Engine Gaming and Media, Inc. (NASDAQ:GAME) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Kupinski : Got you. And then just kind of drilling down on the revenues, you put up some nice improvement in revenues in your advertising, particularly and this is, you know kind of goes against what the industry is seeing in a tough environment. Can you kind of just talk a little bit about what’s unique about your advertising revenue growth and how you’re able to kind of buck to the trend of €“ and the headwinds in the environment out there?

Lou Schwartz: Sure. I’ll take that one, Mike. Listen, our advertising team has done a tremendous job in managing our inventory. The delivery yield improvement during a really challenging advertising period, including all the Google algorithmic changes, the search and discovery that we’ve seen. That said, we’ve been able to grow our CPMs and our RPMs by 33% between fiscal 2021 to 2022. We’ve accomplished that primarily by diversifying our demand network and driving higher CPM values from our supply inventory through our demand partners. I would say more importantly, our network of sites is targeted. They are brand safe, and they’ve been proven to engage very highly with audiences. So advertisers are willing to sort of pay us a premium, right, for a safe network and for advertising against a safe audience.

Michael Kupinski : Got you. And this probably is for you, Lou. Can you talk a little bit about the improvement in adjusted EBITDA and what you’re looking for? I know you indicated that you should see further improvement in the fiscal first quarter. Can you talk a little bit about your cost reduction efforts? Are they still ongoing? Are we cycling €“ when are we going to be cycling through most of those cost reduction efforts? And maybe give us just kind of a glimpse of what your thoughts are about how we should look at adjusted EBITDA going into the next fiscal year?

Lou Schwartz: Well, as we stated in our release, we’ve shown both sort of year-over-year and sequential sort of improvement in our adjusted EBITDA figures, and that’s a result of a combination of things. One, just refocusing sort of the business on our B2B elements, but two, also the cost reductions as you highlighted, that came from both corporate and non-corporate expense. And as you know, these take some time to flow through the P&L. We’ve seen improvement over the last sort of couple of quarters. I think you’ll continue to see improvement into Q1, 2023 and in subsequent quarters. This is something that is absolutely top of mind. We’ve been extremely disciplined about rightsizing the organization and addressing sort of our cash burn rate, and we remain sort of focused on achieving cash flow breakeven in 2023 on a run rate basis.

Michael Kupinski : Great! That’s all I have. Thank you guys.

Lou Schwartz: Thanks Mike.

Tom Rogers: Thanks Mike.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Jason Tilchen with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your question.

Jason Tilchen: Yeah, great! Thanks for taking the question. Just a quick follow-up first on the advertising business. Obviously, you just talked a lot about the reasons why you saw really strong results in fiscal Q4. The quarter ended August 31, so just wondering if you could comment maybe on some of the trends you’ve seen over the past few months and if some of that strength has held up as you go into sort of a seasonally important quarter for the advertising business?