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spk02: Greetings and welcome to the Play Studios third quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are on a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during a conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Samir Jain, head of treasury and investor relations. Thank you. You may begin.
spk05: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for Play Studio's third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are our chairman and CEO, Andrew Paschal, and our CFO, Scott Peterson. Before we begin, let me remind you that during the course of this call, we will make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations and beliefs and are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect our future results. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures during this call. These measures should not be considered as a substitute for financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Our results are prepared in accordance with GAAP and a reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures will be provided in our third quarter earnings release and in our SEC filings. With that, I'll pass the call to Andrew.
spk06: Thank you, Samir, and welcome, everyone, to our third quarter 2023 earnings call. Earlier today, we published a press release containing our financial results along with commentary for the recently completed third quarter. As always, our release contains considerable financial disclosures as well as our thoughts on topics we believe are pertinent to our company. I hope you had a chance to read the release, and if not, I'd encourage you to do so. Rather than rehash what's contained there, Scott and I will spend a few minutes highlighting some key developments and save the majority of today's time for your questions. Adjusted EBITDA and, more importantly, EBITDA margins increased meaningfully versus year-ago results. A number of initiatives have contributed to this, including our focus on operating efficiency and a more diversified business model that now sees nearly 25% of our revenues coming from higher margin advertising sales. We believe there's still more opportunities to improve our cost structure and optimize productivity, which will further improve margin gains going forward. As we've discussed before, our margins are a bit leaner due to our ongoing investments in new products, our Play Awards platform, and other growth initiatives. However, it's our view that we can achieve margin parity with our peers as these efforts mature and contribute to our revenues. Our Play Games group continues to benefit from momentum in our growth portfolio, with DAU and ARPDAU increasing throughout the year. Player interest in Tetris remains high with many of the key performance metrics improving steadily. In addition to scaling our existing Tetris Prime product, we continue to advance the development of our new casual titles. With that said, I'm thrilled to share that we recently executed a new agreement with the Tetris company, extending our exclusive rights to this important intellectual property through at least August of 2029. With this renewed commitment, we can now confidently pursue a more comprehensive and long-term growth strategy for this beloved gaming franchise. We're also optimistic about other products in our growth portfolio where early tests of new features and capabilities have been promising. Most notable are the enhancements to some of our Brainium games, which have lifted our advertising revenues and contributed to our intranetwork cross-promotion, reaffirming our initial acquisition thesis. We plan to incorporate these changes along with our MyVIP program into the full collection of Brainium products throughout the remainder of this year and nearly part of 2024. In doing so, we expect the portfolio as a whole will generate higher revenues in the coming year. We also remain committed to creating and publishing new games. As a result, we'll further diversify our portfolio, expand our player network, and position the company for continued growth. Of course, crafting new games is more art than science, and as such, the timing and ultimate success of each is hard to predict. Having said that, I'm happy to share that we're making solid progress with our new game initiatives, and anticipate launching at least one new title within the next 6 to 12 months. The trends in our core portfolio remain consistent with the broader social casino industry. While we remain hopeful that the conditions will improve for the genre as a whole, we're undertaking numerous initiatives to drive organic growth, lift revenue, and continue to expand margins. At the top of the list are the games we transitioned to new operating teams as part of our restructuring back in March. As a reminder, the teams overseeing these games now include key product leaders from Popslots, our top performing social casino title. Given our experience, we continue to believe that both MyKanami and MyVegas can achieve meaningful improvements in payer conversion and spend per payer. Other initiatives focused on improving the performance of our core titles include enhancing our direct sales capabilities, new advertising products, and improved capabilities with incentivized cross promotions. Now turning to play awards, we continue to advance the technologies, program features, and benefits of our MyVIP program and underlying platform. We're also making strides in our plan to launch our loyalty as a service solution to external partners and continue to believe loyalty will be integral to the mobile gaming industry's future. We remain enthusiastic about the as-yet-untapped potential of this unique strategic asset and look forward to more fully realizing its value. Before I hand the call over to Scott to discuss our financials, I wanted to reaffirm our interest and focus on M&A. We continue to actively search for and qualify compelling opportunities that are in keeping with our overall strategy and expansion plans. We have a history of growth driven by both internally crafted games along with acquired game assets, and I expect it to continue into the foreseeable future. We've been thoughtful stewards of our capital, opportunistically accumulating our own stock while maintaining substantial cash reserves to enable strategic acquisitions. While the public markets will always be unpredictable, we'll remain focused on optimizing the returns for our shareholders. I'll now turn the call over to Scott to provide some additional comments. Scott?
spk07: Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone. In addition to today's press release, our Form 10-Q will be filed shortly. Please look to those filings for a comprehensive summary of our quarterly results. As Andrew mentioned, we were able to generate strong adjusted EBITDA performance again this quarter. As a reminder, Branium was acquired in October of 2022 and wasn't part of our company in the third quarter last year. Both DAU and MAU in the quarter were heavily skewed by the inclusion of Branium. Fourth quarter results will be more comfortable, and a full annualization will happen in the first quarter of 2024. Excluding Branium, Organic growth in DAU and MAU was up double-digit percentages versus a year ago. This growth was driven by our casual portfolio that more than offset the declines in our core social casino users, which we believe were in line with the industry. These declines translated to lower paying users and lower DPU this quarter. Excluding the impact of our advertising-driven games, Tetris and Brainiam, ARPDAU was up mid-single digits. The growth in ARPDAU was broad-based across our social casino portfolio. We ended the quarter with approximately $130 million in cash, no borrowings, and full availability of our $81 million reborder. We did not repurchase any shares during the quarter and continue to have $30 million remaining in our stock repurchase authorization. Our broader capital allocation goals remain the same. investing in our games, building and scaling play awards, pursuing strategic and accretive M&A, and investing in our public equity. Looking ahead, we are adjusting our annual guidance given that there is only one quarter remaining in 2023. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance increases to 60 million versus the previous range of between 55 and 60 million. We are tightening our full-year revenue guidance to be between 305 and 315 million, versus prior guidance of between $305 and $325 million. As discussed last quarter, our guidance assumes a pickup in spending to support our growth and development gains, as well as continued industry and economic stress. I will now turn the call back to Andrew for some closing remarks.
spk06: Thank you, Scott, and thanks to everyone participating in today's call. While not without its challenges, I'm very encouraged by the progress we've made this year, and I'm quite optimistic about the many developments underway. Our efforts to increase profitability are working, and I believe we're on a path to margin parity with our peers. Our growth portfolio is adding meaningfully to our total revenues, and I expect the contributions to grow into 2024. I'm also excited about new games and development, and I'm hopeful that one or more of them will be in the marketplace in the coming year. Alongside these internal efforts, we continue to scour the market for acquisitions that can accelerate our growth and expand our overall opportunity. Before I conclude the call and take your questions, I want to address the ongoing conflict in Israel. As you know, we have a significant presence in the region with a number of our playmakers based in Tel Aviv. Like the rest of the world, we were horrified by the events on October 7th and profoundly saddened by what's transpired since. While we have comprehensive business continuity measures in place and a collection of services aimed at supporting our employees during this turbulent and complicated time, know that we'll continue to do everything possible to minimize the impact to our company and safeguard our team members and their families. And above all, we hope that someday soon these cycles of violence and suffering will end in an era of tolerance, justice, and stability will come to this beautiful and sacred land. I'll now turn the call over to the operator to take your questions. Operator?
spk02: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask your question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. Our first question comes from the line of Ryan Sigdall with Craig Hallam. Please proceed with your question.
spk03: Good afternoon, Andrew Scott.
spk06: Hey, Ryan.
spk03: Hi. Uh, I think Scott, I didn't catch exactly. You have a lot of metrics. What was organic revenue growth, excluding brainium in the quarter?
spk07: Um, organic revenue growth. Um, give me just a second. It was closer to flat.
spk03: Yeah, sure. If you want to look, I can keep, keep moving.
spk06: Yeah, that's okay, but the answer, it was pretty close to being flat quarter over quarter.
spk03: Okay. Then you mentioned a focus on, and you have been making good progress in the margin expansion, focused on getting to margin parity with peers. Can you do that without a reacceleration in revenue growth, or do you need some of these growth initiatives to really hit to get there?
spk06: Well, there's one of two things, right? I mean, we have a number of initiatives that are in their development stage, right, where we're investing substantially that aren't contributing at all to revenues. So as they mature, they're either going to contribute to revenues and result in that margin expansion or they're not going to work, in which case we as a company have a strategic choice to make to redeploy that capacity into new development efforts that will drive future growth or to adjust the cost structure of our business in order to achieve what we believe to be more mature margins. When we kind of look at and evaluate our business and we look at the core portfolio, we are at margin parity with our peers, even burdening it with the overhead, the more G&A and other expenses outside of that portfolio. And so really our margins are compressed by the investments we're making in our new development opportunities, and then, of course, the investments we continue to make and play awards as a platform and its capabilities so that we can leverage it more fully as a service beyond just supporting our own products. So, you know, I hope that addresses your question. You know, we're either going to enjoy the benefits of these investments, or we're going to adjust our overall cost structure, or we're going to redeploy that capacity into other future opportunities that we think are going to drive growth.
spk03: Helpful. Yeah, I was getting at the structural margin of the business, excluding all those growth initiatives, which you answered. My last question, you mentioned you've been testing the waters on external parties and partners using play awards. You mentioned it in the press release of the growth driver now. Curious how that pipeline is progressing, what you're hearing, and then maybe any timeline around when we might hear something more formalized.
spk06: Yeah, I mean, I think it's still premature for us to kind of speak more specifically to what the overall shape of that opportunity looks like. And we've talked about our vision, which is to provide loyalty solutions to other key strategic partners or players in the industry. We've had a number of conversations that feedback generally is pretty constructive and positive. I mean, they see it as a really unique asset, and particularly given the dynamics of the industry today and how difficult it is to acquire players, retaining them becomes all the more important. And so a loyalty program is really aimed very specifically at retaining players over a longer period of time, and as a result, driving up LTV. So early feedback, people appreciate and see the value of it, and we're in the early stages of just qualifying what does that mean? So how to really support a third-party partner with not only the underlying technology solution, but all the other services that it might provide. And so it's been super helpful because it's refined our thinking. And it's helped us understand how to better approach exploiting that opportunity. So again, I would characterize the conversations as still being quite preliminary, but really instructive for us.
spk03: Great. Thanks, Andrew. Scott, good luck, guys.
spk07: Awesome. Thanks, Ryan.
spk02: As a reminder, it is star one to ask a question. Our next question comes from the line of David Pang with Stiefel's. Please proceed with your question.
spk01: Thanks, everyone. Can you talk about the puts and takes on guidance, which implies a fairly wide range in 4-Q revenue? And what gives you confidence in your EBITDA outlook given this revenue range?
spk07: I mean, we did tighten the bandwidth of our revenue. So, you know, 305 to 315, midpoint at 310. We felt that was just the appropriate thing given the general uncertainty that we experienced in the market, which, again, that's why we reduced it. From an EBITDA perspective, we've been, you know, we've been pretty consistent with our EBITDA projections, and we just kind of leaned it in to be a single number. we've already kind of accounted for the additional UA that we expect to spend in the fourth quarter, so. Did I answer the question?
spk05: Yeah. Hi, it's Mir. Just the clarity on EBITDA, just remember it also includes quite a bit that's on the expense side, you know, which we do have probably a lot more control over. Also, like, the mix shifts that you can sort of see towards the casual gains, et cetera, so there's probably a little bit more of a line of sight with that as opposed to the revenues, which are, as Scott mentioned, much more based on how the broader economy is doing, how the category is doing. So that's why there's a little bit more precision in that number than the revenues.
spk01: Got it. And separately, how do your players engage with player awards during periods of economic weakness or uncertainty?
spk06: They become more active. in the rewards program because they're playing games for free and accumulating all of these real world benefits that they then get to take advantage of. So where in a tighter, more distressed economy and people are being a little more frugal, they take greater advantage of the program.
spk01: Great, and lastly, On the initiatives that you ran for Solitaire, what were some of the key learnings from that?
spk06: That there's a lot of opportunities still within Solitaire as a game category, at least with our execution of it. And we think across the broader casual portfolio that we have. So the things that we're doing that are impacting the fill rates of kind of our various impressions and new ad products that we're being very careful in how we insert them into the products, you know, or translating to revenue lift. And so those, you know, as we prove them out in one game, we believe that that can be pulled through and extended to the others. And there's a whole roadmap of other features and developments, some of which are very subtle and some of which are pretty material, like the introduction of the IDIP loyalty program to those products. So that's why we feel like It's been a great source of growth over the past couple quarters, and we think it'll continue to be.
spk05: You'll recall, too, David, when we purchased Brainy, and we talked a lot about the synergies that were available that we just weren't able to quantify at that point. So I think what you're seeing now is that there was always a plan in place, but we've, you know, obviously with the restructure, like a lot of stuff has happened in the interim since we bought the company roughly a year ago. So we're finally starting to address a lot of those opportunities that we saw at the point of purchase. We've had a long time to think about this and we're just starting to implement it now.
spk06: I would say not only think about it, but we've been implementing a lot of the core infrastructure and these casual titles generally don't have the same kind of underlying infrastructure and back end capabilities that allow you to deliver a lot of the core aspects of a loyalty program. there was quite a bit of just infrastructure work that we had to do and put in place in service of now launching the My VIP program into those products. And that's what's coming up here shortly. Is that good? David, you good?
spk01: Oh, yes. Thank you.
spk06: Okay. Awesome. All right.
spk02: Our next question comes from the line of Greg Gibbous with Northland Securities. Please proceed with your question.
spk04: Great. Thanks, Andrew and Scott. Appreciate you taking the questions. Yeah. You know, wondering if you could speak to the timing. You know, you commented on some new formats to come under the Tetris banner. I wonder if you just speak to, you know, maybe what some of those similar games or new formats would be and then kind of the timing of those launches. Sure. Sure.
spk06: Our vision is that we're going to have a portfolio of Tetris products. Today, we have one, our Tetris Prime product. It's really focused on the players that are wanting the kind of more purist, traditional players that want that basic form of Tetris. We've actually introduced some features that I think make even the basic gameplay kind of unique and different. And we're seeing how that translates to both scaling our audience and the performance that we're seeing out of that product. We intend to then complement that game with several other Tetris products, each of which is a bit more casual in its nature. And so as we shared when we first stepped into the rights for Tetris and now that we have this longer-term relationship, our belief is that there's an execution of Tetris that will make it a bit more approachable and appeal to the more traditional, mobile, casual, and puzzle game audience. And that if we can arrive at a solution that appeals to that audience, well then there's the opportunity to scale up a product that would be a perfect complement to the Tetris Prime product. So we have a couple of different game teams that are actively advancing what I would characterize as a more casual version of a Tetris game. And then it is our intention to craft a version of Tetris that even more than Prime really appeals to the purist, that delivers the traditional purist form of Tetris so that for those people that that's what they want to engage with and play. They'll get it. We'll, of course, complement it with some of the other aspects of our new value proposition like Play Awards. But we have a vision where we can see a world 12, 18 months from now where we have a portfolio of products from the classic Tetris game to these casual alternatives that are rich with meta features and the mechanics make it a bit more approachable and easier to play and engage with. So that's what we have in mind.
spk04: Cool. That's good to hear. And I wanted to follow up on your previous comments related to your Tel Aviv studio. You know, from, I guess, a high level, curious if there are any disruptions there. And, you know, I ask because I know that you recently transitioned a few studios there and are working on, you know, improving some games at that studio. So just curious if there's, whether it's an operational or financial impact or, you know, visibility is tough, but I'm curious if you are seeing disruption there.
spk06: Well, we're certainly having to adjust to the current conditions. We don't anticipate any real meaningful adverse financial impact. And that's because we have in place crisis management practices that we activated. In the case of our GAIN portfolio, one of the primary things is to decentralize the leadership such that each of the different products is directed and managed by people that, while they still have a very tight connection to our core leadership team in Tel Aviv, they're not as dependent on that core leadership team in Tel Aviv. Over the last couple years, we've invested quite a bit in development capacity and production support out of markets like Belgrade, which is really a companion studio to our Tel Aviv team, and in Asia. which also serves to support, from a production perspective, a lot of the other products in our portfolio. So we're really not that dependent on the production capacity that's based in Tel Aviv. That capacity tends to be concentrated on just a few products, and there are a bunch of measures, as I just alluded to, that we've taken to ensure that we can maintain our continuity and support each of our products without any meaningful disruption. That's a fairly general description of what we put in place. There's obviously beyond that a very comprehensive and detailed plan byproducts where the entire teams are mapped and there's kind of redundant capacity in other markets that we could activate in a moment's notice if needed. And with all that said, I really want to highlight the extraordinary resilience on the part of our team that's in Israel. They care deeply about The company, they've obviously invested deeply in the products they're attached to, and they feel this deep sense of responsibility to kind of support and maintain the business. And so, you know, even though there's this extraordinary event that's happening there that is, as you can only imagine, it should be all-consuming, they remain successful. really focused and supportive of all the company's efforts and very flexible as far as adopting and supporting whatever the solutions are that we think are appropriate for an interim period of time. So I couldn't be more proud of that team and their overall mindset. And of course, we're all deeply concerned about them and wanting to do everything we can to ensure that they have the flexibility to focus on their primary responsibilities, which is you know, their own safety and the stability of their families and security of their families. So it's complicated, but I think that we've got all the right practices in place to ensure that we can continue to operate our business. And, you know, as we sit here today, when we look at the performance across the portfolio, it feels like we're managing pretty well. So...
spk02: There are no other questions in the queue. I'd like to hand it back to Mr. Pascoe for closing remarks.
spk06: Well, I just appreciate those of you that have dialed in. Thank you for your continued interest in the company. We look forward to continuing to close out this year. We've had some pretty meaningful improvements in our performance, growth year over year, which we're excited about from an EBITDA perspective. a bunch of efforts that we've alluded to and touched upon that we believe are going to drive top-line growth in the coming quarters. And so we just look forward to revisiting with you once we get on the other side of the new year where we can talk more about those things. So again, thanks for tuning in and look forward to our next call.
spk02: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.
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