Acast AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to ACOS earnings call for the Q3 2026 interim report. Joining us today are our CEO Greg Glenday and CFO Anders Hagg both in 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'd now like to start by handing over to our CEO Greg Glenday. Greg, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much LP. Good to see everybody. I'm glad you're here for our Q3 interim report at ACAST. Hopefully by now you are familiar with our famous flywheel. This is our visual representation of our business and quite simply we start with our creators. We look for the greatest creators in the world. Those creators generate audiences. Those audiences attract advertisers and bigger advertisers create a meritocracy in the creator economy. So we think this flywheel has really served us well the last couple of years. And ACAS, we really focus on the people and the technology in the middle. One of the things that the questions that we get pretty often are, you know, we'd like a little more detail on the stuff in the middle, the people and the technology. So I thought today I would do a little bit of a quick tour around our tech stack. From a creator perspective, we have one connected platform powering every stage of the creator journey. So we think about our creator hub as Everything from the minute they create the episode, how seamless, how easy is it to upload video, audio, how are the tools, how does that work, how do we get that out into the marketplace, then how do they manage the business, where do they put the ad markers, our ad management systems, and then real-time revenue dashboards and analytics. So essentially managing the business on the ACAS platform. So from end-to-end for the creator, we have tools that help them run their businesses. And you can think about our ad platform the same way. It's an end-to-end toolkit for podcast advertising all in one place. From campaign creation to smart recommendations as to which audiences or shows to buy, and then to take a very manual process and put that all through our platform with AdCollab. All of this is underpinned by Podchaser, our wholly owned data ecosystem within ACAST. When we think about Podchaser, Podchaser is a great freestanding business that we use in the marketplace, but it also, we use this data to underpin all of the technology I just showed you. For example, if we have a large advertiser that's interested in F1, we might have a dozen shows that specifically talk about F1 in their title, in the name of the show, what the topic is, those are very obvious. But by using Podchaser and smart recommendations, we can surface over 300 shows. Maybe it's a comedy show that happens to talk about F1. So there's lots of different ways to use Podchaser to create more context for brands. ACAST remains the best place for creators to build and monetize their shows. We have premium publishers like TED, Perfect Day, The Washington Post, and Le Monde. Big Independent Shows, and then where we see real value is in the long-tail niche audiences. By using our technology that I've just demonstrated, we can aggregate these audiences and make a very fragmented podcast economy easier for advertisers to work with. So we think about premium talent, exclusive big shows, and then long-tail niche audiences. Acast is the world's largest pure play independent podcast company. As we've spoken about the last few quarters, ACAST has a very unique place in the market. When we think about Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, each of our local markets has a different set of competitors in their market. None of those competitors truly competes with us globally. So when you think about podcasting, it's a borderless medium. So we think the fact that ACAST is in all these markets is a real differentiator for us. And now for the Q3 results. The financial highlights for Q3 2026, show 25% sales growth with 18% organic, 10% adjusted EBITDA margin, and 6% adjusted EBIT margin. We have record revenue, record margins, and our growth is translating into profit. When I look at year-to-date January through September, we have 25% sales growth, 26% organic, 7% EBITDA margin, and 4% adjusted EBIT margin. Profitable growth adjusted EBIT of 88 million SEK versus negative 15 million last year at this time. As I discussed earlier, ACAST is really powered by our people and our technology, so I wanted to acknowledge two key hires we made in Q3. We hired Liv Sandberg from TikTok to join as EVP Europe and Mark Bulling from WPP to join us in the UK as VP of Product. I'm going to take a little bit of a deep dive into our podcast pulse research in just a moment. And we're going to talk about our acquisition of backyard ventures in Austin, Texas. So this is our third year doing what we call podcast pulse. It's a year long research study that we spend a lot of time on we release in the fall and it's now become a bit of an industry. This is the third one. Now, this is the largest one. We did it in 13 markets with 4,300 global respondents, and we partnered with a third-party research company called Differentology to give us a little bit of credibility. A couple of key points from this study. Listener watch. Last year in 2025 when we first did this question, we kind of thought video was going to overtake audio. And if you look at 2025 to 2026, the one thing that really stood out was the margins have become compressed and the middle has become larger so increasingly our bet that podcasting is going to be bimodal both audio and video is proving to be correct so if you see we grew 11.3 points in consumers saying that they both listen and watch podcasts so the margins people who only watch and only listen are getting smaller and increasingly people are doing both One thing that really jumped out to us is the story travels, so does the audience. 63% of people have started a podcast in one format and finished in another. and very surprisingly 75% of those people have switched an app or platform to do it. So if you think about that, the key in technology is to try and avoid as much friction as possible and the fact that 75% of people are stopping in one platform, finding their spot in another platform just to switch from audio to video and back and forth, we think that our bet on HLS video where you can seamlessly do that is proving to be correct. Also, 88% of We found this to be really interesting. We've asked this question now three years in a row. Who are the most trusted sources for brand and product recommendations? We saw a huge leap for podcasters, while journalists, YouTubers, and social media influencers have all declined. All of this culminated with our Q3 acquisition of Backyard Ventures out of Austin, Texas. Backyard Ventures is 200 premium creators with a focus on omnichannel, including things like newsletters and social. Those 200 creators will now benefit from the ACAST sales, infrastructure, and technology, and we also get a beachhead in the very important creator economy market of Austin, Texas. Welcome back to our ventures. And now I'll turn it over to Anders to talk a little bit more about the financials in detail.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. So let me walk you through the key financial metrics for Q3 2026. Listener views reached 1.155 billion in the quarter, up 4% year-over-year. That's an acceleration from 2% growth we had in Q2 this year. Average revenue per listen or view increased 20% year-over-year to 0.69 sec. And that's in line with the record level we reached in Q2, so we've held the step up in monetization while growing volume. And as always, Our focus is on the value of each listen and view, not volume alone. Net sales reached 802 million SEK in Q3, up 25% year over year. And that's our highest ever quarterly revenue, above the previous record of 776 million SEK in Q2. And organic growth was 18%. The difference reflects acquisitions contributing 32 million SEK of which Backyard Ventures 28 million and Wake World Studios 4 million and also a modest positive FX effect. Backyard is included from the middle of August so this is the first time you see it in our numbers. Gross profit increased 25% to 314 million SEK, also a new quarterly record. Gross margin was 39%. In Langley Q3 last year As gross profit grew in line with net sales. Margin has held at 39-40% in every quarter except Q1, which is seasonally lower at 37%. Looking at our segments, North America is now our largest segment, with net sales of 384 million SEC up 54%. Organic growth in North America was 41%. and as we just mentioned in August we acquired Backyard Ventures which contributed 28 million SEK in the quarter and there was also a small FX effect. Contribution profit almost doubled to 72 million SEK and contribution margin expanded to 19% from 16% a year ago. North America accounted for the large majority of the group's 160 million SEK net sales increase. Europe grew 5% with 3% organic growth to 362 million SEK. That's a more modest quarter after 25% in Q2 for two reasons. First, Europe is up against a tough comparator. It grew 27% in Q3 last year, our strongest European quarter of 2025. Second, Q2 this year was unusually strong Partly supported by advertiser activity around the World Cup. Contribution profit was stable at 78 million SEK with a margin of 21%, so profitability held while growth normalized. Other markets grew 18% with 12% organic growth, and contribution margin improved to 15% from 11%. So, all in all, strong momentum in North America, A steady Europe after a strong Q2 and against a tough competitor, and margin expansion in both North America and other markets. At group level, adjusted EBIT came in at 52 million SEK, a 6% margin and our highest ever. That compares to 18 million SEK and 3% a year ago, so almost tripling the absolute EBIT and doubling the margin. Adjusted EBITDA margin was also a record. The improvement reflects continued revenue growth combined with operating leverage across the cost base. On a last 12 months basis, adjusted EBIT reached 129 million SEK, up from 2 million SEK a year ago, with the margin at 4% up from 0%. And for the first 9 months this year, adjusted EBIT was 88 million SEK, compared to minus 15 million SEC last year. Operating cash flow for Q3 was 22 million SEC compared to 20 million SEC last year. But the underlying picture is stronger. Cash flow before working capital was 83 million SEC up from 26 million SEC. Working capital was an outflow of 62 million SEC compared to 6 million last year. This is mainly a timing effect. We paid the creators in Q3 for the record Q2 sales. Operating cash flow for the first nine months was 111 million SEK compared to minus 5 million SEK last year. And on the last 12 months basis, it's 178 million SEK. And we closed the quarter with a cash position of 479 million SEK giving us the flexibility to continue investing behind our growth strategy. And with that, I hand it back to Greg for closing remarks. Over to you, Greg.