Call is being conducted as a Zoom audio webinar. All participants will be in a listen-only mode until the Q&A. When we come to the Q&A, please raise your hand by pressing the Raise Hand icon at the bottom center of the screen, and your line will be unmuted in turn. Participants who have joined by telephone will be in a listen-only mode throughout. The agenda for this morning's call will include a business and strategy update by Co-founder and CEO Chris Hulls, which will be followed by an overview of the financials by CFO Russell Burke, which will then provide some outlook comments, which will be followed by a Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call over to Chris.
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. Before I move to the details of the result, I want to provide a high-level view of Life360's achievements in a landmark year for the company. We achieved accelerating operational metrics across the business, finishing the year with annualized monthly revenue of $135.7 million, a year-on-year increase of 51% and a strong leading indicator of the growth opportunity ahead. Despite the continued disruption from COVID-19 in the U.S. and other countries, global monthly active users increased 34% year-on-year, with the U.S. delivering growth of 39%. We delivered a 39% increase in paying circles, with three consecutive quarters of record subscriber additions. We also delivered two transformational acquisitions of Tile and Jiobit and a key new data partnership with Placer.ai.
Together with Tile and Jiobit, Life360 has taken a fundamental step forward in our vision of being the dominant platform for a much broader suite of family services. We are now the only vertically integrated cross-platform solution of scale that brings people, pets, and things together in a unified app. Our data agreement with Placer.ai will enable us to spend less time navigating the rapidly evolving regulatory environment and Apple and Google platform changes, allowing us to focus on our core while simultaneously reducing business risk. Importantly, Life360 is in a very strong financial position to deliver on our growth aspirations for the company, with cash and cash equivalents of approximately $94 million following the close of the Tile transaction. Life360's impact in the real world continues to grow.
User metrics on this slide illustrate how we connect families and save lives with a dispatch of almost 20,000 ambulances in 2021. Testimonials such as this one demonstrate why our organic growth metrics are so strong, as word of mouth is such a key driver. A high-level view of our strong 2021 financial performance is outlined here on slide seven. Revenue of $112.6 million increased 40%, supported by 48% growth in direct revenue, 11% higher indirect revenue, and the contribution from Jiobit and Tile. Total expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, increased 49% due to growth investment and increased variable costs reflecting higher revenue. R&D costs increased 28%, while user acquisition and TV expenses increased 66% as we shifted from traditional performance marketing to new channels that also enable us to focus on our broader brand story.
Variable commissions and cost of revenue increased in the direct revenue. Russell will provide greater expense detail later in the presentation. Investment in the business, together with the acquisition of Jiobit, saw the underlying EBITDA loss increase to $13.1 million, and our ratio of expenses to revenue remained broadly stable. Slide eight shows the acceleration of our quarterly revenue in the third and fourth quarters is COVID impacted despite the emergence of the Omicron variant. In Q4, revenue increased 54% year-on-year, with a small contribution from the Jiobit acquisition. As I mentioned earlier, annualized monthly revenue for December, which excludes Jiobit, increased 51% year-on-year. To put this performance in context, AMR has more than doubled since our IPO in May 2019. Turning now to the drivers of our revenue.
Monthly active users increased 34% year-on-year to 35.5 million, with U.S. growth of 39% and international growth of 24%. While the U.S. has delivered strong and consistent growth all year, our December international MAU is slightly below June levels. It should be noted that this decline is not due to deterioration of fundamentals, but rather due to expected churn from a significant viral spike we had in downloads from low-value regions earlier in the year. During our half-year call, I spoke about the surge, which was primarily driven by memes on TikTok. This supported a number one position in app store charts in more than 11 countries in May and underpinned the 2.6 million lift in MAU as of June.
As the chart on the right highlights, this surge was particularly pronounced in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian territories, which has since reverted to more normalized rates of growth. MAU trends in high-value Anglosphere markets have remained consistently strong. Turning now to direct revenue, which increased 48% year-on-year, a significant acceleration from the previous year growth. The three consecutive quarters of record subscriber additions I referred to earlier is clearly visible in the significant step up in paying circles in slide 11. New membership subscribers increased 72% between June and December, with our legacy subscribers remaining relatively stable. Membership now makes up 56% of paying circles and is the key driver of the continued uplift in our average revenue per paying circle in the U.S. ARPC for new cohort subscribers is 38% ahead of the first half of 2020, prior to the membership launch.
The drivers of the acceleration in our paying circle net additions over the course of 2021 are outlined on this slide. U.S. registrations have continued to strengthen with a particularly strong performance in the key back-to-school Q3. More importantly, we have seen a continued improvement in conversion metrics which doubled in Q4 compared with Q4 in 2020. It's exciting to see the impact of the work of our product teams in driving the acceleration in net additions, which you can see in each quarter of 2021. While we expect strong growth to continue, it should be noted that we have seasonality in our business and we do not expect Q1 to set a new record for subscriber additions.
In addition, we are heads down integrating Tile and Jiobit, and we expect their impact to be felt in the Q3 back-to-school and Q4 holiday periods, so the year will again likely be back-half loaded. Turning now to indirect revenue, which increased 13% year-on-year, representing 22% of 2021 revenue. Data revenue increased year-on-year ahead of expectations that had been moderated in anticipation of changes to iOS IDFA guidelines. The contribution from Arity was consistent with the prior year. We recently announced a new partnership with Placer.ai to transition Life360 to sales of solely aggregated data. As already mentioned, we believe this partnership will enable us to spend less time navigating the rapidly evolving regulatory and platform environment while preserving revenue in line with CY 2021 results for the duration of the three-year agreement.
We completed the acquisition of Jiobit in September, and we see an exciting opportunity to extend the market for our safety services to young children, customers, and seniors. Jiobit's performance continued to bounce back strongly after the COVID-19 impact in the first half of 2020, with year-end subscriptions increasing 43% and second half subscription revenue lifting 62% with the benefit of higher price points. While the hardware business still faces significant supply constraints, our strategic goal of adding low churn subscriptions is already being achieved and will be further enhanced as we integrate cross-marketing for Life360 subscriptions. We're also excited to share that we are merging the Tile and Jiobit brands into a single lineup. We'll share more on that later. Turning now to an update on our strategy. 2021 was a tremendous year of progress for Life360 with strong delivery against our strategic objectives.
Our goal to build a large user base delivered more than 35 million monthly active users. This event was supported by a brand new brand campaign and new user acquisition channels in concert with a range of new free features, including data breach alerts, updates to our map, and a number of small improvements. Our Gold and grow membership saw the delivery of more than 1.2 million paying circles. As I mentioned earlier, we saw three consecutive quarters of record paying circle additions benefiting from product investment to drive conversion. We began the first stage of the international expansion membership with the Canada launch. Finally, our goal to expand recurring revenue saw the acquisition of Jiobit and Tile, marking a fundamental step forward in our vision of being the dominant platform for a much broader suite of family services.
These acquisitions dramatically expanded the use cases in total addressable market for Life360, and in particular, have the potential to hyper-charge our membership. While both businesses bring meaningful hardware revenue, what really excites us is our new dominant position in the ecosystem and now having the ability to bundle something that people can touch and feel as part of what was previously a solely digital experience. We believe this will give us the ability to increase conversion, raise pricing, and reduce churn. Integrating Tile and Jiobit into Life360 to drive higher membership growth and conversion rates is the first of our 2022 priorities. This means that our members will be able to find, connect, and protect everything that matters to them, including people, pets, and things.
We expect the integration work to take place in the first half of the year, ready to take advantage of the back-to-school peak seasonality launch. It should be noted this is a very significant undertaking, which in the short term means other revenue initiatives have been deprioritized. As mentioned, growth for the year will be very back-loaded after we complete this launch. We are also watching developments around the privacy concerns relating to Apple AirTags and stalking risks. The scrutiny Apple is facing in the press is moderating growth of the category overall. While this does not change our ability to drive subscription growth through integration with Life360, it may be a headwind for standalone hardware sales until the situation resolves and the category is able to more fully emerge.
This slide provides details on why we are confident that integrating Tile and Jiobit will drive an uplift in key membership metrics. First, we see the opportunity for higher conversion to paid and increased ARPPC as customers are more willing to pay for something they can physically touch. Our new bundled offering will enable increased pricing as well as shift to higher tiers. We see the opportunity for conversion and ARPPC to increase by double-digit %. Secondly, we see the opportunity to reduce churn and improve overall LTV. Subscriptions that are tied to physical devices have exceptionally high retention rates. Jiobit's retention rate, for example, at month 12 is almost double that of Life360 standalone. We're excited about the opportunity to extend customer lifetime and increase LTV.
Finally, we see the opportunity for broader brand reach and expansion in our total addressable market as a joint offering appeals to additional demographics. Long term, we see additional markets opening up, such as elder care. This extended reach opens up additional pay channels and improved top-of-funnel. I've spoken previously about our goal to deliver a more emotional connection with the Life360 experience and evolve from where are you to how are you. We did some very small improvements along this vein in 2021, and we are significantly increasing resourcing to this initiative in 2022. We're doing a lot to make the app more fun and engaging, and also to provide ways to use Life360 that are less utilitarian and more about fostering a sense of togetherness.
We like to say less, "Where are you?" and more, "I love you." Features like this will significantly differentiate us in ever-increasing number of generic location trackers and grow the size and engagement of our user base, which ultimately translates into more paying customers. Our Membership 2.0 initiatives deliver an expanded offering, which will drive upsell and ARPPC. They are designed to introduce customers to the Life360 feature set in new ways. Examples include our driver tab 2.0, which expands driving features while also bringing them front and center. A physical welcome kit with in-app branding to reinforce value and in-app messages and seasonal marketing hooks to drive upsell.
Given the success of our U.S. membership model, our priority for 2022 is to expand into new geographies. We have established a dedicated international team which will focus on enhancing the free user experience and starting the rollout of membership international. We plan to deliver feature parity in key markets with free crash detection, SOS, and data breach alerts. Our Canada launch in late 2021 has achieved strong metrics of more than a 100% uplift in the RPC for new memberships. Our plans for a U.K. launch build on the strong MAU performance in that market, with a 63% year-on-year growth rate in the fourth quarter. Over the course of 2021, we scaled our spend in performance marketing and into a broader array of channels.
This investment was supported by the improved unit economics resulting from the strong conversion of subscription retention that I described earlier. As we see the benefits flow through the product improvements, we can scale spend profitably to accelerate growth. Our expansion outside of traditional performance marketing include the brand campaign I mentioned earlier. In 2022, we plan to accelerate our marketing investment, including expanding high-efficiency streaming TV and broader brand campaigns, which will incorporate linear TV and out-of-home during our back-to-school season. As we invest in improving the user experience and rolling out membership internationally, we will unlock our ability to invest in international performance marketing, which has been limited to date. As I outlined earlier, Life360's core values of family safety and security are having a major impact in the real world as we connect families and save lives.
We have made progress in formalizing this commitment to our community, our employees, the environment and government for the development of an ESG policy and the achievement of carbon neutrality for 2020. With that, I'll turn the call over to Russell, who will run through the financials.
Thanks, Chris, and thanks to everyone who's joined the call today. Please note that all of the numbers I will be discussing are denominated in U.S. dollars, are in accordance with U.S. GAAP accounting standards, and are unaudited. Before I go through the financial results in more detail, I'll provide an update on some of the unit economics that I've discussed on previous calls with some additional perspectives. All of these unit economic slides focus on the core Life360 business. Slide 27 illustrates the retention rates of our U.S. organic users and the retention of membership subscribers. Our organic user retention for March cohorts prior to 2021 shows an initial negative impact of COVID, followed by a bump of reactivation. There has been no COVID impact on our March 2021 cohort, with retention rates running at all-time highs.
The longevity of our relationship with users is illustrated in the length of the lines. These now stretch out for more than four years and show consistently stable and improving retention rates. The chart in the top right-hand corner measures month-one user retention over time. While there's seasonality in this series, it illustrates the initial negative impact of COVID and recovery to recent all-time highs. As we have invested in improving the user experience, we've seen engagement increase significantly over 2021, and this has resulted in improving user retention. We expect this to continue as we establish a dedicated team focused on the initiatives that Chris described earlier. Turning from free users to membership subscribers, the charts at the bottom of this slide show the impact of membership on retention rates.
The end-of-year one membership retention rates continue to deliver well ahead of pre-membership averages for both monthly and annual subscribers. The investment that we've undertaken in enhancing the membership experience is clearly being recognized by our subscribers. As Chris outlined, Membership 2.0 is designed to further enhance our offering and provide more value to subscribers, which will further support retention. This slide is a new addition and provides a deep dive into the improving conversion metrics, which we've mentioned several times, the charts that illustrate the first four months of revenue contribution by the quarterly cohort over time, beginning in quarter two of 2017. We show the cohorts by quarter, given the seasonality in the business, particularly the back of back-to-school impact in Q3. The declines in Q2- Q4 of 2020 show clearly the impact of COVID on these cohorts.
However, our higher conversion is driving a significant uplift from Q2 of 2021 onwards, with revenue more than doubling compared with the prior year quarter. The charts on slide 29 show the cumulative revenue of our quarterly cohorts over time, also beginning in Q2 of 2017. The length of the line show the extended period over which we're able to monetize users, now extending out as far as 54 months. Apart from the COVID impacts of Q2 2020- Q1 2021, each cohort has delivered an increasingly steep gradient, and we've benefited from improving retention and higher price points. It's very encouraging to see that from Q2 2021, we're seeing a significant uplift in cohort revenue. This slide shows revenue retention by half-year period for users who had signed up at the end of the previous period.
While we experienced a modest COVID-related decline in the first half of 2020, you can see a recovery to historic levels at all subsequent periods. Increasing success in driving free users to paid subscriptions and paid subscribers to higher price points underpins the delivery of revenue retention in excess of 100% consistently. This movement of free users to paid and paid subscribers to high-priced plans is illustrated on slide 31. ARPPC has increased progressively over time, increasing for successive cohorts, which can be seen by the line starting at higher price points each time. The upward slope of the lines shows that we're able to increase average pricing even within the same cohort. The launch of the membership plans in Q3 of 2020 saw a substantial step up in ARPPC with a further increase to around $120 in subsequent quarters.
The current flatter curve for membership cohorts is a reflection of the recent surge in absolute subscriber numbers into Gold tier, somewhat diluting the proportion of high-priced Platinum subs. The final unit economics slide I'll focus on is marketing ROI. The charts show payback curves on investment across all marketing channels by quarterly cohort. While marketing spend was constrained by COVID impacts in Q2 and Q3 of 2020, we took advantage of the momentum of our user growth and improvements in conversion to paid to increase marketing investment in the second half of 2021. This included a national brand campaign during the back-to-school season and increased performance marketing spend. We take a longer-term view of U.S. user monetization with the goal of achieving profitability between 12 and 24 months, and that's what's reflected in the lines on this chart.
This high level top-down view of blended spend across all marketing channels is related to, but different from, the bottom-up ROI analysis of user acquisition, which we undertake on each individual channel and each initiative. This top-down approach captures all spend in aggregate, including brand and TV spend, some of which may not be directly measurable. Turning now to the details of our income statement. Total revenue increased 40% to $112.6 million, driven by 48% growth in direct revenue and 13% increase in indirect revenue. Jiobit's contribution since acquisition is reflected in direct and hardware revenue. Cost of revenue increased 47%, and gross profit was 38% higher at $89.9 million. Gross margin was slightly lower at 80% due to the impact of hardware cost of sales as a result of the Jiobit acquisition, plus higher technology costs.
Operating expenses increased 49% to $121.3 million as we increased investment to help scale the business. Research and development expenses of $43.5 million increased 28% year-on-year as a result of higher headcount to support product development. User acquisition costs of $7.1 million increased 66%, reflecting the increased investment undertaken in the second half that I referred to earlier. Sales and marketing expenses of $39.5 million include variable sales commissions paid to Apple and Google, which account for $22.1 million. The year-on-year increase resulted from strong growth in our direct revenue with a proportionate commission increase and higher other marketing expenses, which reflect the investment in streaming TV channels and brand and other performance marketing.
General and administrative expenses of $19.8 million increased 104% year-on-year, reflecting the scaling of headcount to support growth as well as insurance, facilities, and public company-related costs, and costs incurred for acquisitions. Stock-based compensation of $11.4 million increased 48% year-on-year as a result of new hires and continuing competitive marketplace in which we operate. The statutory EBITDA loss of $31.4 million increased from $16.0 million, reflecting the investment in growth. The underlying EBITDA loss, excluding stock-based compensation on recurring items, increased to $13.1 million. Now turning to the balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents of $231 million increased from $56.4 million due to the proceeds from the capital raising associated with the Tile acquisition. The accounts receivable increase of $2.8 million largely reflects the timing of receipts from the channel partner.
Inventory of $2.0 million, intangible assets of $8 million, goodwill of $31.6 million, and the contingent liability of $9.9 million all relate to the Jiobit acquisition. The current convertible note of $4.2 million and non-current of $8.3 million relate to the private placement investment round and convertible note issued for the Jiobit acquisition. Finally, turning to cash flow. Operating cash flow of $12.2 million increased by $4.9 million due to investment to grow the business. Net cash outflows from investing activities of $7.1 million are in connection with the Jiobit acquisition. Net cash inflows from financing activities of $194 million reflect proceeds from the capital raising associated with the Tile acquisition, and cash received on issuance of convertible notes in relation to this Tile investment round, slightly offset by the exercise of options.
Life360 ended the period with a cash balance of $231.3 million. Following the close of Tile acquisition, the cash balance is approximately $94 million. Thanks for your attention, and I'll turn the call back to Chris, who will discuss the outlook.
Due to potential implications under U.S. federal securities laws, we are not currently able to provide specific guidance for CY 2022. After a strong CY 2021 performance, we are confident in our ability to drive continued growth, in particular in our core Life360 subscription business. We anticipate that we will return to providing guidance as soon as we can do so in ways that do not potentially raise U.S. securities laws implications. That concludes our prepared remarks, and I'll now turn the call over to Melissa, who will manage the Q&A portion of our call today.
Thanks, Chris. As a reminder, to participate in the Q&A, please raise your hand by pressing the Raise Hand icon at the bottom of your screen within the Zoom app. You will need to unmute yourself to ask your question. Also, once unmuted, please tell us your name and what company you're calling from. First up, we have Laf.
Hi, everyone. It's Lafitani from MST. I just wanted to ask a few questions. The first is in relation to the dual listing. Could you just remind the Australian investor base what the advantage is of moving toward dual listing, particularly in the current environment?
Sure. I have to speak a little bit generically there and formally, I cannot share plans in terms of what we're trying to do from a specific standpoint. I can talk a little bit more generically about why we have had this long-term plan of becoming a dual-listed company. The first is long-term, we are a U.S. company. We always saw the ASX as a stepping stone, and it just makes a lot of sense that we would eventually be domiciled in our home market, where most of our employees are citizens, where the investor base is much deeper as we grow bigger market. We also do feel that the multiples, even though they've come down across the board, are still significantly higher in the U.S.
When we do look at how we think we could be valued across borders, we do see a gap that we think we can take advantage of. As we look to grow, we do want to look to where we think we can be valued in line with our peers. Russell, anything to add?
No, I don't think so. Just to your last point, Laf, again, speaking generically, you know, anyone looking at a listing is clearly taking into account the overall marketplace and that's, you know, had an impact in the U.S. with what we've seen so far this year. You know, that will just be something that everyone, including ourselves, will continue to monitor.
Yeah, sure. Why don't I move on? The comments that you made around Apple AirTag and impacting category sales, could you give us a better idea to quantum? 'Cause there's a few moving pieces, right? When the Tile acquisition, some of the sales reported for last calendar year or financial year already included an impact from supply issues. There's a lot. How should we think about the year ahead, taking into account what you've just said has a category impact as well as the supply issues from last year? From last year to this year, do you expect it to be flat? Up?
I know it's sort of teetering on guidance, but it's, you know, there's a lot of moving pieces for us to take into account, and it's hard to sort of hypothetically decide on what's happening under the business.
Sure. Let me start by answering your question more indirectly and recapping why we're very excited about the deal to begin with. 'Cause it does tie into resource allocation, where we're putting dollars. There were two bets that we were making. I'll start with what the biggest bet was and the most critical part, which is. Can we use hardware to drive membership upsell, and will that give us a better position in the market with a much broader offering? Obviously, software revenue is far, far, far more valuable than hardware revenue. What Life360 has is that very high value annuity stream. The broader category doesn't really impact our ability to drive membership dollars. When we look at supply issues, in particular, we're going to prioritize anything we can do to drive membership over direct hardware sales.
Clearly, we'd like to not be supply constrained, and that would enable us to also capitalize on the second portion of our bet, which is: Can this category emerge in its own right in the same way that AirPods made Bluetooth headphone category emerge in a much bigger way that was good for all participants? That latter piece, I think, is gonna be maybe a little bit slower than we hoped because Apple's essentially stopped marketing AirTags while getting through some of these privacy headwinds. We think that's more of a wait-and-see moment. Given that supply already is somewhat limited, we will be deploying more of that to moving membership numbers anyway. When we think about what it could look like, I think we need to be very careful on guidance, obviously, given some of the issues we mentioned. I would not expect.
Tile standalone will probably stay in a similar band to last year. It won't be a huge growth year. I don't expect it to be a huge down year either. I think it's more, again, consistent, and we're gonna be redeploying as much possible to driving membership possible. If we have a trade-off to make, which is, A, allocate Tile devices to Life360 to drive membership, or B, allocate devices to Tile standalone to drive hardware sales, we're always gonna take the bias towards driving membership.
Okay, got it. Just moving to my next question. Could you update us on the board and management's thinking around pathway to profitability, not necessarily any specifics with any numbers, but just the thinking. Is there more urgency in the current market environment to move to profitability quicker? Do you think now that you've failed to move to profitability, or are we expected to continue seeing high levels of investment over the medium term?
Sure. For a start, we try not to be driven by the market in terms of making decisions. In general, if we can see ways to profitably spend to grow, we're going to lean in on them. Clearly, this year, as we've already discussed, it is gonna be a build year where burn does go up meaningfully as we integrate these companies. There is a lot of R&D that we're putting into this that's largely gonna show payoff in 2023. I can say very clearly right now our anticipation is that 2023 will have significantly reduced burn to 2022. Clearly, if something absolutely hits it out of the park, we'll step on the gas and keep going. We have plenty of money in the bank.
Our plan will be that this will be a peak burn year. I do hope that everyone recognizes that we have been able to get cash flow breakeven, essentially at moment's notice with what happened in COVID in 2020, where we had our first consecutive cash breakeven quarters. If we ever need to do it, we maintain that option. We're prudent and disciplined in spend. I'm very confident that we will always be in a position if we need to adjust burn, we'll be able to do so extremely quickly.
Okay. Just moving on to the Canada full membership launch. Can you give us a bit of detail? There's not much in the presentation about how that's going.
First off, it's pretty exciting. It's very early. We just launched at the end of December. ARPC has more than doubled. Conversion obviously does come down a bit when you increase pricing that much. We need to see over the next few months, but the team is feeling very excited about that, where a lot of what we did hope to see as early indicators have happened and have shown that if we do expand the offering, people will start taking up the new membership tiers, and it will drive significantly increased LTV, which would confirm we can then pivot to paid marketing. Canada is obviously a very small country in relation to the U.S., but it does reaffirm our playbook that we now can go to other regions, and we have a model of what that looks like.
We are midstream exploring what it will take to get the vendors propped up in the United Kingdom. We hope that within the next quarter, we'll have even more numbers around Canada. We can have a little bit more specificity around what that looks like. Again, the early numbers are quite promising.
Okay. Just finally on acquisitions, you know, you flagged other verticals in the past, you know, as an example, insurance. Could you talk through appetite, given current workload?
Short-term, very focused on execution. I'll never say never. Clearly, if something amazing comes along, we'll look at it. We're an extremely ambitious company. A lot of what we are looking at with moving back to deeper markets with deeper pockets is having the ability to raise capital and do bigger acquisitions because we really do see the business as one where if we get the breadth, we get the users, that is how we add a zero or two zeros to our valuation. Right now, we are much more focused on internal execution. Net- net, I would rather that we grow our business organically versus inorganically, and focus is extremely important to us. Of course, I did mention previously that we don't like the market to dictate how we run the business.
We do think, given the chop in the market and given what is now not particularly favorable to raise more capital, we would not really look at deals that we would have to dilute ourselves at the current valuation, which is probably just as frustrating to many of you on the call as it is to us. We have a full roadmap ahead of us, so we're not feeling like we're losing out to any opportunities we wanna do right now anyway.
Laf, I guess just to add to that too, the acceleration in the membership side of the business that we saw in the latter half of 2021, we feel that just gives us the opportunity to really maximize that and thus the focus in the short term on doing just that.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you, Laf. Up next, we have James. James, please tell us your full name and what company you're calling from.
Okay, it's James Bales from Morgan Stanley here. I just wanted to touch firstly on slide 20, where you talk about the hardware opportunity. The comment on the left talking about the conversion uplifts and the ARPPC opportunity. Should we interpret that comment as being you wanna see double-digit uplift in conversion and a separate double-digit uplift in ARPPC?
Yes, absolutely. I feel very confident that once the integration is done, we're gonna be able to deliver on that. It's gonna be a while till it's done. It's gonna take us a while to dial it in, but I'm supremely confident in what I view they're gonna bring to the membership tiers.
There's kind of two parts to that, James. We're already seeing the conversion aspect in several tests. The ARPPC will be probably more driven by the potential for price increases, but that's really part of the ability of putting these things together.
When you say price increases, is that a like-for-like price increase on the existing tier levels, or is that simply a mix of people paying for more Platinum and Gold?
It's all of the above, and we're doing testing right now to figure out the specifics.
Okay, got it. Maybe on slide 11, my interpretation of your earlier comments was that you expected membership paying circles basically to over time see churn from your legacy subscriptions onto membership. They seem pretty recent, though, and not churning as much. Is that something that we should take into account in terms of those pre-membership circles sticking around? Or is that hardware, you know, sort of try and see more of those migrate to our membership?
It's a bit of both. We obviously have very good long-term churn, and you have some people that are grandfathered in, and if you're grandfathered in, you might as well upgrade. If you are getting this discounted Gold, it's a pretty sweet deal to remain on that. For longer-term customers, there will be holdouts for a while, because they're incentivized to stay. As we grow the size of the overall base, all new users are coming in on membership, so percentage-wise, that will continue to go down. We do look forward to using Tile and Jiobit as ways to attempt to get people to upgrade. We are more focused on the new members coming in.
Got it. Maybe just one last one. Back on the point on the international rollout in Canada. What do you expect to see there in terms of changes in monthly actives and paying circles? How much capital will you put into customer acquisition there to new markets of Canada and the U.K.?
U.K. won't be out, just to clarify, till very late in the year. With Canada, our hope is that we show metrics that start looking more and more like the U.S. The real interesting thing for us will be, A, can we get Canada looking as good as the U.S. or possibly even better? B, how long does it take? That will help guide how much we spend. We will, in the short term, to establish market experiment, what happens if we do a little more liberal spending just to see if we can get some of the, that rally going on its own. It's such a small market, it won't be huge dollars.
I don't have the exact dollar budgets for you, but given Canada is less than 10 times the size of the U.S., it's not gonna be huge changes, but it is gonna be much, very valuable learning. On a per capita basis, we might lean a little bit more aggressively to understand what does happen when we get more aggressive in a given country.
The broader point too, James, is that you know, as Chris said, Canada is a pretty small market. The next market that we're looking at, the U.K., is much bigger. You know, the learnings that we take from Canada can be applied to the next rollouts and really help those hit the ground quickly.
Got it. Okay. Thanks, guys.
Welcome.
Thanks. Up next, we have Chris. Chris, please repeat your full name and which company you're calling from.
Thank you. It's Chris Savage from Bell Potter. Just a couple of questions. Back on the potential U.S. listing. Chris, in the past you said in conjunction with that, you'd look to do a raise, something like $100 million.
Yep.
To provide liquidity and get U.S. shareholders on board. In the current market environment, would you still look to do that?
We have lots of lawyers who have told me to be very careful about talking anything around firm plans. I am gonna probably give you a little less than satisfactory answer here.
Sure.
We want to make sure that if we do a listing, we do it right. We haven't experienced what it's been like to be a bit of an orphan. It took us a while to get our sea legs on the ASX, and we do wanna make sure to the best of our ability that we don't repeat that dynamic in the U.S. markets. It is a little bit different. This is our home market, from our early feelers. The investors, it's great how many of them use the product. We do compare very favorably to a lot of our comps in terms of how sticky the product is, and how we haven't been massively subsidizing margins or anything to grow.
We think it can be very well received, but we also do think to get interest from what are much bigger funds, we do need to have a capital raise associated with listing. We obviously hope that this growth sell-off, which has been very indiscriminate and sort of goes down, course correct. Clearly if people see a line of sight to how we're gonna be trading on a different comp base, that might change how people even react in the Australian market. If we were forced to do a couple hundred million dollar raise at this price, I think we would really have to think deep if we would wanna take that dilution, and quite frankly, probably we wouldn't. Nothing's happening over the next couple of months. This is a slightly longer term game plan.
A lot can change, and we're of course watching the broader markets extremely closely. This is a bit of an aside. When I look at advice around the feasibility to raise, I ignore the lawyers because they get paid no matter what. They're billing by the hour. Whereas the bankers, when they're leaning in on a deal, they only get paid if it gets done. I can say bankers are extremely excited to work with us and extremely excited, I say that sanguine on the market in terms of the current headwinds being something that could be short-lived. I do believe them because otherwise they're wasting a lot of cycles on something that isn't gonna happen. We'd like the market to course correct.
Clearly if the market keeps this current trajectory, it's not a good position for anyone out in the capital markets. If you just look a couple of months ago, the world was very different and a couple months in the future it could also look very different.
In that respect, Chris, the other only other thing I'd say is obviously we have plenty of runway, but we have the ability to give this process to take a little bit of time. We'll have the optionality to make the decision, the right decision at the right time.
One very last addition. Through the process, we're obviously gonna meet a ton of U.S. investors and we will be on the radar in a much bigger way regardless of whenever the trigger gets pulled. I think that's a worthy endeavor that is for the benefit of the business and all our shareholders having the profile of the company raised in general. We have optionality when time is right to do whatever we want.
Yeah. No, thanks for the color. Just what would the couple hundred million, say, be used for or paid for? Or would it just be basically an additional buffer on the balance sheet?
It'd be a combination of things. We are very bullish in some of our new initiatives, in terms of their ability to drive this growth. If we do really get the international playbook dialed in, that is something where you're almost assuredly gonna be upside down for a couple of years before you go in the green or the black. International is one. Very, very promising signals on new paid acquisition. Our new CMO, Gary, has been really stepping up, and that team's been expanded. If we see profitable payback, we do wanna be able to capitalize on it. We know investors are supportive, but also want to make sure we don't get too close to hitting a cash buffer that could be problematic. The third thing is just increased R&D in general.
There's a lot we wanna get done. We have a pretty good track record of doing what we say in terms of getting payback on our investments. I think we can prove to the market that Jiobit and Tile is a success. We'll have even more leeway to lean in more on future R&D. Then lastly, if there are any organic opportunities to grow more quickly, having a balance sheet gives us optionality from the M&A standpoint as well.
Sure. Second question. Apologies, that first one was a bit long. On AirTags, I get the two products, yours and theirs are quite similar, both use Bluetooth technology, for instance. Do you believe the security controls for the Tile are better than AirTags? Could that be something you can use as a point of differentiation?
Sure. There are a few points. I'll highlight a few things more on what's going on. Our perspective is that this is largely an issue around the press. The average customer does not seem to have an issue with any of this. There are a lot of parallels to our data platform as well, where a small but vocal minority is elevating the issue. I do think this is a little bit more real than concerns around data because, I mean, clearly the devices can be used in more troubling ways. That's just the law of large numbers. I think it's an extremely rare edge case. The dynamic that's been more challenging is that big companies in particular are very worried about the press.
There's a little bit of a pause from partners, retailers, and Apple marketing the category, which just kind of put things a little bit on ice. I think for hopefully it's gonna be more months as things normalize. So it's not a user concern as far as we can tell. It's a press concern and a partner concern. When we look at our security versus AirTags, it's also not a security issue per se. I don't think anyone's saying the devices are insecure. It's more the ease of being able to drop a device into someone's bag or car is very easy. What AirTags has done that Tile standalone didn't do, because they have every device, every iPhone device, essentially being a finder for those, for those tags. So it does make it much more akin to a very low cost real-time tracking device.
Whereas, with Tile, since the network is much more conducive to finding lost things than people in real time. We are looking at ways to capitalize and highlight, well, hey, Tile truly was built around devices, and some of that was just implicit on the technology not having this network density. Life360 will increase network density by a factor of 10, which is great and part of why we were a very natural acquisition. It still won't be like Apple, and we're thinking of a number of ideas where we can go a little bit more on the offensive and highlight the difference between our network and Apple's, and where we're gonna have really solid coverage. Life360 customers are across the entire U.S., but it's not gonna be this down to the minute real-time thing, which Apple is closer to.
I think we'll be able to mitigate it that way. We are also. I wanna save some of our excitement for later, but we have some new lineup plans which we will share with the market in the coming months that will hit on this much more directly and differentiate us from AirTags. Because what we do see with Apple is they land in a category's lowest common denominator, not very customized, whereas we focus on families and do a lot of custom tailoring to the audience, which I think will also tie in to some of these stalking concerns. If I am a betting man, I'm highly confident that this will pass. Whether it takes a few months or a year, I don't know.
I think long term, my faith that location can be in everything is largely undiminished.
Okay. All right. Thanks. Thanks, Chris.
You're welcome.
Okay. As there are no more questions, I will hand it back over to Chris for some closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for joining. I appreciate everyone taking the time, and I'm looking forward to delivering on a very exciting 2022. Thank you all.
Thanks everyone.