Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of ZEAL Network SE, following the publication of the Q1 figures of 2025. I am delighted to welcome the CEO, Dr. Helmut Becker, and the CFO, Andrea Behrendt, who will guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly via audio line to the management. Questions via chat cannot be submitted today. Having said this, Mrs. Behrendt, the stage is yours.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call. First of all, sorry that none of you won actually the EUR 120 million jackpot yesterday. Bad luck for you, but great news for ZEAL. Let's talk business. I hope you all can see the presentation. If not, you can find it on our website. Let me talk you through the agenda. We will share the highlights of Q1, then go into the financial details, followed by an update on strategic focus and the guidance for 2025. We will iterate our dividend proposal and close with the key takeaways. Before, it's your turn, and we are happy to take your questions. Handing over to Helmut now to give us a short summary for Q1.
Good morning. Q1 was a successful quarter. Compared to last year, we saw very strong margins. We acquired more new customers than ever before in a quarter without a peak jackpot. Our high revenue growth continued, and our EBITDA almost doubled. Back to Andrea.
Thanks, Helmut. Now, let's get into the details of our Q1 financials. First of all, let's put the results into context with the jackpot environment. As you all know, jackpots are important for us to drive customer acquisition and activation of our existing customers. Q1 2025 was marked by the absence of any peak jackpot. This compares to four peak jackpots in Q1 2024. Despite this jackpot environment, we had a successful quarter, fueled by the strong growth of our customer base in Q4 of last year. On slide seven, you will see how this translates into our financials for Q1. Here, I want to highlight three numbers for you. We see an overall revenue growth of 42%. This is driven by an increased billings of 7% and an improved margin.
We increased our marketing spend by 16% and acquired more new customers than ever before in a quarter without a peak jackpot. Bottom line, we delivered strong results with an EBITDA of EUR 17.7 million. Let's zoom into the billings growth of 7% that I mentioned in the quarter without any peak jackpots. On the back of the strong Q4 2024 customer cohort, we were able to achieve 1.5 million monthly active users on our platform, and these customers spent an average of EUR 59 per month. On the next slide, you see the second driver for the revenue increase: our margin expansion. We achieved an underlying lottery gross margin of 16.9%, mainly based on the successful price increase that we implemented last year and a continuously improving product mix.
Let's look on the other side of the growth driver for ZEAL, our customer acquisition, and you will see that on slide 10. With 247,000 new customers, we acquired a record number of new customers for a quarter without any peak jackpots. The overall cost per lead was EUR 48.5. This is higher than last year due to jackpot situation, increased overall media prices, and marketing tests to reach new target groups in our new businesses. With an isolated view on the core brokerage business, the CPL is EUR 41.1. For comparison to previous quarters, we added the backup slide 24 for you. Now, handing over to Helmut for an update on our businesses, games, and Traumhaus-Aus Verlosung.
Thanks, Andrea. Yeah, let me talk about two other parts of our business. First, about games. As expected, our games business steadily gains traction based on the improvements we are rolling out. We have grown our games portfolio to over 400 games now. Importantly, we added some well-known games brands that customers recognize. In the past, we saw lottery jackpots, peak jackpots driving growth in our games business. In Q1, we have stable monthly active users and billings and revenue growth in our games business, even though we did not have a single peak jackpot. This retention of activity shows that our customer value proposition in games increasingly resonates with our users. Let me now move on and talk about Dreamhouse Raffle. Our second Dreamhouse Raffle ended with the house draw on 28 February. The results were even stronger than those for the first house draw across the board. We generated EUR 2 million for charity. Our third house raffle is already underway. This time, it's a house in Bavaria. The draw will happen on the 2nd of June. Now, back to Andrea.
Let me give you now an update on the progress we made on our strategic focus areas in Q1. On slide 14, you will see the three strategic focus areas that I shared with you already in the last earnings call. Firstly, we continue to improve our customer acquisition and profitability in our core brokerage business. What have we seen in Q1? We have seen in Q1 already an underlying lottery gross margin of over 16%, and we already improved our customer acquisition in Q1 in a weak jackpot environment. Our second focus area is Traumhaus-Aus Verlosung. After a successful launch, we are on track to deliver four draws. On the product side, we implemented subscription features for our Lotto 24 customers and added a high-end car raffle that you might have seen.
For games, as Helmut already mentioned, we increased our portfolio to over 400 games already and generated a year-over-year growth of 56%. As you can see, we are on track to deliver on our targets that we committed to. We had a strong start with Q1 and confirmed our full-year guidance as presented in March. Just ensuring that you are not taking the Q1 results and multiplying them by four, we expect additional investments in our new business growth, especially in Dreamhouse Raffle in the next quarters. On slide 17, you will find some facts about the dividend proposal, as we already communicated in March. After the AGM in two weeks, we plan to pay out EUR 51 million to our shareholders in the form of a basic dividend of EUR 1.30 per share and a special dividend of EUR 1.10 per share. Now, handing over to Helmut to close this presentation with the key takeaways.
Thanks, Andrea. We increased our gross margin to more than 17% now. We expanded our customer base despite a weak jackpot environment. Our strong revenue growth continued, and our EBITDA nearly doubled. Our EBITDA margin is higher than 34%. That is it for today, and now we are ready to move on to questions and answers.
Thank you very much for your presentation, and congratulations on your increasing results. We will now move on to the Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via audio line. To do so, click on the "Raise Your Hand" button. If you have dialed in by phone, please use the key combination star nine followed by star six. Please note that questions via chat box cannot be submitted today. We already have three hands up. Mr. Marius Fuhrberg, you should be able to speak now.
Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. The first one with regards to the indirect costs, which were a little bit higher than previous quarters related or in relation to sales. How much of those indirect costs had a one-off character, or do you expect this level to maintain a little bit higher than throughout the year? The second question is with regards to your guidance, and you just told us that we should not extrapolate Q1 on the remainder of the year. I understand that you plan higher investments, but if I look at the top line, I would assume that we should at least see, let's say, Q1 times four, especially, yeah, with the current jackpot environment. I would even expect growth compared to Q1 throughout the remainder of the year. Would you agree with that, or is there something I'm missing?
Thanks, Marius, for your questions. On the indirect cost side, I think it's just in line with the projections of the last quarters. I think we had exceptionally high other operating costs in Q4 last year, but the level that you see now, I think, is realistic. On the guidance, we confirm, of course, our guidance. We can see good top line development.
Now, right now, we cannot hear you in the management line. This will take a second.
Way back. Please continue with the questions.
Okay. Thank you so much. Mr. Tim Kruse, you should be able to speak now.
Yes. Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the great quarter once again. On the Dreamhouse Raffle, I have a few questions. First of all, yeah, great that you could increase all the KPIs. Is it correct that you record the billings for the raffle continuously through the quarter? Q3 would have had one month of the current raffle. Could you just confirm that?
Hi, Tim. Yes, we can confirm that the billings are based on the quarters.
Okay. And then maybe quick follow-up. How do you see sort of player activity throughout the raffle? Is it evenly distributed, or do you see sort of, you know, activity, yeah, throughout different activity throughout the raffle? That would be interesting.
Yeah, we see strong activity when we launch a new house. We see some activity pushed by the intermediate raffles, like if we raffle off a car, for example, that drives activity. The biggest part is, of course, the days before the raffle, we see a peak in activity. Of course, there is a baseline activity happening throughout the full draw period.
Okay. So, fair to assume a lot of quite a bit of activity at the beginning and then at the end, sort of the highest and in between, yeah, sort of baseline. Okay. That's helpful.
The highest is at the end, yes.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Then maybe one comment on the CPLs in Q1. Although the jackpot activity was not so high, I mean, I think we saw quite low CPLs second half of last year. Maybe you could just comment on the maybe competitive environment on your keywords and, yeah, how you see that going on through the year. Then maybe lastly, on the games, is it sort of with the new games you increased in Q1 and the increase in revenue there, is this a level depending on the playing activity of the lotteries, which you would assume to go out throughout the year, or do you have higher activities that would actually even stimulate the games business?
Yeah. On the CPL, what we're seeing is a slightly higher CPL, as Andrea pointed out. Part of it is experiments that we did, especially in the new businesses, and that's why Andrea also talked about the CPL that we have in our core business only. There's a small effect, I think, which is sort of a baseline increase in media cost, but the larger effect is due to the jackpot situation. We see slightly different CPLs in low jackpot situations than in high situations. I think the most important message is that the CPL is very well within our target range, and our payback periods are great and even better than last year. To your second question on the game side, we will continue to grow our games portfolio, and that will continue to have a positive effect.
We will also roll out further features, customer-facing features that will improve the games business. What we expect there, and I think we've said this before, is a steady growth in our games business. We have to be a little bit patient, but we see a lot of potential, and we will see this materialize in form of steady growth.
Okay. Thank you. Very helpful. All the best.
Thank you very much for your questions, Mr. Kruse. We will go on with Henry Wendisch. The stage is yours.
Hi. Thanks, everybody. And congrats for your strong results. It sort of feels like it's hard to find a heron to soup of results, but I'll try my best. Maybe we can elaborate. Could you please elaborate a bit more on page 10 of the presentation? You mentioned the games on page 11, sorry, that the monthly active user activity in games was sort of high despite the weak jackpot. Maybe could you please elaborate a little bit more how we can think of the relationship between the games user activity and the jackpot environment? Usually, I would assume that if jackpots are high, user activity in lottery is high, and then the activity in games is also higher because people see the product offering and then also play a little bit more games than they usually do. Is that the fair assumption, or what is the connection that we see here?
Henry, I couldn't have explained it any better than you just did. Yes, peak jackpots drive traffic. Some of that traffic then ends up on our games pages. I think what we are seeing here, which makes us confident, is that even in low jackpot situations where we do not have as much traffic and less discovery of games, there are a lot of players who are just returning and who just continue to play games. Like I said, that tells us that the games' value proposition is resonating more and more with our users.
Okay. Thanks a lot. Also, I've seen that you are partnering a little bit with Tipico and Gamoma. How can we think of that? What does the partnership look like in detail? How does it affect your user metrics at games? Which segment is it recorded? Maybe you could give a little bit more detail here.
Yeah. It is about the games portfolio, both for us and also for our partners. The games industry is a very promiscuous industry. What I mean by that is that we integrate games from other partners, and they integrate games from us. We have our own game studio. We have unique games. That is why partners are interested in our games. Some of the names that you mentioned and others are well-known brands in the games business, and they have well-known games in the industry known by the users. It is helpful to have these games on our site because customers recognize them, and that leads to better conversion and retention.
Okay. Got it. So, it's not like people can play via the Tipico page on your games, which would then influence your, for example, monthly active users. It's not like that. It's more like a technology partnership.
We are integrating.
Technology partnership.
Yeah. We are integrating some of their games, and they are integrating some of our games.
Okay. Got it. Cool. Last question regarding the marketing and marketing tests that you're doing. Could you please go more into detail? What can we think of this sort of, yeah, what kind of tests are you doing, and how are they working out? Maybe we can think of user intake for the rest of the year given sort of a basic or average jackpot environment.
Yeah. We're testing different channels. Of course, always continue to optimize and improve the standard channels like Google and Facebook and Instagram, but we're also doing TV advertising, testing there for our new businesses. We are now on TikTok, for example. Always testing new channels. We are always testing new creatives and different creatives. Yeah. Then we're testing some products too. Like we have a Team Player Product, for example. It's a great product. The user KPIs look very good. We are testing advertising for that product as well. If you follow us on Instagram, for example, you would have seen some advertising there in recent days. Yeah. Like always, some of these tests are very successful, and that's the stuff we continue. Some of the test results are not so successful, and then we stop it. It is important to try these things in order to overall continue to optimize our marketing.
Okay. Got it. Thanks a lot. Yeah, congrats again.
Thank you very much, Mr. Wendisch. We will go on with our last hand up for today. Let me remind you, if you have any questions left, you can place them now. We go on with Abed Jarad.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. I have a follow-up question regarding the revenue guidance for the full year. I know you already explained it, but I would like some more clarification because, just as was mentioned before, even if we assume zero jackpot peaks in the upcoming three quarters, we already land at the midpoint of the full-year guidance. Is there any reason or anything unusual in Q1 that prevents you from upgrading at least the revenue guidance?
Hi, Abed. Thank you for your question. Q1, there was nothing unusual in sight. We are confirming our revenue guidance and are very optimistic here.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Jarad. As we have no questions left, we come to the end of today's earnings call. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Frank Hoffman from Investor Relations. A big thank you also to Mr. Becker and Ms. Behrendt for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. I wish you all a lovely remaining week. With this, I hand over again to Ms. Behrendt for some final remarks.
Yeah. Thanks again for joining this call tomorrow and this morning and making the time and your interest in ZEAL's growth path. Remember, we have EUR 120 million up for grabs on Friday. Looking forward for Q2 numbers. Thanks.
Bye-bye.
Bye.