Acast AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to ACAST's earnings call for the Q1 2026 interim report. Joining us today are our CEO Greg Glenday and CFO Anders Haig. You're welcome to submit questions throughout the presentation using the form next to the stream and we will raise the questions during the Q&A held after the presentation. I'd now like to start by handing over to our CEO Greg Glenday. Greg, the floor is yours.

Thank you, LP. Welcome, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm here with Anders, our CFO, now four months in and fully hitting his stride. In my section, I'll cover our high-level performance and momentum, and then Anders will take you through the numbers. We have been very excited about the momentum our strategic approach is generating in the marketplace. We've been working on this vital infrastructure for more than a decade, and it is now paying off. At ACAST, we strive to be the best place for creators. Great creators bring very valuable audiences. Valuable audiences attract brand revenue. Once we have the brand revenue, that attracts and motivates creators and so on. You can see how this becomes a self-fulfilling flywheel with Acast at the center. We like to think of Acast as the engine room in the middle of this infrastructure. We have talented people around the world, we have industry-leading innovation and technology, and we have the best data around podcasting. All of that together powers this flywheel. We want to create an unencumbered relationship between creators and their audiences and advertisers. Creator choice, open ecosystem, no real editorial point of view. We let creators create. We focus on brand safety. Those are the principles underlying everything we do at ACAST. So when I say the best place for creators, I mean everything from premium publishers like TED, Le Monde, Perfect Day, or Slate, to huge independent shows, all the way down to a large number of niche shows with passionate, smaller followings. We don't have an editorial point of view that we force on them. We do advise our creator partners on best practices we've seen over the years, but we let them run their show, and we think that's really important. We deliver tools to create and monetize your show the way you want to. We believe in creator independence. We meet creators wherever they are to empower them, not control them. The result is every creator gets the same infrastructure and access to monetization options without losing what makes their show their own. Now, how does that translate to our advertisers? The big name still pulled the demand, that's vertical sales, where we do omni-channel, deep, authentic integrations with buyers and advertisers when they come to us looking for a household name show. But many times we say to them, you're not actually looking to buy that show, you're looking to borrow their audience. So that's the power of Acast. We can then take niche audiences and unlock scale. Our technology aggregates investable audience buys across hundreds of smaller shows that no other platform can monetize at this depth. For example, a dozen big shows may reach 5 million people. 500 niche Acast shows can reach the same 5 million people. So when we put those two things together, we can go vertically deep with a bunch of shows and then go much further horizontal to buy across the audiences. From the audience seat, both deliver a one-to-one relationship with the brand. We package both into one buy. That's what we mean when we say buy the audience, not just the show. Our sales motions cover the full spectrum from blue-chip omnichannel brand integrations to programmatic to self-serve automated. Acast has solutions that cover all kinds of advertiser needs, and that's amazing news for creators. Not long ago, the video conundrum was a dark storm on the horizon for the podcast industry. Today, video optionality is one of the most exciting work streams at Acast and within the podcast industry. Four in five global podcast consumers both listen and watch. Of those consumers, they fall along this logical continuum. Some listen more, some watch more, and the vast majority do both depending on the context. Everyone I know who loves podcasts, myself included, changes modality depending on the context. Sometimes I'm commuting on a train or exercising or doing chores or walking the dog or driving. That all leads to different listening habits. And it also depends on the context of the content. News or business versus pop culture or comedy or true crime. This is exactly what we mean by narrative influence. It's not audio. It's not video. It's a new mode, a consumer-creator relationship that lives across formats. Why we're built for this. Our newly established video partnerships, which I will touch on in just a minute, gives the creators an open choice ecosystem. We made that years ago on the audio side, and now we're doing the same in video. Speaking of creator choice, we've worked hard to ensure that this applies to video podcasting too. We're in a unique position in that we have solutions for all the current major platforms, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. That made us the first fully platform-agnostic video and audio distribution monetization company in podcasting. Earlier this year, we were proud to be an inaugural launch partner for Apple's new video offering via HLS technology. Currently, we have around 90 shows live with video, and we have our first integrated advertiser campaign with Apple launching this quarter. On the Spotify front, they have a new distribution API that we are participating in between creators, publishers, and monetizing video on Spotify without switching hosts. YouTube, we have the UK's largest premium video podcast offering. Over 20 of the biggest shows in the UK are already live, and the US is rolling out this quarter. From an advertiser perspective, this gives you a single gateway to premium audio and scaled video across every platform. The strategic flywheel is omni-channel, earlier bookings, larger bookings, and a broad base. This is what global scale and pure focus actually looks like. We are a category of one, the world's largest pure play podcast company. Specialists, not generalists. Podcasting isn't an add-on for us. It's the entire business. We built Acast to be global, but we prioritize local expertise and execution. This illustrative example represents the competitors our local managing directors compete with on a daily basis. Of the 60 or so companies on this slide, only five are in more than two markets, and only two are in more than three markets. And over time, our business model has grown further and further from Spotify, which has made us much stronger partners with them. The creator benefit is one relationship with a worldwide audience plus revenue. Podcasting does not need a corporate suit to green light a show in every country. It's a meritocracy. A show from the UK can be big in the US or Australia if the audience says so. We have a show in the US whose second largest market happens to be Ireland, and we monetize the audience there as well. The advertiser benefit is a single point of entry to a fragmented global market for both brands and the big global advertising holding companies. All that to say, we are very confident in our position in the next phase of the podcast industry as it evolves. Our advantages took years to develop. global scale, local execution, platform agnostic distribution, creator control and choice, full spectrum sales motion from self-serve to blue chip omnichannel buys, proprietary data, and end-to-end technology trust across the industry. Network effects that strengthen every creator we add. These aren't separate USPs. These reinforce each other. That's what makes it hard to replicate. Our podcast roadmap approach is simple, but very hard to replicate. We simply listen to our constituents, creators, their audiences, and advertisers. Their desires, frustrations, and ideas become our roadmap. We're obsessed with building or acquiring the tools needed to remove friction to make this flywheel spin, throwing off more value to everyone involved. With that, let me move on to our Q1 highlights. Our momentum from Q4 carried straight into Q1. We delivered 20% net sales growth and 31% organic growth when adjusted for FX and M&A. This consistency is the result of deliberate execution, not an accident. North America was our primary growth engine, up 43% organic growth year over year, with meaningful contributions from Europe and other markets. And the milestone of the quarter, this was our first ever profitable Q1, with adjusted EBIT of 5 million SEC at a 1% margin, particularly notable given that Q1 is seasonally the softest quarter in advertising. Looking at key events for the quarter, I've already mentioned our expanded video podcast distribution with Apple Podcasts. We also signed an exclusive ad sales distribution partnership with Slate, one of the most respected names in audio journalism. This validates that the world's best creators choose Acast, and it expands our high-value content and editorial credibility in North America. We also added Perfect Day Media, with a strong niche portfolio here in Sweden. This leads our long-tail monetization engine, the deep, loyal communities that advertisers want. I'll now hand it over to Anders for a financial deep dive.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. I'm now a few months into the role, and I have to say the business momentum you see in these numbers is real and consistent with what I experience every day inside the company. Let me walk you through the key financial metrics for Q1 2026. Listens came in at 1.121 billion, up 1%. But as we said consistently, our focus is not just on volume, but it's on quality and value per listen. Average revenue per listen, or ARPL, reached 0.58 SEC in Q1. And that's the highest Q1 ARPL we've ever recorded and represents a 19% growth year over year. This reflects our continued success in expanding monetizable inventory, improving sell-through, and commanding premium pricing through integrated, multi-format campaigns. Net sales reached 645 million SEC in Q1, up 20% year over year. Organic growth, adjusted for FX and M&A, was 31%, continuing our strong growth trajectory. Q1 is seasonally the softest quarter in our industry, so this result reflects particularly strong underlying demand from advertisers. Growth was driven primarily by North America, supported by solid contributions from Europe and other markets. Gross margin came in at 37%, delivering a gross profit increase of 20%, growing at the same rate as the top line. The Q1 margin was in line with Q1 2025 and was just like then affected by lower margin in North America. Looking at our segments, we saw positive contributions across all segments in the first quarter. Europe grew by 16% with 23% organic growth, supported by strong performance in the UK. While contribution profit in Europe increased, margins decreased slightly, partly impacted by the acquisition of Wake World Studios. In North America, our momentum remained very strong, serving as a primary driver of group growth. Revenue increased by 43% organically. However, this was offset by a negative currency impact on the reported top line, resulting in a reported growth of 26%. We also saw significant expansion in our contribution margin from increased operating leverage. Finally, other markets delivered 22% growth with 26% organic growth, and contribution margins also increased year over year. Overall, this regional mix shows that we have strong double-digit growth across all regions, while also scaling a cost base. At group level, adjusted EBIT came in at 5 million SEC, a 1% margin. This compares to a loss of 26 million SEC and minus 5% margin in Q1 2025, an increase of over 6 percentage points. And this is our first ever profitable Q1, a clear milestone and evidence that our operating model scales. On a last 12-month basis, our adjusted EBIT margin stands at 2%, continuing the steady upward trajectory we've been building throughout 2025. Operating cash flow for Q1 was 40 million SEC, including 12 million SEC in positive working capital movements. On a last 12-month basis, operating cash flow was 73 million SEK, reflecting the genuine cash generation that comes with sustainable profitability. And we closed the quarter with a robust cash position of 602 million SEK, giving us the financial flexibility to continue investing in our growth strategy. And I'll now hand back to Greg for closing remarks.