Good morning. Thank you for joining. I'm here today with Carsten Koerl, the CEO of Sportradar. Carsten, welcome back to the conference. Good morning, David. It's the early morning slot you gave me today. Well, we know you're on European time, so you'd be up bright and early. We wanted to get your thoughts here to start on the evolution of sports technology, particularly what is most exciting for you as a consumer and a fan, and for global sports fans as well. Well, like everybody in Sportradar, what is uniting us is sport, the passion for sport, the emotion which you have in sport. That's fascinating. Doing by myself a lot of sport, and knowing my colleagues is doing this, working in this environment is really a privilege. Now, if I'm looking to what excites me around this is, we get to know so much more about sport with all the data points which we have, and they are all real-time. The skill here is real-time processing and ingesting more and more information. If you look now to where is that going, our society, and many of the Western countries and societies also in Asia, is going more into consuming more and more sport because people have more time. So consuming more and more live sport will change the way how you need to create a product, and the big vision here is to make a user-customized product. Hyper-personalization is a buzzword for this. That's in the betting space, that's in the media space. For the betting space, we started that journey already many years ago, and we enrich the product according to what we know about the client. So we show different versions of deep data. We show different perspectives. We show probabilities real-time for the punters and for our clients. If I'm looking now to where is that going in the media industry, I'm totally certain we see a big shift here. We see a big shift from the linear consumption on the big screen into streaming, but streaming by itself, I would say is not the product of the future. In our opinion, the product of the future is a hyper-personalized sport entertainment product. You know who is sitting on the other side, you know what he wants to see, and you're taking complex, partly very deep data, in a simple visualization, but you make it in the way that the customer gets exactly what they wanna have. There is an international race in sport for the sport fan. The NBA is competing worldwide with this. They have 2 billion fans worldwide, so you're gonna need to be better than other sports to be attractive for this. Huge opportunities for the one who is sitting on all this information and data. Maybe talk a little bit more about the NBA, just as someone who's been a loyal follower of all the semifinal games and exciting finals to come. You know, maybe particularly what you see for the NBA as, you know, representative of some of these trends in sports technology. First of all, I'm very sorry for the Warriors. I hope, I hope you got that message already. I grew up in Dallas- Yeah ... so the Mavericks are at least That's okay. At least they're in the playoffs. ... from this perspective, that's okay. They, they are doing well. So look, the NBA, I would say, shares more or less exactly this vision. That's when I met Adam Silver first time, probably 10 years ago, 11 years ago. We instantly had that connect to say: How does the world look like in five or 10 years? Where is that going to? What is driving it, and, how can we really work together on that vision? That was, that was the stimulation with the NBA. What I think the NBA is, is a, is a fantastic sport, is a fantastic competition, but it is a technology play. It's driven by the wish to innovate. It's driven by the wish to be the first to explore these territories. Hyper-personalization is a very big topic there, and for us, the partnership for the NBA from the very beginning is a partnership where we can innovate together. So that's besides the pure reach and the commercial property, the spirit of this cooperation, and that is driving us. So the NBA is, for us, always the first point when we have some ideas, when we wanna develop something new for sport, when we wanna deploy it, that is the go-to place. That is the partner which is willing to also test some of the things, how is it working? The latest sample is emBET. emBET is a product where we put a visualization and information in live match streams. And the NBA said, "We really like this. We'd like you to stimulate sports betting." We have our partners in sports betting with DraftKings and FanDuel, so the client should pick and choose where he is stimulated, and we are making the technology and the overlay for this. They deployed it on the League Pass, and what we saw there is that the rate of people clicking on this, that's, that's in marketing language, engagement rate, was a 3.8%. For the ones among you which know the marketing, anything which is bigger than one is sensational. Usually, you are between 0.5%-0.8%, so this thing is working four times better to stimulate people live during the match to bet. Now, it's good for us, for our business model. As you know, every percentage point from pre-match into live is driving us roughly $1.4 million into our pocket and more profit because that is where we wanna be. We wanna be in the live, and our business model works for this. So that's a good sample of saying there is an innovation which is good for all players in the market, and the NBA is our go-to place. ... maybe in thinking about some of these other players, you know, you've referenced some of the B2C companies like, FanDuel and DraftKings. Maybe talk about Sportradar's place in the ecosystem, and how your technology and offerings differ from others? Well, let me start with something which is easy to measure. Sportradar is, since its existence, profitable. I invested, 20 years ago, EUR 150,000, roughly $200,000 at this time. Since then, I never invested money into the business, but you can ask every founder and entrepreneur, how much money has he invested in the business? They all know it in the early days. So given this, and looking now to the last three years, we as a public company, we always have been growing more than 20% top, and we show leverage in the bottom line, and we even are cash converting, not on the level like we will be in the next years, but we do. So we generate money. There is no company in our space, public or private, which has these patterns, so that separates us enormously. Looking to the cash which we have available, yes, it separates us. We have a pretty strong position. All this is only thanks to the people which we have, to the coverage which we have, to the market acceptance, and to the technology. That's the reason why we are where we are, and we can prove that we are better than anybody else. So being a partner to the market is the most important one. Now, the exciting thing is, how do we leverage our position? We are pretty good if it comes to the sports betting industry, and we prove it with numbers, that we grow on that pace and that we are generating money. Looking now to the industries which are associated, media, advertising, the sports leagues, to leverage this in a product where it all gets together, that's the really exciting story. I'm a big believer on platforms, I'm a big believer in technology, and that's what we are doing, so I would say that separates Sportradar. Maybe talk a little bit more about the technology backbone, of Sportradar, and particularly how that leads itself to differentiated products for your customers. Well, if we are looking now to our population, we have around about 4,000 employees. Around about 1,600 of them are engineers, so this is a technology business. By the way, it's the biggest position if we're looking to our salaries. So what do we do here? We store content. We do this in real time, and we arrange it in a format that it's processable, and then we are developing our products of this. 80% of our revenues are coming from sports betting, so you see a sophisticated range of products, always with the idea: how can we generate value for our clients? It's not purely selling data. That would be, in fact, pretty boring for me. So you need an API, you need the scalability. That's very much it. You don't need that whole machine which we have. But we use the data, and then we are calculating with algorithms probabilities. So we are using various formats of data which we source, but we are running then our algorithms, and we are monitoring, is the prediction of our model better? And let's take a sample with... We have been with the NBA. Let's take tennis as a sample. I love tennis. Do you play tennis? No, I don't. We should play Padel one day. Yes. That's easy for you, so, we can do this. I can close enough to pickleball. Yeah. I can do that. Yeah, that's okay. So looking now to tennis, we have deep data. We get that from the tennis court. So we have 50 times a second the position of the player, X, Y, Z, and the ball. With this, we can ingest it in our system in real time, and we can calculate who is winning that point, and the basis with the deep data is nearly 10% better than human beings. So if we look to our statistics, if we look to the calculation, we are getting 10% better by ingesting the deep data into this. And we have a lot of options to visualize with this deep data which we get. How was the ball speed? How was the hit of the racket? But the calculation is there. For this, you're gonna need to have the technical processing, you need the front end, you need the back end, and you need data scientists which can do this. That was four years ago. Nowadays, it's in the way that you have the algorithm, and then the machine begins to learn itself. Call that AI. And next gen AI is already in the applications there, so you manipulate the liquidity pools by predicting where the client streams are going. This is what the engine looks like, so it's a pure technology play, and by the way, here, we really earn our profits. We do not earn a lot by simple reselling data. That's a very small margin. The profit comes with the products which are generating value to the clients, and that is the prediction of the prices, that is the risk management which is there, that's the optimization on the platform with the clients, the churn, the bonus, the cross-selling, the upselling. Maybe talk a little bit more about how AI is evolving across the business. Maybe starting with your own investments. You acquired a company back in 2022, particularly that had AI solutions for the iGaming industry. You've made a significant hire of a new CTO and Chief AI officer. Would be great to hear how you see AI kind of evolving across Sportradar's technology complex. When we did the IPO together, David, you told me that was three years ago. "Carsten, you need to mention every of your sentence, crypto and blockchain." You told me this. Yes. I said, "Hey, that's not really, that's not really something which I believe is creating value for us." But it was a buzzword at this time. The reason why I'm saying it is, AI is a buzzword, but AI has a very different meaning for the companies. If you are not going on this, and if you're not fully embrace it, you will be out of the market in three years. I'm totally sure about this. So that is something which is here to stay. That is something where you have to find, as an entrepreneur or as a leader of a business, the way how you can put this to work for you. Having said this, looking to what we are doing, and we can prove this, we created a product which we call Alpha Odds. Alpha Odds is a product which is based on a very successful one, MTS Trading, Managed Trading Services. Here, we are predicting liquidity streams. Sports betting business is all about risk management, so you need to predict exposure, and your prices need to correlate with this. If you manage this on scale, you have a sure profit. And this Alpha Odds is now ingesting tickets from the clients of our clients, that we can predict on those tickets, liquidity streams significantly better than we can do it manually with this product. So that shows by adding now the AI layer on top of it, you are getting into a direct advantage for our clients. We make them 12% more profits. So if we can do this on scale, there is a little share in for us. We have a revenue share model for this, so it's good for all sides. We are creating value by directly putting AI to work. How will that look on scale? Here we are coming to the difficulty. We are all human beings. I'm an engineer by myself, very early days. No worries, I do not program anymore in the company. That would be not good. An engineer wants to learn. He wants to embrace, he want to learn from the best. So it was, for me, it was really a tough time in the last three months to convince, where I would say it's the best person from Google outside of the United States. He's VP, or was VP in Zurich. He developed products like Google Lens, and he said, "I'm ready to look for a new journey, for a new adventure, but I have here 10 different places where I can go, amongst them, OpenAI and others." So securing this leader will put a lot of pressure on our engineering population, but what it will do, it, it will transform the population to the AI-first thinking. This is a journey, but you're gonna need to have an anchor point to start this journey, and you're gonna need to do it carefully. So that's what we started, I would say, three years ago, and now with Behshad being the CTO and CAIO, that is the next milestone of that journey. Getting it directly into the product flow is the scale that you see the success here. So that's how I would describe the things which are happening at the moment on our technology. I'm very excited about this. Fascinating. Maybe give the audience a bit of sense for the data that you work with, just in terms of the longevity of Sportradar, coverage globally. Mm. -sports. I think it may be interesting just to hear how you think about that, you know, that data- Mm ... repository that Sportradar has. So if I'm looking now to historical data, wow, we have 132 years of Major League Baseball matches. I didn't know in the beginning that it's such a long history. So we have that all. It's validated, it's stored in our repository. Historical-wise, we have that for more than 90 sports. To be exact, it's 92 sports. We cover currently 43 sports live. We cover 1 million live matches every year. That's a number where we are by far, far, far the biggest player in the market. Of course, we store this information. We use it for algorithms, we use it for learning and teaching, so the repository we are sitting on is quite enormous. The reach which we have is by far the biggest in the industry. I'm not happy that we are not faster in driving things which I would say makes a lot of sense. I would say we are the company which can define a sports ML language. How do we define how data for sport is exchanged in the future? One of the projects which we have in mind, that we set the standards, because we are sitting on the biggest data pool. We totally get it. We can't be the only one. There are many, many providers in there. Why not give them an open exchange how to ingest that information? We know what to do with this in the sports betting space, and we proved it in this quarter. We proved it with a 28% top-line revenue growth and 29% adjusted EBITDA margin. We know what to do with it, but this is the fascinating thing. To the sports data, we have now the fan information with the Fan ID. Of course, we have the liquidity information. Yeah. Looking to the liquidity and to our run rate in this year- And by liquid, just for the audience, in terms of when you talk about liquidity, you mean in terms of- That's the betting tickets. Yeah. So that's the ticket, that's the stake, that's the ID from the player, and that's the ID from the teams playing against each other. It's anonymized. But that gives you so much information because you pick the brains of our clients. Why are they exactly in this second betting this kind of amount on it? So if I combine all this information in the platform to analyze it, that gives enormous opportunity for future products. ... You noted a bit on financial performance, and you know, you've obviously been, you know, consistently 20% grower top line since the IPO. You've once again guided to 20%+ growth in 2024. Mm. Maybe talk a little bit about growth of the core products versus new enhancements, and how you think about- Mm the complexion of that growth over time. If I'm looking to this year, David, we lately had the quarterlies, and we said that we are raising our outlook from a 20% growth, top and bottom, to a 21% growth. And we are very optimistic to reach and outperform this, looking to our forecasts. Why can we do this? We managed to step up six months ago, which was quite tough. So we took 10% of the costs from a people perspective out of the business. We managed this, and we had a step up of 500 basis points on the sports rights. Why have we had to step up? We choose to go with the NBA, we choose to go with the ATP, because we had the total trust that we can monetize on those two properties by using the deep data and the technology which we can deploy, and that was proved to be right. So looking now to the first quarter, we see 28% top line growth, 29% bottom line. So I think that proves itself that we know what we are doing and that we managed to step up. Looking now to the big contracts, which we started, and you know this from a financial accounting perspective, you have to amortize this linear. So if I have a deal for five years, it's split it in equal pieces for the five years, and we have to write it off and activate it on our balance sheet. Meaning, I know that every year we can get a step up because we get more clients on it, we have price increases. So at the end of the deal, the revenue and the income from it is bigger, and we get it in the products, which I told you before. So that means on the second half, it's always better. The big deals which we have, they started now, and now we can already deliver the 20% top and bottom line. So we see operational leverage in the business model. We demonstrated this, and we stay very disciplined now with our costs. You will not see us to do crazy actions here. You will see us to grow the costs in the single-digit number, and with the growing revenue and the mechanic of the bigger deals, we are pretty optimistic for the next foreseeable future. It's always difficult in a digital business model to predict five years or more, but, what we can see makes us very optimistic in our core market. Maybe in thinking about just your last quarter, maybe talk a bit more about the U.S. in particular. Mm-hmm. I mean, you had something over, I think, 65% revenue growth in the U.S. in the last quarter, you know, well over 30% last year. Maybe just what you're seeing in the U.S. and your expectations for the U.S. market over the next several years. So over the next several years, we think, that is a 25% annual growth market. There is still to be decided, when is California, the lovely state you are coming for, going online? When does that happen? But if we are looking to all the predictions, our assumption is, at the moment, 25% growth on an annual basis. That's what we see. Might go a little bit quicker, might go a little bit slower, but it's not avoidable. So, that's where we see the market growth. We have to leverage this. We did this in, in this quarter. You mentioned 65%. Wow! That's really- that shows how powerful this engine is. We are sitting on three of four leagues here in the U.S. The coverage is 100% there. So, we have very strong partners and very strong multipliers with this. The exciting thing in the States is the conversion from pre-match into live betting. All the tools, and I mentioned emBET as a tool, I can mention 4Sight as a tool, where we enrich tennis, for example, with this deeper data pattern that you see the ball speed, you see the acceleration of the players, you see his fitness condition directly in the feed. So having this stimulates, of course, live betting. Yeah. That's what we wanna do. Looking into the shift, if we shift the pre-match more into the live, one percentage point shift is EUR 1.4 million plus on our P&L. There is a little cost with cloud computing in there, so it's not 1.4 fully, but let's say it's close to this. So, this together shows strong growing market opportunity and high profitability simply by those patterns. So that's how we see the U.S. Just something in there that's interesting to me, as you think about comparing maybe European bettor experience versus in the U.S., just where we are in terms of the product offering here in the States- Mm ... for, yeah, your typical U.S. bettor versus someone in Europe, like where, where do we stand just in terms of technology and actual, Mm ... you know, use of the product? Around the globe, there are, of course, many more sophisticated developed markets than the U.S., simply because it is already since 20 years in many of those core markets. And there is 20 years of marketing. If you look now to England, you can say it's more than 100 years there. So we see that those markets found their way. That's the same what we see here in the U.S. There is a bit more testing. How can we deploy technology? How can we use technology? And that's what I love here in the country. So that passion for technology and getting it to work, and optimizing it, and asking constantly the questions: "Can we be more efficient? Can we do that different?" That's, I think, what we see currently in the U.S. Player markets and those things, that is a good sample for it, where we have a lot of development. I'm personally a big believer that players are getting more and more important. It's not the teams, even if the teams might not want to hear this- Mm-hmm. It's the players. So having something which is related to the player, always with the consideration, it should not be a player, a single player should not be able to manipulate this from a betting perspective, that's exciting territory. But, adaptation of live betting is something where I'm totally certain it will happen because life is so much more emotional. You watch the match, in that moment, you want to bet on a touchdown, you want to bet on a point. And these are things where it's not avoidable that we see more betting activity live, and everybody agrees to this. It's only the question, how quick does that adaptation go? And that's an international trend, which we see everywhere. Maybe just talking about international trends, you obviously have a very global business. What are some of the markets that you think are particularly interesting from a growth perspective over the next five years? I'm very excited about Brazil. I was there three weeks ago. That's always the same when I see opportunities, I want to understand it, boots on the ground. I want to speak with the people, I want to speak with the team, I want to understand the mechanics. That was quite a trip. São Paulo is a city of 33 million people. I met the mayor, he said, "Officially, we are 23, but add 10 million more, so the city is growing." It's a mega city. And the people, they have such a passion for sport. Of course, it's soccer where they have the biggest passion, and sport is looking for ways how to monetize their sport better. By the way, that's the same when I was speaking with the commissioner of the NBA six years ago, "What should we do with sports betting?" And he asked me that question. I said, "Probably you need to be the lobbyist for this. You need to be-- You need to promote it," and he did that, and, the rest is history. So I see in Brazil something similar. I see that the federal government has licensed now sports betting. It's still not implemented, so we are very early innings, and here it is now about being a partner to the government, helping them how they best regulate it, being a partner for sport, which is the most important. Sport need to have a profit for this. You're going to need to engage with sport, you need to speak with them. And then understanding what are the conditions of this market? It's a big retail market. It's a country of 220 million people. It's quite sizable, and many of those people still paying in cash on the street. So there is a huge retail in there, needs a different infrastructure than most of the places here in the U.S. And you can only understand this by being boots on the ground. Mm-hmm. Now is the time to set really the right setup for the company and liaising with the partners to engage on this. The only downside for me is, you're going to need to have, Portuguese language and, that's something where, we need local leadership, and we are exactly doing this to monetize on the opportunity. I'm very excited about Brazil. As you hear, it's at the moment, $2 billion GGR, and now we are getting into regulation. We predict that is $5 billion-$7 billion GGR in three to five years' time, so it's still a bit rough to predict this because it's very early days. To give you a proportion, $5 billion-$7 billion GGR, comparing it to the 10-11, what we have at the moment in the U.S., that gives you a feeling about the size of opportunity. So it's the right time to be there, it's the right time to engage and do this. Other markets, I think, India is still a big, big topic, country of 1.4 billion people. We see early signs of adaptation. I'm personally very fascinated about Japan. Huge, huge, and very strong economy. Very passionate about sport. We have sports betting only regulated in a very basic way, and in a monopoly. And we know there are many of the mega companies in this world, in Japan, which are keen and eager to explore sports betting in a fully regulated market environment. To give you three samples, I can go on more, but these are markets where I try to follow very closely. This is where we see growth, and now to close the loop, we see in the next 10 years, a growth in sports betting globally between 10%-12%. We want to grow 20%. For this, we need to outperform the market. We need to have the right products in the market, and I think we demonstrated on scale in the last years that we are able to do this. Maybe as you think longer term, what's kind of North Star around a longer-term EBITDA margin? We will show definitely leverage. So that's something which is clear. We have this operational leverage. We demonstrated it now, and we will double and triple down on this. Looking to the stage of maturity in our traditional model, which is more than 80% sports betting, we see 25%-30% as a realistic margin. If we are able, let's look five years plus, to establish a platform, that might get higher, but that's too early to talk about it. ... Great. Well, with that, maybe we'll turn to any questions from the audience. The audience is still sleepy. It's early in the morning. You gave me the early morning slot. We did give you the first slot. Could you talk a little bit about the stickiness of the contracts with the leagues, and what they're looking for from you in order to retain those contracts over time, and how you defend against competitors with that? Now looking to the leagues, and we said that a couple of times, in our announcements, we're pretty happy with what we have signed up. So we don't see that we need to sign up major new and big deals. We have the portfolio, which we take to market, and the prediction which we gave you with a 20%+ top and bottom line, now 21, is with this portfolio, and the outlook in the future is with this portfolio. So we think we have a pretty stable and significant portfolio to execute on our business plan. Looking to the duration, it plays in our favor that big contracts are in the very early innings. The NBA renewal is seven years, so give and take, we are six and a half years in there. Looking to the ATP, it's five years, give and take. We are half a year, three months is in there. So, and we managed on these two properties to show already the revenue from a top-line perspective on a growth trajectory significantly higher than the market expected. NHL is, I think, still in eight years or seven and a half years, where we have them locked in. So I can go now through every contract. If you ask me an individual contract, which is interesting for you, I'm happy to go on this, but the general picture is, we are more on the beginning of the big contracts than in the middle or at the end. Given now purely how we have to amortize, that we have to do it flatly, and I had long discussions with our auditor about this, that plays in our favor from a profitability perspective in the future. Carsten, real quick, can you comment a little bit on the noise we hear a lot about the potential for disintermediation of your product set from the operators? There's a lot of talk- Can you repeat it about- Sorry. Disintermediation of the product set from the operators. We hear a lot of- Oh ... noise about that. Look, I'm doing this now since quite a while, this business. And I think this noise specifically comes from the United States. Looking on what we can measure is we have now more than 100 clients on Managed Trading Services. If I'm looking to Brazil, all the big players, the regional players, are using our management to run their business. So we are not selling only the data, we are selling the products in there. So if I'm looking globally, and if I'm looking only to numbers, the statement is, the one who is sitting on the content with the lowest latency and the one who is sitting on the user information, the liquidity information, will be able to manage and establish a better product with higher profitability. So over the time, I'm totally sure you will see this pattern. So it's only about, can we prove that we provide a product and a service to our clients, which is doing the business better than they can do it by themselves? And I think we proved this. So, and the rest is noise in my mind. And only for the record, we had a private bet here with the gentleman. He said 6 was yesterday at this time, the level of participants. We are significantly better, David. Only that you know you lost that bet. Only one J.P. Morgan person, so we feel very good about that. Yeah. I don't think we have any questions in the queue. If there's no one else in the audience, thank you all for joining. Thank you very much.