Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Aspire Global second quarter report 2021. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO, Tsachi Maimon, and CFO, Motti Gil. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Speakers, please begin. Thank you very much, Denise, and thank you audience for joining this call. We are very proud to present a very strong quarter two in 2021. Here with me, I have Motti Gil, the CFO of the group, and myself, Tsachi Maimon. This is the first slide where we present again what Aspire Global has become. The people and investors that are following Aspire Global in the last four years, since we listed the company in Stockholm exactly four years ago, we were a company with one main product and around 20, 25 paying partners, and operating our products mainly in the European market. Four years later, this is what we have become, a group of companies of products that control the value chain of iGaming. We have around 150 paying partners every month and reselling our products to four different continents, each one of the operators, of course, to its targeted market. It's a very strong development of the company, not only by controlling more products in the gaming, but also doing it with a very strong revenue and profitability growth over the years. I want to take also this opportunity and thank all the employees in the group. We are now getting closer to 500 employees, and each one of them are contributing everything that we see on this amazing journey of Aspire Global. I'm jumping to slide three, where we have the financial highlights. It was a strong and the strongest record quarter of Aspire Global. The company grew to almost EUR 56 million in revenue. It's around 27.7%, almost 28% year-over-year. The EBITDA was 40% growth over last year. I remind us all, and we will see it also in the further slides, that we are comparing the results to the very strong Q2 2020, where the COVID has just begun. The EBITDA margin was 17.7%, also an increase from Q2 2020. The EBIT also grew very nicely, high double-digit number, 37.5% to a EUR 7.8 million. Of course, the earning per share also was affected positively from the performance to a EUR 0.14, so it's an increase of 56% year-over-year. When I'm going there to slide four and sharing with you the key business wins that we had around the quarter. There was very interesting deals that were done in the quarter. One of them is that Aspire were able to expand its product to more markets. We have here some examples, that we opened up the U.S. operation with the deal with Amelco and GAN. Those are gaming platform in the U.S. market, so we are able to sell our games into them to resell it to their operators on their platform. This is the kind of deal that we have with Amelco and GAN into the U.S. market. We also went live with Codere, one of the biggest operators in Latin America, and it's already live. Our games are live there in Colombia. We also received the supplier license in Greece, which opening up a very strong regulated market in Europe. Last but not least, we also being able to accept and have Quincy Raven joining us as the U.S. Managing Director of Aspire Global. This is from that aspect. When I'm going to the below the line deals that we signed, this is a demonstration of the kind of deals that Aspire Global is able to perform. You can see that we have different deals, different aspects, different aspiration, and this is exactly the strength of Aspire, that we are not limited. We have, for example, Luckster and JNS Gaming. Those are international operators that are not going to focus only in Europe but also outside of Europe, and they are going to enjoy not only the gaming platform of Aspire Global, but also the managed services, the sport product, and our games aggregation. We are going to have more of the wallet share from those operators. We also signed with FanDuel. Look on the ability of Aspire Global to take one of the biggest land-based operators in Ireland and to guide him and be together with him when he's joining the online in Ireland. We are proud to have this deal and to lead him through. We also signed a very interesting deal with Luckbox. Luckbox is a publicly listed company in two stock exchanges, and it's a company that declared that they want to be one of the biggest esport companies in the world. We are migrating this operator from a competing platform, and it's due to be accomplished around the end of the year, beginning of 2022. This is also showing that Aspire Global is not only in sport and casino, but also entering with a very strong push from this operator, also to the esport journey. I am moving to slide five, where we wanted to show a little bit the differentiation between different kind of strategies that there are in the gaming sector. We know that there are some B2B companies that are focusing on one, maybe two products. They want it to be, of course, the best. They are also focusing on one or two markets, and they have also a big dependency on very few big partners. On the other side, we have Aspire Global. We were able to have and to own more than one or two products. We have five different products that we are able to sell independently or as part of a package of everything. We are able to sell it in four different continents, so it's many markets available. I can say that we are selling it, and we are not dependent on any one big or two big operators. Even if, not that it's happened in the past, but even if one will decide or two will decide to leave, it will not affect the train of growth of Aspire Global. I am moving to slide six, where we consolidated all the performance of the group, B2C and B2B. What we can see here is that Q2 with EUR 55.8 million in revenue. It's a 27.7% increase year-over-year. Also, we see the EBITDA of EUR 9.9 million. It's an increase of 40% year-over-year, but also 15% sequentially. What we can see also, and it's very encouraging, is that the profitability continued to grow, even if the taxed and locally regulated markets income grew from last year. This is something that we are very much happy with, and it showed that we can continue and grow in regulated and taxed markets. I am moving now and zooming in on the B2B. In the B2B, we have those three main products that we are selling, the gaming platform and managed services, the sport solution, and the games and games aggregation. I will start with the overall results of the B2B. We reached all-time high with EUR 40.6 million, also a 24.4% increase over last year, and EUR 7.8 million in EBITDA. Also here, we see a more than 40% increase year-over-year and reaching a 19% in margin. Some of the things that we are happy with when we are taking the consolidated group. We signed with two new partnership, especially in the U.S. market. This is a slide to show what are we aiming to do in the U.S. market. Again, as I said before, we hired Quincy Raven to lead and to be on the ground. Quincy is living in Vegas. He comes from leading companies like Scientific Games, Blackhawk, and Aristocrat, and he's well-connected and strong with all the relevant operators in the U.S. market, and he's very much motivated to take our products and to lead the sales in the U.S. market. In those products that we have in the B2B, I will zoom in first on the gaming platform and managed services. We can see here that it was the strongest quarter ever. Also with revenues of EUR 30.5 million and EBITDA all-time high of EUR 5 million. Also, when we are comparing it to Q2 2020, we remember that that quarter was the first quarter with the COVID-19 effect. We are especially happy that we were able to continue and grow the business, although when comparing it to Q2 2020. There are some key enhancements that we did on the gaming platform. I will not go through everything. Of course, this presentation is also on the website of Aspire Global. Few takeaways from this slide is the Buy Win feature that proved the ability of Aspire Global to be very creative, flexible, and fast with creating this feature, especially for the opening of the German market. We also needed to do some adaptation and adjustment to our code after the Google changes request throughout the world, we did those adaptations for the last six months. More and more very interesting things to continue and have our funnels automated and native apps that were started to be released to our partners. There is another very important development that we released a few days ago. We are happy to complete the integration and already roll out the first brand BetTarget. It's right now available in Ireland and in any day now will be available also in the U.K. market and more than that. This is the beginning of the rollout of the brands and the partners that we have on our platform to move from the existing sport solution that we have, the third-party sport solution, into our proprietary sport solution, BtoBet, and we expect that to end until the end of the year. I will zoom in on the sport segment. Also the sport segment, we see a very nice growth of more than 100% in revenue to EUR 2.7 million. Also the EBITDA grew almost 50% from last year, Q2 2020. We have some takeaways from the quarter, very interesting things to learn about BtoBet. First, what I said before, the signature with Luckbox and to supply them with our sport and esport. We also appointed Guy Gani as the new CTO to take the technology and product even further. One of the most interesting things that we have is that we were able not only to launch Betfair earlier this year, but also to integrate their RAM feed. RAM feed is one of the strongest feed that exists in the sport world. It's a feed that is competing with Sportradar and Betgenius and all the other leading feeds. It's usually serve only Betfair or Paddy Power or FanDuel, all the companies in that Paddy Power FanDuel group. We were able to integrate this feed into our proprietary sport solution, and it's opening up to Aspire Global and BtoBet, a very big opportunities out there, that we can leverage this integration and possibly resell it to other companies, of course, with the approval of Betfair. Betfair, this is also connected to a very strong relationship that we have with them. They confirmed and approved for us to share with the investors their development in Colombia, and we can see their development of the new depositing players throughout the last three, four months. We can see also their growth. It's very exciting to see what Betfair is planning for the Colombian market. I am moving on to Pariplay, our games and games aggregation vertical. Pariplay continue to perform very strong. We can see it quarter-over-quarter, with revenue growth of more than 70% year-over-year and more than 100% in EBITDA. All in all, the quarter ended with EUR 7.4 million in revenue and EUR 2.2 million in EBITDA. Some interesting things around Pariplay. As we said before, the signatures and the deals signed with GAN and Amelco and Codere, and we also have 12 new operators that we signed. We went live with 10 partners already in Q2, and six new games were released. It's very exciting times when a company in the size of Pariplay is able to roll out and launch 10 partners in one quarter. In this slide, what we wanted is to take advantage of a very newly, recently acquisition that was done, in the space of the same area of Pariplay. We want to compare in this slide, Pariplay to the transaction of Relax Gaming. Relax Gaming is a games company, a games aggregation company that was acquired by the Kindred Group only a few weeks ago. The valuation of this acquisition was around EUR 320 million. Of course, that it's including also the potential earn-out. What we want to show is to compare with different KPIs with Relax Gaming. Both companies were founded in 2010. Both of them are on the same area of games, content, and aggregation. Look on the amount of proprietary games studio that Pariplay produced, almost 120 games that Pariplay own themself, and access to more than 3,000 third-party games. This is when we compare to Relax with half of the amount of proprietary games that they produced, with a little bit more than 2,500 games that they are connected outside. Look on the quality of the technology of Pariplay with doing everything that they are doing with around 100 employees, compared to 240 employees in Relax. The revenue is approximately the same, EUR 24.4 million compared to EUR 25 million. The EBITDA, a little bit less, EUR 6.4 million and EUR 10 million in Relax. I remind everyone that two years ago when we acquired Pariplay, it was almost a loss-making business, and we acquired it for only EUR 13.3 million. In this slide, we want to show the importance of the M&A and the execution of Aspire Global of creating value through the acquisition to our shareholders, and we will continue to do so in the future. I'm moving on to Karamba. Karamba, which is managed by our VP of Karamba, Yoel Momigliano, that is doing a great job by taking Karamba to new heights quarter-over-quarter. We can see here the great results that he was able to achieve, reaching almost EUR 20 million in revenues with EUR 2.1 million in EBITDA. We can see great increase even when we compare it to the very strong Q2 2020 with the COVID-19. It was 45% increase in revenue and 30% increase in EBITDA. We can see that the great development came especially in the U.K. and Irish market, and especially came from the new brand that they released around six, seven months ago, Griffon Casino, that is doing amazing in those markets. I'm now handing to Motti with the financial position of Aspire Global. Moti? Thank you. We will go through the right chart demonstrating the cash development during the quarter. We can see that the good business momentum and the good business trend across all segments was also translated into the cash derived from the operating activities. We can see that we've generated EUR 8 million during the quarter. This is taking also into account that we paid in Q2 almost EUR 5 million of taxes that we expect to receive material part of it, around EUR 4 million as a refund, during Q3. On the investment activities, we've invested EUR 2.5 million, mostly in enhancement to our technology. On the financing activities, we can see the repayment of the bond. The repayment of the bond took place in April 6, 2021. This is the same bond that we took in 2018, it enabled us to execute on our M&A initiatives with the acquisitions of Pariplay and BtoBet. We ended the quarter with EUR 19.4 million, of which around EUR 7 million are attributed to players' balances. Looking on the left chart, we can see the strong balance sheet position of Aspire Global. We can see that the current assets are higher than the current liabilities, even after the repayment of the EUR 27.5 million. Of course, the equity, which is very strong and demonstrate our financial position. Looking at our good cost control. If we're looking at the administrative expenses, we can see that in terms of ratio from the revenues, it stayed at the same level of 10%, showing our scalability, taking into consideration that we added quite a lot of headcount between Q2 2020 to Q2 2021. Meaning that we managed to grow it in a scalable manner and not impact our profitability. The distribution expenses went down by almost 3%. This is taking into consideration the synergies following the integration of Pariplay, some efficiency measures that we've implemented, and the economies of scale. Of course, as the company or the group is growing, we can capitalize on its scale. All of those efficiencies were offset by an increase in our marketing activities of Griffon Casino, mainly in the U.K. Overall, as I mentioned, we managed to reduce it by 3%. On the gaming duties and the VAT, we can see that we have an increase of over 1% of total revenues, which is in line with our growth in the regulated markets. To touch a little bit about the sustainability. We had a lot of activities around it during the quarter. First of all, although it was quite some time ago, in April, we released our first sustainability standalone report in which we've elaborated on our four focus areas, which are environment, safe user experience, our people, and safe digital environment. During the quarter, we reached carbon neutrality. It was recognized by the Carbon Footprint standard. We also strengthened our collaboration with educational institutions. We are participating in researches that they are doing, and we benefit from the insights that we are receiving from those educational institutions. Collaborated with GamCare in order to enhance the knowledge and the way that our employees are interacting with the players in order to bring more into mind the responsible gaming that we would like to promote. Back to you, Tsachi. Thank you, Motti. This slide is to summarize the continued revenue and EBITDA of Aspire Global when we are rolling for every quarter the previous 12 months. It shows that even if we have, again, stronger or weaker quarters, at the end, when we are consolidating the growth of Aspire Global, we see constant growth, not only in revenues, but also in EBITDA. We are now counting 12 months back, we can see EUR 188 million in revenues and more than EUR 33 million in EBITDA. This is very strong milestone for Aspire Global in our continuous and the future growth. When we are zooming in on the future, there are some interesting initiatives that we have on our table in order to achieve. First, now that the integration with our sports solution is there, we want to roll out more and more partners into the new sports solution. It will allow us, first, to have a strong product, a better product than we have today. Second, it will allow us also to save of the cost that we used to pay to third parties now will remain in the group. Second thing in related to the sport, as you saw, the investors that are following us, we are taking BtoBet and now certifying its product to one market after the other in Europe in order to be able to sell it to more operators, not only to Aspire Global partners, but also operators outside of our platform, and to make sure that this solution is becoming the preferred solution also in the European market. When we take the share of wallet, as part of the things that Motti presented with our scalability, one of the reasons for us to own more and more products is that we are now able to sell more products to the same partners. It means that if we took X chunk, X percentage from their revenues before, now we are going to have more revenues, more percentage out of their revenues. This is part of the things that we are doing, approaching those portfolio of clients and selling them more and more products to increase our wallet share with them. When we are talking about markets, so it's true that Aspire is active in many markets, and we are regulating our platform and products in Germany and also in the Netherlands. We have very interesting leads and deals in the pipe for those markets. We have two markets that we defined as our long-term strategic markets, and this is the U.S. and Brazil. For them, we are going to do an extra effort, including people on the ground in order to make sure that we will not miss any interesting opportunity in the long term. This is where we are putting our eyes, and the investors that are following us know that we are a very focused company, and we are thinking only and only for the long term of Aspire Global, and this will not change in the near future. We are aiming to be very strong in those two, few of the biggest markets in the world. With that slide, we finish the presentation. I'm handing it back to you, moderator. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now ready to take your questions. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. The first question comes from Russell Pointon from Edison. Please go ahead. Morning, all. I've got a few questions, please. You've been very quick in signing the global platform deals after bringing the companies together. Could you just talk about what the pipeline is like and just talk about the terms of those deals? Are they significantly different than if you just offered those companies the individual products? Second question is, could you just give a bit more background what's happening in B2C? What you've seen there for the last few quarters now is increased deposits and transactions, but fewer players. They're getting good revenue growth coming out of that. Is that the way forward? In Germany, could you just talk a bit more about how the Buy Win product works and what the benefits are to the operators and the players, please? Thanks very much Okay. Thank you very much. In regards to the B2B products that we are selling and how the pipe looks like. If before the acquisitions that we did and the integration that we have with our own newly acquired companies and products like Pariplay and BtoBet, we used to resell some of those products to our partners. When we are reselling, our margins are lower than selling it when it's ours. Even if before we also used to sell more products to different operators, now it's our product. This is one thing. It means that our share will grow, our margins will grow long-term, and this is one element. The second element when we are talking about the pipe, I must say that the branding of Aspire Global, the understanding that we became really a true powerhouse for iGaming operators, we are receiving very interesting leads that three years ago we didn't receive. One of them was what we declared with the Funfair Casino, the biggest land-based in Ireland. There are others, tier 1 operators, that want to grow in the Netherlands or in the newly German markets, and they don't have the capacity to deal with the technology adjustment. Why? Because maybe they are focusing on other markets. This is something that we see a very big interest of the product, because when they come to Aspire Global, they are dealing with one company that can give them everything that they need and to have the speed to market without now having the need to integrate or sign contracts with a lot of providers. This is very interesting development from the B2B side. You asked also about the B2C. Yeah. Karamba is doing amazing. Some of the things are related to an improved ROI and campaigns that the Karamba team is doing. Another is because of the new AspireEngage tool, the CRM tool that we said in the last four months that we were able to develop an amazing CRM tool that will increase the lifetime value of our partners. Not only our partners, but also the B2C player value of their players. We see that it's a combination that connected in this quarter, and not only this quarter, but also previously and probably in the future, that it's a strong optimization on the marketing campaigns together with a very strong CRM tools that enable to receive even more from each and every player. This is the outcome also of the B2C, but not only the B2C. In regards to Germany, yes, the new feature that we developed, the Buy Win. It was interesting not only for Aspire Global, this feature is serving also Aspire Global on the Pariplay product to outside operators and vendors, game suppliers. Think about game suppliers out there, NetEnt or Red Tiger or GameArt, or whatever game content that want to be live in Germany and didn't have the time to adjust their product to the newly taxation and requirements in Germany. Now they can receive it through our Pariplay aggregation. It's a very strong product that we see a lot of traction around it, not only on the Aspire Global product, but also outside. This is in regards to Germany and we have, I hope, also in this newly regulated market. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you again, if you have any comments or questions, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Dear speakers, the floor is yours. So we have- Yeah. Mm-hmm We have some written questions coming in from the webcast. The first few come from Petri, and I start with the first. What's the status of your U.S. operations? How many states and how many operators are live? When do you expect new states go live? Right now we have our license in two states, and we have pending approval in two additional states for our gaming vertical. We are live with one operator, with Rush Street, and we are in the process of the integration together with Amelco and GAN. This is from the business perspective. Of course now with Quincy on the ground, we believe that the deals flow will increase in the coming months. What's the status with German, Dutch, and Brazilian markets? Maybe you answered about the German already. We answered about the German market. In the report, you can see that if there is a decrease in rest of Europe, it comes from German, but very much compensated also from other markets that we are active in the rest of Europe. German of course is an interesting and very good market for the future. Brazil, yes, we have a very interesting lead. We think that Brazil will be regulated in the coming few months to start with sport and probably after to follow with gaming. We are putting our eyes over there, and we want to be really in the forefront of Brazil. In your latest trading update, you stated, "The objective is for the larger brands operating on Aspire Global's platform to have migrated to BtoBet's proprietary sports solution before the end of the year." If you succeed with this goal, what would it mean to your financials? It means that we will talk mainly on 2022. The effect on 2021 will be limited, still exists, but limited. When we are talking about 2022, so one aspect of it is that we will not pay what we are paying now outside, but it will remain in the group because this is a cost saving that we have from owning this product. This is one thing. Second, we believe that because we control the roadmap of this company, of this product, we believe that we will be able to grow in that segment of sport even more than we used to do in the last few years. Those are the two things that I would zoom in 2022. There seems to be a trend that many major operators are either acquiring or developing their own proprietary technology. Is this assessment correct? What does it mean for gaming industry in general and for Aspire in particular? I'm very happy for this question because when people asked us few months ago, how are we going to approach, for example, the U.S. market? We answered, and I will say it in a second. We believe that there are two different approaches. In the U.S. is one approach, and outside of the U.S., it's a different approach. Outside of the U.S., it's what we are familiar with. Yes, big operators have their platform, but not all of them, and they are feeling very confident to be also with third parties. When we are zooming in on the U.S., we know, and Aspire knew it from the first moment, that the big operators, they also declared it, they will control the value chain from their perspective. They will control the gaming platform, they will own it, and also probably the sport. Aspire said, even a few months ago when we entered and started entering the U.S. market, we said that in the U.S. market, Aspire will target not the tier 1. We have several products. With our gaming platform and sport, we will target the tier 2, 3, and 4. This is where we put our eyes. With the games company, with Pariplay, games and games aggregation, we will target everyone, tier 1, tier 2, tier 3. This is the strategy of Aspire Global, and this is how we are going to approach it, and we believe that it will be very much successful. We see the challenges that other companies have when they are dependent only on a few companies. It's clear. Given good performance of the first six months, do you see any reason to raise your guidance of EUR 200 million revenues and EUR 32 million EBITDA for 2021? At the moment, you are well ahead of the pace. My answer to this is that who would have believed beside Aspire Global a year ago or two years ago when we said that this is what we will achieve? A lot of eyes and hesitations were in the market. We are proving, and not for the first time, that we are going to meet it. To answer directly, no, we are not going to do any change right now to the financial targets, and we hope to continue and meet and maybe surprise in more elements in the future. Next question is from Atte. "Congratulations on a great quarter. It feels good to be a shareholder right now. While things are going so well, I would also love to hear from some of the challenges you have faced within the past quarter year, and how do you plan to solve them? It's a good question to show that Aspire is growing, and there is the growth pain, and the growth pain has also required much more recruitment, much more manpower in order to support. If 2two years ago, we had five or 10 open positions around the company. Right now, we have between 30-50 open positions. To manage all those open positions and to make sure that the right personnel is joining to this growing business is one big challenge. This is one thing. Of course, the second one is that when we have more and more products, we want to make sure that once we are integrating everything, it's to the right and very strong matching between the products, and this is something that we are putting more focus on that. It means that if before we rolled out or integrated much faster, now for the first time with our proprietary products, we integrated it in a very thorough way in Q2, and from here it will be much easier for Aspire to continue and roll it out because it's our proprietary solution. The challenge was to conclude the integration, and now it's becoming much more simple. Thanks. The next question comes from Andreas. How many signed deals have Pariplay, respectively BtoBet, that not yet have gone live? If I understood correctly, the question is how many deals Pariplay have from the BtoBet partners. Right now we have two operators that signed. One of them went live and hope that more to come also in the near future. Also from Andreas, can you elaborate more on the U.S. market, for example, your expectations during the second half of 2021 when Pariplay's recently launched deals will go live in the U.S., et cetera? We expect a very slow revenue growth in the U.S. market in the first phase. We believe that once we will be able to consolidate more products and new deals pipe in the U.S. market, that will include not only games and games aggregation product, but also managed services and gaming platform and sport, which is the big portion of Aspire Global revenue. We believe that it will be much more significant, but not in the next few months. We are looking at the U.S. in the eyes of the next two, three, four, five years ahead. We are building it right now. I don't believe that there will be any significant increase in the coming few months. From Pano, how do you see the rollout of own sportsbook for platform customers to affect numbers for full year 2022? We see it from two aspects. One, we believe that the player engagement will be better and the lifetime value will increase. We believe that the sport performance for our operators will be better and will bring more return to our operators. This is in one aspect. Second, again, because we are controlling the roadmap of BtoBet and the sport, some of the deals that we already announced and some that we have in the pipe, they are going to operate in markets that Aspire didn't operate or didn't serve the product until now. We are able to do it mainly because of the availability and flexibility of the sport solution. On one side, increasing revenue from the existing partners, and from the other side, we expect BtoBet to grow in more markets that right now Aspire don't have revenues from. Thanks. The last question at the moment from Mikael. Now that you are sure of reaching the financial goals for 2021, are you planning to introduce new financial goals for the next three to five years? It's too early for us to talk about it. We want to make sure that the year is ending as it should. We have a lot of things to focus on right now. Of course, internally we have those targets and we know where we will achieve in the next two, three years, but we will take it with the board and to see what will be their approach into the future with the potential new financial targets. There are no more written questions from the webcast, and there seems to be no more from the teleconference either. I just hand it back to you for some closing remarks. Thank you very much again to you and your team, and also thanking Motti and Aspire Global employees. It was a great quarter and thank you for the audience for listening and hope to see you in Q3. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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