Bango (LSE:BGO) — Interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2022

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the BANGO PLC interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and 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 will review all of the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so.

0:31 Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. Now I'd like to hand you over to CEO, Paul Arby. Good afternoon, sir. Hello, and thank you, everybody, and welcome to our webcast for the first half twenty two interim results. Really, really grateful for everybody joining here live with us today and and encourage you to ask q and a, but also thanks for everybody who's watching after the the event online. And if if you're watching it and you think of a question that you didn't answer, can always email us at [email protected]. And so hopefully, you've had time to look through some of the material on the investor website. A really great first half revenue growth of 9%, end user spend up 16%, really solid results, and that's in the context of, obviously, the a very strong dollar against the currencies, particularly the Japanese yen.

1:25 And also where the spending patterns are slightly different in this half year versus last half year. Last half year, Amazon Prime Day was in June. This year, it's in July, it's moved from first half to second years second half. So all in all, a really, really strong set of results. We're really pleased that growth on the top line allowed us to to continue to invest in growing the business and capturing the opportunity that we we see ahead of us that resulted in a in a flat EBITDA versus the first half because we chose to invest that additional profit from that top line growth back into the business to allow us to to continue to grow and and capture new market share. One of the new metrics that we report at this time, which is a new metric we've continued to report, is what we call annual recurring revenue. So that's a good measure of the the platform business. You remember the platform, the digital vending machine as we called it, where we we create, like, a SaaS type license for operators to bundle tens of different services together has grown up by over by over three and a half times. It was $7,000,000 at the end of last year.

2:25 It's $3,400,000 at the end of June. And I think there are two really key messages about that. It shows a really strong growth in the platform business. New operators launching, which triggers the start of that license revenue. Existing operators starting to climb through the tiers, right through the capacity tiers of that. So, again, both Dragon and ARR up. And it gives us a really stable and unpredictable revenue base moving forward. So just simple math, surely, that we you know, in the second half, 1,700,000 is already locked in because we we sort of have that as the as the end of the June recurring revenue stream. So really, really, you know, solid set of results where and we're really, really pleased with the progress that we've we've made in the first half. We sort of look at some of more some of the more sort of operational highlights. Again, linking to the platform deals we announced to be with T Mobile in The US.

3:13 If you add that to the deal we already have with Verizon, you can now see that majority of people in The US are basically using BANGO to bundle their subscriptions on their on their mobile with their mobile partner, over 250,000,000 customers through a combination of T Mobile and Verizon, and that's bringing even more merchants into the platform. We added more merchants than ever before in a period. We added 24 new merchants in the first half,

3:36 and that's across all sorts of verticals from sort of, you know, the traditional video providers to people like Peloton and Duolingo and Calm. And when we talk about adding a merchant, we're not talking about making one connection. We're talking about bringing a merchant into the platform so they can connect to the tens of operators that are also connected to the the platform. So a really big growth multiplier over time. And, obviously, post period, we announced a platform agreement with NTT Dokomo that extends our relationship with NTT Dokomo. We've already done the physical carrier billing goods, physical for carrier billing goods for a number of years with Amazon through NTT DoCoMall, and this adds all their app stores as well as exciting new merchants like Jetstar who so allows you to buy an airline ticket and charge it to your phone bill, and also more physical goods through Shopify. So I mean, Dokomo as a as a payment method, carrier billing through Dokomo as a payment method within the Shopify. So in a Shopify shop, you can choose to pay via via carrier billing. So really, really exciting developments there from the payment side, And that falls through, I think, into into audience. Some really new customer wins in new verticals, added Dass and Hard Rocks or some maybe unusual brands as part of that mix as well as extension into our usual games developers where we added the Marvel games publisher, Caban, as a as a customer in the first half, along with many more that we we've just not named.

4:58 Facebook continues to be an important part of that business, and we were awarded the official partner status from from Facebook in the in

5:07 the first half, meaning that when app app developers go into the Facebook app manager, they can now see BANGO audiences as a recommended way of helping them target their marketing and and generate better return on their app spend. Likewise, But, we expanded into new platforms. I think we've talked about TikTok before on previous calls, and we added Snapchat in the first half of the year. We'll probably have Twitter in the second half. So continuing growth within the existing platforms, but also across platforms as well. We step back and look at the the bigger company. We got a record employee engagement score in the first half. The first half is always a period when we measure our employee engagement. We got a really incredible score last year of 82%, and we thought that was probably as high as it could go, but actually we increased even further this year to to 83%.

5:52 And that puts us in a position where we have a really motivated employee base who's focused on driving the vision, focused on driving growth for BANGO. And it means that when we're recruiting, we're recruiting to grow rather than backfill, and that's a luxury that very few tech companies can boast in the in the in the current environment. So really strong employee engagement score. And likewise, both periods in the same time as announcing the platform agreement with NTT Dock and Wall, we announced that we'd acquired the payments business. So previously traded as Dockamore Digital, something we've competed with for a number of years. We'll talk a lot more about that acquisition and and how the integration of that business is going towards the back end of this presentation. But a significant deal for us as a company, you've heard me talk before about that journey from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. This pushed us two year over two years further forward on that journey. So a really transformational acquisition.

6:46 And and that means we're getting more and more sort of visibility publicly, multiple award wins and nominations. You can see we've been nominated for multiple AIM awards, multiple tech awards. We won a business weekly quality company of the year against some pretty stiff competition. BANGO audiences won a prestigious SAMI. So that's basically a sales and marketing equivalent of an Emmy for the best technology in 2022. And already, these slides are today because the ecommerce award in the bottom left where it listed as the finalists, we actually won that yesterday. So really, really strong recognition of some of the innovation and unique technology we're bringing out of the way we're actually bringing that to market and operate as a business across all sorts of across all sorts of different industry bodies. Just as a reminder of the the strategy, you've seen me talk about this a lot before, but our strategy is really centered around this virtuous circle where we can connect merchants in the platform, connect them to paying users via somebody who has a bill on which we can place that charge that generates this huge pool of payment data, allows us to generate insights from that payment data that we can help to make people better target their marketing using purchase behavior. So targeting marketing based on purchase behavior, that means you immediately find more paying users, which generates more payment data to allow us to generate more insights.

8:00 Really, you know, two businesses growth in one very much drives growth in the other. And I think you see that all through the results that that we reported in the first half. So with that, let me pause for a while and turn over to Matt to to run through some of the financials. Thanks, Paul. Good afternoon, all. Thanks for joining us. As you can see, we had a great organic growth during the first half of this year. We had end user spend increasing 16.516%, going up to 2,900,000,000 You'll also see that revenues increased by 9% to $10,800,000 Now this is without taking into account any of the currency headwinds. Typically, if we were to adjust for those, both the end user spend and the revenues would be up around eight to 10% on the announced growth that we had in place.

8:52 One other thing to recognize as well when you're looking at the revenues for the first half as compared to the previous year is that in 2021, Amazon Prime Day fell in the first half of the year. So that was reflected in the 9,900,000 from 2021. Whereas within 2022, it fell into July this year, so it will be shown in our second half.

9:13 Together as well, we found out the other day that Amazon also doing a second Prime Day in October, which should also help change that revenue profile back to more 40%, 60% that we've experienced in previous years. So growth continues to be strong on revenues. It's a five year compound annual growth of 32.3%. And as Paul referenced, we've also now started to announce our ARR number of $3,400,000 just reflecting the deals as they come through from our platform licensing subscription deals. So more about that one later on. But again, it continues to be really good profit margins greater than 90%. So those revenues, those increased revenues are helping to fund our growth as well elsewhere.

9:59 And going through onto that one, we have looking at the investment for growth. So our adjusted EBITDA compared to last year is slightly up, although as a percentage, not as large as we invest in growth in the platform. So this is a planned investment strategy. We're building up the platform strength whilst also improving the platform licenses segment. And also for the Audiences business, we've been doing a lot of investment in making sure that, that platform can become more autonomous and allowing customers to serve themselves. So resulted in an operating loss of $423,000 which increased which reflects that increased spend on sales and marketing and R and D, which we plan for to drive through the advantage that we feel we have at the moment and develop the revenues on in the second half and moving forward. We expect that to normalize as towards the year end as the investment generates those further revenues.

11:00 From a cash perspective, see the movement from the end of twenty twenty one to the end of the half year. Some timing elements on the receivables where just revenues were coming towards the end of the half year period, but will be recovered in the second half. And that will also go along with some customers that have now opted to do some payment in advances, which will help us increase that cash level again to support the growth and strategy investments that we're doing in the second half of the year.

11:35 So a bit of a summary. Continued growth in the revenue growth is coming from all across our revenue streams, sort of growth continued in all areas. The strong margins are still in there, giving us that cash to reinvest within the business. And predominantly, that reinvestment is in sales and marketing and R and D. We took on 23 new people in the first half of the year, which added to the over 40 people we took on in 2021, all within the sales and marketing and r and d segments. And that investment is going to drive platform scalability, adding new functionality to the platform, which then becomes available to everyone linked in, and adds new features. I'll hand back now to Paul. Thanks, Matt. So looking a bit more at the first half and and some of the highlights. Again, this is a formula we've seen before. That that growth in the payments business is really driven by connecting more users, buying more routes, more merchants, giving them more things to buy from more merchants, and using the data in the platform to make the payments as successful as possible to drive as many payments through those connections as we can, and that that's given us this exponential growth in in payment data. We continue to see good growth around the world in both physical and digital goods. The Amazon Prime Day we had in July was a record Amazon Prime Day for us beating what was a really strong 2021.

12:58 With the second one in October, we're excited about just the sheer number of spending events that that fall into the second half. More routes, obviously, new merchants at T Mobile platform deal we talked about, continuing to expand new services with existing merchants wallets and alternative payment mechanisms becoming increasingly part of the business, and they continue to generate good traction. And the merchant piece I touched on before were just the sheer number of merchants now who are now connected into platform across all sorts of all sorts of all sorts of different verticals. You remember a few months ago, we issued an RNS with a somewhat mysteriously named global tech leader. That that integration is going well. We're excited to be able to do sort of carrier billing for the App Store as well as bundling for the different subscription service that that that tech leader offers. And that was the last really major brand we were we were missing from our from our sort of logo lineup.

13:49 So we're really excited to bring them on board. But look at the all the different logos, sort of old global names, but not necessarily the sort of the same video services, the Disney's, the HBO's, the Netflix's that we've seen before. But people like Weight Watchers, McCaffey, Duolingo, Norton, Prey, Televisa Univision, who's an exciting new merchant. We know it's not that long ago where we're helping this most popular Spanish language streaming service in The US, and we're helping them power that through with their new VIX plus streaming service. So all sorts of new merchants really, you know, focusing and centering in on the BANGO platform as their way of finding new customers and taking their services to more and more people all over the world. And a lot of that a lot of that distribution is through what we call that the digital vending machine. This is that SaaS business that we have with mobile operators in particular where they basically BANGO provides this digital vending machine. It's branded by the mobile operator.

14:43 They decide what to stock it with and how it's priced. But the mechanism of dispensing those subscriptions and managing those subscriptions is really the power of the BANGO platform. And a lot of that r and d investment Matt talked about is about making it smarter in terms of how offers are bundled together, making sure that offers can be marketed, services can be marketed using the right assets to to to different customers. So lots of innovation around this digital vending machine. And as a result, we're seeing some really great traction. That's very evident in the ARR number as well as in the sales funnel that we that we see behind that. Right? The sales funnel behind that of new deals that we're working on at the moment has really never been strong.

15:24 All of those together give us this increasing pool of payment data, so this increasing pool of end user spend, which is a big driver of the audience's business. We're now doing that across more sectors. So gaming, we talked about, but new logos like Adidas and Hard Rock clearly taking us away from the sort of the pure app in sort of ecommerce and and general sort of brand marketing. More and more, we're seeing a number of different brands start to use purchase behavior targeting, not just finding the paying users at the bottom of their marketing funnel, but in filling the marketing funnel with more users who are likely to flow flow through it. So we have some great expectations for that business in the second half on on what is becoming an increasing variety of of platforms. Facebook continues to be strong. There's been some challenge with good Facebook from a pricing perspective. The cost of advertising on Facebook has probably been higher than it's been in the past historically.

16:18 And that's driven two things. It's drawn certain people to move to other platforms. So we have some great growth on TikTok, and it's caused the spend that is now focused in Facebook to to have to to have an even bigger requirement on it for return on ad spend. And that therefore, targeting based on purchase behavior is becoming more powerful and more in demand as a result of some of higher costs of the Facebook marketing platform. Snapchat, we got run our initial campaigns with Snapchat. We're very pleased how that's developing. That's saying we'll expand into into further platforms in the second half. And you put all

16:50 those together, that gives more paying users, and then we're back around the virtuous circle, generating even more payment data so that we can generate even more insights moving forward. So really, really strong business. The fundamentals of the business have never been stronger. It's a, you know, a great position to be in. And with so many things in the second half, Really excited about what the second half has to bring.

17:14 So part way through the second half, actually, only about four weeks ago, we announced the completion of the acquisition of the global payments business of NTT DOCOMO, NTT DOCOMO being the largest operator in Japan, Japan itself being the largest carrier billing market in the world. So we completed the acquisition of their business and at the same time sign up a platform agreement. So you can see, basically signing up, the ability to bring global services and global merchants into Japan with the largest operator and the largest carrier billing market is is really a, you know, game changing new customer for Bangalore. You couple that with the additional customers that come to the Dokomo digital business, and the the power of the Bangalore platform has increased exponentially. The rationale for us is very clear. This accelerates our growth by over two years.

18:04 That long term agreement with NTT DoCoMo is very, very powerful. We're both, you know, one of most innovative and largest carrier billing operators in the world. And it just gives us more scale, and that more scale gives us a better position with the global merchants and gives us even more payment data to monetize through BANGO audiences.

18:23 I spoke of the customer base, and I think there's a a few interesting points here. There are some customers that we are new as a result of the acquisition. Shopify and Jetstar, touched on earlier, being being interesting ones. And there are some merchants where we've consolidated our position. If we look at Google and Amazon in particular, between BANGO and DOCOMO Digital, we were sort of number one and number two in terms of in terms of Roots Live. We've now combined the number one and number two, and so you have a clear leader in that sector. So really exciting opportunity there. And it's based on the telco side. We brought in new the telcos, particularly, you know, Millicom Group across Latin America, the Hutchinson Group across Europe and Asia, Telefonica Group across Europe as well as as Latin America. So really great new customers who were connecting into the BANGO platform and now have access to all the other merchants that are already connected. And so really, really, really good good progress. And feedback from these customers has been universally positive. I spent the last couple of weeks speaking to customers, and the feedback has been incredibly strong. And the one thing we never when we when we put them the number we'll go through the number shortly. But when we put the numbers in the market, what we never baked in was any revenue synergies.

19:30 Working revenue synergies come from they can come from the fact that we now have more scale, so it's easier to expand services. And I think you see the first example of that with the announcement that we made a few days ago to expand with Telefonica into taking carrier billing into Mexico. So really new exciting development that wasn't baked into any of the numbers that we that we talked about previously. So the first signs of those revenue synergies. And then the second area of revenue synergies will become from what how can we expand BANGO audience? A lot of really valuable payment data in Europe in particular. It's a great demand for the app developers. So there's the opportunity to accelerate the BANGO audience in its business even more as well. And then there are some customers that sort of fall into that piece in the middle where BANGO already had a connection under Doggo Digital, and that really strengthens our position. Obviously, the most obvious one being entity DOCOMO, but obviously Vodafone where BANGO did a lot of the bundling and DOCOMO Digital did a lot of the carrier billing. So you put that together, and now we basically do all of that third party integration across the Vodafone Group. So really exciting position to be in.

20:35 The power of the acquisition is all about migrating everything away for the Dobbin World digital platform, which you see on the left hand side of this left hand side of the chart on the blue box, all over to the BANGO platform. And there's many benefits to everybody from doing that. Obviously, for most, it takes a big big chunk of cost out of the business. That's a big part of that 21,000,000 of synergies that Matt will talk about later. It But gives benefit to everybody else that's already connected. The way the Dorkmob digital platform built was very much in silos where as a merchant, you integrated more or less directly to each individual operator. So there was multiple integration points. And as an operator, every time you wanted to add a new merchant, you had to do a new integration. That's very different to how we built the platform in BANGL. The power of the platform is you int you don't integrate to somebody on the other side of it, you integrate to the platform.

21:22 So if you're Google, you integrate into BANGO once. If you're an operator, you integrate into BANGO once. And then the connection between those two is basically configuration in the middle. So a very different approach from a platform perspective and gives massive benefits to everybody connected in because you really do only have to connect in multi. You don't have to connect in many times when you want access to another merchant or if you're a merchant to another operator. That migration will take place over the next sort of eighteen to to twenty four months, and, really, the migration plan is very simple. There were a lot of people who were already connected. Those those customers that fall into that middle bucket of that Venn diagram where we really have a connection. But, really, all we have to do is is some configuration in the platform to to make those connections live. And there are others where we'll have to integrate the telephone. I'll talk about how we do that, but those are, again, that's that's business as usual for us. It's something we've done many times before.

22:13 Back in 2016, for those who have been holders a long time, we acquired a company called Build to Mobile. We migrated all of their carrier billing away from the Build to Mobile platform to the BANGO platform for Verizon without any data loss, without any loss of service. So it's something we've built before. We did it as recently as as last year when we took all of the Amazon business from another integrator and brought it onto the onto the BANGO platform. So we're very used to to executing all these migrations and have a standard set of operating procedures and tools that allow us to do that. When we want to migrate routes at scale, there are really sort of three key use cases. There there are people that are already connected. There's the the top where the partner just connects directly into the BANGO platform. They're connected to our native APIs. There's really no work for us to do. And the majority people integrate directly like that.

23:06 There are a number of partners that are connected into the standard DOCOMO digital APIs. And so, actually, we've already built an adapter to convert the DOCOMO digital APIs into the BANGO APIs. We actually did that prior to the acquisition because we migrated the customer away from DOCOMO digital over to BANGO again without any loss of service or data. So that adaption layer will allow us to migrate anybody that DOCOMO digital have integrated using the standard APIs very, very quickly. And then we have this number of partners who will require some sort of level of customization. For those, if it's a simple custom adapter, we'll build it. If it gets into the point where it's too customized, we will look to exit those businesses, especially if they're low profitability. So what ironically, the more complex integrations tend to be with the smaller operators where there's a lower revenue stream. So in that that case, we will look to exit those because it's just not in anyone's interest to do all that customization work, and it's you know, that's not our strategy. Our strategy is the BANGO platform, the native APIs of the BANGO platform are really where the power is, and you should adopt those because those are the standard payment interfaces that you need if you want to expand global.

24:11 So running through some of the key highlights of the acquisition. Just to remind everyone, we paid a gross consideration of EUR4 million for the business, but there was 3,100,000 of cash left within the business. So it was a net consideration of just under €1,000,000 for that business. I think it's good here to remind the fact that this wasn't a sale from NTT for a cash benefit for them. They were looking for the right partner to look after their DCP business and to assist them with their business as it moves forward. So a lot of it was down to having a good reliable partner. What it gave to BANGO was increased end user spend, so an extra $3,500,000,000 worth of end user spend that we can also utilize against the for BANGO audiences.

24:59 It's going to give us increased revenues, and we put that one as a full year basis of about $16,000,000 in 2023 and 2024. And for that side, that $16,000,000 is based on the revenues that we currently see. We haven't included anything for any synergistic increases in revenues either for BANGO and the former DOCOMO business on payment side nor for any increase that the additional data will may give for the Audiences business. Looking at EBITDA for 2022, whilst we implement the synergies, we expect to see an impact of about $4,000,000 on EBITDA, but then that's moving to an accretive element in 2023.

25:44 And then in 2024 onwards, dollars 10,000,000 of contribution once the synergies are impacted, and we see a lot of that top line revenue just flowing through to the EBITDA. In 2022, we'll also take a lot of impairments for some of the IP and some of fixed assets that are currently within Document Digital, and that will add to historic tax losses, and we should be able to utilize those in a very beneficial manner. And as far as the restructuring goes, part of that 30,000,000 to $35,000,000 that we've indicated for 2022 will include some of the restructuring costs where we'll count for those within 2022, but the actual implementation will extend through into FY 2023.

26:33 So looking at the cost synergies, we indicated as well that there would be $21,000,000 of synergies by the end of twenty twenty three. I think just keen to point out that already we've executed on some first level savings and that $7,100,000 has been accounted for within the first four weeks. That's four weeks since we took over on the twenty ninth. So onethree of the savings already implemented and executed. And we'll see some more of those building up as we progress through the transition period of the platform movement to from Docomo to BANGO. Thanks, Matt. And so I think this is a it's good to end again, I think, with with this formula because it's really driven our organic growth, which was really strong in the first half. And when you add in the benefits from that acquisition, it really does take us, you know, more than two years forward on our on our sort of revenue journey.

27:31 Those new telcos, they've got access to all the BANGL merchants. We're already talking to a number of them about the digital vending machine and how they can now use the BANGL technology to bundle multiple services together, some really exciting discussions already in the first few weeks there. Lost new merchants who we know the existing BANGO payment providers now have access to. Shopify in particular will we're really keen to see how we can develop that further and maybe take that outside of of Japan. The scale that it gives us with existing merchants like Amazon, Google, and operators like Vodafone really put us in a very strong position. As I say, it's all the the the scale we have in this business now is is really significant, and that gives us all even more data to monetize through BANGO audience. So really a a really great growth accelerator transformational deal for BANGO on the back of what was a really, really good first half with, you know, good payments growth, good actual revenue growth, good platform growth, and and some really big traction in in the BANGO audience's business, the purchase behavior targeting.

28:31 So you add that to what's what's coming up in the second half with two prime days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, and then I think we're well positioned for for a really successful year. So with that, let me pause and I'll turn back and then we'll do some Q and A. Paul, that's great. And 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 top right hand corner of your screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Paul, Matthew, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. So thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. And Rebecca, perhaps if I could just hand back to you to chair the Q and A session with the team. And then if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great.

29:27 Yeah. Brilliant. Thanks, Jake. So the first question that came through was how many telcos have signed up to the platform, which I think was as you were talking about platform deals themselves. But if that wasn't the question, then do send the run up. Okay. So the the platform deals are made up when, you know, there's there's hundreds of telcos connected into the into the BANGO platform itself. The the number that have adopted that digital vending machine approach, I think, currently at eight, and the but the sales will be behind that is really, really exciting. One interesting thing about this business is because it's a SaaS licensing fee and because it operates as an effect launching a new service. I don't if any of you looked at the Verizon plus play material. When you're trying to launch a digital revenue machine to build subscriptions, there's a lot of marketing effort that goes around it. So the the timing for these businesses, the sales cycles are a bit longer than a traditional payments deal, but the rewards are so much greater because it's a multiyear contract. It's set in several million dollars, and it's that that sort of annualized recurring revenue. So really, really strong payments for full on top of a really solid base. And we see in within the base, we have, you know, deals we've signed starting to come live as part of that growth, but also operators starting to climb up the different revenue teams. So the the two of those together will continue as we move forward through the second half.

30:39 Thank you. Can you expand on how we monetize the data we capture given the issues caused by Apple and Facebook? Yeah. So if you look at what sort of Apple did a while ago with IDFA, they basically took away the ability to use sort of an app tracking ID, so which was one of the big sources of data that app developers used in their marketing campaigns. And in BANGO audiences, one of the competitors has always been not another company, but actually different way of doing things. We're quite unique in creating these audiences of users that people can generate and use your marketing tools to to target based on purchase behavior. The actual concept of targeting on purchase behavior is new for a lot of people, and you'll have seen a number of the campaigns that we ran last year to try and raise awareness in the benefits of purchase behavior purchase behavior targeting. So, actually, as other sources of data start to dry up, the BANGO audience has become even more valuable. And certainly, we've seen customers who were using alternative sources of data now switched to using BANGO audiences as a default part of their marketing campaigns and and not targeted. So, really, it's been those have been a a sort of a certainly a tailwind, I think, for us as a business. It's caused all sorts of people to do sort of different things in Facebook and some customers pause Facebook for a while. But when when they go back to advertising, the BANGO audiences are in a more powerful position than before.

31:59 Thank you. There are a couple of questions also on audiences. One on the number of audience days sold in h one of twenty twenty two. So maybe just a quick reminder on revenue model shift there, and then what growth rate we anticipate in the audience's business over the next couple of years. Yeah. So BANGO audience data was a metric we introduced probably a year eighteen months, two years ago now to sort of try and give a a proxy for the the the revenue of that business. And it made sense because of the time we used to sell audiences at a fixed amount for a fixed period of time. We very much moved the revenue model away from that. We wanted to we saw was as as people start to put get really good results from the audience is they spend a lot of money in that in that audience. They start to play with most of the entire of their Facebook budget through that through that final audience. But we wanted to capture some of that upside.

32:51 So really what we did was change the pricing models, and then we take a percentage of whatever they spend in the digital marketing platform. So if you spend a, you know, $100,000 in Facebook, the fee for using that audience will be somewhere between 710%. So it's very much a a shift in the revenue. Thank you. A question now on whether we're hoping to add further telcos and merchants to platform. The And as as we're already integrating NTT, is there a limit to support further integration? No. I mean, we we so firstly, we've built a platform in a way, and I think we've talked about this many times. We built a platform in a way that it's it's it's easy to scale. Right? And the cost of us bringing new merchants and new routes onto that platform is is is very, very small. And there are always new merchants to be doing. We have now with the the global technology leader, all the sort of the the the big logos.

33:43 But you can see within types of new services from Peloton and so that there are lots more merchant opportunity to connect into the platform. But I think the exciting point is once you have all those platforms is is getting as many connections as possible to each each operator. So if each operator has two connections and we wanna get another 10 or 20 into into that operator. And that's really where the the platform power becomes, you know, really evident because that's largely configuration. So they can be done very quickly. So I think, really, a lot of the key growth will be coming almost I guess the question almost hints that we're almost at sort of critical mass and we're almost connected to everybody. And I think there's still opportunity for growth. But, yeah, that's a that's a very, very perceptive point. But now the opportunity is to make as many connections within that platform as possible, and that's where the revenue will really start to scale. Thank you. And it's obviously a very difficult macroeconomic backdrop at the moment, pressure on consumers on discretionary spend. Has BANGO seen any impact of that?

34:37 Yes. That's a that's a good question. Obviously, the the macroeconomic environment changes very quickly at the moment as we've seen in the last in the last week or so. I think we have no data yet that we've seen that that points to any particular reduction in consumer spend. Certainly, if I look at Amazon Prime Day in July this year, it was significantly above the the Amazon Prime Day that we that we that happened the previous year. So no evidence there. If I look at the spending across the different app stores and then different subscription services, they all, you you know, appear to be continuing to grow. I think maybe there's a sort of a trend where entertainment services that you can do at home without relatively low cost on an individual basis, maybe become even more useful as you can no longer maybe afford to go out on on holiday or things like that. So maybe a a spending squeeze will drive people more to use those lower cost individual services that they can they can consume at home.

35:30 It also drives consumers to look for bargains. That's where I think subscription bundling actually becomes really, really valuable. And and, actually, they it there's almost pressure from the customer bundling and from the from the streaming providers as well. The streaming providers start to see, you know, subscriptions canceled on credit cards. They're looking for ways of accessing customers who have a long life within their particular streaming service. Any streaming provider will tell you that if this service is bundled, the churn is a lot lower. So they're willing to give all those few points of margin to get access to those new customers and to have those longer term subscriptions. So actually, what we've seen in the last sort of couple months is even more creativity from a bundling perspective. Customers wanted to bundle services together in different ways, in different combinations. So I think I see that that sort of general squeeze potentially drives more creativity in a bundling perspective.

36:21 And likewise, from an advertising spend, in any sort of pressure squeeze, people wanna get more better return on their investment, and there's no better way to get a better return on your ad spend than use purchase behavior targeting with BANGO audiences. And does BANGO have any plans to support crypto payments with our telco merchant partners? Yeah. So crypto is something we've we've looked at before. We've done a number of number of proof of proof of concepts around that. Historically, the gas price that the the the cost for this alleged may sort of most cost prohibitive for these sort of micro transactions, most, you know, carry billing and subscription. There's still a relatively low value for each individual transaction, so it made it it made it prohibitive. But think what we've seen a lot of interest is in crypto trading platforms. So we have a number of crypto trading platforms who will bang our audience to customers who are using to using the purchase behavior targeting to find high spending users who can make those first time deposits. But it's a continually evolving area, and we'll see particularly how how that holds over the next couple of years. And, certainly, the platform is absolutely very much capable of doing that. We're very agnostic. Right? We've built a set of APIs that are agnostic to any payment mechanism or to any merchant.

37:30 You touched on this briefly during the presentation, but can you just remind us of the factors sort of affected revenue growth this half versus revenue growth in previous half? Yes, sure. So if we look back in last year, especially, I think there's been a general sort of currency headwind. We don't report constant currency, right? We report growth in actual currency, and we grew 10% in actual currency. If you corrected for currency, don't know. It's probably somewhere 17 to 20, I would guess, somewhere in in that range. And it's against the period where last year, Amazon Prime Day was in June. So as we said, Amazon Prime Day was the first half to second half. We look at the second half coming up. We have two Prime Days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and a whole host of new merchants and and operators to connect. So it's yeah. Looks like quite been a really strong second half. Thank you. You mentioned that Adidas is a new customer for audiences.

38:19 Can you talk a bit about how Adidas are are using BANGO audiences and where they spend data that's relevant to them? Yes. We started working with Adidas very initially on to help them target some of their fitness apps. So it was a fitness app that that they offered under I see a slightly different brand, and that's how we we started to work with them. I think what they saw is actually the targeting that worked for the app as it works for generic ecommerce as well. I think if you look at it very simply, if you're paying money for a running app, probably also buying running shoes. So why wouldn't you target same audience with ecommerce adverts for your physical goods as you do to bring customers over to over to to sort of the digital goods as part of the fitness app. And I think that that sort of principle extends nicely across the rest of the business. And I I touched on it a bit earlier, but, you know, marketing funnels have sort of diff different sort of focuses. Mean, you get right at the bottom of funnel. It's all about converting a customer and getting to make that purchase. That's really where we focus the the power of the BANGO audiences and purchase behavior targeting.

39:17 But, actually, it works at the different stages of the funnel even on sort of as you're starting to bring in users who may make a purchase, we can fill that funnel with more users who are likely to fall at the bottom again using purchase behavior target. So we're seeing that the sort of generic brands start to use purchase behavior retargeting in slightly new applications climbing up the marketing funnel. And a question on BANGO share price and whether you can give your view on the recent share price performance and whether you feel there's any takeover risk. Yeah. That's it. It's a good I mean, I think if you look at a very big picture level, you know, we've had a great first half, and we've grown where, you know, I think there are there are, you know, in in real terms, where the other companies who have not reported a such level of growth were still, you know, on or ahead of the forecast that are in the market.

40:04 We, you know, have great traction fundamentally on the business, diversification of revenue stream with the the platform business, BANGO audience is going through great growth. And then we know it's a transformational acquisition that delivers, you know, 15,000,000 revenue, 10,000,000 of EBITDA. We didn't really pay a lot for it. It gives us that long term partnership with the largest operator in the world, and the share price today is more or the same as it was a few months ago before we did that, that sort of transformational deal. So I think if you ask us what we think of the share price, I think we're very disappointed. Clearly, there's lots going on in the macroeconomic climate that we can't control at the moment. But I think, you know, it's a you know, it certainly, I think, potentially increases any any sort of takeover risk just because we feel we are so undervalued now given the given the potential returns in the future. But on the positive side, we have a strong and loyal shareholder base who we're in this for the long term.

40:54 They're in it for the for the big picture, and, you know, they they see that journey to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue revenue and sort of billions of of valuation. So I think they're in it for the long term. Yeah. But, absolutely, I think we're it'd be be like if we said we were anything other than disappointed with the current share price. Paul Paul, if I may add as well that when I when I'm asked questions like this, I always look at those of you who can access the analyst reports on BANGO. And maybe those of you in the retail market look at investors chronicle coverage and things like that, you'll see their target share prices are considerably higher than the share price that we we've currently got. And I think the most recent analyst reports have pointed out that the forecast and future earnings and discounted cash flow ratios that BANGO is currently trading at are way below the mark the average you would expect for a business of this strength and this this financial profile. So you can you can take from that what you will, but seems like the consensus from analysts, etcetera, is BANGO's share price is heading to a much higher point than it currently sits at.

41:58 And what is the progress on the New Deep joint venture and its technology that targets Shopify sales? And how does the acquisition of Document Digital strengthen the relationship with Shopify? Yeah. Very good question. So if you look at what the New Deep acquisition, which is a joint venture that we we hold with NHN, what they're focused on now is very much on using the platform they have to make people who run Shopify shops more money to be able to convert more users, run campaigns that that convert abandoned baskets into into baskets that fulfill the the the current shopping form. They've been continually investing to add new features onto that platform. It's very very sign up. You sign up almost like as a Shopify widget if you run a Shopify shop and you add it to your store. So the customer the customer retent the customer acquisition model is is very much self sign up and self serve within that within that particular model, and they're making really good traction. They're focused very much initially on sort of the European market, but they're they're really making good traction.

42:57 The nice synergy that that we have that we'll we need to see or we can exploit is the relationship that we now have with Shopify. You are now a payments customer for BANGO in in in in Japan with the with with NTT DoCo. But I think there's clearly if we can connect, you know, the the the the the new deep technology that creates more paying users, if we can use that to generate more payments, and, you know, we almost have a a second virtuous circle almost there. So we think there's there's definitely opportunity there. We'll have to see how we can we can use that over the next over the coming months. We've talked about sort of the journey to hundreds of millions of dollars of of revenue, a question on sort of whether we can give any timing target on sort of reaching that $100,000,000 of turnover. No. I mean, I think I think we've sort of we've sort of never, know, deliberately never given sort of a a target on there, but I think you can see sort of the the historic growth and the pace that we've made. We just in once we've added 15,000,000 to that, and that's a conservative forecast without those revenue synergies that we get from now having more data for BANGO audiences, expansion with existing merchants and operators like we've already seen with Telefonica in Mexico. So, no, I think, you know, we're we're we're close two years forward on that journey.

44:09 So I think let's let's see how fast we can get there. That's it for questions on the answer, I think. Rebecca, absolutely. And Paul, Matthew, Annie as well, thank you for being so generous of your time there and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended for you to review and then add any additional responses where it's appropriate to do so. Paul, perhaps before redirecting those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great. Just wanna thank everybody again for your time and and for those who have been chosen a long time. We we appreciate your support and your continued support for the business.

44:55 You know, we've had an incredibly busy first nine months of the year. The last quarter looks to be busier than ever. Lots of opportunity. Please, if you do have any questions and and that you didn't ask today or didn't, you didn't feel we answered successfully, then please do email [email protected]. We really do appreciate and value all your input and feedback. And thanks again for your support, and we look forward to seeing as many of you who can on our, our Capital Markets Technology Day, which will be held in November. There's details on the BANGO investor website. If you'd like to register for that, please do. There are links on the BANGO investor website in terms of how to do that. It'd be great to meet as many of you in person as possible then. Failing that, we'll talk when we announce our full year results in early part of next year. Well, thanks again for your time, and speak soon.

45:40 Paul, that's great. And once again, thank you for taking the time to update investors today. Could 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 that management team can 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 the management team of BANGO PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.