Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Inspired Entertainment Third Quarter 2022 Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note today's event is being recorded. I'll begin today's conference call by referring you to the company's safe harbor statement that appears in the third quarter 2022 earnings press release, which is also available in the Investors section of the company's website at www.inseinc.com. This safe harbor statement also applies to today's conference call as the company's management will be making certain statements that will be considered forward-looking under securities laws and rules of the SEC. These statements are based on management's current expectations or beliefs and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and change in circumstances.
In addition, please note that the company will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation is included in the earnings press release. With that completed, I would now like to turn the conference call over to Lorne Weil, the company's Executive Chairman. Mr. Weil, please go ahead.
Thank you very much, operator. Morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call this morning. With me as usual are Brooks Pierce, Stewart Baker, and Dan Silvers. Despite the inconvenience of the slide in the pound, and some narrowly focused inflation and supply chain issues, our underlying momentum in the third quarter was very strong, and we're executing well along each of our main strategic vectors. Just to be able to put everything in context, it's worth reviewing our overarching strategic objectives. One, drive high double-digit growth in our high-margin, capital-efficient digital businesses, addressing the gaming, lottery, and sports betting verticals. Two, manage our land-based businesses for mid-single-digit growth while reorienting our business model in a way that significantly reduces its capital intensity.
Three, combine these two to yield an overall business that is growing faster, has higher margins, and far lower capital requirements. These three in turn allow us to more than adequately fund our overall growth objectives while at the same time attending to our balance sheet. Our net leverage right now is below 2.5, and as mentioned in the press release, we have repurchased more than 1 million shares so far. Notwithstanding the currency inflation and supply chain issues mentioned earlier, our EBITDA in the quarter was about equal to consensus, suggesting that the underlying business is close to hitting on all cylinders. Our overall EBITDA margin, though a healthy 37%, was down from about 39% in 2021.
More than all of this decline was a result of inflation and supply chain issues, unique in our holiday park segment. In a moment, Brooks may elaborate on that a little. As we move through the fourth quarter and into the first quarter of next year, we expect that this situation will have been remediated. As we've mentioned before and as we've been targeting, our digital businesses grew to account for a little over 50% of our EBITDA in the quarter, up from 36% a year ago, and what happens otherwise to be the seasonally strongest quarter in the holiday park segment, at least from a revenue point of view. The star of the quarter once again was our virtual sports business, which established records for revenue, EBITDA, and margins.
Specifically, revenue and EBITDA grew respectively to $14.6 million and $12.6 million in 2022, from $10.5 million and $8.6 million a year ago, about a 50% increase in EBITDA and a rather remarkable result. While a majority of the recent growth has come from outside the United States, we're getting excellent traction with the Pennsylvania Lottery, the DC Lottery, and Ontario iGaming, and we're cautiously optimistic that there are many more important developmental opportunities in the North American market. There is no seasonality to this business, that we can see, and there were no one-time revenues or other events in the quarter.
Effectively the virtuals business at the moment is generating EBITDA at the run rate of $50 million a year, which just so happens to be more than twice what the entire EBITDA was of Inspired Entertainment five years ago. Growth in our digital interactive or iGaming business was more moderate in the quarter as we wait for contracted new customers and product enhancements, as Brooks will talk about in a moment, to come on stream. Revenue in the month of October for the interactive business accelerated to 14% year-over-year, and we feel that we are pivoting back upwards to a higher rate of growth.
Of particular note, here is that we will shortly be launching our second iLottery game with Loto-Québec following the extraordinarily successful launch of our first game earlier this year. The Betfred contract mentioned in the press release represents a very critical element in our overall strategy. With about 1,400 retail locations and 5,600 terminals, Betfred is our largest customer in the U.K. server-based gaming market. Historically, this market has evolved around our making the capital investment to create the installed base of terminals and earning a return over the life of the contract. In the Betfred model, we will be selling the terminals and then supplying on an ongoing multi-year basis, content and technical services.
Here again, we're cautiously optimistic that in the relatively near term, the majority of our customers will move to this model so that our retail business will become effectively an extension of our digital business. We supply content and technical support on a recurring multi-year contract basis, but we do not supply capital. I should also mention that Betfred is a very important customer for our virtual sports and iGaming products, illustrating even greater synergy between the two sides of our business. With this, I'll hand it to Brooks to elaborate in more detail.
Okay. Thanks, Lorne. Excellent summary of how we view the business, and I'll try to give some more detail and insight on each of the operating segments. Let's start with the digital businesses, which as Lorne mentioned, now contribute more than 50% of our EBITDA and are the areas of higher growth and higher margins with less capital intensity, which we expect will continue to scale nicely. Our virtual sports business had another outstanding quarter growing on a functional currency basis at the revenue line by 63% and EBITDA at 75% compared to Q3 of 2021, and by 12% and 13%, or 12% of revenue and 13% of EBITDA over our previous quarter, again, on a functional currency basis.
This segment continues to perform at an extremely high level with a number of key drivers still to look forward to, notably the plans we're building on for the North American market. We're now live with two lotteries in the U.S. and several gaming operators in both New Jersey and Ontario. We're very encouraged by the responses we received at both G2E and the World Lottery Summit in Vancouver with an increased pipeline of opportunities developing based on the success we're seeing for virtual sports on a worldwide basis. The segment continues to show strong organic growth in both online and retail across a number of geographies, and we expect to add additional territories to build on this base.
A good example of the popularity of the product is in Greece, where we expanded our menu of available products and increased the frequency of the events and saw 17% growth last month in what's a very mature market. We're excited to launch our Home Run Shootout product this quarter with icons like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and other legends of the game, and expect it will be very popular in many key markets. Lastly, we expect to see a bump from the World Cup this month as there will likely be increased footfall in many of our betting operator shops in retail and increased interest in our most popular sport, soccer or football, depending on who you're talking to, in our online channel. Needless to say, we're very bullish on this business segment.
Moving over to the interactive or iGaming segment, which showed 10% growth in functional currency in the quarter as well, although somewhat moderated from our growth rates experienced during COVID. We're starting to see the benefit of our launches in Pennsylvania, with Q3 only having Rush Street for the full quarter and DraftKings for just a few days in the quarter. BetMGM will be going live this month, Caesars will be going live next month, and we're still hopeful to add FanDuel in Pennsylvania and our other key markets of New Jersey, Michigan, and Connecticut. Interestingly, where we are live with FanDuel in Ontario, they already represent close to 10% of our business there. We have high expectations when their resource challenges free up, and we can get them live in all of our jurisdictions.
We're also introducing some key product enhancements, like our first progressive games in North America, plan to go live in Q4 this year. All of the above, plus continued growth in key markets like Greece and the Netherlands, the launch of a number of new titles throughout the fourth quarter, and the holiday season bode well for this business going forward and going into 2023. We also have gone live with our second iLottery game in Loto-Québec and are looking to expand this footprint in other jurisdictions worldwide as we build out our library of iLottery content. Clearly, we believe there's great momentum in the segment, and as we've seen from our October results, a number of positives that we see for all of our digital businesses.
Moving over to the retail side, we are gratified to sign a new 5-year contract with our largest customer in the U.K. by machine totals and shop locations, Betfred. The Vantage cabinet will be rolled out to the Betfred estate in 2023 after its successful trial this year that produced a meaningful uplift in the cash box in the locations where it was on trial. We expect strong demand for this product from all of our LBO customers in the U.K. and will also be introducing this product in the pub segment of our leisure business. In Greece, we continue to see impressive results with Q3 win per unit higher than any other Q3 since our first launch in 2017, and this is with significantly higher number of machines deployed.
We're at the early stages of discussions with our customer in Greece on replacement cabinets for those that have been there since inception. With over 9,000 terminals deployed there, we believe there's a great opportunity to drive incremental value in a mature market with new cabinets and industry-leading content. Lastly, we're very encouraged by the opportunities discussed at G2E with additional operators in the distributed games markets where we have already proven our success in both Illinois and Western Canada. As Lorne mentioned in his remarks in the leisure segment and specifically the holiday parks is where we faced headwinds on a cost basis from inflation and cost of goods sold unique to that business. The revenue across the leisure segment held up very well across pubs, holiday parks and motorway services, but margins were impacted by the aforementioned cost issues.
We continue to believe strongly in the opportunity in pubs and motorway segments, but clearly we need to rectify some of the cost issues in the holiday parks part of the business as we move forward. With that, I'll hand it over to Stewart for his comments. Stewart.
Thanks, Brooks. Good morning, all. For the first time since the pandemic began nearly three years ago, we're now in a position where we have a clean quarter in both the current year and the prior year. Of course, each quarter has its nuances, and we'll go into one or two of these, but overall, it is like for like in terms of trading restrictions or lack thereof. One area where it's not like for like, though, is in exchange rates, which were 1.18 in the current year and 1.38 in the prior year. We're looking at the average for the quarter. 1.12 at the balance sheet date versus 1.35 a year ago. This is why, as with the last quarter, we're trying to make clear the underlying trading of the business by talking about functional currency results.
Now, this isn't perfect, as costs incurred in U.S. dollar will still show as more expensive than British pound with a stronger dollar, but it is certainly more useful in our view than looking at just reported numbers. There's no better example of this than overall quarterly revenue, which declined 3% when looking at reported numbers but grew 13% in functional currency, with all business units growing revenue year-on-year. Virtual Sports, as mentioned, was yet again the standout segment, with growth of 63%. Interactive also grew 10%, Leisure 6%, and Gaming 3%. These latter two segments would have been slightly higher had it not been for the closure of certain venues as part of the mourning for the death of the Queen in the UK.
It's also worth noting that gaming had high quarter product sales in the prior year, which as we've mentioned before, do fluctuate quarter-over-quarter. Now in addition, sequentially versus the second quarter of this year, all segments were up in functional currency. Turning attention to adjusted EBITDA, we saw growth overall of 7% compared to the same quarter in the prior year, driven by virtual sports growing 75% on a functional currency basis. Sequentially, quarter-over-quarter, EBITDA increased 13%, driven by seasonality in the leisure segment, but also virtual sports growth of 13% and interactive growth of 4%. Now, like many other businesses, we are facing some cost challenges from factors outside of our control, such as inflation in terms of salary costs, fuel costs and utility costs, and any purchase where the underlying cost is in dollars.
Now, as you'd expect, the impact of these is seen within the parts of the business with higher costs. To some extent, gaming and pubs within leisure, but mainly in the holiday parks business, where our cost of sale includes non-cash prizes, the cost of which has risen significantly year on year. We have a track record of dealing with costs that need to be taken out of the business. For example, after the reduction in stakes in the U.K. gaming market as part of synergies after the Novomatic Technology Group acquisition or during COVID lockdowns, and we will do so again to mitigate these challenges. Looking further down the income statement, net income for the period was $10.2 million. This compares to $7.5 million in the second quarter of this year.
Last year's equivalent number was $25 million, but this included an accounting gain on the fair value of warrants of $17.3 million. There are no items that we would consider as accounting anomalies in the current quarter or in fact year to date. This left basic earnings per share at $0.39 in the current quarter and at $0.72 year to date. The diluted equivalent EPS numbers are $0.35 and $0.66. Turning attention to cash flow, we started the quarter with $31.8 million and ended it with $37.4 million, an increase of $5.6 million. This would have been higher without the FX impact, with Great British Pound rates reducing from 1.21 to 1.12 between the two balance sheet dates.
In addition, included in the net movement was a repurchase of shares in the quarter of $5 million, taking the year-to-date total to $10 million. CapEx in the quarter was $9.3 million, taking the year-to-date total to $31 million. Now we would expect the fourth quarter to be lower than other periods, but even so, the full year number will be above the long-term average of $30 million we've talked about a lot. In part, this is due to one-off purchases that we needed to make this year, but also because we brought forward some investments. We were asked on the prior earnings call if buying back stock would mean a reduction in the ability to make the most of opportunities in front of us to accelerate growth. As you can see, this is not the case. We have the ability to do both.
Finally, a note on net leverage, which is now down to 2.4x from 3.7x a year ago, due to increasing EBITDA, higher cash, and a reduced US dollar equivalent debt balance given the movement in exchange rates. With that, I'll hand back to Lorne for any remarks before opening up to Q&A.
Thank you, Stewart. That was very good. I have no further remarks at this time, operator. If you could open up the program to Q&A, please.
We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, again press star one. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.
Your first question comes from the line of Barry Jonas with Truist Securities. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the virtual business and pipeline look to be heavily lottery operator-focused. Is that somewhat a function of the lower volatility of the product relative to traditional sports betting? I would just think that this could be even more attractive for commercial operators given how the World Series just played out. Thanks.
Yeah. Well, if we steered in that direction, that wasn't intentional. I mean, obviously lottery is a very big channel for us, in large part because from a retail perspective, there's a huge number of locations where you know the game can be played. We feel you know we feel very strongly about the sports betting operators and having this as a core product for them and you know. We've talked about a number of times you know the RTP is favorable from an operator perspective. There's not the risk of a loss like you saw in the World Series. We think it's only a matter of time before it's gonna be a core offering for both the sports betting operators as well as the lottery segment.
Great.
You know, one thing, Barry, just to elaborate sort of slightly on that is. It's not a direct answer, but it's interesting that so many of our major customers outside of the United States, customers like Lottomatica, Sisal, OPAP in Greece, in fact, are the major lottery operators in those countries. So this kind of signals up to us that in the fullness of time, if the main lottery operators in North America, which happen to be the states and provinces rather than private operators like Lottomatica or OPAP, will eventually jump on the product. Of course, if we got the same kind of response there as we've had in Europe, then you know, all bets are off.
Yep. Yep, that makes sense. Then just for a follow-up question, you know, at a high level, curious how you're thinking about M&A here. Is there sort of a checklist for you for identifying appropriate deals and then executing?
Well, yeah. I think right now we're more focused on M&A that gives us technology or product or platform expertise to fill out our menu rather than acquiring revenue or EBITDA per se. We don't feel like we need to go out and buy earnings, but not that we wouldn't if we had the opportunity, but for example, in our interactive business, as we've talked about, our game development expertise is phenomenal, and we can see that in our lottery business and in our iGaming business. There are some, let's say, ancillary features or platform features that we haven't developed essentially because we haven't had time because we've been so focused on the game.
We think we could make a very immediate quantum step up in the scale of our interactive business if we could more quickly fill out the features on our platform. One of the things we're looking for is possibly an acquisition, an M&A opportunity that would do that for us.
Great. All right. Thank you guys, appreciate it.
Sure.
Your next question is from the line of Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your line is open.
Morning, guys. Congrats on the strong results and, clean results. Wanna start with Betfred. Nice to see the extension there, improved terms as well from a capital efficiency standpoint. Can you discuss the impacts to revenue margins and EBITDA in 2023 with the equipment sales, and then what that looks like, in 2024 and going forward from a service standpoint?
Yeah. I think the equipment sale is really at cost. This is not a one-time sale, you know, gain event. I won't get into the terms, but they're certainly no less favorable than where we are. I think what we'll hopefully see and what we've seen in the trial of the Vantage cabinet is a pretty significant uplift in the cash box. That's one of the things by rolling out, you know, new terminals with new features. We're hopeful that we'll get some, you know, some uplift from that side.
It's safe to say higher revenue next year at zero margin, and then you get the high margin flow through after that?
Yeah. I mean, I was just gonna you know, add into that, Ryan, because there will be a significant sale to Betfred deliberately at no margin because the idea is by doing this, then effectively Betfred is making the capital investment that we would otherwise have made. I would expect that our equipment sale, overall equipment sale margins next year obviously will be down because there'll be a significant sale deliberately at no margin to Betfred. When the time comes next year and we report that sale, obviously we'll point that out that we were anticipating that to happen. If you see next year a fall in the gaming margin, it has nothing to do with the health of the business.
It's simply the, you know, the business model where we're slowly but surely grinding our way through eliminating the capital investment.
Yeah. Ryan, I think we would expect to give clarity on what the normalized margin would have been at the time, so that it's clear, you know, what portion was zero margin and what you should think about on a stabilized basis.
Yep. No, it certainly seems like an improved contract. Just wanna make sure expectations are set right-
In terms of going forward.
-for the coming years on that.
In terms of going forward, I think there's no doubt that it will produce a significant increase in both EBITDA and margins on an ongoing basis. Because as Brooks said, that the cabinet itself in trials in the U.K. has produced a significant uplift in the cash box, and our revenues are, you know, a percent of the cash box. Our costs are essentially fixed and have nothing to do with the revenue. As we drive more revenue with a higher performing cabinet and have fixed costs, obviously the margins will get better going forward.
Understood. Thanks. On the interactive, just wanna move over. How much visibility do you have to the iGaming launches that you mentioned? Appreciate the detail kind of by operator and jurisdiction, but are those firm dates where you know that's when they're gonna launch, or I guess are those best guesses?
For the ones that I mentioned, BetMGM is firm. As I'm sure you know, you know, there's a number of steps that have to happen, both from you know a technology standpoint and a regulatory standpoint. The BetMGM one is locked in because we have visibility to that. Caesars, we feel very confident about. FanDuel is the one that I mentioned that obviously, you know, FanDuel, if you look at the numbers, is roughly 15%-20% of every one of those markets, and other than Ontario, we're not participating with them, even though the Ontario numbers are great. It's a pretty big gap not to have FanDuel in our, you know, our customer profile.
Obviously, as soon as we can get that done and go live with FanDuel, we will in all the markets.
Great. One last housekeeping. Did you actually repay any debt in the quarter, or was the sequential decline entirely FX?
No, it's just FX movements, Ryan.
Thank you so much. Good luck, guys.
Thanks, Ryan.
Your next question comes from the line of Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Brooks, you mentioned positive reception from G2E this year with respect to VLTs in Illinois and in Canada. Can you remind us where things are in Western Canada in terms of placements, any new opportunities, and then any other performance metrics in Illinois that would kind of help lead to higher market share? Thanks.
Sure. Well, Western Canada, you know, we'll deliver the big order, 800 machines in the fourth quarter. They're just now starting to hit land in Canada as we speak. Western Canada does, you know, a yearly RFP cycle. Obviously we went from 100 machines, and now we'll have, you know, over 800 machines there. Hopefully, again, and assuming the games perform as the first ones have, we would hope to be able to win their next RFP to be able to get significant share. The other markets that are probably, you know, closest to the horizon in terms of distributed gaming are Oregon and Alberta. We obviously, I think we've mentioned we've had discussions with them at G2E.
In terms of Illinois, I would say it's a mixed bag. In certain parts of the state, our games are performing very well. In the Chicagoland market, not as well as we would hope, but we've actually just rolled out a couple new games that we hope will show some positive impact this quarter. Chad, as I'm sure you know, I mean, Illinois is now really fully a replacement market because they've added the sixth machine, they've increased the stake limit, so it now really is just, you know, kind of a fight for market share with, you know, the IGTs, Light & Wonder and Aristocrats of the world.
Great. Thanks, Brooks. The obligatory question about the U.K. White Paper following a new prime minister. Any updates just in terms of how you're thinking about when we could potentially hear something and kind of what your partners are doing in the market? Just anything to be aware of for the next 3, 6, 12 months?
Yeah. I'm not sure I can talk about with great certainty of anything going on in the U.K. political landscape right now, Chad. I think a couple of things to say on that. One is the expectations of the white paper, a bit of an unknown, but probably starting next year. Not hearing any rumblings of significant changes, but the ministers that are in place now, we think, shall we say sensible ministers for the gaming industry. We don't expect any significant changes, but as for timing, I couldn't say with any certainty.
Okay. Thank you very much. Nice quarter.
Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Edward Engel with Roth Capital. Your line is open.
Hey, thanks for taking my question and, nice set of results. Just wanted to kind of check in on the state of the U.K. consumer. I mean, third quarter results kinda speak for themselves. Looks like things are still steady as she goes, but just kinda wanted to confirm that even in October and November, that things are still relatively steady.
Yeah. We're not seeing any changes, you know, even through October. Everything that you read about the U.K. economy doesn't seem to have impacted gaming play for us, at least based on the results. You know, obviously we see these real time.
Perfect. Within Interactive, I saw you added just 6 games during the third quarter versus 22 in the first half. Was that part of the reason for the slower sequential revenue growth? Now that you kinda have more bandwidth after the Pennsylvania launch, should we expect kind of game releases to get back to that 10-12 a quarter, which kind of implies maybe a bit more of acceleration in revenue because of that?
Yeah. That's actually a good catch on your part. Yes, we've got a pretty good lineup of holiday games. We had a bunch of games that went out for actually Halloween and produced some very nice results. We've got a bunch of Christmas games that will go out. Yeah, the fourth quarter will certainly have you know, significantly higher number of game launches than the third quarter. As Lorne mentioned in his remarks, you know, the October numbers were very strong.
Great. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Your next question is from the line of David Bain with B. Riley. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. I guess, you know, first, Lorne, in the PR, you cite an exciting pipeline of new products that could open up significant new avenues of growth, that you're gonna speak to in the coming months. I'm hoping you can maybe give us as much as you can on these. I mean, if it's virtual sports, iLottery, new concepts, new contracts, all of the above, kind of what we're in for. It kind of left me wanting that comment.
Sorry. Sorry, Dave, I couldn't help.
Well, I think the thing that I can take out of what you just said, Dave, that I would agree with is the all of the above part. You know, we're gonna be introducing a number of platform enhancements in our iGaming business, as Brooks talked about. We have a couple of terrific things coming in virtual sports. I think they're probably the couple of most exciting things going on. We won't be saying any more about those until they're at a point where we feel we can make a public statement. Let's just say that we're very, very excited about a couple of things that are coming along in virtual sports that would only further accelerate the growth that, you know, we're already seeing.
Okay. Fair enough. Let me choose a second one. I don't know if this makes sense, so maybe Stewart or Dan. Is there a way to lock in current currency exchange when it comes to the debt or use the most recent leverage as an opportunity to continue to refine the structure of the balance sheet somehow?
Well, I mean, technically yes, there is a way to do it. I think for a number of reasons, we've always taken the position that, you know, we formulate our capital structure in order to sort of match our general currency exposures of our business, but that we are unlikely to put financial hedges in place against our capital structure.
You know, that we try to explain very clearly exactly how we're set up to investors. If investors wanna do their own hedge, then, you know, that's probably a more appropriate way to do it than our trying to make a directional bet on currency movements.
Okay. Understood. All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Lorne Weil for any closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. I think the things we've talked about so far pretty much speak for themselves. I think, again, other than the unfortunate decline in the pound that at least now seems to have abated, run its course, we're very happy with the quarter. We're accomplishing exactly the things that we set out to accomplish. We're obviously very excited about where things are gonna be heading in the next few quarters. Thanks for joining this morning, and we'll see you in a few months.
Great. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.