G5 Entertainment AB (publ)

for the attendee list to fill up. You will see on the screen here that you will be in listening view mode only for the start of the call and the presentation. After we finish up the presentation, we're going to a Q&A session. where you can either raise your hand and ask your questions or you can also type them into the Q&A box that is available in Zoom. As you open up that, you can type in your questions and we'll answer those as we get to them.

All right. It seems like everyone has come on the call.

So welcome, everyone, to our second quarter results. My name is Stefan Wikstant. I'm the CFO of G5 Entertainment. With me, I have Vlad Suglibo, our CEO as well. Unfortunately, Vlad is traveling today, so he has a bit of a poor connection. So I will walk through the presentation. and go through that part, and he will be available for the Q&A that we'll get to afterwards. We expect the presentation to take roughly 10 to 15 minutes before we get into the Q&A. So we'll start with some of the highlights from this report. And we are rather happy with the sequential dynamic. In USD, revenue declined by only 1.7%. in what normally is a seasonally slower quarter, Q2. If we look at the USD performance, which is more relevant to us, we are primarily a USD business. We saw a decline of 11% in USD terms year over year, much better than the corresponding figure in the first quarter. If we compare it to the Q1 USD dynamic, this is quite important. And if we look at the portfolio in more detail, our actively managed portfolio of games only shrank 0.2% sequentially in USD terms. And Sherlock revenue was actually up 2.4% from Q1 to Q2. This performance was driven by the improvements that were made in the game and the increased UA spending that we did in the quarter. The Jules family of games delivered a relatively stable performance in the quarter. And of course, the team will be working on making improvements to those games that can change their dynamic, just like they did with Sherlock. Use acquisition was 18% of revenue, back within our previously communicated range of 17 to 22%. Up from 17% last year, but only 15% in the first quarter. So this has been achieved by expanding the number of UA channels and the volume of acquisition on the back of the improvements that we did on existing games, specifically Sherlock Down. G5 Store continues to show strong growth and now makes up 23% of our net revenue compared to only 15% a year ago. And thanks to the continued success of G5 Store, gross margin reached a record 70% up from 67.8% last year. In the quarter, we paid the annual dividend of 62.2 million SEC, which is eight SEC per share, which was the same as last year. But despite this, our cash position at the end of the quarter stood at a strong 247 million SEC, up from 196 million last year. As you may have noticed in the report, and it's kind of going through all the numbers that we look at, this quarter was impacted by the substantial and continued weakening of the US dollar and the strengthening of the Swedish krona, which affects our reported numbers. And in addition to having an impact on the reported turnover, it also has an impact on earnings and specifically on this revaluation that we do over operational assets and liabilities. And this quarter was impacted by minus 10 million SEC on these other operating cost lines. And that impacts the earnings quite drastically. But we remain debt free. We continue to have a strong, solid cash flow. And that is something that we're very, very proud of. If we then move ahead a bit and talk about the G5 store, which is our third largest source of revenue or platform. And during the quarter, it accounted for 23.3 of total net revenue, which is up significantly from the 15.2% that we had last year. And G5 store continues to build momentum. despite a much larger size than a year ago. So gross revenue growth in USD terms was 38.5% year-over-year and 8% sequentially, which is a significant pace of growth and one of the fastest we've had for G5 Store in any given quarter. As you know, one of the key advantages of the G5 Store is the lower payment processing fees, which are in the low single digits. This is in stark contrast to the 12 to 30% fees that we typically charge by third-party application stores such as Apple App Store and Microsoft Store. This cost efficiency directly contributes to our improved profitability and the expansion of our gross margin. Last quarter, we mentioned that G5 Store has a significant opportunity to scale its revenue by licensing and distributing third-party games that are or were successful on mobile platforms. We're currently working on the technical preparation for third-party developers to be able to distribute their games on G5 Store. The goal is to release the first games from other developers on G5 Store before the end of the year. This will bring much desired incremental revenue to mobile game developers while further expanding our reach and scale of the G5 Store operations. G5 Store is now at the size where its strong continued growth may start positively affecting the overall top line dynamic from the sheer size of the store. If we then go ahead and looking at the gross margin and what is leading up to that, the owned games accounted for over 72% of net revenue and active owned games accounted for 62% of total net revenue up from 59% last year. And this is then excluding Mahjong Journey that was put into harvest mode in Q1, but it's reflecting a strong performance from our in-house Hytos. Our gross margin, as mentioned before, would reach a record high of 70%, up from 67.8% a year ago, thanks to the G5 Store's growth. Our monthly average gross revenue per paying user reached an all-time high of 68.9 USD, a new record and significantly higher than last year's figures of 63.7 USD. And this number reflects the improvements of the underlying quality of the audience, where we see a shift to having a smaller number, but of higher paying users. And this is also primarily driven by the growth of G5 Store. If we then move to the operating profit, the operating profit for the period came in at 5.6 million SEC compared to 21.8 million SEC last year. This is equal to an EBIT margin of 2.4%, which is down from last year. But as mentioned on the first slide here, the lower EBIT was mainly due to foreign exchange revaluations, specifically related to SEC USD fluctuations. And those amounted to 10 million SEC in this quarter compared to 3.4 million in the previous quarter. As we have mentioned before, we are primarily a USD business and most of our revenue and most of our expenses in the form of U expenses, royalty, et cetera, are in USD. However, we are reporting in SEC and being a USD operation means that we have the majority of our balance sheet in USD as well, which then needs to be revaluated to SEC upon reporting. And therefore, when the SEC USD rate moves fast, it causes these other operating income expenses to move and they can move quite drastically and can go both ways. And currently with the USD weakening, we see the negative results here in Q2 as well as we saw in Q1. But if we adjust for this negative impact from other income and expenses, our EBIT margin would have been 6.8%, which is a healthy margin for the quarter. At the same time, we saw that net capitalization impact on earnings was only minus 0.4 million SEC compared to minus 8.1 million SEC last year. Let's then move on to our cash position. which continues to be very strong. We have a capitalization impact on cashflow of minus 22.5 million SEC, which is a bit less than the minus 27.1 million SEC we had last year. That moves us into cashflow before financing activities, which was a solid 25.7 million SEC compared to 6.5 million last year. Total cash flow for the period was minus 38.8 million SEC, down from 66.3 SEC, or up rather, from a negative 56.3 SEC last year. And the quarter was heavily impacted, as it was last year, by the dividend payout of 8 SEC per share. And this year, that was a total of 62.2 million SEC that was paid out to the shareholders. Total cash at the end of the period was 247 million SEK compared to 196 million SEK last year. We move ahead to the status and outlook for the rest of the year. And looking ahead, we continue to maintain the healthy profitability as we've done over the years and looking forward to sustainable growth in the next half of 2025. We'll continue to make improvements to the active games to stabilize the top line and increase UI spend to facilitate growth. During the quarter, we made seven iterations on new games, of which one game, Twilight Land, is expected to launch global later this year. Our collaboration with third-party developer continues and want to be able to distribute their games on the G5 store with the goal to release the first games before the end of the year. We are strengthening our management team with expertise in development, marketing, and growth. And these strategic hires will be essential in ensuring that we stay on track with our long-term growth goals. Our focus on operational efficiencies remains a priority, and we continue to make improvements in our development funnel and our game evolution process with the aim of releasing one to two games globally per year. A key driver of our future growth is the rapid expansion of the G5 store. And as we grow the G5 web shop for direct payments and mobile users to G5 and leverage scalable distribution opportunities in G5 store, we expect a positive impact on both our top line and gross margin from the G5 store. In terms of user acquisition, we are taking a disciplined approach. We expect to stay in the range that we have indicated over the years of 17 to 22% for UA as a percentage of revenue, which will help us to continue optimizing growth while maintaining profitability. If we see opportunities for venturing outside of this UA range, we will communicate that to the market in advance, as we've said before. Throughout all of this, we maintain a strong financial discipline, generate solid cash flow, and we're proud of our very strong net cash position, which gives us the flexibility to execute on strategic initiatives and strengthen the foundation for future growth. We would like to end by thanking you for following G5 and also thanking the G5 team, obviously, for their outstanding efforts in the quarter. And that concludes our presentation for the day. And we are ready for opening up the Q&A. And as I said in the beginning, you can either raise your hand to ask questions verbally, or you can write them in the Q&A box if you have anything. We'll start here with Hjalmar Ahlberg from Redeye. Let's see. There we go. If you unmute, there you go.

Hi, thank you for taking my questions. Just curious, but you mentioned some improvement of scalability of games. Can you elaborate some on that? What are you seeing in terms of upside from that, from your existing portfolio?

I can probably take that a question. So my connection freezes sometimes randomly, so I apologize in advance if that happens. So the team was able to narrow down on what's driving user acquisition channel performance and understand better the underlying dynamics. So they've made changes to the games that align their performance more with the user acquisition channels. And that created the opportunity to expand the spending and kind of give the channels the opportunity to know better what kind of users are better for our games. So these were changes in the underlying mechanics of the games, but with the goal to improve the performance of user acquisition. And it did work out for Sherlock, so we're seeing increasing span. And the resulting performance of Sherlock Q1-Q2 is basically the result of that.

Right. And mentioning Sherlock there, I mean, it's been kind of a flattish development over the past year or so. Do you think you can see this moving back to growth from here on the back of these changes, maybe?

Well, we are hopeful that this will eventually happen. We have this first signs that this may be possible, but the next few months will show.

Right. And you mentioned the potential launch of Twilightland here before the year end. What kind of challenges or main things are you working on ahead of that potential launch?

Well, we are obviously working on the understanding of whether it's going to be scalable and also taking into account the positive experience that we just had with modifying ShareWork for better scalability. I could go deeper into this, but I would say the scalability is the main focus. We want to make sure that the game is launched with the best metrics possible for the successful marketing launch campaign. And this involves iterations. and measurements of metrics, acquiring users in smaller numbers to understand the way they interact with the game and whether or not we are on target when it comes to these metrics.

Understood. And looking at the potential with third-party games added here to G5 Store, What kind of ramp up would you see if that is launched before the year end? Will it be slow? And are there any kind of technical challenges or is it mainly just getting the content up to the store, so to say?

Well, usually the dynamic that we see in the store is quite gradual. I don't think we expect any explosive launches. But I think that having more games in the offering will help expand G5 store in the next few quarters. And it's still quite a bit early. We're going to begin with one or two games. and we'll see how it goes. But from experience, the growth in G5 Store is very stable, but also very gradual. So we haven't seen any big explosive releases. But instead, it's a very gradual, but very reliable growth over many quarters. And this is what we will aim with these new games as well.

Got it. And looking at your game pipeline here, you had a decrease of the games in early stage. Is this kind of the natural flow or anything specific impact that? I mean, is it that you have a lack of new ideas or is it a lot of games being cancelled or cut in an early stage?

Well, we certainly don't have lack of ideas. If we go to the ideal level, we are counting tens of ideas in a quarter. It's more of a natural flow where we do some pre-marketing testing and development of the concepts with more marketability testing. And then some of these concepts get thrown out. And some games that even make it to the soft launch, they are sometimes getting thrown out. I would say it's just a normal process. It will go a little bit up, a little bit down. There's nothing to be worried about. And we are providing this illustration just to show there is work going on under the hood, right? We're active.

I see. And also a final question. I mean, you have continued to have a strong balance sheet. I guess, as you say, the market is still challenging. Do you see any potential to do M&A here? I mean, is that something you would consider to improve growth as well?

Yeah, we are open. We are looking at opportunities that come our way, but there's not much more to say.

Correct. Thank you. Thank you. Then we have Simon Jansson from ABG.

Good morning, guys. Can you hear me? Yes, we hear you. Good to hear, good to hear. So first, a couple of more follow-ups on Twilight Land. Could you maybe talk a bit more about... the sort of changes you have made to the game since you first announced it?

I missed most of your question, unfortunately. I heard Twilight Land and then changes.

So I was just wondering if you could talk a bit about the changes you have made to it since you announced it the last time.

Yeah. I can go into... deeper detail, but basically it's about providing certain information points and achieving that to, to the user acquisition channel and also achieving certain lifetime value, or you can call it average revenue per user by a certain day. So our work was focused on comparing White Light Land to Sherlick and making sure that it delivers or over delivers on the key performance indicators of Sherlick. But now that the Sherlock has been taken to sort of a new level in the last quarter, the bar has been raised for Twilight Land as well. So right now the focus is on how do we make sure Twilight Land is even better than Sherlock when it launches. So that's, and then it seems like a rather simple thing. But when you start looking into the details, then of course, game mechanics are an important part of that. And meta mechanics are an important part of that and changing that and trying different combinations is a time-consuming work and also just the number of iterations and every time you need to measure the results and make conclusions from that. So it just takes time to try different things and see what works best and then settle on what we're going to go to the global launch with.

All right, thank you. And maybe you said or talked about this, and I may have missed it, but what quarter here in the second half should we expect the game to be released in?

Well, we said before the end of the year, so we hope to do it earlier than later. But we haven't committed to a specific date yet.

Got it. On the capital allocation, there was some talk about M&A here before and you have done some buybacks before. Can you give us an update on where you stand currently on buyback shares?

M&A is a very opportunistic thing. As you know, as we said, we do try from time to time. But buybacks are, I think, more reliable. They're always there as an option. So we are committed to continuing with the buybacks for sure. And M&A will take it opportunity by opportunity at least.

I see. Just a final one from me on the G5 store and allowing third parties on the platform as well. You know, those third party games that you will look to attract, how will you report that as sales? Will you report like the whole transaction as a revenue for you or will you sort of take as a platform fee as your revenue or how will that be accounted for?

Right. So this will not be different in terms of reporting at least. It won't be different from the way we report third-party games that we publish. So essentially, it's going to be the same. You will see some third-party royalty in the same line where you see it now. And the revenue from these games will go directly to our revenue and accounting for payment processing fees will be done exactly the same way as it's done now for our games.

To be said though, we haven't 100% completed the analysis because as the games aren't launched yet, we haven't reviewed the full terms and can make a full assessment of that before we see the final details of it. So we'll come back to that when we have some revenue to actually record and we can talk more about that when we get to that point.

I see. But the baseline sounds to be that you are sort of not just a pure distributor. You will be listed as sort of a publisher for the platform of that game.

Well, the nature of the distribution in the store is closer to publishing, I would say, rather than distribution. So, yes, I think that's the default point, and then we'll see it.

I see. All right. Thank you guys so much for that. That's all for me.

Thank you, Simon. Then we have a caller.

Sorry, I clicked the wrong button. Ross Jobber. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning. Thank you for taking the call. Ross Jobber from Edison Group in London. A couple of questions. I want to pick up on something interesting you said about a smaller number of higher paying customers. It's something you've noticed. And I wonder whether or not as you continue with your UA investment, do you see the nature of that UA investment changing if the customer base is concentrating, if I can call it that? So that's my first question.

Yes, it is exactly what's happening. As you know, organic users or organic traffic is virtually zero. And it's been declining over the years. So there's more and more Um, users were brought in by, by the paid acquisition and the, as the average prices, uh, go up in the ecosystem, what, what what's happening is that we're sort of getting a smaller number, but, uh, profitable, still profitable users. And when you look at the, the underlying mathematics, um, You know, it's as if five years ago you were buying users, let's say, for $2, hoping to make $4 on average from the cohort, on average per user. Nowadays, numbers can be, you know, you're paying $20 and you're hoping to make $4. And the math actually works. But you end up getting fewer users. It's just that the user acquisition system is getting much more economical, should I say. It's driving more relevant users, basically. And we see that across a number of acquisition channels. And as a result, sort of the user acquisition system kind of sends fewer users our way. but it's still profitable. So if you imagine the total number of users, like 100% and only 10% being the paying customers, you can imagine it as an increase of the number of paying users in the audience that we are receiving, or also as a refinement of the type of paying customer that we are receiving, because it's a whole another dimension where We have users that pay tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, or thousands of dollars over the years. So our games tend to be very performing for a long period of time. People play them for a year or two or three or four, and more in some cases. And so in my view, the ecosystem sort of figures out how to recognize these users and send them far away. And that's essentially the goal of the user acquisition ecosystem, right? To try to find the most valuable users for the business and send them their way. And if you can find a user that is likely to play these games for a long period of time and make a lot of money, then such business will be able to pay a large amount of money to acquire such users. So I think this dynamic has been going on for a while in the mobile ecosystem. And that's why you see average price of acquiring a user go up over time. It doesn't mean that... It doesn't mean that the business is becoming less profitable fundamentally. All it means is that the user acquisition ecosystem is learning how to deliver the most relevant users to the business. So I think that's a reflection of that dynamic. Plus, we also see that on G5 Store, probably because of the larger screen and generally better experience with our games, players tend to spend more money. They tend to be more loyal players. And we achieve the numbers that we achieve through G5 Store with a much smaller number of players and much smaller audience than we have on mobile stores. And so as the share of G5 Store grows in total revenue, we also see that the average quality of the audience improves and that through that we have this dynamic where we have a declining audience on one hand, but the declining audience is compensated by the increased revenue per average user. So I hope I answered your question.

Yeah, thank you. I wanted to come on to G5 Store, if I may, and particularly the potential of G5 Store for your own games. Obviously, there are many facets of the G5 Store opportunity. And I don't know whether or not this is something, well, I'm sure you have modelled it. I don't know if you can share with it. If in the first half of the year that you've just reported, you had sold the proportion of own games through G5 as you think you are ultimately able to do, what sort of impact would that have had on gross margins? Are we talking about one or 200 basis points more if I mean, and this may take many years to achieve? I'm not I'm not saying it's it's tomorrow's story. But you know, is it as it has it got sort of 500 1000 basis points of upside to gross margin? Just as far as your own games are concerned to say I know g5 store will also be about third party games. Can you give us some idea of of what the potential is for gross margins on your games sold through the store ultimately?

Well, we have about the same proportion between owned and published games on G5 Store as on other channels. There's no store fees, right? So the reason our gross margin is increasing over time is exactly because the G5 Store is becoming a larger percentage of the total revenue. And, you know, it's no longer a small base, right? We're talking about roughly quarter total revenue growing with almost 40% year over year, not slowing down. So in the next few years, I think the impact of this growth in G5 store will be much more prominent on the overall top line, and this will further improve our gross margins. um with regard to third-party titles of course the um the gross margins will if we if we um classify royalty the way we do now for third-party titles then this can have a you know suppressing effect on our gross margins but it will be very profitable anyway and we'll um just because it will speed up the growth of g5 store and um You know, it's, it's just a way to do, to do, to do more business with, uh, faster and, uh, fewer capital outplays.

Okay, thank you. And my final question, apologies. Just what is your primary, to the extent you do M&A in the future, what is your primary target? Is it acquiring games? Is it acquiring customers? Is it geographic? Is it acquiring, I don't know, studios and personnel? You know, if you had to say what your number one priority, if you do do an acquisition, what would that be?

Well, we have several, um, several ideas of what, what would work. Um, but obviously we, we have an advantage of having this extra distribution channel that the G5 store, um, and, um, we have the advantage of being very experienced with the distribution of games on personal computers where everyone is sort of looking right now in the mobile ecosystem. So I think games that do overlap in terms of the audience are most interesting because this is where the cross-selling opportunities are possible and the synergy with our existing portfolio, but also You know, we could bring games to the new market, especially if these games are not very, very successful in personal computers at the moment. So our thinking is centered around that, basically, and more or less the same genres appealing to the same demographic.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you, Ross.

If anyone else wants to ask a question, you're free to raise your hand or also type them into the Q&A box. We have a double whammy in the Q&A from Erik Larsson at SCB. I think we answered the first one. Partially before, but the question was 2% revenue decline, quote-unquote, and USD with higher user acquisition. Is it something extraordinary in Q2, or should we read this as an opportunity to grow the existing portfolio near term?

Yeah, it's the latter. It's the latter. We've increased UA spend because we've improved the situation with Sherlock and we hope to make the same improvements in other games. It's not as straightforward, not as simple, but we're working towards it.

And the second part of that question was on third-party games for the G5 store. Obviously difficult to quantify the potential impact, but will you introduce new games cautiously, or should we see noteworthy revenue already in Q4 or H126?

As I mentioned, we'll start with one or two, and we'll see. So we are interested ourselves whether or not it's going to work out as we imagine it would, but... There is great interest, I think. The growth is very strong in G5 Store. I'm quite confident we can distribute more games there. So we'll start with one or two. And if the results are going to be positive, I'm sure other games will follow.

OK.

Thank you for that, Vlad. We have no one raising their hands. We have no questions in the Q&A box either. And so I guess we'll wrap up the Q&A session there. Vlad, any final remarks?

Not really. Thank you, everyone, for participating. Sorry for any issues with the connection. Great. Thank you, everyone.

See you next time. Thank you. Bye.