Thank you. Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It's the earnings call for G5 Entertainment, third quarter 2020. My name is Vlad Suglobov, I'm the CEO of the company. I also have Stefan Wikstrand, our CFO, on the line with me for tricky financial questions. We'll take about 15 minutes to go over the presentation of the third quarter results, and then we will open the line for questions and answers. Let's go on to the slide number two. I'd like to summarize the quarter by saying that we've continued to deliver on our strategy. Even with the third quarter being seasonally weak and lockdowns being eased in many countries, our strategy of seeking organic growth paid off. Sales rose 10% year-over-year, while at the same time reaching all-time high earnings and earning margins.
Based on the strong development of our own games, we achieved record profitability in the quarter, both in absolute and relative terms. Our EBIT margin hit an all-time high of 16.1%, and EBIT was a record SEK 53.7 million . With 62% of the total revenue coming from our wholly owned games, up from 54% in the second quarter, and our profit margins at record levels, we have clear evidence supporting our strategy. All in all, revenue from our portfolio of own games created from scratch by G5 developers surged more than 72% in the third quarter and 2% sequentially from the second quarter, despite the USD exchange rate impacting negatively. Since we don't have a lot of sales in Swedish krona, adjusted for currency exchange rates, the sequential growth in own games was actually 13%, much stronger than two that you see when you look at the SEK figures.
Two, the newly released games, "Jewels of the Wild West", "Jewels of Egypt", and "Match Town Makeover", were the main contributors to the sequential growth in own games during the quarter, and own games continued performing well going into October. We are continuing to launch new games at a higher pace than ever before. In the quarter, we made global releases of the games "Hawaii Match-3 Mania", "Crime Mysteries", and "Pyramid of Mahjong". We also made a soft launch of the game "Sherlock: Hidden Match-3 Cases", which was released globally after the end of the quarter. Our high launch pace is the payback from previous successful investments in our development teams. In addition, we have one new game in the pipeline for release in the fourth quarter this year.
In total, that means we will have launched eight new titles in 2020 on top of the five titles we have launched in 2019. Q3 is a seasonally weak quarter, as I mentioned. However, our strategy of seeking organic growth based on the development of our own games continued to pay off. New games build on previous technology and gameplay foundation, with an emphasis on engaging storylines and immersive meta mechanics. As we have solid understanding of players' expectations, we have high expectations on the success of our new games. We are quite happy we have managed to release so many games in the third quarter, and they will be able to contribute to the results of the fourth quarter, which is ahead of us and going forward as well. During the quarter, encouraged by strong growth in our games, we continued to strengthen our user acquisition teams.
We have put a lot of effort in improving efficiency in our user acquisition spending, and we are spending our money wisely, which is visible in our improving margins. We saw also improved monetization with monthly average gross revenue per paying user up 31% year-over-year and reaching over $60. This number reflects two things. First, the continued growth of higher monetizing Match-3 games as percentage of our revenue, and improved quality of the audience that our user acquisition attracts due to improving efficiency of the tools and processes that we put in place there. We remain financially healthy and strong. We are debt-free, profitably, and highly cash generative. Let me talk about these figures for the third quarter a little bit more and move on to the next slide. We'll start with sales. Revenue was SEK 332 million, which is a 10% year-over-year increase compared to 2019.
Our own games continue to grow while the licensed portfolio share is shrinking. The sequential increase for own games in SEK, as I said, was 2%, but the real sequential growth, adjusting for effects, was a stronger 13%. Own games increased to 62% of total revenues, which is a clear improvement from an already strong second quarter when our games stood for 54% of revenue, and even more impressive comparing to the third quarter in 2019, one year ago, where own games represented only 40% of total revenue. It is worth adding that for the new generation of games, which is games released in 2019 and 2020, revenue grew an impressive 425% year-on-year in the third quarter. Advertising revenue grew every month of the quarter as well, but still remains below 1%. We are taking a cautious approach here.
We don't want to distort the user experience, and while we have a good progress, we're not pushing it too aggressively. Let's move to the slide number four and talk about our earnings. The operating profit was a record SEK 53.7 million, and the EBIT margin was a record high 16.1%. User acquisition costs were down to 21% of revenue compared to last year, it's a decrease from 42% of revenue in the third quarter last year. In absolute terms, we spent 44% less on user acquisition this year compared to last year. Looking at the sequential development, UA slightly decreased as a percentage of revenue from 22% in the second quarter to 21% in the third quarter. It was in all material aspects stable between the quarters. Going forward, we expect our UA spend to be more stable than in the previous years.
Specifically, we do not expect strong seasonality of UA spend in the fourth quarter. As you know, about a year ago, we have changed the management in our marketing department. Since then, a lot of work has been done to make our user acquisition much more optimal. We clearly see the effect this year compared to a year ago. The work continues, and we still have a lot to do in order to make our user acquisition process even more scientific and data-based, and our roadmap for the improvement in our tools is at least a year long ahead of us. We have a long-term commitment to develop cutting-edge tools in order to achieve the best user acquisition performance, as with our cross-platform engine, G5 Friends Network, and other platform tools.
Despite the very clear practical value of these advanced user acquisition instruments, they're not put on the company's balance sheet, but the effect is visible in the trends of our UA spend and in the growing profitability of the company. The EBIT margin was also positively impacted by higher capitalization rates and also by a weakened ruble and hryvnia which decreases our costs in Russia and Ukraine correspondingly. The gross margin was a strong 59%, continuing the long-term trend of expanding gross margins. Looking at year-over-year comparison, there is a decline, but the margin in Q3 last year was positively affected by very high marketing spend on licensed games. It was more of an outlier, rather than something in the trend. The long-term trend is for the gross margin to expand and to continue driving the expansion of the earnings margin.
Let's move on to slide number five, that is cash flow. We had a strong cash conversion during the quarter. Our operating cash flow was positively affected by tax receivables in Malta of some SEK 40 million. At the same time, financing activities were impacted by the repayment of the short-term loan of almost SEK 42 million that we temporarily took out in Q2 to pay taxes in Malta. Financing activities were also impacted by buybacks of SEK 4.6 million. All in all, total cash flow in the quarter was SEK 32.1 million, and total cash at the end of the period was SEK 161 million, which is a record amount for this time of the year. Another record there. Let's move on to slide number six and talk about the outlook.
All in all, I'm very proud of the strong accomplishments by the whole G5 team during this quarter. We achieved record profitability, both in absolute and relative terms. We grew revenue from the owned portfolio of games and also released four new games to the market. A great quarter in all respects. Our range of games is growing, and the portfolio is more diversified than in the past, and we expect diversification to continue, unless of course we have some really big stars in our portfolio, which will come from own games, and that is a good thing to have if that happens. Our own games, especially the new generation of titles, continue to spur growth, reflecting the leverage our business model has in driving margin expansion.
As 62% of our revenue in this quarter came from our own titles, I'm extra proud, and to me, it is clear proof of a successful strategy that we've been implementing over the last few years. The increased activity in our games also continued into October. So far this year, we have released seven games, as I mentioned, and there's one more that we plan on publishing in the fourth quarter. You could expect us to have a total of eight new games out in 2020, but it doesn't stop there. Our development teams are working hard on games that we are going to release next year and creating new exciting updates for already released games. At the same time, we have clearly improved efficiency in our user acquisition, and we have a roadmap for continuous improvements there, thus I'm confident about the future in that regard.
Our teams right now are busy developing new holiday content in order to update our games in time for the major holidays this year. It already happened in part with October already behind us. We already see the signs of increased activity in the beginning of the fourth quarter. We really look forward to how historically strong fourth and first quarters of the year are going to turn out. Unfortunately, we're also seeing a second or, depending on your country, perhaps a third wave of COVID in all of our main markets. The fourth quarter is, as I said, seasonally strong, and we are releasing a lot of content to meet the players' desire to play games during such time. We are happy that we can help and provide entertainment to people during the lockdowns that are being reintroduced.
The G5 Friends Network is also there and gives players an opportunity to communicate between each other during these tough times. We are happy to be of service in that regard and help our players in these difficult times. This actually concludes my presentation. I'd now like to open the call for questions.
Thank you. If you have a question for the speakers, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. Our first question comes from the line of Jesper Birch-Jensen from ABG. Please go ahead.
Hi, Vlad, and congrats on the fiscal report. A couple questions from me. First off, I was wondering if you could rank your new games in terms of revenue contribution. I guess that "Jewels of Rome" is still the best performing own game, but how does the breakdown look after that? Do you have any flavor on that?
Thank you. Well, we don't break it down by game, at least not yet, but "Jewels of Rome" is number one. Actually, if you go to our website, there would be charts. Games ranked by popularity there, what they're actually showing is the ranking by revenue in the last week or so. Depending on the platform, on the second position, you will likely see either "Mahjong Journey" or "The Secret Society" or "Jewels of the Wild West" or "Homicide Squad." These games are quite big and quite close in the revenue that they generate. There's even more games that are kind of below this layer. As I said in the presentation, the revenue is much more diversified right now. Other than "Jewels of Rome," there are no clear outliers in terms of revenue generated. I cannot say if this will remain forever.
We are looking for opportunities to scale all of our games. It could be that we find an opportunity to scale one particular game more than the others. Our goal is to maximize shareholders' earnings. If we see the opportunity to create a larger stream of revenue, we would go with it, whether or not it diversifies, right? If we have one game which is growing so much that we expect it's going to become a large percentage of revenue of the company, we would still do it because it will benefit the rest of the portfolio. Now that new games are coming from internal own development, the effect of this is going to be very strong and positive. We wouldn't hesitate in that regard.
All right. Thank you. My second question is obviously, user acquisition was a lot lower than last year in Q3, and you mentioned that you have a new team in place with new and improved tools. I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on what they're doing different. Are you using different channels? Are you targeting different users than you've done historically, or what's driving the efficiency there?
No, they are actually going after the same users and pretty much using the same channels, but they're now doing it in a much smarter, much more analytical and data-driven way. It would really be a very technical discussion if I would go into details. There is this new approach which is much more disciplined, much more data-driven, quite advanced in terms of algorithms and the predictions and modeling of users' behaviors and how they will be paying back. We've been working over the year I think to catch up with companies that do it in a better way than we did a year ago. I don't think we are on the cutting edge of it, but we certainly caught up with a better standard of doing user acquisition. From here we have a very big roadmap which should take us even further.
It's a never-ending quest for perfection and for analyzing as much data as possible and making as accurate predictions as possible and as fast as possible. It can get really sophisticated, and so there's never an end to the work there. I'm pretty sure that in the next year, even if we implement everything that we want to implement at this point, there's probably going to be other approaches, other interesting things that we could do, and new information that we can process. Also the industry is changing all the time, so we have to adapt to these changes as well. There's a lot of work there, and we will continuously improve the tools going forward.
Thank you. My last question is in terms of converting players from perhaps your older or more popular games into your new ones. How is that going, and do you see conversion from perhaps "Jewels of Rome" into your newly released titles through, I don't know, the G5 Friends Networks or other efforts to convert players?
We do facilitate cross-selling between games. We try to do it in a smart way. We wouldn't distract people who are very engaged and actively playing and paying. In any game, there is 10% of people who make payments during their lifetime in the game, but then there's 90% of people who don't. There's opportunity to bring other games to the attention of these players and maybe also run third-party advertising and try to earn some money from these players. That's what we are doing with cross-selling and with third-party advertising and advertising monetization in our games. Yeah, we are doing it, but it's a process that we have put in place. It's governed by certain metrics and algorithms, and it's just working there. It is there, and it helps increase the portfolio LTV.
Once the player gets into our ecosystem of games into the portfolio, we try to expose them to as many games as possible, and we hope that they will find a game that they really like and that they will really stick to and will end up monetizing and paying in that game. The whole platform and all the cross-selling solutions that we develop, they are focusing on that goal, or on placing a player in a game that they will really like and they will monetize in.
Okay. That was all for me. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Fredrik Olsson from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Morning, Vlad and Stefan. Thank you for taking my questions. First of all, congratulations on the strong report today. I have a couple of questions on your view of the newly released games, the timing, and how to look at 2021. What we usually see is games released, they monetize over the coming year, yet now we're seeing some newly released games contribute to your numbers already. What is the main reason for this, you would say? Is it mainly COVID related, or has it got anything to do with the newly implemented marketing measures pushing the newly released games further? That's my first question.
So, the logic here is quite simple. First of all, we do see an increased interest towards mobile games, right? All things being equal, we'd rather release games sooner than later. Especially we were trying to release games in time for the fourth quarter. It's good to release games in the third quarter because it allows you some time to build up the audience for these games. Ideally, also start running seasonal events and have a Christmas event, for example, in the fourth quarter that helps take these games further in terms of revenue already this year. Also, since the high season kind of lifts all boats, it's good to place these boats on the water, so to speak, in time for the big wave, especially if we're going to see even more interest because of another wave, Sorry, from the virus.
It just makes sense that we try to do it as soon as possible, and we try to line up our games there for the fourth and the first quarter next year. We really want to make this transition that we are in right now happen as soon as possible. By transition, I mean being more reliant on games that we develop internally rather than licensed games. Licensed games are still very important for us. It's a big chunk of our revenue. We'll do everything to make sure they receive timely updates and proper marketing, and they'll keep making a ton of money for us and the developer as they do, and we will do it for many, many years as we do with our own games. Why would we release games later rather than earlier? It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
It's much better if we can release them in Q3, have a great Q4 and Q1, and then go into 2021 with more games and larger revenue from them. That's the intention.
Thank you very much. To follow up on that, what should we expect from 2021 in the sense of pipeline? Are we looking at similar size pipeline as this year, or should we expect the majority of monetization to come from the 2020 release games?
I think the games that were released in 2019 and 2020 will be probably the largest chunk of revenue. It only makes sense. Then for the next year, we do not necessarily want to release more games, maybe a little bit less games. After all, we're going to release eight this year. That's a lot of games. Maybe a few fewer games next year, we will try to aim, obviously, for the best possible bets that will continue driving the growth of revenue, and that will maximize shareholder value. We have a lot of ideas. We have more ideas to test in the market than we have development teams. We kept hiring through the third quarter.
These results that you see with the margin and earnings, they already include continuous hiring of developers and the game teams and platform teams and new people in user acquisition teams. We keep doing that, and the goal is to enter 2021 with an increased development capacity and increased user acquisition capacity compared to the beginning of 2020, so we can develop and deliver all these new games in the next year, and so that we can continue developing games that we have already released. Releasing the game is really only the beginning of the journey. It takes a couple of quarters just to get the content in the game to a certain standard. There's still quite a lot of development happening in the first few quarters after we release the game. I hope this helps. I tried to give you as much detail as possible.
It really does. Thank you very much. Just one final question, and that is regarding M&A possibilities going forward. Last quarter we discussed it and, correct me if I'm wrong, but you mentioned that you were open for it as it is a rapid way to diversify your portfolio. I just wanted to know if that view has changed from the last quarter and where we would most likely see an acquisition, within which segments? Should we see that, in that case, within Match-3, or are you considering to do further genre expansion through M&A in that sense?
Let me say this. If we look at the new generation of games, it's growing + 425% year-over-year. That's a lot, right? It sets quite a high benchmark for any M&A because if we can do this internally while actually reducing the number of shares in the market, it only makes sense to continue doing this. The question then is why would we go into M&A? There is still, I think, a potential for M&A, but it has to be a strategic M&A where we would identify a certain area where maybe we don't have that much progress and we would like to boost the progress there.
As you said, new genres or maybe genres that we have but we think we're not performing well enough there and we're missing some critical component, and if we see that there's an opportunity to acquire that component, we can act on it. I can't give you a timeline, but there are many companies out there, very many games being launched. We are putting in place certain procedures to monitor the market. We're trying to be a little bit more active in this regard. We don't set a certain timeline for us, but we do believe that we need to pay more attention to M&A and the possibilities there, because clearly it's working very well for some companies, and we need to find the right usage for this instrument.
Again, the benchmark for us will be rather high because we can produce all this growth internally. We don't want to be in a situation where we do M&A and then we regret about it, right? Some balance is to be found there.
Great answer. Thank you very much for taking the time, and congratulations again.
Thank you. Thanks for the question.
We have one more question from the line of Matthew Glinko from Sidoti. Please go ahead.
Hey. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking a couple questions from me. I realize, I'm sorry, you touched on this a little bit, but in looking out to 2021, and again, I realize it's a little bit early, but are you thinking about expanding? You mentioned hiring through Q3 on the game development front, is that going to be a process that continues into 2021? Are you looking to continue expanding that capacity? Do you think you've hit the level you want for the portfolio size you want?
Well, thank you for the question. I'll try to explain my thinking, and our thinking in that regard. We are trying to find a balance between hiring more people to invest in future games and actually letting earnings drop down to the bottom line, right? In the second and third quarter this year, we've been hiring people, and still we're growing our development teams. To be able to maintain more games actively in the market, we need to add people to the company, to the development teams. The key here is to be able to afford both things. I think we found this balance, both in the second and the third quarter.
We have found a way to expand our teams gradually, and to make sure that we can afford this expansion, and this expansion does not cause a decline in the earnings margin, for example. I'm very happy with how we did it over the last two quarters. In the third quarter, we have added, I believe, about 30 people, maybe 40 people. That's quite a lot. For the year, this would be like 120 people. I think that's a healthy growth level considering that we keep launching new games, and we are not actively phasing out games. Although this is actually kind of a reserve that helps us reduce the need, the extra development capacity.
What we can do, instead of hiring a new development team, what we can do is also phase out an older game and put it in what we call a harvest mode, where basically updates are minimal and the big team is no longer working on this game. We are basically cashing out of that game at that point, which means we've given up on attempts to bring its monthly revenue higher. We can take the team away from that game, and we can put it on another game. That is what's going to help us also going forward, find resources to develop all the new ideas that we have. To sum it up, I don't think there will be a step, once we get into 2021, then suddenly we start spending much more because we've hired all these people.
First of all, hiring takes time. It's not easy to hire 30 very good people a quarter. It will be a gradual process anyway. It naturally limits the expansion of costs in that regard. We also make sure that this expansion does not put too much pressure on the earnings. That's how we prefer it to happen.
Got it. Thank you. Just to follow up on that. You talked about getting more sophisticated and advanced in how you think about UA. Is that something that, as you really dial in your algorithms and approach and then feel for it to drive more spending towards UA to help accelerate revenue, let's say, or is that something where it's more, you're looking to be efficient and, per your comments, sort of keep the level around where it's at today?
It's basically to make sure we're not wasting money. In the grand scheme of things, to have transparency into break-even period of whatever investment we make into marketing. We do have the ability to, how do I put it? There's always a possibility that we could try and grow faster. Although, I must say, when you look at the top line of the company overall, including this large chunk of older games, it really doesn't show you the underlying growth, right? The focus of our user acquisition right now is on the new games and the new generation of games. Growth there is 72% year-over-year for all games, 425% for new generation of games. There's a lot of growth there. I think we are driving growth in that regard quite well.
What we need to continue doing is to keep that part of the business growing, and just keep collecting money that comes from the old part of the portfolio, which is basically money in the bank. We just need to collect it every month instead of it sitting in the account there. That is our view. User acquisition and smart algorithms, what they allow us to do is to put our marketing money where they are most efficient. The magnitude of the effect depends on the game, obviously, and the competitive situation in the market, and depends on how smart our user acquisition managers are. We try to work on both of these elements. It is difficult to say. We don't have full control, and I think no one in the business does have full control of all these components.
It's always your product that you have in the market creates a certain situation for you, and then you use that situation to the fullest extent, right? We try to create the tools and the teams that can take whatever product we have to its maximum potential. Obviously, the team can be the limit, and the product can be the limit. It's a never-ending competitive activity in the market in order to try and fully realize the potential of the game. I hope I answered.
Yeah. No, that was helpful. I appreciate it. Thanks for answering my questions.
Thank you.
As there are no further questions, I will hand it back to the speakers for closing remarks.
All right. Thank you for joining us today. I'm really happy with another strong quarter. Can't stress this enough, really looking forward to the fourth quarter and the first quarter, which historically work quite good for us. We'll see how it turns out, and I hope you keep following G5. Thank you. Our call is concluded.