Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Linkfire's webcast presentation of our year-end report and Q4 2021 report. I would like to begin by addressing the situation in Russia, Ukraine. It is a situation that we are monitoring very carefully, and we would like to make a statement that we will support all our employees and partners who are directly or indirectly impacted by this. We care for their situation, and we are prepared to support them in any way we can through this. Moving on. We have a forward-looking statement disclaimer. Please pay special attention to this as we continue on in the presentation. Today's agenda. Tobias and I will be presenting. Tobias is our CFO. I am the Co-founder and CEO, Lars Ettrup. We will go through the business highlights for the full year and Q4. We will go through financial performance, full year and Q4, and we will then move on to a market and outlook and end up with a Q&A. Please make sure that if you have any questions, there is a chat somewhere where you can enter any questions you have, and we will happily address them at the end of the call. Let's get started. First up, business highlights. We always start by reiterating our vision and what the company does. If you already know this, you can snooze for a few seconds. If not, then let me spend the next two slides just quickly elaborating what Linkfire does. We're in the business of empowering entertainment discovery, and there's really, really interesting things happening within entertainment and within discovery. What we're seeing now these days is entertainment is actually transcending streaming services, both in terms of discovery, but also in terms of consumption. Both of these things happens, you know, today, not just on streaming services or on the normal Internet, but it happens largely across social media application in games and what is also known as the Metaverse these days. Basically, this market complexity that we're dealing with are increasing by the day. We believe that there is more than ever a need for a middleman like Linkfire to help guide consumers into where the entertainment can be consumed. We connect billions of consumers to entertainment on a yearly basis. In 2021, we connected over 1.6 billion consumers to different music and entertainment services. These connections happened from primarily two destinations. One is our marketing platform, where we create thousands of links from top artists and top record labels on a daily basis. Also through our Discovery Network, which basically consists of a range of social media platforms, publishers, websites that all have engagement around music, where our plugin or our services are integrated into their services. We are a Danish company, of course, listed in Sweden. We have headquarters in Copenhagen, offices in Los Angeles, New York, Lisbon and Accra in Ghana. If we start with some of the 2021 highlights, we obviously in this summer, in June 2021, we concluded our IPO, where we raised approximately SEK 150 million in the process. That's funds that we will use to accelerate our growth strategy. We've also managed to grow what we call an RPM. The RPM is a revenue per mil, or the ability to monetize on all the traffic that we send into entertainment services. The RPM have grown 92%, and that's primarily because of optimizations within our product that has led to a higher conversion rate, but also is due to improved commissions or commission rates from our partners. We also saw traffic grow 9% year-over-year. A lot of this traffic comes from our platform traffic, but what we've seen in very recent months, in particular in December or also in November, last months of the fourth quarter, we've seen our partner traffic coming from our Discovery Network growing 64% compared to same months last year. This is a trend that we're actually seeing continuing into 2022. A big growth number obviously is on our commission revenue. We've seen that grow over 100% year-on-year, and that is, of course, a result of our RPM growth, but also our traffic growth. We've then also seen the acquisition of a key competitor, smartURL, that further consolidates the market for us. It will increase our traffic, it will increase our customer base, and of course, will increase our industry footprint. Well, we expect this deal to add at least 50% on top of 2021's revenue here in 2022. We've also launched our presence or opened an office in Africa. Africa is a key region for us. We can see that on the charts, on the global charts, we can see more prominence of African artists, and we believe that a lot of the superstars of tomorrow will come from Africa, and it's very important that we are there when they appear and when they emerge. We expect high growth in Africa, and we are already seeing really good tendencies down there. We've also very successfully managed to scale up our partner sales team. We have offices in the U.S. or teams, we would say, in the U.S. and in Europe. They are basically negotiating deals with partners to go into our Discovery Network, and eventually that will yield to a significant growth in traffic. I'm also very impressed by the talent that has joined Linkfire. Today we are over 100 employees. I think some of the key talent that have joined Linkfire recently is obviously a great testament to the vision, to what we are doing and have achieved. I also think it's a strong testament to the culture within Linkfire, something that I'm very proud of. If we then start looking at the performance numbers, I will hand over the microphone. Maybe that's it. There you go. Thank you. Two clients. I'll take it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The 2021 performance overall show a revenue that grew 42% on a constant currency basis. This is driven by consistent subscription revenue growth and more than doubling our commission revenue. The commission revenue growth is mainly driven by a steep increase in revenue per mille that I'll get back to in a second. The development in our gross profit and gross margin of 72% has been consistent throughout the year and is in line with our expectations. We've made significant and proactive investments into improving our server infrastructure and securing premium service delivery to our customers. This allows us scalability that sets us in a place to expect positive margin improvement in the future when we scale the traffic, because we are ready for it, and the revenue that follows it by monetizing that traffic. Consumer connections are people that click on our links. These are referred to as traffic as well. The RPM is revenue per mille relating to our consumer connections and our ability to monetize them in groups of thousands. Consumer connections are up 9% over last year. Partner traffic took off towards the end of the year, growing 64% over last year in December. We are content with having maintained and grown from last year's, so from 2020's high. We hit a critical mass of consumer connections in 2020, and this allowed us to focus more on the RPM, so monetizing that traffic. The RPM is up 92% from last year at DKK 77.27. This sets a good basis for the future monetization of our growth and traffic. With the muscle from our IPO and with the increasing focus on strengthening both our overall growth initiatives and the partner sales team additions as well, we expect much from this traffic growth. Looking at the Q4 performance, 2021 had a more linear growth than 2020, where in Q4 of 2021, revenue accounted for 28% of the full year, whereas in 2020 it was 32%. Subscription revenue grew 22%, while commission revenue showed a more moderate growth when compared to previous quarters of 33%. Just let's address the elephant in the room. We would have liked to see more than 26% growth in the quarter, which is mainly due to a later pick on the partner traffic than expected. We are happy to see that in December the partner traffic picked up, grew 64%. That's a trend that we expect to see growing into 2022, as we've seen in the first months of the year. The development of the business overall is in line with the expectations, and we are confident in our financial targets. The development in our gross margin and gross profit shows a gross margin of 72% for the quarter as well, and is consistent with previous quarters and in line with expectations. Consumer connections are up 14% from last year, and here partner traffic contributed as well with a 64% growth in December. RPM grew 16% year-over-year, maintaining the high levels from Q3, and this is largely driven by continued product optimization and conversion rates that we'll continue to invest in improving. Moving into the financial performance. Let's start looking at the consolidated income statement. Recorded revenue grew 36% year to date, noting that the majority of our revenue is invoiced in U.S. dollar. This makes up the difference to constant currency basis figures in our highlights. Generally, our currency risk management is described in note 21 of our annual report. Commission revenue is a larger share of our total revenue, and in the quarter it made up 37%. For the year, 34%, which is up from 22% last year. This is outlined in the revenue specification note 2 of the year-end report. It's a testament to our efforts in improving our monetization of our traffic, and it's interesting for our long-term vision. As the commission revenue comes with a larger margin and thus allows us to expect gross margin improvements. Cost of sales increased by 55% at a gross margin of 72%, over 76% last year. Cost of sales mainly server hosting costs, and last year included some server costs, some server credits that lowered the registered cost for 2020. We continue to invest in this scalable server setup and that allows for sustainable scaling and premium delivery to our customers, so that we are prepared to monetize sustainably on our traffic in the future. Other external expenses include DKK 6.3 million IPO costs and the remaining increase mainly due to one-off hiring and recruiting costs globally, while cost of market expansion is included here as well. We've had a lot of additions to the team in H2, and we've focused on directly contributing roles to our commercial efforts, and we expect the other external expenses to normalize over the coming quarters as we see a normalization of operations as well. Staff costs increased as a result of the same, so our expansions in our organization globally and as well as the investments that we've done into our current team, so retaining the talent in a tough employment market currently. Income tax benefits in the very bottom of the consolidated income statement relate to tax credit for R&D expenses at the applicable Danish corporate tax rate, which is paid out on an annual basis. Moving on to the balance sheet. The most dominant asset in our business is intangible assets. This represents our capitalized development projects, and we will expect a continuous investment into R&D and constant innovation in order to remain relevant to the market and continue our high-pace growth. These projects are continuously being amortized as they complete. By the end of 2021, the upfront payment, the prepayment related to smartURL is included as well, and will start amortization in Q1 as when the deal was completed. Cash and equity remain positively impacted by proceeds from the IPO and trade receivables are impacted by higher than normal billings in Q4. Same goes for the contract liabilities on the current liability side. Debt restructuring was included and concluded in Q4, which reduced our total debt by 21% and ensuring improved capital use by reducing our financial expenses. These reductions will be spent on amortizing the debt instead of paying interest. Lastly, the cash flow statement shows an operating loss that is impacted, of course, by what I mentioned before, costs related to the IPO and the costs related to scaling our business. Looking at the development expenditures of DKK 5 million for the quarter and DKK 16 million for the year, we will continue to invest in R&D to stay on top of market. Just below that, we have the acquisition of business which relates to smartURL. We also have a line item on repayments of borrowings, which relates to the debt repayment. This quarter, in the very bottom, we have gained on exchange rates compared to last quarter or compared to previous quarters. This relates to exchanging Swedish krona into our operating currencies, which was done at a high for the Swedish krona. I just realized that I didn't show the cash flow statement. There you go. The report is available on our website afterwards as well. Moving on to the market and outlook. Yes, that's me again. Thanks, Tobias. Market and outlook. We go and just reiterate our mid-term financial targets over the next 3-5 years. We remain confident in our mid-term targets, 50%-70% organic growth and a gross margin of 80%. I'll explain a little bit on why we remain confident in the next slide. Where will the growth come from over the next years? We will continue to grow our subscription business. Right now, it grew 22%. That will continue along those lines. We will see a very fast growth, both on the revenues, but also sustaining a very high gross margin is by growing our commissions. Here, the ingredients in the commission growth are increasing traffic and increasing the RPM. If we say increasing RPM, this is something that we've been very good at. We've increased the RPM by 92% this year, and we will continuously increase the RPM. We can see in specific regions and markets that the RPM far exceeds the average RPM we have now. We are obviously learning how to improve the RPM together with partners, but also increasing our product to deliver better results for consumers, and thereby increasing the conversions as well, and thereby increasing the RPM. We will continue to improve this as we go forward. We will also grow our consumer connections. We grew them 9% in 2021, and we actually foresee that to grow at an even faster pace. We've seen signs of the fast growth here in the last few months of Q4, and this is a trend that we see continuing into 2022. We've scaled up a lot on commercial resources to extend our network of partners in our Discovery Network, and so we do expect a significant growth in this area as well. We're obviously also expecting to retain our market position, continue our relationships with the artists and the labels and so on, and continue growing in that realm. Finally, we're also aiming for profitability, something that we stated earlier in the year. We can simply see that we can maintain a really, really high gross margin as our traffic grows, as we negotiate better rates and better deals. We can see that the cost doesn't necessarily follow. Something that we've been talking about a very long time, but we can see that in our model happening right now. If we look at some of the opportunities that we are looking into as well, and something that is not, we're not depending on these opportunities for our mid-term, financial targets for our growth, but obviously opportunities that we're looking into on how can we fast-track, our growth. We've talked a lot about podcasts and vertical expansion for Linkfire. We are working on podcasts, both in the product. We're also working with some of our partners that are represented in podcasts, and we're also looking at potential acquisition targets within podcasts, all to basically fast-track our efforts in podcasts and make sure that we have a very, very strong rollout when we do enter into podcasts. The Metaverse is something that we believe in. We believe the hype. We have recently announced a hire that are basically addressing these bigger social media partners and entities within the Metaverse, whether it's games or companies present there. We can simply see that our audience, our target group, are starting to hang out more in these environments, and we need to be present there. Again, we do have a M&A agenda we continue to explore. We have constantly dialogues and feelers out to see if we can fast-track our traffic growth or extend our foothold, maybe even jump into a new vertical expansion by doing this. Again, it's not a prerequisite for our financial targets, but it's something that we are looking at. Again, geographical expansion. We've mentioned a few times that we did open up an office in Africa, and we see high potential there. We are also looking at Japan and other markets in the Southeast Asia region. Japan, we are covering right now out of Los Angeles, and we are constantly gauging whether or not it makes sense to open up an office in Japan. We'll carefully monitor some of the other Southeast Asian countries as well. Yes. I think that was it for the presentation. Moving over to the Q&A, I can see that we have. There's quite a few questions. Quite a few questions. Yeah. A recurring question is, Africa. Maybe, Lars, you can explain a little bit about the rationale again, the strategy in Africa. The strategy in Africa is that first of all, why are we in Africa? I think I touched a little bit upon that. Africa has an enormous talent pool, has a lot of potential. What we are seeing as well is that consumers, fans like us, are also starting to embrace African music, also Spanish, Latin American music. South Korea has had a huge impact on the charts as well. We're starting to see that our taste is becoming more global. We're actually seeing that a lot of African artists will most likely, you know, transcend Africa and be global superstars rather than only local superstars. We've seen very strong evidence in the past years and recently in the past months, where African artists have had huge hits on bigger global charts. Our efforts there is that we put a very trusted employee on the ground in Ghana, and we're hiring within customer success and within partner teams there. Customer success is basically we want to get in front of the artists, we want to collaborate with the artists, the management companies down there, and the labels down there, so that we help them use Linkfire better. We help understand what is their use case there. Because in all honesty, this is also a learning game for us. How do we service you know, units and entities, artists in Africa the better. Our partnership team down there are focusing on making partnerships with different publishing websites, different social media apps and channels as well. Also some telcos we're in dialogue with down there. That's basically our strategy down there. The criteria of success for us down there is very much that we grow our traffic and grow our presence down there. Yeah. I think we can add to that as well, that we've actually seen higher than expected RPM performance as well in some of the regions down in Africa, and that's of course a prerequisite for making money in the region in the future as well. Some of the macro trends that we are tapping into as well is higher adoption on devices, better internet connections, lower data cost, and so on. We are also seeing that the African music market are inheriting some of the music infrastructure that we know from the Western world music as well. These are some of the trends that we are trying to be on the forefront of and see some results from. Yeah. We will report on how we see the success of our efforts in Africa on a frequent basis. We haven't come up with an announcement yet, but we can already see really early signs that this was a really strong bet for us. That's right. A good bet for us. Yeah. There's also quite a few questions to the development in our cost and how we see that moving in the future. Should we expect the same hiring pace, or should we expect slowing down leading to a more even staff and OpEx over the coming quarters? That's exactly right. We have focused a lot on getting top talent on board in H2, seeing a huge impact on product optimization and on sales staff that currently leads to an increase in partner traffic, for example. In December, 64% over last year, same development we are seeing early into 2022. We expect the hiring pace that we've had in H2 to slow down in the coming quarters and to sustain a more even operating function there. There's also one asking about the product optimizations. What does it actually mean? What is it that we're doing? Maybe you can explain a little about that. Yes, of course. Whenever you click on one of our links or widgets or buttons as well, we provide a curated list of options on where you can go in and consume or enjoy that piece of content that you clicked on the link. It's all about presenting the right options to the consumer in that very instance. What we are continuously optimizing is what is the right set of options for consumer. Here we obviously look a lot at where is the consumer clicking from, what is the most active, what is the most high conversion services in that region and so on. We do that very much on a micro level. When you click on a link from Copenhagen or from Sweden or from Stockholm or somewhere, you would actually get a different result, even if you clicked on the same type of link. That's constantly something that we need to optimize to ensure not only the highest relevance for the consumer, but also the highest relevance for us as a business. This is something that we've been doing. We are now investing in more intelligent solutions, so more machine learning and so on into this, to make it faster as well. We can now make these curated recommendations or options within milliseconds, and this is something that we are taking to the market, to all of these partners as well. It's something that we can just see that improves the conversion rates. When something you click on and is of higher relevance to you, then there's just a stronger likelihood of conversion there as well. This is something that we'll continuously explore. This leads into another question that's been asked as well in the gross profit development, which performed a lower rate than last year. That's true. We've invested into sustaining a scalable and premium delivery service cost of sales level. This means just decomposing that a bit. That means that we have a baseline that is secure, it's scalable, and we can actually squeeze more traffic into the setup that we have now. Basically, what that means is that the more traffic we have, the more basis we have for earning commission revenue, and the more commission revenue we earn does not impact our cost of sales or our server and hosting costs. Imagine we add a new affiliate partner to our mix, that will not increase our cost level. The more we improve our RPM, the more we improve our ability to monetize, we'll add to our gross margin, and that's what we are seeing from the partner traffic that is increasing these days. Yeah. When we go from a 1% deal to a 2% deal, that's not gonna increase our costs, but it's gonna, you know, double our RPM for that specific partner. That's what we're focusing on. We're quite happy with where we are on the cost side. I also saw a question on, you know, we showed that we were 42% revenue growth here for 2021, but we are communicating mid-term targets of 50%-70% growth. How does that correlate? The mid-term targets for us is an average across the mid-term period, 3-5 years. We can just see that our growth levers, we're confident in them. Our models show that we will be in that range, and that we'll perform in that range, and that's why we're very confident. We can see already early signs of the partner traffic pickup, something that we invest heavily in. We obviously expect that a lot of these investments that we've made very diligently will come to fruition. Obviously, you know, a quick math, if we're at 42% and then we're hiring next year, that will put us in the range of our midterm financial targets. That's how we view it. Yes. Also contributing to that growth is a question that came in too, what's the status on smartURL? We are close to having completely integrated smartURL, and we start seeing the results of that. We expect smartURL to contribute to 2022 with 15% of 2021 revenues. That is also going to contribute to the growth. It's contributing in all aspects of our business. It's adding traffic, it's improving our RPM, and it's also improving our strategic alliance as we have a strategic partnership with the former owners of smartURL. One question just came in as well that we understand that the flows coming from Apple Music are very important. Have you managed to diversify these flows with another player? Yeah, I can speak a little bit into that. Yes, we are working on diversifying our affiliate agreements with many more players, and we can expect to announce some of these bigger deals, hopefully in the near term, within this year already. It's something that is of great importance for us to diversify that. Yeah. Yeah. We believe it's crucial to the business, of course, and it's something that we are working on and doubling down on. Improving our RPM consists of three things, product optimization, getting more affiliate deals, and improving the ones that we have. When we do significant developments here, for example, closing a new partner, we'll disclose it to the market as well. Yeah. Then there's the final question is, regarding our EBITDA breakeven in 2023, whether that is towards the end of the year or for the full year. We expect for the full year to break even on EBITDA level. That's what we've set out as well. Yeah. That's us. I think that concludes the webcast. Thanks a lot for tuning in, everyone, and we'll see you next time. Please feel free to send any emails to us on investors@linkfire.com or visit investors.linkfire.com. Thanks a lot. Thanks for your time. Have a good day. Take care.
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