Apologies everyone for the technical difficulties there. I'll restart with this slide for those that were unable to hear the audio. Today, Meltwater is a global leader in media intelligence, helping our clients find and analyze online data. The company was founded in Oslo in 2001, headquartered out of San Francisco today, but with a truly global footprint. We have just over 27,000 clients. They're in 134 different countries. Approximately 2,200 employees in 50 different locations globally, and ARR of $453 million to end the quarter, and close to 100% of our contracts and revenue is subscription-based or recurring revenue. Our people and culture are very much key to our success. We see a selection of the awards the company has won related to both our products and people, including new awards from the first quarter, such as Best Sales Teams and Culture. We're very much proud of these achievements and have continued to win new awards every quarter with Q1 2022, as said, no exception to that. Our cultural values on the right-hand side have been consistent for 20-plus years and continue to contribute to our success. In terms of the use cases, 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 with brand management, helping them to track and analyze their brand, share a voice, reputation, and sentiment across traditional news as well as social media. Many customers then build upon that using Meltwater for competitive intelligence, benchmarking their efforts with others in the industry, as well as risk and crisis management, helping them to spot potential issues in real time. We can also help our customers to get their message out there using social media management to publish messages across different social networks and connect with consumers. The acquisitions that we made last year. They open up multiple new use cases and market opportunity. All historic acquisitions have been fully integrated to Meltwater, which is happening now with those that were completed last year. This will not only create synergies, but allows us to continue to provide one integrated platform to our customers' benefit, and ultimately a single source of truth for their PR and marketing efforts. This slide is also key in helping to understand why we win in our space. Customers choose Meltwater because we provide the largest set of capabilities and use cases in the industry, which allows clients to replace multiple point solutions with Meltwater's integrated platform. Likewise, for global accounts and contracts, we're able to replace multiple local vendors due to our broad set of capabilities and access to the best content across both news as well as social. Now in the first quarter, the investment into R&D has allowed us to release a number of crucial product updates to support our strategic initiatives, namely moving up market, growing social revenue, and providing the strongest integrated suite in the market. From a social publishing and social media management perspective, a number of key releases to increase competitiveness in this area. More advanced user permissions to support larger teams using the platform and more advanced capabilities on both Instagram as well as YouTube, the latter we believe being the strongest offering in the market from a YouTube standpoint. A new paid, earned, and owned dashboard was released to help customers consolidate reporting across social channels and more effectively report back on their marketing efforts and ROI. Our influencer marketing platform has seen numerous updates this past quarter, including a new integration to WooCommerce to improve e-commerce capabilities. Lastly, a new solution for the higher education sector. It's an industry and a vertical that Meltwater has already established a strong presence within, and the new solution helps us to increase our footprint in departments outside of MarCom and comes at a premium price point to support those up-market efforts. Now for a look at the recent trading and the performance within the first quarter. 2022 has started with a strong Q1. 20% total ARR growth at the end of the quarter, 13% of which was organic. Guidance for revenue was $105 million-$107 million, but we finished with just over $109 million, so $2 million ahead of the high point of that range. Our premium segment continues to show strong growth and progress with 35% ARR growth in the quarter and 37% growth in the number of 100K-plus customers. ARR from the sale of social products, this saw 56% ARR growth in total for the quarter. Customer retention has continued to show good trends and progress continuing off the back of what we saw at the end of last year with net retention for the 100K-plus accounts improving to 120% in Q1, with 108% in all premium and 95% across all customers. Adjusted EBITDA margin at 8% for the first quarter 2022. Now with revenue finishing above the guidance provided, revenue growth improved to 16% in Q1. As mentioned, ARR growth maintained the levels of the fourth quarter with 20% total ARR growth, 13% of which was organic. There's an important point to be made on this slide with regards to FX headwinds. ARR, as a reminder, and as the footnote at the bottom of this slide shows, uses a weighted average from 2021, which is important when looking to highlight trends over time, but of course shields it somewhat from currency fluctuation. Revenue is based upon more real-time FX, and thus prone to such fluctuations. As an example of this impact, if in Q1 2022 we used the same FX rate as Q1 the prior year, revenue would have actually been $3 million higher, and 11% organic growth versus the 8% we see on the graph. This of course would have been more in line with the ARR growth numbers, and is something we will continue to closely monitor over time. We'll spend some time here on the premium segment, and then revert back to this topic in a few slides' time. The premium segment is now $228 million in ARR from a dollar perspective. It's the first time that is more than half of the total ARR. When it comes to percentages, of course, it's still rounded to 50%. That 50% of total ARR is up from 45% at the same time last year. Growth of 35%, 24% of which was organic, up from 18% in Q1 the prior year. The second strategic focus is ARR from social products. In Q1, we saw the same total organic growth numbers as Q4. A very healthy 56% in total, or 36% organic, and this is up from 26% in Q1 the prior year. ARR from social products now makes up 42% of total ARR, which is a ten-point increase on Q1 of 2021. In the market demand for social products, it remains strong and continues to grow, and the integrated solution that Meltwater provides for news and social has helped us secure many of our premium customer wins this past quarter. That in turn is helping to drive this increased revenue and ARR that we see coming from social products. The largest opportunity for Meltwater here is really with existing customers, and some additional insight around that shortly. With our current growth trends and market demand, there's no question that social will become the largest part of our business over time, and continues to grow at good rates. Elena, I'll hand over to you now for some slides on the key financials, starting with the income statement. Thank you, John. Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We had a strong finish of the first quarter 2022, with $109 million in revenue and 16% growth year over year. Organic revenue growth, as John said, was 8% in the quarter. Gross margin was 75% in the first quarter, which compares to 74% in the fourth quarter of 2021. The improvement is being driven by fixed fee arrangements with some of our largest content providers, and synergies from consolidation of the acquired companies' content agreements. We expect the gross margin in the exit of 2022 to be in the range of 76%-78%, as we were communicating before. Sales and marketing expenses were $47 million in the first quarter, or 43% of revenue. This is in line with our expectations, and driven by a larger sales force in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2021, including the acquired company's sales force we did not have at the same time last year. Sales and marketing headcount today still remains lower than the pre-pandemic levels, while revenue grew 16% and ARR grew 20%. G&A expenses were 12% of the revenue compared to 12% in the same time last year. We expect G&A to be in the range of 12%-13% in 2022, as well as we communicated prior in February earnings call. R&D expenses in Q1 remain at the level of 11% of revenue, consistent with Q4 2021, and up from 8% in the first quarter last year. The current level of investment in R&D reflects our focus on developing products and technology to better serve our customers. Q1 adjusted EBITDA was $8.4 million, or 7.7% of revenue. Q1 bottom line was positively impacted by five key drivers. The first one is strong revenue performance in the first quarter. Secondly, lower headcount hiring than planned. Lower than expected stock-based compensation expenses in Q1, and benefit from the employee payroll taxes through OPEX related to stock-based compensation. Lastly, we had less one-time expenses if compared to Q1 last year. We can go to the next slide, John. On the statement of cash flows, Meltwater generates positive cash flow from operations, which in the first quarter was $13.9 million. This is more than double compared to the first quarter of 2021. Positive cash flow from operations provides flexibility and freedom to continue to execute on our strategic priorities. Quarter-end cash balance was $39.1 million, and $5.2 million difference in cash is primarily driven by purchase of equity shares of $21.7 million in total during the quarter, and $8 million between lease payments and capitalized software costs. This was offset by the drawdown of $10 million from the revolving credit facility to fund the share purchases from the general market we launched in Q1. With this, I will hand over back to John. Thank you very much, Lena. Hopefully everyone can hear me. I had a slew of messages to say that the sound wasn't working at the beginning there, but hopefully we're all good now. We're moving to the go-to-market strategy and highlights. A driver behind the improving retention rates, particularly with larger paying customers, is success in selling social products. In our Q4 earnings deck, we showed this slide on the four core social products that we focus on, social listening, influencer marketing, social media management, and Consumer Intelligence. Here we see how the positive trend and growth of these products continued in the first quarter of 2022, with 69% ARR growth in social listening as just one example being one of the main drivers behind our success in improving social ARR. We continue to leverage the opportunity within our existing customer base, where over 18,500 current customers are not leveraging any of these products, creating a very large top-line opportunity for Meltwater. To build upon that further, we've actually further analyzed the opportunity as we see on this next slide here. At the top left of the slide, you see any customer holding just one of these social products are in a premium segment, with an average ARR of just over $26K. The graph below that shows that today 25% of our customers hold one of the four core social products. As you move up and see customers with two, three, or four core social products, the average ARR by customer really accelerates, and those holding four products are in excess of $170K in annual spend. The bridge on the right really highlights the opportunity over the coming years to sell just one more social product to each customer in those different cohorts, and that creates over $900 million in additional ARR opportunity, with the largest such opportunity coming from adding just one social product to a customer that holds zero today. Success with this particular mission, of course, positively impacts retention rates and customer stickiness as clients move up into the premium tier and will in turn increase the revenue coming from social products where we see, as said, the largest market opportunity today. With regards to premium, here are some examples of our latest premium customers, including some on the left who are in the $100K+ cohort. It covers industries such as travel and hospitality, tech, automotive, luxury goods and fashion, with names such as United Airlines, KAYAK, AMD, Coinbase, and Mattel. This once again highlights the broad appeal of the Meltwater product and the success in moving up market. Of the $11 million in ARR added in the first quarter, $8 million was added in premium. In spite of a tough external environment and the macroeconomic pressures, we continue to see customers of all shapes and sizes signing up to Meltwater or expanding their relationship with us, particularly at this more premium price point. This not only proves a success in our strategy of moving up market, but we feel also speaks to the importance of our product even during uncertain times. It's a product and a spend that is very much prioritized by our customers. Now, the logos from the prior slide are just some of the examples of the 152 new premium customers that were added to the portfolio in the first quarter, maintaining the average spend in premium of $58K per year. Of these, eight were in the 100K plus cohort at an average price point of $210K per year. Our efforts up market continue to drive up the average ARR per customer across the entire client portfolio. This has risen to $16.6K per client or a 16% growth on Q1 of the prior year. With regards to the retention rates, the continued success up market is probably best highlighted by the net retention of our top-tier customers at the 100K-plus cohort. This reached 120% in Q1, up two points from Q4 and up 12 points from Q1 of the prior year. Overall, premium Net Retention was 108%, up five points from Q1 of last year, and across all customers was 95%, or up six points from the same time period in 2021. Retention rates very much remain a key focus for the company in 2022 and beyond, where we expect our investments both in sales as well as R&D to pay dividends, even in the face of that challenging external environment. Okay, last section now before we jump into Q&A, we'll be looking towards the future and the guidance for Q2 and the year overall. For the second quarter, we're providing revenue guidance of $109 million-$110 million. For the full year, we're maintaining our previous guidance that was outlined in the Q4 earnings call. We expect to exit the year with approximately $510 million in ARR. Revenue for the full year between $450 million and $460 million, and adjusted EBITDA margins of 6%-7% to reflect the previously outlined investments that we spoke to in the Q4 earnings call in February and also to help drive towards the long-term targets. Those long-term ambitions are very much unchanged at 20% top-line growth and 20%+ adjusted EBITDA margins. Q1 was a strong quarter. We're pleased with both the results that we see at the top and the bottom line. Likewise, we have confidence from what we've seen from a market perspective as we continue to win premium contracts and that demand for social products continues to grow. That said, considering the macroeconomic climate, including the FX headwinds that we spoke to previously, we do not feel it would be prudent to raise expectations for the full year at this time. I would stress that what we feel we have proven over many years is that we have a very much a resilient business, and one that continues to grow and perform in spite of external factors. We'll keep a close eye on what is happening externally, and update the market where necessary, but are pleased to maintain our annual guidance as being standalone even in the face of that uncertain external environment. With that, I would like to thank everyone for their time today, for dialing in, and Elena and I will happily take your questions, for the rest of the time that we have. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speakers, please press five star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press five star again. We will have a brief pause while questions are being registered. There are no questions at this moment in this call. I will now hand it back to the speakers. Sure. Actually, we have a handful of questions that were submitted via the web. Let's start going through some of those, some really good ones. Our first question is from Eirik Rafdal from Carnegie. He says, "We're two-thirds into the second quarter. Can you give any comments if current macro uncertainty has impacted the demand over the past weeks and months? Are you seeing companies scale back on spending? No, I'll take that one first, and then Lena, feel free to add in as well. At this point, Eirik, no. As I said before, we're very happy with the performance that we saw in the first quarter. We've had limited exposure to what's been happening in Russia and the Ukraine. We do not have people on the ground, either from a sales perspective or tech support. From a sales and product perspective, there's no impact from that. I think like some other companies, we've certainly had some global customers that have felt the impact of that. Some customers in the automotive and the agricultural sector, for example, have been somewhat impacted. Russia-Ukraine has had a limited impact for us today. So far in the second quarter, we are pleased with the progress that we've seen. As you stated, you know, we're nearly towards the end of May now, and we have not seen that scaling back yet from our customers or from prospects in the market. I think we see continued increasing demand, and as I said, particularly on the social side, which is why we continue to maintain the guidance for the full year at this point, but it is an uncertain environment out there. I think any time you open a newspaper or turn on CNBC, that is certainly what you will see, which is why we're maintaining the guidance at this point, despite a strong Q1, and despite continued strong market demand. Thank you, John. A follow-on from Eirik Rafdal from Carnegie, "You've had a solid start to the year in terms of adjusted EBITDA. You're still sticking to your full year target. Should we read this as accelerating investments for the rest of the year and/or growth slowing down a bit on the same cost base? All right. Again, happy to take that one first, and then Elena, obviously feel free to jump in. We're obviously maintaining our guidance with regards to adjusted EBITDA for the year. Again, we don't provide that on a quarterly basis, but maintain the 6%-7% for the full year, and feel that's the most prudent guidance to provide at this point when balancing the Q1 performance and the market demand with that external environment. Also, I think important to note that we are currently forecasting that some of the benefit that we received in Q1, that Elena mentioned regarding payroll taxes, will not repeat in the coming quarters. A couple of key points though I think it's important to highlight here that we did make in February during the Q4 earnings call, because they speak not only to the margins for this year, but also to the future, will probably be with regards to gross margins. We saw a small improvement in Q1. We do maintain that for the year, that will lift up to 76%, and that Q4 will have a stronger number than the annual number. That Q4 run rate will continue into next year, and obviously support margin expansion in 2023, and likewise the same with G&A. Elena, anything from your side to add there? Yeah. Thank you, John, and thank you, Eirik, for the question. I guess what I mentioned before in my presentation, there are really five drivers that fed into the bottom line, which is strong revenue performance, delayed or less accelerated head count growth, which is a part of our efficiency programs. Stock-based compensation, what John mentioned, also payroll taxes. In terms of the pickup in payroll taxes, you probably need to look at page 35 in the report we published today. It's the impact of the IFRS 2 accounting, which is called mark-to-market. What it does, it basically accounts the payroll tax liability for the stock-based compensation. When, in our case, the way the level of the stock performance, we're taking the advantage of that in Q1 at the amount of $4.3 million. We forecast until the end of the year that that will normalize. We see partly that was happening in 2021. I guess with the normalization of the payroll taxes, when and if the stock price goes up, the share price goes up, that would normalize. I guess two things, keeping an eye on the external environment and staying really prudent and not overly optimistic. At the same time, being ready to push for more efficiency programs, cut back on some of the travel, for example, in the second half of the year. We keep a close eye on how the external dynamics are going to evolve, and then really being prudent in our forecast. That's why we're keeping the guidance unchanged, and we believe that is a good news in itself. Thank you, Elena and John. In reference to the macro uncertainty, how has this affected the M&A talks that you are in? Yeah, the situation with M&A, it's really unchanged at this point. We always maintain an active dialogue with interesting companies, and we're always looking for opportunities. They're still there in the market. If there is an opportunity that we want to act upon, we do feel that we're in a financial position to do so. I think a tougher economic climate often presents opportunity for a company that is well-positioned and financially sound, such as Meltwater. M&A is always being communicated as part of the strategy for the long term, and that's unchanged. Any transactions that we do, they have to fit our M&A philosophy, and of course add value to the product and to our customers. At this point, there's no real change there with regards to how the environment is impacting M&A. As said, it could lead to positive opportunities for Meltwater considering the fact that we are in a strong financial position. Thank you, John. Our next set of questions comes from Kristoffer Langfors from DNB Markets. In reference to Net Retention flatlining out for the group sequentially, and LTV versus CAC coming a tad down, can you give some comments on this, and if we should expect retention in unit economics to improve in the second quarter? Yeah, thanks, Kristoffer. I think we spoke previously to the fact that last year in 2021, we were really pleased with the development in churn or the retention rates. I think in fact it was arguably the biggest achievement in 2021, just how much improvement we saw, not just with premium or 100K retention, but actually across the board. We're happy with the fact that in the first quarter these numbers have been maintained, and in the 100K plus segment have actually in target improvement for the full year with regards to the retention rates. Of course, as more business is coming from the premium segment, and that's obviously the case from the numbers that we just showed, this does help to improve retention rates for the whole company. Continuing that journey upmarket is definitely part of the strategy to improve the retention rates overall alongside those product improvements and enhancements. Every single week there are new releases and updates to the product which improve the customer experience. I would also highlight our customer education program and customer academy. I think that is playing a role in lowering the churn, and will continue to do so throughout the course of this year. We have a lot of confidence in the team that focuses on that internally, as well as sales leadership to make sure that we do continue to see improvement in those churn numbers. As I said to Eirik's first question, we haven't seen any decrease in demand or decrease in spend from our customers right now, which does give us confidence around the retention rates for this year. Elena, anything you would add on with regards to the unit economic side of things? That's fine, John. Yeah, you've explained it well. Thank you both. Our next set of questions comes from Kristian Spetalen from Arctic Securities. How should we think about the implied low sequential revenue growth for the second quarter of 2022? Is there anything we should be aware of on revenue recognition, like FX impact? Could you say what the revenue guidance implies in terms of ARR range, as this would give us a better flavor of the second quarter growth? Yeah, I mean, with regards to ARR, that's not something that we're breaking down quarterly at this point. As said, we maintain the 5-10 number for the full year with regards to ARR. As we've always done in our trading update, a couple of weeks after quarters close we'll provide those ARR numbers just to help with that, Kristian. From a revenue perspective, again I would just say that we're happy with the performance in the first quarter and finishing above the guidance range. When I combine our Q1 actuals with the Q2 numbers that we have and look at the first half of the year as a whole, we're certainly on track to get to the guidance that we provided from a revenue perspective, and again, feel confident in that full year ARR number as well. It is of course moving up, right? If you look at the beginning of last year in Q1, it was 6%. It's gone now to 8% from an organic perspective, and the numbers that we're providing for the full year show that the revenue growth will continue to increase. Elena, anything from your side on that? No, thank you, John. Thanks, Kristian. A follow-on from Kristian Spetalen. You have guided adjusted OpEx at 17% up 17% in 2022, while adjusted OpEx increased just below 3% sequentially in Q1. Likewise, adjusted operating run rate, OpEx run rate is $292 million versus the approximate $316 million full year guidance. Could you please give us some color on when in 2022 we will see higher headcount growth? Yeah, good question, Kristian. In the second quarter of the year is typically when we see a higher number of heads added, particularly in sales, which as you know is a large part of the overall employee base. The second quarter is typically when we'll see more heads added. In the first quarter, it was only 15 salespeople that were added throughout the course of Q1 there. To get to that revenue and ARR number despite only adding 15 heads is something that we feel is a good accomplishment. In the second quarter, that will ramp up somewhat more. In Q1, we actually said that we expect to add about 150 heads in sales throughout the course of 2022. We're now forecasting that a little bit lower, at 100-120 heads versus the 150, but still again maintain that top line and that ARR guidance, for the full year. Instead, some of that money will be spent on things like marketing programs, which would increase and improve the productivity of course of the sales organization, and those costs are a little bit more variable. If we do decide that we need to pull back or we want to indeed increase investment in those areas, it's a little bit harder to turn off and on that particular tap. Elena, that covered the sales side of things. Anything else with regards to the other departments or the OpEx overall that you'd like to comment on there? Yeah, sure, John. Thank you. I guess, Christian, the R&D as we said, you know, we keep an eye also on acceleration of hirings there. What we communicated back in February is that R&D is performing well when you hire upfront, so we did a lot of hirings in Q1, but we will be looking into, again, the dynamics of the external world, and see, you know, how much we need to add in the second half of the year. I guess if you put together G&A and sales and marketing, for example, really the focus is efficiency, and investments going forward will be in relation to the higher efficiencies, whether this is hiring, for example, sales people into the upper market and premium segment, as well as investing into some projects that will improve efficiencies in the G&A, as we exit the year. Again, the balance of both growing and maintaining our forecast, as well as really laser focus on the initiatives around the efficiencies is something that we have kicked off early this quarter. Thank you both. We have a question from Øystein Elton Lodgaard from ABG Sundal Collier. Can you give us some examples of key initiatives product-wise or other things that you have enabled to reduce churn? Yeah, I think that's probably one for me, Elena. From a product perspective we obviously highlighted in the deck a few of the key updates that we made in the first quarter. I think particularly those that were focused on Social Media Management will have a very strong impact on churn. The capabilities that we added for Instagram and YouTube, but also as said to support larger teams of people using the product, which in turn obviously fits in with the premium or the up-market strategy. We certainly expect those to have a positive impact on both new logo business, but also retention rates for our social customers. Influencer marketing, there's been a number of updates that we've made there, partly with regards to integrations to e-commerce platforms that we mentioned, but then also around collaboration and improved workflows. Again, enabling larger teams of people to collaborate inside of the platform. With our core platform, and also with the social listening offering that we highlighted before is growing at a particularly fast rate, a lot around ease of use. It's a topic that we've mentioned before, but the reason why we try to release product updates which improve ease of use is it benefits all customers. It doesn't matter if they spend $10,000 a year or $1 million a year, if the product is easier to use and get value from, that's a mutual benefit despite customer spend or where in the world a customer may sit. In this quarter there are a number of initiatives that are really targeting ease of use, particularly around search creation and how quickly a customer can get to insight. When we produce our trading update at the end of this quarter and circle back to the next earnings call, we'll include some screenshots and more information around that. The product team, the investments we make in R&D, a lot of that is focused on improving the product to improve our retention rate, so it's always front of mind as we are releasing product to the market. Thank you both. Our last question comes from Fridtjof Semb Fredricsson from Pareto Securities. Your operational cash flow was strong this quarter with some positive contribution from WC around $1.3 million. How should we think about WC for Q2? Elena, I think if the last one was me, this one is probably more in your wheelhouse, right? That's all for me, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Fridtjof, for the question. Yeah, typically Q1 is the strongest in terms of our cash performance, I would say, mainly driven by the cash collection. At the back of a strong Q4, you would typically bill more and collect more in Q1. We don't provide quarterly guidance on the cash, but we want to say it's in line with our long-term guidance. We will continue to be positive cash generators from the operating point of view. If not in the same level as 2021, then trying to overachieve that. Again, don't give the quarter breakdown. There are some ups and downs and fluctuations. I guess also what I want to draw your attention, we have a page that has been requested by many people that we've spoken to, which actually reconciles adjusted EBITDA to cash. I think that is an important addition to the quarterly report that you can reference and study, so that we can align those metrics together and then maybe do better forecast together. Thank you. Thank you for the question, yeah. Thank you so much, Lena and John, and thank you all for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and support, and look forward to keeping you updated on our progress throughout 2022. Thank you. Thank you very much.
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