Paradox Interactive AB (publ)

everyone and welcome to the Paradox Interactive quarterly stream. Hopefully you can hear me this time. We are very sorry about the delay. We have experienced some technical issues here in the studio. This morning we released our quarterly report for the second quarter and we are here to present it to you more in detail. I'm Alex Bricka. I'm the CFO and with us on link we have our CEO Fred Wester. Are you there Fred?

I'm here. It's really good to be with you on this stream. I think I'm the one who's going to start talking, right?

Yes, please go ahead.

Right, with the first slide that only has my name on it. I think we can skip that one. We should be done with that already and explained. As you can see in the quarterly report, we have delivered, as we say in my words from the CEO, we've delivered on the strategy that we set out a couple of years back. And obviously, the results of the quarter is also driven by the release of HO1-4 that was well-received both by critics and in sales numbers. We also released a line of VLCs for all our core titles. And also... Worth to mention here is a title from Paradox Arc called Mechabellum that released in the beginning of May that's been doing fairly well with really promising retention numbers. We're looking forward to building further on whatever this game has for us in the future. And as we know already, it will vary a lot between quarters depending on what we release, even if the baseline of the company continues to increase and we can see a steady movement upwards in both top line and bottom line as a result of that. If we move on to the next slide here, we can see just a summary of of the releases through the quarter, and as you can see, it was especially a very busy May, with Age of Wonders 4 releasing, we had Crusader Kings 3 Tourism Tournaments, Age of Wonders released its first DLC a month and a half after the release of the full game, Dragon Dawn, Victoria 3 had its first major DLC as well, In Voices of the People, Galactic Paragons for Stellaris, We also had Royal Court releasing four consoles. We also are aware that there has been a couple of problems with the console release that we're looking to solve as well. But Europa Universalis also had a big DLC. It's been a bit fewer from the Europa Universalis side while the game is getting older as well. It's turning 10 years any day now. We also released hotels and retreats for Cities Skylines and a couple of content creator packs. As I already mentioned, we released MechaBellum from Paradox R4. And if we want to know what happened after the quarter, next slide, is we announced Star Trek Infinite, which is a license. Probably, I would say it's the first license in the company history. We announced two things from Paradox Arc, Stellaris Nexus, which is a Stellaris multiplayer-focused experience where you play the game in one hour, and Space Trash Scavenger, which is basically a survival crafting game that takes place in space, where you build a space station, etc. We also announced Arms Against Tyranny for Hearts of Iron 4 and Wars of Wardens for Crusader Kings 3, both for release later on this fall. We have also changed just the other day the early access release date for Life by You, our life simulation game, which will now be released in Q1 next year. Namely, more specifically, March 5. So it's a release to look out for. And back to you, Alex.

Thanks, Fred. So let's, as always, dig a bit further into the numbers. So record-breaking quarter if we look at revenues. We landed on 737 million SEC for the second quarter of this year. That can compare to 459 million the same quarter last year. So it's a 61% year-over-year increase. And as it often is for us, the revenue variations is driven by two things. One is the currency changes. And when the Swedish krona is weakened against the bigger currencies, we are increasing sales. So compared to the second quarter of last year, the dollar, the British pound and the euro is up. against the Swedish SEC. So that means that our revenues are increasing thanks to that. But more importantly, our revenues is driven by what we release. And as Fred went through in detail, we have released quite a lot. It's for sure a record in the second quarter. One new game in Age of Wonders 4 and DLCs on all our core titles except Hearts of Iron 4. So with that plus that we released Mechabellum, as Fred said. So with that, as often happens, when we have a lot of releases, we deliver very strong revenues and strong profits. And that is what we are seeing this quarter as well. To add on it, we had publisher weekend with Steam, as we often have in Q2, which helps revenues also. And we also saw the start of the Steam summer sale at the end of June. Top five contributors normally are the same five, but this time it's Age of Wonders 4 that has broken in on that list. So apart from Age of Wonders 4, it's Sittis, it's Stellaris, it's Hearts of Iron, and it's Crusader Kings 3. Operating profit for the second quarter reached 293 million SEK. compared to 214 million same quarter last year. So that is an increase of 37%. If we move further down in the P&L, we can see that profit after financial items comes in at 311 million SEC compared to 213 million same quarter last year. So profit after financial items is higher than the operating profit. And that is thanks to us selling our shares in Hartsuit Labs. That was a minority position we took some five and a half years ago when we acquired 33% of that studio. And the main reason for that was that the studio was developing bloodlines too for us. Since we shifted studio a couple of years ago, the holding was not strategic for us anymore, and we decided to sell it. And we are very happy to sell it to Keyword Studios, a partner that we cooperate quite a lot with. So that added to our profit of the financial items. If we look at profit of the tax, we come in at 239 million compared to 170 million last year. Profit margins, profit before tax margin, 42% second quarter this year compared to 46% same quarter last year or so. Even though the profit in SEC is up quite a lot, the profit in margin is down. And mainly three reasons to that. We have had quite a lot of marketing efforts in this quarter for games that we have not yet released. So City Skylines 2, Lamplighters League. Life Bayou, Star Trek, we have all done significant marketing activities during the second quarter. But of course, we haven't seen any revenues yet. Those will come when we release the game. So that has the games. So those activities, of course, the cost for them are taking immediately. So that is pushing down the margins a bit. So that is one explanation. Also, we have released, as we said, DLCs and games, new games in terms of Age of Wonders to quite some extent. And when we do that, Since Q3 2020, we have started to use a digressive amortization method, which means that we amortize quite a lot in the first month of the release of the game. So for both, let's say Age of Wonders 4... The DLCs for Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3, we released those in May. So that means in practicality that we take 40% of the development cost for all those games and DLCs in the second quarter. So quite a significant cost of goods sold. Of course, it pushes up. revenues and profits, but the profit margins is often slightly lower when we do the releases. Therefore, it's 42% this quarter. But still, of course, very good. We have also continued to explore our titles on VR. We had a similar launch in Q1 when we, together with a partner, launched Stellaris on VR. And now we have another game, one of our vampire brands. that will come out on VR as well. And these corporations are, they are funded by another party and those funds are immediately kind of handed over to the developer. So we have a zero margin effect on these corporations. So that has held back the margin slightly this quarter as well. Employees 676 at the end of the second quarter. So we increased with two from 274 in Q1. The organizational changes that we have made in the second quarter that we have spoken about before have not yet had impact on these numbers. Let's move on and dig in a bit further into especially the cost. So this slide shows our revenue in green over the years, over the quarters, and our three main cost items. So we have cost of goods sold, selling expenses, and admin expenses. Revenues, you can see very clearly here that we are breaking the records first time over 600 million, and we are over it by a good margin. 737 million. Last record was Q4 last year. I think we had 580 million, so significant increase. Costs. Three major costs, all in all, 454 million SEC in the second quarter of this year compared to 261 million SEC same quarter last year, or 334 million SEC first quarter of this year. And as you can see very clear, both in the table and in the charts, is that it's the cost of goods sold and the selling expenses that has bumped up in this quarter. So let's go through both of them, what has been driving them. So cost of goods sold. These are the costs we have for all our now seven internal development studio, all costs for our external development, royalties that we pay, amortizations that we do on acquired businesses and acquired brands, costs for publishing organizations that works with game development and tech and maintenance. So cost of goods sold, second quarter, 338 million SEC compared to 197 million SEC same quarter last year, or 263 million SEC in Q1 of this year. COGS is built up by several sub-items. Let's go through them. The major one is amortizations. So amortizations, second quarter came in at 155 million SEC, as you can see in the report, compared to 86 million SEC same quarter last year, or 110 million SEC in the first quarter of this year. So why has it gone up from 110 million SEC last quarter to 155 in this quarter? Mainly two reasons. We have touched on them already. We released HO1-4 in May. And as I said, we have a digressive amortization method. So we took 40% of the development costs already in Q2. So that pushes up the amortizations quite a lot. And the same applies for Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3. Both those base games were launched after Q3 2020. That means that we apply the same digressive amortization method also on the DLCs that we release on those base games. So both those DLCs have, we have taken 40% of the development costs for those DLCs. And those development costs are significant. So if we look at Crusader Kings III, the last time we released a DLC on that game was a year ago in May. So it's pretty much the full studio's development cost for a year that we take 40% of now in the second quarter. So those are the main reasons why the amortizations are up 45 million from Q1 to Q2 this year. Then continuing to dig into the COGs. We take 21 million SEK for amortization of acquired businesses and assets like when we acquired the Triumph, World of Darkness, Playroom, and so on. So we amortize that according to a plan. So 21 million SEK this quarter. That has been fairly stable over the last years. Another 9 million SEK in amortizations of fixed assets that also includes rent for all the studios. We didn't cancel any developed or any capitalized projects at all this quarter. We used to do this a couple of years ago quite a lot, but now I think over the last six quarters, it's five quarters that we haven't had any write downs at all. And that is thanks to us changing our approach to high risk projects as we have discussed several times before. Finally, we have royalties, tech costs in the publishing organization, and non-capitalized development costs. That's an item that reached 153 million in the second quarter this year compared to 83 million same quarter last year, or 113 million in Q1 2023. And let's start with royalties. So we have had royalties of roughly 30 million SEC over the last quarters. Now the royalties came in at 50 million SEC, so it's 20 million SEC more. And what often drives the royalties for us is the amount of revenues we have on Cities Skylines and what we release on ARK. Because on Cities Skylines, it's an externally developed game, so we pay the studio Colossal Order a royalty. This quarter, we have come out with content on Cities, so Cities has sold quite well. Therefore, we have significant royalties to Colossal Order. But that's not any different compared to the last two, three quarters. The same goes with ARC titles. We have released Macabellum this quarter, but we have had revenues from the ARC titles like across the Obelisk and Stardews previous quarter as well. So it's another thing that is driving up the royalties. And that's the substantial revenues we have had from Age of Wonders 4. Now, Age of Wonders 4 is a studio that we own, but we acquired... Sorry, Triumph, the studio that has developed Age of Wonders 4 is a studio that we owned. We acquired Triumph some six years ago, and we agreed on an earn-out structure. So we are paying the sellers of the Triumph studios who are still running the studio. They receive an earn-out based on what the games that the studio has developed generate in revenues. It was the same for Age of Wonders Planetfall that released in 2019, but that game didn't sell to the same extent as Age of Wonders 4 is doing. So now when Age of Wonders 4 is performing very well, we are seeing an increased level of earn out to the sellers, and that is being booked as royalties. Therefore, the royalties are up compared to the last quarters. Finally, non-capitalized development costs and costs for the tech development we have in the publishing part of the business, 103 million compared to 64 million of the same quarter last year or 83 million in Q1. So that is also up, mainly three reasons. One is I mentioned this VR collaboration we have for one of our vampire brands. We have taken, I think, 9 million SEC as costs here. Those costs are met with an identical amount of revenues, so that has helped the revenues, but we also have an additional cost of 9 million. A second reason to the increase is that we have for many, many years had a profit sharing program at Paradox, which means that we set aside 5% of the profit plus social contribution and share that with all the staff. So 5% plus social contribution means 6.5% roughly. And a quarter like this, like the second quarter in this year, when we do very well, means, of course, increased profit share. So if we compare it to the first quarter of the year, we are having 154 million sec higher profit. So that also means roughly 10 million sec more profit share, which translates to 10 million sec more personnel cost. The majority of our personnel works in our studios, so therefore the majority of the 10 million ends up as a cost under COGS, therefore it increases. I think that was enough about COGS. Let's move a bit quicker through selling expenses. Also quite an increase compared to the last quarter's levels. 90 million SEC of total selling expenses compared to 40 million SEC same quarter last year. Two drivers. One, we have released a lot during the quarter. New game in Age of Wonders 4 and a lot of DLCs. That drives, of course, selling expenses. The second reason is that we have also already mentioned, we have started to market the games that we release in the upcoming quarters, like Cities Skylines 2, Lamplighters League, Star Trek. and life by you. So we have taken those costs, some of those costs already now. Therefore, the selling expenses are up. Admin expenses, almost the same, slightly up. It's up due to the same reason I mentioned under the COGS walkthrough. The increased profit sharing comes with increased personnel cost. That impacts slightly less, but some admin expenses and on selling expenses. Below the operational, below those three lines, we have other income and other expenses, 10 million this year compared to 16 million last year. These are movements in currencies, especially during the quarter, and especially how the dollars moves against the SEC. So both quarters, dollar has increased against SEC, so therefore we see positive impact. Now we have a new item that we normally don't mention during these calls, but we have financial items below EBIT. And that has normally it's fairly low, but or not that significant. But this quarter, it's 18 million. And it's built up by three things. The major thing and what stands out this quarter is the sell of our shares in Hardship Labs. So that has increased those financial items quite a lot. The other two items are interest on our cash holdings. We have some 800 million SEC of cash. And now with increased interest, that is yielding some interest for us. And then we have also a calculated, it's an accounting-wise, it's calculated interest according to the IFRS lease rules. So instead of booking our rent as rent, it comes in as an amortization and as a calculated interest that is also showing up on the financial items. And that's why it was negative the same quarter of last year. Let's move to the next slide. Revenues and operating profit quarter by quarter. Again, you can see the records in both profits and revenue. But perhaps more importantly, you can see that it varies a lot. And even though it might look like a trend, it might be a trend, but Our revenues and profits, we have said it so many times, but I want to say it once again, it varies with what we release. This quarter, we had a lot of releases, so we are making record revenues and record profits. If the next quarter comes with less releases, we're going to see a decline. We have had the history of very volatile quarters because the release pace is uneven. And I think I'm pretty sure we're going to continue to see that. We're going to see quarters like this where we go up a lot, and we're going to for sure see quarters where we go down. But hopefully we go up more than we go down. That's the very hard aim. If we group four quarters together and look at the rolling 12-month picture, it's much easier to see the trend. And if we remove the spike we saw during the initial start of the COVID years and the following downturn, it's a fairly stable trend, both in terms of revenue and profits. Cash flow important. Very strong cash flow during the second quarter of this year. Operating activities generated 422 million SEC. If we look at last year, so last 12 months, it's 1,253,000,000 in positive cash flow. I think it's the first time we are above 1 billion SEC, and we are with some margin. Cash flow from investing activities reached 172 million SEC. The item consists of two sub-items. One is investment in game development. That amounted to 224 million SEC. But then we have a positive side here, and that is the sell of our shares in Hardshoot Labs. And that has a positive effect of 53 million. So what we don't see in this chart, but that is cash flow from financing activities. We paid dividends of 211 million SEC in the second quarter. So we paid that out to the shareholders. But despite that, despite of paying out 211 million SEC as dividends, we have increased the cash position slightly during the quarter, which we are very happy about. Next page, total non-current assets and total equity continues to go up. Total equity has increased, and this is pretty much our profit off the tax minus what we have paid in dividends. And here you can see what I said. The equity has gone up between end of Q1 and end of Q2, despite us having the dividends of more than 200 million SEC. And the total long current asset continues up. The biggest part is capitalized development that is close to 1.8 billion SEC now, 26% up versus last year. So this is developed games that we're waiting to release. That was all I had planned to walk through. I know that now we have time for questions. I know we have received the questions in advance, and please feel free to write questions to ir at paradoxinteractive.com, and we'll try to answer them now. If we don't have time enough, we will answer them after this call. But let's start. This is a question for you, Fred. How is Paradox adapting to the rapidly growing and shifting AI landscape in the games industry?

Yeah, it's a very broad question. And as we know, And I've said it before that AI is going to, in the long term at least, transform this industry into something completely different than it is today. And it's going to help us with a lot of things. That being said, in the short term, we're exploring AI more as a tool for helping us out and being more efficient in game development. So I would say our main focus at the moment testing AI from before. Again, speaking long term, improving game development in every part from programming, coding into art and even game design as well. And writing stories, obviously. But one thing with AI as well is we also need to be very careful about the technical and legal aspects and who owns what, etc. in this little environment that is AI. So we're really forward leading and hope to learn a lot more in the coming year and years on AI because it's very important to us. So, sorry.

No, thank you. Go ahead.

Yeah, next question, Alex is for you and have sales from console players been significant? And is it profitable to continue to port PC games to console?

Yes, it has been significant. This quarter it went up. We had almost 100 million SEC or perhaps even a bit more from consoles in this quarter. So that's up to 15% of the total sales. So it's for sure significant. And then you should remember that we haven't ported all our games to console. It's Especially Cities Skylines is doing quite well on console. Stellaris and CK3, not that great, but still an important part of our business. Normally it comes with limited cost to do this port, but with significant revenue. So it's for sure something we continue to do as long as our fans like to play our games on the console platforms. Okay, question for you, Fred. Okay, at the recent investor deep dive that we had in May, Victoria 3 was not listed as an endless title yet. Are you seeing progress toward that metric with the release of Voice of the People, the last DLC?

Are you there, Fred? Okay. Alex, you hear me?

Now I hear you.

Okay, good. Some technical difficulties here in the middle of the forest. But so speaking about Victoria 3, overall, all in all, we consider it a good release. However, to be included in our portfolio that we considered endless games, there are a couple of things we want to see from the title. retention numbers, DLC attachment rate, etc. But the team is really working together with the community to work on the things that has been challenging for the game since release. We have good hopes for this game and we hope to present a lot more during this fall and the coming year. It's getting there, but there's a little bit of waiting.

Thank you.

And Alex, looking at selling expenses, should we view Q2 as a full marketing quarter and should we expect selling expenses to increase further or rather stay flat in the second half of the year?

It's a relevant question. So Q2 was kind of record high in terms of selling expenses, driven by two things, as I mentioned. So we had record many releases in Q2. That will shift. So in Q3, it's, of course, likely that we won't have the same number of releases. So that part of the selling expenses is likely to go down. But the part of the selling expenses in Q2 that regarded games to be released, I think that will continue to be at this level, perhaps even increase slightly the closer we come to release. All right, I don't see any more questions. No more questions, and as I said, please, if you have more questions, continue to write at ir at paradoxinteractive.com, and we will answer them after the stream. Thank you very much for listening in. And again, sorry about the technical difficulties. We will see you again at the end of November. No, at the end of October when we release our Q3 report. And I hope to see you in the studio then, Fred, so we have slightly less technical challenges.

I will be there for sure. And looking forward to seeing all of you viewers as well by then. And until then, bye-bye and take care out there.

Thanks, everyone. Have a good day.