Welcome to this presentation of Embracer's acquisition of a leading company, Asmodee. We have a full agenda today. We have the entire management team of Asmodee here. We have Embracer Group's management, CEO and founder Lars Wingefors, and CFO Johan Ekström to also help us get through this presentation. I will come back for a Q&A later. A lot of things to discuss. I also believe we have some guests from the U.S., New York, and Texas. Without further ado, I'll leave it over to you, Lars, for the presentation. Please go ahead. Thank you so much, Oscar, and hello and welcome. I'm super excited to be standing here after a very long week in Paris. Sorry if you didn't hear that. We all came back here to Stockholm and Sweden last night. Standing on this stage with you, my friends, new friends from Paris, it's super exciting. I hope it will be a few good hours of information about the board gaming business and why we believe and you believe this transaction absolutely makes sense. Before saying that, I would like to say that this is a proposed acquisition of Asmodee, and it's subject to completion of legal and social obligations. With that said, I would like to introduce you to the presenters of today. With me from Värnamo, I have Johan, our Group CFO, and my new French family is the CEO, Stéphane, the founder and entrepreneur, Marc, Thomas, Head of Strategy, and Gaëlle, that I got to know over the past month, which has been a fantastic owner of Asmodee the past years. Looking at what we should be talking about today, I would like to give a bit of background here of the presentation. Obviously, the big part will be the Asmodee company presentation. Before going into the company presentation, I will take you through the transaction, the strategic rationale, the financial rationale, the financing structure, and share issue. Finally, Oscar, I'm sure will have a few questions. Background to the transaction is, I think, a lot of passion for what Asmodee is doing. I always been following the board gaming market and the industry. When I was very young, I was very passionate about playing some board games. I remember three years ago when Gaëlle at PAI got the opportunity to acquire it, I noticed that, and I just felt for myself, "Damn. Then, it's too late." I didn't have the money three years ago. That's why I was super excited when I was contacted with my French friends at HSBC about this opportunity. I've been working with this since the summer with my colleagues and my advisors. It's been a very interesting process, because it's been a competitive process. It's a fantastic company, very strong financial KPIs, very cash flow generative. The interest from other financial buyers has been, I think, quite strong. That's why I'm even more excited to be able to beat them finally, yeah. Also to get the old owners as shareholders of Embracer, I think also honors me a lot, yeah. With that said, Gaëlle, perhaps why can't you give us a little bit of rationale and why are we standing here? Gaëlle? Or Tim? Or Gaëlle online here now? So- Okay. Good morning, everyone. Very nice to be here today. My name is Gaëlle d'Engremont. I'm a partner at PAI. I'm heading the consumer sector at PAI. I've been an investor for many, many years. Quickly on PAI, we are a European leading private equity firm. We invest in market-leading companies across the globe. We have a strong focus on transformation and growth. That's really what we look for when we buy companies. We buy sector leaders, and we focus on making them bigger, but more importantly, better companies. It's been a great journey, I must say, with Stéphane and the team. I love board games, so that's a good start, I guess. Also the company is exceptional, with an exceptional team of passionate people. I think that really was what I discovered when I met Lars. He's also passionate about gaming. I guess bringing passionate people always brings good things. Hence we are super happy about this transaction. We've had a great journey with Asmodee, a bit too short, only three years. During that time, we doubled sales, we tripled EBITDA. I can't say I'm unhappy. I'm happy that we've had this journey. I'm a bit unhappy that I have to pass, let's say, that to Embracer in a way, but I'm also happy that we are coming into Embracer. I must say on behalf of PAI, we are totally embracing this partnership, and I'm super happy about this. Thank you, Lars. Thank you, Gaëlle. Is it okay now? Okay, great. Thank you so much. I think it was an honor to have you in Värmland a few weeks ago, and it's an honor to have you on stage here. I think it's been very important for me that you actually are taking an equity stake now in Embracer. That's, I think, for me was very important to bridge the last kind of gap needed in this transaction. Also, aside from this transaction or because of this transaction, we have issued a direct share issue that was completed a few hours ago. You can find the press release that has been published overnight. I was, I'm really happy to see a book of very strong demand of institutional shareholders across the world. Especially, I would like to send a very strong thank you to all our long-term Swedish institutions that has been very supportive of this transaction with a very limited time period. They got this information very late yesterday and were able to consider that information and support us as a company, and that's super valuable. The demand came very strong last night, and I think it's the first time that we have an order book with a lot of institutional investors that has been filled getting new shares, especially hedge funds and the likes of the financial metropoles of the world. Without further ado, Embracer plus Asmodee and my friends here on the stage will take you through the whole group. Why I'm excited? I'm excited about many things this morning. I think the shared DNA of the companies is critical to make this deal happen. There is a very strong cultural fit between Asmodee and Embracer. I think the passion for board games and gaming is across the Embracer Group. When I walk into a game development studio, I see a lot of board games. My employees, they play board games at lunchtime, at parties. I've been surprised by the strong growth of board games in the past year, and I could see that around me with my companies and family, and I could see that in Asmodee, yeah. The decentralized operation model of Asmodee is really very similar to Embracer. With the integrated model, that's one of the beauties, and you will understand especially after listening to this team, the integrated model towards IPs, studios, publishing, and distribution creates a lot of value. On top of that, the track record of organic growth and M&A is unparalleled, well, I would say in many industries, but especially in the board gaming industry. Going to the joint opportunity. Again, the passion, I think, is a super strong foundation. We will hear, we have Randy at Gearbox, and we have Matt from Saber. They will come in in a session a little bit later in the presentation and explain why they are also very excited about this. The cross fertilization of IPs across gaming categories, I think, it has a lot of potential. That's really the on the long term, there is a strong value creation opportunity. On the financials, again, very attractive financials. It enhances the overall group financial profile. It adds diversity, predictability, resilience. It creates immediate accretion to adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow per share. Before going into the company presentation, I just want to take you through the actual transaction. The day one consideration is approximately estimated to be EUR 2.75 billion, where EUR 350 million has been raised with new Embracer B shares on the VWAP 20 set price, which is roughly 90 SEK. The approximate balance of EUR 2.4 billion is cash or debt. There is here defined as other minority shareholders. That is a group of shareholders, quite sizable. A few very important ones are Stephane and Marc, and a lot of other founders and entrepreneurs, management, and other key stakeholders that might be working or not be working within the company, and has been critical for the company's success over the years. They are getting a portion or a sizable portion of their consideration cash for various tax reasons. There is a lot of cash. More importantly, they retain a minority interest of approximately 4% of Asmodee Group. Then we have a put and call option structure that is exercisable year two, five and six, which in maximum, that group could receive a little bit over 40 million Embracer B shares raised at the 90 krona or 89.98, I think. That put especially has a lot of conditions that is quite similar to a normal Embracer style transaction. There is targets that the company should have a significant growth organically over the coming five years on accumulated EBITDA basis, for example. Then year six is a call at our side, so we will end with 100% ownership. The construction of this transaction is a put option, and that's how similar transactions are made in France. Again, subject to works council and local social obligations and antitrust authorities filings across the globe. We expect this transaction to be closed in the first half of next year, 2022, with the assumption of the transaction financially year ending that the transaction will close in March. It's out of our control and the control of these authorities. All management of Asmodee Group will stay. I hope you're excited. There is no planned reorganization, restructuring of the business. The business stays the same. Hopefully we get into the next gear. Hopefully we're not getting jealous now, Girl, to you know, take the next pace and speed. No. You're a shareholder. This is a fantastic company making a lot of money. Unfortunately, you know, it was not for free. We paid a lot of money for this. I'm humbled by the support of the Swedish credit institutions to support this transaction. Led by Nordea, SEB and Swedbank, giving us SEK 18 billion in loans at well above 1% interest rate. There is a SEK 6 billion term loan, a normal bank loan, so to say. Then there is a SEK 12 billion bridge loan. The bridge loan should be paid back within a year. We started last night with a capital increase that became really successful of SEK 6 billion. Now we have SEK 6 billion to be refinanced over the coming twelve months. I think there is all options to have debt, bonds, convertibles, or equity. I'm sure we will sort that out. Very important to say that we are when closing this transaction, or as of today, because we have promised Gaëlle not to. That cash we can't use for anything else. That is kind of set aside for them very strict legally from today. But still we have more than $1 billion to go to be potentially used for bolt-on M&As. We are still in a very strong situation to continue our journey on M&A. Perhaps not tomorrow, substantial, but let's wait for Friday. Just kidding. We will have, you know, a little bit of bolt-ons coming through all the time. That's the ambition. At time of closing Embracer will be expecting to have a pro forma net debt of approximately SEK 17 billion. In line with Embracer's target, financial leverage could temporarily exceed 1x net debt to operational EBIT, but should at least return to below 1x over the medium term. The financial rationale of the transaction, I think is very strong. It is very accretive to shareholders. It adds approximately 30% in forecasted operational EBIT with approximately 7.5% dilution, not taking into account the SEK 12 billion bridge that we might convert to equity as of last night. The combined group, and this is based on the financial, operational, EBIT forecast that we gave at the quarterly, plus the new forecast we're giving on the Asmodee projections, will be on the next financial year in the range of SEK 9 billion-SEK 11 billion, with the financial year starting in April. In the following year, we are expecting the combined group to have between SEK 9.8 billion and SEK 12.9 billion in profitability or operational EBIT. This forecast excludes any further plan M&A. I know you have a few plans, Stefan, and I have a few plans, Matt has a few plans, so hopefully we can do a bit of value creation on M&A. The pro forma net sales of Asmodee, including some recent recent acquisitions that Asmodee has done, for this calendar year ending December, is estimated to be a little bit above EUR 1.1 billion. The pro forma Adjusted EBITDA is two hundred and forty million euros. The pro forma adjusted operational EBIT is preliminary EUR 206 million. There is a very solid free cash flow generation, and Stefan and team will explain why, but it's a very CapEx-light business model with an efficient working capital management. Historically, Asmodee has yielded a pre-tax free cash flow conversion of approximately 70%-80%. Looking ahead, the management of Asmodee expects to have a double-digit organic profit growth over the coming five years period, year-over-year. Not bad, Stefan. Without further ado, I hand over to my French new family here. Hello. Where did I come from? Where do I go? I'm so far away from home. What am I going for? Why can't I know what I'm fighting for? I'm feeling like a man, baby, finally I have a home. I'm feeling like a stranger, baby, on and on we go. On and on we go. On and on we go. On and on we go. So where can I go? A million miles from home. What am I going for? Why can't I know what I'm fighting for? I'm feeling like a man, baby, finally I have a home. I'm feeling like a stranger, baby, on and on we go. On and on we go Tack, tack. I've just been starting learning Swedish during the night. It was a short night for me, but promise next time have other words. Once again, on behalf of the Asmodee team, a big tack for the nice welcome, the nice words. Yes, we do share all the same, you know, excitement and the passion. In fact, you've said everything about us, so maybe we can play games now and have some time. More seriously, throughout this video, first of all, I'm Stéphane, Asmodee CEO. Today with me, Marc. Hello. Who is the Asmodee founder, and today Marc is running our board game platform. Thomas Koegler, our head of strategy. Hi. We are super happy to be here today in the context, as you said, of subject to local and social obligation. We really look forward to be joining the Embracer family. Family is a word that resonates a lot in our minds. You know, you mentioned that we grow big time organically, but as well also from an M&A standpoint. For us, every time we do M&A, the first thing we say to the new guys is, "Welcome to the family." It means a lot to us. Once again, Tack. Today we're gonna spend some time on hopefully taking you through our great business. You will see that board games, I'm sure is about the same thing as video games is about. Lots of ways to do business, but in a very fun way with a lot of people. You will see that, as Embracer, I mean, it's. We work in a very diversified business, disruptorialized business. It's an entrepreneurial business as well. We have a lot of. The first time we met, you know, I had my list. I say, "Wow, we have so many things in common, so we need to do something together." I mean, yeah, it's so very happy and so. Once again, it's an honor for us to be joining the family, so thanks for that. In the short video that we just seen, it was a way for us to welcome you in our world. I'm sure that a lot of our players, as also your players, there's a lot of common things. As you will see, the diversity, I mean, the people, it's board games today are appealing to the vast majority of people. Thomas will later on take us through who are our consumers, and you will see that basically there are a lot of points in common. Maybe we can move to the next slide. All right. Let me take you through our story and journey. Yes, we are a growing company, as you can see on the numbers, but I think I will come back to that. I think that Asmodee, I mean, before the numbers, it's a fantastic story. Asmodee is an entrepreneur story. It's the story of people that are sharing the same passion, the same will of moving forward, the same will of building something long-term, something big, something that help people spend more time together, help people to socialize, help people to have fun, in a very moving environment. Let me take you through our journey, our story. It started, so you founded Asmodee in 1995. At that time, you were a bit younger than today. Yes. You still have the passion and energy and Yes, of course. 1995, I remember. You tell me the story. You have your friends. I think you have three friends. We were three, yeah. Three friends in a garage. A kind of garage. Kind of garage because you also like, driving cars. Mm. In a garage, you started by doing a kind of a very niche- Yes. At the beginning, we was a role-playing game company. Role-playing game company, very niche for very game experts. Mm. This is how it started, basically. Yeah. That's the passion of three guys together. They didn't want to go to school. They say school is interesting, but let's play games. Mm. Okay, let's have the passion and the fun during playing very expert games. The good thing is with entrepreneurs that once they've published their first game, they say, "Oh, it's a great game. We have great fun. What about we sell the game? What about we try to do a business with the game?" Okay, this is how basically, you know what, and so you go and to enter to the first shops, try to get your- Yes. I assume, I'm sure it wasn't that easy at the beginning, huh? Yeah, you know, it was not easy. We are very young. We go shop by shop to try to sell our game. It was difficult, but it was fun. Yeah. What happened in this time, you know, in France, in Europe, you had this new movement about the geek culture. People are starting to play games or interested about that with Dungeons & Dragons and this kind of stuff. What happened is that in this French board game communities, some of the guys, such as Marc and his friend, they started also to publish their own games. And since they were able to have their games being sold in shops, they came to you and said, "Why don't you try to sell also our games? Yes. At this moment, we want to create a kind of distribution company for all the small publisher in France. It was the beginning of our journey in distribution. Exactly. This is how it started. Obviously from time to time, when you start to do a business and you entrepreneur, you want to develop your business, you want to understand the market, you try to better shape what is the retail networks. Okay, you've after year after year started to open up the depth of the game catalog. Mm-hmm. Try to move from doing very niche expert games to open up to a kind of a wider audience. This is, I think, one of the key milestone for Asmodee in France. In fact, it was maybe the first acquisition of the- Yes. The first IP acquisition. It was the first one, yes. IP acquisition. A fantastic game, very fun game called Jungle Speed, which has been in fact the catalyst that has helped Asmodee be listed to, let's say, the multi-specialist, the toy shops. This is when basically, you know, Asmodee started to deliver and, I mean, growing revenues. Also, I think it was in 2023. Yeah. This is when, I mean, Asmodee France started this fantastic long-term relationship with one of the best license ever, which is Pokémon. Mm-hmm. Asmodee France became at that time, the distributor of Pokémon in France. Obviously, it has helped, you know, accelerate the business. Yes, we can increase the level of our customer because Pokémon are very, it's a bestseller in France. A new kind of shop come to us, and we can open our- Exactly. network of customers. Exactly. It's a lot about capillarity, you know, how about, you know. What I think is great for Asmodee, and you'll see that even now, is that we take our time. You know, it's a business, once again, of entrepreneur. You know, I mean, we try to do our business through a lot of humility. I mean, we have the feet down to earth. Even from the beginning, you know. Step by step. Even with the patience, step by step, take the time, making sure that we can install stuff, as you will explain. This is basically how it has started. Because, you know, we see the kind of a potential, we started to expand, you know, outside France with first type of acquisitions in Germany, in Spain, in Belgium. Mm-hmm. Basically, this is when I had the chance to come across you. Yeah. the former investors. Mm-hmm. I mean, I say for me, it was, I was super happy to be joining the company in 2009, so 12 years ago. I must say that I remember this story. I hope you remember too, but. Yeah. It's the first time that we had lunch together, and about 20 minutes, I mean, literally 20 minutes, we say, "Okay, there's no doubt we have to work together. Yeah. This is how it did start. I did not come from the game business. I used to play games, and I was playing Jungle Speed. I was playing another game that I love, which is Time's Up!. I think it's one of your favorite, Time's Up!. Mm-hmm. It's mime games and so on. I didn't know it was Asmodee games. Then I realized, then had a chat with Marc, and then I said, "Wow, this is not only games. Behind game there are this is a company. There is business." Then we discussed, and we said, "Wow." I mean, there's a huge potential to develop the business internationally. There's a huge potential to develop the business. A lot of market share to take. I mean, this is how basically, I mean, we decided to work together. Now it's 12 years that we are partnering. It's a pleasure working together. From then after that, we started. We continue to develop and, as I said, you know, first geo expansion. In fact, when I joined, my first big job was our biggest acquisition at that time, that was the- UK. The U.K. Yeah. It was our distributor in the U.K., and then I will explain later on that basically we made a lot of acquisitions, very, you know, built on acquisitions throughout our current distributors. Basically when we moved to our new shareholders in 2013, Asmodee was at that time the leading board game company in France. We started to have a kind of a decent European presence from a distribution standpoint. Then at that time, basically, we started to realize that if you wanted to continue to grow, if you wanted to become a global company, we had two things to do. Many things to do, for sure, but two main things to do. The first one is that we needed to enlarge our catalog, i.e. enlarge our IPs. We very early in the days when we did understand the strength of having big IPs, the strength of IPs as an assets, and you'll see later on how it has basically shaped who we are today. Also, basically, we did understand that time, obviously, that if you wanted to be credible in the market, we had to develop in the U.S. because the U.S. is the first market by far. Basically, this is what we call the Asmodee 2.0 cycle, whereby we started to accelerate our international development in the U.S., but also throughout Europe. We really accelerated in the U.S. We had our first acquisitions in the U.S. This is where we made a very, very great acquisitions. I'm sure you heard about a fantastic game called Catan. This is when we've been able to acquire the IP. We've also acquired another great game, which I know has a lot of success in Sweden, which is Ticket to Ride. We acquired Days of Wonder. That is the publisher of Ticket to Ride. I think that Ticket to Ride is our best seller in Sweden and Berserk. It's number two or number three. We also made the acquisition of Fantasy Flight Games, which is a great studio in the U.S., specialized in big expert games, but has a lot of great relationships with big franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. That are today very big partners to us. This is basically how we've developed the business in between 2013 and 2018. Gaëlle, you came on board. You're right, three years goes fast and It says we did 3.0, so I knew it would. You knew that. Exactly. It was. What a journey. I must say that, same as Lars, I'm super happy that you stay in the family by you becoming a shareholder in Embracer. It's a great thing because, you know, we've been working together with the team, and it was a lot. We've made a lot of things together, so it's a pleasure working with you, I must say. Even if I won't see you, it's a pleasure working with you. We've gathered the team basically for what we try to develop from this cycle is to basically open up while continuing, super important for us, while continuing developing our business in the board game platform, and we'll explain that with Marc, how we do that. We open up new type of horizons. We started to open up what we call emerging platforms because we really think that at the center of what we do is the IP, is the assets and is the universes, is the storytelling we have and so on. Thanks to that, basically over the last years, basically, we've been able to expand and open up our businesses in digital. Now we have a fantastic family on digital. It's gonna help us accelerate. I'm sure. Based on the first discussions I had with Matt and Randy, who I think are gonna join today, we've seen a lot of potential, and I know we have, we've already identified many ways to have fantastic synergies together. We open up digital. We open up Asmodee Entertainment, which is about bringing some of our IPs, if it makes sense, into the media platforms. We decided to set up also our in-print studio called Aconyte. In 2021, we've just launched our first books and novels. The reason why we're doing that is because in a transmedia world, we wanted to try to work on our IPs and provide more depth in terms of the characters of our IPs. We thought that developing books around our IPs and our storytelling was a good way to develop and strengthen our IP. What was very interesting when we set up Aconyte is that almost, you know, overnight, we had very interesting incoming calls from a lot of our partners, starting with Marvel that say, "Guys, we know you because we are partnering in the board game business because we have a very interesting licensing business whereby we develop," and as I say, "Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones to do board games." When those guys heard that we were moving to novels, they reached out to us, say, "Okay, we'd love you to write books on our IPs." This is how we've been able to strike a multiyear agreement with Marvel. It's important for us because it brings to us a lot of credibility, and it shows also that basically we are long-term partners. More recently, we're also now opening up discussions when it comes to media shows, either scripted or unscripted, producers coming to us being interested in our IPs. We can see basically that there is this kind of a universe or horizon around us about, as we said, transmedia. How are we going to be able to bring our IPs and help people, you know, have different type of experience in the IP they like? This is what we want to do. Just to finish on in terms of what we've been able to do in this type of diversification, we're super happy because we've just signed a very interesting development for one of our IP, which is Werewolf. We signed a partnership with Mediawan, which is one of the biggest movie producer and TV producer in Europe. We're super happy because a very famous writer, which is François Uzan, so the guy who has developed Lupin on Netflix, the big show. He signed up to work on a movie on Werewolf. We'll see how it goes, but it is for us. As you see, a lot of options. We have a lot of options to continue grow the business, because what is super important to understand, but it's exactly what we think with Lars, is that at the center what we do is the IP. The IP, the experience, the consumer and so on. That's basically our journey. Now we are going to enter, I hope, into Asmodee 4.0, with all the excitement. Once again, I really share the excitement. I know that we share the passion and so many things to do. I could not wait to have all this obligation behind us and then start to work together. Yeah. Thank you, Thomas. Let me just share with you some little bit of KPIs and obviously I will hand over to the team. If you like, Stefan, you can use the computer. Thank you very much. Yes, could be, could use it. It will be easier for me. Starting on some financials. You say a lot of nice things about our performance. Just to reemphasize, yes, for the first time this year, we're gonna not only hit but also exceed more than SEK 1 billion in business sales. It's also a big step forward for us. Three years ago, our revenue was roughly SEK 500 million, so we've been able to double the business in three years. As you can see on the slide, yes, we're a growing company. We grew at a CAGR of 25% over the last five years. Organically, you mentioned organic. For us, organic is very important. We grew at 18% CAGR-wise. You will see later on that we do operate in a growing market. The board game market is growing. You say resilient, it's a resilient market, but you will see that we are overperforming historically why we have always overperformed the market, and it is going to continue. The reason why we have very good organic growth is because when you look at Asmodee, and once again, we take the time to take you through that, you will see that based on our geographical expansion, basically all our geographies haven't reached the same level of maturity, so we have a lot of way to grow radically. The first one is that from a market share standpoint. We operate in a growing market, and on that market, on the local markets, basically, we have a lot of market share to grow. If we take France, for example, which is our historical market, our market share is roughly around 25%. If we take the U.S., it's 7%. You see basically the gap that we could do. We look at all our countries, depending on the maturity and of the country. You know, we have a lot of growth everywhere. Second, obviously, it's also linked to our business model, basically, because Marc will explain later on how we launch a game. What is important to understand is when we launch a game, a specific game, and the game has a lot of potential, then we're able to develop expansions from the game and so on. We can bring some license and sell also as a way to continue the organic growth coming from our IPs at the outset. In fact, if you combine, you know, market growth from a market share standpoint and our ability to launch every year new games to expand on existing games, and when you combine the two, basically it brings a lot of potential for organic growth. We also operate in a highly fragmented market, another point in common we have, which enable us to do a lot of acquisitions. Over the years, we've made more than 50 acquisitions, all super accretive, whatever in the IP side, in studio, distribution, and even more recently with regards to the adjacent platforms. Over the years, because we are entrepreneur, because we understand the value of one euro, obviously what's our job also is to. We love to grow. Everybody love growth. What we love is profitable growth, for sure. Over the years, our job also is to increase the profitability of the business. This is why, today, I mean, I think that by 2021, we'd be deriving over 20%. So 22%. And as you said, Lars, we have very strong free cash flow conversion. The reason why we have free cash flow conversion is because we have a very little CapEx, in fact. Or we can consider that our CapEx are our acquisitions, but it's not the way you look at it. The reason why we have little CapEx, and this is what Marc will explain, is one of our secret sauce is basically the high profitability of basically developing your games. You will see basically how it works, and you will understand that why we don't need to spend a lot of CapEx to develop our business. That's on the financial side. Moving to commercial KPIs, we are very decentralized business. On one hand, we own today 22 studios, and studios are about game creativity, game development, and we'll present them to you. This is where people, basically our teams are developing and creating games. As a matter of fact, we now own more than 300 IPs that are spread out around our studios. We operate a go-to-market strategy in 21 countries, sorry. We have direct presence in 21 countries. We fully own go-to-market distribution subsidiaries. As a whole, we operate in 50 countries, which means that in the countries where we don't have a direct presence, we use a third-party distributor. You will see that, when we acquire distribution, very often we acquire our former third-party distributors because we have developed long-term relationship with them, and it's for us an easy way to expand our geographical reach. One KPI on this slide, which is for me very important, is the fact that in 2020 we did sell worldwide on the market approximately 45 million games. It means units. So it's 45 million boxes. It's a lot. But what is important is not that number for its own sake. What is important is that I'm sure you understand that in order to be able to deliver worldwide 45 million units, we need to be structured. We have something that we've done with Gaëlle and the team PAI in the last years. We've invested a lot in the quality of our infrastructure in supply chain, in the systems, ERPs, because you wanna push 45 million box. You have to be ready to do it. This is why, you know, if we were to get back, if you remember the journey, I say, you know, we take our time. We work in sequence because it takes time to be able to push this level of volumes. With Marc and the team, and Thomas, and the team, and the management team, we spend a lot of time investing in the people, in the right skills, in the system, as I say, in the infrastructure. Because for us, the promise we have is when a shop is ordering a game, he has to have it. That's super important. Super important. I must say, we're super proud to see that now we're able to push 45 million games. I'm sure that 25 years ago you were pushing maybe 50 games. Correct. In one shops. What a journey. Maybe moving to the next slide. Just to describe to you how we organize. This is what we call our organization. It's got a flywheel. Today we organize around four platforms, but as you, I'm sure you've noticed at the center of the wheel there is the IP. That's important for us. The reason why today we put the IP here is because over the years, as I said during the introduction, we have moved from being a product-centric company to become an IP-centric company, and moving from just the game or the games, like the box, to an IP. IP being the experience, IP being the storytelling, IP being the universe. This is why basically putting the IP at the center has enabled us over the years to basically, you know, developed our business around four platforms. Obviously, you know, we have our what we call our backbone platform. This is where we come from. The board game platform, which is today run by Marc. And we'll comment on that later. Over the years, we opened up three new platforms. As I said, the interactive platforms that today basically gathers our digital development and also gather one fantastic acquisition we made recently, that Thomas you successfully delivered, which is Board Game Arena, and we'll come back to that. Board Game Arena is today the leading online board game platform, with more than 7 million registered players, and it's a subscription-based platform, and obviously you'll talk about it. As I mentioned, we set up Asmodee Entertainment. Entertainment was set up three years and a half ago. Sorry. Asmodee Entertainment is about, you know, as I said, bringing some of our IPs to the media world. Then more recently, we set up our consumer platform with the objective to better engage our communities. The objectives of being attracting and being appealing to the wider audience. In fact, also throughout the years, helping us moving from being a B2B business. That's what we were at the beginning, at the outset, from becoming today a B2B2C business. Because we also understand that the more we'll be present throughout the whole value chain, I mean, the more we could create value. This is why also very recently we made our first 2 acquisition in e-commerce, one in France and one in the U.S., whereby we did acquire two specialized platform, e-commerce platform on board games. We are very also excited about it. Next slide, please. Now I'm handing over to you, Thomas, maybe you want to come here and Thomas is gonna take us through the market. I'm sure you have a lot of questions about the market. Who's your partner on the market and who are our consumer? Sure. Do you hear me okay? I'm Thomas Koegler, I'm head of strategy within Asmodee. I've been with the business for the last six years on this fantastic ride. I wanted to share a bit about the board game market because it's a market that's not super well documented, and not much information available. I will share our insights because as the leader in the industry, we have a very clear view on how the market is going. The first two things I will do is talk about the past and the future, and then spend a couple of minutes on what happened in the last two years in our market. The board game market is a market that has been growing resiliently. If you were to look back actually in 2008, 2009, the market was flat, so absolutely not impacted by financial crisis, et cetera. This is because we are in an industry where there is a lot of innovation, and in an industry that has transformed itself in the last 10-15 years. Board games kind of lived the same journey as the geek culture that became the pop culture when in the early 2000s superheroes became mainstream. Board games were kind of frowned upon by adults maybe 10, 15 years ago. Today, they are completely embedded in the cultural habits and in the entertainment habits of young adults. It's a market that has been growing roughly 4% a year over the last 15 years, 'cause we could draw the line back 15 years. This growth is expected to accelerate from now on for several reasons. The first one is that thanks to the innovation that exists in our industry, a lot of new ways of playing games, a lot of new formats have emerged in the last years and are answering to consumer demands. If I can give a couple of examples, for instance, there are a lot of two-player games that arrive on the market because couples want to play at home, and it's an offer that did not exist. You also have new immersive games, new hybrid games, with supporting apps, and all of this is fueling increasing consumer demand. This comes from who our consumers are. When we look at our consumers, we see three main categories. The core of our industry is our board game fans. When you ask people, when you do polls, between 70-75% of the people say that they play board games, so a very high penetration rate. Out of those, like in any entertainment industry, you do have 7-10% of the consumers that are super fans. If you are to take the movie industry, it's those that go to the movies, to the cinemas every week or multiple times a week. In our case, it's people, young adults, mainly. Average age range is 35-40 years old. Something I wanna make very clear, the board game industry, it's not a kids industry. It's a young adult industry where also kids play. It's people that play multiple times a month. Playing board games is their main entertainment. If you take Europe and North America, it's roughly 60 million consumers. It's a very big number. You have the more mainstream audience in which we see two different dynamics. The first one, it has been growing extremely fast in the last five to six years, is casual players. It's young adults between 20 and 30 that play games basically to socialize with their friends, either as an icebreaker to start the evening or as a climax in the moment where everybody is having a great laugh. You see it more and more in universities, people that have started their professional life and gather around, and board games are a fantastic opportunity for people to gather around. Lastly, you have families, and we don't talk about children, we talk about families, because usually you have a lot of intergenerational play. Children with children, parents with children, that's becoming more and more important. Parents that are looking for games that they can play with their kids and have good time also. Grandparents with their grandkids or within the expanded family. All in all, this is 800 million players, 60 million core players, board game fans, and 750 mainstream consumers. What happened in the last two years is that we did see an acceleration of the penetration of playing board games during the COVID period. We did some polls, some consumer surveys before COVID hit, so in March 2020, and after we were out of the main waves of lockdowns. What we see is that the share of people that play board games at least once a month has increased over one year by 17 points, so it is massive. You do have a lot of people that discovered or rediscovered the joys of playing board games because they were stuck at home. What's very interesting is that this continues. As soon as shops reopened, for instance, that the lockdowns were eased, the demand continued. If you look at our own sales of board games, month after month for the last two years, they've been growing year on year every single month. It's not temporary. It's really a step change in our industry that has accelerated the market for the last two years and with high expected growth of 6% a year for the next years. The second thing that happened, as I said, is that new people discovered board games. One could ask, yes, but maybe they played when they were stuck at home, and then they moved to something else. Well, actually, when we poll the consumers, and this we did in last September, really way after the waves of lockdown, 75% of the new buyers, so people that bought their first games in 2020 or early 2021, 75% of them say that they will play and buy at least as much as what they have done in the previous year. Again, in the board game industry, the market has taken a step strong acceleration over two years, but the growth is expected to continue for the years to come. Thanks. Thank you, Thomas. Now let's spend some times on our backbone, the board game platform. Maybe, Marc, you wanna join me and we're gonna talk a little bit about this. It's okay? Or maybe this one. I don't know. I mean, no, it's fine. I think it's fine. Okay. Okay. As you can see on that slide, basically we've developed a very strong model whereby we operate throughout all the value chain that you can see here. This is our value chain. This is how it works. Basically, it start with authors, game inventors that basically present concepts to a publisher, so this is what you call studios. The job of a publisher is to take the concept of the game inventor and from that concept basically make it what we call a game, a board game. There's a lot of interaction between the first time when the game inventor or the author came up with the concept and the time when the game basically exists as a product and roughly takes what, between 12 months to tw- 12-24 months. 24 months to move from the concept to a board game. Who are game authors? Potentially in this room there are game authors, I mean, people that are passionate about games and that have ideas, and you have also people that are professional game inventors. It's a lot of opportunities, and that's also why the market is highly fragmented, and this is why, you know, the market is growing is that every day you've got new concepts coming on board. Where we operate is that basically we have developed Asmodee, I mean, the board game platform around first the publishers and also the go-to market. Throughout the years, as I mentioned earlier, we're moving to also better understand and getting closer to consumers by our direct-to-consumer development. I talk a little bit about authors. Publishers, we're gonna talk about it with Marc, but publisher, this is where, you know, basically games are being created, and we explain how we do. Then obviously when the game is developed, because we're a business, we have a business to run, the question now is to bring it to the market, and then we bring into the market through our go-to-market platforms. We distribute our games through appropriate channels. We come back to that, and we very precise on the ground marketing activities that we've been developing over the years and that we've been able to really. We are super specialized in how you market a game. What is important to understand is that the best way to sell a game is to have people play the game. Once the people is playing the game, if they love the game, they're going to become our best promoters. This is basically how it works. Our job is to make sure that when the game comes into a market, whatever, which, whatever local market, we have people play the game, we have people play the experience, we have people share, we have people socialize, we have people share the emotions. Because when you share the emotions with others, then, you know, the other people will love to take the same emotion with their inner circle. That's basically why, basically also, you know how I mentioned during the introduction we are growing organically is because, you know, little by little, you know, the emotion is spread out, I mean, to the wider audience. Thank you. Now maybe we take some time, Marc, to go through our studios and maybe you wanna explain how it works and what we do. Okay. Today we have 22 studios. Yeah. I say today because we increase the number of studio each year. All the studio are independent, managed by an entrepreneur or sometimes the ex-owner of the studio. They are very focused on the creativity to relationship with author, find the new prototype, take time to develop new games. We create around the studio a shared services. We take care of production, marketing, finance, legal. They are focused on creativity. We ask the people who manage the studio to take time to develop the best game in the world and to find the new bestseller for a few years. We have our own studio, and we work with a lot of franchise on fantastic brand like Pokémon, Star Wars, Marvel. For Pokémon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, we are distributor. We distribute games in a lot of countries. We develop franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or Marvel games in our studio. We are a close partner with Lucasfilm, Disney and Marvel. Also what's very important to understand is that I mean, how it goes, and how the research it has evolved. If we take the example of a great license or such as Star Wars, obviously at the outset, it has started with Fantasy Flight Games. Yeah. which is one of our studios. Okay. Very, very core market. Very core gamer, expert type of games. When Fantasy Flight Games joined the Asmodee family, obviously, it enables the other Asmodee studio to enter into the relationship also with Lucasfilm and Star Wars. Basically what we have been also able to propose to our partners today is not only to have access to one of our studio, but when we develop partnerships with fantastic franchise, overnight, they have access to our 22 studios. A lot of creativity, a lot of innovation, and helping us to develop and strengthen very close relationships with the franchise. Because what we love to do with them is not to, let's say, put some of the license on our games. What we love is to develop from scratch games based on their universes in order to provide their fans a wider experience. That's super important, and that's also a big strength of us over the years, being able to develop a group of 22 studios. I mean, today, as you can see, we have a lot of them. I mean, we have fantastic IPs. Mm. I think that if you were to look at basically in terms of the last 20 years, what are the biggest IPs. I must say that most of them, not all of them, obviously, but most of them are with us. It's important to understand that not only we have our own IPs and we develop and we are super innovative, but because of what we built up, we've been able also to strengthen the relationship with our big partners. Mm. You mentioned that, but I think it's important just to insist. You know, when I was saying that we're super happy that in 2020 we pushed 45 million game boxes into the market, it's also because when we did invest a lot in infrastructure. I think that the model that we put in place about having these studios being decentralized, effectively run by entrepreneurs, I mean, super accountable in what they do. I think as a group, what we provide them with is, as you said, we take out everything which is not about creativity. Throughout the shared services that are directly in the organization. What it means is that those guys, they only focus on creation, innovation. Super important, because this is what they love to do. When you are a studio by yourself, you have to do everything. Your passion is about developing games, but you need to develop the games. You need to then say, "Oh, okay, I need to put it into production, so I need to find a manufacturing partner." You need to talk about, "Okay, how we're going to sell the game? What about my financials? Delivery and so on." What we have done is we take that from them to the shared services organization, enabling the studios to focus on what they love, what they are very good at, and basically what creates value, which is innovation and game development. We build a strong scouting team. Scouting, yeah. Scouting team to go in each game fair in the world to discuss with author, to find a new prototype, and to increase our catalog and to put this prototype in our studio. It's for me, this one? I think it's for you. Yes. I think it's a slide that you Yeah. You love, Marc. Oh, yes. Yeah. This is where it goes into the secret sauce of Asmodee and basically touching and understanding basically why we. It's a very interesting game because it's about you say about a lot of small quantities. Yeah a lot of profitability. In reality, even if it takes time, develop a new board game is very cheap. In this case, we take the example of very big games with a lot of miniature or a lot of things, and at the end, the cost of development for one game is around EUR 100,000-EUR 150,000. With this amount, we have 100% finished the development of the game. If you take the economics of this game for the first run, as Stefan say, we distribute our game in 21 countries ourselves, and we distribute our game in 50 countries with external distributor. When we launch a new game, we launch this new game minimum in three languages, French, English, and Spanish. Spanish. When you ask at all this distribution unit how many games you want for the first run of the game, the average is between 40,000 and 60,000 copies. In this case, we take only 30,000 copies to make a very the worst case scenario for us. In reality, the game, the MSRP of the game, the public price is around EUR 30, if you take a normal board game. We sold this game to our customer shops around EUR 15. The business margin for us, we if you take a production cost of this kind of thing, it's around EUR 9 for Asmodee with production cost, transportation and this kind of thing. If we take just an example of 30K units, so it's very low for us, at the end, even if the game is not a success, because for us, it's not a success, at the first run of the game, at the end, we win money. Our target is not to have. Our target in Asmodee is to build a long seller game. We, with Catan, Ticket to Ride, are all sellers since now. 20 years, 25 years, and the games increase each year. Even if we don't take this kind of games, our bestsellers, we have a lot of games in the hobby market that we sold for 10, 15 years, between 50K and 100K each year without marketing. It's like a layer in our catalog, and our goal is to increase the size of our layer cake. Mm. Of course, in this layer cake, we have some bestseller like Ticket to Ride. When, again, we saw that the sales increased a lot, we build around the basic game range. If you take the example of Ticket to Ride, the game was launched in 2004- Yeah. with a basic game, Ticket to Ride in the U.S. With the Days of Wonder, first time as a distributor and after as an owner, we build a real range around Ticket to Ride. It's important to say, Marc, that when we acquired Days of Wonder. Yeah. The range of games were very, very limited. For a few or something like that. For games. Today, in a Ticket to Ride range, you have a lot of SKUs, and you see that the turnover of the range increase year on year. Today, we distribute the game everywhere in the world. In some countries in the mass market, but not. For example, in France, we just launched in the mass market this game, the basic game last year. Mm. We have a lot of room to grow. Room to grow. everywhere in the world. Our goal is to build a long seller. Mm. In each category of market. Sometimes, like this one, a long seller everywhere, but sometimes a long seller only on the hobby market. That's super important because Asmodee, I mean, what we do is to balance basically our development between, you know, between what you just presented before, i.e., the launch of new games, and roughly we launch a bit above like 50 new games per year, having the same methodology, small first run of production, put them to the market, test the reaction. If there is some consumer reaction and we see how the retailers are working and so on, how about the rate of reorder, we might go into a second round of production, then a further round of production and so on. Even if at the end, you know, we stopped after the first production, on the former slide, I mean, the business is profitable. On the other hand, we have the ability, when it makes sense, when there is a potential to take an IP and make it grow, I mean, and big time over the years. Mm. You will see if you were to dig into our portfolio. Roughly we have, we say 300 own IPs, but we're also distributing games on behalf of third-party publishers. On average, our go-to-market distribution platform, they do hold 1,000 games. Our biggest entities such as the U.S., France, U.K., they're more 3,000-4,000 SKUs. Our smaller businesses for example, Chile, Taiwan, they have like 30-50 games. On average, it's 1,000. But if you were to dig into the catalog, you will see that we have games that basically do sell at, on a local market, 15-20 thousand SKU per year. On the other spectrum of the range, you know, we have hundreds of thousand games or even millions. That's basically one of the specificity of Asmodee. That's basically what makes us unique in the market because nobody else is doing that, having this balance between, you know, a depth catalog, what you call long tail, and fantastic blockbusters. But as you said, on the long run. That is super important to understand that our business, I mean, we're able to take an IP and make it grow over the years, and it doesn't prevent us from bringing new games onto the market. What's very interesting is that, when you look at the level of awareness of our best sellers, it's still relatively low. If you ask consumers in Europe, in the U.S., the level of awareness of Catan, Ticket to Ride, et cetera, the level of awareness is still around 10, 20% depending on the countries. What it means and where it's the fantastic news for us is that if you take, I would say the historical games that have been around for 50, 60, 70 years, they have a level of awareness about 80, 90% in the general population. We have huge room to grow even for those very high sellers that we have in our catalog. Now, what we've done is that we need to start somewhere, in the industry that have such a very strong back catalog. Mm. If you took the main competitors in the toy industry, et cetera, they have a couple of titles but limited, less innovation that we have. Automatically, a new consumer that has rediscovered playing board games in the last years, when they want to continue play games, play new games, they have to turn to our back catalog. We also have games in which we will put the focus in the future. What's great is that as soon as we see a brand picking up, we can intensify the marketing effort. We can intensify the relationship with the retailers to put those games forward. This is fairly new to us, as Stefan said, because we did put in place our consumer platform to engage the consumer in the last two years. It's a journey that will deliver a lot of organic growth for the business in the next few years. Thanks, Thomas. Getting back now to our go-to-market platforms, maybe we should share it a bit how we organize from a distribution standpoint. Yeah. Today, we have 21 full distribution organizations in big countries in Europe, U.S., and Asia and South America. All these units are 100%. Owned by us. Owned by us. We take care in all this. We have in all these units sales team, logistics, global organization. We can deliver in each country. We can deliver to each shop in between 24 and 48 hours after the order. Distribution is very important for us because we capture the different margins on our own games, and we have the opportunity to distribute external studios. When you are a young publisher, you want to launch your game, it's difficult for you to go-to-market. Go-to-market is a difficult part of the job. If you are a new publisher, if you contact somebody from Asmodee, between one week and three months, depending on the original language of your game, you can be distributed everywhere in the world. We are the only one-touch solution to distribute a game everywhere in the world. For us, it is very important because we can attract the new publisher, we can create relationship with this publisher, we can understand the level of sales of their game because we are the exclusive distributor of this game. After, we can bring relationship with this publisher, and perhaps tomorrow ask this publisher to join the group. Mm-hmm. This is a very virtuous. Virtuous ...virtuous, ecosystem for us. I know a company that does a similar thing. In France, today, we are number one in U.K., too. Yeah in the distribution market. Yeah. We grow a lot in Germany because we Yes We build a new organization at distribution level. Today our challenge is in the U.S. In the U.S., in the past, for game industry, everybody work with wholesalers, and Asmodee system is to be exclusive distributor. We are exclusive distributor when we distribute our catalog. two years ago, we launched our exclusive distribution for hobby market in U.S. In two years, we double our turnover. We are in a good way. Since only between October and November, we signed a contract with nine new external publisher in U.S., and the external publisher ask us to distribute their game everywhere in the world. The system works. It's very important to understand there's a lot of added value related to our global distribution network. A lot. As you said, first of all, you know, when we publish games, you know, we better control, you know, how we're gonna sell them. It's also a way for us to get closer to retail. It's a way for us to understand what they do. We do a lot of activities at retail level. As you said, effectively, we have become, over the years, a one-stop solution for independent studios. Very important to understand and say. As I said, you know, you are a studio, you can be everywhere in the world. A studio can be only one person, you know? I mean. When you have no time to think about how you're going to distribute your game, or you can go and meet with X number of local distribution company, it's going to take you time. It's not what you wanna do, and you want to be focused on developing games. With this structure we build up, we are the one-stop solution, as you said. Almost now anywhere in the world, any studio that wants to have a global distribution can reach out to any of our businesses. Because, yes, on one hand, we are a very decentralized business, but in fact, also very integrated. You know, I mean, our local country managers, CEOs, they all are always in contact, so very easily, you know, we are building bridge between different countries. That's basically this global distribution network is very innovative and nobody else in the industry has this, as such this type of business, being on one hand, you know, a publisher, and obviously we distribute ourselves, but also, as you said, a distributor for third-party publisher. You're right, effectively. I know. Sometimes you're right. This is the secret sauce and the Steam platform of board gaming. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That's the point. I take the point. It's fantastic because when we take a new studio on board as a third-party publisher that we distribute, it's a great first platform for further acquisition. Because, you know, we test the performance of the games. We developed strong relationship with the studio team, okay? Over the years, when it's the right time, okay, if we think it's the right time for us and for the studio, okay, we propose them to join our family. This is why also, if you were to look at our success rate when it comes to acquisition, if we continue, this is our ambition, obviously, to continue be the undisputed leader in the board game business. Now, what opens up to us is, you know, these optionalities, those opportunities in bringing some of our IPs to what we call the emerging platforms. As Stefan said, we have three emerging platforms that we have created over the recent years. The first ones I would like to talk about is our consumer platform. As Stefan said, we have started the journey to transform our business from a B2B to a B2B2C business, engaging consumers. This came with setting up global marketing teams, reinforcing our organization there. We have our Chief Marketing and Chief Consumer Officer that joined the group two years ago, coming from the video games and from the movie industry. If you remember when I talked to you about our consumers, we have two main consumer targets, board game fans and mainstream players. We have built for both of them consumer engagement programs that will be rolled out directly with them and with the retail over the next months. Unbox Now to engage with mainstream consumers. Really here, it's focusing on a narrow selection of games, work about recommendation, work about helping people learn how to play the games, and ease their experience in discovering new games. A lot of cross-fertilization and cross-sales. This will also be rolled out in terms of trade marketing in shops and in events. Very high consumer-facing value. For our core players, we are rolling out with the hobby shops, so the small town shops specialized in board games because they are at the basis of our industry, as Stefan said, extremely important to us. They help us start the successes of the games that are being launched. In partnership with shops, we built a program called Hobby Next to help them further grow, because it's something I didn't take the occasion to say, but in the last two years, they were fantastically resilient. Very low default rates because they are highly embedded with their local gaming communities, and very engaged with their fans. The second emerging platform that we have is our interactive platform. It is made of two components. I will actually start with the second one because it's closer to our core business, which is direct to consumer and e-commerce. As Stefan said, we have made our first two acquisitions in 2020 and in 2021. Philibert in France, which was the leading online B2C platform in board games after Amazon, and Miniature Market that holds a similar position in the U.S. Very strong growth there, high engagement with the communities. Those two platforms are first targeted to core players because another saying that we have at Asmodee is that we like to build from the core. It's companies that are growing double-digit in the last years and that carry not only our catalog, but the entire catalog of the industry. They remain agnostic, they remain serving the entire industry, and that's what they will continue to do in the future. In terms of digital games and interactive gaming, our strategy is twofold. Historically, within Asmodee, we did have premium board game apps for iOS and Android on certain successful games like Ticket to Ride, for instance, where I think 70 million games have been played over the last years. However, it's not a business model for all types of board games. At the beginning of the year, we made the acquisition of Board Game Arena, which is an online board gaming platform. As Stefan said, it's the leading online board gaming platform. It has 7 million player accounts. It's a platform that has now over 400 games. It's a highly scalable platform because it's very easy to put a new game on Board Game Arena. It's a platform business-wise that has a dual model. It's free to play and subscription-based. Today, we only have 200,000 subscribers. If you just look at the 60 million core board game fans, the room to grow is fantastic. It's a business that's at the beginning of its journey. A lot of improvements will be done in the coming month, both on the catalog, very strong titles arriving, and a lot of work that's being done on the user interface to bring it up to speed to the highest standards of the industry. Obviously, it's a topic where we're very excited to work with the Embracer teams to help us accelerate. Lastly, I would say in the last couple of days, we started opening our IPs to third-party development for double A, triple A, freemium games, et cetera. One of the most exciting prospects, and I think we're gonna talk very soon about it, is that the synergies between the Embracer studios and Asmodee to leverage some of our fantastic IPs that have very immersive worlds that have very strong characters very strong fit for role-playing games, strategy games, adventure games, et cetera. We're all very excited to see what we can do with the various studios within Embracer and find the right studios for the right IPs, because there is tremendous potential there that's completely untapped for now. Lastly, as Stefan said, we launched our entertainment platform. It's a platform that's there to develop our IPs, expand our IPs. It's really the primary goal is to deepen the IPs, deepen the narrative arcs, strengthen the backbones of those IPs, and bring an additional experience beyond gaming, obviously, physical and digital, that has been covered, to books publishing, to media, to consumer products, so that the fans of the IPs can expand their experience in their beloved IPs, either through books. We did set up Aconyte, as Stefan said. Aconyte is our fully owned fiction novels publishing imprint, has released more than 40 books in the last 12 months. Very strong lineup for the future. Two-thirds of those are based on IPs owned by the group and one-third based on partner IPs, like as Stefan said, Marvel and some players in the video games industry. Also, they're very excited to start working on some Embracer IPs, but I don't want to ruin the presentation on the synergies and the discussions with Matt and Randy. Very, very interesting and very cost-efficient way to develop universes, develop characters, bring flesh on the IPs, and probably put them on the best path for media development. Because if you look at board game IPs, you have two main categories, if I was to oversimplify. You have the IPs where it's the universe, that's storytelling that's extremely strong. For those, we have a lot of interest from public, from producers to create scripted content, TV shows, animation. Animation is very, very strong right now. TV shows, movies, a lot of projects that have started. Stefan has mentioned Werewolves with Radar, a studio from Mediawan and with François Uzan the scriptwriter of Lupin. Many other opportunities that are in the workings. You have all the games where there might be less storytelling, but where the mechanic, the game mechanic is extremely pure, extremely strong, and those are a fantastic base for unscripted content. TV game shows, et cetera, that did inspire in the past, and we have many opportunities, many projects in the workings. Thank you, Thomas. Thanks, Thomas. I'm sorry it's dragging a bit over time here, but I just think for all shareholders, and especially the ones that put money into this and that has been shareholders, it's just important for you to understand Asmodee because it will be a very important part of Embracer going forward. This is opportunity to understand the business deeper, and then we will go back to work, tomorrow again. Hopefully we can go back to work tomorrow. I know you can't all stay online, but hopefully you can listen later. Yeah. We will soon have Randy and Matt joining from Embracer or Randy from Gearbox and Matt from Saber, and to hear them out. I think you have one more slide here. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of our growth engines at Asmodee. We grow both organically, as Stefan said, very strong 18% organic growth in the last five years. We also turbocharge our engine with M&A. We've done more than 40 acquisitions in the last years. What we acquire is several fold. Either we acquire to strengthen our IP catalog and our creative capabilities, so in that case, we buy IPs or we buy studios. Or we want to expand our footprint geographically or strengthen in a location or in a country we're already present. We acquire local distribution business units that are run by entrepreneurs on their local markets. In the more recent years, we have made, as I said, our first interactive acquisition with Board Game Arena, and our first e-commerce acquisitions with Philibert and Miniature Market in the U.S. Obviously, as Stefan said, we operate in a very fragmented industry. We have a lot of third-party partners, and so we have many opportunities to welcome additional companies, additional IPs, additional studios within the group in the coming years. Thanks, Thomas. Now, I think, you know, as you said, it's a highly fragmented market. I think today we have roughly a list of 100 opportunities, out of which today we have 10 active discussions. It's obviously, you know, you understand that our business, you know, is the right balance between organic growth and external growth. It's another point in common we have. I can tell you that as soon as we get back to work, we have some discussion to have on the potential acquisition, and we will continue from Monday to enter into very interesting discussion for new opportunities. Thank you. Now, welcoming our friends from America. Are you online? Yes. Hi, Lars. Hey, Randy. How are you? You know, for 3:00 A.M., I'm great. Well, it's such an exciting moment. I'm fueled by adrenaline right now. This is a big moment for Embracer, obviously a big moment for Asmodee, and a big moment for entertainment in general. I'm excited to be a part of it. Hello, Matt. Kittens, which is just now part of the Asmodee Group. There's a lot of reasons why I'm passionate about this, but I think the thing that I'm most excited about is that this partnership with Asmodee and Embracer is going to allow us to build transmedia IP in a way that we have not before. There's huge amounts of opportunity. You heard over and over and saw evidence from Asmodee of the power of IP. Of course, on the video game side, and especially with the Gearbox Entertainment Company, we believe in intellectual property and creating it and cultivating it and growing it is part of why I think I'm genetically built for that, frankly. This moment, where we can join together with tabletop interactive, I think it's gonna show that not merely is Embracer one of the greatest game companies in the world on the table or on your screen, but also one of the greatest entertainment companies in the world. I want to note that, of course, you know, the excitement within Gearbox Entertainment for this acquisition, it cannot be overstated. It's clear that Asmodee is an organization and a leadership group that's passionate about games, passionate about creating entertainment experiences. From my seat within Gearbox Entertainment, I am eager to partner with Asmodee to increasingly bring its IP to digital and transmedia, and we've already had some very substantive discussions. What happens when we get us together, we'll start for an hour-long meeting, and two hours go by, and we have no idea where the time went because there's so much opportunity. I'm very excited to partner with Asmodee game makers to bring Gearbox Entertainment IP to the tabletop. This is gonna go in both directions. Fundamentally, I think this moment is very important for the Embracer Group because it signals something that we've known for some time. The Embracer Group is not merely a video game company, it is an entertainment company. The Embracer Group is an intellectual property company. To be able to join together with Asmodee, which has grown with a philosophy and a strategy very similar to how Embracer's gone forward in the world, makes us very compatible. Yes, it looks great for me as a shareholder. It looks great for me as a fan and a customer of the games of our new partners. When I think about my own role as an entertainer and what we're trying to build for the future, this is extremely exciting. Matt? Well, yeah, well, you know what? Randy's almost left me for the first time with nothing to say because he said everything so well. Look, I'm very excited because a lot of people talk about transmedia, but we're the first that are really, you know, putting our money literally where our mouths are. I just see tremendous opportunity. You know, it's crazy to think that it's been almost two years since I signed on the dotted line and stood at the stage with you, Lars, and tried to make you laugh a little bit after we digested numbers for an hour and a half. Since then, I've been, you know, fighting the good fight to bring all of the various groups that we have together to create new product and to cross those lines between the various groups so that we can continue to explore new IP and new opportunities. This really takes us to an entirely different level. Not only does it bring us a tremendous number of IP, but it brings tremendous opportunity not only for us to bring Asmodee's IP to interactive in a way that they haven't fully explored yet, but it also gives us an opportunity to bring our IP over to board gaming where, you know. That's not something that I was terribly familiar with, to be perfectly honest with you. That's. It's new to me, but it's actually pretty incredible that the size of the audience and the passionate fan base on the board gaming side. Once again, we're just scratching the surface in terms of what we can do, and I'm just excited to be part of it. I just can't wait to see the types of synergies that we can forge. I mean, some of them are obvious, and some of them are obviously less obvious. Over the coming months and years, we'll be able to explore those. I mean, or as soon as we're allowed to according to the regulators, and we're gonna have a good time doing it for sure. Thank you. You know, you made a slide here jointly and Thomas, why don't you know, highlight a few things on each thing here? Well, I think it was already a lot highlighted by Randy and Matt, but there are very immediate synergies between both IP catalogs and the expertise that lie on both sides, either for the Embracer Studios to bring Asmodee IPs to video games or the other way around, for Asmodee Studios to craft experiences in board games for the Embracer IPs. What's very interesting is that I would say that's the first level of synergies, the immediate ones. We are very innovative groups and immediately when we started discussing about what we can do together, we wanted to put innovative people together and to see how we can go beyond in books and entertainment obviously, but also how can we rethink the gaming experience. Are there experiences that we can invent, new IPs that we can create either in hybrid gaming exploiting the power of AR, of VR, of all the emerging technologies that are coming up now. Also, one of the very important points is that, as we said, we have similar, sometimes overlapping communities, and there is tremendous potential in cross-fertilization, in understanding each other's communities, in data, in consumer data, in consumer understanding, that we're all very, very excited about. Lastly, if we look even further ahead, maybe there's a world where we can also invent new location-based experiences. There are very successful groups that have built on entertainment and theme parks. Maybe there's stuff we can explore together. No, you're right, Thomas, and Matt, Randy, I can only, you know, concur to what you've just said. I mean, it's, you know. We just had a quick exchange last week and just, you know, when I was just appreciating, you know, all the flow of ideas that we share and so on, basically could show the high potential that we have ahead of us, you know, with Asmodee having the possibility to join Embracer. You say it right, you know, I think it's, it goes far beyond, which is already fantastic, kind of, having a fantastic video game company and a fantastic board game company you know, joining forces. It goes far beyond that. I think that it is what you call a transmedia, what we call transmedia and entertainment. I think it is something new to the business. It is something unique. I cannot imagine, or I mean, yes, I do imagine, but I cannot wait to see, you know, having, you know, our teams together, you know, and sharing ideas. I mean, you know, you don't know what's gonna come out from that. It is gonna be huge in terms of idea innovation. It will be a dynamic question for us of prioritization and so on, because I can tell you that, you know, we're gonna have a lot of opportunities from the obvious one. As you said, Thomas, I think that the more we think about it, the more we'll be able to provide new type of experiences, because what we're doing is very, very unique. I think from my side, one of the most important reasons and value creations of this transaction is the cultural alignment and goodwill value that I hope this creates with all our fantastic employees. Yeah. the industries. Mm-hmm. That people feel that we are created by heart, that we really. Okay. care about the communities, the IPs. Yeah. There is alignment within both groups about gaming and to create games. I hope I'm not wrong, Randy, that there is some passion for board gaming within our, you know, games developers at, within Embracer and Gearbox for example. Oh, it already exists. You know, one of the big pieces of evidence of that is just in the Gearbox Entertainment group, our interest in having tabletop game representation for our IP. It's been to the point where my wife started a board game company just so that we can have Borderlands tabletop games. We have Borderlands: Tiny Tina's Robot Tea Party already on the market. Just launched is Bunkers and Badasses, which is a role-playing game. This is the very beginning of a new board game company, Nerdvana Games. We did that on our own because we're trying to find a path. It's the same sort of humble beginnings that our founder friends of Asmodee began 20-plus years ago, when they started making tabletop role-playing games. Now we're doing it from our group because we feel that synergy already, and we're hunting for it. Now we've just accelerated that by 20 years with this deal. Thank you. In the interest of time, out of respect for everyone's time, I think we need to move on. Thank you so much for joining from overseas and sorry for keeping you awake. Very excited to be here. Thank you, everyone. Congratulations, everyone. Yeah, congrats to you in Paris and Stockholm and Karlstad and maybe even in the United States at some point soon. Yeah. Good to see you. Bye-bye. Thank you as well. Cheers. Cheers. Thanks. Okay, to wrap up, I would like to just highlight the new structure of the group. Asmodee will become, when it closes, the ninth operating group of Embracer. Combined, we will have more than 100 game development studios, more than 560 IPs across the group, and we will engage more than 11,000 people on a daily basis across the group. All led by Kicki, me, and then operationally with Stefan, Randy, Matt, and all our other fantastic entrepreneurs within the group. Again, you hear Randy and Matt and everyone here, we believe great IPs are valuable across multiple channels. Here are a few examples. I won't bore you to take these examples through this today. You will see things already under production coming out over the coming year and years. Just to visualize this, now at the center, Embracer Asmodee, you can see some great examples of video games IPs we now have and the board gaming IPs. Now from Asmodee, currently on books and media, including a little bit from Koch Media. That's a fantastic playground, huh? Amazing playground. It's an amazing playground. I can't wait to see how this looks. Exactly in a while. Yeah, we have to dive into that, you know. Again, Embracer, the ecosystem for entrepreneurs within gaming entertainment, with a decentralized philosophy of empowering individuals to create creativity and speed. If I may, I think, one company is missing, yeah. We're closing in respect of the legals of this transaction. I didn't want to put it here. Of course. Just to summarize, this marks a transformative step in Embracer's strategy within gaming and entertainment as outlined at the September AGM. It creates one of Europe's largest gaming and entertainment groups and establish an important market-leading position in board game. Again, the opportunity to cross-fertilize IPs and strengthen licensing partnerships across gaming categories. The strong foundation for future development of transmedia IPs within all our game development studios. The ability to leverage omni-channel's distribution network to drive synergies across existing and new markets. A proven platform for value-creating M&A across gaming categories, complemented by a sizable funnel for future opportunities. Share strong culture fit again with a similar integrated model operating across the value chain from IPs through publishing and distribution. Finally, it's enhancing the group's strong financial profile with added diversity, predictability, resilience, and immediate accretion to adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow per share. With that said, I would like to leave at least a few minutes, Oscar, for you to ask some questions. Thank you for that, Lars, and I'll stand down here. I have a lot of questions, might not be able to ask them all, but I would also like to invite the physical audience to ask questions. There's a mic going around for questions, and I have some questions from the web here, as well. I think I'll start with some questions from Stefan and the Asmodee management team. Great presentation. We saw there's obviously been a combination here of organic growth and M&A, 2x sales and 3x earnings in the past three, four years. What is the sort of organic share of the growth in sales? Just to break it down a little bit to understand. We were getting into too much detail. If you were to just give an example, if you were to look at the Asmodee perimeter in 2018 when we started the relationship with Gaëlle PAI, and we look at where we stand today in terms of revenues, 75% of the growth comes from the perimeter that was there at the entry of PAI. It's 18. How much was it? 16, 18. Organic? 18%. 18%. 18% organic growth. 18% organic growth. Exactly. Year-over-year? Yes, exactly. Exactly. Great. A question perhaps for Thomas. You went through the slide with the market growth. Oh, thanks. All right. Okay. No. I mean, you went through the slide on the market growth. Obviously tremendous growth now in the past two years. I know that I myself have bought a number of games, actually. More flat perhaps next year, but what do you see in terms of growth, underlying market growth in the coming years? Historically, the market was growing 4% a year. Again, we've been overperforming this growth, so it's a very strong basis on which to grow our business. In the future, the expected growth is 1.5 times, so 6% a year. That's expected. We're really in an industry where the growth is accelerating because the practice of playing board games is really diffusing in all categories, and more and more people play games. The audience is getting wider. Mm-hmm. You know, in fact, what happened is in the core players, this audience is growing, and they are continuing playing games, and they play more and more games. Also their average basket of purchase is increasing also. That's what we've seen. Now we've seen roughly a 10- Yeah, 10% increase. 10% increase in average basket from, let's say, those core gamers. Then we have, I mean, the wider audience is playing. As such, effectively, as you said, Thomas, projections are 6%, you know, growth moving forward. What's very important is that we are obviously an industry where people buy for themselves, but it's also an industry where gifting is a very big part because when you like a game, you gift it to other people. When you like a game, you invite people to play. We have evangelists that evangelize on the games, hence our catalog growing much faster than the market. we put in the press release that the management believes there will be organic growth on the profitability at the double-digit level year-over-year. Mm-hmm. in the coming years. Yes. You feel comfortable about that? Yeah. Yeah, we do. I mean, related to that, market share gains and high growth and earnings margins progression, the digital side. The digital share, I think from a presentation, there were no numbers on it, but perhaps 6-8% currently. What is the focus area and the potential here, going forward? I mean, the potential with Embracer is huge. Basically, you know, what we think is, I mean, today, I mean, when you look at our interactive business, it's very nascent, it's recent for us. I think that we have to separate between basically all the fantastic synergies that we'll be able to do. Now, you know, I started to think about a licensing out strategy, you know, when it comes to our IPs, moving them from physical to digital. We started to have a lot of discussion with external companies. Now then we have a preferred partner. I think that we have, yeah, we're gonna have access to, You will still be obviously. We will. Free to license out. Of course. You know, Embracer is just 1% of the video game industry. Yeah, yeah. As I say, it will be our preferred route. Yeah, yeah. We have our family then, you know, for me, it's. I don't wanna limit your business. No. Don't worry for that. You know, we won't limit it. First thing, we're gonna explore a lot of opportunities. We see. I mean, we have more and more great video game companies coming to us willing to license our IPs. What we want to internally focus on is Board Game Arena. We think it's a huge potential, as Thomas said. You know, this online board gaming platform has already 7 million players. It's a subscription-based platform, so it's, and every week we have more subscribers than the week before. As you said, already 400 games, more to come. They don't have that many games coming from Asmodee because we just put our first game on Board Game Arena some month ago. Same thing, we hope to be able to work with Embracer there to help us develop, accelerate the development of Board Game Arena. Today, it's a web-based tool. We have a lot of ideas to develop it on a web, on an app standpoint, be more appealing to the wider audience. This is basically where we stand. Curious on that. I mean, Board Game Arena, market leading player. Just to get a sense for it, what are the sort of top three games on the platform? The top three games on the platform are Azul, that's owned by Asmodee, was released two weeks ago, I think. Carcassonne, that is published by Hans im Glück in Germany, and we're a co-publisher in English with Z-Man, one of our studios. The third one is probably 6 nimmt!, which is a game that's published by Amigo, a German publisher. Very fast-paced game. Again, in the top you have a lot of now Asmodee titles, but the more we have from the industry, the better it is for the consumers. What's very interesting with BGA, I mean, it's a French company that's created by two passionate guys. But if you are to look at the split of where the players coming from, it's worldwide, and market number one being the U.S. Very interestingly, you have players from the U.S., from Europe, from South Korea, I mean, super spread. Already super international. The stream of board games, as you mentioned there, will be interesting. I mean, Asmodee 3.0, Gaëlle and her team seems to have done a good job. If we talk about Asmodee 4.0, the U.S. still in focus, I presume, given the lower market share. Yeah. Yeah. What is the plan in the U.S.? You're right. Asmodee 4.0 is in fact continuing strengthening the core, the board game platform, continuing strengthening in the U.S., you're right. Today in the U.S., we are between 7%-8% market share. As Marc explained, the first thing we did in the U.S., just to understand, eight years ago, our revenue in the U.S. was approximately EUR 10 million-EUR 15 million. Today, we are reaching EUR 170 million, so it's already a big journey. The U.S. is for sure a very big country as it is. We had to take our time. We wanted to take our time. First of all, as Marc explained, we wanted to be the leading player on the, what we call the hobby market, which is, this is where we have all the independent shops. Because this is basically we had this position in Europe, so we wanted first to build this stronger go-to-market layer. The US normally is addressed by wholesalers. What we decided to do two to three years ago was to go direct, i.e. it means that we had to build our infrastructure internally. We did recruit, I think, like 80 salespeople to get in touch with the local retailer. We invested in warehouses. We invested in systems, enabling us to go direct, and this is enabling us, as you mentioned, Marc, to develop business in the hobby. With what we've done over the last years in the U.S., we can say that we are the leading player on the hobby market worldwide. As obviously Thomas shown, we have what we call fantastic potential brand, what we call the pillar brands that are big IPs that are much more appealing to the wider audience. In order to move forward in the U.S., we are now going to accelerate our development in the broader retail networks. Obviously, the mass market where we have a very strong presence, but where now we wanna get more closer. We wanna become a strategic partner to the big retail networks pushing our brands. We know that games such as Catan, Ticket to Ride, Spot It! in the US, that are already well known. As we've seen, we have a rate of awareness which is quite low compared to competition. We manage to put in place a very strong marketing approach and we have developed a project which is called Unbox Now that you will see in the coming month in the shops. You know how I mean, they want to build this kind of lifestyle around our IPs and pillar brands. That's gonna help us, you know, develop big time in mass market. That's gonna be a portion of Asmodee 4.0. Great. I mean, talking about market share and mass market, you're number two globally totally. Who is the number one? Is it one of the large toy companies, or is it Games Workshop? On the board games segment, the number one player is Hasbro. They are fantastic IPs. You know, we all know them. We all play them. We all play Monopoly. We all play Magic card games with other Okay. Understood. Then moving on here, what do you see from your side in terms of the main synergies apart from IPs, which we discussed? Do you see any point of, for example, you know, taking manufacturing in-house, or is retail an important step that you see? We have a lot of ways to see the synergies, you know. We need to think about it, and we need to take our time. There are different ways. Retail is interesting, okay? You know, as we mentioned, we move to direct to consumer throughout our e-commerce development. We want to be closer to consumers. We love the idea of testing things. We wanna be closer to retail. A lot of options, but it's a bit early to- It's not in the business plan that we should own retail. Yeah. What I understand. Only e-commerce, perhaps. E-e-commerce. Yeah. Not physical retail. Yeah. No, no. Yeah. Understood. Yeah. If that's the question, it's not in the business plan. For sure. The idea is I think- We want to work with retail. Yeah. Support retail. Of course. Help retail. We are very close to retail. We are doing a lot of activities with them. We have developed a very strong program for the hobby shops called Hobby Next, which is a program whereby we do accompany, you know, selecting the retail shops. Because as I said, I mean, the more people play our games, the better they be promoted, the better the people will know them. In order to do that, we've always wanted to be closer to retail. Moving forward, we'll continue to stay super close to retail, and we will also move to an innovative way for us of being a little bit more direct using e-commerce activity and so on. Great. Just two final questions from me before handing over to potential questions from here on the web. The first question, just get a sense for the revenue and earnings contribution. The largest sort of one to three studios, how much of the revenue do they represent? Is it, Fantasy Flight Games, FFG, or Catan, for example? Are they big? If I may, I will maybe much more talk about the IPs. Yeah. Absolutely. Just for you to understand. IPs- Absolutely. Because more than studios, but in fact, our biggest IP represents 5% of the turnover. We are very spread. I think that our top 20 IPs will present less than 20% of the businesses. Very spread. A lot of room to grow. That's also linked to the rate of awareness. I think that our biggest IP in terms of turnover will be Ticket to Ride, followed by Catan, followed by Spot It! slash Dobble because Spot It! and Dobble are the same game. Spot It's name in the U.S. and Dobble in Europe. Those are the top three games. Great. Transmedia. Yeah. I mean, early stages. Oh, yes. It seems. What is your role as you foresee it here in terms of your role in the value chain in TV and movies, for example? Is it pure IP licensing that you see or anything else? So far, we don't expect to become a producer. What we have is a very fantastic producing companies with whom we have entered into discussion and partnerships. Our role is to provide content. In reality, when I said basically you know that we have, if you remember, our flywheel in our organization at middle of the IP. You know, over the years, we've just realized that we are moving from being you know a game developer to becoming a content company that's content. As such our ambition is to be able to provide content to the media industry because we see more and more appeal for the type of content we have. Because as Thomas said, we have a lot of immersive stories from our IPs. So far, we're very happy to enter into relationships with producers and media company that will, you know, take our IPs, have the same belief that they have, that we have with them, and help us, you know, I mean, bring them to new platforms. With the will for us to provide our fan with new type of experiences, you know, with the IP they love, but also bring new players into our playground, which is our board game platform. Understood. Very good. Do we have any questions from the audience here in the room? No? All right. I'll take a few questions from the audience, from the web, I mean. Mm-hmm. Do we have time for that? Yeah. Let's try to finish off here in five or 10 minutes. Great. That sounds like a plan. I mean, starting here, with a question from Nick Dempsey. I think this is for primarily you, Lars. One possibility for revenue synergies between the two businesses is that Embracer Studios could create video games based on Asmodee board game IP. But all of the studios working hard on their own plans to achieve their own targets. Is there room basically to start new side projects, as you see it within Embracer for this purpose? There is always the most valuable assets I have and we have is time, and there is always an alternative cost for time and resources. There needs to be a competition for what you do, what I do, what Stefan do, and what our games developer does. How do you allocate that time? You do that on projects you believe in, that you're passionate about, and that makes financial sense, and there is a strong alignment for. I expect any game development studio, whether it's Randy's fantastic people or Matt, that they are able to allocate and balance their resources so any projects coming out from the Embracer side makes sense in the competition of our own IPs and licenses. The same is for board games. You know, if we come with a action game, it might not make sense to make a board game, yeah? Then the market say, "No way," yeah? Of course. This is not commercially. Of course. ...viable. We need to do what makes sense for, you know, the market, the consumers, for the operation. I think the friction freeze, the frictionless environment in a way within Embracer, the long-term mindset and the shared alignment on equity. Mm. That we are in the overall same group. Exactly will take down the boundaries of making things happen. I think that's critical to understand because normally you have this licensing negotiations with big corporates, and normally you start with the legal and then there is a limited time period, there is competition, you can't do that with that word or figure, you know? So I think this, you know, we are in the same boat. Looking a decade ahead, this will make an enormous difference. Mm. Looking two years ahead, not much. Great. That's very clear. I know that we have a lot of questions on Star Wars games, Star Wars board games, but I think I'll not take them for now. I think you need a separation. A question here from Tom Singlehurst with Citi. Could you talk about how much revenue for tabletop gaming is recurring in nature? If someone buys, say, Pandemic, how does the relationship evolve over time? Do players rebuy the existing game at some point? If you could discuss that just a little bit. It's a great question. It's a great question. There are several answers to this question. One given player that starts discovering, I would say, an IP, whether it be Pandemic, whether it be Ticket to Ride, et cetera, obviously they start with the base game that they discovered either in a shop or in the recommendations of a friend. Then two things happen. First, when a game is good, and that's one of the main criteria that Mark and his team have, is replayability. First they can continue play. Then if they want to enhance the experience, there are expansions. It's ways of complexifying the game. It's ways of expanding the experience. You might have other standalone games with various levels of complexity. If you take Ticket to Ride, for instance, you have Cities versions for two players. You have had versions for kids, for instance, to play with your children. Lastly, it's one of the very important points I was making on our industry is that it's also a gifting industry in that not only do you buy for yourself and do you buy more products for yourself to diversify your library of games, but also you start gifting the games you like, and you also start asking around what other games you can play if you like these ones. That's where the hobby market is extremely important, in that when you go into a shop, within three or four questions, the shop owner can pinpoint you exactly to the game that you will take home and that you will like for sure. that's why the program that we put in, as I mentioned, Hobby Next, is super important with the hobby shop because it's exactly what's gonna happen. You go to your shops, you're gonna ask for advice. You say, "Okay, I just played Pandemic. I like this kind of cooperative game. What else can I play?" But then they say, "Okay, maybe you want to test something different from a cooperative game, so why don't you play this kind of strategy game, resource game? Why don't you play Catan?" it's a lot of way, you know, to interact. That's basically what's one of the reason why wherever you enter into the board game landscape, you know, if you like to play, if you like to socialize, if you like to share emotion, as I say, it's very, very hard to exit this landscape. I forgot to mention also for a limited number of players but that like competitive play, obviously you do have tournaments. Yes. With tools like Board Game Arena. Yeah. If you don't have friends at hand, you can also play online. Mm-hmm. It's very complementary, and it's a highly complementary experience, between playing around the table with friends and between playing online with people. If you look at your IP, it's growing in revenue year- over- year. Year-over-year. Exactly. I think that financially, you know, it's important to understand. That's super important. Oscar, I think we need to round up. Yeah. Do you have any important questions? Yeah. I think two important questions. Okay. 2. One for the team, the new family, and one for the Okay. the family leader. Mm-hmm. The old family leader. I think the project is highly exciting, as we've been discussing for the last two hours. For us, you know, we love our portfolio companies. We want them to strive after we've left. If I give you an example, we were the owners of Chr. Hansen many years ago. I think the company is thriving on the stock market, and that makes us super proud, and that's what we want. Because remember that we are always making new investments, and we want people to understand that we are ambitious investors, and that with us, they're gonna have a great journey. This is all about our reputation and bringing companies, as I mentioned at the beginning, to be better companies and companies that will continue to strive after we exit. We always write stories that are not five-year stories or three-year stories. The story we wrote with the team was a 15-year story, and we have to leave after some years, but the story continues. All the strategy we've laid, and we discussed that we've put a lot of resources into the business. We put new people. A lot of new people have come on board, and I think this is an investment we made, and this is an investment for the future. We really have to understand this and why we decided to sell. I think, you know, this company needs to take another step. As you heard, the journey has been fantastic, and now I think the support of a long-term shareholder is something that is great. We've talked about the synergies that couldn't happen under our ownership, and we're fully aware of this. I think it's the time to let go and make sure the company continues to grow. Did I have any competition in the process, Gaëlle? Of course there was competition. As we mentioned, the financial trajectory is impressive. The cash flow is great. Obviously a lot of financial investors, people like me, we were very excited in 2018 to buy the company, and I had a lot of competition at the time. There was a lot of competition this time. I think Lars and his team were super efficient and well done on that. Super fast. They delivered faster than others. At the end of the day, the great project, the fact that they were able to put a bid on the table super quickly and deliver on it, because after you put a bid, you have to go through all the legals, et cetera, I think was critical for them to win. We're very happy about the result and that we were able to do this in a quite short timeframe. That's efficient. For me, it's great because, again, we don't want the company to be stuck in a sale process for six months. They need to move on. They need to continue creating great board games and selling them. The fact that we had a short process, I think, is the best for the company as well. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks. Again, just to add up what you said, obviously for us, for Marc and myself. Yeah. You know, it's about a project. You know, the reason why we. Well, you're right, we're highly competitive. I mean, we have the chance of being running a fantastic company. But you know, you don't have that many fantastic product that you can share with somebody such as Lars. I think that we have so many similarities. You know, the more I was exchanging with Lars, the more it become for me obvious that it would be that with you and the team that we'd be willing to move forward. So super happy that, as Gaëlle said, you put the right bid, the right moment. You've been super agile to execute. Well done. We really look forward to be joining the family because the project is fantastic. You know, we're long-term people, so we love to position ourselves in the long term and it's just the start of the journey. It's a big change for us. You know, it's a big change. It has been a big decision for Marc and myself. You know, it's We're a sizable shareholder. Yeah, exactly. We're a sizable shareholder. In life you have to take decisions, you know? That's today the right decision for the business, our people, the future. Gaëlle, did you have anything? I wanted to say that this is really a people's business, you know. The assets are the people and the IPs of course, but the IPs are created by people. That's why from the beginning, the fact that from a personal perspective we could get along super well with Lars and we have the same culture is very important. Because at the end of the day, I think the people of Asmodee and the people of Embracer need to belong in the same group and need to feel that they belong to the same group with the same culture. That's been the starting point, I think, of the journey, where we thought, you know, Embracer could be a great owner, and we had to go through all the specifics of the deal, of course. From the beginning we could sense that there was a human fit that was very important. Yeah. Perfect. Finally, Lars, just as short an answer as you want. I mean, you're paying quite the multiples. I mean similar to previous sort of games company multiples, you know, above 10 times earnings. What do you see ahead in terms of the M&A mix here? Also have you found it? Yeah. I'll stop there. The M&A mix within Asmodee or within Embracer? Within Embracer. Well, you know, obviously I've been talking all year, I've been working on a few other deals that have been taking a lot of time, that has not occurred, at least not yet. I am relieved that we are finally able to bring a fantastic company that I think strengthen the overall group, you know. Again, time is the limited resource. You will see more M&A coming out. Again, we have a little bit of debt, but again, there's a very cash flow generative company. I'm, I feel much more comfortable with that debt and the situation. On the M&A side, there is a lot of activity. Let's see if there is anything else coming under the Christmas tree or if we have something for the new year. For sure we will have M&A coming in. Fantastic. I will be waiting by the Christmas tree. Thank you everyone for listening in and joining here today. Thank you to the Asmodee management team. Thank you to Randy and Mr. Saber. Thank you to you guys as well. Thank you, Oscar. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Great. Thanks.