Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Rovio's first quarter 2022 earnings audio cast. My name is Timo Rahkonen, and I'm a vice president of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy at Rovio, and I will be your host for today. In today's audio cast, we will go through Rovio's first quarter 2022 financial results. With me here in the studio are Rovio CEO Alexandre Pelletier-Normand and CFO René Lindell. After the presentation, we will host a Q&A session. In order to ask your question, please dial into the conference call number shown on the screen. Your question will then be placed in the queue and asked in order of arrival. I will now hand it over to Alex. Please. Thank you, Timo. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for this Q1 2022 earnings call. Before going through the quarterly highlights, let's open by looking at the industry as a whole. This quarter has been another one of transition for the mobile free-to-play market. This was the third consecutive quarter-over-quarter decline of the market according to data.ai, and we attribute it to the combination of first, the normalization of spending and playing habits after the COVID stay-at-home period, and second, the shifts in the marketing landscape resulting from Apple's ATT policy. We still observe residual volatility in user acquisition as publishers are trying to adapt to the aftermath. That said, for Rovio, Q1 was a continuation of the momentum we saw in Q4 2021. Group revenues grew 26.6% year-on-year, and games reached a new record gross booking of EUR 80.8 million, which represents 25.8% year-on-year growth. The growth was 10.6% in comparable currencies and excluding Ruby Games acquisition. All of our top games performed very well during the quarter with our flagship Angry Birds 2 growing over 20% year-on-year. Angry Birds Friends celebrated its 10th anniversary with its best quarter since Q4 2016. Our new release, Angry Birds Journey, was the third largest game with EUR 10 million gross booking in Q1. We also released a premium game called Rovio Classics: Angry Birds, and I'll explain the rationale behind this project shortly. Ruby Games had a very good quarter as well with 6.1 million gross bookings, a 44.7% pro forma growth. Overall, the profitability was at a good level with the adjusted operating profit margin reaching 11.8%. Our marketing investment was slightly lower than expected and represented 37.8% of Games revenue. If we start digging a little bit into the details, the global launch of Angry Birds Journey was on January twentieth after a one-year soft launch period in the U.S. that showed healthy KPIs and good cohort maturation. The global launch was supported by great featuring from the platforms and by a boost of marketing investment, which led to one of our best launch months ever. This strong initial push resulted in Journey generating 10 million in gross bookings for Q1. Now that we exit the launch period, we are cautiously observing and optimizing our UA spend as we prepare for a second push, including a U.S. TV campaign and celebrity-backed in-game event starting June tenth. Angry Birds has been part of the popular culture for 12 years, and this campaign will give us the opportunity to engage with all new audiences in totally new ways. The current quarterly run rate is just shy of EUR 10 million in gross bookings. You know by following our other games, we are barely at the beginning of the road for this new title. Most importantly, we're very proud to have been able to successfully launch a new Angry Birds slingshot game and to extend the genre to the casual audience. We continue to believe that this type of wide appeal and inclusive game fits well in the current market environment. We also released Rovio Classics: Angry Birds in March. This is a premium game, which is a recreation of the original Angry Birds game released 12 years ago. The price point is 0.99, and there are no in-app purchases nor ads. Releasing a game with this business model as opposed to free-to-play is exceptional for us, and the goal was to answer a passionate call from our fans around the world to re-experience the original Angry Birds game. They actually created a Twitter hashtag, which was hashtag BringBackTwentyTwelve that trended for several months. We're not expecting significant revenues from this title given the business model, but seeing it reach the top download position with a rating of 4.9 out of five is a great testament to the strength of the brand. It also shows the devotion we have towards our fans and to our brand. Fan service initiatives like this will help ensure that Angry Birds remains culturally relevant and beloved by our fans for decades to come. Another testament to the lasting relevance of Angry Birds, our game Angry Birds Friends celebrated its 10th year anniversary last February. This is our social and competitive slingshot title. When we talk about Angry Birds being cradle to grave and appealing to all demographics, games like Friends with a stronger male and competitive slant show this strategy in action. Our current growth and momentum here help show that our teams know their audience and how to engage them extremely well. Let's now look at the revenue trend per game. As you can see at a glance, the portfolio has performed well. We reached 82.3 million in games gross bookings and custom contracts during the quarter, which is a record for Rovio. Angry Birds two grew both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter. The growth was driven of course by solid live ops operated by the team, but also by marketing opportunities we were able to take in the aftermath of Apple's ATT. This was the best quarter for the game since Q1 2019, and the fourth consecutive quarter of growth for the game. The game recently crossed the bar of EUR 600 million in gross bookings since launch. The team is working on moving the game even further towards the RPG genre. They will be adding a new bird to the roster and work on clan features. Angry Birds Dream Blast was stable year-on-year, which is a good performance considering that the UA investment were about 20% lower than at the same period last year. The game just passed the bar of 200 million in gross bookings since launch in 2019. Angry Birds Journey is in third position with EUR 10.1 million in gross bookings for its first quarter. Angry Birds Friends grew 12% year-on-year and had a record quarter in over five years. This was the sixth consecutive quarter of growth for the game. Ruby also continued to grow, reaching EUR 6.1 million, a 49% quarter-on-quarter growth. They had seven games reach the top 100 downloads in the U.S. In Q1. If we look at their emerging titles, this hasn't changed since the last time we presented this slide. We are still working on Moomin: Puzzle & Design in our puzzle studio, and we're also working on Hunter Assassin 2 which is our first hybrid-casual games made by Ruby Games. They are helped right now by other Rovio studios for longer-term retention, monetization, and engagement features. It was exactly this sort of collaboration that were top of mind during the acquisition last year. We strongly believe that Rovio's tooling, talent, and know-how can unlock potential for other developers as well. Our sustainability initiatives were, of course, greatly impacted by the war in Ukraine during the first quarter. Our highest priority was to make sure that our employees and our partners were safe and got the needed support. On the business side, we joined the many other companies setting restriction to business and services, and as a result, we deactivated our games on the app stores in Russia and Belarus, and provided ads inventory in selected countries to humanitarian organization. We also ran an employee donation campaign together with our partner, UNICEF, to support Ukrainian children and their families. We have been working with UNICEF since 2019, and despite additional challenges created by the COVID situation, we concluded successfully the Salma project. The purpose of this initiative is to give a second chance to the most vulnerable girls in and out of school, so they acquire the skills allowing them to master the basics of digital technologies, innovation, and social entrepreneurship. We will continue to use these calls to share updates on our sustainability initiatives, as we strongly believe that actively acting responsibly is more important than ever. We're happy to be doing this by using our voice and our strong brand to help drive positive changes throughout the world. Finally, I'm very proud to announce that in April, we achieved another major milestone. We reached a mark of 5 billion downloads for our games. Having reached this very exclusive milestone places Rovio as the mobile games publisher with the third most downloads worldwide. I can tell you that it's very humbling and exciting for our teams to think about how our fans engage with our beloved characters around the world all these years. Angry Birds has brought a lot of joy over the last 12 years, 5 billion times and counting. With the projects, teams, and investments we're making today will ensure that Red and friends stay culturally relevant for decades to come. René? Thanks, Alexandre. Good afternoon to everyone on the call. In the first quarter of the year, we saw record games revenues and the group revenue growing by 26.6%. On a comparable basis, excluding Ruby Games and at constant currency, the growth was 11.8%. The strong growth was driven by the global launch of Angry Birds Journey, as well as the good performance of our top live games, especially Angry Birds 2 and Angry Birds Friends. Also, our hyper-casual studio, Ruby Games, had a very good quarter and grew 44.7% year-over-year on a pro forma basis, with the growth based on the continuing strength of their hyper-casual games and especially the addition of the new word game, puzzle game, Wordus. The Q1 adjusted operating profit landed at EUR 10 million, which was at the same level as one year ago, but with a lower profit margin of 11.8% compared to 15% last year. The lower profitability was as expected as we invested significantly more in user acquisition during the launch of Angry Birds Journey. However, the absolute profit level was still good due to the strong top line and operating leverage. The difference in operating profit during the three periods shown here reflects the changes in user acquisition as well, with Q1 2020 UA being at very low level compared to Q1 2021 and of course now Q1 2022. If you look at the adjusted EBITDA in Q1, it was slightly higher compared to last year, but with lower margin 16% compared to 18%. As with EBIT, this reflects the fact that the top line was strong but also user acquisition investments were higher. The user acquisition investments in the first quarter amounted to EUR 31.1 million and represented 37.8% of Games' revenues, which was in line with but slightly lower than the 40% level that we discussed during our last call in February. The UA thus increased significantly both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter due to the launch of Angry Birds Journey that quickly scaled up to become our third largest game in the portfolio. As Alex mentioned, post the launch, we have scaled down UA and are optimizing the performance to drive further growth in line with our UA payback requirements. The operating cash flow in the first quarter was a solid EUR 14 million, reflecting the level of EBITDA in the quarter as well, and the cash balance grew to EUR 172.3 million. On April twentieth, after the reporting period, a dividend of EUR 0.12 per share and total amount of EUR 8.9 million was paid to our shareholders. Moving on to our audience network and player statistics. Our daily active users grew to over 7 million during the quarter, both due to the launch of Angry Birds Journey and also due to daily active user expansion in Ruby Games. This is the highest level of DAU since Q3 2018. The amount of monthly unique payers grew to 522,000, mainly due to Angry Birds Journey launch, and this is the highest number of paying users since Q2 2018. The monetization metrics, ARPDAU and ARPU, remained stable during the quarter. Thus, the overall revenue growth in the quarter was driven by the increase in amount of users. Finally, our 2022 outlook remains unchanged. We continue to see a trend for strong top-line growth for the full year but with a lower adjusted operating profit. Similar to the previous quarter, we are giving additional information regarding the expected level of UA during the ongoing quarter. As we have said during the call, today's call, the user acquisition investments post Angry Birds Journey launch are now at a lower level, and for the second quarter of 2020, we expect the UA investments to be 25%-30% of Games' revenues. Thank you, Alex and René. Actually, before we move to the questions, just that there's a reminder about the Capital Markets Day, which we will organize on May 11 in Stockholm and also webcast. There is a link to the registration, so please do that if you haven't done that already. You can also see more information from our webpage. That concludes our review for today. Operator, we are now ready for questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. The first question we've received is from Veikkopekka Silvasti, Danske Bank. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hello. It's Veikkopekka from Danske Bank. Few questions. Firstly, can you give any update on how the quarter so far, so the Q2 so far has gone for your top games? I've understood obviously that AB Journey is a bit lower compared to Q1, but what about the other main games? Okay. Yeah, Angry Birds Journey, as we said, is a bit shy of EUR 10 million in gross bookings, so that's slightly lower. Angry Birds 2, we have seen pretty much, let's say similar levels continuing, so that's really positive. Overall, as we said, the UA levels are a bit lower, so naturally, that would impact a little bit, the revenue going forward as well if kind of this level continues for a longer period. Okay. Friends and Dream Blast, are they also flat-ish? I think on those, no major changes, as we see at this point of time, but I mean, it's very early in the Q2 as well. Secondly, if you, René, could remind us how the second tranche of Ruby Games could look, given that the studio is performing quite strongly. How large was the amount you're going to pay in H2 2022? Are we getting closer to the higher end of the acquisition price? The contingent liability that is associated with the Ruby Games transaction. We update that every quarter based on the performance and how we see that performance going forward. There's also an update in the current quarter. We somewhat increased the contingent liability by EUR 2.5 million, and the second tranche which happens in autumn is estimated at EUR 30 million of value, including both the cash component and the share component. The remaining is then in the future earn-out periods for multiple years. Okay. What was the maximum of the second tranche? Was it EUR 80 million? Yes. That's for the full transaction. We are not there yet at the maximum, as you can see. Okay. Yes, indeed. Great. Then maybe continuing on the hyper-casual games. It seems like you spent over 100% of revenue in user acquisition in hyper-casual games. Can you just give us a reasoning behind that? Because I would think that the games are very ad-driven revenue model and so forth, is it sensible to do such heavy user acquisition in there? Yeah, I mean, I think when we look at the hyper-casual game, what's interesting is, you know, when we have a game that can receive those investments and is ready to be scaled, we take the opportunity, right? Sometimes in this hyper-casual world, we don't necessarily see them coming with a lot of time in advance. If we have many of those games at the same time in the quarter, which was the case in Q1, we had seven games that reached the top 100 downloads in the U.S. from Ruby. So that means that there's a lot of games that we, you know, can receive those investments. That said, you know, those investments are always made in such a way that, you know, we believe that it will be profitable. We're very disciplined, as you know, when we do those investments. Clear. Is there any kind of in-app purchases in the world or is it purely ad based? I think, yeah. I don't know if there was a component. Like, it's mostly ad based for sure. Cannot say. Yeah for sure if there's a. Okay. Can you give any update on the Hunter Assassin 2? I guess people have been expecting it to be launched already in Q1, and still in soft launch. Is everything going according to plans, and how does it look? Yeah, that's a good point. You know, like, so we had a very good quarter for Ruby in Q1, but the revenues were not exactly where maybe, you know, we would have thought they would be. You know, if they're there, you know, it's good. The Hunter Assassin 2 is a game that, as you know, is slightly different than what they've been doing in the past because it has component of, you know, in-app purchases, more long-term monetization and retention that needs to be perfected, and we want the game to be really ready when we push it. We already tested in terms of virality, and we know that there's a lot of people that are eager to download the game, but we just want to make sure that those more, you know, longer term engagement mechanics are there in the game before we release it. That's why we're working together with different studios of Rovio to kind of help the hyper-casual teams of Ruby to, you know, to make it perfect before we release it. You know, as it is the case for other games in soft launch, we're gonna release it when it's ready. Let's see. Clear. It sounds like with Hunter Assassin 2, so the virality is there, but now you're just working on the retention and so forth. Yeah. Those more kind of long-term metrics, right? Both monetization and retention. Clear. Great. I guess that's all from me for now. Thank you for your time. The next question comes from Felix Henriksson, Nordea. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Congrats for a good quarter. I have a few questions. I'll go one by one. It sounds like you're perhaps incrementally a bit more cautious regarding the market environment due to the post-pandemic reopening effect. Wondering, how does this play out to your Q2 user acquisition guidance? Are you being a bit more cautious because of this, or does it sort of affect your decision-making here? Yeah. I would have to say that generally speaking, for user acquisition, we're very pragmatic and disciplined. We have our models, and we follow them, and we, you know, we don't, we don't improvise there, right? It's really data-driven, the way that we're acting towards this. It is true that what we've seen in the past few months is that there's a lot of fluctuation in the CPIs between the different platforms, between the different networks to use acquisition. I would say that the, you know, the long-term trends of those costs is harder to predict than it used to be. I'm very happy of the approach that we use, and it really paid off for us in Q1. Yeah, I mean, when we talked about the different level of user acquisition that we plan on having in Q2 compared to Q1, it's also related to the fact that in Q1 we released a game, right? And there was very good featuring that we received as well from the platforms. It was a game that was fitting the marketing landscape perfectly. So that really opened doors to making a nice user acquisition push that was profitable, right? So now that we scale that, we're kind of going back and making sure that, you know, trying to reduce the spend while keeping a similar amount of user joining the game. That's how we expect for now that the percentage of our games revenue that will be invested in user acquisition will be slightly lower in Q2 than in Q1. Got it. Thanks. That's helpful. You know, on top of the games that you're currently having the soft launch, I was wondering if you could provide an update on how many games you have in the development pipeline? My apologies if I missed this comment earlier. No, it's true that we didn't include this number this time around in the presentation. This hasn't changed much since last time we discussed this previous quarter. There's seven games right now in the development pipeline. Got it. That's very clear. Regarding the Canadian studios, just wondering how the team building there is going and the studio ramp-ups in Montreal and Toronto and when can we expect to see some tangible initiative launches by these studios? You know, like those two studios are in a little bit of a different shape, and what they're focusing on is also different. The Montreal studio was obviously started before, so the headcount is slightly higher there. You know, we're a little bit south of 20 people, I believe right now. I would say that the scaling has been going well in the sense that, you know, we're really looking at, you know, very specific type of people to do this. It's very innovative studio and we were cherry-picking, and it took some time to reach that, but we're happy with everybody that was recruited in the studio. You know, the projects that they're working on are a little bit different than the others, the other project in development in mobile free-to-play across the world. You know, it's harder to have a very clear timeline on this one. The Toronto studio is more similar to what we're doing in our other studios, for instance, in our puzzle studio in Espoo. They're much newer, but they recruited the key core team members that they need to start working on a game. They have a prototype of a game already, but we're not there. You know, we're not at the point yet where we can announce even a soft launch period, right? This is gonna come later. The team is being built following a timeframe that goes according to our predictions. Got it. Thanks. The final question from me, regarding M and A. I know you're constantly screening for targets and being very selective on that matter. I was wondering if, you know, you could provide an update on how the deal pipeline is looking then, and then perhaps some valuations. Wondering if you're seeing any developments on the private side, given that the public valuations have come down quite a bit. Yeah. A few comments on the M and A pipeline. I think we still see quite a lot of interesting companies out there, you know, in different sizes. Of course, we are screening them. We are looking the same way as we have done before. I think that's nothing has changed there. We are still gonna be very prudent in what we're looking for, looking for those companies that have clear fit with us and clear synergies and something where we can, you know, help our team that has genre mastery to scale up their game to a global success. That is still there. In terms of valuations, I think the private market doesn't necessarily always follow quickly what happens in the public market. I think it's you know I think it's too early to say, you know, how that will impact, but definitely, you know, it's something you always have to look at. What's the total value of the deal you're doing and for the long term? That hasn't changed from that perspective. Okay. Thanks, René. Thanks, Alex. Congrats for a good Q1. The next question comes from Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. One question related to your growth expectations quarter-over-quarter into Q2. Now, when you say that your Journey revenue run rate should be a bit below 10 million, doesn't that mean that you are basically a bit down from Q1? Then if Dream Blast is basically shifted to earn category, doesn't that mean that you are not expecting growth in that either? It's basically Angry Birds 2 and then Friends that could provide some momentum quarter-over-quarter. Is this really the case that you are seeing at the moment? Do you see other kind of revenue drivers that could have an impact in the short term? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say that about, for instance, Dream Blast. What is clear is that, you know, we still believe that there's growth opportunities there, and the team is focused on that. I wouldn't discard this in this way. Journey is interesting because as I said, of course, there is the launch period, which there was a series of factors that I listed earlier, which made it a great opportunity to reach a certain scale. Right now, as said, the run rate is slightly lower, but just shy of 10 million. We also have a marketing campaign that is planned in the U.S., including a TV component with some celebrities. You know, that hopefully has an impact as well. I wouldn't say that the current run rate is necessarily indicative of what's gonna happen in the future. Angry Birds 2, as you've seen and as we've reported for Q1, is doing very well. It will depend, you know, of course, on how the marketing landscape evolves. In terms of the game implementation and optimization and improvement that we can do, I mean, we're certainly not running out of ideas on that front. Okay. Of course, the guidance of 25%-30% UA in Q2, that also kind of indicates that you have lower expectations on where you can spend the money to grow the games further. Is it so that the marketing campaign in June, is that included in the UA estimate, or is it outside the UA estimate? No, it is included. Everything is included when we talked about those UA estimates. I would also just point out that when you look at the UA spend for Q1, it was perhaps higher than the normal percentage that we invest, and that's, you know, kinda makes sense because we launched Angry Birds Journey during that timeframe. I see it more from that perspective, right? The launch quarter of a game, you can expect, generally speaking, that the UA investment are at a higher level. All right. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Tyler Parker, KeyBanc. The line's now open. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks. The free-to-play games and casual obviously seems to be growing quite nicely, so a couple questions there. Number one, how has the cross-promotion been between those users and your games, kind of relative to your expectations coming in? Two, do you expect that group, through the games group, to continue growing sequentially throughout the year? I'll take the first question, and maybe René can take the second one. Part of the process when we're looking for acquisition targets, for instance, is that we do look for the compatibility between the users of that company and our own. We know, for instance, that on a game like Angry Birds 2, we have players that are coming from, you know, hyper-casual games, for instance. We knew that there was this type of audience fit between hyper-casual games and other games in the portfolio like Angry Birds 2. We started cross-promoting between the games, and we already see some results, but we will continue to do so, you know, increasingly so, in the future. The second. Yeah, I mean, basically, we don't give quarterly guidance for the top line. For the full year, the guidance is still strong growth. We're in good momentum in Q1. Actually, there's a combination of elements that then will impact, you know, how each quarter goes. What we'll be doing, of course, is driving those live games as we always do as a service, and continue to optimize the UA, even though now Q2 likely gonna be a lower level. As Alex said, Q1 was at a very exceptional high level due to the initial launch push. Now we're maybe more to what you could say normal levels in Q2. I think we'll just have to see, you know, how each quarter turns out this year. All right. Thank you. I guess one more from me. Just on, I don't know if it's been asked directly yet, but on the user acquisition market broadly. I know you guys have said the Apple privacy stuff hasn't impacted you as much as the others, or very little at all. Just curious where we're at in the market evolution. We're a couple quarters in now. You think we turned a corner? Is the impacts mostly played out? I guess, has there been a major shift towards contextual advertising for you guys versus heavily targeted spend on the UA front? Thanks. I mean, I would definitely say that we continue seeing shifts in the market regarding user acquisition. I'm not sure where you know we know exactly where things are gonna land. What I do think is that you know we knew or at least we had as a hypothesis that the type of game and the type of brand that we have were a great fit for this type of market. you know very wide appeal so that you don't have to be extremely specific and ultra-targeted when you do user acquisition. then of course the goal for us at this point is to work on our game right? To make sure that they are as inclusive as possible and they're offering something different depending on the type of players that are joining the game. Because it's like this selection of players or recruitment of players, instead of being very precise before joining the game, it's happening a little bit later in the funnel when the players are in the game, right? That's a change that I don't think is gonna go away. You know, fits well with the strategy, so we continue to execute on our strategy. Yeah, I mean, there's still definitely a lot of movement still in the UA landscape. All right. Thank you for the questions. There are no further questions at this time. I hand back to you. Okay. Thank you. It seems these were then all the questions for today. Thank you everyone for your questions and joining us today. We wish you all a nice rest of the day and a relaxing weekend.