Okay. Welcome to Huuuge investors' earnings calls about 2022 financial results. The presentation by the management board will be followed by Q&A. The presentation that will be presented will be available on the website in the IR section just after the call. Now I can go over to Anton.
Thank you Magda. Good day. Good morning, everyone. I'm Anton Gauffin. I'm the founder and CEO of Huuuge, and I have here today my colleagues Jonathan and Marek. We'll be covering last year and speaking a bit of 2023 outlook. Let's move on with the show. Last year, 2022, let's first focus on some of the key details and key numbers. I'm gonna first put our attention to Huuuge Casino, Billionaire Casino, our core franchises, and the fact that during last year, we exceeded $1.5 billion in lifetime revenue landmark. That's astonishing achievement for these brands, and it certainly speaks behalf of the sustainability of these evergreen games. Last year was a record profit year for the company, which we are very proud of.
If you would need to say what was the theme for 2022, we would clearly say that driving adjusted EBITDA, driving our margins, and we did very well on those regard. Last year, Huuuge delivered $82.3 million adjusted EBITDA, and that's a new record for us. We'll be diving a bit deeper with the dynamics and how numbers looked especially on the last Q4 quarter point of view, that was excellent for the company. Huuuge is in an extremely strong position when we think of our finances and cash.
At the end of the year, we had well over $200 million cash, this is putting company in extremely good position thinking the year and future ahead of us. It's good to be well-capitalized and there are more and more interesting opportunities in the industry that we can explore and seize the best ones. The Company announced a $150 million share buyback program, which we'll be discussing in more detail in later slides. Lastly, if we think of the last year and our record profits, what's behind of the improved margins? We wanna put attention to our webshop expansion beyond the native app stores, what's going on in the Company.
We saw some extremely positive responses from our players and we are driving new channel to improve how we engage with especially the most valuable and most loyal customer base of ours. We've seen really strong results so far, what we've done on that regard with our webshop. We plan to continue expanding and allowing us to engage with our customers on a multiple platforms instead of focusing only on mobile. That's a kind of a change for us thinking road ahead. With that, I'll hand over to Jonathan to dive deeper with the business updates.
Thanks, Anton. Hi everybody. Good to be back with you. Good morning. I'll start with core franchises. Next slide, please. Our harvesting strategy continues for our evergreen brands. This strategy, as a reminder, comprises being more disciplined with marketing spend and focusing on delivering financially impactful live operations for our existing players. This whole strategy is about serving our existing players well in order to drive more margin contribution and more cash generation for the broader business. In light of this, in Q4, the sales margin for our core franchises was over 40% for only the second time in the product's lifetime. This is against a revenue profile that has shown quarter-on-quarter growth for the second consecutive quarter towards the end of 2022. Moving forwards, we will continue to focus on profitability and longevity above all for our core franchises. Next slide.
This harvesting strategy, as we just discussed, is built upon these actions that retain and engage our existing user base. Three of our largest recent initiatives or projects for these core franchises serve to do just that. The first is the expansion of Huuuge's VIP program. This ensures that our most valuable players are well cared for and receive personalized experiences. Secondarily, we continued the rollout of our webshop, which funneled approximately 3.5% of the core franchise revenue in 2022, and will continue to rise materially in 2023. The webshop represents an opportunity to serve our most loyal players with personalized, valuable monetization options, and this benefits the company as we avoid 30% transaction fees typically payable to the app stores in-app. Lastly, Q4 saw the release of a brand-new game economy model.
This is more balanced and segmented than the previous model for the entire player base, this provides more of our users to continue to play, stay, and pay in this evergreen set of franchises. Next slide. That wraps up the core franchises short update. I would like to begin this new section by announcing a new initiative, which is called Huuuge Pods. These pods are small, agile teams, operating as semi-autonomous studios within our business. We believe that this pod framework makes sense against the current market backdrop, where marketing dollars are less redemptive and the success rate of new games is quite low.
Taking more shots on goal and being willing to exercising kill games rapidly, making these games at our intersection of our strengths and the consumer behavior trends we're seeing in the market, these kind of coalesce to form the why of Huuuge Pods. Our pod teams are primarily comprised of existing Huuuge employees who will retain creative autonomy within the realm of multiplayer games that are community-centric, highly accessible, and with universal stylistic appeal. We've chosen not to limit our teams to particular platforms, languages, or markets. As such, you should expect to see us actively exploring beyond our home turf of mobile games with some of these new products. Our early success with webshop has given us great cause to be excited about the opportunity in PC and, more importantly, cross-platform gaming.
We've chosen not to limit these teams in most senses, we do believe that the company's core DNA should shine through in whichever games they produce. We'll be aiming to establish at least five pods in 2023, with three that are already operational. A fourth is spinning up as we speak, the whole pod framework will be very lean, representing low single-digit millions in annualized costs for the entire pod scheme, all five studios. Next slide. The creation of these pods and doubling down on our harvesting strategy for our core franchises represent a sustainable approach to future growth and profitability, rich in longevity for years to come.
At the company level, we'll be focusing on reducing marketing costs, non-salary OpEx, company complexity, and direct salary costs in order to streamline the business without jeopardizing our ability to execute on making and growing games that already exist. Our headcount today as part of this initiative is already 20% lower than it was on the 1st of January this year, and we expect our revenue per FTE to continue to improve throughout 2023, and our direct salary OpEx to fall despite inflation. As the result of all of these efforts, we expect to further establish the company as a fundamental value-creating business, and we're targeting another material increase in EBITDA for 2023 as we target another record-breaking year of cash generation. Next slide.
The early efforts of this strategy, as described above, have left the company with $237 million cash position as of the 10th of March this year. Our cash reserves are diversified, and to elaborate more on the cash position and the previously discussed share buyback as scheduled for Q2 of this year, I'll hand over to Marek. Over to you, sir.
Okay. Thank you, JB. Hello, everyone. Good morning. It's pleasure to join you all on today's earnings call. As Jonathan pointed out, as of 10th of March, the company had approximately $237 million in cash and cash equivalents, which I think showcases our strong cash flow generation skills and the effectiveness of our harvesting strategy. As you know, we have fully recovered $24 million that was deposited at the Silicon Valley Bank when the bank collapsed on the 10th of March. As of today, substantially all of our cash and deposits are diversified across several banks, which are classified as global systemically important banks by the Financial Stability Board.
As the recent turbulence in the banking sector is probably not over yet, we closely monitor the situation in the banking market to ensure that the financial institutions we work with remain stable and financially sound. Please note that our primary objective when investing excess funds is the preservation of principal and maintenance of liquidity sufficient to meet our cash needs. As Anton has already mentioned, the company plans to conduct a share buyback. We intend to execute it through an invitation to sell, in which the company will purchase its shares for up to $100 million. The rationale behind this operation is to return cash to our shareholders. After the buyback, management will recommend to the board of directors of Huuuge to cancel the shares bought back from the market.
As Huuuge is a Delaware-incorporated company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, we have to comply with both Polish and U.S. regulations, including with respect to the length of the subscription period. Additionally, the contemplated buyback will be a taxable transaction. Non-U.S. shareholders will be subject to U.S. withholding tax at the rate of 30% unless a lower rate applies under an applicable tax treaty. For instance, 15% for Polish shareholders. We are working with external service providers to enable participating shareholders to fill in all relevant tax information online. Considering the project's complexity, our reporting calendar, and close periods, we have concluded that the share buyback could not begin earlier than our Q1 2023 earnings announcement.
Finally, if and when the board of directors of Huuuge adopts all the details of the share buyback, we will share the details on price, timing, and all other relevant consideration with the market. With this, let's move on to the financial section of this presentation. Thank you. As we mentioned on during our Q3 earnings call, the last year was challenging for the global gaming market, including the social casino segment. In 2022, the global gaming market experienced a 4.3% decline, primarily due to a 6.4% year-on-year decline in the mobile gaming market. According to Eilers & Krejcik, the social casino market declined 2.5% year-over-year, which is directionally consistent with the overall mobile gaming market. For Huuuge, 2022 was a year of rising margins and positive cash flow generation, despite a decline in revenue that mostly followed the trends in the gaming market.
Our 2022 revenue is down by 14.7% and the revenue of Q4 of last year by 12.2% compared to the corresponding period if in 2021. The decline between full year 2022 and 2021 in absolute terms is mostly attributable to our core franchises. There are two key reasons for that. The first is a decline in daily active users and daily paying users, driven by lower marketing spend, and the second, a high base for comparison, given that in 2021 we were still observing COVID-19 related uplift in monetization metrics. The decline between Q4 of 2022 and Q4 of 2021 is in about 50% attributable to Traffic Puzzle as we significantly reduced the marketing budget of this game in the H2 of the last year.
In comparison to the previous quarters, Q4's total revenue remained flat. Revenue for our core franchises increased by approximately 2.7% quarter-over-quarter. This increase reflects our high monetization skills, successful economy update in August last year, and finally, our focus on building lasting player relationships. Moving on to the operation results section, it's worth noting that our sales and marketing expenses were moderated in 2022 and in Q4 of 2022, respectively, by 39.3% and 53.3%. This decrease reflects our post-IDFA user acquisition strategy for core franchises, where we shorten paybacks by focusing on the most profitable channels and reduce the marketing spend for Traffic Puzzle. In the third and Q4s of 2022, we spent $3.4 million on the strategic option review.
With the exception of this one-off expense, we saw a full year and Q4 decline in both research and development and general and administrative expenses. As we mentioned on the last earnings call, at every level of organization, we are actively managing costs and streamlining the company, which is well reflected in the OpEx section. Our operating results in the Q4 of 2022 and full year 2022 was additionally impacted by the one-off impairment charge related to Traffic Puzzle assets of $26.1 million. In February, we also decided to sunset the studio developing the game. Traffic Puzzle will remain live and available to players and is expected to continue generating revenue. Our operating results for full year 2022 and Q4 of 2022 declined respectively by $6 million and $17.4 million compared to the corresponding period in 2021.
However, if we excluded the impairment charge, we would see the increase respectively by $20.1 and $8.7 million. Finance expense net in the first 12 months of 2022 was positive $400,000, driven mostly by the financial revenue from short-term cash deposits, partially offset by the negative X-rate differences. Whereas in the corresponding period of 2021, the finance expense net was negative $45.6 million and resulted primarily from valuation of preference shares Series C and foreign exchange losses. Our effective tax for the last year was 18%. To sum up, in the last year, despite a revenue decline, we managed to maintain a cost discipline and focus on profitability, which allowed us to improve our adjusted EBITDA year-on-year by almost $80 million and adjusted EBITDA margin by 8.6 percentage point. From 17.2 to 25.6%.
Looking at the Q4 of 2022 versus a year ago, the adjusted EBITDA margin improvement is even more evident, and amounted to 14.9 percentage point from 23.4% to 38.3%. Now let's have a quick look on our balance sheet. In 2022, the structure of assets changed, and the share of current assets increased from 77% at the end of 2021 to 87% at the end of 2022, as the non-current assets dropped by about $30 million in the Q4 of 2022, mostly due to Traffic Puzzle impairment charge. At the end of both reporting periods, current assets in about 88%-89% consisted of cash and cash equivalents.
The increase in the current assets value is thus mostly attributable to cash and cash equivalents, which I will cover in the next slide. The structure of equity and liabilities has changed mostly due to the payment of the second and third tranches of $29.4 million in aggregate for Traffic Puzzle. This payment decreased the value of trade and other payables, which at the end of the last year amounted to $24.3 million compared to $52.7 million at the end of 2021. Turning to the next slide, we can expand a bit on our cash position and cash flow generation. On this slide, you can see a simplified cash flow statement for the full year 2022 and for the Q4 of 2022 as compared to the corresponding periods of the last year.
Cash generation is among our top priorities. It is well reflected in our net operating cash flow of $71 million in the full year 2022 compared to $29.8 million a year ago. Strong operating cash flow generation from the first nine of the last year continued also in the Q4, which turned out to be the strongest ever quarter in terms of operating cash flow generation of $28.9 million. The difference between net operating cash flow and the adjusted EBITDA for the last year is mostly attributable to $6.6 million of income tax paid in this period.
With regards to the investing, cash flow in the last year, it amounted to negative $32.6 million. It was mostly impacted by the payment of the second and third tranches for Traffic Puzzle of $29.4 million in total. Our financial cash flow for 2022 was mostly driven by a share buyback on which we spent $20.1 million. What I would like to point out on this slide is that despite cash outflows associated with the Traffic Puzzle purchase and the share buyback program, the company's cash position at the end of the year amounted to $222 million and was almost $27 million higher than at the end of 2021. Next slide, please. Thank you.
As you can see, our focus on profitability of our products, continuous optimization of cost base, positive ROI projects leads to positive free cash flows. We maintain high positive EBITDA to cash flow conversion, which in full year 2022 amounted to 85%, which places us among the most cash generative businesses in the games industry. We believe that cash is king, and in uncertain environment, we are a fundamentally strong business and in extreme healthy position. Between Q2 of 2021 and the end of the last year, we generated almost $110 million of the net operating cash flows, and we are confident that this positive trend will continue. We are ready to return excess cash to the shareholders via the expected buyback, while remain opportunistic when it comes to M&A or investment in any large internal projects.
Anton, would you like to provide any additional comments to this slide?
Sure. Yeah, with what you just said, cash is king, we believe that during times of economic stress, this puts us in a good position. On a relative basis, it would be horrible to be non-profitable. It's quite challenging market conditions, and these conditions may favor companies that are well capitalized and in position like Huuuge is as of today. If we think of the industry long-term outlook, we remain optimistic. We believe there will be more people playing games, spending time playing games, and ultimately generating economic value thanks to that. Let's move from that long-term view to more closer to outlook for this year. If I can get the next. Yes, this one.
As we've covered and discussed today, Huuuge is a fundamentally strong cash generative business. When we think of our objectives for this year, we believe we may well deliver the new profit records this year, and that's something that we as a team are really aiming for. We are putting profitability and sustainability of our core franchises as a top prio. We definitely are going to continue our work as being number one on monetization when we think of social casino. We believe that our product, being a real-time multiplayer, providing more social gameplay, is what helps us to excel on that front. The new approach how to build games are pods. We believe that with time, give us enough time, they will be success.
We hope we can later on on the year tell you a lot more about new successes and about the new games. We've remained busy and excited of what we are building, and there will be time to discuss more of the new games. The continued efforts to drive our margins and increasing our productivity, that's of course also a key theme for 2023. I think we've covered all the key details, and now it would be time for some Q&A and feedback. Thank you for joining.
We have some questions in the Q&A section already. We just remind that you can also ask for microphone and ask your questions live. The first question is from Michał Wojciechowski. What UA revenue level you target for this year? Is it likely to arrive below 20% in full 2023?
Hold on. I'm looking at the Q&A section. I can see Thomas. He's asking about the goal of strategic options review. You are asking something else, Marek.
Can I start from the oldest questions perhaps, like from those which came first?
On the bottom.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry, from your perspective, on top.
Exactly as you were going, Anton, that's fine. You can.
Okay. Okay, okay. Yeah, if that's fine, we'll start from the Q&A chat, and cover those one by one. The first one I see is, can you tell us what was the goal of strategic option review? If you have thoughts, takeaways on the process, was it actually necessary to conduct? We cannot share, first of all, too many details as the process was confidential. We believe the process was necessary to conduct in order to facilitate the best possible outcome for Huuuge shareholders. It's a standard practice in such situations. Yeah, we got tons of feedback, and we got more perspective about ourselves. That's what you always learn in these processes. Shall we move on to the next?
Mm-hmm
Question?
Yeah. Łukasz Kosiarski, congratulations for the amazing job that you do in terms of increasing the conversion rate in your main games. What actions stand behind this performance increase? What is your target at the end of 2023?
Yes. Thank you, Łukasz for excellent question. The conversion increase, so if you think of the core franchises, Huuuge Casino and Billionaire Casino, we mentioned of the economy update that was quite significant achievement from the Huuuge Casino Studio, and we saw success with that. I'd let J.B., maybe you wanna add on top of that as you are.
Sure
More involved.
No, that's a good point. The economy change was arguably the largest change that we made to drive conversion. On top of this, we had a VIP program expansion, which has helped with the conversion of our most valuable players. Just sort of general work on live ops and player prediction models have enabled us to identify users who are most likely to spend in the near future, those who aren't, and be able to target those players more directly. I think that encapsulates most of the drivers.
Yes.
Another question from Łukasz Kosiarski. Do you intend to continue share buyback programs next year?
There's no decisions at this stage, but we continue to focus on cash generation and profitability. That would be something to discuss later on. We are focusing on the current buyback.
Another question from Łukasz Kosiarski. What are the estimated savings resulting from the announced group layoffs?
Marek.
Sure. I take this one. Well, we don't guide directly for savings here, but we already mentioned about 20% headcount cut versus the end of 2022. On the, I think it was page 16 of the presentation, we are, let's say directionally guiding for slight year-over-year savings in normal, in non-marketing complex. This is what I can say about this.
A question from Tomasz Pelcar, niezalezny dom maklerski. How do you estimate the cost for a new mobile game that may achieve $1 million in monthly revenue? What is the market average for this cost in last year?
Yeah, that's a challenging question. I'd say depends quite a lot on the specific game, and there's so many different type of games. We can maybe say that the cost of the development to kind of create the game and the product can be as low as hundreds of thousands. Maybe somebody can do that even for less. The real cost would be then how to get scale for that game. How are you finding users? How much paid app user acquisition marketing would need to be done? I don't know, J.B., maybe you have some more indications and numbers, maybe good comments. It's a very.
Yeah
Question when you are not defining the type of game.
Yeah, exactly. It's so tough because you can have a game like Flappy Bird, which took $25,000 to make, and it creates $100 million of market effect, or you can have a game like Apex Legends Mobile, which is tens of millions of dollars to build and will not be generating $1 million for the future, basically. At least for us, we don't target games that are gonna make $1 million. We could spend $300,000 making a game, for example, and have it generate $1 million of revenue in its first or second year. That's unlikely to be deemed a success for us, and we can probably target something else. I would just set expectations accordingly.
We're looking for new games that move the needle, making tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars per year inside of three years from release. We expect for many of our development initiatives in Pods that for all five Pods operating in tandem every year, it will cost low single-digit millions. That should give you an idea of what the total expected cost for each of the five studios should be.
Another question from Tomasz Pelcar. Can we expect a strategy update so we can see a three to five year perspective for the company?
What we've communicated today of our current strategy about harvesting our core franchises, yet, being very focused on the sustainability of the brands, focusing on efficiency and costs, driving OpEx down, gas generation, and then these pods, agile approach, to building new games. This, in nutshell, is the current strategy we have, plus being opportunistic when it comes to market opportunities and industry consolidation. We definitely are not, kind of closed-minded, but open-minded and exploring, further growth opportunities that could be a match with the company. That's what I would be commenting at this point about the strategy. We haven't planned on doing a major change or update on that regard. Hopefully that will give you further clarity where we are heading.
Okay. Question from Michał Wojciechowski. Oh, sorry. What UA revenue level you target for this year? Is it likely to rise below 20% in full 2023?
Maybe we could look at the slide 16. I don't know if that's too much. When we could be looking at the Q4 of 2022, that would give some indications. It's a dynamic environment, so we haven't given exact guidance. Marek or JB, maybe you guys wanna chime in and comment a bit.
Yeah. Yes. What we can say and what was also presented that we expect marketing spend to be significantly lower year-on-year, and perhaps a Q4 of this year could be, let's say, broadly indicative. However, the spend might increase slightly in the coming quarters as you know, as we are to experiment with some new channels, with brand marketing, with influencers. We don't have any specific target for this year being also to some extent opportunistic to the market and our experiments with the new channels.
Uh-
J.B., anything that you would add?
No, I think, I think that's right. The takeaway really is that we expect materially lower, year-on-year spend on marketing generally, even with the experimentation that we plan to do.
Okay, another question from Michał Wojciechowski of IPOPEMA. Do you expect substantial decrease in platform fees related to webshop introduction this year? What share of webshop in sales is targeted for this year?
Sure. Happy.
That.
Sorry, Anton, go on.
Yeah, maybe I say that, yeah, we do see this revenue stream gradually increasing, and besides the kind of margin improvement, we also believe that this helps us to retain our most, especially our most valuable customers better when we have multiple touchpoints with these players and customers of ours. Yeah, J.B., please, maybe you give some more details.
Sure. We did 3.5% of our core franchises revenue was funneled through the webshop in 2022, and at the moment, the only guidance we're giving on that is we expect a material increase in 2023. In terms of calculating the sales transaction fee paid on those revenue streams, as you well know, through the general app stores, approximately 30% is taken per our accounts. In the case of transactions conducted straight through our webshop, we're looking at roughly a tenth to 15% of that value.
Next question, could you give us any guidance regarding R&D and G&A costs in 2023? Should we expect both lines to note significant decline year-on-year considering your current OpEx discipline?
Marek, I'd let you to comment.
Sure. Gladly, yeah. No direct guidance from our side. We expect slight decline.
Perfect.
Non-marketing OpEx year-on-year.
Next question. You already decreased your headcount by 20% year to date. Should we expect further decline in this year?
Yeah, no further guidance. As discussed, we continue to focus on efficiency and increasing productivity.
A question from Krzysztof Kaczmarczyk from BDM. Is the current monetization of core titles in line with the company's expectation?
We are never done. These games, and brands we are building, we have to continuously ask us what the players, what our customers want, and what are the best ideas to deliver more fun and more excitement for them. Yeah, I'd say that we are doing very well as we are the number one when it comes to monetization metrics on social casino, yet, we believe we can do better.
Mm-hmm. Kacper Koproń from Trigon. What savings do you expect from group layoffs? How many people are affected by the layoffs? Second question, can you comment on the user acquisition market environment? Third question, what to expect in 2023?
Maybe Marek, you comment the layoffs.
Yeah
Question.
We can start on the first part. Yeah. I guess it's similar to one of the question that was previously asked. You know, we expect slightly lower non-salary OpEx year-over-year, and as mentioned during the presentation, 20% headcount reduction versus the end of the year headcount.
Then there was.
You comment on the market environment.
Yeah, question about the user acquisition environment and what to expect in this year. I think it's been discussed quite widely in the industry, the ATT, the IDFA, the privacy change introduced by Apple and its implications on the industry, plus on top of that, the macro and all that, what all the industries have seen. It has certainly put kind of a lot of challenge on everyone how to deal with these channels, we thinking Facebook and Google, and the key digital marketing channels gaming and mobile gaming publishers have used, and there's been like a technical change how things are working, and that hasn't made it easy for anyone. JB maybe there's something additional that we should highlight.
Yeah. I'd say you're exactly right. The media buying environment is basically impossible to predict how much booking.com is going to spend versus how much Ten Square Games is going to spend will all affect our ability to spend. You can imagine that's an enormous industry to try and predict with too many moving parts. I will say one thing that we're starting to see in the marketing ecosystem is the rise of new tools. We're seeing a lot of incrementality based measurement tools, which enable us to do better targeting and understand exactly how well spend is performing in a similar way to the pre ATT environment, although not quite as good yet.
With the rise, and establishment of those tools, we expect that spending will become more viable, but it's very hard to predict, as and when those tools grow to establishment.
Yeah. I'd say that on our side, there's been an increased focus and attention on our organic demand. How many organic installs, how many of the users are going to App Store searching Huuuge Casino, Billionaire Casino, and are we able to sustain that without spending more than an arm and a leg? This is something we are very proud of, that thinking of the $1.5 billion lifetime revenue generated with these core franchises so far. We do see that even we've decreased paid marketing activities, we continue to generate organic installs. This again speaks behalf of the sustainability and the kind of brand equity value we've been able to generate during the years, we are very, very proud of that.
Okay. Next question from Krzysztof Kaczmarczyk of BDM. Do we understand correctly that such large write-off on TP IP is also related to weak KPIs of TP2? Can we ask for a broader comment on this topic?
Sure. You can always ask. There's a, there's kind of a, the market context, what happened on macro plus marketing landscape changes, plus what happened then on our side with our teams. Indeed, the KPIs were not satisfactory. When we did our assessment, we saw that there's more value for Huuuge to focus elsewhere, and that's something we've commented earlier. Marek, JB, is there something you guys would like to add to that or specifically commenting Traffic Puzzle?
No, I think that's clear. The only thing I would reiterate is what Marek said earlier. The game will continue to operate. It's not directly relevant to the question asked, but it's useful to echo. The game will continue to operate with, without a full team, which means that every dollar it generates will be extremely margin additive on a percentage basis. We expect there to be a material generation of cash from this product through its sunset period.
Yeah. Maybe JB, to clarify, you are talking about the Traffic Puzzle, the, like, the main, the main one.
Yeah. Correct. That's a good point. That's Traffic Puzzle 1. TP2, we did do some technical testing with, and we found that the KPIs that we first saw were not indicative of a likely future success, and so we made the decision we did.
Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah.
Okay. Next question. What does the company plan to do with the generated cash, after the shareback, share buyback process is completed? Does the company plan to continue distributing profits to shareholders?
Well, as commented already, we believe it's important to be well capitalized and have good cash, strong cash balance, like we do. There are opportunities on the market what comes to publishing and M&A, so we certainly wanna be in position where we can act, and when we see something that's extremely good match with the company, there's cash and capabilities to take an advantage of such opportunities. That's how much I would be commenting how do we kind of view our position, and specifically the fact that we are highly profitable, and there's plenty of cash that the company may invest when there's a right investment opportunity to do so. Does the company plan to continue distributing profits to shareholders?
Well, we believe, it's a good thing for the companies to be celebrating their success, sharing their success with the shareholders. This is something we would need to be discussing and exploring on a later date. At the moment, we don't have any specific comments about possible future events. Certainly that's a possibility.
Another question from Krzysztof Kaczmarczyk. Recently, Playtika announced its decision to halt the development of new games, amongst others, due to the impact of rising CPIs for new game. Are you also observing such a phenomenon? Could it have an impact on TP2?
Yeah. You know, we follow, of course, our market peers and to some extent what they do. I think what they announced may have been quite company specific as well. I wouldn't know. I think, to my understanding, our ways of operating companies and building new games have been quite different for quite some time. Yeah, that's much how I would comment about what the competition is doing. Indeed, the market dynamics have been quite challenging, and it hasn't been easy to launch new games and deliver massively, massive scale for those games. The whole industry is searching new answers and new solutions how to do that.
We believe there are already signs for, like, improvements, how the industry has adapted to new realities post IDFA and privacy changes. Yeah, that's how much I would comment about that. Guys, anything that you would like to add?
No, I think that's right. I think we agree with the conclusion that releasing a game today in the current CPI environment is very difficult if you plan on scaling it the same way that you might have scaled a game two years ago. What we're focusing on with Huuuge Pods is making sure that we can scale new products in a way that does not depend on attributable, targetable, scalable, paid user acquisition through Facebook, as an example. We're just trying to adjust the way that we make games to reflect the new reality.
Indeed. If still some time ago you could have gone blitzscaling and doing very fast scaling of the games, now the approach is more like slow scaling, and build first community, and make sure that layer community part is there, and perhaps having a bit more patience, thinking scaling. These things are changing, and the industry isn't kind of stagnant and stable, but evolving all the time. It's important to be highly active, and kind of focused on where the industry is going, instead of trying to work with the old methods and what once was.
One more question. What is happening with the company's investment in blockchain?
Well, on blockchain, if you would say loosely on a crypto, it's been quite hectic place where there's been and where there are ongoing regulatory developments ongoing. We remain interested. While we are a gaming company that builds games, we believe that some of these games may benefit from additional Web3 layer. This is something we still are active and working on, but the blockchain itself isn't the purpose or point for the company. In that sense, our focus is on the game, on what's fun for the player.
It's been quite interesting to see how the sentiment has evolved and what the players are thinking about the blockchain. We have to be highly sensitive and attentive to these details and do things that our players love. That being said, we believe there are good use cases for blockchain and Web3, thinking games and thinking future games. Do we have something more specific to say today? We don't. You would have to wait to see some more info news on that regard.
Question from Piotr Łopaciuk from PKO BP. It seems the buyback is complicated tax-wise. Why not to consider dividend instead?
Marek, I'll let you to comment how on that, if it's.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll gladly take this one. Yeah, please remember that we are U.S.-incorporated company, and we need to follow also not just polish, but also U.S. tax regulations. Actually, you know, the taxation of dividend is quite similar to the taxation of the large buyback transactions of the kind that we are contemplating right now. I don't think that there would be a material difference in terms of taxation.
Another question from Krzysztof Kosiński. Can Google's privacy policy change prove to be a challenge threat to the company?
There's been the Google, is it Sandbox, change, what they talk about. They seem to be taking a somewhat slightly different approach. They are not doing exactly the same as Apple. This is touching the whole industry, not only Huuuge Games. At the moment, we don't have any specific concerns regarding Google's privacy policy change, and don't have much more to comment before it goes live. JB, Marek, maybe you guys wanna, or Maciek have something to say.
Sure, yeah. Happy to weigh in. I think that's right. The latest rumors as we understand them suggest that the Sandbox privacy update is likely to come either at the end of this year or maybe early to mid next year. We are preparing already for this. The change will be similar in magnitude to the IDFA change but probably less acute. The way that we prepare is making sure that we can do user acquisition without the need for direct attribution through things like media mix modeling. The way that we model and measure will be fundamentally changing as a result.
When I talked about incrementality-based measurement tools previously in the presentation, they very much come into play in light of this change, and our focus on organic traffic, exactly as Anton mentioned, is also part of that hedging strategy. We will be prepared for when this launches. We're making the moves necessary today.
Question from Łukasz Boczek. When you say about increasing adjusted results in 2023, you mean that you expect to achieve increasing profits quarter by quarter, so every quarter of 2023 should be better than Q4 2022?
There's also seasonality aspects in our business, and some of the months may be having more days than others. I'm not saying anything, you know, absolute. I'm saying that our goal is to deliver another record-breaking profit year, that's definitely that we are aiming for. Yeah, Marek, maybe you wanna give some more detail if there is more to comment on, you know, specific quarter by quarter.
Anton, mostly as you said, we are not guiding for quarter read results. As we already pointed out, we expect full year 2023 adjusted EBITDA to be significantly higher year-on-year.
Another question from Łukasz Wachełko. What is the planned value of share buyback program? Will all the shares be canceled?
That's the intention. Again, the final details would need board decision. What is the planned value? Clearly if the shares are then canceled after bought, it is increasing the per share value as an outcome. Anything additionally you guys would JB, Marek, say about buyback?
Maybe just clarify that what has been communicated so far that the value of the entire buyback program will be up to $150 million.
Question from Emil Popławski, PKO Brokerage House. How many people are required just to maintain Core Games working and generating long-term cash flow, assuming you will not develop any new games and focus on the maintenance only?
Hmm. There's no straightforward, you know, number or answer to give. There are multiple teams working directly on the game. There are also a number of support functions across the company that are crucial to our operations. Yeah, there's, if you think of the total head count and the employees we have, clearly it's not all. We wouldn't need all of the people, but I don't have a very exact answer to that. We've been going through structuring the teams and the departments, so we should have perhaps later on the year, more exact answer to that, as there are some organizational changes going on in the company.
A question from Przemysław Kąpczyński, Millennium Dom Maklerski SA. How many people does the team currently have? Do you plan to increase it this year?
Marek, I'll give that to you.
At the end of the last year, we had 582 employees, or full-time equivalents. As we have already indicating that this headcount is to be reduced by approximately 20%, also as a result of the PAST Traffic Puzzle Studio Sunset and other ongoing initiatives.
Are there any further questions?
Looks like we covered, and also time is up, so it's exactly 60 minutes, which I would say it was well planned.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think we can conclude. No more questions coming.
Okay. Thank you all for joining us today. Hope to see you soon. Thank you.
Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.
Thank you.