Acast AB (publ) (ACAST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the Acast Webcast with Teleconference Fourth Quarter 2021. [Operator Instructions]. Just to remind you, this conference call is being recorded. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO, Ross Adams; and CFO, Emily Villatte. Please go ahead with your meeting.

Thank you. Hello, and welcome to our Q4 2021 earnings call. And as always, it's great to have you all here. And a big welcome, of course, to any one of you that is new to this. My name is Ross Adams, and I am Acast's CEO. And I am joined today by our brilliant CFO and Deputy CEO, Emily Villatte. Are we...

Just give me 1 second, Ross.

That's all right. No problem. That's no worries at all. There we go. Okay. So before we kick into the numbers, I think it's worth reminding you all about our core Acast strategy, especially for those of you that are new to this call. Podcasting, as you have heard, is a very fragmented space, and it can be very difficult to get your head around who does what. But the key thing to understand here, of course, is that Acast plays the central role in hosting, distributing and monetizing content for creators. Our vision is built around the creator and the creator economy. Now Acast is effectively, as you can see here, a 2-sided marketplace, servicing the 2 main stakeholders. Firstly, that is, of course, the supply side, which is the center of our business really, which is the creator, in our case, of course, the podcasters. And these guys are the center of everything we do here at Acast. And today, we represent 40,000 creators, and that number is growing all the time. In turn, we, of course, have the demand side, and this comprises of 2,400 advertisers that run campaigns with Acast in the past year on those podcasts as well as the monetization of those podcasts directly from the 73 million monthly unique listeners in our marketplace. That is a whopper. Everything we do and build, of course, is to support both sides of this marketplace. And it's our mission to enable podcasters of all sizes to be fairly rewarded for their craft. So we make sure their content is distributed to absolutely anywhere an audience is able to listen and discover their show. And for brands, we offer advertising solutions that reach an immersed, targeted, passionate and engaged audience of affluent listeners, driving maximum effectiveness and ROI for the advertiser, while always respecting the unique relationship and bond a podcaster has with their listener. These things are key and unique to Acast as a pure-play podcasting infrastructure company and an app independent marketplace. Okay. So let's see the update. This time now to look at our recent highlights. And with both Q4 and 2021 now closed, Acast's position of strength is super clear. We delivered 40% net sales growth in Q4, with a healthy gross margin of 36%. We also delivered a single-digit adjusted EBITDA margin, which sat at minus 8% in Q4. When looking at 2021 as a whole, net sales growth was an impressive 73% across the year. Gross margin was 36%, with our adjusted EBITDA margin at minus 15%, which is a tangible improvement on the prior year. Emily will be presenting these financials, of course, in more detail shortly. When considering our full year performance against the financial goals we set back in June, we are comfortable that we have the prerequisites in place to deliver these over the coming years. So let's take a look at our growth we've seen across our podcast portfolio. For the first time in a single quarter, in Q4, we recorded more than 1 billion listens from our network of podcasts. And the number of shows that are part of that network increased to 40,000 as we've added another 5,000 podcasts just during Q3. Now if you look at this next slide here, here of what the numbers mean for Acast. And if you were to track our numbers on the Podtrac ranker, when it comes to global downloads and streams, counting U.S., but also Europe, South America, Australasia and the rest of the world, we are, in fact, #1 to other U.S. podcast networks, which is a huge, huge achievement. And so it shows the actual size of Acast. We had 1.09 billion listens in Q4, and that puts us, of course, at the top of the pile, one of my favorite slides. If you look at the U.S., we are now the third largest podcast network in the U.S., measured by reach. We get 17.6 million monthly uniques, which puts us just behind NPR and iHeart and ahead of huge names like the New York Times, Wondery and NBC. Other good markets of market positions are both the Apple Podcasts charts and Poddindex chart in Sweden. As you may know, the Apple Podcasts charts are a great indication of popularity and Poddindex is based on hard listener figures. In Sweden and the U.K., which are 2 of the most mature podcast markets in the world, Acast's podcast absolutely dominate the landscape. As you can see from the snapshot taken one day last week, 60% of the top 10 and 72% of the top 50 shows in Sweden are with Acast. And in the U.K., that figure rises even further to 70% of the top 10 and 58% of the top 50, wow. We're not resting on our laurels, of course. And Acast continue to attract the biggest and best podcasters throughout Q4. You can see here some of the most high-profile names to join us from are across the world. Notably, in October, one of Sweden's largest podcast, Flashback Forever, became an Acast podcast. After the end of the quarter, we also announced that Anna Faris, one of USA's biggest broadcasters, joined Acast, too. So these podcasters continue to choose Acast alongside companies like the BBC, Financial Times and other big names, demonstrates once again the great support for our Creative First strategy and our belief in the open podcasting ecosystem. There is so much depth of talent throughout the Acast Creator network. In fact, let's hear from just a few of them now. After all, we are an audio company. [Presentation]

Great. One thing I wanted to briefly mention this quarter is the unparalleled access to quality data that Acast is afforded, thanks to our unique position in the podcast industry. We underpin the entire open podcast ecosystem, which means we have access to a huge amount of quality data that we can use to help enrich our advertising offering and help our podcasters to grow their audiences. Every day, we can see data from every single listening app and platform out there, from Apple Podcasts, to Spotify, Google Podcasts to Apple, Amazon Music, and everyone in between. Many of you will know this already, but just to ensure we're all in the same page, I'm going to be talking about these kind of 3 things: first-party data, this is data that we generate directly ourselves; second-party data, which is collected from other sources through a shared partnership; and of course, third-party data, which is aggregated from other external sources. Thanks to our unique position, I mentioned, we can gather first-party data from the potential entire spectrum of podcast listeners as we sit on the pipes powering all podcasting listening apps. Our portal first-party data is uniquely rich and deep. So firstly, we have the data being fed to us from our 40,000 podcasts RSS feeds, being consumed on all the different podcast listening apps. Next, we have our Acast owned properties, our embed player, which all of the podcasters customize and share across the web. It's sending that data from 233 countries. Our own listening app, the Acast app, RadioPublic also provide us some data. Each of our podcasts has its own customizable website to share to with listeners, and we also get feedback and data from that, too. And we run regular listener surveys through our podcasters to get even more granular data on their habits. Next, we use deep audio intelligence powered by a speech-to-text transcription and machine-based content analysis. This allows us to quantify key themes, sentiment and contextual elements within individual podcast episodes, helping to inform ad campaigns, and planning campaigns and seller efficiency across our entire catalog. And now thanks to Acast+, we have tens of thousands of logged-in authenticated podcast listeners, which will very soon become hundreds of thousands with the wide rollout of the product, the potential to ultimately reach all 73 million of our monthly unique listeners. These users log in to get an authentic and tailored experience through their podcast memberships. And with this approach, we're effectively creating the world's largest and farthest-reaching podcast listener panel. Besides from all this rich first-party data, we also work with well-respected partners, such as Nielsen and Comscore, to power third-party data audience segments and enable brand suitability and safety, too. So what does it all this rich and diverse data allow us to do? And how does it further our mission? Well, it means we can really offer the likes of really powerful effective ad targeting, actionable insights for both advertisers and podcasters alike, and perhaps most excitingly, true innovation for the whole ecosystem. One of those innovations is best-in-class conversational targeting for our advertiser clients, which we believe is the future of podcast advertising in a privacy-centric manner. Conversational targeting is powered by our AI and machine learning capabilities, and allows us to find the right content for the right brand to advertise within based on episode level insights, like the words and phrases being spoken by the podcast hosts and even the sentiment and emotion with which they're being spoken about. This also has clear benefits when it comes to brand safety and suitability as we can help brands steer away from conversations they're less comfortable with. Now I've mentioned our paid podcast subscription product, Acast+, several times so far in this presentation. But I'm keen for you to hear more about its inception, rollout and success from a key member of our product team, Lauren Tharp. Over to you, Lauren.

My name is Lauren Tharp. I'm a Product Manager here at Acast, based in the United States. I want to talk to you today about one of the products my team has been working on called Acast+. Acast+ is a raft of powerful subscription tools, created to support podcasters in monetizing even more of their audience across the majority of podcast listening apps. We're excited to announce that it is now out of a successful beta and widely available to all podcasts hosted with Acast. Acast+ is an important part of our growth in scaling plans as a business and for those of our podcasters, too. Available in 135 countries, it makes good on our creator-first mission by giving podcasters of all sizes creative freedom and even more ways to connect with their listeners and make money. Podcasters can offer paying subscribers ad-free listens, early access, exclusive content, such as bonus segments, whole episodes, spin-off series, and so much more. The way the Acast+ differs from other podcast subscription offerings you may have heard about is that, crucially, Acast+ works across the majority of listening apps. This includes Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Castbox, and many, many more. This means that podcasters can offer these paid for benefits wherever their listeners are already listening. This removes a lot of friction, and it strengthens even further the relationship that podcasters have with their fans. We're in the middle of the whole ecosystem, powering paid for podcast subscriptions across the majority of listening apps and platforms out there. Acast+ also provides our podcasters and Acast itself with even richer data on listeners while always respecting privacy and security, crucial in scaling both podcasts and product. In our beta period, we saw tens of thousands of listeners sign up across memberships in 8 different markets globally, all helping our partners significantly increase their revenue through Acast+. Of these tens of thousands of listeners who signed up during the small testing period, our beta partners saw an average revenue increase of 25% during the testing period. With Acast+ now available to all podcasters on Acast, the next stage of the product rollout will include providing additional formats, such as bundling and seasonal offerings, all to capitalize on the relationship between the podcaster and their listener. Thanks for having me. It's great talking with you today.

Thank you very much, Lauren. I am so incredibly excited about the potential for what is a market-changing product. And as you saw in the product demo, in this case, working alongside Apple Podcasts, positions Acast at the heart of the industry once again. Just to underpin the revenue potential for Acast+. Going forward, Acast will generate 15% revenue per Acast+ listener contribution, which will be accounted for net of the podcasters share in Acast's financial statements, a percentage, of course, which is competitive within the industry. There's so much going on in podcasting, but here are some of the highlights from Q4. It's clear to me that the open ecosystem is the most sustainable way forward for the industry. And it continues to serve the interests of podcasters by giving them creative control and the freedom to reach all listeners everywhere. Paid subscriptions, like those we're offering through Acast+, have real potential when it comes to helping podcasters to make more money, which, of course, is crucial if they keep on creating the content their listeners love. We very much see subscriptions as a revenue stream to complement ad-supported monetization. Influencers from other media channels are starting to flock to podcasting as another way to engage with their fans. And we're seeing creators from YouTube and TikTok starting up their own podcasts, and we expect this trend to accelerate further. The advertising landscape continues to be a healthy mix of both regular ads and host-read sponsorships, while programmatic buying, where Acast is truly the market pioneer, has become the industry's fastest-growing advertising channel. Finally, certain recent events have shone further light on the need for all podcast platforms to provide and enforce relevant transparent community guidelines for creators. And it goes without saying that Acast community guidelines are shared with all podcasters and made publicly available on our website and have been for a number of years. All right. Now it's time for me to pass the mic over to Emily, who's going to take you through our financials in a little more detail. Take it away, Em.

Brilliant. Thank you so much, Ross. Okay. Let's start by looking closer at our listens. As you know, the quarterly listens surpassed 1 billion in Q4. It's lovely to be above billions -- 1 billion. It's wonderful. If we look at the full year, listens continued to grow, and we delivered 26% growth year-on-year, reaching 3.7 billion listens for the full year. Per usual, the business continues to improve the way that we're monetizing each of those listens. And our key metric, our average revenue per listen, increased from SEK 0.2 in 2020 to SEK 0.27 in 2021. We look at Q4, listens growth actually accelerated compared to Q3, which can be seen on the right hand side. And as Ross noted, again, that 1 billion in Q4. You might recall from Q3, we discussed [ Apple bug ] effects that we flagged, but they do not have any significant effect on listens when we look at the year as a whole when it comes to listens growth. Moving on to net sales. We grew net sales by 73% in the year, reaching SEK 1.026 billion for the year. Again, another 1 billion milestone reach. So that was a niche [ one ] to hit. If we look at organic growth for the year, it was slightly higher, coming in at 74% year-on-year when adjusting for FX. Now before going into commentary around the quarters, I'll just briefly note a few highlights from our segments, as all of our segments contributed to this net sales growth. Now Europe's net sales increased by 77%, Americas by 70% and other markets by 59% when we look at their full year growth. Now I'm just highlighting here as well that the growth in the Americas was significantly impacted by currency effects. And when you look at their growth on an organic growth basis for the full year, Americas grew by 78%. So a wonderful contribution from all segments. When looking at the quarters on the right-hand side and the trend, we see the usual seasonality in the podcast cost advertising, where Q4 is the strongest quarter of the year, followed by a softer Q1. All right. Gross profits grew by 70% in 2021 compared to 2020, reaching SEK 373 million for the full year. And this is the result of our strong net sales growth, combined with delivering a healthy 36.4% gross margin for the full year. Now looking at the quarter, we also achieved a healthy gross margin of 36.5% this time around. Now Ross has mentioned Acast+. And in the future, Acast+ will over time start to contribute to net sales, gross profit and gross margins. But it may take a little bit of time for us to see a discernible financial impact. Now moving on to operating expenses. Here, we can see an evidence how our business operations continue to scale. Here, we're illustrating how other operating expenses have grown materially slower than our net sales. So if we look at the full year and exclude our one-off IPO costs, our other operating expenses grew by 53% year-on-year, which is 20 percentage points slower than our net sales growth that came in at 73%. So we're illustrating the scalability that we have in the business even as we continue to invest in both market expansion and our technology platform. So you can see those measured investments coming through quarter-by-quarter on the right-hand side. All right. The scalability that we're evidencing is also coming through in the improvement that we've made in our adjusted EBITDA margin year-on-year. So we landed a negative 15% adjusted EBITDA margin in 2021 compared to negative 21% in 2020. On the right-hand side, looking at the quarters, you can see the seasonality trend, with net sales flowing through to EBITDA and that late COVID recovery in 2020, which almost had as a breakeven in Q4 2020. So we can see that seasonality come through in EBITDA as well. But overall, the trend remains consistent. Our adjusted EBITDA margin is improving materially year-on-year. Now we have some bonus content for the full year. So for the full year, we report on our largest individual markets, U.K., U.S. and Sweden. All these 3 markets contribute more than 10% of revenues each to the full year. So we will be disclosing this on an annual basis. And on a quarterly basis, per usual, you'll be able to follow our segments growth and local profit contribution in each quarterly report. But let's have a look at how the U.K., U.S., Sweden did both on net sales and at a local profit level CBIT. As you can see, we delivered strong growth, with the U.S. achieving the strongest compound annual growth rate for this period. From 2019 to 2021, U.S. delivered 85% compound annual growth. But the U.K. and Sweden are also showing fantastic growth. U.K. growing 68% in 2021 and Sweden growing 74%. And this is coming from the markets already having a dominant position in their local markets, so their growth is very strong, as well as everyone is contributing. Now all 3 markets deliver full year local profits, and the U.S. did so for the first time to also meet scalability milestone to hit. Now in addition to these reported figures, I'm also delighted to share with you that both the U.K. and Sweden were profitable after allocating not just local cost, but global cost as well, so at their operating profit level. Both the U.K. and Sweden were fully profitable in 2021. For Sweden, this was the first year it happened. U.K. did the same in the last year. So it's just wonderful for all of these 3 markets to continue to scale and deliver these milestones as well. And of course, we feel very comfortable and happy with this progress as it illustrates our financial viability and the sustainability of our business model. Now before I hand back to Ross to wrap this up, I'm just going to spend one minute on our cash flows. But we've been working in the background to improve how we manage our working capital. And just like that, we reduced outgoing operating cash flows by more than half, going from negative SEK 189 million in 2020 to negative SEK 72 million, excluding those IPO costs, in 2021. Now of course, individual quarters will see an impact in cash flows from operating expenses coming from working capital fluctuations. In Q2 2021, we had the impact of IPO costs. So the quarter-on-quarter cash flows may fluctuate. But the trend is clear. The business has improved its operating cash flows steadily and significantly over time when looking at the full year progress. Needless to say, I'm pretty pleased with this result. Ross, back to you to wrap it up.

Thank you for that. Right. I'm sure you all can agree now that it's incredibly encouraging to see so much growth coming from many different markets and different parts of our business. So it's a great time, of course, to be an Acaster. But finally, before we wrap up and take questions from the audience, there are a few things to cover off in terms of how we've kicked off 2022. Our efforts continue in working to attract podcasters of all sizes the world over. We are furthering and redefining our data strategy to enhance our advertising offering even more. And of course, we're continuing to roll out and market Acast+ across multiple regions, whilst continuing on future enhancements for that product. And that's it for the earnings call. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions]. The first question comes from Derek Laliberte from ABG.

I really appreciate the positive development in terms of financials, the growth in shows, [ notably ] Acast+ and many other things. And with regard to Acast+, how do you expect platform compatibility to look going forward? Because it's my understanding that it's not available on Spotify at the moment. And I know it is at Apple, but there seem to be some functionality issues there. So I was just wondering about this because I think that what are probably the 2 largest listening platforms on a global basis, that this is quite important for -- just for the -- how smooth it is to sort of use the product?

Yes. I mean Acast+ right now is available to every single listener. So even if you're listening on Spotify, you can, of course, listen to an Acast+ show, but you'll listen to it elsewhere. But you can access it from that site, you'll hear the promotion for it. We're constantly working with the other apps that don't now support Acast+, but that's over 80% of our listeners and 80% of our reach actually does support Acast+. So for us, it's about working closely with them, understanding the needs and the products and how we're developing it. So that's kind of work in progress, really.

Now that's good news and that makes sense. And on Acast+ also, what would you say is the most -- I know you just came out of beta mode here. But what's the most used feature on the listener side? Is it ad-free? Or is it early access? I guess both in a lot of cases, but...

Yes. I mean it's up to the creator how they want to bundle that. And ad-free is kind of the easiest way to access and use Acast+ because everyone loads up an ad-free version to Acast, and we dynamically insert all of our adverts. So it's easy to strip them out at the same time as well. So whilst that's the easiest thing to use, if you want to convert more of your audience, and we see actually that when people actually produce unique content and actually produce a brand-new show for their listeners, that's when we see a higher conversion. So that's really the bigger part of what's being adopted. Ad-free is a small percentage of that. The larger opportunity is actually the exclusive content that people produce.

Okay. And then -- and also, on another topic here. I mean, given the recent news flow and discussions about Joe Rogan and Spotify, I mean have you -- this doesn't relate to you directly, of course. But I mean, have you changed anything or planning to do anything related to your operations? Or do you not consider this a potential issue for you as you don't sort of own the content per se? Or how are you sort of mindful about the potential issues here?

Yes. I mean, good question. I think one of the most important things to understand about Acast is that unlike Spotify and the Joe Rogan matter, Acast is not in the business of making content available or promoting it exclusively on one single app or listening platform. We've got 0 control -- creative control over the content of our podcasters, which they decide to record and publish. But Acast does, of course, have responsibility to protect listeners and advertisers from any content that, of course, is illegal or deemed harmful or, of course, inappropriate. And so as soon as we are informed, then we'll always remove any content from our hosting service that is in violation of our terms of service. And we'll never actively promote content that could, of course, violate these terms. So we've been ahead of this for a very long time. Our terms of service have existed for many years and are publicly available. And this is something that we are very well prepared for if anything were to happen. But we are a very different type of service in that case, in that scenario.

That makes a lot of sense. And then I was also wondering if you could shed some light on sort of helping us understand the balance between listens growth and monetization, or [indiscernible] here, not maybe the numbers per se, but I mean you're clearly doing very well in improving monetization further, and the shows are growing greatly here. But I'm just thinking about this. I mean, if shows were to like expand, depending on review, in some -- by some form, it would get like 10,000 or 20,000 more shows through an acquisition or just signings or whatever, I think at some point, I guess, it could become an issue of sort of satisfying everything again, and putting that advertising demand that you have on all shows. So how are you thinking about this? And are you saying no to shows, et cetera? Just some comments on that would be helpful.

Em, you want to answer?

Yes, sure. I mean we -- it's a really important point. And this is why we've highlighted in the past that we foresee listens to continue to grow, but we also foresee average revenue to grow alongside. And it is really important that we increase our [indiscernible] for the reason that you mentioned. We want to be an attractive partner to our podcasters. And it's a key metric for us to continue to improve monetization and make sure that we deliver on those promises to podcasters. And we share in those spoils, so of course, it benefits all of us. So we believe that this will continue to progress, growth in listens and growth in more effective monetization.

Okay. And finally from my side, I know in the report, you had some positive comments about the development of programmatic sales. I'm just wondering if could we get some specific figure on that? How -- maybe how much it's up? And just if you could remind us what the share of programmatic sales is of the total?

It's not a big share of the total, but it's growing fast. It is our fastest-growing channel. Now we haven't split it out because it started from a small base. But who knows in the future, that might be something that we'll disclose. But it's really strong growth, really encouraging. It's scalable, automated product. And we have a team that is best in industry in podcasting and programmatic.

Next question comes from Dennis Berggren from Carnegie.

Following up on Acast+, could you provide some more details on some of the current status on how many podcasters are currently using Acast+? And also, I think you were pretty clear that we shouldn't expect any major contributions already here in Q1. But how do you think about this potential in the midterm? I mean how much could it contribute to your '24 revenues? And also, how important is this launch for you to reach the organic growth target?

All right. So on -- Dennis, wonderful to see you. When we look at Acast+, I'll just reiterate again, which Ross mentioned, that we are accounting to this net. And we're taking around 15% of each listener contribution net of the podcaster's share. So the way that the Acast+ will behave in the statement is more, it will look and behave more like a SaaS product. Net sales, high gross margin are contributing to gross profit and gross margins over time. But it is a smaller portion, and we're starting from a small base. So we're really keen to see how this can contribute over time. We still foresee that we would be majority ads-based business. But we are very hopeful that Acast+ -- and this is exactly what our initial beta test is showing us, that for those podcasters that sign up and they work in an engaged way with their audience, they convert between 2%, 3%, 4%, sometimes even 5% of their audience to paying subscribers. So it's about us making this product as valuable for podcaster, its ease of use, offering different features and so forth. And over time, this will contribute to our P&L. So -- and I think you picked it up the right way. Near term, we will -- we won't see any revolution in our P&L. But over time, we're hoping that this can be a -- or we're comfortable that this will be a good contributor to our gross profits.

Perfect. A question related to sort of competition. We have seen the subscription-based podcast platform [ Podomatic ], attracting a number of large names in Sweden. Actually, some of the ones listed at the previous top list. I mean what's your view here? How do you make sure to defend your relationships with podcasters against the premium subscription-based platforms? What is the strategy here?

And for us, we allow our creators to kind of choose where they want to monetize their platform. We give them complete freedom of doing that. And we've attracted 5,000 new podcasters over the quarter. So you're always going to see a slight bit of churn. But we have no reliance on any one podcast, so the churn is normal, and it's not an issue for us. We're focused on an open ecosystem. We're focused on monetizing in the way that the creator wants through advertising and now through subscriptions. And if you want to reach as larger audience as possible, that's the best way to do it, through Acast.

Perfect. And then finally, can you say something on the cost dynamics during the quarter? And perhaps especially on sales and marketing costs, we saw a very small increase compared to Q3 despite Q4 being this quarter with very high activity. What factors are coming into play here? And what should we expect going into '22?

Thanks, Dennis. All right. So looking at the sales and marketing costs. In Q4, we do have some variable costs in our sales and marketing cost line, and they will fluctuate quarter on quarter. In Q4, it's never the easiest time to attract the talent in sales and advertising because people are focused on delivering that year-end. That slightly changes when you get into Q1. Q1 has been historically an easier time to attract talent, both on tech and on the sales side. So I think that's just a natural dynamic generally in the markets actually. Was that helpful?

Your next question comes from [ Emily ] Johnson from Barclays.

It's Emily here. So I've got 3 questions, if I may. The first one is just -- I know, Ross, you touched on 2022 at the end of your remarks. But is there any color that you can share on current trading in the podcast ad market in January and February so far? For example, have you seen any weariness from advertisers upon podcasting given the Joe Rogan fallout? And my second question is, can you talk about how you think about the shape of your growth across your geographies? So for example, the U.S. grew 60% in 2021, which is in line with your CAGR target, but below what the group as a whole grew during the year. Do you think that Europe and the rest of world will be the biggest drivers of your growth going forward? Or is there anything specific to consider about the timing or phasing of the U.S. growth? And then thirdly, in terms of your gross margins, are you seeing any impact on your revenue split? So the 30-70, 50-50 splits across podcast format. And as you come to renegotiate those contracts or perhaps find podcasters in a market that is starting to mature from a relatively nascent base. Those are my 3 questions, please.

Thanks, Emily. And so I'll just -- I quickly could touch on the first one, and then pretty much, they're all yours, if you want.

Thanks, Thanks, Ross.

Thank you for those questions. I think I just wanted to add about the Joe Rogan, and has that shown any hesitancy with advertisers investing in podcasts? Absolutely not. But actually, I think if you look at how we look at the safety of where we're delivering ads for our partners, we work with the likes of Comscore as well to really verify and make sure there's safe content for advertisers to deliver their core messages in. And obviously, they saw huge safety with us that we -- this is something we've been doing for a very long time. We take care about, and we're very, very cautious about who is allowed into our marketplace and with what content. So to answer briefly, no, we haven't seen any hesitancy.

So if I jump into that question again around near-term guidance on Q1. We don't tend to give near-term guidance. Overall, we're very comfortable with our overall financial goals and we're comfortable in delivering overall goals in 2022 as a whole. In terms of Q1, historically, what we've seen is that seasonality where Q4 is the strongest sales quarter and Q1 comes in softer than Q4. We've also historically been quite investment-heavy in Q1. If we look at the geographic growth, and you double-clicked on the Americas and the U.S., I'll come back to looking at both U.S. and Americas over a 2-year rolling basis. We had a lot of FX boost in 2020 and very strong growth. And we had FX impacting those numbers, both in the Americas and the U.S., negatively in 2021. So on a compound annual growth basis, U.S. grew 85% between '19 and '21. When you look at the FX impact of the Americas, if you dig through the report, you'll see that Americas delivered 78% organic growth in 2021 compared to 70% reported. And you can apply a similar FX impact to the U.S. So organic growth for the U.S. would have been around 66%, which is higher than the 60% reported in SEKs for 2021 as a full year. So coming to the question, who will contribute in 2022? We foresee -- we had everyone contribute to strong growth in 2021. And we expect everyone to contribute to the growth in 2022, Europe, U.S., Americas, the like. And it's really lovely to see as well in the Americas, our investments in Mexico and Canada working together with our strong U.S. team to deliver synergies and cross-border opportunities together. So that's a great collaboration that is taking place. Moving on to the gross margin and splits. In 2021, the main driver of our gross margin -- resulting gross margin was the way that we sold our product, so our product mix. And you will recall from previous earnings calls that we've highlighted that we have sold slightly more -- or skewed a little bit more towards selling native ads or whole spread sponsorships. And they come at a lower split. But at a higher price, the higher CPMs, at the gross profit level, we still get a cut. When it comes to contract and splits, it's the usual commercial relationship or dynamic that takes place. We have a different conversation with some of the bigger podcasters than we have with those who are growing and being funneled up through our network. But it is our mission to continue to work with all size of podcasters and to improve monetization for us and for them. So the increase in ARPU is a great help in us continuing to provide good monetization for our podcasters. And with Acast+ as well, it's a new revenue stream that can contribute in a good way to podcasters earnings.

Okay. There are no further questions. Dear speakers, the floor is yours.

Thanks very much.

Thank you. Bye.

We'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, this now concludes our conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.