Opera Ltd Q2 FY2020 Earnings Call

Thank you and thanks everyone for joining us. With me today, I have our CFO, Frode Jacobsen; and Song Lin who today now holds the role of Co-CEO of Opera. Before I hand over the call to Frode, I would like to remind everyone that in the conference call today, the company will be making statements about its future results and expectations, which constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Such statements are based on current expectations and the current economic environment, and are inherently subject to economic, competitive and other uncertainties and contingencies beyond the control of management. You should be cautioned that these statements are not a guarantee of future performance. You may refer to the Safe Harbor Statement in the company’s earnings release for details. Our commentary today will also include non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA which are different from our consolidated financial statements that are prepared and presented based on IFRS. We believe that the use of our non-IFRS financial measures provide an additional tool for investors to use in evaluating ongoing Operating results and trends. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with IFRS. With that, let me now turn over the call to our CFO, Frode Jacobsen.

Thanks, Derrick and hello everyone. We have a lot of exciting stuff to cover today, two big announcements which I'll address first and later I'll cover our financial highlights and provide some color on how our business is recovering from COVID-19 and returning to growth. Let's cover the first piece of news, namely the elevation of Song Lin from his role as Chief Operating Officer to his new role as Co-CEO stepping in alongside Yahui Zhou, who remains both CEO and Chairman of Opera. This promotion formalizes a strong role Song Lin has been executing on for the past years, basically overseeing everything at Opera outside of the microlending business and highlights the trust that Yahui places in him and in the global Opera leadership team. As context, Song Lin joined Opera in Norway 18 years ago and spent many years in key engineering roles. Later on, he was instrumental in our privatization and transition to new ownership and our strategy to accelerate our trajectory and leverage our user base to launch new businesses. As many of you have realized in live face to face discussions, Song Lin knows everything there is to know about Opera and the markets where we operate. He is a fast talker and a quick thinker with good intuition. And just like Yahui he has a tremendous drive and urgency and together the two of them have shaped our company and our ambitions over the past years. On a personal level, he is also a fantastic guy to work with, and I know I speak for all of our staff when I congratulate him on his expanded role. Now to the second topic, the formation of Nanobank. As many of you know, we have been working towards massive fintech opportunities for several years. First, we incubated OPay, now Nigeria's largest mobile wallet company both in transactions and value. It has become a leader in its space and again doubled its transaction volumes over the past six months. We structured OPay as its own company from day one as we wanted to raise external capital to address the massive potential of filling out such an offering across Africa without impacting Opera’s strong balance sheet. OPay has raised $170 million to date and investor demand to take part in that journey has been very strong. Separately, we have scaled our microlending offerings from practically nothing to a massive business in just over a year. It has continually exceeded our expectations with exponential growth and strong profitability. And it's a great example of how Opera utilizes its platform and significant user base as a competitive advantage. Last year, which was really the first year of operations, the business provided approximately 15 million loans representing over $800 million in value and built a user base with tens of millions of registered users. With that background, we are excited to be announcing Nanobank, which is the combination of Opera’s microlending business and the equivalent business of our closest partner in this space, MobiMagic, which works with us in India and has a large growing microlending business in Indonesia. When operating together, these businesses will form a significant power in the fintech space for emerging markets. By creating Nanobank, we are setting the stage for continued growth, consolidating profitability and cash generation, diversification on both the product side and in terms of geographies, and finally we are providing this business with the flexibility to operate as its own company. The resulting Nanobank will be one of the biggest global fintech companies focused on emerging markets and a category leader. Nanobank will single-mindedly focus on increasing its leading position in the emerging markets fintech space. Combined, the business will also benefit from shared technologies, data aggregation, and central functions such as risk management and credit scoring through user profiling and KYC efforts, shared operational know-how and a more holistic view and adaptation to regulation. Further, Nanobank will have significant strategic flexibility for the future to come, such as taking in strategic investors or floating shares. We are very proud of the business we have built over such a short time frame, including an efficient organization with strong operations and well-managed business practices. For Opera and our shareholders, this transaction highlights the value we've created, it simplifies our investment story, provides us with additional flexibility, and it creates a corporate framework that best supports the business as it continues to scale as a category leader over the next several years. Now let's get into the details on Mobimagic, the combined companies, and the transaction. Mobimagic launched microlending operations in mid-2018 with a goal to be one of the largest fintech providers in Southeast Asia. Its initial market was Indonesia. Then Mobimagic supported our launch and scale in India as our technology and business partner, leading to results well in excess of our most optimistic forecasts. In 2019 Mobimagic generated $106 million of revenue for a highly profitable business that had $48 million in pre-tax profits. Mobimagic shared a similar growth curve to our first microlending efforts as Indonesia scaled throughout 2019 and as they participated in the exponential growth we saw in India. In the same period, Opera generated $128 million in fintech revenue and a pretax profit of approximately $19 million in this business area. The combined Opera and Mobimagic businesses pro forma results when adjusting for our transactions between the companies generated revenues of approximately $209 million and a pretax profit of approximately $68 million in 2019, as well as provided almost 20 million loans with an aggregate value well over $1 billion. To provide some additional context on the scale and rapid growth of this business, prior to the significant impact from COVID-19, the combined businesses generated a combined $120 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2020 alone, on 10 million loans disbursed with a total value of $686 million. This compares to a combined revenue of $22 million on less than $100 million in loans dispersed in the first quarter of 2019. Further, Nanobank as a whole generated profits in the first half 2020, despite significant extraordinary credit loss provisions related to COVID-19. On that point, the recovery from COVID-19 is well underway. The Nanobank businesses have been increasing loans provided in all key markets India, Indonesia and Kenya since the end of June. Loans disbursed were 44 million in July compared to 28 million in June. This ramp has continued into August, most notably in Indonesia that is already nearing pre-COVID levels. While higher credit standards have been employed in the near term to ensure profitable loans, Nanobank expects to continue to rescale volumes as it gains additional confidence. While it still remains difficult to predict when this business will return to early Q1 levels, it is clear that Nanobank is on that path. Looking ahead, we have massive growth expectations for Nanobank to grow far beyond pre-COVID-19 levels. First, India is a huge market and today Nanobank has only interacted with roughly 3% of the population or 18% of the unbanked. Second, Nanobank has just begun geographical expansion. Today, we can also announce the launch of another major market prepared in collaboration between Opera and MobiMagic, namely Mexico, which has a substantial unbanked population. And as we look ahead, we expect Nanobank will launch in several new countries to further increase its total addressable market. Finally, Nanobank will continue to develop and deploy fintech offerings beyond microlending. This includes marketplace offers, buy now pay later products, mobile payments, and debit cards, some of which are now live and others that will be launched over the next year. Over time, we really believe that the potential to broaden the offering is substantial building Nanobank’s large registered base of 50 million plus users and enabling increased recurring engagements with our products. The transaction itself and Opera’s interests in particular have been overseen and closely reviewed by our Press Audit Committee of Independent Directors as Mobimagic was controlled by our CEO. Further Opera engaged an independent professional third party to value the respective Nanobank contributions and to help determine the ownership split. The factors that determine the agreed ownership split were the forecasted cash flows, multiples of most relevant public companies, and provided working capital such as cash and loan book of each party. The cash that was part of Opera’s microlending business as consolidated by Opera in our June 30th balance sheet was $31 million and our loan book was $14 million. As part of our contribution to Nanobank, the net cash in the business and the loan book will also transition to Nanobank. This resulted in an agreed ownership split of 42% Opera, 58% Mobimagic in this otherwise non-cash transaction. So looping back to the combined pro forma results, if Nanobank had been affected on January 1, 2019 Opera’s 42% share of pre-tax profits would have been approximately $28 million in 2019, compared to the approximate $19 million that our standalone business generated. From a reporting standpoint, we plan to be transparent and discuss the performance of Nanobank in our quarterly results, as it will be a key factor in our overall sum of the parts valuation. We expect to provide details such as revenue, profits, and key operating metrics on a quarterly basis and we will make it easy to see what our revenue and adjusted EBITDA would be when including our 42% fair share of Nanobank revenue and adjusted EBITDA. In terms of IFRS reporting, Opera’s share of the Nanobank results will be reflected in the share of net income of associates and joint ventures listed in our income statement. Additionally, Opera will report a sizable one-time gain as a result of this transaction currently estimated at over $100 million. This follows the recognition of our initial Nanobank ownership at fair value, representing a step up versus the book values of Opera’s contributed business. Further, we will conduct a PPA on the difference between fair and book value of Nanobank as a whole and Opera will recognize amortization costs as appropriate over the coming years as it relates to excess values allocated to intangible assets such as technology, customer relationships, and licenses. To sum up, we are really excited about Nanobank and expect it will demonstrate a highly attractive trajectory going forward as it continues to scale and expand into new geographies and products with the potential to be multiples bigger and generate hundreds of millions in profits. This, along with Opera’s other growth initiatives which Song Lin will speak about are key elements in our effort to drive strong returns for Opera’s future results and recent trends.

Hey guys, thank you Frode. So, I'm glad to be named as Co-CEO and I view it as not myself but really a realization of what the overall Opera team has accomplished over the past few years, growing revenues, users, and to growing multiple new businesses so thank you guys. It's an exciting 18-year journey. I look forward to taking on this new role and continuing the strong momentum together with the proud Opera team. So at this time I will talk about some recent trends and developments. Our user trends for Q2 with a historical high user base becoming our key role. Our user base in the Q2 was a record 363 million monthly active users, an increase of 12 million users compared to Q1. This was driven by growth in Africa and Europe our key regions of focus. Our base has further growth in July and an all-time high of 329 million monthly active users in this time of COVID. We are very pleased to be doing that. And to further break it down Opera News has achieved an important milestone in May of 200 million monthly active users and averaged 205 million users in Q2, it is up 26% year-over-year. We are of the thought that Opera News has become a critical information hub during the COVID-19 outreach. On the other angle our technical abilities grew 15% year-over-year to a record of 75 million in Q2. This was driven by both the strength in Europe with our PC offering which is becoming ever more relevant when people spend more time at home. And also globally from Opera GX North South venues which have reached 4 million monthly active users recently and more than doubled year-to-date. On mobile, we are also seeing strong results in Africa due to our product relevance and also our increasing technical relationships. We are very happy to announce the cooperation with leading technological companies and also recently Safari.com in several countries in Africa. These partnerships have provided for strong future user growth. Our focus is to continue our growth trajectory and see 12 million mobile browser users versus June so very excited. Now also getting to a clear recovery trend from the low point in April, with each month showing improved year-over-year trends. So overall we continue to be bullish on our long-term monetization rates, with offline to online transitions accelerating signaled by continued growth of OList with 60 million monthly active users compared to a little over 4 million at the start of the year. We are also very excited about our launch of Opera For Business in partnership with Google, which we just announced last week. It will be topic based to enhance monetization inter-raging and even though short term monetization has been slowed by COVID-19, the digital advertising ecosystem in Africa represents a very attractive long-term growth. Let me also lean a bit on Opera News for instance. That product has grown revenues 65% year-over-year despite the monetization impact of COVID, it has actually reached significant metrics in Google's problematic inventory worldwide. There are of course still many review related inefficiencies for problematic inventory in Africa simply because it has not received enough attention from global players, but what we are working on is solving this problem every day with all our partners, because given all scale and also the quality of that product, we believe monetization potential can be huge. And finally, we are also extremely excited about our new European think tank initiative, which we think has the potential to be very big and also accelerate our growth in 2021 and beyond. We have some real competitive advantages with more than 50 million addressable users in the region that make online transactions and purchases through our browsers, which in fact is the point of sale. That gives us huge potential to kick up innovative financial services. We have been testing our digital wallet for some major new market and have already acquired users. Initially, our offerings will be monetized through a buy now pay later product, which will generate revenue through transaction commissions and credit fees. This product while having similarities with others in the market, will be unique as it will focus on the users versus the margins. So essentially a user should be able to make purchases with any merchants like they would normally do, with the browser and then retrospectively decide how to pay for them. So we expect to formally launch later this year and also to take additional steps in the near term for our offering. We have built up a great think tank business in emerging markets in the last two years and now as a company deeply rooted and headquartered in Europe, we've also recently added strength from our PocoSys acquisition and recently Fjord Bank we are very excited about the potential and also opportunities that we see in Europe. This will be the focus of the team for the next few months and we really look forward to updating you as we scale this new business. So just to conclude, Opera has a lot going for us. First, we are growing and have record high users. Second, we are diligently focused on increasing monetization. And third, we have exciting new initiatives that leverage our existing skill assets and will drive additional revenue and earnings growth in the years to come. So with that, let me hand back the talk to Frode of our Q2 financial results in detail.

Thanks Song Lin. Given the extraordinary nature of the second quarter, I'm going to keep our comments short as the results aren't reflective of our business and focus on key highlights and trends. Additionally, I would advise you to look at our press release for more detailed information. Revenue for the second quarter was $55.4 million. Of this, search was $17.6 million, down 18% year-over-year. Trends improved each month of the quarter. PC has recovered quicker, whereas the mobile recovery is taking a little longer based on exposure to emerging markets. However, both platforms are on the way to recovery, and in July search revenue had regained half of the year-over-year decline observed in Q2. Advertising was $12.7 million, down 22% year-over-year. Advertising revenue also improved each month of the quarter and we benefited from strong e-commerce partners and sports leagues returning. In July advertising revenue had regained two-thirds of the year-over-year decline observed in Q2 and was back to year-over-year growth when excluding the travel vertical. Fintech revenue was $11.8 million and as discussed, loan volumes began ramping in late June. Finally, combined retail and tech revenues were $13.3 million. As a reminder, we expect combined retail and tech revenues to be between $5 million and $6 million next quarter, though that reduction is not expected to affect profits. Our operating expenses were $59.4 million, down considerably from the first quarter due to two primary factors. One, discipline around variable costs and two, lower credit losses in microlending due to the smaller revenue base and stronger than expected collections on loans that were open at the end of Q1. As a result, adjusted EBITDA was positive at $2.9 million in the quarter. Net income was $17.1 million, benefiting from finance income from marketable securities, the performance of our investees, and other income from our divestment of a Nigerian subsidiary. Our operating cash flow was positive at $7 million for the quarter, where the biggest components were microloan collections adding to our cash and cash outflow related to costs of prior periods with greater fintech volume. The reason our total cash and marketable securities still fell by $55 million in the quarter was that we repaid $48 million of loans, largely in market credit facilities and repurchased $13 million of our own shares. Everything else more or less nets out. In terms of our share buyback program, at the end of Q2 we had repurchased 2.47 million ADS’ year-to-date for a total spend of $18.5 million. Including repurchases in this quarter, we have repurchased 3.46 million shares for a total spend of $28 million, averaging $8.08 per ADS and leaving $22 million of additional repurchases under our announced $50 million buyback program. Now, looking forward, the good news is that the year-over-year trends in our business have improved each month since bottoming in April. While we are hesitant to give specific revenue guidance for the third quarter due to continued uncertainty around COVID-19, we think it's helpful to share several directional data points. First, combined search and advertising were down 8% year-over-year in July, recovering from the 19% year-over-year decline that we saw for Q2. And we've seen further improvement in August month to date. We expect the sequential revenue increase from Q2 to Q3 in our combined search and advertising business to materially exceed the 6% increase we had in the same period last year as our business continues to recover and user metrics remain strong. Further, we expect to see a similar benefit from Q3 to Q4. Second, as discussed earlier, retail and tech revenue will be roughly $5 million to $6 million combined. This will be almost an $8 million headwind on third quarter revenue versus this past quarter, but will not impact profitability as both businesses are low margin. So three, our new initiatives, OList and European Fintech, will start to generate revenue in the second half of this year, though we expect the contribution to be small and our focus here is to prepare for significant contribution to our growth as we look into 2021 and beyond. Finally, we are expecting a meaningful improvement in EBITDA margin in the third quarter, primarily top line driven given the high margin of search and advertising revenue. To wrap up, our core search and advertising business is recovering from COVID-19 and we believe is positioned to return to its historical growth rates in 2021. Our new initiatives are progressing well and we expect them to support further acceleration of our growth rates next year. Finally, we believe our investments in OPay, Starmaker, and now Nanobank will drive value creation for Opera shareholders as these businesses continue to execute. We are very excited about the future and returning to our strong growth trajectory. With that, I think we can now move to questions.

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Lee Krowl of B. Riley FBR.

Great, thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the promotion to Co-CEO. I wanted to start out on the search and advertising business, you kind of consolidated the trends of those business into down 8% year-over-year. Could you maybe break out the trends specifically by search and advertising quarter-to-date? And then I guess the other breakout I was curious on is just by the subsectors which have returned to kind of normalized levels and which are lagging? Thanks.

Yes, sure. Thanks for the question. So yeah, as mentioned in Q2 search was down 18% year-over-year and advertising 21%. And in July we saw that search had regained half and was down 9% year-over-year. Advertising even more so was down 6% year-over-year and as I mentioned, excluding travel it was back to growth year-over-year in July.

And this is Derrick, the other comment that we made is that, month-to-date in August we're seeing better trends than July.

Hi guys, thanks for taking the questions and glad to hear things are improving. Let me actually ask you a couple of questions on Nanobank. I guess the first is how easy or difficult do you expect the integration with Mobimagic and the formation of the JV to be, are there risks there that, you know, putting the two companies together causes you to miss some of the opportunities in the marketplace over the next, say, three to six months?

Sure, Frode here again, I'll answer that question. I would say at the starting point operationally the businesses have different core markets. Where it overlaps we already work together. So that would actually simplify things being apart, having it as part of one joint group. Think we've also seen that in Mexico, which we are really excited about. That market we have prepared together and we are about to really start scaling that now. I think in terms of building a corporate function, that is an area where Opera will remain quite involved, very similar to how we supported OPay in its early days until we have sort of the corporate consolidating function well in place.

Okay, and then sticking with this, so you obviously you talked about the disparate profitability, right. So Opera generating more than half of the revenue, but at a relatively low margin versus Mobimagic generating less than half of the revenue but at a pretty impressive margin. How do you explain that margin differential, is that sustainable, what are the structural elements that go into that, and I guess, I know you mentioned all of the factors but at the end of the day is that margin differential really why Opera winds up with only 42% of the equity in the JV despite contributing the majority of the revenue?

Yes, I would say that there will always be differences in profitability from country to country. Each market's profitability can vary, and Mobimagic has established a very appealing business in Indonesia concerning both growth and profitability. Another factor contributing to their strong profitability is that they have effectively utilized their technology developed for Indonesia to support Opera, which has made the company profitable, as you mentioned. And so to cover the second part of the question, so when we've looked at the relative valuations, we have looked at cash flows over a long time period, and we have looked at multiples both on revenue level to sort of determine the right split. On that one as I mentioned, we engaged an independent professional party to help us confirm the appropriateness of the...

And Lance this is Derrick. We're not expecting any structural changes in terms of Mobimagic's business, meaning their tech platform will be the same in Indonesia and we'll continue to do what it's doing. So there's nothing that's one-time this year.

Thank you, that was a significant part of the question. I think you addressed this in the prepared remarks, but I want to clarify that there was approximately $31 million. If I consider your cash and marketable securities of about $160 million as of June 30 and subtract the roughly $31 million that you are allocating to the joint venture, you are left with about $130 million in cash and marketable securities. Is that correct?

Correct.

Will there be any debt at the joint venture? I assume there is nothing on the balance sheet, but could you share details about the debt structure? Additionally, I'm not familiar with the shareholder base of Mobimagic. I understand there is a relationship between your other Co-CEO and Chairman, but could you clarify his percentage ownership in Mobimagic and whether that is direct or through other investment vehicles?

Sure, so to answer the first question, no, there won't be any external debt in the Nanobank balance sheet so that will be clear. On ownership that is correct, that our CEO is the majority shareholder in Mobimagic.

Okay, thank you very much, guys. Appreciate the help.

Sure. Thank you.

Hey guys, thank you for taking my question, congrats. First on the Nanobank, can you talk in a little bit more detail about how you think this expands the TAM both from a geographic and scalability standpoint as well as from a new product standpoint? And then number two, can you walk me through kind of the strategy for customer acquisition, especially for some of these markets where Opera hasn’t had a significant presence through any other products previously? Thank you.

Sure, I can go first. So we believe that a consolidated company working across different geographies makes the operation solid, makes it easier to expand to new geographies. It also supports a broader product diversification to essentially have a company that has centralized tech, that it can apply in different geographies. So we believe that the combination of Opera and Mobimagic into Nanobank is very supportive for its continued growth.

Yes, this is Derrick, I would add you look at the existing markets, I guess the new markets of Indonesia and Mexico, they're two of the top unbanked markets. Obviously, they're smaller than India, but bigger in size than Kenya. So there is bigger opportunity. I mean, I think Mexico has the opportunity to be very similar to Indonesia in terms of scale. There's some other markets that Nanobank is looking at and which again would fall into large unbanked populations. And, they want to a) make sure everything with this deal goes right, b) get Mexico continuing to scale and India scale back up. But in the next 6 to 12 months would not be shocked to see a couple of big more markets. The other thing that I think we spoke a little about last quarter or the quarter before was the expanded products. So they're working on that. There's multiple different products. Remember, when you look at Nanobank, there were 50 million registered users. And when you look at the loans the companies provided, they're not giving a lot of users. So they're really focused on how do they get the most out of that registered user base and go from there. I think your final question was around how do they acquire users in different countries?

Yeah, just the customer acquisition strategy in countries where Opera hasn't previously had a big presence?

This is Song Lin. I apologize for interrupting; I was feeling a bit envious that Frode was getting all the questions, so I wanted to contribute as well. I believe now is an excellent time to focus on our microlending business, which is performing strongly despite the impacts of COVID-19. The region is recovering, and we sense that demand is higher than ever. Regarding customer acquisition, this is a particularly opportune moment for us in markets like India, Indonesia, and Mexico, where we have a significant presence. The cost of acquiring customers is low right now, as many individuals are still rebounding from COVID. This allows us to gain users more affordably than before. We strongly feel that we have a chance to scale significantly, particularly in these emerging markets, which presents a unique opportunity for us to potentially achieve a top position in a short time frame. We must focus our efforts on streamlining risk control and other processes. Hence, I believe this is a prime moment to acquire users in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, making it cost-effective, especially with the traffic from Opera.

It's super helpful. Thank you. Thank you Song. And second one also for you. Can you just talk a little bit in more detail about the trends you're seeing with the Opera News reduced hub, kind of the progress you're making there with the expansion into, I believe you are in six markets now, as well as how all this is trending and whether that's kind of ahead or in line with your expectations maybe at the beginning of the year? Thank you.

It's a bit sporadic, but I'll do my best to respond. Overall, Opera News is performing exceptionally well in Q2, achieving a milestone of over 200 million users, with the average now exceeding 205 million in the second quarter. This suggests that our strategy is effective. You are correct that buyers are establishing a strong presence with local content creators in key countries like Nigeria and Kenya, which is contributing to our growth. We're pleased with the role we've played during COVID, as we have become a primary source for relevant news. As mentioned in our financial report, we've reduced our marketing expenses because the organic user growth is substantial enough that we don't need to invest heavily. Despite this, we’re happy to see a 26% year-over-year growth. Regarding monetization, despite the impact of COVID, we've seen a nearly 65% increase year-over-year in Q2, which is a strong indicator of our progress. While the app impressions we're serving globally are still low compared to the U.S. or Europe, we are confident that we’ll be well-positioned for growth as the region recovers. Overall, we're very pleased with our performance in Africa.

And that was our final question, I'd like to turn the floor back over to Song Lin for any additional or closing remarks.

So yes, as there are no further questions, I think I have to say that, guys, I'm very proud of how Opera has continued to integrate it among the uncertain times. The good news is that our user app monetization is bouncing back and we have very exciting new initiatives that could really turbo charge our growth and we are positioned to take advantage of the structural change from the transition of offline to online. So looking forward to taking the great opportunity, together with all of you and thanks, everyone, for joining us today and have a good day.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call, you may now disconnect.