Earnings Call Transcript - APP Q1 2022

Ryan Gee, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance

Good afternoon, everyone. Let’s get started. Welcome to AppLovin's earnings call for the quarter ended March 31, 2021. I’m Ryan Gee, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance at AppLovin. And joining me today to discuss our results are our Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairperson, Adam Foroughi; and our President, Chief Financial Officer, Herald Chen. Please note our SEC filings, earnings release, and shareholder letter discussing our first-quarter performance are available at investors.applovin.com. We also posted a short slide presentation that Herald will reference later in this call if you’d like to follow along. During today's call, we may be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. These statements are based on assumptions and beliefs, and we assume no obligation to update them except as required by law. Actual results may differ materially from those results predicted. Please review the risk factors in our most recently filed Form 10-K and our Form 10-Q to be filed shortly after this call for additional information. We will also be discussing non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of our GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are included in our shareholder letter available on our IR website. Please be sure to review the GAAP measures and reconciliations as non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for or superior to our GAAP results. This conference call is being recorded, and a replay will be available shortly. We will be hosting a Q&A session after our prepared remarks. But first, I'd like to turn it over to Adam and Herald. Adam, please go ahead.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

This past quarter we achieved many key milestones for AppLovin. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary in the business and our one-year anniversary as a public company. We cleared over 10 billion app installs through our marketing platform. We can celebrate this milestone because of the hard work, value, and culture that we have in AppLovin. First, we hire and work with great people from diverse backgrounds. We give them an environment to thrive in, always trying to ensure each person has room to develop their professional and personal skills more than anywhere else. Second, we are entrepreneurial and we never settle. We know that in a competitive and challenging market, complacency leads to failure. And third, we maintain focus; we aim to do big things. But all our decisions are tied to our core goals, continuing to expand our footprint as a marketing and monetization platform for developers. It was key to the team that we maintain these core principles as we entered a new public chapter for our company. I'm very proud to say we've done just that. In fact, this was demonstrated in our first quarter. Further, our software platform business will continue to expand by adding new clients and increasing the amounts that existing clients are spending. The strong performance allowed us to record EBITDA in Q1 of $276 million. Most software businesses lose money while growing. We're growing quickly and just cleared the $1 billion EBITDA run rate. Next, we successfully completed migrating MoPub into our MAX platform, unifying the two wireless mediation solutions in the mobile app market. We not only had to execute quickly on our side to accomplish this, but we also ask publishers to integrate our platform into their apps in just 90 days or risk losing their ad revenue. A couple of things to call out specifically here: Historically, we grew MAX to become the leading solution in the market by offering the best technology, not by paying bonuses. This is exactly how we will run our business going forward, focusing on continuing to deliver the best solution in the market. Given the short window of time to move toward a unified platform, we made the decision to payout $210 million in one-time publisher bonuses. We accounted these bonuses as contra revenue, and Herald will give you the accounting details shortly. We see the opportunity to own the largest marketplace in the app advertising ecosystem as strategically valuable long term. Therefore, this was a decision that was an easy one to make because it helps ensure continuity with the publishers coming over from MoPub. Pushing the monetization platform is a big undertaking, and we are proud that over 90% of our publishers moved over to MAX. As a result, we now have a significant share in the market using our solution, so much so that the success of our platform will directly influence growth in the total addressable market and success for all major parties in the ecosystem. That's a strong position to be in and a responsibility we will be proud of. Finally, we acquired Wurl, a leader in empowering streaming TV. Together, we will partner to create performance marketing for CTV. It is clear just how quickly we moved forward on items to make the biggest impact on our business. When we look back just one year to the IPO and see that software was only 14% of our revenue and is now at 40%. At that time, we discussed just how important the first-party data that those games provided was to our software platform's success. Today, our software platform businesses are growing at a significant rate, much faster than we expected. While there has been a leveling off, in fact, our software business in Q1 ‘22 is four times larger than it was in Q1 ‘21. And in Q1, software contributed over 80% of our EBITDA. For the last several quarters, we've talked about how the app business is not as strategic as our software platform, with the continued scaling of our software platform, we've proven that the two businesses can operate independently from one another. More directly, given the success of our software platform, we will no longer run our game as a cost center. That means we will be exploring how to structure our app business so that it is run more efficiently as its own standalone business unit. This exploration may result in operational changes and possibly result in the selling or spinning off our studios, among them are nearly 20 gaming studios and their teams. We will operate the studios with a more profitable spend on user acquisition, which we have already started to do in late Q1. Traditionally, we were willing to spend more on new users valuing the scale and audience data as a justification. This was operating around break-even while typically gaming companies operate at 20% or higher EBITDA margins, which we will now aim to reach over time. Mobile app discovery and monetization are critical for app developers now more than ever. With MAX, we are the market-leading monetization solution. App discovery is the fastest early user acquisition channel for developers today, with customers paying us for performance; we're shielded against macroeconomic volatility. We have a powerful machine learning engine that is only 18 months old and will continue to improve. MAX allows us to serve ads to the 700 million daily active users we help monetize. We have been seasoned in navigating a complex ecosystem in a dynamic privacy landscape. With the growth opportunities across our software business and feature initiatives and the highest cash flow our business generates even today, we're very excited about our future. Now I'll turn it over to Herald Chen to outline the details of Q1 financials and our outlook.

Herald Chen, CFO

Thanks very much. As Adam mentioned, with the growth environment for our software platform and a new operating approach for our apps portfolio, we're excited about our near and long-term growth prospects and cash flow outlook. To better understand that thesis going forward, we'll be providing greater insights into the economic drivers of our two businesses. Regarding the overall cash generation of our company, for a quick preview of what Adam just described in more detail shortly, our guidance for the software platform business is to generate over $1 billion of revenue in the second through fourth quarter this year. Based on an estimated margin for that business of 70% and a flow-through cash of another estimated 70%, that business alone will generate over $0.5 billion of unlevered free cash flow in the next three quarters alone. Now let's get back to the quarter and some key decisions and good progress toward our goals. I'll highlight a few in detail before we take your questions. The first topic is our overall strong spending in margins. We have strong quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth on both the top and bottom line when adjusting for the $210 million of contra revenue we booked in Q1, which were the bonuses paid to publishers related to the MoPub transaction. Our burst in Q1 was driven by the growth in our software platform revenue, more than making up for a modest decline in our app revenue. Let me spend a few minutes on the contra revenue so you can appreciate the growth and margin expansion that we saw in the quarter. First of all, just the accounting of contra revenue. We pay these publisher bonuses to our vendors that are currently or may become future customers of ours. Since GAAP requires offsetting revenue for fees you pay to customers or potential customers, these publisher migration bonuses of $210 million are accounted for as contra revenue. Second, these are non-recurring and a result of the MoPub transaction. Historically, we did not incur these fees in any significant size. But when you shut down one of the largest players in mediation and ask their publishers to move over in 90 days, those publishers incur real revenue loss and cost to migrate. Going forward, we view these publisher bonuses as a significant cost to our normal business and we did not have them before MoPub nor do we project anything significant going forward. Because the MoPub related fees are non-recurring, we add it back to adjusted EBITDA, and any non-MoPub related publisher bonuses, as we would see after Q1 we will not be adding back to adjusted EBITDA, so therefore, it is just a one-time occurrence in this past quarter. For reporting purposes, on the revenue side, we cannot add back the contra revenue. But for internal purposes, of course, we combined the two numbers, which adds up to around 38% greater than our Q4 number. Overall, we continue to record $210 million of contra revenue as part of our $1.05 billion purchase rights for MoPub, the total price for that acquisition was $1.26 billion, and that's a very attractive price for such a strategic and financially accretive asset. On the cash flow side, Adam mentioned we had a record $276 million in EBITDA with a reported margin of 44%. When normalizing revenue for the publisher bonuses, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 33%, which you can see in purple here; we think is the normal run rate of the business. This margin expansion was entirely driven by the strong growth of our high-margin software business. In fact, the margin was slightly reduced by our assets where the reduction in apps revenue was larger offset by user acquisition spending, but it was still related to our overall margin. As we mentioned in the shareholder letter, we currently estimate that our software platform business runs at a normalized EBITDA margin of 65% to 70%, and our apps business at an estimated EBITDA margin of 5% to 10%. Therefore, faster growth of software related apps drives margin expansion. We will be providing more details on this in our Q2 earnings report where we will be providing segmented financials for the first time. Our strong performance for software platform revenue and margin, plus operating cost management, allows us to raise our EBITDA guidance for this year and we'll talk about that further in a minute. Of note, at our current operating scale, we're able to translate a significant percentage of our EBITDA to unlevered free cash flow given our low CapEx, working capital requirements, and moderate tax rate. We estimate that the normalized run rate percentage of adjusted EBITDA translating to unlevered free cash flow to be around 65% to 75%. The next slide we want to show you talks about our software expansion for the quarter. So we’ve heard now a few times from Adam and me; we believe that software platform growth is key for our long-term growth and cash flow. Let’s take a deeper look at our Q1 software performance. First of all, as noted in purple, you can see that all of the one-time contra revenue is taken against our software revenue. But when added to GAAP revenue of $119 million, the total is $329 million for Q1, representing a 33% quarter-over-quarter growth rate on top of strong growth over our prior three quarters. We saw strong customer adoption across all of our solutions including AppDiscovery, AppLovin Exchange, Adjust, and MAX. As we started to pick up revenue from the integrated MoPub customers, our customers continue to find success with our solutions, growing their business and in turn spending more on us. In Q1, we received approximately $40 million of revenue from the integration with Twitter, and we expect this revenue from the acquisition to grow over the course of the year. However, going forward, it will be difficult to discern what revenue comes explicitly from MoPub now that it is fully integrated into MAX. Across the board on software KPIs, we had a solid performance normalized for the contra revenue impact. We had a 258% net dollar-based revenue retention in the quarter over the prior year, showing the resiliency of our customers and continued increase in the use of our software solutions. We also had a solid increase in the number of new customers. Our normalized SPEC count reached 519, an increase of 58 customers, but we still believe that a small percentage of customers is available to us in the marketplace. The additions were across the business, including from new customers migrating from MoPub as well as new customers from AppDiscovery and Adjust. On top of the more customers, we saw the average revenue increase among all of our SPECs reaching a normalized $603,000, a steady increase over the past three quarters. Notably, when we remove the $210 million of contra revenue from these metrics, we still were able to grow net dollar-based retention and the total number of SPECs. For the third topic, we wanted to provide you an update on our guidance where we're increasing our ’22 adjusted EBITDA target. For ’22, our operating outlook for the software platform remains the same as previously given. However, we're adjusting our formal guidance by the $210 million in contra revenue to GAAP revenue guidance of $1.14 billion to $1.29 billion. We're continuing to expect $2 billion in software platform revenue in 2023, which will be a 10x increase from 2020 and a 65% increase over the midpoint of the revised software platform guidance in ‘22. We believe we have the market solutions, technology, and team to reach that goal. Furthermore, given our scalable cost structure, which we articulated earlier, we believe that cash flow from a $2 billion revenue software business would be substantial. Switching to the app side investment, as Adam mentioned, our software platform and immense features of the MAX solution means we are much less reliant on the data from our apps to drive financial performance for our clients. Therefore, we're planning to manage that business to optimize for operating and financial efficiency, with a perspective on how to best drive cash flow from that business over the long term. In the near and medium term, that may include lowering our investment in user acquisition, which will drive up margins for lower overall growth. We will also review our app portfolio, which could lead to a wide array of transactions or no change at all. Based on this new approach, we're lowering our revenue guidance by $200 million, and now targeting a range of $2 billion to $2.15 billion in revenue from apps in ‘22. The combination of our changes in software and app guidance leads to our revised total guidance of $3.14 billion to $3.44 billion on a GAAP basis. With regards to adjusted EBITDA, given record performance and strong margins, we're raising our adjusted EBITDA guidance to a midpoint target of $1.2 billion. This target represents a 65% increase over the prior year. This is also an increase from our previous guidance of high 20% margin against the total revenue forecast at midpoint of $3.7 billion, which equated to just over $1 billion. Key drivers in the same region EBITDA guidance for the much higher growth for our software platform business, which has a much higher margin profile. We have lower investment requirements than originally earmarked for new initiatives. Now we expect a higher margin from our apps business as we optimize it. From an overall margin perspective, this equates to a 36% ‘22 adjusted EBITDA margin at midpoint of GAAP revenue guidance, and a 34% adjusted EBITDA margin when excluding the contra revenue. Therefore, the 34% target is our runway margin to focus on which would be an 800 basis point increase over the prior year. Since we do generate a good amount of cash flow, I wanted to touch briefly on our capital allocation perspectives. Previously, we stated that we're not focused on M&A for the apps parts of the business, and we will opportunistically look on the software side. Although there too, we've assembled many of the key assets we wanted to look at 18 months ago. Regarding the stock buyback side, we do have our $750 million authorized program, and we have used just over $45 million thus far. We are planning to use that authorization when appropriate and are open to doing so given the right opportunity. We appreciate that the public markets are highly volatile and difficult to predict. In these markets, we believe cash is king and cash flow growth is crucial. That's exactly where our team is focused. We believe in our strategic position, growth, and cash generation potential, and we will work hard quarter after quarter to post the numbers that will earn your trust. Thank you for taking the time to get an update on our business. And with that, we'll open the call for questions.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Excellent. Can you hear me? Beautiful. Thank you. Hey, guys. So just a couple of questions for me, maybe just at a high level. How long do you think this review of the apps business will last? In the meantime, what kind of performance do you expect from it? I think it was down $40 million sequentially. That's one and then to a question we often get from investors is around just this shift in strategy away from the apps. Historically you guys have positioned yourself as strategically leveraging the apps as a source of first-party data. So maybe just refresh us, why is that not as important anymore? Thank you.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Hey, Yousuf. I think the two questions are well tied together. And really what we're focused on with the games business, as it is today, is operating efficiently. We've got 20 or so studios, distributed all over the world, some are run very well, generating a good amount of profitability, while others are generating losses. We're going to go through the portfolio and ensure that every single one of them is held to the same standards as any independent gaming company would be. What gives us confidence in that is that our software business has frankly grown so much faster, and so much larger than what we thought when we first went public a year ago. We were talking about $650 million of revenue in software for the entire year this year, and we're now talking about over double that amount, with around half that amount in the first quarter having quadrupled in the last four months. This scale gives us confidence that we have really become a market solution. We’ve gotten a lot more software platform enterprise clients to come use our platform, we’ve gotten a lot more scale with the MAX and MoPub marketplace now. This gives us confidence that our games are only a small percentage of that software business. For four quarters in a row, our games business has been fairly flat in both audience and revenue, whereas our software business has grown immensely. That gives us a lot of confidence in the trajectory of the software business. We want to focus entirely on running that and achieving a couple of billion, which we put out as a goal next year.

Eric Sheridan, Analyst

Okay, can you guys hear me now? Great. Hope everyone's well on the team. I want to come back to some of the acquisitions you've done and talk more broadly there. You finished MoPub obviously, there's Connected-TV with Wurl. Where do you see now the collection of assets you have in terms of positioning yourself for compounded growth in different verticals on the advertiser side, potential budget unlock, not only in 2022 but as we look beyond 2022 over the next couple of years? I'd love to get as much color as we can about that. Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Great question. In mobile, we're really confident with our position. We've got the largest marketplace, we have machine learning technology that’s only 18 months old, and it's going to continue to improve. That's how these things go. We know the performance model. So we're not looking to take advice from others; we are looking to give our advertisers measurable results that fit within their financial goals. That unlocks unlimited budgets. As we think about how to increase our market over time and create growth factors for many years to come, we really think about finding the consumers we know how to serve as well, with recommended offerings across other access points, and that’s what makes Connected-TV interesting for us. We're also being one of the leading software solutions to bring content online and Connected-TV for a lot of the brands that need content distributed through a channel. We advertise in that content, which will have immense reach and value. We believe it presents a really large performance model on television. We'll focus on continuing to expand the software business and integrate our machine learning software wherever we can.

Stephen Ju, Analyst

Hi, great. Thanks. Can you hear me? Awesome. All right, great. So, Adam, reading between the lines of your shareholder letter, it seems like now's the time to go after the larger ad market, as opposed to just a spin from the mobile game sector. So with MoPub now in the house, is there any sort of direction or update you can give us in terms of the mix of ad revenue now coming from non-gaming clients and what the relative growth between gaming versus non-gaming is now and where that could be? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

MoPub and MAX together serve over 700 million daily active users around the world. These consumers, in large part, on our platform, are playing games, but I can assure you, they don’t just play games; that's not the only thing they do in their lives. So they represent a very good audience at the level of scale to monetize on both games and non-games. We traditionally focus our solutions on game developers and have built a lot of performance technology there. MoPub products access the MoPub marketplace, which allows them to monetize their audience. As we continue to integrate and push forward after this month of the transaction, we are going to see more and more monetization potential from non-gaming customers to augment the leading market solutions we have in the mobile gaming category.

Clark Lampen, Analyst

Okay, can you guys hear me? Awesome. Maybe I'll follow up on Stephen's question there for a moment. Because, Adam, you mentioned the Trade Desk onboarding. In prior quarters, we've seen in the shareholder letter that there's really been a spike in sort of customers coming on board. With ALX and MAX now kind of under the AppLovin umbrella for the first full quarter, could you give us a sense of customer response to the unified platform or maybe if it's possible, if there's any sort of backlog or just qualitative read on demand? And then Herald, I think, if I understood this right, as we look at the ’22 EBITDA guidance, most of the adjustment years is really sort of change a plan around apps and maybe it's asset adjustments. But given what you've talked about with strategy, does this change your willingness to move potentially into new spaces, like OEMs, sort of blockchain and NFTs and some of the things you talked about last quarter? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Yes, as we think about the integration that we just did, we’ve put together the largest truly open marketplace in mobile apps. It averages just over 700 million daily active users in one exchange, which is a very large amount. We’ve heard really positive feedback from the customers coming over. They were traditional DSPs buying on MoPub, thinking that MoPub was the biggest solution. By coming into this unified solution, they’re getting over two times the amount of scale for their business, which has made the reception really strong. And on the publisher side, having that much scale in one software solution creates a lot more liquidity. Our entire objective with MAX was to drive up competition in the marketplace, so we can increase the amount of money that publishers earn, knowing that on the other hand, those publishers are going to invest in user acquisition. You are seeing that really fuel our growth, wherein size we've almost tripled them in the last 12 months. You’re seeing that net dollar retention was around 265% just this past quarter. These are the same customers spending nearly three times as much on our platform today, and that’s because the efficiencies we’re bringing to the market enable them to do that and grow their businesses faster than the market's growth.

Herald Chen, CFO

Thanks for the question, Clark. The other question you had was around margins and investment in new initiatives. I think last year, we talked about the highest margins this year and about three big investments we needed to make. One was the infrastructure to grow the software platform as fast as we could, particularly given MoPub. The second was the investment in new initiatives, and we set aside a budget without knowing exactly what that would look like. The third one was regarding new apps and studios. We onboarded to go engage with that investment. Very simply, we're still doing the first one, or actually have done that; it's in place. We onboarded the vast majority of what we wanted to achieve with MoPub, and because of that infrastructure in place, we now get to continue to grow alongside MoPub and the software platform as it grows. I think the other big piece is on the new initiatives side, we're pursuing NFT blockchain, OEM strategies, and I'll touch on that in a second. We're still as bullish as we were in the first quarter out there, but we just don’t think it takes as many dollars in this year to invest behind it to go achieve those goals. Lastly, regarding the app side, which is a very different approach and investment there. We previously told you the M&A dollars would not be allocated there. Importantly, though, we're running at low single-digit margins, where they really should be in the 20s. There is a lot of room for us to improve that from an OpEx standpoint, so we remain extremely excited about the new initiatives. We discussed CTV with Wurl being one, OEM another, plus NFT blockchain, and we would expect in the next couple of months, if not sooner, to come back to you with some of the progress we’re making on all of these fronts.

Matt Cost, Analyst

Hey, everyone, thanks for taking the question. I guess just looking at the ad network revenue in the quarter, very strong; it looks like revenue perspective, I have this right, it’s at an all-time high. So I guess, what are the sources of strength in Q1, particularly while you're going through the transition of MoPub into MAX that you would call out? And within that could you talk to the contribution from MoPub in the quarter? And then just Second, kind of more philosophically, I guess, historically, the way that I certainly thought about what made your ad network unique was that you had a flywheel between the data that came from the apps business, and then you said the algorithms in the ad network. So I guess in the future, where the apps could be spun or sold at the very least smaller in scale relative to the scale of the ad network, what differentiates AppLovin’s ad network now, as you sort of drive to the next leg of growth, if it's not just running the same playbook that got you from where you started to where you are? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Yes, great question. When I look at it, it's all interrelated. The inflection point for our ad business was the release of AXON 18 months ago and the continued expansion of dollars invested by our own customers over the past year, coming from the efficiencies brought by our machine learning systems. These systems just improve as they get more data. Your question about our data is key: when we started, it was the AXON, the only data we had were on games. That entire operation we got into was in games. When we went public a year ago, our own games made up 35% to 40% of the software business. We reported that to you in the past. Now that number continues to shrink. That's because we've seen immense adoption of the technology, witnessing customers coming online and serving more ads, which is providing us a more significant feedback loop. We now see that machine learning continues to improve without the necessity for our own games to be fueling the data. That gives us the confidence to successfully run both businesses to effectively maximize shareholder value and grow the software business to generate meaningful margins from both the games business and, at the same time, because we are generating benefits out of it as well.

Ryan Gee, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance

Yes, I think you asked what the contribution was from MoPub in the quarter, and it was just over $40 million specifically. We know that number, because Twitter was still running that business for us in the quarter. Subsequently, it has been fully integrated into MAX. As everyone knows, MoPub was completely shut down on March 31 of this year, and so it is fully integrated in our numbers rolling forward. We won't be able to parse it out moving forward, because all the data and customers are integrated. However, we expect to see that number increase quarter over quarter, as shown in our software guide for the year.

David Karnovsky, Analyst

Thank you. Just one on MoPub integration. I know it's early. But for the publishers that have migrated over, can you maybe say how much traction you're seeing and pushing these kinds toward in updating? How do you think about cross-selling from these new relationships in your AppDiscovery products or anything else you offer? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Yes, the MAX solution itself, really, we built and pushed the market. We partnered with Facebook and really were the first two big bidders in the marketplace. Clients are coming over to MAX, yet we're not bidding out of the box. What we have seen is strong performance for the publishers that have come over. Just because of the scale we’ve built, we have some liquidity on the platform, allowing us to get more differentiated demand. The technology was built much later than the other mediation solutions. That’s why we had such a strong trajectory to MAX before MoPub and why we continue to expect it to be the leading solution in the marketplace.

Tim Nollen, Analyst

Okay, great, thanks. I've got a couple of questions related to the contra revenue. I had thought of the $200 million as a number that you've mentioned before as being more of a cost. If it's a contra revenue item—you need to make sure that it’s not just MoPub customer revenue that's being shifted over to MAX, but there must be some other revenue in your system that's also being moved over to MAX, just want to be sure I understand that, because the $40 million versus the $210 million number, just to make sure I understand what that difference is. Also, if you've got 90%, I think you said, of customers moved over to MAX, does that mean most of this is behind you and the other 10% are going to come? Or what happens to that other 10%? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Yes, thanks, Tim, for the questions. Yes, sorry, this would require clarifications. On the revenue side that we took to our software business specifically coming from MoPub customers, that is the $40 million. The $210 million we are referring to is the fees that we paid to our vendors or our publishers to move their inventory on the MAX. Those are not necessarily customers of ours, but vendors putting inventory that we’re monetizing. The accounting is structured around that, given many of the publishers are our customers as well. The contra revenue applies against the revenue they contribute to us, while some of them are publishers who aren't our customers; we want them to be our customers. We’re hopeful those publishers will become customers on our AppDiscovery platform. In terms of the migration, we do have a 90% conversion ratio on the publishers currently on our platform, by the way. That’ll take time to fully scale out of the platform and for the demand side to catch up. I think the remaining 10% are certainly other providers out there, and some do and some don't. But we got all the key vendors that we wanted, and publishers to feel very good about that exceeded our expectations.

David Pang, Analyst

Great, can you hear me? Right. Thanks. So given the challenges of one of your key competitors, how are you ensuring that AXON won't face a similar challenge and is learning on 'good data'?

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Yes, I mean, like machine learning, obviously, has opportunities and sensitivities, and it really doesn't require a good data team. A lot of that just comes down to execution. We're focused on our own execution, not what others around us are doing. The key with us is that our models are being trained with substantial amounts of data, and we believe we have the ability and infrastructure to build very substantial machine learning technologies. We did just that, and you can see for the past few quarters, our growth has outpaced the market. We’re very confident in our platform’s ability to be stable and continue to drive growth going forward.

Franco Granda, Analyst

Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Perfect. Despite the phasing out of IDFA and 14.5, it appears that probabilistic attribution is still very prevalent across the industry. There are rumors that Tyra 16 might be cracking down on this. And yes, this is the thought that using private relay similar to Google's plans, Apple would be able to do this in a non-disruptive way. So I guess two questions on this. First, just how big of a task is it for non-compliant ad tech businesses to move away from fingerprinting? Then, two, if a change like this were to happen, would this be an opportunity for you to gain share in a similar way that when HAC was enacted? Thanks.

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Yes, look, I think that if you go up a level in the marketplace, these privacy changes have continued to come over the last few years. Part of GDPR... yes, this was frankly the biggest; now what Wurl does in the future is uncertain, but we can't predict exactly what’s going to change in the market. There are a couple of certainties. One is people will play games on their mobile devices; we know that for certain. We're also operating on a very large scale platform of 700 million plus daily active users. The technology and the team is really nimble, and we can move quickly whenever these market shifts happen. You always expect to see winners and losers; that’s just the way it shapes out. The key to our success in the last decade is our ability to move faster than everyone else. While these changes can be disruptive to businesses, we're prepared to navigate them.

Martin Yang, Analyst

Hey, Ryan, can you hear me? Thank you. My question is about the first quarter software platform revenues. Even back in MoPub, it was very strong, seasonally, and also net expansion rate quite extraordinary. Was that a surprise to you?

Adam Foroughi, CEO

I mean, when we put out guidance into next year, a 10x increase of the software business from just four years ago for a business at this level of scale reporting on net revenue, and we’ve now talked about 65% to 70% EBITDA margin for this business, to be able to do that requires a lot of confidence in your operation. Even though I think we surprised ourselves with how fast this trajectory of growth developed, we’re not surprised by our ability to execute and continue to grow this business going forward.

Martin Yang, Analyst

Let me be more explicit; do you feel you benefitted from some of the hiccups from your competitor in the first quarter?

Herald Chen, CFO

Okay, so the way these markets work is not a zero-sum game. However, when one competitor experiences a decline in performance, the other one doesn't automatically improve. The reality is we’re effectively matching idle offers through our platform, focusing on providing value to advertisers who are seeking performance. We aren't directly competing with others; we’ll just need to ensure that matchmaking is accurate and drive value to those advertisers purchasing through our platform. The impact from one competitor doesn't diminish our results. That said, we're committed to ensuring that every marketing platform in our ecosystem achieves success. The stronger the marketing solutions in the industry, the larger the market becomes. This ultimately benefits our growth and the ecosystem’s growth.

Ryan Gee, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance

Okay, and there's no more questions in the queue. I'd like to turn it back to the guys and thank you all for joining us today. Do you guys have any closing remarks you'd like to say?

Adam Foroughi, CEO

Thanks for joining us. We noted a lot in the letter and covered information. We appreciate people taking the time to look into this volatile market. Thanks so much.

Herald Chen, CFO

Thanks everyone.