Welcome to the Readly Q4 2021 report. All participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards there will be a question and answer session. Today, I am pleased to present the Interim CEO, Mats Brandt, and the CFO, Johan Adalberth. Please begin your meeting. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 year and year-end presentation. My name is Mats Brandt, and I recently joined Readly as Interim CEO. Before I and CFO Johan Adalberth have the pleasure to present Readly's results, I'd like to take this opportunity to briefly introduce myself. I have a background as CEO at Euroflorist, an e-commerce company with operations in 12 European countries, and as CEO at Hemnet, Sweden's leading property platform. Before that, I had several executive roles at Live Nation Entertainment in Sweden and in Asia. I've also served on boards for several companies, including Dirac Research, a global leader within audio technology. My focus at Readly will be to enable the organization to successfully execute on our strategy and to accelerate our pace of innovation and product development further. This to ensure that we have a strong growth, organic growth going forward. I'm very excited to be joining this team and to lead the company through this next phase of growth until a permanent CEO is in place. Without further ado, let's have a look at Q4 and year-end results. Slide 2, please. We delivered good fourth quarter. We continued stable growth and improved results. Total revenues increased 37% compared with last year, supported by two months of results from Toutabo in France. We continue to improve results, and for the fourth consecutive quarter, we report improved results from margins. I would also like to highlight that for the first time since we were listed, we report a positive contribution margin in a single quarter. Our largest market, Germany, continued to deliver good growth, over 30% adjusted for VAT and currency effects. Our other markets continued to make good progress with over 45% growth, and we saw particularly strong growth in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. In other words, we continue to do very well in the DACH region. However, as expected, organic growth, excluding growth from Toutabo, slowed down somewhat in Q4. As we communicated in the last quarter, marketing prices have substantially increased throughout the year, and to adapt and maintain healthy unit economics, we have reduced our marketing spend and allocated investments to the markets with the best return. For example, the DACH region. As a consequence of the increasing marketing prices, we have updated our financial targets, which Johan will walk you through later in this presentation. All in all, a good quarter where we continue to show good top line growth and further improve results. Next slide, please. Looking at the full year, we delivered stable total revenue growth of 32% and increased the number of full-paying subscribers with 29%. Despite increasing marketing prices throughout the year, we managed to deliver 29% organic growth, just slightly below our financial growth target growing 30% organically. As I mentioned on the previous slide, we consistently improve results, and we are definitely following our path to profitability. During the year, we took several important steps forward to strengthen our European market-leading position. With the acquisition of Toutabo that was completed in November, we now have a leading position on the major markets. This create good growth prospects going forward. Just to give you a quick update on the strategic acquisition of Toutabo, the integration is proceeding according to plan. The development in France was good in the quarter, and for the operation in France, it's pretty much business as usual. The integration is expected to be completed during the second half of the year. Looking at partnership and content, which are two important cornerstones of our strategy, we increased our focus on partnerships during the year to increase cost-efficient growth. All in all, we launched over 140 partnerships across our markets. We progressed well with our content strategy, and in total, we now collaborate with over 1,200 publishers worldwide. I will come back to some of the Q4 highlights on content and partnerships later in the presentation. Last year, we also took very important steps forward within product development and did major improvements within recommendation functionality, navigation, and design. Going forward, and as I mentioned before, we need to accelerate product development and innovation, which will enable us to increase market penetration, widen our target group, and drive cost-efficient growth. That will definitely be a focus area for this year. With that, I would like to hand over to Johan, please. Next slide. Thank you, Mats. We are now on Page number 4. If we start looking at the top chart, our subscriber base, how that has developed, we see that the subscriber base grew 29.4% compared to Q4 last year, ending the quarter at 478,000 FPS, fully paying subscribers. This FPS number is up 43,000 from end of Q3, and the significant number comes from the acquisition of Toutabo, where we have included the Toutabo all-you-can-read subscribers. Several other users exist within Toutabo, such as single credit users, B2B customers, and print subscription. These have not been included in this FPS number. Over time, we plan to convert many of these users to our proven all-you-can-read Readly offer. The organic FPS growth was affected by lower marketing spend in the quarter. We choose not to compete for users during the expensive holiday period, especially in December, where acquisition costs were too high in relation to forecasted LTV. On the bottom chart, we see revenues that grew 36.6% year-over-year to SEK 135 million in Q4. Also here, we saw a positive contribution from Toutabo, where we have consolidated their full revenue as of 1 November. The organic revenue growth was 24.5%. ARPU, average revenue per user, was up compared to previous quarters, and this was mainly an effect of the market mix with higher ARPU in DACH and in France. Next slide, please. Page number 5. On this slide, we see sales figures for our core markets and Rest of World combined. Germany showed good revenue growth with 28% growth year-over-year. Adjusted for FX and VAT, Germany grow even higher with 32%. This implies an increasing growth pace for Germany compared to previous quarters, which is a consequence of us steering marketing activities to markets where we see the most beneficial unit economics. U.K. and Sweden grew 16.4% and 10.6% respectively, and this was according to expectations and also a consequence of the redirected spend I mentioned about. We retain a positive long-term outlook for both U.K. and Sweden and have already initiated measures to increase LTVs in these markets. France, our new core market as of Q4, thanks to Toutabo, accounted for nearly 9% of group sales, despite only two months of revenues have been consolidated. Total sales in France was SEK 11.9 million, which was slightly above our expectations, and we have big hopes for France ahead being Europe's largest magazine market. Growth in Rest of World remained favorable and increased 46% year-on-year to SEK 22.4 million. We saw a particularly positive trend in Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. Next slide, please. Now on Page 6. On the top chart, we show gross profit and gross margin. Gross profit was SEK 45.1 million in Q4 and increased by 34.4% compared to Q4 last year, corresponding to a margin of 33.5%. The underlying gross margin is sound, but we have brought on many newspapers during 2021 which are affecting our margins. On the bottom chart, we show gross contribution, which is then what is left after we have paid both publishers and for all marketing expenses. This was positive with SEK 5.6 million for the first time in a quarter since we listed. This is mainly a consequence of the lower marketing spend, and it also shows our ability to adapt to a changing landscape. We will continue to closely monitor marketing prices going forward to make sure we deliver long-term value. The main focus ahead is to grow in a cost-efficient way with help from product improvements and partnerships. Next slide, please. Page number 7. Adjusted EBITDA has improved throughout the year, as you can see, and this is, of course, pleasing to see. Lower marketing expenses was one main driver, but as you can see, we continue to invest and strengthen our teams, while personnel cost was SEK 28.1 million in Q4, up from SEK 22.3 million in Q4 last year. Next slide, please. Page number 8, financial targets. On this slide, you see our updated financial target. It is the first target on revenue growth that has been amended from 30%-35% organic revenue growth midterm to now 25% total revenue growth for the next three years, 2022- 2024. The change marks our shift from heavy acquisition marketing to more cost-efficient growth with help from product improvements and partnerships. It also provides maneuverability as when and where to allocate resources. Our second financial goal of reaching long-term gross margin of 35% remains. As I mentioned earlier in the call, we have a sound underlying gross margin, and we believe this goal can be achieved without any changes to our business model or contribution from new revenue streams. Our third financial goal, reaching EBITDA profitability by 2025, also remains. We continue to see great growth potential in this massive $150 billion market opportunity that is about to go digital in the coming decade. Back to you, Mats. Thank you, Johan. Now looking at slide number nine. During the quarter, we initiated 24 new collaborations with publishers and welcomed 153 new titles to Readly. Some of the new titles include popular magazine brands such as Rolling Stone, Men's Health, and Sports Illustrated. A growing number of daily newspapers have chosen Readly as a distribution channel. Some good examples here are Die Presse, one of Austria's largest daily newspapers, and Swiss daily NZZ, and the Sunday edition NZZ am Sonntag. Our focus on adding newspapers enable us to reach new readers and drives user engagement. These are underlying factors behind the great growth results we're now showing in the DACH region. The portfolio of Readly Exclusives is also growing. We have launched Readly Exclusives in Italy for the first time with three titles. In Sweden, we launched the music magazine Sonic as part of our new content series, Readly Retros. This launch was done together with renowned music journalist Fredrik Strage. In summary, Readly has welcomed almost 130 publishers and more than 1,500 titles, including 18 daily newspapers during the year. Our combined content portfolio now with Toutabo consists of 7,500 titles, including more than 300 daily newspapers. Next Slide, number 10, please. During the quarter, we launched 40 new partnerships, for example, with Barclays Bank in the U.K., United Airlines and Singapore Airlines, and Wind Tre Mobile in Italy. Our focus to extend partnerships into more countries is generating results. Our partnership with Samsung is now extending into the U.S. Readly's partnership with Corporate Benefits is extended to Italy, the Netherlands, and Austria. During the year, we launched more than 114 new partnerships, and we'll continue to focus on partnerships to drive cost-efficient growth and to increase brand awareness. Next Slide, number 11, please. Finally, just to summarize the quarter. We delivered a good quarter with total revenue growth of 37%. For the fourth consecutive quarter, we improved the results. We are following our path to profitability. Germany continues to deliver and other markets, which account for 70% of the total revenues in the quarter, performed well, with particular strong growth in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. We have adapted to the increase in marketing prices and reduced marketing spend in the quarter, which affected the organic growth negatively, especially in Sweden and the U.K. As a consequence of the increased marketing prices, we have updated our financial targets. Finally, we are very well-positioned for good growth ahead. We have a leading position on the major markets in Europe and are supported by the strong mega trends, such as digitalization and sustainability, which are driving forces behind the transformation in the magazine newspaper industry. I much look forward to work with the Readly board, the leadership team, and our staff to ensure that we will accelerate on execution and in accordance with our strategy. With that, we'll open up for questions. Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Our first question comes from the line of Derek Lalibert`e of ABG. Please go ahead. Good morning, and good to hear from you, Mats, as well. I wanted to start off by clarifying a bit that, or if you could confirm that the target period for the growth target has now been shortened by one year. I know that the previous target said midterm, but I think you said also that that was for 2025, sort of as the end year. Also, if you could clarify for what years or this long-term gross margins, that is for 2025 as the margin target. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Derek. Good morning. Well, your first question, it's true, we have defined now specifically that the target of 25% total revenue growth is for the coming three years, 2022- 2024. I think we said midterm before, so maybe that could have been interpreted up until 2025. Now at least it's the coming three years. When it comes to gross margin, the target, I would say also 2025 would be the target to hit there long term. All right. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying it. Looking at your new growth targets, I'm clearly going to do some math myself there. But clearly, you will be boosted there in 2022 by the Toutabo acquisition, which is very positive. What type of assumptions sort of do you have for 2023 and 2024? Given that you changed the target to total growth, does this include any assumptions about additional acquisitions, or are we only looking at organic growth assumptions for those years? Thank you. Yeah. As you said, Toutabo will have a significant contribution to our numbers ahead, not least this year. M&A, I think, it's clear that this is now part of our strategy. I think Toutabo is a great example of this, and we continue to be active in looking in this area, so definitely part of our strategy ahead. All right. Thank you very much. That's all from me now. Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Carlsson of Handelsbanken. Please go ahead. Good morning, guys, and, nice to hear from you, Mats. Good to meet you virtually. Mats, you've only been with Readly for quite short period of time, but it would be interesting to hear your first impressions of the company. I mean, where do you see Readly having the right to win, and where do you see a need to improve in the near term? Thank you for the question. I'm not gonna elaborate to any length on that today, but the first impressions are very positive, a very talented, motivated team. Obviously there's been changes going on, but focus is on executing on the strategic plan. I'd like to come back to this at a later moment to maybe elaborate more than this than now. Got it. Thank you. If we turn to the intake line, it looks to me that if we exclude Toutabo, intake now declined for the fourth intake levels. I mean, they were slowing down, I should say, for the fourth consecutive quarter. Of course, it raises questions about the future. Could you help us understand what ambitions you have in terms of intake for maybe 2022, 2023? Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think we have indicated before. I mean, marketing prices are clearly up very much. I think when we looked in December 2021, I think they have rose some 32%, and that's just for the 12-month period, not including 2020. It's clearly so that we now are aiming at even more cost-efficient growth. We will continue to grow. We will do so in an efficient way, mainly from product improvements. We look forward to launch many new product features, not only this year, but in the coming years. Also partnerships, as we've been saying before, is clearly a strategic focus area. We're adapting to the changing landscape. We're being responsible with shareholders' money. Yes, we continue to grow, but we do it in a cautious way, making sure that the return on investment will always be there. Very clear. I mean, you mentioned marketing spend here and the significant increase, the price levels. In light of that and your new approach to focus more on customer lifetime value and also adding a new country in France, how to think about the marketing spend going forward? I mean, we saw it come down to like the 40-ish mark compared to 50-ish, the previous quarters. Is that a new level to for Readly to be at? I think it's important that we will always be very cautious monitoring the LTV to CAC ratio to make sure, as I said, to deliver value. France, as you say, is a massive opportunity. Europe's largest market is over $7 billion annually. That will continue to be a big focus area for us already now in 2022. We look forward to migrate users to the Readly platform in the near future. The marketing spend levels will depend on the opportunities we see in the market. We need to make sure we have the right content in the right market. If we see an opportunity, we absolutely have the ability to spend a lot of money when we see the returns are at the right levels. Got it. If we look at the world right now, especially in Western Europe, we see that restrictions are being dropped, so we have a more open society. One could easily think that you've been favored by a more closed society. How are you thinking now as we move into a more open and normal world? Will this hurt your intake figures? Yeah, this is also something that we have been working quite extensively with. I mean, we are adopting our go-to-market strategy accordingly. This opening of society, I mean, it's not the first time now that we see the society open up again this spring. We are well-positioned for this. I mean, and not least when it comes to partnerships with travel agencies, airlines, as Mats mentioned here today. Those are generally very good situations in order to attract new customers. When you have dwell time at airports, bus stops, lounges, there are many different occasions where this is an excellent opportunity for us to grab attention. We do have a strategy for this, and we are well-positioned to continue to grow. Thank you for that. If I may ask on, given your new, guidance here on revenue, growth, right? Can we read into anything there that it's more likely or not likely that you will expand to one to three new markets each year? Maybe I flip the question a bit. Has your guidance in entering one to three new markets each year changed? No, that has not changed. We continue to see opportunities in new markets. I mean, we need to seed now for what growth become long term. Continuing to open new markets is part of our strategy. If you look at France, for instance, you have nearby countries where it makes sense for us to make an impact. We definitely hope to continue open up new markets already this year. Got it. Maybe a last one, more housekeeping. We saw that personnel costs came up quite significantly both in Q3 and Q4. Should we expect this line to flatten out going forward, or are you still ramping up in that, on that line? There are still departments that we need to strengthen, and then not least when we see the shift now away from maybe heavy acquisition marketing now shifts the spend towards the teams, not least the product and tech teams, will need to be further strengthened as we have introduced new ways of working. I'm absolutely positive that this will increase the velocity the more in these teams. Yes, you can expect these costs to keep increasing somewhat throughout the year. That's really clear. Thank you guys for your answers. Thank you. Just to remind everyone, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypads. We have no further questions at this time. Please go ahead, speakers. Thank you so much for this, earnings call. We look forward to presenting Q1 figures in May. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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