Good afternoon, welcome to the Azerion Q4 and preliminary full year 2022 results. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. For those of you who are joining us via Zoom, if you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand by clicking the Raise Hand at the bottom of your Zoom window under the Reactions button. Once called upon, please unmute your audio and ask your question. Thank you. I'd now like to turn over the call to Atilla Aytekin for the welcome remarks. Yes, thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Atilla Aytekin, co-CEO and co-Founder of Azerion. I would like to welcome you to Azerion's Q4 and full year 2022 results presentation. Today, I'm joined by our CFO, Ben Davey. We would like to look back on our strong performance in Q4 and full year 2022, also to look ahead and share the promising outlook of our business. Before I move on, let me pause a moment to acknowledge the disclaimer. We closed 2022 with a strong feeling of accomplishment. First and foremost, we delivered on our targets for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. That means that while we have been building a track record as a listed company, we remain focused on our business performance. In Q4, we had a record performance in our Platform segment, and as we grow our scale, we start to see the benefits in our margins. We start to harvest the benefits of scale, and further growing our margins remains one of our top priorities for 2023 and beyond. Today, we have updated our outlook, and while we see a lot of room for us to continue growing our revenue organically and gain more market share, we plan to grow our profitability at the same time. Finally, we will balance our growth with a prudent financial framework. As one step, today, we have announced our intention to cancel most of our treasury shares to a level more in line with the market, relying more on cash and less on shares as M&A currency going forward. In addition, we will also increase our focus on de-leveraging our balance sheet and reducing net debt in 2023. Now, let me also share some reflection on recent macro developments, which is a question I've been hearing often from investors and media lately. From where we stand, we continue experiencing strong demand from advertisers. In fact, our direct Ad Sales had a record quarter in Q4 2022, and our confidence for 2023 and beyond is reflected in the guidance we announced today. On the gaming side, we see a stable macro backdrop for revenues from in-game purchases. Parts of this business are still growing, while others are more mature and generate healthy profits and cash flows. We will look to manage those parts of our business for value in 2023, while focusing on driving synergies with our Platform. We have confidence in our future because we believe in our fundamentals. As people spend more time online and do more things online, brands will engage with their consumers online. Even more traditional media formats like TV, radio, or billboards are increasingly becoming online also. That is why we partner with over 300,000 publishing websites to reach around 400 million active users every month, while also reaching another 100 million users or so, mainly through our casual game distribution business. We can help advertisers reaching the right audiences at scale through our integrated technology, creative proprietary formats and local expert support. In order to become the to-go partner for advertisers, our Platform value proposition is focused on three components: the Ad Sales, the Ad Tech, and the Curated Content. Starting with Ad Sales, we have people across whole Europe and other parts of the world working with advertisers and offering local support to maximize the results of their advertising campaigns. Over the last few years, we have invested heavily in our local direct sales capabilities because we believe advertisers value this local expertise and support, and the strategy is serving us well. After winning a number of awards throughout 2022, in Q4, we had a record quarter for direct sales, and for 2023, we expect direct sales to represent about 60% of our advertising revenue. Our second Platform component is Ad Tech. There, our strategy is to offer efficient technology and creative ad formats. For that, we are investing in integrating our technology, so we can remove complexity for advertisers with a simple and competitively priced solution. For example, in Q4, we initiated and expanded a number of partnerships that will bring additional volume to our Platform from advertisers working with Google, Amazon, and Hawk. We made good progress on our strategy for creative ad formats. In Q4, we entered the realm of audio advertising through a few organic investment as well as also the acquisition of Radionomy, which added digital audio advertising capabilities to our stack and even audio content products within Shoutcast. Digital audio advertising is an emerging innovative technology, and we are very excited about the growth prospects that it brings to our Platform. Our last Platform pillar is Curated Content. Our main goal here is to bring audiences together. In Q4, we launched a new product, Azerion Fanz one, in which we partner with sports clubs to engage their fan base. Fans are passionate about the sports, about the sports clubs, and therefore they are engaged audiences. We have the expertise of bringing these audiences together, entertain them, and helping advertisers to reach these audiences. With this compelling value proposition, we expect to grow our partnerships with sports clubs in 2023. Finally, our premium game business. Our strategy for this business has evolved over time. We see premium games as an opportunity to offer an extended value proposition for advertisers. As audiences move more to the virtual worlds or metaverse, the possibilities for advertisers to connect with these audiences are limitless. In-game branding, all sorts of digital events, digital collectibles, and merchandise are just a few examples. That is why in Q4, we expanded our presence in our Habbo Metaverse. We sold 1,300 unique rooms and announced more partnerships with brands like DB Sports. We have made tremendous progress on our strategy in Q4 and over the whole of 2022. As we look ahead, we see compelling growth for Azerion. Today, we are updating our guidance for net revenue and adjusted EBITDA in 2023, and also the medium term. We expect to grow our top line from EUR 453 million in 2022 to around EUR 560 million in 2023. This includes the impact of the acquisitions we made in 2022 as well as organic growth. At the same time, we are committed to grow profitability, so we are also stepping up our guidance for adjusted EBITDA margins. We announced an adjusted EBITDA guidance today of at least EUR 75 million for 2023, and expect our adjusted EBITDA margin to further grow even and be in the range of 14%-16% in the medium term from the 11.5% reported for 2022. The improvement in margin consists in part of a number of initiatives that seeks to optimize costs, realize synergies from acquisitions, and make our Platform more efficient. Ben will cover those in more detail later in this presentation. Equally importantly, the improvement in margin comes from the benefits of scale in our Platform that we're just starting to capture. Let me now hand over to Ben for a closer look at our financial performance. Thanks, Atilla, and good afternoon, everyone. When we look at our financial performance, it's important to connect it with our value drivers, revenue streams, and reporting segments. Let me take a moment to take you through the chart you see on the screen. Starting at the foot of the chart, our advertising and e-commerce revenue streams are reported under our reporting segment called Platform, while our premium games business is a separate reporting segment. I'd also like to use the graphic on screen to explore some of the value drivers of our business model. Starting at the top of the chart, you have our advertisers and our media agencies, in other words, our advertising demand. As we move from the top center of the chart to the left of the slide, we typically see lower volumes but higher margins. Our automated auction sales is a volume product and serves over 400,000 advertisers worldwide. It represented in 2022 about 50% of our advertising revenue, and we estimate that this trend may move to around 40% as of 2023. At the same time, our direct sales business serves a few hundred of our advertisers. Given the direct and often strategic relationship that we have with those clients in this business, our differentiated offerings and the volume that it brings, direct sales accounts for the remaining 50% of our advertising revenue, and that's expected to grow to around 60% as of 2023. That's according at least to our expectations and estimates. In the same way, if you look at the bottom of the chart, which relates to our publisher content supply, as we move to the right, we grow margins and value. The contracted publishers account for over 300,000 of our publisher websites, but account for less than 50% of our advertising revenue, while the 10,000 or so exclusive publishers that we serve represent most of our advertising revenue. Of course, if Azerion is the publisher, then our margins are even more attractive as the product proposition is then fully integrated. This means that we're able to capture more value, and also means that we can share part of that value with our advertiser and publisher partners and offer more cost-effective solutions for them. Let's see how this is translating into our financial performance for Q4 and full year 2022. We're very pleased with our financial performance in Q4, which had record net revenue and adjusted EBITDA contributions from our Platform segment. At the same time, as Atilla said, we're starting to harvest the benefits of scale as we continue growing our Platform, and you can already see this coming through in our numbers. We're also targeting profitable growth. Since the second half of 2022, we've been working on several initiatives, some of which we discussed on our last call, to improve our margins, including accelerating the integration of past acquisitions. We're also improving our adjusted EBITDA compared to the same quarter of last year. Growing our profitability will remain a priority in 2023. I will share more details of those initiatives later, but let's first take a closer look at the financial KPIs for the quarter. In Q4 2022, we delivered our highest adjusted EBITDA ever. Besides focusing on growing our earnings, we also delivered a strong cash conversion. Azerion generated an operating cash flow of around EUR 20 million in Q4 2022, and around EUR 50 million for the full year 2022, and that's up from EUR 24 million in 2021. This means that while our revenue increased by about 47% year-on-year, our operating cash flow broadly doubled. This strong cash generation enabled us to reduce our net debt position in 2022. Looking ahead, we expect more growth in our business as we gain more market share, and this is reflected in the guidance that we've shared today. At the same time, we will continue optimizing our costs and cash generation in 2023, so we deliver profitable growth and further de-leverage our balance sheet. Now let's take a closer look at how our Platform segment performed in Q4. The Platform is essentially digital advertising on non-game and game content, as well as e-commerce. Digital advertising accounts for on average 80% of our Platform revenue, while our e-commerce business accounts for the remaining 20% or so. We use some operational KPIs to assess the performance of our advertising business. While our total number of digital ads sold has been relatively stable at around 9 billion-10 billion ads sold per month on average, our gross revenue per ad request has been improving steadily. Now let me explain how this metric works. When we receive an ad request in our advertising auction Platform, for every request that we process and participate in the auction, there's actually a cost associated with it, and we only have revenue if we then win the auction. This metric shows how the total revenue generated by the ads we sell remunerates all the requests that we get. The fact that this metric is improving shows that our Platform is becoming more efficient and more profitable. This operating performance is also reflected in our financial performance of that Platform segment. Our margins have improved in Q4, and we delivered record performance in the segment. We remain really excited about the growth potential of this business and the value we can generate from benefits of scale and all the efficiencies that we can drive further in the Platform. Moving to premium games. We have 9 free-to-play titles consisting of social card games and metaverse, which generate revenue mainly from in-app game purchases. Now, in the metaverse, we expand and differentiate our value proposition to advertisers and unlock new ways for those advertisers to engage with the consumers digitally. Our social card games are profitable, value generative assets. We continuously optimize these games to maximize user engagement, and we manage them for value. Looking at our operating metrics for premium games, we saw a normalization in our KPIs in 2022 post COVID, and the elevated levels that we delivered through that COVID period. We've stabilized our number of users at around 560,000 daily active users, and the time in game per user, again, remains stable at around 80 minutes per day. For a number of those quarters now, we've seen that performance. At the same time, we've been growing the average revenue per user in 2022, and this shows that our loyal user base is increasingly engaged in our premium games, mainly due to new features and events. Looking at the financial performance of this segment, the reported numbers in 2021 included the impact of a successful NFT launch that overall in 2021, generated around EUR 6 million adjusted EBITDA over Q3 and Q4. This makes the year-on-year numbers less comparable. If we exclude this impact, our results in Q4 were broadly flat on revenue and slightly down on adjusted EBITDA due to higher marketing costs. Our results for Q4 and the full year 2022 were strong, and looking ahead, we'll seek to continue growing whilst also improving our profitability. Let's go through the levers we're pulling to maximize value. We've established three areas of focus: contribution margin, cost management, and organizational structure, which are expected to generate over EUR 10 million of savings on an annualized basis. Starting with contribution margin, we have a number of ongoing initiatives to structurally grow our margins. This includes, for example, driving more value, volume, to our local direct sales channels. Integrating the technology of the acquired companies and improving the efficiency of our combined technology. In Q4, we managed to reduce our costs per ad request by over 50% compared to Q4 2021 by optimizing our resources on ad slots. On cost management, we will continue integrating past acquisitions, removing duplication of contracts, offices, functions, legal entities and branding. However, this also comes with some hard decisions. We're reducing our headcount by about 9% as we continue to integrate our acquired companies and businesses. We're doing the best we can to support the employees that are leaving us. Another area of focus for us is our organizational structure. Here we're simplifying our entities and processes both internally and externally. For example, we've now completed the legal merger of our two main reporting entities, as a result, we are publishing a much simpler quarterly report and will publish only 1 annual report for 2022. Also, as we announced this morning, we're proposing to cancel most of our treasury shares, moving to a capital structure that is more aligned with market practice for a listed company. These are just a few examples of the levers that we're pulling to optimize value and will be priorities for us in 2023. Let me hand back to Atilla for some closing remarks. Yes. Thank you, Ben. 2022 was a year of outstanding delivery for us. We listed Azerion, acquired several companies, expanded our technology and capabilities, set our strategic priorities in the growing digital advertising market, all while delivering strong financial performance and keeping our promises. We also focused on profitable growth and started to harvest the benefits of scale in our Platform. There's more to come. We are very excited about the growth prospects for 2023 and beyond, while we also see many opportunities to further improve our margins. We shared a strong growth outlook today and will continue to update the market as we have more visibility into the future. As we move into our second year as a listed company, we are increasing our focus on our financial framework, simplifying our capital structure and de-leveraging our balance sheet. I'm confident that 2023 will be an exciting year for Azerion, and I'm looking forward to taking our Platform to the next level. With that, let me open the call for questions. Operator, who is our first question, please? Thank you. We will now move into our Q&A session. For those of you who are joining us via Zoom, if you'd like to ask a question at this time, please raise your hand by clicking the Raise Hand at the bottom of your Zoom window under the Reactions button. Once called upon, please unmute your audio to ask your question. Our first question comes from Thomas Singlehurst. If you'd like to unmute yourself to ask your question, please. Hi, Tom. Are you there? Perfect. Sorry, I'm now successfully unmuted. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah, perfectly. Hi, Tom. Hi. Thanks very much for taking the questions, and congrats on the results. I've got a handful of questions if that's okay. The first one is whether on the guidance outlook for revenue, which is I suppose more or less sort of 25% top line growth. Can you just sort of deconstruct that a little bit and talk about how much is expected to come from M&A and how much is organic? Within the context of that organic discussion, I would love a little bit more color on sort of trends year to date. I'm presuming the near-term outlook is a little bit rosier than the performance in the fourth quarter, but I would love some detail on that. That was the first question. The second question was on the margins. 14%-16% medium term. In your slide deck there, it looked like medium term was defined as 2024 and 2025, which is reasonable enough. I'm just interested whether you think 14%-16% is the upper limit for Azerion as a group. As a Platform business, I would've naturally assumed it could go higher, I know there's a lot of emphasis on creating content and direct sales, so does that limit the margin potential? Very finally, sorry, third question, the significance of the cancellation of the treasury shares and how that fits in to the broader picture with capital structure because, I, you know, you've got, you know, good cash generation, you've got big plans with M&A. I'm just interested whether, you know, equity issuance or could be one of the solutions to accelerating that de-leverage process. And, yeah, any comments on the different modes of de-leverage would be very much appreciated. Thank you. That's great. Thank you very much for those questions, Tom. Look, I think if I pick up perhaps the first two, and then, I think probably Atilla perhaps you talk about the treasury shares. Sorry. Look, I think your first question, Tom, was talking about 2023. Obviously, I think the first point you picked up was, well, look, you've got relatively strong top line growth being forecast under the guidance for 2023. Can I give you a bit more color on that? Look, obviously there are two key components to that top line guidance. You've got essentially the pro forma benefits of the acquisitions that we completed in 2022 coming through those numbers. You've got an element of underlying, or what you would call sort of organic growth with that same book of business running into 2023. The way that we're thinking about that is in the context of the market as we're seeing it, we think a combination of the Platform growth and the premium games growth comes in in and around double-digit or just under organic growth. You can sort of see that in the guidance that we've given. To give you a little bit more color if it's helpful, you know, clearly, in line with the strategy that we've been discussing, we would see the vast majority of that growth coming from the Platform part of the operation. We seem to see low single-digit growth on the premium game side. That hopefully gives you a bit of a feel for the mix as we think about top line growth in 2023. On the second question, which related to margin, look, good question, and you're quite right. The guidance that we've given is medium term, and we've given a little bit more color on that in the presentation slide. The 14%-16% is a medium term. I think your question was do we regard that as an upper limit? Well, look, no, we don't. At the same time, we don't wanna be forecasting too far forward in obviously, markets which continue to change. The logic is as we continue to scale, as we continue to see synergies across the Platform, we become more meaningful as a partner and indeed as a client, we would hope to see further room for improvement. We felt that for the time being, obviously the first time we've really updated our guidance for a while, this was the right timeframe to be focused on. Your third question was really a question about the significance of canceling treasury shares. Perhaps I'll hand to. Yeah. Thank you. Well, first, the cancellation of treasury shares. The proposal to cancel a significant portion of the shares held in treasury is due to two main reasons. First, we feel very confident in the cash generation of the company and rely less on shares and more on cash to fund the acquisitions. That's a very important point for us. Secondly, we want to migrate our capital structure to one that is more aligned with the market practice. Of course, the treasury shares are an heritage of the SPAC of last year. Now we want to align with the market practice. The small amount of shares which are held in treasury now are titled to the earn-outs, which is associated with the previous acquisitions as well as the employee stock options. Also in the future, with the cancellation of the treasury shares, as I said, we will also aim to finance the new acquisitions through the cash generated through the business. Yeah? Okay, Tom. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Can you, I mean, should we infer if there is still a focus on deleveraging on top of that, should we infer that the pace of M&A will slow? Or can you do both at the same time? Yeah. Shall I pick up a little bit on that one? Look, I think there are lots of different component parts to the strategy that we've talked about. I mean, first and foremost, if we can deliver on the operational uplift that we've given in our guidance, the benefits you get obviously from the increase in adjusted EBITDA and the cash flow through the Platform will go a long way, of course, to moving the ratios and giving you more resources generally. How we deploy that will obviously be a choice during the year. We still have a very active pipeline, and we see real value opportunities in the market. There's just gonna be this balance all the way through. I think what we're saying is, look, as now entering our second year as a listed company, we're now increasingly focused on the financial framework, as you'd expect, within which we operate. We feel very confident about our ability to deliver in 2023. We'll be using our resources to manage both balance sheet and to go after some of those external opportunities. Look, is it ultimately possible also to be raising some equity to go after those acquisitions in the future? Yes, that's certainly possible. It's always been part of our strategy. We want to be engaging with investors alongside us when we see those opportunities, and we will manage our resources appropriately over the year. That's very clear. Thank you very much. Once again, congrats on the results. Thank you, Tom. Much appreciated. Thank you. Our next question comes from Gustav Froberg. Please unmute yourself to ask your question. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me as well? Yes. Hi, Gustav. Perfect. Hi. thank you for taking mine also. I have two, please. first is on margin guidance as well. I wanted to hear if you could give us a little bit more color on, just a breakdown across the two segments, how you see that trending, if you see, margins in Platform going up, disproportionately relative to premium games. Just any color on the segment breakdown would be great in terms of margin. The second question, there's been a lot of, I guess, noise, if you will, around, litigation with, U.K. company Bidstack. Could you please just update us on that situation? Tell us a little bit more about the expected impact on Azerion and, when you expect the matter to be closed so we can move past it, please. Okay. Thank you, Gustav. Shall I take both those? Yeah. Yeah. Look, on the margin guidance and sort of a sense of split between the two segments, look, we regard the premium games part of the operation as relatively stable, both in terms of top line and on margin. We will continue to work hard to optimize costs within that part of the operation, manage for value. I think whilst we do see some room for margin improvement, it'll be relatively contained within the existing performance. To your question, we would see, I think, the majority of the improvement in margin coming through the ongoing growth of the Platform and the synergies that should drive for us. On your second question, look, obviously we're in a litigation process with Bidstack. Unfortunately, these things do happen. There was a preliminary hearing recently in the Netherlands, where broadly the judge found a number of points in our favor, and ended up on the basis of the information in front of the court, reducing the size of the claim from about EUR 4.6 million to about EUR 1.6 million, in terms of what was then capable of being argued by the parties. Look, it's one of those things, we've made our position clear through our holding statement. You know, this is something we regard as unfortunately part of the ordinary course of business. It's not material in our view, and we move on. All right. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much, Gustav. Our last question comes from Matthew Walker. Please unmute to ask your question. Thanks a lot. It's Matthew from Credit Suisse. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Hi, Matthew. Yeah. Hey, guys. Yeah, just a few questions, please. The first is on the savings, the EUR 10 million. That says that's an annualized number, so how much is gonna be achieved in 2023? Do you expect further cost savings to come in in 2024? The second question is on the organic growth side. I think, you know, previously you were going for higher numbers. Can you just maybe tell us what's changed in either the Platform side or in the premium game side there? Just on the share count and the free float, can you confirm, is everybody now unlocked so they can, you know, that they're free to dispose? What would you regard as the free float, the genuine sort of free float at the moment? Okay. Thank you, Matthew. Shall I take the first two, and then perhaps Atilla you kick off on the third? Yeah. On the savings question, as you say, we've guided to over EUR 10 million. And your question was to what extent do we see those falling within 2023. We're already in execution on the plan. Obviously it does take, you know, roughly a quarter to work through the timing. You know, I think you can probably phase that number across the 3 quarters. But we're already sort of fully in execution, as it were. We're well on our way. Do we see further scope for savings into 2024? Yes, we do. We're very mindful of getting the balance right between investments and profitability. We're gonna be constantly looking for other areas of efficiency. This isn't a once and done. We're gonna keep moving through the organization. You know, as we get more and more integrated, we do think there will be other opportunities. We're certainly starting with what we regard as a sort of convincing commitment. The work is already well in execution, as I say, on that first part of our cost plan. On the second question, which is around organic growth. Look, I think there is an element of prudence in our outlook. It's been obviously a fairly volatile market looking back in time. Having said that, we still ended up delivering just under 10% organic growth. We're really pleased with the way that the Platform collectively has stood up and the robust nature of the relationships that we seem to be able to establish in the market. That's reflected, I think in the confidence in our guidance in 2023. At the same time, we see sort of a number of possibilities. We've level set our initial guidance around a reflection looking back and how we think we can carry that into the, into the year. You know, we saw a slightly slow start at the start of the year, but again, momentum seems to be picking up. again, we feel that there's a real opportunity in the market in 2023, but we didn't, at this stage, have a firm view on the end outcome. We wanted to be relatively prudent, give a good starting point, and of course, we can update on our guidance during the year. The third question related to sort of share counts and whether lock-ups have come off. Atilla- Yeah ... just wanna pick up off that one. Yeah. First, the lock-up. Yes, all lock-ups are finished at end of January. Last year, we have done some acquisitions, which we have paid with shares. On those shares, we have some lock-up, but the majority of the lock-ups has been finished. Secondly, the free float. The free float at this moment is I think around between 10%-15% in that in that bandwidth. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Matthew. Okay, thank you. Okay. Operator, do we have any more questions? There are no further questions at this time, gentlemen. Okay. In which case, thank you very much, everyone for joining. Thank you very much for all the questions. Operator, perhaps you could close out the call for us. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you, gentlemen. We have now reached the end of our session. Thank you for joining today's call. Please feel free to disconnect.