eEducation Albert AB (publ) (ALBERT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to this Q4 presentation with Albert. With us today, we have CEO and Co-founder, Arta Mandegari, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Salman Eskandari; and CFO, Martin Dahlgren. My name is Christopher [indiscernible], and I work for [indiscernible]. [Operator Instructions] And with that said, I hand over the word to you guys. So please take us through your Q4 presentation.

Thank you very much, Christopher. And for everyone calling into this hearing. Thank you for joining. We're looking forward to walk you through our second quarterly report since our IPO. This is the agenda for today. We're going to give you a short reiteration of Albert and the company short instruction. Go through the Q4 summary and events, we will dig into the Q4 financials and also looking to some key strategic progresses and events that we have been doing starting 2022, this new year. And we will end this presentation with a short summary and Q&A for everyone joining here today. Today, it's me, Arta Mandegari, one of the co-founders of the company, who will present -- I'm also the CEO and I have an engineering background, but also me starting a couple of companies before. This is my third company, mainly been focusing on marketing and sales, and that's mainly the focus that I've been having in this company also here at Albert.

And I'm Salman Eskandari. Similar background in engineering. But previously, I worked as a management consultant for 6 years. At Albert, I have been mainly focusing on product, tech and organization.

Good day, everybody. My name is Martin Dahlgren, and I am the CFO at Albert, and I have a previous background within audit from Deloitte.

To reiterate a reason of existence. I would say, it's important for us to go back to the vision we have, why do we start this company. And our vision is basically to give every child in Europe a custom learning experience through our products and apps. And I mean, in essence, what we're doing is we want to democratize learning. And the way we're doing it is by eliminating the human element in the learning experience. And in that way, we could basically price ourselves in a way that makes this kind of services available for the broad mass and for the many. And here, we would like to highlight the word Europe. We have a very strong European focus. We see a great opportunity to grab leading position in Europe, mainly in direct-to-consumer, but also in the B2B segment. And you will notice this as we progress in the presentation as well. We started with mathematics only, but we are progressing and moving into a one-stop shop for kids learning. So except for mathematics for children 3 to 16 years old, we have also recently launched a local language learning to read and spell, also geography, physics, biology that we recently launched and also English that we launched just a couple of days ago. We founded the company in Gothenburg in 2016, actually started as a B2B company, selling to schools. But mid-2017, we switched to a more scalable and faster-growing segment, which is direct-to-consumer. And since then, we have helped over 300,000 families with their children's education and these families and their children have, in total, sold more than 50 million exercises in our products and apps. We are a strong team of approximately 40 full-time employees, whereof approximately 35 hours work within in product and technology and the rest working with marketing and sales. We are a leading direct-to-consumer player in the Nordics. As per Q4 closing, we have approximately 78,000 paying subscribers and an annual revenue of SEK 90 million recurring revenue as per Q4 closing. We have subsequent events that drive this number upwards. We will get into that later in the presentation. We are active in 5 main markets today, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland and United Kingdom. But we are experimenting a lot with the new markets as well. If we take the Q4 in brief, we are happy with the growth. We are continue focusing on growth, and we're growing the net sales with 119% where of all these organic and the annual recurring revenue with 136%. We have had a successful launch in the United Kingdom and as we progress and gather more data here in the U.K., we have identified U.K. as a great market for us going forward, and it will become a key market for the organization and for the company. We are starting the -- started the consolidation that we have been communicating since our IPO. We have completed -- during the quarter, we completed 2 acquisitions, Jaramba and also Stairway Learning. And subsequent event is we were getting to that, that was also communicated today. And so we have done 3 acquisitions in total, whereof 2 came in Q4. We launched a new platform for kids, 3 to 9, where we instead of having many different apps, subjects delivered to the customers, we have basically consolidated the experience, where we lift in the different study subjects in one platform, which is -- which initially have shown the great data of contributing to better retention and lowering the churn of our customers. And we have also done some additional strategic subsequent events like I just mentioned, and we will go through them later in the presentation. Net sales summed up to SEK 18.5 million. ARR, which is basically the most important KPI for us right now was just below SEK 90 million. ARPPU of SEK 96, which is a big growth from previous year, but a little bit lower than previous quarter, and that basically comes from the acquisition of Jaramba who has some sales to the B2B segment, but also a little bit lower ARPPU on the consumer side on their subscriptions. EBITA of minus SEK 16.6 million, which is going into the right direction, it's lower than the previous quarter. When it comes to the geographical expansion, as we communicated during the quarter, we entered U.K., which was followed by an -- which came from evaluation phase, which was carried out already in Q3. And in Q4 October, we successfully launched and we're gaining traction in the U.K. And you will see that when we go through the key financials as well that markets outside Sweden is gaining more and more traction is contributing to our growth going forward as well. And like I said before, U.K. will become a key market for us going forward, both in terms of growing the customer base. It has attractive conversion rates among our users and showing a good retention on a cohort basis of the users that we have acquired in U.K. right now. But in addition to that, we also see great M&A opportunities in U.K., and we have a lot of good dialogues ongoing there. And as a subsequent event, we announced today our acquisition of Sumdog which adds to a new B2B offering to the company, which we are very happy about. It basically drives our ARR from SEK 90 million to SEK 123 million, and it's -- we are very happy to announce that because it creates another business unit to the company as well, which gives us a very good financial profile going forward and we'll have a very important strategic function for the company going forward.

So as Arta mentioned, if we rewind 13 months -- 13 months ago, we only had mathematics that we offered to our customers. And during the last year, we have added a bunch of different products, local language learning, English, geography, programming, biology, physics, and with that also change the complexity of making it easy for the customer to access all these different apps or different subjects. So we started a strategic work together everything that's relevant for a certain age group within the same app. That experiment was launched first during last year, and we saw that it had a significant positive effect on how the products were used if we talk about weekly active users and the usage retention. So we decided to go all in on that [ platform ] strategy moving towards having one app per age segment. And the first one out was out here, the platform for children aged 3 to 9, which was launched in November. And today, it contains Mathematics, local language and English and Code, teaching children how the program will be added to the platform as well during this year. And it's also in line with our ambition to have an equal offering on all the markets on which we are active. So Arta mentioned the 2 acquisitions that we did in Q4, Stairway and Jaramba. Stairway targets children aged 10 to 16. Jaramba, a younger age segment, so preschoolers basically. If we start with Stairway, it was a fantastic acquisition. We bought the intellectual property rights to the content for math, physics and biology content aligned to the U.K. curriculum. So this basically came after evaluation phase from us if we should take the content we have in Sweden and localize it and deploy it in other markets or if we should look to acquire already existing content. And with Stairway, we acquired the content for not only one subject, but 3 subjects. And in a record time, we've managed to integrate it into the platform, which is called the Albert Teen and was launched just last week in the U.K. So taking the content, integrating it into our own platform, launching it in our own brand in less than 2 months. So that has been a fantastic effort from the team. And we will use that platform as a basis moving forward also for the other markets on which we're active. Jaramba was acquired right before the New Year, platform for younger children in preschool age, great product, fun to use, very interactive. And they also had an established business already, both on the B2B side, but primarily on the B2C side with 4,000 to 5,000 paying subscribers. The amount we acquired Jaramba for was SEK 10 million, half paid in cash, half paid in shares and the share price was at a premium of -- at that time, 16% or 17%. Jaramba is in the process of being launched under the Albert umbrella. So within this year, we will have a distinct offering for toddlers, 2 to 5, junior segment, which will be 6 to 9 and then Albert Teen covering the needs of children aged 10 to 16.

We will now go through the financials as of Q4 2021 in relation to comparative figures, which we have presented in our year-end reports. If we initially look at our ARR at the end of the quarter, we see strong growth in this key metric. Our ARR has increased from SEK 38 million to SEK 90 million between Q4 of 2020 and Q4 2021. The growth is both in paying subscribers as well as average revenue per paying user, and this is driven by our introduction of new subscriptions plans, PLUS and Standard. The absolute majority is related to organic growth, but some is related to the acquisition of Jaramba which was completed in the end of the quarter. As Arta mentioned, the acquisition of Jaramba have had an initial negative effect on our ARPPU since the ARPPU for Jaramba users are significantly lower than those of Albert. But our objective going forward is to include these users in Albert's ecosystem and therefore, increase the ARPPU to the average for the group. If we then look at our net sales for the quarter, we continued to see strong growth during the year. Our net sales grew from SEK 8.5 million to SEK 18.5 million from Q4 2020 to Q4 2021. This is a year-over-year increase of 119%, which all is organic since the acquisition of Jaramba closed in the end of the quarter and has therefore no effect on our P&L for the year. The growth is primarily outside of Sweden, which we will see [ thorough ] during the presentation in the next slide. If we look at our other financial metrics, there are some I want to highlight for the quarter. Our adjusted gross margin is around 90%. It has decreased since Q4 of 2020, and this is mostly due to the platform fees from Apple and Google. But we continue to have a high adjusted gross margin due to the in-house development of our products where Albert is responsible for the development of new products. And here, we have example which has been launched during the first quarter of 2020 -- 2022, such as Albert [ Teen ] and Albert English. Our EBITA for the period was minus SEK 16.6 million in Q4 of 2021 and minus SEK 8.2 million in Q4 of 2020. The decrease is due to our key focus on growth and the marketing expenses by far the largest expense item in our profit and loss statement. We also have a one-off item of SEK 1.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, which is related to the IPO. As I mentioned earlier, we have grown on all markets in Q4 and 2021, but markets other than Sweden has been the strongest in absolute figures -- in comparative figures. Year-to-date, Sweden stands for 61% of our net sales. But if we look at Q4 isolated Sweden was 60% of net sales. This shows that our dependency on Sweden is decreasing when we move further into 2021 and also 2022. And our products are requested in markets other than Sweden. Lastly, I wanted to go through our capitalized R&D expenses. Our capitalized R&D expenses contains of personnel expenses, expenses for consultants as well as other expenses tied to the development of our products. During Q4 of 2021, we capitalized R&D expenses of SEK 3 million, which is recorded as revenue but not included in our net sales. It is the largest amount we have recorded in history, and this is due to the large initiative to launch new subjects based on acquired IP from Stairway as well as our new subject English, both which were launched in Q1 of 2022. It has, however, decreased in relation to net sales, and it is 16.3% in Q4 of 2021 and 18.8% in Q4 of 2020. And this shows the economics of scale in our business where the investment in our product development decreases in relation to net sales. To wrap things up, I just want to highlight that as of Q4 of 2021 had SEK 8.7 million capitalized in R&D expenses in total on our balance sheet and our self-developed intangible assets are amortized during 3 years, which is the estimated [ useful life ]. All of these items in our P&L are also included in the EBITA metrics.

If we move into 2022 and some of the events happening during this year, we can go to the next slide. We have mentioned it already a couple of times. There were 2 significant launches made just during the last week. First one was Albert Teen that we launched in the U.K., covering in the same app mathematics, physics and biology using the content that we acquired from Stairway. So before that, the only offering we had for children 10 to 16 was mathematics in Sweden. So for Albert, this is a huge step into broadening the product offering on all the markets in which we are active. So today, it contains mathematics, biology physics. We will add Albert Geo and language learning to the platform during the year. And then the subjects within the platform will be rolled out to the other markets on which we are active as well. Just a couple of days ago, we launched Albert English within the Junior platform. And now -- so that was a very strategic and important launch for us for 2 reasons, one being that with the launch of English, we now cover the 3 main subjects that parent considered to be most important for children in that age range, meaning local language, mathematics and English. But another thing that we would like to highlight is the technical advancement we made with the launch of English in the platform, combining 2 totally different technologies into the same app, which also prepares us for future additions in a much better way. Today, the platform now contains math, local language, English and the plan is to integrate Albert Code into the platform as well during the year. This morning, we announced the acquisition of Sumdog, a great company with a long history on the U.K. market. And we really share the same vision, making every child learn in their way, developing high-quality content aligned with the curriculum, by teachers, educational experts. And then Sumdog is used by 15% of all the schools in U.K. And U.K. is a really core market for us. But in addition to that, they are also present in other English-speaking markets such as U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. One thing that we would like to highlight that with the acquisition of Sumdog, we have taken a huge leap in the group's financial profile and the way we will run the business moving forward. We have only been focused on B2C consumer business model, but with the acquisition of Sumdog, we also established a B2B business unit within the group which has exactly the same metrics that we measure. It's ARR, it's churn rates, average revenue per paying user. It's just that the dynamics look a bit different with longer contracts, very low churn rates, a high volume of users. And over time, we will aim to gather the synergies of being able to have the teacher, the student and the parent within the same ecosystem. So it's a really exciting move into the B2B market with a lot of new opportunities that will come with that. And as Arta also mentioned, we see great opportunities on the acquisition side to do complementary acquisitions as well as doing cross-selling between our 2 different platforms and our different customers, both B2B to B2C, but also B2C to B2B. And with the acquisition of Sumdog, the total ARR was raised from SEK 90 million to SEK 123 million.

I think we can conclude this slide with a highlight of the financial profile of Sumdog for 2021. The ARR landed on GBP 2.6 million with a gross profit of [ GBP 2.2 million, ] and therefore, a gross margin of 88%. The revenue retention rate was 91% for the year, and the purchase consideration in total is GBP 8.85 million. The day 1 consideration was [ GBP 6.8 million ] as well as a deferred consideration of [ GBP 2 million, ] which is related to the development of ARR between 2022 and 2023. The deferred consideration will be paid out in total if the ARR has developed to GBP 4.5 million at the end of 2023. I think it -- we can summarize and look a little ahead and check our financial targets for the business. So we have divided those in growth and profitability. So regarding our growth, we target to grow our net sales on average by more than 50% per year in the medium term, of which organic growth will be the majority, but we also see possibilities of acquisitions. And this is to achieve net sales exceeding SEK 500 million for the full year of 2025. And regarding the profitability, we target an EBITA margin of 40% in the long term.

Continuing the summary, for us, it's very important to reiterate on our equity story, why did we go public? And what have we communicated that we will do and try to reiterate and really delivering on what we actually say that we're going to deliver. So mean when we did the IPO, we said we are only in the Nordics. We had launched in Poland, quite recent at that point of time. We said we're going to enter a new European market during Q4. We did that with U.K. in October. We said that we're going to make the customer experience better with the platform initiated and also now fully launched. One of the key reasons for going public was except from continuing the finance of our organic growth, also enable us to execute M&A agenda more efficient. And since then, we have carried out 3 acquisitions since the IPO, Stairway Learning and Jaramba and now recently Sumdog. And including Sumdog, we have raised our ARR now from SEK 69 million at the point of the IPO to SEK 123 million today. And I think that's basically 80% growth -- just below 80% growth since the [ IPO ]. And also, we have said that we're going to continuing our aim to become the #1 direct-to-consumer company or EdTech company in Europe, and we have started the consolidation in Europe, which we see as a very high opportunity to consolidate the fragmented market here. And we have several dialogues ongoing with high-quality companies in both B2C and B2B segments here in Europe. And we are very opportunistic going forward. The key takeaways of this report, we would like to highlight that we still have continuing focus on growth. We have said that we're not going to focus on profitability until 2025, and we see great opportunity to still continuing growing our customer base, our ARR, net sales and that is something we will continue doing because we see great opportunities here in Europe mainly. We have moved from having several apps to one platform and the platform way of thinking will be something that is very important for the company and the [ organization ]. U.K., a very successful launch, and it will become a key market for us, but we would like to highlight here that we will launch more markets, and we are having experiments live in other markets as we speak and that we will continue executing our -- on our communicated M&A agenda. With that said, we are happy to get questions from the audience.

Great. So let's start with the first question. You have talked about the expansion to U.K. But if we look at further expansion, are there any countries that you find extra interesting and why?

Yes, I would say we find several markets extra interesting. We are having experiments live in 2 new markets as we speak today. We are having EBITA version out in France and also one in Spain. And we think both are very, very interesting market. It's both are -- I mean very mature audience, digital savvy and also, we see local actors that have proven that this kind of product and service that we offer is actually attractive in those local markets as well. So that makes it interesting. But I think the most important thing for us is what the data shows. I mean, how is the initial traffic on our websites and in our apps actually performing in the experiments we are having. And I would say that both in France and Spain, the experiment so far looks really good. And yes, I think that summarized it quite well that the data from the experiment shows good data -- good numbers.

Okay. Next question. Will you report B2B and B2C consolidated? And if so, how should we think about or ARPPU and subscriber mix effects going further?

Yes. Thank you. Great question. And we will -- when we acquired Sumdog, we saw that as a new segment basically. So we will report -- we will disclose in segments, the B2C and the B2B business separately given that the characteristics of the business are quite different in relation to subs and also ARPPU, of course. So it will be divided in our reports from Q1 and going forward.

Okay. Next question, what did your marketing costs amount to in the full year of 2021 and/or how much do you expect to increase these efforts in 2022?

We don't give a specific number on the marketing side, but it is in the ballpark of -- in total of operating expenses, I would say the ballpark figure for marketing expense is roughly 70%.

Okay. Next question. How do you see the M&A pipeline going forward? And in your discussions with your targets, how many are willing to get paid in cash only versus those waiting to be paid in shares as well.

Yes. So if we take the first part of the question, looking at the M&A agenda, moving forward, it's the same as we described it during the IPO process. We look at both B2C companies and B2B companies. On the B2C side, it's mainly for 2 reasons. One is to further strengthen our own B2C business. So how can we get better LTV/CAC ratio with those type of acquisitions, may it be additional products, additional age segments and so on, like with Stairway or with Jaramba. We also look at buying position on a market, so buying established actors on certain markets. So those are the 2 types in B2C. On the B2B side, there are a lot of opportunities. Majority of the companies are B2B companies. And there, we look at establishing this new business unit. Now it's done with Sumdog as a first acquisition, but we're continuing to having dialogues with other actors as well. When it comes to those companies and the entrepreneurs, we see a wide range. So we see those that are really excited about joining forces, creating something big together with Albert where we have different strengths and where consideration containing a higher portion of shares is interesting. In some cases, it's less interesting. So there is a mix. I think for us, it's really important just to see that there is a high strategic fit and a clear value for both the Albert as a group, but also the shareholders that we can create higher value together moving forward over time. And then each individual deal will be negotiated on the basis of what is best for that particular deal.

Okay. Do you have any defined targets in terms of ARR or similar metrics?

Not specifically on a yearly basis. We go back to the financial targets where we have a financial target for 2025, and we have said that we will grow by -- on an average of 50%, but we don't guide on specific years.

Okay. And can you share any info regarding the churn rate on your subscribers?

We don't share numbers when it comes to the churn rate, but we can highlight again, things that we talked about before during last year and why we are extending the product portfolio, why we decided to extend the product portfolio. We did a lot of churn analysis during 2021, talking to our customers, understanding that with additional subjects, customers would be willing not only to pay more but to stay longer in their subscriptions. We did the initial experiment with Albert ABC, where we offered mathematics and local language, and we really saw the positive effects and now adding even more subjects to the portfolio, adding more products, we will bring significantly more value to the customers, but not at a much higher price. So we expect that to have a positive effect on churn moving forward.

Okay. Next question. Can you please elaborate a bit on your acquisition strategy? What's your sort of main targets with the acquisition strategy?

Yes, absolutely. We can repeat a bit what I previously mentioned. So one part is to further strengthen our own B2C business. So can we find good companies with great products or products on additional age ranges that can further boost our own B2C business. Can we find companies that are already established and have positioned on a market which is interesting for us and a market in which we consider to be interesting to be established on? But then we also have the B2B side. Continuing to build on the first acquisition that was made now with Sumdog, finding additional and complementary acquisitions that can further strengthen our position on the B2B market.

Okay. Great. Thanks for clarifying. You have a collaboration with Tre -- you have had some -- have that for some time. Could you please elaborate a bit on that collaboration? What it means?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, in essence, it's about finding new channels for us to acquire customers at a lower cost than what we are doing in our paid acquisition channels as of today. And we are having a -- one of the channels that we actually use in our marketing mix is with partnerships and Tre is one of this partnership. We have partnership with other -- I mean, collaboration partners as well, such as [indiscernible] here in Sweden, [indiscernible] for example, we have different child events, for example, [indiscernible] et cetera, that will help us acquire customers at higher volumes and lower costs. And Tre is basically the same thing. It's a new channel for us, where we create great value Tre customers. They can access educational subjects or app services like us at easier way. And for us, it drives volumes and the new customers at the lower cost than we can acquire in other paid channels basically. And the communication we had regarding Tre recently is that it was followed by -- after evaluation phase we had with them. So we were doing a couple of experiments where we, for example, communicated with their customer base that Tre customers with family subscriptions that Tre could access Albert apps and services at a discounted price, for example, or a longer trial period. And the purpose of these experiments was just to gather data on how attractive is our product and service for customers at Tre, and their experiments and their numbers showed very good numbers. So we're taking that collaboration to the next -- or deepening that collaboration by integrating our systems. So instead of pushing communication to Tre customers, now the next step will be API integration between our systems basically, so a Tre customer can directly from Tre's website just by one click basically add the Albert subscription to their already existing Tre plans. So on their invoice, it will be stated Albert as a product, and they will be builded through their telecom operator basically. And we will invest Tre for that -- for that some basically. So it's about creating great easier customer experience more seamless customer acquisition between us and Tre.

And are you looking at similar collaborations with other operators?

We are looking into -- we are continuously looking into the collaboration partners that can integrate with us and help us drive higher volumes at lower cost. When it comes to telecom operators, we are not having discussions with other ones right now. So we have an exclusive contract with Tre. But the plan is -- and the goal is to create great value for the Tre customers in Sweden. And hopefully, over time, we can expand with Tre to the other markets that they are active. For example, they are very strong in U.K. They're strong in Italy, for example. So -- and also in Denmark. So hopefully, we can show great value for their customers here in Sweden, and then we can roll it out over time to new markets as well and expand together.

Okay. Great. That was the final question for this Q&A session. A big thank you to Arta, Salman and Martin for the presentation, and thank you all -- thank you all to the viewers for all of your questions. And I hope to see you again on the next quarterly presentation with Albert. I wish you all a very good day. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.