EBM: Criteo, the performance marketing technology company, reports results for the first quarter of 2015, Eric Eichmann hello. You are the President and Chief Operating Officer of Criteo. You had a really strong Q1; what would you say were some of the drivers behind this performance?
Eric Eichmann: A very, very strong Q1 – we are very happy. We exceeded expectations now for 6 quarters in a row. It all comes back to consistent execution around our plan. Three key drivers for us: one is technology improvements that we rolled out to our clients. A couple of things behind that; one, our new and improved engine that optimises around the value of the conversion, not just the conversion, which now has been deployed with 22% of our clients. The second thing is also our multi-screen solution, which is now with 84% of our clients and also as part of our multi-screen solution we have our in-app solution, which is gaining a lot of momentum. Finally, in general our mobile solutions are getting a lot of traction in a market where mobile e-commerce is growing quite rapidly. So that’s for technology improvement. The second big driver for us is client additions, as it’s been for a while, so this quarter we added 640 net additions, which is a record. I’m very excited about that and a lot of it is coming now from the momentum we have in mid-market. And third, we continued to expand our publisher relationships, so we reached a great number, 10,000 publishers where we have direct relationships. comScore reported that we reached 1.1 billion unique visitors in March which we’re very excited about that.
EBM: Looking at mobile in particular, could you expand on the momentum you are seeing in mobile commerce?
Eric Eichmann: That’s a great question as mobile is seeing a lot of momentum, so we now have in our new mobile e-commerce report, we’ve seen that 34% of transactions on-line are happening through mobile devices and in countries like Japan, which are at the front end of what is happening in mobile, you are seeing more than 50%. So everybody is moving towards that, so the world is becoming more complex for advertisers and for e-commerce companies. Why? Because the consumer is actually browsing on one device and purchasing on another and it’s very hard for the advertisers to track that and figure out how to propose a solution that is seamless. So advertisers are coming to us and basically saying “Help me with these problems” and our full solution is actually helping them and it’s helping them drive sales in an environment where there’s a lot of different devices. Mostly our cross-device today that we are deploying and our in-app solutions are driving that.
EBM: What are your comments on your performance by geographical zone?
Eric Eichmann: So three geographies for us, the Americas, where we continue to see very, very strong growth, we have more than 100% growth this quarter, year on year on a constant currency basis, driven by a couple of things: The deployment of our technology, with our current base and then the increase in the number of clients that we’ve seen. We’ve seen two things in North America, our best in class performance is now starting to show a lot of traction in the market and then we are also getting a lot more buying power. So, great in North America. Then going on to EMEA, we’ve seen very healthy growth, 34% across all markets. And finally in APAC we are seeing growth of 61%, driven again by the deployment of new technologies to our existing base, mostly in Japan where our biggest base is, but also by the increase in number of customers across the region and in particular we are very excited about new markets such as South East Asia where we are seeing tremendous growth.
EBM: And lastly, what would be your focus for the rest of 2015?
Eric Eichmann: Three things. One is continue to expand on our multi-channel solution. A couple of things behind that, one, our in-app solutions continues to get a lot of traction and we are very excited about that bringing new clients into this platform. The second thing is our cross-device solution to allow advertisers to get consumers across different devices and finally the deployment of e-mail. So that’s the first priority, just a cross-channel solution. The second priority is to continue to expand across geographies for us. We are very excited about a lot of geographies like the US that still have a lot of potential but also early stage geographies like the Middle East and Africa and APAC. And then, within geographies and within the expansion of clients, the mid-market segment continues to show incredible potential. So that’s the second priority. And then the third one is further innovation to our core technology. Two big things there: we are revamping our creative platform, which should bring the ability for us to serve many different creatives to users that today they can’t see and then further improve our current engine.
EBM: Eric Eichmann, President and Chief Operating Officer of Criteo, thank you very much.
Eric Eichmann: Thank you
