments to be bigger in the second quarter due to this and thereafter moving towards more normal seasonality patterns, so to say, from a historical perspective.
Looking at the different parts of the cash flow and starting with the operating cash flow, we have SEK 25.7 million in operating cash flow. Of course, a very strong quarter. We do not have any investing activities in the quarter and the financing activities. We made a small dividend payment to a minority holder, and that gives us a total cash flow of SEK 25.3 million in the quarter and a very strong net cash position of SEK 129 million ending the quarter. I give the mic back to you.
Thank you very much. In the last quarter, we talked about some new regulation for the Swedish consumer credit market, and I would just like to comment a little bit on that and what has happened from our point of view. One law said that interest cost would no longer be tax deductible for certain loans, and the right to do so is being gradually phased out. We did not see a big impact because of that.
In March 2025, an interest rate cap of 20% was introduced and also a cost cap. We did see some effect of that. What we said in the call was that we expected a decrease in Adtraction's total gross profit of a couple of percentage points. This is what happened. I think that the general performance of the finance sector has been more important than this regulatory change, actually. There is some other stuff going on. We already talked about this a little bit in the last call, but I will mention it again. What is being proposed here is that starting in July 2025, everyone needs to be a bank. They do not need a license by then, but that is when the law is supposed to be in effect.
Parliament will vote about this by the end of May. The person who's driving this process is Niklas Wykman, he's Minister for Financial Markets. What's going on here is actually a little bit strange. Mr. Wykman is disregarding the opinion of the Council on Legislation, which is Lagrådet. What Lagrådet is doing is essentially saying if a proposed law is good in relation to other laws and if in general it's a good law. What's happening here is that Lagrådet is saying that it seems a little bit weird that brokers need a banking license. We couldn't agree more. That is indeed a strange proposal. I think what's extra strange here is that it's not exactly clear what the broker is. For sure, the brokers who are brokers probably are brokers, so to say.
There are some other types of sites, for example, white label sites who collect leads for banks. Are they now required to have a banking license? To us, that is a little bit unclear. I think it's unfortunate that the Swedish Parliament seems to be passing poor legislation like this. It is what it is. I think in summary, Adtraction has a role to fill no matter what happens because there's going to be a demand for credits and there's going to be a supply of credits. We have a role to fill when it comes to matching consumers with the right loan providers.
We're not worried about this. We are, however, a little bit surprised about how laws are being made and completely unreasonable things are becoming law all of a sudden. Finally, I would like to talk a little bit about our expectations going forward. The first thing that will happen is that Adrecord will be fully integrated in Adtraction as of Q2 2025, and the AdRecord platform will be closed down fairly soon. We are working with a broader advertiser portfolio and a broader service offering, the one that I talked about initially.
Back to growth is the main goal for 2025. Like I said before, the Q2 growth is at risk for the reason I mentioned. I already know that there are some questions about this, so we'll get back to this topic. Let us see what questions there are. There's actually quite a few questions here, and we'll just get started here and see where it takes us.
Here's a question. In the finance segments, have you seen the same effect on all markets at the same time at the end of March? How was the finance segment in those markets before until the last weekend in March?
What is going on here is that we have a couple of very important finance markets in Adtraction, and those are mainly the Nordics, Spain, and to some extent Germany. We have seen poor performance across all of those markets. The performance in Q1 was fairly stable. Then we saw a decrease in April. We saw a decrease in April, and that is perhaps to some extent related to one-off effects. There are a lot of things happening at the same time, and perhaps there is a possibility to recover, but because we do not know that, we are not comfortable sticking to a growth target in Q2.
Here is another question. You are increasing headcount with five people this quarter, and you have several positions open in April. What's your view on continuing an increasing headcount before a clear market turn?
I'd say that these recruitments primarily are related to E-commerce, and we're seeing a stronger development in E-commerce. To some extent, we are acting because we see a stronger market.
Here's a very specific question. What's your view on activity in the M&A market? Any interesting bankruptcies to look at after the tough market?
I think that the person who's asking this question is well aware that there are things happening in the market. There is a German company called Belboon, which is under an insolvency process. What's going on there, in my opinion, at least what I've read, is that Belboon itself was performing and delivering profitability. Belboon was owned by a private equity-owned holding company that was unable to service its debt when it comes to amortization and interest rates. Because the holding company was in trouble, that put Belboon in a difficult position. I probably do not expect Adtraction to have a plain active role in that process.
Which month did you start to see a weaker performance in the finance segment?
I think that you see the performance in the finance segment in Q1, as we have reported, and our assumption was that this would continue. It turned out that performance was a little bit worse in April. The beginning of April was worse than the end of April.
Is the weak performance in the finance segment a consequence of lower demand for loans from consumers or approval rates from lenders?
I would say neither. There is the demand. There is a nice approval rate going on from lenders. What we have seen is a shift of products. People are introducing other products. They are pausing campaigns because they want to change something in their offering. There is a lot of stuff like that happening in April. Actually, I would not say that the demand is lower or that the approval rate is lower. I would say that from a macro point of view, there is, of course, more uncertainty in the economy.
Eleven place gross profit within E-commerce seems solid, even if AdRecord is helping there. Is this mainly due to lower figures, or are you seeing increased customer activity?
I would say both. The base numbers are better, but we are also seeing increased activity. I think we have done that for a while, but it takes a little bit of time to pick up pace. E-commerce growth is both organic and helped by AdRecord.
We have a question about, can you put some color on the split for growth within E-commerce between existing customers and new customers?
Clearly, the growth that we're seeing is from existing customers. We are constantly trying to win new accounts, but Adtraction is a fairly big company. We need to win a lot of accounts before we see a significant change in our sales and gross profit. Of course, over time, this will happen. It does happen because we're continuously saying, but the effect that we see right now has more to do with the existing base.
How high visibility do you have into the advertisers' marketing budgets that are planning to spend on Adtraction's platform?
That is going to vary from customer to customer, of course. What we see is that, as far as we know, they continue to spend on our platform. If anything, like I said before, we see increased activity. Now there's a question for Andreas, so you won't have to listen to me here. The question is about currency.
Right. Can you say something about how much currency fluctuations affect you in the quarter?
Surprisingly, from a growth perspective, it hasn't affected us much because the Swedish krona was relatively strong throughout the full quarter of the first quarter, 2024. From a growth perspective, marginally, we expect that to be more relevant in the second quarter as the Swedish krona was weak. 2024 versus probably strong in the second quarter this year if nothing extraordinary happens again. Yeah.
All right. Thank you, Andreas.
How much do you expect to increase the number of conversions as a direct consequence of your tracking initiatives? 1%, 5%, 10%?
We are not stating a number at this stage. What I will say is this: it is not going to be more than 10% because that is not how much we are currently losing. We are not going to give guidance on this. I think we will get back to this once we have presented and implemented the solution. Clearly, there is some sales to fetch here.
All right. We have some more questions from the feed. Let us get into that. Did I understand correctly that finance showed similar growth risk in April as in Q1?
No. Finance was worse in April than in Q1. That was the surprising thing. We expected sort of the same development as in March, but it turned out to be a little bit worse in April. That was the surprise to us.
We have the same question again. How much of your lost sales do you expect to recoup from your updated tracking?
We're not going to state a number here. At some point, we probably will. At some point, we probably will, but in order to answer that question in a good way, we need to monitor what happens.
Will the updates on your tracking have a positive net effect on your net sales, or is it more on an initial take you back to normal?
That's sort of the same thing, isn't it? I think the net effect is that we're hoping to increase sales a little bit as a result of this. In a way, this is more of doing what's right and doing what's fair.
Could you explain what you hope to achieve with your new CRM compared to before?
Of course, Adtraction had a CRM system before, and we've worked with that system for many years. What we're doing now is a tighter integration with our platform. We will collect data from our platform, put that into the CRM system, and then we will base our actions in the CRM system on what's in our platform. That means that we're going to have certain service levels, depending on the performance of partners and customers. We will be happy to talk more about this once it's been implemented. The reason that I mention this now is that it's a big project. It's going to cost something, and it's going to require some resources from Adtraction.
Here's another question. What is the margin difference between E-commerce and finance?
In general, so here's the thing. We don't disclose that. We only disclose gross margin at the group level. What I can say is that in general, E-commerce margins are slightly better, and that's because we have a long tail there where we operate with slightly higher margins. We have more E-commerce customers that operate with high margins.
I think here's one more question. How much weaker was April compared to the first quarter? Was it single-digit decline?
April was in line with Q1 totally. That's what we can say now, or it seems like that when we're looking at numbers. Of course, we do have a lot of data, so that's what it currently looks like. April was in line with Q1 from a growth perspective.
I think that's it. Let me update again. Thank you, everyone, for your interest and all the questions. See you next time.