MAG Interactive AB (publ)

Welcome to MAG's Q3 report. So this is March through May that we're talking about today. And here to present today is myself, Daniel Hasselberg, CEO of MAG. And Magnus Sifo. So MAG, we are a mobile games developer and publisher. We are about a hundred people and been around for 10 years now. We have studios here in Stockholm and in Brighton. And we're doing free to play games for casual gamers. And today we're gonna talk about our record revenue. So we did the best quarter in the company history and also talk a bit about how the margins have improved over time. And talk about the ARPDAU journey. So how we're continuously improving our ARPDAU and some words about the currency and lockdown impacts that we've seen.

And this is referring to the strong US dollar we had a year ago and the influx of users in the lockdown period throughout Europe. Yeah.

And also mentioned a bit about our live operations and an update on the M&A side of the business. So if we start with the ARPDAU journey. So this is something we talked about for I think two and a half years now that we want to work on the average revenue per day the active user, which we call ARPDAU. It's a KPI where we see, have seen and still see a lot of potential. The picture we're looking at here is the development of the ARPDAU and the revenues for the last nine quarters. And there's a strong correlation we see here between the ARPDAU and revenues. And that's because we mostly have had a fairly stable user base. And then we improved on this important key metric which is the ARPDAU. And I'm very happy to see how this has been kind of a continuous improvement over time. And we also, as we mentioned in multiple reports lately that it's an improvement across the board in terms of game development. So all the teams have really helped improve their respective games and that's helped this continuously improve.

Yeah, this is also a good opportunity to see the effects from a year ago on the Q3 in 2020 with the bump in revenues we had from the influx of users in the pandemic. And it's part of the comparison story. We see this also in our audience KPIs, the DAO daily actives and the monthly active users where we had this influx a year ago and we're down 20% roughly this year. But mostly back to level we've been at in the last two years or so on both the DAO and the MAO metrics. And on the ARPDAU we're up 84% again. This time we're fairly evenly adding in app and adds revenue to our ARPDAU. And it's a cross portfolio improvement we're seeing. And of course a big effect in this improvement is from the migration of users in Q2 that we did during the winter

as well. And I think we sent out a press release like a year ago about the influx related to the lockdowns. We got about 25% bump in the EU back in March, April last year.

Yes. Yeah, on the financial KPIs we're reporting a record net sales 26% up year over year to 81 million SEC. And that's in the light also of currency headwind and the COVID effects we had. You can see the currency also in the US dollar growth which is 47% year over year. User acquisition is on similar levels and with a record contribution of 49 million we're also netting positive EBIT and positive cash flow in this quarter.

Yeah, that's great to see. And if we take a look at the EBITDA development or EBITDA margin development correlated to revenues this is something that you and I have talked about quite a bit over the last couple of years that we want to grow into a profitable situation. And that's, of course, what you want to see is that there's a correlation of revenue growth and margin improvement. So here's a view of that. So we can see that when the business is slightly larger you start to see these margins coming through. So the underlying business of games is really strong and we need to just grow into place with those profit margins come all the way to the bottom line. So this quarter we had a 19% EBITDA margin and a positive EBITDA as you mentioned. But something we also have talked about on and off for the last couple of years, various presentations is long term we think is reasonable to expect an EBIT margin of at least 20%. So that's something that we really are heading towards and aiming for over a long time. But then you see in this picture, for example, that some quarters we have opportunities to really double down on the user acquisition side and that of course affects the margins. So getting to the 20% EBITDA is a long term goal that we're kind of targeting. Yes, but just to recap this, I think it's really great to see the connection here between revenue growth and EBITDA margin improvement.

An important component in long term profitability is longevity and the long lifetime of our games. And we see a sign of that in our evergreen section of the product mix where we have Russell nearing 10 years and we have Word Brain around seven years old. And we also added Word Bubbles and Word Whistle this year. These are games that we've come back to in all our presentations, but they have long term audiences with stable dials, stable revenues, typically supported by LiveOps. And we're most likely adding Word Bubbles and Word Whistle to that as well. And it's an important contribution driver for the business since there's no marketing behind these games either.

And also that they are operated by a very small team in our Brighton studios. It's very cost efficient in that way. But they're also doing great work in terms of running these events and really focusing on improving engagement and ARPDA in those games. And at the same time, as an added benefit of moving games to LiveOps, we free up more developers and artists and designers to work on new games. So I think the white part of this picture, the new games, that's where we have now more people than in a very long time working on what's going to be the growth drivers for MAG in 2022 and 2023. So it's super exciting to have more development going on in that space. And then, of course, most of our time and effort go into the growth part where we have our strongest games, where we can invest in user acquisition and we also invest in kind of further feature development and content development and so on. So it's a really well balanced picture and a lot of excitement around the new stuff that we're building as well. So a couple of words on the M&A side. So we have done acquisitions of both IPs and studios over the last seven, eight years or so. The last two acquisitions were Primetime and Apprope. So Primetime we acquired in September last year, so first month of this financial year. And in addition to running the Primetime standalone service, the big driver here is to integrate LiveTrivia into new QuizDuel. So as of March, so basically for the full quarter of this financial year, Q3, we've been live in the German market with QuizDuel Live, as we call this feature. So what we've been able to see is an eight cent art dow for people who play the QuizDuel Live feature. So now the big thing is to get the adoption rate high. So that if we get a big chunk of the user base to take part in QuizDuel Live, these eight cents will affect a bigger part of the user base and push the entire art dow up. So what we're lacking now in terms of the QuizDuel Live feature is real money rewards. So that's something we have in Primetime that we've seen worked really great for that service. So now we're integrating with a payment provider to be able to pay out money in the German market, and that's been lagging a bit. So what we're doing now is we're taking a break and relaunching again after the German vacation period. We don't think we're going to get good enough attention if we launch it in the middle of vacation. So hopefully second part of August, we go live with real money prices and really launch it with a big bang within the game. And then it's all about getting this adoption rate up. So it's a very exciting part

for us. Exactly. And for a probe, we passed one million downloads for Word of Mansion, which is generally an important milestone for us in all game launches. And that's on the back of effective UA throughout the spring. So we're happy about displaying that ability for this game.

And other stuff about M&A. So of course, we are continuously in discussions and it's exciting to see how many interesting studios there are out there. And we are in active dialogues with several studios. And of course, M&A is about timing and the stars aligning and all that stuff. So you never know when you actually get to do an acquisition, but it's great to see that there's still a lot of interesting and interested companies out there that we can continue to talk to. So some areas that we're focusing on right now as a company. So we're still super excited about the ARPDOT potential in QuizDuel. So in addition to QuizDuel Live that we talked a lot about, we also have other features in development for QuizDuel. So we're going to test a new single player mode in the game, hopefully during the summer here. So it's exciting to see what that can do. And just in general, it's our biggest game in terms of DAUs. And of course, that means that's the highest potential for an improvement of ARPDOT has a big effect and something that I like to emphasize is also that when that effect happens across the audience, it actually goes all the way to the bottom line quickly because it's not correlated with any user acquisition. So it's a very kind of profitable improvement if we can make that happen. And then of course, the growth games, we continuously want to invest more in both user acquisition and development and the live ops part as we mentioned. Very profitable, great working team and freeing up people to work on new games. So I think that's it for our walkthrough of the report. We'll open up for any questions right now and then also throughout the day. If you don't have the opportunity to see this live or don't send the questions right now, you can send questions on Twitter and we'll respond to that throughout the day. So, but let's see if we have any questions we can also take right now. Just pulling that window up where we can see the questions. So first one I see here is how our mobile gaming M&A multiples developing currently any IDFA impact at all so far. So I think the M&A that you can see happening publicly, for example, EA did an acquisition of Playdemic I think recently. I don't know if they have released the actual revenues, but I saw a report when they tried to deduct it from Sensor Tower and that was pretty high multiples, like five, six times revenues. So, but it's of course case to case and will be depending on profitability and so on. We generally don't take part in any kind of bidding wars over studios. It's more of this long-term relationship building and figuring out like why would we be the best buyer and best partner and do we feel like we want to work together for many years. So it's usually not these multiples that we focus so much on. It's just figuring out if this is a good partnership. On the IDFA side, I haven't seen anything. I think if I just talk generally about the M&A landscape related to IDFA, I think the biggest thing is that we see some of the really big players in mobile games have started buying up advertising networks and like it's a different kind of ecosystem play, but we haven't seen it on game studios. Okay, would you consider your current valuation still too low to raise new capital or equity? So I think if we see an opportunity, that means that we should and need raise money or use our stock as a currency, we will definitely do that now. So we're ready to look at that if that makes sense. So I think we're in a much better place from that perspective. Okay, great, 30-turn profitable. Can we now count on that being the new normal for MAG? And what about the margin goal? What's the timeline? So this is basically, I mean, it's great to see that we're profitable. We have positive cash flow. The bank account is increasing. That's great stuff. And the EBIT margin goal, that's something we really strive for. But I think it's really important to stress that that's a long-term thing that we aim for. If we want to move in that direction, then quarter to quarter things will happen. We will always act with the long-term in mind. And it's great to have that ability, not have to be super short-term and optimize for the next couple of months. So when we see opportunities to grow, we will do that, but always with a long-term profitability in mind. But it's hard to state a specific timeline. There are so many moving parts in a mobile games company. New games that are coming, is it the same niche or something new? So we're definitely developing games in multiple categories. And we've done that over the years as well, looking at kind of adjacent categories, too. But still, we believe that we can find these casual gamers. Most of the development focusing on multiplayer games, we believe in the kind of this long-term retention strength of having users interacting with each other. But we're not kind of category-focused. We're more audience-focused. Learnings gained by seeing the growth boost of word management. So this has been really exciting, both just to work with the Approbe team and see how well they fit in with Mag. And also, of course, that we can learn from each other. I think we've seen some improvements in, for example, their evergreen titles, just from interacting with our live operations team. In the other direction as well, some of the stuff they've done with the marketing around Word Mansion has been really interesting to see. So I think when it comes to storytelling in ads and working with having more exciting dynamics in the ads, for example, is something we now take inspiration from and want to see if we can make work, for example, for WordC as well. It's a hyper-competitive landscape in user acquisition. You really need to figure out and learn as quickly as you can. So it's good to have another studio and inspiration.

Have you considered increasing the payback time of your UA spending? What's the next one? Yeah, you can do that. That's a good question. We have stated a six to nine month-ish payback time, generally towards the sixth month. But it's not a fixed time, per se. We always evaluate all the games. We market. So it can go longer, I think. With a game with a really long-term monetization and a strong retention, it can go up from that. But we're still operating most of our spending within that range, I'd say. But we definitely consider that from time to time and from case to case.

I think it's good if you look from the outside and think about our UA. It's good to have those kind of six months in mind as kind of a rough estimate. Yeah. Good. I think that's it. And again, if you have any other questions, of course, you can try and use Twitter and send us questions. And we will answer that so everyone can see what we respond. Great. Thank you for watching. Thank you.