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

Good morning, and a warm welcome to the presentation of Acast's report for the third quarter of 2023. Our CEO, Ross Adams; and CFO, Emily Villatte, will present the results and developments for the quarter. [Operator Instructions] Now I'd like to hand over to our CEO, Ross Adams.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to listen to our report for the third quarter 2023. In case you are new to our calls, I'm Ross Adams, the CEO of Acast and based in New York. But today, I'm in our Stockholm podcast here. Our CFO, Emily Villatte, and I will take you through the numbers and events for the past quarter. Acast is the market-leading independent global infrastructure platform in podcasting, and our vision is to empower anyone, anywhere to connect through and create value from podcasting. We are uniquely positioned at the center of the podcasting value chain, connecting advertisers with podcast creators who want to monetize their content and their highly engaged audiences. Through our work on building the world's most valuable podcasting marketplace, we have achieved success in generating substantial revenue streams from our marketplace. We have built a solid portfolio of over 100,000 podcasts with a total of 1.3 billion listens per quarter, equating to some 2.5 billion monthly impressions available on our platform. Around 2,300 advertisers in the form of global brands and smaller companies reach these listeners with effective and creative advertising campaigns by Acast marketplace. During this third quarter, we've held firm on our journey towards profitability with keen management, cost management and several fresh approaches, and we've set the stage for profitability and revenue growth combined. We're delivering a positive revenue growth momentum with North America being a particularly strong driver of this trend in the quarter. Equally encouraging, our operational loss reduced year-on-year for the third consecutive quarter, this time, significant. During the third quarter, Acast grew by 32% and organic growth reached 26%, marking an uptick from the second quarter. The gross margin amounted to 35%. And we see continued good development of all our products as well as an increasing share of SaaS revenues from Podchaser, impacting the gross margin positively. We also saw some negative impact on the gross margin related to some specific large podcast contracts. The EBITDA result improved for the third quarter in a row, and the EBITDA margin is now in the single-digits region at minus 6%, and we are on track towards profitability. And I'm proud of the way that we are able to deliver both growth and profit improvement in the context of the current market. It is still too early to point with certainty to the moment of broad recovery and upswing in the world's advertising markets. But despite the macroeconomic backdrop, we continue to strengthen our position as the global independent market leader in podcasting. We are increasing our effectiveness of podcast advertising every single day, especially through our product-led initiatives from both the Acast and Podchaser teams. One driver of our work is the approaching death of the cookie and digital advertising. Third-party cookies have long been a cornerstone of the advertising industry used to track and target online ads. But privacy concerns continue to grow, and more and more companies are choosing to protect their users' data from third-party cookies. And cookies are set to dive out of advertising by the end of next year. So without the ability to track users across the web, advertisers must find new ways to reach their audiences. Podcast represent an emerging channel within advertising that is ideally positioned to thrive in a cookie-free world. Our progress has been supercharged through the acquisition of Podchaser, the most comprehensive podcast database in the industry. Earlier this year, we launched Collections+, an AI-powered data capability that increases advertisers' reach in podcasts. Collections+ pulls data from the widest range of sources across podcasting, including hosting platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify Category and Chart data, IB categories, surveys and transcriptions to offer the richest verticals in podcasting for advertisers to target instead of targeting individual users. In the third quarter, this feature was further developed through Predictive Demographics, an offering that optimizes advertisers' ability to target the most relevant audiences based on a data-driven analysis of the language within the episodes. In other words, an advertiser can increase the reach and accuracy of their advertising by discovering and targeting completely new podcasts and audiences relevant to their goals. And by doing so, we can increase our advertising sales in smaller and medium-sized podcasts and thus scale up our advertising sales further. And again, we're able to target users through context and language. I would also note here that our product teams are using AI thoughtfully to advance the advertising experience for all. Optimizing our processes and enhancing the scalability of our ad sales is central to shaping Acast's future. And by adopting automated sales flows, the foundation for building long-term growth has strengthened. The development of Acast's self-serve advertising platform is a good example of how we're increasing scalability, and I am delighted by the very positive reception, which has led us to already reach our full year revenue target for this new sales channel in the third quarter. During the quarter, we launched AdCollab, a tool that enables advertisers and podcast creators to collaborate in real time to create host-read sponsorship campaigns. Through AdCollab, the podcasters and advertisers can create host reads together within the Acast product, reducing the time and resources needed from the Acast sales teams. Early test results show an 85% time improvement in the process of booking and producing this type of ad. In the third quarter, we entered into new agreements with Warner Bros. Discovery and Luminary, two leading podcast publishers, which each bring a slate of premium popular and high-profile shows to our marketplace. Acast has entered into a partnership with Luminary, previously a paywall-only podcast provider to increase the reach of selected Luminary original podcasts across any podcast app. Six shows, including Joking Not Joking with Mo Amer and Azhar Usman and How I Masaba with Masaba Gupta, are now being made available to listeners on all platforms via Acast. Acast will also serve as Luminary's exclusive monetization partner for these podcasts across all platforms, including Apple Pods, Spotify and the likes of Amazon Music. Additionally, Luminary will leverage Acast+ Access, the capability which allows subscribers to access exclusive gated content on the listing app of their choice. Acast has entered into a new partnership also with Warner Bros. Discovery to become the exclusive distribution and monetization partner of its podcasts. The deal makes pods from Food Network, TLC, HGTV, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel and Travel Channel, including Curiosity Daily, Food Network Obsessed, A Ghost Ruined My Life with Eli Roth and many more available to advertisers through Acast's marketplace. By adding even more household name brands to our already extensive marketplace, we increase our attractiveness to both advertisers and podcast creators. Alongside such important new partnerships, we are continuing and continually strengthening our existing relationship with our largest podcasters who hold a lot of appeal to advertisers. Here is just a snapshot of some of the creators across the world that renewed their agreements with Acast in Q3. The podcast shown here alone represent over 12 million monthly listens in our marketplace, and this evidence is the depth of our relationships with our creators and the high levels of satisfaction that we afford them across monetizing and growing their shows as we continue to focus on monetizing the inventory we have. An additional development within the podcasting industry, which impacts advertising effectiveness, is Apple's rollout of iOS 17. This rollout delivers more accurate insight into podcast listening frequency, benefiting our entire industry. We expect a short-term decrease in the number of overall listens on the Apple Podcast app and an increase in the average revenue per listen. I'll now hand over to Emily to talk you through our financial performance for the quarter in more detail. Emily?

Thank you, Ross. All right. Let's have a look at the numbers. So we can conclude that the monetization of our portfolio podcast continues to improve as ARPU or average revenue per listen grew by 36% to SEK 0.33 in the quarter. Listens decreased by some 3% compared to Q3 of 2022 with a minor impact from the iOS 17 rollout that Ross just mentioned. Revenues grew by 32% in the quarter despite mixed advertiser sentiment. And it should be noted that Q3 of 2020 represented an easier comp, but we are still happy with our growth against the macroeconomic backdrop. Organic growth was 26% in the quarter as Podchaser contributed 1% of FX contributed to a further 5% to reported revenue growth. As Ross mentioned, the gross margin in the period was stable at 35%, but there were some solid underlying improvements. We did see a 5% negative impact on the gross margin in the quarter as the performance of certain larger podcast guarantee contracts were affected and are affected by Apple's ongoing rollout of iOS 17. This also means that our underlying gross margin in the quarter was a healthy 40%. And our ongoing product development, growth in the SaaS revenues and successful implementation of the likes of Collections+ and our Predictive Demographics, these initiatives do support our longer-term gross margin development. Now when it comes to segment performance, North America remains an important growth driver, where net sales growth increased by 55% and the profit contribution margins. So an improvement to 5% in the quarter compared to the negative 27% in the same quarter of last year. Europe is also holding its own, considering a more subdued prevailing advertisers sentiment and delivered 25% net sales growth in Q3. The profit contribution from Europe was impacted by the podcast contract mentioned earlier to the tune of SEK 22 million. Other markets delivered 24% net sales growth and a marginal increase in contribution products. So in an advertising market where many players struggle with growth, we are growing at this pace, which I think validates our position and execution of our strategy. We are, of course, managing our operating expenses in a diligent way. And as a result, OpEx decreased by 11% year-on-year overall. You'll note that the Acast FTE and FTC count at the end of the quarter was SEK 374 million, which is a continued reduction compared to previous quarters. And we are continuously managing our fixed costs whilst making deliberate decisions around discretionary spend to support our growing business. Moving on to EBITDA. We do remain on track towards profitability. In the quarter, EBITDA improved to negative SEK 26 million, which is a significant improvement on the prior year when we had some negative SEK 99 million. The EBITDA margin, again, in the single digits at negative 6% compares favorably to the negative 27% we delivered in the same quarter of last year. And actually, without the impact from these podcast guarantee contracts, we would have been quite close to breakeven in the quarter. So again, we are on track towards hitting our profitability goal for the full year of 2024. Moving on to cash. We can report that our balance sheet remains strong, and the cash flows from operating activities improved to negative SEK 19 million compared to the negative SEK 97 million in the same quarter of last year. And overall, the cash balance as at the end of quarter was a healthy SEK 750 million. I've included a new slide in this presentation, which is an illustration of our operating cash flows on a rolling 12-month basis, which highlights the material improvement in cash flows that we've seen during the year. We ended 2022 with a negative SEK 295 million in operating cash flows for the 12 months during 2022. And as at Q3 2023, so this quarter, looking back at the last 12 months, operating cash flows had improved by about 2/3 to negative SEK 91 million. I'm happy with our progress. Ross, back to you.

Thank you, Emily. In the spirit of improving investor transparency, we are now publishing quarterly consensus estimates collated from our bank analysts, so ABG, Barclays and Carnegie as well as a crowdsourced retail consensus from Pinpoint. And these are available on investors.acast.com. So please do have a look at those if you're interested in market estimates. And we're also continuing to focus on driving scale and efficiency in our ad operations, and we'll be rolling out more tools to support our automation and efficiency goals. Now let's go to the Q&A. So if you want to post a question, feel free to type in the box below.

Thank you. We'll start with a couple of questions from Andreas at Carnegie. First of all, regarding the 2024 target, what is key for you to achieve EBITDA breakeven? There is some upside to the upper end of the gross margin range, but how would you see OpEx to be stable from the current run rate? And how can you further scale sales growth at unchanged sales and marketing, for instance?

So what we need to get to our full year profitability next year is simple. We do need continued growth, and we do need to manage our cost line. To your point, Andreas, we have seen a positive underlying development in our gross margin in this quarter, which continue to clearly support the cost. Now we don't guide on costs, specifically quarter-by-quarter or year-on-year, but we do maintain focus on managing our fixed costs and making deliberate decisions around discretionary spend as we progress. So what's needed is continued growth and continued diligent cost management with some support from the gross margin.

Great. And another question from Andreas. You have reached the automation targets for the year, yet the gross margin is declining both sequentially and year-on-year. Should we not see positive impact on gross margin from increased automation in sales channels?

The improved automation gives us operating leverage. So that supports our EBITDA margin, but it does not directly impact our gross margin. The gross margin is mainly impacted by our product mix. So whether we sell ads that are typically sold at 50-50 splits or whether we sell host-read sponsorships, which are typically sold at a 30-70 split. And then, of course, combined with our growing SaaS and AdTech and non-ad revenue lines, but the automation supports our ability to grow revenues faster than our operating expenses. So in essence, delivering operating leverage and supporting our path to EBITDA profitability.

Another question from Carnegie. What exactly happens in the iOS 17 update? And how is it impacting listens?

Yes. I mean the iOS update implies a change to how podcast episodes are downloaded on mobile devices, which, in turn, of course, affects the measurement of listens. In the long term, the change will mean a more accurate picture of the listening frequency for each podcast, which is a positive development for the industry actually as a whole. But in the short term, we expect a decrease in the number of overall listens and an increase in the average revenue per listen. For us, it's about monitoring this super closely. And although it's too early to say how large the impact will be, we estimate an overall drop to listens by around 10% in Q4. But I'm happy to note that, as I've spoken about in previous quarters, it's all about the unique listeners and the unique users, and that continues to increase month-on-month. So we're reaching a larger audience month-on-month, which is where we pay close attention.

We have a question from Emily. You referenced the podcast, which you've resigned with Acast during Q3. Have you seen any podcasts leaving the platform?

We do have some churn in our podcasting portfolio. I think that's natural when you have around 100,000 pods. But our churn in our podcasting portfolio has been low historically, and it continues to be low.

Thank you. And we have a question here from Richard at Arete. For Ross, can you give us a sense of scale of the Luminary and Warner Bros. deals? What sort of ad revenue were those publishers doing before?

I mean if you look at Luminary, Luminary is completely ad-free prior to the deal with us. So this is the first time that their shows are available on all platforms outside of their kind of subscription service. So scale-wise, it's a brand new thing. So we're kind of watching that as they distribute further and wider. But that's a great opportunity because they have some very strong shows behind their payroll, which are now in the open ecosystem. And again, for Warner Bros., this is a brand-new deal. We're looking at the kind of scale that brings, but they have a huge amount of shows and some very popular shows. So this is a great scale for us, but we don't talk about individual reach of each of our networks. But it's -- we're very pleased with those signs.

Another question from Richard. What's the further levers you can point to, which might lift gross margin? Is Podchaser too small to impact gross margin?

Not at all. I think the combination of Podchasers added SaaS revenues with the synergies that we're seeing in combining and joining our forces between podcast -- Podchaser and Acast with the innovation of the likes of Collections+ and Predictive Demographics, these things support our gross margin. Now we're already seeing that in the quarter and into the future. So we're happy with the contribution and the progress.

Another question from Emily. How much of your organic growth reacceleration comes from increasing CPMs and sell-through on existing podcasts versus new podcast signings?

The main driver of our accelerated growth is selling more on the portfolio that we have. CPMs have remained relatively stable during the year, and this has been a function of increasing our sell-through rate on the portfolio that we have.

And we have a question here from Ramil on minimum guarantee contracts. What is the strategy for signing new minimum guarantee contracts? And can you say anything about prices on minimum guarantee contracts today compared to, say, 2021?

I think there was a period where there were a lot of contracts being signed at high levels. I think the times have changed since 2021 to now. There will still be very popular shows with very popular contracts. But I think the market allows us to negotiate stronger contracts in favor of the likes of Acast as a platform. Also the strength that we have in the size of our marketplace and audience and how we can attract new advertisers and continue to grow helps when it comes to renegotiating and negotiating new contracts with talent.

And I have another question from Emily. From a demand perspective, is the organic growth coming from like-for-like ad spend increases at existing advertisers? Or is it also coming from new advertisers starting to spend with Acast?

I'd say it's a mix of both.

Yes.

We are seeing new advertisers testing out the media, and we have advertisers that we worked with for several years coming back and spending a good amount of money.

Yes, I think self-serve has been a great example of how we've attracted the whole host of new advertisers. You can spend as little as $250 to start a campaign there. So it allows a lot more advertisers to come into the space and trial it and then start to invest more, so yes.

And we've got some questions from Derek here. How has Q4 started? And what is the outlook like heading into the important month of December?

So December is always an interesting month, you can either have some last-minute spending and sort of accelerate into that quarter or you can see some years we have seen, a tightening of budgets and hold back in December. So we're monitoring this closely. Clearly, there is mixed advertiser sentiment out there. We're fortunate to have exposure in different geographies. So we don't have single geography exposure. And -- but Q4, all things equal, should, of course, be the biggest quarter of the year.

And linked to that from Derek, can you give a market macro update based on what you're experiencing in your major markets?

I think we're experiencing similar trends that reflect the general macroeconomic sentiment. We have seen some positive data points in the U.S. macroeconomic climate, and we've also seen positive growth for us in North America as a whole. You can see that reflected in our Q3 numbers. Europe's sentiment has been a little bit more subdued. But despite this, we are posting some 25% revenue growth in the quarter, which I think is a positive sign. Other markets as well, this is mainly Asia Pac, Australia and New Zealand, but also an international team posted 24% growth, which I think is a good delivery as well.

And then another question from Richard at Arete. Following up on the sell-through rate, what's the rough fill rate now? And can you speak about the concentration of the top 10 advertisers as a portion of sales?

We have very -- so the fill rate has increased. Our listeners went down by 3%, but our average revenue per listen went up by 36%, and that is largely driven by an increase in fill rates for CPMs and then largely stable. When it comes to single advertiser or single podcast or exposure, we do not have any advertiser nor any podcast that represents more than 10% of our marketplace. So the key advertiser or key on cost dependency remains low.

And we have a question here on self-serve advertising from Andreas. Looking at self-serve ads, how low initial ad spend have you seen -- have you so far seen being used by new advertisers? And do you see that when new advertisers start acquiring ad space that the spend increases over time? Any indicators during a 3- to 6- to 9-month period?

I don't think from the indicator point of view, but I think we're definitely seeing new advertisers come into the space and trialing self-serve out from as little as $250, as I mentioned earlier on. And naturally, I think when you try out a platform and a platform, the light podcasting that is brilliant for the likes of our acquisition, we definitely see an increased spend when they come back and return spend. So it's a great way to get new advertisers into the space and increase our overall advertiser account.

Great. And specifically on AdTech from Ramil, can you talk a bit about your uptick and what you're doing there to drive EG programmatic sales?

I think programmatic, we've led for a long time. Programmatic for us has been something we focused on. We knew that this is going to be a focal point for the industry. We've been doing this for 6, almost 7 years now and lead the every -- we lead kind of the entire market in programmatic. I think for us, it's looking at the likes of AI demographics and how we're focusing on segmenting podcasts into collect -- different collections as well, and operating and giving new targeting options to programmatic buyers. So we continue to invest heavily actually in our ad technology and the evolution of targeting within podcasting.

Another question from Andreas. You're in quite a nice position with SEK 750 million in cash and very close to cash flow positive. So this means you might have excess cash. Do you have any specific plans on how to use this excess cash to take Acast to the next step and increase growth in different ways?

Right now, we're laser-focused on achieving our profitability and the profits in 2024. But of course, we are continually assessing our cash position and our capital allocation, be that towards organic growth initiatives or other strategic elements. Right now, you might have seen that. In this quarter, we have continued to invest in our North American operation to further drive organic growth in the U.S. business, for example, with several new hires joining the team. So that is one element where we're seeing growth opportunity and investment that doesn't [indiscernible].

And a question from Peter around sales efficiency. So with the changes you are taking to make sales more efficient, could you please give us some insight on sales and marketing costs? It's been around 24.5% to 26% of sales during 2023. What level should you achieve over time?

We haven't guided specifically line by line. But you are right, we have invested in sales and marketing, and we will continue to make bets around both the fixed cost element and our discretionary spend within sales and marketing. Typically, this is normal seasonality, so marketing cost typically go up with higher revenues in Q4. So I would just note that. But over time to the point around building more scalable sales channels and product-enabled flows, this should deliver overall operating leverage over time, which also suggests that the percentage that we spend on sales and marketing as a percentage of revenues should naturally decrease over time. The nominal numbers may, of course, go up, but the percentage -- but the cost as a percentage of revenues, in line with our efficiency goals, should decrease over time. But we have not guided to a specific number.

Thank you. And thanks for all your questions. I'll hand back over to Ross.

Great. Thanks very much, and thank you, everyone, for attending this. On February 12, we will publish our year-end report for 2023, and you are welcome to attend the presentation. Don't forget to follow us on investors.acast.com, our Acast blog or listen to our financial results, of course, as a podcast. And if you want to receive company data continue to see to your inbox, please subscribe to press releases, news and financial reports on our Investor Relations web. Thanks very much.