Greetings, welcome to the Adcore Investor Presentation webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd now like to turn the call over to Glen Akselrod of Bristol IR. Thank you. You may begin.
Thank you, Daryl, and thank you everybody for joining our webcast today with Adcore. The purpose of today's presentation is to give Bristol's audience a better understanding of the business through a presentation and then questions with management. The discussion is gonna be led by CEO, Omri Brill, who is also joined by Yatir Sadot, CFO, and Martijn van den Bemd, Chief Partnerships Officer. You'll see the presentation in the webcast. If you'd like a copy and you don't have one, simply email me at Glenn, G-L-E-N, @bristolir.com. I'll be happy to send you a copy. We'll break for questions at the end of the formal presentation. When we do break, we encourage questions. Just a quick reminder, we're only taking questions using the web portal. If you're listening over the telephone, please access the web link we sent earlier to ask a question.
Remember, you can submit a question using the portal at any time. I'll ask the questions on the air for everyone to hear, and then Omri, Martijn, or Yatir will answer. I will not reference any names, but simply read the questions asked. As we have a fairly large audience today, if I can't get to your question online in time, and it has not yet been addressed during the call and can be, I'll come back to you by email. I won't read the forward-looking statements, but I do state that they do apply, and I reference them on Page 2 of this PowerPoint. With that said, once again, thank you for joining us. Remember, this is fairly informal, and we do encourage questions to help you better understand the business and its growth path.
Now I'll turn the call over to Omri to start his part of the discussion and presentation.
Thank you, Glenn. Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to tell you the Adcore story today. I truly hope that you're gonna like what I have to tell you today. Let's get started. The next Page is gonna be a general disclaimer. I wanna give you an opportunity of one to two minutes to read the disclaimer. Hopefully, everybody had a chance to read it. Time flies very fast, I guess, in Tel Aviv, Israel. We are Adcore. Adcore is a leading AI-powered marketing technology company. The company offers a suite of digital marketing solutions, seamlessly managing and automating digital marketing journey in an effortless and accessible way. The company's vision is Effortless Marketing. We believe marketing should be effortless and accessible to everyone.
In a sense, we, our engineers are working very hard every day in order to make the life of our customers very easy, make media and advertising accessible and affordable. This is what the company is doing quite successfully in the past couple of years. Some investment highlights when we talk about Adcore, and I know that under the current market condition, probably a lot of you are asking some very important questions when you're looking into company. Is the company growing? Does the company have good gross margin? Is it profitable? Basically, if it's a proprietary technology. I'm glad to report that basically Adcore checks all these important questions. Yes, the company is fast-growing. We've seen 45% revenue year-on-year growth in Q1 2023, and gross profit grow to 35% year-on-year in this quarter.
We maintain good margins, 40% margin, gross margin in Q1, 2023. The entire year in 2021 was 43%. The company is profitable. The core Adtech activity generated Adjusted EBITDA of $350,000 in Q1, 2023. If you look at the entire year of 2022, the core Adtech activity generates more than $2.5 million in Adjusted EBITDA. The company enjoys propriety technology. We have all inclusive marketing apps for a complete media journey. This basically technology allow us to scale our activities to be profitable and give us a lot of advantage and edge in the market. When we talk about the market, the company actually benefits from a huge addressable market.
Online ad spending is estimated to reach more than $900 billion in 2023. Actually, as you see from the right graph, this number is gonna grow a lot. By 2026, it's projected to be almost $1.2 trillion. This represents 30% growth over a course of just 3 years. What is already a massive market is growing and becoming even bigger in the next couple of years. When we look a bit under the hood on this impressive number, we actually see tectonic industry change in our industry. These are two very important graph of that basically represent a very big opportunity for Adcore.
On the next slide, we can see the blue portion of the slide is Google and Meta, or formerly Facebook, market share within the U.S. market. What we can see that up until 2017, this market share was actually increased to almost 50%. Since 2017, up, and up until today, Google and Meta are actually, dominance is fading out. Basically, they are losing market share, and these other emerging channels are gaining more and more market share. If you look at the right graph, we can see the same story happen on a geo level.
Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. Omri, can you see if you muted yourself by accident, please? Once again, please stand by.
Daryl, Yeah. Can you just reach out to him? Maybe, something wrong with his phone.
The line is still connected, but I will dial back out. Please stand by.
Thank you.
Okay. Omri, can you hear us?
Yes.
Okay. We could hear you now as well.
That's amazing. Okay. Should we continue?
Yes, you can continue. Thank you.
Guys, sorry about the technical issues. Hopefully everything gonna be okay moving forward. Let me go start again the last slide, which is the tectonic industry changes. We already understand that digital ad spend is a massive market, almost $1 trillion in 2023 numbers and projected to be even $1.2 trillion by 2026. If you look under the hood, we see a very interesting change in our market. The next slide is basically market share by channel in the U.S. Basically, what we can clearly see is that up until 2017, Google and Meta market share was increased. Since 2017 until nowadays, they are losing market share, and other channels are basically gaining market shares on their expense in a way.
If you look at the right slide, then we see the same story happen on the geo level. U.S. is losing market share and other regions are getting market share. Basically, this makes fast forward the world of online advertising in 2023, much more diversified, much more complex. Basically many other more channels than just Google and Meta, many different regions that you need to address. That puts Adcore in a very interesting and strategic position. In order to, I would say, benefit from this massive change in the, in the market, the company decided to do two main efforts since going public in 2019. The first effort that the company decided to do is to expand its geographical expansion or footprint.
Basically since then, since let's say 1 office in 2005, sorry, 2016. When the company in 2017 opened an office in Australia, in Melbourne. Once we became public in 2019, we decided to grow faster and open in 2019 an office in Canada, followed by 2020 in Hong Kong, 2021 in Shanghai, China, and 2022, we opened a subsidiary in the U.S. Basically the company expanded a lot in the past couple of years, and we are quite happy with the current footprint we were able to achieve. That actually puts us to the second effort that the company decided to do, which is what we call vertical integration. Historically, EBSCO was very good in offering solution around campaign creation optimization.
We used to have special app developed for it. That's what we call now EBSCO View. That was the first and original app that EBSCO developed. Basically the company worked quite good around this specific, I would say task force in the media journey. When we look at the media journey, it actually doesn't start with campaign creation optimization and definitely doesn't end in campaign creation optimization. It actually starts with account creation and then probably when they need to do media research and planning Feed creation and optimization. If you're an e-commerce website, then you're ready to create your campaign and to optimize them. You would also probably need to monitor your campaign and analyze your campaign, and obviously, we have financing and budgeting management as well.
What the company decided to do, that we don't wanna give a very tailored solution just around one touch point. We want to be able to cater all the different touch points, and therefore, we develop different apps that give solution to the different touch points around the media journey. Basically, this put the company in a much better strategic position, and we can see it on the next slide. If you look at the right side, we can see, let's say, the advertising world starting in 2007 was quite easy or simpler. The client could approach Google directly, open a Google account, and as we see in the previous graph, getting very good coverage because Google was very dominant back then.
Fast-forward, let's say fast five years ago, maybe you needed to also to open a Facebook account. That again, gonna give him quite a good coverage. Nowadays, everything is far more complex. With multi-channels, obviously, you have YouTube, you have Instagram, you have TikTok, you have Snap, you have Twitter. You have multiple channels, you have multiple regions. Basically, for the client to have a direct relationship for every single channel and every different region is quite complex as one can imagine. This is exactly where Adcore solution come into play. Adcore is basically a single access point or one access point to all the different channels in all the different regions. We have partnerships with all major channels. We operate, as you saw before, in all regions. That puts Adcore in a very strategic position.
The same story applies to the client's media journey. Again, we now today can give him solution across the entire journey, starting from campaign creation, feed creation and submission, basically monitoring, reporting, analyzing, and obviously financing as well. Basically, very large, I would say, shift in our industry and Adcore actually is very strategically positioned to benefit from this shift. If we talk a bit about the Adcore technology or the Adcore Marketing Cloud, basically, which is our suite of marketing apps, then you can think of the Marketing Cloud of what Adobe did with their Creative Cloud. Adobe put together almost more than 10 for sure different apps under one roof, which they call the Creative Cloud.
Let's say a designer can get an access to this cloud and basically utilize any of these tools, whether it's Photoshop and other tools that Adobe has. Adcore basically wanna take the same concept and apply to the marketing world. With a single access to Adcore Marketing Cloud, the marketing will get access to now more than seven different apps that Adcore has to offer. Equally important, each of these apps give the client a solution for a different touchpoint within his media journey. When we look at the apps basically that are under the cloud, we can see the following apps. Media Blast, which is an account opening, account budgeting app.
Using Media Blast, the client or agency can very easily create a Google Ad account, a Microsoft Ad account, finance this account, allocate budgets to this account, and start advertising. Basically, we take the first step. Then obviously, if you're an e-commerce website, you would need probably an app like Effortless Marketing that can easily create a feed for you from your Shopify store or WooCommerce store, for example. Then if you need more advanced feed optimization, you can use our Feeditor app, which is built for feed optimization, including AI enrichment and other powerful functions. Let's say once you created your account, you financed your account, you created a feed and optimized the feed, the next step will be creating an optimized campaign, and this is when we have the Views app.
Obviously, maybe you would like to monitor your campaign and your activity, not only your campaign. The Alerter app that we developed helps you to monitor your campaign 24/7, your website, your data feed. If something go wrong with any of your digital assets, you will get an instant notification to your email, for example. Semdoc is advanced reporting and analyzing tool that we developed, and obviously, Orca as well, which is more performance-oriented type of a app that we developed. You can clearly see that we have multiple apps that give multiple solutions, but a very comprehensive solution with the client's media journey. If we look at an example, our Marketing Cloud, who is like a perfect audience for this type of solution, then we can look at like a potential client like Princess Polly, for example.
That's a very big fashion brand, operate in the U.S., but also in other market like Australia and U.K. and other places around the world. Obviously, as big as us, operating more than one channel. They can do a Google activity, Instagram activity, YouTube, TikTok, Microsoft, and many others. This is actually a perfect example because if you remember before, like, life was very easy, let's say 10 years ago, maybe one market, U.S., and one channel, Google that's not the case anymore. Again, this type of advertiser now operates on multiple regions, multiple channels, and they need a solution like the Adcore Marketing Cloud in order to help them with all these activities.
Starting from the feed creation, feed submission, then obviously based on the feed, campaign creation, optimization, monitoring via the Alerter app and basically analyzing and reporting via the same toolset . Again, a lot of activity for this type of client and a lot of solutions we can add them across this journey. If we talk about the company's financial and basically how everything that we spoke up until now are reflecting with the numbers, then we can see that are reflecting quite well. If you look at the company yearly revenue, which is the right top slide, the black bars, and you can see 2018 was $12 million revenue, 2019 was $15 million in revenue, 2020 was $23 million in revenue, 2021 was $35 million in revenue, 2022 was $27 million in revenue.
You see a slight decrease between 21 to 22 because the company took a bit of a strategic shift and decided to focus on more high margin revenue in 2022 on the expense of low margin revenue. I'm happy to report that moving forward in 2023, the company expects to see growth across the entire, let's say, all important matrix. Revenue, gross profits, and Adjusted EBITDA are expected to grow again in 2023. If you look at the left graph, which is the blue bar, we can see the quarterly numbers of revenue, and this is actually very good demonstration how in advertising industry quarters are basically because of seasonality, usually they start low in Q1 and picked up, and 2022 was a classic year in this regard.
Q1 was $4.6 or $4.7 almost in revenue. Q2 2022 was $5.1, and then $7.5 almost in Q3. Q4 was $8.7. Q1, again in 2023, you can see that it's down from Q4 to $6.8. Actually when we look year-over-year, that's a big increase of 45%. It's a massive start for us for 2023. On the right side, we can see like a healthy mix of global revenue, EMEA being the largest region for us with almost 50% of the revenue. APAC is the second largest one with almost 30%, and North America is 23%. Actually, both EMEA region and North America region grew a lot for us year-over-year.
EMEA grew with an astonishing 80% year-over-year, and North America grew 61%. Very impressive growth over very few, these two regions. APAC grew, but not as much. If you look at the next slide, which is the quarterly breakdowns, we can see in Q1 2023, the company did $6 million in top line revenue. That's again, 45% increase year-on-year. That's quite impressive. $2.7 million in gross profit, 35% increase year-on-year. Again, very impressive. Adjusted EBITDA was $0.1 million or $350 thousand if we look at the core Adtech activity, and working capital was almost $9 million. The company has also been able to maintain a very healthy balance sheet.
As of March 23, the total assets was almost $17 million. Cash position for the company as of March 23 was $7.3 million. If you can see on the right graph, the company is bearing no debt. The company is completely debt free, which is always good to be in the current market and the current interest rates. A bit about the cap table and comparables. On the left side, you can see the cap table of the company. Total outstanding shares are 61 million. Float is 19 million, which is 30%, a bit more than 30%. Another metric that is interesting to see is that during the last 12 months, the company purchased and canceled almost 4 million shares.
The company believes that the share price is currently not reflecting good enough the true company valuation. That's why we announced NCIB last year. We actually recently announced a renewal for this time for additional year, and we continue to purchase the shares for cancellation as long as we believe that the current share price don't really reflect what we believe should be the right company valuation. If you go to the comparable slide, then we put over there eight company, some big brand names that everybody know, like The Trade Desk, for example, some Canadian company now also listed in the last stock, like a FUTU, we can also see from the comparables that basically again, ETCO is undervalued and basically this can be a massive upside for the company or for the shares.
To round up. What is Adcore value proposition and why we believe Adcore is such a great story to tell. As we saw, there is a tectonic change in the online advertising industry. Google and Meta are losing market share. These rise of both new channels and new markets as well. Basically what used to be a very simple world up until 10 to 5 years ago now become much more complex and diversified. This complexity is a very strategic opportunity for a company like Adcore that can sit exactly in the middle and be like an app between the clients and the different channels and the different regions. Fast-growing company, 40% year-over-year growth in revenue, 35% in gross profit, good gross margin and profitable.
We have proprietary technology, suite of different apps that give solutions from different touch points across the client's media journey. Maybe the most important thing, there's plenty of headroom to continue to grow. Bear in mind that Adcore currently manage around $1 billion in ad spend. This is out of the number that we remember, $900 billion in 2023 numbers. That means almost 0.1% of this ad spend. There's massive potential for us to continue to grow, to gain more market share, and I think that's probably the most exciting thing about the company's story. With that, I can already go to the Q&A session.
Super. Thank you, Omri, for that. And to our audience again, if you have a question, please use the question text box within the webinar portal. We do have quite a few questions in the queue already, so we'll just get going. First question, Omri, is: Other marketing cloud competitors must be using, marketing technologies. It seems Adcore software algorithms appear to provide a lot of automation. Are your technologies that much more differentiated or unique that you're winning market share?
Yeah. It's a great question. I would say Adcore USPs are as follows. A, the fact that Adcore have multiple apps to multiple steps or stages in the market journey. It gives Adcore in a very strategic position because we can acquire clients, for example, because they need a feed optimization tool. They reach out to Adcore and started to use our feed tool app. We have the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell this client to many different other apps and solutions that we can provide. We already invested money in this client and basically there's no need to invest additional money in basically acquiring, but now we have an up-sell opportunity or cross-sell opportunity. That I would say is one very important USP that the company have.
Other important USP the company have, I would say is the different partnerships that we have, strategic partnerships that we have with all the major channels and basically our footprint in many different locations across the globe. Again, we can give the client an access to let's say now we want to be in Google China, for example. We have partnership with Google China. You want maybe to Criteo in Israel, we have partnership with Criteo in Israel and so on and so on. Basically that's another very strong value proposition.
Okay, super. Thank you. Sort of sticking on the same theme, is this service applicable to a new brand launching and does it interact with an influencer community or can it take the place of blogging or influencer given the reach of automation?
It's a great question. I would say the following. We don't have influencer component into the core solution or suite of solutions. That I would say is separate effort that somebody would need to do if you would like to do it. With regards to new brands, the answer is yes, of course. It doesn't matter to us if you are a new brand, if you are an existing brand, maybe you're already large enterprise brand. We have, let's say different solutions to different sizes of businesses and different apps for every business size I would say.
Okay, thank you. Again, as with the same theme, does this take over the individual function of SEO or for a small company such as a small cosmetic manufacturing company in either business to business or business to consumer?
The services or solution the company is provided is around paid media. Paid media is not SEO. SEO is organic media. That again a different I would say stream within marketing. Yeah, for all your paid media effort, that give you a very comprehensive solution.
Okay, thank you. I know in the beginning of the presentation, your intro referred to, Adcore as an AI-driven company. The question here is: How do you see AI disrupting the industry and your business strategy and plans? Are you planning on using these capabilities?
The, the honest question would be TBC. nobody know yet how AI gonna influence the industry. We do expect obviously influence. I would say something that we know for sure that we use AI as basically enabler or something that allow us to scale, to give better solution. The company is very, I would say focused on implementing as much AI solution now that we can in the different apps. So for us, actually, AI is the beginning of the list.
Okay. Thank you. Next question. Tell us about a typical customer. How do they use Adcore? How often? For what? For what services? How much does this typically customer pay Adcore?
AdCo, yeah. So I would give you example of two, I would say, potential clients or typical clients, and the first one would be actually, ad agency. An ad agency can look for potential, I would say, solutions for the client, and then probably an agency will have anywhere from, I don't know, 10, 20 clients if they are quite small, to sometimes even hundreds of clients if they're quite big. These clients will be usually become from multiple industry, let's say e-commerce, travel, lead gen, and will have different needs. For this agency probably to manage all these clients manually will be a very difficult task, they're gonna look for tools to help them automate some of all their marketing tasks.
Basically, Adcore, because of its comprehensive solution, give them a very attractive, let's say, a solution to their needs. They can have access to the Adcore Marketing Cloud, access, let's say, seven different apps within this cloud, and basically gets a lot of their day-to-day marketing fully automated. That's only one type of a potential client. Another type will be direct advertisers. That's somebody that it can be small, but usually it can also be quite big, like BP in this example. Basically, again, it will have complex marketing needs, it will look for a technological solution to automate its marketing efforts.
Okay, thank you. Next question. Are you exclusively a demand-side platform? Are revenues generated as a % of the ad spend by clients?
Yeah. AdCo is not a demand side, and we're not DSP or anything like that. That's more a space, let's say, a QTS or a, or a The Trade Desk into programmatic. AdCo is mainly doing paid media. Programmatic can be some of the solution we can enable, but we are not programmatic company in this regard. We mainly will do probably search campaigns, shopping campaigns, social campaigns to our clients. Programmatic can be another addition to this media mix, but it's not, I would say, the main mix. With regard to business business model, then these, like, these business models that is reflected, I would say, as percentage of ad spend. That's mainly for do it, do it for me type of clients.
If we're talking about do it yourself type of clients, I would say, it's more software-as-a-service model . You have a license fee, and you're gonna pay extra for what we call automation tasks. Basically, as you automate more stuff, you would end up paying more eventually.
Okay, thank you. One of the slides covered the regions where you're active, and I have a couple of questions on this topic, so I'll just sort of combine it into one. First, is there any differences within the regions that drive growth? Number one. Number two, part of this question is, do you see any particular region that is growing faster? If so, why?
That's actually a very good question. I will try to answer it in few layers. I would say, A, the fact that the company is very well diversified in its geolocation, has a very good global footprint. It's very good for us because we can see over the years that maybe during some years, some markets have grown faster than other and vice versa. The past, for example, during COVID, the APAC region for us was the big growth. Like, we saw the massive growth coming from this region. Post-COVID, actually declined and vice versa. Post-COVID, we see North America picking up a lot, EMEA region is picking up a lot.
The fact that the company is diversified is actually very good for us, and this allow us to being able to show a continuous growth over the years. This would be my first response. My second one would be, yeah, let's say over the past one year or so, we saw massive growth coming from the EMEA region. We saw massive growth coming from the North America region. I would say the following. North America, that's a strategic region for us, and the company put a lot of efforts to expand over there. We recently in last year, we opened a U.S. subsidiary. We recruit a U.S. sales force as well.
That's the strategic that we put a lot of efforts in. We saw it growing quite nicely because of this effort. That's always nice, something nice to see. Within the EMEA region, I would say it's mainly growing because I would say, A, it's the most established region for us. This is number one reason. Number two is a lot of new initiatives that we started that actually started in this region and already generated a lot of growth for us and a lot of revenue.
Okay, super. Thank you. We have some financial related questions, so I'll get into that part now. I know you touched on this topic during the presentation, but maybe expand on it. The question is, Adcore generated cash in 2018, 2019, and 2020 and actually generated $5 million in 2020. Since then, it looks like the model has changed. What happened, and what is the fundamental difference now?
Okay. As I touched base again in my presentation, in 2022, the company decided to take some kind of shift in its strategy and focus more on high gross margin type of customer. Basically, this type of shift proved itself in 2022. As a result, we needed to ditch some clients that come with a, I would say, that generate historically good cash flow to the company but wasn't very profitable in terms of margin. We give up these clients in order to improve our gross margin. What the company expected to see in 2023 is that we're gonna continue to grow in cash flow, but to maintain, let's say, the 40%-50% gross margin, which is where we wanna be.
2022 was a transition in that regard, and 2023 should be back in more, but where gross margins are within the, let's say, the desired range as well.
Okay. Thank you. Another financial question for you, are your charges always in the client's currency or standard like U.S. dollars? Do you see inflation playing any important role?
Yeah. This means that if we serve clients in Australia, they probably would pay in Australian dollar. If we serve clients, let's say in Hong Kong, they will probably pay in Hong Kong dollar and so on. This is one. For us, inflation actually is an opportunity because if you see inflation in advertising costs, basically it is a good thing for us because the company have no debt. We don't see the negative parts of inflation. We can only see the positive part of inflation. I don't wanna. I don't know if the Fed listen to us or not, under the current inflation rate, it's still okay for us.
Okay. Thank you. The next question is somewhat guidance related, so if you can't answer, completely understood, but I'll ask it anyway. In what future quarters do you expect to produce positive after-tax earnings?
Like we touched before in the presentation, and you can look it at the buildup of, let's say, the revenue in the quarterly revenue. I would say, again, this is not a guidance, but this is something that based on historic numbers, Q4 should be where the company will become positive in all metrics.
Okay. Thank you. Follow-up question on the last point, Omri, is regarding the profitability from 2018 and 2020. Was the difference just the margin profile, or was there something else behind it?
I would say a few things. When the company became public, we did a lot of investment to expand the business. We opened a lot of offices from a single office that we have or two offices we have pre-going public. We decided to open the Toronto office and two offices in China, Greater China region and another office in the U.S. This requires big investment from the company. Again, the company make a strategic decision to expand its apps range as well. From a single app or two apps, three pre-going public, we now have seven different apps covering, giving a very comprehensive coverage of the media journey.
I would say we went public in order to grow the business. In order to grow the business, we needed to invest money in R&D, in geo expression, and in other stuff. We also have a new initiative that we call Amphy that required a investment in the last couple of years. I would say, all in all, I would say the following. In terms of geo location, or geo expansion, the company is happy of what we stand today. We don't expect to see any, I would say, additional massive investments over there. In terms of app development, again, we have a very good coverage.
Probably we're gonna continue invest in R&D because we need to invest in R&D all the time. Again, we achieved a lot over the course of the last, I would say, two to three years as well. Even with Amphy, which requires a big investment of the company, we have a very clear roadmap to reduce this investment to the bare minimum in Q3 and Q4 as well. I would say that give us a lot of confidence in the sense that the company now already did the majority of the investment in a very good strategic position and now we can focus on growth, profitability, and basically you can already start to see the shift in, let's say, Q1 results, for example.
Okay. Thank you. I have a couple of questions on a different topic now, so I'll sort of combine them. First, can you discuss what Amphy is and your capital investment in Amphy? And also the platform's recent growth.
Okay. Amphy is a online education platform that the company opened during COVID. We saw an increase, I would say, demand for this type of solution. Its main USP is that it offer live online learning, which most of the other platform don't offer. They only offer a pre-recorded VOD type of learning. A total investment in Amphy is 2.7, around CAD 2.7 million Canadian dollar to date. What was the last question regarding Amphy?
I guess the two questions, one from a different individual, one from the same one is number one is are you still investing in it? Two is can you talk about its, I guess current and potential growth?
Okay. Yeah, we are still investing in Afy, but most of the investment, which was around building the platform, recruiting, let's say, the teacher and stuff like that was already done, and the company have a clear roadmap to reduce, I would say, the monthly burn rate from the top, it was $120K monthly to $30K monthly in Q4. That's gonna become much, I would say, low investment moving forward, which is I think it's a positive news for the company. With regarding to Afy potential, it's still a young business, so it's a bit hard to say what is the Afy full potential. If we talking about educationally market in general, then we're talking about $100 billion plus market, which is a massive market.
Okay, thank you. I have a few more questions in the queue here. To our audience, if you do have any follow-up questions or any additional questions, please use the text box to go ahead and ask it now. Next question for you, Omri, is, are you seeing the current environment in retail playing out in your favor, with end consumer, that is, I guess, stretched with the current economic environment? How is that impacting both e-commerce spend and your business?
It's a good question. I would say first regarding Adcore business, to date is very diversified business. Adcore is not only serving e-commerce type of clients, although this is, I would say, still probably the majority of the businesses uses Adcore, but we also serve travel clients, for example, that obviously has a very big example post-COVID, for example, leisure clients and other type of clients as well. This allow us to be more diversified, so it's not very industry focused in that sense. This is one. I would say with regards to retail specific, what we saw that post-COVID, which was mainly in the first part of 2022, we saw some adjustment.
Obviously, clients was like a COVID peak or boom for retail online activity, store was reopening, let's say in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and other places as well. We saw some declines. They need to do some inventory adjustments and stuff like that. We saw it in the first part of 2022. We saw the second part of 2022 was actually, I would say, strong again, and we see the same momentum carried well into 2023 as well. I know there's a lot of discussion about recession and other stuff. I would say majority of the clients that use Adcore actually running quite strong, and we know doesn't see currently a big impact. Maybe some clients are impacted in some, I would say, niche.
I would say in general, we don't see a massive impact.
Okay. Thank you. I guess technology related question for you. With regards to your suite of marketing applications, which of your offerings are your clients utilizing the most, or would you say it's pretty even across the board?
That's a great question. I would say always the go-to app probably for us, and that's let's say the jewelry on the crown, is Speedito, which is our speed optimization and and submitting a platform. I would say that's probably the more used app in our suite. We also see an increased use in other apps as well. I would say once they started to use, for example, Speedito, then it become more easy to convert them to use or persuade them to use other apps as well, because they already see the value for it. They are more open to try other apps, it become more easy for us.
For us, it doesn't really matter how do they start their, let's say, business with Adcore, whether it's Speedito or other app, because we know that eventually probably we can convert them to become full Adcore Marketing Cloud users.
Okay. Thank you. A couple more questions for you, Omri. You have a comparables table on slide 21. Who would you say within that table is your most direct competitor? How would you distinguish your business between that competitor? I guess what is the most unique part of your business that separates you? Is there a moat advantage that our audience should be thinking about as it relates to you versus anyone on that table?
Okay. That's a great question. I would say the following, like fortunately or unfortunately, we don't really have a specific direct competitor from this list actually, for a few reasons. A, there are not a lot of public Adtech companies, believe it or not. There's a lot of Adtech company or advertising companies, but the public one, there are not so many. This is one reason. Another reason I would say, for whatever reason, whether it's a historical reason or other reason, a lot of the companies on this list are actually programmatic companies, and Adcore is not doing programmatic. We can allow programmatic advertising for our clients, I would say we are not a programmatic company.
We do paid media automation, which is mainly Google, Meta, formerly Facebook, and many other type of channels. It's a more comprehensive solution for online marketing.
Okay, super. Thank you. I've got one more question in the queue unless another one comes in. I'll ask it now, and afterwards we can give some closing remarks. Again, this question is, I guess, a little bit guidance related, so I'll let you determine how to answer it. Based on your NCIB share buyback and your current cash balance, is it right to infer that the company's confidence in strong pro-profitability this year?
Yeah. Again, like, this is like a forward-looking statement for the entire year, that's not something that the company usually like used to give. I would say the following. The company, and we announced it in both the last earning call and the earning call before when we summarized 2022, we expect 2023 to be a very strong year for the company. We expect to be able to show growth across all metrics. Top line, middle line, and bottom line as well, we are 10/10 with this expectation to date. I think Q1 was a phenomenal start of 2023. We saw massive growth across the board. Again, very much in the advertising business, Q1 is the slowest month in the slowest quarter for in the year.
Being able to demonstrate such a strong quarter give us a lot of confidence on what one can achieve in the entire year.
Okay, super. Thank you. I did have 1 follow-up question, regarding your apps that came in, so I'll ask it, and then I'll ask you on closing remarks. On average, how many apps do customers use?
That's an interesting question. I would say the average, and that, like, don't quote me on the exact number, is around two. That's the average. Obviously, there are some clients which would utilize three to four apps. Some of them only use one, but I would say the average now is around two.
Okay, excellent. I think you did a great job here, Omri. Any closing remarks, and then we'll end the call.
No, I think like, we got a lot of engagement from the audience, which is always great. A lot of very good questions. It means that people were listening to what I have to say and what we have to say about the company. I think like my closing remarks can be, the round-up, slide, you know, like tectonic change in the, in our industry, which represent a very, strategic opportunities for the company. The company is fast-growing, good margin, and profitable, which is always good, especially under a challenging market condition. Proprietary technology, a suite of different apps covering every aspect in the media journey, and plenty of headroom to grow. We, we trust we're only getting started, and we still have a lot of place and length to grab in the future.
Super. Thank you, Omri. Thanks to your team. Thanks to our audience, and this concludes this presentation.
Thanks everyone.
Thank you. This does conclude today's presentation. You may disconnect at this time. We appreciate your participation. Enjoy the rest of your day.