Hello and welcome to the Truecaller Webcasts with Teleconference Q4 2021. Throughout the call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, so there's no need to mute your own individual lines. Afterwards, there'll be a question and answer session. Today, I am pleased to present CEO Alan Mamedi and CFO Odd Bolin. Please begin your meeting.
Shall we? Shall we get started?
Yes.
All right. Hi, and, welcome everyone who's listening in. My name is Alan Mamedi, and, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Truecaller. Today, today's presentation will be presented by me and my CFO, Odd Bolin, who are very excited to announce our fourth quarterly report and full year's results. We'll start with me presenting the quarterly highlights, then a product update, then Odd will walk you through our financial performance, then I will quickly go through the summary, and then we open up for Q&A. Let's get started. Let's start with the quarterly highlights. Next slide, please. We had an outstanding quarter and closed Q4 at 301 million monthly active users, a 16% increase.
We made SEK 392.2 million in net sales, 111% growth compared to the same quarter the year before. We had a strong adjusted EBITDA of SEK 196 million and an incredible adjusted EBITDA margin of 50% in Q4. We're super proud to be a high-growth tech company with strong profitability and great margins and highly efficient cash conversion, resulting in very strong cash flows, and we intend to stay that way as well. Next slide, please. We had a very strong growth in advertising, driven by increased demand from advertisers, especially in India. On Truecaller for Business, we're very proud to announce our first great milestone of surpassing 1,000 paying customers.
We're seeing a healthy growth through our direct sales team, but also through our reseller partners. Not only are we growing at a healthy speed, we're also growing in several markets in parallel. Some of the Truecaller for Business customers we highlighted in Q4 was to educate the market and show the power of our product and its impact on many sectors. Indian Railways was one example, who's the largest employer in India with over 20 million passengers every day, who we're very proud to have as a partner on Truecaller for Business. Lastly, every Q4, we publish our global scam and spam report, and we did the same this time as well and got very strong coverage globally.
It's important for us as a company to highlight and make societies aware of the growing pain points of frauds and scams, which leaves big marks in people's lives. What came out of this report was a staggering 770 billion calls and messages that were identified by Truecaller during 2021. Next slide, please. Our user base continues to grow. Majority is driven by a strong organic growth, but we're also seeing a healthy growth coming from some of our focus markets through our user acquisition initiatives that we have started to ramp up in Q4. We closed Q4 at an average of 301 million monthly active users, and it's up 42 million from last year quarter or 16%.
The larger part of the growth came at the end of Q4, which is not visible in the average numbers, but we're growing at a very healthy speed. Our daily active user base is also growing in a healthy manner and closed at an average daily active user base of 239 million users, a 90% increase from last year's quarter. We continue to see an increased engagement of 79% of our monthly active users being active on a daily basis. It's a very strong and high engagement on a daily basis. Our growth activities on the user acquisition side ramped up in Q4, as I mentioned, and we continue to see very positive returns on ad spend, meaning that the users we acquire becomes profitable for us early during their lifetime, which is aligned with our strategy.
Next slide, please. In Q4, we continued to see a healthy growth on the incoming call volume side, where our users received 291 billion calls during Q4, which is a 16% increase from last year. This is just to indicate the growth, and the need of something like Truecaller in existing markets and in upcoming markets where we see a healthy ramp-up. Next slide, please. Let's go through some of our product updates for the fourth quarter. It's hard to cover everything we do since we have weekly updates on the app side and hundreds of releases on a monthly basis on the back-end side, which improves the user experience. Let's go through some of the highlights here at least.
Before that, let's recap the product offering first for some of our new listeners. Next slide, please. There are two main areas where we focus on from a product perspective. One is our consumer product, which is available on iOS and Android, and being used by over 300 million users every month, where Truecaller is the leading global platform for phone number verification and call blocking. Consumers use our products in order to have a safer and more efficient calling and messaging experience. It's basically their go-to product for their communication needs. The other side of this is our business product that we call Truecaller for Business, that allows businesses to verify through a KYC process and become verified businesses on our platform.
They can also integrate their calling and messaging experience directly into our product, so they can grow their business more efficiently through features like call reads and much more. As an example, as a consumer with Truecaller installed on your phone, you can rest assured that when your bank is calling you, we will verify that it's actually the bank and the reason for why they're calling you, or your medical insurance company or delivery company and so on. This enables businesses to become more efficient, save time, and save money. Our first B2B product that we launched was about a year ago. Let's go through some of the product highlights. Next slide, please.
Some of the highlights we have this quarter, which are on the same themes as our previous report, are the consumer offering itself, our premium offering, our machine learning initiatives, and our ads and enterprise products. Next slide, please. In the fourth quarter, we released Truecaller, a new update called Version 12 on Android, which includes a fully redesigned user interface, which separates calls and messages into two different views, as seen on this screenshot. The app was redesigned to provide a more streamlined and user-friendly experience across the app, such that users can navigate through their calls and messages in a more intuitive way. By doing these changes, we started to see great reviews and adoptions from our users, which is a great sign. Next slide, please.
Another highly appreciated improvements in Truecaller 12 is our fully new design profile page. After many iterations and A/B tests, we finally launched it, and because it's the most visited screen inside of the Truecaller app, where people engage to make phone calls and messages and read community comments and so on, we wanted to make sure we made it 10 times better. We've loaded it with more relevant information about people and businesses and some advanced data insights for more advanced users to get a better understanding of the person or business that they're communicating with. We've also prepared it for some future data options for business profiles as well, and we're expecting to see a higher engagement thanks to these improvements over time. Next slide, please.
Another big feature release for Truecaller 12 is Video Caller ID, a way for our users to create a more personalized and unique calling experience. Video Caller ID allows users to deliver personalized video greetings, either self-recorded or selected from our built-in templates, that plays automatically when calling a friend or a family. Over time, we'll also open this up for our business customers. In addition to delivering these new experiences to our 300+ million users, Truecaller 12 is faster and leaner and gives users a smoother UX with improved battery optimization. Next slide, please. We made many improvements to our premium offering during Q4.
Just to highlight a few of them, we launched the Announce Call feature, which uses our voice assistant to say who is calling you, so you don't need to look at your phone. Through this feature, Truecaller's voice assistant reads out the name of the caller or reads out the contextual information on the type of call as identified by Truecaller's AI identity feature. For example, likely sales call. This is an incredibly popular product that has been enabled by almost 50% of our premium users since its launch, less than three months back. It's a very high adoption. We made a number of enhancements to add value to the premium experience for both Android and iPhone users.
In the third quarter, we committed to driving iPhone user adoption by dedicating focused resources on rebuilding the app on the iOS platform, with the goal of delivering a Truecaller app that is as much as possible on par with our Android product. We are on that journey and are progressing very well, I would say. Some of the improvements that have been seen so far on the iPhone have been driven by Advanced Caller ID, which was launched in the third quarter for premium users in the U.S. and Canada. Advanced Caller ID was further developed in the fourth quarter with the launch of voicemail support, as an initial step towards cloud telephony services, which we believe is the future of communication.
Lastly, on the page, we've enabled purchase of premium through our website, making it much easier to upgrade or give a subscription as a gift to a friend or a family member. This has initially been rolled out in the Indian market and supports 25 different payment methods. More markets will be added in the future, but we see a high adoption and the usage of being able to gift premium to friends and families through an alternative source. Next slide, please. We continue to build on machine learning and AI-driven capabilities in order to improve services across functionalities. In the fourth quarter, two machine learning initiative drove significant advancements in our spam detection capabilities in a number of markets. A new machine learning-powered spam detection algorithm was introduced, driving drastic improvements to spam detection in several markets.
Mainly, we can notice that change in the European and in the U.S. market. Also, a model for predictive analytics focused on call center carrier was deployed. This model enables Truecaller to better identify the likelihood of numbers being identified as spam. This initiative has improved spam detection accuracy significantly and also in similar markets. Truecaller's messaging platform has also been upgraded with AI-driven capabilities, improving incoming messages efficiency and highlighting the most relevant information from businesses who reach out to them via SMS or instant messaging. The integration of machine learning signals into Truecaller's messaging ecosystem has increased precision in differentiating between relevant promotions and spam, which has resulted in better visibility on business messages.
All these improvements, we do are built with a custom, customer-first mindset, which means that data processing to enable these capabilities occurs on the device and never leaves a user's device. Next slide, please. On the AdTech side, we made a number of investments designed to deliver a better demand profile, which are scaling well and have shown very promising results. Changes previously introduced, to the ad server auction mechanism have scaled well in the fourth quarter, driving overall auction efficiency, improving fill rates and eCPM, and providing more value to our advertisers. In the fourth quarter, AdTech infrastructure has been optimized and new features were introduced, enabling diverse integration path and enhancing Truecaller's ability to work with a wider range of demand partners. These enhancements helps improve demand liquidity and yield management while aligning better with demand-side expectations.
Optimizations on the supply side have also been a key focus area, and some recent initiatives have been propagating very well for us. These improvements contribute to the overall revenue growth in the fourth quarter, and we will continue to see these improvements adding value to our business in the future as well. Before jumping over to some of the highlights on Truecaller for Business, we would like to play a short video that explains how it works. Let's go with that.
Is reaching your potential customers becoming challenging day by day? Perhaps your calls are getting lost in the clutter of other calls. How can you solve this? Introducing the Truecaller Verified Business Caller ID. Now, every time you call new customers, they see the right brand name, the green caller ID, the green verified tick, the right business category, and the right call reason, indicating you're a verified business and not a fake one. This further enhances your brand reputation by adding identity, improves customer experience, and can further improve your call efficiency. You can also make intelligent decisions with AI-powered analytics. That's not all. Truecaller Verified Business Caller ID works across Android and iOS devices and is also a network-agnostic solution. Whether it's for your service, security, or sales calls, you can make your business stand out of the clutter of fraud and spam calls.
Get started today with Truecaller.
Great. Truecaller for Business has grown at a tremendous rate and achieved the milestone of serving over 1,000 active business customers across India and several other markets in the fourth quarter. Truecaller for Business has gained traction across a wide range of verticals, with the strongest demand coming from banking and financial services, EdTech, and healthcare. Key customers onboarded in the fourth quarter, including a number of leading brands such as Zomato, IKEA India, TVS Motor Company, Digit Insurance, as well as a major bank in South Africa. Business Call Reason, an add-on feature that allows business customers to provide context for why they're calling before a Truecaller user decides to answer a call, has shown a strong potential with the business adoption quickly growing to 40% since its launch in the third quarter last year.
A number of operational improvements were introduced in order to support the growing demand for Truecaller for Business. We launched a self-serve portal for the new business customers to self-onboard directly on our portal. This has had a significant impact as this enablement contributed to 35% of our direct sales in December alone. We're working on building a similar self-serve portal, but for resellers such as CPaaS companies, with the goal of increasing new business potential in many more markets using the resellers' help. Now over to Odd to talk about our financial performance.
Thank you. Next slide, please. Well, as you can see, we had an exceptional year in 2021 and also an exceptional quarter during the fourth quarter.
We had a very strong sales growth of 111% versus the same quarter last year, 2020, driven by a number of different factors. Obviously, we have a continuing strong growth in users, monthly active users. We also saw the number of revenue-generating impressions, ad impressions per user increasing, as well as prices. We had a positive trend through CPM during the end of the last year, and there was an extra seasonal impact during the fourth quarter that had a positive impact on us. We see a situation ahead of us where we will continue to grow at a very considerable rate. We have a continuing strong organic growth in the user base.
We have made, and we are making further investments in user acquisition and preloads, in order to increase our growth rate further in both existing and new markets. We also see a strong, continuing demand within the Truecaller business area. Next slide, please. Looking at the revenue by business area or service type, you can see that advertising had an exceptional quarter, growing almost 130% versus the same quarter, 2020. The Truecaller business was growing obviously even faster, but from a lower base. While the consumer subscriptions is a little bit slower right now, to a considerable extent due to the problems that Google had last year in India with the Reserve Bank of India.
That has been solved, but take a little bit of time to get back on the growth track we want to be on. As I said, we saw a growing number of ad impressions, which helped boost our ad sales. We also made a number of changes to our ad service auction mechanism that has scaled very well, and that has contributed considerably to the growth rate. Within the consumer subscription space, we see increased ARPU, because we grow in markets with a higher price picture than our initial core market, India. We also saw that the subscriber growth picked up during the end of the year, during the end of the first quarter. Next slide, please.
Gross profit, gross margin improved to 78% during the fourth quarter, which is seven percentage points higher than we saw the same quarter the year before. There are a number of reasons for that. We sell more through partners that have lower fees. Most of our cost of goods sold comes from commission to partners that we sell through, where we use their ad platforms. We've been selling more through partners where we have lower fees or partners that do not report precise commission figures so that we have to report income through these partners net, which means we have a 100% gross margin on these partners in our books. We also saw some effects from the economies of scale we get within in terms of server hosting.
The pricing of our server hosting does not increase in parallel with the number of ads we are serving. Then we also had an increasing share of direct sales, where we don't use any partner for putting our ads to our customers. Next one, please. A little bit on the cost side. Our adjusted EBITDA number excludes certain non-comparable items, such as the cost for the IPO, but also the synthetic options that we had prior to the IPO, that are now out of the books. The other external expenses here consist of marketing, primarily marketing, user acquisition, and then some other operational costs. We do see employee expenses increasing in line with our expectations.
We have a very strong operating leverage in our business model, meaning that we don't need to grow our employee base as fast as we grow revenue, but we do of course recruit new employees, and we see our employee cost increasing over time. In 2022, we expect to continue increasing our investments in growth-focused activities such as user acquisition, pre-installs of our app on new smartphones, preloads as we call it, and marketing. We expect to increase such cost by a factor of two to three compared to the fiscal year 2021 in order to continue our journey with a very strong growth rate. Next slide. Next slide, please.
The adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 50%, which was nine percentage points higher than the same quarter the previous year. Once again, our operating model has a very high leverage, meaning that when we see an increase in revenue, and much of that falls straight down to the profit line. We also saw that this was partly offset by the increased investments we're doing in user acquisition and marketing. Next slide, please. It is worth pointing out that we have a very high cash conversion ratio, 89% for the full year 2021, meaning that 89% of the EBITDA profit we reported actually came out as cash flow. We have a very strong cash flow based on that.
We will over time possibly see some decrease in that number due to the fact that we are the Truecaller for Business is growing so fast. We foresee that we will have a very strong cash flow for the foreseeable future. I believe that was my last slide, and then over to you, Alan.
Last one.
Sorry, financial targets. We want to emphasize that we stand by our financial targets. The financial targets that we published ahead of the IPO, and we're still standing by those targets. We are aiming to grow by 45% per year in the medium term, which means up until 2024, according to the definition we decided on. We're also believing that we can achieve an EBITDA margin of about 35% over time after 2024. We expect the combination of revenue growth and EBITDA to stay above 70% even during the medium term. We have been clear about the fact that we are prepared to invest for growth.
We are investing for growth as we speak. As I mentioned just a second ago, we will increase those investments even further, but we do believe that we will continue to show a very strong profitability even in the light of those investments.
To summarize. Next slide, please. We had an exceptional year in terms of growth and profitability, growing net sales with 130% and also a strong 41.9% adjusted EBITDA margin for the full year and 50% in Q4. With this strong revenue growth and a slower increase of OpEx, it resulted in a very strong profit margins, which exceeded our long-term financial targets, as Odd mentioned. We've always been a product-first company, and we'll continue to serve our customers first. This can clearly be seen in our execution, but also building monetizable products such as Truecaller for Business that benefits both consumers and the businesses.
A very exciting announcement in Q1, but the work began already in Q4, was the acquisition of Call Hero, which will strengthen our product on iOS and Android around the world, especially in the U.S., which is one of our focus markets long term. Their technology and knowledge will accelerate our bets in the cloud telephony space, which will open up many opportunities for our product with a digital assistant that will change the way we receive phone calls in the future. Once you start using it, you won't be able to live without it. The integration work is happening as we speak, and we hope to launch it in a couple of months for our community.
Lastly, I'm very proud of the team at Truecaller for all the great accomplishments, but also the major milestones we reached in the single quarter, such as 300 million active users, surpassing 1,000 customers on Truecaller for Business, but also surpassing SEK 1 billion in net sales and closing the year at SEK 1.13 billion, basically. Now over to Q&A.
Thank you. Just before we start, I just want to confirm that the speakers can still hear me on this line. Is that right?
Yep.
Perfect. Great. To the participants, if you wish to ask a question, you have two options. You can submit them via the webcast screen. Alternatively, if you do wish to ask these via the phone, you can do so by dialing zero one on your telephone keypads now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask your question. If you find your question has been answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial zero two to cancel. We have a few questions in the queue already. The first is from the line of Predrag Savinovic of Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you very much, operator. Hi, Alan. Hi, Odd. Congratulations. It was quite a strong report today. I have a few questions, but I think I'll start with this one, because this is where we receive a lot of incoming questions, and that comes down to, you know, Apple, Google, new changes into how data is being handled, and there seems to be a mixed view here. What we hear from those engaging in advertisements, they say this new sandbox from Google, it's a gift to advertisers. We've seen also the market punish, you know, stocks with ad-driven businesses. It'd be quite valuable to hear your opinion here. Can you spend some time in talking about how this might affect Truecaller going forward?
Yeah, absolutely. I can start. Actually, I didn't see any companies taking a hit on Google's announcements. I believe that, you know, first of all, Google is very transparent. We actually think this decision is the right decision to serve the customers first. We also have to remember that this is something that Google announced already a year ago, and they've been working on it since then, which we were aware of. Google also have different incentives. They are not like Apple in that way. You know, what we have learned so far is that we won't see any changes, at least for the coming two years. During that time, they're building out their SDKs for their advertising partners.
I believe that, you know, in two, three years, we'll start seeing a solution that is probably better than exists today, that will benefit the consumers and the advertisers.
All right. That's very clear. Thank you very much. To Odd, you had very good commentary on the gross margin and what has impacted it so far. Thinking ahead, would you say the level we are at now, maybe looking at the four-quarter rolling, is that a good, you know, starting point when you think about this for the coming years?
Yes, I think it is. Ahead of the IPO, we thought we would be maybe a bit closer to 75% than 78%. The fact that we have reached a bit higher than that is really due to these changes in the mix of partners that we work with. As I said, some of those partners don't give us precise numbers on the commission that we pay them. We know obviously roughly what we pay them, but they don't give us precise enough numbers for us to put in the books, meaning that we do have 100% gross margin on those sales. We've seen more sales from these partners that has taken up the gross margin.
We don't see that there will be any major change in that mix going forward. If it is, we will obviously be transparent about that, in order to give you the best possible insight into the gross margin. Right now, our best estimate is that this is a level that is sustainable.
Okay, perfect. Then, on Truecaller for Business, I believe we asked something similar a quarter ago. This seems to be scaling quite nicely. Is this the result here, is that a snowball effect? Do you see, you know, one company from one specific sector hopping on, seeing results, others joining? Is it your sales efforts? Is it the partnerships you have? Can you discuss a little bit on what drives these new additions in terms of Truecaller for Business users?
Yeah. I think it's a combination of many things. I mean, as I mentioned, our self-serve portal that we launched end of Q3 in December stood for 35% of the sales that came in in just one month. That one is, of course, scaling up. The team is scaling up as well, where we have some very talented folks in the Truecaller business team. And as you said, there is a certain FOMO where, you know, people in the same vertical, when they see their competitors becoming a customer, they also want to participate. That's definitely helping us. We're also seeing opportunities now, like with onboarding IKEA India.
I believe it will be much easier for us to onboard IKEA in another market as well when we have, you know, the same company as a reference customer in the neighboring country. I think that will help us as well. I do believe that given the demand we're seeing on the reseller side through CPaaS companies, investing now in the portal to make it easier for them to onboard customers to our platform will definitely help us. There's a lot of things going on at the same time in parallel, and it's a very exciting business area that we're fully committed to, but it's also a very new business area for us. The positive side of that is, of course, that we can move pretty fast.
We can make changes quickly if we wanna do that. You know, it's super exciting, and it's also adding a lot of value in them to our users.
Fantastic. Thanks, Alan. Just as a final question, maybe if you can give us an update on your ambition to grow Truecaller in new countries. You mentioned the U.S., where you have a you know, long-term vision to grow in and reading through your global spam report, the U.S., the U.K. have quite rapid growth in spam. If you could put maybe a timeline context to that as well. Thanks.
As soon as possible.
Crystal clear. Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Akhil Dattani of JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe if I could start with your CPM and some of the comments you made during your introductory comments. You flagged that obviously Q4 had quite a nice sequential step up, but I think you mentioned there were some seasonal factors as well as some structural factors. I wonder if you could maybe just unpack that a bit for us and maybe help us understand as we look over the next couple of years what you can do to try and drive the CPM up further, given obviously you've done a great job on volumes, but it seems like there's a big opportunity on CPM going forward. That's the first question.
The second question is, I think Odd mentioned that, and I don't know if I understood the comment completely, but he said something about investment costs in 2022 would step up two to threefold versus 2021. I guess I was just keen to understand what specific buckets of costs he was talking about and, you know, what the focus areas are. Where are you investing to step up? Then the final thing was just on B2B. You obviously mentioned the strong success you've had so far, and obviously the need to be dynamic, as you continue to grow the business.
I guess it was just a big picture question to understand, as you think about the journey for B2B going forward, do you think this is something that you leverage by yourself, and this is something as a business yourself, you have the scale and or can build the scale that you need to really leverage that platform properly? Or do you think more and more this becomes more of a partnership model, where maybe you collaborate more with other players that do things in the same sort of space? Thanks a lot.
All right. Thank you. Maybe I can start with the CPM.
Please.
You know, when it comes to CPM levels, it's something that is, of course, driven by a seasonality in the sense that in Q4 there's usually a lot of things happening with Christmas, Diwali in India, and other type of holidays coming up, which means that the demand is pretty high and in the auction bidding model, of course, it drives up the price. That's one side of it. The other side of it is now that people are going back to the office and life is becoming more and more normal, that also means that our sales team can go out and meet our customers.
We've definitely seen a ramp-up in the direct sales side as well, which is enabling new inventories for our advertisers, which of course also drives up the price and the average CPM levels. These are just a few examples, but there are many of these things that plays in, that also controls it. I would say the seasonality is around many of these aspects.
Saying something about the investments, what we're saying is that investments in user acquisition, preloads, and marketing will increase. We expect that those investments to increase by a factor of two to three in 2022 versus 2021 full year. What we're saying here is that we have been continuously and gradually increasing those investments. We have been building the necessary infrastructure and capacity in-house in order to do all the investments that we see that we can do in a profitable way, and we will be able to do more in 2022 than we did in 2021. The basic reason why we're doing these investments is to further boost our growth rate and ensure our long-term growth targets. That is that.
Maybe I can answer the last question, which is around Truecaller business and what will be the driving factor. I think it will be a combination of all the things that I mentioned, the self-serve portal where businesses can go in and sign up themselves, our sales team reaching out to the businesses, and then also the reseller side. I think what is important for us in order to scale is to have these three in place. I think we are also cautious and making sure that we own the relationship with the important customers. We have an advantage here because we know who the big clients are, and those are the ones we're reaching out to.
That's clear. Thanks a lot. It does. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Yemi Falana of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your line.
Hi, Alan and Odd. Thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, all growth is welcome, but I think investors will be particularly excited that the rate of user growth in what you classify as Rest of World is outstripping growth in India and the Middle East and Africa. Can you perhaps provide some color on the key drivers or the key markets behind that growth within that Rest of World bucket? Secondly, any early indications you can give on the user reception of CallHero within the U.S. market and the timeline before you'd expect to roll that out across your markets more broadly? Thank you.
Thank you. Well, what I can say about CallHero, since it's been public and been used by users mainly in the U.S., is what we can read in the app reviews and so forth. It's a highly rated app with lots of great reviews. We've also made our own due diligence and called customers to understand. I think the founding team, two very technically strong product people, joining us to sort of help us build this and own the call telephony part. I think that will add a lot of value to our customers. You know, once we roll it out in a couple of months to part of our users, we'll start getting more and more feedback, and we'll improve the product as we go.
We're quite bullish on this, and we think the opportunity is really big. Do you wanna take the first question?
Can you repeat the first question, so we get it?
To get some color on perhaps the key markets within that rest-of-world bucket that are driving the user growth there. Just saw that the user growth there was kind of more than twice the level that you're seeing in India, Middle East, and Africa. Appreciate it's smaller numbers, but yeah, keen to understand the moving parts there.
Well, the focus markets we have outside of India, Middle East, and Africa would be Southeast Asian markets, Indonesia, Malaysia, but also obviously the U.S., where we invest considerably in order to keep growing. That's where we also see growth.
Worth adding is also Latin America, where we see a lot of growth coming in from, which is not classified.
Now, we have recently started increasing our focus on Latin America further, so that's absolutely true. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Currently, we have one further question on the phone. Just as a reminder to participants, if you do wish to ask a question on the phones, please dial zero one on your telephone keypads now. That next person is John Karidis of Numis. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you. Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the questions. You've been asked about this a number of times. I'll, if I may, sort of have another crack, if I may. Unlike the sort of previous analyst, I sort of noted that the absolute net adds ex India in Q4 were not that different to those in Q3. We've been talking about it now for quite some time that ex-India, the growth prospects are awesome. I also know that even if you just keep growing in India, you'll have an awesome business.
I wonder if I could sort of encourage you to say something more concrete about what type of growth trajectory you would expect, at least in 2022, with things like Advanced Caller ID and CallHero versus what you've. That's customer growth outside India, please. Then I've got a couple of questions for Odd, please.
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, it's hard to project what the growth will be coming from these initiatives. However, these initiatives are to improve the premium offering in these markets where we also see a very high willingness to pay for users. We do see growth coming in from, you know, many of these markets that Odd mentioned. One thing to keep in mind as well, if you compare Q3 and Q4, as I said earlier in this presentation, is that these are average numbers. In the fourth quarter, we were kind of back-heavy, where a lot of growth came at the end of it, which means that the average is sort of taken down. We do see maybe more growth than expected in some of the Latin American markets.
The key for us is to continue to focus on our markets that we mentioned before, which is Indonesia, Malaysia, LATAM, some big markets in Africa, like Nigeria and South Africa. The list is quite long, to be honest. We're working quite hard to sort of be able to drive growth in parallel in all these markets through the initiatives. Just wanna highlight as well, you know, one of these things is gonna be coming from our partnership with the OEM manufacturers, which we announced a couple of weeks back, where Truecaller will be installed on 100 million devices that are gonna be shipped in the coming 12-18 months, with a big focus on India, but also outside of India, actually.
We're expecting this to sort of help us drive growth and take down the CAC.
Thank you, Alan. From what you said, was I wrong to understand that CallHero will be available only to the premium customers?
Correct. It's only gonna be on premium for now, at least. That's the plan.
Okay. Thank you. Then a few questions for Odd. I think it's gonna be more than two. Regarding the gross margin, I'd love to know who the advertising partners are that for whom you sort of assume 100% gross margin, and roughly what proportion they make up of your entire business. I noted you say the mix is not going to change going forward.
We haven't and I don't think we're in a position to name specific partners that follow that principle. Today, they make up in the order of 10%, 10%-15% of our overall revenue within ads. We don't see that. That has increased quite significantly over time, but we don't see that as increasing that much from where we are right now. That's how we see it right now, based on what we see and when we talk to them and how we see traffic being channeled.
Thank you. Can you give me a little bit more color or just to understand a little bit the cost that you incur related to preinstalls, so what you pay commission to the handset manufacturers per unit. Is that how it works?
And/or per activation. Slightly different models in different cases. We do see that we will invest a substantial amount of money in that in 2022. We see that as part of our user acquisition investments and we see that as a model that gives us a higher return than traditional user acquisition. Obviously, not all the people that have their phones with Truecaller pre-installed will activate that. We believe that the hit rate, so to speak, will be good and as I said, give us a better return than traditional user acquisition can do. Even though we do see very good returns on traditional user acquisition, we think this is a very beneficial step for us.
Okay, thank you. I recall about sort of three months ago when you talked about the Q3 results, you were talking about the difficulty it is to find enough right people to be able to spend a lot more on things like user acquisition and marketing. A, has that changed? And B, is it essentially that the pre-installs are the reasons why we will go from 50% EBITDA margin in Q4 last year to a lower number this year in order to sort of square that up with your longer term EBITDA margin guidance?
Yes. As I said, we will increase our investments in user acquisition, including pre-loads and marketing by a factor of two to three this year versus last year. That will definitely have an impact, yes. Obviously we do that in order to increase our long-term growth. Finding the right people, though, is still very much of a challenge, not only for user acquisition, but generally speaking, the people that we need in order to continue to build this business. It is a very challenging task to find the right competencies that we need. We look all over the planet and then we bring them into our offices because finding them locally is often turning out to be too difficult.
Just to add to that.
Right.
Just, sorry.
Sorry.
Just to add to that, I think the hiring plans we have for this year is to prepare us for next year, basically. Just to mention, since you mentioned the hiring plans in combination of OEM deals, this is actually one of the great hires we did when building out the partnership team, where we hired a fantastic person who brought in people around himself to actually make these deals happen as well. For us, it's not about the amount of people, but rather the quality and the having the best people. Given that we are just a bit above 300 people, but serving over 300 million users is quite staggering, and that's something we're proud of. We'll continue to scale our business.
That's great. Thank you both very much. Again, congratulations to the entire team.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are currently no further questions on the phone, so I'll hand the floor back to our speakers.
We actually have some questions from the webcast that has come in by email, and the first set is from Pontus Wachtmeister at SEB, who wanted you to perhaps elaborate a little bit more on the CPM impressions and if there is any seasonality. I think maybe we covered that, but if you wanna add something else. Can you give us more details on Truecaller for Business on number of customers, average revenue per user levels or churn? The third question is how render rates are developing.
Yeah, I mean, on the CPM levels, the seasonality that we see is that when there are certain festive seasons, the demand always increases. When demand increases, CPM level goes up. As I also said, it's a mix of many other things like direct sales, how many ads that we actually want to serve our customers and so forth. This is, you know, in some way it's an art, so we're not super stuck on delivering a high CPM level, but rather high quality, great yields, but also great revenues in the end. This is something, you know, that we can adjust basically on the go, where we adapt it depending on the, you know, which season we're in.
When it comes to our user base and our growth, we don't really see much of a seasonality or the usage of it, basically. Truecaller is a product you need every single day, basically. Sorry, Annika, what was the other question?
Yeah. There were questions on Truecaller for Business. If you can give any details on the number of customers and how it develops, the ARPU levels or the churn?
Yeah.
how render rates are developing.
Yeah, on the Truecaller for Business, we don't want to go too much into the details of it. What I can share is that, you know, during this year, we've, as I said, surpassed over 1,000 large enterprise customers, and also over 90% of them are still with us and retained. The churn is actually extremely low if you compare it to many other businesses. For us right now, we're pricing it in a way where we can actually land grab and win as many customers as possible, but at the same time not give the product away for free. We believe that, you know, focusing on growth and delivering a great experience to our customers is more important than delivering high revenue numbers or ARPU in the short term.
Great. We have a number of questions also from Johan Berglund. These are also related to Truecaller for Business. If we can say anything about how our business to business performs compared to our competitors or peers. If we can elaborate a little bit on the gross margin in Truecaller for Business, if it's perhaps higher or if there's a difference compared to the rest of the business. Do we see any significant impact on user engagement overall following the Truecaller for Business?
Yeah
growth?
What we can see on the user engagement side is that people actually really appreciate this feature because it gives them more information about the businesses they communicate with and the reason to why. It also gives them a lot of safety that they know. I had one user in Florida calling me three weeks back who's a retired 75-year-old man. He got scammed a couple of weeks earlier on $3,500 because someone called him and claimed to be from the medical insurance company and said the bill wasn't paid. For him, his medicine is super critical, and he needed to he couldn't afford losing that, so he paid this instead to these scammers. After that, of course, he became a user of Truecaller.
I think the use cases are, and the benefit for these businesses, for these consumers to actually feel safe, that these are the real businesses they are communicating with is super valuable. When we look at other peers, there are some smaller competitors in the industry. I'm not sure exactly how they're pricing themselves towards the other, but I do know one thing, and that is who actually owns the end, the last mile experience. In our case, we have a product that people install on their phone, that 300 million people use it and have installed it on their phone.
We control the UX, the UI, and what we want to deliver to the consumers and offer to the businesses, while some of these other competitors, or actually all of them, don't own the UI, the product on the device side. It's actually built in or through the carriers and so forth. I think owning end to end and owning the last mile experience is super valuable long term because we're not in control of you know, the distribution of carriers or you know, preloads like built-in preloads into the operating system. I think that's very important for us long term.
Great.
Then quickly on the gross margin for Truecaller for Business, we have very little or almost zero internal cost of goods sold. The cost of goods sold that we recognize in the Truecaller for Business is related to partners that we work with. As Alan said, that will be one important factor for our continuing growth and we do see that will increase the number of partners we work with and how much work they do for us. That will also gradually increase the cost of goods sold and take down the gross margin. It's still in an early stage and have no significant impact on the overall gross margin.
Good. Andreas Vesterberg has a few questions on the-
Linear or predictable as, you know, one might think because Truecaller is a brand that people recognize, and they install it by searching for Truecaller or being recommended by friends. As I mentioned before, you know, a big chunk of our growth came at the end of the quarter, which is why the average looks a bit lower. I think it's, you know, it's not fair to look at the numbers quarter by quarter because this is organic and for sure we have not penetrated the market. I think we have a long way to go, not only in India, but everywhere.
Good. On that note, Andreas is also asking about South America that we haven't spoken so much about before, but we seem to see good growth potential there. Could we say anything about the kind of potential we see and when we expect it to materialize?
Yeah. What we usually do when it comes to growth is that, we let it grow organically. We let the data become so good that people start to share it with their friends and tell their friends how great the service is. And that phase, as we call it, high growth phase, we've passed that in many markets in Latin America, such as Colombia, Chile, Peru, and so forth. And all that growth is actually coming in organically without us doing anything. And I think an easy way to sort of verify what I'm saying is to just look at the App Annie, just look at Twitter, and you will see during certain hours of the day and depending on which time zone you're on, you will see that tweets starts coming in in Spanish and Portuguese.
Where we are right now in terms of data accuracy and the organic growth, we've sort of hit the tipping point where we can start boosting this through user acquisition to grow it faster than the organic way. You can't do that until the market has reached a certain maturity. That is happening right now, which is also why we've started to focus some of our investments on the user acquisition side in some of these Latin American markets such as Colombia.
Great. One last question from Andreas Vesterberg is regarding ad impressions and the inventory, if we feel that we have optimized this so that we're done or do we have further potential in terms of, these two factors?
Yeah, it's a good question. Today we're serving around 7 billion ad impressions on a daily basis. I would say we're far from done with optimization. It's an ongoing thing that can never be perfect, and that's what our ad ops team are focusing on and working on. Having that said, there are also other opportunities when it comes to opening up more inventory, but we're doing things in a certain speed and pace that makes sense for us.
Great. Filip Helmroth is also wondering about average return on ad spend and how this has developed over time.
Yes.
Do we feel confident in the numbers we've named earlier that we have 1-month payback in India and three to four months in the U.S., for example?
Yes, we're seeing the same trends. We did expect that number to change a bit the more we scaled it up. But so far we're still on the same ballpark. Just to have it said as well, when we do these investments in user acquisition, we want to see some sort of a profitability during the user's lifetime. We're not in the business of wasting money and just walking away. We want to see, you know, this business grow on all lines basically, and we'll continue to see Truecaller being a profitable business.
Perfect. One last question from the webcast is from Ramil Koria at SEB.
Yep.
The interpretation I have made from pre-integrated Truecaller installs based on previous communication from you is that engagement levels are lower with customers funneled through that channel. Is that fair to assume it will be this time around as well, or will the requirement to install something lead to high-intent users being converted instead of a broader base?
Yeah. We did preloads in the past, this was in 2015. What Ramil and I talked about a couple of months back when we discussed this was the activation rate is not 100%. It's much lower. We do expect to see an activation rate that is fairly okay. However, the good thing here is that we pay per activation in the most cases. We've also seen that combining preloads where we pay on activation with advertisement to target these users increases the activation rate quite significantly, and also increases the engagement. The reason for that is because the user don't need to download the app, when they get, you know, when they click on the ad, it actually opens the app instead then, and they can start registering themselves.
What Ramil and I talked about before was not engagement in the product itself, but activations. As I said, most of these preloads are activation rates, so we only pay for these things. Doing it in a combination I think will be really good. We've also this time worked with the OEM partners to make sure that Truecaller becomes as visible as possible on the first screen when you set up your device for the first time.
Okay, great. Nothing more from the webcast.
Okay. Yeah. Actually, we do have one further question coming through on the phone as I say this. It's a follow-up from John Karidis of Numis. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you, and I'm sorry to have a second bite of the cherry. I recall about three months ago, it was said that there aren't many sort of mini Truecallers to acquire in other markets. I just sort of wonder, and of course it's an awesome lovely problem to have, but at what point will you say, "Well, you know, we're significantly under-leveraged," given everything that you discussed today and the EBITDA conversion rate to cash, or have your M&A or your acquisition opportunities changed, or are they changing? Thank you.
No, I would say we are far, far cry from that point. There are, as you say, not that many mini Truecallers out there, but there are a few of them that we would be interested in looking at. We have quite a few inbounds, people that have realized that we are listed and they're not, we are large and they are not, and they are potential acquisition targets for us. There are also technology companies. CallHero was a technology acquisition. There are other potential technology acquisitions out there. Some of them could be quite a bit more expensive than CallHero, but we would need more resources in order to acquire them.
I think we're a long way from a point where we feel that we are under-leveraged. That may happen. We have, as you know, a very, very strong cash flow, but we're not there yet.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, John.
Thank you. There are no further questions from the phones at this time.
Okay. I guess we have one last slide, which is the thank you slide. Just wanna wrap this up together with Odd and say big thanks to all our users, of course our employees and our partners for a phenomenal year, and we're looking forward to, yeah, killing it in 2022. Thank you everyone for listening in.