Truecaller AB (publ)

Welcome everyone. I'm Alam Amedy and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Truecaller. And with me, I have our CFO, Odd Bolin. We're here to announce our interim report covering the first quarter of 2024. Today we'll start with overall highlights from the quarter and then walk you through our financial performance in detail. We'll then cover some developments on the product side before wrapping up and opening up for questions. So let's get started with the highlights of the quarter. I'm pleased to report that our user base continued to grow during the quarter. We closed Q1 with an average of 383 million monthly active users and an increase of 11%. Average daily active users grew to 314 million, an increase of 13%. Our growth during the quarter was almost equivalent to the population of Sweden. We closed the quarter at 427 million Swedish crowns in net sales, a 10% increase year on year. All three revenue streams contributed to the growth this quarter, with consumer subscription and true call for business growing at a relatively faster pace. We continue to operate profitably with EBITDA landing at 151 million Swedish crowns at the end of the quarter and an EBITDA margin of 35%. Earnings per share landed at 0.38 Swedish crowns, a 27% increase compared to the same period last year. We continue to have a very strong cash flow with 114 million Swedish crowns in net cash from operating activities before tax payments. We continue to grow our user base. And in the first quarter, we started to increase our investments in our selected growth markets, which is starting to pay off. In Colombia and Nigeria, we grew our user base substantially with an analyzed growth rate of 40% to 50%. Our investments in the US are also starting to pay off. In the US, our main focus is to grow the number of paying subscribers, and in the first quarter, revenue from subscription in the US grew by over 60% on a year-on-year basis. We're also pleased with the development of our premium business overall. The number of paying subscribers increased by 15% year-on-year, higher than the relative growth rate of our total user base. Truecall for Business continues to develop well and in the first quarter we saw strong growth in terms of both revenue and the addition of new customers. We continue to see healthy demand for our enterprise products and the growth of our partnership with major players such as Airtel, Tata Tele and Tanla have shown great results in terms of expanding market reach. We'll cover these in more detail in the coming slides. But we continue to see strong user growth, and we closed Q1 at an average of 383 million monthly active users, which is up by 39 million from the same period last year, or 11% increase. Our daily active user base continues to grow at a slightly faster rate. We ended the quarter with 314 million daily active users, which is an additional 36 million from the same quarter last year, or 13% increase. Majority of our user growth is still driven by organic growth, but the fact that we see particularly high growth in the markets that we are investing in continues to indicate that our investments in user acquisition are bearing fruit. We also continue to see strong retention and are proud that 82% of our monthly active users use Truecaller on a daily basis. We see this as an indicator of our product stickiness and the growing relevance of our services. Now over to Odd.

Thank you, Alan. So it's time to look at it a bit deeper into our financial performance. Starting with the revenue, net sales increased by 10% compared to the same quarter last year. All revenue streams contributed to the growth. Currency effects this quarter had some impact on net sales with a slight negative effect, but the effect cannot be quantified precisely due to the indirect nature of our currency exposure. Ads income increased with the increased user engagement, newer ad formats and increased monetizable impressions. IPL, the Indian Premier League cricket, also started earlier this year compared to 2023, which had a substantial positive effect on ad sales versus the same quarter last year. Subscriptions continue to develop strongly with increased conversion and an all-time high ARPU. True code for business also continues to develop well compared to last year. Strong intake of new customers and new partnerships with telco resellers was a driving part of that growth. Business messaging also increased volumes and we started to get some smaller revenues from our new risk offerings. Now, let's look in a bit more detail on the three revenue streams. And let's start with the largest one, ads. Our ads revenue grew by 10% compared to the first quarter last year. After a slow start, the performance gradually improved during the quarter. And towards the end of the quarter, demand from the Indian Cricket League came in, which I will talk more about on the next slide. General demand in India outside of IPL continue to be rather soft, and it has been evident also in other companies' public reports where reported price per ad continue to come down. This holds true for all players working with third-party programmatic ads where we have information. During times when demand decreases, suppliers as ourselves have increased supply to counteract the decreased demand. On a market level, this has further decreased pricing. And we continue to improve our platform through better tech improvements and the growth of the user base. We also continue to optimize revenue per user rather than pricing or fill rates. We continue to increase impressions available to monetize within the existing ad slots. These improvements help us marginally now, but more importantly, when demand bounces back, they will generate a good return. When looking at our recurring subscription revenues, you can see that we grew our revenue by 25% compared to last year and that the sequential growth in revenues continues, although we have negative currency effects from weak occurrences in Nigeria and Egypt. A strategy to add more functionality through the cloud telephony platform continues to pay off. with contributions coming from the AI features True Caller Assistant and Call Recording, which both yields higher subscription prices. An important driver of our revenues on subscription is our growing footprint on iOS, where the conversion rates and willingness to pay is substantially higher than on Android. As Alan mentioned, our efforts in the US on subscriptions is trending strong and contributed to an ARPA reaching an all-time high. True call to business continues to grow substantially. In verified business, we continue to see many positive things happening here. Net additions of customers, longer contracts, and higher pricing plans. We are growing revenues as well as number of customers both year over year and quarter over quarter. Growth has increased with successful new reseller partnerships. During the second quarter, we will roll out new packaging and price plans which gradually are expected to drive up revenues per customer further. Volumes within business messaging continue to grow and contributed to the growth in revenues both year over year and quarter over quarter. Quarter over quarter revenues decline, sorry, not quarter over quarter. Quarter over quarter revenues decline due to the fact that in Q4 we recorded higher revenues due to a catch-up of revenues that had not been recorded fully in the accounting from the old agreement that we had with Tandla over the last year. The new agreement that started to impact revenues late in Q1 and expected to further grow revenues and volumes The Indian Cricket League, IPL, is the most important seasonal driver of the ad income for Truecore. This is due to the magnitude of the event and that we are a preferred platform for partners doing performance marketing to attract new users for, for example, Fantasy Cricket League. The IPL started earlier this year, which meant that more of IPL spending came in Q1 compared to last year when almost all the spend came in Q2. Overall IPL spending from advertisers during 24 is expected to be considerably lower this year than in 2023, as there are fewer companies spending at the same magnitude as in 2023, where we witnessed a very strong IPL season in Q2, as can be seen in the graph. The spending in 2024 is expected to be at the level of 2022, and the lower spending compared to 2023 is due to multiple reasons. like changed GST rules and general demand softness. Our expectation is that this year's contribution to IPL will be evenly shared between Q1 and Q2. For us at Truecaller, our direct sales with the largest advertisers on our platform during IPL were as large as last year, which demonstrates the value we give to our advertisers, and if anything, we have strengthened the contribution We have strengthened the contribution of third-party programmatic ads is expected to be significantly lower this year as there are fewer advertisers spending due to the reasons that I mentioned just a second ago. Now, we continue to grow our two recurring revenue streams, consumer subscriptions and true content. Here we have a strong momentum with sequential growth every quarter, and we're still quite early in the development of their respective offerings. In 2024, we have a lot in the pipeline for our subscription offering, both when it comes to features and packaging and targeting, as well as looking at new partnerships, and we see a potential in a continuation of higher R2 and increased conversions. For our SAS offering true quality of business, we are growing steady, but the potential continues to be very large. We will start to reprise verified business clients gradually from the second quarter on, and we will see benefits coming in from the new agreement on business messaging as well as our new risk offering. The two combined revenue, recurring revenue streams grew by 33% and constitutes about 25% of net sales today. The ambition going forward is straightforward, continued growth and increasing the recurring revenue streams, share of total revenues and thereby adding stability and diversification to the overall revenue mix. Our gross revenue grow year over year where all revenue streams contributed. The gross margin development continues to be very stable at the 75-76% level. Now let's turn to cost developments. Efficiency is key in delivering solid margins, and Trueco has a very high operating leverage. I think generally we are doing a good job in managing our overall cost base. This quarter incentive costs is back to previous levels after the one off in Q4, which was due to not reaching performance criteria in the long-term incentive program 2021. The board has suggested a new long-term incentive program 2024 to the annual general meeting in May. And if approved, it should start to impact costs from late second quarter this year. Staff costs, excluding incentive costs, continue to be well managed. From Q2, the annual salary review will start to impact costs. Last quarter, we guided the market that we will also increase investments in targeted growth areas. in specific markets. This is mainly digital performance marketing efforts and preloads to boost growth in those targeted geographical areas where we see long-term revenue potential and ability to further boost our user base, as well as a continued diversification of our geographical mix. The investments are easy and quick for us to turn on and off, depending on where we see best results. We are pleased with the results we get out from the investments so far, and we expect to continue to do those investments at about a similar level as in the first quarter going forward. But of course, we continuously fine-tune where we get the best long-term return on investment. As we have previously stated, our tax rate is a combination of the Swedish corporate tax rate and the Indian tax rate. And we also said that we expect the tax rate to increase somewhat over time. This quarter, the tax rate was approximately 23%, which is a bit lower than what we can expect for the longer term, which is about 25 to 26%, but with continuing possible variations between quarters. In the quarter, we reported a strong increase in profit for the period and earnings per share. It is driven by a strong net financial income from primarily currency gains and income from short-term interest rate funds. Earnings per share growth is further improved by our buybacks. EBITDA grew by 1%, and the margin was 35.4%, which is above our long-term financial target that is supposedly taking effect from next year onward. And as we go to the market at the last report, the margin was lower than last year due to the increased growth investments. Currency effects had a small negative impact on the margins. Our operational cash flow was stable versus last year, although we had some negative effects from changes in working capital. During the quarter, we continued to buy back shares, and we have in total bought back 7.5% of the outstanding shares at an average price of approximately 32.8 Swedish crowns per share. The board of directors have suggested to the AGM that we should cancel those shares. We continue to be in a favorable position with no debt and 1.5 billion Swedish crowns in cash and short-term investments as we continue to generate cash at about the same pace as we have been doing buybacks. With our strong financials, the board has decided to introduce dividend policy. That means that 25% of the profit after tax for the period should be distributed to shareholders. We have consequently suggested an ordinary dividend of 0.4 Swedish crowns per share to the AGM in May. We have also proposed an extra dividend of 1.3 Swedish crowns per share to adjust the capital position in the company. Our strong financials means that we can finance both growth investments, a dividend, and have room to continue doing buybacks. The board has asked the AGM for a renewed mandate to have the option to continue buying back shares up to 10% of the outstanding share capital. outstanding number of shares. After the suggested dividend, we will have cash in short-term investments of around 1 billion Swedish crowns on the balance sheet. Let's then look at how we compared to our financial targets that were set by the board in conjunction with the IPO in 2021. The medium-term financial targets were set in a different economic climate than we have today, and the current macroclimate And in the current macro climate, I'd say the revenue growth target, as it was stated in 2021, clearly is less relevant when evaluated on an annual basis. However, even though the financial targets are based on average results during the period of 2021 to 2024, we on the board still believe that they would make sense also on an annual basis, but in a more normal macro environment, which is not the case right now. We continue to deliver an EBITDA margin above the 35% long-term target that formerly is not taking effect until next year, even though we still are in a quite difficult macroeconomic climate, and including the fact that we also have initiated those higher investments that I've spoken about. With that, I will hand the word over to Alan.

Thank you. So let's move on to our quarterly product update. The three areas we will cover are the core product offering, TrueColor Premium and our ad take capabilities and TrueColor for business. We continue to invest in the core product to give users the best experience possible. In the first quarter, we improved data quality further by expanding our scope of partnerships with external data providers, especially in markets that are strategically important to us, like the US. At the same time, we continue to advance our AI and machine learning capabilities to ensure that users receive the most relevant information about unknown numbers. Our machine learning efforts have enabled more precise business categorization, leveraging calling patterns and name suggestions from user contributions. Our algorithms assigned tags to inform the user of exactly what type of business is calling. This capability was expanded to cover 19 languages in the first quarter to give more context on communications from businesses for even more users. Last year, we introduced AI driven fraud protection for SMS, which uses machine learning algorithms to actively identify and flag fraudulent messages. This quarter, we expanded this through a combination of community feedback and machine learning initiatives. Through a fully automated flywheel system, we detect fraudulent messages by analyzing sender signals and message patterns. By the end of the quarter, we sent over 9 million fraud alerts on a daily basis with an accuracy rate of 99%. And the number of users protected from SMS fraud through this feature grew 13 times compared to the previous quarter. We continue to enhance our overall experience by delivering products and performance improvements. And in Q1, app engagement grew by 19%. We made improvements to managing contacts, which not only streamlined the flow, but also introduced a simpler method for users to compute suggested names and make our service even better. We continue refining channels for community feedback for both Android and iPhone users to make it easier for users to contribute in the form of spam reports, fraud alerts, survey responses, and much more. By the end of the quarter, over 20% of users were actively contributing insights. We also achieved a significant milestone during Q1 as we continue to extend Truecaller availability beyond mobile devices. TrueCall for Web was launched at the end of the quarter and expands the app's features to desktop. Android users globally can now link their phones to send and read messages by SMS and chat, receive call alerts, and search for numbers on their PC or Mac. This not only improves the user experience, but also opens up opportunities for additional features, business integrations and other use cases. Moving on to our progress for the product on iPhone. Our focus is on driving revenue growth across both free and paid versions of the app on iPhone, converting more users into subscribers while finding innovative ways to monetize free users more effectively. We continue to introduce more engaging ad inventory, including video ads, throughout the app. We're happy to see this scaling well on iPhone and we'll start integrating these kind of things, kind of ads on Android as well, but we'll talk a bit more about that later on. Advertising revenue from iPhone users witnessed substantial growth in the first quarter, increasing by over 150% compared to the same period last year. On the subscription side, our initiatives aimed at converting iPhone users into paid subscribers have yielded positive results. This has led to significant growth in both subscribers and recurring revenues from the iOS platform across markets. Revenue from iPhone subscribers in the US demonstrates particularly good performance, growing by 100% year-on-year. As the share of iPhone users continues to expand, we remain committed to investing in the product enhancements on the platform to deliver the best search and caller ID experience globally. On subscription products, more broadly, meaning for paying users on both Android and iPhone, we continue to see robust growth. Revenues from subscriptions grew by 25%, while the number of paying users grew by 15% year on year. We continue to invest in developing new packages and refining existing premium offerings. For example, Android users now have the choice between basic spam protection, which automatically blocks calls from a limited number of top spammers in their region, and max protection, which is premium features that blocks all known spammers. This has shown strong conversion potential with the average daily new subscribers increasing by 40% from this sales funnel since its launch. We continue to invest in call recording and assistant, as Odd mentioned, which are only available to paying subscribers. And we also continue to improve call recording, which records, transcribes and summarize your calls. In the first quarter, we introduced support for these transcriptions and summarizes for more languages and also launched a product in seven new markets, including India, where we're seeing strong early adoption. Truecaller Assistant also made good progress in product localization, revenue growth, and subscriber retention. Retention improved from 40% to 70% since its launch. We continue to work on new offerings using cloud telephony technology to tackle growing communication challenges, including fraud. These new features will use AI to detect suspicious calls, making sure users stay safe, as we've always done. On the advertising side, we continue to make strategic investments to deliver an even better experience while providing better monetization opportunities for the long term. In the long term, we see an opportunity to introduce more engaging ad formats in the product on Android, such as videos to all our users, which would broaden our ads business further. And this is an area we haven't tapped into yet on the Android platform, and we see great potential in it. As a first step, this requires that we increase the number of app interactions per user per day by improving the user experience and building further value into the product. Small but meaningful improvements make a difference, and this has been a major focus internally since last year. The number of app interactions from our daily engaged users has until today increased by more than 50% compared to the first quarter in 2023. This work is progressing and the next step is to test our new video format in the coming quarters before we scale it up to all our users. Our efforts to improve our capabilities have scaled well and we continue to deliver meaningful impact for advertisers. For example, Xiaomi, one of the most popular smartphone brands in India, engaged us to drive visibility for the launch of their newest device. We not only offered an innovative click-to-experience format for the campaign, but we also provided customized targeting. This ensured that Xiaomi was able to drive awareness and engagement with the right audience. The campaign gave Xiaomi massive reach and visibility with over 40 million impressions delivered in just two days to the right customers. Engagement was also high with a high click-through rate. Now, True Color for Business continue to demonstrate strong revenue growth in terms of both revenue and new customers, as Odd mentioned. We continue to secure larger deals and see strong retention from major accounts. The enterprise offering has already demonstrated a clear product market fit within the banking and financial services sector, and we see our customer base expanding across industries. Outside India, adoption continues to gain traction. In the first quarter, we onboarded prominent brands such as Woom in Chile, a major telecom operator in Latin, and Talabat Egypt, the largest food delivery brand in the MENA region. Business messaging, our service delivered in partnership with Tanla, helps businesses distribute messages to end customers in a more reliable and cost-efficient way. During the first quarter, implementation continued to scale with over 2.3 billion messages delivered to end users on this channel. We continue to enhance our business messaging capabilities. During the first quarter, we introduced rich media, which enables businesses to deliver dynamic and engaging messages. For example, various attachment types and customized calls to actions, for example. This lays the groundwork to drive even higher user engagement through capabilities that enable two-way communication between users and businesses. And now to wrap up things. We continued to grow our user base and saw this develop very well, especially in the markets that we've chosen to invest in, like Nigeria, Colombia, and the US, as mentioned. Our revenue growth this quarter was driven by all revenue streams. Revenues from ads benefited from IPL timing this quarter, but our advertising business remains affected by macro conditions and the impact of an increasing digital ad inventory in the Indian market. Our recurring revenue from both subscriptions and Truecall for Business continues to develop very well, growing at 33% year on year. We continue to innovate our offering in both areas in order to serve the growing subscriber base as well as evolving needs of enterprise customers. Since we've seen promising results from the investments towards our selected growth markets in Q1, we expect to continue to make these investments going forward. We're also proud to continue delivering a solid profitability with an EBITDA margin of 35% and year-on-year EPS growth of 27% while making investments towards long-term growth. And lastly, as you know and are aware of by now, the board decided to introduce a dividend policy, proposed a dividend of 1.7 Swedish crown per share to the AGM and proposed to cancel all bought back B shares, as well as ask for a new mandate to be able to buy back up to 10% of the outstanding shares. Our profitability allows for us to finance investments in growth, give dividends to our shareholders, finance smaller acquisitions, as well as the opportunity to continue to buy back shares. As always, a big thank you to our users, the great partners that we work with, and the phenomenal Truecaller team across the world. And now we're happy to take your questions.