Welcome, everyone. I'm Alan Mamedi, and I'm the CEO and the co-founder of Truecaller. And with me, I have our CFO, Odd Bolin. We're here to announce our year-end report, covering the fourth quarter of 2024. Today, we'll start with overall highlights from the quarter and then walk you through our financial performance in detail. We will then cover some developments on the product side before wrapping up and opening up for questions. So let's get started with the highlights of the quarter. I'm pleased to report that our user base continued to grow during the quarter. We closed Q4 with an average of 374 million monthly active users, an increase of 11%. Average daily active users grew to 305 million, an increase of 12%.
This brings us to a strong DAU to MAU ratio of 81%, and we closed the quarter at SEK 425 million in net sales, a 4% decrease compared to the same period in 2022. Our net sales results continue to be impacted by the slowdown in demand in advertising, but we see consumer subscription and Truecaller for Business continue to grow at a good pace. That said, we continue to operate with adjusted EBITDA landing at SEK 169 million at the end of the quarter, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%. We continue to have a very strong cash flow, with SEK 229 million in net cash from operating activities before tax payments.
We continue to grow our user base, and in the fourth quarter, we achieved the milestone of hitting 300 million daily active users. Our user growth continued, continues to develop very well. During the quarter, we saw higher relative growth in regions outside of India and the Middle East. Having that said, we're proud to have reached a new all-time high in our Net Promoter Score in India, ending the quarter at an NPS of 62. We're also pleased with the development of our premium business. The number of paying subscribers increased by 19% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022, which is almost 2 times the rate of our total user base relative growth rate. In terms of where this growth is coming from, we saw notable traction on subscriptions in India, as well as on iPhone users globally.
Truecaller for Business developed at a good pace throughout the year, and the fourth quarter was the strongest quarter for Truecaller for Business in terms of both the revenue and the addition of new customers. We continue to see healthy demand for our Verified Business and the Business Messaging offerings. Our newest enterprise product, Risk Intelligence, was also strengthened with the integration of TrustCheckr, which we acquired during the quarter. We will cover this in more details in the coming slides, but on our user growth, the number of users is steadily growing. We closed Q4 at an average of 374 million monthly active users, which is up by 36 million from the same period last year, or, as I said before, an 11% increase. Our daily active user base grew at a slightly faster rate.
We ended the quarter with 305 million monthly active users, 12% increase from last year. India and the Middle East are regions that we have penetrated fairly well, and as I mentioned earlier, we saw higher relative growth in countries outside of these two markets. Majority of our user growth is still driven by organic growth, but the fact that we see faster growth rates in other markets is something we see as an indication that our investment in user acquisition are starting to pay off. As mentioned in Q3, a lower growth compared to the very strong development that we saw in Q2 and Q3 was expected, but we saw user growth start to pick up again towards the end of Q4, and we've begun 2024 user growth on a strong note.
That said, we continue to see strong engagement with 81% of monthly active users using Truecaller on a daily basis. We see this as an indicator of our product stickiness and the growing relevance of our services. Now over to Odd.
Thank you. So, now it's time to look a little bit deeper into our financial performance during the quarter. As usual, we start with our revenue, revenue development. Our net sales, like Alan said, decreased by 4% compared to the same quarter last year. The net sales for ads declined by 12, 12%, while our recurring revenue streams continued to grow at a very material rate. Consumer subscriptions grew by 23%, and Truecaller for Business with 42%, so this strong growth continued. Now, let's look a little bit in more detail on our three different revenue streams, and let's start with the largest one, the ads. It is clear that 2023 was a challenging year for ads compared to 2022.
In Q4, we saw a small seasonal uptick, from Diwali, that happened in October, but the general demand was lower than in 2022. This holds true for all players working with the third-party programmatic ads, as far as we know. The decline has been obvious and has multiple reasons. First of all, global macro and inflation, which impact overall spending, even among Indian advertisers. Focus of advertisers that used to drive up prices and demand, for example, risk capital-backed companies, have significantly lowered their spend as they have been forced to focus on profit instead of growth. This has been a global shift and has also been clear in India, as in many Western markets.
During times when demand decreases, suppliers as ourselves have increased supply to counteract the decreased demand in order to safeguard revenue. On a market level, this has further decreased pricing. Stable spenders that can then choose to buy as many impressions as they have done historically, but at lower price, or spend the same amount and get more impressions. We continue to improve our platform through our tech improvements and the growth of the user base. We continue to optimize for revenue per user rather than pricing or fill rates. Particularly seen in this quarter, where we choose to increase impressions at the cost of average prices, but with the benefit of reaching higher revenues than we would otherwise would have. We also continue to increase impressions available to monetize within the existing slots.
These improvements help us to marginally now, but more importantly, when demand bounces back, they will generate a significantly higher return, significantly higher return than what we saw before this slowdown in demand. We, at this point, don't see any material uptick in underlying demand, and we continue to focus on factors that we can influence, ensuring that we are in the best possible position once the macro situation starts improving again. In the near term, we do not see any signs of a demand recovery, but things can change fast in the advertising business. When looking at our stable subscription revenues, you can see that we grow our revenue by 23% compared to the same quarter last year. There's a sequential growth in revenues also continues.
The relative growth in the number of premium users is almost twice the relative growth in monthly active users, which is to us very encouraging. Our strategy to add more functionality through the cloud telephony platform continues to pay off, with contributions coming from the AI features, Truecaller Assistant, and call recording, which yields much higher subscription prices. An important driver of revenues on subscription is our growing footprint on iOS, where the conversion rates and willingness to pay is substantially higher than on Android. Truecaller for Business had a great quarter and continues to grow fast. Remember that this is, this revenue stream started in 2021, and in Q4 accounted for 12% of total net sales, and also grew 42% compared to Q4 2022.
We see many positive things happening here: net additions of customers, longer contracts, and higher pricing plans. In 2024, we will continue to focus on upselling on the existing client base, as well as growing further. An important contributor to growth in this segment during 2023 and going forward has been Business Messaging, where we have signed a new agreement with Tanla, our partner in India, that further will grow volumes and revenues here. Our first customers for the new product lines within fraud prevention, fraud protection, and credit assessment have come on board and are expected to add revenues from the second quarter this year and onwards. While ads has higher price volatility and cyclicality by its nature, we have, over the last years, continued to focus on growing our two recurring revenue streams, subscriptions and Truecaller Business.
Here we have a strong momentum with sequential growth every quarter, and we are early in the development of their respective offerings. In 2024, we have a lot in the pipeline when it comes to becoming more advanced in our subscription offering, both when it comes to features and packaging and targeting, as well as looking into potential partnerships with, for example, telecom partners and where we see potential in increased pricing. For our software as a service offering, Truecaller Business, the offering is still young. We have passed 2,500 enterprises for Verified Businesses, but the potential is much larger. We will continue to grow the customer base, but also to upsell on the current base and develop new products and features.
We have a low involuntary churn, and we look forward to what our Risk Intelligence solution and what our improved Business Messaging solution will add in the future. Today, the two combined recurring revenue streams grow with more than 30% and constitute about 25% of total revenues. The ambition going forward is straightforward, continued growth and increasing revenue, recurring revenue streams, the share of their share of the total revenues, and thereby adding stability and diversification to our business. Our gross margin development continues to be very stable, and this quarter we had a small uptick, given the efficiency work that has been done for costs related to servers, hosting and verification costs. Now, let's turn to cost development.
As usual, costs are seasonally a bit higher in Q4 with some annual adjustments, but overall, as you know, we have been working on efficiency in technology and staffing in other areas, given the overall macro situation that we see. The incentive cost is low this quarter due to the fact that we are not reaching certain performance criteria in the 2021 long-term incentive program. Efficiency is the key in delivering solid margins, and Truecaller has a very high operating leverage. I think we have done a pretty good job here in 2023 in managing our overall costs. As stated many times before, we will not hold back on investments when we see long-term benefit for the company and the shareholders.
Therefore, we are now doing selective, concentrated, and focused long-term investments with clearly measurable KPIs for each investment, which in the near term will increase our operating expenses, and thereby, in the shorter term, will see impact our margin. The investments, which Alan will come back to, are made to boost growth in targeted geographical areas where we see long-term revenue potential and ability to further boost our user reve-- user base, as well as the continued diversification of our revenue streams, and also the geographical mix. The investments are easy and quick for us to turn on and off, depending on where we see the best results. As we have previously stated, our tax rate is a combination of the Swedish corporate tax and the Indian tax rate, and that we have expected the tax rate to increase somewhat over time.
This quarter, the tax rate was approximately 26%, and year to date is about 25%. In the quarter, we also reported a 40% EBITDA margin, and for the full year, the margin is at, came in at 41%. I believe this is a great achievement, given the stable or slightly decreasing revenues and our continued investments in our product offering. Compared to 2024, Q4 2022, our EBITDA grew by 24%, and earnings per share increased by 43%. Our cash flow was also strong, and we continue to be in a favorable position with no debt and SEK 1.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, as we continue to generate cash at about the same pace as we have been doing, buybacks.
During the quarter, we continued doing these buybacks, and over the last five quarters, we have bought back shares for SEK 842 million, and also done smaller acquisitions, but thanks to our strong cash flow and profitability, we have been able to keep the equivalent amount of cash in the balance sheet. With our strong financials, the board has now decided to ask the next AGM in May to cancel the repurchased B shares, which, as of now, is about 6.7% of the outstanding capital, and also ask the AGM for a new renewed mandate to have the option to continue to buy back shares.
Now, let's look then at how well we track compared to our financial targets that were set by the board in conjunction with the IPO in 2021. The medium-term financial targets were set in a different economic climate. Now, in the current macro climate, the revenue growth target, as is, as stated previously, clearly less relevant when evaluated on an annual basis. However, even though the financial targets are based on average results during the 2021-2024 period, we and the board still believe they make sense also on an annual basis, but in a more normal macro environment, which is not the case right now.
So as mentioned in the last reports, with a shift in macro and with the outstanding performance we had in 2021, 2022, and 2022, 2023 was a more challenging year on a revenue growth basis. But with that summary, I will hand things back to Alan.
Cool. Thank you, Odd. Thanks to our focus on cost optimization that Odd mentioned, throughout the year, we were able to reinvest our, in our product and make sure that we continue to serve our users' evolving needs. Now, let's cover some of the exciting things that our teams have worked on, to develop an even better product experience. The three areas we will cover are the core product offering, Truecaller Premium, and our ad tech capabilities, and Truecaller for Business. We continue to invest in the core product to give users the best experience possible. We continue to prioritize performance, optimization, and improve the technical side of it. This is especially important as we grow our user base, as we want to make sure that our product works smoothly on all devices, including lower-end phones.
Ongoing improvements to the core product have yielded positive results, and by the end of the quarter, we saw app engagement grow by 21% compared to Q4 2022. This helps us grow all monetization engines, such as subscription conversion, ads impressions, and so on. We continue to build out our machine learning capabilities, not only to strengthen caller ID and search, but also to improve experience in other parts of the offering. One of these initiatives is our AI chatbot, which we went live with in Q4. We've already seen the volume of support tickets drop by almost half. This means that we will be able to continue growing our user base without the need to grow our support team in the same speed.
On the theme of machine learning, we continue to improve our data quality through investments in our AI identity technology, which leverages machine learning to provide users with the most relevant information about unknown numbers in real time. We're now identifying spammers even more accurately and are flagging over a million additional extra spam calls every single day. We continue to invest in building out our fraud intelligence capabilities. In early Q4, as I mentioned, we acquired TrustCheckr, a service that verifies customer information and detects fraudulent activities. We're very proud that we have completed the integration of their models into our app during the quarter as well. This improves our ability to detect suspicious numbers and alert users in real time. We've also beefed up other initiatives to stay ahead of fraudsters.
We continue to proactively inform users about ongoing scam trends, and during the fourth quarter, we focused on ensuring that the alerts we deliver are locally relevant in terms of content as well as the languages that we offer.... We see that the trend of fraudulent activities on mobile phones is becoming a more common problem globally. What makes this worse is that fraudsters are getting smarter and getting creative with how they execute their scams. This is why we're ramping up our efforts to fight this problem more aggressively. I want to show you a sneak peek of something in the works that we are very excited about. With a combination of our data, our cloud telephony platform, and the way we actually use AI, we will soon offer something like this, and we'll play this video for you now.
A new line of defense for Truecaller users: real-time AI-powered fraud protection. Here's how it works. First, add the AI to the call with the tap of this button. It will listen and analyze the call for scam and fraud patterns.
Hello?
This is Acme Customer Support. We see some unusual activity on your account. Can you share your login code, so we can check that for you?
If it detects either of this, Truecaller will warn the user in real time.
This is a Truecaller alert. We detected a pattern of known fraud in this call. Please be careful.
Great. When it comes to phone fraud, there's one thing that's always there, no matter what, and that's the human voice. It's like our own personal fingerprint. This is where voice biometric and sentiment verification comes in. Instead of waiting for something fishy to happen, this tech keeps an ear out for imposters in real time. It's like having a virtual bouncer at the door, basically, making sure to always keep you protected. And the more calls that our service can protect, the better it becomes at learning the different patterns and how they change in behavior. And in a world where cybercrime is running rampant, having super secure and lightning-fast ways to verify authenticity and purpose is a must.
We're building on products right now to both combat fake voices and to detect fraudulent patterns, and we'll make them available to all our users where it's possible. Now, moving on to our progress for the product on iPhone. As our base of iPhone users grows, we, of course, continue to invest in making sure that our Truecaller experience on iPhone is top-notch, to ensure the best search and caller ID experience in all markets. iPhone has previously been under-monetized platform for us, but our investments in the platform have driven substantial progress in revenue growth on both the free and the paid version of the app. On the free version, we have improved our ads monetization by introducing inventory in new formats.
This has scaled very well and has started to pay off, as we saw advertising revenue from iPhone grow by 76%, compared to Q4 last year. On the subscription side, we've been working on some targeted monetization initiatives that are also starting to show promising results. In the fourth quarter, we saw an increase in our iPhone subscriber base, which grew by 41%, compared to last year. Recurring revenue from iPhone users is getting a nice boost as well, especially in markets where pricing works in our favor. On the subscriptions, product, more broadly, meaning for paying users on both Android and iPhone, we continue to invest in developing the offering to ensure that we give subscribers the most value for their experience. We continue to improve the Assistant, Truecaller's personal call screening and virtual assistant.
In the fourth quarter, we rolled out some major upgrades, thanks to the integration of large language models into the premium experience. This lays down the groundwork for deeper integration and even smarter features. During the quarter, we also took the call recording feature to the next level by integrating LLMs. This model or these models work behind the scene to transcribe your calls, and then condense them into precise summaries and bullet points. It's like having your own personal note-taker, but way, way smarter. With this feature, you can instantly capture the essence of your calls, turning lengthy discussions into bite-sized insights. It even generates subject lines for ease references. Over time, the integration of LLMs into Truecaller's Assistants could enable other exciting use cases, for example, live language translation during calls. Truecaller Assistant and call recording are now available in seven markets.
The response from subscribers in these markets has been very encouraging, and so we will continue to focus on improving the offering and bringing them to even more markets in the coming months, much faster. Further supporting our subscription growth, we continue to build out our user monetization engine, our scalable in-house tool that helps us segment and target users for better chances of conversion. In the fourth quarter, we expanded the capabilities of the engine to focus not just on conversion, but also to improve retention. In the fourth quarter, we witnessed a notable increase in conversion and saw revenue grow by 23%, and the subscriber base grew by 90%, compared to Q4 last year, as mentioned earlier.
On the ad tech side, we continue to build out our capabilities in order to deliver an even better experience, while providing better monetization opportunities for the long term. We continue to invest in our in-house ad server, with a focus on evolving into a comprehensive full-stack advertising solution partner that caters to a wider range of use cases across funnel. A growing focus area for us is our capabilities in performance ads, which helps advertisers improve return on their investments for different outcomes. For example, driving app installs, closing sale transactions, and capturing prospect leads. As we grow in this area, we will be able to offer more customized solutions to help advertisers solve their specific business needs. Our investments in these capabilities have scaled well, and we've already delivered meaningful impact.
For example, Games24x7, one of India's leading gaming companies, engaged us to support their user acquisition efforts during the fourth quarter. With a focus on driving lower funnel marketing objectives, we offered custom targeting, consistent optimization, and customized creatives. This ultimately resulted in over 50,000 installs, translating into 2x growth as compared to previous campaigns executed prior to our partnership. So this is fantastic, and these are the initiatives that we continue to work on, and we'll continue to invest in these initiatives, which will improve our effectiveness and monetization potential, which will put us in a very strong position in the long term. Truecaller for Business developed at a good pace throughout the year and this quarter. We grew not only our revenue, but also portfolio.
As Odd mentioned, this quarter, we reached a milestone of serving over 2,500 large business customers. What's noteworthy is that the shift towards long-term plans, indicating the stickiness and continued relevance of our offering. This trend is reflected not just in India, but also with the majority of our business customers in other markets, also committing to long-term plans, which is signaling a robust growth in markets beyond India. Demand for our flagship product, Verified Business Caller ID, continues to develop very well, particularly among large enterprises. We also broadened our network of reseller partners. We have previously only worked with CPaaS resellers, but in the fourth quarter, we expanded our network to include telecom operators as well. So with Tata Tele as our first Verified Business reseller in space, we're very excited about what's about to come.
Business messaging, our service delivered in partnership with Tanla Platforms, helps businesses distribute messages to end consumers in a more reliable and cost-efficient way. We saw Business Messaging scale significantly throughout the year. In the fourth quarter alone, we delivered over 2 billion messages throughout the platform, which is over 100% growth in volume compared to the same period last year. The success of this partnership has, as mentioned, further strengthened our collaboration with Tanla Platforms, meaning that we can expect Business Messaging volumes to grow as we have the opportunity to serve other partners and business customers via Tanla Platforms' network. We also continue to enhance the offering, itself. So in the fourth quarter, we fully integrated rich media capabilities, which enable more dynamic interactions with end users. This is expected to drive a more relevant experience for users, as well as increased engagement for the businesses.
Last quarter, we talked about the Risk Intelligence, our newest offering for businesses. Risk Intelligence is a scoring engine, as mentioned, that uses our own machine learning magic to assess the risk associated with a phone number. In the fourth quarter, we have been beefed up the effectiveness of our risk assessment, making it even more powerful and informative for business customers. Right now, our Risk Intelligence offering is available to a few business customers, who are part of our early access program. The early results from our pilots are encouraging, and we've already secured two deals before we fully commercialize the product in the first quarter.
Now to wrap things up, we continue to grow our user base, as mentioned, and saw this development very well, not least in markets outside of our core markets. Our advertising business remains affected by macro conditions, as well, as the impact of an increased digital ad inventory in the Indian market. We've seen promising results from the initiatives we've invested in on both the supply and demand side, and we see great potential in more direct sales, which makes us optimistic for a strong recovery when conditions finally will improve. Our recurring revenue from both subscription and Truecaller business is developing very well, and we continue to innovate our offering in both areas in order to serve the growing subscriber base, as well as the evolving needs of enterprise customers.
Quickly, I also would like to highlight that during the fourth quarter, a new telecom legislation was adopted in India, where previous provisions that would legislate a requirement for telecom operators to display the caller's name were removed. Together with the decision on the new data protection legislation taken in 2023, the new regulatory frameworks within which we will operate in our largest market have now been established, creating continued favorable conditions for us to grow our business in India. Overall, I'm proud of what we have achieved this quarter, despite a continued challenging operating environment. We continue to be in a good position with solid financials, strong cash flow, and strong organic growth.
Our strong position and our continued growth means that we'll still continue to make strategic investments, and even in a time of uncertainty, we'll continue to take advantage of our strong position and find opportunities to continue growing. I will also share a quick update on the start of 2024. We had a strong start in terms of user growth this year. We expect to continue to see organic growth as well, and also expect our investments in the acquisition and preloads that will continue to ramp up. In terms of advertising market, we expect the muted demand and therefore lower pricing in India to continue in the near term.
Other markets are off to a strong start, but given the scale of our presence in India, we do not expect this to offset the trend that we're seeing in India in the near term. But on the enterprise side, we're very pleased that our collaboration with Tanla is about to be extended, and we expect to see growth in this area in terms of both volume and revenue, as the partnership continues. We continue to work hard on premium offering, and we'll continue to expand the Assistant and call recording products to other markets.
As Odd mentioned, the board has also decided to ask the AGM in May to cancel the bought back shares, which is currently 6.7% of the capital, and ask for a new mandate to be able to buy back after the AGM. But our focus in 2024 is to continue to grow our user base, to further invest in AI-based fraud prevention, and to increase the share of recurring revenues in our revenue mix. To achieve medium-term recurring revenue growth, we are doing targeted growth investments at the beginning of this year, as Odd mentioned.
These efforts have already begun to yield positive results, such as an 8% increase in subscription revenues in the U.S. in January 2024 compared to the previous month, and an increase of more than 50% compared to January 2023. The investments we're making will have a short-term negative impact on our profitability, but are important to broaden our recurring revenue base and strengthen our position, both geographically and product-wise. Our goal is to achieve a balance between good profitability and growth of predictable revenues over time. With our robust financial position, we expect to continue our long-term growth initiatives while having the opportunity to continue share repurchase. As always, a big thanks to our users, the great partners that we work with, and the phenomenal Truecaller team across the world. Now we're happy to take your questions. Thank you.
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.
Good afternoon, Alan and Odd. Thanks for taking my questions. Alan, first to you on growth. And I appreciate the final comments you made on some, you know, outlook for 2024. But if we assume then that CPM falls a little bit more in the first quarter, then you have consistent trends in business and subscribers, it sounds like, then this positive organic growth you are talking about, you should see that already in the first quarter. Is that a fair assumption?
Not sure I followed. Can you repeat that?
You gave us a little bit of a summary here at the end-
Yeah
... of your presentation, saying you expect to see organic growth, and to see strong user growth, and other markets are off to a good start.
Yes.
You expect a lot of good things from the business side and so on.
Yes.
So if we assume and try to blend all of this, you also said CPM could fall a bit more, but is it a fair assumption to assume that the growth will be positive already in the first quarter of 2024?
On the user growth, is that what you're referring to?
Revenues, group revenues.
Uh, re-
I think that would be premature to say. We are still not halfway through the quarter, and there are a lot of things that can change either way. The advertising market is very fast-moving. We do see continued very good momentum in Truecaller business and subscriptions, but we are not at a position where we would like to give you any sort of guidance for the quarter, as usual, so we'll have to pass on that one. Sorry, Predrag.
Could you quantify maybe then a little bit more on the investments for Q1? Maybe walk us through the balance here. So you will take up some cost, but at the same time, that could potentially lead to you growing a little bit more, which improves then the margin. So how should we think about this phasing for Q1 and Q2? And you did mention it might come at the expense of margin, but how much we can get-
Well, we don't-
... clarity there?
We don't give you any more details than that, but what we can say is that these are investments that are aiming at short, medium, and long-term improvements, and advantages for the business and the shareholders. Some of that will materialize fast. Like, Alan pointed out, we have seen a considerable growth in a number of subscribers in the U.S. month-over-month. Those are the sort of short-term effects that we hope to see, continue seeing, and then there are medium-term effects that will have more of an impact on the profit and loss account. And then, of course, there are long-term effects that we believe will have a strong impact on our strategic positioning. Now, we haven't given any details on the investments we are making.
Apart from that, we are making them in the markets and in product lines that we see very considerable potential in. What we can say, though, is that we give you this heads-up for the same reason we gave you a heads-up in Q3, in 2022, when we said we were gonna do certain marketing investments in Q4. We wouldn't do that unless we felt that it was a reasonable thing to do, given the amount that we are planning on investing or that we are investing as we speak.
I think the big difference this time is that now that it's very targeted performance marketing campaigns, we can track these in real time and see the effect of them. And hopefully, the ambition is, of course, to provide a premium product to our users that they will keep for a very long time, which makes the revenues compound, you know, in the future. So that's the investments, the bets we're doing, and obviously, you know, it would have been fantastic to do these investments in a more in a better ads environment to not affect other financial metrics. But we think that there's an opportunity here that we want to do.
Given the company is in such a great shape, with a strong cash flow, we believe that this is the right thing to do to give back to the shareholders in the long term.
I know, for sure, I agree, and I think it makes perfect sense. Can I just ask a final one on TrustCheckr?
Yeah.
I think that product on paper, it seems to suit a lot of your business customers, and if you could reason a little bit about the interest here from your customer base, what's the pipeline like, and so on. Are these fast sales? Have you seen that already in the fourth quarter? Is something that builds up gradually over the year? You know, generally speaking, that would be interesting to know.
Yeah. No, it's we do have an exciting pipeline, I should say. But the sort of audience of customers is smaller than what we see on Truecaller Business with verified calls, but the monetization potential on this product is much higher. So, you know, you can get fewer customers, but make significantly more in revenues. And it's an early product, but it's already, you know, we're already getting good signals from customers who wants to sign up. And I think, just like you rightfully said, many of our Truecaller Business customers and actually advertisers are in need of something like this. So it makes a lot of sense for us.
But we shouldn't expect, you know, 2,500 customer, large enterprise customers, as we have on Truecaller Business, with the verified calls. A smaller size, but, higher revenue per customer.
Yeah. Super. Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Stefan Gauffin from DNB. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello. Thanks for taking my questions. If I could follow up on the previous questions. So you stated a 50% increase in user subscription revenues in the U.S., January versus January 2023. Could you just provide some comparison numbers for Q4 so that we can see what kind of a step up this represent? And then secondly, you talk about regular user growth picking up as well. So could you just give some magnitude if we compare Q4 versus Q2, Q3? Should we look more at the level that we saw in Q2, Q3? Thank you.
Let's start with the second one. The user growth that we see is strong, generally speaking, but it varies a little bit up and down. After there were strong Q2 and Q3 last year, we indicated that we believed Q4 was gonna be slightly lower. Q1 has started out very well. It is a little bit premature to say how the quarter is gonna end. There is nothing at this point indicating that the growth rate that we see right now is about to change. But those are the variations we see are within the normal variations that we expect quarter- over- quarter. So, we had a slightly slower Q4, now we believe we are at a growth rate that we that is a normal growth rate for us.
I think, thanks for the question, Stefan. On the first question regarding the subscriber base on iPhone in the U.S., you know, we, we started to, to do these performance marketing activities late Q4. So, you know, the comparisons are, are not really relevant in that sense. But otherwise, you would probably see now single-digit growth or something like that without these initiatives, or like low tens.
Annually, that is.
Yes. Okay, thank you. That's very helpful.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Akhil Dattani from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. I've got a couple, please, if I can. Can I maybe start by digging a little bit further into your advertising revenue trends? You've obviously highlighted strong ongoing customer growth on MAU and DAU, so I think the momentum is clearly still very impressive. But as you've highlighted, the issue more seems to be around CPM, and I was interested in some of the comments you've made around some of the macro pressures, but also some of the supply-driven structural issues you're talking about. So maybe if you could help us better understand what you think the mix is between those two effects.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that, if I look at industry data, it seems that globally, ad revenue trends have rebounded strongly over the last couple of quarters, so we're back to double-digit global ad growth on digital platforms. The challenge is, obviously, there's not a huge amount of Indian-specific data. The only data I have seen is from Affle, and Affle seems to be talking about pressure related to huge supply increases in the Indian market, and they seem to be saying that's more the issue. So I guess I'd love to understand better from you how you think about that mix. Is it more macro? Is it more structural? And if it's structural and supply-driven, what can you do to weather those supply-related issues, just to better understand what you can do to reestablish top-line growth in the ad business?
So that's the first question. The second one, and I appreciate, obviously-
Akhil
... you're not guiding here today.
Akhil?
Yeah.
If you don't mind, let's answer them one by one, otherwise, we're gonna end up being super confused about your questions. So let's start with the first one, and then we can please go to the next one. Okay?
Yeah, that sounds good.
Good.
Cool. I can take it. So good question, Akhil. You know, I think there's no news that companies are, you know, focusing on reaching break even or profitability, which means that companies have taken down their, marketing spend, especially on the branding side, which, which has affected us. And there are also certain industries that have stopped advertising, you know, overall, which is also affecting the, the industry in general. Now, there are certain industries, like the FMCGs, that are still doing some branded advertising, but they're focusing on other channels, which are video, like type of channels. These are areas that we don't historically have had a big play in or any play at all.
So what we've done in the fourth quarter, which I mentioned in the letter, is that we've been elaborating a bit on this type of video ads format because we do see, you know, a CPM that is 10x higher. So there's still pretty good demand on that side. And that's what, you know, some of these other companies with video ads or video formats, you could say, that are helping them to drive the growth, basically. So that is one aspect of it that we've been working on, and hopefully, at some point, we'll see more of more product improvements that can generate a more natural way for us to actually display video ads. So we've done some of these experiments in the fourth quarter, as mentioned.
But in general, you know, when it comes to the regular type of ads, the banner type of ads, when we look at... You mentioned Affle, which is actually a very different business because they're on the other side of it, and most of their business is outside of India. But when we look at peers in our industry, like other consumer apps in India, they see a similar trend when it comes to this. And what we can do going forward is work closer with the agencies, work to win trust with some of these verticals, like the FMCGs, build out the natural type of engagement in our product to serve video ads, and also innovate more on the existing ad format that we have with the large advertisers.
Like, during Valentine's Day, this month, we actually did an interesting ad together with Amazon to drive more conversion. So we're working on these things while we do hope and expect the regular ads market to come back at some point. That's, you know, my assessment of it. And, as you rightfully mentioned, most of these consumer apps or products with similar ad formats like us in India, they're not public companies, so you won't get that type of information. But, you know, we have friends in the industry, and we speak with them to get an understanding of, you know, is it us, or is it the industry, or what is it actually?
There is more supply than there is demand, and that has been the case for quite some time, which is creating this Catch-22 for not just us, but also the Google and the Facebooks, where, you know, you increase inventory basically to compensate that.
... That's clear. Thanks, Alan. Can I just ask one quick follow-up before I get to my other question, which was just, you mentioned obviously video is one potential route to providing richer ads that could increase your CPM, and you mentioned, the CPM being 10 times higher. Given this oversupply issue, is that something that you're looking to, maybe reduce the total volume of ads you're pushing through, but creating richer ads that create much more CPM? And obviously, you've anecdotally given us a few data points, things you're doing, how quickly can you pivot the platform to do these sorts of things? How can we try and understand how quickly you can reshape, your strategy here?
Yeah. So, I mean, we're not really optimizing for CPM, but we're trying to find a fine balance here. But the things we're doing—so usually we have weekly releases, so we release new updates every week. So it can take us, you know, a couple of weeks before a new update has reached a couple of hundred million users. So it can go fairly quickly. And, you know, to give you an example of the things that we're experimenting with. So we know that in India, the willingness to pay for subscription services is quite low. It's, you know, around 0.5%, while in the U.S., it's double-digit percentage.
So we know that we have certain premium features that people might want, but they won't be able to pay for it for several reasons. For those users, we could have various incentive video ads, for example, where you can earn certain hours or days of premium offering. This is one example of the things that we're elaborating on. How quickly can we build out these functionalities? Can go fairly quickly. It won't happen, you know, in a month, due to the fact that we have release cycles and distribution and so forth, but fairly quickly, I would say.
Great.
I hope that explained.
Interesting. No, it does. It's very useful. Thank you. And then the last one, I guess, is probably quite hard for you to answer, but maybe I'll ask it anyway, which is just around the shape of 2024. Obviously, I appreciate you don't want to be drawn on quarterly guidance, which is understandable, but I guess I'm just trying to think big picture. If we look at where consensus is, consensus modeling, very low double-digit ad revenue growth for 2024 and established margins. I just wondered if maybe you could comment on some of the puts and takes, even if you don't want to necessarily comment too explicitly on those numbers. Just how should we try and think about what are the key moving parts to try and help us better on think about the 2024 numbers?
I'll hand it over to the bad cop here.
If you look at the recurring revenue streams, we don't see any reason to believe that the trend that we've been seeing lately is gonna change in any material way this year. Both the Truecaller business and the subscription business is reasonably predictable because the revenues are much more recurring than in the ads business. And we have nothing that indicates at this point that the positive trends that we've seen lately would change in any material way. The ads business is, of course, much more difficult. You all know probably by now, as well as we do, that visibility into the ads business is very low. It's a fast-moving business.
Investments come up and down, go up and come down very quickly, like we saw at the end of the first quarter of 2022. Most likely investments are whenever they come back, is gonna increase pretty much as quickly as they decrease them. But it is very difficult, or, I would say impossible, to know when that's gonna happen. Whenever we have a situation in India, where Indian companies in general, Indian companies that do digital advertising, feel that the inflationary pressure has not only stabilized and decreased, but become more predictable. And we all know that at this point, there are still some variation in the inflation trends that makes them slightly uncertain.
Whenever they can become more predictable, input prices become more predictable. I believe that we will see quite a few of these Indian potential customers to us, starting to invest again in advertising in a way that we don't see right now. But once again, when we-- when that will happen, I'm sorry, I don't-- we don't have a better insight than anyone else. We can speculate, but speculation doesn't... isn't of much use in a situation like this, so, we'll refrain from that. Cost-wise, the underlying costs that we have are stable and semi-stable costs in terms of employees, et cetera. Nothing dramatic is about to change there. We are very careful when it comes to recruitment, given the situation overall.
We don't refrain from doing certain critical recruitments, but we don't do any large numbers of new employees. We do, and we will continue as long as we see good returns, strategic growth investments, like we have spoken about during this call. We will continue to do them as long as they are useful for our shareholders, short, medium, and long term. That's the most detail I can give you, Akhil.
No, completely understood, and thanks both for your answers.
...As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hi. Thanks very much for taking my questions. Just firstly, on this extra performance-driven spend, I'm sorry, Odd, but we have to go back to our spreadsheets. So I just sort of wonder whether you can sort of put your bad cop hat down for a second and help us a little bit, please, with estimating what this is, the magnitude of this. I mean, for example, consensus expects other external costs to be up 26% in 2024. Do you think that estimate absorbs what you are planning to spend extra during the first half of 2024, please?
Well, first of all, talking about the strategic investments, growth investments we are doing, and we're evaluating them continuously. But as long as they keep giving us the results we're looking for, we are open to continuing them, as long as we feel they are useful for the company and for the shareholders. So there is no explicit time limit as to when we would stop doing those investments. Now, I'm not gonna comment on the percentage numbers, no matter how much you would like that, John.
I know your Excel sheets, and I'm not gonna be able to help you with the details, but let me put it this way: We did give the market a heads up in Q3 2022, that we were gonna do investments, and those were more temporary and investments of a different kind than what we do now. But we gave the market a heads up because we felt that was material enough to justify such a heads up, and we do give a heads up now, too.
Okay. Moving on, do you think that the gross profit margin that you've achieved in the fourth quarter is a good base for the full year 2024?
Say again, which margin?
Gross profit margin.
The gross profit, profit margin?
Yeah.
Um, yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, we did see a slight improvement last year because we managed to decrease. Primarily because we managed to decrease our verification costs for new users. We have implemented new channels or new ways of doing that verification. Those are not gonna change. Of course, there are always a possibility of unknown unknowns happening, but at this point, we don't see any reason to believe that the gross margin will change in any material way.
Okay. Thank you. Then the next one, I think you've introduced a third word to describe the impact on FX to sales. So it used to be minor and limited, and now you've included somewhat to this. So, I know you're guesstimating it by virtue of how the revenue model is, but can you give us an idea of understanding the sort of magnitude of the negative FX impact on sales in the fourth quarter, please?
Yes, that one isn't that difficult to actually ask, most of your other questions. Most of the lion's share of currency exposure or currency effects in Q4 came from certain Middle Eastern African markets, primarily Egypt and Nigeria, where the local currencies tanked. And that impacted us. As you can see in our report, that had a pretty material impact on our revenues in that region. And I can just put it this way, most of that, or pretty much all of that impact came from currency effects, and those were the currency effects that had some impact in Q4. The INR
Right, but without the-
INR and dollar wasn't having much of an impact in that quarter.
Yes, sir. But, so if the currencies hadn't tanked, the revenue had been SEK 10 million higher, SEK 20 million higher, what we have seen-
I think we would have seen-
On the sales number?
We would have seen a fairly flat development year-over-year.
On the sales number?
Yes, in that region, in the fourth quarter.
In that region, in the fourth quarter. Okay. And of course, that has repercussions for CPM, for those who look at that as well, right? By definition.
Absolutely. Absolutely correct. But that gives you-
Yeah. Okay, thank you.
By looking at that region, you can get a pretty good view on the entire currency effect, what we call somewhat this quarter.
Okay. Okay, sir. So, okay, so Q4 versus Q4 last year, and that is the impact. Okay, thank you. And then, one more niggly point, and then I need to ask about the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill. But the niggly point is that you've had two years now of, albeit small, but nevertheless working capital inflow, despite the fact that Truecaller business is increasing. And I think you had sort of signaled that because of the latter, you would have working capital outflow. What's going on there, please?
Well, it is primarily an effect of the fact that we realized at a fairly early stage that we would have working capital outflow in general as a trend, due to the increasing business we do within Truecaller business and also direct sales in India, in the advertising business. So we took, we took action in order to, counteract that at an early stage. We have a team working only with credit control only, which is, I would say a somewhat early thing to do, given the size of that business at this point. But we did that because we felt that, it was better to do it a little bit too early than too late. This team has been working efficiently, and, has managed to, to...
Still, as a trend, you would see capital working capital outflow. But quarter-over-quarter, like last quarter, given the effectiveness of the team that are working with credit control, certain quarters we can still see things going the other way because they are, they are bad guys when it comes to collecting the money. I'm in charge of them.
They deserve a bonus. Excellent. Thank you. And then, can I ask on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, although we know what it is, we don't actually. Am I right in thinking that we don't have explicit guidance about what the implications will be on a sort of day-to-day basis, and how that may or may not affect your business? If that's the case, other than imminent, is there anything you can say about when we'll get this?
Well, I think the latest information, which actually came out yesterday from the government, was that the sort of practical rule sets around this will be announced post the election, which is gonna be mid this year. And then there will be a transition period of 6-12 months for companies. But what we do know is, you know, the sort of law is formed, it's approved and established, so we know what framework we have to work within.
This framework, even though some details will have to be set, we have, like we did in the last quarter, done several tests during a longer period of time with certain data that could be affected by the new law, and we've seen, you know, a retention that is basically the same as at the current stage. So most of our data is, as I've mentioned before, either consented or of personal interest or public interest, where it's businesses, scammers, fraudsters, et cetera. So we don't expect any changes in the user experience based on the ongoing sort of A/B test that has been running for many months now.
But there might be some operational adjustments that we'll have to do, which are, you know, during that transition time, but it's nothing that will affect our day-to-day operations.
Fab, thank you both very much. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, John.
Thank you, John.
The next question comes from Brett Knoblauch from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I have a few. To start with, I was just wondering if you can help me understand. I do note that the US consumer subscription growth has been pretty good. But I was just wondering, given the material part of your platform, advantages of your platform comes from more users that happens to be in India and certain other regions in the Middle East, how is it that you're able to grow US subscription revenues? What is your pitch to the US consumers?
Yeah.
Like, to follow up on that, like, why do you think it's a good use of cash from an ROI perspective? Thanks.
Yeah, good question. So I mean, we've been, you know, we've been available in the market for 15 years, and we've been... You know, the community that we've built up during all these years have actually improved the data over time. And, you know, data is also available to partner up with through other companies and purchase. So number one is, we need to have a great search experience, and that we have in the U.S. today, in order to sort of grow our user base based on that. Second thing is, the retention is something that we track on a day-to-day basis.
We, when we do these performance marketing activities through other channels, we do target them users to download our app, and we do track them during their lifetime on our platform. So we do see exactly, you know, how many percentage of those users that we acquire is actually converting into becoming premium subscribers. And of course, the return on investment have to make sense for us in order to do that. The difference between the U.S. and maybe some other markets is, as I said before, the willingness to pay is quite high. So the math sort of works for us. Now, we've been scaling this, and it's yet to see how it scales, the more we invest into it.
But that's in short how we're measuring it and the foundation that we have. Then lastly, I should just say that the U.S. has a huge issue with spam calls, fraud calls, you know, calls from unknown numbers. I would almost say that, you know, the scamming of older people, and, you know, these type of tax frauds were actually invented in the U.S., so, you know, it's a great product market fit, so let's say. And you've probably heard of these-
Understood.
- scams and so forth.
So, yeah.
Yeah. Well, makes sense. I was wondering, like, based on the answer that you've just given, that means you have, like, a good identity kind of database there as well in the U.S., then. Is that right?
Yes. Yes. I mean, that's, you know, expected, otherwise, this model wouldn't work.
Yeah, yeah. All right. As a follow-up to the question I think was asked earlier, I know you answered the FMCG companies, though they increased advertising in Q4 last year for their brands, but you didn't necessarily see the benefit of that because of increased supply of digital ad inventory. I was just wondering who the main, let's say, competition is. I think you alluded to it by saying it's other consumer apps, but is there anybody you can point to specifically? And then, what would be the top, let's say, four or five sectors, like, verticals that you typically do advertising for?
Well, I wouldn't say there are, you know, certain competitors. It's a general macro challenge for everyone. But then, of course, you have the two big companies that, you know, has the lion's share of the ads market. And, you know, those are the companies that I think everyone is competing against in one way or another.
In terms of the top three sector verticals that you-
Uh
... typically do advertising for?
Well, I think it's a pretty even distribution, you know, amongst the categories. But what I do see, and what we know is that one category that really stands out that is not, you know, as big as it should be, is the FMCG category, which could be, you know, the, the. Maybe I shouldn't mention the companies, but the category consists of a lot of larger companies, and those are the, that's the category we're looking at. But on top of that, of course, you know, there are other verticals: education, e-commerce, OEMs, et cetera. We want to build a better product so that they spend more of their ads dollars on our platform, and that's something that we constantly work on.
Understood. Thank you. Just this last one from me then. In terms of the click-through rates for your ads, would you be able to, like, tell us how that's trended over the years? And then with your investments into your performance advertising, firstly, how much more investment is needed? And secondly, have you seen an improvement in the click-through rates?
Um...
I didn't get all of that, but, but let's start with the part that I got. How much more investments are needed?
Yeah.
I mean, our total user base is less than 10% of the total smartphone number of smartphones on the planet. And since pretty much every smartphone is a potential customer of ours or user of ours, every smartphone owner, there is a lot of market share for us out there that is still waiting for us to come and help them. We need to do performance marketing in order to introduce ourselves to people that don't know about us. From that point of view, we will keep investing in growth pretty much forever, like every other company in any growth market. I don't know if I misunderstood your question, but-
But I think what's worth adding to.
Yeah
... Odd's answer is that, you know, it's there is a network effect in Truecaller, and there's a reason why, you know, 95% of our growth has always been organic. And that's what we're always focusing on, building things that people love, so they tell their friends. And sometimes you need to nudge people to start discovering in new markets, and that's something we've been doing for more than a year in several markets. What we're doing now is more narrowing it to certain strict KPIs, basically, which are ROI on subscriptions, and so forth, amongst other-
Sure
- growth.
Yeah, yeah, understood. Just to rephrase a little bit on what I asked you. The investment for your own ad tech stack that you're building-
Uh-huh
... in terms of reaching full capability, so how much more investment is needed, is what I was trying to get to. Sorry.
Okay, sorry.
Yeah.
Sorry about that. I mean, it's hard to say. It's more about time, honestly. We have the competence, you know, we have the people, we have the roadmap. It's more about executing. And as you can see, you know, in the report, the revenues from our ad server continues to grow. And that's, you know, where we want to go long-term, basically, that we serve the ads and have, you know, the most attractive performance-driven ad model. So it's more about time, to be honest, than anything else. I think we have a very strong team in place.
Understood. Thank you. The first part of my question, which I think I wasn't clear on, was the click-through rates that-
Yep
-you've seen for your ads. What are they trending at over the years?
Okay, sorry about that. So the click-through rate on the ads that we serve on our platform is actually going in a positive direction. We know that we are, you know, if not on an industry standard, depending on which vertical, in certain we're actually slightly higher as well. So I think we're doing pretty well there. And that's also, you know, why advertisers come back every year, the large ones.
Yeah. Perfect. Thanks very much for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brett Knoblauch.
The next question comes from Jesper von Koch from Redeye. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys, thanks for taking my question. So first I'd like to start with the Digital Markets Act, or the DMA. Do you see any effect from it, like margin sub on subscribers, like enablement to accelerate your database growth from enhanced search, and possibly also, like, interoperability enabling new functionalities?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think... You know, there, there are certain areas in this that could be to our advantage, that we rather not talk about here today, but there could be some potential advantages to us. We don't see any, any disadvantages, which is great news. But I think there are other industries and companies that see more benefit in this. But I, you know, given our, our user base is mainly outside of Europe, you know, it's, it's less of an interest, but usually what, what gets pushed through in Europe usually reflects in some other markets as well. So, so we'll have to wait and see.
All right, thanks. And then also I'd like to touch on the introduction of high taxes on online gambling. Like, how much of the demand issue for the ad business, how much has come from the introduction of that tax and the lesser demand from those players?
From the gambling companies?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So, so we actually don't allow gambling on our platform. We've never done that either. So, you know, there was some news last year about some gambling companies pulling out of India. We never actually took any money from them, so it didn't affect us. What you might be referring to is the fantasy gaming companies, which are usually relevant for us during the IPL season in Q2. And, the GST tax change is affecting these companies, but to what degree, we don't really know, and I think, you know, no one in the market really knows how that will affect their marketing spend during the IPL season. So unfortunately, we don't have an answer on that, but we'll have to wait and see.
We should probably expect it to be lower than it has been in the past, but to what degree, we'll just have to wait and see.
All right. All right. And then just, like either if you could give us an update on your possible pipeline for M&A, and also, I think Odd mentioned in an interview that, like, if you don't find any, like, big enough acquisition that would, like, use all of your cash, it would be time for dividends. So what would be, like, the timeline for, "Okay, now we've searched for long enough, and now it's time for a big dividend?
We haven't, or I haven't, and we haven't ever said that we're—there is a particular time when we're gonna do a dividend. What I've said over the years is that if we haven't found any major acquisition targets that would need us to have this substantial cash pile that we have, and the market has stabilized and become more, more transparent, then we would look at ways of, of, distributing money back to our shareholders. Now, that can be done in different ways. We already used one of them. We have bought back shares for SEK 840 million so far, which is a substantial amount of money for many companies. We are asking for a new mandate to buy back more shares.
Whether we would be willing to do anything else is a question that will have to be discussed and internally will not be raised with the board, and then eventually decided in AGM. But it's at this point, we're not, it's too early or not a good point to say anything about that because no such decision has been made.
Okay, great. Thanks. That's all from me.
Thank you, Jesper.
There are no more phone questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.
All right. Thank you everyone who dialed in, and for all the great questions. Thank you everyone for listening in, and we look forward to seeing you at our next earnings call. Thank you.