Match Group, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Match Group fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then choose. I would now like to turn the conference over to Lance Barton, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Today's call will be led by CEO Char Dubé and our CFO and COO, Gary Swidler. They will make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions. Before we begin, I need to remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate, or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thank you, Lance. Good morning and thank you all for joining the call today. Since this is the first one of the year, I'm going to start out with sharing some of my thoughts and then Gary's going to add a little more color to the financials. The 2020 was some year and even though it feels like we're still dealing with some of the hangovers, All in all, I feel grateful for how we navigated the year, both as an organization and as a business. It is remarkable that despite COVID and lockdown having put a real damper to dating and meeting and socializing, we were still able to meet our goal of mid to high teens growth we set out at the beginning of the year. Needless to say, without COVID, it would have been an even better year. The thing I wanted to point out is the strength of our portfolio strategy, as well as our ability to pull different levers quickly, which is what allowed us to manage through different levels of volatility we saw throughout the year. And as you're probably aware, COVID has had a resurgence in the second half of Q4 and several large markets, UK being an example, where four of our largest brands have a meaningful presence, are seeing an outsized drag still. But despite all of that, every one of our key brands grew revenue again in Q4. And, you know, at the beginning of COVID back in March, April, I don't think I could have predicted exiting the year with a 19% revenue growth and, more importantly, fueled by all of our major brands. Investors should also take comfort in the institutional strength of the company. In addition to having delivered on business goals consistently these last five years of being a public company, in a year like 2020, with all of our global employees working remotely, we were also able to seamlessly navigate leadership changes and even a full separation to become an independent company. So as I look ahead, one thing I do see that 2020 has done in particular is a real step change in user behavior, not the least of which is how much of our lives and activity has moved online. And while I do think as the world gets back to normal, some of this online-offline behavior will rebalance, but parts of this online shift is definitely here to stay. And this, of course, has implications to our products, both in terms of how we evolve the experiences on our apps, as well as looking at new use cases we offer to help people connect. And we think this is going to be a big area for us this year. And again, while we set similar levels of goals for ourselves at the beginning of the year, it is important to keep in mind that the pandemic is still disrupting our lives and activities. And we continue to see volatility, which makes predicting this year particularly challenging. For instance, in many of our Western markets, we generally see a positive seasonality post-Christmas and into the new year. I always like to say single people going home for the holidays and getting nagged by their family is what causes this post-Christmas spike. This year, however, as you can imagine, it was less pronounced. That said, as in Q4, we're still expecting to see all of our major brands grow revenue again in Q1. And as we saw last summer and in countries that emerged from periods of lockdowns, I do expect that as vaccines roll out and things look better on the pandemic front, we will see more people pick up their dating activities and turn to our apps. One of the areas I wanted to talk about is an area of incremental investment and focus we're planning to make this year, which we called out in our letter. It's in our trust and safety efforts. You know, this has been an existential area for our category since the very beginning. And here's how I think about it. In the real world, we've developed laws and enforcement tools and acceptable codes of behavior and rules over hundreds of years. The digital world, by contrast, is barely a couple of decades old. And its popularity really has only increased in the last decade. So it is going to take leadership from tech companies, regulators, law enforcement, and the community at large to work through the acceptable rules and norms of this digital world. And so we're planning to increase investments in our own platforms. But more importantly, you will see us make an increased effort in broader initiatives like partnerships with third-party organizations, technologies, nonprofits. You're going to see us have increased collaboration with law enforcement and regulators around the world in order to continue to be a leading voice on trust and safety in the digital world. All in all, I feel good about our product and our portfolio strategy that gives us multiple levers of growth. The value proposition of our products remains strong, and I am hopeful that the vaccine rollouts are months away. And we will be looking at more normalcy later this year. And just as I am personally looking forward to getting on a plane and visiting with our teams again, I know our users will be out there dating and meeting with the renewed perspective of what connections and relationships mean to them. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Gary.