Modern Times Group MTG AB (MTGB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

April 29, 2025

Nasdaq Stockholm SE Communication Services Entertainment earnings 38 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Anton Gourman

executive
#1

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our results for the first quarter of 2025. My name is Anton Gourman, and I'm the VP of Investor Relations at MTG. With me and hosting this call is our CEO, Maria Redin. After the end of the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions, which you can do over the phone if you prefer or via the webchat. If you're dialing in, please follow the instructions from the operator. Otherwise, please use the online form for your questions as usual. Thank you, and I now hand over to Maria. Maria, please go ahead.

Maria Redin

executive
#2

Thank you, Anton. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Q1 was a historic quarter for MTG. And in February, we successfully closed the transformative deal to acquire Plarium. We consolidated the business from the 1st of February, and I'm very excited about the opportunities that this acquisition creates for our group. The deal significantly strengthens our game portfolio. The biggest addition is, of course, RAID: Shadow Legends, which is one of the clear category leaders in the turn-based RPG genre. But also our lineup now includes games like Mech Arena and Merge Gardens, which we're very excited to have on board. Plarium is also more than its game. They have their own suite of strong proprietary tech and tools like the GoGame and the Plarium Play platform. And we've already begun to work to evaluate the opportunities for the commercial synergies and the improved collaboration in key fields like business intelligence, marketing and games distribution. There is indeed a lot to be done across our expanded groups in regards to knowledge sharing, industry knowledge and consumer insights. And we are firm believers that both our original studios and Plarium will be able to benefit of the combined merger. I truly believe that we can achieve great things and be even better together as a scaled global gaming group. There will be a whole lot more to say about Plarium, and we continue to plan on how we can be better working together, and we will tell you all about that as we host our Capital Markets Day later in the year. But for now, let's look at the first quarter in more detail. I'm very happy to kick off the year by delivering a 6% organic growth. We continue to both deliver strong live ops and in-game content in our games. We also continue to scale our key new games to ensure that we can deliver future growth, not just today but also tomorrow. And these games include the Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, Heroes of History and our localized word games from PlaySimple that we now onboard on a Geo expansion. We consolidated Plarium from the 1st of February, and we therefore reported SEK 2.6 billion in net sales for the period and with an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 660 million. This amounts to a 24% operating margin in a quarter where we continue to have high levels of UA spend on key established and new titles from our original studios. We generated SEK 143 million in free cash flow in Q1. That means delivering a 56% cash flow conversion for the 12-month period ending 31st of March 2025. This is indeed lower than the elevated cash conversion levels that we reported throughout last year, but is still comfortably within our current long-term guided range of 50% to 60%. The Q1 levels reflected significant working capital adjustments during the second half of last year, which were then partially reversed as we now entered into Q1, thus leading to the negative working capital in the quarter. In addition, our cash conversion was also affected by higher tax payments and the noncash IFRS adjustments of deferred revenues that occurred in Plarium after the closing of the acquisition. Moving forward then, let's have a look at our sales in the quarter. Our revenues in reported currencies were up 77% year-over-year, and this is a result of the consolidation of Plarium. In this quarter, we did see a negative impact from the currency effect as the Krona has strengthened and the total sales in constant currencies were therefore up 79% year-over-year. As we mentioned on the previous slide, we delivered 6% organic growth, which underscores the strength and the focus of our original portfolio and the live games. Going then into further details, let's look at the performance of our gaming franchises. As you can see from the slides, we are showing Plarium's Games as a separate franchise, and you can expect us to do this also through Q2. Our plan thereafter is to present a new reporting structure at our upcoming Capital Markets Day. And therefore, Q3 results will be the first quarter when we then introduce the new way of reporting. If we then look at our original gaming franchises, I'm very happy with what we delivered. As always, there is more work to be done, but I think we demonstrated a very strong quarter. And it's also worth keeping in mind when looking at the sequential performance that Q4 is seasonally the most important quarter for our games. And in combination, we also did have a very strong Q4 last year across the board in all companies. Normally, on the other hand, Q1 is the seasonally smallest quarter for us. Sales for the Word Games franchise were up by 7% year-over-year despite relatively tough comps last year. This reflected the continued success of the geographical expansion of our word games in local languages, combined with a very attractive content and feature pipeline for the live games. And this was supported by the increased user acquisition spending for all key word games. The digital ad market is now also operating on a like-for-like basis after Google's transition last year to the real-time bidding that took place in Q1. Strategy and Simulation franchise were up 10% year-over-year. This strong performance was driven by the continued growth in the Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, which is now going into this third year of being. And Heroes of History was also soft launch in Q3 last year. Tacticus continued to scale well, thanks to updated stream of new game in content, and Snowprint is also focused on diversifying the revenue stream for the games. Tacticus is now also available on PC and Mac and recently launched the Tacticus Store, which now generates over 5% of the games revenues in March. Heroes of History is still in a very early stage of its development, and the team is continuously adding new content and characters to drive player engagement. Forge of Empires, which is our second largest game after the addition of RAID: Shadow Legends was down slightly year-over-year despite the very active and rather successful content calendar with 3 in-game events. It's quite exciting. Forge is celebrating its 13th birthday this year, and we continue to have a dedicated and passionate players community around the game, which, of course, we continue to nurture over the long run. Sales for the Tower Defense franchise were up 3% year-over-year. It's also worth noting that the sales were up by 15% from Q4. This strong performance reflected the launch of the Legends expansion for the Bloons TD 6. This expansion offers players a totally new way to play the game. It has been very well received by the player community, and it's something we can continue to build on in future updates to the game. Ninja Kiwi's new titles, Bloons Card Storm that was soft launched in the end of last year is still in early stages of its development. The team is beginning to start doing small marketing tests and as they see the right trajection, they're hopefully going to be able to start to scale the game further. Racing franchise sales were down 12% year-over-year and is driven by a decline in sales from some of the legacy games and also the active decision to move resources and focus from Forza Customs to the new title Matchcreek Motors. Matchcreek has been developed by using what the team has learned from Forza Customs, but it aims to rather offer a more casual Matchcreek experience still based around cars, targeting an older demographic. We also continue to be happy on how well Formula One Clash is performing. The game delivered strong performance in the off-season, and this is thanks to the focused efforts by the team to drive player engagement with strong key content. And of course, we look forward then to the new season reset coming up within soon. Players Games continue to contribute 2 months now in Q1 results, and it amounted to just over SEK 1 billion in Q1. RAID: Shadow Legends celebrated its sixth year anniversary with a large in-game event called the Festivals of Creation. This was well received by players and resulted in March being the fourth highest grossing month ever for the game and actually delivered an all-time high revenues for a single day within the month. RAID was also expanded with 5 new champions inspired by Alice in Wonderland, which further boosted engagement. The other games within Plarium Mech Arena received a St. Patrick's Day celebration event and launched a new in-game season with new weapons, a new map and new skins. And further on the casual side, Merge Gardens also continued to expand live ops in the quarter, and the team launched a Valentine's Day event with a wide variety of content and introduced a new game mode and a new monetization system. So that was a more established games. So if we then look at the new games pipeline, that covers both new games and upcoming projects across our portfolio. Today, we have 20 games in early scaling or early development. 13 of these games are already fully available on the App Stores. And if we take these together, this game represent 13% of our total group revenues in Q1, driven mainly by Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus and Heroes of History, which I talked to you earlier about. We further then expect Ninja Kiwi to launch Fightland, which is a new IP later this year and also Zombie Assault: Resurgence, which actually builds on a very successful IP they previously launched, Zombie Assault IP, and that is coming at the end of the year. I also mentioned earlier talking about Hutch that we launched a new title Matchcreek Motors in Q1 now, utilizing the learnings from Forza Customs and still very early days on the games, and they're monitoring the KPIs whether we can scale that up further or not. And last but not least, on the Plarium side, they have several games in the development and continue to evaluate and improve the performance of the new title Elf Island, which has been soft launched for quite some months now. And then moving to the key performance indicators for the quarter. As you can see, the revenue shift is slightly balancing post the consolidation of Plarium. This means that we now have 76% of our revenues coming from in-app purchases in the quarter, whilst approximately 21% is coming from in-app advertising and 3% from third-party platforms. We significantly increased our daily active users to 9 million daily active users and with an ARPDAU of just over SEK 3. The increase in DAU was driven both by the consolidation of Plarium, but also on the success of the PlaySimple's geographic expansion, driving more users to the companies and also supported by the growth of Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus, where we continue to see an active scaling. We did have a healthy uplift in ARPDAU for our original studios in the quarter, driven by Hutch, Ninja Kiwi and InnoGames. And with that, I will now hand over to Anton that will look into user acquisition, profitability and our financials.

Anton Gourman

executive
#3

Thank you very much, Maria. So looking at UA, we invested 38% of our total revenues in user acquisition in Q1, up from 36% in Q1 last year. Our total UA spend in the quarter amounted to SEK 960 million, which reflected the consolidation of Plarium and the scaling of UA in key current and new games. Our UA spend from our original studios was up 26% year-over-year and the largest part of the increase in UA from our original studios came from PlaySimple as the team continued to invest into the geographical expansion of key titles like Word Search Explorer and Crossword Jam. InnoGames also significantly increased their UA spend year-over-year, mainly driven by the rapid growth of Heroes of History, which Maria mentioned. And that continues to perform well and is showing strong early KPIs. Now Snowprint, of course, also continued to invest in UA at high levels for Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus in the quarter. All in all, when it comes to UA, we are happy to deliver another quarter of good traction in our marketing and to continue to invest in our momentum to drive future growth. If we then move on to look at our profitability, we reported SEK 616 million in adjusted EBITDA in the quarter. This represented a 56% year-over-year increase in absolute terms, of course, primarily reflecting the consolidation of Plarium together with lower adjusted EBITDA levels in 3 of our studios, driven by the continued scaling of key current and new titles to drive growth, as I just mentioned. As a result, we reported a 24% operating margin in the first quarter. If we quickly look at our adjustments to reported EBITDA, they amounted to SEK 21 million in the quarter compared to SEK 19 million in Q1 last year, so pretty stable. So this included an adjustment for nonrecurring bonus structures of SEK 7 million and an adjustment for M&A transaction costs of around SEK 14 million. Our depreciation and amortization amounted to just over SEK 300 million in Q1. This was more than a doubling of what we reported in Q1 last year, and this increase was driven by the purchase price allocation from the Plarium acquisition as around 70% of the PPA was allocated to intangible assets, of which RAID: Shadow Legends is the key asset, followed by their other core games and the tech stack, which in turn, as you can see, drives our DNA. So next, let's touch up on our financials for the quarter. We generated SEK 538 million in cash flow from operations and reported free cash flow of just over SEK 140 million. This enabled us to deliver a cash conversion of 56% for the 12-month period ended 31st of March 2025, as Maria mentioned before, which, of course, sits quite squarely in the middle of our guided long-term range. And as Maria mentioned, this means that we are coming down from the rolling 12 months levels we reported throughout last year, which were clearly above the long-term range that we have set. And I think this dynamic overall is quite in line with what we have signaled before for the quarter. The Q1 levels reflected the reversal of positive working capital trend we had in the second half of last year, combined with the costs related to the Plarium acquisition and then a negative effect arising from the revaluation of revenues deferred at the time of acquisition of Plarium and higher tax payments in the quarter. Our net financial items in the quarter amounted to minus SEK 85 million. This included SEK 19 million in net interest and other financial items of negative SEK 67 million. Of these, there's a mix of positive and negative effects. The negative effect included the revaluation of C shares following the increase in MTG share price and then the final revaluation of an incentive program in PlaySimple that we took over when we acquired the studio and got paid for at the time of the acquisition. So on the positive side, which only partially then offset the total, this included primarily a positive revaluation of our earn-out liabilities driven by currency, some currency exchange fluctuations and exchange rate differences. Our paid taxes in the quarter amounted to SEK 214 million compared to SEK 78 million in Q1 last year. And this increase reflected normal paying taxes combined with payments of a deferred tax item from 2023 in one of our studios and the payment of withholding tax in the quarter. If we then look at our total net income in the quarter, that amounted to SEK 65 million, but it may be a better indication to look at how we're actually performing as a group if we look at the underlying number without noncash items and amortization related to our M&A activities. And then if we look at that, our operational net income, therefore, amounted to SEK 377 million, which demonstrates the health of our business. When we then look at our CapEx, that was up year-over-year in Q1, which reflected the consolidation of Plarium and our CapEx when you look at our original studios was stable. So lastly, as you can see, we are now in net debt following the closing of the Plarium acquisition. Our financial net debt at the end of the period amounted to SEK 2.5 billion, which comprised external financing of SEK 4.4 billion and SEK 253 million in leasing costs reduced by SEK 2.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Our financial leverage ratio, therefore, amounted to 0.8x based on EBITDA for the rolling 12-month period ended 31st of March 2025. Our total net debt amounted to just over SEK 5 billion and comprised SEK 4.7 billion in interest-bearing liabilities, SEK 2.2 billion of earn-out liabilities and SEK 322 million in put call options then offset by SEK 2.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents, which leads us to a leverage ratio of 1.7x based on the net debt versus 12-month rolling EBITDA, including Plarium. Thank you. That was all for me, and I now hand over back to Maria to discuss our outlook for 2025 and some closing remarks.

Maria Redin

executive
#4

Perfect. Thank you, Anton. As we promised, we are providing you with a full year outlook for 2025 as planned. On the revenue side, our outlook is for the full year 2025 for our organic studios to be up between 3%, up to 7% for the full year. This is underpinned by our strong first quarter and also good momentum going into April. Organic here, as I said, refers to the sales in the constant currencies from our original 5 studios within the old MTG. Further, as we discussed on this call and also highlighted by Anton, we continue to intend to invest in efficient marketing to scale our group and to drive growth both today and for tomorrow. We are, therefore, guiding for our full year, and that is total reported adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 21% and 24% for the full year. And just to avoid any confusion, this do include both our original operations as well as Plarium. As before, the exact level of our margins will depend on our ability to invest in user acquisition at the right return levels. We have always been diligent and we will continue to be diligent on that. And also the phasing of the UA will depend on our studios' ability to scale the games and in particular, the new games initiatives along with the geographic expansion during the year. But we want to make sure that we are optimized before we enter into Q4, which is the seasonally strongest quarter of the year. Last but not least, before we move on to Q&A, I just want to briefly summarize where we are as we move further into the year -- into Q2 and the rest of the year. As we have noted, Q1 represents a major historical milestone for us because of the closing of the Plarium acquisition. We are now pushing ahead to identify opportunities for commercial synergies that comes from combining Plarium's and our own tech and tools and ways of working. We are convinced that together, we will become much better. We also laser focus at the same time on our execution to make sure that we deliver a full year in line with our expectations that we have set. I'm really happy about our strong organic growth that we see in Q1 as well as our momentum going into Q2. We have a very promising new games lineup that are scaling well and a well-executed geographic expansion within our word game sector and a healthy pipeline of the new games. All of this is underpinned by a top-tier live ops portfolio. So that means we have high expectations and the people, the tools and the IP we have around us to also support us to deliver on our ambition levels. Our Q1 results demonstrate the overall strength of our studios, which enables us to accelerate profitable investments into new games when we see the right opportunities. We're also reviewing how our future and our strategy can benefit from our newly scaled portfolio and expanded tech stack. And I very much look forward to presenting to you an updated view on our vision and strategy at our Capital Markets Day later this year. I'm truly excited about the future and MTG's place as one of the leaders in our industry. So with that, I want to thank you, and we're now ready to take your questions. So operator, please go ahead.

Operator

operator
#5

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Simon Jonsson from ABG Sundal Collier.

Simon Jönsson

analyst
#6

Congratulations on good numbers. So I want to start with the marketing investments and see if you can add some more color on that. So the organic spending increased quite a lot, 26%. I think you increased it by 13% in Q4. But here in Q1, was the spending growth even? Or did it accelerate through the quarter? Or how has it trended? And was it just a new game and localizations? Or was it also a sort of broader trend?

Maria Redin

executive
#7

Simon, no, I think we overall had an opportunity to scale game throughout Q1. Remember the period also after Christmas actually provides usually a very good opportunity for us to do a successful UA. We sometimes call it Q5 for some reason. So actually, throughout Q1, we saw good opportunities. I do believe, however, when you look at the year-over-year comps, I think the increase in percentage was higher in the second half of the quarter simply because the comps were lower because after the Google changes, we also then pulled the brake probably a little bit more accelerated on the UA spend. So that's a difference. But otherwise, in absolute value, I think that we were on healthy levels throughout the quarter. And as to the split, I would say on a good note, we actually had it on all the different growth initiatives, which means that we were able to scale up UA on some of our existing live games. We were able to scale on some of our new growth games, both Warhammer 40,000 and Heroes of History as well as the geo expansion. So I think that's very exciting.

Simon Jönsson

analyst
#8

Excellent. And I also have a follow-up on the marketing here in April. You said that the conditions remain good. And so with the tariffs and all that, we have seen Chinese e-commerce players pull back quite heavily from the U.S. specifically here. I think Sensor Tower [indiscernible]/marketing investments by 30% or so here in April. Do you see that this has any impact on your return on marketing investments currently? And what could it mean for the future, you think if this trend continues.

Maria Redin

executive
#9

Yes. No, absolutely, you're right, and we've seen sort of those high number as well flying around. I think that the one thing that one should remember is for some strange reason, to be fair, in some of our marketing channels, we tend to see more gaming companies rather than other type of companies, which means that in those type of channels, we see less impact. But if you look at the broader marketing scheme in the U.S., it's definitely impacted. And hopefully, over time, that can also positively impact our sort of CPMs -- or CPIs, sorry. On the flip of that, in that case, it could also potentially hit PlaySimple's eCPMs in the U.S. specifically. Remember also that some of the scaling that we do within PlaySimple that equally phased into geo expansion where probably this tariff conversation is less applicable. That could be over time rather the opposite that some of their attention is focused into new geographies. So I would say, today, we don't see any negative impact nor do we see any positive impacts from it.

Simon Jönsson

analyst
#10

Okay. So there was nothing really that impacted your April wording?

Maria Redin

executive
#11

No, nothing so far, but that is something we clearly are monitoring to make sure that we try to pick up trends in an early way.

Simon Jönsson

analyst
#12

So with that in mind, what else has sort of impacted the market then for you to see better marketing conditions?

Maria Redin

executive
#13

I think, first and foremost, the games. I mean, I think we started to talk about these initiatives almost a year ago when it comes to PlaySimple geo expansion. That was an initiative that they proactively drove post the Google changes. As we spoke about then was to say the way that you can offset sort of the loss of value that we saw in the lower eCPMs was to actually reach a larger audience. The 2 ways that we wanted to address that was, a, geo expansion, which we're executing on now and also launching games outside the word category, which we're launching now. So I think that has been an amazing execution by the PlaySimple team. That's been great to see, and they've been very fast on responding. I think the second one is a continued scaling on Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. We were excited when we bought Snowprint 2 years ago, and I think they've been demonstrating strength after strength each quarter, and I think that's been an exciting journey to see. And I think now we're also seeing here's a history for InnoGames being the most successful game launch they had since Forge of Empires. And as we have great games, that can allow you to break through the market. I think in general, the market is a little bit more favorable if we look at different sort of analysts and outlook. I think the general assumption is that the market is back to growth this year, but still low single-digit level, which means that we are pushing ahead in a strong way. And I think that comes down to the execution within the studios.

Simon Jönsson

analyst
#14

Excellent. And just one last one for me on the guidance and the range on the margin, 21% to 24%. Is that -- should we view that purely as a function of the growth, meaning yes, if you reach 7% organic growth, we should expect like 21% margins? Or would you say there is some other swing factor like synergies with Plarium or something that we should keep in mind?

Maria Redin

executive
#15

No. I mean, of course, the biggest driver will always be how much can we scale UA and higher growth will implicitly lead to lower margins. Then there are some fine balances about the revenue mix. The more successful we are, for example, on some of the Forge events where we have a high degree of browser revenues that comes with a different margin profile. So there are some areas to that. And I think then the opportunity that we have ahead, but I will be a little bit cautious on how much I would plan for this year. But of course, there are clearly exciting synergies with Plarium that we are currently working hard to untap and we'll come and present to you as well at the Capital Markets Day. And ideally, we start to actually see some already this year, but I think the more exciting level is more likely to come next year.

Simon Jönsson

analyst
#16

All right. And in terms of Plarium, I think when you acquired it, the rolling rate was around 22% or so on margins, if I'm remembering correctly. So should you expect – [ or this guide ], do you expect that Plarium is quite stable on the margins? Or is that also something that you could see Plarium with lower margins? Or how do you view that?

Maria Redin

executive
#17

As we said as well in my part, they are scaling Elf Island, hopefully. They soft launched Elf Island. I think they are still sort of tweaking the games, but hopefully, they look forward to a full commercial launch in the second half of the year. And subject to how successful we are there, you're also going to see an impact on the margin. And that game is a little bit more like the mid-core game where you actually have a higher investment upfront and then get the return sort of over a longer period of time. So a little bit depends on how successful they are in all fairness on the new games.

Operator

operator
#18

The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

Jacob Edler

analyst
#19

Congrats on the strong results this morning. I just want to continue that discussion that Simon had on the tariff war implications because -- I mean, this is just me theorizing, right? But I mean, I feel that maybe this could potentially turn out net positive for you guys. You've reduced your mix in terms of in-app advertising revenues from 1/3 to around 21%, as you said. But I guess on UA, you have a higher exposure on marketing prices. So should [ TMO and SHI ] and other actors impact the overall CPM level in the market, couldn't that be net positive? Or how should we see it?

Maria Redin

executive
#20

No. I mean you're absolutely right. I mean what we said before is on the PlaySimple side, we do have a natural hedge because you see both the upside and the downside when you see lower CPM levels. I mean, ideally, you can acquire a customer cheaper, but you also monetize them less. But now as we're becoming even more in a purchase-driven company, you can argue that the upside significantly outweighs the downside should CPM levels go down. I think what we are still to see is that within our addressable markets and marketing channels. But if that happens, you're absolutely right.

Jacob Edler

analyst
#21

Yes. Cool. Perfect. Then getting a bit on to the organic growth guide, I think it was quite strong at 3% to 7%. At least the sources I've been looking at have been for a low single-digit number this year. So what would you say is the main genre that's going to be driving potentially market share expansion this year? Is it Strategy & Simulation or Word Games? Or what's in your guide, so to speak?

Maria Redin

executive
#22

I think you mentioned it to be fair. I think that the 2 ones that we believe we started very strong on and that we continue to have a high degree of excitement around is the Word Games and the initiatives that they sort of buildup and the momentum they build up in that business together with the Strategy & Simulation, both on back of Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus and Heroes of History. And then, of course, I think in this quarter, I think we were excited to see the Legend launch in BTD6. They've had a tough sort of last couple of quarters. And now with this update, they revitalize the games and really engage the customers. So that's exciting. And that's early things to build on. But I think on the big movers, I think that you mentioned the 2 ones.

Jacob Edler

analyst
#23

Perfect. Last question on my side. Is there any seasonality for Plarium to be aware of going into this year that differs from the organic part of MTG?

Maria Redin

executive
#24

I think we usually say -- but I think that has also shifted in all fairness a little bit. We usually say that July, August -- sorry, June, July are the weaker months for us historically. But I think then Q2 is actually slightly on the weaker side for Plarium. So I think that is the seasonality one. But otherwise, it's a business that looks pretty similar to ours. I think when it comes to sort of you in general, I think what they have this year is, of course, a potential launch of Elf Island in a full commercial launch, which could be excited to see and that's coming in that case in the second half.

Operator

operator
#25

The next question comes from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Rasmus Engberg

analyst
#26

Kepler Cheuvreux actually is the name of the firm, but regardless. So you haven't really seen any change in player behavior nor in market prices in the kind of turbulence. Is that a way to summarize what we have seen so far in March, April?

Maria Redin

executive
#27

Yes. I think that's a good summary.

Rasmus Engberg

analyst
#28

Okay. Very good. And just on the cash flow side, what should we think of in terms of your interest rate costs going forward? Are there one-offs in this quarter? Or how should we look at it for a full quarter?

Maria Redin

executive
#29

No, I don't think on the interest costs, you don't have any one-offs this quarter. I mean you always get the first commitment fee when you sign an agreement, but otherwise, you have the regular running costs. I think where you had on the cash flow a little bit more abnormal quarter, but you did have that on the other side last year, we had a very positive working capital swings for several quarters in a row. I think what you saw this quarter was a reversal of that. I think it's fair to expect you will see a similar reversal most likely next quarter as well and ideally thereafter normalize it a bit more.

Rasmus Engberg

analyst
#30

That was the last question, right? So one more quarter of reversals possibly.

Operator

operator
#31

[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Anton Gourman

executive
#32

Thank you very much. So we have 2 questions from the online questionnaire. The first one is, how do you view the opportunities of synergy between Plarium and MTG or other MTG companies during 2025 -- and can you quantify today any impact that these synergies might have on margins?

Maria Redin

executive
#33

Yes. No, I think as I said in my presentation, we are truly excited about the potential. And I think we were excited before we were able to close the transaction. And on a good note, I think after getting to know the team and spending more time together, I think we are actually even more excited. So I think it's a great team, some great tech and tools and ways of working. And I think that's when we compare notes, which we are quite well into. I think we are learning things about each other that we can become much better together. I don't want to quantify now. I think that's premature. A, we haven't finalized the work. So as much as I can be excited, I want to make sure we finalize the work properly all the way through. And I think the way you should expect it is that we come and present that to you at the Capital Markets Day in the second half of the year.

Anton Gourman

executive
#34

And then one last question is, earlier, we guided or MTG guided for CapEx in the range of 2% to 3% before the acquisition. How has that changed after the acquisition? Is there anything you can comment on that?

Maria Redin

executive
#35

I think as Anton said, we like pretty much doubled the CapEx level in absolute terms in the quarter. And then, of course, we only had 2 quarters out of 3 for Plarium included, which means that it's slightly increasing more than that with Plarium. I do, however, believe that we are probably on the low side in our CapEx investment. So as long as we are investing in the right games development, I actually welcome that we are increasing those levels slightly because we are still on very low levels. So I think to make sure we continue to have a healthy pipeline of game is important. CapEx will always, however, fluctuate a little bit where we are in the development phase. Like right now, we have a lot of games being in soft launch or early scale up. And that also means that our CapEx on the MTG side has actually been historically low right now.

Anton Gourman

executive
#36

Thank you very much. That was all from the online questionnaire. So I want to thank everyone for joining us today. Thank you, Maria, and we are here for any follow-up questions, and we will keep you up to date with news as and when appropriate. Thank you.

Maria Redin

executive
#37

Thank you.

This call discussed

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Modern Times Group MTG AB earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.