Q4 20/21

Oct 20, 2021

Quarterly report

Hello and welcome to our Q4 report presentation. Here today to present is me, Daniel Hasselberg, CEO of Mag. And And me, Magnus Zucklander, CFO of Mag. And we're going to talk you through some of the highlights from the quarter And of course, just mention a couple of words about what we're doing here in general. So here at MAG, we make mobile games. We're both developer and publisher of the games. The target audience are casual gamers, mainly in North America and Western Europe, and they're all free to play. And our games have been downloaded more than 350,000,000 times over the last 10, 11 years. Of course, it's a free to play company. We're both involved in creating really fun games, but also work with optimization on the data side in terms of improving the products and of course working with performance marketing. We are about 100 people at MAGG right now, studios here in Stockholm and in Brighton in the UK. And to some of the highlights, so we will walk you through this over the next 10 minutes or so. So first of all, just want to summarize, since it's Q4, we have a full financial year. And it's the best year in the company history. So something we're very, very proud of and happy about. So thanks to everyone at MAG for helping to contribute to this. So we ended the year at SEK287,000,000 in revenues, which is 32% up versus last year. Yes, and we also ended up in a profitable year. So that's something we're super happy with as well. Exactly. And we will look at our continued growth and our improved margins as well as our ArpDAU journey, which concludes with another strong quarter. Yeah, today. And we'll also talk a little bit about our live operations, which are growing in importance for the company and some talk about new games as well. So let's dive into it. So here we can see a picture of our revenues in Arpdal for the last 9 quarters. So I think What this picture tells us, of course, 59% growth year over year, which is fantastic, but also course, a long term trend here. We see revenues going up and ARPDAU for a very long period of time. And this is A very orchestrated effort across all the teams to try continuously improve our games. What we see here as well is a very clear seasonal patterns. We always have this kind of Q3 to Q4 dip in terms of usage. So our Q4 are June, July, August, which are the summer months. So Revenue get from the impressions go down a bit during Q4. So that combined usually puts a press on our revenues and ARPTA. We can see this in this picture. Q3 a year ago is a bit different. As you all know, it was kind of when the pandemic hit and we had a lot of Unexpected downloads coming in. So higher revenues in DU's and also slightly pushed down on ArpDA. So that's kind of I think puts this picture into context. Yes. And more of that, we're looking at our KPIs. And first our audience KPIs MAU and DAU will see a decline year over year. We can I see that behind that we have lower marketing activity, we use acquisition this year? And we also have an effect from COVID where Q4 last year was affected by the influx of users in the Q3. So with both of those to contribute to the decline. And of course, as mentioned, we have the OpDA improvement of 59%, which we see comes from the switch from Twist Dual to new Twist Dual, which pretty much happened during this year. As well as growing Boardsea, adding to increase of ARPDAU. We also had acquisition activity, adding above average games to the portfolio and also broadly every game actually improved Dow individually in the portfolio. So that's behind the growth in Arctaw since last year. And our financial KPIs, 7th consecutive quarter with a plus 20% growth with a 26% growth to SEK 70,000,000 This quarter, user acquisition is lower as we mentioned, we are working actively to get that back to levels where we want to be. And all of this leaves us with a strong SEK 48,000,000 contribution, giving us a positive EBIT and positive cash flow for the quarter. Yes, fantastic to see. And if we look a bit longer term here, how our Revenues and EBITDA margins have developed. So this is something that you and I have talked about for several years now that we want to grow the company into higher stability and I think that's what we're looking at here. So a longer trend line, we're increasing revenues and also the strong underlying margins that we see in the business become more and more visible as we grow the overall revenues. So there are always fluctuations in EBITDA margins, especially when you have kind of this UA Volumes that go up and down affect the margins, but I think the long term trend here is interesting and that's our continued plan for the future as well to continue to grow the company's revenues and get the margins continue to go up. And as we talked about last quarter, we also stated kind of a long term EBIT goal of at least 20%. That's where we are heading. And during quarter, we also had some changes in how we kind of classify our products. So if you talk about the product mix for a bit here? Yes. We had Board of Nation during the Q4 moved into the Evergreen segment. That's a segment where we focus on sustained and high revenues and Sales over time and with high margins. So we don't have any or at least low UA support for these games. We expect them to be there for a long time delivering profits to the company for years to come. And I at the same time as we kind of started thinking about World Domination more as an evergreen title than a growth game. We also transitioned the game to our live operations team. So That's one single team that manages a number of our products. So already since a couple of years, they've been running WordBrain and WordBrain 2 and Word a lot. But This year, they also have the responsibility for Russell and now also word domination. And There's been some great developments in the live operations side of things. So in Q4, we released a new event Engine from our backend and core team into Wordbrain. And through using that they've been able to push up They both ARPDA on revenues quite significantly versus previous years. So it's actually the best Q4 for Wordbrain in more than 3 years. So it's going to be really exciting to see now what we can do with the Barcelona World domination also being run-in the same way and of course across learnings when you have one team and multiple games. And another effect when we transition a game to LiveOps is that we have fewer people actively involved in that particular product. So we free up resources to go and work on other projects. So right now we have a lot of focus as a company on developing new games and kind of finding the next hit game for the company. So in Q4 we had 4 different games out in market tests, some with thousands of players in like on the Google Play Store and Sam in more closed environment testing. But really important for us now is like have a high speed in validating ideas and getting the next game out to market. So we know already in Q1 we're going to have additional tests of new products as well. So it's a very exciting point in time for MAG. And what we search for and try to find is these games that can take the same journey as World Domination has done from launching as a new game and then becoming a growth product for the company for multiple years. So Word Omenation launched slightly more than 3 years ago globally. And now it's kind of time to move from growth to the evergreen state. So and then of course, we have always focused on supporting the growth game. So User acquisition behind WordC and growing the other growth games as well is very important for us going forward. And New Quiz duel, we talk about that game a lot because it's our biggest game in terms of DAUs and Want to share some stuff with you regarding what's happened recently and some stuff that's about to happen in the game. Exactly. And first of all, we have the Arena mode, which has been around for a while in the game, but there was work done in Q4, actually launched after Q4. That significantly changed the in app conversion in the game by tuning the economy basically in that mode. That's exciting. And we also during Q4, we did tests In Germany, we launched something called Solo Mode. So it means that you have a single player challenge in the game. You see a picture here in the middle of what Solo Mode looks like. And here we have the full free to play toolbox to work with in terms of energy mechanics or using in game currency To skip ahead the reruled categories and so on. So there's a lot of potential here to kind of build a stronger in app economy. So version 2 of Solo mode based on the learnings from this summer are rolling out in Germany this week and then the plan is to continue to extend that later in the year to more markets as well. And also Crystio Live, which is his game mode we build in collaboration with Primetime, a company we acquired last year that we had launched before summer but without cash prices and now we relaunched it in mid August with cash prices. And What we wanted to see here was kind of increased engagement from the players. So is it exciting to win real money? And I think the answer is yes. We can see The ARPDAU is up quite significantly, thanks to having the cash prices and we also see kind of a sticker audience. It's a pretty stable Level now slightly north of 10,000 daily players. And that's of course a number we want to grow. And I think the most obvious way to grow that is to make sure more people have actually I tried the game mode to see how fun it is. And one test we did to expose it to more players was About a week ago, we ran a live marathon in the game. So we had 6 shows running the same day. And then we had more than 50,000 show entries during that day. So Some were repeating players playing multiple times during the day, but we also reached a bigger audience. So it's exciting to see this kind of interest in the game mode and we continue to work on increasing the number of involved players. So summing up, the focus for us as a company now going forward It's to leverage this big potential we see from new Quiz duel, a massive audience and a great team that's really kind of shipping new stuff frequently now out to the players. So it's a lot of A lot of great stuff going on in the game. And then of course, the growth games, we have really strong growth products we want to support with more user acquisition and just continue to grow those games. And as we mentioned, live operations is becoming more and more important for us now. We have both Russell and War domination in that category and new games. So if you follow us closely, of course, you're going to see more market tests and our ambition for this year is to get new games out globally. So hopefully at least one more game launch and maybe more during the year. That's what we aim for. So with that, I think we're ready to go in to see if we have Some questions and also reminding that we always have throughout the day, we will answer any questions you have on Twitter. So You'll find that in the invite to the meeting, actually we show that on the screen as well, how you find us. And we're super happy to take any questions for me or Magnus or anyone else throughout the day. So we'll take a look at some questions here in the Twitch stream. So One is it's great to see the ARPDAU improvement. Can we expect this to continue? So that is our own Expectations that we will be able to continue to improve the ARPDAU. And I think both, I mean, all the stuff that's happening in your Crystal, but also the fact that all new games we do and the newer games in the portfolio in general is above average. So when the mix changes to more new game players, Arcta should continue to go up. So we definitely are not happy or content with where we are right now. Happy with the progress, but we have more to do. No new game for MAG in 2 years since you released World Seachem. We hope that they can come some new games next year. Are your demands too great or why are you slow on launching new games? So I think We did launch Newquiz Johan as well. That was in May last year, but it's still more than a year ago. And it is really important for us, this kind of Disciplined to make sure when we launch a game, it can be a game that provides value for MAG for many, many years. So I mean, we Russell is still an important game for us. It's 9 years since launch. So when we do get these games out with high quality, it's a huge value for us and we can continue to operate it for many years. So the bar is high. So you're correct in that sense that we have very high demands for a game to be launched. But I think that's the right way for us to go. And That's also because every new game that's actually out live will take some focus from our teams. So we need to make sure they are Great and we can operate them for many years. So rather have longer time between game launches, but make them really, really great. But a strong focus for us is, as I mentioned, to get new games out. We really want to release games every year. That's our ambition. Okay. Personnel cost in Q4 were down SEK7 1,000,000 from Q3. What's the explanation? So you want to take that, Magnus? Exactly. I think there's probably good reason for commenting on that. So between quarter to quarter, I think there is going to be several things here to comment on personnel costs. But quarter over quarter, it's Mostly seasonal effects with Q4 generally being lower. And in this particular quarter, we also have a revaluation of The social fees on our option programs that kicks in, that has some effect on this quarter in particular. Otherwise, this is normal seasonal effects in Q4. And then year over year, we also had a change that is worth commenting, where In the Q4 last year, we had the research and development tax relief coming into the Q4 and we have commented on that in the report how that affects the comparison numbers. So it could be good to know as well. Good. Can you tell us more about market tests on new games? So yes, so what we do here is basically when we have new game concepts, we test them in kind of One is of course all the internal game testing that's going on, but we also use services where we can reach a limited set of players We know our fans of particular types of games, so we can get relevant feedback and see how they interact with the games. So we try to do that multiple times during development to get it be as close to the players as possible. But sometimes you also need to do a slightly larger scale. What we usually do is to take the game out on the Google Play Store and acquire 100 or sometimes a 1000 players for a new update. And then we can start measuring Data. So that's where it's good to have been around for 10 years. We have a lot of benchmark data to look at to see what should a game look like at this particular point in its development cycle. So we go back and forth with that. And I think on an accounting side of things, We don't treat this as kind of investments until we decided we're going to go for a soft launch. And that's when we kind of make it public to anyone outside of the company that this is a game We aim to actually get to market and then we treat it as an investment. So there are no kind of bad surprises That all of a sudden there is a Games as Council that will hit the P and L because we test this kind of in another way. And When we do go to soft launch, we also send out a press release and tell everyone about it. Okay. I have a question on which games have lost the most DAU during the quarter. So I think in general, it's Depending on the total DU, so usually it's a very similar pattern in terms of percentages. So if all games lose, I think we're down 15% if you compare Q3 to Q4 and that's probably relatively across the board. So biggest games lose the most absolute number of players, but it's a similar pattern in terms of fewer installs and also slightly fewer play days per player during the summer months. Talk about the ability to invest in U. A. Did you plan to reduce Q4 'twenty one? Or was it due to market conditions and provide an update on Facebook and other algos since the Apple change. So this is, are you seeing the same ROI? So this is of course, it's a great question and a very relevant one. So What we do is we always aim to maximize our investments in user acquisition. We work with payback windows. We want to see money back in X number of months And that's kind of based on the lifetime value development of that particular product. So we don't plan ahead and say, let's invest SEK 10,000,000 or SEK 30,000,000 next quarter. It's always how can we maximize the amount of money we invest tomorrow and the day after that based on We see in our prediction models. And on the IDFA side, so Apple's changes to iOS 14. I think we've seen different impact on different networks. So some ad networks seem to handle this effect better or worse. And as I pointed out in the report as well, we've seen Facebook being impacted the most. And I think you If you follow Facebook in the public market, you see they also publicly talked about that this is having a lot of impact on us. So of course, they have an enormous and fantastic development team. So we expect them to improve and adapt to this new situation and start working better in the future as well. That's the network we've seen the biggest effect on both sides, both user acquisition not working great and ad monetization not working great either. But it's overall, I think especially on the ad monetization side, it's been much smaller effect than we might have expected. But the same return on investments, this is we work the other way around. So we have our target and then we try to invest as long as we can meet the target rather than seeing what it ended up being. How aggressive would you consider monetization in Quiztual currently? So it's not very aggressive. I mean, the monetization is still mainly from advertising. So that means that you as a player actually don't have to pay anything to play the game. They are always Free to play, but I think in Crystal is actually less things that people spend money on than in other games, but that's something we want to change as well to Add more fun things that you as a player think is rewarding to spend money on. So hence kind of solo mode for example where it's really fun new way of playing a quiz game, where you also have some free to play mechanics. How would you handle backlash from members to use the previous payment solutions? So this is another good question. So of course, When you introduce new things to a game, you need to do it with care. So for example, one reason for Looking more to, for example, arena mode and solo mode for free to play mechanics and improved in game economies that That's new things that players have not been playing before versus going into the classic player versus player mode in new Crystal, which is much more sensitive to change and we would have to thoroughly AB test and verify that it's a good idea before you do it. But it's, I think, less controversial to add new fun stuff where you have a different way of progressing, for example. So we are very careful with the audience for sure. I think that's it in terms of questions here. But as a reminder, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or through email and just ask any questions you might have on the report. So thank you so much for watching.