Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Bragg Gaming Group Q1 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker today, Yaniv Spielberg, Chief Strategy Officer of Bragg Gaming Group. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. I'm Yaniv Spielberg, Chief Strategy Officer for Bragg Gaming Group. I'll be hosting the call today along with Bragg's newly announced Chief Executive Officer, Richard Carter, who will share some opening remarks and an update on our business, and Chief Financial Officer, Ronen Kannor, will provide the review of our financials. In this call, we'll review Bragg's financial and operating results for the first quarter of 2021. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the conference call to a question-and-answer period. I'll start the call with some brief cautionary remarks regarding certain statements that may be made on this call. Certain statements made on this conference call and our responses to various questions may constitute forward-looking information or future-oriented financial information within the meaning of applicable securities law.
Statements about expected growth, prospective results, strategic outlooks, and financial and operational expectations, opportunities, and projections rely on the number of assumptions concerning future events, including market and economic conditions, business prospects or opportunities, future plans and strategies, technological developments, and anticipated events, trends, and regulatory changes that may affect the corporation, its subsidiaries, and their respective customers and industries. While we believe these assumptions to be reasonable, they are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are outside the company's control and which could cause the actual results, performance, or achievement of the company to be materially different. There can be no assurances that these assumptions or estimates are accurate, or that any of these expectations will prove accurate.
For complete discussion of these factors, please refer to our recently filed press releases and our publicly available disclosure documents that we filed this morning as well. I'll now pass the call to Richard Carter, CEO of Bragg. Richard?
Thank you, Yaniv. Good morning, everybody. To open, I'd like to say how excited I am to be speaking to you today. I joined Bragg last October as Chairman of the Board because I recognized the potential of the company's technology and product offering. Now as Group CEO, I'm very much looking forward to building a market-leading, vertically integrated iGaming business, which enables our clients to be successful and facilitates an outstanding user experience for our end users. On today's call, we will cover the following topics: our first quarter results and recent accomplishments, our product and technology investments, as well as the group's corporate developments. Before turning the call over to Ronen Kannor, I will talk about the Spin Games acquisition we announced yesterday and the outlook for 2021.
I'm pleased to announce that we continue to build on the strong momentum of 2020 with an excellent first quarter, outperforming our targets and accelerating our progress on the company's strategic plans. Revenues continued to grow in the first quarter, increasing by 62% to EUR 14.2 million. Wagering revenue also saw a significant increase, rising by 52% to EUR 3.5 billion, compared to EUR 2.3 billion during the first quarter of 2020. We've also seen a 54% increase in unique players using the Bragg Gaming Group content, rising to 2.4 million from 1.6 million during the same quarter in 2020. We continue to transform the business into a global player in the B2B gaming sector and adhere to the three pillars of growth that we set out in early 2020.
Enhancing our technology and product offering, diversifying our revenue and expanding into new geographies, and collaborating with key players in leading jurisdictions through strategic partnerships and content deals. In terms of enhancing our technology and product, we today offer more than 13,000 seamlessly integrated casino games that can be accessed through a single player account. These games are provided by more than 100 of the industry's leading content providers, including 1x2 Gaming, Peter & Sons, Gamomat, Red Tiger, and Evolution Gaming, just to name a few. We launched 11 new casino games in the first quarter via our exclusive content partnerships. I'm very pleased to report that our first in-house developed proprietary casino game recently launched across our network with encouraging early signs, and with five more games planned during the remainder of 2021.
This is a very important initiative for the group, as it will enable us to create a point of differentiation and to increase engagement with our customers, as well as giving the group access to medium-term gross margin synergies as the in-house content increases relative to third parties. In addition, we continue to focus on deepening and broadening our proprietary player engagement platform with its market-leading gamification tools, allowing operators the ability to greatly enhance the customer experience, including personalized promotions and rewards tailored to individual players, which are completely platform and content agnostic. Even with our rapid pace of expansion, we've been able to maintain our ability to close contracts and integrate new content and customers at a significant pace.
We launched nine new B2C operators during the period across a number of global jurisdictions, including Paf, a state operator based in Finland, iGaming platform Senator, and Swiss market leader Casino Luzern, and Maxbet in Romania. As I already mentioned, we launched 11 new exclusive casino content deals, fully certified and distributed throughout the entire network. This is critical, ensuring that we stay ahead of the competition. We are continually adding new customers, expanding our global footprint, and are looking to diversify our revenue. In addition, our customer retention is excellent. Our dependence on the top 10 customers has decreased from 65% in Q1 2020 to 62% in Q1 2021, and I anticipate this trend to continue.
We also entered an additional regulated jurisdiction in the first quarter with a launch in Switzerland with Casino Luzern. We expect to add more clients in this exciting new market over the coming quarters. Since the quarter end, we also expanded our presence in the Mexican iGaming market with our partnership with Logrand, a leading local tier 1 operator. Looking forward, we will continue to focus on entering new markets. I'm pleased to report that we are in the process of applying for a U.K. license, which will give us access to one of the world's largest regulated iGaming markets. Turning to M&A. We're extremely excited about yesterday's announcement to acquire Spin Games. The acquisition is a game-changer for Bragg. It will provide the foundations of our U.S. strategy and offers compelling strategic and financial rationale.
It's consistent with Bragg's previously announced strategy to diversify its revenue from European markets and to grow its U.S. operations to capitalize on the growing U.S. and Canadian online casino markets. Through the transaction, Bragg will gain access to key strategic operator relationships in the U.S., including BetMGM, Roar Digital, FanDuel, Golden Nugget, DraftKings, to name a few. The initial planning of technical integration between Spin and Oryx are currently underway, and we expect the combined offering to deliver the benefit of the Oryx advanced turn-key player engagement platform and premium content, together with Spin technology, local market know-how, and its U.S. operator relationships. We welcome Kent Young and the whole team on board, and we look forward to a highly successful future together. Now looking ahead, our 2021 strategy will continue to focus on rapid expansion of our B2B gaming technology solution through our Oryx Gaming assets.
The company is in advanced discussions with potential new customers across multiple licensed jurisdictions in North America, Europe, and Latin America. We'll continue to invest in our platform and integration capabilities in order to provide the best products and services to our customers. We'll continue to explore further bolt-on M&A opportunities in the U.S. and globally, where we believe we can exploit significant synergies and add material medium to long-term shareholder value. In conclusion, we're off to a great start in 2021. We performed exceptionally well in the first quarter. We launched nine new customers, and our customer pipeline for the remainder of 2021 continued to grow, underpinning future growth.
We advanced our in-house proprietary content initiatives, and with our acquisition of Spin Games, laying the foundations for our strategy of building a tier 1 vertically integrated iGaming business in the U.S., Bragg Gaming has never been better positioned for long-term success. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Ronen Kannor, who will run you through the first quarter results.
Thank you, Richard. Good morning, everyone. As a first note, I'd like to say that all the numbers are presented in euros. Revenue. Revenue increased by 62% to EUR 14.2 million in the first quarter of 2021, compared to EUR 8.8 million for the first quarter of 2020, maintaining a quarterly growth momentum since Q1 2019. Revenue growth was mainly derived from gains in content services, which accounted for 86% of the total revenue, as demand for the corporation's unique games and content and technology proposition continues to grow. Quarter-over-quarter revenue increased by 3% from EUR 13.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 to EUR 14.2 million in the first quarter of 2021. Total wagers was up 52% from the same period in 2020, totaling EUR 3.5 billion. The number of unique players also increased by 54% to 2.4 million.
These strong growth numbers demonstrate the strong demand stemming from our unique content portfolio and continual technological advantages. The gross profit increased by 68% to EUR 6.6 million, compared to EUR 4 million last year, with an increase of margin from 45%-47%, which is mainly attributed to the shift in proportion of revenues from games and content to iGaming and turn-key services, the latter of which have low associated cost of sales. The group profitability continues to improve as well.
The adjusted EBITDA ended at EUR 2.3 million in Q1 2021, which is up 234% compared to EUR 700,000 in Q1 2020, with increasing margins from 8%- 16%, primarily as a result of higher scale and cost control. Net loss for the period was EUR 1.1 million, a decrease of EUR 4.6 million from the previous quarter, mainly due to the full settlement of the Oryx earn-out on January 18 this year, resulting in nil expenditure for remeasurement of deferred and contingent consideration in the current quarter. The weighted average number of shares of March 31st was 18.1 million shares compared to eight million shares of March last year on a post-consolidation basis. Loss per share was EUR 0.06 versus EUR 0.71 last year. Cash and cash equivalents of March 31st, 2021 amounted of EUR 30.1 million versus December 31st was EUR 26.1 million.
On a corporate level, we recently announced our intent to cross list on the Nasdaq, we're finalizing the steps to make this happen. We currently expect to complete this process in late May or early June. Finally, in terms of guidance, we continue to target our full year 2021 revenue of EUR 47 million and adjusted EBITDA of EUR 4 million pre-M&A. While we have started this year strongly, I'm pleased to say momentum from Q1 continuing to Q2, we remain mindful of the upcoming regulatory changes in Germany from 1st of July and onwards. With that, I'll turn now the call over to the operator for any Q&A session. Thank you.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from Neal Gilmer with Haywood Securities.
Yeah. Good morning, and congratulations on the quarter. Maybe, I guess my first question might follow on the last comments there on the guidance. Obviously, if you take a look at the run rate from Q1, you're factoring in obviously a little bit of a decline in the second half of the year. Can you just provide maybe a little bit more color on some of the assumptions that sort of go into that on both the revenue and EBITDA level?
Sure. I'll take that. Effectively, we're assuming that obviously, regulation happens in Germany from the beginning of July. If you read some of the recent news flow, there are some question marks over if it will necessarily go ahead and will there be some legal challenges, which could potentially delay it. Our working assumption is that from the 1st of July, that the market will be fully regulated and therefore, obviously there'll be full compliance with the regime. We've assumed that. We've obviously assumed that probably to create some impact for our clients, some clients will leave the market. We've tried to be conservative. We've assumed a sort of medium enforcement. If it is full enforcement, I think that will help our company because obviously the locality of our operators will then be able to grow the market and hopefully there'll be greater channelization.
There's a lot of moving parts. We've tried to be as conservative as possible. We're assuming quite a significant decline, obviously in our German business from July onwards.
Okay. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I guess my second question might be just on your U.S. strategy following yesterday's announcement with Spin. Sort of as you work together to integrate and obviously close that transaction and access some of those markets, what's your overall philosophy for further penetration within U.S.? Is that closing this and working to get deeper into the U.S., or are you still evaluating other opportunities, either whether it be M&A or working through your own licenses in certain states?
Just to give a bit of background. We're obviously looking, running an organic strategy of entering the U.S. It's just Spin obviously tremendously accelerates that. We were already in the process of applications and all that fun stuff. In terms of looking forward, Spin gives us that foundation. They have all of the customer relationships. It's a case of we'll be using them as our building blocks and springboards into the U.S. Obviously, there is discussions at the moment in certain states about further iGaming regulation. We'll probably get one or two new markets over the next 12-16 months, and we'll be going into that market as a combined entity. We'll be using the combined entity effectively going into them.
Okay, great. Thanks, Richard. Appreciate it. I'll pass the line.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Suthan Sukumar with Eight Capital.
Hi, good morning, Bragg. This is Abhiram for Suthan this morning. Good morning.
Good morning.
Just wanted to maybe kind of ask another question on Spin. Maybe can you maybe talk about the cross-sell opportunity from the content from the European portfolio? How much of that is a relevant fit for the U.S. consumer, and are there any maybe technical efforts that you guys are going to require in order to bring these to market?
Yeah, it's a very good question. I can give you the view that Kent Young has, and he's obviously got the local knowledge, but I think one of the things which really excites.
Kent about this combination is that he's very bullish on the European content we've got. It comes from a land-based audience and therefore, the thought process of that will resonate very well with U.S. customers. I think it's a significant opportunity over the next 12- 24 months to bring our European content into the U.S. market. Again, I think a lot of content won't necessarily work from Europe into the U.S., but we have a lot of content that resonates from the land base, so we think it will, and that's Kent's view. In terms of from a technical perspective, we don't think there's a huge amount to do. There are some slight rules in New Jersey in terms of some payouts and things like that on the math side.
The initial analysis suggests that it should be actually relatively seamless and quite incremental. Obviously, you need to go through the certification, but most of these games have been certified anyway by GLI. You'd have to go through the New Jersey process, and that obviously takes a little bit of time and has a little cost. Overall, no, very limited amounts of change needs to be undertaken.
Okay. That's great. Thanks for that color. Maybe just aside from the actual content, are there any other aspects of the Bragg tech stack that you can see leveraging across the acquired Spin Games base outside of content, really?
Yeah, I think there is. I think I mentioned it. We have a player engagement platform, and I think that's going to become increasingly important in the U.S. market. The ability to be able to personalize promotions and rewards tailored to individuals, I think is going to be a really expanding part of the marketplace, having jackpots and things like that. We're working over the coming quarters in deepening and broadening our jackpot offering as well. I think that player engagement platform will be another key area of the product offering that we'll bring from Oryx into Spin and into the North American market.
Okay, that's great. Thank you very much. Just one quick question on the U.K. market. I know you said that the licensing was kind of on track. Is there any potential timing there?
I'd be very disappointed if we're not live in Q4. Obviously, with COVID and things like that, the SLAs on the license application are maybe extended a little bit. As I say, I'd be disappointed if we're not live in Q4 of this year.
Okay, awesome. Thanks a lot, guys. I appreciate all the color. I'll pass the line.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Matthew Lee with Canaccord.
Hey, good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Just in terms of backlog, can you maybe disclose how many customers have signed on right now but aren't launched yet?
Ronen, do you have any color on that?
Yeah. We have a list of quite a few customers that have been signed or in the process of being signed. We're waiting for from our side, from the counterparty side. We're talking about dozens of customers, at least in next Q2, Q3, Q4, Q2, Q3 that we are looking to sign. I don't have the specific number to give you because it's quite a big list. We have quite a few people.
We can come back to you on that. I remember last week on one of the calls, the pipeline was sort of like 85. Of that pipeline, we'll come back to you with the exact number that's moved into the other buckets of where they are in terms of contract negotiations and signed. We'll have to come back to you on the exact number.
All right. That's perfect. Maybe just a follow-on with regards to guidance. If Q2 looks relatively similar to Q1, does that fundamentally mean that your expectation for EBITDA in Q3 and Q4 is zero to maybe a little bit negative?
There's a lot of moving parts. We're obviously investing significantly in our in-house content. As we've already guided at the beginning of the year, we're expanding the team. We're also entering the U.S. market. There's quite a few moving parts in terms of the business, but there is a potential of that, yeah. Ronan, do you want to add anything? No? That's all good. I think it's fine. Thanks. Yeah.
All right. Just lastly, on the M&A front, what do you think is the next target for Bragg? I assume that Spin Games is kind of the first move for you guys in the North American market. Are you still interested in adding a sportsbook? I know that was something talked about earlier on.
We're interested in adding product verticals and businesses that we think can create significant shareholder value, not just for the sake of it. If we can find the right product verticals that we think fit with our culture and add value for shareholders, then we'll do it. We're not going to particularly go around focusing on lots of different areas and just doing it for the sake of it. Clearly, I think we all know what's happened in terms of inflation in the online sportsbook market over the last 12 months. We're happy to see how that settles down.
All right. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from David McFadgen with Cormark Securities.
Yeah. Hi. A couple of questions. Just looking at your guidance statement, you put a pre-M&A qualifier on there, and I was just wondering how we should interpret that.
Well, it is just to say, obviously, that in terms of, I don't know when Spin is exactly going to close. Obviously, it could close a lot sooner. Obviously, if we did any other M&A, it is just a pre-M&A just to keep it clean and relevant to our last guidance.
Okay. Just on the gross profit change, I didn't fully understand what was driving gross profit there. Maybe you could just elaborate on that.
Yeah. Ronen, do you want to take this, please?
Hi, David. Good morning. How you doing? We're discussing about that in every single announcement. We're saying that our revenue is a composition of two segments, gaming content and gaming platform. We said 86% of this revenue in this particular quarter was on gaming content. Last quarter, if you remember, Q4 was 89%, Q3 was 88%. When we have some more signage of more revenue comes from gaming content or turnkey services. In a particular quarter, the weighted amount of those particular revenue from gaming content is higher. We have less cost of goods associated to that. If you remember, games content comes with a cost of goods, which is the cost of choosing those particular games, the royalty payment, royalty base.
When we have more weight from our gaming platform and turnkey solutions from time, from quarter to quarter, what we have is literally change in gross profit margin. We anticipate that those particular platform will continue with us going forward because it's long contract. We believe that we'll start scaling down to be more gross profit-oriented and more profitable. I assume it's going to be about 46%, 48%, 47%, that's where we're trading. It's all about the composition of revenue.
Okay. All right. Thank you. Can you give us an update on the Netherlands? Because I know you've signed a contract with a big operator in the Netherlands. It's going live, I'm not sure exactly when, but can you give us an update on that market?
I've been looking at focusing on Netherlands for five years, and it's been going on for quite a while. I think finally, it's hopefully, I think it's going live in October this year. We're moving forward with that, and the expectation is that we'll be live in early October.
Okay. Sounds okay, great. Just an update on your Nasdaq listing. Anything new there?
No, I think Ronan touched on it. We're continuing to proceed, and we currently expect to complete that process late May, early June. That's what we communicated recently.
Okay. Okay, great. That's it for me. Thank you.
Thanks very much.
Again, to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question comes from Lisa Thompson with Zacks Investment.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Just to clarify a little bit, for Q2, do you expect the revenues to be up sequentially and margins also?
We've not talked about what we expect in terms of Q2, just given yearly guidance.
Okay. expense-wise-
We've made it clear that we started the quarter well.
All right. Will we expect expenses to be around the EUR 7.1 million level going forward quarterly, or does it come down or up?
We'll move around. Ronan, do you want to?
Yeah. Lisa, Ronan again. Which kind of expenses? You're talking about the operation expenses?
Yes.
I think they'll remain the same as we guided on the 26th of January. We are going to see more investment coming on the cost side, more investment in the U.S. It's for compliance, it's for the key executives, it's for technology. You'll see a slightly increase of scaling up. Q2 will be slightly higher than Q1 and so on. Yeah, slightly higher than that. You have to normalize the share-based payments and exceptional costs. We just need to take them out to come with a real like-for-like comparison.
Right. Okay. If you were to look at a pro forma with Spin for the first quarter, what would gross margins look like?
Unfortunately, given our move on to the Nasdaq exchange and the documents we are compiling, our advisors and army of lawyers and bankers have told us that we're not allowed to comment on that until that document has come out.
Okay.
You'll have to wait, I think, a couple of weeks before we can get into the detail of the numbers.
Can we assume it's a higher number?
A higher number than?
Than your current-
You can assume. We can't really talk about it. I mean, the company's pivoting away and building its own content. Hopefully we'll be able to give guidance once this move to the Nasdaq has occurred. Have you anything to add, Ronen? Is there anything else you can add?
No. It's a clear message from the lawyers and the bankers.
Yeah. Correct. Apologies.
All right. My last question is, when you say U.K. market is going to go live, what specifically does that mean? Do you have customers that are ready to flip a switch, or how does that work?
Yeah. Let me just give you a bit of background. Obviously, we operate in almost every European market, so we have the relationships with all of the major players in Europe. We've got those contractual relationships. We may have to add some addendums, but we can do that pretty quickly. We've got the integrations, again, so it's pretty seamless. In terms of it's not quite flipping a switch, but that's how you should think about it. Obviously, some of the content needs to be slightly changed for some of the rules in the U.K., but again, that's not a tremendous amount of work.
We should be able to bring quite a significant library of our exclusive content, turn it on with a lot of the operators in the U.K., and pretty quickly target one of the biggest casino markets in the world. There will be a period of, let's say, three or four or five months, just as we roll out across into all the different customers. Within a couple of quarters then we should be up to speed, and it should be a material market for us, which we haven't assumed in our numbers. Once we get closer to getting the license and we've got a bit more certainty on it, then we'll be able to give a bit of guidance around the U.K. Clearly, it's a big market.
Great. Thanks. That helps. That's all my questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time.
Thank you everyone for joining the call today and for your interest in the Bragg story. We appreciate your time and look forward to providing updates on progress over the next few months. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you for participating in today's conference. You may now disconnect.