SciPlay Corporation (NASDAQ:SCPL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Matthew Cost: Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. On the market, the broader market, are we in a sort of early stage of a recovery in terms of consumers’ willingness to spend money on in-app purchases in the mobile gaming market broadly. Are you seeing any evidence that maybe like the worst of kind of like the COVID hangover and the IDFA hangover are now totally behind us? And you mentioned that you expect to outgrow the market this year. Do you have an expectation for what the market will grow this year? That’s the first question. The second is just should we expect kind of like the run rate for next year for marketing spend to be similar to the fourth quarter, which was a little bit lower than the middle of the year? Thank you.

Josh Wilson: Yes. Okay. So I’ll kind of start — we’re going to kind of balance between a couple of us here probably to answer all these, but I’ll go ahead and I’ll start with the market recovery. It’s interesting because I really wouldn’t say that it’s a market recovery or a market change. I would say the whole dynamics of everything started to shift at the back half of 2021, and it kind of went into 2022, and different companies adapted and changed to it at different rates. But I think this is kind of the new norm until Apple does whatever it will do with IDFA. So for us, we were one of the first companies that were able to understand that IDFA was going to have a large impact on our current business and have a large impact on how we’re able to bring in new players.

So what did we do? We took a step back and said we need to do everything different. And we said we need to focus on the payers and players that we have in our games today. This needs to be our main focus. And this is where the SciPlay engine was born, and this really helped drive a lot of our 2022. At the same time, we understood that, okay, UA is something that has to continue, but the market has shifted so much that we need to think about it different. And this is where the investments we made in our ASO team, our growth team, our ad tech team and they redefined how we look at spending money, and then redefined it for the market that is at that point, not the market that used to be. And because of that, this is why we were able to take a step ahead of everyone else.

Now I do believe the mobile market as a whole will continue to adapt to this new environment and then we’ll continue to move forward for that reason. But even all the way through 2022, we had multiple games in the industry that did really, really well. It was just most companies didn’t have multiple games doing well at once like we did. And so we did see glimmers of hope as far as that goes. Daniel, do you want to –?

Daniel O’Quinn: Yes. In terms of the market, we look at kind of what Eilers puts out there. They have the market kind of flat to down. What we’re seeing as we kind of move throughout 2023, we’re continuing to see momentum and really feel like we believe that we could definitely outpace these estimates that they have for the year.

Josh Wilson: And I think when you’re thinking about marketing spend, I wouldn’t look at Q4 into Q1 and say this is what the run rate is because Q4 is normally a lower marketing spend for us because of the challenges that are there. But what I would say is I would expect year-over-year the total marketing spend to be very similar from 2022 into 2023.

Operator: Thank you. Next question will be from Ryan Sigdahl, Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.

Ryan Sigdahl: Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking our questions. Curious on expectations for, I guess, throughout the year on DTC, kind of how you think about the investment needed there and then how that potentially ramps throughout the year in the fundamentals?

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