Mail.Ru Group Limited Annual Report and Audited IFRS Results for FY 2016 and Unaudited IFRS Results for Q1 2017

MOSCOW, April 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Mail.Ru Group Limited (MAIL:LI, hereinafter referred as "the Company" or "the Group"), one of the largest Internet companies in the Russian-speaking Internet market, today releases its annual report and audited IFRS results for the year ended 31st December 2016 and unaudited IFRS results and segment financial information for the three months ended 31st March.

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Performance highlights 

• Final audited segment results for FY 2016 are fully consistent with the preliminary trading statement 
     -Group aggregate segment revenue of RUR 42,751m, Group aggregate segment EBITDA of RUR 17,914m and Group aggregate net profit at RUR 11,616m
• Q1 2017 Group aggregate segment revenue grew 24.4% Y-o-Y to RUR 12,636 million.
• Q1 2017 Group aggregate segment EBITDA grew 10.7% Y-o-Y to RUR 4,884 million.
• Q1 2017 Group aggregate net profit grew 25.4% Y-o-Y to RUR 3,478 million.
• Net cash position as of 31 March 2017 was RUR 8,428 million.

Dmitry Grishin, Chairman of the Board and Boris Dobrodeev, CEO (Russia) of Mail.Ru Group: 

"We are pleased to report our final IFRS audited results for 2016 which, as in all previous years, are fully in line with the preliminary announcement in February. We are also pleased to announce we have a strong start to 2017 with Q1 revenue growth, including Pixonic and Delivery Club on a pro forma basis, of 24.4% Y-o-Y to RUR 12,636m.

Advertising revenue growth remained strong in Q1 with the trends that we saw in 2016 continuing. Despite us using a part of our inventory to boost our new mobile products advertising revenues grew 24.3% Y-o-Y to RUR 4,871m. The fastest growing advertising revenues were in-feed advertising across the social networks and in mobile. Through 2017 we will continue to focus on the growth of mobile and video advertising and on the continued roll out of new ad technology. Engagement continues to rise across all platforms and our unique position allows us to continue to take advantage as advertising budgets continue to shift to digital, and especially mobile.

In Q1 VK continued the strong performance that we saw in FY 2016.  In Q1 revenues grew 45.9% to RUR 2,744m. Advertising continued to be the bulk of the revenues, and while VK IVAS increased in Q1, advertising revenues grew faster than total revenues.  We continue to make improvements to the platform and the user experience. In Q1 we made further updates in the smart newsfeed after which post views grew significantly. Additionally Q1 saw the roll out of VK Live and the start of money transfers to communities. Daily VK live video stream views grew 3.5x and exceeded 10m in March. Total monthly active users set a new record of 97m. Mobile usage also continued to see strong growth with a new record of over 80m mobile monthly users.

In Q1 2017 on a pro forma basis our MMO games revenue grew 51.8% Y-o-Y to RUR 3,977m with share of international revenue for the first time exceeding one third of total MMO games revenue and hitting a record high of over 40% in March. This was driven by a combination of continued strong growth in Warface, which remains our largest game, strong continued growth in War Robots and a successful domestic and international launch of Revelation Online. The pipeline of further major releases for 2017 based around the key franchises remains very full.

In November 2016 we announced the acquisition of Delivery Club. As previously stated the business has been fully integrated into the Group. Since the acquisition of Delivery Club, we have seen very significant growth in all operating metrics. In March 2017 the number of orders doubled Y-o-Y to 718,000 (with a record high of 50,000 daily orders) and the number of restaurants exceeded 5,200.

Throughout 2016 our location-based marketplace Youla saw very strong user growth. This has continued in 2017 with a new high of 16.6m monthly active users and 3.0m daily active users on all platforms in April. The app remains consistently in the Top-5 overall in Russia in both the App Store and Google Play. We will continue to examine the potential of some limited monetization experiments later in 2017 however, as previously stated, the main focus will be the further driving of user numbers and engagement. In Q1 we added full buy-side functionality that was earlier introduced in mobile apps to the web version, and rolled out advanced moderation in the real estate category. User feedback remains very positive and hence we anticipate further user growth through 2017.

We had a strong start to 2017 with good contributions from advertising, games and Delivery Club. As such, and based on current visibility, we are pleased to increase our FY 2017 revenue guidance from previous guidance of 16-19% pro-forma revenue growth to pro-forma revenue growth of 17-21% to RUB 50.0-51.7bn."

The full version of the press release can be accessed at https://corp.mail.ru/en/press/releases/9967/