Earnings call transcript: Audioboom sees 1% revenue growth in Q1 2025

Audioboom Group plc reported its financial performance for the first quarter of 2025, showing modest revenue growth and a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock appears undervalued despite recent price weakness, with technical indicators suggesting oversold conditions. The company remains optimistic about future growth, particularly in its Showcase platform and potential YouTube monetization.

Key Takeaways

• Q1 2025 revenue increased by 1% year-over-year to $17.3 million.
• Adjusted EBITDA surged tenfold to $700,000 compared to the previous year.
• Gross margin improved from 16% to 20%.
• Showcase platform revenue increased by 36% in Q1.

Company Performance

Audioboom's performance in Q1 2025 reflects a steady growth trajectory, with revenue increasing slightly by 1% to $17.3 million. The company's adjusted EBITDA experienced a remarkable tenfold increase, reaching $700,000, signaling improved operational efficiency. InvestingPro data shows the company maintains a healthy current ratio of 2.53, indicating strong short-term liquidity. Audioboom's gross margin also saw a significant improvement, rising from 16% to 20%, though still below the trailing twelve-month margin of 23.42%.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $17.3 million, a 1% year-over-year increase.
• Adjusted EBITDA: $700,000, a tenfold increase from the previous year.
• Gross Margin: Improved from 16% to 20%.

Market Reaction

Audioboom's stock experienced a significant decline, with InvestingPro data showing a 25.59% drop over the past week, closing at $6.16. This movement places the stock just 1.04% above its 52-week low of $6.07, despite the company's positive financial performance and strategic initiatives. InvestingPro's comprehensive analysis, including 10 key ProTips and detailed valuation metrics, suggests the stock may be oversold at current levels. Discover more insights with InvestingPro's exclusive Fair Value analysis and financial health scores.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Audioboom is targeting $80 million in revenue for 2025 and projecting $4.5 million in adjusted EBITDA. Analyst consensus from InvestingPro shows price targets ranging from $9.50 to $17.00, with expectations of profitability this fiscal year. The company expects revenue acceleration in the coming quarters, driven by continued growth in its Showcase platform and potential expansion into YouTube monetization.

Executive Commentary

CEO Stuart Lars highlighted the company's resilience, stating, "EBITDA, 10 times what it was a year ago," and expressed confidence in meeting financial targets. Lars also emphasized the company's strengthened position, saying, "We are much more resilient and robust than we were in 2022 and 2023."

Risks and Challenges

• Market Saturation: As one of the largest podcast publishers, Audioboom faces the challenge of maintaining growth in a competitive market.
• Economic Conditions: Macroeconomic pressures could impact advertising revenue, a significant income source for the company.
• Technological Changes: Rapid advancements in technology require continuous innovation to stay competitive.

Audioboom's Q1 2025 results highlight its ability to grow revenue and significantly improve profitability, despite a challenging market environment. The company's strategic focus on its Showcase platform and potential new revenue streams, such as YouTube, positions it well for future growth.

Full transcript - Dmc Global Inc (BOOM) Q1 2025:

Jake, Moderator/Presenter: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Audioboom Group plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send.

The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today. We'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the investor meet company platform. And before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll. And if you could give that to your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful.

And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Audioboom Group plc. Stuart, good afternoon, sir.

Stuart Lars, CEO, Audioboom Group plc: Thanks, Jake. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today for a look back at q one twenty twenty five. We're pleased to be here to to talk you through some of the progress Audioboom has been making. Pleasing update for us, everything landing almost exactly where we expected it to be, and I think that's been really good progress

So we'll dive into that in a moment. As Jake said, send your questions in. We have a few in already on things like YouTube and and tariffs. We'll get to those at the end. But we'll walk you through the business model first, talk a little bit about the background to the company, which we like to do each time for those that are new to Audioboom.

Then we'll go into detail on that q one performance and give you a deeper look at some of the numbers around that and the operational progress we're making there. And then finally, we'll we'll look ahead into the rest of 2025 before we get to those questions. So send in any more that you have. For those of you that that don't know us, we'll do some introductions here. I'm Stuart Lars, CEO of Audioboom.

I've worked for Audioboom for the last ten years launching the the business in The US back in 2015, stepping up to CEO, in in 2019. And, you know, love what we do here. This company is focused on building value for creators and advertisers in the fast growing podcast space, and it's been an exciting time at the helm of this business over the last six years.

Brett Clark, CFO, Audioboom Group plc: Hi, everyone. Yeah. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Brett Clark, CFO here at Audioboom, chartered accountant here based in London. Been with the company just over seven years.

I've been joined in March 2018. Many folks on media companies in my career, New UK, Brave Bison, now I'm at Audioboom. I'll be back a little bit later just taking you through a few financial focus slides. But for now, back to you, Stuart.

Stuart Lars, CEO, Audioboom Group plc: Thank you, Brad. So key points, I think, today. EBITDA, 10 times what it was a year ago. So we've talked a lot about the gearing of our business model and the focus on higher quality revenue, higher gross margin revenue. So we'll we'll give you a little more detail on that.

But having EBITDA 10 times the level what it what what it was a year ago is a real sign, I think, for us that that business model is is working and is building nicely. Making good progress on the revenue front, $63,000,000 of revenue booked for this year. So, you know, moving very quickly and and and very solidly towards our goal of $80,000,000 of revenue for for the year, so that's very pleasing. And and I think you you should be confident in the progress that we're showing there. I wanna talk a little bit about Showcase.

That's our automated ad tech focused product. We've added AI through a partnership to showcase. So we'll highlight some some progress around showcase. You know, Audioboom leading the way when it comes to monetization in the podcast space, our monetization engine getting stronger and stronger. So we'll take a look at that.

And then key points, I think, for the rest of 2025 will be the growth in in in the audio group creator network through renewals of of of of our strongest podcasts and the signings of top tier podcasts in the space. And all of this coming together, as I said before, to deliver record revenue, record EBITDA for us hitting our 2025 goals as we get through the year. So first of all, and as I said at the top, we do this for for anyone that that's that's new to Audioboom. I think it will help the rest of you also get a deeper understanding of what we do is to look at our business model and where we sit within the the podcast space. As you know, podcasting is a fast growing medium right now, and we are really at the heart of it.

What Audioboom does, and it does it at scale and very efficiently is join three key parts of of podcasting together. So we connect through our platform creators and and podcast hosts with audience and with advertisers. And it's only when you bring those three elements together that you can create any value. Take one of those three elements out of this connection, and there is no no value here. So the audio beam platform does this at scale, hundred million downloads or listens from the audience every single month to some of the best podcasts in the world.

And then we work to bring in advertisers into that mix to to really create to create value across the the podcast space. So audio room is a vital part of podcasting. As I said, without us, there there is no value in in podcasting for these creators and and for these advertisers. And we will continue to to platform more and more content and and bring in a wider group of of advertisers and build audience. Our model our business model is is proven, and it it's proven to deliver growth, and we've done that consistently over the last ten years.

But on the chart here, you'll see over the the the last eight years, we've delivered 38% CAGR over that time, 1200% growth since 2017 in our revenue. So going from $6,100,000 of revenue back in 2017 to this year's goal of of $80,000,000 of revenue. So it's a very consistent revenue growth there. Obviously, back in 2023, you'll see a little dip there as the ad market had a downturn because of global economic headwinds, but coming back up last year and again this year. We've consistently outpaced the industry growth, building our market share over that time, and and that's what we're focused on doing going forward as well.

And you can see the opportunity here for Audioboom over the next five years. We've marked that out. The industry is projected to grow around 22% CAGR. As I've said, we've consistently outpaced the industry historically, and we will look to do that again. If we do that again, we're we have a pathway to more than $200,000,000 of of revenue by 2030.

So you can see the track record. You can see what the future opportunity looks like for Audioboom. And, again, we hold a a very strong place in the the podcasting space. This is the Triton Digital Podcast Publisher ranker for for The US. Audioboom in that ranker is the third largest podcast publisher.

There's another ranker from Edison Research, which measures a wider group of podcast publishers as well. We appear fourth or or fifth in in in that that ranker. So we are one of the biggest podcast publishers in The US where 85% of our income comes from, but we do hold a a global position too. So it's the second biggest podcast company in The UK. We're big in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, English speaking nations.

We have a a big presence. So, you know, we're we're we're building a great platform that's showing off in the financial results. It's also showing off in our position within the industry. Audioboom is a a great company, and I think we have a really strong future ahead. So I hope that was helpful for those of you that are new to Audioboom.

This next section will dive into the q one numbers a little bit and and give you an update on how we've performed in the first part of twenty twenty five. And I think the the key message here from us is is really both revenue and and adjusted EBITDA hit exactly as we expected them to. So $17,300,000 of revenue in q one and $700,000 of adjusted EBITDA in q one. So to break that down a little bit, that revenue growth, 1% up on q one of twenty twenty four. Now, obviously, that is a lower growth percentage than overall goal for for 2025.

But, again, it's exactly where we expected. We are still seeing some of the impact of Apple's iOS 17 change, which reduces downloads from the network that is in its final it was in its final quarter of impact in q one. So we are seeing some inventory limitations because of of that impact in q one. But bigger than that, we took this chance in q one to move on and relinquish around $3,000,000 of low performing contracts and replace that with higher margin revenue. Now that's something we've talked about to you on these presentations over the the the past year.

We've talked a lot about moving into higher margin revenue focusing on that area of the business, and that's something we did a lot of in in q one of this year. So we moved out $3,000,000 of low performing contracts, replaced it with higher margin, and that's reflected in that in in that 10 x adjusted EBITDA. What else is there here? I think what we're seeing on the revenue side is continued improvements in pricing and and and demand in in the ad market. And we do expect now we have moved on from that that $3,000,000 of lower performing contracts to see that growth rate accelerate across the rest of the year.

So we know as of today, and we've we've we've said this, we have $63,000,000 on the books for the year. That pathway to the 80,000,000 and the the 10% year on year revenue growth is is very there, and and we're very confident again of of achieving that. So while we have that lower growth percentage in q one on the revenue side, you know the reasons why. It's it's improving the health of the company and proving that that business model can gear and and and and grow. So as I said, that's led to 10 x adjusted EBITDA growth over the the the the last year, you know, around 700,000 of of adjusted EBITDA.

That business model is working. Money is is flowing through that that that that p and l. The reason for that, again, as we said before, is is improving those that that revenue mix, and that has led to a 25% improvement in the gross margin in q one versus last year. So high quality revenue, improving that gross margin, that's flowing through to adjusted EBITDA. And we have that continued stable OpEx base.

Brad will go into more detail on a lot of this later in the presentation. But that that that our operating costs haven't really changed over the past four years, and it's just, again, allowing more of that revenue flow through to adjusted EBITDA. So very pleasing that these landed exactly where we wanted them to and sets us up well to achieve our goals for 2025. I think you'll see a little more of that detail in this chart, which takes a look at our mix of of revenue. So it compares at the top here, q one of last year with q one of twenty twenty five.

And what you're really seeing here is a shift into our higher gross margin revenue product. So showcase has the highest gross margin amongst our revenue products around 30%, we've gone from showcase being 2222% of our revenue mix to it being 31% of our revenue mix in just a year. So we've moved quickly to improve the quality of that revenue as you are seeing here. So as I said on the last slide, that's leading to 25% gross margin improvement that's flowing through to EBITDA for that 10 x EBITDA increase. And by taking out 3,000,000 of of lower quality revenue and putting it back in a higher margin, we're really seeing some strong results in the model.

Each quarter, we release three KPIs. Those are global distribution, which is the size of our network, the audio audio boom creator network, how much consumption is going on within that that network in terms of downloads and video views. We have a second KPI called RPM, which is revenue per meal, revenue per thousand downloads through the platform, and then brand count, the number of active customers that that we have buying from Audioboom. So I'll walk you through those, and they paint a good picture of the the health of the company and the progress we are making. For for global distribution, in q one of twenty twenty five, we had 94,800,000 monthly downloads and video views.

As I said earlier, this was the final quarter where we will see that downward year on year trend because of the Apple iOS 17 update that has changed the way that that that downloads are are measured. So you're seeing a a year on year decrease for the final time, but you are seeing a step up from the previous quarter. So from from q four of last year, we've we've we've grown the network by around 4%, and we expect to see growth in the upcoming quarters and be back on a growth trend, for our global distribution. We're signing new shows to the podcast network. We are retaining the best shows that that we do have, and that's gonna lead to network growth and a rising global distribution number.

That means more inventory to sell, more revenue opportunity for audio. Second KPI RPM, how much money we extract from every 1,000 downloads. This is market leading. No one gets close to our our numbers here in in the podcast space, and that talks to the high quality advertising products and monetization engine that that that we've built in q one of this year. Obviously, seasonally, our lowest demand and lowest revenue quarter, we delivered $61 per thousand downloads and video views.

That is a record for q one. It's up 17% versus the same period last year. So we continue to make improvements to those ad products. Showcase continues to build. That RPM number is driven by advertising demand, inventory creation, and pricing.

Those three things come together and build that RPM number. You can see the progress we've made in this one over the past five years coming from $26 up to a peak of of $76 in in q four of last year. So good strong performance on the RPM number and just a sign that we have a healthy healthy model and healthy income when it relates to the amount of downloads and and inventory that we can create. And then finally, brand count. Again, another record for q one, '8 thousand '9 hundred and '70 four brands advertising through the platform in q one of of twenty twenty five.

That's up 14% versus, a a year ago. Second highest quarter ever. Just a little lower than the high demand q four of of of last year. Very much expected that we would dip after that, but we'll head back up across this year, of course. Brands are coming into podcasting quickly.

We've built a new unit to work and and bring in blue chip global brands into Audioboom over the past two years. That's having a great effect on this number. Showcase and the advertising technology that we are building makes it easy for brands to advertise across Audioboom that's helping bring in more customers. And just our general sales work is is driving that customer count. So really good result there, I think, on the the the brand count.

And positives across the board here on on on the KPIs. We're seeing distribution heading back in the right direction and then records on the RPM and and brand count. I talked a lot about showcase, and you've seen the importance of Showcase in that revenue mix model, highest gross margin, and and the the fastest growing part of the audio boom business. So I wanted to break down a little more information about Showcase and talk you through some updates that that we've made to that platform over the past quarter. So for background showcase is our second advertising product.

It's the advertising product that is very, very scalable because it is built a % through advertising technology, works at high volumes more than 5,000,000,000 available advertising impressions will be made available to monetize within Showcase this year. Like I said, very high volume, very scalable tech based advertising product. What Showcase does is effectively matches up supply. So that's advertising inventory coming from all of our content and all of our content creators, and it matches up with demand from our customers and our brands either directly when we are selling directly to a brand or through a programmatic ecosystem where all of that buying and selling is is done through the the the technology. Showcase is doing that, like I said, in real time and very high demand.

We've seen strong growth of Showcase over the past three years since we launched it, and you saw on the previous chart that it's now over 30 of Audioboom's revenue. And it had another great q one, so 36% revenue increase for Showcase versus one of of last year. So continuing to grow very quickly, continues to be a very important part of AudioBoom. And really driven, I think, by the the pricing increases that we've been able to put into showcase. We're now selling it at more and more premium pricing to advertisers as we prove that it is efficient, that it works for them, and has a lot of options in there for them to target specific audience groups and potential customers for them.

So we've seen a 34% pricing increase in there. This quarter, we added AI to showcase. So we have partnered with a platform called Sounder that provides artificial intelligence to showcase. And that does two new things, which I think will be very powerful going forward for for showcase. The first thing that it does is provides brand safety and brand suitability guidance to advertisers.

And the second thing that it does is it allows those advertisers to target audience through contextual targeting. So let me talk a little bit more about those two things, which I think are exciting to us and can lead to higher pricing, more premium pricing, and stronger show growth. First off, brand safety is very important for this new breed of advertiser that we are trying to attract. So a couple of years ago, we set up a new unit to go and attract the biggest blue chip global brands in in the world to to Audioboom. What they require, high levels of brand safety and a lot of sophistication around that brand safety.

They do not want their brands to be aligned with content that is unsafe or questionable and doesn't doesn't suit their brand guidelines. So by adding this brand safety guidance through the AI, we can now go to those blue chip brands, show them how safe this platform is, show them the content that is safe for them to advertise around, give them that confidence, and open up new budgets at those, major global brands. Contextual targeting, is a a fantastic option for, advertisers as well, and the AI in Showcase will enable that contextual targeting. What the AI effectively does is for every piece of content that we have across the platform, this is millions of hours of of of content at this point. It transcribes that content, understands the context of what is being talked about within those podcasts, and then offers out the ability for advertisers to target their brand messages against specific parts of that content.

So let me give you an example. Two hosts on a podcast are talking about travel and booking vacations. Showcased through the AI will now recognize that that conversation is happening, and it will then go and ask brands like Expedia or Airbnb if they want to advertise against that specific piece of content. Because of that very, very targeted ability, we can then charge more to those brands to to to target their advertising there. Premium price point that will grow the pricing in within Showcase, and it gives advertisers another layer of optionality around how they advertise in podcast.

So I think integration with Sounder and adding AI to Showcase is an extremely important part of our future, and it's gonna be very impactful as we integrate that over the the the the the coming months. We're really excited to see how Showcase continues to grow and continues to to to drive our business forward. With that, I'll I'll hand over to Brad who's gonna go deeper on some of the the the numbers.

Brett Clark, CFO, Audioboom Group plc: Great. Thanks, Stuart. Hi, everyone again. Let's go through these the next few slides. Focusing on revenue, gross margin, minimum guarantees, OpEx, EBITDA and cash in the next few slides.

Simplistically, I view Q1 as a good solid quarter, which sets us up for the rest of the year. One of the questions was from Ned about market expectations for this year. You can view these numbers in the context of the full year, which are revenue, $8,000,000 EBITDA, 4 and a half million dollars. Hopefully, these graphs also appease Andrew Kay, who put a question saying, can we see a quarterly breakdown of revenue and EBITDA? We've got those on a lot more in these next few slides, Andrew.

So, hopefully, you can get the information you need on those. By the way, the presentation in PowerPoint will be on our PLC website, and also the YouTube version will be available on the PLC website tomorrow as well. You need to reflect and look at these slides again, Andrew. And given those market expectations, I'll also answer Stephen O's question about whether we can expect revenue acceleration from the 1% and an improved adjusted EBITDA margin. Well, yes, clearly, expect that because our market expectations are, as I say, GBP 80,000,000 for the full year and 4,500,000 of EBITDA.

So yes, we would expect those to improve throughout the rest of the year. Perhaps that's what's going on the share price today, is that we are judging q one against q four. Now q four is our seasonally strongest quarter. Q one is the quietest quarter because that's the way advertising spend works. But as I say, really pleasing aspect of this quarter is delivering that 10 times adjusted EBITDA improvement on last year.

Obviously, benefiting from a smaller number last year, but still the principles and the way we explained the business we have done over the last year, they're really coming through in the numbers, which good to see in our quietest quarter. So let's look through the next few slides. First slide looks at revenue, gross margin and POCs and minimum guarantee exposure over the last few quarters. Very much a continuation of the focus on that high quality revenue, gross margin and improving adjusted EBITDA that we saw from Q3 onwards last year. And obviously, again, remember that seasonality within the business when you're looking at when you're looking at audio beam.

We expect this thing to get stronger as we go through the rest of the year. Good to see that six successive quarter of year on year revenue growth following that downturn in 2022 and 2023. Overall revenue growth of 1%, but with Showcase having a really good start to the year at 36 up year on year. We've seen the contributions in the revenue split earlier on with with Stewart. You know, the really pleasing point with Showcase is that higher gross margin.

We are keeping more of that revenue which flows through to the bottom line. Premium revenue increased by 9% year on year due to those price increases. We've seen obviously seen decrease in Sonic year on year, but Sonic does contribute that lower gross margin. Gross margin overall has increased from 16% in q one of last year on a group basis up to 20%, so 25% improvement there, which, again, is is very, very good. Graph in the top right hand corner, that's that gives a really good couple of positive indicators as well.

So in terms of gross profit, generated 700,000.0 more in gross profit from 2.7 up to 3,400,000.0 year on year. And that higher gross margin is about 20% versus 16% last year. And note that Q1 of this year was higher on both of those metrics than Q1 and Q2. So Q2 generated 3,000,000 Gross profit, Q1 this year, 3.4. Again, good encouraging metrics.

Focus on higher quality revenue been assisted by the continued growth of Showcase, as we say, good growth on premium revenue. That's coincided with us reducing our minimum guarantee or MG exposure. Now if you're new to the story, we I do go through this explanation every time, but just to give you that context in terms of minimum guarantees. So the context is that to secure exclusive advertising rights for leading podcast talent, we offer carefully modelled minimum guarantee revenue share contracts. So we guarantee revenue for those podcast partners, and it's our job as a company to generate revenue share or payments in excess of those minimum guarantees.

If we don't deliver on that, then we would recognize a lower gross margin than we expect on those contracts. Now typically, in The US, where the majority of our revenue is generated, we recognize 20% to 25% gross margin on those tier one podcast tonne contracts. Where we don't achieve the monthly contraction minimum guarantee, we have what's called a minimum guarantee true up, effectively a shortfall on the agreed minimum revenue share, and therefore, we recognize a lower gross margin than anticipated. The company has worked very hard to honour all of those minimum guarantee contracts and when contracts come up for renewal, we restructure them to ensure that they are attainable. The chart on the bottom right hand corner details the percentage of content partner payments that relate to MG true ups over our total cost of sales.

So that was higher in Q3 of twenty twenty three when we had exposure to those MG because of the ad market downturn, but since then, we've seen that exposure decrease quarter on quarter. We'd expect the increase in Q1 of 6% of total cost of sales because of that seasonality within the revenue, and we'd expect that exposure to reduce as we go through into the second half of the year. So for example, if we had a minimum guarantee of 1,200,000 per year or $100,000 a month, we may only generate $90,000 of revenue share in the early part of the year. We'd expect to go over and above that $100,000 per month later on in the year. Thus, we overall, we've gone in excess of that minimum guarantee.

We see that impact unwinding in the second half of the year, which is why we saw in the second half of year higher gross profit. So we'd expect that pattern to reoccur as we go through the rest of the year. If anyone needs me to take you through that detail, then please send me an email. I'm happy to happy to take you through that. But, again, it goes back to the seasonality point.

Along with revenues, there's seasonality and costs as well across the across the business. Okay. Let's go through to the next slide. On this slide, I just mentioned the OpEx. That's something we're very proud of within Audioboom is that consistent OpEx base.

We can see it's very, very flat over the last seven quarters here, dollars 2,800,000.0 a quarter. I'm not expecting that to materially change going forward. We don't need to gear that up significantly to continue doing what we're doing, and that's been consistent at $2,800,000 in the first quarter of this year. So, you know, for that the OpEx, 2,800,000.0, what is that made up of? Well, 67% of that in the first quarter of this year relates to salaries and commissions.

Historically, that's been around the 65% mark, so a slight increase there in the first quarter of this year because because of cost of living salary increases and additional head within the business, slightly higher commissions. But it's been able to remain consistent because our technology costs have reduced since since last year. So historically, costs have accounted for around 25% of cost in q one of this year. That's down to 18. Why?

That's been through the renegotiation of our ad impression and bandwidth contract with Voxnes, yielding cheaper rates. So it's costing us less to run the platform than it did last year through that contract negotiation. Overall, though, good that that's maintained at 2,800,000.0. Very lean headcount within the business, ending the quarter at 41. We'll go to 42 by the April with a new sales head high, and we'll go to maximum 44 by the end of the year.

So again, consistent within the business. And on the right hand side, we can see that adjusted EBITDA improvement Q1 versus Q1, up to 700,000. In terms of that scaling or gearing, we'd obviously expect with an annual expectation of GBP 4,500,000.0, we'd expect that to increase as we go through the rest of the year. And then the cash and debtor slide. So good that we've got an increase in the cash balance since the end of the year to £4,300,000 We said before, we've spoken about onerous contracts.

We recognized a couple of those back in 2024, the start of 2024. One of those contracts ended in January, which is good, and the second, more material one, will end in December of this year. So we're not expecting to significantly increase the cash balance as we go through this year, but we would expect to start seeing adjusted EBITDA be more of a proxy for cash generation once we step into 2026, once that onerous contract ends. In terms of the working capital cycle, again, we mentioned this on every call. It's just to give you an update.

It's still working as we've seen historically, working very, very well, very, very efficiently, still collecting very well on from our customers. The right hand side shows what we write off as a company on an annual basis, but also in q one of this year. Very, very small proportion of revenue, database, and in line. We collected a 13% of revenue booked in the first quarter of this year. We expect that to be higher than revenue because we're collecting on a big q four and a quieter q one than q four.

So that's all moving in in the right direction as well. So all working very, very efficiently in better days, yeah, in in line with what we just said, but on our target of of ninety days. So yeah, that's the end of my section there. As I say, it's good solid quarter, good foundation to build on across the rest of the year. Back to you Stuart.

Stuart Lars, CEO, Audioboom Group plc: Thanks, Brad. I guess last chance to get any questions in as we'll move on to those in just a moment. I think one more kind of quick slide for for me, really, is just to build on a couple of things Brad mentioned there, which is what we're doing for the rest of 2025. So as he said and confirmed, market expectations for audio boom for this year are $80,000,000 of of revenue and 4,500,000.0 of adjusted EBITDA. And as we've said all the way through here, you know, we continue to be confident about delivering those.

We have $63,000,000 of advertising revenue booked for the year. So in the past three months, we've added $8,000,000. So you can see the the the progress there. And we are not other way around. I'm sorry.

We have added $9,000,000 in the the last three months. So you can see the progress that that that we are making there towards the $80,000,000 goal. And we are $8,000,000 ahead of where we were at the same point last year. So you can kind of draw those lines and and see, you know, what we added after this point last year and and kind of project that forward, I think, for for progress this year as well. But, really, the pathway is there to that 80,000,000, and and we've made a really good start to be at 63,000,000 of the 80 on April.

Continue to see good progress on pricing and improving that pricing across our platforms. We talked a little about that earlier. Showcase now, including AI, will help us do that, and Showcase will be an important part of of of building our revenue going forward. So we continue to to build our ad tech products to partner with the the the the the right people to add functionality and sophistication into Showcase and giving those advertisers everything that they need to to spend more with us. Good set of show renewals in the first quarter.

You know, the the first thing we look to do here is to continue to work with our biggest and our our best shows. So we you know, seen in our training update today, we announced a number of shows that will continue with us where those renewals are generally on two year or three year terms. And, you know, we have great working relationships with those shows, and and we'll continue to to build together. We also signed new shows to the Audioboom network during this year during this quarter. You're not really seeing the results of those signings within the q one numbers.

Those will come in q two and beyond, and we expect the signings that we did make in q one, including things like the Smosh Network, reading Reddit, Small Town Dicks. Those shows will will add revenue going forward, and we expect them to be delivering more than 5,000,000 downloads or YouTube views every single month. So so some some pretty big shows in there, and and that will drive that the network and and add inventory and and revenue opportunity from this point forward. And we continue to invest in tech, like I said, bringing in the the the the best technology into showcase and and building out tools for our podcasters to to create new inventory to give them, you know, more value as as we go forward. So, again, we have that path to 80,000,000 of revenue, and we're confident around achieving that given where we are today.

EBITDA, 4,500,000.0 is the market expectation. We've shown you the stable operating costs that we have within Audioboom. As Brad said, we do not expect those to to go up in in any significant way. Then that higher showcase gross margin, the showcase becomes a higher percentage of our revenue mix. That's gonna drive EBITDA.

We continue to remove more of those low gross margin contracts, that lower quality revenue. We have more of those coming out in q two that will get EBITDA. And as I said, fully confident of making 2025 a record year for the business. So thanks for joining today. We have a few answers to some questions coming up.

But, Jake, I don't know if you wanted to to say anything more before we get there.

Jake, Moderator/Presenter: Absolutely. Stuart, brother, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab that's situated on the right hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can all be accessed via your investor dashboards.

Guys, you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon, and thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But, Stuart, Brad, at this point, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that'd be great. Thank you.

Stuart Lars, CEO, Audioboom Group plc: Thanks, Jake. Yeah. Brad's picked up on a on a few here. I think probably one of the the most popular, though, one is from Eddie and a few others. It's really just asking about tariffs and and and the economy.

So let's get to that one one first, I think. So we mentioned in the trading update, and and just to kind of reiterate that, you know, Audioboom is not directly affected by Trump's tariffs. So, you know, our inventory is created and sold within specific territories. You know, our US entity is entities are responsible for producing, creating 85% of that revenue generating ad inventory. Nothing's being exported, imported here, so there is really no direct impact from those tariffs in terms of additional costs associated with that ad inventory that we would need to pass on to our customers or suck up ourselves.

So no direct kind of impact there. Where we continue to watch and wait, I think, and and last week, I spent three days in Chicago with the wider podcast and advertising industry, a a large event. And I think the industry is is doing the same thing watching it and waiting, really watching to see how those tariffs impact inflation and consumer spending in in in The US. It's obviously too early to give any meaningful predictions on that. But what I would say is that because we've we've really just worked through an ad market downturn across 2022 and 2023, we know what that looks like, and we're stronger and and more resilient than than before.

So, you know, lower risk, minimum guarantees, stable cost base. We are much more diversified in our ad products than than ever before. And so, for example, I saw a piece of research from Martech last week that that suggests that 34% of advertising buyers would shift their spending towards performance based advertising if if tariffs have a negative effect. And and that bodes very well for our business model. Much of the advertising that that we run is performance based advertising.

So I think we're we're we're resilient and is much more robust, I think, than than we were for the 2022 and '23 ad market downturn. As I said, we'll we'll continue to to watch and wait. We I don't think anyone knows the true impact of of tariffs. I'm certainly not gonna make any predictions on on that today. But as a direct effect, there there there is no real impact of those tariffs, but we will wait and watch on that kind of secondary impact as as the year progresses.

Next question here is about YouTube. It says there were reports a few weeks ago that YouTube would be switching on automated advertising for podcast. How does that help audio boom? Yeah. So YouTube is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our distribution.

Actually, more than 16% of our distribution came through video last month. So people viewing video versions of of podcasts. Around 16% of our distribution happens that way. But video distribution and audio distribution work very differently. So when it comes to audio distribution, audio comes

So if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Pandora and you click play, the audio is served directly from the AudioBoom platform. But for video, it works differently if if you're watching a video version of that same podcast you're watching on YouTube and you click play. The video doesn't come from the audio platform. It's served locally from YouTube. So what that means is that we can currently only monetize video through our premium advertising product where the ads are baked into the content.

Whereas on the audio version, all of our ad products can run. So that's our premium advertising and also our showcase advertising too on the audio side. So if YouTube was to switch this on, it would be strong upside for audio. So first off, it would allow adrip to be used. Adrip is our proprietary inventory creation tool.

It would allow that to be utilized in video. It automates the removal of those premium baked in ads and creates a second window of monetization. So there's the potential to, I think, to open up millions of new ad impressions to sell every single month that way. And then secondly, we would be able to run showcase across video distribution. So delivering ads via our global marketplace.

And I said earlier that that 16% of our distribution was in video. So effectively, this could increase showcase revenue by 16% because showcase could now run across that 16% of distribution that it currently does not run across. So I think we're we're excited at what this could be. Waiting to learn more from YouTube as to what YouTube as to what they're planning. But it yeah.

It could be a, I think, a really great thing for for the industry and and for audio boom. We got two minutes left, so just mindful of time. I think there's one more question here I'll I'll answer, which is about shows. It says there there are lots of retail investors talking about shows that have left audio boom over the past quarter. Can you comment on that?

I I touched on it a little bit in the presentation, but, yeah, I can talk more to it. Yeah. Shows do leave audio boom. It doesn't happen often, but they they they do leave. Podcasting is a very exciting space right now.

It's a competitive environment. Podcasters and their talent agents are looking for the best network partners, and and Audiobeam is a great partner to some of the biggest podcasts in the world, and that's reflected in partnerships with shows that are probably almost a decade old. So as you you've probably seen, we just renewed our work with no such thing as a fish, one of the biggest UK podcasts, astonishing legends, true crime obsessed. We've worked with these shows for for almost ten years at this point, so we have a great track record, I think, of of long term partnerships and renewing our work with shows. But a few shows do leave.

I would say just remember that they leave different reasons. Sometimes we decide to walk away from a partnership as I laid out at the top here. We are focused on high quality revenue and high performing contracts. So if a show is not performing, we will make decisions to to exit. And we'll also stay disciplined.

If a show is being priced at a level that doesn't make sense, we won't chase those shows. The risk is too high. It's not sustainable. We need our work to to be sustainable, to be profitable. So, yes, shows leave, but look at our history.

We've delivered strong growth consistently over the last ten years, consistent network growth, consistent revenue growth. That's not what you get from a company that's losing shows. Right? So we're building our network. We're signing bigger and better shows like Smosh, which I mentioned earlier.

It's huge top tier podcast. And we're very comfortable, I think, with letting the odd podcast move on when it's not a a a good fit. So, hopefully, that gives you some context around there. There's obviously, you should be very confident in in the growth of of our network. Alright.

We're at ten forty five here. Sorry. In in New York, three forty five over there. Time for us to wrap up, I think. So thank you very much for for for joining us.

As I said, right at the top here, q one update, very positive from our point of view exactly where we expected things to be setting us up for a record 2025.

Jake, Moderator/Presenter: Perfect, Stuart, Brett. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company.

On behalf of management team of Audioboom Group plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon.

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