Zedge, Inc. (AMEX:ZDGE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Zedge, Inc. (AMEX:ZDGE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript December 13, 2023
Operator: Good afternoon and welcome to Zedge’s Earnings Conference Call for the First Fiscal Quarter 2024 Results. During management's prepared remarks, all participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation by Zedge’s management, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Brian Siegel.
Brian Siegel: Thank you, operator. In today's presentation, Jonathan Reich Zedge’s Chief Executive Officer and Yi Tsai Zedge’s Chief Financial Officer, will discuss Zedge’s financial and operating results that were reported today and the forward-looking statements made during this conference call during the prepared remarks or in the question-and-answer session, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results in the future to differ materially from those discussed on today's call. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to specific risks and uncertainties disclosed in the reports that Zedge periodically files with the SEC. Zedge assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast.
Please note that our earnings release is available on the investor relations page on the Zedge website. The earnings release has also been filed on form 8-K with the SEC. I would like to turn the call over to Jonathan.
Jonathan Reich: Good afternoon. Thank you, Brian, and thank you all for joining us today. I will start by briefly reviewing our first quarter results, which are primarily encouraging and are a consequence of the investments we made in fiscal year 2023, which we expect will continue driving sustainable, profitable, long-term growth. Q1 revenue increased 3% from last year as we continued managing geopolitical, macroeconomic, and industry-specific challenges. Despite these challenges ad revenue grew following four quarters of decline. The uptick was driven by Zedge marketplace's improved performance and Emojipedia, which was up 62%. Zedge Plus, our Zedge Marketplace subscription offering, delivered exciting results with revenue, up 10% from last year and also showing sequential active subscriber growth for the second quarter in a row following six sequential quarterly declines.
These factors led to record ARPMAU and 35% Zedge premium GTV year-over-year growth. Last quarter, we announced our commitment to building a full stack marketing team with capabilities spanning user acquisition, branding, creative execution, marketing, analytics, and reporting, competitive research, content marketing, app store and search engine optimization, and re-engagement marketing. Along those lines, we recently hired a seasoned head of user acquisition who is scaling our marketing investments in order to deliver positive return on ad spend growth. I'm now going to provide an update about each of our business units and/or products. Paint is now more than a generative AI wallpaper maker and continues to be a primary focus of the Zedge marketplace.
Take a look at what we have accomplished since our last call seven weeks ago. First, we have made paint available globally and are testing different regional business models in order to scale this feature. Next, we launched the beta version of paint for mobile web, which enables users to create all types of images, not only wallpapers, and seamlessly integrated it with print-on-demand functionality. This feature allows customers to purchase merchandise like t-shirts, pillows, coffee mugs, and more, printed with their art. If this goes well, we believe the Zedge website can fuel incremental growth, especially as we evolve the paint offering. Turning to Zedge Plus, our subscription offering, as you recall, we overhauled the Android offering in late fiscal year 2023, resulting in the second consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth.
Almost in parallel, we introduced Zedge Plus for iOS, which has been an early bright spot in driving subscription growth. Overall, the iOS ecosystem is an untapped opportunity for us and has delivered attractive growth rates over the past two quarters, driven not only by the Zedge Plus subscription offering, but also by better optimization of our ad inventory and growth from paint. We remain committed to continuing to grow iOS, and generative AI may be key to unlocking this potential. While Emojipedia had another strong quarter, we believe there is more to come with continued product innovation. Our previous investments in the website redesign, localization, and technology upgrades are paying off. In fact, in November, Emojipedia recorded its best revenue month ever.
With that success, we are now focused on testing new features such as emoji text translations and mashup emoji designs, as well as introducing new content verticals like emoticons, not to mention print-on-demand merchandising to name a few. Some of these will start rolling out in Q2 while others will become available later in the fiscal year. As mentioned last quarter, GuruShots has had initially been the case with Emojipedia, experiencing a revenue downtrend, with growth taking longer to actualize than originally anticipated at the time of the transaction. Much of this relates to Apple's ATT framework, which has severely limited the information that app marketers can collect to target prospective customers. Although Apple released SCAD Network 4.0 to enable growth with improved attribution tracking capabilities.
Its impact will be limited until major platforms like Meta successfully embed this into their tech stack. In the meantime, we are taking a two-pronged approach to stabilizing GuruShots and positioning it for growth. First, we've focused on product innovation by recently rolling out Battles, a new hybrid casual gameplay feature for users to start competing in fast-paced, short-duration photo competitions that are limited in size. Battles is now available to 5% of GuruShots global user base. Our product team closely monitors all of the relevant KPIs to tune and refine the experience and optimize engagement, retention, and in-game economy. We expect to make the feature available to a much larger audience over the next several weeks and believe that Battles will ultimately assist in making the GuruShots game more accessible and relevant to a broader addressable market.
We believe this feature will also avail an advertising supported monetization strategy. Second, we are expanding our user acquisition efforts to deliver ROAS positive users. This strategy is an iterative process that benefits from the data overhaul we undertook last year. Beyond the core game, we continue developing AI Art Master, a new hybrid casual game that leverages generative AI and gameplay where users compete against each other in fun, fast-paced competitions. AI Art Master is currently in soft launch in five countries and can potentially be a fourth core product for us. We are improving the game by analyzing the usage data and targeting a broader rollout over the next several quarters. Taken together, we continue to believe that we have never been in a better position to create sustainable, long-term, profitable growth, given the combination of market opportunity, our current product portfolio, and roadmap, our marketing prowess, data capabilities, tech stack, and most importantly, our team.
Furthermore, we are not just talking about AI. We have already integrated it throughout our business, including product, technology, and marketing. I wish everyone a happy holiday season, and I would like to turn the call over to Yi, who will review our financial results. Yi?
Yi Tsai: Thank you, Jonathan. Now, for the Zedge marketplace, define as the number of unique users that open Zedge app during the last 30-days of the period decreased 10.7% from a year ago to $28.5 million. Now in the well-developed market and emerging market were down 13.1% and 10% respectively. Total revenue in the first quarter was $7.1 million, up 3% from last year. Digital goods and services, which encompasses revenue from GuruShots came in at $0.9 million, down 29% from last year. Similar to Q4, GuruShots revenue was again negatively impacted by Apple's ATT framework, macroeconomic issues, and the geopolitical situation. Subscription revenue for the quarter was up 10% versus last year. Additionally, this metric was up sequentially for the second straight quarter as our net active subscriber trend improved and higher value iOS subscription and new value added Zedge Plus offering for Android, replaced lower cost legacy subscriptions, which only removed ads.
Zedge premium GTV grew 35% from last year to $421,000, reflecting incremental revenue generated from paint, which offset much decline in auto content sales. Advertisement per monthly active user or AMAU was $0.63, up 17% year-over-year, reflecting stability in ad pricing and the positive impact of our new iOS and Android subscriptions. Cost of revenue declined by 23% and was 6.9% of revenue. SG&A declined by 5.6% to $5.5 million. GAAP income from operations returned into the black, increasing by $0.5 million to $0.3 million. GAAP net income and EPS for Q1 were new, versus a net loss and loss per share of $0.1 million and $0.01 last year. This quarter, FX and income tax expense swing negatively impacted GAAP net income by $143,000 and $271,000, respectively versus last year.
Adjusted EBITDA was $1.5 million versus $1 million in the prior year. From a liquidity standpoint, we remain in a strong cash position with over $18.7 million in cash and cash equivalent and only $2 million in bank loan at the end of the quarter. Note that on November 15, after the quarter ended, we paid down the $2 million in bank loan and had a remaining cash balance of approximately $16.7 million. Additionally, please note that we reached an agreement with GuruShots product owners, and we will not make any earnout payments related to our purchase of the company. Thank you for listening to our first quarter earning call and I look forward to speaking with you again on the next call in mid-March. Operator, back to you for Q&A.
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