Welcome to Linkfire's Q2 2023 webcast, where we'll be covering our, the main highlights of our interim, report for Q2 2023. Before we move on, please pay special attention to this forward-looking disclaimer. All right, Attention paid. Attention paid. Presenting today, myself, Lars Ettrup, CEO and Co-founder of Linkfire, and my trusted sidekick, Tobias, our CFO. Before we get started, somewhere there is a box where you can ask questions. Feel free to enter questions, while we progress, and then we'll pick them up at the end in our Q&A session. Today, we'll be covering business and market updates, highlights, financial performance for Q2, and our outlook, and also we will finalize, or finish up with a Q&A. Flash highlights, or what were the highlights here of Q2? First of all, something we're very proud of, is that we are narrowing in on profitability with a stabilized cost base. We said at the beginning of the year that we would focus on breaking even for 2023, and we're now showing that that is very much in sight. Revenue was up 25%, gross profit up 53%, and we improved EBITDA 85%. Really, really great numbers, and showcasing that we are following our guidance, and we are, we are eyeing profitability. Business and market updates. For everyone's, that are new to Linkfire, just a quick, introduction and then a recap for the ones that know Linkfire. We are a Danish-based company listed in Sweden. We work within music and audio entertainment space. We help music and audio creators promote their products. That can be a song, it can be a podcast, it could be tickets for a show, it could be T-shirts. Our goal is to optimize the promotional impact and drive more music streams or podcast streams or increase ticket sales and so on, and we create all these different links that can be used before you release your product or after you release your product. And it's small links or microsites that helps your fans or consumers figure out where to go and listen or consume or buy, and so forth. We help our creators and their teams connect billions of consumers and fans into streaming, ticketing, and merch services. In 2022, we connected over two billion consumers. We have a twofold business model. On one hand, we have a subscription side of the business, where creators and artists and their teams and so on, can subscribe to our platform to create many of these links and micro websites and access really granular analytics and so forth. And that's roughly 60% of our 2022 revenue. On the other side of the table, roughly 40% of our revenue in 2022, is what we call commissions, and commissions are attributed to our traffic. So typically that is, affiliate kickbacks that we have negotiated with some of the shops or streaming services where consumers end up in, can also be ad-supported, where there will be ads appearing on our small websites and so on. That's 40% of our revenue, and that is our fastest-growing revenue stream, and we expect this year for these revenue streams to be closer than they were in 2022. Again, we are focusing die-hard on becoming a break-even, business, self-sustainable. You can see on the right-hand side that our goal is to hit EBITDA break even, ± DKK 5 million. Revenue expectations are within 14%-33%, so here, Q2, with 25% revenue increase, falls well within that guidance. Again, what is our focus here strategically? Well, focusing on break even and becoming a self-sustainable business. We're also focusing a lot on our platform, improving our offering, improving our marketing funnel, really obsessing over those metrics. Then we're focusing a lot on our traffic monetization. So we had two billion users here in 2022. Now we're focusing on higher yield on that traffic to ensure that we fully monetize all of that traffic, something that we measure in RPM. And then, of course, we are focusing on vertical expansion, you know, broadening our shoulders a little bit more across audio entertainment, something that was very evident on Monday when we launched Linkfire for Podcasts. Business highlights. Again, improved EBITDA by 85%. Really focusing on a diligent cost structure, focusing on sustainable growth. You know, less quantity or less is more, basically. How can we focus on areas that can return value immediately and not in three or four years, and so on? Then we focus a lot on creator growth here in Q2. What does that mean? So for us, it's basically, again, expanding a little bit on the audio entertainment, but also expanding more in the long tail of artists and creators. Typically, Linkfire has been very strong in the Enterprise and Business segment, and we continue to be very strong there, but we are eyeing more and more an opportunity in the long tail, all the way down to the free users, artists and creators that maybe only have one podcast or one song, and so on. Because basically we can see that there's a lot of interest from the industry in this long tail. The streaming services have a lot, a lot of interest in the long tail. We are beginning to be able to monetize on them as well with our traffic. We can also see that side of the business also needs professional services that we can offer them as well. So it's a little bit of a win-win, and we can definitely see that there's a lot of potential there. BandLab announced over 60 million of long-tail users, also a little bit in the business and enterprise segment, but very much in the long tail. So there's plenty of opportunity for us there, and it's something that we've seen a lot of growth in here in Q2, and we will continue to see that going further on. And again, the Q2 highlights showing the Q2 also brought with it two amazing partnerships. I will cover them more in the next slides. So first of all, we launched with YouTube Music something called a pre-save link. This is the first of its kind. It's something we partnered with YouTube bring, to bring to market, something that resonates very well with creators and artists and their teams worldwide. It basically gives valuable insights and data to a creator or team before the song is released. It can be several months before, and it allows them to build up the hype, build up the audience for when the song is then actually released. It basically also, from a business point of view, increases our value proposition to these creators and artists, but it also, from a traffic commission point of view, extends our, you could say, monetization availability. Again, an amazing new partnership as well, or not really new. We have a very long-standing relationship with Apple, and this time with Apple Podcasts. We launched something specifically with Apple, where we get access to exclusive integrations, insights, and so on from Apple Podcasts, something we've been working on for quite some time, and so we're very proud to then basically release that now. Also a further testament to our relationship with Apple, and we hope that it will resonate very well with podcast creators of all sizes. At least, that's what we've heard. Of course, we've done lots of focus groups and so on, and we've been very well received. We've had a lot of news coverage on the release of this and have already received quite substantial amount of interest from big and small creators in this space. It's really, really interesting for us. And again, that's part of our strategy to broaden our shoulders and expand across audio entertainment. Yes, so- Over to my sidekick, Tobias, on the financial performance. Yeah, and as per tradition, we'll dive a little bit deeper into the figures here. So looking at the revenue, it increased to DKK 12.5 million for the quarter, increasing 25%. And that is obviously driven by our two revenue lines that I'll cover a little bit later. On the gross profit side, we saw a really strong development, increasing our gross profit by 53%, and that is mainly due to an optimization of our infrastructure in our server and hosting, which ensures that we can be more efficient in serving our traffic and our customers, also when we grow in the future, so we can do it at a higher gross margin than we're used to. Our gross margin came in at 84%, compared to 68% last year, which cements the strong development. This development, the gross margin and gross profit, as well as the revenue development in a lean organizational setup, sits on the revenue... or sorry, on the EBITDA performance, which we improved by 85% compared to the same quarter last year, ending up at a -DKK 2.4 million EBITDA loss for Q2, and encourages again, the development that we are on to make break even for the year. The equity is solid to break us, or to make us, to meet break even and beyond, and carry us through. Looking at the intangible assets, it hosts our product development projects that we do in our product development department. Lately, we've launched quite a few of these results from having developed intangible assets, most recently with the Linkfire for Podcasts, and all of these projects sit in the balance here on the intangible assets, something that we're turning into revenue as we go as well. Our cash flow on the right-hand side is subject to seasonal fluctuations. In Q1, we saw a positive operating cash flow, and this quarter we are seeing a draw on our cash. That's completely seasonal and in line with expectations, and it's mainly impacted by our working capital movement, which is impacted by larger subscription payments, it's impacted by vendor agreements and so on and so forth. Looking at our working capital, it's always something that we're trying to optimize so we can operate more efficiently and the most efficiently, the most efficient as we can. Our cash preparedness is something that we've started to report on since we closed the credit line in Q2, in order to show our cash preparedness to date. As of the reporting date today, we have a cash preparedness of DKK 19.45 million. Comparing that to the cash flow from operating and investing activities of DKK -11.1 million, and improving for the first half year, it's sufficient to take us to break even in our current plans and current performance. So we are very happy with that situation right now. Looking at the revenue development, again, 25% overall, consisting of subscription revenue and commission revenue. Starting with the recurring subscription revenue on the right-hand side, and overall growth of so 37% on subscription revenue, whereof recurring subscription revenue drives 17% growth, and that is basically licenses to our platform. And then we have the non-recurring part on top of that, which relates to contracts that are limited in contract time, contract period by nature. We don't expect to record more non-recurring revenue from Q3, but we do, however, expect to see the non-recurring revenue we've had in the past year to turn into recurring revenue in H2. So on commission revenue, we saw a growth of 2%. Commission revenue appears when advertisements are presented on our links and when we send consumers to shop, shops in which they buy, for example, signing up to a streaming service, buying a ticket for a concert, or the like. Drivers for this performance are consumer connections and RPM. The RPM represents our ability to monetize, so the commission revenue per thousand consumer connections. When looking at the consumer connections or the traffic, first of all, we can see a substantial increase in the platform traffic. On the right-hand side here, the red graph here. That's mainly due to a large amount of large releases from major artists such as Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles, and also most notably, an increased baseline in our Creator and Business segment, which is extremely interesting for us, since it opens up in this long tail of artists in the industry that is super interesting for our continued growth. Looking at the main drivers for commission revenue and RPM development, which increased 51.1% year-on-year. Q2 is traditionally a weak quarter looking at the overall performance. There are lower release cycles, and there's festivals and live performances and so on. So Q2 is always expected to be one of the lower quarters, as you can see in the graph. Compared to last year, we also cut off some costly partner revenue in order to improve our profitability agenda, which sacrificed portion of the revenue that we had included in Q2 last year. Including that, we would be around 10% growth. Generally, as a business, we focus on the least capital-intensive initiatives, and we expect to offset some of this cut-off revenue from last year in organic revenue growth this year. Moving on to the outlook and guidance, we maintain our guidance. We are still confident in our guidance of -DKK 5 million to +DKK 5 million in EBITDA and DKK 60 million-DKK 70 million in revenue. We also maintain our midterm targets of 20%-40% organic growth and an 80% gross margin, which both of them we are within range this quarter as well, and for the year. So confident in that development. Moving on to the Q&A. Yes. Oops, Q&A. Let's see if anyone has any questions. Feel free to enter them on the side. I don't think there is any questions. Let's give it another minute. And again, if there is no questions, then, you know, feel free to email us on investors@linkfire.com. Check out our investor website on investors.linkfire.com, or email us on td@linkfire.com or le@linkfire.com, that is directly. Some of you have done that and does that regularly. It's great. We try to answer to the best of our ability. Yeah, and we can maybe just- There are some questions down there, maybe. Great. There we go. Okay, so the first one is: "Great quarter, guys. Thank you. Can you mention the trends you are seeing in Q3? Of course, we can't disclose full numbers, but what we are seeing is, of course, our diligent focus on profitability, diligent focus on cost savings and so on, is something that we're continuing. You can expect something along the same lines as we have seen in Q2 and Q1. Cost tied down. Yeah. Keeping it cost tight, you could say. Yeah. So that is an expectation, and again, that is because we want to focus on becoming a self-sustainable business. So you can expect that. You can also expect to see some more focus and continued focus on the long-tail creator segment, so very much in the free segment or even in the low. ... how you can say, user segment from a subscription point of view, because we're seeing a lot of traction there. Recently, we changed our sign-up flow to feature sign up for free and so forth more, and we saw a quite significant influx of new signups on the free segment. Mm-hmm. And as we are also obsessing over how can we monetize, you know, service these long tail better, it's very much in the smaller, like, we're optimizing the value proposition here, optimizing, no, this these ads should not be shown here, and so forth. And we're seeing that that is paying off. And first of all, we have a big opportunity within our existing user base on increasing our RPM and monetization there. Quite significant, actually. We've seen really, really promising RPM results in different cohorts around the world. So really within the existing user base, there's a big opportunity, but also just in new users and new creators, there is a gigantic opportunity. So you will see us continue moving in there. Now with obviously with podcast being part of the offering as well, that just expands the, you can say, the level playing field or the market, basically. Yeah? Yeah, and also, just a comment on the industry here. I think it's what we are developing now is also in the to the benefit of the industry. We want to help increase the number of subscribers for the streaming services. We want to help the artists make more money and so on, so we can lift the industry basically as a whole, and that's all we are, we're working on- Yeah ... at Linkfire. There's a few questions about delisting and so on, but let's just, I will just wrap up this in terms of, the trends and the opportunities- Yeah ... in terms of podcasting, and then we can jump onto the delisting- Yeah ... side of things. So in, in terms of podcasts, it's, it's a massive opportunity. Obviously, we've seen investments from all the streaming services into this. Spotify have invested heavily in this. Apple have invested heavily in this as well. I think you, you can speak for our own user behavior. I listen to more podcasts. I know everyone in my sphere listens to more podcasts. Yes. There's also a consumption trend that is happening. It is actually a preferred method of consumption for a lot of people. And that obviously feeds into a big creator space, both on the enterprise level, so the big organizations that have many big podcasters and, you know, heavily listened shows. We have a very strong offering to them, so we can expect to see some enterprise-like deals in this space, all the way down to people sitting in, you know, in their own studio, in their own bedroom, featuring a podcast, but we call them long-tail creators, and this is something that we're focusing on them as well. So we know we can service the really big guys. That's the ones that will have the immediate biggest impact of the Apple partnership and the Linkfire for Podcasts as well, because that's where we're really, really strong. And then, of course, there will also be an impact for the long tail, but this is something that we are focusing on optimizing that value proposition a lot more. Yeah. What we're doing right now is a prioritized beta live launch, or a limited beta launch, that we're rolling out right now, and then we expect to expand it to the entire market in the fall. The way we're thinking about podcast is, as a starting point, it's free, and you can unlock some premium features with a subscription amount. But the way we think about it in, like, mainly is an advertising opportunity and an affiliate opportunity. So in the commission revenue, it's mostly where it's gonna reside. And then, of course, the volume of creators out there that can potentially sign up to our premium features here. One of the things that is noticeable about the partnership. There's a question here as well, if the Apple integration is exclusive, and yes, it is. Yeah. We are launching this with Apple as a launch partner, with unprecedented insights for the creators. So there's no platform out there that can show the full funnel of promoting your show, as Linkfire can in collaboration with Apple. So we have insights so to how users engage or the audience engage with the creators' podcast shows. And we can see, like, subscription development trends and so on as well. So that's exclusive and unique to this offering. Yeah, exactly. All right, let's jump into... There's a few delisting questions. One question is: Why delist the company only two years after the IPO? And in relation to that, are we confident that the delisting will be approved by the board? And if- I can take the technicality of that. Yeah. So the board are the ones proposing this to the shareholders. So it is already a board proposal. And we are obviously figuring out all the details in like the timeline and so on. All we've communicated for now is that it's at least three months from the announcement date, which brings it to, I think it's end of October- Mm-hmm ... or the application to Nasdaq. And in this process, we're obviously figuring out what is the best setup, how do we do it best for our shareholders to also continue holding their shares, and so on and so forth. We described all of this in the report as well, with some fairly diligent Q&A, and I can only encourage to read that again. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, please, there's actually a really good Q&A in the report as well. So why delist the company only after two years after the IPO? So, I can just start very high level. So of course, it's was never our intention to intend to delist and so on. And we are as such we don't mind being a listed company, we don't mind the governance and having all these calls and so on. We're actually, we're quite comfortable with that and- We started quite enjoying it. We started quite enjoying in that process as well. But what we're seeing in the market is that we've done different analysis of the market, we've done analysis of the Swedish market, Danish market, Norwegian market, small cap market, peer groups, and so on. And the common denominator is that there is a strong lack of liquidity. We also looked at, you know, we can always improve our investor relations and our communications, but we try to look at, you know, is there an impact when we push out you know big news, and, you know, like... And we just don't see the impact that we would like to see, basically. We're kind of, you know, coming to the conclusion that we can, of course, always look inwards and say we can communicate better, we can perform better, and so on, but we also believe that the market is not a working market for us, at least at the moment. Yeah, and then there's the clean financial part of it. So it- we're looking obviously at how would we become a better publicly listed company in the current venue that we're in, which would require, we believe, rather substantial investments into getting the attention and to improving, improving on our attention. And that is in a contrast to our breakeven agenda, where we are looking at a delisting as well as an alternative and saving costs on being a listed company. So that's also a way in that dialogue and something that has been one of the decisive factors for the board to propose this. And we obviously stand behind that, the proposal as well. Yes. And so, yeah, I think, in general, this is in the interest of all shareholders. We are always considering, and the board is always, always considering all shareholders in this decisions or proposals. And we believe firmly that the delisting in the current situation for Linkfire and for considering the market would be a benefit for all shareholders. And we believe that we have a good amount of options on the other side of that to create shareholder value. Yeah. At the end of the day, that's the whole premise, is to create shareholder value for us. Yeah. We believe that is the best path forward to create shareholder value. It's not an easy path, but we believe it's the best way forward. I can only encourage everyone to, again, we want to continue doing these calls. We want to continue keeping our shareholders updated. So we can only encourage you to sign up to our newsletter on the website, so you make sure that you get all of our updates, and we will also be more firm and detailed in terms of how it's going to work after a potential delisting. We're looking into over-the-counter trading platforms, so we can continue having trading in the share in a probably windowed kind of setting. But we will keep having the shares registered in Europe just as they are today. So there's no change as such for you as a shareholder to holding your shares. Then it's up to mandates and stuff, like that. But, we've done our analysis, and, we believe it's a very limited amount of shareholders that cannot hold their shares, that don't have the mandate to it. Yeah. But if you have any questions related to this, comments or whatnot, then again, reach out to us, and we are happy to jump on a one-to-one calls as well, if you have any questions, since this is important, of course. Yeah. We've had several of those calls. We're happy to jump on calls with everyone, explain in more detail as well. Again, just reiterating what Tobias said, we will keep the reporting cadence, so you will hopefully not miss information. So that means quarterly reports, we'll jump on these calls as well, and we'll be open for Q&As as per usual, so- Continue sending out news. Exactly. So we will continue in the same news, cadence and format as well. So hope that answered some questions. I can't see if there's any further questions. We'll give it another, 30 seconds. If you have any further questions, feel free to enter them, otherwise, we'll call that... We'll call that a day. Yeah. There's a question of, "What does the competitor landscape look like, and where are we in terms of market share?" That's of course a very broad, broad question, but if we're looking at music, we are clearly and have been for a long time in the top of the market. So when we're talking about the long tail, that's where there's a lot of players and also a lot of a lot of creators and users, whereas in the top of the market, there are the major labels, and we are servicing them since half a decade for most of them as well. So it's fair to say that in the top of the market, we are market leaders and definitely sit strong in that market as it is today. We are moving down the longer tail to take a larger market share of that. We've seen that increase as well. We've seen the amount of music being uploaded to streaming platforms increase significantly over the past years. Now, I think the last report was 100,000 a day to Spotify. Mm-hmm. So there's a big opportunity there, of course, but it's also a red ocean of competitors. ... There's a lot of smaller companies in the long tail. There's also some bigger companies that are focusing only on the long tail, also broader vertically as well. It's definitely a competitive market, but it's also a big market as well. We believe with our diligent focus on audio entertainment, with these partnerships with YouTube and Apple and so on, that we have a very, very strong offering, something that we can see in our inbound engine as well, something that we can see in our unit economics. It's not a winner-takes-all market, it's quite big market. It's I would probably call it more- Mm ... survival of the fittest. You know, like, do you actually have a monetization model for the long tail? It becomes a little bit theoretical now, but that is a little bit the biggest challenge in the whole creator economy, is that a lot of businesses are focusing on the 5% of creators that can actually pay a subscription fee, and 95% are basically feeding that funnel. Now, we do like to feed our funnel as well with subscription revenue, but we're also focusing die hard on the 95% of creators and basically saying, "Look, they're also interesting. They also need professional services. They also need that value proposition, so let's figure out how we make money on them." Yeah? And these are people from potentially third-world countries that will never jump on a $10, $5 monthly subscription. They simply won't, but they still need the professional services. So how do we cater for that? And that's what we're obsessing over right now. Can we, can we convert, you know, them into a free user, monetize with them, potentially share some revenue back with them? We're doing that with some of our bigger customers as well. And so that's a little bit the competitive landscape that we are looking into, is there's a lot of companies in the long tail, but we believe that we can service them differently than everyone else. And of course, we have a strong brand coming from the big artists, the big creators. We have a trusted brand as well, so we can see there a spillover into the long tail there, and we hopefully... Yeah, that's our strategy, basically. Yeah, and that, that's for music, of course, and the same is pretty much the case for podcast. There are also some bigger players that we are focusing on, and not as big for the podcast industry and as dominant as the majors for the music industry. But there's a really long tail of creators there as well. And we are, as we mentioned before, we focus very much on the advertising, on the traffic monetization part of it, for it to grasp the long tail there. And since we have a very well-developed machine here in terms of monetization, we are turning that on from the beginning on the podcast side. And yeah, then it's about lifting revenues for the entire industry, and that's what we're focusing on. Yep. All right. Cool. We have another 10 seconds. If no further questions, then again, investors.linkfire, investors@linkfire, if you want to email us. Look, it's been great presenting for you again. We will make this webcast available on our website. We'll also push it out on LinkedIn and so forth. So again, thanks a lot, everyone, for tuning in, and I hope you have a wonderful day. See you again soon. Yeah. Yeah. See you. Bye. Take care. Tobias? Ah, we were muted. We were muted. Okay. Classic. Okay.