Adtraction Group AB

Thank you, everyone, for joining. I think that the second quarter shows us two important things. The first thing is that partner marketing is a great business model that delivers value and growth to partners and brands, and also that the model keeps evolving. The second thing is that Adtraction is a company that can deliver not only profitability and cash flow in the chat box. So the short story of the second quarter is this. Sales grew by a close. Thank you everyone for joining. I think that the second quarter shows us two important things. The first thing is that partner marketing is a great business model that delivers value and growth to partners and brands, and also that the model keeps evolving. The second thing is that Adtraction is a company that can deliver not only profitability and cash flow, but also attractive growth rates. So let us look into the second quarter. As usual, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat box. So the short story of the second quarter is this. Sales grew by close to 20%. Gross profit grew by 18%. And this is the third consecutive quarter of growth. This growth is mainly organic. Of course, there is a contribution from Affiliate Future, but the bulk of this growth is organic growth. What is extra good is that both finance and e-commerce are growing. We haven't seen that in a while so it's very satisfying to see that development. EBITDA grow by 17% and typically we would expect a higher EBITDA growth. In this quarter we need to take a look at the cost side to understand this development and we'll do that in a minute. Cash flow from operations was minus 3 million. And in order to properly understand cash flow, we need to look at the longer term trend, which we will also do in a minute. The second quarter is typically seasonally weak, and that explains this number. What is not weak is bundler. So bundler continues to grow and had a growth rate of more than 200% in the quarter, year on year. Bundler is growing from small number, but it's now starting to have a slight impact on the group's total numbers. Bundler has a beautiful revenue model with strong integrations and recurring revenue, and we remain very excited about this project. During the quarter, we have increased our ownership from 67% to 70%. And the reason we did that is simple. We believe that this is a great investment and we expect a good return on this investment. And of course we had an opportunity to do this. So that's all. That's the simple explanation. Finance, we've seen a couple of good quarter here and we see both sequential growth and year on year growth. Finance Sweden is the main engine here without a doubt. And I would like to give a shout out to our man Ked. who is managing the Swedish finance team. And he has delivered what we in Swedish would call growth, which in English means really good growth rate. We saw a strong quarter also for e-commerce. As a matter of fact, this is the best second quarter ever for e-commerce. And what's good to see and great to see is that we see growth across most markets, not all markets, but most markets. Looking at the combined picture, we also see the best second quarter ever, not by a great margin, but it actually is the best second quarter ever in terms of gross profit. So let us dig in a little bit to the cost side here. As you can see in this graph, costs have increased a bit in the second quarter and a significant part of explaining that is the non-recurring cost that we incurred in the second quarter. So what's happening here is that we made organizational changes in Denmark and the UK and we have non-recurring costs related to that of 3.4 million. Now, we guided that the cost would be 2 million and that was simply an incorrect estimate and the correct number is 3.4 million. We're also reducing costs by around 2 million. So that estimate was correct. And that is happening already in Q3. And what also happened was that we needed to pay fair salaries in the UK, which meant that we needed to increase salaries for the affiliate future employee, which increased costs of around 0.4 million Swedish per quarter. So the net effect here is that we will lower the cost base by 1.6 million going forward. Then another thing which is not necessarily related to these projects is that we are using AI tools and perhaps it's interesting to know what the cost of those AI tools is. So currently it's around 0.5 million Swedish per quarter. And there's two use cases for this. The first one is on the development side and the second one is on the commercial side. And we use AI tools for communicating with the platform. So we have connected LLMs to our platform and we can ask all sorts of questions to the platform. and this is a great benefit for our account managers and partner managers. The main tool that we're using is currently Claude. That may of course change over time and we are also constantly monitoring costs here. If you follow Adtraction, you know that we're interested in growth, profitability and cash flow. And let's start looking at growth. This has been a sad little graph for many quarters. I think that we have underperformed in 24 and 25. And if you ask me, I think that the graph is starting to look better now. We're fairly close to our target with the 20% growth rates. And I think that we are demonstrating that the growth rate of 20% indeed is possible. This, of course, does not mean that we will grow by 20% each quarter, but it does mean that it's possible to reach those growth rates. EBITDA margin was 3.5% for the quarter, which is in line with the second quarter last year. If we look at the EBITDA margin before non-recurring costs, it's around 4.5%, which means that there is still operating leverage in our business model. That's what I claim anyway. We also want to generate cash flows and the proper way to do that in our view is to look at the cash flow rolling 12 months over a period and the number of quarters. And if we look at things that way, cash flow looks strong and stable. At Adtraction we are constantly trying to develop our business and there are a number of projects that we have talked about before and I will briefly mention three of them. The first project is Iris which is our influencer platform or influencer app and really what that is is a way for influencers to access Adtraction's great brands through a new user interface, that is the Iris app. And it's a great way for brands to access Adtraction's great influencer base. So it's essentially a packaging of Adtraction's influencer offering. We will invest in this project and we will continue to build. What has happened to date is that we've now shown that the technology works. We've recruited influencers, we've recruited brands and everything is working out. The next phase will be about scaling this thing. And we know that that will take a little bit of time, so I will not expect a significant impact on sales or gross profit, at least for a couple of quarters. But we will keep building this and from time to time we'll get back and report about this project. We've also talked a lot about service levels before, and really what we're trying to address here is a bigger market and more customers. So there's two things here that I would like to point out. First of all, we are adding a self-managed offering for primarily smaller accounts. And then we're also making it clearer what is included for bigger accounts in our full service offering. And of course, the managed accounts is our bread and butter offering where we generate a lot of business and we find many brands. This whole structure is based on us using Salesforce. It's not really possible to work like this unless you have a great CRM system which you're actually using. Now we are where we need to be when it comes to Salesforce and we're ready to launch this thing. Actually, we are already working according to these service levels and you will find them on our site in the third quarter, probably in September if I were to guess. And in connection with that, we'll also include some more information about pricing. So who is this fair lady? You may ask when you see this picture. And she is a symbol of our fair tracking project. Our thinking here is straightforward. Tracking should always work and always be GDPR compliant. So in addition to our normal tracking, we also use probabilistic tracking on anonymous transaction data and CPC compensation. This way, tracking and compensation works regardless of cookie settings, which I would argue is unique for Adtraction. No one else is really doing this. So thanks to this, Adtraction has increased commission to partners by millions already, and we grow that number every month. This is good news for brands too, I believe, because the only way to develop your partner base is to actually pay for the converse that you're receiving. If you're not paying, no one will be interested in in developing the partnerships. So fair payment is what lets partners invest and grow. So we stay committed to fair tracking and fair tracking is now having an impact on growth and we expect that to continue to increase. We see a real impact on our sales and gross profits as a result of the fair tracking project. So with that, I will hand the mic to Andreas who will continue.

All right, thank you. And let's look at the numbers for the second quarter. And starting with net sales, we have 315 million, and that is a 19% growth rate. I'm not going to go into an exact split between organic and acquired growth due to the complexity after the migration. But this is mostly organic growth, like Simon mentioned. We didn't see any effects coming from the fluctuations in currencies in this quarter, and that's why I'm only presenting the 19% growth rate. 60.6 million. That is the delivery of gross profit we got in the quarter. That's an 18% growth. EBITDA 11 million. That is an increase of 17%. If we were to exclude the one-off from the organizational changes, we would have had a 50% increase in EBITDA in the quarter. And that is really showcasing the operating leverage of our business model. We will also expect to see a slightly lower cost base from the third quarter, like Simon mentioned, north of 1 million from Q3 forward, due to these organizational changes, of course. The adjusted net result per share is at 0.55 kronor per share, and that is a 28% increase. Then looking at the verticals, starting with e-commerce, we have 35.5 million. That is a 13% growth. Here we have both organic and acquired growth without going into taxing. specifics there. We also see that we have growth on most markets and also good to see that the bigger markets in the Nordic all have growth. Finance, 23.2 million in gross profit. That also is a 19% growth. We have more of a split picture in finance. Across markets we see seven markets growing and we also see a very, very strong delivery by the Swedish finance team and it's a record quarter. We also see strong delivery from the Italian and German team. And on a positive note, we also see that the Spanish market is looking up towards the end of the quarter, then getting closer to year-over-year growth rates, even though the second quarter as a total here is negative. Geographies in Nordics, 46.2 million in gross profit. That's a 20% growth. This is driven by the Swedish market. And like we mentioned, a fantastic result in finance, but also a very good result for e-commerce. And in Europe, 14.4 million in gross profit. That's an 11% growth. This is driven by the acquisition in UK. And we also see very good growth rates, both in e-commerce and finance for Italy. On top of that, we also see growth rates in Netherlands, Germany and Poland. And the reason that we have a low growth rate in Europe is the bigger markets, Switzerland and Spain, where we still see negative growth rates. And when it comes to cash flow in the second quarter, seasonality always hit us and we have a negative cash flow of 3.2 million. Looking at the longer trend, you see the rolling 12 is still a very good result. And that is, of course, the main objective here to deliver strong cash flow over time. In investing activities, we have received the second payment from the loan given to the buyers of Clara Loan, 3.8 million. And we've also invested 3 million for an additional 3% in Bundler. Finance Activities, this is mainly the dividend payment in April and that is a negative 19.2 million, giving us a total cash flow of minus 21.6 for the quarter and still a very strong net cash position of 112.4 million ending the quarter.

Thank you, Andreas. So I will conclude by saying a few words on our goals, our strategy, a little bit about M&A and the third quarter or the start of the third quarter. So looking at our goals, I think it's very clear what we're trying to achieve from a financial point of view. We're talking about growth, profitability and cash flow. So we have a goal of a 20% growth rate and an EBITDA margin of 7%. Adtraction wants to be a European network, and we are a European network. We think that there are too many small companies in our industry, which doesn't really make sense in an industry that is characterized by network effects. It's better to put more things in one platform. Adtraction wants to be an active consolidator in this industry. We also want to serve a wider range of clients. This is achieved by updating the service levels like I talked about earlier today, but also by acquiring a bigger customer base. So that's how we think. The cornerstone of our strategy is our local presence. So we are locally present in 12 different markets. and of course the main thing for us is to find growth in existing markets by finding new partnerships. This is indeed the driver of the growth in the second quarter. We're also interested in geographical expansion and of course we didn't start a new market since 2022. That was when we started Italy and to be honest I think it's more difficult to start new markets from scratch now than it was maybe five, six, seven years ago. We may still do that, of course, but I think that we will also use M&A to enter new markets. So we're interested in M&A to expand geographically, and we're also interested in M&A to strengthen our position in the markets where we are already present. And just to remind everyone, we have been I would say the leading consolidator in our industry in the last couple of years. So no one has been close to our activity level when it comes to the number of transactions. The big thing here, of course, is ad service. So that's a transaction we did in 2023 and that was strategically very important for us. Then we've made a number of smaller acquisitions. I guess you could call them bolt-on acquisitions. Each of them have given us some sort of important advantage. And we are very happy that we have made these transactions. So going forward, we will be interested in doing both. Bigger transactions and these smaller bolt-on acquisitions will be interesting. So in the report I wrote quite extensively about the regulation in Sweden that will be implemented July 30th. I think the basic assumption here is that we will see continued growth for consumer credits and of course there will be some fluctuations and we may see a bad quarter here and there but the long-term trend still is good for consumer credits I would argue. So we're, what is it, 21, 22 days into July. And for the first two quarters of July, we have seen a double digit growth. And that is some sort of indication for the performance of the third quarter. I also wrote in the report that we have M&A ambitions there are two or three targets in Europe which are very interesting for us and we're having some type of dialogue with these players and of course it takes two to tango as they say so it's not enough that we want to buy the seller needs to be willing to sell as well but We expect some sort of progress in these discussions. So that was our presentation for today. And let's see if we have any questions and turns out that we do. So let's get started here. And as usual, these questions are We receive them as we speak, so to say, so we will need a little bit of time perhaps to read the question through and then come up with an answer. So I ask for a little bit of patience here. So. Here's a question just looking at the operating leverage here. It's really strong and going forward you expect costs while growing double digits, lower costs while growing double digits. Without giving any guidance, how do you think about balancing margins and growth? How much volume is needed to achieve the 7% margin you think? I think we can get some sort of guidance by looking at our historical numbers. So we were very close indeed to the 7% goal in in 2023, so that will give some type of indication. When it comes to balancing margins and growth, we are interested in growth mainly. This is something that we've, I think, said fairly clearly when it comes to our goals, so that is what we will prioritize. Can you tell us a bit more on Iris and the rollout plan? There is an app, an Instagram page and some influencers have started using the platform. But what is the plan here? Will influencers using a traction platform move to Iris or will this cater to a new audience? Well, I think, like I said in the presentation, what we've done here is we've demonstrated that the technology works, the platform works, everything works. So now we're ready to scale that. And the main idea is to recruit more influencers. Obviously, we will address influencers already on Adtraction's platform, but we have much bigger ambitions than that, which means that we also need to go outside what's in currently in our platform. Secondly, when it comes to brands, we will initially only work with Adtraction brands, Adtraction customers, and then we will see where we go from there. Again, this is a long term project and we're sort of trying different things. And when something sticks, we will go for that. Congrats on the affiliate future acquisition. Seems like it's paying itself really quickly. The other two, three companies you're looking at, can you tell us anything about what kind of size you're looking at and what kind of financing you would prefer? Given your cash flow profile, you should be able to take on that. So I'm not going to say... anything I think about the two to three companies specifically. What I can say is this. We are interested in the bolt-on acquisitions and we are looking at bigger strategic pieces like ad service. And when it comes to the financing, I think that we have a clear list of financing priorities here. So first of all, we want to use our own cash. This is what we've done for the bolt-on acquisitions. For bigger transactions, we use our own cash. and and after that we use debt and as a third choice we would issue new shares so cash debt and new shares that's it so we have acquired three percent can you tell us how the valuation is is evaluated and what KPIs dictate the valuation So I will not get into a super detailed discussion about this, but what I can say is that Adtraction had a right to acquire shares at this valuation according to a shareholders agreement, and we chose to exercise that right because we thought that it made sense. And of course, we have to ask ourselves, does that make sense, given the performance and growth of Bundler? And our answer was a clear yes, a clear yes. And yeah, the transaction implies a valuation of 100 million. And of course, this is our assessment. Not everyone needs to agree with this, but this is what we believe. And I believe we will get a good return on that. And then we have another question, sort of the same questions around bundlers. I'll skip that. So here's a familiar question. What is driving your organic growth is an increase in number of customers, a higher number of conversions per customer or a higher average revenue per commercial. I would say all of the above without breaking that down. This is a question I got last time, so we're trying to monitor that a little bit, but we are winning new accounts. We are seeing more transactions per customer and we are indeed seeing higher revenue per conversion, especially in the finance segment, I would say, especially in the finance segment. So here's an attentive reader. During your presentation at the Färsfärden, so I was there I think, when was that? A month or so ago, a little bit more probably. You mentioned that you had called off an acquisition. Could you elaborate on what happened and why the deal was cancelled? Terminated. So when we look at M&A, we first of all look at the customer base and the publisher base and the risk associated with that and how well that fits into our existing portfolio. So that had something to do with it. And also, I think that... the organizational setup of that company was not a perfect fit for us. I think that we have a lot of emphasis on local teams and that's the organizational structure that we prefer. Yeah. Given the destruction during the quarter, how should we think about headcounts going forward? Is the Q2 ending headcount of 123 a reasonable baseline for Q3? So we're actually employing a little bit here. And the need is going to look a little bit different in different markets. And I would expect the headcount to actually increase slightly. Do you agree with that, Andreas?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's also quite normal that going into the summer, it's a little bit lower and then we employed after the summer as well.

Yeah. Cool. So are you planning to launch exclusive offers or advertisers in Edis to attract more partners regarding? Yeah, I think we will try a lot of different things and to attract that. And the plan is under development, you could say. So regarding your new tiers, Is it a new approach for you to charge a monthly fee per customer? And how do you plan to compete for smaller self-managed customers when other affiliate networks typically only pay a percentage of ad spend without any fixed monthly fee? So I think we have been charging fixed fees. for a while and we will continue to do that. And I don't necessarily agree that other networks offer self-managed services without fixed fees. There's typically a fixed fee involved for quality networks where you reach quality publishers. So that's the... starting assumption and that's what the market looks like. So maybe someone will prefer to work with a smaller network without the fixed fee. That's fine. Then they will simply buy a different service. So I think that the market in general is moving towards fixed fees. What type of partners are driving your growth? One way of answering that is finance partners because we're such amazing finance growth. It's traditional finance partners. Then on the e-commerce side, it's a mix as always. I wouldn't say that anything stands out other than perhaps CSS, which has turned out to be a very important revenue driver for us. But again, it's a mix of publishers. So growth solely organic, according to your comments and additional points on affiliate futures reports performance. So no, Growth is not solely organic. What I said was that the bulk of the growth is organic and I think that Affiliate Future is performing. We are actually running a profitable operation there. in the UK and we have successfully migrated all accounts that we wanted to migrate, perhaps with one exception or so that is work on the progress. And yeah, so Affiliate Futures performing, I would say probably better than I expected going into this. We're not disclosing any growth rates at this point, but in general, we are very happy with this transaction. So how large are the potential M&A targets you aim for? So again, we're talking about two different tiers here. We're talking about... the bolt on acquisitions and you get some sort of guidance by looking at the table that I showed in the presentation. So there are targets like that and then there are bigger targets and I don't want to specify that because that would be a little bit too revealing, I think. And I don't want to reveal exactly who it is that we're talking to. Can you talk about your initiative for turning Spain around and how's it going? Well, we have a great team in Spain that's doing great things. And actually, they have turned things around, I would say. There's no big secret here. This is about providing value to partners and brands and keep doing that every single month. And of course, applying a little bit of new technology and innovation. And what our Spanish team has been very good at is working with API integrations for finance. On top of that, they've also successfully grown the e-commerce vertical, which has always been very small for us in Spain, but now things are happening there. We are seeing really strong growth rates, and at the same time, the finance vertical is stabilizing. So things are looking a lot better in Spain now than they have basically in, I would say, two years or so. So So the team has done good stuff there. And I think that's it. Anything you want to add, Andreas, before we close this?

No, we had a good quarter.

Yeah, a good quarter and a good growth. And thanks for listening, everyone, and have a good summer wherever you are. Thank you very much.