Welcome to the earnings call of ZEAL Network SE regarding the Q1 figures of 2026. The company's CEO, Dr. Stefan Tweraser, and CFO, Andrea Behrendt, will guide you through the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line. Please make sure we can see your full names, ladies and gentlemen. With that, I'm handing over to you, Andrea.
Thanks a lot. Good morning, everybody, welcome to our earnings call for Q1. I'm happy that you're joining us today. With me is Stefan, we will present the Q1 results. I hope you see the presentation. If not, you can find it on our website on the Investor Relations section. The agenda for today. We will begin with a brief update on our highlights for Q1, dive into the financial details, have a look how we deliver against our strategic focus so far. At the end, we will give the time to you, open up for questions. With that, handing over to Stefan for a summary of Q1.
Andrea, thank you very much, and also a warm welcome from my side to everyone on the call. As you know, our business is very much driven, especially on the top line, very much driven by the jackpot situation in Germany. Although we haven't seen a jackpot in Germany, neither in LOTTO 6aus49 nor in Eurojackpot, for more than seven months now, we are still on a very strong growth trajectory. Revenue and customer acquisitions have increased in the 1st quarter of 2026. Our gross margin has improved once again, EBITDA was a little bit lower than expected because of the focus on investments in marketing and other initiatives that we've taken to ensure our sustainable future growth. Speaking of growth, we are very proud that we have launched our 3rd charity lottery, Traumautoverlosung, in April.
Thus we have strengthened our foundation for long-term growth while continuing to invest in diversification of our business model. I'll hand back to Andrea for more details.
Thanks. Now let's get into the details of the first quarter financials. As always, I will begin with the jackpot environment because that's crucial for us, and it drives customer acquisition as well as reactivating our existing customers. As you most likely know, the first quarter of this year was a very weak jackpot environment. We had no peak jackpots, and it was even worse than last year because the averages, especially in Eurojackpot, was below last year. If you compare to last year, you see that we had a EUR 112 million Eurojackpot in Q1, and this year we had nothing relevant. That's the jackpot environment. Fingers crossed that the jackpot builds up now in May. We are hoping for both products to reach a peak in May and drives Q1 top line growth.
Despite this, we delivered a good performance in the first quarter, and on slide number seven, you will now see how this reflects in our financials. Here, I wanna highlight three numbers to you, starting with the revenues. We had a revenue growth of 6%, like I said, in a very weak jackpot environment, and this is driven by a slight increase on the top line on the billings, combined with higher growth and higher number of monthly active users. That's a good result for that environment that we have been in. Additionally, we have been able to increase our marketing activities by 13%, always within our boundary conditions, and we acquired a significant number of new customers. Again, a good achievement for this weak jackpot environment.
I want to really highlight here that this marketing investment and also the expansion in our personnel are targeted to our growth ambition and initiatives that will drive ZEAL's future growth in the coming years and also the long-term value for our shareholders. On the bottom line, we generated EBITDA of EUR 50 million, like I said, the investments into diversification of our offering, of course, reflect in this EBITDA. Let's look closer to the lottery billings. A good number, especially in this given challenging environment, but how did that come up? We increased our monthly active users by 5%, and on the other hand, these customers spent EUR 57 in average. Both numbers, actually as expected in this environment, even with some growth on the monthly active users.
The second driver of our ZEAL growth is the customer acquisition, and here we acquired 270,000 new customers in the first quarter. This is a clear sign that our diversification strategy works because we were able to acquire 11% more new registered customers compared to last year, and that's a success. We spend for this customer EUR 53.8. In the brokerage core business, it was actually just EUR 46. With that, looking into games, our other product category, here we generated still quite some momentum. We expanded our portfolio to over 740 games, and we improved further on with additional product features. This results in an increase of MAUs of 34% and in decreased overall average revenues per user, what is driven by the overall increase on MAUs.
With that, handing over to Dr. Stefan Tweraser for an update on Traumhausverlosung and the new kid on the block, Traumautoverlosung.
Before we talk about cars, let's talk about houses. We are very proud that we have now the eighth Traumhausverlosung raffle running. The 2026 performance of the two houses that we raffled off on Mallorca and Föhr has been very, very promising. The Mallorca house in particular has achieved double-digit numbers in billings, EUR 10.5 million to be exact, and showed the very best retention performance of all houses so far, indicating how stable that business growth is already. The current house that we're raffling off is located in the south of Germany near Lake Chiemsee. If we move on from houses to cars, we're super happy to have launched a new social lottery in Germany. We did that in April.
It's our third lottery after freiheit+ and the Traumhausverlosung, so the focus now is on cars. We will have a very exciting lineup in on cars. The first season is focused on a very rare Porsche 911 GT3 RS. In that particular configuration, only five cars are available worldwide, and it's actually one of the most followed cars on Instagram. What's new with this raffle is that we are limiting the number of tickets. Each tickets costs EUR 10. Please understand that it's early days, and we are unable to provide any further information regarding ticket sales or billings at this stage.
We're super happy with the launch and very proud that we now have a third social lottery in Germany that is attractive for a very new and different segment of customers. With this, I'll hand over to Andrea again to take the progress on our strategic priorities.
The strategic priorities we shared with you in the March earnings call, we wanna give you an update how we delivered against it already in Q1. Let's look at it quickly. First of all, on the strengthening of the Lotto24 core business, we achieved a gross margin of 17.8%, as already communicated, we acquired 274 new pay new registered customers in a weak jackpot environment, really a success. Additionally, we are further pushing on diversification and added Traumhausverlosung to Traumautoverlosung to our offering. The second part is Traumhausverlosung, here the two draws for 2026 are already done, we are working already on the third house, we are committed to deliver six draws in 2026.
On the game side, we increased our portfolio further, and our billings growth is on track as well. With that, on the overall guidance, on our guidance for 2026 is unchanged, even with the weak jackpot environment that we faced in Q1. We expect the revenues to be in the range of EUR 250 million-EUR 260 million and EBITDA to end up at EUR 70 million-EUR 75 million. On the midterm guidance, also nothing changes. Double-digit annual revenue growth in the mid-teens and a 30% EBITDA margin to be expected. Last but not least, the dividend proposal we shared already with you in March. We propose, together with the supervisory board, a dividend payment of EUR 1.40 per share.
This will reflect a total payout of EUR 30 million. The dividend payment date is planned for the 26th of May after the AGM approved. Like always in the past, we are looking, of course, to be an attractive investment for our shareholders and looking into capital allocation, and we'll come back with potential share buybacks or alternative growth initiative for the rest of the cash generated. With that, we wanna generate significant value for our shareholders. With that, back to Stefan for the key takeaways for today.
Thank you, Andrea Behrendt. Three messages that we want to leave you with is, first, we continue to lay the foundation for our long-term growth strategy whilst consistently investing in diversification and the resilience of our business. The numbers that we delivered in the first quarter of 2026 clearly are testament to that fact. Our growth, despite a weak jackpot market, reflects the resilience of our business model and our ability to effectively invest in strategic initiatives. Last but not least, we are strategically expanding our social lottery offering in Germany through Traumautoverlosung, adding a very attractive product for a very attractive customer segment. With this, thanks for your attention, and we'll hand over to you for questions and answers.
Yes. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, now it is your turn. We are opening the Q&A session with questions via audio line. Therefore, please click on the Raise Hand button, and if you are dialing in by phone, please press star key nine to raise your hand and star key six to unmute yourself. We already have two hands up. Mr. Tim Kruse, the stage is yours.
Yes. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions, and thanks for the presentation. Two quick questions from my side. Looking at the marketing spending in Q1, we are quite a bit below the run rate for the full year if you take it that by quarter. I'm assuming that obviously your marketing guidance also assumes a sort of normal jackpot environment. Would it be fair to assume that if this stays as muted as it is at the moment, then your marketing spending would probably also be lower than you initially guided? The second question would be on the Traumautoverlosung. If the lotteries are capped to 250,000 tickets, that would imply EUR 2.5 million in billings.
Can you maybe break that down to how that would break down into sales, and also maybe how many cars you expect to raffle out this year? Thanks.
Okay. Let me start with the marketing question to take that. You are totally right. Our guidance is, of course, on a standard jackpot environment. A standard jackpot environment for ZEAL means we would expect in a full year nine jackpots. At least two in a quarter. We had now zero. Of course the marketing run rate from Q1 is lower than we guided on. We still expect jackpots to come up, and therefore we still continue with our guidance. Of course you're right, if no jackpot at all in the year will appear, then we might not be able to allocate the money within our boundary conditions and therefore not spend it.
Yeah. On the Traumautoverlosung, as I said, please bear with us. We just launched the first product, and we are not going to share any additional numbers at that point in time.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you for your questions, Mr. Kruse. We will move on to Simon Keller. This is your space, Mr. Keller. Yes.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. I want to question also the, or get some additional comments on the same topics that Tim was already looking at from Traumautoverlosung and also marketing. On marketing, you mentioned that you had some tests for the charity lotteries, that also is the reason for the higher cost per lead above the core brokerage. Can you explain how these tests have gone? When can we expect them to converge, like the cost per lead to converge to the historic average? Do you think it's more structural that for social lotteries, there's higher cost per lead going forward as well? On Traumautoverlosung, can you share early indications on the ticket sales for season zero? Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Simon. I will take the marketing again. The investments into the new products are not tests anymore. These are actually the consistent marketing investments that we are doing in this area. The charity lotteries have a higher margin and higher CRVs from the customer side, we are able to also afford these higher CPLs. While we are tracking that our core brokerage business is rather stable, we will always expect these marketing investments into the other D2C offerings on the social lottery side to be higher because it's new product categories, it's brand investments that need to be established, and also it's within our boundary condition because the CRV of these customers are better. On cars, back to Stefan.
Yeah. Thank you. I unfortunately have to repeat the message that I now sent twice. We are at very early stages, and thus I'm not able to provide any additional information on cars. I can just tell you that we are super happy with the development. When you look at the activity that the Traumautoverlosung has been able to generate on social media, you see early indications that this is really very well received. We are the first dedicated high-end car lottery in Germany. It's built on the same foundations that we have for Traumhausverlosung, also a very strong social engagement. With this, we have selected Johanniter as the charity partner for Traumauto. Bear with us.
In the next couple of calls we definitely can provide more information, but we are super happy with the launch of the product.
Thank you for the additional insights.
Thank you, Simon, for your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, with no further questions, I will hold the room for another moment in case someone is thinking about raising their hand, what doesn't seem to be the case. Therefore, we come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in ZEAL Network SE. A big thank you also to you, Stefan and Andrea, for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions at a later date, please feel free to contact Senior Investor Relations Manager, Frank Hoffmann. I wish you all a successful day around the world, and handing back over to Andrea once again for your closing remarks.
Yes. Thank you once again for joining and your interest at ZEAL, and we are looking forward to speak to you soon.