Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ZEAL Network Conference Call regarding the Q1 results 2023. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. Let me now hand the floor over to Jonas Mattsson.
Thank you so much. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to ZEAL's earnings call. I hope you all have access and can see the presentation on the webcast. If not, it's also accessible on our homepage under the Investor Relations section. On the content slide, you will find today's agenda. We will start off with a summary of the first three months of the year, followed by financial update. We will reiterate our guidance for the year before we're finishing off with the key takeaways. After the presentation, we will give you the opportunity, as always, to ask questions. I will now hand over to our CEO, Helmut Becker.
Thanks, Jonas. Good morning. First of all, we're happy that we've received the games license from the German regulator. I will touch on the games business plans in a second. We've also made a good start in 2023 with double-digit top-line growth. We have increased our EBITDA compared to previous year. Furthermore, the World Lottery Association, the WLA, has accepted ZEAL as a member. This is a great signal towards our key stakeholders, our partners, and potential partners in the industry. As the German market leader for online lotteries, we take our responsibility in the areas of compliance, security, and risk management very seriously and attach great importance to social commitments as well. We are pleased to be part of that important organization. Two days ago, ZEAL was able to hold, again, a physical general meeting in Germany, first time after nine years.
Among other things, the dividend proposal of EUR 3.60 was approved. The payment of the dividend will start next week on May 17th. Page 5, let me give you an update on regulation. As you know, we are now operating under the new Glücksspielstaatsvertrag, and we've already talked about the extension of our broker permission until 2029. Let me go straight to the games license or virtual slot machine license, which is probably the most interesting for you. As I already mentioned, at the beginning of April, we received the permission to operate virtual slot games. This is an important milestone in our business strategy. The permit is valid for 5 years. After that, we have to apply again for the continuation of that permit, which should most certainly be an administrative act.
I now jump to slide six to tell you a little bit more about the games business. We expect our games business to go live in May or June this year. With a smaller number of games than originally expected, as the regulators simply cannot keep up with the flood of games submitted by all providers that require approval. We will be the front runner in the lottery segment with our brands. In the second half of the year, we expect a rapid expansion of our games portfolio, adding a lot of games in 2024 and constantly refreshing the games portfolio. Let us now go to slide seven. Looking at other markets that already offer virtual instant win games, it becomes clear what a great potential our new business field offers in terms of potential and perspective going forward.
In other markets, instant win games already account for almost half of total lottery revenues. By the way, this is also very much the case for our ONCE business in Spain. Therefore, the German market has a lot of catch-up potential in this area. In combination with a significantly higher gross margin than our brokerage business. There are regulatory limiting factors that make it difficult to predict the speed of the ramp up and probably will limit the total size of the potential somewhat compared to the leading markets. Back to you, Jonas.
Thanks, Helmut. Let's now go to the next page, we will start describing the jackpot situation for the year. I'm now on slide 9. As you can see, this is the jackpot development for our two main products. 6/49 is on top, and Eurojackpot graph is below. For LOTTO 6/49 , the jackpot situation has been weaker than a comparable time last year. The average jackpot is slightly lower, but more importantly is that we did not have a single peak jackpot in this quarter. As you can see, we at least got close at the end of March. This to compare with last year, we actually had two peaks. This have, of course, an impact on both customer acquisition and billings number for the period. For Eurojackpot, it was in par with last year.
The average jackpot was a bit higher, no period experienced any peak jackpot. At least we got close with EUR 104 million in late January. In summary, a slightly weaker jackpot compared to last year, and also to mention is the lack of true peak jackpot for the quarter, which is actually below the historical statistical average. Let's now move to the income statement that you will find on next slide. We grow revenues by 6% despite a lack of good jackpot development. The revenue growth is somewhat lower than the corresponding billings growth that I will talk about in a moment, but basically it's due to less favorable product mix in the quarter. Total costs follow the revenues and increased by 7%. Personnel costs have increased as a result of higher provisions for our long-term incentive schemes.
We also had 4 more headcounts in the company, that has lesser impacts. Marketing expenses are slightly down versus last year and in line with the jackpot situation. Direct operating expenses are in line with the increase in the transaction volumes, the 11%. Indirect operating expenses are up 7%, with the main driver being more consultancy costs for the quarter. Combined, this has led to an EBITDA that is 4% higher than last year and now at EUR 9.3 million. This equals to a 35% EBITDA margin for the period. Finally, EBIT is up by 5%, while after tax is 12% lower due to more tax charges. The latter is explained by the reversal of deferred tax assets that has an impact on the tax charge for the quarter.
In the coming three slides, we'll look closer at some KPIs. Let's go to slide 11. Our billings grow to EUR 2.1 million or by 11%. This growth is supported by the strong customer acquisition as of last year. Gross margin of 12.4% is down versus last year, but due to a less favorable product mix, as I just mentioned. This is, however, nothing that worries me since the product mix is always changing over the course of the year. On the next slide, we have highlighted net cash and new registered customers. Let's first talk about net cash, which is up 45% since last year and now standing EUR 100 million.
This is mainly due to the strong operating profit in combination with the inclusion of the EUR 56 million VAT receipt, but offset by the last year dividend payment of EUR 48 million. Regarding acquisition of new customers, we're 7% below last year, which is explained by the higher acquisition number we have in the beginning of 2022 when LOTTO 6/49 reaches peak two draws in a row. Moving on to slide 13. Here you will find some additional KPIs. The CPL or cost per lead is reduced by 3%. The main explanation is that we had some special campaign last year, which have increased the number for those periods. Besides this, nothing material has changed, but of course, happy with the lower CPL. The MAU or monthly active users are up 6% for the quarter and now at 1.1 million monthly users.
Finally, average billing per user is still very high and up by 5% to EUR 61. This is indeed very satisfactory, but I don't expect this to go further up until games are launched, which could have a positive effect, but we do also expect high level of cannibalization with this product. Let me now reiterate on the outlook for this outlook for this year that you will find on slide 15. Our guidance for the year is that we expect the billings of around EUR 800 million-EUR 830 million, revenues of around EUR 110 million-EUR 120 million, and EBIT of around EUR 30 million-EUR 35 million, mostly depending on how much we ultimately invest in marketing. We are indeed planning a step change and have assumed EUR 34 million-EUR 39 million in marketing investments for the year.
For the games business, we have assumed a low single-digit EBITDA impact of this year. Obviously, the business is expected to continue grow in the coming years. The bottom numbers indicate a double-digit revenue growth, which is also our expectation for the midterm. As always, this is based on the average jackpot for the rest of the year. With this, I hand back to you, Helmut.
Thanks, Jonas. These are the key takeaways from our presentation today. We continue to grow the business. We have received our long-awaited gains permission. Despite the turbulent times, our business is remarkably resilient, and we continue to pursue our goal to continue growing the business and gaining market share. With our approved dividend for the 2022 financial year, we have now returned approximately EUR 186 million to our shareholders in the form of dividends or share buybacks since the business model changed. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We are now closing the presentation, and I think I give it back to the operator to take questions.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press 9 and the star key on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to withdraw your question, please press 9 and star again. Please press 9 and star to register for a question. First up, we have Henning Wendisch from NuWays. Over to you.
Hi, everybody. I hope you can hear me fine, and thank you so much for the presentation, and congratulations on the good results. You briefly talked about average billing per user, that it increased quite a lot and above my expectations actually. What was in particular, if you want, the driver for that? If you could elaborate on that, would be really helpful. Also, I saw that the tax rate has increased to 30%. You also briefly touched it, but can we assume that kind of tax rate for the rest of the year? Those are my two questions. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you so much for your question. Let's start with the tax question. Yes, the future tax rate will be very normal. The tax spend is mainly inflows influenced by the reversal of deferred tax expenses. Going forward, you should just assume the normal German tax rate, and that will be approximately 32%. Obviously, the paid tax is less, but what we charge the income statement is more or less in line with the German tax rates. On the average billing per user, yes, it's continue going up. It has impact when related to the jackpot situation. As I said, games could actually positively impact that one. We also know that games, money spent on games maybe be EUR 1 less spent on other products.
We want to be a little bit careful that it will not continue too much, but at least have a positive development over the years. If you go back a few years, we were probably 10% lower than we are today. It's a nice development we have had. I hope this explains the two questions.
Yes. Perfect. Thank you.
Next up is Marius Fuhrberg from Warburg Research. The floor is yours.
Yeah, thanks. One question from my side. Could you give us an update regarding the progress of the billings in the own lotteries? How is your current strategy to increase those billings or are you actually in the progress of introducing new lotteries also? That would be helpful. Thanks.
The... When you say own lotteries, let me try to explain it. We have the majority of our billings or transaction volumes comes from the lotteries that we are broker, that officially are owned by the state lotteries, meaning six out of forty-nine, Eurojackpot, and so forth so on. We also have other lotteries that we are self the operator, we have developed them, like the freiheit+. We have also the Deutsche Traumhauslotterie. We are adding more lotteries to our portfolio. These are relatively new. freiheit+ was launched 2 years ago. The Deutsche Traumhauslotterie was last year. We hope that these also will take effect and becoming even bigger part of our portfolio because they comes with a higher margin.
That's why we want to push these lottery products to our customers, as well as continue brokering our standard products. On top of that, we have the games, as we talked about, where we develop some games and other games we do in-source from third party suppliers. Was that answering your question?
Yeah. I was a little bit more pointing the direction of how your current strategy looks like, of convincing more people of playing those lotteries or do you spend especially a little bit of your marketing spend towards promoting those lotteries as they come with, yeah, higher take rates?
We see potential to further grow these lotteries on our current customer base. We also are refining the products themselves and the value propositions of these lotteries, so we are learning as we are going. Yes, you have a point there. We do plan to also invest into customer acquisition with these lotteries. This is something where we also are in test and learn mode right now.
Okay. Thank you.
At the moment, there are no further questions. If you would like to raise another question, please press 9 and the star key. 9 and star if you have any further questions. There are no further questions.
Okay. I would like to say thank you for everyone that participated and took the time to listen to our presentation. As we said in the beginning, it was a very good start for ZEAL and the group companies in the Q1, and we expect a nice future as well. Thank you so much for taking the time, and should you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to us directly. I'm happy to support you with any kind of explanation. Thank you so much.