Good afternoon, and welcome to the Azerion Interim Financial Results Q3 2025. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to send a question through, please type it in the ask a question tab at the right-hand side of the player. These questions can be sent in at any time during the presentation, and they will be addressed after the live Q&A portion of the event. Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to Umut Akpinar for welcome remarks.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Umut Akpinar, CEO of Azerion. I am here with my colleagues, Ms. Julie Duong Ferat, our Chief Financial Officer.
Hello everyone.
Sebastiaan Moesmann, Chief Strategy Officer.
Yes, hello everyone, welcome.
We would like to welcome you to today's webinar to present Azerion's Q3 and year-to-date 2025 interim results. Before we start, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the disclaimer and our forward-looking statements. Thank you. Let's please move on to the presentation. Today, I want to take you through our Q3 update around three strategic achievements that define where Azerion is right now and where we are going to. First focus, we completed the divestment of Whow Games, generating EUR 55 million in initial cash and another potential EUR 10 million in earnings. With that, we removed the complexity in our business to focus 100% on our core advertising platform. Second, stability. We successfully refinanced our bonds. This transaction reduced our debt by EUR 40 million and secured our funding for the next four years. Along with ongoing cost savings, we now have a stronger position and balance sheet.
Third, the future. With a sharper focus and a stronger balance sheet, we are now investing more strategically in AI and multi-cloud. This is the engine that will drive our efficiency and growth. While preparing for the next phase of Azerion, we also had a solid Q3 in our operational business, which Julie will elaborate on shortly. First, to give you more insight into our technology, how this AI strategy will deliver significant efficiencies, and how it will unlock new revenue opportunities, I will now hand over to Sebastiaan for a strategic update.
Yes, thank you very much, Umut. Indeed, let's focus on our path forward. As you can see in this timeline, and maybe it sounds a bit redundant if you've been in these calls over the last 16 or so quarters that we've presented this, our strategy over the last few years has been a deliberate and focused shift of moving away from the premium games to concentrate our capital and energy on a real core business, which is digital advertising and increasingly digital intelligence. This is, as I explained also in our last Q2 release, because although the premium games provide good and stable revenue and EBITDA, they don't scale like digital advertising does.
The divestments of Governor Poker in 2023 and more recently Whow Games in 2025 were not just portfolio optimizations. They were key strategic decisions to sharpen the focus and to fund the future of the company, which lies in the advertising and the cloud and AI services in that space. Given the immense volumes our platform already processes every second, you can imagine that machine learning, predictive algorithms, and then recently generative AI have always been a core part of our business, and it's been so for over a decade. When we are focusing on our own future, of course, a core part of our strategy is then how we build our technology in that space. Instead of relying on a single specific vendor for intelligent cloud and AI services, we have actually been steadily building our own infrastructure. That gives us three critical advantages.
It means we're independent of any single provider. It means we are maximally efficient by optimizing across services and managing pricing, and our platform is incredibly robust and scalable. On multi-cloud, this is where you see our infrastructure in action, basically. We process over 500,000 auctions every second across multiple cloud providers, and this gives this astronomical 30 billion data points every minute that we need to process, predict, analyze, etc. Now, everyone knows that the big tech and cloud companies like Amazon, AWS, Google Cloud Services, or Huawei, and those many companies are building their own business on top of those cloud providers. You have to realize, and I think everybody does, all of those, none of those cloud providers are flawless. They're not cheap, and no one of them is really best in everything. What we do is hedge.
We run on several cloud instances and providers, and so we can better control cost and guarantee service to ourselves and to our clients. Once you have a stable infrastructure, you can build on top of that. Our AI platform is one of these examples, offering a single entry point to many different AI models and workflow tools. We have effectively created an engine that can be used for many different purposes, and we are doing so today, every day. I think there is a lot of talk in the market about using AI and where this usage of AI is actually helping businesses, but we are really putting it center in our whole workflow, and it is already showing. On the publisher side, for instance, AI is a massive time saver for onboarding new clients and for optimizing ad slots.
As you can imagine, we have hundreds of thousands of web pages and apps in our ecosystem, and all of them have these ad slots, and you need to optimize, configure the pricing, the sizing, manage them, really. It is a massive job manually, but we automated it with a lot of AI. Our sales and delivery teams also, it cuts their time to build a quality media plan. Normally, people are busy with that for days, maybe hours and days, and now it is really minutes to really have the AI assist in a great advice. It also supports the teams to do the implementation and the optimization of those plans in mere minutes instead of hours. That improves not just the efficiency in our company, but also the quality and the output of the advertising campaigns for the clients.
Across all of the departments, from HR to finance, it is already reducing overhead and assisting our developers. Just imagine agents that are listening to e-mails and already pre-categorizing support requests, invoices, etc. It is all there. Obviously, if you think about developing software, which of course we do every day, you can imagine that it is already, let's say, almost core business there to have the AI assist with coding, optimizing the UI, ticketing, bug tracing, testing, and optimization. This is really how we drive operational leverage already today, every day with AI. It is not just a big term, but it is there. This powerful platform is not just for our internal use. We provide this whole stack, our multi-cloud infrastructure, and our AI platform as a service to our partners.
We launched this comprehensive platform earlier this year, and already we see a lot of traction in our ecosystem, and many partners are signing up to our platform and joining us as we help them activate their own multi-cloud and AI instances. This basically comes back to our core consolidation strategy over the last few years, because by aggregating volumes and applications, we build critical scale, just as we successfully demonstrated this already with our acquisitions across Europe in the last few years, with business units like Game Distribution, AAA Distribution, Fanzone, and our SSP, all consolidating Europe's fragmented landscape. We leverage that deep understanding of Europe to deliver a unified platform with real economies of scale, and it empowers local businesses with the enterprise-grade capabilities that they need to compete in a world that is dominated by global tech.
All of the effort we have put into building our internal capabilities also generates new external opportunities in this way. This brings me to what we see as another really big opportunity. The more seamless and skilled our platform becomes, the easier it is to use. Of course, several peers in our industry are actively pursuing AI as well in their workflows to increase efficiency. We see a very specific opportunity in the SME market, because all of that seamless automation allows us to serve the smallest of advertisers and publishers out there, a market that was previously locked out by complexity and high cost. We are building technologies to serve exactly that kind of customer. It makes high-performance omnichannel campaigns, including digital out of home, as you see here, accessible to everyone, everywhere, and at every size.
All it takes is a simple chat like you see here with our platform, and even a florist on the corner of the street can have advertising at a level that was previously reserved for big global advertisers`` like Nike, Unilever, or Vodafone. It really is like you see on the screen here. You chat with our systems, say, "Hey, I want to be famous. This is my shop. Can you please help me?" and it will come back not just with an advice, but if you say yes, it will actually execute, create the ads, and make you famous in your neighborhood, outdoor radio, news, all within a hyperlocal environment. That will create a big opportunity for customers that are currently using, for instance, Facebook ads or Google ads. To summarize, our—oh, there is one slide missing, but it does not matter.
Our multi-cloud and AI platform drives smoother processes and optimizations, meaning higher margins and EBITDA for a more efficient business. At the same time, more and more partners use our platform to grow the footprint and relevance in the market and increase with us the economies of scale. Finally, the seamless operations improve accessibility for the SME market, creating a powerful new long-tail revenue stream. This is the engine of our future platform growth and our focus for the next 12 to 18 months. Before I hand over to Julie, let's make sure that the presentation is up. It looks to me like the presentation is no longer showing. Can someone from OpenExchange verify or double-check this? Silence. Is it us? Okay. We will continue. I will hand over to Julie for the financial part of the update.
Thank you, Seb. Hello again, everyone. Happy that if you can see the slides. I'm going to focus today on our continuing operations, the true measure of our performance. As a reminder, these continuing operations, our growth engine, include the advertising platform and AAA Game Distribution. Basically, Q3 was the continuity of our transformation, and I'm going to highlight the three main pillars that are supporting this. First, the sharpened focus on the platform. Then secondly, the reduction of our indebtedness. And finally, the solid operational performance of Q3. As Umut mentioned, the first milestone supporting our transformation is the sharpened focus on the platform. This was further enabled this quarter by the successful divestment of the lion's shares of our premium game segments. On July 14, we completed the sale of Huawei Games.
Basically, the deal consists of an upfront payment of EUR 55 million and an earn-out of up to EUR 10 million, subject to customary adjustments. This transformation is a transaction series transformative for two reasons. First, we have now full focus on our core platform business and freeze-up resources to expand our cloud and AI solution, as Sebas mentioned. Secondly, the proceeds strengthen our cash position, which was also instrumental in reducing our own refinancing. Last but not least, the gain of sale of this operation brings positive results in our P&L for approximately EUR 22 million. The second major item of Q3 was our bond refinancing. We have now a new EUR 225 million under a larger framework of EUR 350 million, which increases our financial flexibility. We use these proceeds, plus our existing cash, to fully redeem our previous EUR 265 million bonds. This strategic transaction achieves two main goals that we have.
First, it reduces our nominal bond debt by EUR 40 million. It secures highly favorable terms, including a lower interest rate of three months euro bond plus 5.5% instead of previously 6.75%. It is a four-year framework instead of three. The redemption was formally completed on October 10. Now, with a sharpened focus on our platform and a strengthened balance sheet, we have built a solid foundation, and we are continuing to deliver. On Q3, our revenue grew by 8% to EUR 120 million. This growth was driven by strong commercial execution, and especially our high growth pillars, digital out of home and connected TV. Our Q3 adjusted EBITDA grew even faster than the revenue, up 13% to over EUR 14 million. This consistent strength is also clear on a year-to-date basis. Here, revenue is up by 8% to EUR 371 million.
Regarding adjusted EBITDA, it's up by 14% to EUR 38 million. Now, if we look at the EBITDA, it almost doubled compared from approximately EUR 12 million to EUR 24 million on a year-to-date basis. This 90% growth clearly shows the real positive effect of our ongoing consolidation programs and our investments in AI-driven efficiency. Discipline, I would say, is also a key word in Azerion. Basically, we are continuing our discipline focus on operations. As a clear demonstration, you can see in this chart the revenue per FTE that is still increasing year- on- year. In Q3, the revenue per FTE is up to EUR 135,000 from EUR 126,000 last year, which is the highest for a third quarter ever. I'm pleased to report that Azerion is leaner, more focused, and better positioned than ever to deliver sustainable long-term value.
I will now hand it back to Umut for the conclusion and the wrap-up.
Thank you, Julie. As we have presented today, we have successfully transformed our business in 2025. Our core platform is delivering strong, profitable growth. We have focused our company through the divestment of Premium Games, and we are getting ready for a future where AI is playing an increasingly important role. This gives us strong momentum and clear visibility as we enter Q4, which is historically our strongest quarter of the year. Therefore, based on the solid year-to-date performance, we are reaffirming our full year 2020 guidance. Now, I would like to hand over to Seb for the Q&A.
Yes, thank you, Umut. Operator, can you please repeat the instructions for Q&A, and then we can get started?
Of course. We will now move to our Q&A session. If you would like to send a question through, please type it in the ask a question tab at the right-hand side of your player. I'll now hand back over to Sebastiaan Moessman for written questions.
Yes, thank you, Operator. All right, we have a few questions already in the queue. One of them is, do you have initiatives to increase trading volumes in your shares? They are priced under their value right now, and the ability to buy and sell may be a significant reason. Yeah, let me answer that. I think regarding share liquidity evaluation, we agree that our strategic progress, simplifying the business, reducing the debt, and growing the profitability is not currently reflected in the share price as we would like to see it. Our primary focus is to continue delivering strong, profitable results, and that is, according to us at least, the best way to create long-term shareholder value.
We're also committed to improving our investor relationship and the engagement there and the transparency, such as the clear reporting split of continuing operations right now to help the market fully understand our focused high-growth story. Yeah, I think over the next few months, we'll just keep on trying to perform like we do. Ultimately, I think both the share price and the volumes will follow the developments that we do internally. All right. There was a question. Let's see. Your peers like Meta and Google are in an AI arms race spending tens of billions. How does Azerion's AI strategy compete? Let me take that one as well. Obviously, and maybe, yeah, sadly, we are not able to spend tens of billions in our own investments there, but we're also not in the same space.
We are using the infrastructure that is available in the world. If you think about data centers or cloud providers like AWS, we're using AI models, whether that's Google's Veo3 or Mistral or Llama We're using the existing models on existing infrastructure. We're just hedging it. It also means that we're not part of this massive CapEx investment war that's going on right now. Everybody knows that the big tech in America is spending close to $1 trillion a year on data centers right now. This is not what we do. We use what they build. Therefore, we're not part of this AI arms race in that particular sense. There was a question about the bond redemption and how the interest payments went. All I can say on that point is that we have fully and completely closed the last bond, repaid everything that was due there.
We, of course, stepped into the next bond. If there's any question about payments there, there shouldn't be because, yeah, this is a very regulated and strict and official process that we obviously follow. Let's see. We have a question about the continuing operation where we mentioned stranded cost. Maybe Julie, do you want to explain stranded cost?
Basically, we have a cost at holding level that we used to allocate to our both segments, Premium Games and the platform. Basically, we still have certain costs that obviously will remain and are remaining after the operation and the sale of Huawei that we are working on to reduce those costs. Basically, you have different costs at the holding that we have centrally to manage, let's say, the both segments and that we have now fully in the continuing operations. This is what we call stranded cost that we are now able only to, let's say, allocate to only one segment. This is what we're working on actively to reduce those parts.
Yeah, and I think so the costs that were basically linked to Premium Games but part of the holding, this is also what we said during our refinancing of the bond. We are always actively looking for efficiencies and cost savings. Of course, costs that are no longer necessary because they were previously meant to support a segment that we have divested from. We will try to get rid of those costs basically as soon as we can. All right. And then the last one is here. Let's see. The Trade Desk is putting pressure on SSPs like Magnite with its Open Path initiative. Are you feeling similar pressure in programmatic automated auction business? I think the benefit of us, so we are not, if you want, an SSP. Azerion is a platform with both DSP, SSP. We have our own supply, but also we have our local sales teams.
We are not basically waiting for the DSPs to either give us or not give us their money. We procure deals with big advertisers and agencies locally, and we make sure that they're being executed through their respective DSPs. It still means that most of the money, and that's what we call direct, is actually given to us directly. That is why the word direct. We are not really relying just on the DSP like The Trade Desk to decide on that budget. We do not feel the same pressure as other SSPs might in our business. All right. One more question about cash flow. Basically, the question is, how can we expect your cash generation to evolve in the fourth quarter and the next year?
I think what we have done in the last two, three years maybe even, and this is the picture that Julie also showed on the operational efficiency. We are constantly, let's say, improving the bottom line profitability of the company. We will see a, let's say, increasingly, yeah, profit obviously ultimately talks about the cash generation. The more efficient we are and the better we have our cost under control, the better the cash generation will also be. Of course, the fourth quarter is specific because it's the best quarter. It also means that we have the biggest campaigns and the biggest revenues in the last quarter. That will obviously help with the cash generation on a, let's say, seasonal level. All right. I think those were all the questions. With that, I think we can close the meeting.
Thanks everyone for attending, and we see each other in probably a few months.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.