GDEV Q1 2024 Earnings Report

GDEV EPS Results

• Actual EPS: -$0.10
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

GDEV Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $106.93 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

GDEV Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q1 2024
• Date: 5/28/2024
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, May 28, 2024
• Conference Call Time: 7:00AM ET

GDEV (NASDAQ:GDEV), Inc. operates as a gaming and entertainment holding company that oversees a diverse portfolio of studios focused on developing and publishing live-service games across multiple platforms and genres. Its portfolio includes studios specializing in mobile, browser, and PC games, as well as captivating intellectual properties spanning various genres. The company's franchises include hero wars, island hoppers, pixel gun 3D, and others. GDEV was founded by Andrey Fadeev and Boris Gertsovsky in 2010 and is headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus.

GDEV Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Bookings Growth Resumed: Q1 bookings reached $109 M, up 4% year-over-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter, despite revenue of $107 M being down 10% year-over-year due to deferred revenue timing.
• Profitability and Cash Flow Improved: Net loss narrowed to $1 M versus $8 M a year ago, adjusted EBITDA loss shrank by $10 M to –$3 M, and operating cash flow turned positive to $0.4 M.
• Operational Metrics Strengthened: Monthly active users grew 17% year-over-year to 14 M, daily active users rose 8% to 1.6 M, monthly paying users increased 6%, and average bookings per user climbed 4% to $88.
• Franchise Highlights: Hero Wars continued strong performance, Pixel Gun 3D saw MAUs +33% and a top-selling PC launch on Steam, and Island Hoppers delivered 56% year-over-year booking growth.
• Share Repurchase: Completed a tender offer to buy back 16.5 M ordinary shares to enhance market liquidity and shareholder value.

Presentation

[Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer at GDEV]

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the First Quarter 2024 Earnings Results Presentation for GDEV Inc. Today on the call, we'll present Andrey Fadeev, founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alexander Karavaev, Chief Financial Officer, and Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements which may not develop as we currently expect. We have posted a supplementary slide deck to the Investor Relations section of our website at gdev.inc, which contains information and precautionary warnings on forward-looking statements, as well as our non-IFRS financial measures, and we will also post our prepared remarks. For a more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the SEC. With that, I am turning it over to Andrey.

[Andrey Fadeev, CEO at GDEV]

Hello, everyone. Today, I am delighted to present to you the GDEV preliminary first quarter 2024 earnings results. We will share the progress we've made during the first quarter of 2024, discuss our initiatives to increase shareholder value, and highlight recent developments in our gaming franchise portfolio. The past two years have been challenging for the world, the global gaming industry, and our company. However, I believe we have navigated these turbulent times most competently. We returned to year-over-year bookings growth in the fourth quarter 2023, and we are happy to see that trend continuing into the first quarter of this year. We adopted a new product development strategy for our portfolio studios, which strive to be on top of their genre, delivering fun and engaging experiences for our players worldwide. Our flagship IP, Hero Wars, continues to perform strongly across various platforms.

[Andrey Fadeev, CEO at GDEV]

Moreover, Pixel Gun 3D is showing great numbers in terms of user activity. We are also excited about promising new titles like Island Hoppers, which we believe will follow in their successful footsteps. Apart from the operating business, we have also made steps towards improving the corporate profile to enhance shareholder value. In January, we completed a tender offer to repurchase 16.5 million of our ordinary shares with the intention to reintroduce them to the open market to enhance market liquidity. Thank you for joining us today. I will now turn it over to Alexander Karavaev, our CFO, who will provide more details on our business and financial results.

[Alexander Karavaev, CFO at GDEV]

Thank you, Andrey. I'm turning to our financial results. For the quarter, we generated $107 million of revenue, down 2% sequentially and down 10% year-on-year. The main reason for revenue decrease is the increase in the change in deferred revenue in the first quarter of 2024, in the amount of $17 million versus the same period in 2023, partially offset by an increase of $5 million in bookings in the first quarter of 2024 versus the same period of the prior year. At the same time, let's look at our bookings. Bookings are our performance metric that directly reflects how much money players spend in our games during the period before taking into account the deferred revenue that is required for financial accounting purposes.

[Alexander Karavaev, CFO at GDEV]

Our bookings amounted to $109 million in the first quarter, representing a 4% increase year-on-year and a 3% increase quarter-on-quarter. Our selling and marketing expenses in the period were $63 million. That is a 16% increase quarter-on-quarter, but a 19% decline year-on-year. These changes are attributed to a shift in our user acquisition strategy, focused on increasing the return on our investments in user acquisition. They were also amplified by substantial initial investments in marketing during the first quarter of last year. Platform commissions decreased by $6 million, or 19%, in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period last year, driven by the decrease in revenues, amplified by growth of bookings through PC platforms, which are associated with lower commissions.

[Alexander Karavaev, CFO at GDEV]

Game operation costs decreased by $2 million and amounted to $13 million in the first quarter of 2024, driven mostly by a decrease in the employee benefits expenses, partially offset by an increase in technical support services. General and administrative expenses remained relatively stable, decreasing by only $700,000 in the first quarter of 2024 versus the same quarter of the last year. As a result of the factors above, we recorded a loss for the period, net of tax, of $1 million, compared with a loss of $8 million in the respective period of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2024 amounted to $-3 million, an increase of approximately $10 million compared to the respective period last year.

[Alexander Karavaev, CFO at GDEV]

Cash flows generated from operating activities amounted to $400,000 in the first quarter of 2024, an increase from $-12 million in the same period of the prior year. I would also like to mention that, just like last year, we aggressively invested in growth during the winter holiday period, but our results are better due to improved efficiency. That means that we achieved overall better return on our investments in user acquisition in Q1 2024 versus the same period of prior year. The share of advertisement sales as a percentage of total bookings increased in the first quarter of 2024 to reach 7.7%, compared to 7.0% in the respective period of 2023.

[Alexander Karavaev, CFO at GDEV]

The increase was driven by the successful implementation of advertisement functionality in Island Hoppers from the start of the second quarter of the prior year. Regarding other metrics, GDEV's monthly paying users reached 381,000 in Q1, representing a 6% growth quarter-over-quarter and remaining relatively flat year-over-year. Our average booking per paying user reached $88, a 4% increase year-on-year. Now, our Chief Corporate Development Officer, Roman Safiyulin, will continue on operating metrics and product update.

[Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer at GDEV]

Thank you, Alexander. I will now provide some details on the operating performance of the group and share some insight on the key franchises. As Alexander mentioned, the first quarter of the year is usually a hot season for the user acquisition investments, when you can acquire users at very attractive returns. This year was no exception. We have seen growth in the first quarter 2024 across all key operating metrics, such as downloads, monthly active users, daily active users, et cetera, across all our key products, thanks to our marketing efforts. Overall, our monthly active users increased by 17% year-over-year, reaching approximately 14 million in the first quarter 2024, while the daily active users also saw an 8% year-over-year increase, with 1.6 million players engaging with our games daily.

[Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer at GDEV]

While our core franchise two titles, Hero Wars: Dominion Era and Hero Wars: Alliance, continues to account for the greater majority of our bookings, we also remained well diversified by other products, as well as platforms and geographies, which provide us with more flexibility in our operations as we can allocate resources in a more efficient way. Hero Wars: Dominion Era, our PC RPG title, showed solid performance in Q1 2024. The team managed to attract a record high of 7.5 million new registration, which led to 6% growth in monthly paying users year-over-year. As a result, the game now accounts for 38% of total bookings. Given we pay much lower commission on our own proprietary PC platform, that development helped us to decrease the blended platform commission from revenue to a historically low level of 21.9%.

[Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer at GDEV]

Hero Wars: Alliance, our mobile RPG title, also saw a massive influx of new players during the first quarter, taking the game to top 5 among all RPG games by download on mobile and top one in its Team Battler subgenre in the first quarter, according to AppMagic. Now, let's move on to our Pixel Gun 3D franchise. While bookings in the first quarter experienced a year-over-year decline, the team managed to improve monthly active users metrics by 33% year-over-year. Moreover, Pixel Gun 3D is no longer just a mobile game. The PC version was released on Steam on second of April and immediately entered the top 20 best-selling and top 50 most-played games upon debut, without significant marketing investments, purely due to the brand power of the title.

[Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer at GDEV]

Talking about Island Hoppers, our mobile farming title, the team is constantly working on adding new content and features and improving the game metrics. This resulted in a 56% year-over-year booking growth, amounting to over $7.5 million. Going forward, this year, we are fully focused on further enhancement of our key franchises. Teams are constantly working on improving the user experience for the players to grow retention, engagement, monetization metrics in order to boost the forecasted lifetime value. And the benefits we received from the lifetime value improvements, we plan to use in more intense user acquisition investments, which is expected to provide us with cohorts supporting growth in the future periods. With that, we conclude our first quarter 2024 earnings results presentation for GDEV, Inc. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Goodbye!

Participants

Executives

• Alexander Karavaev, CFO
• Andrey Fadeev, CEO
• Roman Safiyulin, Chief Corporate Development Officer