MAG Interactive AB (publ) ($MAGI)

Hello, and welcome to the presentation of MAG's Q2 report. So this is December to February. Here to talk to you today is me, I'm Daniel Hasselberg, I'm the CEO of MAG.

And me, Magnus Wiklander, I'm the CFO of MAG.

So we're going to, as usual, look at some of the highlights from the report itself. [Operator Instructions] So but we start with this, looking at the highlights from the quarter. So first of all, I want to highlight the organic growth of 16% as measured in U.S. dollars, which is our main currency. And what's driving this organic growth is both optimizations of live games, primarily QuizDuel, but also the addition, of course, of Crozzle to the portfolio compared to a year ago. And if we look at ARPDAU, same story. So 35% is, of course, a really big improvement of that KPI. This is the average revenue per daily active user. And again, QuizDuel, our biggest game, has seen a lot of improvements. And then we've added to Crozzle to the portfolio, which has a much higher ARPDAU than the average that we have, which is around $0.09. Also happy to see a record revenue quarter for QuizDuel. So the game that we launched about 6 years ago, continue to grow and make record numbers. And we have really great faith in this product being able to grow into the future as well. We have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline for QuizDuel. And I think just showing how we work with live ops has really, really paid off with this game. And then, of course, cross-sell is very interesting. We started scaling this game a few quarters ago. So in the summer quarter, we had a really, really high volume of good quality UA and the game grew quickly. And then in Q1 and Q2, we have not been able to invest as much in UA as we want to. That's made the game decline, but now it's been stable for a few months, and we see that this we can definitely see us grow from where we are now and into the future, both in terms of the product road map, but also as of this week, we're actually globally available, and we added a number of important languages to the game. So we see both those dimensions are important for the growth, both geographical, but also kind of general product development. It's very early days if you compare to QuizDuel in its sixth year doing records, and this is just the third quarter.

So we take a look at the product mix as usual, and we have the older games on the right-hand side here, typically taken care of by live ops and being slightly smaller, older games in the portfolio. And here, we show good stability with the same net sales this quarter as the previous quarter. And if we zoom out a year or even 2 years, we see stable revenues in U.S. dollars. So movements here are down to U.S. dollar exchange rate. And we still see a bit of effect in the comparison numbers from the divestment of Primetime in January of last year.

Yes. And if we look here on the growth side of things compared to the previous couple of quarters, this is a lower number. It's Wordzee has been stable. QuizDuel has been growing, but Crozzle has been declining with the UA levels have gone down. And this is like the dynamics of a new game when you start buying traffic, a lot of the cohorts are young. So they will have a more kind of dramatic effect when you increase or decrease the UA spend levels. But as the game matures, it gets much less fluctuating. So what we see now, as I mentioned earlier, more stability in coming into 2026 and the ups and downs of 2025. And if we look at the bottom left here with the new games and cores, so we have 2 word games in development, and we also have a couple of side cores in development. And those are kind of other type of game mechanics that we run in parallel with our games. So we've seen that have a great impact on QuizDuel, where we have a puzzle side core running. And now we're going to launch a Match three side core into Word in the next few weeks. So it's going to be very exciting to see the impact of that.

And our audience KPIs. We see user acquisition is up compared to last year from 12% to 14%, but it's down sequentially as we have discussed and even more so from Q4. And at 14, we refer to it as maintenance level marketing, maintaining the business, not growing it. DAU is stable sequentially, down a bit year-over-year. And as mentioned, ARPDAU is on historically high levels at USD 0.01. And it's coming down from the previous quarter connected to the lower volume of UA towards cross-sell primarily.

And our financial KPIs with net sales down a bit year-over-year, mostly due to the U.S. dollar headwind compared to the same quarter last year. Looking at it in U.S. dollar, as mentioned, we're up 16%, mostly connected to a strong record quarter for QuizDuel as well as adding cross-sell to the portfolio and backing it up with UA compared to last year. EBITDA is at the level where we would expect it to be given the size of the business and the marketing levels, and it allows us to build cash a bit. So we're ending that at SEK 84 million at the end of the quarter.

And here, we see the kind of more long-term view of what happens when we invest in UA. We see the short-term impact on the profit margin and then it bounces back when UA levels are lower. And then, of course, if -- again, we talk about currency here, but if the U.S. dollar has been as it was a year ago, it look more exciting on the revenue bar to the right in the graph. But the dynamic is important that when we go back to more, as you say, the maintenance levels of UA, we always see kind of our normal EBITDA margin levels return.

So on our growth engines to see the story of this quarter is on the expanded portfolio side, of course, Crozzle being added to portfolio in the last year, backed up by UA, creating growth on the U.S. dollar side. And importantly, improving LTV and ARPDAU for QuizDuel has also added to the growth part of the portfolio.

Yes. And finally, looking ahead into Q3 and beyond. So the expansion of Crozzle is, of course, super important. I mentioned that in the report today that when we make games at MAG, we think about games that will be played by millions of people for decades. We have a number of games in the portfolio that are now around or even beyond 10 years since launch and still super important to the business. This is how we think about Crozzle as well. We're very early days with the game we believe in. So expanding this geographically and continue to build out the product itself and optimize marketing and so on. We're very early days here. And for QuizDuel, we keep coming back to that, but it's a really interesting story when you double down on live ops and optimization, how much value you can unlock. And now we're going into that phase with Wordzee. It's now live on our new platform, which unlocks a lot of new functionality, including the side Core Match 3 that we're going to start testing shortly. And we have, as I mentioned earlier, 2 cores that we're going to test. So we're going to update the puzzle core in QuizDuel well, and that's be later in Q3, but it looks very exciting in testing, and we hope we're going to see another ARPDAU boost from getting this live in the product. So very excited about what's happening here in Q3 and Q4.

So by that, I think we are at the end of our presentation and going to have a look and see if there's any questions that have come in during the live stream. [Operator Instructions]. Okay. We have a number of questions we're going to walk through here. So the first one is cost control. Interesting to hear thoughts on this, saving just a couple of hundred thousand would make a big difference considering market cap and size of the company. Yes. So I agreed like market cap and especially if you look at the cash position, the EV is very low. Cost-wise, we're very mindful of that. So part of that, you start to see in this quarter as well that we have going with a lower cost of rent. We have decreased the office space, for example. And we're looking at all the costs that we can impact that doesn't harm our potential to grow the business, which kind of our long-term goal that we keep coming back to is that we want to grow the size of the business to SEK 500 million a year with a 20% EBIT margin. To get there, we want to make sure we have the resources to be able to go there. But of course, looking at kind of all the kind of fixed costs or costs you can tweak or tune down is very important to make sure we can be cash generative on our path to where we want to go. How can you increase the number of employees to more than before Primetime was told -- sold? Shouldn't you become more efficient with the help of the platform and AI? So this is -- when you compare to the same quarter a year ago, there was actually kind of a dip. So we are at the same level we've been for about 2 years now, excluding Primetime. So the comparison number is a bit low last year. But we're not on the path to kind of rapidly increasing the headcount or the cost of staff. But again, like what we really believe that we will see and we start to see already is kind of how the platform can help us to be much more efficient to build, for example, a side core and run it in multiple games or all the functionality in words in now being able to use in all new games and so on. So we see that as kind of we should be able to hire the throughput, get more and more complete games out and also the live ops be stronger across several of our games in the coming year. AI is definitely used basically across the entire company in terms of product development and production and so on. So it's definitely helping us to move faster and get more done. Why are you letting the cash pile grow? Why not dividends or share buybacks? So the share buyback thing is actually not allowed. There is a proposal from the government, so it might be that from December of this year is going to be legal for a company on First North to buy its own shares. It's currently not legal. So that's not been an option, but that could be something for the next general meeting to take into account if you want to have that mandate. We did do a dividend not this year, but the year before when we saw the cash grow very quickly, and we did not have a new game to invest in UA, for example, and then it felt it was the right move to do a dividend. So we're going to continue to have that as one of the options to work with our cash. But hopefully, we can increase the UA investments again, and then we're definitely going to need the cash. And as a big shareholder, I definitely don't want to have to go to the market and ask for more money when we need it. I prefer to have it available so we can grow quickly when we want to grow. Can you say anything about whether the Google versus Epic ruling will affect you? So it looks like it in a positive way. So I think there's still some moving parts and the verdict, I don't think has been formalized yet. But what it looks like is that from June, if this goes into effect, all new players that come in on Google or Android games will have a 25% fee instead of 30% for in-app purchases. So it's going to kind of gradually create value. But unfortunately, they don't apply it across all in-app purchase for mature players. And then they also have something that they call level up Google program that's also a moving target of the industry is trying to understand exactly how it would work and if it's good or bad. But if you become part of that, there could also be another 5% fee reduction then across all installs. So definitely moving in the right direction. This might be a few million kroner of profit in the coming year or 2 or if it goes faster, it could become even more, of course because the path towards more 25% or 20% fee average, I think, has started. And we saw Apple also in China go from 30% to 25% just across the board. So hopefully, that's a sign of something. Have you started to see any positive effects yet in Wordzee from the updates you've made? I think what we expect to see the first big effect of that is now in a couple of weeks' time when we go live with the Match 3 side core. So we're going to be able to talk about that in the next quarterly update. But that's going to be exciting. And the last one here, are you getting closer to be able to scale QuizDuel in the U.S.? So yes, maybe you followed us closely and see we've done some UA tests again in the U.S. for QuizDuel. So we continue to look at how we can make that game more applicable to Americans, both in terms of content and how you onboard into the game and so on. So that's kind of a continuous effort. But as soon as we see something really work, then of course, we'll double down on UA, but that's not where we are right now. But we continue to explore U.S. Trivia, I think, is a very relevant topic for us for sure. Okay. Thanks. A lot of really good questions. And again, if you have anything more, feel free to post online, and we'll answer throughout the day. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you.