Welcome to the Media and Games Invest Q1 2023 conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Remco Westermann, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. I would like to welcome our investors, our other stakeholders, and everybody who is dialing in here, to our Q1 presentation. Yeah, we are pleased to announce that we were able to grow at 4% despite continuing headwinds in the advertising market and divestments of smaller, non-strategic assets and games in this quicker space. I would like to start first with quickly introducing the presenters. Coming to the next slide. Paul, our CFO, who most of you know, and myself, Remco, the CEO. Some of the key numbers for Q1, revenue LTM, EUR 327 million. In the first quarter, it was EUR 69 million, which was a growth versus last quarter, the first quarter last year.
First quarter last year was still a very strong quarter because it was before, let's say, the things hit the market. Ukraine war started on 24th February, till advertising budgets reacted, it was a bit later. We're pretty happy with this quarter. Adjusted EBITDA, and that's what you see also, we were really doing well on profitability, so EUR 95 million adjusted EBITDA for the last 12 months, EUR 19 million for Q1. Roughly, let's say, numbers of employees roughly stayed the same. Overall, 4% revenue growth. We have done more in the past, I know, but in this market fell, circumstance, we did pretty okay. 550 software customers that are driving the majority of the revenues, and we did 8% growth in our core business, the programmatic revenue.
Coming to the next slide. Going a bit into detail, what happened in the last quarter. Yeah, I mentioned already with 8% growth in our core business, mostly driven by the demand side. I mean, the demand side, as we have said in previous presentations, is the one that we want to push more, because the more equal our demand and supply get, the more efficient our company gets. Strong performance on user acquisition DSP, with contextual iOS campaigns. To explain, we do for larger companies, gaming companies, but also non-gaming companies, we help them to create app installs or also do sales. That was a Dataseat, an acquisition that we did now, three quarters of a year ago, and that's developing extremely well. The game streamlining successfully concluded.
We announced that, what happened end of Q4, beginning Q1, we concluded it now, which reduced our overall cost base. It's roughly EUR 10 million revenues less, so that means that the base that we compare against last year is higher, of course, but even though we were able to grow. 160 new casual games launched in Q1 2023. To make that very clear, gaming is still focused. Gaming is extremely important for us, for the data, for all the other assets that it brings, also to the advertising side. The main growth driver now is really advertising, as you also see in the numbers.
Yeah, coming to that growth, and that is what we're proud at, in the in-app, let's say, exchange field, we achieved 12% market share and we're announced market leader. Come to that a bit later in the presentation. What we're also doing, we are working on increasing profitability. We have done a lot of acquisition in the past, so we're further consolidating the tech stacks. On the other hand, we also do a lot of feature development to just create growth. Yeah, successful and prudent refinancing of the 2024 bonds. Not an easy market environment, but really happy that that worked out very well, giving us a much better profile on the financing side.
Then ESG, further a core focus, and also luckily, leading to nice improvements in our ratings, MSCI and also S&P ESG ratings. Those are, let's say, some of the main things that happened. A lot more happened, of course, it's a substantial company, but this is just a short summary. Coming to the next slide. Going into a bit more into depth, yeah, we have been developing ourselves, starting on the left upper corner. We have been developing ourselves from a gaming company. We did full gaming, let's say, before 2018, then started the advertising part to improve or to strengthen the gaming part, but really found out that selling the shovels is easier than digging for gold, if I may say so. We have really been very successful with building up our advertising part.
It's all programmatic advertising, so all digital. Yeah, you see that in Q1 2023, actually, we had 81%, so the share was further increasing. The main drive of the revenue are our larger customers. Also here, we were able to increase the number Q1 2022, 479, versus now 557, which is an increase by 75 software clusters. Looking at the ad impressions, prices have been under pressure because of the market. People are in these kind of, I would say, cyclical periods, or lower economic situations, spending less per ads, also reducing budgets.
We are happy to really show that also our volume has been growing, which means that we have been gaining market share from 156 billion ad impressions, we have increased to 166 billion. If you look at the bottom a bit more in detail, what has happened? Our existing customer base, which we measure quarter versus the quarter last year, the same quarter last year, had an 89% extension rate, which means that we actually lost 11% of revenues. That was not due to losing customers, because you see there's a 95% retention rate, which is really good. That means also that the existing customers have spent less.
If you then take together volume growth, current customer base spending less, it automatically leads to the conclusion that we have won a lot of new customers, which you see on the left side, which has been driving our revenue growth. Coming to the next page. The market is, how to say it, a cyclical market, depending on the economic environment. What you see on the left upper side in the picture is the forecast of analysts with regards to ad spend for the full year 2023. In June last year, they were still very positive with, let's say, almost 10% growth. We see that each quarter, or let's say each period, they have been bringing their forecast down. If you look on the right side also, that's a comparison of our peers.
The median of growth was in Q1, 2%, as far as numbers have been released so far. Minimal to zero growth for the ad market in the first two quarters. That's basically what's happening in the market. The market is expected to show signs of improvement in the second half of this year, sorry. Coming to the next page. This is the environment that we're working in. Going a bit into our channels, where have we been growing? Where didn't we grow? Mobile has, from start, been a very strong part. Why mobile? Because mobile is in a very... How to say it? Mobile is growing. Mobile is super important for data.
Your mobile phone is the one that you have with you all the time, yeah, use most of the day, and that's where we also have seen strong growth. That's what we're focusing on. Mobile is one of our core segments, and we've been growing with 8% year-over-year. CTV, which is, let's say, traditional TV gets digital, the whole, yeah, connected TV is growing. It's a hot market, a lot of interest in the market, and also here we have been able to grow actually with 10% versus last year. Desktop, which is a smaller segment for us, as you see, also less of a focus. It's lower margins, and especially also in this, yeah, more difficult economic situation. Margins were already low on desktop, they have become lower.
That's also a reason that we just do less on desktop to also protect our margins. Digital out-of-home, with some larger campaigns, so we were able to show very nice growth there, but it's a very small part of our total business. Coming to the next slide. Yeah, this is an report that was just released by Pixalate last days, which is showing a bit of market shares, a bit of positions in the market. Here, as I said before, in-app for us, mobile is super important and really proud that, yeah, when starting this business four years ago with the ad-tech, that we have been able really to bring ourself to a very nice position.
We are number one in the Google Play Store in the U.S., with 12% market share, and we are number one in the Google Play Store in EMEA, with 13% market share. Also in iOS, we're doing pretty nicely, not on the top position, I hope yet, but we're working on that. There we are at number four in Europe and North America, with 6%, respectively, 7% market share. This is a really an important part of our business and one we're really excelling. Reasons for that are, yeah, having good systems, but also really, our data part is super important to drive our revenues here. That brings me to the next page. Talking about data, yeah, we have been investing a lot in innovative targeting products. AI is very important to do targeting.
If you have data, if you know what a user is interested in, if you know what environment he's living, it's of course easier to target and you get better results. There's so many data that you need AI for that. We're focusing a lot on contextual. Contextual is the world without identifiers. Apple has, yeah, deprecated IDFA. Google has also announced that they will do that on their mobile services. They already have done it, actually, on their web services. What is the world that we're living in, or let's say, that we're focusing on? It's no personal data, AI-driven, no use of identifiers, and future-proof targeting. That's what we have been investing in, and some of our products, we have developed by that is Moments AI, which is contextual targeting solution.
Visual Intent, which is contextual targeting solution, which is cooperation with Getty Images. Next to each image of Getty, and Getty has a lot of images out, or let's say a lot of Getty Images are used in the market. Next to each of those images, we can sell the ad, so you have a very good environment to place the ads, high quality also. At anonymous targeting on mobile device, where we are also able to target users, without any personal data leaving the device on their mobile device.
We have our own first-party data, which are identified data, but there we get the full consent of our users and are able to also use those to test our how to say it, AI routines, to test our algorithms and to improve our contextual results. This together is one of the big drivers of our revenue growth and also of our market share growth in these markets. Coming to the next slide. On the demand side, as mentioned before, we have the strongest growth. What is driving this growth? First of all, supply. Having a good supply makes also the demand drive. That's what we always said is an integrated platform has a huge advantage because you have much more control, there's less middlemen.
That makes a lot of sense in there. Our first-party data coming from AxesInMotion, our racing game, App Store, games provider. Being omnichannel, so being a one-stop shop where advertisers can really and agencies can really run campaigns on different platforms. Supply path optimization, so taking out the middleman, very important, just makes it more efficient, but also much more transparent. As mentioned before, privacy compliant, AI-driven product solutions. Those have really been driving our demand side. From having a very strong base on the supply side, we are now really pushing more, much more on the demand side and seeing a 35% year-on-year growth. Coming to the next slide, and that's the financial part, and I would like to hand over to Paul, our CFO. Paul?
Thank you, Remco. Starting here with the first quarter financial highlights. We saw a stable growth in the first quarter of 4%, with actually very strong growth of the programmatic advertising revenue stream of 8%, outperforming the market here very nicely, as well as a -6% from the game side, which is also following some divestments and game closures in Q4. Which but also came with a very strong increase in profitability. We see a 9% EBITDA growth versus a 4% revenue growth and a 12% EBIT growth, which means we also improved our EBITDA margins now to 28% versus 22% EBIT margin.
Overall, we see that we have a very strong profitability in cash generation, while we have a stable, solid growth in the first quarter. That brings us to our long-term financial development, here we see that we have grown on an LTM basis now to EUR 327 million revenues, EUR 95 million in EBITDA, and EUR 78 million in EBIT. We maintain our strong EBITDA margins of 29%, which is at the upper end of our 25%-30% financial target. As mentioned earlier, we saw 4% growth in the first quarter, which is above the median for our peer group, and therefore, consider that despite the headwinds and the game closures, as a solid revenue growth.
That brings us to the segment performance. Here we see it on the left side, the demand side segment, which has grown now with 35% in the first quarter. Here we see that the investments of the previous years really pay off. That also our contextual UAD DSP, which is doing user acquisition, especially for games companies, without any reliance on identifiers, shows very good results. We also improved our EBITDA margin now from 2%-13%, and also expect to further grow the share of the demand side in the coming quarters. On the supply side, we see a stable quarter with a 2% growth, and that is also following some discontinued, non-strategic smaller games, as well as some lower budgets from existing customers.
We also adding, constantly adding new customers here and also expect some further growth in the coming quarters. Also here, we see a further improvement in profitability with an EBITDA margin of 28% to now 29%, as well as almost EUR 1 million more in EBITDA year on year. Coming to the operating cash flow and CapEx development on page 18. On the left side, we see the operating cash flow development which we're coming in at EUR 109 million on a LTM basis, which means very strong high free cash flow, despite increased interest expenses.
We also saw a seasonal working capital effect of EUR - 26 million, which is due to a lower use of the securitization, so the selling of receivables, as well as some publisher payouts, but that's rather seasonal working capital effect, and we also expect that to become positive again in the coming quarters. We also see on the right side, less focus on M&A has reduced the expansion CapEx quite a bit, and we also expect that to further decrease. We also see that the maintenance CapEx have been reduced, following also the streamlining of the games business to now EUR 8 million, and therefore we generate a very strong free cash flow. That brings us to the net leverage and interest coverage ratios.
On the left side, we see that we are coming in at the higher end of the net leverage target of 2x to 3 x, that's in the end, due to the working capital effect, which is expected to flatten out during the year. By taking that out, we would already be at 2.7. We are very confident that we also further delever over the coming quarters, but also the interest coverage ratio on the right side, the 3.5 x remains very strong, therefore we consider these as very strong and solid credit ratios, as said already, also expect to further delever in the coming quarters.
That is bringing us to our revenues and EBITDA guidance for the year 2023, and we are guiding on EUR 335 million-EUR 345 million in revenues, which would actually, by adding back the games divestments, as well as assuming a stable FX rate, be EUR 350 million-EUR 360 million in revenues, which means an 8%-12% pro forma growth, which is compared to the overall market growth from our perspective, actually a very solid and strong growth number, which also provides some outlooks for the future.
Looking at the EBITDA guidance of EUR 95 million-EUR 105 million, we see that actually EBITDA is increasing much faster than the revenues, and is also above the consensus numbers. That is also taken into account in the end due to our cost reductions which we achieved in the first quarter and which we also will see in the coming quarters. Therefore, we have a stable growth with a very strong underlying profitability. That is bringing us now to our midterm financial targets. We have discussed and talked a lot about the macroeconomic environment and some numbers for 2023.
We actually expect a very strong midterm outlook and remain confident that we can actually grow the company also in the coming years, with a revenue CAGR of 25%-30%, with very solid and high profitability compared also to previous years, by keeping also our leverage between two and three, and also investing further in our AI routines and then to the overall growth of the business. In the end, yeah, it's a macroeconomic environment where we are in, but that will also improve over time, and therefore, we also expect much higher organic growth numbers for the coming years. With that, I would like to hand over back to Remco, and I think then we are open for questions.
Thank you, Paul. I would hand over to the moderator to arrange the questions, organize the questions.
We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from the line of Fiona Orford-Williams with Edison Group. Please go ahead.
Good morning. First of all, can I ask you about the current situation in terms of ad volumes and pricing? On the Tremor call yesterday, they were saying that they were seeing a sequential improvement in Q2 and expected Q3 to be better too, and so to build through the year. Some comments on that would be really helpful. The other thing I wanted to ask about was that you mentioned consolidating the tech stack. How far through the process are you on that? How long to completion and what benefits? Thank you.
Yeah. I can take. Thank you for your questions, and I would like to answer them. Talking about ad volumes and prices, we had hoped, let's say, end of last year, that beginning this year would, let's say, become more positive. What we saw is basically a similar situation as last year. Customers still being hesitant, still looking very, I would say, cautious at their advertising budgets, partly delaying advertising spend. That's the situation that we had, and I would say still have in Q2. We see some, I would so say, lights at the end of the tunnel in the sense that we talking to customers, get there's more sense like, "Hey, markets won't dramatically change, but we need to get to our market share.
We need to start doing more marketing again," and things like that. That's what we, let's say, also, if you look in the past, at a certain point, you see people start spending again, have more confidence. At the moment, there's stability, and I think also in the interest front is very important. We are expecting to see, let's say, people to start spending more on the advertising, and that automatically will also have a pricing effect, of course, because less demand means, yeah, let's say the ads are there. If there's less demand, prices go down, but with more demand, prices will go up. That's expectation. I don't have a crystal ball, so it's really difficult to say.
That's also, if you look at analysts, they, let's say, said, and yeah, expect now, but it's after it's always easier, that the Q1, Q2 are low, and Q3, Q4 will be better. Q3, Q4, of course, are always the stronger quarters for advertising. That's basically what, yeah, I can say to that. Hope that answers your question. Consolidating the tech stacks, we have done two large consolidations for a wireless platform that we acquired in the U.S., one of our early acquisitions, which has basically treated differently or let's say three activities that we separate. All three have been moved except for one customer now. That means that basically all services, except for a few last ones, have been disconnected and all the features have been developed on the other platforms.
In that sense, that transformation is fully done, I would say. The last customer will move in the next one or two months, then we can fully deprecate that stack and it's done. The other large move that we have done is from LKQD, the CTV company that we acquired. That tech stack has been now almost fully moved to Smaato. Last movements are done now in Q2. Also here story, let's say in that sense, two last customers on the platform, they are also preparing and moving, so we expect to close it by end of Q2, might run into early Q3. That's also done. Those are things that, let's say, were big cost savers.
We are still working on consolidating more the data centers on the cloud. There's still a lot of things, improvements going on, but I think the big work on bringing stacks together was basically deprecating those two stacks. What we're looking now is indeed, how can we get more synergies between our two large exchanges, which are Smaato and PubNative, which is more joint feature development, all those kind of things. Bringing it down back to one stack doesn't make a lot of sense because the PubNative stack is much more on performance, Smaato is much more on brand, and that's also where we aim to further develop them. Really bring them together would get so much I mean, in theory, it makes sense.
It would make it a bit more efficient, but it would also tie up so many tech resources that we rather, at the moment, use them for further feature development. In the future, maybe we will further integrate stacks, and we basically do it by joint feature development, which will bring the stacks closer together. That's a bit of background, but if you look at it economically, I think a substantial part of it has been done, not ruling out that we will or let's say that we're further, working on further, how to say it, integrations. The big two stacks that we wanted to duplicate are almost done. I think I hope this answers your questions. I don't know if you have more questions?
Yes, thank you very much.
Back to the other one. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Star followed by one. We have a question coming from Ellis Acklin with First Berlin. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for the detailed presentation and taking my questions. Just a couple of things to follow up on. Paul, you mentioned you had some understandable seasonal effects on the cash flow. I was just wondering if you could share your expectation for the coming quarters in the four year, if we'll see similar cash conversion levels that we saw last year. Then, it looks like you also, a second question, that you had a rather flat development with a number of your software clients quarter-on-quarter. If you could maybe give us a little bit of background on that development. Thank you.
Thanks, Ellis. Let me maybe start and if you have anything to add, Remco, just add in. In regards to the starting with the working capital development, here, we had a reduced use of the securitization line, so the sale of the receivables, compared to the previous quarter, of roughly EUR 20 million. Also had some larger publisher payouts following a strong fourth quarter. That's more a kind of one-time effect, and we expect actually the working capital effect to become positive in the coming quarters again.
We will also increase cash conversion and therefore with it also as a more true view to look at the net leverage on the kind of pro forma base on the 2.7, which takes out the working capital effect. That's rather a seasonal thing, which will flatten out over the year, and we would expect similar cash conversion rates like we saw it also in 20. There's also one additional thing to mention, is that we had some accrued expenses for the restructuring and streamlining of the games division of roughly EUR 4 million, which were also part of the working capital effect. That's obviously a very clear one-time effect, even that was a smaller number compared to the overall effect.
Looking at the software clients, here we see that we see an increase roughly of 7 large software clients. That's in the end, the clients doing more than $100,000 US dollar revenues per year, quarter-on-quarter, 75 increase in software clients year-on-year. We also expect to further onboard more software clients and especially also we onboarded many more software clients in the first quarter as also quarter-on-quarter. I think it has been 50 or 60. The only thing is that we first of all, need to scale them and that they're coming into the $100,000+ USD basket.
Here, obviously, the current market environment, where you need to scale existing customers first, because before they become large clients, that's currently something which takes a bit more time as in the previous years, due to the fact that also overall budgets have been decreased. We're still further building a base, and a strong base, and getting more direct integrations also with publishers and, therefore, also taking further market share. I think that's also what is very nicely reflected in the Pixalate report, where we are actually very pleased that there is such a report which consolidates all the different sources now. That is one thing which we have always kind of, yeah, reviewed on our own data internally.
As you might recall, always said, we are one of the top five mobile SSPs worldwide, and I think it's good to have some data sources now, which showing some transparency on that as well.
If I may maybe add one sentence to that. It's, we see a lot of new customers coming in, indeed, because of customer budgets overall being under stress, the over $100,000 per year definition here hurts us a little bit. Even though there is still growth, a bit lower than because of this price and budget pressure from the customers.
Okay, guys. Thanks a lot. That's very helpful.
Thank you. Handing back to the moderator.
Again, if you have a question, please press Star, then 1. The next question comes from the line of Juergen- Philipp Frey with Baader Bank. Please go ahead.
Hello, gentlemen. Thanks for the presentation. I would like to pose my questions one by one. I hope that's okay for you. Starting really with the Pixalate report. As I understand it's the first time that we have such a report. What's your estimate of the market share you gained actually in the last year?
Yeah, we have been growing, for, on the in-app side with 8%, as we showed in this report. We started, if I may say, the other thing, four years ago with 0. Of course, acquisition driven, we have built this position and also been able to organically grow it now. To really, the, we know that we've been taking position, how much exactly is difficult to say, though. Therefore, we are happy that the report is there, and also next quarters we will be able to, of course, show the further developments in here in the market share.
Really looking at this market, which is lots of players which are a bit smaller than you, but not yet extremely out distanced, do you see a level where you kind of get an escape velocity, where this market more or less consolidates into kind of well, small oligopolistic market with, say, something like five players or so? What's your general view how this market is going to develop?
Yeah, looking at Let's say, I agree with you that there's too many players in this market, and that we see on the demand side, so on the advertiser and agency side, that they want to work with less parties. In that sense, there will be further consolidation, alone driven by the demand. The larger parties will take more share. On the other hand, there's also, as I think in most of the digital markets, people don't want to have monopolist here. I would assume that there will most likely be, I don't know, four or five large parties that take the main market shares, and then, the others that just are a lot smaller or are really getting out of the market. This is, let's say, my estimation on it.
Not certain, of course, that that will happen, but it would make sense.
Yeah, just to understand that we see it similarly. Then going a bit into more nitty-gritty figures, I really liked your operating cost control in the first quarter. Is there anything that you want to particularly highlight there? Can we assume that this is more or less a cost level that you are going to keep?
Yeah, we constantly... Okay.
Go ahead, Remco.
Shall I go first? Yeah, yeah. We're constantly watching our cost, of course, and the larger thing we did was the deprecation of smaller games. As said, it costs us revenue, on the other hand, it improves our profitability. We also don't look only a quarter or two ahead, we need to look at, let's say, three or five years ahead, and that made a lot of sense to do that. Deprecating tech stacks, as before, also discussed already, it makes a lot of sense, just become more efficient on the technology side. Those are, let's say, bigger things that we have been doing already. There's a continuous, of course, looking at the, also at the manpower. I mean, we have substantial number of employees working, which also drives our innovation, of course.
On the other hand, also there's continuous looking at is it efficient? What we do a lot is also bringing, how to say it, manpower from expensive salary places to cheaper salary places. That's something that you don't see on the number of employees, of course, but that you see on the cost base. U.S., let's say, engineer costs like double what an engineer or maybe a bit less, but almost double what an European engineer costs, and that's roughly double or 3 x what somebody in India or in Philippines or Armenia, where we have tech centers cost. Also there we see an, let's say, the non-customer facing roles that we really bring them a lot into lower salary areas.
That's something that you cannot do immediately, but you can do that step by step, so that's a continuous process. Those are, let's say, some of the big movements we're doing there, of course.
Yeah. That is really helpful. On the cash flow side, am I right to assume that there have been no earn-out payments in the first quarter? Can you a bit talk about the earn-out payments that you are going to for the prior acquisitions that you expect for the remainder of the year?
Yes, absolutely. I think there has been one small earn-out payment, of roughly close to EUR 1 million, in the first quarter. For the remainder of the year, we expect in the end, a fixed payment of EUR 5 million, as well as roughly EUR 5 million earn-out payments. It would total up to EUR 10 million for this year, which is well below the initial numbers, which were out there, one and a half years ago. That's in the end, also our natural hedge in regards, to the growth, and to the profitability and the overall macroeconomic environment.
Obviously, acquired companies then, if they don't grow, obviously 10%, 20% organic growth, and the profitability is not increasing in line with that, then the earn-out payment is also being reduced, and that is what we currently see. Therefore, it's a very nice natural hedge, we don't expect large cash outs for earn-outs this year.
Right. Yeah, thanks a lot, and all the best for the rest of the year.
Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Sven Sauer with Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello. Good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my questions. I would have three left. The first one is, I read in the report that you are still planning on buying bonds back. Is this the case? Do you have any target on how many you would like to purchase? The second question would be regarding Fractured Online. I was wondering if you could provide some color on the discontinuation of this game. I assume this happened in Q1 or even Q2. Is this included in the EUR 10 million that you mentioned? The third question would be the positive investment cash flow in Q1. Could you maybe provide a breakdown of this positive figure and also the CapEx? Yeah, thanks.
Paul, do you first want to take the financial questions?
Yes, absolutely. Starting with the investment cash flow, that's in the end, the investment of the EG7 shares, which is going into the investment cash flow, was roughly EUR 18 million. Therefore, it's positive. Otherwise, it would be, I think, in line with your expectation, minus EUR 10 million. On the Fractured side, that was already discontinued last year. There's an agreement with a, with a developer. I cannot provide many details there, but, in the end, in the numbers, that has not been largely reflected as there were limited revenues from this game. That's not part of the so-called games closures, and a pro forma calculation, which we have done.
If I missed any other question on the financial part, Sven, please just repeat.
Yeah, on the gaming part.
Yes.
I think, Paul. Sorry, go ahead, sir.
The bond buybacks, I think, was one of the questions.
Exactly, yeah, bond buy.
We have bought back further bonds. The current total bonds outstanding are at EUR 385 million. We also, depending on market price, are looking into further bond buybacks to further decrease our overall interest expenses and gross debt. That's something we're constantly looking into, but that also depends on the trading of the bonds.
Fractured Online, to give some more background, was a licensed game where the developer got into trouble and issues, and the game was not in a state that we said, it makes sense to further finance into it. That's the reason that it was difficult.
Thanks. Maybe if I may, one follow-up question. Looking at the financial results in Q1 and also the typical sequential behavior over the past years, typically the financial results were the lowest in Q1 and then increased over the coming quarters. I was just wondering if you would expect a similar development this year for 2023?
Not really. In the last years, due to the acquisitions, we also usually issued equity and debt. Therefore, the gross debt were increasing during the years, which then led to an increase in interest expenses. This year, we also expect a slight increase in interest expenses as we have just hedged 65% of our bonds, while 35% remaining floating. There will be some smaller impacts on the financial result from that. We don't expect large differences of Q1 versus the coming quarters.
On the operational side, let's say we are, of course, having the seasonality in the numbers. Normally, let's say, especially Q3, Q4, are the stronger quarters in advertising. Also, let's say there's a lot of future development, a lot of customers being onboarded. We expect also here, let's say, in line with last year, to show better results during the year.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, John.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Remco Westermann for any closing remarks. Mr. Westermann?
Yeah, that brings us to the end. I would like to thank everybody for listening in, and everybody who's seeing this later online, also, thanks for looking at this. Yeah, market is still a bit challenging, as said. I think the company is developing pretty nicely. We're working on, yeah, being fully ready when the market rebound. Also in the current time, we just gain market share, and as said, very happy with our position in in-app, and we're working on strengthening our other channels as well. Thank you all very much. Yeah, we go back to work. Thanks.