Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Aspire Global Audiocast with Teleconference, Q4 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, Annika, and also to Financial Hearings. Thank you, audience, for joining. I would like to take the opportunity before we move forward in summarizing Q4 in 2021 to also thank to the board of Aspire Global. Usually, in those quarterly reports, I'm talking about the employees of Aspire Global and appreciating their work, but I think that I want to also in this opportunity to thank also to the board of Aspire, the Chairman Carl Klingberg, and the board members Fredrik Burvall, Aharon Aran, and Barak Matalon. I think that what they did in the last few years with leading us to a fantastic year. Of course, a very busy period where we did three transactions in the last six months and seven transactions in the last two years. When I say sevem transactions, I mean from the beginning with the IPO, then the bond, and then acquiring Pariplay, BtoBet, the bingo company, END 2 EN D with partially owning the sale of Karamba and the latest transaction that we are in the middle of, the bid that we received from NeoGames. I want to thank them for providing us and the management the confidence, the flexibility, and of course, the experience to deliver upon our strategy. For now, I will move to the second slide, where I will again show a little bit about. I will explain briefly about Aspire Global, which is the powerhouse for iGaming operators. This is what we wanted to be, and I believe that we achieved it, where we have a complete proprietary offering, including gaming platform or called also PAM, player account management, managed services, sports platform, game aggregation, game studio, and bingo. We are offering it to 170, even more partners around the world, and you can see just some examples of the names that are already our clients and partners, and they are selling our products in four continents around the world. This is what we aim to be, to provide them with the ability to sell their players and to improve their results through our proprietary products. We can move on to the slide three. When we summarize 2021, we can see that, you know, three years ago, we provided guidance and also long-term targets for 2021, and the targets were EUR 200 million in revenue and EUR 32 million in EBITDA. We can see the yearly performance from 2018 to 2021. We met those financial targets with EUR 213 million for the full year 2021, and in EBITDA, EUR 35 million for the full year of EBITDA. It's representing around 30% increase year-over-year. I must say that, and it will be also shown in the remaining of the presentation, that there are two things that happened in the quarter. One of them is the divestment of our B2C. We sold our B2C, but it was still part of our full NGR accounting in Q4 for only two months, and one month, we only calculated it as the royalties, as a client, as a B2B partner of Aspire. This is one thing. The second is that also in Q4, we shut down the Netherlands market. We didn't receive anything from the Netherlands market in Q4, and we did have a few million in the previous quarters. Even if taking this into consideration, we met our full year target, and this is a great achievement, and we can see here year-over-year of Aspire Global. We can move on to the next slide. We can't do this presentation without giving again a repetitive verbal explanation of the bid received by NeoGames a month ago, exactly a month ago. The bid was announced in January 17th. By the way, I will read from those two or three slides directly from the slides from the content because of legal issues, legal perspective, of course, in order to make sure that everything is in order. The offer to acquire Aspire Global shares for 50% in cash consideration of SEK 111 per share, and 50% in NeoGames share, which means that EUR 0.32 per share of Aspire Global. This is the calculation. Just a minute. The founding shareholder made it possible for the minority shareholders to have the flexibility to choose one of the two options below: cash consideration of SEK 111 or a mix of cash and shares. This is something that we also appreciate, the founding shareholders, where they allowed the minority shareholders to take the opportunity to enjoy the SEK 111 for the full consideration. We can move on for the next slide. Thank you. The opportunity is to create a global leader across all verticals, including iLottery, iGaming, and online sports betting. The expected new structure will have two business divisions across iGaming and iLottery. We are expecting revenue synergies. One is that the global reach by using each company's strength across regions and markets, and the second to increase the wallet share through a wider proprietary product offering. We can move another slide, please. Those are the timeline for the transaction. We received the announcement letter in January 17. Until April 4, there will be the publication of the offer document. From April 5th to May 3rd, there will be the acceptance period. Of course, in May 17, there will be the commencement of the settlement. Let's move on to the next slide. When we are talking about the financial highlights of Q4, I will zoom in only on a few KPIs. There are few KPIs overview, but it is important again to mention that in this quarter we had many things that can make maybe the understanding of the numbers a little bit more challenging. By the way, also in the report, we made it clear what are the numbers of the quarter, but also what are the numbers when we are taking into consideration the pro forma of the Karamba sale. When I'm saying pro forma, we're talking about taking into consideration that the Karamba sale and it's paying Aspire Global royalties throughout the period. We did a simulation in Q4 and also for the last 12 months to make sure that we also understand how the results of Karamba affected Aspire Global if it was already for 12 months. I will show here three different slides. The first one is what you see in the report with the real numbers, taking into consideration that Karamba was only as a partner for one month, for December. We can see that the revenue increased for 15% up to EUR 50.1 million. The B2B revenues was EUR 41.7 million with a 26% increase year-over-year. We are zooming in on the B2B EBITDA, it was 24% increase year-over-year, reaching EUR 7.7 million. Also, in the earnings per share, we did the two calculations. One, what was the real earnings per share, which is EUR 1.37. Of course, this is due to the sale of Karamba and the receiving of the cash from its sale. Also when we are excluding this exceptional item, we see that we ended it with EUR 0.09, and it's an increase of almost 30% year-over-year. We can move to the next slide. This is a slide where we wanted to explain how the Q4 2021 was versus the Q4 2020 only on a pro forma results, meaning that Karamba was, let's say, as a partner for the full quarter comparing to 2020. We can see that the revenue increased by 24% quarter year-over-year, reaching EUR 42 million. The EBITDA was EUR 7.7 million, the EBITDA margin was 18.1%, and the EBIT also grew 25% year-over-year compared to last year, reaching EUR 5.3 million. We can move to the next slide. We did also this pro forma presentation for the full year of 2021 in order to see how was it compared to 2020, where we are taking everything as a pro forma. The full year of 2021 would have ended as in EUR 166 million, representing a 32% increase year-over-year. The EBITDA reaching EUR 30.4 million, which is 45% increase year-over-year, and the EBITDA margin 18.2%, also year higher from the 16.6%. The EBIT grew almost 50%, reaching EUR 21.6 million. We can see that the performance of Aspire Global as a full B2B business, taking already into consideration the Karamba sale as one of our partners, paying only royalties to Aspire Global. We will not count the full NGR of Karamba, showing great results for 2021 and of course specifically for Q4. We can move to the next slide. Some of the key business wins that we had during the quarter and also a little bit after the end of the quarter. We just put a few examples of the different verticals and business lines that we have. We see that in games, we have won a deal with BetMGM in the U.S. We also signed Holland Casino, the biggest operator in the Netherlands, and also went live with Play Alberta, the only operator, national operator in the Alberta region, where we are one of the few content providers supplying them our content. This is on the games. On the sport vertical, we won this deal with FanDuel together with Globo in Brazil, so giving us the ability to lead the market when it becomes regulated very soon. We won the deal with Bet24 in Poland to provide them with our sport. Another two deals recently announced for the platform and PAM and more services. One of them is BoyleSports. It's a Tier 1 operator from Ireland and the U.K., taking our products to the Netherlands. With ITSP, a deal we announced two days ago, where we will supply one of the strongest German operators with our technology to go into the German regulated market, so they will take from us the platform and the sport. All in all, very successful quarter and of course, very strong projection from those deals in the future. Please move to the next slide. This slide is again to show what that means executing our strategy and to provide endless iGaming opportunities to operators around the world. If you remember, we started with the core of having the gaming platform and managed services. Then we added some value-added acquisitions by buying Pariplay and BtoBet, so adding gap, game aggregation, game studio, sport platform and bingo. It's not a secret that we are on the hunt to acquire live dealer company. What we can see that by each and every acquisition, we are succeeding of taking more of the wallet share of the operator. It means not only more income from every GGR that the operator is doing, it means also more stickiness to our product, making sure that he will take us and have us as a strategic partner in his vision and plans. This is our strategy. We are happy to execute it year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter. Please, move to the next slide. Slide 12 is showing the consolidated performance comparing quarter-over-quarter. We can see that Q4 ended with EUR 50.9 million in revenues. When we will take the revenues only on a like-for-like basis, meaning the full B2C NGR for December of Karamba, and when excluding the Netherlands income in Q3 2021, because we want to make sure how really Q4 ended without those outliers. Q4 was even higher than Q3. This is just to show the momentum that Aspire Global is in, and it's the same with the EBITDA, where we ended with EUR 7.5 million. Over a year, of course, that it's without the Netherlands. It was a market where we earned revenues and profit. Also in Q4 before we handed over the B2C to Esports Technologies, we invested a lot in marketing, and this, of course, affected the B2C profitability, and this is something that we did in order to make sure that Esports Technologies will receive Karamba in a very good growing revenue momentum. We can move on to the next slide. This is the same slide as before, where we are doing the pro forma performance of Aspire Global, meaning taking into effect that Karamba was paying royalties only. We didn't count its NGR for the full quarters before, just the royalties. This is the results quarter over quarter, ending Q4 with EUR 42.6 million, and also here take into consideration that in Q3, and of course also before, we were removing the Netherlands market because we shut it down fully in Q4, so Q4 was overall higher than Q3 and of course also from the previous quarters. This goes the same with the EBITDA that ended with EUR 7.7 million. Also here, if we were removing the Netherlands profit from previous quarters, so Q4 ended higher than that. Let's move to the next slide, please. Let's zoom in for the gaming platform. Also in the gaming platform, we ended up with almost EUR 30 million, with EUR 5 million in profitability. Also here, the Netherlands market was shut down for the full quarter. You can imagine that Q4 was also higher than Q3, and of course also with the profitability. All in all, we are very happy with the strong quarter that the gaming platform and the managed services vertical had. Let's move on to the next slide. Some major enhancement that we did to our core platform. I will not go over all of it. I will just mention two which providing us an advantage over the market. One of them is the dynamic payment gateway, where we are able. It's one of the unique abilities in the market. We are able to add each and every payment method for our operators in every regulated market without development resources. It's a great advantage that will provide our operators to have a much higher time to market when they choose to work in a regulated market. Of course, we completed the sports migration to BtoBet, which means that we were able, in a very short time, to move from our third-party supplier that we had before into BtoBet in a very short time. I think it was around five or six months we succeeded completing all the migration, and it's a great achievement. Let's move to the next slide. Sports segment. Also here, when we zoom in on the sports segment, we see that the revenue is growing quarter-over-quarter and reaching to EUR 3.5 million in Q4. The EBITDA was EUR 500,000, but this is due to one specific month, October, where the players' favorite results were strong in this month. This is something that we saw recovering very strongly in November and December. One of the most important KPI to measure the success of the sports is, of course, the betting turnover, and it was a record high quarter for BtoBet and for the Aspire Global group. We can move on to the next slide. Some major progress for BtoBet. We added Oddin, which is a strong Esports feed, and of course, provide us with the added value for Esports companies to choose the Aspire Global product. We added some horse racing, also a new product for our operators, and the highlight is the deal with FanDuel in Brazil. We can move to the next slide. Aggregation and games, which is Pariplay. Also here we see a strong momentum reaching all-time high quarter with EUR 8.3 million and EUR 2.2 million in EBITDA. Really high double-digit growth year-over-year, and we're glad to see the momentum that Pariplay is in, signing more and more deals. We can move to the next slide, and we can see just some examples of it with Rush Street, BetMGM, and Holland Casino. What we did more is creating the new in-house studio of Wizard Games, where we believe that if this will be successful, and we see good signs of it, will improve the profitability and the margin of Aspire Global. Let's move to the next slide. The bingo segment. It's true that we are not owning majority in the bingo segment. We only invested minority, 25%, but we still want to share one slide of the performance and the development of END 2 END of the bingo company, which is very nice to see that already in Q4, there was the integration with Pariplay. We are going to sell the bingo product through the aggregation and the distribution of Pariplay. They received the U.K. license to supply bingo in England and one important agreement with Tenlot Company and operator to launch the bingo retail in El Salvador. There are some more projects in progress, and one highlight is that we are planning to integrate the bingo product to the Aspire Global platform in Q3, and by that time, all the operators that will enjoy the Aspire Global PAM will be able to enjoy also from another very strong bingo product. Let's move to the next slide. Moti, if you can, go over the financial results. Sure. Thank you, Tsachi. Here we can share with you on the right chart. You can see the progress of the cash position of the company. We can see that in Q4, we generated EUR 2 m illion from operating activity derived from the strong business results, however, offset by increase in trade receivables and the decrease in the trade payables, which affected the cash from the operating activities. We can see money flowing in from the divestment of the B2C, EUR 50 million net of transaction costs. In addition to that, we had continuous investment in our proprietary platform, and also the last secured payment of EUR 5 million to the shareholders of BtoBet as part of the transaction. This quarter led us to a cash balance of EUR 63.7 million, of which EUR 4.2 million was related to player balances. If we're looking at the left chart, we can see the strong position of the company if it comes to cash and current assets compared to current liabilities. Also we can see the very strong equity position of almost 2/3 of the company's balance sheet. When it comes to expenses and cost control, we continued our good cost control. When we're looking at the administrative expenses, we can see that we slightly lowered the absolute amount and also decreased the percentage of the administrative expenses out of the revenues, definitely showing our ability to monitor and to scale up and yet continue and keep the expenses low. On the distribution expenses, we are higher by approximately 1%, mainly as Tsachi indicated before, a lot of investment in marketing acquisition costs of the B2C in order to hand over the B2C, the Karamba and the other brands at the best position and best momentum that we can to Esports Technologies. Apart from that, in Q4, we had partial synergies from the rollout of BtoBet into our brands operating on our platform. Of course, when it comes to VAT and gaming duties, we see a very high increase, almost doubling the percentage out of revenues due to the taxes in the German market, but we managed to mitigate it through the bonus buy feature. A little bit about the sustainability. We are doing a lot of activities just to name the four focus areas of the company. It is the environment, safe user experience, people, and safe digital environment. What we're doing is monitoring and making sure that we're making progress together with the sustainability committee of the company on a quarterly basis, setting targets and making sure that we are executing on it. Aspire Global in Q4 was an official supporter of the Safer Gambling Week in the U.K. In addition to that, we received again recognition from the Carbon Footprint Standard that Aspire is a carbon neutral company by measuring and reducing the emissions that we produce. Also, of course, a lot of activities that we are doing in our local communities, joining, and one of the examples that we have here is volunteering in a dog shelter. This is something that is very important for us, and I think that apart from those activities, there were a lot of participations in various forums led by our Sustainability Manager, Liz Betesh. Handing back to you, Tsachi. Thank you, Moti. This is the last slide to really summarize the amazing record year of 2021, where we met our long-term targets very successfully, higher than that. We worked on three strategic transactions, which is the sale of Karamba, the acquisition of minority shares in END 2 END, the bingo company, and of course, we are in the middle of the bid received by NeoGames, and we have established Aspire Global as a true iGaming powerhouse with proprietary product to control the value chain, and of course, to assist any operator in any jurisdiction any time. We look forward for an interesting future for Aspire Global. Back to you, Annika. 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 the line of Hjalmar Ahlberg from Redeye. Please go ahead. Thank you. Maybe first question on the difference within the report that B2B revenue and pro forma, you explained this quite well, I think. Just wondered if you could maybe add some info how we should view this per B2B segment. I mean, the difference of around EUR 1 million roughly. Would that have been evenly split between core games and sports, or would it be more to the core business? Motti, can you take it? Yeah. The difference that was mentioned and Tsachi indicated during the presentation is that for the divested B2C we are going to account for revenues not based on full NGR but it will be only based on the net royalties coming from the commercial terms of this transaction. This is the difference. This quarter was a bit of a mix. Two months were part of the NGR because the B2C was still owned by Aspire Global. Following the divestment, we moved into a net royalties model with the divested B2C. Okay. Got it. Regarding the BtoBet sportsbook, you saw very strong quarter-over-quarter growth here, despite a slightly lower than the normal margin, as I understand. Could you say what the revenue would have been with a normal margin, or some indication if it would be a big difference on the top line there? also in the top line and also in the profitability, it should have been higher. Let's say that if we're talking about mainly October, as one month, one-third out of the three, and we did receive some recovery in November and December. You can appreciate a little bit higher, but not much higher revenues and profit, but higher than what we see. Got it. As you have mentioned during the presentation, you have signed several new deals for you. Is there any specific market or a segment where you see most potential if you look at the recent signings? It's a very good question. The fact that the three business lines are being managed almost independently, we are trying to keep it up faster in the market and not to slow down each one of the business lines. Each one of them have a very interesting projections because think about BtoBet, that before they had their focus in Africa and Latin America. Now because of the certifications that we did in Europe, so they have all new deals pipeline in Europe as well, not only in Africa and Latin America. Later on it will be also in the U.S. market because we have big plans for the North American market to certify the product and to roll out there. Think about Pariplay if I'm moving to the games. We don't have really any need to replace content in any operator that we are approaching. Our world of opportunities for the games is endless, almost endless. Pariplay is pushing hard with the addition of a very strong salesman that we added recently. One of them is dedicated for the U.S. market. We also added Enrico, the chief commercial officer who came to us from being in the same role in NetEnt. Of course, we have Andrew that is doing an amazing job for Pariplay. Everything is being managed by Adrian. There is a whole new pipeline, strong pipeline, week after week, a lot of deals. The fact that Aspire Global with the PAM have certified it to many regulated markets, and this is where the focus is, we are not taking our attention to the black market where we can do easy money. I'm saying it out loud. We are not there. Because we are focusing on the regulated markets, more and more Tier 1, Tier 2 operators want to join the Aspire gaming platform. Each one of them in its own pace have great projection to the future. Thanks. A question on the new bingo vertical here. Can you say anything about the kind of market growth in this segment? Is your aim here to kind of take market share to grow, or how should we view that? In which market? Can you say again? The bingo market. The bingo is not a huge market, but it's a complementary product for operators that want to acquire players with a little bit less expensive marketing per player. This is more to complete the product to acquire players, bringing them into the system and then cross-sell them to the other more profitable products like the sport and the casino. It, or as its own, it's not a big market, but it's an important market, especially in regulated market where you want to sell to any specific player more than one product. This is where the strength and the strategic approach to acquire the bingo. Thanks. Maybe last question. You mentioned a lot of interesting synergies with the NeoGames combination. Are there any of these potential synergies we could see as low-hanging fruits or easy synergies? There are, but I cannot share more than what I have. I cannot share more than what we discussed. There are a lot of things. Some of them are obvious and some of them will become available. But those are things that the time will tell how we will execute on that. Okay. That's all from me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a, ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Once again, it's zero one on your telephone keypad for a question. There are currently no further questions. I'll hand the conference back to you, speaker. Yes. We have one question then from the message board on the website. The question is: How will the NeoGames deal support Aspire Global in the U.S.? Is there a clear benefit from their reputation, experience, and relationship when applying for licenses and signing up operators? Thank you. Also, it's a very good question because we know that the bar to enter to the U.S. market is very high. Not only product-wise, to localize the product and to make sure that it's matching the local U.S. operators, but also compliance-wise, to move on the due diligence and to make sure that there is the right approach, also legally and of course, compliance-wise. The bar is high. The fact that we already entered with Pariplay as the spearhead of Aspire Global two years ago, it means that everything that we will want to roll out in addition, we already been through this path, so we understand the timeline, we understand who we need to speak with, how we need to connect. Of course, business-wise, when we are having good business relationship with an operator, what will stop us from selling more products t o him right after we are rolling in the sport and the managed services and the gaming platform? It will help us to shorten our time to market in the U.S. market into the future, and this is why it's very important for us to have Pariplay continuing and signing a lot of deals in the U.S. market. I think already we have five or six and we have more in the pipe. Thank you. There are more questions online. Okay. Thank you very much everyo ne for joining this call. Thank you for the questions and allowing us to elaborate a little bit more on the quarter and how it ended together with the sale of Karamba and the other adjustment. Wishing you a great day and week. Thank you very much.
Loading workspace