Hey, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Q4 presentation for Play Magnus Group. This is the second quarterly presentation as a publicly traded company. I'm Andreas Thome, the CEO of the company, and with me today is Dmitri Shneider, our CFO. I will share some business updates and recent highlights. Dmitri will take the financial section. We will also have a Q&A session in the end. We can go to slide number four. I want to share some highlights for the quarter and also for 2020. Bookings for Q4 was $3.73 million, which is up 196% year-over-year. Bookings for 2020 ended at $9.26 million, which is up 158%. This is also higher than our guidance that we gave on November 18th. Revenue for Q4 was $2.95 million, which is up 154% year-over-year. Revenue for the full year of 2020 was $7.9 million, which is up 110% year-over-year. The average monthly paying users was 44,000, which is up 89% year-over-year. ARPU was also strong. It ended at $18.4 for the quarter, which is up 30% year-over-year. We have now updated our guidance for 2021 to $19 million-$21 million. The previous guidance was $14 million-$16 million. We have a very solid cash position of about $31 million as of February 15th. We can go to the next slide. We will take a bit closer look at the Q4 bookings and the 2021 guidance. As I said, Q4 was higher than expected. This was driven by strong growth in our e-learning segment. We also had very positive traction on our tour partnerships, and we benefited across the ecosystem from the Queen's Gambit. We also raised the 2021 guidance, and into this year, we see continued strong growth for e-learning. We now have higher visibility for our tour partnership revenue, which is also helped by improving tour viewership numbers that we will come back to. The bookings from the entities that we acquired by M&A account for around $3 million-$3.5 million of the $5 million increase. We can go to the next slide. Recent developments. We'll go now into those, but first, I will just recap quickly the strategy of the company since there might be some new listeners here today. We can go to slide number seven. Chess is played by 650 million people globally, and chess is rapidly moving online. Relative to other sports and games, chess is perfectly suited for the online play. Right now the chess market is booming and the commercial opportunities are really untapped. Chess is a global game with many positive attributes and associations. We can go to slide number eight. With the chess opportunity in mind, the Play Magnus Group has built a unique portfolio of valuable brands and services. We have products and services for play, watch, compete, learn, study and train. Our brands are the Play Magnus, chess24, Chessable, CoChess, the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, and with our two recent acquisitions, we also hold the brands iChess and New In Chess. As you can see, most of our revenue is either based on subscriptions or repeat buy of content. Now we also have a meaningful part coming from the media and partnerships around the Champions Chess Tour. Can go to the next slide. We are really a high growth company, and it was from 2020 that we were able to start to execute growth and taking out synergies in a very meaningful way. As I mentioned at the start, this has resulted in 158% year-over-year growth. Now with a stronger guidance of $ 19 million-$ 21 million into 2021. Looking forward, we feel a very clear strategy. It's about scaling our existing products. It's about investing heavily into the tour and continue to do smart M&A. We have set ourselves a long-term target of above $60 million in 2025. We can go to the next slide, which is called slide 10. Let's go to some of the recent highlights. We are extremely pleased and proud of the great partners that we have signed for the Champions Chess Tour. The viewership numbers have also been strong with a significant increase from the tour this summer. The pace of the quality content release on Chessable is also growing very fast. We are delivering on our M&A strategy with the acquisition of New In Chess. We are also honored to have signed the strongest female chess player of all time, Judit Polgár, as the educational ambassador for the group. Go to slide 11. As I mentioned, we signed many new partners for the tour, and in October, we announced NRK, TV 2, and Eurosport as distribution partners. We also signed Skilling as a partner for our first tournament. In November, Airthings came on board as the air quality partner, and Julius Baer continued the partnership and are focused around education. In December, Opera came on board as a browser partner for the tour. Early January, we made the biggest announcement with Meltwater as a title partner for the tour. Last week we announced that Aker BioMarine will be the learning partner. Looking forward, we also work with a lot of interesting cases for new partnerships for the tour. We can go to the next slide. Slide 12. The tour is growing fast on YouTube and Twitch. The peak viewership of the Opera Euro Rapid, which was our latest tournament, the one that ended this weekend, it was up 145% since the average this summer. In addition, we also got good numbers from Eurosport for the highlights, and NRK and TV 2 are constantly delivering good numbers in Norway. The interesting thing is that these channels are bringing a different and very complementary audience to the online platforms. We can go to slide 13. One of the reasons we raised money, it was to continue to strengthen our position in the chess content and learning space. As part of this strategy, we announced the acquisition of New In Chess. New In Chess is one of the most respected brands in chess. They publish chess books and also the "New In Chess" magazine. They were one of the first publishers on Chessable, and so far they have been the highest-grossing publisher. They have around 34 titles already on the platform. New In Chess' revenue in 2020 was around EUR 2 million, and they have a positive cash flow. Also, a significant part of the business is coming from subscriptions. The strategy moving forward is to use those titles and create more Chessable courses. Of course, also as a group, we own this content. We can go to slide 14. The number of Chessable courses is growing really well. We now have more than 460 courses. In addition, iChess, that we acquired in November, has produced 500 courses. With New In Chess, we have more than 200 new titles. We are now releasing new Tier 1 content on Chessable every week. When it comes to localization, we are planning to launch Spanish in Q1 and hopefully more languages during the year. We can go to slide 15. As I said, we announced Judit Polgár as our education ambassador, and Judit is one of the most famous personalities in chess. At her peak, she was ranked number eight player in the world. Judit has founded the Global Chess Festival in Hungary and many chess education initiatives. Judit is also a strong advocate for gender equality, and she's a UN Planet 50-50 Champion. In our company, Judit will create Chessable courses. She will also make commentary on chess24. We're also planning for initiatives where Judit will promote chess as a powerful tool education and also encourage more women to play chess. We can go to slide 16. 2020, it was a very different and difficult year in the world, but for chess, many stars aligned. Chess is growing really fast as an online sport with new content and streaming being created and with events like the Champions Chess Tour and Chess.com's FIDE Champs is really driving awareness to the game that we've never seen before. We can go to the next slide. Then also 2021 should be really good. Now we see that over-the-board tournaments are slowly coming back, and the Tata Steel Chess Tournament happened in January. With the announcement this week, we know that the Candidates Tournament is scheduled for April. We are all really looking forward to the World Championship Match in November. It's going to happen at the World Expo in Dubai. We know that these World Championship Matches are really driving a lot of attention to chess. In addition to this, we have seven events left in the 2021 season of the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, and we expect and hope that the final can be held in San Francisco in September. With that, I will give the verb to Dmitri. He will go through the financials, and then I will come back for the Q&A session. Moving on to the next slide number 20, which is the core key KPIs continuing strong growth trend. The key KPIs are growing and they're accelerating. For those of you that are new to our group, just a quick reminder, our core KPIs are bookings, monthly paying users, and average revenue per paying user. Bookings in the fourth quarter were up 196% year-over-year and 92% quarter-over-quarter. Were driven by continued strength in the e-learning segment, as well as positive traction in tour partnerships. Fourth quarter also saw both an increase in the number of monthly paying users, as well as the average revenue per paying user. We think that there's significant opportunity to grow both metrics over the longer term. Obviously, when they both are up in the same quarter, that's an added bonus. The number of paying users in the fourth quarter was up 89% year-over-year and 23% quarter-over-quarter. The average revenue per paying user grew to $18.40, up from $14.40, up roughly 30% quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. Going into a bit more detail on the bookings on the next page. Of the 196% year-over-year growth in bookings, the main contributors were e-learning and the tour segments. Chessable, which is a key part of the e-learning segment, continues to have strong organic growth. The course revenue was up to $1.5 million, up 185% year-over-year, and the contribution came from both more customers as well as higher spend by those users. Now, there is some positive seasonality in the business with the holiday sales, but really, that's a small part of the story here. The team really executed well and also benefited from a lot of the traffic that came from other parts of the group, from the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, and the chess24. The team, as Andreas mentioned, accelerated the pace of publishing content, including premium content, by really some of the top-tier creators in the chess industry. The pipeline is also looking really good for 2021, the rest of it, as we expect to continue to publish more and more titles over the course of the year. With the addition of New In Chess, this visibility is enhanced. Overall, we really want Chessable Marketplace to have something for everybody. Chess, as a game, there's many different aspects to it, and there's always more content that can hit some of those various areas. With respect to the other part that the team did well is just executing well on the promotions. Moving on to the tour. Tour was a large contributor at $1.15 million in bookings. This is essentially a new business that has seen quite a positive reaction early on. Just a quick note here. Both the Meltwater announcement as well as Aker BioMarine, these are booked in Q1, not in Q4. We'll see that additional benefit going forward. We see pretty good visibility here going forward. Subscriptions were up 48% year-over-year and 29% quarter-over-quarter. This was an improvement from a modest 3Q. This was certainly helped by the growth in Play Magnus, which benefited from general interest in chess, but also from other parts of the subscription businesses. As mentioned before, New In Chess will join the group. They do have a sizable subscription business, this part of the business will increase going forward. The New In Chess magazine is an iconic magazine in chess. It is a premium product that retails for around EUR 99 a year. While we're not modeling growth there for the coming year, there is significant optionality as it joins the Play Magnus Group with its distribution channels. Looking into 2021, while we don't give quarterly guidance a month and a half into the quarter, the trends are looking very good. The quarter does have potential, pretty solid potential to be higher sequentially than 4Q. This is helped by good visibility on the tour partnerships, as well as continued strong start in the e-learning business. Moving on to the next page, talk a little bit more about the users. The monthly paying users grew both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, as previously mentioned, to 44,300 users. Play Magnus had the fastest growth in users, both on a relative and absolute basis. With that said, we continue to see solid double-digit user growth in the e-learning space. Looking forward, we do think that this will continue both as we experiment more with marketing initiatives, but also the Chessable app just launched about a month ago. While it's still very early and it's still only on iOS, the initial numbers are looking pretty good, and it's showing that it's contributing to new user growth. We expect that to become a bigger contributor to user growth and retention over the course of 2021. As I mentioned before, New In Chess, with a subscription business, they had about 7,000 monthly paying users, 7,000 annual subscribers in 2020. That will be additive going forward. Moving on to the next page. Average spend by paying users. That's growing. It went to $18.40, up from $14.40. This was led by both an improvement in the product mix, with Chessable continuing its outsized growth, but also there's higher spend overall in the e-learning space, both just naturally because of the additional premium content that was published, as well as well-executed promotions. I mentioned on iChess, we're only seeing a month of numbers, because it was only acquired late November. There is already growth, and it seems to be benefiting from being included in the Play Magnus Group. There's already a little bit of cross-selling with Chessable courses going on, which we expect to accelerate. On the next page, the tour partner, just a little bit of an overview here. We booked $ 1.15 in Q4 with partners, and we recognized about $ 400,000 of revenue in Q4. Much more revenue will be recognized over the next couple of quarters. Just a way of thinking about how we're going to recognize revenue and book the contracts. When a contract is signed, and we know the terms, there's contracted revenue. We will book it at the time of signing, but then we will recognize it over the duration of the contract period. The terms with the partners are all slightly different, both on the amounts, the terms, and the obligations. There are some sales commissions when modeling the gross margin. There may be some sales commissions on certain deals. Going to the next page. Bookings, just a little bit of a bridge between bookings and accounting revenue. Just generally, there'll be several reasons why there may be variances between bookings and revenue. One is tour partnerships. Generally, they'll be recognized over a longer period of time, like the whole season for the Champions Chess Tour, and also revenue from subscriptions that are one year or longer will be recognized over the whole time, but booked when the customer makes the purchase. In Q4, a lot of the variance between the bookings and accounting revenue is due to the tour. We signed a lot of partnerships, and they'll be recognized mostly over the next few quarters. Going on to page 25, profit and loss. The summary here is we are investing in the business. We see an incredible opportunity. We did have elevated costs in the 4Q, given the listing on the Euronext Growth market. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $2.4 million. That's approximately $800,000 of negative EBITDA per month in Q4, and that's up from negative $500,000 per month in Q3. Going through this in a little bit more detail. The listing had specific expenses related to the equity funding transaction expenses. The share-based compensation and employee benefit expenses were higher because there were a vesting of a number of options, given there was a trigger event. Advisor fees related to the listing, which a lot of them are in the other operating expense line, certainly contributed. Advisor fees were a little bit elevated because we did work on several M&A deals in the fourth quarter. Otherwise, we are increasing investment into our product and our people. We see significant opportunity in the chess market over the next several years and we will continue to hire the best people as much as we can. In the fourth quarter, we hired across various senior positions, as well as many IT and content people on those teams. Additionally, the tour studio started ramping up in the fourth quarter. The Oslo studio only came live in November, and so that cost is now being reflected in 4Q and will be a cost going forward in 2021. We also modestly increased marketing in the fourth quarter to benefit from "Queen's Gambit" and the holiday season. Although overall, our marketing spend is still relatively low and has room to increase as we start to kind of work on this part of the business. Going on to the next page. We do have a strong cash position to continue to invest. We have $31 million as of February 15th. This already includes payments for iChess and New In Chess, which were paid out in the first quarter. There's also over 4 million in warrants that if exercised, and that strike price is at 16.79, could potentially add another $8 million or so to the cash position. The cash position also benefited from the strengthening in the Norwegian krone. While we're relatively diversified across our functional currencies, we do have a slight overweight to the krone, which is the currency that we raised money in the listing for. Overall, we're going to continue to invest. While the one-off expenses related to the listing will moderate, we do think that the burn rate might continue to be somewhere around these levels going forward. With that, I think we will open it up for questions. Thank you, Dmitri. We'll now move into the Q&A session. Please submit any questions you may have in the webcast player. We'll start with our first question here. How does Magnus Carlsen participate in the company, and how do his results in tournaments impact bookings? Magnus participates in the company. He gives obviously input to new products, as he's the number one chess player in the world. He's extremely engaged in the company. He has contributed. He has made Chessable courses. He has also appeared many times on chess24. Right now, the most important thing is that he's an ambassador, and he's playing frequently in the Champions Chess Tour. He's actually playing all the tournaments so far. He obviously does a great job giving interviews, helping us to create relevant content around it. Yeah, it was fantastic matches that we saw in the latest tournaments, the Opera Euro Rapid, where Magnus also played some really exciting games. That certainly helped us to drive those viewership numbers really high because he's an extremely popular player. We now have several questions from Øystein Lodgaard at ABG Sundal Collier. What is the main driver behind the increased ARPU compared to Q3? I can take this one. It's a combination. Mainly it's growth of Chessable, which as I think many people here know that has a higher average revenue per paying user than the rest of the group. The strong growth in the core segment, which was up 185% year-over-year, elevated the ARPU and actually offset the lower ARPPU from the growth in the Play Magnus business. Also the addition of Chess had a modest benefit as well, even though we only had one month of Chess. For the next question, other OpEx increased by 53% quarter-over-quarter. What was the reason behind this increase? Part of it was related to the listing as we had advisor costs in there. Modestly, there was an additional marketing spend, but also we ramped up the studio costs, so that's another OpEx. We hired various consultants that would be in the OpEx as well across IT teams and content. Next question. How much is OpEx likely to increase from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021? We're not guiding specifically to this number. What we can say is that the one-off expenses related to the listing should moderate from there. We will have some increase in the IT cost budget as we hired a whole slew of people in that space. Overall, it probably should not really increase too much from current levels. Okay. Next from Erik Eritsland at ABG. Approximately how much do you expect the tour to contribute in 2021? Initially, and obviously we'll see how it continues to go, but the tour of the overall booking should be roughly 20%, 25%. Can you say how many employees you hired in Q4 for the various departments, and what are your expectations here going into 2021? Overall, we have approximately 150 people full-time. We hired probably about 25 - 30 in 4Q, approximately. I don't have the exact number off the top of my head. We have also used the opportunity now to really get hold of some extremely good talent. We know that for us to achieve our long-term goals, it's really about having the right people in the right place. I think we have much better product and technical teams now. We have hired significantly into that department, which we're really satisfied with because we also have more senior people. One additional area which we would like to strengthen is specifically in the area of marketing and business development. It is a huge opportunity for us if we can replicate what we have done now in certain markets, in multiple markets. I think we are in a stage of this company where it's really about getting hold of the right people, putting them to work. Yeah, we will hire when we find good people, but we are, of course, not just hiring for hiring's sake. Okay, next question here. How concerning is the competition of Chess.com and others in terms of attracting more users? Yeah, I think we are all growing. Chess.com is certainly growing tremendously their numbers. They are much stronger than us in the area of Play. I think we are really strong in the area of learning and e-learning. I think the market here is definitely big enough for more than one player. The more interest that comes into chess and the more people that are introduced into the game, I think will benefit all of us in the long term. Events like the PogChamps, which they are currently organizing, is bringing a new audience of people into chess that were not necessarily chess enthusiasts before. I don't think this is something negative. I think it's something positive. It is a very vibrant, high-growth industry that we are very happy to be part of. Next question, back to the recruitment side. The fight for talent is obviously hard. How would you consider your ability to attract the right talent? Yeah, I think that we are a very exciting company. We have traditionally hired people from our fan bases and from people that are already been interested in chess, which is very powerful because some of our products are definitely products that are really for more the hardcore chess players. In that respect, we also think it's important that the people that work for our company has that full understanding. As we are growing the company and as we are broadening our product portfolio and creating interesting, more mass market-oriented products like, for example, the Champions Chess Tour, we need also to attract people from outside the chess industry. I think we see really good traction. We see many people being interested in our company, people like our vision. People like the fact that we are addressing global markets. I think we stand for values that are very modern and that are very trending right now. We are very optimistic, and we are very proud and happy with all of the people that we hired so far the latest quarters. I will just add to Andreas' point on the first one. We are very unique in the sense that we are the only publicly traded chess company, and a lot of people play chess around the world. We've said this a lot, often, and many of them have quit. This was their passion, and they quit to go do something else, and they have various other skill sets. Like for example, I was at JPMorgan for 12 years, and there are other people that are at other big companies that have developed skills. A lot of them just would love to work for a chess company because there's no other chess company in the world. We see that coming in, and if you talk to some of our new joiners, you will notice that they might take even less money sometimes or other compensation in order to join our company. Yeah. Next question. In the 2025 horizon, what geographies are most important to drive growth? I think this is a great question. Growth is more than one thing, right? Growth is growth in terms of relevance and users, and then the other one is growth in revenue and profit. I would say that, in terms of revenue and profits, I still believe it will be the Western markets driven by the United States markets. It's where we see the highest growth today, and it's where we probably see the biggest potential to continue to driving that growth when we only talk about money and profits in that 2025 horizon. At the same time, we need to not forget about the even longer term. In that respect, chess is so popular in many of those more emerging markets, the so-called BRIC countries, and that's definitely an area that we are investing in. For people that are following us closely, they will see that we are doing more things in India right now. We have also ambitions for doing more in Russia. We are strong in Spanish-speaking countries. I think that it's going to be a mix of revenue-driving still a bit from the probably more focused on the Western, but also opening up to those new markets in terms of user growth and relevance is absolutely critical. Next question: can you comment on the momentum going into Q1 2021? For the first month and a half, the trends are looking very solid. Both on the tour partnerships, as we've already signed our title sponsor, Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, as well as Aker BioMarine, we have conversations going with a lot of very high-quality partners that they're seeing the visibility and the exposure on the tour, and they're seeing how they can be a part of the story. Also in the e-learning segment, already the start has been quite strong, the pipeline is looking quite good for the balance of the quarter and the year. Far the trend is looking very good. On a related note, what are the biggest opportunities and risks in Q1 and 2021? Yeah. The opportunity I would say is that we are localizing into new markets. That's definitely one very big opportunity. It's also doing more in marketing, reaching out broader, and it's good activations around the World Championship period which is coming into the fall. I think those are some of the opportunities. In terms of risks, I don't want to pinpoint anything very specific there. I think right now, as I said, we have good momentum, and we are focusing really on keeping up that. Yeah. One risk, of course, is there has been significant interest in chess in the fourth quarter with Queen's Gambit. We think actually Queen's Gambit probably benefited us less than our competitors because it benefited most the casual segments. Yeah. Part of our business that benefited the most from that is the Play Magnus app suite, which is a smaller contributor than Chessable or the tour. Of course, if that slows down, that could be a potential risk. There's so many other drivers in the chess space today, from the over-the-board tournaments coming back, the World Championship, the Candidates. Just in general, these kinds of momentous events like Queen's Gambit probably don't go away in just a quarter. Actually, a lot of new people that were introduced to the game probably will stick around and will want to explore the ecosystem, in our view. We have some further questions from Øystein Lodgaard at ABG. Can you comment on the progress of the new play zone? Will you create a new play zone or would you consider an acquisition in this space? Yeah. We are definitely creating our own. We have hired a significant amount of developers. The Champions Chess Tour players are playing in that new play zone today. We think there is a big opportunity for us moving forward when that is being released, as this is one of the areas where we are currently behind our competition. What are the main product development focuses in the next quarters? It's about continuing to develop the tour. I think if you look at the broadcast quality of that broadcast right now, it's much better than what it was. It's actually really good right now, there is still big room still for improvements of integrations. That's one area which we're investing heavily into. The other area is around Chessable. We have released the app for iOS, and we are going to also roll that out for other platforms. That's another very important area which we're investing heavily into. We have also made an announcement that we'll introduce a Chessable Classroom product, which is another area of big opportunity for the future and current investment. Into revamping chess24. Those are the main areas which we're investing into. Also localization in Chessable. Absolutely. The first courses in Spanish are expected to launch by the end of the first quarter. Next question: can you comment on the M&A pipeline? Yeah. We cannot say something extremely specific, but we definitely have a pipeline. We are working on that continuously. It's still going to be around content, which is our number one priority. New In Chess was the company that we thought was the best fit first. There is definitely more opportunities there which we are looking at. Yeah. There are some other interesting companies, startups, small teams in the tech space that we're also looking at. We have M&A as a very important part of our strategy. It's also a great way for us to get hold of talented people, ambition, and drive. As a company, we think we have a model where we can integrate these people in a very good way. Yeah, I think that's an area that is definitely a top priority for us as a company. On a related note, can you comment on how recent acquisitions have been integrating into the group so far? Dmitri, you can take it. Yeah. We acquired iChess. The deal closed basically at the very end of November, so we had about two and a half months or so, and so far so good. The pace, the revenue growth is accelerating over the run rate from the prior year. From the early kind of synergies of iChess selling Chessable courses, we've seen quite a positive contribution, and we're working on scaling that up more over the coming year. Yeah, so far it's looking quite good. The next question: what yearly growth is expected for the next three years in the post-COVID time? Yeah. Now we have given a growth rate for 2021, which is really solid. That's where we have the most clear visibility, where we feel comfortable in making and guiding as such. We have also said that we have a long-term goal of being above $60 million in 2025, and as you have understood from the presentation today, we feel really confident with where we are right now. We are very confident with what has happened in the last months. I don't think it's correct that we go in and start to readjust and talk about growth rates for those years. I think for now we will focus on that 2021, and then maintaining our long-term target. When we are ready to talk more about those coming years, we will do that. For now, I think the way you should look at it is that we are feeling more confident in the business than what we did a few months ago. Next question: what major chess events with Magnus are scheduled during Q1? One more time. What major chess events with Magnus are scheduled for? Q1 is very interesting. We have a major tournament in the Champions Chess Tour in March, which we are currently in the planning about. We are looking forward to Magnus to definitely play there. That's going to be the most important thing he does in the remaining part of this quarter. I think moving forward, we are looking forward to then see which of the over-the-board tournaments will happen, which tournaments Magnus will play on. Of course, he needs to go into some preparations for the World Championship Match in November, which is obviously his number one goal for the year, is to defend that World Championship title, and he needs to concentrate on that. At the same time, I think he spends a lot of time on our platforms. He's, as I said, a fantastic ambassador for the Champions Chess Tour. With that, I will thank Dmitri and Andreas, and for everybody that sent in questions. That's all the time we have for this. We'll endeavor to get back to all outstanding questions by email as soon as possible. If there are further questions, please reach out to ir@playmagnus.com. With that, I hand it back to Andreas for a closing statement. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for listening in to us today. Yeah, we see each other next time, and I know that some of you will participate in other sessions organized by the different banks in Norway later this week. Thank you very much. Yeah.
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