NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / December 13, 2023 / Zedge, Inc. (NYSE American:ZDGE), a leader in building digital marketplaces and friendly competitive games around content that people use to express themselves, today announced results for its first quarter fiscal 2024, ended October 31, 2023.

"Our first quarter financial results reflect the positive trends we discussed during the fourth quarter," said Jonathan Reich, Zedge's chief executive officer. "Zedge+, the Zedge Marketplace's subscription offering, which returned to sequential active subscriber growth last quarter after six quarters of sequential declines, continued delivering net active subscriber gains in the first quarter. Furthermore, Zedge+ revenue was up by nearly 10% from last year, driven by the introduction of iOS subscriptions and continued interest in the overhauled Android offering. Emojipedia's revenue was up 62% from last year and, combined with the Zedge Marketplace, drove double-digit ad revenue growth. These factors led to record ARPMAU ¹ with 17% year-over-year growth.

"We are also making steady progress from a product and feature development perspective. We have completed the global rollout of pAInt, our generative AI wallpaper maker, and launched pAInt's print-on-demand feature immediately before Thanksgiving. Additionally, we benefited from redesigning Emojipedia's website, as its enhanced site performance yielded much faster load times and continued optimization of the advertising experience. We also rolled out the Battles feature to a limited number of GuruShots users to gain insights into how we can optimally integrate this feature into the Gurushots game. While these initiatives are all starting to show positive momentum, we plan to continue enhancing these features and products in 2024 to drive sustainable, longer-term growth."

First Quarter Highlights (fiscal 2024 versus fiscal 2023)

• Revenue increased 2.6% to $7.1 million;
• GAAP operating income of $0.3 million, compared to an operating loss of ($0.2) million;
• GAAP net loss and loss per share were nil compared to ($0.2) million and ($0.01), respectively:
• Adjusted EBITDA ² increased by 60.8% to $1.5 million;
• Zedge Premium Gross Transaction Value¹ , or GTV, increased 35.0% to $0.42 million.

¹ We use the following business metrics in this release because we believe they are useful in evaluating Zedge's operational performance.

• Monthly active users, or MAU, captures the number of unique users that used our Zedge App during the previous 30-days of the relevant period, is useful for evaluating consumer engagement with our App, which correlates to advertising revenue as more users drive more ad impressions for sale. It also allows readers and potential advertisers to evaluate the size of our user base.
• Zedge Premium Gross Transaction Value, or GTV, is the total dollar amount of transactions conducted through the Zedge Premium Marketplace. As Zedge Premium is an internal focus for growth, we believe this metric will help investors evaluate our progress in growing this part of our business.
• Average Revenue Per Monthly Active User for our Zedge App, or ARPMAU, is useful in evaluating how well we monetize our user base.
• An Active Subscription is a subscription that has commenced and not been canceled, including paused subscriptions and subscriptions in free trials, grace periods, or account hold.
• Total Installs - Cumulative measures the cumulative number of times the Zedge App has been downloaded since inception.

² Throughout this release, Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP financial measure intended to provide useful information that supplements Zedge's results in accordance with GAAP. Please refer to the Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measure at the end of this release for an explanation of Zedge's formulation of Adjusted EBITDA and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measure.

Fiscal 2024 Commentary

Reich continued, "We continue to believe that we have never been better positioned to create sustainable, long-term and profitable growth, and we are excited about moving our growth strategy forward in fiscal 2024. Adding to this, our continued positive cash flow generation and the fact that we will not have to make any earnout payments to Gurushots' sellers gave us the confidence to pay off the remaining principal on our term loan in mid-November, making us debt-free.

"As indicated during our last call, one of our goals for FY '24 is to build out a full-stack marketing team to enable growth. To this end, we have already added several key hires, and we are already benefitting from their expertise as we continue to ramp up our paid user acquisition spending for the Zedge Marketplace. Of course, we closely monitor performance to ensure acceptable returns on our investment. As we previously said, this is an ongoing process where we continually test and optimize programs to drive higher returns through increasing engagement from existing users and new user growth.

"We've also been executing on our generative AI initiatives, with a global rollout of pAInt within the Zedge Marketplace, including the release of this feature on the web with print-on-demand capabilities. The initial results from the soft launch of AI Art Master, our hybrid casual game, are attractive, encouraging us to continue its development with a focus on improving onboarding, game mechanics and retention. In the coming months, we expect to expand the rollout by adding more countries and iterating based on what the KPIs tell us.

"November was Emojipedia's best revenue month ever, and we will continue to make enhancements to this product, as we believe there is additional untapped upside. Starting with our second quarter, we are targeting releasing more features and enhancements, with many more initiatives still in development.

"Finally, Battles, the new GuruShots game mechanic, has also been rolled out to around 5% of its user base, and we expect to increase this number over the next several months. We believe this new feature will help draw new players to the game and help convert them into paying customers."

Earnings Announcement and Supplemental Information

Management will host an earnings conference call beginning at 4:30 p.m. Eastern today to discuss its first-quarter fiscal 2024 results, outlook and strategy, which will be followed by a Q&A with investors.

Live Call-in Info:
Toll Free: 888-506-0062
International: 973-528-0011
Participant Access Code: 575696
Webcast URL: 1Q24 Earnings Webcast

Replay:
Toll Free: 877-481-4010
International: 919-882-2331
Replay Passcode: 49574

About Zedge

Zedge builds digital marketplaces and friendly competitive games around content people use to express themselves. Our leading products include Zedge Ringtones and Wallpapers, a freemium digital content marketplace offering mobile phone wallpapers, video wallpapers, ringtones, notification sounds, and pAInt, a generative AI wallpaper maker; GuruShots, a skill-based photo challenge game; and Emojipedia, the #1 trusted source for ‘all things emoji'. Our vision is to enable and connect creators who enjoy friendly competitions with a community of prospective consumers in order to drive commerce. In July 2023, we served approximately 40 million active users across our offerings. For more information, visit: investor.zedge.net

Forward-Looking Statements

All statements above that are not purely about historical facts, including, but not limited to, those in which we use the words "believe," "anticipate," "expect," "plan," "intend," "estimate," "target" and similar expressions, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment of what may happen in the future, actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied by these statements due to numerous important factors. Our filings with the SEC provide detailed information on such statements and risks and should be consulted along with this release. To the extent permitted under applicable law, we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Contact:

Brian Siegel, IRC, MBA
Senior Managing Director
Hayden IR
(346) 396-8696
ir@zedge.net

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

(in thousands, exceptpar value data)

ZEDGE, INC.
CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS AND COMPREHENSIVE LOSS
(in thousands, except per share data)

ZEDGE, INC.
CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS
(in thousands)

Use of Adjusted EBITDA as a Non-GAAP Measure

Adjusted EBITDA, defined as earnings (loss) before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, stock compensation expense, transaction-related expenses and other non-recurring expenses, and Adjusted EBITDA Margin, represents measures that we believe are customarily used by investors and analysts to evaluate thefinancial performance of companies in addition to the GAAP measures we present. Our management also believes these measures are useful in evaluating our core operating results. However, Adjusted EBITDA/Margin are not measures of financial performance under GAAP and should not be considered an alternative to net income or operating income/margin as an indicator of our operating performance or to net cash provided by operating activities as a measure of our liquidity.

SOURCE: Zedge, Inc.