MAG Interactive AB (publ)

STO:MAGI

Earnings Call Transcript

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Hello. Welcome to MAG's Q1 report. Here today to present the report is me, Daniel Hasselberg, CEO of MAG.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

And me, Magnus Wiklander, CFO of MAG.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

And here at MAG, we make mobile games. And we have studios here in Stockholm and in Brighton in the U.K. And we've been around for about 10 years now. Had 0.25 billion downloads. And what we do here is working both on the creative side, we're making games, obviously; but also on the data side, with optimizing based on game analytics and also running user acquisitions, so performance marketing. So there's a lot of stuff going on in both those departments, and we love being in that crossroads of data and creativity.And over the years, we've built up a really strong portfolio of games. So by launching games continuously over a long period of time, you have then games in different parts of their life cycle, and that gives you stability over time. So some are further out in more harvesting mode and some are in the earlier growth phase. And on any given day, we have about 2 million daily active payers, and they spend more than 1 million hours playing our games every day.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Exactly. And we, of course, grow this portfolio, as we said, over time. And lately, we've added 2 welcome IPs to this. On the left-hand side here, we see Primetime. And on the right-hand side, lately also Apprope's Word Mansion added to this picture.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

And during this quarter that we're reporting, so this is September through November, we celebrated MAG's 10-year anniversary. So in 2020, we turned 10. And originally, we had a plan to throw a big party. But of course, COVID made that impossible, but we decided to celebrate together with the players. So in all of the major MAG games, we ran 10-year anniversary events. And that was really fun, like have a common theme across the games. And we also saw those events perform really well in terms of high player engagement and increased in-game monetization and so on. So that was a really good effort to have across all the key titles.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. And in addition to in-game events engagement, we also had cross-game engagement through our newly released new cross-promotion platform that we released prior to the 10-year anniversary. And we see that creating brand recognition and value for MAG, and we're going to continue to use that also going forward. And it's active in all our games.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Yes. So a couple of words about Apprope. So this is the most recent acquisition for MAG. So we announced that just a few days before Christmas, and they are part of MAG since January 4. And this is a step for us into a narrative and decoration category of games. So this is something that's become very popular over the last couple of years. So this is basically you wrap your key core game, it could be a word puzzle or an ad-free game into a progression that's -- kind of you follow a story and often you renovate or decorate or make something look better over time. And that's a metaphor that's performed really well lately. So with Apprope, we get this framework for building games on this kind of narrative integration theme. And the first game they built on this framework is called Word Mansion, and it came out second half of 2020. And we see that grow really nicely during the fall, both in downloads and in revenues. And of course, now with Apprope onboard at MAG, we really look forward to see if we can leverage some of the MAG capabilities in terms of game analytics and user acquisition and so on, and help strengthen that growth even further. So it's going to be really exciting to see, and that would be then 2/3 of our next quarter, you will see some Apprope effect.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Exactly. And with Apprope, we also have a profitable portfolio of old games, primarily WordBubbles and WordWhizzle, and we see that as an opportunity for our LiveOps team to take care of. They have lots of experience to work with games like this. And we hope also that will allow the Apprope team to focus on the growth titles going forward.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Yes. And if you follow us for a while, we sometimes show this picture of the kind of product mix, our portfolio of the key games. And the difference, this picture versus last time around, is that classic QuizDuel is not here anymore. So that's because, end of November, we could see that 90% of all QuizDuel players were now playing in New QuizDuel. So that migration is now behind us when we go into Q2. So let's take a look of this picture as of the acquisition of Apprope, so then we see an even more balanced portfolio. So we have our new games space, of course. There's a lot of exciting projects going on inside that we haven't announced yet. But we also now have an announced new growth game in Word Mansion. So that's really exciting to see in this picture.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. And as mentioned, we see a number of titles on the right-hand side. And in the evergreen section, we have WordBubbles and WordWhizzle coming in, slightly lower revenue than, for example, Ruzzle, seen with a profile with years after peak, stable audience and stable revenues and creating contribution going forward for the company.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Yes. Yes, let's look at some of the high-level KPIs.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. As usual, we start with audience and ARPDAU where we see a similar story to last quarter, where we have a stable, slightly growing audience year-over-year. I think we have the COVID pandemic peak behind us. And on the ARPDAU section, we have a strong growth in ARPDAU, with 43% up year-over-year. And we can see that as a broad portfolio improvement in all our games. And in particular, adding is Wordzee with a strong in-app economy. And we can also see that a lot of the growth comes from the in-app purchases in our monetization split. And having a look at our financial KPIs, we're filing a 34% growth in net sales. Of that, 25% is organic and the rest is acquisition from Primetime. And it means that we have -- in the fifth quarter in a row that we filed around 20% or more growth. So that's nice. Also worth noting is that we have 86% growth in in-app net sales as a primary driver of our growth compared to last year. UA is up from SEK 11 million to SEK 16 million, which is in the right direction. We're still not where we want to be. But now with a growing portfolio of growth games, we hope that we can continue to add to our spend and show high numbers in the future. And contribution, being what we have left after paying platform fees and marketing, so it's our gross profit, we're filing a SEK 38 million contribution this year, which is the highest we have seen as a public company so far.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Yes, correct. That's a real sign of strength, I think, for the business, growing with -- keeping that margin really high. So here's a view of kind of longer time periods. So if you zoom out and look at 9 quarters, we -- that's basically from the start of our focus of the development on multiplayer games. And also when we decided -- we talked about that both externally and internally that ARPDAU is a KPI we think we have a lot of room for improvement. We make great games that people love to play and they stay for months and years, but we can improve on the monetization side. So here is a view of how we've been able to do that continuously for a very long time now. And I think it's because all of the games are actually improving, and we can learn between the different games. So something that works in Word Domination can be reused in Wordzee and so on. So we kind of get better and better as a company. And look at the last bump-up here between Q4 and Q1, which is an even quicker growth of ARPDAU improvement, that's attributed to the migration of players from classic QuizDuel to New QuizDuel. So we talked about that during 2020 that new QuizDuel is a much stronger product, and we look forward to kind of migrating players onto this new generation of the game. And here, we can start seeing that in numbers also across -- it lifts the entire average of the portfolio's ARPDAU. So really happy to see that. And if we look at a bit of what we're going to do going forward here. So we announced in December that we started to do smaller tests of live trivia shows run inside of the New QuizDuel game. So this is something that I think has been really great to see how quickly we've gone from closing the acquisition on September 1 with Primetime, and already in December, pretty complex integration is done between the 2 companies. So I think really well done from both the Primetime side and the New QuizDuel team to make that happen so quickly. So now during Christmas, we've done a number of test shows. As of this week, we're live on both iOS and Android. We're still doing this small-scale testing, tweaking the concept and so on. But the goal now is to gradually get a bigger and bigger audience onboard with the aim of end of February being fully live to all German-speaking QuizDuel players. So that's a really, really exciting move for us.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. And with the higher ARPDAUs in Primetime, $0.07, $0.08, we've seen before in the Nordics, combined with complementary type of monetization with a new revenue stream. We hope that this will also contribute even further to the ARPDAU of New QuizDuel and to portfolio as a whole.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Yes. And as you mentioned, Magnus, we have Word Mansion now as part of the growth portfolio, we can invest more in user acquisition. So I think another focus for us now is also in that area to invest even further in user acquisition and get the benefit of having more growth games. That's, of course, really important for us going forward. And the continued investment in the live game portfolio. As we've seen with this kind of continuously growing ARPDAU graph, it shows the value of continuously updating and working with your live products. And of course, new game development and infrastructure as well in terms of better tools for user acquisition and optimize game analytics and so on. So I think a lot of the stuff we are working on now works really well. So I'm happy to start this financial year with a great report. So with that, I think we'll go over to some live Q&A. And then also, as we've done for the last few quarters, you can also use Twitter. So if we don't have time to answer your question right now or maybe you come up with it during the day, feel free to just address us on Twitter and we'll try to answer everything as best we can during the day.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

Let's see if we can get our window up here with the questions. So I don't know if we have a sign, we can show the Twitter handles or if you just can find that in the report. Yes, here we are. Good. So let's take a look at some questions. Talk more about the rationale behind acquiring Apprope. How much potential do you think there is to grow in the puzzle game decoration category? So this is a really exciting thing for us. So if you look at the -- that kind of -- if you describe that as a category, this kind of narrative and decoration meta-game, it's been applied in many of the really, really top grossers in the world in the match three space. So we think that this audience really enjoys this kind of progression. So we think there's a lot of potential in this category. And then, of course, we already see that Word Mansion is a working game that's already taking off a bit. So continuously working with that, I think, could leverage a lot of opportunities. But as a category, it's a really, really big opportunity. So that's exciting. Okay. Second one. How are you able to achieve this growth of ARPDAU in a year? Is it sustainable over time? So this is the biggest improvement, I think, we reported in the year at 43% up in ARPDAU. So it's, of course, hard to know in advance what the pace would be in the next quarter and the next year. But what we know is that we still have a lot of stuff we're working on that will -- or should improve the ARPDAU. And it's going to continue to be important across all of the games to work with that. I think there's still a lot of room to grow if you look at what can be done in this category and with this audience. So that's -- we haven't reached our goal yet, so we're still working on that. Any new game releases from Brighton in 2021? So what we -- we have new game development, we -- both in Stockholm and Brighton, actually ongoing new projects. But our kind of way of approaching this game development is we're very data-driven and we have our milestones and processes and so on, and what we decided in terms of talking publicly about new games, we announce it when I go to soft launch, not before. But there's really interesting games being developed in both studios. When can we see the live shows in Germany? What do you expect the impact on ARPDAU to be from that addition to the game? So I guess that's close to what you talked about, right? So if you're really lucky and in Germany right now, you might see a show any day. But it's a pretty small sample still. But that's going to expand. So end of February, I hope that everyone that has a German account on New QuizDuel will be able to watch the shows. And ARPDAU effects. So the MAG average ARPDAU is $0.04. And New QuizDuel has a lot of potential to grow. And then, of course, when we talk about -- we describe Primetime as having -- I think it was $0.079 ARPDAU this quarter. That's a stand-alone Primetime app. So that's an ARPDAU that we've seen that we can generate with this kind of sponsorship monetization. So that's how Primetime works. You have a sponsor of different shows. And then, of course, it's how much uplift you'll see in New QuizDuel will depend on kind of the opt-in rate, how big part of the opt-in audience want to take part in these live quizzes and then view the show that will generate sponsor revenues. So that's one of the interesting things for us to explore now from February and onwards, I guess. But that was the kind of the key driver for the acquisition of Primetime. We think this will be a really, really exciting match. Next, what are M&A valuations currently like at MAG Interactive? How much of an increase are you seeing in mobile companies and IP valuations? So this is a really interesting question. Because I think sometimes you look at companies with multiples, so how many times revenues or EBIT should you pay for a company. But there's also a lot that goes into kind of synergies. Like with Primetime, we could see that this is something we can plug into a much bigger gain and scale up. And then you see opportunities that are very different from just looking at kind of revenue multiples, for example. But of course, if you have a game that's out at scale and is much easier, we can put it into our spreadsheets and we can see how much profit we'll get from that game in the next number of months and years. But I'd say, in general, we don't see unreasonable expectations when we talk to studios around the world. It's a lot about, also, as a seller of a studio to find a buyer that you feel comfortable with and where you think that life is going to be fun and exciting, and you will get the opportunity to grow both you as a team and as a business and also make a potential earnout actually happen. So I think that's where kind of the more relationship thing also is really important. So the short answer is we don't see super high valuation expectations from those studios. Okay. What level of UA are you aiming for in the future? So this is -- we're basically always aiming at spending as much as we can on UA, given that we can keep our kind of profit margin. So this is really a matter of what's the competition like when -- and that's changing basically on a daily basis, right? So we're trying to address an audience that might also be exposed to advertising from Amazon or Instagram or some other game and so on. And it is a really fluid market and that's why it's great to invest a lot in user acquisition, tools and analytics because that means that we can always monitor that we're buying with profitability, because it's really easy to waste money if you don't know what you're doing in performance marketing. But in general, we want to continue to increase investments, but we'll do that while monitoring that we get the ROI we expect from our investments. And we often come back to payback times as something that we used to measure performance, and we aim for about 6 months payback time currently. And then, of course, different games could have different kind of shapes of their LTV curves and so on, then maybe you can experiment with longer or shorter payback times. But that's kind of our general view in 6 months. Of the next steps to increase QuizDuel ARPDAU are you most excited for seeing most opportunities? And so I think that's the most immediate, of course, is the live quiz to get -- in addition to programmatic ads and in-app purchases and subscriptions, we're also now adding the sponsorships as a revenue stream. There is a lot of exciting kind of more, what you call it, traditional game monetization mechanics coming in, so other events. So if you play in New QuizDuel, you know that you have the arena where you can compete in different categories on daily lead boards and so on. So there's a lot of other exciting stuff on the road map for that game. So I think that will drive more of the in-app revenue side of things. But it's hard to talk about specific features, but there's a lot of really fun and exciting ideas there. Will games from Primetime and Apprope be MAG-branded going forward? So we'll see. I mean the Primetime stand-alone app has a really strong brand and brand recognition in the Nordics. That will stay Primetime. The live shows integrated into New QuizDuel, that's obviously part of QuizDuel and our QuizDuel branded. And with Apprope, it depends on what kind of games they do. So we'll see what kind of direction we choose there. And if the games are more social, they're closer to kind of the MAG brand. And if it's more purely single player, then maybe it's further from MAG brand. We'll see. If I got that right, it's the last question.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes.

[Daniel Hasselberg, Co]

So thanks for watching. And as usual, you can always send us a question on Twitter as well, and we'll do our best to respond. Thank you.

[Magnus Wiklander, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you.