Spotify Technology S.A. (SPOT) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

April 25, 2023 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning. My name is Julian and I will be a conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Spotify's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to turn the call over to Bryan Goldberg, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Bryan Goldberg

Thank you, and welcome to Spotify's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining us today will be Daniel Ek, our CEO; and Paul Vogel, our CFO. We'll start with opening comments from Daniel and Paul and afterwards, we'll be happy to answer your questions. Questions can be submitted by going to slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com and using the code #SpotifyEarningsQ123. Analysts can ask questions directly into Slido, and all participants can then vote on the questions they find the most relevant. [Operator Instructions]. If for some reason you don't have access to Slido, you can e-mail Investor Relations at ir@spotify.com, and we'll add in your question.

Before we begin, let me quickly cover the safe harbor. During this call, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements, including projections or estimates about the future performance of the company. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed on today's call, in our letter to shareholders and in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

During this call, we'll also refer to certain non-IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between our IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures can be found in our letter to shareholders, in the financial section of our Investor Relations website and also furnished today on Form 6-K.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Daniel.

Daniel Ek

All right. Hey, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us. As we open this call, I really can't help but feel a tremendous amount of excitement about the progress our team made this quarter. In fact, this quarter represents our strongest Q1, since going public. And over the last few months, we've celebrated a few significant milestones, including surpassing over 0.5 billion users and reaching more than 200 million subscribers.

Further, our user growth exceeded our expectations by 15 million and our subscriber numbers by 3 million. And at our scale, it is pretty remarkable to see this level of reacceleration in our user growth, but it is a trend that's been consistent now for over the last five quarters. In fact, the last two quarters saw the largest MAU growth in our history. The outperformance was broad based, meaning growth was pretty evenly spread across every region without a single market dominating. And on top of this, we were able to accomplish this level of growth with lower marketing spend. We look at this as a promising sign. But it's too early to draw any conclusions yet.