Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the presentation of G5 Entertainment. We are a developer and publisher of free-to-play games, indeed, for tablets and smartphones and personal computers. It's a global company. We have offices in five countries, and we operate in the global market of mobile games, which is a $70 billion market. All of our offices provide a specific competitive advantage. We try to place our offices where we can get the best quality for the work done, you know, at a reasonable cost. We've been making games for a quite specific audience of female 35+. About 70% of our audience can be characterized as that, and we've been quite successful at doing it.
Some of the best games that we had are The Secret Society and Hidden City. The first one sold over $130 million to date, and Hidden City sold over $330 million to date, and they also had a lot of downloads, like, intensive audience. The company was originally founded as a mobile game development studio, one of the first in the world, in fact, and we are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm since 2014, and before that, we were listed on other exchanges in Stockholm since October 2006. As you can see, our strategy of focusing on mobile games, you know, I think works, has worked for us.
There's been quite a tremendous growth over the years. The company has developed steadily, although it underwent several important transformations. We've changed the business model a couple of times, initially focusing on premium games, then transitioning into free-to-play, and the latest wave of growth is facilitated by a focus on internal development and on the new generation of games that is developed internally within the company. If we look at the market for mobile games overall, it's the fastest growing segment of video games market, which is a huge market, and it is expected to reach even larger size in the next few years. There were several revisions of the forecast of how fast the market is going to grow into the future.
I think the latest was about 10% annual growth in the next 5 years or so. That's what consensus is. I think the forecast came down a little bit because there was so much growth during the last year. The market, there are billions of mobile gamers. That audience is also forecasted to grow, and Asia is about half of the global market. We're not very strongly present in Asia. If you look at our breakdown of revenue, which you can see in the bottom right corner, north of 60% of our revenue is derived from North America, primarily United States. Europe is the second, with 22%. Asia, about 12%, that's mostly Japan, and then rest of the world is 6%.
Again, a global market and a global company focusing on selling games in many different countries, but U.S. and Europe are two main markets. An interesting thing about our primary markets, such as North America and Europe and Japan also, is that these are the areas where you can find the best-paying players. We are, we certainly appreciate that, and we continue to focus on these markets, but also looking at other, you know, possibilities for geographical expansion as well. If we look a little bit more closely at our target audience, I think the best way to characterize our audience is to say that these are people who like non-violent, family-friendly, adventure games with puzzle elements or maybe puzzle games with adventure elements. I think these are two main elements that our players strive for.
It's an adventure, an interesting storyline, maybe a mystery, some engaging narrative, plus puzzles, something that is good to exercise your brain and that, you know, makes your brain work and also gives you pleasure when you finally accomplish the puzzle. We've been mostly active in three genres. Those are our three biggest money makers. Initially, we had big success in Hidden Object games, and the two biggest games that I've mentioned are, were in this genre and still are in this genre. The next genre we had big breakthrough in is Match-3, and this is by far the largest genre of casual games by revenue. It's enormous. We only have a small percentage of that market, but it's already providing a substantial chunk of the company's revenue.
There's a lot of expansion opportunity in that market, but it's a competitive market, but it's much larger than what we have. Naturally, there's space for expansion. Hidden Object is smaller than Match-3, but we have much stronger position there as a percentage of the market. Still there's a lot of room to grow as well. The third leg, so to speak, in terms of genres for us, is Mahjong Solitaire, or sometimes it's called Match 2. These type of games, they come from, like, nineties, when they originally were developed for PC, and they were called Shanghai Mahjong and other names.
It kind of evolved into a separate genre, which is smaller than Hidden Object or Match-3. It's also very stable, very sustainably growing every year, and usually it's a very loyal audience. They tend to be really good payers, and they tend to be really engaged with these games over long term. We call this an evergreen genre, and this can be said of all of our 3 genres, but perhaps Mahjong is the most evergreen of them all. It's an important market for us. We also happen to be number 1 or number 2, kind of changes depending on the month, provider of Mahjong Solitaire games in the world by revenue. We are venturing out into new genres every now and then.
This is how we got into Match-3 genres, by trying to get there, eventually succeeding. The latest additions to our genre lineup are word games and Blast games. Not a big success there yet, but it usually takes us a little bit of time to figure things out. Our games are connected with G5 Friends Network. It's a small social network that is built into all of our games, where you can find out about what other games people are playing, exchange gifts with your friends, invite them to other games. It's quite popular with our audience and allows you also to play on all kinds of different devices. You can start playing on another device where you left off on the previous one. You can transition between your phone and your computer, for example.
As I mentioned, we. There are 3 main genres and 2 more, so 5 genres. Naturally, we have a portfolio of games. We are a company that strives to maintain a portfolio of games, and that's how we see our business. A business of having and maintaining and evolving a portfolio of games, where sometimes some games become really big successes. A number of games is just somewhere there in the middle of making money, and maybe there are some unsuccessful games because you can only succeed, you know, all the time if you're not trying anything new. Essentially, we are trying new things, and sometimes we fail, and our success rate is high, and it balances out those unsuccessful attempts. That's the way we look at our portfolio.
If you look at our portfolio structure by revenue, you can see the biggest, the fastest-growing segment, and now the biggest segment of revenue is actually a new generation of games that were developed internally, starting with the latest transition that happened within the company around 2018. When, you know, back then, we saw that we had these big hits that were licensed from other developers. The business was growing, so we decided... We were always a developer. For all these years, we were a developer as well, but we decided to double down on internal development and produce the next hits internally. I can say we have succeeded. This is, internally produced games are now the largest chunk of our revenue.
The percentage of the share of revenue coming from own games continues to grow within the company. As of the first quarter, it was more than 63%, and that is a very dramatic change from a couple of years ago. A lot of these games that we have developed, we have released since middle of 2019, that's what we call new generation of games, are so-called Jewels family of games, and it continues doing well. We're planning on launching new games under that franchise, and we expect this revenue of that family to continue to go up. We have seen great and steady growth performance from our most recent release, called Sherlock. That has really worked out well for us so far.
We released eight games in 2020. We have five in the pipeline for 2021. The reason we can develop so many games and make a lot of these attempts at finding new niches in the market, is due to developing all of these games internally on the same technology, same engine, when it's really easy to try new things. You know, we can develop these games basically relatively quickly, in an economical way, with a lot of reuse, a lot of smart architecture decisions, and then deploy to a lot of different platforms really quickly, and then reliably deploy many updates month-over-month, across a number of platforms. A lot of benefits from developing games internally.
If you look at the typical free-to-play game, I'll try to go briefly over this. It's a life cycle of a typical game. You create a game. It takes a little bit of time, maybe half a year or a year, to put a game together and take it to the market. It starts in so-called soft launch, when you expose it to a relatively small audience, look at the KPIs, how are players playing? Is the retention good? Is the monetization good? If you hit certain KPIs, you start accelerating the growth of the game by investing in marketing. If that works out, you can get to a certain level of sales, and inevitably, somewhere you will find a ceiling.
Maybe after a few improvements, you can get to the next ceiling, but there's always some sort of ceiling, and the game peaks. It may be years after it was launched initially. This is where you really actually, you drop the amount of advertising spending, because it's no longer economical to invest for growth. Usually, revenue drops a little bit off the peak level, but in this off-peak period, you actually earn most of the profits from the game because your advertising spend is not as aggressive as in the early stages of the game. A lot of these older games that have peaked together, they create a really long and stable tail of revenue and profits, and it's just there's some compound effect there when you put more games on top of more games.
This stabilizes the business in longer term. If we look at the first quarter results this year, we've grown 54% year-over-year in earnings, and we have reached record earnings of almost SEK 60 million. This is just another one. In USD, the growth of 22% year-over-year, that relates to the top line. Sorry for formatting. If you look at the Swedish krona figures year-over-year in the first quarter, they're not as impressive as 22% because of the currency exchange rate. As I mentioned, most of our revenue comes from U.S.
I think U.S. figure is more representative of the true underlying growth of the business, so it's important to look at the USD dynamic when you're looking at the trends for the top line. EBIT margin was also record in the first quarter, 18.3%. Earnings per share, the highest we've ever had, 6.26 krons per share, and that was +69%. Again, sorry for formatting, year-over-year. That is more than the growth of earnings because we've done quite a, you know, we've done some buybacks over the last year, and this year, buying back between 2020 and 2021, about 5% of the company's shares.
The percentage of own games in our revenue exceeded 63%, and last year it was 45%. Again, portfolio of own games, and especially new generation of games, is growing dramatically. If we look at own games, year-over-year growth was 68%. New generation grew 197% year-over-year. You know, it was a quite a dramatic development. In the first quarter last year, it was only 54 million SEK from all the new generation games, and this first quarter of 2021, it's 141 million SEK. That's just in SEK, that's not in USD. The growth dynamic in USD was even stronger, and that is a purely organic performance.
These are new games developed internally within the company from the cash flow, deployed to the market and marketed, and that growth came from this organic source while we were actually buying shares back, from the market. We've launched a new game and a new genre, Empire Blast, in the Blast genre. It just happened a couple of weeks ago, not much information to share there. We have five additional games in the pipeline for 2021. Actually, we have launched one of these games in a soft launch mode. It's a hidden object game. It's a licensed hidden object game, so We still continue publishing games by other developers. It was launched just a few days ago in Russia, in soft launch. We start with Russia for some reason.
New generation of games delivered quarter-on-quarter growth, as well, as well as own games. This performance from the new generation of games continues to be due, you know, an important factor, which is our marketing. We have changed the management of the marketing about a year and a half ago. I've spoken about it a lot of times, the new team did a tremendous job in optimizing our marketing spend and investing in development of new tools, processes, and hiring really smart people and forming new user acquisition teams in Europe. Now our marketing is way more efficient, this continues to have effect both on the sales of licensed games and own games.
It continues to stimulate growth within the company, both in terms of the top-line development and in terms of EBIT margin development as well. If we look at the fundamental metrics that we track for our audience, such as monthly active users, that was up. Monthly average gross revenue per paying user, monetization metric that we track, jumped 25%. I think this is the highest we've ever had year-over-year, quite remarkable. We see that this dynamic basically is due to having more games having more users playing our Match-3 games, which tend to be more monetizing, so we earn more per user. Financial summary for the quarter, I think we pretty much went over it at this point. You know, some of the...
You know, we have strong cash flow. We don't have any debt. We generate cash flow every month. Some of the items that affected the cash flow was the capitalization and repurchases of own shares, obviously, as I mentioned. Still, the total cash flow for the quarter was 25 million SEK, and we ended the quarter with 215, almost, million SEK, which is more than last year and the highest we've ever had towards the end of the first quarter. When we look into 2021, the rest of it, there are some interesting developments ahead of us. First of all, we're gonna release the games that are still in the pipeline and will be released to the market. We will continue working on optimizing our user acquisition tools and improving our marketing.
That will continue to have an effect. We have a long roadmap of things that we still want to do and how we can improve our marketing. Recently, there was announced that Microsoft Windows Store is lowering their fees from 30% to 12%, effective August 1st this year. This will have a significant effect on G5's EBITDA margin because we derive significant revenue from the Windows Store, and we actually have 17 games in their top 90 grossing games in the Windows Store. We are probably the biggest beneficiary in the world among developers, maybe, you know, one of the top three beneficiaries, if you look at their top charts, in addition to King and Roblox, potentially. They're much bigger companies, so maybe it's not as noticeable for them.
Another interesting development we've had, we started offering our games for download directly from our website. You can go to our website, www.g5e.com, and there you can play our games in your browser, the web versions, or if you have a Windows computer, you can download a game directly from our website. We see that a lot of players actually choose to do that. What that creates is a channel for us to deliver games directly to the end user without paying store fees. Some users, turns out they prefer to do that.
We've launched this just a few months ago, but this new store, G5 Store, has been showing really interesting dynamic, and we believe that it can be responsible for much more, much higher percentage of our revenue compared to the first quarter, where together with advertising monetization, another area for business where there's no store fees whatsoever, it exceeded 1% of net revenue for the first time. It's very early, but also very interesting and very exciting development. I'm actually very optimistic about 2021. As we have said in the reports, we expect a record year, and, you know, we'll do our best to deliver that. With that, let me conclude the presentation and move on to questions and answers.
Thank you for that presentation, Vladislav. It's time for questions. Det är tid, hög tid för frågestund. Skriv in era frågor, så tar jag upp dem här direkt. Vi har fått in några frågor. Vi börjar med Christer. We'll start with a question from Christer, who says: Which companies do you see as the biggest competitors?
I think, you know, if we look at the companies that are active in similar genres to where we are active, you can probably know Playtika, or you can know a company called Plarium as well. A company called Mytona, also a company called Zynga. I think these are all companies that have some titles in their portfolio that compete directly with the games that we have, just to give you a few examples.
Lev says, any game similar to what Plarium produce, Raid like, how is the revenue looking in this category?
I'm not sure I understood the question. I know the company Plarium. I know mostly they do different type of games. I think maybe they have a couple of casual games, but mostly they address a different audience, I believe.
All right. Keep asking the questions. Fortsätt att ställa frågor till VD. Next question is: How easy for you is it to hire the best skills?
Well, it's not easy anywhere in the world, right? At least we have this amazing base of talent in Eastern Europe, and at least we have a lot of people in Eastern Europe and a lot of technical universities that produce, you know, bright students. Over the years, we've managed to build amazing teams. It helps to be a Swedish public listed company. It certainly gives us certain credibility. It really helps us to have long-term performance incentive programs for our employees as well. These are all good things that help us obtain the best people in the market. I think it will continue to be an important base for us in terms of development talent.
You know, we have more than 850 employees now. It's quite a power behind the development of new games. I think it's a very valuable asset.
Which is the most important indicator, ratio, multiple, to look at as an investor to understand your company?
Well, I think the mix between own games and licensed games in the revenue, that is important. I think understanding gross margin is important, understanding how much money goes towards store fees and what changes with the Microsoft change, and what can happen if other stores have to follow or will choose to follow. I think that is important. I think tracking our key performance indicators, such as monthly active users, monthly paying users, and average monthly monetization per user, especially over time, the better yet year-on-year, because quarterly figures can fluctuate because of seasonality. I think those are important fundamental things about the business, which will get you the big picture.
Can you just tell us a little bit more about the news from Microsoft going down from 30% revenue cut to 12%? How much would that affect your company?
Well, it will be significant. As I said, we have 17 games, and they're top 90 top grossing games. We could be one of the, you know, developers in the world that generate the more money than from Windows Store than any other developer in the world. Maybe, you know, if you look at the top 3 games, it's Roblox, it's Candy Crush, something and whatnot, and then there's Hidden City by G5. We are there right at the top, and we are one of the biggest beneficiaries of Windows Store. We derive quite a substantial revenue from the Windows Store. Some of the analysts that follow us have said that we derive from 30%-40% of our revenue from Windows Store.
When the margin, the store fees drop from 30% to 12%, that's, you know, if you take 30% of that 18 percentage points, that's quite a boost to gross margin. The question is, how much of that is going to drop down to EBIT? Obviously, we can choose to spend some of that money on investing in new games or accelerating growth of the company by investing in user acquisition. It's a large amount of additional free cash flow, which, starting August 1st, is going to be left within the company and not go to the stores. It's a very important, very positive change.
Quite an impact in financing.
Yeah
-growth, of course. We have a couple of questions coming in right now. We have Evrim, who says: What are your recruiting plans? How much do you think FTE will grow this year, and in additional FTE required to handle the current and soon-to-be-released games for further growth?
You know, our bottleneck is not the money. It's not the amount of ideas that we have. Our bottleneck is the resources that we can find to create new game development teams and to strengthen the game development teams that we have. I wouldn't even worry about the cost of that. It is a very different situation now for the company. We have a lot of money, and compared to how much we spend every month on developing all these games. We'd like to develop more games, but the bottleneck really is not the money, it's our, you know, the speed with which we can form the teams, and we can hire people, and we can train people. We can just, you know, get them working together, making sure there's the right kind of teams.
They move in the right direction. In the last couple of years, maybe 3 years, I think we've been adding about 100 people, 150 people a year. I think you can expect it to continue to be... I mean, if we were able to do that over the last couple of years, we should be able to do it from here. I hope so, because I think the more people we can hire, the more ideas we can test by creating games and putting them on the market, the better it is for the company in the long run.
All right. Time flies when you have fun, and we have a few questions left, but we don't have so much time. I will try to take those questions in a quick manner. Christopher says: The likelihood of you being bought, is there anything you can comment on?
Well, there's really nothing to say. We are very excited about the organic growth potential in the company, and we want to realize that growth as much as we can. I think we are, relatively speaking, we're just starting.
Evelyn says: Do you believe in other platforms will follow Windows stores in lowering store fees, like maybe Apple, for an example?
I do believe that over the long term, the store fees will have to come down just under market pressure, maybe regulatory pressure. I think it's just unsustainable on current levels. They just need to drop it down to reasonable levels. It's just my personal opinion that maybe not next year, you know, maybe next year, maybe earlier, but maybe in 2 years, but it's going to happen. I just don't see how that's avoidable.
The final question will come from Haley, asking: Do you play your own games? In that case, which game is your favorite game?
I do play our own games. Unfortunately, I don't play other companies' games enough. I've been working on that recently. Most of the time, I play Jewels of Rome. I've started playing Sherlock as well, but I think Jewels of Rome is the farthest that I got into. I'm on level 47, I think.
Vladislav, thank you very much for this interesting presentation.
Thank you so much for having me.