QYOU Media Inc. (QYOU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. My name is Jace Sparks. I'm the Chief Product Officer for QYOU Media. Curt Marvis will be joining us shortly. And we'll see you in just a second. Curt, whenever you're ready, please feel free to join the stream and take it away. Okay.

Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us this morning, this afternoon or this evening, depending upon what part of the world you're in. We thought it was really important. We started a while ago with these calls that we called First Thursdays, and as many of you who are regular viewers know, we've delayed those over the last couple of weeks, because we've wanted to hold off on announcing some news that we'll talk about more here in a second. But the real purpose, the underlying purpose of the First Thursday calls has always been to create clear shareholder communication. And we think actually with the news that came out this week about Chatterbox, there's a lot of confusion, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of questions that exist. We want to clarify some of that as much as we possibly can. And also, I think, we want to -- I'm here today, not really talking about Chatterbox, I'm talking about QYOU Media, and how we see things really happening with QYOU Media in 2025 and what the purpose is of what we're doing; why, frankly, we're as excited as we've been in years and years about the prospects of our business; and why we think ultimately, this is going to be the benefit of all shareholders? So with that said, I am going to share my screen here and with any luck, you all are seeing the deck here. There we go. So let's get started. The first thing that I wanted to talk about, which we've spoken about on some of the previous shareholder communications is kind of where our goals are for 2025. These remain very clear for us, and we're very steadfast and dedicated to executing against what we've been looking to do for quite some time. The cornerstone of that is a focus, and I'll even call it a dogged determination within management to rally around the growth of the two business units inside of our company that have been not only growing 28% to 40% year-over-year, but have also been EBITDA positive. And those two business units are the QUSA business and the Chatterbox business. As an example of that, in QUSA, while we didn't make public pronouncements about it with a very, very large streaming company that everybody would be familiar with, we signed our largest deal ever in the company's history for fiscal 2025 of over $3.5 million. These are the types of things that are happening in the U.S. business beyond just the growth of that business that are getting us so excited about what's happening. I mean, if we had spoken 2, 3 years ago, we could have never imagined having contracts of that size in the U.S. business. And what's also happened for the U.S. beyond just the profitability and the growth is that we continue to expand the depth and breadth of the categories and the creator economy that we're working in. So just on a stand-alone basis, and we've been talking about this for months and months and months, we feel that we're not getting kind of the love that we deserve and the valuation at the end of the day and share acceleration that we deserve just on the backs of the U.S. business, forgetting about anything else that we're doing or trying to do, et cetera. The other half of that, that exists in the creator economy is Chatterbox. And Chatterbox, as many of you are familiar, has been, like the U.S. business, around for many, many years, it's a testament to the people who founded Chatterbox, to the management that's worked there for many, many years since 2016 that the company has continued to grow. It's continued to expand the base of its clients. It's continued to deliver higher revenue and even more recently started to deliver some real profitability. When you combine these two businesses, the U.S. business and the Chatterbox business, you end up with something that's not only very compelling from a financial point of view, but even extremely compelling from the point of view in terms of the growth of the businesses themselves, the client bases that they collectively manage, but also the intrinsic growth that's happening in the so-called now creator economy and the concept of influencers and influencer marketing being used to market brands and products. So for us as a business, it's been now a full year that we've been looking at how can we take businesses. I mean, I think I've kind of almost joked about this, although it shouldn't be a joke in the past, how can we take our two businesses that are growing very well, that are profitable in delivering financial benefits to the business, have blue-chip client bases across the board, continue to drive greater and greater revenue through larger and larger contracts across a more diverse base of customers, how can we take these businesses and use them to be able to really leverage the growth that we've struggled to see in the company for a long time now? That is what we're doing. That's the plan of the company. That's been what we've been moving towards for really close to a year now. And as part of that, which I'll get into a little bit more detail here momentarily, is that created interest in Chatterbox. And in what's happened in the India marketplace in terms of the public markets, particularly in the area that they call SME, which stands for small medium enterprise. And I'll get into that here in a second. But the fact is, is that we received interest from the financial markets around that. And between that and what we saw happening in the U.S., the combination and the focus that we have and are moving forward with today is being driven by those factors. The second thing is, is that why we've always believed in our channel business strategy, and we've always believed in our gaming business strategy. The fact is, is we weren't seeing any love from the markets, frankly, in terms of what was happening from a share appreciation level. And furthermore, both of those businesses required significant capital to be invested in them to really compete at a level that we felt was necessary to drive those businesses forward successfully. And the fact of the matter is, is that as we all know, it's been extraordinarily challenging to raise capital over the last 2 or 3 years. It has been a situation where the businesses have been literally dragging us down, because of the capital needs that they both had to not only grow but survive. And so we made a decision really in earnest over 6 months ago now that we had to begin the process of divesting our interest in both of those business units, whether that's fully, partially, whether it's selling off a piece of it, whether it's bringing in a new partner that's going to put the capital up to grow those businesses. All of these things are in full motion right now and actually are happening in both the channels business and the gaming business. So shareholders can expect that there will be news that I've spoken about in the past, and they will be forthcoming about moves that we're making in those businesses, but those things are happening right now at this moment in real time. There are negotiations, discussions that are taking place that revolve around all that I was just talking about. And we fully expect those businesses to be dramatically reduced in terms of not only our stake and our responsibility for driving them, but also the financial drag that they've created on our business to date, because they require so much capital and are not profitable. And so, it was a business, the cornerstone of everything that we've been doing for the last 6 months is to drive our focus and our attention to the influencer marketing businesses to ride the wave of growth that's happening in the creator economy and in the India public markets. And to reduce the reliance that we've had on these other businesses that are requiring massive investment for them to become successful going forward. If that was -- if we were sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe we would have a different strategy, but it's all now about how can we take every dollar that we've had and make it turn into better shareholder equity for all of us who are shareholders of the company. So that's the first thing that I wanted to clarify for everyone. Second thing that I wanted to clarify, we are officially in a quiet period with our filing of Chatterbox. A quiet period, as I'm sure most of you are aware, is a period where after a company has filed for an IPO, and it's exactly the same in India as it is in most markets around the world, the management of that company is required to not be out and hyping and making sort of grandio statements about what's happening with that business. Frankly, we're super excited about this, otherwise, we wouldn't be doing it. But the bottom line is, is we can only really publicly talk about what has been published in what's known as the Draft Red Herring Prospectus or DRHP. The DRHP is what was filed, we announced on Monday. It's available. It's a public document. It's 341 pages long, so it took a long time to put it together, and it is available on the link that you see on the screen, which is bsesme.com. That is a small, medium enterprise area of the Bombay Stock Exchange. This is a publicly available document, and it goes through all of the different aspects of our business, of our financials where we're taking Chatterbox and what we plan on using the capital for, on everything you can possibly imagine in those 341 pages. I'm not suggesting any of you need to take the time necessarily to read every word that's in that document. But it is a publicly available document, and we have to adhere to the regulatory restrictions of only talking about things that are in that document. It's statutory. It's not a marketing document, it's a document that's out there to inform investors on why we believe this business will be extremely successful going forward. What you will also notice in that document that may not be clear to people is that we have received or receiving what's known as QIB status for our offering. This is not a given when you're an SME company and IPO-ing, and it means that we will have the participation of institutional investors in our financing. That's extremely important to us. We've spoken many, many times with all shareholders about institutional investment. And this is something that's absolutely key to what drives our excitement and our feeling that this is really going to be something that's successful for all shareholders. With that said, we've spent months and months preparing this document. The delay that many of you are familiar with has been around all of the things that are necessary to file a statutory document that has this level of detail and sort of legal weight to it in terms of everything from an audit perspective and a legal perspective that's necessary when you file. India is no different and probably arguably as strident as any company in the public markets that you could possibly approach. One of our advisers said to us, if you can go public in India, you can go public anywhere in terms of scrutiny that we have to go through in the detail. That's all happened now. This is why we're so excited that we finally have gotten this all accomplished and filed. We have an incredible team of people that we've worked with to do this, who have worked tirelessly. And when I say tirelessly, I mean, literally night and day for months and months now to get this done. And so if you want to find out more about the business and you want to read in black and white in terms of what we're telling the market, what we're telling all potential investors, what the story is behind what we're doing, you can go and you can look at that document, you can find it there. And I feel confident in saying that if you were to read this, you will have the same level of excitement that we have about the potential future of this business. Everything that I'm about to say here in the next couple of minutes comes effectively out of the DRHP because that's all we can do. Why do we believe in India and the Bombay Stock Exchange is small and medium enterprise public markets? As it says here, India is on track to become the third largest economy by 2027, surpassing Japan and Germany, and the third largest stock market in the world in 2030. For those of you who are not aware of this, India has had a boom over the last couple of years in terms of investment capital that's gone into their -- to the public markets. Like any market, it doesn't matter whether it's in Toronto, New York or London or wherever, it's always going up and down, et cetera. But the number of IPO listings over the last couple of years in the graph you see at the lower right here, has been the largest of any major country in the world in India. And the reason for that is that the population of India, the people who are there, the economy of India and the growth that the economists all over the world are seeing there has driven a huge amount of interest in the stock market. But from our point of view, this is just the beginning. This is only the beginning of what's going to continue to develop over the coming years in terms of what's happening with India investment into the public markets and what's happening in terms of the potential and the opportunity that exists for companies that are part of high-growth categories like we are in the creator economy to be able to leverage that marketplace, to be able to drive things further. So our excitement and the reason that we're doing this is because we view what's happening with or without us listening in the public markets in India. If that wasn't happening, that train has already left the station and that ride has already started and is continuing to move with or without what we're doing with Chatterbox. The piece that's exciting is that we're not creating that wave. We're going to become part of it. And the reason that we've chosen to pursue the public markets, there's a myriad of them actually. But one of the big reasons is that we believe that all of the years that we've spent now since really 2017 being in the India market, hiring the right people, getting Raj Mishra on board to lead our business in India, all of these things have contributed to an opportunity that we see as being massive in terms of what's happening for us there. Again, you can read more about the details of this if you look at the section that talks about that in the DRHP. Why do we believe in the creator economy? I've spoken about this over and over again in the last year as well. But I cannot imagine that anybody who's on this call, certainly if you're under the age of 30 or have kids that are under the age of 30, doesn't realize that all of the activity in their lives for all of us now is on our phones. And platforms like YouTube, like Instagram, like TikTok, like Snapchat, like X, et cetera, these are part of the fabric of daily life of everybody on the planet now. And India is no different, the United States is no different, and what we're starting to see is a lot of the campaigns in both India and here for Chatterbox and here in the U.S. for our business are becoming more and more and more globalized. When we got into this business back now 8 years ago in the influencer marketing space and when Chatterbox got into the business in 2016, the concept of doing an influencer marketing campaign was an afterthought for brands and marketers and agencies in terms of the concept of, "Oh, we've got our TV ads, our print ads, our billboards, whatever, and, "Oh, maybe we should look at doing something on one of these social media platforms." That's changed completely over the last several years. And it's driven the growth of our Chatterbox business in India. It's driven the growth of our QUSA influencer marketing business unit here, based here where I am in Los Angeles, and it's going to grow the combined -- it's going to drive the combined growth of both of those businesses as we move forward in 2025 and beyond. This is the foundational reason that we are so excited about being the first company in India in the creator economy to list on the public markets. This is not a trivial point and it's the reason that it was the second bullet in the press release that we put out on Monday. This is a huge opportunity for us to be able to leverage the power of a growing business in a rapidly and very established category going forward for marketers everywhere. And so the chart you see here at the side, these are -- this is one party's projections of what's going to happen with the growth. Goldman Sachs came out with a report that the creator economy is going to be $0.5 trillion business in 2027, 2027, being around the corner. And as I mentioned earlier, in terms of the size of the kind of contracts that we're seeing both in the U.S. and in India, the ticket size, if you will, of the campaigns that we're running continues to grow and grow and grow. And this is why we talk about all the time internally that we're established in these businesses. We're not only established in terms of our technology that we use or the people that are doing these campaigns for us, but also the client bases that we have in both India and the United States. And we see this as a platform for tremendous growth going forward, both for the public market presence we have at QYOU Media in the Canadian markets and OTC and in India once we're live and able to trade there. I know it's hard for us, all of us to feel this way sometimes when we look at the share price and the valuation of the QYOU Media business. But as I said to our Chairman, Scott Paterson, just the other day, this is the brightest future we've had in a long time. Probably that occurred when we started the business. The next wave of that was when we started to get real traction with our channel business in 2019 and early 2020. This is the most excited I've been about the business in the last 5 years. The reason for that, there's a multiple number. First one is, again, we're not an idea. This is not a whiteboard concept. This is not something that we're dreaming up and hyping and talking about what we can do, we're doing it. We're in the middle of this right now, and we have two complementary businesses that can both begin to feed each other more effectively, both from a technology point of view, from a marketing point of view, from a client point of view. And this really can be a 1 plus 1 equals 11 in terms of what we're doing, which is what we've always believed from the very beginning when we originally acquired Chatterbox. The other thing is, is that we're getting out of investing capital and crossing our fingers and hoping something good is going to happen. And we're going to focus on the businesses that we know something good is happening, that are growing at these very, very rapid rates and delivering profitability at increasingly high margins. So we're going to take what we know is working, and we're going to build from that. We're not going to take something that we aspire towards doing and cross our fingers and hope that happens. We think that's going to ultimately benefit all shareholders. I mean, we saw -- I just mentioned 2019, I saw when this share price went from $0.03 to $0.50 from 2020 -- 2019 to 2020. And I'm not making any predictions because we're not allowed to make predictions, but we're doing this because we believe, at the end of the day, it will provide more value for all shareholders. It's the only reason we would do these things, which leads me to why we're leveraging the capital markets. Capital markets remain the most dynamic and robust place for companies to build their businesses and grow. We think having the opportunity to have the listing for QYOU Media in Toronto and the OTC, combined with the ability to have Chatterbox listed in the India public markets on the Bombay Stock Exchange, as BSE as it's now known, is a tremendous opportunity for us to continue to grow this business, and we fully expect that to happen as we move forward, especially once we're live and trading in the India markets. And the final thing is, I'll say we have the right team. We have people, Raj Mishra in India, Glenn Ginsburg here, people like Jace Sparks, who have been with us since day 1. We have people on our teams on both sides of the world, in India and here in the U.S. that are highly, highly experienced individuals with proven track records of success, who are going to make this happen. And so with that, I really just wanted to get on and explain some of this, because I saw feedback and spoke to a number of people. There was a lot of confusion, and why aren't you talking about this, and why are you talking about that? The reason -- main reason is, is we can't talk about this or that. I could sit here and tell you all the wonderful things that I think that we think as management are going to happen with this, but that's not allowed. It's in black and white right now with respect to Chatterbox. And certainly, we wouldn't be taking any of this and doing any of this if we didn't have very, very high expectations for the outcome for all shareholders going forward. And so with that, Jace, since I've been presenting, perhaps you can feed me a couple of questions here.

Thank you, Curt. So we are streaming and there is some latency. So if I don't get to your question immediately, that's why. But I'm going to ask you the first question here that I'm seeing, which is, will QYOU still be the majority shareholder after IPO?

Yes. We will be the majority -- we will be the majority and largest shareholder of Chatterbox after the IPO. And we have a set of investors that we hope and will be coming on board that will not only be valuable from just a pure financial point of view, but also strategically valuable to the company as well.

Okay. Thank you, Curt. When can we expect Chatterbox to be listed?

Well, yes, that's a good question. We -- look, as many of you know who follow us for a long time, we never expected the process of managing and filing the DRHP was going to take this law. It's been an arduous process. Frankly, part of that has been something which we think is beneficial to all shareholders, which is that the India regulatory business has gotten much more, what's the word I am looking for, strict, I guess, I'll say, in terms of the things that they're requiring, which we believe is a great thing for all shareholders. We think that type of scrutiny and management is good for all of us. We also took time to want to try to secure what I talked about, this QIB status. So the whole process took a lot longer, at least solidly probably 3 months longer than we ever expected. With that said, we believe that we have a very, very solid DRHP that we have filed. That's why it's taken a long time, and we've worked so hard at it. And we think that the process will be something -- I don't want to state a time frame publicly, we'll just say that we think that we're well positioned for the process to be as rapid as it can possibly be and certainly that's what our expectation is right now. But I don't think I'm in a position where I can quote an exact time frame.

All right. Thank you, Curt. And I'm just going to say we have time for about two more questions because we both have to jump. If you have any more questions after these, last two, please don't be hesitant to post in the discord, and we'll address them on the next First Thursday's video or maybe we should call it the next Thursday video, because Curt still [indiscernible] naming it First Thursdays. But the next question I have is I feel like it's a pretty good one says, we are raising money to complete the deal, including paying the CB earnout, that's Chatterbox. So you must have an idea of valuation. If that's in the DHRP, (sic) [ DRHP ] what is the range being discussed?

The answer to the question is, yes, we, of course, have valuation expectations. As I mentioned, we took the route of going the QIB route, which means there's a book building process. What's happening with the filing is basically you file. You wait for the queries and questions to come back from SEBI and the BSE. We respond to those. There may be another set of questions that comes back. We respond to those. You hopefully, it doesn't go more than two or three cycles of going through that. And then we get into the official book building process once we've been officially approved. When that starts is when the pricing of the business begins, we -- what I can say is that, we've spent now, I think, 6-plus months on this process. As I mentioned earlier on this call, we have very high expectations for what this is going to deliver for all shareholders. And so when the book building process begins, there will be a price that will be assigned for this. And it's our hope and expectation that all shareholders are going to be pleased with where we start and where we head thereafter once we're fully listed, but I can't mention that now, unfortunately.

Okay. We have time for one more question, and I'll -- I assure you, we have a hard out at 8:30. So I'm just going to get to one more. I think we can make it, and it's simple. Where is the TV business?

The TV business, the broadcast business, we are in the middle of negotiating and hopefully finalizing a move where we're going to, as I mentioned, divest our interest in that. We are going all in on the creator economy businesses with QUSA and Chatterbox. It doesn't mean that we still don't have ownership stakes in parts of these businesses, gaming and broadcast and channels business, and that we still will participate in a variety of different ways going forward. Some of that is still TBD. But the bottom line is, is that, as I've said over and over on this call, we're going to go very hard, pedal the metal on businesses that are growing and profitable, and we think that's going to ultimately be massively to the benefit of everybody who's listening or watching this call live right now.

So Curt, thank you so much for your time to our investors. We really appreciate you. And like I said, please do not hesitate to join our discord. We are very open and transparent, and we do our best to answer your questions. And Curt and I have discussed today that we're going to be more active in the Discord going forward. So there's a section in there where it says Management Questions, please don't hesitate to post them in there, and we will do our best to address that on our next Thursday video. So that being said, thank you for joining, and we'll get you next time. Bye guys.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you.