All right, let's go ahead and get started. Dave Mossberg with Three Part Advisors. We met PLAYSTUDIOS, I guess maybe a little over a year and a half ago. It's a really good example, kind of underfollowed, thank you. Underappreciated company, strong balance sheet, really interesting growth characteristics from the company. We have Samir Jain, who heads up IR for the company, and this is the first time they've done our conference, so I'll turn it over to you.
Thank you, Dave. Thank you for attending. We really appreciate being here, and I really appreciate your time. As Dave mentioned, this is the first time for us at this conference. We're really excited to be here. I will quickly go through a presentation just in case someone isn't familiar with the company, but by all means, you know, stop me in between. I'll definitely leave some time for questions at the end. Right. Here we go. Disclaimer, that's myself. So before we get into the company, I always like to align everybody in sort of why this is interesting. You know, I understand you guys are investors. You just don't want to hear a story.
You want to see if there's some reason to put your money to work here, and I think these are a few things that really stand out and are interesting about the company. So the first one is we have strong leadership with aligned interests. So I think this might be, I know it's different than a lot of other companies. I'm not sure if it's that different from some of the companies here, but effectively, our largest shareholder is our Chairman and CEO. But if you go beyond that, to our page one holders, you are going to see all kinds of executives, board members. And what I tell you as well, every employee at this company is compensated with RSUs, and we are highly, all highly motivated to see the stock price go up.
That is the basic metric that most of us get compensated on. So we very much have aligned interests. We want to see the stock price go up. On top of that, the experience and reputation of this company probably doesn't naturally fit with what you would see with other small cap companies, particularly companies that have only been public for a few years. So the Chairman and CEO, Andrew, used to be the president of Wynn Resorts, so a very large company. Before that, he had started two companies, which he sold to IGT, you know, the public slot manufacturer. And then across the company, you will see people with a lot of experience in very large companies. The second thing is that we are rapidly diversifying our game portfolio.
So whereas we started being very concentrated in social casino, which is a category I'm not sure everyone's familiar with, we can talk about that a bit after. The business is changing, and it's important because it's diversifying. We're moving into areas with larger TAMs, and the margin profiles of the areas that we're moving into are substantially better. So the business, in a sense, is sort of the ROI profile of it is starting to go up, and you saw that last year when our margins went up 700 basis points. The third thing, we're very well capitalized, and we generate positive cash, positive EBITDA, etc. As it stands today, we have $130 million of net cash.
So keep in mind, we are a small-cap company, so our market cap's around $300 million. So it's almost 40% of our market cap is covered just by net cash. We have access to debt through a revolver, but we haven't tapped any of that. And on top of that, we generate positive cash. As I mentioned, we're expected to generate $65 million-$70 million of EBITDA this year. We're spending a little bit more of that this year based on some sort of legacy licenses and stuff, but you should think of us converting 30%-40% of that to cash annually. The fourth thing, we have a differentiating factor compared to our peers, who are mostly in the game space. We have a loyalty business which sits next to it.
That is something that nobody else in this space has. We've been building it for over a decade, so now it includes a collection of over 100 partners. Large companies like MGM, who's also a large holder of our company, but the cruise line companies like Royal Caribbean, we have the movie theaters, affiliates with Hilton, IHG, numerous companies. And that's a huge differentiator for us, and a huge lead generator. So if anyone's familiar with the mobile gaming space, you have to spend a lot of money to bring in new customers, and the churn rate's really high. So we actually have built in this ecosystem where we can start getting in players in a different way.
What's really exciting about playAWARDS, our loyalty business, is for the first time this year, we are looking to externalize it. So it's, up until now, it's just been an addendum to our games businesses. So it's helped our results, but now we're starting to open up the platform, both to other publishers who could benefit from being attached to loyalty with player engagement, retention, monetization, but also to rewards partners who want access to the millions and millions of players that access our game every day. And that would exponentially grow if we opened it up to other publishers. So for the first time, we're looking to generate external revenues out of that business. And at its core, it's a SaaS business, so if we can start making money in that business, the margins are going to be really higher.
And, presumably, the valuation on that business will be quite a bit higher than what a games business would be worth, which is kind of where we're trading now. And then finally, I think something people don't realize about us is that we own the Tetris franchise, at least in the mobile world. So that is something that we procured a couple of years ago through a sublicense. We have recently entered into a license directly with the Tetris Company. We have this license in perpetuity for the next eight years, and that's really important because now that we have visibility on this license, we are starting to build this out as a franchise. We never thought Tetris was a single game. It's the second most known gaming IP behind Super Mario Brothers.
You get 20 million organic installs every single year on the game. So as we look at it, we see it as much more, a placeholder for an entire category. We see upwards of 10 new Tetris games that could be entered into the market. We actually introduced our first new Tetris game, last week, Tetris Block Puzzle. So for anyone who plays, games a little bit, it's that, mechanic where there's a fixed grid, and you're basically placing in the tetrominos, but still trying to accomplish either vertical or horizontal lines. It's a very popular game.
Block Blast is kind of the incumbent right now in terms of the most popular game, but we feel quite strongly, once we introduce the Tetris brand into this category and many other subcategories, the familiarity with this brand, its iconic stature will naturally bring players in, and then you have that flywheel effect. As more players come in, they play our other games, et cetera, et cetera. All right. Very quickly, who we are. I talked about a little of this. Functionally, we're one company with sort of two divisions, the loyalty business and the games business. The games business has 19 titles. Eleven are in the casual sector.
So think of games like, obviously, Tetris, but we have a Sudoku game, we have a Mahjong game, we have Solitaire games, and then we have our eight social casino games, which is our legacy. So these are games that aren't real money gaming. You, if you think about it, picture a true kind of mobile game with all the bells and whistles. Think of a slot game, mash them together, that's what social casino is, but it's all free to play. So you never have to spend money to play this game. But if you choose to spend money to buy more virtual currency, et cetera, you can. That's how these games make money.
So our social casino games make money on IAP, in-app purchases, as people buy this virtual currency, whereas our 11 casual games make money on ad monetization. So as we sell different forms of advertising in the game, they make their money there. Obviously, ad monetization doesn't run through the app stores, so we don't have to pay the 30% fee that I'm sure you've all heard of, you know, with Epic suing Apple, et cetera. So the margin profile is substantially higher of that business. This is just a quick footprint of our company. We're based in Las Vegas, but we are global. Nearly half of our headcount of roughly 700 people is between Belgrade and Vietnam.
That's important because obviously these are lower-cost employees, and we're starting to increase the functionality of these offices, so that is another accelerant to our margins, and we're creating a lower and lower dependency on high-cost markets. Tel Aviv is also a big market for us because it's sort of the center, particularly for social casino, but mobile gaming at large, so we have roughly 20% of our staff over there. Here's a quick snapshot of some of our games. Tetris, you know, the top - besides Tetris on the top, the rest of the games you can think of as a social, social casino games, and the bottom ones are more our casual games. A couple of quick statistics on us. So we are, we're not the biggest publisher out there.
We're a top 50 publisher, but we still have a lot of people playing our games. So nearly 50 million every single month are visiting one of our titles and approaching 4 million. And I say that because we again just introduced a block puzzle game, which is obviously going to attract more players. So as of the last quarter, it's 3.5 million DAUs. So again, 3.5 million people are engaging with us every day, and that's where the value proposition of this loyalty business, particularly to rewards partners, really stands out. Imagine that you're any sort of business, and you have this pipeline to 3.5 million people every single day. So that's really what the pitch is as we sort of get out there and talk to rewards partners and try to monetize this system.
And then, on the right-hand side, you'll see some statistics around the loyalty business. So again, many, many people are engaging with it. You know, over 17 million rewards have been purchased since inception. All right, so this is, playAWARDS, again, is our loyalty business. You know, what is the point of this thing? Again, the infrastructure, if you will, of gaming is, to some extent, it's not broken, but it's been severely damaged once regulations were entered into the place. IDFA from Apple, basically this inability to track users. So it's much, much harder to find a proper return in terms of user acquisition. So you've seen that across the board.
The margin profiles in mobile gaming have gone down quite a bit, and companies are trying to find innovative ways to get in front of customers. So our pitch with loyalty is basically, instead of jamming more people at the top of the funnel, instead of having a 99% churn rate at the bottom, try to retain a few more people there. So just like loyalty, you'll see in any other part of the economy, give someone a reason to use your service, buy your product outside of, you know, what's plainly obvious. So instead of getting your Starbucks coffee just for the value there, get that rewards point, so incentivize someone beyond that. And we've seen it work. I have a page up here I'll show you.
Mention again, that's the key. Skip some of this. You know, and basically, I'll very quickly how it works. We have our games within that. As if you're a player and you're engaging with our games, underneath that, you're accruing these loyalty points. So you are playing Tetris, you're having a great time. Underneath it, mostly based on your engagement with the game, so time spent on the game, you're accruing these loyalty points. You can, at some point, once you've accrued enough, take those loyalty points over to our loyalty store called myVIP.co. You will see a collection of many, many rewards, again, through our over 100 partnerships.
So, for example, with MGM, who is our biggest partner, you might see a night at the Bellagio, you might see a buffet at, you know, MGM Grand, etc. And you effectively can take those loyalty points and exchange them for free. We benefit, clearly, as the publisher, because if you're happier, you're spending more time, you're less likely to leave the ecosystem. And then it's a pretty fixed algorithm. If those two things are happening, we're going to monetize you at a higher clip. If you're a player, you're quite happy because you're getting something for free. And then if you're a rewards partner, who populate the store with the rewards on their dime, we don't pay for this, you're happy because the cost of consumer acquisition is very, very low.
Think about this in terms of ad dollars and what you'd have to spend. Here, you basically are putting some level of, like, inventory, and you know, you purposely pick whatever inventory you want. So if MGM is putting a night at the Bellagio, they're probably not doing it over Super Bowl weekend. They might do it on some random Tuesday at, you know, a slow season, February, whatever that is. And then they get to yield that, which probably wouldn't have yielded anyways. But once that player comes in, they're obviously spending at the casino, they're spending at the buffet, they're spending on shows, etc. So MGM talks about the incredible value. I think at some point they've said they've made something like $60 million-$80 million of EBITDA annually off of this.
So effectively, MGM, through their partnership with us, is making as much or more money than we are as an entire company. So you could see the value of this. We see that kind of value with the cruise lines, the movie theaters, etc. And that's really going to be the pitch as we open this up and try to externalize it. Here are just more, more numbers. I mean, the key thing is it's global because we do have a global base of players. It's fairly broad. We are making an effort to expand this more into retail and restaurants now. I feel like that's kind of the white space for us, so we're working on that. You know, and again, it works. You know, we've had over 17 million people purchase these rewards.
You know, it's approaching $1 billion worth of rewards. It's something that players engage with, and they clearly like, inventory. This is a more important sheet. So I know it might be hard to see from there, and I'm happy to send the presentation after, so you can get a better look at this. But the key is, isolate the darker blue, either line or bar, in each of these charts. So the first one's engagement, or sorry, retention, engagement, and then monetization. And then look at that versus the other three. And the other three are all proxies of someone either engaging with rewards, in terms of viewing the store, buying a reward, redeeming awards, etc. And the key is that anytime someone engages with this system, they become immensely more valuable.
Whether it's them staying in the system longer, whether it's them engaging on a daily basis more, and critically, whether it's us being able to monetize them, the LTV of that player shoots up. So, this is why it's benefiting our games, but this is also going to be the pitch to the external publishers as we get out, get out there and try to get them to come on board. You know, and it's basically this is the bottom line for the colors, basically shows what typically happens. So, you know, you have somebody come in, they get excited, they play your game, and then eventually they leave, it level sets at some sort of number. This happens with even the most successful games.
I mean, you're already starting to see this with something like a Monopoly GO!, which was just a home run, and it still is. But slowly, at some point, there's fatigue. So this gives a player a different reason to stay in the ecosystem, completely outside of the utility they get out of the game, which they still get. So what are our goals for 2024? And I would say beyond. As I mentioned, it's to really expand this loyalty side of the business. You know, one side of it's going to be monetizing it. The other side, frankly, is getting broad adoption across all our games. It's largely adopted across most of our games, but we made an acquisition of a company called Brainium at the end of 2022.
That was a collection of 10 casual games, so we're still waiting to integrate it into that. That should be happening imminently. The second thing is to increase profitability. As I mentioned, last year, we increased our EBITDA margins by 700 basis points. We went from 13 to 20. We think we can keep increasing that. If you look at some of our peers, they're into the 30s. Why is that? For half of them, it's really a collection of 1 or 2 games established, so they don't really have the same makeup as we do. But broadly, the difference is that we're a real development studio. So whereas we have established games which have margin profiles like our peers, we also have so many games underneath that which are in varying states of development.
Either they are growth products, so they're just scaling, or like Block Puzzle, which just got introduced last week. Up until then, it was something we were just spending a lot of money on, but hadn't even entered into the marketplace. So as those games start to come into the market and as they start to scale, I have no doubt we can close the margin gap. And if we can get playAWARDS, the loyalty business, external, externalized, basically have customers outside using it, then I think we can actually exceed the margin profile. Because, again, that is a SaaS business. You know, as you look to other SaaS companies, and they have margins of 80%, etc., there's really no reason that once scaled, playAWARDS can't do that as well. We're just repurposing software over and over again.
So that could blow us right through that number... but there's a lot of execution that happens before that has to happen. The third thing is we continue to expand and diversify the games portfolio. Pre-2023, before we made the acquisition of Brainium, the company with 10 casual games, and really scaled Tetris, we were almost entirely social casino. You could think of us as effectively 100%, which also meant we were all IAP. Fast-forward to now, it's more like an 80/20 split. It's rapidly changing, partly because the casual side is growing substantially faster, which also means 20% of our business is now ad monet, which has a significantly higher margin. So that was a big contributor to the 700 basis points that we grew last year.
And as the mix shift continues to move more towards casual, that's just a natural accelerant for our margins. And then the fourth thing I would say, and this is all organic because we have an inorganic strategy as well, is we just are really going to return our core portfolio back to growth. It's been an area, again, within social casino, that's been lagging a bit. The category is tough. It generally, you know, goes down, particularly if you look at the slot side of it. But we're making some fixes within some of these games, specifically two games, myKONAMI and myVEGAS, which we moved out of their native markets to Tel Aviv, our more kind of most successful studio last year. In particular, we're trying to increase the conversion rates of paid players there, because, again, these are IAP games.
It's working. We started the year at about 2% conversion rate, from players to paid players. I'd say it's about 2.5% now. I feel pretty comfortable that we'll approach 3%. And the goal is to get that up to the 4%-5% range, that, you know, either our most successful game, POP! Slots, does or other peers do. So the margin profile should or the profitability profile and revenue profile of those two games should increase a lot, and I think that will stabilize the entire social casino portfolio. You know, we'll skip this. This is just an interesting slide because aside from playAWARDS expanding externally, it can also be a bit of a, again, expanded lead generator internally.
We're already seeing some of this, but as we expand it across those Brainium games that I mentioned, as it really gets its foothold in this expanded Tetris franchise, we think it can basically act as its own like a mini app store, like an app store within an app store, where there's going to be this connective tissue between all our games, our 19, now 20 games with Block Puzzle, where, you know, if someone's playing in MGM Slots and someone's playing Tetris, very different users. But now, if they're connected with playAWARDS, there's this commonality, this platform, we can get that player rerouted to another one of our games. We can incentivize them, particularly if they're incentivized to increase their loyalty points.
And we think that's really powerful because that can keep our players more sticky, and it can also lower our dependency on UA, user acquisition expenses, which for a gaming company, are the most onerous cost. You can spend upwards of 30% of revenues, just going out there trying to find players. So if you have an ability to keep these players within your ecosystem and repurpose them, you can drastically increase the profitability of your business. Again, this is the margin that I was talking about. Peers doing 32%. You know, we finished last year at 20%. We absolutely think we can get there, you know, for the same reasons I talked about before, so I won't rehash that. This is just a quick little snapshot about how Ad Mon is increasing.
So as I mentioned, we break out IAP and Ad Mon in terms of revenue, so 80/20. We don't break it out in terms of EBITDA, but the split is a lot closer because obviously, Ad Mon has substantially higher margins. They don't have to pay $0.30 on every $1 to Apple or Google. There are other costs associated with advertising revenues, but I'd say the spread is probably like net 20 or something like that. So it's quite powerful. And again, that business is growing substantially fast, faster. The TAM is also substantially bigger, so that's the blue part. So you can see it's more or less triple the size of social casino. So bigger TAM, growing faster. That's why we're aligning ourselves over there. Again, Brainium Puzzle.
We, you know, this is a presentation pre Block Puzzle launching last week. So obviously, the one variant in development is now out, Block Puzzle. There is another one, that's actually really exciting. Picture, picture Candy Crush, you know, with the worlds and the characters. We are trying to bring that format into Tetris, in a game we call Tetris World. Still very much in development. It is being offered out right now in Canada. It's seemingly doing well. It's still relatively small. Our hope is that we can have this ready to go, ideally by, you know, very end of this year, but most likely, probably into 2025. So that is going to be the game right behind that. We're pretty excited about that because that'll be the first foray into IAP for Tetris.
So it will have ad mon, but it will have the ability for people to spend within the game, which can make it very, very powerful. And then again, I would tell you behind that, whether it's Tetris based on music, Tetris based on, competition and challenges, whether it's, Tetris, sort of a, a color-based games, there's so many versions, of Tetrises that we can introduce. And we know that because if you look at the category, the one thing that you see, which is common in all of these games out there right now, is that they effectively try to kind of ape the aesthetics of Tetris. So again, I mentioned Block Blast, which is the most popular, block puzzle game out there.
If you were to download and play it, you would think you're playing Tetris, because that's what people know and like. So these game developers are purposely trying to use that format and interesting introducing games. So our theory is that they've kind of established these markets. Why don't we go in there and give the player the real thing? You know, instead of having the RC Cola, now you can have the Coca-Cola. And we think we can pretty comfortably and quickly slide into, you know, a top ten category in a lot of these subcategories, as people will naturally choose the branded one, which, again, we own. This is just quickly our capital position. So very well capitalized.
I don't know if anyone saw this yesterday, but in our cap table, our largest holder. We have a dual class listing, so Class B is the shares that are owned by our CEO founder, Andrew. Roughly, you know, 16% of the company or so. But on Class A, top holder is MGM. The second holder is Activision, which obviously ported over to Microsoft post that transaction. So we had been talking to Microsoft for a while now, after that transaction closed, you know, to let them know that if they were looking for liquidity on that close to 10% of ownership in our company, we'd gladly provide it. We're a thinly traded stock. We trade 300,000 shares a day.
So for them to liquidate nearly 12 million shares in the secondary market, even through block trades, would be very, very hard. So we let them know we could provide liquidity, obviously, at a price that we deemed to be fair. So we actually reached an agreement with them last week, and we published, you know, we put out a press release and published the 8-K last night. So we've effectively, as of today, spent, I think it was like around $25 million to buy 10% of our company back. And we're quite serious, like, that was an opportunity, so we took advantage of it. But even before that, we were buying back stock in the first quarter. We were buying back stock in 2023.
We're very serious about the deep discount in our shares, and again, generate free cash, generate EBITDA, net cash, but whatever. So our only sort of gating factor around sort of a continuous substantial share buyback is, one, we want to use our cash to pursue transformative M&A. We think we need to be a larger company, and really maybe realize some economies of scale of the infrastructure we built, so we're pursuing that. So we use that as a gauge of how much we're going to spend on share repurchases. And then the other thing is, obviously, as I mentioned, liquidity. You know, it's a little bit challenged now, which is something we do plan on addressing eventually.
It's very hard to address it now when your stock is trading at $2 and change, and you think it should be multiples of that higher. But I will say if the stock improves somewhat, like last August, we were trading at $5 a share. I don't know if that's the exact number, but if it starts to get more in that neighborhood, we recognize that the liquidity is challenged in the stock, so we will address it. But until then, we don't want to exacerbate that pressure by, you know, being overly aggressive in our buyback right now, making it even more challenging. Of course, something like this, a Microsoft opportunity presents itself, so we took advantage of it. But aside from that, we will, you know, keep investing in our businesses.
As I mentioned, like Tetris, there's a lot of ideas there, so we'll keep supporting that. You know, and I think as it stands now, we can still do some levels of buyback, even post this Microsoft transaction. You know, it says $46 million here, so net out, let's say, like roughly half. So we'll still have close to $20 million that we could be spending. We have an active 10b5-1, so we'll use that. These are just the financials. So the only thing that I think is really worth zeroing in on is the last couple of years, because the company's been in a bit of state of transition. I think some of our growth rates have slowed a little bit.
We fully intend to return to that, you know, double-digit CAGR growth on revenue, EBITDA, et cetera, which EBITDA has maintained revenue, sort of slowed down a bit. But I do wanna, I do wanna emphasize that that is our legacy. It isn't a trend change. This company has been around, even though we've only been public for 3 years, it's been around since 2012. And if you look at the compounded growth of this company over that period, again, very high rates of revenue growth, like the CAGR of +30, +50 on EBITDA. You know, we were cash flow positive within the first year. I think we're very kind of conservative in how we deploy and use capital. So, it would just effectively be like a return to what we've always done.
I should review the first quarter, and again, guidance as it stands now, calling for fairly, you know, limited revenue growth, about like, 3% gets to, like, approaching 5% at the high end, approaching double-digit EBITDA growth. I will say, if you look at what we reported last year to what we guided, particularly on EBITDA, there was a bit of a gap. We are-- we try to be conservative. It's not to say we're going to blow through this number, but just, you know, keep that in mind. And then again, these sort of four points that I mentioned before, I don't need to rehash that. I think I have five minutes, so I'm going to stop there, if anyone has questions. We will be... Yeah, please. What's that? Yeah. Structure. Yeah. Yeah, no, no, thank you for asking.
So we do have three parts to this. So there is a royalty that we have to pay them, which we have as a minimum guarantee liability. So you can see that on our balance sheet. Right now, it's booked for $25 million, and you can think of that being depreciated over 5 years, so $5 million slugs. And then we've made commitments to them in terms of the amount of money that we're going to spend. So this doesn't go to Tetris, but this goes to the franchise on both game development and marketing. And what I would say on those two fronts, those would be numbers that we almost view that as floors. We would have spent at least that much on advertising and development anyways, but that's effectively it.
And the history of this game, if you look at it, EA had it. They weren't able to make it work. Then, when we sub-licensed it out a couple of years ago from this company called N3TWORK, again, flailing. It was not working. They couldn't scale it. In the couple of years that we had it, we tripled the size of this thing. We completely knocked it out of the park, and it continues to grow at a very, very high clip, and we've been able to demonstrate that we can start to expand it beyond just the core game. So if you look at negotiations, we technically, our sublicense still goes through August of 2024, of this year. It was Tetris that came to us and sort of started this negotiation of, "You guys have been phenomenal, like, stewards of this product.
Let's enter into direct relationship, so when this thing rolls over, you know, you're in charge of it." So I think they're quite happy with our management of it. And it's. If I could add one more thing, I mean, the real value of something like Tetris beyond the game is the value of the IP. You know, again, getting all those 20 million organic installs, and as I talk about M&A, that's something we're hyper-focused on because we see this as a structural issue in this industry, and I would say media at large. It's just so much more congested right now. It is harder and harder whether, because we don't view ourselves as just competing against other games. We're competing against social media, we're competing against movies, streaming platforms, you know, TV, anything.
So it's very, very hard to get people's attention, so the value of having brands and IP is paramount. So as we look towards M&A, I would say that is kind of the vector that we're really focused on. I will say the caveat around that is if we can find an extremely well-priced, attractive asset that would be beneficial just in traditional M&A perspective. So economies of scale, generates a lot of cash, immediately accretive. All of these things, we would look at that as well. But if we found our ideal transaction, it would align ourselves with more IP like that, because we think that's the future of all, of all media. But yeah, in our case, in gaming, for sure. Oh, yeah, please. I would say you-- Yeah. So if you're looking at revenues, for example, Tetris, which is...
So let's say just Tetris, we just launched the new Tetris, so it's effectively the original, which we call Tetris Prime, like Tetris, Game Boy Tetris, Tetris that we know. That game, that game would be over 10% of revenues. And in Social Casino, we also have another game called Pop Slots, which would be over 10%. I would say the trend, though, should be, you should think of it as being very much more on the Tetris, casual side, though. So I would if I were to extrapolate this a couple of years out, I think Social Casino, whether it's Pop Slots or any other game, won't be kind of like that big game in, you know, these other areas is kind of what. Thank you for your time. Please follow up.
All my information's on the website, you know, 2.5x multiple for the stock. Well capitalized. I mean, it's worth digging into. I mean, it's the reason I joined the company, is the valuation. Thank you. Thanks so much.