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

Welcome to our investor call. Today is November 24, 2025. I'm going to turn it over to our CEO, Curt Marvis. Curt, are you there?

I am. I'll pop on my video here. Here we go. Raj, are you there as well?

Yes, sir. Good morning.

All right. Well, it's good evening for Raj. He's dialing in from India. I'm here in Los Angeles. Jace is on the East Coast. So we've got all time zones covered for the call. Welcome, everyone. Obviously, the call this morning is under much better conditions and happier announcements than we've had in quite a while for the company. We're super, super excited to share the results with our shareholders and friends and people that have followed us for many, many years now. Before I get into that, I wanted to address the consolidation. A lot of people have voiced concerns and questions, wondering why we ultimately selected to pull the trigger on this and why we're doing it now. The reason for that is pretty straightforward and simple actually. At a $0.03 and $0.04 share price, it's extremely difficult to attract institutional investors. And institutions are sometimes prohibited from doing anything even under $1. Certainly, they don't have interest in so-called penny stocks or stocks that are trading certainly under $0.10. And so for the last 3 years, many of you are aware that we've put on to the ballot at our Annual General Meeting to do a share consolidation, and we've discussed it over and over again. As I've said on these calls previously, I've been the Co-Founder, CEO of this company for a long time, over 11 years now and haven't sold a share of our stock. So certainly, I would never do anything that myself or the Board members who are all in the same position or employees in the company who've been here for a long time. None of us would ever do anything that we felt was hurtful or harmful in terms of the ultimate share price for the business. That would be crazy. And so any moves that we make, whether they're directly for the business or whether they're revolving around the share price are always made with the intent to improve the value of the business, improve the share price, improve the overall market capitalization of the company and improve the business in terms of what's happening. I'm sorry, a message is popping up on my phone right now. So at any rate, the consolidation was executed as of this morning because we, as you all are aware now, know that our company is growing and growing in a very, very positive way. We have major revenue growth. We have net profit for the first time in our history. We have positive EBITDA that continues to be solid for the business. And so the key to getting institutional investors to invest into a company like ours is obviously demonstrating financial -- solid financial results. And because we're so bullish on not only the quarter that we've just reported, but on continuing quarters going forward and in 2026 and beyond, we felt it was the appropriate time to do this not only based on sort of a hunch that we might have or a feeling we might have, but because of inbound interest that's been coming to us from institutional investors who want to come in and invest in this company but are prohibited from doing so because of our share price. So that's why we made the decision. That's why we've done this today. It's also unwieldy and very challenging to deal with 600 million-plus shares outstanding for a company like ours. Even with volume that you get that's not been tremendous for us lately. It's very hard to move the stock one direction or another. We think already this morning, you've seen some positive reaction to what we've done. We hope, obviously, that holds, but it's not about holding, it's about us building the business from here. Both myself and Raj very much believe that we're on our way to a 2 -- first -- next up is $1, obviously, but to a $2, $3, $4, $5 stock. We believe we're going to build great value in the business, which we'll talk about here momentarily. And that's kind of the state of why we did the consolidation. So I appreciate that there's concerns about that. I know I've received e-mails and calls and other things from people that are like, why are you doing this now? Those are the reasons behind it. We're extremely -- we thought about it for a long time. It wasn't a hasty decision. We've evaluated it, discussed it with institutional investors and here we are. So moving forward from here and bullish about the opportunity. So why is that? Well, the first reason is the news that we put out this morning. We had our highest revenue quarter, over $9.6 million of revenue, 44% year-over-year growth in terms of the same quarter last year. And these are the kind of numbers that we've been building towards for a long time. As many of you are aware, when we stopped having some of our other businesses, including our channel business, gaming business, et cetera, that were contributing revenue to the overall business, but also contributing massive losses that we were facing. We cut that out and now we only report what's happening with the 2 businesses that we're focused on, which is all around what's become known as the creator economy or influencer marketing. So both Chatterbox, which has had its successful IPO in India on October 3, and Raj will talk a bit more about Chatterbox in a bit. We also have been able to drive through just really aggressive moves in terms of both costs, but also bringing on more people to drive revenue, a pathway that has us very, very bullish on the growth of the business going forward, both from a revenue standpoint and from a profitability standpoint. We're not giving any specific guidance today or yet for 2026. We'll sort of address that as we move closer and further into 2026 if we'll be doing that. But shareholders can rest assured that it is our continued goal to not only continue to drive revenue growth, which we expect to do in the quarter that we're currently in, but also drive profitability over quarters and years going forward. There are some investments that we're making into the business in terms of our technology, in terms of our headcount, in terms of our sales force, in terms of some expansion that we'll be doing as a business. But the bottom line is that the bottom line is what we're interested in, which is the top line and the bottom line. And it's producing growing revenue for the business going forward, leveraging the huge CAGR that's depending on which person you want to believe, is somewhere probably between 25% and 35% on an annual basis right now. So the creator economy and the influencer marketing industry is a global business that's continuing to grow. And we believe that we're positioned because of our vast experience in it, the client list that we have, the continued growth that we're seeing in both the businesses here and with Chatterbox that the shareholders of our company will enjoy the benefits of that as we all will going forward. The other piece of news from this morning that we're probably the most proud of is net profit. We've never reported a net profit in the history of our company. The net profit was just over $738,000. And while we obviously hope to continue to grow that going forward, the fact that we finally have achieved net profit in the business is extremely gratifying, and we believe a real financial testament to the fact that we've shed these businesses that we're burning capital, focused our efforts as a company, as a global company, both here in the United States and in India on the creator economy and on influencer marketing that the financial results demonstrate that, that strategy is working. And that's fundamentally what the message is today is that the strategy that we've been working towards that you've all been patient with. It's been frustrating for all of us in terms of the performance of the company from a share price perspective. We believe we're going to start to see the benefits of that going forward in a big way. And that's going to continue. And Raj and myself and the teams both here in the U.S. and in India are completely focused on making that happening going forward. Does that mean every quarter is going to be perfect? Maybe, maybe not. But every year is going to be, and we're definitely committed on an annualized basis without question to continue to outperform ourselves from a revenue basis quarter-over-quarter and to start to generate net profits for this business, which will be reflected in our share price. So that's kind of where things are at, at the moment. The final thing that I'll say, and then I want to turn it over to Raj for a few minutes, is that the phenomenon that we're now working in as a company through QYOU Media, which again is comprised primarily of our North American business at the moment and our India business, this is a global phenomenon. And this is not something that's unique to India, that's unique to North America, this is happening all over the world and it's happening in a massive way. I'm sure all of you are aware of the incredible impact that YouTube has on our lives for many -- for nearly 2 decades now. Certainly, the impact that YouTube Shorts has had in terms of its growth. And certainly, we all know that Instagram, TikTok and these other platforms -- X, Snapchat, et cetera, have become part of the fabric of the daily lives of people of all ages all over the world. What that translates into is that brands and advertisers that want to reach audiences at scale must use these platforms to reach their target customers. And this is something that we started on -- when we started this in the business, both for ourselves and Chatterbox, 8 years plus ago was almost -- it wasn't even a fledgling business, it was just sort of a new thing. Then if there was a brand campaign, it didn't matter whether it was Coca-Cola or a new beauty product or whatever it might be that was coming into market. Unless they were really targeted to a very young audience, they tended to stick to more traditional marketing means. The CEO of Unilever, which is one of the largest global product companies, as you all know, in the world, came out at the beginning of this year, 2025 and made the announcement that this year, Unilever, which is one of our customers in India, our partners in India, was going to spend up to 50% of their brand marketing spend on social media platforms. These are things that are happening in real time right now. They're driving the growth of our own business. And we are absolutely committed to capturing more market share of this on a global basis as we go forward. So with that said, I'm going to turn it over to Raj now. We're obviously both super excited about the successful IPO of Chatterbox that occurred on October 3. That's not really part of the reporting that you'll see in the Q3 results. And so that will be coming up more in terms of what you'll see from financial impact in Q4. But I'll turn it over to Raj. And Raj, maybe you can fill people in on kind of what's happening over in India.

Sure. Thanks, Curt. I mean all I could say is really detail on everything what just Curt said right now. Look, for us, in India, it's been phenomenal. We have shifted gears in India over the past few months. The Q3 results since obviously, it's really acted as a vantage point for us to scale up our businesses. But what the IPO has really done is it's sort of build a momentum in the country, which is here to stay. The hype is really what people are looking forward to. I mean we were the first influencer marketing company in the country to ever be listed. That in itself has created a lot of euphoric value about the company. People are more interested to know what exactly are our capabilities across the region, not just in India, but global footprints, how well deep rooted we are in our tech capabilities to serve the next demand with regards to the way influencer marketing as a business and industry is really growing. The entire global industry is valued at about $500 billion by 2027. It's growing at a CAGR of about, what, 20% to 25% right now. And I mean we are just a drop in the ocean right now with regards to the potential and the opportunity, what it entirely has to serve. And we are stoke. The team is really fired up. There's a lot of energy right now with regards to what we can achieve as a team together in all the emerging markets where creator economy is really sticky. And the fundamental fact that the IPO -- the entire experience of having a successful IPO with regards to the type of people, the QIBs, the institutional investor, the marquee investors who backed our entire vision of making inroads into the creator economy has really been something phenomenal for us as an entire company. We see a lot of investor interest still with regards to the future, and that's something which is going to help us build our North Star in a much more stronger way. For us, 2026 is all about -- our pillars of North Star are basically 3. One is scale. We want to scale all our different metrics, which is important to the company, whether it's scaling our wallet share across brands, it's scaling our financial metrics, which is -- which dials up into our second North Star, which is more profitability or scaling our tech infrastructure. All these are something which the entire teams dialed up into delivering moving forward. And that's how we are envisioning the next leap of growth right now because we're here to win. That's fundamentally the reason why we have actually -- the entire team has been crushing it all this while. And what we see right now is a testimony to all the hard work which the teams has been really putting in. So we know the playbook. We know the beat plan, what needs to be done right now. And we've already had a great support with regards to the type of people who are back to our gig and take this opportunity to thank all our investors and shareholders and believers who have stuck with QYOU and now Chatterbox for all these years right now. But one thing we can promise you that we are hit to hit the home run. That's exactly what the entire team is within the company, and that's how we are envisioning our next leap of growth. And there's a lot of cool stuff what we'll be pulling off as a company, whether it's international expansion, venturing into emerging markets, whether it's really sticky creator economy or whether it's building into very strong levers of tech capabilities, which can really help people decipher the right value proposition, what the creator-centric company has to offer or whether it's financial discipline in the way we go about spending that each dollar within the company. All these are going to add up very soon, and it's already started to reap results in what we see in the country right now after the IPO -- successful completion of the IPO. We've seen bigger mandates come to us. We've seen creators who are top heavy creators, TikTokers, big YouTubers reach out to us that they want to be part of our ecosystem. I mean, we have bought into more wallet share of brands. So the momentum is really real. And that's something I want to really again try and emphasize on. And yes, as we move forward, there's going to be a lot of stuff what we're going to fill you guys in. And yes, I'm going to happy to field questions and answer more on that soon.

Awesome. Thanks, Raj. Yes, I think as anybody who's been on these calls previously and our shareholders know, we can't really share material on public information, unfortunately, of things that we're working on. But Raj mentioned technology. We've been working actually through Jace who has been leading the charge here in the U.S., and we've had a team working in India for quite some time now, ramping up our technology capabilities. This is very much a data-driven industry and a data-driven business. People want to be able to measure the results, know what happened. This isn't like a billboard by the side of the road where you're not sure how many people actually were impacted by it. We know exactly what has been shared, what the demographic is of the people who are using it, what they're doing with the content, et cetera, which is a huge advantage to our partners. And so what we've been doing is ramping up our technology capabilities. You'll be hearing more about that potentially before the end of this year, but certainly by -- in 2026, you'll be hearing more about our technology capabilities, our expansions -- our expansion of campaigns in a variety of additional markets globally. We're already starting to do that. We have a campaign currently that we're working on between the North American operation and India. We're really one company. And -- and so we are -- a big agenda item for us in 2026 is to integrate the companies more and more. I mean, Raj and I usually speak once or sometimes twice a day. And a big part of where we're going as a business is because of the global opportunity is to integrate the businesses from a performance basis, technology basis, client basis, opportunity basis more and more in 2026 and beyond. And we think, again, we'll see the benefits of that strategy, both in terms of our financial results and also in terms of our overall market share and growth in the industry. So with that, Jace, it's always challenging for me on these calls to be able to field questions. Are there are a couple of questions that have come in that you can send our way?

Yes, I'll read them to you now. So the first question comes from -- I'm going to butcher this, but it's Pedron Oliver, I believe, is the name. he says, Curt, could you comment on plans of opening new offices in Southeast Asia and expansion in other regions such as Europe and Latin America?

Sure. I mean we've spoken about that a little bit. And the -- look, the real strategy of our business is to remain very, very focused. That's why we think the financial results reflect the fact that we're focused on one industry, the creator economy and influencer marketing, both here and in India. I mean I think a lot of people don't necessarily know or realize that outside of China, the largest territory for the use of social media on the planet Earth is India. It's by far the largest user base for YouTube. It's by far the largest user base for Instagram. But with that said, as we spoke about, it's a global phenomenon and a global opportunity. And so we absolutely plan on targeting countries where we're already doing business in terms of campaigns that are reaching those territories. We've started increasingly as products are launched internationally to do that. But yes, that's certainly very big on our list, but to do it in what I would call a very tactical and strategic fashion, not to sort of throw a bunch of money up in the air and open up offices in places around the world. Raj, do you want to add anything to that?

Yes. No, absolutely. I think we are pretty focused with regards to our go-to-market strategy moving forward. Like Curt said, we want to be very tactical and having a -- we want to have a very high cost center. We want to be very financially disciplined in the way we scale up our operations in these emerging markets, the ones you all mentioned in the question. And yes, bang on. There's a huge creator diaspora in these markets, and we want to leeway our capabilities into trying to build profit centers in these markets. But we're going to have focus on setting up markets to start with. We are already setting up shop in a couple of these emerging markets, which we're going to be publicly announcing real soon. And yes, you'll see a lot of these markets being activated as and when we build use cases out of those markets.

Yes. Certainly, we're well aware that areas like the Middle East, Indonesia, South Asia, et cetera, have huge opportunities for us to continue to grow the business.

Okay. Next question comes from Gigi Cyprus. I believe that's Gregory Cyprus. What are the Indian BSE financial reporting requirements? Are they the same quarterly as QYOU?

I know they're actually a bit different. Raj, do you want to comment on that?

Yes. I mean, each market is bringing different regulations and guardrails of us executing businesses without going much deeper into those regulations and how they're really trying to be different from each market. But yes, I mean, our objective is to be completely in line with regards to local requirements, what any government would have, and we comply with regards to all tax and financial regulations, and we're going to continue to do that. And so yes, in short, yes, they are different, and we have a team -- we have a strategic team to help us dive into such aspects of legalities in the country, and we are ensuring that we are on top of it.

Yes. The other thing specifically, too, is I think after the initial IPO, we were required to report the first 6 months. The fiscal year is different in India than it is for us. So the first thing is that our -- the India fiscal year for 99.9% of companies in India is -- goes from April 1 to March 31. As people are likely aware, our fiscal year for QYOU Media is calendar year. So India after your IPO, you're required to report -- is it -- Raj, was it 45 days after we listed or...

45 days.

[indiscernible] reported on, I think it was October 24 for the first 6 months of Chatterbox's fiscal year and then the next report is required 6 months later. So our next financial report will come out whatever 6 months after October 24 is. So I guess that's end of March.