Match Group, Inc.

Welcome to the Match Group fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. 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 two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tani Shelburne, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Today's call will be led by CEO Spencer Raskoff and CFO Stephen Bailey. They'll make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up to questions.

Good afternoon and thanks for joining us. Just one year ago, I became CEO of Match Group. From day one, my focus was clear, prioritize user outcomes to rebuild trust and position Match Group to lead the next chapter of human connection. Given Tinder's scale and importance, I also took direct ownership of its turnaround. To guide this work, I laid out a simple three-phase transformation. Reset the company, revitalize the products, and drive a resurgence with our audiences and, over time, our financials. We completed the reset phase by putting user outcomes at the center of everything we do, rationalizing costs, and shifting from a siloed organization to a more collaborative 1MG approach. With that foundation in place, we are now firmly in the revitalize phase, focused on delivering clear value to users and building experiences that lead to real human connection. We have compelling 2026 product roadmaps across the company, and at Tinder, I'm confident that by the end of this year, the product will feel meaningfully different. Before focusing on Tinder, I first want to highlight our financial performance in 2025 and our expectations for 2026, which Steve will then cover in more detail. In 2025, we achieved our match group revenue and margin goals, excluding the discrete items we've called out in prior quarters, and generated over $1 billion in free cash flow, which we returned to shareholders through nearly $800 million of share buybacks and nearly $200 million in dividends, reducing our diluted shares outstanding by 7% year over year. And we did this while making meaningful progress on the Tinder turnaround and continuing to invest in Hinge. In 2026, we expect Tinder year-over-year direct revenue declines to be similar to 2025, as we continue to make product changes to improve user outcomes and drive long-term sustainable growth, but with short-term revenue tradeoffs. Across the rest of the portfolio, we expect continued strong direct revenue growth at Hinge, while Evergreen and Emerging, or E&E, and MG Asia continue to face headwinds. We are reinvesting savings from last year's workforce reductions and alternative payments initiative into Tinder and Hinge product and marketing to drive long-term growth and shareholder value. Together, we expect this to result in relatively flat match group total revenue year-over-year in 2026 and adjusted EBITDA margins broadly in line with last year's, excluding the discrete items we've discussed. Now, let me go a level deeper on Tinder. The most important leading indicators we track for product efficacy are sparks and spark coverage. Sparks reflect the number of users engaging in a six-way conversation, which we believe is a strong proxy for real connection. Spark coverage measures what percent of our users get a spark in that period. Both metrics are improving, including among Gen Z users in the U.S. Globally, total Sparks were down 11% year-over-year in December 2024, compared to down 5% year-over-year in December 2025. Similarly, global Spark coverage improved from down 1% to up 4% year-over-year over that same period. Our product work is paying off. Our data indicates that sparks drive retention. Retention helps stabilize monthly active users, or MAO, and stabilized MAO supports revenue recovery over time. It is the earliest measurable signal that the ecosystem is healing, and I am very encouraged by these trends. We also closely tracked new registrations as a leading indicator of future malgrowth. Globally, new registration trends have improved significantly, down 5% year-over-year in Q4 compared to down 12% year-over-year in Q2, also a very positive signal. Mao naturally lags, but again, we're starting to see some progress here as well. Mao was down 9% year-over-year in Q4 compared to down 10% year-over-year in Q3. In fact, year-over-year Mao declines in December improved by at least two points across 15 countries, together representing approximately one-third of Tinder's global Mao. And in 10 of those markets, we're actively testing new marketing strategies. This momentum has continued into early 2026, driven by better retention of existing users. Much of this progress is a result of our increased focus on improving the experience for women, and in turn for all users, through greater relevance and stronger safety. For example, we've been testing new AI-driven recommendation algorithms, which affect the order of profiles shown to women. Project Aurora has been an important learning engine, allowing us to test multiple high-conviction product changes together in a single market, Australia. In tests, Sparks went from down 14% in December 2024 to down around 8% year-over-year in December 2025, and Spark coverage reversed declines from down 2% to up 2% year-over-year over that same period. Now trends have also improved in Australia, from down 12% in January 2025 to to down 9% in December 2025. And improvement was even more pronounced among women over that same period. Importantly, the negative revenue impact from these product changes continues to be less than we expected. This gives us a lot of confidence that the turnaround is working. Our 2026 product roadmap at Tinder directly addresses the most common Gen Z pain points. They want better outcomes, so we're focusing on relevance and match quality. They want authenticity and trust, so we're further strengthening verification and safety. And they're feeling dating fatigue, so we're redesigning discovery to be more expressive and less repetitive. The early indicators give us confidence in our strategy, and I expect more lagging indicators like year-over-year mall trends to improve throughout the year as we execute on the product roadmap. Our objective is to reestablish Tinder as a sustainable growth business in 2027 and beyond by restoring durable user engagement and relevance at scale. While this approach involves making some near-term revenue trade-offs, we believe it ultimately strengthens Tinder's long-term monetization engine and will provide opportunities to increase both payer penetration and revenue per payer as user outcomes and the overall ecosystem improve. On March 12th, Tinder will host our first-ever product event in Los Angeles to showcase upcoming feature updates, AI-driven innovations, and a deeper look into our roadmap. The event will be webcast and available via our Investor Relations website. Turning now to Hinge. Our latest research with Harris Poll shows that roughly 80% of Gen Z singles want meaningful relationships, much higher rates than older generations, and we believe our platforms will increasingly be where those connections begin. Hinge continues to be the leading app in this intentional or focused dating space, with strong user growth and revenue momentum. Hinge's exceptional performance reflects clear positioning, disciplined execution, and a simple north star of getting users on more great dates. Trust and safety is the foundation for this Hinge experience. Built upon Tinder's successful rollout of FaceCheck, Hinge is also rapidly rolling this feature out in key markets. Thank you for watching. and we expect it to meaningfully improve Hinge's user experience as well. In Q1, Hinge is also testing features that help users get out on great dates faster, including Direct-to-Date, which clarifies intent to accelerate IRL or in-real-life plans, and a redesigned onboarding experience to build confidence in profile creation. Hinge will also roll out an AI-driven feature, Convo Starters, to more countries following its successful rollout in the U.S. in December. Hinge is poised to stay at the forefront of product innovation in the category, and it continues to show broad appeal not only in the U.S., but also across every international market it has entered. Hinge officially entered its first non-English speaking market in Q2 of 2022, supported by already strong organic traction. Since then, Hinge has actively marketed in 12 European countries, its European expansion markets, where it is the top downloaded app as of December 2025. In these markets, Hinge ended 2025 with over 3.3 million monthly active users, up from only 200,000 at launch. User growth continues to scale rapidly, with now growing nearly 50% year-over-year in 2025. We expect Hinge to deliver over $100 million of direct revenue in 2026 in its European expansion markets, with significant runway ahead. In the second half of 2025, Hinge successfully launched in both Mexico and Brazil, where very early results have far outpaced our expectations. Hinge was already the second most downloaded dating app in Mexico and Brazil as of December 2025 and is clearly resonating with intentioned daters. Building on this momentum, Hinge plans to expand to three additional Latin American markets in 2026, Argentina, Chile, and Peru, and into its first APAC market, India. Hinge has already built a meaningful organic presence in India with over 1 million monthly active users in 2025, growing 40% year-over-year without marketing spend. Overall, Hinge is on track with the targets we've shared previously and demonstrates how a strong focus on product market fit and user outcomes can drive durable growth and long-term shareholder value. Taken together, the work at Tinder and Hinge gives us greater clarity on how the portfolio fits together and how we can unlock new value with focus and investment. Our robust multi-brand portfolio provides scale, rich data from multiple apps in a multi-app usage category, and the ability to serve a different user intents while preserving strong and distinct brand identities. We've introduced a simple internal framework to articulate how we position our brands based on how they solve users' needs. At one end of the portfolio is fun, where Tinder leads with social, low-pressure connection. At another is focus, where Hinge leads with intention and depth. And across familiarity, our affinity brands serve communities with shared intent and purpose. Some of our apps sit at the intersection of these user needs. For example, The League, our app for intentional dating among highly ambitious people, sits at the intersection of focus and familiarity. This rubric shows how we think about future growth, including M&A and incubations. It helps us identify white and gray space where unmet user needs exist and where we can build or acquire products that meaningfully expand how people connect. Let me close with this. At the core of our vision for Match Group is a simple truth. Humans need humans. In a world facing a growing loneliness and mental health crisis, we believe Match Group is uniquely positioned to make a positive impact by helping people form real connections. We believe Match Group plays a fundamentally different role in people's lives than most digital platforms. Our goal is clear. Help users get off their phones and into the real world where meaningful relationships actually form. Long-term value creation depends on delivering successful outcomes for our users. People will only use our products if they work. We believe AI is a core enabler of how we improve relevance and matching, strengthen trust and safety at scale, and increase the speed at which we learn and iterate. The early progress we're seeing in our technology, product quality, and user outcomes reinforce our decision to double down on these initiatives, all while maintaining a commitment to returning meaningful capital to shareholders through buybacks and our dividend, and boost our confidence in the turnarounds already underway at Match Group. With that, I'll turn it over to Steve.