Acast AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to ACOS Earnings Call for the Q2 2026 Interim Report. Joining us today are our CEO Greg Glenday from New York and CFO Anders Haag from Stockholm. 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 would now like to start by handing over to our CEO Greg Glenday. Greg, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Lizzie. Welcome, and thanks for joining us today. In my section, I'll cover off our high-level performance and momentum, and then Anders will take you through the numbers. ACAST is the world's largest independent pure play podcast company. We build the infrastructure that allows creators to monetize and advertisers to reach audiences through podcasts across audio, video, and beyond. We continue to be very excited about the momentum our strategic approach is generating. We've been working on this for more than a decade, and it's very rewarding to see this payoff. We strive to be the best place for creators. Great creators bring more valuable audiences. Valuable audiences attract advertising revenue. Advertiser revenue attracts and motivates creators and so on. So we have created this infrastructure flywheel for podcasting. ACAST is the engine room at the center of all of this. Talented people around the world and industry-leading innovation, technology and data. We want to create an unencumbered relationship between creators, their audiences and advertisers. Creator choice, open ecosystem, no editorial point of view, brand safety. Those are the principles underlying everything we do. Thank you. Thank you. We're excited to be actively working with them on establishing industry standards for HLS measurement, podcast audience consumption that may be either audio or video, or a hybrid of the two. And from this quarter, we are moving to report both listens and views. Today, our reported audience numbers reflect RSS audio and HLS consumption. We expect to expand this to include YouTube by our Q3 report. So, when I say ACAST is 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. There are three reasons that creators come to ACAST and stay. First, we are the best place to monetize. We've now paid out $690 million to our creators since launch. Second, full independence. Creators keep both creative and commercial control over how the show sounds and looks, where it's distributed and how it's monetized. Thank you. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our sales motions cover that full spectrum. Omni-channel brand, programmatic, and self-service. With precise, data-driven targeting, ACAST is the only company that does all of this, and we do it well. That's exactly why we're also great for creators. You don't have to be a household name to earn here. A smaller niche show can be aggregated with others and sold to an advertiser. Every advertiser solution feeds creator monetization, so the flywheel turns even faster. Underpinning this approach is robust proprietary data, especially through our subsidiary company, Podchaser. Over the past year, our teams have been working hard to develop ACAST intelligence tools on top of this data. Thank you. In addition to that, you can imagine a long menu of valuable use cases. Some examples our teams are already using include brand competitive snapshots, audience analysis, and narrative sentiment with so much more on the roadmap. . . . . . . . . Take the 2026 World Cup. Podcast attention ran at roughly three times search interest across the two weeks leading up to the event, surging closer to kickoff. And that's exactly where the opportunity lies for brands. If you're trying to break through during the event itself, it's incredibly crowded and incredibly expensive. But through podcasting, you can start that narrative early and be part of the conversation organically. This is podcasting, and it's what we call narrative influence. ACAST is the world's largest pure play podcast company. This is what our global scale and pure focus actually look like. A category of one. 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. We operate in 32 markets, and we have people on the ground in cities and offices around the world. This illustrative example represents the competitors our local MDs compete with on a daily basis. Of the companies we come up against, only a handful, four or so out of the 60 on this chart, operate in more than two markets. And over time, our business model has grown further and further from Spotify, which has made us stronger partners. The benefit for creators is that one relationship equals a worldwide audience and worldwide 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 Australia or the US if the audience says so. For example, we have a show in the United States whose second largest market is Ireland. We're able to monetize that audience effectively there on day one. The benefit for advertisers is a single point of entry to a fragmented global market for both individual brands and big global advertising holding companies. All that's to say we are very confident in our position for the next phase of podcasting's growth. Our advantages took years to develop. Global scale with local execution, platform agnostic distribution, creator choice and control, full-spectrum sales motions, self-service to blue-chip omnichannel deals, proprietary data and end-to-end tech, trust earned across the industry. Network effects that strengthen with every creator we add. These aren't separate USPs. They reinforce each other. That's what makes us hard to replicate. Our product roadmap and approach is really simple, but it's very hard for anyone else to do. We simply listen to our constituents, the creators, their audiences and advertisers. Their desires, their frustrations and their ideas become our roadmap, and that's what we build. We're obsessed with building and acquiring the tools needed to remove friction from this process and make that flywheel spin even faster. This will throw off more revenue to everyone involved. So this approach is exactly what's driving the results we will now take you through. Let me give you the headline numbers for the quarter. Net sales were up 28% with 29% organic growth. And that's on top of a similarly strong first quarter. So this isn't a one-off. Thank you. Zooming out to the first half of the year, the picture is just as strong. Net sales were up 24% with 30% organic growth. But the real story is profitability. Adjusted EBITDA grew by nearly 600% year over year, taking EBITDA margin to 6% and our EBIT margin to 3%. That's the clearest proof that our strategy of scaling revenue ahead of costs is working. So if I look at the key events for the quarter, in Q2, we expanded our video work with Apple Podcasts, launching the first ever video advertiser campaigns on the platform with blue chip brands like State Farm and T-Mobile. This is an early vote of confidence in this new advertising format and the start of a broader wave of advertisers coming to the format. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. has joined ACAST under a multi-year partnership, bringing household names to our U.S. talent network. And we're also delighted to welcome viral hit show The Comment Section with Drew Afualo. These signings reflect ongoing success in attracting premium publishers and talent with highly engaging multi-channel audiences. Finally, two high-profile award wins this quarter. Divine Intervention from ACAST Creative Studios won a 2026 Peabody Award, one of the highest honors in broadcast storytelling. ACAST Creative Studios is the team formerly known as Wonder Media Network, which was acquired at the end of 2024. And ACAST creator Pablo Torre Finds Out won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting, a true mark of quality. a Peabody and a Pulitzer in the same quarter, proof of what both podcasting and our creator-centric model can produce. I'll now hand it over to Anders for a financial deep dive. Thank you. Anders, please take it away.

Thank you, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me walk you through the key financial metrics for quarter two, 2026. And we have now updated our audience metrics where reported listens and views and average revenue per listen or view now include all IAB valid listens plus HLS listens and views. We are working closely with the IAB as HLS measurement continues to evolve. Our new metric listens and views grew 2% year over year. As always, our focus isn't on volume alone, but on the quality and value of each listen and view. Our updated metric, average revenue per listener view, reached 0.69 SEK in Q2, a record high and 26% growth year-over-year. Net sales reached 776 million SEK in Q2, up 28% year-over-year and our highest ever quarterly revenue. organic growth adjusted for FX and M&A was 29%, broadly in line with the 30% organic growth we delivered in Q1. That extends a run to six consecutive quarters above 25% organic growth, underlining the consistency of underlying demand. The gap between reported and organic growth narrowed versus Q1, as we saw a much smaller FX headwind in Q2. Gross margin came in at 39%, delivering a gross profit increase of 24% to 305 million SEK. The slight year-over-year softening in margin continues to reflect country and product mix, as North America, which carries a somewhat lower margin while it scales, becomes a larger share of the group. Looking at our segments we saw double digit growth across all three regions in the quarter again. Europe grew 25% with 26% organic growth and contribution margin improved slightly to 25%. North America continues to show strong growth, up 34% reported and 37% organically. And we saw meaningful margin expansion there too, with contribution margin reaching 13% up from 10% a year ago. In absolute terms, Europe and North America contributed almost identically to group growth this quarter, 79 million SEC and 81 million SEC respectively. other markets grew 17% with 13% organic growth and with contribution margin broadly stable at 11%. And overall, this shows strong momentum across all regions alongside continued margin discipline as we scale the cost base. At group level, adjusted EBIT came in at 32 million SEK, a 4% margin. And this compares to minus 7 million SEC and a minus 1% margin in Q2 2025. An improvement of 5 percentage points or 39 million SEC in absolute terms. And this builds directly on the milestone we shared last quarter. Our first ever profitable Q1. And confirms that our operating model continues to scale. On a last 12 month basis, our adjusted EBIT margin now stands at 3%, up from minus 1% a year ago, continuing the steady upward trajectory we've been building throughout the year. Operating cash flow for Q2 was 50 million SEK, an improvement of 103 million SEK year over year. This reflects our return to profitability, EBIT of 32 million SEK this quarter compared to minus 66 million SEK a year ago when results included 59 million SEK of large non-recurring costs. On a last 12-month basis, operating cash flow improved to 176 million SEK, reflecting steadily strengthening cash generation over the past several quarters. And we close the quarter with a robust cash position of 630 million SEK, giving us the financial flexibility to continue investing in our growth strategy. And with that, I'll hand back to you, Greg, for closing remarks.