Opening call of ZEAL Network SE following the publication of the Q3 figures of 2025. I am delighted to welcome the CEO, Dr. Stefan Tweraser , 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. Questions via chat cannot be submitted today. Having said this, Andrea, the stage is yours.
Thanks a lot, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to our earnings call for Q3 this morning for ZEAL Network. I hope you have the presentation. If not, please have a look on our Investor Relations section on our homepage, there everything is available. Before we start, I really want to welcome Stefan. Stefan, your first earnings call with us, so I'm happy you're joining us today, and I'm looking forward to building this future together with you. Let's go to the content, the agenda of today's call. We will start with a brief overview on the highlights of the first nine months. Then let's dive into the financials, that's what we are here for, to talk about, and then have a look at the strategic focus and talk about our updated guidance for 2025.
We will wrap it up with the key takeaways and go to our Q&A session. With that, for the first time, handing over to Stefan for a short summary.
Andrea, thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. Also, from my side, I'm obviously super excited to be here. I've joined ZEAL now a bit more than two months ago, and it has been a blast. I really enjoy being here and obviously enjoy attending this call with you to update you on our financials. The headline that we want to communicate is that we continue to execute our strategy very consistently and very successfully. As you all know, a major driver of our business is the jackpot environment, and Andrea will deep dive into this. The jackpot environment that we've been able to witness in the first three quarters of this year has been below the statistical average. Despite this not so welcoming environment, we've been able to really drive our business very successfully. We have accelerated the growth of our customer base.
We have been able to continue to significantly increase the gross margin of our business and thus also have grown the profitability of ZEAL Network as a consequence. You notice we have been able to adjust our ambitious targets upwards and have increased our guidance in September 2025. Back to Andrea for all the details.
Thanks, Stefan. Yeah, let's go through the details of the financials. On slide number six, you will get the jackpot environment. Like you know, it's really important to put our results into context from the jackpot side. The jackpot is an upside potential that, if it comes, we have the option to acquire even more new customers and reactivate existing ones. It's a real driver. In the first nine months of 2025, it was unfortunately a weak jackpot situation, but we delivered strong results with that. We saw only four peaks in the nine months this year, while last year, for example, we had six peaks already by the end of Q3. As you all know, Q4 was a blast last year. Like I said, despite this situation, we delivered strong results, and let's see how that translates into financials on slide number seven.
Here, I want to highlight three numbers for you. Let's talk about revenues. The revenues grew by 34%, and that's driven by an increased billings of 12% year-over-year and a notable improvement of the margin, as we know, based on the price increase that happened last year. We increased also our marketing spend by 35%, investing into future growth of ZEAL, and acquired a significant number of new customers in such a weak jackpot environment. Bottom line, we delivered a strong EBITDA of EUR 54 million, and we really are maintaining this momentum of efficient growth, what has really mattered for us. Let's take a closer look at the billings, slide number eight. We grew our billings 12% year-over-year. This is based on an increased customer base of 17%.
That is based on Q4 strong acquisition from last year, but also the new FTMPs or leads that we acquired this year. We reached over 1.5 million monthly active users this year on our platform, and they spent around EUR 59 per month, a really strong number. Previously, I already mentioned that our margin increased, and the key driver here is really the successful price increase from last year. On the other hand, what we are really actively working on is steadily improving our product-market mix. Herefore, we ended up with an overall gross margin of 17.5%. The other side of the growth for ZEAL is the customer acquisition, and you see that on slide 10. We acquired, in the first nine months, 879,000 new customers. This is a clear sign of effective marketing, also in weak jackpot environments.
We are really able to grow our customer base also in these situations. That is also a strategic goal for us, as you know. This overall led to a CPL of EUR 46.5. This was, of course, an expected increase compared to last year because of the weak jackpot environment, but also because of overall increased media prices and the investments that we are doing in the new businesses to really test new target audiences and widen our market. The CPL for the core brokerage business was actually at EUR 42.5 on levels as expected. On our other side of the business, the games business, we are seeing continuous growth and improved traction. We increased our games portfolio up to nearly 600 games and see how the product features really resonate with our customers.
Overall, the business grew by 51% year-over-year on the revenue side. Now, last but not least, to our Traumhausverlosung. We already have done four draws this year or have planned our fourth draws this year for the house raffles. In this slide, you will see the performance of the first four houses for Traumhausverlosung. We also this time added the overall duration of the campaign to give you even a bit more context for the numbers. As you see, the house four, our house in Sankt Peter-Ording , was a success. It was higher than all our expectations and even previous performances. Really a strong delivery here. We are delighted to announce that we are already on our fifth house.
We have a beautiful house that you see there on the picture in Bavaria that you are able to win until Monday. Maybe you want to still buy a ticket and get your chance on it. It's so far my favorite house. We are looking already on the next house campaign, and here we choose the favorite holiday destination for the Germans. It's in Mallorca, so we're really waiting for this one to go and, yeah, go live. With this, let's give an update on our strategic focus areas and our guidance. On slide 14, you will see the three focus areas that I presented to you already in March and that I'm always updating you on because they are so important to us. Firstly, we continue to improve our customer acquisition and profitability in our core brokerage business.
You have seen in the first nine months, our underlying gross margin is at 17.5%. That is a really strong number. We already improved our customer acquisition in this weak jackpot environment. The second focus area, Traumhaus, we are scaling Traumhaus. As you see, the numbers are running well. We delivered already the fourth house campaign, and all of them actually exceed our expectations. On games, we also delivered what we told you. We are currently on track to deliver over EUR 14 million in revenues. We saw year to date so far a year-over-year growth of 51%. On the guidance, you know that we already increased our ambitious guidance for this year. Thanks to the increased lottery gross margin and also the positive development of Traumhausverlosung, we communicated to you an increase.
We expect revenues for 2025 to be in the range of EUR 205 million-EUR 215 million, and EBITDA is expected to be in the range of EUR 63 million-EUR 68 million. Now over to Stefan again for the key takeaways, and after that, we will head to the Q&A session.
Thank you, Andrea. As you can see, everyone on the call, this has obviously been a great environment for me to start. Because we've been able to accelerate the growth of our customer base. We have added about 880,000 first-time paying customers and have been able to motivate more than 1.5 million people to be active on our sites on a monthly basis. We have increased our gross margin to a remarkable 17.5%, driven by both price measures as well as product mix improvements. That overall led to a very profitable business. The strength of our business led to an increase in the profitability and thus an increase in the guidance that we've been able to give to the markets. This concludes our presentation, and obviously, we are now happy to answer any question that you might have.
Yes, thank you very much for the dive into your third quarter, and congratulations on your results, Stefan and Andrea. Andrea, ladies and gentlemen, we will now move on to the Q&A session and are happy to take your questions in person via audio line. We have a few raised hands already. 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 will start with the questions from Henry Wendisch. You should be able to speak now.
Yes, hi. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Andrea, and welcome, Stefan. I have a couple of questions. First one, I think, is regarding the recently upgraded guidance. I think on sales, I totally agree with your new guidance, but on EBITDA, now that we have seen the Q3 results, you are implying EUR 9 million - EUR 14 million of Q4 EBITDA, and this seems rather weak in my view. Do you also agree that this is a rather conservative estimate, or are you expecting any sorts of jump costs that are not foreseen by us in that sense? I think, shall we do all at once or one by one?
We can do one by one. Hi, Henry. Let's start with the guidance one. Yeah, I mean, we had strong Q3 results. You have seen that. I agree with you on that. We will most likely end up at the upper end of the guidance. You are not seeing anything wrong. Of course, also in Q4, we want to grow and invest into efficient marketing, and we are searching for these opportunities all the way. That is just giving us with the guidance a little bit of breathing room.
Okay, thanks. Understood. Next one is regarding the user activity. Just on the Q3 level, I've seen a large jump in activity, and it was bigger than I expected, actually. I wanted to maybe get a little bit more color on how this happened. I mean, we've seen two peak jackpots in Q3, which might be a result or actually probably a big result. Is it already also maybe that there is a recovery of the strong cohort that you acquired in Q4, that they sort of played quite well in Q4, and then Q1, Q2, activity went down, and now it went up again because they sort of gained trust with you, and they sort of also, yeah, returned to a higher player frequency as they got to know your offering and how it works at ZEAL, and then now the activity is going up.
Is it a mix of both, or what's the real answer here?
Yeah, I think you're kind of right, but it's not only the Q4 2024 cohort, but it's actually basically all cohorts really got well activated in this Q3 with the two peak jackpots. We saw a lot of activity there. On top of that, really also the Dream House Raffle is really driving activity on the platform in the existing customer base, but also bringing in new customers. That's the two main reasons that we can mention here.
Right, thanks. And then on the gross margin improvement. We've seen the 2.2% in price optimization on a nine-month basis, but now Q3 is the first quarter without this base effect sort of. So does that mean that there was no price effect in Q3 and then the increase in gross margin in lottery was only driven by a mixed effect?
Exactly. If you compare Q3 to previous year, you have now a clean gross margin comparison. There is no additional price increase, no relevant price increase topics there. What you see is mainly really the hard work into optimizing our product mix, getting our customers focusing on premium products, and therefore increasing the overall gross margin.
Good, got it. Understood. Next question is regarding the user intake. I think it was the second largest user intake we've seen following, I think, Q4 2024, which was the biggest. And that with only, in quotation marks, only two peak jackpots. Is there anything, I mean, beyond marketing efficiency gains that has driven this strong intake? I mean, obviously, there's a Traumhaus effect in that because a lot of people signed up for that as well. Are we missing anything?
No, exactly. I mean, there are two points. The one point, Traumhausverlosung, exactly. We really see that this is a product that works very, very well in customer acquisition. It drives customers into our platform. On top of that, we really worked hard on optimizing our marketing playbook in certain jackpot environments so that we are not only able to harvest a lot of new customers during peak jackpots, but also in lower jackpot phases. I think that is a combined success of both measurements that the team is driving.
Great. I can jump over to Dream House. It was quite a big, and I was surprised positively by the demand there. Regarding especially average billing per user, and if my math is correct, also the average revenue, which developed proportionately. Is there any, besides the big demand, any effect that maybe played a role that pushed this average billing per user figure higher than the previous draws?
I think we, also, on top of the normal demand increase, like you already mentioned it, we pushed the product with different price points into our existing customer base, and that increased the average billings per user here.
Right, cool. Then my last question also regarding the Traumhausverlosung. We've seen in the last, I think, two or three quarters that Omaze, sort of your small investment from the U.K., what you copied from them to U.K., now they copied you in Germany. They have quite, I think, very, very similar offering, and it looks almost the same. What's your sort of your assessment on this? How are they performing against you? Do you see this as a threat maybe, or what's your sort of your take?
No, first of all, like I always say, I get a lot of this question. We were welcoming competition, and it's good competition. Especially, we see that Omaze helps us actually with their investments into this product category to make this really a relevant product category in Germany. Because the marketing pressure that comes in now from two providers helps really to make this known product concept in Germany. It is not a threat. We are happy to see that it also works for them. As you know, we are also invested in Omaze, and no negative impact there.
Okay, but you're also not teaming up in any sense. So vice versa, spillover effects, but not like you have a joint effort.
No, no. I mean, we are competitors.
Yeah. Cool. Thanks very much.
Thank you for your questions, Henry. We will move on to Tim Kruse in a moment. One note, please make sure that you use your full and real name in the queue and rename yourself to get the permission to speak. Tim Kruse, the stage is yours.
Yes, thanks. Good morning. Yeah, a lot of questions already asked by Henry, but a few follow-ons. Can you confirm that the lottery margin, even if my calculations excluding the Dream House Raffle, the core lottery margin was very, very strong in Q3? Is that something from a mix effect that we should, yeah, look at in the next quarters as well?
I mean, we told you already that we are on a high gross margin and that we see this sustainable, although Q3 is, of course, a special effect because you have two peak jackpots and you had. This drives, of course, especially sales on the lottery clubs that has a significantly increased margin compared to the core brokerage business. You need to adjust it a little bit down, but not like massively.
Yeah, okay. Okay, understood. On marketing, that was significantly above last year and also the first two quarters. You said that you would be planning to increase marketing. Can you maybe split that a bit? Was that a lot coming from the Dream House Raffle? What is sort of the expectation for Q4, maybe just sort of a similar or slightly lower level? That would be helpful.
Yeah, on the marketing side, it's had two effects. Of course, we are trying, like I said, also in weak jackpot situations, to acquire new customers in our core brokerage business. Therefore, you see that this worked out and we were able to efficiently acquire. On the other hand, you're right. Of course, the acquisition of Traumhausverlosung works very well, and we are investing relevant amounts there as well to grab as much of the market as possible, as fast and efficient as possible.
Maybe a follow-up on the Dream House. Can you give us a bit of guidance in terms of the number of houses? I mean, you are still at a quite similar pace in terms of days for duration between the periods. What are your expectations going looking into next year in terms of the number of houses you will be expecting to raffle?
Our idea is to increase the frequency clearly because the demand is there and it's a really well-known product. This year, we were able to deliver at the end 4.5 houses, let's say. The draw of the last house will be beginning of next year. You can for sure add a few houses on top of that for next year.
Okay, perfect. Maybe finally, personal costs in Q3 were quite a bit higher also than the previous quarters. Were there any one-offs we have to look at, or is there any sort of volume-related personal costs there, or is that a level which we should look at for the next quarters as well?
I think there was one special effect that is really a one-off because of our change in the CEO position. Of course, we have to record for that, and we put everything of that already into our Q3 results inside. We also had some increase on the short-term and long-term incentives because of the success of the company. As we want to be successful over the future quarters, I would say that's rather something that we would not define as a one-off.
Okay, understood. Thanks a lot. All the best.
Thank you, Tim.
Thanks, Tim.
We will move on to the next person in line, Henrik Lehmann. The stage is yours.
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language] I will switch to English if it's okay, but we can follow up just because we have some audience that don't speak German. Yeah, on the overall guidance, like I said, I expect us clearly to end up at the top of the, on the top range of the guidance. On two things that I just want to communicate. It's like for us, it's always the jackpots driving significantly top-line growth. If Q4 last year was amazing, and that's true, that doesn't mean it needs to be this year. It could be also not the case. We are already beginning of November.
We just have one more chance to get a jackpot run this year. Otherwise, there will be no more jackpots this year lining up because they need a certain time to build up. That is already kind of envisaged in this guidance. On the bottom line, if you talk about EBITDA, it is for us really, we want to have the breathing space of power on the marketing investments. If we see investment opportunities, we want to do them. Of course, they might not pay off already in 2025, but in the next years. Therefore, we want to leave us with this breathing space. There is nothing hidden or any other investments. It is really just we want to have that opportunity to still in Q4 invest if we see opportunities. Invest into customer acquisition. That is a key point here.
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language] we want the same.
Thank you, Mr. Lehmann. With this, we will move on to Mr. Matthias Mirwald from KochBank. You should be able to speak now.
Hi, Matthias at KochBank. Can you hear me well?
Yes.
Okay, thank you. I have a question, and this question is more towards your midterm growth algorithm. On page 15, it says, of your presentation, it says. You target continuously double-digit revenue growth in the mid-teens and continuously expanding EBITDA margin. My question is, if we look to these outer years. How the scale effects are going to unfold towards these outer years, how are the cost blocks developing? Specifically, I would be interested in the marketing spend. It was in the region of 31%-32% of sales in the last two years and this year. I am curious how the further growth is going to scale into profitability.
Yeah, so I cannot give you a fixed percentage on our marketing investment, but what I can tell you is.
Maybe directionally.
Sorry?
Maybe directionally. Just.
Also not directionally. Let me tell you why. Because we really are keen on acquiring customers now than in the future and really generate value for our shareholders. Therefore, we really look into the opportunities. We do not see any relevant limits that will limit us on marketing investments unless we do not fulfill our boundary conditions on efficiencies that we are setting ourselves. Therefore, if it is today, this year we guided you on EUR 60 million-EUR 70 million, maybe next year it is even a bit more because we see more opportunities, right? That is the kind of mindset that we have. We want to generate growth, efficient growth, of course, that then builds up the value of this company, the additional value that we have. That is really our guidance. We are not limiting us on the investment side. That is what I want to communicate.
To sum it up, it's basically you want to keep your opportunistic position on marketing spend. But as an investor, it's also very important to see how this scales, if you can achieve these growth rates, and how this transfers into margin.
Exactly. Therefore, we always communicate, and you will see that in the numbers, that 80%-85% of that top-line growth has to go to bottom line. That is our goal. That is what we also communicate with these increased EBITDA margins. It is better to look at the EBITDA margin even without marketing to really see how this efficiency gain is there and the scalability of this business is really showing up.
A final point on this. Can you give me, if you see those new activities, newer businesses, also kind of as a marketing spend to acquire customers, is it then that for your traditional, let's say, brokerage model, that the marketing cost to sales relatively declines?
Yeah, exactly. That is why we also started, I think, two quarters ago, started to also communicate you the CPL, so the cost per lead for the core brokerage business, to really give you a baseline for that, because that is the standard. I want to also make very clear that we are also growing in the core brokerage business. If we see investment opportunities there, I mean, it is still an under-penetrated market where we can still double the online penetration. Therefore, we see a lot of investment opportunities also there within the next years.
Okay. Many thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Matthias. We will move on to our, for now, last stand-up, Jörg Philipp Frey. You should be able to speak now.
Yeah, hello. Jörg Philipp Frey of Warburg Research. A lot was covered already. I would stick to marketing and the cost per lead, actually. You mentioned that. The increase of media prices played a significant role in the 31% increase. Can you be a bit more precise how much of this increase was by media spending and how much by the impact of a weaker jackpot environment? Any idea there?
Yeah, it's hard to separate these two things, right? Because we are just paying one price. But our indication is that overall platform media prices increased around 10%.
Yeah.
Year- over- year.
As I've seen, it is mostly driven by the big internet players like Google or Facebook.
Exactly.
Significantly. Are you exploring alternative media channels, meaning venues like out-of-home or in-app advertising, which, where we've seen, for example, in the in-app advertising, we've seen a substantial increase in eyeballs, but a decrease in prices. Is that something where you are looking at for additional efficiency gains?
Absolutely. We are always trying to find new ways to attract new customers in the most efficient and profitable way. Depending on the jackpot situations, we have various media scenarios that we are employing and always new channels that we are adding. At the end of the day, it's the challenge to find the right balance between volume and price. New channels obviously play an important role here. That's good. Lastly, one housekeeping question. If I understood it correctly, regarding taxes, you have kind of a EUR 4 million positive one-off regarding deferred taxes. Otherwise, we should assume.
An underlying tax rate of 32%. Does that?
Totally right.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
All the best luck you always need for jackpots.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Frey. In the meantime, we have received no further questions. We therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining and all your questions and your interest in the ZEAL Network SE. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Frank Hoffman from Investor Relations. A big thank you also to Stefan and Andrea for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. I wish you all a lovely remaining autumn week. Maybe the next dream house is yours. With this, I hand over again to Andrea for some final remarks.
Yeah, thanks a lot. I can just repeat that. Thanks again for joining this morning and your interest in ZEAL. I'm also very happy to see or hear new investors popping up in the earnings call and asking questions. I really, really appreciate that. Of course, special thanks to you, Stefan. Your first earnings call, well done. More to come. Thanks a lot and have a lovely Wednesday.