Good morning, everyone, and welcome to a short call where we aim to present our latest acquisition of Connex in Austria, and give you a chance to get to know the company a little bit and also the CEO, Christian Haslinger. This call will be recorded. Also please, if you have any questions, put them in the chat and we'll pick them up and answer them in the end of the call. Today in this call, I am Erik Grohman, the CEO of Awardit, together with Niklas Lundqvist, who is the head of M&A, also the founder of Awardit, and also on the call we have Christian Haslinger, who is the CEO of Connex. I will allow Christian some time to introduce himself, and of course the company a bit later on in the call. First of all, most of you, I guess know about Awardit, but I just wanted to capture in brief who we are. Before the acquisition of Connex, obviously we are the market leader in loyalty programs and gift card solutions in the Nordics. We are a one-stop shop that has a broad offering to cater for all needs that our clients may have. We offer everything from strategies, concepts to customer support and shipment of products in our programs. In our proprietary platforms, we aim to give easy access to our services with turnkey solutions, both within loyalty programs and gift cards. Today, before the acquisition of Connex, we reach more than 15 million consumers in the Nordics with more than 250 programs. We have had strong organic growth for the past years, we show strong profitability, we show that through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions. Before the acquisition of Connex, we were 133 employees based mainly in our offices in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Copenhagen and Hamburg. This position of being the market leader and being a one-stop shop that can cater for all the clients' needs, we have achieved through acquisitions. After the IPO around five years ago, we have made 10 acquisitions before now, signing with Connex. Our latest acquisition before Connex was the first one outside of the Nordics, that was the German acquisition, a business called Prämie Direkt. We believe there is a great fit between Prämie Direkt and now Connex. The history shows we have been successful in growing organically with our existing business, but also combining with acquisitions, joining the business and growing together, with new companies as well. With that, I would like to hand over to Niklas to talk a little bit more about the acquisition of Connex. Thanks, Erik. This is actually, you know, from my personal perspective, and I think from Awardit's general perspective, this is definitely one of our top three most interesting acquisitions so far. It is actually very similar to the acquisition of Crossroads, from a structural perspective, which we made in 2018. It's been a very long process. We made the first contact with the owners of Connex almost two years ago now, and it takes a long time to get to know each other. We've seen during the whole process quite some market volatility and geopolitical issues, the war in Ukraine, some issues that also have during the process prompted us to recalibrate our valuation principles, thus prolonging the acquisition process. There has also been some other issues along the road, you know, coming to the target itself. They have merged two companies to change their ERP system, and this has prolonged the due diligence process. We finally managed to close this, and it's a fantastic deal for both parties. Connex itself, it's a true one-stop shop when it comes to loyalty programs and gift card programs, and thus is very similar to Awardit, actually. It's one of few businesses here in Europe that are, you know, doing the full- scale programs both within loyalty and gift cards. The difference is that Connex started out in the hotel voucher and gift card business and then moved into the loyalty program business, while Awardit started out in the loyalty program business and then moved into gift cards. We're obviously seeing really great synergies here when it comes to Connex. I started out with comparing the acquisition of Connex with the acquisition Awardit made of Crossroads in 2018. What I'm seeing here is that we made when we bought Prämie Direkt at the end of 2021, Prämie is a company specialized in loyalty program fulfillment, et cetera. They're not doing full- scale loyalty programs. Thus, we're seeing that Connex is here a perfect fit with Prämie and the rest of the group. We're seeing possibilities here to populate the loyalty programs and other programs and the programs run by Connex with goods and services from supplied by Prämie Direkt. We're obviously seeing possibilities to take Connex products and services to the Nordic region. We're definitely gaining the strength to sign on and deliver full- scale loyalty programs to multinational companies in the whole of Europe and possibly the whole of the world going forward. Great synergies going forward. Obviously Connex has a really great team, a really strong sales team also, which believe will be able to boost our growth going forward. Looking at the deal itself, we paid a purchase price here of EUR 10.7 million. EUR 7.2 million was in cash, EUR 3.5 million in Awardit shares through a directed issue. There's no earn-out, so it's a clean deal. Obviously, if we wanted, we could have paid everything in cash here, but it was important for both parties, both the sellers and Awardit as buyer to be vested in the future and get the former owners of Connex on board for the future trip going forward. In such a case, paying part in shares is the way to go. Apart from that, obviously the Awardit shares the most valuable asset we have, and we almost want to avoid the dilution for our shareholders. We have a so-called locked box mechanism in the deal, which means that we actually acquired Connex on basis of the balance sheet per the 31st of May. Essentially, you know, to put it short, this means that after May, there cannot be any profit distribution, et cetera. No adjustments are made. Any profits that are generated after May are essentially will end up on Awardit's group's balance sheet. At the time of the end of May, there was approximately EUR 10.7 million in cash and cash- like assets in Connex. No interest- bearing debt. On the other hand, there was obviously working capital related debt such as gift cards, gift card liabilities and similar. Looking at the forecast for 2022, obviously 2022 is already over, but we're working hard, or Connex is working hard to close the year and do their accounts. But we expect their EUR 15.6 million in turnover and EBIT result of approximately EUR 1.4 million at least. In the purchase agreement, we actually have a guarantee clause with respect to the EBIT forecast. We will be doing something a little bit differently here than we've done historically, is that we aim to provide a pro forma group financial statement as soon as possible after we're done with the closing balance sheet and the purchase price allocation. This will probably be around the first quarter report at the latest, but probably around there sometime. This is in order to make it easier for our investors to do their analysis of this acquisition. Apart from that, if we're looking at our M&A priorities going forward, we are still very interested in the DACH region. It's a high priority to find new potential acquisitions there. We obviously have a list of what we want to do, hopefully we'll be able to execute on that list. We don't rule out that we'll be doing further acquisitions in the Nordics. It can be private label concepts, it can be niche companies, within the loyalty and gift card sectors up here. We obviously will also remain open to possibilities that may surface in other parts of Europe. We remain active in the sector, and we will keep growing the companies through acquisitions and through organic growth. Yeah. Great. Thank you, Niklas. Thanks. Again, any questions you might have, please put them in the chat and we will pick them up in the end of the call. With that, I will give the microphone to Christian, who is with us from Austria. Hi Christian. Well, Christian. Not sure if you can hear me, Christian. We cannot hear you. Yeah. Sorry, now I can do it. It was deactivated for me. Sorry about that. Somebody made it possible. All right. The microphone, the floor is yours, Christian. Okay. Officially, welcome to the group. Okay. Thank you, Erik and Niklas, hello, everyone. Thank you for giving me the opportunity today to present myself and Connex in front of this audience. Let's start a bit about myself. My name is Christian Haslinger. I'm the CEO of Connex. I'm part of the company since 2017, and I have previous experience from Ernst & Young Advisory. I studied actually business informatics, so a very technology-driven university degree. Had some experience, as I said, with IT advisory at Ernst & Young, and then changed to Connex in 2017. I have a very strong sales and technical background. Basically I'm driving sales at Connex and also have through my studies and my previous experiences, strong technical background, which I think is a wonderful combination. All right, regarding Connex, I don't know if I can change the slides, or Erik, you can do it, to be honest. Thank you. Yeah, Connex was established in 1986 and was always focused on sales promotions, customer retention, and employee motivation. Basically, we have products and systems that cater those fields and basically those products and services and systems are ranging from voucher-based solutions to loyalty programs delivered in full scale and yeah, in full service. We have a very strong market presence in the German-speaking countries, so Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. We also have a very good and growing impact into most of the CEE countries, so for example, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, et cetera, and through partners also in the UK. We always had a very distinct focus on B2B clients. We're basically covering all major industries and brands. I would say for example, especially in the automotive industry, for example, in Germany, basically every large brand is a customer of Connex in the voucher business. Yeah. As I said, basically we're covering all major industries via voucher solutions and also loyalty programs. On the other hand side, we have a very strong B2C market position for packed travel gift products, especially in retail in Germany and Austria, but in addition also via corporations, for example, with Jochen Schweizer and mydays in Germany, who are especially in e-commerce and retail, a very strong gift product provider in Germany and Austria. Exactly. Let's just change. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Basically, as I said, we're focusing on two product or business areas. The one hand side are gift cards and rewards and incentive products. There we are really focusing on voucher-based solutions. We have a very unique product in the hotel and travel voucher section. It's a private label brand and product. And then thus we are able to have a very high margin there, gross margin. On the other hand side, we can also deliver restaurant and experience vouchers in Austria and partly in Germany. We can deliver multi-select reward vouchers like, I think also Prämie Direkt and Awardit can do. A lso we can deliver gift cards and multi-store gift cards, pretty similar to what Awardit can do, with the Zupergift in the Nordics or is doing with Zupergift in Nordics. We are offering to clients in Austria and Germany, mainly B2B. And also, of course, we have a lot of direct cooperations with renowned retail brands like Amazon, Zalando, et cetera. And we are reselling those gift cards in, within loyalty programs, et cetera. On the other side, we have, we are running around 30-plus loyalty programs and systems for our clients. We deliver those systems completely in-house, so from conception strategy to implementation to operations and optimization in the end. Everything is done within Connex and in-house and in full service for our clients. We do that on a white label basis. Basically, I think it's the same as Awardit is doing most of the times in the Nordics. This is, yeah, I think a very strong synergies that we have in this regard. Yeah, as I said, I think especially in combination with these voucher-based solutions that we have, we have a very unique capability to onboard new clients as we have a very adaptable business model in that regard. We are quite flexible on where we can earn money in those programs. On the other side, we have programs now running, I would say almost all over Europe. We have programs that are running in the Netherlands, in Poland, in the UK, et cetera. Of course, there's a strong focus on Germany and Austria and Switzerland, but we have a growing impact with some of the programs also throughout Europe. Exactly. Just as a reference, the revenue distribution between those two business units is roughly half and half, with a bit more revenue coming in from the voucher-based solutions. Okay. As I said, we have a very strong partner ecosystem, so this is mainly because of our voucher solutions. We have around 1,400 individually contracted hotel partners across Central and Eastern Europe. Thus we can offer very unique voucher solutions in that regard. It's, as I said, I think it's a very high-margin product that enables us to have a strong sales team, a strong organization in the end. We're currently adding 400+ hotel partners in Western Europe through a cooperation. Basically we can then produce or offer products to our clients that cover the whole of Europe and can be used by through the whole of Europe in the voucher business. We also have, as mentioned before, direct cooperations with retail brands like Amazon, Zalando, MediaMarkt, et cetera, that we resell within our programs. On the other hand side, we can offer thousands of high-quality rewards. As I think Erik mentioned before, we don't own a warehouse right now, so this is a very good synergy with Prämie Direkt in Germany. Currently we are doing this via drop shipping cooperations and partners. Our customer base in terms of gift card reward business, it's a huge number. If we look into our customer base, we're currently serving around 1,500 B2B clients in Europe and counting. Of course, that number changes all the time. This speaks for that we are able to really offer our voucher-based solutions as a first step when getting into contact with our potential clients. It historically has always been a very good chance to first sell vouchers to our clients and then continue talking to them and adding loyalty programs at the later stage, basically. It's for us, it's really a perfect synergy in terms of sales. We also have currently around 20 B2C partnerships with retailers and retail chains where we offer our packaged gift travel products, gift boxes and where they are on display. We are, as I said, the main supplier of packaged travel products for the Jochen Schweizer mydays Group in Germany. As you can see here on the right-hand side, we really have the who is who on in terms of large brands as our clients in Germany and Austria and the CEE. In the loyalty programs and systems, as I said, we are currently operating more than 30 loyalty programs, mainly in the German-speaking areas, but also in the meantime, internationally. We have a few of those programs like, for example, Gutenberg or Würth or ZF, they are actually running in multiple international countries within Europe. For example, Netherlands, UK, Poland, et cetera. We have more than 3 million members right now in our programs, we have a very strong focus and strategic focus on B2B programs, with a few large B2C programs on top. Those are namely card complete. It's like a Visa and Mastercard issuer, credit card issuer in Austria, and Allianz Germany. Those are both two large B2C programs. We experienced quite a good organic growth trajectory in the last years, directly organic, but also via partnerships, where we can onboard new programs. Finally, just to give you a bit of an idea about the Connex team. We currently have around 100 employees in total, with a very strong sales focus. As you can see, we employ around 25 people in sales. We have also some active independent sales representatives, but actually also the partnership management is some kind of sales. Basically we have around 35 people in sales right now. On the other hand side, we have a very clear focus, of course, on IT and R&D. We are currently employing around 15 people in that regard. Maybe a word to those two gentlemen on the right-hand side. The one is my father, Ernst Haslinger. He was one of the founders of Connex, and he is currently operating as the head of strategic new business. He has, of course, a very strong background in customer loyalty, in sales promotions, in a wide range of industries, where he has gained a lot of know-how through the years. He's serving us to really enable us, getting to employ new systems, new programs, and having a strong market focus. Georg Maier, he's a former co-owner of Connex, and he's the head of retail and B2C. Georg is, through his roots, I would say he has a very, very strong ties into the retail landscape. He has a profound knowledge there, a lot of connections, I think it goes a long way to connect also the businesses of Awardit and Connex in terms of retail and gift cards in the future. All right. I think that was it. Thank you for your attention. I hope I could give you at least a short glimpse into what Connex and is doing or has been doing in the past. Yeah, really looking forward to all the things coming and the really good synergies that we see in the new formed group. Thank you. Thank you very much, Christian, for that. As I said before, please, if you have any questions, put them in the chat, and we will try to pull them from there. Let us have a look. First of all, the first one, congratulations on what seems to be a great acquisition. If Europe enters into a recession, what are the biggest risks for Connex? Well, thank you. Christian, maybe you want to have a short one on that. Yeah. I think it's a pretty, it's a bit of a tough question to answer. I mean, if Europe enters into a recession, I think no company in the end can really, you know, avoid having some impact there. In terms of biggest risks, I don't really see some specific risks in that we are affected mainly. Because usually, or historically, I can tell you that, if there's been, a recession or if there's been a tough market conditions, Connex usually was performing actually quite well or even better than in, I would say, normal years. Because, you know, companies are then always struggling to find good offers in terms of or interesting products that they can use in terms of customer retention and keeping their customers or employees motivated and on board. To be honest, usually when we see a recession coming, or let's say a stagnation in the market, we were usually able to leverage that actually to a degree and profit from that to a degree. I don't really see a risk there for us right now. Let me also add that that's also our point of view and our experience that, you know, a downturn in the economy has actually boosted our business historically. You know, it makes the need for loyalty and focus on existing customer becomes greater for companies rather than mass marketing, et cetera. Exactly. I can only... As I said, from historic perspective, this was always the case usually. Great. Thank you. I hope that answers the question. The next one is, why is the Connex gross margin so high? What has been the organic growth for Connex in the last years? What was the past merger at Connex? Does Christian have other acquisition targets in the DACH region? Maybe on the gross margin side, Christian, if you want to sort of mention how that is structured. Yes. The, this high gross margin, of course, is to a degree from our voucher business. As I said, we are running a private label voucher solution here in the hotel market, and we have a very unique concept behind that, behind that voucher solution. Basically, we are able to procure hotel inventory to a very, very good price. This is why we have this perfect or very high gross margin in the end. On the other hand, also in the loyalty business, we have a very good gross margin right now, which is mainly because we don't have any warehousing costs, nothing like that. Basically, we are, yeah, able to deliver those things with a, with a good gross margin in the end. Yes, thanks. On the organic growth, maybe you just want to sort of, mention, the development over the past years, roughly. Exactly. Roughly saying, Connex has always been growing quite, I would say steadily and well, in terms of a family-owned business, I would say. Of course, the coronavirus impacted Connex a bit because of the... As I said, within the voucher business, we are very much focused on travel and hotel, hotels, hotel vouchers. Of course, this affected us to a degree. But, since the since corona has, you know, vanished a bit to a degree, at least from public perspective, we returned to a good growth. Again, I think steady growth going forward. I think, especially with the synergies that we have within the group, we are actually able to have a better or even better organic growth in the future. Yes. Thank you. That was a related question to that as well. I think you answered most of that actually already. Then there was the question about the past merger at Connex. What was the past merger at Connex? I think this. Yeah. ... probably to what you mentioned before in the call. In, in summer, we did a merger between two Connex companies, basically. It was mainly done to, you know, reduce complexity within the, within the c ompany. It wasn't really an external merger or something. It was an internal one for organizational purposes. Thank you. The last question, there was, around d oes Christian have other acquisition targets in the DACH region? I believe the answer is that we are, jointly, obviously looking at how to, progress in the region and, looking at potential acquisition targets to complement the business moving forward as well. That is a joint effort, from now on. Yeah. Obviously, I mean, Christian, Ernst, Jörg, they all have fantastic networks in their region. Same goes for when it comes to our German CEO, Jörg. We're doing our, obviously our best to leverage these connections, et cetera, to find suitable partners and more business and more acquisitions. Yes. Okay. Thank you. I don't have any other questions in the chat at this stage. If there are no further questions, I mean, I will, as I said, the call has been recorded. It will be made available on our site, also the presentation. There you can obviously details. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions related to the Connex acquisition or related to the business in general. With that, I will close the call. Thanks very much, Christian, for participating, presenting yourself and the business. Thanks, Niklas. Thank you for having me. Yes, thanks. I hope to see most of you again in a week's time when we present the Q4 results. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thanks. Bye.