Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Q3 2021 presentation for Play Magnus Group. I'm Andreas Thome, I'm the CEO, and with me today is, as always, Dmitri Schneider, our CFO. I will share some business updates and recent developments before Dmitri takes the financial section. In the end, we will do a Q&A. So this was again a really strong quarter for the company. I'm very satisfied with the overall progress we have made, and we are ahead of the plan that we outlined earlier this year. Bookings for Q3 was $6 million, up 210% year-over-year. Revenue for Q3 was $5.5 million, up 176% year-over-year, and our average monthly paying users was approximately 60,000, up 69% year-over-year. Our PPU was $18.2, up 29% year-over-year. And also we have a very solid cash position of $22 million as of this week. We are a high growth company. We booked $3.6 million in 2019, $9.3 million in 2020, and we started this year with a guidance of $14 million-$16 million. We are now looking at $23 million-$25 million for 2022. I can also share that we have had a strong start in Q4, and we know from previous years that the second half of November and December is the strongest period of the year in our business. We have set ourselves a long-term goal of $60 million in 2025, and with the current pace of growth, we should be in position to reach that goal before. We should also no longer see the 60 million as a ceiling for our business. The chess opportunity is real. Hundreds of millions of players are rapidly moving online and there is a global audience. Chess has a positive impact in health, education, and equality, and we are still in the early days of development of this market. Over the last year, we have seen that chess creates real opportunities within e-learning and e-sports. Play Magnus has invested significantly into creating leading positions in these two areas. Over the last year, we have built a valuable e-sports business from scratch. We now have a large and growing audience, we have a leading broadcast, we have global partners, and we have many of the best players playing in our tours. All of this is making up a vertically integrated e-sports play. Over the last year, we also become the established leader in chess education. We have an engaged and growing user base, we have the largest library of content, we have a network of authors, and with the recent acquisition of Silver Knights, we have also established expertise in teaching kids. The U.S. scholastic market opportunity is big, and we are getting in position to capture that. So the first season of the Champions Chess Tour ended in October. It was a big success. We had more than 115 million live broadcast views, 29 million hours watched, and we had really big numbers, both in social and traditional media. We created a business from scratch in less than one year, and the tour is here to stay. The tour also showcased that professional chess can be played online and that chess can be seen as an e-sport. We did lots of innovations with our studio and our broadcast, and we also launched the first NFT platform for our final. We strive for more youth and female to be involved in chess, and with our Challengers Tour, we were nominated to the ESG Award for promoting gender equality in chess. Mastercard came on board as a tour partner for the 2022 season. We think this will pave the way also for other global brands to want to activate with chess. We see this partnership as a strong testament to Magnus and to the work that we have done with the tour. Also, the pipeline for more partners and new partners for the tour is really strong for 2022 and for the years to come. One of the most encouraging aspects of our business are the strong synergies between the e-learning and the e-sports activities we have. And we are leveraging the tour players and the ambassadors to create courses for Chessable and for other platforms. This is creating new avenues for the players and for the ambassadors to make money, but equally important, it's also an opportunity for our fans to learn from the players. Half of the top 10 players have already created courses. Looking a bit more at Chessable, the number of courses are still growing very well. We now have more than 600 courses, and in addition, we have iChess, we have New In Chess and Everyman Chess that are all bringing out more content. The library has grown 12% quarter-over-quarter and 57% year-over-year. Titles by influencers like Anish Giri, Nepo, Judit Polgár, Kramnik were launched this quarter. And we also see more and more courses being created and digitized from companies that we have acquired, like New In Chess and Everyman. There is a lot of expectations and excitement before the World Championship match, which will take place on the World Expo, from November 24th to December 16th. And we know that this World Championship is drawing a lot of media attention to chess, and Play Magnus is perfectly positioned now to take advantage of and capture all of that attention. So we have multiple broadcast teams covering the match for Chess24, and we expect big audiences and plenty of opportunities to market our different products and services as part of this. In addition, we have many on-site activities, and we're also launching a Play Magnus app collection in conjunction with the new New In Chess book. If we look forward into 2022 and our growth strategy, I would say we have built up the company really well over the last quarters, and we have an amazing platform now to grow. Our 2022 plan is clear. The launch of the new Chess24 Play Zone will help us to grow users and audience, and finally have a product to compete in play. Chessable has a solid foundation. It also has the tools to expand and grow its audience and the engagement on the platform. And the tour is here to stay. The tour is coming back in February 2022. It has a clear strategy for how to grow its audience and also continue to evolve more partners. So very exciting that the Chess24 product will arrive later this month, and we will now look at the video that explains the new Chess24 mobile app. After that, Dmitri, he will take the financial section. Welcome to the new Chess24 playing experience. Play in light mode or dark mode. Choose from a range of time controls or create a custom game and get paired with players from around the world fast. Enjoy a polished playing experience while making moves on a fresh, responsive board to claim your victories. Train and improve with over 80,000 puzzles. And that's not all. Download now and discover what more you can enjoy in our brand-new app. Okay. Q3 was a solid quarter, continuing the trend of greater than 200% year-over-year growth. That was again led by the tour and courses segments. Both divisions are executing extremely well and setting up for a nice 4Q in 2022 and beyond. The average revenue per paying user also grew, led by Chessable, as Chessable grew number of users, as well as increased and deepened the penetration with its existing core users. The monthly paying users had strong growth year over year, up 69%, and stabilized at record levels in Q3 as in Q2. The highly engaged user segment growth was offset by the moderation in casual segment, which was led by the Play Magnus apps. This is in line with the expectations that management gave over the past several quarters, and should not be a surprise to anybody that's been following the company. We do believe that this moderation in the traffic post Queen's Gambit and stay-at-home is largely complete and back to pre-COVID levels. Talking about the bookings a bit, the growth continued to be strong. We had another $6 million in Q3. That's $17.3 million year to date versus $5.5 million at the same time of 2020, up 215% year-over-year. The quarter-over-quarter was similar at $6 million, and this is similar to the 2020 level in Q3. So the seasonality kind of continued this quarter as well. Of course, as Andreas mentioned, Q4 is historically the strongest quarter seasonally, and this year should be no exception and should be also magnified by the addition of the World Championship. The organic growth this quarter continued to be strong. It was up 150% year-over-year. The tour segment was a key contributor again with $2 million in revenue, as we had a number of new partners that signed up, as well as existing partners that renewed their commitment. The courses segment saw re-accelerated growth, up 7% quarter-over-quarter and 138% growth year-over-year. As Andreas mentioned, the strategy is working. Chessable has published a significant number of high-quality titles with significant influencers, which is unique in the chess industry. You know, players such as former world champion Vladimir Kramnik or World Chess Championship candidate Ian Nepomniachtchi, no other platform can claim that. M&A companies also contributed to revenue, adding about 20% of the overall bookings, up $1.2 million in the quarter, up $3.3 million year to date, and well on track for what management has guided to a $4 million-$5 million contribution for 2021. Subscriptions continue to be less of a growth factor as in the prior quarters, and we do expect this to start shifting in 4Q and 2022 as the Chess24 Play Zone launches, as well as contributions from some of the acquired companies. So a little bit more about the organic growth. Of course, you know, we had 200% year-over-year overall bookings growth, but most of that was organic. It was 150%, year-over-year, and the tour and courses were the primary contributors. Of course, as we've mentioned many times, the tour has essentially started from scratch, and added a full $2 million of incremental revenue year-over-year. The courses added another million, led by Chessable, and subscriptions were less of a factor, but M&A has added another $1.2 million. The repeat and recurring bookings, which is courses and subscriptions, were up 62% year-over-year, helped by the organic monthly paying user growth of 34%. A bit more about the partnerships. This was another very strong quarter, and the tour continues to track above management expectations. What's exciting is that it's both new and existing partners. It's really great to see existing partners such as TV 2 sign long-term deals, as well as a major company such as FTX renew their commitment for 2022. This is a testament to the quality and success of the tour. Of course, with new partners, as Andreas mentioned, we're super excited to announce Mastercard, a company that's familiar to all, and certainly is a testament to the high quality and global nature of our partners. But we also added a lot of other interesting partners, such as MPL, an esports company in India, leading company there that we are excited to cooperate on expanding the regional tour strategy in India in particular. We also signed a deal with the MUST Group, and launched the first NFTs, and several other new partners. Overall, we do expect to have a good Q4. The FTX partnership will be booked in Q4, but certainly, and we do have other deals that are later stage of the discussions, but Q4 is unlikely to be better than Q2 or Q3. So a bit more about the monthly paying users. Strong growth year-over-year, and stabilization at record levels in Q3 at a little over 60,000 paying customers. The highly engaged user segment in e-learning growth, led by Chessable, was offset by the moderation in the casual segment, primarily led by the Play Magnus apps. They were the biggest beneficiary of The Queen's Gambit boom, and now that has essentially come back, and normalized. As I mentioned before, this is in line with our expectations, and we do expect the number of paying customers to increase in Q4 and beyond. The average spend by paying users continues to be strong at $18.2 per month per paying customer. This is primarily due to Chessable and their highly engaged user segment as Chessable continues to grow the share of wallet there, as well as the number of customers that come to the platform. Again, it's that best-in-class content by different authors that's drawing their fans and new users, and having them come back month after month. Of course, the product mix also improved with the lower contribution for the casual segment, which are also the lowest average revenue per paying user segments. Profit and loss. We had a solid quarter. Revenue in Q3 ended up at $5.5 million, up 176% year-over-year and 8% quarter-over-quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was not too much different from Q2 at negative $3.7 million versus negative $3.5 million in 2Q. We continue to invest for the longer term, especially in the growth areas and key functions. A couple of examples here. This quarter, we tried out the hybrid format with the tour. So that meant we had players actually some players playing physically here in Oslo, and others online. And the whole studio was decked out, and we had people come and watch. And this was extremely well-received by both the players, the fans, and the media. But of course, this cost a bit more money. And we, as we do more of these, as we decide to do more of these next year, we're working out now how we will manage those costs. But ultimately, this kind of innovation is extremely exciting, and we will do more of these kinds of things going forward. On the other side, we've made progress on various cost items. You know, after all the acquisitions, we've been working on consolidating and optimizing the various costs, and we've started to see improvements. This can be seen in the decline in the other operating segment line item. Another positive is that the margin of the courses, content, and subscriptions also improved. As you can see, the, the actual cost of the content subscriptions was $1.025 million. Not too different from last quarter, even though the courses and subscriptions revenue increased. So we made about a 1.5% improvement in the margin there, and this is just a result of the execution of the M&A strategy as we own a lot more content from the publishers, as well as the longer term deals with authors and deals with the players that have created content from the tour. Q4 should see additional revenue from the World Championship, but should also see additional costs. And of course, those costs related to the World Championship should not repeat in the Q1 or the quarters in 2022. So where do we go from here? Again, similar to the message that we provided last quarter, we expect to scale in 2022. We expect the burn rate to start narrowing in the Q1 of 2022, and this is because we expect the revenue to start increasing. The core businesses should continue to grow with Chessable and the Champions Chess Tour. We're launching new products with the Chess24 Play Zone, as well as the Chessable Classroom and the scholastic opportunity. And several of the acquired companies, we do expect a growth contribution from there. And we are working on optimizing and streamlining the operational model, extracting synergies from the acquired companies, improving operations, simplifying the corporate structure, and we have already started seeing improvement, and we believe there's a lot more to come in 2022. So with that, I think we will leave it open for Q&A. Thank you, Dmitri. We will now move into the Q&A session with both Andreas and Dmitri, and we welcome you to submit any questions you may have in the webcast player. We'll start off first with a question from Øystein Lodgaard from ABG. The new Play Zone looks very good, but it will be important to be able to reach critical mass in terms of the number of players. What will you do to attract many players from launch? Yeah, I think that's a great, great question. The good news for Chess24 is that we already have a lot of traffic on our website, and we already have a significant amount of players on our old Play Zone. So we have that. We have a good base to start from, and obviously now we also have a platform to grow. I think specifically mobile is an area where, you know, our new Play Zone is looking very promising. We have a question here from one of our viewers. What impact can we expect from the World Championship? Yeah, so. From previous years, we have seen really high growth from the World Championship. It's both driven by, you know, more interest in chess, but also many people watching our broadcasts. So, you know, we expect a strong growth both for the learning segment, but also for the apps, and we are using this opportunity to also launch products, as we know the attention around chess is very high. Can you say a bit about your ability to recruit? Is it easy to attract the best talent? Yes, I think it has, it has been been, it has been good. We have been recruiting from to say, we have been recruiting globally, but we have also started to centralize some functions in our offices in Norway, in Barcelona, and in Poland. So, you know, I think it has been, it has been, it has been easy for us. We have a good brand, and there is a lot of people that would like to also work with their passion. And you know, that has probably been the most successful for us, is when we have found people that are both passionate about chess, but at the same time, they're also either engineers or marketing people. So that kind of combination has been very successful. We have a question here from Eirik Eritsland at ABG. Can you elaborate on your initiatives to extract cost synergies in acquired companies and also say something about how much you expect the cash burn rate to narrow as we go into 2022? Yeah. I mean, there's various things, you know, with extracting synergies. There's certainly ways that we can optimize the talent pool in some of the acquired companies to do more on a group level and contribute to other companies. And thereby, you know, of course, we have as you have multiple companies, there are functions that have similar sort of capabilities or have a need that's not really being filled. We can really optimize the talent pool in that regard. And we've already started to see doing that as more and more people are contributing to different parts with, for example, from marketing one side, they're starting to contribute to SEO at Chessable or New In Chess and starting to really early signs, but we are seeing success of, of these synergies. With regards to the narrowing of the burn rate, we do think that we don't expect the cost base to go up that much. And we do think that the revenue will continue to grow at a very healthy pace. And there are some areas, for example, on the administrative side, based on the cost, you know, for example, like, some of the centralized functions like legal, where we can certainly optimize a bit more. So I would say that it should be a natural progression, not super sharp, but we should see a steady pace of narrowing from Q1, Q2, and all the way until the end of the year, where we think we can still should be able to be at a break-even run rate. A follow-up question from Eirik: Can you share your thoughts around your strategy to retain new users from the increased activity during the World Championship? Yeah, I mean, that's, that's of course always a critical question in business, is that, you know, one thing is to recruit users, another thing is to keep them. I think what we have seen very important is to constantly release content and new functionality. And Chessable has been very successful in this with constantly, you know, having quality content coming onto the platform, new authors. So like, I think we learn a lot from that side. And so on the Chess24 side, on our Play Zone, on our, you know, Chess24 Experience side, it's obviously those synergies between the Champions Chess Tour, the Play Zone, and things we do there to constantly have exciting features and content for our users. Another question here: When do you expect to be EBITDA positive? Yeah. Well, at the rate we're going now, we reiterate that we can be at a break-even run rate by the end of 2022, and EBITDA positive in 2023 for the full year. Question here: How do you see competition developing? Yeah, so there are... Chess experienced a rapid growth last year, specifically in 2020, and into this year, and there has been more and more companies and initiatives being interested in this market. So of course, any healthy market also has healthy competition. And we are competing mainly with Chess.com, which is the other sized company that is in most of the different verticals that, like, we are in. And I think we have found the two areas that, like, we are most interested in, learning and the e-sport side. I think there we have found also an approach to that market which is quite unique. Yeah. I would say that we have dominant positions in various subsegments. Yeah ... like the professional tour and Chessable, and we've continued to widen the moat there with every quarter via various innovations or acquisitions. And now, of course, you know, we are launching the Play Zone, which has been, historically, one of our weaker areas. How is your traction in Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe? The potential here must be enormous. Yeah, so. I mean, we have focused mainly on English-speaking and Spanish-speaking territories. That has, that has been the focus for the company in this phase. Like, we see tremendous opportunities in Asia, we see tremendous opportunity in Russia and in Eastern European countries, and that's definitely something that the company is going to, you know, work on and grow into in the coming years. But still, to reiterate, we're still scratching the surface of the opportunity in the high-paying Western markets. Yeah. You know? That's still gonna be the primary focus of our energies. We have another question here from Øystein Lodgaard at ABG. How is the pipeline developing for new partners for next year's tour? Do you expect more announcements during Q4, or is it more likely to come closer to the launch of the tour? Yeah. So it's a mix, right, between making sure that those partnerships that we have already signed, which are many, are, you know, evolving into, you know, becoming bigger and more important, and then finding partners into different segments that are valuable to, like, bring the tour forward. We, we will not say something specific about timing of partnerships, but, like, we have a lot of processes going and, you know, there will be more announcements to be made, before the tour starts in 2022, for sure. What are the most important factor or factors to reach the long-term targets, and is there upside to the 2025 target? Yeah, I mean, I think, as I said also during the presentations, with the pace that we have today, you know, there is definitely upside towards that target, which is, which is something I believe we should be able to reach before 2025. And yhe most important factors to reach it, I would say is that, you know, we continue to maintain the leadership position in learning and, at the same time, we start to have a product for play so we can grow our, you know, audience a bit easier than what we do today. Because obviously, the product that has most users and most traffic is the Play Zone, where we historically haven't been that strong. That is all the time we have for questions. Thank you to all who have sent in questions and tuned in today. If there are any further questions, feel free to reach out to ir@playmagnus.com. We'll endeavor to get back to all the outstanding questions via email as soon as possible. I'll now hand back to Andreas to end the presentation. Okay. Thanks, everyone, for participating here in Oslo and for people on the stream. So, thank you very much. Thank you.
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