Welcome to Truecaller Q4 presentation for 2024. During the Q&A session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, and CFO, Odd Bolin. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hello everyone, and welcome to our year-end webcast. I'm Rishit Jhunjhunwala, CEO of Truecaller since January this year, and I look forward to presenting our report along with Odd, our CFO. We'll start with the overall highlights from the quarter and then walk you through the financial performance. We will then cover product highlights, and then we'll open up for questions as well. So let's get started with the highlights of the quarter. We closed Q4 with an average of 429 million monthly active users, which is an increase of 15%. Our average daily active users grew 16% to 354 million. This therefore takes us to a record high DAU to MAU ratio of 83%. Our net sales for the quarter stood at SEK 523 million , a 23% increase year- over- year.
All three of our revenue streams contributed to this growth, and the relative growth rate for ads and premium revenues increased from the third quarter, while Truecaller for Business continued to show good growth. EBITDA increased by 19% to SEK 201 million. This growth is despite higher growth-related investments as well as higher incentive costs due to a higher share price. Net profit and earnings per share grew even stronger, with approximately 30% year- on- year. We're really proud that we continue to operate profitably. We have a solid cash flow with SEK 228 million in net cash from operating activities before tax payments. In terms of user growth, we continue to grow very well. We crossed 400 million users on Android, and the growth numbers for 2024 are at an all-time high, with good growth from all regions. Our biggest income stream, advertising, continued to show growth as well.
We saw stronger market development in several countries such as Middle Eastern regions, the African markets, and so on. The recurrence of ad revenue growth during the second half of 2024 was driven by a combination of user growth, users engaging more with the product, improved demand, as well as optimization of our inventory. Our enterprise offering, Truecaller for Business, continues to develop well. Growth is mainly driven by strong performance both in our Verified Business consumer experience platform as well as Business Messaging. Growth for consumer subscriptions accelerated with strong development in all regions, both on iOS as well as Android. The growth of our subscriber base continues to outpace the growth of our total user base, with the average revenue per user continuing to increase.
In January this year, we launched the long-awaited update of Truecaller for iPhone, which brings caller ID and spam blocking on par with our Android product. With this new release, we're shifting our strategy, and we will primarily position Truecaller for iPhone as a subscription product. It's still very early days for us, but the initial results on this look very promising. We will cover everything in more detail in the slides that will come soon. Now, going into a bit more detail, as mentioned, we continue to see strong user growth. We closed Q4 with an average of 429 million monthly active users. Compared to the same period last year, we grew by 55 million users, which is equivalent to 15% year-on-year growth. Our daily active user base grew at a rate of 16%.
We also continue to see strong retention and are really proud that 83% of our monthly active users use Truecaller on a daily basis. We see this as an indicator of product stickiness and the continued relevance of our services. During the quarter, we surpassed 400 million users on Android, and the average monthly active users was 396 million. User growth continues to be a key metric for us on Android, but on iOS, like I mentioned earlier, we will start focusing a bit more on premium subscriptions as opposed to just MAU. With that, I'll hand over to Odd for a financial update.
Thank you, Rishit. So, as usual, it's time to take a more in-depth look at our financial performance this quarter, and as always, we start with our revenue development. This quarter, we grew revenues by 23% compared to the fourth quarter of last year, and as you can see from the graph, Q4 was the strongest revenue quarter this year. Actually, it was an all-time high revenue quarter for us. All our three revenue streams contributed positively to this. We saw accelerated growth for ads compared to Q3, and subscription revenues also grew fastest during the end of the year. Now, let's look at our three different revenue streams, starting with ads, where revenues grew for the second consecutive quarter, this time with 16%-17% year- over- year. Positive contributions came from all regions, with the strongest development in the Middle East and Africa region.
We continue to grow the number of impressions. This is an effect of improved ads platform, further user growth, increased interactions by our users, and last but not the least, some positive demand development in at least parts of the Indian market. The overall digital ads demand in the Indian market seems to have stabilized with some signs of an uptick in demand. We also continue to see positive signs from our introduction of other formats than the traditional banner ads. The scaling of these formats made some positive contributions, and we see good fill rates and good yield for them. We're obviously happy about the recent development we have seen in the ads business, but we're also still cautious and continue to focus on areas we ourselves can control. The strengthening of our subscription offering with more advanced features and one global...
The subscription revenues are sticky and stable, and we have a strong incentive to continue to drive adoption of subscriptions as we earn approximately 30 x as much on a premium subscriber compared to non-paying users. Our recurring subscription revenues grew by 39% compared to the same quarter in 2023, and with 15% compared to the third quarter in 2024. The conversion continued to improve, and so did the revenue per user. We see a strong development across all regions. India and Middle East and Africa continue to grow at a good pace, but the strongest growth came in the rest of the world. Growth is coming from both Android and iOS. Truecaller for Business continues to develop well with the growth of 45% year- over- year. These are SaaS revenues that are sticky and where we see many more opportunities going forward.
The current product offerings can be expanded much further with higher adoption, larger geographic spread, and to other segments of the market. We're growing revenues both with new agreements as well as expanding current partnerships. An important driver of the growth has been that our customers utilize more functionality in our offering, which increases revenue per account and overall revenues. Volumes within business messaging continue to grow strongly and also contributed to the growth in revenues year- over- year. Now, ads is our largest revenue stream, and as mentioned before, we grew by 17% year- over- year. Our ad revenues per DAU increased for the first time in a long time. CPM declined, but overall revenues still grew at a decent rate. As mentioned before, we do not focus on CPMs or fill rates, but rather on maximizing overall ad revenues.
Given our strategy, we think a more relevant measurement is ad revenues per DAU, where we saw this quarter a small growth year- over- year. Our subscription revenues showed a very strong development in the quarter, and the growth was 39% year- over- year. iPhone users have been important contributors to our subscription revenues already before the release of our new iOS product. iOS users are about 7% of our user base but contribute with 43% of the subscription revenues. The new iOS product launched in late January is a premium-first product, so we're expecting that this will further boost our subscription revenue. However, please remember that this is a gradual process. First, users need to be on the latest version of the operating system, which takes some time. Then we market the product through our CVRM tools, as well as with external marketing, which will happen later this quarter.
Users will be given a 30-day trial of the new product so they really feel the value that we bring. They can then decide if they would like to continue being a paid subscriber with the same capabilities of caller identification and spam blocking as on Android, or if they would like to continue with the free and much more limited version. The initial data that we are getting from the launch are positive, but bear in mind that this will be a gradual process. Do not expect any material impact from the iOS launch until the second quarter. Average numbers of subscribers grew by 22%, which is higher than our overall user growth, and consequently, conversion also increased.
Average revenue per user continued to grow as an effect of the geographical mix of our subscribers, as well as us moving to one global payment plan with a higher price point than the average of the older plans. Truecaller for Business continues to show good growth with a growth rate of 45% year- over- year. The customer experience platform, Verified Business, is the core of our enterprise offering sold based on a SaaS model. Today, this offering is primarily for larger enterprises, and it has been, to a large extent, focused on India. The annual recurring revenues for the Verified Business segment grew by more than 50% year- over- year, and since the start, we have had a very low revenue churn.
The other major part of our Truecaller for Business offering is the Business Messaging, which has seen good growth in message volumes this quarter with more than 80% year- over- year. The growth in total recurring revenues continues to be encouraging, and we see more levers for growth in these areas going forward. Combined, they grew by 42% year- over- year, and now they make up around SEK 600 million on an annualized basis. We're pleased that our gross profit grew by 25% year- over- year and that we continue to have a gross margin at the same good level that we reported in Q3, 77%. Going forward, we expect the gross margin to be rather stable around this level with possible variations between quarters.
Long-term, a positive impact could come from a larger share of Truecaller for Business revenues, lower fees to subscription advertising partners, or more direct sales in the ads business. However, in 2025, we also expect somewhat higher server costs from the new iPhone offering. Time now to move with the focus to costs. Truecaller has a robust business model with very high operating leverage, but efficiency is key in order to deliver solid margins. Underlying staff costs are quite stable but will increase with our annual salary revisions. We also plan to add some more headcount in 2025 as we do selective recruitment in revenue-generating units and growth-related areas. Incentive costs increased from Q3 due to the long-term incentive 2024 program. This quarter, we also saw an increase in our accrued social security costs coming from the increased share price.
As mentioned previously, some volatility is to be expected here due to the share price developments. In Q4 2023, we started to increase investments in targeted growth markets, as can be seen as an increase in other external expenses during 2024. More on this shortly, but first, something on our tax rate. Our tax rate is a combination of the Swedish corporate tax rate and the Indian tax rate. The tax rate was stable both for the quarter and for the year, and we continue to think that a 25%-26% tax rate is reasonable, but with possible variations in quarterly numbers. As you probably are aware, the Indian tax authorities initiated a tax survey in Q4 where they are looking into our transfer pricing model. This is a common thing that multinational companies are being questioned about their international tax practices.
At this time, there is not much to report on this topic. We have transparent and well-documented transfer pricing policy in place. Our external advisors that have assisted us in developing this model do not believe there is reason for us to pay more taxes we have done so far. We are not a tax-optimizing company. However, we do think that this process will take time, but we do not see any reason at this time to believe that the survey should result in any material increase in tax payments in India. We will, of course, get back to you if and when we have anything to communicate around this subject. Let's also look at our cost development in a full-year perspective. Our costs, excluding growth-related investments and incentive costs, increased by 6%. As mentioned during 2024, we increased our growth-related investments.
These investments are easy and quick for us to turn off and on and off, depending on where we see the best results. We continue to be pleased with the results we are getting out from the investments so far, and we continuously fine-tune them to achieve the best long-term return on investment. In 2025, we intend to expand these investments to a few more geographical markets as we see that there is a lot of room for global growth for us. The increased investments we are planning for can still be absorbed without us not achieving our financial targets. With the launch of our new improved iOS product, we will also do some extra marketing efforts to make users aware of the new improved product. Now, turning to our profit development, our EBITDA grew by 19%, even with substantially higher growth investments and higher incentive costs than in 2023.
Excluding incentive costs, EBITDA grew by 36%. Our EBITDA margin came in at 38.5%, which was the highest quarterly margin during 2024. The margin excluding incentive costs improved to 44.3%. Net profit grew by 29%, and EPS grew by 33%. Our cash flow continues. Conversion continues to be strong. The cash flow creates opportunities to continue to give back money to shareholders through buybacks and future dividends, as well as continuing to invest in growth and scan the market for potential M&A. We are in the very favorable position of having no debt and SEK 1.3 billion in cash and short-term investments. In Q4, we halted our buybacks as they mainly are a tool to provide liquidity in the stock market during times when liquidity is limited. It's a flexible tool we can turn on and off as we please.
The board will come back with a dividend proposal in conjunction with the notice to the AGM. Then lastly, our financial targets, a few words on them. As we close 2024, it is time to look at our actual performance compared to the targets we set in conjunction with the IPO in 2021. The target that has been active since the IPO was to have an annual net sales growth of 45% on average between 2021 and 2024. We did not fully reach that target, but we grew revenues by 40% on average over those years. We also stated at that time an ambition, although not an outright target, to achieve a combination of revenue growth and EBITDA margin above 70%. The purpose was to clarify our ability to combine revenue growth and profitability. Here, we reached 80% during the 2021 - 2024 period.
Now, what takes effect now from 2025 is that we should have an EBITDA margin of about 35% after 2024, starting this year. During the period 2021 to 2024, we had an average EBITDA margin of 40%, but like I said, that wasn't an outright target at the time. So going forward, the EBITDA margin is the target that remains. If there will be future financial targets added, we will, of course, inform the market about that when the board makes such a decision. We also have a dividend policy worth remembering in place since last year, stating that we should do an annual dividend equal to 25% of net profits. Of course, we can also do one-off dividends or more buybacks. It all depends on what we believe is best for our shareholders in the medium to long term.
We have also decided to make some adjustments to our KPI structure in 2025 to give investors the most relevant KPIs for our business. As mentioned previously, for user growth, our focus for Android will be on the total number of users, while for iOS, our focus is on paying users and subscription revenues. For ads, we have now, for quite some time, stated that CPM is not something that we focus on and that it isn't a very enlightening KPI considering how we run our ads business. We will therefore stop reporting CPM, but we'll instead report ad revenue per user and add additional qualitative and quantitative comments, which aligns better with how we steer the business. We will be more transparent and give more data on how our subscription business is developing. We'll add data about the number of subscribers, conversion rates, and iOS share of revenues.
We will continue to report our ARPU. For Truecaller for Business, we will give data on annual recurring revenue as well as revenue churn for our SaaS part, Verified Business. For Business Messaging, we will continue to report the number of messages delivered. For all these KPIs, we will provide the historical trend well in advance of the Q1 report that we are publishing in May. Now, with that said, I will hand it over to Rishit again.
Thanks, Odd. So now let's take a look at our quarterly product updates. The four areas we will cover are the core product offering, Truecaller Premium, Ad Tech, and then Truecaller for Business. So in order to constantly work towards protecting people from scam and fraud calls, in Q4, we rolled out a new neural network-based approach that greatly improved our spam detection capabilities.
This system was able to accurately detect 50% of more spam callers in focus markets such as Colombia, and we saw gains in other top markets as well. We also launched a first-of-its-kind Spoof Call Detection capability, which addresses a growing fraud mechanism in many of our markets. With this, we're already able to identify millions of additional fraud calls. A key aspect of protecting people from scams and fraud is to create awareness on common practices that bad actors use. So once again, we use the power of the large community we have to achieve this. So in Q4, we launched a Scamfeed on Android, which gives our community of hundreds of millions of users a destination to discuss real-world fraud incidents and to learn from the experience of others.
We rolled out Scamfeed first to a small number of users in India to gauge their interest, and now we've rolled it out to the entire user base in India. We're already seeing healthy engagement in addition to underlining Truecaller's thought leadership in this space. For subscription conversion improvements, as well as growing retention, we built a very powerful internal tool, which we call the User Monetization Engine, that enables us to accurately target users with contextual offers that are suited only to them. In Q4, we continue to invest in this engine, both for iOS as well as Android, and now we're able to segment our audience much better. We're able to communicate with them in a more timely manner, and we're also able to gauge the likelihood of them becoming subscribers.
The capabilities built within the User Monetization Engine have been one of the key factors in improving conversion and growing Truecaller's premium subscriber numbers. Artificial intelligence remains a key driver in many of our product development efforts, particularly within the Assistant product. As we revealed in the previous quarter, we leveraged LLM, or large language models, to significantly enhance the conversational capability of the Assistant. This resulted in a more natural and a very human-like experience. We also made substantial progress in optimizing the speed and responsiveness of Assistant interactions. This enhanced Assistant experience has been successfully launched to our premium users in the U.S., where we've already observed a 50% increase in Assistant usage. We are now working towards a global rollout of this new experience in the next few months. We remain confident that products like Assistant hold transformative potential for mobile communications in the years to come.
Now on to Truecaller for iPhone. As we mentioned in Q4, we continue to work on this new iOS app along with Apple, which gives users the full caller ID experience of Truecaller, something that was available only on Android until these capabilities were unlocked in iOS 18.2. We launched this brand new iOS experience late in January 2025, exclusively for Truecaller Premium subscribers. We now also have enabled the family subscription on iOS, which is a popular and more affordable option for users to protect their friends and family. We've started marketing efforts on this to raise awareness about the new product, and we'll continue to deploy external as well as internal marketing tools in the near future to broaden the reach and drive adoption continuously.
The early feedback from this and some very initial data looks promising with new subscriptions, lower cancellation rates after the trial period, and we continue to see more and more users in general coming to the higher-priced single plan and the family plan. So while it's early days, we expect positive revenue contribution from this to come gradually only from Q2. Remember that subscription revenues from iOS users are already 43% of our total subscription revenues. So this should be an exciting development for us in 2025. On the advertising product, we continue investments in improving supply, improving demand, building our proprietary ad tech, in-house ad tech platform. A significant development is that we ran our first pilot campaigns with the new Caller ID ad unit.
This new ad space, which generates billions of impressions per day, is managed through our own proprietary in-house ad server and sold only by our own direct sales channel. We believe this format holds significant potential for us in the future, and we'll continue to develop on it. Additionally, we continue momentum on interstitial ads, rewarded ads, video ads. We onboard a lot more advertising partners, and we continuously optimize our inventory. On the Truecaller for Business side, our offering, which helps businesses communicate better with their audience, we've evolved to become a more well-rounded customer experience platform. In Q4, we launched Verified Campaigns for businesses to create hyper-personalized and contextual engagements on calls as well as messages to their audience. Verified Campaigns has received early customer interest and has begun to show encouraging signs of commercial adoption already.
We also continue to create value for businesses in the existing Call Me Back functionality, which has turned out to be a very valuable lead conversion tool for businesses, where improvements rolled out in Q4 made it easier for businesses to engage with the right customers at the right time. The product strategy overall for Truecaller for Business continues to be deeper integration with enterprises, as well as a broader range of capabilities on both calls and messages. In the recent quarters, Truecaller has integrated large language models into its messaging platform as well, introducing AI-powered Message ID. We recently extended this functionality even to enterprises, which enables businesses to customize the summary of their messages, resulting in enhanced engagement and improved message visibility.
During the last quarter, Q4 of last year, Message ID saw adoption by prominent businesses such as Swiggy, a leading food delivery service in India, and NoBroker, a major real estate technology platform, demonstrating the versatility and effectiveness of Truecaller's messaging part of the enterprise offering. Right, and now to wrap things up, I'm very happy to state that the need for Truecaller has never been bigger. We've been on a positive trend during the quarter with an increased growth this quarter, and this quarter, we saw the strongest DAU growth in the history of Truecaller. I'd like to remind you that the absolute majority of this growth continues to be organic. With targeted growth investments we've done in 2024, we now have a blueprint to grow in markets with lower penetration. We'll continue to use this strategy even more in 2025.
We'll cover more growth markets, and there is immense growth potential left for us. Q4 was an all-time high revenue quarter for us as well, but we have a lot more to do to further monetize our platform even more efficiently. All our revenue streams contributed and saw good growth, which was very encouraging for us. The profit development also was really strong, and we have a great operating model. We generate strong cash flows backed by an already strong balance sheet. We continue to be optimistic about the new iPhone experience, of course. We have already made progress in the past few years improving monetization on iPhone, but with the new update, this will enable us to deliver a significantly better user experience and further grow our revenues. I'm also proud and yet very humbled about my new role as CEO.
I think Alan and Nami and our fellow Truecaller colleagues have built a great company that helps almost half a billion people make their communication efficient and safe. Before we open up for questions, I'd like to extend a huge thank you to our users who love us and use us every day, the great partners that we work with, and the phenomenal Truecaller team across the world. Right, with that, we're happy to take your questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Predrag Savinovic from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Hi, Rishit. Hi, Odd, and thanks for taking my questions. First one to you, Rishit, and congrats on the new role.
Could you discuss the succession from your previous role? I mean, you've been influential in the establishment of Truecaller for Business, the ads business as well, both of which are, for obvious reasons, quite important, right? So you can discuss this transition, make sure that this is smooth, and on your appointments that you're going to make there and that you have made.
Sure. Thanks for the question. So luckily, we were very well staffed at the leadership level, and this change was quite smooth for us. Fredrik, who used to manage some parts of our revenue earlier, he now manages all the revenue. So he looks after the advertising business as well as Truecaller for Business. So that part of the succession was relatively easy, I would say. It's early days, of course, and I'm still paying attention to it while Fredrik onboards fully.
But I think we were in a really fortunate position that our leadership was so well beefed up that we actually didn't need to even look at any hiring from outside to fill the roles.
All right. Coming back to some of the numbers then and looking specifically on subscribers on premium, when I do the math in ARPU, backing out the users in absolute numbers, it looks like you almost go double digit compared to Q3. What has changed here with regards to user growth? What levers have you pulled to improve this reasonably high figure then for the quarter?
I guess your question is about user growth. So a lot of our activities, as well as subscriber growth, we were able to unlock a lot of the investments that we've made in 2024.
We spoke about the user monetization engine that helped to improve not only conversion to premium, but also retention of premium subscribers. We saw growth coming from various regions. India, of course, grew, but many of the other regions as well contributed to this growth. We had migrated to a single plan instead of a few different plans. I think that simplicity helped in users being able to subscribe easier as well. So overall, it was a set of various factors that helped in subscriber growth.
Okay. And just finally then, on your enterprise offering in the report, you say that you believe that you have only scratched the surface of this full potential. If you can elaborate on this disclaimer and the ambitions you have going forward, what kind of new products you expect in the future, etc.?
Sure.
So when we said scratch the surface, I think we meant it in two different ways. The first way is that while we have most of the largest businesses in India and a few businesses outside of India as well that are customers already, we still have penetration left within those enterprises. So while some of their processes are using our platform, there are various processes that still haven't migrated to the Truecaller platform. So we see some potential there as well. And that's why we've only scratched the surface for our existing customer base. On the product side as well, I think we started only with a simple offering of verifying your brand and your enterprise on Truecaller. As we added on more and more capabilities onto the platform, we realized that we've unlocked a huge potential where there are areas such as fraud protection within enterprises.
There are areas such as CRM within enterprises that we still have room to grow in. So I think that's where I came from, that we've just scratched the surface on the Truecaller for Business side.
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Ramil Koria from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, guys. And Rishit, welcome aboard. It's going to be a ton of fun to interact with you moving forward. A few questions on my end. So starting off on perhaps iOS and the rollout of it, if you could elaborate a little bit on the potential for ARPU changes as iOS sort of increases the share of total, presumably in the future. Which markets will you target more specifically from the get-go, and how will that evolve over time? Any color on that would be quite helpful.
Sure.
So like I said, we launched the iPhone app, the new iPhone app, less than a month ago. So it's a bit early to comment on how it's going to do in the future. But I think we have some signals already. Users have been extremely positive to this development. They've been waiting for the iPhone to have the full Truecaller experience for a long time now. There are some signals as well that we have already in the business. Like we spoke about, the iOS premium subscription revenues is very disproportionate to our user base. And that tells us that we're quite confident that the new iOS version should lead to a growth in subscriber revenue starting Q2 onwards.
In terms of markets, we believe that the existing markets where we have good penetration of iOS will continue to be the ones that drive revenue growth as well. India being one of them, the U.S. being another one, and various other markets will continue to drive that revenue growth.
That's very clear. And then on the topic of this Caller ID advertising solution, I'd love to hear a little bit more. What have been the hurdles to launch such an ad inventory historically? Why has that changed now? Clearly, if one believes that the after-call screen constitutes a large share of your total ad inventory today, launching Caller ID ads effectively means that your ad opportunity improves quite substantially. So any additional color on that would be quite helpful.
Sure.
So the Caller ID ad unit is a unique ad unit because we can't really have a click-through on it, simply because when a user gets an incoming call, that's probably not the right time when somebody's going to click on the ad and try and take an action there. So it's a unique ad format that we had to tweak over a period of time. We had to speak to some of our biggest advertisers and try and package it in the right manner that will suit them. Secondly, it's taken us long because we have to crack the experience right. We're always conscious about the UX load of ad units on our users, and we balance it very carefully against that. So we've rolled out the Caller ID ad unit slowly over time, experimenting as we go along, making tweaks as we go along.
Finally, we reached a stage in Q4 where we were able to take it to the market, and we ran a few pilot campaigns from it successfully.
And now that you've run a few pilot campaigns, how should we think of the rollout of it or scaling of it, so to say?
Yeah, it's hard to comment about how the take-up will be in the future. But so far, the pilot campaigns were successful, and it remains to be seen how our advertising partners will latch onto it.
Okay. Very clear. And then if I may, guys, just a final question on the topic of OpEx, perhaps for you, Odd, if you could shed some light on the two main sort of variable OpEx buckets here. First off, what is the actual recruitment need? If you could shed some light on that.
You said selective recruitments, but what are we talking in terms of numbers? If you could provide us with anything there. And secondly, on the topic of growth-related costs, now with the iOS launch that you also alluded to will drive some marketing expenses, how should we calibrate our expectations numerically on that line item?
Wow, you're looking for some guidance, are you? Seriously.
I always am. I always am.
I know that. I know that. In terms of recruitments, we are still very selective. We have been very selective over the last years. Obviously, that has been partly due to the fact that the ads demand has been subdued. But we continue to be selective and careful on recruitments. We don't want to ever end up in a situation where we have more employees than we actually need.
I'd say that over this year, between 5% and 10% increase in employee costs due to new recruits on top of the salary revision that we do every year. Not more than that. You could argue that we could potentially use more people than that, but it is in our DNA to be a cost-efficient company and do a lot of things with not so many people. And we intend to continue along those lines. When it comes to the growth investments that we do, which is primarily user acquisition, preloads, and also some marketing, we will increase those this year. But like I said, we will be able to absorb that extra cost that we will take on within what is being achievable and still reaching our financial target.
Okay. That's very clear. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Stefan Gauffin from DNB. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello. Thanks for taking my questions and nice to talk to you, Rishit. So looking at the new iOS launch, can you provide some information on how many of your existing users have downloaded the new version and are hence possible to try the new version? Secondly, you've stopped the buyback program and explaining that due to liquidity reasons, but that also increases your cash situation. So you now have SEK 1.2 billion in cash or short-term financial assets on your balance sheet. And just how are you thinking about this position? And yeah, is it room to hand out more to the shareholders?
If you take the first one, I'll figure out a good answer to the second one while you talk.
So on the iOS, it'll be hard to share the exact numbers, but I can give you some flavor nevertheless. There are actually two dependencies for adoption of the iOS product. The first one, actually, even before the Truecaller app upgrade, you need to be on iOS 18.2. So once a user is on iOS 18.2 and then the user has the latest version of our app, then they can get the full experience of Truecaller on iPhone. So this is a gradual process. There is, I would say, a decent audience already that is on iOS 18.2 and have the right app version installed. But it is a gradual process because iOS 18.2 is a recent OS version. So it'll gradually gain adoption over time.
All right.
And on the capital structure and capital allocation, Stefan, first of all, we are always looking at this from the perspective of what's best for our shareholders in the medium to long term, meaning that we are basing our decisions or as a company, as a management team, we're basing our decisions and recommendations to the board based on what we believe are the operational targets and the ambitions that we want to achieve. So Rishit has only been in this role for about a month. And that then comes back to the capital structure and capital allocation. So far, we have spent more than SEK 1.5 billion since the IPO, buying back shares and giving back dividends.
And we will continue doing that. But the exact format is something that will be decided by the board and communicated in advance of the AGM. So no later than the AGM notice that comes out will come out mid-April. We do not intend to be over-capitalized, but we do intend to be capitalized in such a way that we have a freedom of action when it comes to both investments in M&A and potential business risks such that our shareholders can rest in peace in our ability to always do what's best in the market at the time.
Okay. If I can squeeze in one more question, and that relates to the solid MAU net adds. And how much of these are coming from pre-installs on smartphones, and how has this trended recently?
Most of our user growth continues to be organic, which is basically based on word of mouth. And a portion of it comes from activities like Odd mentioned from preloads, from user acquisition, and other marketing spends. But I think it's a very healthy trend that most of our growth is still organic.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
The next question comes from Boris from Cantor. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my questions. And congrats, Rishit, on your appointment. The first question I have is a question I've asked historically as well. Please could you give us a flavor for the industry or sector mix with regards to your ad revenues? Is there a focus sector in 2025?
Right. I think the sectors vary quite dramatically from season to season.
For example, during Q1, when the IPL starts off in, I believe, mid-March, we'll see gaming companies in India that will begin to advertise a lot more. Then once towards the end of the year when there's e-commerce sales, then we'll see the e-commerce companies advertising a lot more. When there's a festive period, we see FMCG companies probably and electronics type of companies that sell mobile phones because that's what takes place at that time. So I would say it's a wide mix of advertisers, and 2025, I don't think we're focusing on exactly a segment of advertiser as such because we are quite a broad-based set of customers in the advertising space for us.
Sure. Thank you. Thanks for that color .
With regards to the second question, the ad impressions per user continue to grow, but probably this has a ceiling before it kind of worsens the customer experience. Given this context, and I bear in mind what you said that you're focusing on ad revenue per user rather than CPMs or anything else, I just want to understand how big a factor is CPMs going to be for 2025 ad revenue growth?
Yeah. So I think how we have always looked at our ads play is that our job is to monetize on user engagement. And as the product gets more and more engaging, which means as we add more value to users and users use our product for many more different things, that's when our set of impressions available will expand.
It's not necessarily going to be, like you were rightly pointing out, it's not going to be about slapping on more ads and ruining the user experience. That's not something we have done in the past, and we won't do that in the future as well. It's going to be driven more by users engaging with the product a lot more.
Okay. Okay. Understood. Thank you. The last one, if I may, is do you have any feedback from customers and churn from your Truecaller for Business customers outside of India?
We have minimal churn. It's a number we've started publishing now as well. Outside India as well, we have very low churn. We have high-quality contracts that have a good tenure exceeding six months, 12 months, and beyond. So outside of India as well, we continue to see customers appreciating the value that Truecaller can add to their business.
And we haven't seen a specific concern outside India from Truecaller for Business customers.
Super. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Viktor Lindström from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Hi, Rishit. Hi, Odd. And congrats on a solid quarter. So a few ones for me. First of all, you mentioned that you would like to invest and scale up in new countries in 2025. So which countries are you primarily evaluating here? And also on a relative basis, how will these investments be compared to this year's growth investments in Nigeria and Colombia?
I can talk about t he first part.
Sure.
How we evaluate countries that we pick to grow? Firstly, we look at those countries that have good organic growth for Truecaller already.
This means there is initial product-market fit, our brand is appreciated over there, our service is appreciated over there, and we're growing slowly organically. That's when we actually step into the country and we start localizing the product, creating flavors of features that are more local to that region. We have partnerships for marketing and so on and so forth. At the moment, we're looking at a few different regions, some regions in Africa, South Africa as well, some LATAM countries as well that are showing positive growth to us.
Right, and in terms of numbers, we are looking at increasing our investments in those sort of activities by a factor of, say, between 50% and 100%, a little bit depending on the timescale, or rather a little bit depending on when we get started for real.
We are in the process of finding people on the ground in those countries. And once we have that, we will start investing. And we will invest similar amounts as compared to what we have invested in Nigeria, Colombia, and so forth.
Great. Thanks. And then just another one. I noticed that the compensation was a bit higher here in the quarter. So is it something extra here, or should we view this as a new normal base?
No, there is nothing particular, but we are working on more and more functionality-enhancing capabilities. And we have to increase capitalization a little bit in order to be working according to the IFRS. So there will be some increases probably during the year.
Great. Thanks. That was all for me. Thank you.
There are no more questions at this time.
So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Okay. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening in. We look forward to seeing you at our next earnings call. Thank you very much.