Roger James Hamilton
Analyst · Diamond Equity. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Flora, and good morning, everyone – or good evening, wherever you are. First, I’d like to apologize for the delay in the releasing our full-year results. Due to the complexity of accounting treatment to write down the value our recent acquisitions, to align with our low share price and market cap in December 2022, our order took longer than planned, and this is the reason for the delay. However, our CFO, Erez Simha, will provide more details on this following my business summary. Genius Group has had a great year and we’re excited to share the results with you today. I’m going to start with a quick recap of the year and we have come a long way since the IPO in April 2022. We have established a strong leadership team with Erez Simha as our Chief Financial Officer; and Rav Karwal as our Chief Revenue Officer. We’ve also got Richard Berman and Tim Murphy joining as new Directors. And these individuals bring a wide range of diversified, corporate experience, which helped drive the growth of our business last year and this continues in 2023. We have completed five acquisitions: the University of Antelope Valley, Property Investor’s Network, Education Angels, E-Squared, and Revealed Films. And we’re in the process of integrating them into the Genius Group family and will add their curriculum onto GeniusU. In 2022, GeniusU was named as top 10 emerging giant in one of KPMG’s reports. And we’ve signed a partnership with NASA as a sisters with UAB. And we also are – gave details about each of these milestones in our previous earning calls. So I invite you all to listen to our archive recordings for more information. Our achievements translate directly into the growth of students and partners that are joining our platform. First, let’s focus on GeniusU. GeniusU increased in total numbers of students from 2.7 million in 2021 to 3.1 million in 2022, which represents a 70% growth year-on-year and an average of 8,500 students joining the GeniusU platform each week in 2022. We’re seeing growth in number of students on GeniusU in the range of 10% to 20% per year. And this growth is primarily due to three factors: organic growth through word of mouth and referrals, partners in our acquisitions attracting new students, and direct growth from paid digital advertising. We have historically spent a lower amount on advertising, as we have relied on word of mouth referrals and partners, but we plan on increasing marketing spend in the next few years to accelerate growth. GeniusU operates on a freemium model, where the majority of students receive free education, from which a percent opt in to upgrade to paying students. Of our 3.1 student – our 3.1 million students on GeniusU in 2022, 3.06 million were free students and 43,000 were paying students. In comparison, GeniusU had 37,000 paying students in 2021, which implies a 15% growth in paying students year-on-year. It also means that in 2022, GeniusU attracted 444,290 new students and 5,755 new paying students, representing a 1.3% conversion rate. In comparison, after the conversion rate from 2019 to 2021, was closer to 1%. This increase in conversion rate reflects improved marketing services and the growing strength of our sales team. We expect the improvement in conversion rate to be an important factor in the growth of paying students in the years to come. Overall, pro forma numbers for the group, including the acquisitions, reflected a 58% growth in total students and users in 2022 compared to 2021, with paying students and users growing by 137% in 2022 to 171,919 paying students. As we integrate the acquisitions, we’re introducing our GeniusU freemium model into their student pathways, as we introduce free courses and our student conversion model to the three acquisitions that have a more traditional education model. These are UAV, Education Angels, and E-Squared. Currently, these three companies rely on enrollment directly into a full-time paid service, of course, and as a result, they have a much lower student numbers at present. With this integration, we will see great potential for student and revenue growth. The number of partners in GeniusU grew from 10,200 in 2021 to 13,000 in 2022, which represents a 27% growth year-on-year. And pro forma numbers for the group, including the acquisitions, grew from 11,400 in 2021 to 14,700 in 2022, which represents a 29% growth in total partners. We see the number of partners as a key measure for the scalability and the delivery of the Genius curriculum, as each partner attracts their own students to GeniusU and as partners are joining from all parts of the world, we’re able to overcome the two, largest bottlenecks to the growth of most education companies, which is location and teachers. Going forward, we expect a growth of 10% to 20% in partners each year, as we are maintaining a balance between growth and quality. As the five acquisitions this year are instrumental to our strategy and as the integration process is currently ongoing, I believe that providing more color to this topic may be beneficial to all of you and for you to understand the potential synergies in more details. I’ll use the integration of Entrepreneur Institute into Genius Group as an example. Prior to its acquisition, Entrepreneur Institute was delivering in-person events and mentoring to entrepreneurs, student attendance was limited to where events and courses were held, course sizes were limited to venue space available, and the number of the courses was limited to the number of faculty members who could teach. Following the acquisition, Entrepreneur Institute courses and products were fully integrated into GeniusU. Students were able to join from anywhere, at any time, courses were digitized to be delivered part recorded and part facilitated, and faculty were able to join and get certified to deliver the courses from anywhere around the world. The conversion of Entrepreneur Institute from an event-based training company to a freemium ed-tech model has resulted in an increased student intake from an average rate of less than 50 new students per week to over 2,000 students per week as of December 31, 2022. Also, an increased event registration, from less than 1,000 attendees per year to over 20,000 attendees per year as of December 31, 2022. And we attracted over 1,000 faculty members that became full consultants and performance consultants globally, as well as attracting country partners translating and delivering the courses in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Swedish, Polish, and Czech, and over 50 city leaders who are hosting regular events and online communities, while marketing Entrepreneur Institute products and courses in their cities. The model that we used to acquire, integrate, digitize, and distribute the courses and certification for Entrepreneur Institute is a model that we’re now repeating for the five acquisitions that we made in 2022, with the goal of reducing the average marketing cost per student cost, increasing the student and partner intake, and increasing the average revenue per student and partner. Prior to the completion of the four IPO acquisitions, each of the companies had been delivering certification and degree programs to the students in their respective locations. Students based in Lancaster for UAV, students in New Zealand for Education Angels, students in South Africa for E-Squared, and students in the UK [indiscernible]. Since the completion of the acquisitions of these four companies, we’re in the process of integrating each company’s varied certification and degree programs onto GeniusU. This will enable us to provide an education offering from early childhood students all the way to adult learners, while linking our GeniusU conversion model to their products and courses. We believe that this integration model will result in multiple benefits, including the growth of our global student, partner, and faculty community globally, and the distribution of each company’s courses around the world. It will also enable us to provide our faculty with the option of teaching courses to students of all ages, either online or in person, with a small group, or at any one of our campus venues with a large group. This flexibility in delivery for both faculty and students is an important partner of our vision for our Genius curriculum. Moreover UAB is our global center for curriculum development and our long-term aspiration is to expand the campus to include innovation labs, accelerated camps, and courses delivered for all education stages of our life-long learning curriculum. With regard to our fifth acquisition, Revealed Films, this acquisition is a good example of our acquisition strategy to target media companies that strength our freemium model, as well as education companies that grow our accreditations, product and course offerings. Prior to the acquisition, Revealed Films had been focused on producing documentaries and docuseries that are initially free to view and then lead to an upgrade to the low-cost products and courses. This has resulted in a viewer database in the millions, with a low revenue per viewer. We plan to integrate Revealed Films film format model as a front-end pathway into GeniusU’s life-long learning pathways, turning viewers into students and increasing the lifetime value of each upcoming Revealed Films documentary, such as AI Revolution, that leads viewers to courses on GeniusU to master and use AI in their education, businesses, and investments we believe will demonstrate the power of linking media, entertainment, and education. In terms of corporate actions, we announced in November 2022 that we had hired law firms to investigate the market activity on our stock. The initial results of the investigation indicated that certain individuals and companies appear to be part of a market manipulation scheme, which artificially depressed the price of Genius Group’s shares. We then decided to establish in January 2023, an illegal trading task force and launched legal action against those individuals and companies to seek to recover liquidated damages to the costs incurred to the company and to preserve shareholder value. This action is ongoing. We also implemented a list of corporate actions to address this issue. We organized an extraordinary general meeting in February 2023, where resolution for a share buy back and a share consolidation were passed by shareholders. The company will only implement such resolutions if necessary and if it increases shareholder value. As an initiative to increase visibility of our shares and shareholders and to give shareholders the option of having their shares on the block chain, where they cannot be shorted, we issued a $10 digital discount coupon per share to all shareholders in March 2023 and dual listed Genius Group in April 2023 on Upstream Exchange, a fully regulated global stock exchange for digital securities and NFTs. We also settled litigation with our lenders in an applicable settlement, canceling $36 million convertible note conversions and reaching an agreement between Genius Group and the lending party to invest in our next offering. And lastly, the Board approved a spin-off of Entrepreneur Resource Limited, which will provide all of Genius Group’s shareholders an account date with shares in Genius Group’s subsidiary, Entrepreneur Resource Limited, which is listed on the MERJ Stock Exchange in the Seychelles. This spin-off was approved by shareholders during its ordinary general meeting, which took place on the 16th of May 2023. The spinoff of Entrepreneur Resource will help streamline and rationalize the group’s operation into Genius Group Limited, with its ed-tech focus, and Entrepreneur Resource Limited, with its hospitality focus under new ownership, which will enable each management team to grow their respective businesses more effectively and it will also result in a full share count of bona fide A Genius Group shares on the count date. Looking forward, our theme for 2023 is the AI Revolution. From the launch of Genius Group, we have anticipated a period when education will be transformed by AI, with every mentor and student having a personalized path to learning with an AI assistant. The launch of GPT3, GPT-4, and now AutoGPT, and the AI platforms, all the major technology companies that are launching in 2023, we are accelerating our AI plans. While there are schools and universities banning students from using ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools, we believe that new educations will arise and we expect all students to use AI. We believe the future of learning and the skills, jobs, and tasks we are learning for, will require high-tech, high-touch approach, which relies not only on the growth of AI, but the growth of our human intelligence as well to harness and pallet that artificial intelligence. This combination of AI and HI, we believe can combine to create SI, super-human intelligence. We believe that there is a significant opportunity for education companies to address this growing need and demand for global platforms for super-human learning. Our plan this year is to combine the AI capabilities of GPT-4 with the AI capabilities of Salesforce’s Einstein AI to power Genius Group’s Genie AI virtual system on GeniusU. Our Genie AI provides personalized pathways for students based on their talents, passions, purpose, and interests and will be linked to their assessment results and course progress. It will also enable educators to constantly generate an updated curriculum, and we launched the alpha version of our Genie AI in Q1 this year, and launched the beta version to all GeniusU students last week at our AI Investor Summit. We plan on new versions of our Genie AI regularly to continuously improve the experience of our users. In addition, we are planning to make the use of artificial intelligence a requirement as part of our curriculum to ensure that all the students learn and embrace this new technology. We plan to integrate artificial intelligence within our curriculum and make learning with an AI assistant compulsory and we’re expecting our successful ed-tech companies to follow suit. The second, strategic project that we’re continuing to focus on is our Genius Metaversity. You already heard some details in the past earnings results calls about our plans on creating a Metaversity, which will combine gamified learning, a digital credit system, and augmented reality within a virtual engaging environment. This project is core to our vision, as we believe that Webbtree and a Metaverse will provide students and teachers with an enhanced way to interact and learn in a global classroom. We hosted an Impact Investor Summit last week, where we launched the beta version of our Genius Metaversity with a large audience. This experience was a great success, as we had more than 1,700 participants join our virtual reality event, experiencing the summit in our global classroom, where they could interact with each other, the summit speakers, and our partners from around the world. We will continue to update the market with news on the progress of this project as the official launch plan continues to be finalized. Our M&A strategy in 2022 was to acquire education and ed-tech companies of smaller size, with revenues ranging from $5 million to $20 million. And our ed strategy has now evolved into acquiring fewer companies, with higher values between $50 million and $100 million. We have also added companies within the media industry as potential targets, as we believe that we could acquire expertise related to our core competency and create synergies to come out of combining media and education. Each acquisition, whether small or large, takes a similar amount of time and resources to complete, and we, therefore, think that making fewer, but larger acquisitions will be more effective and will allow us to grow faster and more efficiently. With regard to our other M&A criteria, we’re looking at the same regions, including the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. And we want to ensure that each acquisition that we make is not only acquiring services that are complimentary, but also accretive for our shareholders. The global education, entertainment, and media markets are highly fragmented and we believe that there are a wide range of players that could be a great fit for Genius Group. If I were to summarize, there are several, key factors that have contributed to positive growth and operational performance in 2022. They are the growth in our student and partner numbers, the global adoption of our Genius curriculum, the improvement and development of new technology on our GeniusU platform, and the ongoing integration of our acquisitions. Considering that 2022 was a challenging year globally for all businesses due to a broad-based economic slow-down, high inflation, multiple interest rate hikes, the war in Ukraine, and a crypto- crash, among multiple other factors, and considering that we are still growing at a faster pace than the ed-tech industry, we’re extremely pleased the growth of Genius Group and its subsidiaries in 2022. Overall, as education is a defensive sector, education continues to be a top performing industry during economic slowdowns. So we plan to leverage this economic environment to attract new students and grow our platform. We will also coordinate to partner with high-profile companies implementing strategic projects, such as our Genie AI and Genius Metaversity, and further integrate our past acquisitions and realize synergies to continue on this growth trajectory in 2023. Now, I would like to turn it over to Erez, so that he can give an overview of our financial performance.