Modern Times Group MTG AB (publ)

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our live stream for our second quarter 2024 results. This event is hosted by our group president and CEO, Maria Redin, and our CFO, Nils Möskow. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you are watching through the live stream, please use the questionnaire feature to submit your questions. If you are dialing in by phone, please follow the instructions of the operator when the presentation section of the call is over. I now hand over to our CEO, Maria. Maria, over to you.

Thank you, Anton, and welcome everybody to our Q2 results for this year. Looking at the quarter and our Q2 results, you can see that our Q2 result shows that we're progressing well towards our guidance for the full year. We've had in the quarter a strong profitability and cash flow generation, and we have made sure to maintain marketing discipline while we get ready to scale our marketing again in the second quarter of the year, or second half of the year and onwards. In the quarter, we reported sales of 1.4 billion kronor in a softer Q2, and that is corresponding to a decline of 1% in constant currencies. Our Q2 was focused on operation execution and a wide range of initiatives to improve our momentum during the rest of the year. We are facing a challenging market environment. If you're looking on the ad side of things, Google's transition to real-time bidding for the digital inventory has resulted in lower eCPM levels for our advertising business. We are of course working hard to explore what we can do to mitigate these effects, but this is just the new reality of the digital ad markets. On the in-app purchase side of things, we have not seen any change in the overall trends that we have observed now for quite some time. The mid-core segment is and will continue to remain extremely competitive. And that means that we, of course, need to remain laser focused on our operations and execution to ensure that we retain and entertain the customers and players who choose to spend the time and money in our games. Again, looking at Q2, we reported another quarter of very strong profits. Our adjusted EBITDA was up 7% year-over-year in Q2 to 426 million kronor, and our operating margin increased to 30% in the quarter. We also, again, reported an all-time high adjusted EBITDA on a 12-month rolling basis, which we're very proud of. Our strong profits were primarily driven by lower short-term user acquisition spend in Play Simple, primarily in April and May, along with lower UAS spend in InnoGames. If you look down at operations, we feel that they continue to be robust. Our business model has a strong optionality to deliver high returns in period when we're getting ready to scale up to growth again. As I said, the execution across the businesses remains very high. And that means also that we remain confident in delivering our full-year outlook of 1-5% reported growth, excluding currency effects, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 26-29%. Moving on to the next slide and looking at our sales, that was down 1% year-over-year in constant currencies. We have currently 37 live games in our portfolio, and that also includes the newly launched and upcoming titles in the pipeline. As said, while our Q2 sales were somewhat softer overall, we also saw more positive dynamics at the end of the quarter, which is important to highlight. We talked about the challenges PlaySimple have had, but they did actually grow year over year again in June, and that is thanks to the localization of the two current popular word games and an increased focus across the company on data science and AI to accelerate their execution, both towards existing and new customers. Snowprint overall had a very strong quarter and continued to successfully scale Warhammer 40K Tacticus. And that has now grown so well, so it's now our third largest game. And we're very excited to see how it's progressing. And looking also at Hutch, who you know have had some tough quarters behind them, they're now showing better trends. And thanks to the successful reset of Formula One Clash, they also had a very strong finish of the quarter. Drilling then down one level further and looking at our franchise sales. If you're then looking at the word game franchise, sales were down 6% year over year in constant currencies, and it was down 5% from Q1. The performance reflected the effect that the Google move to real-time bidding has had on digital inventory on the ECPM levels. During the quarter, they have launched localized version of both Crossword Jam and Word Search in several countries. And the games are scaling well in terms of install, DAOs, and revenues in these tours, which are very exciting to see, and that also helped us going out of the quarter. So thanks to these efforts, PlaySimple saw improvements in its revenue momentum, as I said, towards the end of the quarter, with June sales franchises were actually up year over year. Looking then at our strategy simulation franchise, sales were up 20% year-over-year in constant currencies, driven by the consolidation of Snowprint in December last year and the ongoing scaling of Warhammer 40k Tacticus franchise. Franchise revenues were however down 4% from Q1 this year and Tacticus received many updates during the quarter and continue to have a very active pipeline going forward which includes a games two-year anniversary event which we all look forward and we also come with more playable characters. Indie Games on their end had a softer Q2 and their sale was down from last year, as the events now in Q2 didn't reach the same high level and the uplift that we achieved last year. Also worth mentioning as we look forward for Indie Games, last Q3 we had very tough comps because we had some of our most successful events in June, July last year, which means going into the new quarter, even though we are expecting Indie Games to continue to improve their performance, it's going to be tough comps. Looking at the end of games and their efforts to make sure we continue to improve performance, they have now added a second team to Forge of Empires that will focus on growth initiatives. And on top of that, they're also launching new Guild Raid features that is designed to drive revenues and engagement between the major events that we're having once per month. Moving on to tower defense franchises, they were down 10% year-over-year in Q2, but they were also up 3% versus Q1. The franchise continues to be affected by the lower intake of new customers we saw in the beginning of the year, although the inclusion of the blue TD6 in the April steam sale mitigates that somewhat. BTD6 was also included in the summer sale on Steam, which turned out to actually become our second highest, most successful download event that we've had together with Steam, which was really exciting to see. Nidakibi also tried some new things in the quarter, where they tested a major influencer campaign with MrBeast. He is one of the biggest YouTube stars in the world. And the campaign helped to reactivate already existing players in BTD6, and it also drove in our purchases in the quarter. Ninja Kiva continued to add strong content to BTD6 and has an exciting pipeline for the rest of the year, and that includes both a new tower as well as new features enabling players to generate and share their own in-game content in the games. The racing franchises were stable year over year and were up 26% on a sequential basis in constant currencies. The improved performance was driven by a well-executed season reset of Formula 1 Clash. And we're also starting to see a positive momentum from the new game NASCAR Manager, but the revenue contribution is still quite limited as the game was launched in February this year. Moving on then to the new games pipeline. Of course, we talked about our franchises and our day-to-day focus remains, of course, making sure that we continue to entertain the players in our established games. But new games are crucial to drive our long-term growth. We're therefore really excited to see our strong pipeline on new games that we actually have across all the studios. Some of the new games are already available in the App Store, so you can actually play them, but they're not yet full commercial launch, which means we don't deploy that much UA behind them. And these games includes three new games from Play Simple, Time Match, Word Trip, Search, and Two Square 2048. And we further have two new titles from Hutch, just mentioned one of them, NASCAR Manager, and Forza Customs. And they've been around for a while, so we are now iterating the games based on the data that we gathered from the launch. For these new games, once we see the right performance, which we hope to see now coming through in H2, we will begin to accelerate UA spend in the second half of the year. Ninja Kiwi is also due to launch BTD6 on PlayStation in Q3 and on Switch in Q4. And that is following the successful launch we saw on Xbox last year in Q3. We also look forward to the launch of several brand new titles. The first one out, we expect Indie Games to launch a fully revamped successor to Rise of Culture, now in Q3. And thereafter, we do expect Nidekiwi to launch Bloons Card Store, and that is a new collectible card game. And that launch will expand on the Bloons IP franchise to a new title and also add a new genre to our portfolio. In addition, Nidakivi also have two more titles in the pipeline and they plan to launch the first of them hopefully at the end of the year and the next one to come next year. Looking then at some of our more detailed KPIs and performance indicators, we generated 61% of our revenues from in-app purchases in Q2 and 33% from advertising. This is a slight short-term shift from the previous quarters, which reflects the advertising environment I mentioned earlier, together with the addition of Snowprint Games to our portfolio. Looking at our daily active users, they were down both year over year and sequentially, and this is mainly driven by the divestment of Congregate in Q1 this year. If then looking at our DAO excluding Congregate, it is only down slightly from both Q2 last year and also from Q1 this year. And this is then reflecting the higher DAOs in the word game being offset by lower DAOs in the other franchises. Looking then at the average revenue per daily user, or ARPDA, that was up 11% year over year, and this is again mostly driven by the divestment of Kongigate, which primarily had lower ARPDA customers, but also then from strategy simulation and tower defense, where ARPDA was up from Q2 last year, and sequentially, and while raising, ARPDA was up significantly from Q1. So now with that, I will then hand over to Nils, who will take us through the user acquisition, profitability and the financials.

Thank you, Maria. We spent a total of 470 million SEC on user acquisition in the quarter and just under 2.2 billion SEC during the last 12 months. This represents 33% of revenues in Q2, down from 39 last year, and 35% in the first half of this year, which was down from 40% last year H1. And if we look at the rolling 12-month period, we spent around 36% of revenues on UA. The main drivers of this decline was lower investment into UA at PlaySimple during the first two months of Q2 as they continued to work on localization of established games and optimizing their new titles. We saw, however, positive effects of this work already in June when PlaySimple began slowly increasing UA spend again. which enabled them to also report a year-over-year revenue growth in June. We continue to have a disciplined approach to marketing, as you can see, but we also are flexible and can rapidly scale up marketing spend again when we see the opportunities. This provides us our business model with optionality to deliver high profits and margins for our shareholders in periods when we prepare for growth. But it also means that we can invest more into UA when the time is right to scale our business again. Looking at profits, adjusted our operating margin increased by 7% year over year in Q2 to 426 million sec and was up 25% in H1. The 12-month rolling adjusted EBITDA again was at an all-time high, so we reported an increased operating margin of 30% in the quarter and 28% for the first half of the year. This time, the main driver of our high margin in Q2 was lower UA spend, driven by our disciplined approach to marketing, but our performance was also supported by a focus on cost control. This obviously reflects the high optionality in our business as mentioned before, but our ambition is of course to begin investing more into growth when we see the right opportunities. We also continue to have a healthy cash generation and cash conversion levels. We reported a free cash flow of 295 million SEC in Q2, which enabled us to deliver a high cash conversion of 66% for the rolling 12-month period. This is higher than our guidance of 50 to 60%. This quarter we had positive working capital effects, both in the quarter and for the rolling 12-month period. And in the quarter we had positive effects on both the payables and receivables. And it's good to keep in mind that these time effects may vary between quarters. We also had significantly lower capex in the quarter, around 1.5% of revenues, driven both by the divestment of congregate in Q1, but also because we are ending in a capex cycle where several of our new games are developed and on soft launch. All this enabled us to deliver a high cash conversion level of 66% for the last 12-month rolling period. With that, back to you, Maria.

Thank you, Nils. So we will shortly then move on to QA. But before that, I want to summarise where we are today. While we did report lower sales in the quarter, we did also at the end of the quarter see strong improvements in the momentum, which of course makes us excited as we look into the second half of the year. PlaySimple was able to cautiously start scaling UA and grew revenues year over year in June, thanks to the two new localised games. Hutch, on their end, saw a strong performance on back of the Formula One Clash season reset. In addition, as I mentioned, we also had our second most successful steam sale ever for Ninja Kiwi at the end of the quarter, which onboarded many new customers for them. We also report, as Nils said, another quarter of strong profits and margins, which converts to high cash levels and cash flow thanks to the leverage in our business models. We therefore are confident in and reiterate our outlook for the full year, both on the revenue growth and the EBITDA margins. We have a strong cash position, further bolstered by our ongoing cash generation, and we will continue to buy back shares under the 400 million kronor share buyback program that runs until the end of April next year. At the same time, M&A remains to be an important part of our strategy and we will continue to look for the right opportunities to expand our portfolio. But it's important to remember that we have always been and we will continue to be highly selective in our approach to make sure we find the right companies to join our gaming village. When we look at our companies, we generally feel that we have a high-quality gaming portfolio of games to play and an exciting pipeline of new titles planned for the coming six months and beyond. And speaking to our teams, they are all highly motivated to continue to provide players around the world with the games they love. And the way we look at it, that is a great foundation for long-term sustainable growth, and that brings us excitement as we look forward. And with that, I want to thank you for following us, and we now look forward to take your questions.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Simon Johnson from ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Maria Nils. First a question on your growth guidance of one to five percent constant currency growth assuming an M&A contributing around four percent this year the organic growth should be around minus three to plus one percent and I think you are somewhere around the midpoint of that in the first half of this year. Should we expect the second half to be sort of a mirror of the first half, meaning mid single digit negative growth here in Q3 and positive in Q4, or how should we think about that?

Yeah, hi Simon and thanks for the question. I mean we don't want the guide isolated in quarters and I know it does become we have guide on reported but then you have a M&A driven part which is no prints and of course you also divested Kong which you need to remember and they are also in the Q4 numbers for this year and then we have underlying organics. So the way we look at it is we want to make sure that the second half of the year is much stronger than the first half of the year and which normally, remember, Q4 is the seasonally strongest quarter. And looking also at the momentum, we are leaving Q2. I mean, that gives us comfort that sequentially we aim to grow Q3 versus Q2, and then we should grow Q4 versus Q3. And I think that's what we're aiming for.

All right. Thank you. And to follow up on that, how dependent do you think you will be on... on the potential sequential improvements both in Q3 but also mainly in Q4 from new game releases.

No, I think that will be this year quite marginal, even though it's exciting for us to launch them and see the traction on them. And I think they look great, but seeing is believing. So the main foundation of us driving the improved performance is the live ops and the events we have with existing games. And of course, also then the localization of the already existing games that we have in Play Simple. Remember, they have today the vast majority of the revenues in the US, which means that the rest of the world is an addressable market for them. And then the new games, of course, should then bring value to 2025 and onwards.

Thank you. And turning to PlaySimple, the world game segment delivered lower sales in the quarter, but you said it grew in June, at least year over year. Can you say something about the drivers behind that, the sequential improvements?

Absolutely. I think the Google changes are what they are, which meant that the eCPMs are down. And I think that's just the new reality we live in, short term at least, which means that the growth comes from these new initiatives where they worked really hard, both adding new features to the existing games that they're having through AI, which speeds up their execution from an already high level. And I think the other really exciting part is the localization, which was the main driver, which also allowed us to scale up marketing still quite strong sort of in June versus the levels that we saw in April and May.

Thank you. And one last from me on the cost side. I understand that marketing costs or spending will correlate with the sales growth, but looking at the other costs and optimizations, should we expect other costs to remain stable here or increase slightly or how should we view that?

Yeah, I think you can assume that to be stable.

All right. Thank you, Nils. Thank you, Maria, as well. That's all for me.

Thank you. The next question comes from Martin Arnell from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, Maria, Nils and Anton. Good morning. My first question is a follow up on the Google changes there. Can you elaborate on what Play Simple have done to try to mitigate it? And do you think it will be a drag that follows us this year and next year?

Yeah, no, it's a good question. I think that right now, the way that they try to mitigate it is to get new revenues. And I think that's where the focus lies to make sure they, instead of only focusing on improving the isolated eCPM levels through the bidding systems, they are finding how can we make the customers more engaged to retain them for a longer period of time, which comes back to the different AI initiatives and live ops in the existing games. And the other part is how can we reach a completely new audience? which has actually done the localization that they quite successfully were able to scale up in the end of the quarter. And I think as we look forward in the second half of the year, what we are optimistically excited about, and again, as always, launching new games, seeing is believing. We have three games in the pipeline that is actually reaching out to new audiences that they don't have today that is adjacent to the word genre. So I think short term, whether you defined 2025 midterm, I don't know. Focus lies on actually engaging the customer more, which means you get them to stay longer in the games and improve the monetization that way. And also then adding new revenue streams by actually reaching out to new customers, whether that is through localization or new game launches. They're working on both.

Okay, perfect. Thanks. And on the group, Revenue, you expect sequential increase in Q3 and then another increase in Q4, that's correct? Yes, that's correct. Can you talk a little bit about InnoGames and the campaigns? Maybe you have higher expectations, but they have tough comps. And just elaborate a little bit on what actions they are taking to try to return to that growth.

Yeah, I think that they had three events and I wouldn't say they failed. They did okay, but they didn't do great. Last year they did great events. So I think that's what you see in the performance versus last year. They now rolled out new features like guild features. So it's going to drive more engagement between the events as well. So you're going to change pattern a bit in the game. We are still calibrating to understand what is the impact on that. How do you make sure that you still get the same share of wallet and ideally more because that's the aim of those features. And that's also why they added a new growth team. So that is, I would say the team is fully focused on making sure they improve their excellence in the sort of key events, but also finding the right shift in spend and time on adding the Guild features between the events. I think regardless of what I think to replicate the success as I said at the July event last year I think will be difficult because we did see and I also called out that last year that It was an exceptional performance they did. And I think that's just going to, no matter how you look at it, that's going to give us tough comps as we go in this year. I think then the team is focused, of course, to deliver the same great results, but I think that will be difficult. But they're very focused on the events and Q3 will be tough comps, Q4 a little bit easier.

That makes sense. And then I have a final question. Given your strong margin expansion and the cash generation, Are you in the face of discussing a higher conversion target for the long term?

I mean, the cash conversion type, we will be at the higher end of our guidance of 50% to 60% over a 12-month rolling period. There's always going to be swings on working capital. CapEx is lower this time. And for now, we are narrowing the guidance to the upper part of the range.

Okay. Thanks, guys. That's all for me.

you cheers the next question comes from rasmus engberg from kepler please go ahead yes hi hi good morning um can i ask you about play simple uh when you talk about localization i assume that that local language versions of the games Is that correct? And if so, which languages are you focusing on?

Yes, so basically you can argue to some degree it's the same game engine, same mechanics, but you still have to remake the game from scratch because the words work differently and different words have slightly different meanings. I think they're quite excited and they actually worked quite a lot with AI in a successful way as well to make sure they had a good speed to market. The core, I mean, they are not more difficult than they look at the GDP of the different territories and then they find the addressable markets because you want to still have In a perfect world, a big audience, but also relatively high ECPMs. The US has the highest ECPM levels in the world, but then they're going down the ladder. And that gives you Spanish, Portuguese, German as some key languages. But they actually have a very long list. But they go in a priority, highest potential monetization, and then down from there.

Thank you. And the second question, are you currently involved in any M&A discussions?

You know that we never comment specifically on M&A, but I don't think, as I usually say, you never start and stop M&A, which means that you're always discussing to people. And I've said it several times, I do believe consolidation would make sense in our industry. So definitely we're speaking to a lot of people, but then whether something is concrete or not, I don't want to comment on.

But do you think that you will do one more acquisition this year or is it otherwise? I mean, you're just adding to a very, very big cash pile.

Yes. No, I mean, if we didn't believe that we could and would want to be acquisitive, we should give out the cash. By us keeping the cash, the way you should read that is that we want to be acquisitive, but we are, as I said, very disciplined, which means that we can only do the acquisition when it makes both operational, strategic and financial sense. And that's what we are having strong principles on. There are definitely some companies that I would like to be able to secure, but then it takes two to tango.

And is there, in some ways, the acquisition going forward becomes more and more important relative to your business in the sense, at least now when it's somewhat stagnant. So is there a level to your cash position where you say we don't need more than this or how do you think about that?

No, I think it's important to remember that. I mean, for us, it's really important to make sure we drive organic growth in the existing business. And there's no M&A that will take away that focus. I think that's really important, the discipline to always maintain. And we do feel that with our existing five studios, we have the quality to be able to deliver that, both on the existing franchise and combined with the new games. And then we would like the additional M&A to accelerate that. And also, in a perfect world, also be... finding those synergies by finding the right companies that are adjacent to the existing games that we're having and make sure we can also leverage the reach. So that's the way we think about it. But it shouldn't be because we don't feel that there's growth in our existing portfolio.

I mean, the question was more like, is there a level where you don't need to have more cash that sort of the acquisition, maybe you want to spend 3 billion, but maybe not 5 billion or, you know, you have the opportunity to borrow money as well, I suppose.

And I think it's just important to stress we're very comfortable to utilize our balance sheet. And I think that is something that we should do. But I also do believe that the current cash balance that we have is a very strategic asset to hold to because it does put us in all the discussions that are relevant and ongoing.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

Thank you very much, operator. We have a few written questions. So maybe to start on the more operational side of things, Maria, could you please just maybe at the start comment again on the development of the daily active users, which in the reporting numbers have seen lower in the quarter?

I was repeating myself quite a few times. The main difference was the congregate divestment. Remember that congregates, given the pure nature of the type of games, did have a very high level of DAOs, but they were also very low ARP DAOs, so they didn't monetize very well. And that was the biggest driver. Then if you exclude that, that was still a small net net negative, both sequentially and year over year. And the mix of development within that was basically you saw an increase in Play Simple, which was driven primarily by the strong ending of the quarter they had, which I talked about, and then being netted versus the other development where the net franchise is slightly decreased.

Thank you. Then moving slightly more towards the operational side of things, we have two questions. So is there anything that you can add on the growth and potentially profitability of Warhammer 40K? And then also any learnings from the MrBeast campaign that you want to comment on?

Yeah, good question. I think when it comes to Warhammer Tactical's game, it's clear given that it's grown to become our third largest title. I mean, we're excited about the performance. I think they are doing really well. They are able to scale up their UA in a strong way. But still, I mean, we always said that the way to look at this Snowbrain company and the isolated game is they're going to be growth accretive to us, but they will be margin dilutive. And that's basically what we're seeing. And on the Mr. Beast campaign, I think that was truly exciting. And also for those that are new to MTG, I think it's important to remember in our games, BTG6, which is run by Ninja Kiwi, they don't spend any user acquisition at all. So they are basically relying on getting new customers through MTG. the community and general streamers and influencers. And this is the first time they actually tried a paid campaign. We saw the engagement work really strong. So we saw a big uptake on both reactivation on existing customers that has not played for a time and also increased monetization of the customers that we had. So I think that was important learning. I think in reality, probably we thought we would also drive some new customers and we didn't see that. So I think that is also a lesson learned on how to basically use and work with streamers going forward.

And then how will the UA allocation be between existing and new games in the second half of the year?

It all depends on the game's performance, and I think that's the charm of gaming. It's extremely KPI-driven and performance-driven, which means that, of course, it's fair to assume that the biggest UA wallet will be to our existing core games, because they can absorb the most UA. But our aim is to be able to also then, next to that, scale up UA on back of our existing games. But that all depends on the ROA levels, return ad spend levels that we're seeing, and how much a game can sustain. It's too early to say, but still the foundation will be our core games.

Makes sense. And then moving to a slightly different topic. If you looked at the insider trading list, some of the executives sold off shares last quarter. In general, some would consider that the ownership is below a level of typically... you know, governments and other companies, will there be any obligation to hold more for management, maybe at least one to two-year salaries in shares to align incentives?

That's a fair question. I think it's important to remember the only reason why we sold was to cover taxes. So I think we kept, at least from top management point of view, I think that we kept the net of the allocation that we got of taxes. And I think it's also to remember that we still have quite a lot of shares to still be received that we haven't got in our accounts that is either to be issued by the company or be bought by the company and issued to us. So if you include that, I think our shareholding will look much greater. But then, of course, You can argue where the level should be, but I think at least we do have faith in the stock and I think our actual shareholding is greater than what you actually see is reported.

Thank you very much. At the moment, we have some more technical questions that we can address offline and we have no further questions from the guests.

Very good. Thank you very much for following us.

Have a nice summer.