Hi. Today, we are hosting Pareto Securities Nordic TechSaaS Conference in Stockholm, and one of the presenting companies is Linkfire, a company that helps the music industry by providing them with smart links. The company IPO-ed late spring, early summer, and a lot has happened since then. Hi, Lars Ettrup. You recently acquired your biggest competitor, smartURL. Could you explain why you bought this company, and how it has contributed to Linkfire? Yeah, it's great to be here again, and also in person. Yes, smartURL, it's a difficult name to pronounce. It's a kind of a pioneer in our industry. They started a good five to seven years before us. They kind of pioneered the whole smart linking space that we are in. For us to basically try and consolidate the market a bit, it made a lot of sense for us to acquire them. With that, there is obviously a lot of unit economics there. They have traffic in the hundreds of millions. They have a lot of users. They still work with a lot of big record labels and artists as well. For us, it made a lot of sense to look into that to fast-growth our growth basically, but also to consolidate a little bit. We don't have that many competitors there. smartURL was one of the competitors, and so it makes sense to join forces with them in that sense. Obviously there's also the top line growth aspect of it. We do actually you know it will contribute to our growth going forward. I believe we came out and said a minimum 15% next year. There is a lot of potential there. There's also the aspect that smartURL is owned by a big media company that has a lot of good relationships in the global entertainment ecosystem. Whether it being streaming services or record labels and so on. We're really also, you know, increasing our footprint in the industry and the ecosystem at large as well. It's an acquisition that really makes a lot of sense for us. Could you describe some ways you're working to increase both customers, connections and the monetization of the traffic? Yeah. We call it consumer connections, but really everyone calls it traffic. We are probably also, s tarting to call it traffic. Essentially, it's people that click on our links, people that we're sending to streaming services or ticketing services. Yeah, that's a very valuable metric that we look at because we monetize at the end of these consumer journeys. Whenever we send someone into a streaming service and they sign up or they buy a ticket, if we have negotiated a commission or an agreement there's a kickback. T o us basically. Yes, it is a very important parameter for us, and we focus on how can we increase the amount of traffic that we have. We obviously have our marketing platform where we see continuous growth of traffic. I mean, there's more music now than there's been ever before, and there's a constant need for our service. And links, so we just see that growing and growing. We're really also, you know, moving out of our marketing platform and going into social media applications, websites and offering same piece of software, but basically saying, "Here, you can use our links or our buttons or our widgets and we can help drive, you know, fans into services from your app. Yeah. O r from your website, and so on. We have a very clear plan for continuously growing our traffic or our consumer connections. The monetization of that, we have a metric called RPM, like revenue per thousand. It's basically like a CPM equivalent in the advertising world. Basically that's for us, how can we go in and improve the agreements that we have by understanding how does a specific streaming service want to grow. How can we help, you know, them reach their targets. By potentially, you know, influencing the demand, you know, sending more people over to that service in that region. But also establishing new relationships with new streaming services or entertainment services. That's really, you know, part of the key is improving those deals that we have, but also improving our technology. It makes a lot of sense for us, and we've seen already really fast improvements where if you click on a link, for example, in Sweden, you know, Spotify is a big streaming service here. But maybe there's other opportunity to show other services. You know, we should show different suggestions or recommendations to people depending on where in the world. We have growing traffic in South America and Africa as well. You know, there are other services there. The whole streaming service is coming. It's actually very complex. If we present the best options, the best recommendations to people within, you know, a very short timeframe, as soon as they click on the link, they should just say, "See, okay, here's where I can get that content or consume further." We can see that if we could recommend different services at specific points, it just makes a ton of sense. We're enhancing the product as well to provide better recommendations, but also to predict more what would this consumer actually like to see of opportunities. Yeah. You recently established an office in Ghana. Yes. Tell me about Africa. Yeah. Potential you see there. It's enormous. Yeah. I mean, first of all, you're talking like you were talking about Africa in general. I mean, it's a whole continent, so it's humongous. There's also very diverse in terms of culture and people and so on. But what they have in common is that, you know, internet penetration is starting to grow. I think, can't remember completely, but 4% or 5% every year. Mobile adoption is, you know, everybody has mobile phones down there. What we're seeing as well is there's a surge in entertainment demand and also supply there. What does that mean? The market is growing super fast, and we want to be there. What is also happening is similar to what we've seen in the past years, is that we've seen Latin American music artists, you know, being very popular in the big charts and the Billboard and so on. Now recently we've seen South Korean artists also, you know, being exported out of South Korea and hitting our charts. We're seeing, you know, Western artists collaborating with South Korean artists as well, and we're seeing the exact same thing happening in Africa now. Last month, our biggest trending link was an African artist called CKay. And there were some really big Western music releases happening at the same time, yet they still outperformed that. Really, it's a move that we have to do, and for us it was just we saw an excellent opportunity. We had an employee in the company that was, like, super fit to spearhead our mission in Africa, and it just made a ton of sense, so yeah. Very low-hanging opportunity f or us, and, like, we need to be there. Are you looking for entering similar markets? Yeah. I mean, we're looking at Japan. We're obviously looking at South Korea as well, but Japan is probably the one that is, like, nearest and dearest to us. Japan is the second-biggest music market in the world, big in entertainment in general. We have had some COVID challenges there. It's very much like we are present there. We've hired people that speak Japanese in our L.A. office as well. Right now we are covering it from L.A., but as soon as we get a little bit out of COVID, that's most definitely an effort that we'll look more into, basically. It's a really interesting market as well. The last time we talked about competition, y our peers. You bought your biggest competitor in smartURL. Yeah. How has the competitive landscape changed? Obviously there, we are many people, many companies that drive traffic into streaming services, so we're not the only ones. But in terms of the space and what we are offering, we only see a small handful of competitors. There are other people that make links. That's not exclusive for us. But in terms of, like, servicing the major labels, the major artists and so on, where we have a strong foothold, there's only, like, a very small handful of competitors. We're keeping a close eye on that, and we're seeing consolidation options there, potentially acquisitions as well. But that's something that we're keeping a close eye with. We're again similar to how we're looking at social media apps and you know expanding where we can connect people to services so we're looking at other linking providers as well. For example, I often get asked, "What about Linktree? I see them everywhere on." You know, we have a dialogue with Linktree. You know, we're working on how can we provide value together, because some of these Linktree or bio link companies out there, they don't have the solution that we're having. They make links, yes. That's why we are being confused a little bit with them, but they are only 4%-5% in music. They are also working with politicians, other influencers. They're very big on OnlyFans segment as well. We basically just wanna help with the 5%-6% that are music or entertainment related. Basically. Exciting. Yeah. Thank you very much, Lars. Yeah. Thanks for having me.