Acroud AB (publ) (STO:ACROUD)
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Apr 30, 2026, 9:09 AM CET
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Earnings Call: Q2 2023

Aug 10, 2023

Robert Andersson
CEO and President, Acroud AB

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Q2 presentation. My name is Robert Andersson, and with me, I have Tricia, our CFO. If we look at today's agenda, I will be going through some Q2 highlights, Q2 key figures. Then we will summarize where our company is at the moment. Tricia will then follow with financial details. In the end, we will have a Q&A. If we look at the highlights, we had record revenues of EUR 10.3 million. That's a revenue growth of 43%. We have record NDCs of 117,000. That's a massive increase of 234%. I repeat, revenues as at 10.3%. We have the adjusted EBITDA of EUR 1.6 million.

This is a bit lower than where we necessarily had wanted to be. However, we did decide to really invest in paid media, and that is why we have those record NDCs. The profit of the tax was EUR -21 million. This is predominantly due to the write-down of the old legacy business. Adjusted profit of the tax was EUR -931,000. As I've said, NDCs was record-breaking, and this is also then kind of reflected in our lower EBITDA, because we invested heavily in acquiring these NDCs, and they are all on revenue share. This is gonna come back in our growth later on, but this is needed to hit our long-term targets. We are moving on. You know, I keep repeating it, record revenues and record NDC numbers. This is something we are really, really proud of.

What Q2 was, was a very active quarter when it comes to restructuring. What happened is, a few years ago, we bought two companies. We bought PMG Group, which consists of Voonix and Matching Visions, predominantly, and we bought TDC. What has happened is that all of these companies have outperformed our wildest expectations. This is really good. We managed to do some really successful acquisitions. What this did lead to, though, is that we have very high earn-outs, and we, we had to initiate a written procedure related to the bond in order to cope with these cash outflows that were supposed to happen according to all the contracts, and we had also to amortize on the bond, et cetera. We did renegotiate all of these deals.

This led to our contingent liabilities going down from EUR 26 million to EUR 6.5 million. That's a massive figure to be able to reduce in, in a contingent liability, EUR 26 million to EUR 6.5 million. We also changed our cash flow outflow in the company from EUR 6 million to EUR 2.5 million, which is also a huge achievement. All of these figures will be reflected in the Q3 report because these were closed after the end of the quarter. We also took steps to move our core business, the legacy business, which we did the write down on, to Serbia. This is due to the fact that we haven't been able to create the growth we need in that business.

We tried different strategies, different management, et cetera, but it had so much legacy issues that we couldn't get past. It was really time now to make clean slate and no holy cows, and give it to a team to really do what's needed. And I've worked with them in the past, so I'm really hopeful about this, and we have also structured the deals so that they are incentivized for quick growth. What we have done now is that I feel with this quarter past, we have really set up the company for future success. It's a really clean company that doesn't carry risks in its balance sheet, et cetera. I'm very, very happy with what we have achieved. So as you can see here, our revenues keeps pretty much being record-breaking.

The trend is clear, this trend is something that we expect to keep going, especially considering how heavy we have invested in all these NDCs lately. If we then look at how our group looks, or as I like to call it, a crowd of companies. We have Voonix, which is a leading SaaS offering for affiliate software in order to track your own business and your own performance. We have Matching Visions, which is a super affiliate network, which it means that we aggregate smaller affiliates up into operators. We have maybe 1,000 different smaller affiliates using Matching Visions and the deals we provide for the smaller affiliates. We have PokerListings, which is a global poker news site. It's one of the most renowned poker news sites and poker affiliate sites out there.

We have The Gambling Cabin, which is probably Sweden's largest sports betting community. Its largest client is Svenska Spel, and if you are interested in sports, I urge you to check out their broadcasts and take part in the really active community there. We have something I like to call A core. This is the traditional SEO and casino and sports affiliation. That's pretty much what the affiliation of the past was based on. There is still business to be made there, but the industry has changed significantly, and this is now what we have given to the team in Serbia to turn around and grow. We have our media buying business.

We are going to start calling that Fairgrounds. It is a little bit of a funny story behind that name, but for that, you're gonna have to tune into our Q3 presentation, when we will be presenting this a little bit more in detail. With that said, we are moving on to the financial details, and Tricia.

Tricia Vella
CFO, Acroud AB

Hey, Robert, and welcome to the Q2 presentation. My name is Tricia, and I will be going through the financial details of Quarter 2. Starting off with revenue, as Robert said, revenue keep increasing and has now reached to EUR 10.3 million. If we had to look at the split in between our two segments, the iGaming affiliation contributes for EUR 6.8 million of this revenue, and our SaaS segment contributes to EUR 3.5 million of the total group revenue. Also, NDC is has reached an all-time high, high of 117,000, which represents a year-on-year increase of 234%.

Moving on to the revenue bridge, which is showing us the movement in revenue from Q1 2023, and the main movement, as we can see, is an increase in the sports betting revenue of EUR 1.2 million. We can also see an increase of 210 in our SaaS business coming from the network model, and this is counteracted a bit by the decrease in casino and poker of 261 and 150, which gets us to a revenue of EUR 10.3 million. Also, the costs, starting off with EUR 7.2 million in Q1, as Robert said, we invested in our paid media business, and thus we had an increase of EUR 1.3 million in other external costs.

In line with also the increase in revenue of in the network model of the SaaS segment, we also had a slight increase in cost of EUR 73. The increase in our payroll costs of EUR 110 is also coming from the investment in our paid media business, and that gets us to a total cost base of EUR 8.7 million in Q2. Looking at the adjusted EBITDA, which stands at EUR 1.6 million in Q2, again, the decrease is because there was an investment in costs in the paid media business, which has lowered EBITDA.

Right now, the group is operating at a blended EBITDA margin of 16%, which is coming from an EBITDA margin of 13% in our SaaS business and an EBITDA margin of 18% in our iGaming segment. Specifically focusing on the iGaming affiliation and starting with revenue, which stood at EUR 6.8 million. As we can see, the majority of our iGaming revenue is coming from our sports betting vertical, which contributes to 83% of the total iGaming affiliation revenue. We have poker and casino, which contribute to 9% and 8% respectively of the total iGaming affiliation revenue. Looking at the revenue model, 77% of our iGaming revenue is coming from revshare deals.

We can see a movement from last year, which was only 41%, and this movement is mainly coming from the introduction of the paid media business, which is focused on revshare deals. We have CPA deals, which contribute to 11%, and other fees, which contribute to 12% of our revenue. The revenue by type. The largest part of our revenue is 74% coming from our paid media business, 21% coming from our SEO, which is the traditional website business, and 5%, which is coming from our social media business. This season, the iGaming affiliation stood at 101. As we can see, the total groups and this season increases mainly coming from the iGaming affiliation. EBITDA, EBITDA is EUR 1.2 million.

The decrease since Q1 is mainly because of the investment in our paid media to ensure that revenue grows in the near future. Adjusted cost base, EUR 4.9 million of costs to other external costs. The increase here is the paid media investment and personnel costs, EUR 6 million-EUR 7 million in Q2, which is also represented. The increase is also represented by the paid media business in this segment. Moving on to our other segment, which is the SaaS segment. Total revenues of EUR 3.5 million in Q2, mostly coming from our network model, which has also seen an increase of 6% over Q1, and whereas the subscription model have remained pretty stable from Q1 and also year-over-year. EBITDA at EUR 0.463 million, which is also very much in line with Q1.

We can see a slight decrease since last year, and this is mainly represented by an increase in costs and a slight decrease in revenues since last year. I repeat that the EBITDA margin of this segment is now standing operating at 13%. RGUs, which are our revenue generating units, stood at 428. These are increasing slowly, but pretty much stable as well in this segment. Moving on to the gross debt, which is now standing at EUR 20.1 million in Q2. We can see a slight decrease from Q1, and this is mainly represented by a higher cash and cash equivalents at the end of Q2, which reduces the gross debt.

Also, we had a favorable set FX during Q2, which converts the euro equivalent of our SEK-denominated bond to a lower amount. May I also remind that the bond is also moves with the amortized bond redemption and amortized bond discount. Net debt, which is standing at EUR 2.2 million at the end of Q2, which we can see a slight improvement also when we compare it to Q1. Moving on to the last slide, which is our cash flow development. Operating cash flow stood at EUR 1.7 million in Q2, which converted to a cash conversion of 145%, which is a very good conversion. This comes after we had two quarters of low cash conversion, but as we had explained, this would be simply timing differences.

Cash flow from investments, very minimal, EUR 42,000, and these represent the additions in our intangible assets. Cash flow from financing, EUR 863,000, which is mainly represented by the bond interest, but also includes finance lease payments and some minority dividends. Cash position of EUR 3.3 million at the end of quarter two. With that, I hand over back the presentation to Robert.

Robert Andersson
CEO and President, Acroud AB

Ah, I am... classic. This has been an amazing quarter. Looking at all the things that we have achieved and set in motion, all the record NDCs and the revenue. The only thing that one could look at in this presentation is the lower EBITDA that we achieved. But this is something that we have to do in order to continue towards our aggressive financial target. This all comes back in Q3 and Q4, and now with the really, really clean balance sheet, I think the sky's the limit. With that, I am handing over to Q&A.

Operator

If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Robert Andersson
CEO and President, Acroud AB

Okay. That brings us to the end of this presentation, and I look forward to our Q3 presentation, and thank you.

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