ZEAL Network SE

XETRA:TIMA

Earnings Call Analysis

ZEAL Network's Q3 2023 Revenue Grows by 16%

ZEAL Network SE kept its strong growth momentum in the first nine months of 2023, increasing billings and revenues by 16%, credited to an aggressive marketing strategy, expanded games portfolio, and customer acquisition boosts during high jackpot phases. Despite comparable jackpot environments with the previous year, top-line growth was impressive at 15.5%. The third quarter also marked the games business's first significant revenue contribution, adding EUR 1.2 million to the total. However, EBITDA growth was a modest 5.3% due to substantial marketing investments aimed at long-term brand building. Reinforcing investor confidence, ZEAL reaffirms its financial year guidance, predicting billings between EUR 800 million to EUR 830 million, revenue from EUR 110 million to EUR 120 million, and EBITDA ranging from EUR 30 million to EUR 35 million.

Building Momentum in Revenue and Profitability

ZEAL Network has showcased robust performance in the first nine months of 2023, with billing from lotteries and revenue growing by a notable 16%, continuing the strong growth momentum and improved profitability seen in the earlier half of the year.

Intensified Brand Building Investments

In a strategic move to bolster growth, the company has amped up investments at the top of the marketing funnel by concentrating on brand building efforts, aimed at unlocking additional customer and business expansion.

Growth Through New Games Business Launch

ZEAL launched a new games business swiftly following license acquisition in June and already features 28 games online, expecting further expansion in the portfolio in the fourth quarter. This initiative sets ZEAL apart in the lottery segment, as no state lottery company currently offers a comparable games business.

Jackpot Environment: A Key Driver for Growth

The similar jackpot environment year-over-year remains a critical element for ZEAL, significantly influencing billing, revenue growth, and new customer acquisition.

Revenue Uplift and EBITDA Dynamics

Revenues surged by 15.5%, fueled by a 16% increase in underlying billing. The games business contributed its first significant revenue at EUR 1.2 million. However, EBITDA saw a relatively modest rise of 5.3% due to an intentional 27.4% spike in marketing investments, including initiatives to stimulate new customer acquisition and the launch of a landmark brand campaign for LOTTO24.

Brand Campaign and Customer Acquisition

Following the brand campaign, aided brand awareness jumped from 40% to 47%, setting the stage for future customer growth and subsequent revenue increases in the face of high jackpot phases.

Operational Expense Management

While marketing expenses grew substantially, other expenses, including personnel and direct operating costs, increased by a lower rate than revenue, with respective growth rates of 9% and 11%.

New Gaming Business Metrics

The first nine months witnessed a pay-in of EUR 503 million for lotteries and EUR 3 million for games. The pay-in margin for games is a significant 35.3%, outperforming lotteries at 15.8%. The gaming segment also boasted a higher monthly average revenue per user at EUR 19.52 compared to EUR 7.65 for lotteries, reflecting promising potential for significant contribution to future revenue and profits.

User Base and Billing Enhancement

The period observed a 16% boost in lottery billing, propelled by a 12% rise in monthly active users and a 4% uptick in average billing per user. Despite this, the gross margin for lotteries dipped slightly from 12.8% to 12.5%, influenced by product mix variations.

Cost Per Lead and Long-Term Branding Impact

The cost per lead escalated by 29% due to media cost inflation and competitive dynamics. The company anticipates benefiting from the brand campaign in the form of an increased customer base in subsequent quarters and years.

Financial Year Guidance Reconfirmation

With confidence in its Q3 performance, ZEAL reaffirms its financial guidance for the year, projecting billings between EUR 800 and EUR 830 million, revenue between EUR 110 and EUR 120 million, and EBITDA in the range of EUR 30 to EUR 35 million.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q3 Results 2023 of the ZEAL Network SE. [Operator Instructions]. Let me now turn the floor over to Sebastian Bielski. Please go ahead.

[Sebastian Bielski, executive]

Good morning to everybody. Welcome to the Q3 earnings call of ZEAL Network. I hope you can all see the presentation. But if you can't see it, you can also access it through the Investor Relations section on our home page. Let me now walk you through the agenda for this morning's call. First, Helmut will give a short summary of the first 9 months as well give a business update, then I will walk you through a financial update and will also reconfirm our guidance for this year, and then Helmut will end with the key takeaways of this call. Over to you, Helmut.

[Helmut Becker, executive]

Thank you, Sebastian. Welcome, everybody. In summary, of the first 9 months of 2023, we maintained our strong growth momentum of the first 6 months and once again improved our profitability. Although the jackpot situation was largely similar to that of the previous year, we were also able to raise billings from lotteries and revenue by 16%. In line with our marketing strategy, we've accelerated customer acquisition during high jackpot phases in June and September, we've also started to invest more at the top of the funnel in brand building. We expect this to unlock further customer and business growth.

Following our launch in the second quarter, we were able to successfully expand our games portfolio. Back to you, Sebastian.

[Sebastian Bielski, executive]

As all of you probably know, the jackpot environment is very important for us...

[Helmut Becker, executive]

Sorry, Sebastian. I gave back to you too early. There's one more slide on the business update. So we jump now to Page 6. And let us talk about games because it's a business that we've recently launched. So as mentioned before, we were able to launch our games business in a very short period of time after having received the license already in June. With our brands, LOTTO24 and Tipp24, we are still the front runners in the lottery segment. To date, no state lottery company has launched a comparable games business. .

Starting with a very low number of games, currently we have 28 games online. We expect in the first -- in the fourth quarter of the year to continuously expand our games portfolio. Now with that special update on games. I hand back to Sebastian to take us through the financial update.

[Sebastian Bielski, executive]

Now I've already spoiled out the headline of this slide. Yes, the jackpot environment is really very important for us actually for both billings and revenue growth as well as for the acquisition of new customers. As you can see on this slide, the jackpot environment in this year was very comparable to last year with 5 peaks in each years across LOTTO 6aus49 and Eurojackpot. In terms of the average jackpot sizes, it was stable at EUR 15 million for LOTTO 6aus49, but for Eurojackpot, it slightly increased from EUR 39 million to EUR 42 million. Even though the jackpot environment was very comparable, we still grew our top line very, very strongly this year.

We grew our revenues by 15.5% compared to last year and that was driven by growth in underlying billings of 16%, as Helmut has already mentioned. The third quarter of 2023 also saw the first meaningful revenue contribution from our newly launched games business, which came in at EUR 1.2 million. While revenues grew very strongly by 15.5%, as you can see, our EBITDA only increased by 5.3% compared to last year. The main reason for the lower growth of EBITDA compared to revenue was an increase of marketing investment of 27.4% year-on-year.

This large increase in investment into marketing was a very deliberate management decision and consisted of, firstly, a large push for new customer acquisition in the second quarter during 2 consecutive Eurojackpot peaks. And secondly, the launch of our biggest brand campaign ever for LATTO24 in the third quarter. Overall, about half of the circa EUR 6.6 million increase in marketing investments came from our investment into the brand campaign in the third quarter.

We can already see the first very positive effects of our brand campaign and that our aided brand awareness has increased to 47% after the start of the campaign compared to 40% before the launch of the campaign. We believe that this increased brand awareness will enable us to gain additional new customers in future high jackpot phases, which will lead to further revenue and growth down the lane. All other expenses, except for marketing increased less than revenue, with personnel costs growing 9%, direct operating expenses growing 11% and indirect operating expenses also growing 11%.

Since Q3 2023 was the first quarter with a meaningful revenue contribution from our newly launched games business, we have decided to include a few new KPIs which we believe will help investors to better understand and track the progress of our games business. The most important new KPI is called pay-in, and it's defined as money which our customers deposits into their wallets for playing lottery or playing games.

As you can see on this slide, in the first 9 months, our customers have deposited EUR 503 million to play lotteries, while they have deposited EUR 3 million to play games. The reason why we believe that this is an important KPI is that it allows a different view of revenue margins when you compare lotteries with games. When comparing the gross margin, which is defined as the ratio of revenue to billings, our gaming business shows a lower margin of 7.3% compared with the gross margin of 12.5% for our lotteries.

However, we believe that this comparison does not provide a complete picture due to the difference in the underlying mechanics of the games business and the lottery businesses, respectively. As you can see on this page, the multiplier of pay-ins to billings is circa 1.3x for lotteries, whilst it is 4.9x for games. The reason for this difference is that our Games business has an average return to player of 88% compared with 50% for our most important lotteries. This means that in our games business, a much higher share of the bets our customers placed are returned to them in the form of winnings.

Our games customers usually use these winnings to play additional games. That is why we believe that looking at the pay-in margin, which is defined as the ratio of revenue to pay-ins provides a better comparison between those 2 businesses. When looking at this metric, you can see that the pay-in margin for games stands at 35.3% and is actually materially higher than for lotteries where it stands at 15.8%. This difference is also reflected in the significantly higher monthly average revenue per active user of EUR 19.52 for games compared with EUR 7.65 for lotteries. As you know, our games business is still very young and it's in a start-up phase.

But seeing these early metrics makes us highly confident that the games businesses will be able to contribute a very significant share to both revenue and profit in the midterm. We will now look at a few other metrics. As Helmut and I have already mentioned, our lottery billings have grown by 16%. This very strong growth was driven by an increase of the number of monthly active users of 12% and an increase in the average billings per active user of 4%. We're especially happy to see the strong increase in our monthly active users because it was not only driven by an increase of our customer base, but also by a higher level of activity of our customers.

Our gross margin for lotteries has declined slightly from 12.8% to 12.5%, the underlying driver was a slightly different product mix in the first 9 months of this year compared to last year. We have been able to grow the number of new customers by 3% and this is, again, a very good result because it is growth from an already very high level. Lastly, you can see that the cost per lead has grown by 29%. Driver of the increase in the cost per lead was, number one, the overall media cost inflation, which does not just affect us, but everybody. Number two, an increased level of competition, especially in the second quarter in search engine marketing and thirdly, our strong brand investment in the last quarter.

When investing into brands, the company always faces a timing gap. What that means is that we have incurred the cost for the branding campaign in the third quarter, but the benefits we expect to derive from this investment will only accrue to us in the coming quarters and years in the form of higher numbers of new customers, which will then transform into higher revenue and growth. Based on the very good performance in Q3, we're also happy to reconfirm our previous guidance for this financial year. We expect billings to come in the range of EUR 800 million to EUR 830 million, revenue in the range of EUR 110 million to EUR 120 million and EBITDA in the range of EUR 30 million to EUR 35 million. With that, I'll hand back to Helmut.

[Helmut Becker, executive]

Thank you, Sebastian. So what are the key takeaways from the first 9 months. We have successfully maintained our strong growth momentum and once again improved our profitability. We successfully launched our Games business already in June, and are in the process of ramping up and broadening our games portfolio. We've accelerated our customer acquisition with significant marketing investments in high jackpot phases and also broadened our marketing investments. We further expanded our brand building measures.

Thank you. Now we will start the Q&A session, please.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Henry Wendisch from NuWays.

[Henry Wendisch, analyst]

Good morning, everybody, and welcome Sebastian to our quarterly calls. Happy to have you here. I have a couple of questions. The first one is I thought that the Instant Win Games gross margin was at 7%. When I talked to you back a few weeks ago, a few months ago, I expected actually 20% to 25%, is that because you also said that you increased the return to player to 88%, is that basically the case that you pay out more at the beginning of the launch of Instant Win Games, in order to attract players and bodies with the Instant Win Games. And do you plan to raise that to the 20%, 25% gross margin in the future? Or is that a figure we can calculate for the next quarters to come?

[Helmut Becker, executive]

I'll take that question. So right now, we are -- it's still very early days. So right now, we are in the process of ramping up our games portfolio. And we depend on the approvals and the approval rate of the regulator that we have 28% -- 28 games live right now, which is not very much, not very many. We're looking to launch a much, much bigger portfolio of games.

And the standard games in the market are slot games that come with a very high return to player, which means a low margin and a lot of cycling through the same money again, which is the dynamic that Sebastian explained. Those standard games are the games that the regulator is approving first because that's the standard in the market, that's what they're most familiar with. We are looking to broaden our portfolio going forward.

And we will add some lower RTP games. We've actually just gotten approved a first slightly lower RTP game called Bingo. And that will change the average RTP and the average margin again. We may not get to that number that you just quoted, which we thought we would get to with a very balanced portfolio from to the start with, but we are probably getting closer to that number because there's a difference between what we thought we would launch.

And again, we will get there over time. And what we have now launched dependent on the regulator, we felt that it is important to explain the economics and the unit economics of the games and especially point out that also these high RTP games are a very great source of growth and profitability if you look at the right metrics.

[Henry Wendisch, analyst]

Okay. Thanks very much. Also regarding on the Instant Win Games, the impact in Q3 was quite better than I expected. I think you were happy with that as well regarding that it's only 28 games so far launched, how do you expect Q4 to develop more on a similar level to Q3 or even better than Q3 already?

[Sebastian Bielski, executive]

Yes, we expect the games to grow actually in Q4. So we expect a higher revenue contribution from those games given that we are, as Helmut explained, building up the games portfolio over time. And we launched with a few games, we added some games. We are actually, today, adding a few more games. We've probably got some more games approved by the regulators. So yes, we are expecting it to contribute more to revenue.

[Operator]

Okay. So at the moment, there seems to be no further questions. [Operator Instructions] Okay. And we have a follow-up question from Henry.

[Henry Wendisch, analyst]

Yes. A quick follow-up. Thanks. I saw the cost per lead was also quite on the level that Q3 -- on the Q3 level -- was quite on the level of Q2, I expect actually a bit of a decrease because they really pushed marketing in Q2. Do you expect the cost per lead to stay on these heightened levels going forward? Or can you give an indication that it's really the market-driven push that also pushes the cost per lead ratio that has basically led to increase in this number or do you feel that it's going to go away on a statistical average jackpot quarter that is going to be below the EUR 40 again.

[Helmut Becker, executive]

I don't think we're in a position to provide specific guidance on specific numbers at the moment. What we can say is that the experience that we've made with the brand investment in the third quarter were very positive for us. So we saw that increase in the aided brand awareness going to 47%. And as such, we currently plan to continue to invest into brand channels, especially into TV in the next year. We will sculpt this a little bit to TV pricing across the year. But yes, so we continue to believe that this is a good investment, but we cannot guide you to specific numbers at the moment.

[Operator]

Okay. Since we didn't receive any further questions in the meantime, I will hand back over to the hosts.

[Sebastian Bielski, executive]

Yes. Thank you very much. If you have no further questions, then we would like to finish the call. Thank you very much for the participation. And our next regular call will be the Q4 earnings call in March next year. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.