Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today for the Elys Game Technology Investor Day video conference. My name is Valter Pinto, Managing Director of KCSA Strategic Communications. Joining us today are Mike Ciavarella, Executive Chairman, and several members of the Elys and U.S. Bookmaking team. Before we begin, I'm going to review the company's safe harbor statement. Listeners are reminded that certain matters discussed in today's conference call or answers that may be given to questions asked could constitute forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to Elys Game Technology's future financial or business performance. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. The risk factors that may affect results are detailed in Elys Game Technology's MD&A filings and other documents that may be accessed via the SEC database.
I'd like to remind everyone to submit your questions via the chat function of today's webinar. After covering a few important topics, we're going to do our best to get to each person's question within the timeframe allotted for today's call. We're gonna be covering a lot of really interesting topics today with the team. As most of you know, Elys is a global gaming technology company that has successfully been operating in Europe for many years. It recently entered into the U.S. market with a unique business model, targeting small businesses while simultaneously partnering with casino operators. The company recently announced its strong financial results at its Grand Central Washington, D.C. location for December, signed an agreement to license its software to industry leader Lottomatica, and is rapidly approaching the launch of its partnership with Ocean Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
We're gonna dig into all of the above today. As always, as I mentioned, we're gonna get to your questions as best we can. So please submit your questions via the live Q&A function of today's webinar. Please note today's call is being recorded. It's Friday, January 28, 2022. I'd like to give the opportunity to Mike, Executive Chairman, to introduce himself and the rest of his team. Mike?
Sure. Thank you very much, Valter. So this morning, everybody, nice to see everyone on again. We've got a nice audience. Myself, Mike Ciavarella, and we have quite a large group here from our team, commencing with Matteo Monteverdi, Vic Salerno, Bob Kocienski, and Robert Walker from USBookmaking. We also have John Salerno, Tory Key, Tyrone Fayard, and are expecting a couple other chats, but they're gonna log on as they log into their desktop. We have a nice audience from our side as well.
I appreciate it, Mike. As we mentioned at the onset, the company does have a unique business model. Can we dig a little bit further into the strategy in the U.S.? A lot of us are familiar with some of the other gaming companies. What's different about us?
Well, I think some of our audience today knows quite a bit about our background. They've been—A lot of the folks have been following us for many years as we've sort of built up to this moment in time, the launch of 2022. For the benefit of some of the folks that are new to the company, new to the story, the company's not new to the industry. We've been a B2C operator in the Italian market for well over 20 years, and that's really where we learned and understood the industry, the behavior of our players and the customers and what they're looking for.
What we did differently is about five or six years ago, we were using a third-party platform and understood the drawbacks, if you will, or the weaknesses of them. Our tech group essentially stepped back and developed a solution that was designed, built, purpose-built for this industry. What we did differently really is we looked at the market that exists in the Italian or the European market, and luckily we designed a technology that was a distributed model. Because in those markets, rather than having sort of large casinos speckled across the nation, it's all little coffee shops and bars and, you know, restaurants and places where most folks frequent on a daily basis.
So what we did was we designed the technology not only to be a sports betting technology, so it elaborates the data properly, establishes the markets and the products that the players wanna play, but it's also designed to be very cost-effective on a modular basis, and I can describe that as we kinda go on today, so that it's very inexpensive for us to establish sort of a main server system and deploy very cost-effectively in each small location. That really is one of the main, you know, competitive edges.
That basically is what we have now created, coming into the United States, is a system that we can establish a set of servers in a state, in any one of the states, and we can service the entire state very inexpensively from that one location. That really, in our view, is a significant competitive advantage and really an unfair advantage because many of our competitors in our industry are built on, let's say, more monolithic type of technologies, very rigid, very powerful, but very rigid. As you know the old adage, like you can have any color you want as long as it's black. That's the unique thing about this technology and where I think we have a leg up on the competition going forward.
What it seems to at least the investors that I speak with, you all have a very de-risked approach to the gambling industry. It seems like it's mutually beneficial, not only for yourselves, you know, low marketing spend, but also for the small businesses. Explain the benefits to the partners that you all have started working with and future partners at the small business level.
Okay. Like this question is one that I hope investors that have invested in our space, or let's call it the gaming or leisure betting space, could truly grasp. Because now there's been a couple of years that have passed, particularly in the United States, essentially, 'cause this industry really didn't quite exist the same way it did in Europe for many, many years. It just literally opened as a result of the repeal of the prohibition on sports betting.
Initially, many investors were somewhat euphoric because most investors, whether they're recreational investors or professional investors, were essentially, in my view, in my opinion, looking at investing in companies from the perspective of a sports bettor and saying things like, "Wow, you know, let's get behind early movers because, you know, they're gonna own the market in the next couple of years," you know? Now they're looking at things and wondering out loud, going, "Well, what about the sustainability of some of these companies?" Because they're reporting their business now. Folks are getting to understand, you know, what they're really doing to capture market share and the fact that it might not be a sustainable methodology.
Because of the nature of our business, we, Elys, took a very surgical, tactical approach to the U.S. market. You know, first, we were very vocal that the European technology would not work in the United States because the lines are different, the way players play is different. The tech and the know-how has to be different. Elys took a step back and developed the tech properly. We took time, you know. Unfortunately for us, you know, the investors didn't pay much attention to the company, and that was in the early years. I guess if I could put it in a very colloquial way, the tide is gonna change. It's gonna go the other direction because now, we're not just a talking head anymore.
You know, Elys now has completed the U.S. tech stack, and we have physically deployed in one of the toughest environment. You know, it's a single small location with only one or two points of sales. This is a key and a very key metric, a very key point that I want everybody to understand, because it was probably one of the toughest type of deployment in our industry because it's a small location. You don't have a lot of liquidity. The team from USBookmaking and our team overseas have worked really well to generate very positive numbers. Those numbers speak for themselves. The economics are undeniable. Elys as a business and investment holding is significantly de-risked because early the proven results that are officially posted that are now launched, you know, with Grand Central.
In a few weeks, we're launching now a large location at Ocean Casino Resort. Over the immediately coming months, as you mentioned earlier, we're going to deploy a large digital solution that could reach, you know, millions of people nationwide with Lottomatica. That means really Elys will corner virtually every single potential angle that the North American market has available to us.
The company recently announced December results after only launching in October, right?
Right. Yeah, these results, as I pointed out, are really the results from the first deployment in that small restaurant bar in Washington, D.C. The key here, folks, I really hope that the audience kinda gathers from the official results from D.C. We're not just sort of saying, "Hey, these are our results." Yeah, we did a press release to highlight that. The key answer is really the cost of the deployment, and that what really is what the takeaway is from the numbers. What essentially we could do, Elys can actually set up a location for a sliver of the cost of what some of our competitors can do.
In fact, if you were to take essentially a mining view of this industry, and you discover a huge pot of gold or a big pool of oil underground, but it costs you three times more than the current market to get it out, the economics just don't work. It's useless to mine. It's not feasible. What we actually do have here is, in this case, you have a small restaurant bar or a coffee shop owner that wanted to add sports betting as an ancillary revenue stream by leveraging their own loyal existing customers, and they've worked really hard to develop and foster those customers. They're now able to use the betting to actually attract them to their place of business and to keep them there longer.
Elys can set this all up for a fraction of the cost that many of the competitors could, and it could be paid back only in a matter of months. Those numbers really are reflecting that. Moreover, it's also worry-free because most of these small businesses, they don't specialize in gaming. Sure, Ocean Casino Resort does, Lottomatica does, but Grand Central is a food and beverage establishment, and they need to make sure that they're introducing a new product line that is favorable to their customers and also is worry-free to them because they're not bookmakers. They wanna make sure that it's a well-run operation. Now Elys provides not only the cutting-edge technology but also the training and the management.
That is essentially the result that we get here.
Mike, if I may say.
Sure. Yeah.
What this allows us to do is the money that we save in our cost gives us the ability to give it back to our customers and pay better odds to the customers or the bettors, as we call them. That gives us an advantage there and differentiates us from the other locations.
I appreciate that. I’m seeing a couple questions about Ocean Casino. It's headline news that Ocean Casino, who's undergoing significant investment in Atlantic City, chose USBookmaking as the partner. Tell us a little bit about that process and obviously a significant accomplishment for the company to be chosen.
I'll start the answer, and then maybe I'll pass it over to, you know, Vic and his team or Tory or Matteo even to add a little extra color. As I kind of pointed out before, when we really started to survey the business, we were talking about PASPA being repealed well before 2018. When we started to develop, it was after the market really existed because you couldn't really develop something that you didn't know what it was gonna be like. We started developing in 2018. What we created in terms of the design of the tech stack is one that could, as I mentioned in my prior response, was to capture all potential angles of the industry. Okay?
Taking a look at Ocean, as always is the case of deploying a new product in any industry, in any market, there's always challenges. Add to that, the layer in our industry of regulation, certification, and switching out maybe one of our competitors that they prior, previously had. This all adds that little layer of complexity and potential risk for both Elys and our customer, Ocean. What I could say on this, and I'll let the guys add some more color, as I mentioned, is despite these headwinds, both Elys and Ocean teams are fully engaged, we're totally focused and we're having a lot of exceptional cooperation to succeed. We're really restricted to getting set up before...
by March first. That's only a few weeks away. Again, this is an exciting milestone for Elys, and I believe it'll add another firmer layer of credibility to this company in our deployment in North America. Maybe you guys might wanna add a little bit more color to that and what it really means to Elys and also to Ocean.
John, would you like to comment on that?
Sure. Getting great cooperation from the Ocean side. Tech teams are working together currently on the deployment. We expect to launch and hit this March first date and you know then grow with the Ocean expansion over time. The coming months there at the casino are really exciting. They're looking to do a lot of new things and really capture more of the market share in Atlantic City, and this gives us a nice entry into that market.
Robert, could you add?
I don't have a lot to add on top of that, except for that we're really excited. I mean, our philosophy at USB is to get to the right number as quick as possible, so we're excited to get to Ocean's. It's similar to some of the books that we ran in Nevada, Mirage and Bellagio and whatnot. The Elys technology allows us to do that. I think that's the most important thing and the most exciting thing from the USB side.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that up, Robert. It's Mike here. You know, because I was hoping that you'd say something like that, because what's really quite critical is, you know, Ocean is a perfect example of how you have a bricks and mortar location that relies on gaming and gambling as its core business. It's not generating core business revenues from hamburgers and wings and beer. Its core business is gaming. They're in a strip in Atlantic City that they have to compete against some of the biggest names. Everybody knows Borgata and all the other big names are there. It's a highly competitive zone, not unlike Nevada. Guys like Robert have extensive experience in that environment.
I think we're gonna bring in some really cool different things that the guys are working on, that is gonna give Ocean. Because again, that really is what Elys' preference is. We don't wanna be the forward-facing. We don't wanna be facing the customer. We wanna give Ocean the power to be able to face the customers with the best product and the best results from trading. Again, the D.C. numbers give you an indication of what I think our team could potentially do there.
You recently announced, Mike, and you alluded to it a little bit, the partnership with Lottomatica. We're getting a couple of questions about that, but do you wanna give a little bit of a background? There are some questions specifically about that.
Sure. Okay. I guess let me begin by saying the following. The agreement with Lottomatica just food for thought for our audience, because again remember, we're just gonna, you know, we did give you a forward-looking statement disclaimer at the beginning. If I say anything here, you know, I don't wanna overlead the folks. The agreement is multifaceted, and we alluded to that in both our press release and our Form 8-K that we filed. We only have announced that principal deal, but the underlying deal could be considered a soft test for the capability of Elys Gameboard, our technology.
What might be worth describing is that Lottomatica has a very serious ownership group that has a broad interest in gaming ventures. You could imagine that before putting pen to paper, what we recently announced, there was significant deep dive. Like we didn't just get on the phone on December 24th and say, "Hey, what do you think of doing a deal?" This has been a six-month road. Matteo's on the line. You know, he kind of spearheaded a lot of the work behind making sure that everything is technologically sound. Our team in Europe did a fantastic job of demonstrating the product. They've done a significant deep dive on that.
We're satisfied the tech stack, excuse me, is highly capable compared to the other candidates, 'cause again, they didn't just sort of pick a straw and say, "Oh, well, you know, lucky you, Elys, we're gonna look at you." They did actually look at a wide range of potential candidates out there, I'm certain of it. Importantly, our team was very synergistic with theirs. There's a lot of commonality with Lottomatica and our team in terms of our development team, as you would imagine. And there's been some extensive collaboration, and that's gonna be required going forward. Now we're going to prepare a customized solution.
Again, I hope that the folks as part of this discussion kinda extracted that or took away from what I said earlier, is that the tech stack is super flexible. Not only is it designed to be able to go to a small little coffee shop in the middle of downtown Rome, but also is able to service a large, you know, powerful operator like Lottomatica and their B2C brand that they want to deploy in North America. With this going live and getting evaluated in the real world, you know, I believe that it will likely lead to broad application of many properties that they might have in their portfolio.
You know, fiscally, for us, it made a tremendous amount of sense because ultimately, we have already designed the technology. A lot of our prior spend has gone into the technology. That spend, we don't have it now going forward. Lottomatica and their teams are going to be able to adopt what we built and customize what we've done there for their own purposes. We'll get compensated for that design and development and that sort of thing. There's no additional cost for us to be able to customize the software for them. Really, it's a win-win situation for both us and Lottomatica and their shareholders as well as ours.
Someone is asking about why not just compete with Lottomatica, but I guess you just answered. Those are the reasons and the thought process behind that.
Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah. Maybe I could just touch a little bit upon that because, again, we've always said we wanna be the backside. We don't wanna be the forward-facing side. We don't wanna be facing the customers. If they have a brand that they're going to label on top of our technology, we're gonna generate revenue from that. Ultimately, we don't need to compete. Folks in the audience, I'm sure they've looked at many of our peer group companies like DraftKings and FanDuel and BetMGM and some of the most recent news about, you know, what it's costing these folks to generate client bases and build their business. Some of that could be unsustainable.
We know that because we've been able to hone that process in the Italian market. Most of our revenue generation, as everybody can note, is the revenue generated from the Italian market. That's primarily B2C, so we know how to operate in that space. Our strategy, as I mentioned earlier, is quite surgical in the U.S. It's rather than being front-facing, we'll provide our customers like Lottomatica, Grand Central, and Ocean Casino, the best technology and the best trading services so that they can generate the best revenue for their commercial operations.
I can guarantee we're not gonna be spending $5 million or $6 million on a 30-second commercial on the Super Bowl.
I already did that.
I wanna remind everyone, please submit your questions. We have quite a few, so I just wanted to remind everyone to submit in the chat function. Jumping around a little bit, Mike, back to the small business initiative in the U.S.
Mm-hmm.
We can't get into specifics, obviously, but people are curious about, you know, what is the model? What are the economics of the relationship with the small business without getting into specifics into Grand Central and others? How do we kinda think about, you know, revenue splits and all these different elements of the how the deal is structured?
Sure. Okay. I think maybe I can. Again, I'll do the same thing. Team, you guys can jump in and add some additional color. Just my thinking from the top is this. It's for the audience, really. Folks, you could do the math, right? I mean, from the D.C. results that are public, their official results are coming from D.C. Lottery. You could see that a small bar with two sales points are generating anywhere between $50,000 and $60,000. In fact, December was an awesome month. They approached almost $100,000. Even if we sort of be very much more conservative, $50,000 -$60,000 per month on average in terms of revenue. Then again, I just wanna qualify, folks. You know, it's also somewhat seasonal, right?
We had, you know, NFL football, which is a big, you know, a big generator. We're going to have now in the next couple of months, Super Bowl. Well, we're gonna have Super Bowl soon. We're gonna have March Madness and then baseball and so on. It's a little less cyclical than it would be in Europe. That being said, going forward in terms of cost, our installation cost now is essentially negligible on a per location basis. For instance, I mentioned earlier, most of our technology spend and server setup that we did for the state, well, the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., if you will, where we could service thousands of locations from that one set of servers. Because we do that in Europe.
You could see the numbers are there based on our servers that service the entire Italian market. Now, the deployment of Grand Central was really our, let's call it our proof of concept model, okay? Essentially, because the cost is now negligible, it's really a powerful scale-up opportunity. Even if you were to split that with that $50,000-$60,000 per month with our customers, you have an exceptional worry-free ancillary revenue for them that can actually assist in boosting their core business like food and beverage sales, coffee sales or whatever.
While Elys, you know, has the scale of potentially thousands of locations earning, let's divide that number by two, anywhere from $20,000-$30,000 per month, and deployed virtually at no cost to service, you know, it's quite a significant revenue driver and value driver for our investors. Conservatively speaking, you know, if we look at the entire nation and of course it's gonna be subject to each of the states adopting the similar model, although we are seeing now Maryland and Ohio and a few other states following the small business model of licensing. Across the nation is about 600,000 potential locations. Even if we were to get 5,000 of that, you know, that could generate hundreds of millions on an annual basis, even billions.
Even though that seems extravagant, it's still important for you to look at the results, and I refer you to analyze you know, the peer results as well. Okay?
Folks were asking about that. What we have Grand Central, I'm sure we have other locations without getting specifics. What does the pipeline look like? You're just alluding to that entrance into new space. What's the growth strategy on the small business side?
Well, I don't wanna commandeer the conversation, but again, at the risk of you know, getting one of my guys to put too much information, I'm happy to have Tory or Matteo give maybe a little discussion because I know that they're working on that pipeline. It's active, but the only point I'll make on that is very important. Again, when we look at what is Elys all about, the one thing we did not do is just try to clamor and grab market, right? We wanted to think our way through what was going on. When you look at, say, some of the regulations in the early periods, you know, they were very stringent. Like the regulators didn't know.
They didn't have any experience in terms of, you know, how they should apply this. Look at New York, only mobile. Does that really make sense? At the end of the day, we need to try to help the regulators. That's part of our obligation in the whole ecosystem of the industry. But getting them to appreciate that small businesses can operate a small sports book within their venues, drive ancillary revenue, create employment and also it, you know, provide an ancillary product for people to go to locations to enjoy themselves outside of the house, if you will. Essentially, what we needed to do in D.C. as an example is, if you look at the regulation, it was initially restricted to only two locations per operator.
That didn't quite make sense to us. Even though we had a pipeline of restaurants and bars and potentially coffee shops that were coming to talk to us about potentially starting, the first thing we said is, "Hang on. We need to make sure our system's working," which we did at Grand Central. Now we've been working with the regulator to look for some sort of regulatory methodology to be able to offer that same product to more than just one more. Based on what we've been working on, we're just about in that position. We feel very confident about that. The folks at USBookmaking and Tory and Matteo have been working on a bit of a pipeline.
Maybe Tory or Matteo, if you guys wanna, you know, kind of highlight, you know, the developments in both D.C. and other states.
Yeah. Sure, Mike. Do you wanna go ahead first, Matteo?
No, no, go ahead, please.
Okay. Yeah. I'll keep it brief, because of course, we can't get into specifics, but as Mike alluded to, we're able to now through joint ventures in D.C., create a number of partnerships which we do have in the pipeline. Of course, we can't get into the details of what those businesses are currently, but we have a number of opportunities in the district, but as well as in Maryland, there'll be, at least for now in the regulatory environment, 30 potential Class B licenses that we can potentially partner with, and we have a number of chains and individual bars and restaurants that we're already in conversations with in the state of Maryland. On top of that, Ohio will be adopting the same kinda regulations as Mike has already mentioned.
Having conversations with, you know, groups out there as well. On top of that, keep in mind that we're still able to work with tribal casinos and other entities that have brands that they'd like to, you know, ultimately, you know, be able to white label a solution for. It's not just these small businesses. We're still in conversations with tribal casinos and as well as, when you look at areas like Puerto Rico where they're looking to partner with operators as well. Another number of opportunities in the pipeline, and you know, we're looking to basically be able to scale these opportunities and in all these areas where they're Class B licenses as well as, areas whether it's tribal casinos or anybody that might wanna white label the solution.
Mike, we sometimes forget that we're USB has locations in New Mexico, three Native casinos in there. We have a Native casino in Colorado, North Dakota, two in Michigan. Where else are we? Well, we do have another license in D.C. that we're going through now. We have a license in Iowa, so a lot of times that gets overlooked. People have to realize most of those are on rev shares. When we go into a new jurisdiction, we always have to look at the tax structure. There's so many moving parts that decide whether we'll go in. I mean, New York has really blown it. With over 50% taxes, it makes it very difficult for us to make any money out of it.
We look at that, we look at the regulations, we look at the opportunity as far as what wagers we can take. There are many different things that we have to consider before we even consider going into a jurisdiction. Those are the main parts though. Then some of the native, the taxes in the Native casinos, sometimes there's no taxes, sometimes they have to pay the state taxes. That varies also.
Matteo, did you want to, you know, if there's anything you can add to that?
No, I think that both Vic and Tory cover well the pipeline. Clearly we expect in the future that other jurisdictions might adopt a similar Class B model. Clearly we see an advantage from our side when this regulation will be enacted because obviously we are very much focused on providing an end-to-end solution to these locations. We believe that sooner rather than later many other markets will adopt a similar model.
Perfect. Mike, I'm not seeing any further questions.
Okay.
Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Well, I guess the final thought here, Valter, is I hope that some of the, you know, the things that we've launched here in early 2022 give our audience an indication that we haven't been sleeping at the wheel, as they say. We, you know, even though in the last six to eight months, despite the fact that we've had sort of a global pandemic affecting everything, we have not been, you know, silent. We've actually been working extensively in the background, and now we're starting to open that flower. It's blossoming in my view that we're essentially going to have a very transformative year starting in 2022. Majority of our costs are behind us.
We've become an economically de-risked company, as you asked me earlier. From an investor's perspective, I hope that we can give you some motivation that we are genuinely well-positioned to expand and grow and capture a significant market share now that we have the right product and the right team to service that product for a wide range of potential customers here. I guess in one other point, look, folks, as long as there's people on the planet, and as long as there's sports, there's gonna be sports betting. This industry, regardless of recession, regardless of what's happening in the market, corrections, et cetera, as long as there's a Super Bowl game on a weekend, people are gonna be out there wagering on it because it's part of our.
It's ingrained in us as human beings. We wanna compete, we wanna have fun, we wanna enjoy ourselves. I could tell you we've got a great product, a great company, great team, in an awesome industry. We're really excited about it and hope that we have the support of our investors and audience going forward.
Well said, Mike. Thank you. Thank you to our participants today. As you can see on our slide, we have our contact information up there. If we missed your question for any reason, please reach out to us anytime. Thank you, and we look forward to the next one. Thank you so much.
Thank you all. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.