Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Meltwater's Q3 2021 earnings call and presentation. With me today is the management team of Meltwater, John Box, CEO, and Lena Shishkina, CFO. We're gonna start with a presentation that will run about 20 minutes, and then we'll turn it over for a Q&A session. Box. Thank you very much, Brynley, and hello, everybody. Thank you for joining today. John Box, CEO for Meltwater here. I will start this Q3 earnings call with some reminders on the company, our history, customers, the market, products, and technology. Then we will switch focus to our current trading and the financial results from the third quarter. Now, for the first time in an earnings call, we'll be joined by our new CFO, Lena Shishkina. Lena will take a closer look at the P&L, cash flow and the development of our two strategic focus areas, namely premium clients and revenue from social products. Lena, perhaps I give the word to you if you want to take this opportunity just to introduce yourself before we move forward. Thank you, John, and hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Lena Shishkina, CFO of Meltwater. I joined the company in October this year, so I'm very excited about this opportunity. A couple of words about my background. I'm Russian by birth and British by choice. You know, I've been working in sales companies for nearly 20 years right now and bringing the CFO experience to Meltwater with this. I've been working at SAP for over 10 years in their CFO and M&A functions. I've been with Workday for nearly four years, where I was the VP of Finance for the international business. The last two years, I was CFO of a SaaS company based out of Spain, and with Meltwater, I will be moving back to London in 2022. Very excited to be a part of the leadership team of Meltwater and continue to grow the company. To you, John. Yeah, great. Thank you, Lena. As I said on our call for the second quarter, we're very excited to welcome Lena on board. She's actually in New York right now with myself, as we communicate our quarterly numbers and then build up towards our capital markets day on Friday of this week, and we'll speak more to that later on. A few key highlights just to kick things off. We're very proud to report revenue above $100 million in the quarter for the first time in our history. While we see that as a good milestone, and one I said that we're proud of, we also feel there is much more to come as we move forward. Revenue in Q3, $103 million, which is a 15% increase year-over-year, driven primarily by success with premium and social. If we double-click on those two areas, we have continued to execute and show good progress in both areas. Some numbers were shared in our Q3 trading update in October. We will provide more insight here today, but as the headline shows, 34% year-over-year growth in premium ARR and 53% growth in social. Integration of acquired companies, both commercially and product-wise, has continued well, and Klear and Linkfluence are both positively contributing to our progress in social. Retention rates have continued to improve in all segments of the business. Some of these numbers related to premium will be shared here, and some more will be touched upon further in the capital markets day. We are now at the final stages of the up-listing process to the main exchange of the Oslo Børs and look forward to providing more firm dates when available. Today, Meltwater is the global leader in media intelligence, helping our clients both find and analyze online data. The company was founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001, today headquartered out of San Francisco, but with a truly global footprint. We have just over 27,000 customers, and they're in 134 different countries. We have over 2,000 employees in 50 different locations throughout the world. Our ARR at the end of the third quarter this year was $431 million, and the vast majority of our contracts and revenue is subscription-based or recurring revenue. Investment highlights. As said, today we are the global leader in our space with an integrated platform cutting across both news and social media. The total addressable market is very large and continues to grow as we add acquisitions targeting new use cases. Meltwater has a strong track record when it comes to M&A, and we will highlight one of the successes of those M&A acquisitions coming up shortly. A key asset for Meltwater is our global reach, providing a strong distribution channel for acquired products and companies. Lastly here, we have long-term targets of 20% organic growth and 20% EBITDA margins. As said, we're working with over 27,000 different customers today, and there are a few examples of those customers on the slide here. The client base, it spans across all verticals and industries, and today we are proud to work with category leaders such as Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and PayPal, to name just a few. I think this slide really illustrates two key points. Firstly, if a company or organization, really in any industry, needs to find and analyze online information, they can certainly be a customer for Meltwater. Secondly, the slide also illustrates the opportunity that we most certainly have upmarket or upstream with segments such as the Fortune 500. While we work with over half of them today, the ACV is below 120K at this point. This is primarily driven by the fact that they are only customers in a small number of countries or markets. There's a lot of scope to not only work on signing up the remaining 50% of the Fortune 500, but to increase share of wallet with existing large accounts, growing them internationally, and expanding the use cases that Meltwater provides to them today. Meltwater differentiates in the space by having a fully integrated platform for multiple use cases that spans across PR, communications, and marketing. One of the main ways that we help our customers is really with brand management, helping our clients track and analyze their brand, share of voice, reputation, and sentiment across traditional news media as well as social. The second key use case that we serve to the vast majority of our clients is really competitive intelligence. Our clients benchmark their efforts against key competitors, look for insight around their competitors' strategy, and use that insight to formulate their own approach. We can also help them to get the message out there and amplify that using social media management to publish messages across social networks and connect with consumers, fans, and followers. Our most recent acquisitions open up multiple new use cases such as consumer insights and influencer marketing. All acquisitions will be fully integrated to Meltwater. This is not only to create cost synergies, but also allows us to continue to provide one integrated platform to our customers' benefit. Our technology platform continues to support the company as we grow and scale, helping our customers mine insights from an increasing amount of online data. If you look today, we collect over 800 million documents per day. These documents are in over 110 different languages and coming from well over 200 different countries throughout the world. We leverage our investments in AI and data science to enrich this content, which in turn creates insights for our customers in the form of real-time analytics and dashboards in the platform. As an example here, if somebody was to tweet something right now, within two minutes, that will be in our platform. We can show people the sentiment of that tweet, key themes, the reach, information about the author, and the entities mentioned in that content. That all forms part of the analytics that we provide to end customers. To give you an idea of the scale involved here, we run over 20 trillion searches every single day for our clients, and the breadth of content that we look to cover is unrivaled in our industry. Meltwater's traditional market opportunity, the one that's wrapped around media intelligence, is a $40 billion opportunity today. Over half of that sits where we're really focused for the last 20 years with public relations, marketing, and communications buyers and use cases. There's an additional opportunity to further tailor the products as well as the go-to-market strategy to focus more on things such as lead generation or risk management as just two adjacent examples. This year, we've completed three acquisitions thus far, and each one has expanded our market opportunity. If we look at Linkfluence, it's really about consumer insights and market research. That's the field that they're in today. It's a very large space as customers look to use software to mine consumer insights in social media in real time. Klear, they specialize in influencer marketing. Now, influencer marketing is a space that's continued to see good investment and strong growth, and it's a use case which is in high demand from our existing customer base. Then lastly here, we have Owler. Their technology will over time support all of our customers as we leverage their company database, crowdsourcing, and knowledge graph. This will help our clients to get insights more quickly and easily than they do today. So far this year, we've seen good improvements in our growth rates as a company. The way that we look to grow the top line, it's very simply outlined here on this slide. Firstly, looking to land new customers and expanding share of wallet with all clients. Our go-to-market strategy is increasingly focused on accounts and customers that have greater potential and will become part of our premium segment. We look to increase share of wallet within all customers by selling more seats or users, additional modules and products to those clients. We continue to see very strong demand in the market for our social media offerings. It is part of the upsell strategy to existing clients as we increase penetration into the 27,000 clients that we work with today with those social products. Social products are also sold as part of an integrated solution to new clients, and we see that most commonly perhaps with the premium segment. 96% of new premium clients are including social as part of their subscription. It's a key reason as to why they come on board with Meltwater at that more premium price point. Lastly here, we continue to expand the total addressable market with new use cases from acquired companies. The products from acquired companies, they're again offered to existing customers and new customers alike and substantially increase the total addressable market for Meltwater. Lena, I'll now hand over the word to you, and if you could talk everyone through the latest financials. Thank you, John. We had another strong quarter finishing with $103 million in revenue, up 15% year over year. Excluding acquisitions, which contributed $6.1 million in the quarter, revenue grew 8%, up from 2% one year ago. This was driven by our successful focus on premium clients and the social business. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $5.8 million or 6% of revenue. This reflects our planned investment in both sales and marketing and R&D as we invest and take advantage of the market opportunity to drive growth. Adjusted EBITDA excludes both charitable contributions related to MEST and one-time expenses. The one-time expenses in the quarter was $4.2 million and were preliminary related to M&A. On the cash flow, we exited September with $52.1 million in cash on the balance sheet, up $1.4 million year over year. Q3 2021 cash flow from operations was a negative $3.1 million. Cash flow in Q3 was impacted by our investment in sales and R&D, as well as a negative Forex impact of about $4 million year-over-year. Net cash declined in the quarter by $5.7 million, primarily due to the increase in operating cash flow and capital investments. The remaining $225 million is available on the revolver to support the growth strategies going forward. Let's take a look at the 2021 year-to-date so far. Year-to-date, we added 672 new premium clients with an average ARR of $57K. Where we see the most significant progress is with the clients of $100K plus, which year to date grew by 83, and overall the total number as of September 2021 of these clients is 315. Average ARR of these clients is $208K. Moving up market, combined with improved retention rates across all customers, has improved average ARR by 16% so far this year. We were able to enter into agreements with large global organizations such as World Health Organization and HBO. Our ability to close business with these large clients is a testimonial to the strength of our product offering. John has spoken a little bit about the premium clients, and I want to indicate this exciting growth area for Meltwater. Premium clients contribute strongly in our accelerated growth. In Q3, premium reached $208 million ARR, up 34% year-over-year. Organic growth, excluding M&A in Q3, was 23% year-over-year. This is compared to 9% growth prior year. Growing the premium client segment is a strategically important priority for us, as customers in this tier have high retention rates and they are more profitable. Premium clients net retention rates have reached 104% in Q3 2021 and 106% excluding M&A. The premium client segment now represents 48% of all ARR, and the ambition in this segment is to become 70% in the coming years. The customer count, the accounts plus 100K ARR grew by 38% year-over-year. Now we can move to the social business. Social growth has accelerated rapidly in Q3 to $166 million of ARR, up 53% year-over-year. Organic growth of the social business in Q3 was 33% year-over-year, an increase from 23 a year ago. Social today represents 39% of all ARR. Social products are sold to all client tiers, usually as an upsell to an existing client or a part of the integrated offering to a new client. It is important to note that social products were included in 96% of all new premium client subscriptions year to date. Finally, on the accelerated growth, our ambition is to grow 20% year-over-year in the longer term, and total ARR in Q3 grew 17% overall to $431 million. With everything we looked at today with social, premium, and net retention rates improving, organic ARR growth in Q3 was 10% versus 2% same time last year. We previously said that ARR would accelerate towards the end of the year and the trend which we currently see. The reason we're looking at ARR metric is an indication of the secured future revenue, including long-term contracts, before the revenue recognition kicks in. The difference between ARR and revenue is typically due to the timing effect of the subscription revenue recognition. ARR, in addition, is a metric which makes Meltwater comparable to other SaaS companies. At this point, I'll hand it back to John for the next couple- Yeah. Thank you very much, Lena. So as previously communicated, we are hosting a capital markets day on Friday of this week, the nineteenth of November. This will be a virtual event and features not only myself and Lena, but also our Chief Technology Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, and the company's founder and executive chairman. There will be sessions looking at the origins and beginnings of Meltwater, our products and technology. We will double-click on our growth drivers and the financial model before recapping the day and looking to the future. That session will really end with a live Q&A with the executive management team. We'd of course love many of you to join us for that event, and the recordings will also be made available on the investor relations site. Okay, final slide now before the Q&A. Revenue guidance for 2021 is raised to $398 million-$401 million. We expect to finish this year with adjusted EBITDA of around 5%. As previously communicated, and as Lena's touched upon here, we're currently investing for growth, and these investments are primarily within R&D and sales and marketing. The long-term model and ambitions, they are unchanged, with 20% plus for both top and bottom line. Our CFO letter will expand upon those plans during the investor day that we host on the 19th of this month. As said at the beginning of this presentation, we're edging closer to completing the up-listing process to the main exchange of Oslo Børs. It's something that we will complete this quarter, and we'll share more information as soon as that is possible. With that, I would like to thank everyone for their time, today, for dialing in, and Lena and I will happily take your questions for the rest of the time that we have. Brynley, I'll hand back to you for the Q&A section. Great. Thanks, John, and thank you both for the presentation. Our first questions come from Øystein Lodgaard from ABG Sundal Collier. You said that you will end 2021 with an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 5%. Does this mean in the fourth quarter, or the full year 2021 as a whole? I can take the question, John. Thank you, Brynley. Thank you, Øystein. This is for the total year. We would see, just to double-click on this, we would see naturally higher expenses in Q4 related to the performance of the business, which is typically, you know, overperforming on the sales and marketing side, and also the increasing investments in R&D. We would also have a spike in G&A investments related to the Børs and up-listing, and that would include the audit fees, conversion fees, and also some of the legal fees that we will be incurring. I think that all together will drive the adjusted EBITDA to 5% approximately. Thank you, Lena. A follow-up. The low end of your new revenue guidance implies zero growth in revenues from Q3 to Q4. The Q3 ARR divided by four would point to revenues in the U.S. of $108 million in Q4, or full year revenues in the U.S. of $403 million. Is this guidance too low? Well, Lena, and if you have any additional points, then feel free to chip in at the end, of course. Øystein, we're pleased with what we saw in the third quarter and also happy with how the business is trending so far this year. Therefore, we do feel positive and optimistic for the end of the year. Obviously, the top end of the range would be around $106 million for Q4. That would represent about 14% growth compared to Q4 of last year. I mean, the bottom line is that we feel that we're in a strong position, but the guidance is what we feel is prudent at this time and what would be responsible to give. That's the guidance. as I said, I think the business is in good shape, and we do feel optimistic about the end of 2021. Thank you, John. I just had a couple of points here. To my real point in the presentation, the difference between the ARR and the revenue catching up, because of the seasonality, Q4 will be quite significant in terms of bookings, but then obviously the revenue recognition might kick off with a bit of a delay, which will be rather in Q1 next year. I think that just illustrates the difference between the ARR and the revenues in that case. Thank you. Thank you both. Our next question comes from Eric Ragdahl with Carnegie. You're adding a plus sign behind the long-term EBITDA margin target from Q1 and Q2. Is that something that we should read into? Lena, is that something you want to speak to? Yeah. Thank you, John. Basically we wanted to really give a clearer guidance until the end of the year, and I believe the major, you know, one of the drivers is the adjusted EBITDA, about $2.8 million is due to acquisitions. I mean, we currently, as of September 30, integrated all three acquisitions that we did in the course of 2021, and out of this I have to remind you that there's $1 million of the haircut, which is the purchase accounting in U.S. GAAP, which is adjusting the deferred revenue. We are slightly behind on the top line, which will then be catching up in the next years for 2022, 2023 for the M&A to be accretive, and also leveraging the synergies and the cost of goods, which is primarily will be coming from content, which we have already seen in Klear in Q3, and we saw in the past synergies from Sysomos acquisition. I think just to that, and more specifically on the question, Øystein, in terms of what you should read into the plus. Well, what I would say is that we know that the business scales very well when we look at the margins, particularly on those content agreements, which obviously, as you know, forms the bulk of the COGS. Many of those are fixed fee, so as the top line continues to grow and as the company continues to scale, we do know that after we have been optimizing for growth, we can drive very healthy margins with the business. 20% is what we are shooting for, but there is certainly room to go beyond that based upon the way that the business scales and the model that we have. That's something that Lena will actually double-click on Friday during the analyst day. Great. Thank you, John. On the same note, you've removed the target rich environment comment related to M&A. How should we think about M&A activity going into 2022? I'm happy to take that one, Lena. We still feel that there is a target-rich environment. There are still acquisitions that we are speaking to right now, still targets that we have identified. I've mentioned on previous calls, however, that we do have to balance the integration of the companies that we list with any future M&A that we would look to. From a financial position, we are in good shape to execute on further M&A if the right opportunities are there, and they certainly are. As said, there's a balance between the two, but there is certainly still a target-rich environment and companies that we can do at this time. Excellent. The final question from Eric. You've taken a step up on the S&M OPEX in Q2 to Q3 to around $45 million-$46 million. How should we think about the sales and marketing level for next year? Yeah, again, that's. Sorry, Eirik, I think I called you Øystein just now. That again is something that we'll touch further on during the analyst day on Friday, just in terms of how we see that developing. What we've just seen in this quarter, however, is really in line with what we previously communicated, which is our intention to ramp up investment in sales and marketing this year, primarily related to additional headcount in the more upmarket or premium-focused sales positions, such as account executives as well as enterprise. That's really why we've seen the increases so far this year is positioning the team to more accurately go for that segment of the market which is upstream with the premiums. Great. Thank you, John. The next question comes from Frithjof Frederiksen. Your premium client update in October revealed that you added $3.4 million. This is down from the average of $4.9 million for the months in Q3. Should we expect this to pick up in November and December, or will Q4 be a slower quarter than Q3? What I can say is in the past, we've certainly never seen Q4 be a slower quarter than the third quarter, and we have a lot of confidence for November and December. Q3, it was definitely stand out from a premium perspective, and I think we've seen that with the numbers that we shared here today, as well as the trading update in October. If you look back at the first two quarters, October was certainly higher than what we saw the first six months of this year, and I would certainly be confident that November and December will show strong progress as well. Great. Q2 and Q3 trading updates showed that news and PR has started to grow again. Is it fair to assume growth around these levels, $2 million per quarter going forward? Yeah, I don't think you'd be far away with using those types of numbers. What we've said in the past is that towards the end of this year, we would expect low single-digit growth with the news and PR segment of the business. The reason as to why that's happening is something that Lena touched upon, which is really improved retention rates across all segments, and that's by tier or size of account, but also in news and PR, not just in social, where we see the strongest progress in the business. As we go into next year, we would expect incremental improvements with news and PR as well. Great. The final question from Frederick. Can you please give us some guidance on growth and profitability next year? Lena, is that something you want to speak to directionally at least? Yeah, sure. We would remain to be forecasting, let's say, and targeting long-term 20% top-line growth and 20%+ EBITDA growth. We wouldn't be guiding just yet on the next year, but we will do so at the beginning of the year. Again, more to say how we look at the model, how to double-click on different elements of sales and marketing and R&D and gross margin and EBITDA, so that is coming on Friday for the Investors Day. John, anything to add? No. Other than the fact that we will continue our progress towards 20% top-line growth in 2022. Again, we're pleased with what we've seen so far this year, and we do expect to see that progress continue into next year, and we will always look to be EBITDA positive. Excellent. Our next set of questions comes from Kristian Spetalen from Arctic Securities. The first question, can you elaborate on the $14 million in stock compensation? Lena? We'll probably have to take that offline. I think there were some prior adjustments to how that was accounted for, so happy to talk through in the dial-ins. Great. Is the downfall in gross margin purely related to the acquired units, or has the content cost increased on a relative basis over revenues? John, I can take that one. All right. I mean, yeah, and John can add 'cause he's more aware of the content costs. As I mentioned, really the swing was NOK 2.8 million negative contribution to the EBITDA from acquisitions, out of which NOK 1 million is the haircut of the deferred revenue. On the cost from the content, most of it is, I would repeat John's words before, are fixed costs. And we have some synergies that were coming from the Klear contracts, for example, that we don't have to pay that partner fees anymore, which we've seen as well, you know, before from the content synergies. I would repeat that the primary swing was from the acquisitions and with the NOK 1 million of a haircut. John? Yeah. Lena's right. The majority is coming from the acquisition. Kristian, we're not seeing large increases in content agreement costs or anything of that nature, and the vast majority remain fixed. Great. Thank you, John. Final question. Can you comment on why consensus estimates are considerably above your guidance? Are they too optimistic on the growth in Q4, or is there something in the revenue recognition that we should be aware of? Lena, is that one you want to take? Yeah, we're raising the guidance, I would say quite cautiously. We still need to see the top-line development of the acquired companies. I think that is maybe the area that we have to push further a little bit. We raised the guidance. I think we feel confident about this now, but there's nothing remaining, I would say, on the revenue recognition side, that would change that guidance. John? No, nothing further to add on that. Okay, great. We have a question from Giles Debon from Sycamore. The EBITDA guidance seems to imply OPEX growing NOK 14 million quarter-over-quarter. How much is related to new listing in Norway? There's some significant swings that I mentioned before in the uplisting. You would probably see the spike in G&A, but also the one-off expenses that are not included, obviously, in the adjusted EBITDA. They are related to the listing. I mean, it's early days to say how much exactly, because the majority of these expenses will come in Q4, and that would be cross-legal conversion of the legal entity, uplisting as such, conversion of the US GAAP to IFRS, and a lot of other things that we're very grateful that other people are supporting us externally. Thank you. What do you expect operating to show in the business? You've been investing a lot this year, but do investment levels come down, and you show more operating leverage going forward? This is true. Again, we will present more detail how we're thinking about the long-term model, long-term operating model from last year to date, and going into the longer term. There's obviously an opportunity to look at the operational scale, the scale of M&A, the focus on the top line there, but also the scale within internally. What I would say is, you know, some transformational programs will take time, so some of those effects probably would not be immediate. Also, given the complexity of the uplisting initiatives this year and also the three acquisitions that we have done, yeah, we will share more light in the upcoming Friday. Excellent. Thank you all again for joining us. This concludes the Q&A section of the call. As we've sort of highlighted, we're excited to showcase the management team and our talk about our strategy in our upcoming Analyst Capital Markets Day on this Friday. Feel free to find out any information on the IR website or reach out if you have any additional questions. Really appreciate it.