MAG Interactive AB (publ) (MAGI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to MAG's Q3 report. So this is March through May that we're talking about today. And here to present today is myself, Daniel Hasselberg, CEO of MAG.

I'm Magnus, CFO.

So at MAG, we are a mobile games developer and publisher. We are about 100 people and have been around for 10 years now. We have studios here in Stockholm and in Brighton. And we're doing free-to-play games for casual gamers. And today, we're going to talk about our record revenue. So we did the best quarter in the company history and also talk a bit about how the margins have improved over time, and talk about the ARPDAU journey. So how we're continuously improving our ARPDAU and some words about the currency and lockdown impacts that we've seen.

And this is referring to the strong U.S. dollar we had a year ago and the influx of users in the lockdown period throughout Europe a year ago.

Yes. And also mention a bit about our Live Operations and an update on the M&A side of the business. So if we start with the ARPDAU journey. So this is something we've talked about for, I think, 2.5 years now that we want to work on the average revenue per daily active user, which we call ARPDAU. It's a KPI where we see -- have seen and still see a lot of potential. The picture we're looking at here is the development of the ARPDAU and the revenues here for the last 9 quarters. And there's a strong correlation we see here between the ARPDAU and revenues, and that's because we mostly have had a fairly stable user base, and then we improved on this important key metric, which is the ARPDAU. And I'm very happy to see how this has been kind of a continuous improvement over time. And we also, as we mentioned in multiple reports lately that it's an improvement across the Board in terms of game development. So all the teams have really helped to improve their respective games, and that's how this continues to improve.

Yes. This is also a good opportunity to see the effects from a year ago on the Q3 into 2020 with the bump in revenues we had in -- from the influx of users in the pandemic as part of the comparison story. We see this also in our audience KPIs, the DAU, daily actives, and the monthly active users, where we had the same influx a year ago, and we're down 20% roughly this year. But mostly back to level we've been at in the last 2 years or so on both the DAU and the MAU metrics. And on the ARPDAU, we're up 84%, again. This time, we're fairly evenly adding in-app and ads revenue to our ARPDAU and it's a cross-portfolio improvement we're seeing. And of course, a big effect in this improvement is from the migration of users in QuizDuel that we did during the winter as well.

Yes. And I think we sent out a press release like a year ago about the influx particularly related to the lockdowns. And we've got about 25% bump in DAU back in March, April last year.

Yes. On the financial KPIs, we're reporting a record net sales, 26% up year-over-year to SEK 81 million. And that's in the light also of currency headwind and the COVID effects we had. You can see the currency also in the U.S. dollar growth, which is 47% year-over-year. User acquisition is on similar levels. And with a record contribution of SEK 49 million, we're also netting a positive EBIT and positive cash flow in this quarter.

Yes. That's great to see. And we're -- if we take a look at the EBITDA development or EBITDA margin development correlated to revenues, this is something that you and I have talked about quite a bit over the last couple of years that we want to grow into a profitable situation. And that's, of course, what you want to see is that there is a correlation of revenue growth and margin improvement. So here's a view of that. So we can see that when the business is slightly larger, you start to see these margins coming through. So kind of the underlying business of gains is really strong. And we need to just grow into place where those profit margins come all the way to the bottom line. So this quarter, we had a 19% EBITDA margin and a positive EBIT, as you mentioned. So -- but something we also -- I've talked about on and off for the last couple of years at various presentations is long term, we think it's reasonable to expect an EBIT margin of at least 20%. So that's something that we really are heading towards and aiming for over a long time. But then you see in this picture, for example, that some quarters, we have opportunities to really double down on the user acquisition side. And that, of course, affects the margins. So getting to the 20% EBIT is a long-term goal that we're kind of targeting. Yes. But just to recap this, I think it's really great to see the connection here between revenue growth and EBITDA margin improvement.

Definitely. An important component in long-term profitability is longevity and the long lifetime of our games, and we see a sign of that in our evergreen section of the product mix where we have Ruzzle nearing 10 years, and we have WordBrain around 7 years old. And we also added WordBubbles and WordWhizzle this year. These are games that we come back to in our presentations, but they have long-term audiences with stable DAUs, stable revenues, typically supported by LiveOps. And we're most likely having WordBubbles and WordWhizzle to that end as well. And it's an important contribution driver for the businesses. There's no marketing behind these games either.

And also that they are operated by a very small team in our Brighton Studios. It's very cost efficient in that way. But they're also doing a great work in terms of running these events and really focusing on improving engagement and ARPDAU in those games. And at the same time, as an added benefit of moving games to LiveOps, we free up more developers and artists and designers to work on new games. So I think the white part of this picture, the new games, that's where we have now more people than in a very long time working on what's going to be the growth drivers for MAG in 2022 and 2023. So it's super exciting to have more development going on in that space. And then, of course, most of our time and effort go into the growth part where we have our strongest games where we can invest in user acquisition, and we also invest in kind of further feature development and content development and so on. So it's really a well-balanced picture and a lot of excitement around the new stuff that we're building as well.

So a couple of words on the M&A side. So we have done acquisitions of both IAPs and studios over the last 7, 8 years or so. The last 2 acquisitions were Primetime and Apprope. So Primetime, we acquired in September last year, the first month of this financial year. And in addition to running the Primetime stand-alone service, the big driver here is to integrate live trivia into new QuizDuel. So as of March -- so it's basically for the full quarter of this financial year Q3, we've been live in the German market with QuizDuel Live, as we call this feature. So what we've been able to see is an SEK 0.08 ARPDAU for people who play the QuizDuel Live feature. So now the big thing is to get the adoption rates high so that if we get a big chunk of the user base to take part with QuizDuel Live, these SEK 0.08 will affect the bigger part of the user base and push the entire ARPDAU up. So what we're lacking now in terms of the QuizDuel Live feature is real money rewards. So that's something we have in Primetime that we've seen worked really great for that service. So now we're integrating with a payment provider to be able to pay off money in the German market, and that's been lagging a bit. So what we're doing now is we're taking a break and relaunching again after the German vacation period. We don't think we're going to get good enough attention if we launch it in mid of vacation. So hopefully, second part of August, we go live with real money prizes and really launch it with a big bang within the game. And then it's all about getting this adoption rate. So it's a very exciting part.

Exactly. And for Apprope, we passed 1 million downloads for what I mentioned, which is generally an important milestone for us in all game launches. And that's on the back of effective UA throughout the spring. So we're happy about displaying that ability for this game. And other stuff about M&A. So of course, we are continuously in discussions and it's exciting to see how many interesting studios there are out there, and we are in active dialogues with several studios. And of course, M&A is about kind of timing and the stars aligning and all that stuff. So you never know when you actually get to do an acquisition, but it's great to see that there's still a lot of interesting and interested companies out there that we can continue to talk to. So some areas that we're focusing on right now as a company. So we're still super excited about the ARPDAU potential in QuizDuel. So in addition to QuizDuel Live that we talked a lot about, we also have other features in development for QuizDuel. So we're going to test a new single play mode in the game, hopefully during the summer here. So it's exciting to see what that can do. And just in general, it's our biggest game in terms of DAUs. And of course, that means that's the highest potential to -- for like an improvement to ARPDAU has a big effect and something that I like to emphasize is also that when that effect happens across the audience is actually it goes all the way to the bottom line quickly because it's not correlated with any user acquisition. So it's a very kind of profitable improvement if we can make that happen. And then, of course, the growth games, we continuously want to invest more in both user acquisition and development and the LiveOps part, as we mentioned. Very profitable, great working team and freeing up people to work on new games. So I think that's it for our walk through of the report. We'll open up for any questions right now and then also throughout the day, if you don't have the opportunity to see this live or don't send the questions right now, you can send questions on Twitter, and we'll respond to that throughout the day. So -- but let's see if we have any questions we can also take right now. Just pulling that up window up, we can see the questions.

So first one I see here is how our mobile gaming M&A multiples developing currently? Any IDFA impact at all so far. So I think there -- the M&A that you can see happening publicly, for example, EA did acquisition of Playdemic, I think, recently. I don't know if they have released the actual revenues, but I saw a report when they tried to deduct it from [ Sensor Tower, ] and that was pretty high multiples, like 5x, 6x revenues. So -- but it's, of course, case to case and will be depending on profitability and so on. We generally don't take part in any kind of bidding wars over studios. It's more of this long-term relationship building and figuring out like why would we be the best buyer and the best partner, and do we feel that we want to work together for many years. So it's usually not these multiples that we focus so much on. It's just figuring out if this is a good partnership. On the IDFA side, I haven't seen anything. I think if I just talk generally about the M&A landscape related to IDFA, I think the biggest thing is that we see some of the really big players in mobile games have started buying up advertising networks. And like it's a different kind of ecosystem play, but we haven't seen it on game studios. Okay, would you consider your current valuation still too low to raise new capital or equity? So I think we're -- if we see an opportunity, that means that we should and need to raise money or use our stock as a currency. We will definitely do that now. So we're ready to look at that if that makes sense. So I think we're in a much better place from that perspective. Okay. Great. Do you turn profitable coming out count on that being the new normal for MAG? And what about the margin goal? What's the time line? So this is basically -- I mean it's for -- great to see that we're profitable. We have positive cash flow. The bank account is increasing. That's great stuff. And the EBIT margin goal, that's something we really strive for. But I think it's really important to stress at that, that's a long-term thing that we aim for. If we want to move in that direction, then quarter-to-quarter, things will happen, we will always act with the long term in mind. And it's great to have that ability to not have to be super short term and optimized for the next couple of months. So when we see opportunities to grow, we will do that, but always we're kind of with a long-term profitability in mind. But it's hard to state a specific time line. There are so many moving parts in mobile games company. New games that are coming, is it the same niche or something new? So we're definitely developing games in multiple categories. So -- and we've done that over the years as well, doing -- looking at kind of adjacent categories too, but still where we believe that we can find these casual gamers. Most of the development focusing on multiplayer games. We believe in the kind of this long-term retention strength of having users interacting with each other. But we're not kind of category focused, we're more audience focused. Learnings gained by seeing the growth -- boost of Word Mansion? So this has been really exciting, like both just to working with the Apprope team and see how well they fit in with MAG. And also, of course, we can learn from each other. I think we've seen some improvements in, for example, their evergreen titles just from interacting with our Live Operations team. But in the other direction as well, some of the stuff they've done with the marketing around Word Mansion has been really interesting to see. So I think when it comes to kind of storytelling in ads and working with having more exciting dynamics in the ads, for example, is something we now take inspiration from and want to see if we can make work, for example, for Wordzee as well. It's a hyper competitive landscape in user acquisition, you really need to kind of figure out and learn as quickly as you can. So it's good to have another studio inspiration.

Have you considered increasing the payback time of your UA spending? Is the next one.

You can do that.

That's a good question. We have stated a 6- to 9-month-ish payback time, generally towards the 6 months, but it's not a fixed timing per se. We always evaluate all the games we market. So it can go longer, I think, and when it came with a really long-term monetization and strong retention, it can go up from that, but we're still operating most of our spending within that range, I'd say. So we definitely consider that from time to time, from case to case.

Yes. I think it's good luck, if you look from the outside and think about our UA, it's good to have those kind of 6 months in mind as kind of a rough estimate.

Definitely.

Good. I think that's it. And again, if you have any other questions, of course, you can try and use Twitter and send us questions, and we will answer that, so everyone can see what we respond. Great. Thank you for watching.

Thank you.