ZEAL Network SE (TIMA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the ZEAL Network SE preliminary figures 2022 and outlook 2023. [Operator Instructions]. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Jonas Mattsson.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this call. I do hope you have access to or can see our presentation. If not, it's accessible on our web page as normal. Today, we will talk about the preliminary results for 2022. We will then provide a business outlook and finishing off with presenting our guidance for the year, followed by our dividend proposal as already announced on Friday evening. With this, I want Helmut to take us through the highlights of the year.

Thank you, Jonas, and welcome to our webcast. Despite the macroeconomic headwinds and the uncertainty for consumers that we saw last year, we look back at a successful year. We reached our ambitious growth objectives. We have successfully invested into efficient customer acquisition. We expanded our online market share to 41%, concentrating on the strong value proposition that we offer. We won the VAT case and give back EUR 56 million to our shareholders in the form of a special dividend. We are expecting continued business expansion, both in our core brokerage business, and in our games business going forward. We were able to extend our broker license until 2029, providing the solid and predictable foundation for our business going forward. And we continued to manage our costs rigorously. And thanks to this, we've been able to grow EBITDA by 14% year-over-year. Back to you, Jonas.

Thank you, Helmut. So let's move to Slide 3. On this jackpot slide, you can see the development of our 2 main products, Lotto 6aus49 on top and EuroJackpot below. For Lotto 6aus49, the jackpot situation improved versus last year, especially in the first half. But as you can see, the second part of the year was rather unattractive. The key difference between the 2 years is the 4 peak jackpots we had in the beginning of the year, while in 2021, we had none. As you know, it's the in the peak that is the most valuable for our acquisition efforts and also to drive [ sacli ]. With EuroJackpot we reached a record level of EUR 120 million 3 times, which is the same number as in 2021, albeit then the maximum is EUR 90 million and is now EUR 120 million. The average jackpot has been better, as you can see, from the table to the right. In total, we had 7 peak jackpots in '22, where 9 would have been the statistical average. Peak jackpot are particular relevant for customer acquisition. So the fact that we are able to outperform the customer acquisition target in '22 gives us confidence that we continue to ramp up our efficient marketing investment. In summary, better jackpot year than previous year average Jackpot slightly better than the statistical expectations, peak jackpot slightly lower. Let's go to the next slide and zoom in on some of our most important KPIs and financial metrics. We grow billings by 16% to EUR 758 million, thanks to improved jackpot situation, but also for the efficient marketing activities that added new player and customers. Our revenues grow even more, increased by 21% and supported by a favorable product mix, meaning proportionally more sales of high-margin products like our successful lottery [ clubs ]. EBITDA grew by 40% to almost EUR 32 million and this despite the significant additional marketing investment we did last year. Its quite an astonishing achievement. Gross margin rose by 0.7 percentage points to 12.9% due to the better product mix. This is very much in line with what we told you already back in 2019 when we were below 12%, that we will constantly work on improving the margin. Even if our assumption is to improve this number further, it will be a gradual improvement, for example, when games are live and cherry products are scaling up. We also increased the number of new registered customers, almost by 30% and sign up more than 700,000 new customers. The drivers are successful acquisition activities, coupled with a more favorable jackpot environment than we had the year before. We also spent significantly more than the previous year to take advantage of this favorable situation. And this is how we manage marketing expenses. We scale up when the efficiency is expected to be higher and vice versa. Let's now move to Slide 7 to talk about the preliminary income statement. Revenue increased by 21% due to the product mix that we have in combination with higher volume. Total cost operation increased by 26% compared to previous year. So let me break this down a bit for you. Personnel expenses were flat despite having cost inflation and slightly more people since we were able to accept this by lowering incentive provisions related to our employee share-based incentive program. With a high jackpot situation, especially in July and November, we took advance of the situation, increased marketing expenses for the year by almost EUR 12 million. These investments led to strong customer acquisition numbers, as I have explained. Direct operating expenses is perfectly in line with the higher billings numbers with the higher transaction volume. We had an increase in indirect operating expense of 33%, mainly due to several special effects. A one-off effect in the same period of 2021 when we released the provision for a legal dispute of close to EUR 1 million. We had this year an increase in consultancy cost and freelance of EUR 1 million. We increased our travel trading entertainment cost of EUR 0.5 million. And we had some special insurance costs related to our charity product of roughly EUR 400,000. But all in all, this led, as I just explained, that EBITDA for the year rose by 14% to almost EUR 32 million. Let me also talk about some numbers from our market share. We're indeed very happy to see all the work to further improve our marketing activities and acquire more customers paying off. We are undoubtedly the market leader of private brokers in Germany, now with 41% online market share, growing from 39% the year before. In addition, we saw the German online market share increased to 23%, still below many other European countries, but it's moving in the right direction. Let's now talk about the business outlook for the year. So back to you, Helmut.

Thanks, Jonas. Let's look at Page 9. People want to dream in good times and in bad times. Lottery business models have proven to be recession-resistant in the past in Germany and in other geographies. We were happy to see that this was confirmed during the multiple crises that we faced in 2022. We continue to see strong unit economics, high lifetime values based on the stickiness of our customers and strong and efficient customer acquisition. And we see further opportunities to invest into profitable growth. Let's start with the core business on Page 10. We start from a position of strength. Our license foundation is secured. We are the market leader in online lottery in Germany. We also have a very scalable business model. More than 85% of every incremental revenue in euro can be used to either grow short-term profitability or to be reinvested into long-term profitable growth. And we have these profitable growth opportunities. 2022 confirms that we can efficiently ramp up our marketing investments to acquire customers at attractive unit economics. In addition, we see the opportunity to invest into games and charity lotteries. And we plan to take advantage of these investment opportunities and given the nature of our business and our analytics capabilities, we can track the efficiency of our investments very well. We are aiming for double-digit growth over the next years and to grow our market share. The opportunity is there. Therefore, we plan to ramp up our marketing investments as long as we can stay efficient. We measure that in terms of payback periods and return on investment. Given the high lifetime values of our customers and the good predictability of their behavior, we are confident that we can continue to see a return of more than 3x on our marketing investments. This is supported by our continuous optimization of the customer lifetime. For example, we have been increasing conversion rates, customer loyalty and profit margins. We will also continue to test new marketing channels and expand our existing marketing channels. On Page 12, we see 2 more opportunities to add further growth and that's games and charity lotteries. On games, we had built a successful games business in the past that we had to stop when we moved back to Germany and changed our business model of our core business. We now plan to build on that experience, the data and the technology. Instant Win Games are a proven and successful categories in other markets, and I will show a few numbers in a minute. Because we will operate these games ourselves, we expect to see attractive margins between 20% and 25%. Finally, this business should be profitable from day 1 as we leverage existing assets. And in addition, we can and will look for investment opportunities to drive games growth even further. On the charity lottery side, this is a category that we have already launched successfully. It also comes with good margins and therefore, helps us to increase our customer lifetime value. We want to use it to build products that address the customer need of our existing customers or invest into acquiring new customer segments. So before the games launch is the games license. The new regulatory authority called the GGL has assumed responsibility for the licensing process in January this year. We are fully prepared to launch our portfolio of 50 games, and the steps are we have to receive our license first, then get the games approved. We are confident that we can launch this summer as planned. As mentioned earlier on this slide, this is Page 14, we see how successful the Instant Win Game category has been for lottery companies around the world. Instant Win Games' billings typically make up 30% to 50% of total lottery billings. In Germany, however, so-called scratch cards make up only 5% to 50% of lottery billings, depending on the state offer. For ZEAL, the percentage number of scratch card billings as a brokerage product is even lower as some state lotteries don't even offer our scratch cards online. So there's definitely room for growth. What we also know from other markets is that it will take several years to exploit this potential and that the size of the potential and the speed of the penetration maybe influenced by regulatory market conditions. We will, of course, keep you up to date and update you as soon as we know more about the license. Now back to Jonas to talk about our guidance for this year.

Thank you, Helmut. Yes, let's talk about the guidance, and you will find that on Slide 16. So our guidance for the year, we assume to have billings of around EUR 800 million to EUR 830 million, revenues of around EUR 110 million to EUR 120 million and EBITDA of around EUR 30 million to EUR 35 million, mostly depending on how much we're ultimately then marketing. We are planning a step change and have assumed EUR 34 million to EUR 39 million in marketing investments for the year. For Games business, we have just assumed a low single-digit EBITDA impact for the year. Obviously, the business is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. The above numbers that I just talked about indicated double-digit revenue growth, which is also our expectation for the midterm. And as always, all this is based on average jackpot for the rest of the year. As you saw on Friday, we have already announced our dividend proposal for this year. So let's go to Slide 18, and I will take you through the proposal. As you can see from this chart, we've constantly returned significant amounts to our shareholders with a special dividend on top of a base dividend, also in 2022, but also now proposed for 2023. This will further improve our capital structure, which has been one of my missions for the last 2 years. We are proposing for this year to return EUR 78 million as dividend, which consists of a base dividend of EUR 1 per share and a special dividend on top of EUR 2.60 per share, which equals the amount we received back from the tax authority for the win in the VAT case that we just won. Just to add a bit of context, the VAT amount was set aside during our previous business model that should normally have been returned to U.S. shareholders should we not have had this exposure for all these years. Since this exposure has not gone away, we think it's not more than fair to return this to our shareholders. And we see no reason to have sit on the cash that is not used for our normal operations. Would it harm our ability to grow? The answer is no. We are already generating sufficient cash to being able to invest in growth and also have the opportunity to leverage the company should an opportunity present itself. Let me now finish off by reiterating why you should consider investing or staying invested in the ZEAL stock. We are the #1 online lottery in Germany. We're bigger than all state lotteries individually and almost equal in size if you take them combined. We have a strong, sustainable cash-generating business model. We have outstanding customer loyalty, which is unique in the e-commerce world. Some customers have been loyal for more than 10 years and still counting, which creates a superior customer lifetime value. We have a huge growth opportunity in a still-underpenetrated market when converting offline players to the online. And as we have said, we have an attractive dividend proposal by returning a large amount to our shareholders without harming any growth opportunities. This concludes my presentation, and we are very happy to take any questions. But before that, many thanks for taking the time and listening to our presentation. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Marius Fuhrberg, Warburg Research.

The first one is you mentioned that you aim for double-digit growth for the years to come. So not only 1 year. Is this meant for lottery as a standalone product? Or does it also include games and the charity products? Second question on the games business and the license, you mentioned that the -- there is a new regulator in charge now. Have you already -- I mean, of course, you have, obviously, but what are the indications from your last contact to the new regulator and is there any wording you can share with us from that? And the last question is on the market spending and the customer acquisitions. It appears that marketing might become a little more expensive, correct me if I'm wrong there. But can you share a little bit of details on what kind of customers you want there? And are those customers showing the same characteristics with regards to gaming and lottery behavior? Or is there any difference? And do you expect this to change with your new marketing efforts at yes, at any level?

Thank you for the questions, and I'm sure we can try to address them to our best knowledge. So let me take 2 questions and Helmut will talk about the games license. So when we talk about double-digit revenue growth, we're talking for -- still for the entire group. Obviously, we will, in the future, see high growth rates, obviously, for games and charity it because they're starting from zero or from a low scale. And also, we expect customer that are spending today money on our normal brokerage product will partly cannibalize that into games, meaning that they have a wallet and either they spend on the brokerage product and/or on the games product. The good news is that the games and charity have so much higher margin, that's a good, what we call a cannibalization, but of course, we will try to acquire customer also that is not using our core product. In terms of the marketing spend, as I said, yes, we are going to increase our marketing spend -- marketing investments and trying to acquire more customers. The customer is very similar in behavior. We have changed some channels and increased pressure. But when we see unit economics, and we break them down, they are very similar to the ones that we acquired in the past. Sometimes, we can even see slightly higher spend on some of them. But it's, in general, very similar type of customer, type of customer cohort as we acquired in the past. The marketing mix may be slightly different. In the past, we did, I would say, to the large majority of what we call performance marketing to acquire new customers. But also for the longer term, we need also to improve the brand of Lotto24, which also supports the performance marketing. But it's very important to say we're shooting for the same efficiency here. So obviously, we will not start just spending unless we see the efficiency. With this, Helmut maybe you can talk about the gaming license.

Yes. We now have an authority full organization that's working on regulation and licensing processes 5 days a week. So I think that's important. Of course, we are in touch with the authority. They keep their cards close to their chest but we know that they are working on the licenses.

Okay. One follow-up, if I may, on marketing. You mentioned that you will also do more brand marketing now. And I wonder how you will proceed with that in terms of efficiency. So would you rather first do a step into brand marketing and spend some money and evaluate the measures thereafter and -- or where would be a threshold where you say, okay, brand marketing might not be that effective, and we need to stop that again and focus more on performance marketing again? Or how should I think of it in terms of also how CPL should develop in the future?

So we have already done some brand marketing already this year when I say this in 2022, maybe you have seen the Sky demand advertising on some of the TV channels. We will continue with these kind of things, but also doing other brands. What we say is that we have the same efficiency. So the normal payback period that we shoot for is 24 months, sometimes you go to up to 36 months depending on it. But we analyze each and every cohort that we acquire. We follow them by day, by week, by month and also by year to making sure that every activity, is performing well. If they are not, we close them down like we do today with performance marketing. So actually, it's nothing different, we analyze -- we look at the data we analyze, and we continue to develop if we see that we can improve going forward further. So nothing has really changed. It's just that we add an important element to the mix that can have a boosting effect on our long-term growth rates.

The next question comes from [ Henri Randis ], [ New Ways ].

I have a few ones. Maybe let's start off with the gambling authority. I read the news that they are starting to enforce measures against Lottoland, I would like to hear your take on this view, maybe are prepared once the banks come in fact, if you're prepared to take on the customer. Second question is regarding the guidance. Is it fair to assume that you're guiding conservatively for billings and sales and over-guide, maybe it's a little aggressive on marketing expenses in order to guarantee guidance reached during a low jackpot year and if it's a high jackpot year, you can maybe exceed the guidance in your view. And the third question would be on your monthly active users and average billing per user for the full year 2022. If you have any numbers to share with us, it would be great. And on the dividend policy, one last question, you mentioned a double-digit growth and should you reach the double-digit growth in the long term. Is it also fair to assume that the dividend payout is on the base dividend first is going to grow up to double digit?

I start with your first question. And so the gambling authority is taking a hard stance on Lottoland, and we don't see them change that at all. I'm not sure I fully understood the second part of your question, but there's no change in their attitude of their conviction to regulate with regards to Lottoland and enforce also with regards to Lottoland. Jonas, maybe you take the other questions, and I hope I've answered your question.

Sure. So your first or actually the second question was regarding the guidance, and how conservative this is. As you know, everything we know today is building into our guidance. I wouldn't say that is neither conservative nor aggressive, is our best estimate for this year. The marketing spend is, as you know, our big discretionary spending, more or less everything else is kind of fixed or semi-fixed for the year. Marketing is the one that we can scale up and scale down, and that's what will also provide a range for it. So we expect this to be EUR 34 million to EUR 39 million, can be slightly more or slightly less, but this is the band where we believe will end up. Obviously, short term, that will have an impact on EBITDA. So the less we'll spending on marketing is typically good for the year's EBITDA, but clearly not good for the midterm or the long-term growth of the company, so we're always trying to invest as much as we can efficiently. But clearly, this has the variability. So that's why we wanted to give you the full information about the expected spend. You talked about the average monthly billings per user, the spend per customer in '22, and we will obviously detail all the questions related to this one when we send out the full package, but it was around EUR 59 per month that the customer was spending. And we expect this to be stable for our core business, and then we will see what happens with the games. We assume it stays stable for our core business. And then your last question was about the dividend if we increase that further. So we will only commit to what we do this year and then I would like to come back, depending on the profitability for the company going forward. But clearly, if the companies continue increasing at profitability, there may be reasons to assume that even the return to shareholders will increase, but I cannot now commit to any precise numbers after 2023.

Maybe regarding the first question, maybe I should have worded it differently. I was wondering if the gambling authorities effectively banned Lottoland, I would want to know if you're prepared for that to take on their customers, the customers of Lottoland that now need another place to pay lottery.

There's no plans with regards to that. I mean we always prepared to acquire customers that are looking for place to play. And we are also always open to making an investment into buying a customer base, but that comes with a lot of cost as well. And conversion losses. So that's something that we need to look at very carefully. Like I said, there is no plans to do this. And we have plenty of customer acquisition opportunity ahead of us. just scaling up what we have been doing successfully and also expanding our marketing channels and marketing activities. So we don't have to rely on other sources of customer acquisition.

[Operator Instructions] And there is one question from Jean-Marc Mueller, JMS Invest.

I understand that short term is when we look at 2023, I mean, the guidance on EBITDA level is very dependent on how much you spend on marketing. Maybe if you could give us a little bit of an idea of how you see deal in 2025, how you expect Instant Win Game to take off? What will be the contribution of Instant Win Games? I noted that EBITDA estimate for 2023 have come down quite a bit over the last 24 months, and that is mainly due to the fact that the Instant Win Game license has been postponed and delayed. But if I look at all the estimates, there was once the idea that maybe in a 2 years' time, you could produce some EUR 20 million of EBITDA with Instant Win Games on a 2-year horizon. Is this still valid when I look into 2025, just to give us a little bit something to think about on the midterm basis and not just on the short-term basis, that would be helpful.

Sure, Jean-Marc. So clearly, we are as disappointed as anyone on the delayed games license. We were expecting this a year ago, but hopefully, it's very imminent now. And you're absolutely right. The reasons for the EBITDA coming down since 2 years ago is that we expect it to be already live with -- and probably pretty, pretty advanced in scaling it up already by now. So that is the big driver, but also that we are now planning to expand our market investment and to gain market share. In terms of what can we expect for games going forward, so it's a number of things that we need to analyze. We need to have the license. We need to understand the conditions we get the license and analyze this one. But clearly, it's a big opportunity for us. As I said, we're only expecting low single-digit EBITDA contribution this year. But if we are launching now as we expected, we should significantly increase that for the following year, at least low single to low double-digit contribution from games. How big can this be? If you look at other European markets, it's a huge impact. I don't think Germany will get that far. But as you remember, we had games in our past business model that was quite successful that had no marketing restriction. We were kind of free to do whatever we wanted. Now we have restrictions. I mean the German gambling law will have restriction, so we maybe not go to that level, but still it will be a big contribution to our profit going forward.

Okay. But that means -- I mean, if I understood you correctly that you would expect some EUR 10 million EBITDA move already going into 2024 from low single digit to low double digit?

That is correct, assuming that we launch on time and we get the license as we expect because if it...

Yes, but that's already helpful. I mean, it gives me a bit of an idea of what the trajectory might be.

So as there are no further questions, I would like to hand back to you, gentlemen.

Thank you very much, and thanks, everyone, for taking the time listening to this, and I'm looking forward to many more discussions -- fruitful discussions and also meeting in person. So thank you very much. And should you have any further questions, please reach out to Frank Hoffmann, and we will gladly to respond to your questions. Thank you very much.