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Tattooed Chef, Inc.
11/15/2022
Thanks, Operator, and welcome to Spotify's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be Daniel Ek, our CEO, and Paul Vogel, our CFO. We'll start with opening comments from Daniel and Paul, and afterwards, we'll be happy to answer your questions. Questions can be submitted by going to slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com, and using the code hashtag SpotifyEarningsQ322. Analysts can ask questions directly into Slido, and all participants can then vote on the questions they find the most relevant. We ask that you try to limit yourself to one to two questions, and to the extent you've got follow-ups, we'll be happy to address them, time permitting. If for some reason you don't have access to Slido, you can email Investor Relations at ir.spotify.com, and we'll add in your question. Before we begin, let me quickly cover the safe harbor. During this call, we'll be making certain forward looking statements including projections or estimates about the future performance of the company. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed on today's call, in our letter to shareholders, and in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During this call, we'll also refer to certain non-IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between our IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures can be found in our letter to shareholders, in the financial section of our investor relations website, and also furnished today on form 6K. And with that, let's turn it over to Daniel.
All right. Hey, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I hope you had the time to review our results, and as you can see, it was another solid quarter. User growth and subscriber growth keeps humming along very steadily. I've said it before, but it can't be understated. Top-line growth in the platform is the leading indicator for future success on all other financial metrics. But I want to start by addressing the macro environment, which I know is top of mind for all of you. There's a lot of global uncertainty. But for Spotify, our business continues to perform very nicely around the world. And outside ads, we aren't seeing much impact at all. And the ads business is still growing and will be important, but it remains a relatively small portion of our overall revenue today. So if you recall, at our investor day in June, I said that I suspect many of you think Spotify is a great product, yet at the same time, you may also think that we're a bad business, or at least a business with bad margins for the foreseeable future. And our Q3 results clearly show that our investments in the product and experience have resulted in strong user growth, retention, and increased engagement, but they've also been a drag on near-term margins. Just to remind everyone, this is all consistent with the strategic decisions we communicated in early 2021 and again at investor day. So as we've said, we expect this drag on margins to start to reverse in 2023. As I also shared at Investor Day, LTV, the lifetime value of a user, is the primary tool we use to inform our business decisions and judge whether our strategy and investments are working and achieving better outcomes. And the beauty of LTV is that it factors in the longevity, quality, and value of the relationship we have with a user. It is a critical metric to all teams at Spotify. And we're constantly experimenting with what leads our users to stay longer, engage more deeply, and ultimately convert to our paid offerings. And what we've seen time and time again is how sticky our users are because of the product and experience that we've created. And I believe we have the lowest churn across our competitive set because of the many ways we keep listeners engaged and happy, and therefore retained. And because of the strength of this relationship, we know that spending to acquire new users is a worthwhile investment that over time will have a meaningful return. So here's how we think about it. This trade-off is worth making if our actions result in an increase in lifetime value of a user, and we also maintain a healthy customer acquisition cost to LTV ratio. But I also want to reiterate that we're keenly aware that this is an uncertain time and the cost of capital has increased. So inevitably, you should expect our hurdle rate for new investments to be higher. And consequently, you should also take this to mean that we will be more selective with our overall spending moving forward. We will make new investments with two criteria in mind. First, it must be accretive to margin over the investment period, given this new hurdle rate. And second, over the long term, that investment must strengthen our value proposition to users and creators alike. This said, new opportunities will likely emerge in downturns. As an example, we may find that our customer acquisition cost goes down as the cost of advertising typically declines in a software market. This would then offer us a clear opportunity to grow our market share even in a challenging economy because we can acquire users at lower cost relative to LTV. We saw this dynamic play out in the beginning of the pandemic, and we benefited from it, and we expect we would do so this time around should the opportunity present itself as well. And this philosophy is not new for those that have followed us for a while, but I realize that this may frustrate some of you who would prefer we manage to the quarter. Some companies do just that, and I get that's what some investors look for, especially now in this show-me market. But simply put, I don't think that's a winning strategy long term, nor is it the right one for Spotify. We've been transparent that 2022 was going to be an investment year, which would result in a drag on our gross margin in the short term. This quarter is case in point. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that nothing really has changed with our fundamentals. Our business is strong. We are heading into 2023 with more cost certainty, stronger product, and a better user proposition. So this is all playing out largely as we expected, despite the macro environment. Our confidence in our ability to meet our long-term goals and the ambitions we laid out at the investor day remains unchanged, and based on the strong demand for a platform amongst consumers and creators this quarter, I believe we will deliver. With that, I'll hand it over to Paul to go deeper into the numbers, and then Brian will open it up for the Q&A. Thank you.
Great, thanks Daniel and thanks everyone for joining us. I'd like to add a bit more color on our operating performance and highlight what we're seeing with respect to the macro environment and then touch upon our outlook. Starting with our strong user performance, total monthly active users grew to 456 million in Q3. This was the largest Q3 net additions in our history and excluding our exit from Russia, our year to date net additions are at a record high and we expect this to sustain throughout year end. Moving to premium, we finished the quarter with 195 million subscribers, 1 million ahead of guidance, thanks to broad-based strength across regions, particularly LATAM. Our revenue grew 21% year-over-year to just over 3 billion in the quarter. This was slightly ahead of guidance, driven mostly by foreign exchange. Our advertising business grew 19% year on year, and was led by strong double-digit gains in our podcasting business. While this overall result was a bit below expectations, we continue to see encouraging signs that our ad strategy is working, despite some of the near-term macro headwinds, and particularly the continued strength and interest in Span. Turning to gross margin, gross margin of 24.7% was below guidance by 50 basis points. There are three factors that contributed to the results and in order of significance. First, the expected renewal of a large publishing contract outside the US resulted in a cruel adjustment this quarter. The adjustment reflected revised estimates spanning the previous nine quarters. And while the amounts were immaterial in any single quarter, taken together, they added up to a material impact in Q3. And second, like many, we did experience some impact to the top line advertising growth from the macro slowdown, and this shortfall had a modest impact on margin. And third, currency fluctuations, mainly the continued strength in the US dollar, had a small impact on cost of revenue. Historically, currency has had a big impact on operating expense and a somewhat minimal impact on cost of revenue. However, given the significant strength of the dollar, it has started to impact gross margin as well. Taking a step back, we don't see anything in the results to change our view of the margin potential we laid out at Investor Day. Importantly, we view the publishing renewal in this quarter, along with a recent proposed settlement related to the US CRB on Fono Records for Rates, as very positive developments. They offer greater cost visibility, and taken together, these two deals are consistent with the profitability targets we communicated to you at our Investor Day. Looking at operating expense, growth in the quarter was slightly lower than forecast on a currency neutral basis. However, currency fluctuations proved greater than planned. When combined with our modest variance in gross profit, our operating loss was slightly below guidance. Currency continues to be a big impact, adding 85 million to operating expenses or just over 14 percentage points of year-over-year growth. And touching on free cash flow, we generated our 10th straight quarter of positive free cash flow. We continue to generate roughly 200 million in free cash flow on a trailing 12 month basis. And given the timing within quarters, we may see free cash flow turn negative in Q4, but we still expect to be free cash flow positive for the year and moving forward. Turning to our outlook. Looking at Q4 and beyond, as Daniel said, we continue to monitor the global macro environment, and to date, we have seen no material impact outside of our ads business. When we began 2022, we stated that we expected to see MAU and subscriber net addition growth at roughly similar levels to 2021. As we enter the fourth quarter, we now expect MAU net additions to finish materially higher by year end, and we see subscriber growth roughly in line with those expectations, excluding the impact of Russia. With respect to Q4ARPU, we expect it to be up mid-single digits on an as-reported basis. On the advertising front, we are seeing some modest improvement from where we were a month or two ago, but the back row environment still has a reasonable amount of uncertainty. As such, we expect another quarter of decelerating growth in Q4, but we continue to remain confident in the long-term potential of the business. Our gross margin outlook for Q4 is 24.5%. We recognize this is likely a bit below what many of you have been expecting based on our commentary exiting our Q1 results for a gross margin of around 25% for the balance of the year. The variance between these figures is primarily a result of three factors. One, including the softening macro environment over the course of the year, which is reflected in the current advertising slowdown. We also see another quarter of negative currency exposure. And last, Q4 includes a restructuring charge at our podcasting business, which should lead to improved productivity at select studios on a go forward basis. All in, we anticipate approximately 70 base points of impact from these three items, with the impact spread roughly evenly across each. And in closing, despite an uncertain macroeconomic environment, we continue to be highly encouraged by the overall trends we have seen year to date. We laid out a vision for our business model expansion at our investor day, which we still firmly believe we will execute against. This year has been one of investment, hitting both gross margin and operating expense. And while it is too early to provide any guidance with respect to 2023, we do expect our profitability rates to improve relative to 2022 as we grow revenue, lapse certain investments, and deploy capital more efficiently. And with that, I'll hand things back to Brian for Q&A.
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