Truecaller AB (publ)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Q2 report webcast. I'm Rishi Jhunjhunwala, the CEO of Truecaller, and with me, I have Aud Bolin, our CFO. As always, I'll talk about how we performed in the quarter in a few important areas, and then I'll hand over to Aud to talk about the financial performance. At the end of the presentation, we will also talk about the news flow we sent out yesterday, and then we'll open up for a Q&A. In Q2, the average monthly active user was 471 million, which is a growth of 10% year-on-year. Our average DAO was 409 million, which is 11% growth year-on-year. And we continue to have a very healthy engagement, with a down ratio of 87%. Net sales decreased with 21% year-on-year in SEK. Our EBITDA decreased by 49%, and we reported a margin of 22.4%, including incentive costs. While our year-over-year comparisons continue to reflect the challenges we have been navigating over the past several quarters, we saw sequential growth across all our revenue streams, which is definitely encouraging. We'll talk more about this later in the slides. In terms of user growth, we added 8 million users this quarter, which is 44 million users year on year. This growth came from all regions, even though as mentioned in the previous quarter, we have reduced our spending to acquire users given the lower revenues we have had. It is not unlikely that we will increase the spend if the revenue situation continues to improve. The strongest growth this quarter came from the Middle East and Africa, a region where we now have surpassed 100 million users on Android and 110 million users including iOS. This region is also a very fast-growing region for us when it comes to premium revenues. In particular, this quarter, growth in the MEA region was solid in multiple markets, but Kenya and Egypt stood out the most. Now I'll talk about each of our revenue streams, starting with the advertising revenues. In Q2, as announced earlier, the flag that was impacting our programmatic revenue was lifted, resulting in a 10% to 15% increase in daily revenue towards the end of the quarter. While this is definitely an encouraging sign, we're clearly not out of the woods yet, and we have work to do to get our ad revenues back on track. The ban of the RMG category last year affected Q2 revenues as well since the IPL cricket tournament continues into Q2. Growing direct sales has been a priority for us and I am pleased that we continue to grow this quarter as well, both quarter over quarter and year over year if we exclude the RMG category. We made good progress on our longer-term plans for the ads business as well. Like we've mentioned in the previous quarters, we're transitioning to a more competitive auction model. We're revamping our programmatic ads, and we're focused on direct sales. We now have a significant portion of our user base transitioned to the new architecture, as opposed to just 30 million in the last quarter. We expect this rollout to be completed within this quarter. With the new architecture, we can now begin testing our new bidding model, which we've rolled out to 40 million of our users already. In the long term, we expect this to get us higher yield per ad impression, and therefore revenue growth as well. And for strengthening our direct sales offering, we have two new proprietary ad formats. One of them, which is almost live, and the other will go live very soon. Our premium revenue continued to grow exceedingly well, 36% year on year, which is 41% in constant currencies. Our subscriber base grew by 33% year on year, and the conversion rate overall grew by 27% with a steady ARPU. While our subscriber base is the same on a sequential basis, we focused on higher value creation for the long term in this quarter. The conversion to premium was healthy as well. Android showed a slight decline, though nothing alarming. And the iOS conversion rate grew as well. The main reason why the Android conversion is lower is primarily because we reduced discounted pricing in favor of higher LTVs, which resulted in a lower conversion. Now about Truecaller for business. Net sales declined by 5% in SEK terms, but grew 8% in constant currency. The ARR for the verified business increased 12% in SEK, which is an increase of 23% in constant currency. And we also kept churn at low levels. Business messaging volumes grew well sequentially. We're still far from the volumes we saw last year as we reset our partner strategy just earlier this year. As you saw from the numbers, we grew quarter on quarter and year on year in Truecaller for Business in constant currency. We still remain very focused on building more capabilities on our platform to help businesses interact with their customers better because we believe Truecaller can play an even more pivotal role in this space. On business messaging, new partners scaled up their volumes significantly compared to Q1, which was expected as they get a flavor of the value of our Truecaller business messaging platform. Additionally, our long-standing exclusive partner from earlier has now been signed back on as a non-exclusive partner, and we continue to expect to come back to 2025 volumes by Q4 at the latest. Additionally, our SDK product, which is used by thousands of apps globally, continues to show encouraging potential in the long term for monetization. Now let's talk about a few interesting product updates we made during this quarter. Caller ID spam and fraud detection is the core of our product. Improving this in multiple markets is an important focus area for us. This quarter we've done several improvements in the EU as well as many other markets resulting in far better name coverage and spam and fraud detection. Community suggestions, which shows you what others say about the caller, is now LLM powered and is available globally, both on iOS as well as Android. And scam feed, which is a user powered community of the latest scams going around, is now global and has 120 million users already. On the messaging side as well, we made several improvements. We now declutter inboxes by allowing users to organize their messages, therefore being able to find and act on important messages faster. We've rolled this out in India and Egypt, and we've seen very healthy growth in engagement. Lastly, we forayed into a new adjacent space, travel eSIMs. We launched our travel eSIM service in 29 countries simultaneously on iOS. This is the first time we are offering digital consumer products beyond our core offering. And while it's early days, we're excited at the potential. With that, I'll hand over to Aud to walk you through our financial performance in detail.

Thank you, Rashid. Okay, so let me as usual walk you through our financials in some more detail. RISHIT HAS ALREADY GIVEN YOU THE OVERALL PICTURE BUT THIS QUARTER WE WERE HAPPY TO SEE A QUARTER OVER QUARTER GROWTH IN ALL OUR REVENUE STREAMS. ON A YEAR OVER YEAR BASIS NET SALES CONTINUED TO DECREASE BUT AT A LOWER PACE THAN PREVIOUSLY. Like before, to make it easier to understand the underlying development for our business, we will give you the net sales and EBITDA development in both SAK and in constant currencies. The constant currency figures are our best estimates based on the information that we have available as usual. In S&K, our net sales decreased by 21%, but in constant currencies, the decrease was 14%. EBDA decreased by 49% in S&K and 42% in constant currencies. The EBDA margin was still 22.4% in S&K and 23.8% in constant currencies. Now, since we did a restructuring in Q2, decreasing our workforce by over 70 persons, we took a restructuring cost of 23.5 million Swedish crowns. Most of that is staff costs, salaries to be paid out during the redundancy periods, but that are not being booked as employee costs after May the 7th, when the restructuring program was announced. We also have an effect on our incentive costs. We reversed the already booked costs for the employees that are leaving us, which decreases the incentive costs in the second quarter by close to 10 million Swedish kronor. All in all, EBITDA during the second quarter decreased by 13.8 million Swedish crowns due to the restructuring. Excluding this, our EBITDA margin, including incentive costs, would have been 25.9% versus 34.8% in the second quarter last year. Now, looking at our three revenue streams, ads decreased by 34% year-over-year, but we did see an improved momentum once the flag was removed by our largest demand partner at the very end of the quarter. It is, however, too early to say what the full effect of this lifting will be, since we have made substantial modifications to our ad showings in order to ensure the flag lifting. Now, with the flag lifted, we continue to work on optimizing our user experience in parallel with our monetization potential. Direct sales continue to improve, like Rishi said, if you exclude the RMG sector that was banned in India last year and that previously made up a substantial part of our direct sales. Premium continues on a steady growth path with sequential growth quarter after quarter. For TFB, we also saw renewed traction. The verified business calls part saw considerably more bookings in Q1 versus Q4 last year, which translated into higher revenues in Q2 versus Q1 this year. As of now, we don't see any slowdown in these developments. Our take is that many Indian enterprises that decided to explore business in-app has concluded that the very basic functionality coming out of business in-app doesn't meet their needs to the extent they would like, while our verified business solutions have considerably more value-adding functionality. Our new business messaging partners continue to grow their traffic, and the previous exclusive partner has also accepted a new agreement that once again gives them full access to our services, but now on a non-exclusive basis. And we see a rapid ramp up of traffic from that old partner. Now, as you can see in the waterfall graph, most of the revenue decrease continues being due to the weaker demand for our ads inventory that primarily is an effect of the flag imposed on our inventory in 2025. Currency effects continue to have a material negative impact as the Swedish krona has stayed strong versus USD, INR and other currencies. Given the developments we've seen over the very last weeks and months, that may change, but it's still too early to say how that is going to impact us. Now, as revenue decreased by 40%, 34% in constant currencies, the decline mainly comes from the lower demand due to the previously mentioned flag. The flag removal, as mentioned, that came late in the quarter improved revenues and they created much better momentum. FX continues to have a negative impact also on ads. Within True Call for Business, verified business continued to grow year over year and had good development quarter over quarter. Business messaging started to recover in Q2. However, I want to point out that 6 million Swedish crowns of revenue in the second quarter was due to delayed payments that should have hit Q1, but that we couldn't book at the time due to a dispute that we had with our old partner. Now that it's been resolved, then we have booked this revenue in Q2 instead. As for ads, strong SAK versus USD and INR continues to negatively impact our financials. Now, moving to profits, gross profit decreased by 27% year over year in SAK, but grew quarter over quarter. Gross margin declined to 71.5% from 77.2% last year, but also increased quarter over quarter. Now, cost for service and not least verification of new users, which is booked as cost of goods sold, are not proportional to revenues, meaning that gross margin can decrease as revenue decreases. Improved transparency on some partner fees, meaning that we can book them gross rather than net, also had a negative effect on the gross margin, although it had no impact on the bottom line. Looking at operating expenses, the largest component, employee costs, decreased from the beginning of May due to the restructuring announced on May 7th. In return, we took, like I said, a one-off restructuring cost of 23.5 million. From Q3, the full effect of the lower amount of FTEs will be visible in the P&L and the employee costs. You also see the reversal of 9.6 million Swedish crowns that I mentioned on the incentive costs that came as an effect of the restructuring. We reversed previously booked costs for employees that are leaving us and that came as a decrease in the incentive costs in the quarter. Other expenses were lower due to efficiency initiatives and lower use acquisition costs. Now, like I said moments ago, what I call dilution cost included reversal of close to 10 million Swedish crowns due to redundancies. Dilutions costs are expected to be lower than in the past due to LTIP 22 maturing as well as the restructuring. And we also expect to see a lower volatility in the social security fees, part which is reliant on the share price development, simply because we have fewer employees. Obviously, the accounting treatment in the property and loss account is different from cash flow effect. Cash flow is only impacted once an incentive program matures, such as it did in June this year. What I want to talk about on this slide specifically is the fact that the tax rate was 39% in the second quarter versus 29% in the second quarter last year. Now, this is obviously higher than our Indian tax rate of 35%, not to mention the Swedish tax rate of 21%. The high tax rate is an effect of losses in the Swedish legal entities. The taxes booked in India are then divided by a lower total profit than the profit booked in India, while the deferred tax assets that we book in Sweden due to the losses don't compensate due to the lower revenue in Sweden. then we have in India, in combination with the lower tax rate in Sweden. So the final result is a higher tax rate, not a higher tax payment, but a higher tax rate than we would see if we made a plus minus zero result in Sweden or a profit in Sweden. Now, going forward, this will correct itself due to us having modified our transit pricing policies to more clearly reflect the value creation in India versus Sweden. The modified policy that started being implemented during Q2 will ensure that both entities make profits. The combined tax rate will then continue to be a mix of the Swedish and the Indian corporate tax rates, but be closer to the historical figures. It is worth noting that the modified model is fundamentally very similar to the model that we have had in place since 2018, although it is more clear on the specific value drivers in India and Sweden respectively. We continue to be of the opinion that our transfer pricing policies, both the original one and the modified version, properly and accurately describes a fair and just distribution of revenue and profits between Sweden and India. We will come back to this shortly. Net cash flow from operating activities excluding paid income tax and charge in working capital was 122 million, which is lower obviously than the 221 million that we saw a year ago. But changes in working capital was 21%, year-to-date it's been 34% and the accounts receivable trend is stable. Now, as of June the 30th, we held 11.8 million B shares and 2.1 million C shares, corresponding to approximately 4.1% of our capital. As of June 30th, we also had approximately 850 million Swedish crowns in cash and short-term funds. Our revolving credit facility of 500 million SEK was still not utilized at that time, but available for interesting M&A opportunities. Now, in parallel with the acquisition of TEX Plus, we continue to actively evaluate such opportunities, either when we get inbounds coming our way or due to the fact that we see areas where we could further strengthen our product and services portfolio and then reduce time to market for important initiatives. If you can find the right fits, we'll discuss both the new financing facility and the TEX Plus acquisition later or shortly in this call. Now, let me touch on the news that we announced yesterday evening, which was that we increased our funding, reiterating our previous communication regarding the transfer pricing survey in India. And then after that, I will hand over back to Rishit to talk about our acquisition of TechPlus. Well, let me start by saying that I'm very happy to say that SAB has the confidence in us to agree on a new 850 million Swedish crown term loan facility and to extend our existing 500 million revolving credit facility to 28 with an option to extend it to 2030. With these facilities in place, we ensure that we have the financial strength to manage a possible bank guarantee regarding the previously communicated ongoing transfer pricing survey in India THAT WAS INITIATED A YEAR AND A HALF AGO, ACTIVELY CONTINUE OUR BUYBACK PROGRAM AND CONTINUE EXPLORING M&A OPPORTUNITIES SIMILAR TO OR LARGER THAN TEXPLUS, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME STILL RETAINING A HEALTHY CASH POSITION FOR ANY SORT OF RAINY DAY INCIDENTS, GLOBAL MARKET ISSUES OR YOU HAVE IT. As in the past, this creates financial flexibility and puts us in a strong position going forward. Now, just a few words on the India tax issue. As we have communicated numerous times so far, our Indian operations are subject to a transfer pricing survey by the Indian tax authorities that is focusing primarily on the company's transfer pricing practices for the fiscal years 2018 to 2023. We currently expect to receive so-called formal assessment orders from the Indian tax authority during the first half of 2027, although this could be extended formally until the first quarter 2028. Those assessment orders will most likely ask us to pay additional taxes in India. Our position has in no way changed. We, as well as our advisors, continue to believe that our transfer pricing model has correctly allocated revenues and profits between Sweden and India. and we intend to unilaterally challenge any potential assessment orders. But in parallel, we have also invoked a bilateral process between the competent tax authorities in India and Sweden through which we believe the matter ultimately will be resolved. This bilateral process is expected to be concluded no earlier than late 27 or during 28. When an assessment order is issued, when we receive assessment orders from the Indian tax authorities, they will typically require a bank guarantee to be posted for the assessed amount while the matter remains under dispute and pending resolution. The assessed amount could be materially higher than the final additional tax payments, if any, that will be decided during the bilateral process. With that background and also with that being said about the financing facility, I'll hand over to Rishit for the M&A update.

Thanks, Saad. So we announced yesterday that we have entered into an agreement to acquire TextPlus Inc., SOME BACKGROUND ON TEXPLUS. TEXPLUS WAS FOUNDED IN L.A. AND PROVIDES A FLEXIBLE, COST-EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL WIRELESS CARRIERS IN THE U.S. SIMILAR TO TRUECALLER'S MISSION, TEXPLUS MAKES MOBILE COMMUNICATION BETTER BY PROVIDING A SIMPLE, RELIABLE WAY TO GET A SECOND NUMBER AND KEEP IT COMPLETELY PRIVATE FROM YOUR PRIMARY NUMBER. In our discussions with Scott, the founder of the company, and the rest of the TextPlus team, it was clear that there were a lot of synergies between us, and we could create a very powerful, modern, and trusted digital telco. This is what got us excited to start with. Additionally, TextPlus is focused on recurring revenues, which has been our focus, as you're well aware, for several quarters now. and the financial discipline of being profitable, maintaining a lean operation was also just right for us. Their revenues in the last 12 months are about $5 million with good profitability. The US is their core market and they have a very exciting roadmap for that market. This will create a larger footprint for Truecaller in the U.S. Additionally, we will eventually use Truecaller's distribution and expertise in various other regions to grow TextPlus even faster. The opportunities of growing in the U.S. and accelerating TextPlus' growth is what is most exciting for us. We're really happy that we're coming together, and in the coming quarters, I'm sure you will hear more about how this acquisition is progressing. So let's summarize quickly, and we can then open up for questions as always. In summary, just to reiterate, all three of our revenue streams grew sequentially. While we still have work to do to get back to our earlier levels, this direction is definitely a good sign for us. Additionally, recurring revenue is now almost half our revenues. The transformation of both the ads business as well as the business messaging is progressing very well. We are now a leaner organization that not only reduces cost, but has made us more focused. We announced the acquisition of TextPlus, which is very exciting for us in the future. We also announced new funding, which gives us a lot more flexibility and stability to manage anything in the future. Overall, I'm encouraged by the progress we made during the quarter and very confident in the direction that we are now heading. With that, let's take your questions.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad.

The next question comes from Predrag Savinovich from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. I'll start with one on the business side. So I think it's very interesting and encouraging to see that your biggest partner in business returning. Can you elaborate on how the terms are different this time, if there are any changes? Could you also remind us of what types of volumes they used to have with Truecaller before the contract was terminated, and if that is a good guiding point for where we should be heading in the coming quarters?

Got it. Thanks, Predrag. The first part of your question was what are the terms and how has it changed when they came back? The biggest change is actually that they were our exclusive partner. They were the only partner selling our business messaging services. Now they come on as a non-exclusive partner. Apart from that, since they're non-exclusive, there is no minimum guarantees that we enjoy anymore. And it's a pay-as-you-go model, essentially. The rates, per se, are very similar to what we used to have earlier as well. On the volumes, your question was, what were the volumes that they used to do last year? In average, in 2025, they used to do around 1.3 billion a month. Those are the kind of volumes that we used to see. We expect us to come back to those volumes. I would say Q4 at the latest, we should be back at those volumes.

OK, super. That's very, very clear. And then if you could also discuss on the market for business generally in India. I know you previously said how both CNAP and cheaper options in the market could cause you some churn, but it seems to be quite solid progress for you. You deliver really well on business. Odd, you made a comment on this, but it sounds like this might not be an issue to consider anymore.

All right. So Truecall for business and the consumer side of our business, both have some bearing on CNAP. On the consumer side, CNAP has been rolled out. We estimate, because there's no scientific way to know this, but we estimate it's been rolled out already to 50% to 60% of users in India. And in spite of that 50, 60%, we're not seeing any major impact on our user growth so far. That's definitely an encouraging sign. However, it hasn't been fully rolled out, and we still need to make sure that we continue building on our product. We already had a lot more value than pure CNAP, and we must continue on that journey as well. On the true call for business side, we spoke about this a quarter and two quarters ago, that there are enterprises that are trying the cheaper and more limited business synapse solution. That affected us in Q4 in the form of new bookings. Q1 was slightly better, which showed up in the Q2 numbers. And we are seeing that enterprises have experienced business CNAP and realize that our platform offers a lot more than just business CNAP. And that's why we have healthier numbers now.

Okay, super. And then a final question. When you say that your ads revenue has increased by 10 to 15% QVQ on average with your main advertising partner following the flag change, is this a level that is reasonable to expect going forward or will you be able to fine tune this traffic further and make this sequential increase even higher?

No, we definitely will fine tune the traffic. We also hope and we are, you know, we have the ambition that the algorithm itself will learn that we are a highly reputed publisher platform and therefore that should improve as well. So we definitely have... We're looking forward to more growth from these levels as well in the next few quarters.

Okay, very good. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Prajan.

The next question comes from Thomas Nilsson from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question. I would like to ask about premium renewal rates developed over the past year, and what do you see are the main drivers of customer retention among the premium subscribers?

Thanks, Thomas. I think you broke up a bit, but I think your question was, how is the retention rate on premium developing, and what is keeping people retained, essentially? Yes. So over the years, we've done a lot of work on premium. So it's not a single factor that has changed anything. For example, last year, we added capabilities to completely block spam. We added an insurance product in India. We added a verified badge in India using your social security. We've done a lot of optimizations on using AI on exactly how we should tell a user at what point that they need to convert to premium. So we've gotten overall much better. The offering has become much better. And a combination of this is actually what is keeping people retained to premium. So it's not a one single silver bullet. It's a combination of multiple factors that has created this outcome for us.

Okay, but you're not giving any official data on the renewable rates? no that's not something that we discuss at this point okay okay and final question for me what are your hopes and ambitions for new products such as the e-sim offering and other new opera products and when should we expect these to have a meaningful contribution to to overall sales and and lastly also do you have any further mna opportunities on your radar i think today's announcement was very exciting

Yeah, absolutely. The eSIM was launched last quarter. It's launched just on iOS in 29 different markets. We've just begun this journey. We didn't expect this to be a blockbuster success from day one. This takes several quarters to mature, and as users experience the product and get more used to it, we plan to see growth in revenue numbers then. But we're encouraged by this start, definitely. We're always adding new products as well. We're always building more, and it is definitely our intent to continue expanding our monetization capabilities on this massive audience that we have. And you had a second part of your question as well?

Yes, do you have any further M&A opportunities given today's exciting news?

I mean, we are an open door for M&A. We're always looking at opportunities, multiple opportunities. Most of them don't pan out for various reasons. TextPlus came through because it ticked all the boxes. So, yes, we are always exploring M&A opportunities, but nothing that we can, you know, announce straightaway. Thank you very much. Thanks.

The next question comes from Erik Larsson from SEB. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I wanted to start with a follow-up on B2B with the strong development here in Q2. So if you could just give some more flavor, what I understand is that some of this ARR increases essentially may be from deals that you maybe didn't close the past two quarters. So to what extent can we extrapolate the performance here in Q2?

Right. You're absolutely right. The ARR comes from past deals closed as they add up to ARR in the next month or the next quarter as the case may be. We do expect that as more and more enterprises try out the limited business CNAP, they do feel that Truecaller's platform continues to add more value and they come back to us or renew their contract or expand their contracts with us. We continue to have that belief that this will continue, and we definitely want to continue pursuing the same growth that we've seen in Q2.

All right. And then on other external expenses, it came up a bit here versus Q1, I think around $78 million, if you exclude the one-offs. And I note your comments regarding revenue development, etc. But is it fair to assume a similar level for H2 before factoring in maybe a text plus with some impact?

Similar level to Q2 going forward or? I didn't really understand. If you look at our operating expenses, you have the employee cost, which is fully proportional to the number of employees. And we did 70 people redundancies in the beginning of May. So that will have an impact, of course, for Q3. It doesn't mean that we're never going to recruit anyone, but that's a new baseline. Then you have growth-related investments, use acquisition, preloads and marketing. And then you have other operating expenses. The other operating expenses is stable, very stable. So the changes that you will see from quarter to quarter, THE BASELINE OF A CERTAIN NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES IS DUE TO THE GROWTH INVESTMENTS. WHAT WE DO SEE IS THAT THERE IS ROOM FOR MORE GROWTH INVESTMENTS IN THE THIRD AND THE FOURTH QUARTER. making those investments is valuable for our shareholders in the long term. And we are in the process of looking at how much we intend to invest during the second half of this year as we speak. But we do see that there is room for more investments than we did during the first half of the year.

Perfect. And then a final question on the new bidding model on advertising. How should we expect this to play out? Could it have an impact already in Q3 or is it more gradual?

It is gradual. The ambition that we have is that we will roll out the new architecture to all our users. It's already on a significant number of users. We'll roll out to all users. Once we have that in place, we will be able to conduct a far better orchestration across our global ad partners than we've done in the past. This has also been rolled out to some extent to our user base. And as we get comfortable with the results of this testing, we will continue rolling this out. So the rollout is definitely planned for Q3. The next question comes from John Jackson from Human Capital. Please go ahead. Hello.

This is regarding the two recent court decisions in Stockholm, where the courts ruled unanimously in favour of the former employee in the trade secrets case. How does the board assess the company's handling of the matter? And given the seriousness of the allegations and the fact that the company's own witnesses, including board members, senior management and the CTO...

I believe you said something about the recent court decisions. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Thank you very much once again for joining our webcast. Thank you to our investors, our customers, and the entire Truecaller team. See you in the next quarter.