I just remind everyone that you will be in listen and view-only mode during the presentation. After the presentation, you can ask questions by raising your hand, and we can allow you to speak and ask your questions verbally. You can also, during the presentation, post questions in the Q&A box, and we will answer those in the Q&A section in the end as well. Yeah. With that said, I will hand over to Vlad Suglobov, our CEO.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our quarterly call. Let's start with addressing the change that you have seen in the report and that we informed you about in the previous quarterly report. We have, from the Q1 , started to report in USD currency. Previously, we reported in Swedish krona, obviously. As you know, we are primarily a USD operation, with more than 60% of our revenue coming from the U.S., and the majority of the costs are being nominated in the U.S. as well. We believe that this change will provide a better understanding of our performance over time and will allow us to comment on the underlying performance of the business without using a large number of comparison numbers in different currencies.
We understand that this might take some effort to get used to for some investors, but on the other hand, this better represents the business and arguably also makes it easier to understand for a wider audience of investors worldwide. The second thing that I'd like to address before we dive into the numbers is the press release that we issued this morning. As outlined in that press release, we have stated that what we call a right sizing is going to happen, a program to reduce the staff to approximately 635 employees, more in line with the current size of the operations. It was a difficult but necessary decision for the long-term financial health and focus of the company.
We expect that the program will create savings of about $6.2 million over the following 12 months when it is finalized. It is important to keep in mind that such savings will primarily offset the revenue decline, as well as an increase in UA investments that we want to have. Let's review the performance in the quarter. Revenue was $21.7 million, a decrease of 11% year-over-year and 8% sequentially, or minus 5.5% sequentially adjusted for the number of days in the quarter. We saw a sequential decline across all three main pillars of revenue, Sherlock, Hidden City, and the Jewels family of games.
This was largely driven by being partly priced out of the highly competitive UA market during the high season from around mid-October to mid-January, when costs per install, also known as CPI, spiked. At the same time, we continued to see promising signs in the third-party publishing that started to gain momentum in the quarter, both in terms of revenue, the number of games published, and also the number of new games being signed. On the topic of the G5 Store, we have reached a new all-time high gross margin of 72.7%, up from 69.7% last year, thanks to the positive development of our direct-to-consumer channel, as well as our web shop for the players on mobile devices.
Monthly average gross revenue per paying user hit a new record of $76, a 16% year-over-year increase, reflecting the high quality of our loyal audience. UA was 19% of gross revenue, up from 15% a year ago. We have an ambition to increase UA spend to support our games, specifically outside of the high season in October, January. At the end of the quarter, our cash position stood at a strong $26.6 million, up from the Q4 , thanks to positive working capital fluctuations. We remain debt-free and continue to have a strong balance sheet, which gives us strategic flexibility. Now let's move on to the next slide, please. Let's talk a bit more about the G5 Store and our D2C strategy. The G5 Store remains our standout success story and the primary engine of our margin expansion.
The G5 Store is now our largest source of net revenue if broken down by distribution channel, surpassing both iOS and Google Play. The low single-digit processing fees continue to be a key driver for our margin performance, given that third-party app stores typically charge between 12% and 30%. This cost efficiency directly contributes to our improved profitability and the expansion of our gross margin. While third-party mobile store sales declined for G5 Store grew 1.3% sequentially in the quarter and 19% year-over-year. It now accounts for 22.6% of total group revenue. If we look at net revenue, it's over 25% of that, which is net revenues after the commissions. We have also doubled the share of payments processed from the players on mobile devices directly compared to previous quarter.
Such revenue percentage reaching 11% in the Q1 , up from 5.4% in Q4. This further reduces our platform fee dependency. We are expanding G5 Store as a distribution platform for third-party games. During and after the quarter, we have launched five more games and have signed at least four more games during the quarter. More games are in the negotiation. We have really, at this point, a pipeline of games already being released, third-party games already being released in G5 Store and a pipeline of games being signed up and in preparations for new game releases on G5 Store. Revenue from third-party games is already growing steadily, and we are on track to make this a significant fourth revenue pillar of revenue if the current trends continue. Let's move on to the next slide.
Now, let's look a bit more in detail on the development during the quarter. While Hidden City remained resilient, down only 5% year-over-year and 5% sequentially, Sherlock unfortunately saw a 7% decline year-over-year and a 9% sequential decline. The performance of Jewels games remains a challenge with a 23% decline year-over-year, and we are implementing changes to address historical game design debt, as we said before, and we expect to make a definitive decision on the future of the Jewels games in the Q2 . As mentioned, our gross margin reached a record high of 72.67%, primarily due to the continued growth of the G5 Store and direct-to-consumer payment processing channels. Monthly average gross revenue per paying user reached a new all-time high of $76, 16% year-over-year growth.
This reflects the continued trend for the improvement of the underlying quality of the audience. G5 Store is a key factor with its generally higher-paying players. Let's move on to the next slide, please. Let's now look at our operating profit for the quarter. Operating profit for the period came in at $0.9 million compared to exactly $1 million last year. This resulted in an EBIT margin of 4% compared to 4.1% last year. The lower EBIT was positively impacted by foreign exchange revaluations. Adjusting for the revaluations, the EBIT margin would be -1.2% compared to 9.7% last year. UA increased from 15% in the previous year to 19% in this quarter.
The increased UA budget has a significant negative impact on the EBIT margin, the resulting EBIT margin, and is an important factor to stabilize the performance of our active games in the portfolio. During the quarter, the net capitalization impact on earnings was $0.3, $0.3 million, sorry, compared to -$0.3 million last year. Now, let's talk about our cash position. We remain debt-free with a strong cash position of $26.6 million, providing flexibility to fund new game development and marketing from our operations and from this cash position that we have. Cash flow was positively impacted by movements in working capital amounting to $3.4 million compared to $1.4 million a year ago.
Capitalization impact on cash flow was -$2.7 million compared to -$2.2 million last year. Total cash flow during the Q1 was $3.8 million compared to $3.1 million last year. That's it with the numbers, and let's talk about the thoughts for the rest of the year. As we move through the year, our focus is rather clear. First, it's completing the organizational changes to save around $6.2 million annually while maintaining product momentum. Continuing to sign and launch high-quality third-party titles on G5 Store to solidify the store as our fourth revenue pillar. Increasing UA investments throughout the year to turn around the top-line trend for our main revenue pillars.
Moving forward with our two new games in the pipeline towards potential global launch, hopefully before the end of the year or cancellation, depending on the results of the soft launch as it happens. Utilizing agile teams for continuous innovation. That's our new approach with creating smaller teams that come up with new innovative game ideas and test them much faster in the market. We remain committed to financial discipline and generating long-term shareholder returns through dividends and buybacks. I'd like to thank the whole G5 team for their resilience in these circumstances and our shareholders for their trust. This concludes our presentation, I'd like to open the call for questions.
As I said, you can ask questions in the Q&A box, or you can raise your hand. We have two here, so we'll start with Simon Jönsson from ABG. If you unmute yourself, I think you're good to go.
All right. I hope that works. Thank you, and good morning, guys. Hope you can hear me. First of all, could you maybe expand a bit on how much of the savings that you expect to reinvest in higher UA spending? Basically, what do you expect the sort of net effect to be on an annualized basis?
I can give you a general framework. We are trying to spend outside of October to January time the money that we should have spent during that period of time. We're going to take the revenue, sorry, the UA levels that we had in the Q1 , and we'll try to do more to compensate for underfunding our titles during the high season. It's going to go up from there. To give you more specifics, I would say the higher bracket of the previously indicated range between 17% and 22%, so the higher bracket of 22% would not be unreasonable. I mean, it depends on whether we're going to be able to deploy these amounts.
Ideally, we would go to the high bracket of that range. In reality, we will see where it lands, but we will be trying to deploy more outside of the high season. That's the idea.
All right.
And-
Yeah.
Yeah. Basically, we are taking these cost-cutting measures in a situation where we've already lost a little bit more revenue compared to Q4. What we're trying to say is that we are doing this obviously to save money, but already on a lower revenue with the necessity to spend more in user acquisition that basically we're saying it's probably not going to be all profits. This, this amount might not be essentially an additional profit margin.
Yeah. I understand. Should we think that, when you say that you hope to be at the high end, that depends on the UA range, it depends on new games coming out, or can you also be at the high end just with existing portfolio?
Well, I'm talking only about the existing games. We would have to go higher from where we are. In case we actually start globally launching new games, obviously it's going to be a change, a fundamental change. We'll probably say something about it, like send out a press release and say, "Hey, there's this new game we just launched that's really growing, so we're going to spend even more money on user acquisition." I'm saying we're going to have to go to the higher end of that bracket, just to try and stabilize the existing portfolio.
All right. It also sounded like in the, in the press release this morning that you were open to potentially more right-sizing in the future, depending on outcomes of certain things. If that's a correct understanding, how and when could that be determined by you think?
Yeah. I tried to say it in Q2, we aim to make a decision on Jewels of Rome and other Jewels games in terms of whether we want to continue to have a large team, try to get the game back to the ability to grow or we want to do what we call harvesting the game, where the team on the game would be minimized to do the basic updates and content updates. We will give up the plans to kind of revamp the game, renew it and try to rebuild it in order to get it back to growth. Right now, the team on these games is rather large.
In Q2, we aim to decide whether which way we're going to go with this game. Same applies to Sherlock. While the game is much more stable, even despite this little hiccup, I think fundamentally, Sherlock is in a much stronger position. I really hope that the decline that we've seen in Q1 is temporary, and we're going to get back to higher levels through the end of the year. Also if that doesn't happen, then we will start questioning whether we have such a large team on Sherlock. When it comes to two new games that we have, the same thing.
It's, as we go forward through the stages of the soft launch, we will make the decision to either release the game or if we make a decision to cancel it, then maybe we don't need this many people to work on this particular game. The question is, how many new games do we want to work on, at the same time? All these decisions are in front of us, and they are an opportunity to further optimize the team for the size of the operations, is what I'm saying. We will still want to continue making new games, obviously.
We'll just need to find a way to do it, you know, in a smarter way with more compact teams, maybe fewer attempts at a time or maybe like in our in the other teams that we're building, whether it's those micro teams that are pursuing certain opportunity for a limited amount of time and then switching out to another idea. We'll have to reimagine potentially how we think about developing new games, and that all creates opportunities to further optimize the staff. I mean, we still have quite a lot of people. Not to mention the ongoing automation with AI. That's what I was trying to say.
Yeah. All right. You mentioned AI there as well. Is there a case of efficiency gains you have made also before here that you think you have better resources to produce? Or is this mainly, you know, taking away teams from games that aren't performing?
It's both. Like for example, we wouldn't be able to write the ESG report without the AI this year. Jokes aside, it's both. It's both not having to have as many people to produce the same amount of content, but it's also an ability to iterate faster and in the end have a higher quality of work. I mean, examples would be numerous, but especially with the advancements this year, I think it is a real opportunity for us to continue rethinking how we approach developing new games and integrating more of these tools.
All right. A final one from me on G5 Store and the third-party releases. Can you maybe share a bit more on how the economics of that works? You know, it sounds like you are putting some marketing efforts in there as well. Like if there's any kind of positive net contribution from that yet, or if you have some revenue, but also some cost associated to it.
We have, I would say limited costs associated with it. We do invest in marketing. We invest to a certain point. From the very beginning, it's already profitable essentially. The dynamic is good. It's all incremental value. We analyze how the audience behaves. We like what we see. The audience appreciates new games, the ability to play these new games. The developers see that our audience is really high-quality audience. We're also able to acquire users from outside into these games. This has all the signs of a very healthy ecosystem that we can build out here with more game releases. We are rather satisfied with how it began.
We're not talking about growth rates because they're kind of meaningless at this point because we just launched the first couple of games late in the Q4. Maybe quarter 2 from now when we understand where this dynamic sort of lands, we're going to start communicating exactly how the growth looks like, quarter-to-quarter. With new games being released and more games being marketed, we expect that this will be a quite a nice dynamic based on what we see right now.
All right. Thank you for that. That's all for me.
Thank you, Simon.
Thank you, Simon. We have Hjalmar Ahlberg from Redeye. You can go ahead.
Thank you. Just a question on, you comment a bit here on the key franchises. Hidden City sounds like it's a soft, but it seems like it's doing okay. Sherlock, you still have some hope to turn that around again. Can you give some update on Jewels, which I think you said you're trying to do some changes in these games in Q4. Any signs that that is working or is it more likely that these games will be more like harvest games in the future?
Yes. You are right. Hidden City has actually been growing through the H2 of last year as we were increasing marketing again and the game responded. Sherlock, we had these improvements that we did last year, and that sort of fueled the increase in revenue through the end of the year. Unfortunately, we have this decline, which I think and I hope is temporary. Jewels of Rome has been on decline for a while, and at this point, we're not acquiring users in the game anymore.
Like, we use this formula like a game design that basically, match-three games in the market, the ones that make a lot of money, they moved in a certain direction, we have to decide whether or not we are going to try and chase them. That would be quite a few changes to Jewels of Rome to sort of catch up with the trend in the market. Right now, we are working on a number of things that are designed to move Jewels of Rome towards that new game design. This is a lengthy process, but it's split in stages. We are getting close to completing stage one and seeing the results of that.
The preliminary results, whether the players are responding in the right way, whether the new players responding in the right way. Based on that information, we'll be making the decision, we haven't gotten to that point yet, but, you know, sometime during Q2 we'll have that information and we'll make a decision. It's hard to say. I, you know, I really want the team to do their best, to try their best. They know it's a difficult task, but I want them to stay motivated and try to do that because I know they love the game. But Sherlock is the most difficult case of these three. Oh, I'm sorry, not Sherlock, but Jewels family of games is the most difficult case of all three.
That's the situation. We will find out soon enough what we decide.
All right. Regarding the cost savings there, I think you mentioned that, I mean, it doesn't impact the pipeline in the near term, but with the cost savings you're doing here, do you think it will be, I mean, longer term you've talked about the one to two new games globally per year, will it be a lower level after this cost savings?
I hope not. I think of it as, you know, I think that we will find a way to continue trying to achieve the same thing. We would still want to try one or two new games a year. Maybe we will be even more selective, maybe we will prioritize even more. If we are, for a few years, trying to have several teams making new games all at once, and we keep receiving games that are not really scalable in the present market environment, I think the decision is to sort of slim down, slow down, and really think harder about what do we need to do in order to achieve that scalability. I would say it will be probably like a narrower funnel of games but aiming to have the same result out of this funnel.
I hope it makes sense.
Yeah. Understood. I mean, if you want to look, we're able to turn around growth from here, I mean, you now have a pretty good pipeline of third-party games. Do you think that, I mean, what will be most important would you say to see this turnaround? Will it be the new third-party games or in-house games or a turnaround of existing games?
Yeah. Well, I think it's all of that, right?
Yeah.
We have still quite substantial revenue from existing games. I think it's really important that we continue to work with Hidden City, and hopefully, continue finding ways to grow revenue there. It's important that we continue to work with Sherlock, figure out what happened, and go back to the levels which we were able to have just a few months ago. It's a very solid game with evergreen IP in it. Jewels, a bit more difficult case, like worst case here is that we will decide to harvest the game and it will be gradually declining from here on. It will be doing it profitably.
We will be essentially cashing out of the game, but we will sort of admit to ourselves that this is a declining revenue stream that will be gradually losing for many years, but it will be a declining one, because it's still rather large revenue stream month to month. Replacing that revenue that we in the worst case will be losing, and if it stabilizes, then it's not a big problem then. To replace that, we would need success with the G5 Store third-party distribution, and I think we will have the success. We are having the success as we speak.
The dynamic of the growth of third-party distribution, you know, we have some optimistic expectations based on the beginning that we've had, but we have to observe it for a couple more quarters to be more certain in what kind of dynamic we're going to have there, and is it going to be enough to turn around the top line? We, as I said, we have two new games. One is actually going into scalability testing, relatively soon. We are cautiously optimistic, cautiously because we've shut down many a game in recent years. This one is really showing, good promise in terms of the metrics, in terms of early metrics at least. And it's very different from the games that we were making before. We'll see soon enough.
In a couple of months we'll have much better understanding of the potential of that game. Obviously a new game is always, a potential, always has a potential to change the situation.
The other game that we have, the other new game that we have, which also looks pretty good, that's probably going to happen more in Q3 when we will come to understanding whether it's good enough or not to be globally launched. We have a couple more strategic initiatives that we will be testing in around Q2, Q3. It's a little bit too early to talk about that. We have a couple of more ideas on how what other things we can do to sort of revive growth in the company. It's a combination of all these things, not to mention the continued work on direct to consumer channels which saves us a ton of money.
The combination of all these things, hopefully produces the turnaround in the top line except it's hard to say when exactly. When we have an idea of when this can happen, we'll probably share it.
Right. Yeah. Interesting. And also, I think you mentioned that you saw some indication that G5 Store can result in roughly 50% of the revenue that the mobile game has in other stores. Does that mean that if you find a game that has $10 million of revenue per year in App Store, you see that it could do $1.5 million in G5 Store? Is that the way to understand that metric?
Yeah. Yes, that's exactly the way to understand it. We've started with games that are smaller.
Yeah.
We, we are seeing that 15% is very realistic to generate on G5 Store from their mobile sales, and we can certainly deliver that to the developers, and that's why we see that developers are interested in trying putting their games on G5 Store. The only limitation to that would be that if, as you say, the game is making $10 million, then it will probably take us a few months to get to 15%.
It is kind of in relation to the size of G5 Store, right? We're currently not trying Essentially, we're not even trying to get $10 million games into G5 Store. We're thinking of kind of smaller games because it makes more sense. I hope that as we show positive results with the current caliber of games, we will switch to larger ones. It's already happening. We are signing up games that are much larger than the ones we have started with. We will continue these experiments with how much incremental revenue we can generate for these games. For the caliber of games that we are signing up now, we are quite sure that we can deliver 15%, but we'll be testing it from game to game.
Okay. Understood. Then just a final one. I mean, you commented that, of course, that, I mean, you have a decline in revenue. You do some cost savings, but you want to add UA spend as well, and you said that profit margin will be challenging. I mean, can you add some color on that? Do you still think you'll be able to have a positive EBIT and a positive cash flow? If you could add some color on that would be helpful.
Yeah. Well, we certainly don't want to be cash flow negative or unprofitable unless we are in a situation where we have a new game that performs so well that we just decide to go all in on it for a couple of quarters. You can certainly believe that we will do everything necessary to continue to be not unprofitable month to month on average. We feel that, I mean, our models are telling us that we have to spend more on user acquisition if we want to stabilize the games.
The other challenge is that, you know, while we see that, for example, investing in more user acquisition on G5 Store makes a lot of sense, on mobile platforms, for example, on iOS, sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense. Under the hood for one particular game, there's also a continued sort of transfer of revenue, so to speak, happening or rather the change of the mix of revenue happening, where mobile platforms continue to shrink and personal computers continue to go up because fundamentally it's more profitable to acquire on personal computer platforms. This situation is very specific to our specific games because these are games of specific genre, and they're quite old games as well.
Overall, if you look at the overall models that we're looking at, we have to be spending more. If you compare even ours to some peers of ours, you can see that companies that are able to maintain their revenue tend to spend more in user acquisition than we do, and it's another confirmation that we have to be spending more. That's our logic. We think we can still be profitable at these levels of spending. We have to, as we said, we're going to be taking these decisions to further optimizing, about further optimizing the company through the rest of the year, depending on the outcome of our current efforts with the new games, with Jewels of Rome, and even with Sherlock.
Okay. I got it. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Hjalmar Ahlberg.
Thank you. Then we have Erik Larsson from SEB. You're good to go.
There we go. Maybe you can hear me now.
We can.
Okay. Sorry about that. Morning. I just have one follow-up question here on the most recent one with, I mean, the current backdrop a bit, you know, call it the turnaround scenario. How do you think about capital allocation? You have a very strong balance sheet. Are you more inclined to preserve cash, or do you still see, you know, deploying cash? Would it be buybacks, et cetera? You know, some reasoning there would be interesting to hear.
Yeah. Well, I mean, we do intend to continue buybacks. Otherwise, I view our current reserve as an important reserve in the face of a little bit of uncertainty. On one hand, we have all these interesting things happening with the third-party distribution in G5 Store. On the other hand, we have these issues with the declining revenue on older games, and we also have to fund new games that seem to be showing great signs of potential success. Obviously, our track record in the last few years makes us only cautiously optimistic about that.
The most important thing for which I think it is very important to have a reserve is that, if you look at what's happening with new companies when they stumble upon a successful game that they need to scale, well, they really need money to do it. That's the reality of today's market. I think our reserve is our chance that if we have a really successful and scalable game, and really it doesn't even matter if it's in third-party distribution in G5 Store or it's an original game coming out of G5 and we have to scale it in the market, we have to have that dry powder in order to be able to fund that success to where it can be. That is very, very important in my view.
We'll keep this dry powder and a large part of it we're going to just keep, and we'll make sure we add to it a little bit every now and then. We will also think about buybacks because that's what we do, and we will obviously continue paying the dividend. That's the plan, basically.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Erik.
Thank you, Erik. We have no questions in the Q&A box, and I can't see that anyone has raised their hand either. All right. Nothing seemed to happen there. Well, Vlad, final remarks.
Well, thank you for your attention to our quarterly results. I hope you have a good day. Yeah, this concludes our call.
Thank you, everyone.