All right, Gerard, thank you for joining us. I think this is both the company's first time at this conference, certainly your first time. I'd love to have you just walk through, for those less familiar with the business, a little bit about Sportradar, the evolution of the company, and then what, what drew you to Sportradar?
Yeah, well, let's start with Sportradar. I think the operative word is sports, although we don't have S in our name, that's been a big debate with me, with Carsten, "Why aren't we Sports Radar?" But we're Sportradar. You know, what we do, you think about it, if you've got a passion for sports, we're right in the middle of it. We're sort of pivotal to the sports federations, the sports teams, to sports betting operators. And what we do is we deliver intelligence, whether it's data, whether it's analytics, whether it's algorithms, to make all of those partners smarter about their businesses.
Obviously, the critical part of it is, for us from a business point of view, 80% of our revenues come from sports betting, is delivering solutions and data to betting operators to make them smarter. And what does that mean? You know, they're in the business of getting all those crazy people, whether you love football, as in the one which you kick your foot or throw the ball, they, they're very much connected to those fans, and a percentage of those fans participate in sports betting. And what we do is we drive engagement there and ensure that the betting operator can best manage the risk and reward of, is Saka going to score the goal? What time is it going to come at? And managing that intersection.
And, you know, when you think about it, there's a lot of correlations between entertainment and sports, and sports betting, because it's... You know, I was saying earlier, I'm an Arsenal football fan, so I'm at the game, and I'm watching people as they're watching the game and screaming for the next goal. They're also on their phones, looking at the statistics, and some of them are actually betting, live- betting. And so for me, what drew me to Sportradar was basically that convergence and that immersion, because when I looked at my own career, I've spent most of my time in media and technology and gaming. Gaming as in, you know, computer gaming, mobile gaming.
When I looked at Sportradar, what I saw was a company that was deeply immersive in technology and analytics, and driving that to engage with sports fans. So for me, it was an exciting space, something new for me to take on. Yeah, it's been fun for the last seven months. We'll see how it goes.
So let's, let's dig into, I guess, the different businesses. Maybe if you can first set the stage, remind us what's in the U.S. now, what are the aspirations? What is, what does the business look like outside of the U.S.? How does that dictate how we should think about maybe how the business evolves or doesn't?
Yeah. I'll start with going global first. You know, just as I just said, you know, if you think about our business, we engage with over 900 betting operators globally. We engage with over 700, you know, media companies, broadly speaking, our sports solutions entities, and we engage with sports federations globally as well. Some of them are partners of ours, some of them are aspirational partners of ours. What that means in terms of from a revenue point of view, 80%+ of our revenues comes from sports betting, and the balance of our revenues come from media services, advertising, and what we call sports solutions and integrity. Specifically here in the States, the business is nearly 1/3 , 1/3 , 1/3 , currently.
Sports betting being 1/3 , I would say media and advertising being 1/3 , and then sports solutions. Sports solutions is where, you know, we help sports federations, sports teams, in terms of performance and engagement with their fans or with their players. In other words, watching a basketball player, for instance, where LeBron James or somebody say, "Okay, we've done analytics on it, and here's where we see positives, negatives in terms of what they do and how they can improve." The integrity services is a small part of our business, but an important part where we actually monitor sports betting and see is there any outliers that would indicate that there's something going on in the game, and reporting that back to a federation or to a team. And advertising is advertising.
We do a lot of, you know, client acquisition for sports betting companies to bring sports fans into their business. Media services is if you're on a sports website or if you're watching the Super Bowl, for instance, and you see at the end, "Data brought to you by Sportradar." We have such an immersive, deep investment in sports data, going back, in some cases, you know, 100 years in some crazy sports, that all of that is rich for media companies when they're trying to sound smart on screen. Going back to the biggest part of the business, as I said, is it's data, it's odds, it's algorithms, it's solutions to enable a sports operator to better engage with its customers and managing that margin.
And we're talking... It's highly driven by technology, it's highly driven by data, because we're talking about small, small changes in margins can make a big difference for a betting operator, and then obviously, we look for our, our take of that percentage. So we've gone through kind of what the business looks like and where it fits into the ecosystem, but maybe digging in a little bit deeper, how do you get the data?
Yeah.
How important are the leagues? And differently, maybe there's different, you know, leagues to think through, in terms of how to monetize that data.
Yeah, it's interesting. The company's been around over 20 years, and if you were to go back in the day, it was all scouts. It was literally people out in sports, out in football fields, just tracking data, tracking it and recording it, bring it back in. And then, you know, as sports federations evolved and as data evolved, you entered into agreements and licenses with sports federations to be the authorized access to that data, whether it's working with the Bundesliga, UEFA, the Premier League, ATP, or ITF. And then more recently, as things have evolved here in the States, the major professional sports and actually some of the collegiate sports, even though we don't do gambling there, we do a lot of work with the college sports.
When you think about it, there's a variety of ways we capture. Historically, it was manual. You're talking about scouts in the arenas, and I never thought about this when I was in a football game, watching some guy with a phone, like, literally like this all the time, you know, and thinking, "That man, that guy's got a problem, but he's probably communicating back to their Sportradar or one of the other companies about here's the key data point.
Yeah.
So that's still pervasive in the industry. We also obviously use video, and if you go to some of our offices, some days you'll see nobody there, another day, the place is packed, and there's a lot of people on screens, and they're tracking data and aggregating it and reporting it back in so we could compile, analyze, and report back into our client base.
We also use, you know, from a sports point of view, some of the innovations you'll see coming, whether it's with ATP or with NBA, is now that we have those deeper relationships with the franchises, is getting deeper access to the information, deeper data on the sports teams, on the players, and having cameras and more analytics in arenas so that we're capturing a lot more true technology. So, you know, from a franchise point of view and working with, whether it's with the NBA, working with the MLB, working with UEFA or Bundesliga, that's about getting access to data, and it's about leveraging those relationships to further enhance fan engagement as well.
Because for us, we're in the middle, and so a lot of what we're doing will be leveraged to improve the algorithms to support the betting operators, but also by producing this content and looking at the data and the performance of sports teams and players, we can also communicate that to the federation, so they can leverage that in terms of fan engagement. 'Cause in the end, it is the one, it's one of the main commonalities I've seen between my previous life and now. It's all about engagement. It's all about driving that fan engagement, because that's going to drive action. In the case of the federations, if you're ATP, you're trying to promote the next generation of tennis fans. If you're the NBA, it's basketball.
If you're a sports bettor, you know that these fans are the target population that you're looking to get into your apps and get into sports betting, and we're underneath that, trying to, you know, obviously nurture it and drive more momentum.
Right. So on the one hand, you have scouts who are collecting data. I'm sure there's some data that even the leagues or federations, they collect as well.
Yeah, pure delivery. Yeah.
Just... Now, on the other end, when you're now going out to monetize this, how do you typically structure those deals with whether it's FanDuel, DraftKings, et cetera? What really moves the needle more or less for you as we think about how the industry is growing?
Yeah. Listen, from a value proposition, you start with raw data, and in certain cases, whether it's a sports operator or a media authority, they may just want the actual simple data. They may want just the schedule of times for the sports games, and how are they changing, who's managing that? It's something very basic, but somebody's got to do it, and guess what? We do it very well. Then there's the actual, you know, the feedback from the game and just having that data coming in. As you go up the value chain, it's manipulating that data and analyzing that data into a solution or an algorithm.
Probably the most powerful part of that is the odds, is how we can influence the odds and in particular, saying, "Okay, based on what's happening in the game and the data we have, real-time, giving that communication back into the sports operator and say, 'Okay, the risk of a goal by Saka in the next five minutes has just gone up by X%.' You should be thinking about that because there's people betting on that. And making sure that we're giving them that data in real-t ime so that they can manage the risk profile. You go further up the food chain, what we call all the way to full services, there's smaller Tier II, Tier III clients that want to get into sports betting. They have...
Like, some of them are virtual casinos that want to come into sports betting. We will give them a full- service option. We'll manage their liquidity, we'll manage the tickets, we'll manage the odds. They'll manage client acquisition. You know, they'll manage the, sort of what I'd say, the front and the marketing side of it. And obviously, as you go up that sort of value proposition, the take rate increases from a few percentage points into the teens.
I guess maybe going back to the odds question. So how much of that is based on all the proprietary data that you have and collect, and how much just sits on the other side of where bettors are moving, they could theoretically move the market and trying to keep a balanced market?
Well, you know, ultimately, the odds are set by the operators, and they're - but they're set off data, and if you take a large operator, like a Bet365 internationally, they've got their own data analytics and data analysts that are driving a lot of the algorithms, but they're also layering in our data, depending on the sport. If it's football, as in soccer, that's the biggest sports- betting sport in the world. Believe me, they've got deep investment in that. When it comes to tennis or it comes to cricket or some of the smaller football leagues, like the First League in Kazakhstan or the Second League in Portugal, they're going to look to somebody like us to be driving that more. So it's a mix... and, you know, it's continually evolving.
You know, I think, you know, if you fast-forward a few years, the level of service that we would deliver to a large Tier I client, I don't think it's going to decrease, but the type of services and the analytics we give them will probably have evolved. Because again, we're talking about massive margins in absolute dollar and euro terms, but very small percentages in terms of how they're operating. So anything we can do to inflect value there drives real meaningful value for them and us.
I guess on that point, you know, it sounds like concentration maybe is not an ideal outcome, but there still is an ability to cross-sell?
Yes.
Is that fair? And so what, what types of bets, or just the type of bet, I should say, does that change the take rate that you have? And so which types, as the market evolves and we get either more parlays, more in-game, does that change the economics of the business?
Well, it does. It does from this, not as much internationally, but here in the States, absolutely. You know, if you look at our U.S. business, obviously, we've got deep relationships with the key operators here. Our economics is more inflected into in-play, as opposed to pre-betting and parlay. So we do sell services in the pre-in-play, but you know, our ambition, and I believe it's the evolution of the U.S. market, is it. You know, I usually use this when I got it on the back of a Guinness napkin one time. You know, the U.K. and America are countries divided by a common language.
I'm not saying Americans and English are all going to converge, but if you look at what's happened from sports betting in the U.K., there are lessons that I think will translate over, i.e., in-play here is somewhere between 30% and 35% of the betting today. It's over 80% in the U.K. As that evolves, that's where we see real economics for us with our U.S. clients. In the parlay side, not as much, but again, we've got a patient long game as it relates to the U.S. market. I personally believe this market's going to be very exciting over the coming years, but it's going to take time for it to evolve to some of the advanced markets like the U.K., France, Germany, and some of the Asian markets.
Is that incumbent on you, the leagues, the operators?
I think it's all of the above. I think the key for me is, we collectively need to be delivering the opportunities to the bettor, that they can actually engage more in in-game. Now, again, I'll go back to my earlier example. I don't think there's a difference between somebody engaging with a basketball game or an American football game to a soccer game from the point of view of immersion. And what I would actually say when I look at U.S. sports, the propensity to really be focused in on statistics, and you know, I've been watching football all my life, and you know I don't get to the level of granularity that I know some of my U.S. friends do when they can tell me the statistics around that player doing X, Y, and Z.
Now, if you take that immersion and that enthusiasm, and you give them the opportunity to test their skills from a sports betting point of view, I think that's very powerful. Today, they can do it with parlays, and they can vary combination bets, but if you've got, you know, in the case of a football game, you've got 90 minutes to 110 minutes, depending on how long a game goes, and throughout that game, you are creating data points that can be bet against.
If you think about any sports, even the four quarters of an American football game, or in a baseball game or a basketball game, you know, the different lengths, there are so many different opportunities for you to say, "Hey, do you want to bet on who's going to slam dunk the next ball? Is it going to be a foul? Who's going to be sent off?" It's you know, it's not endless, but it's a lot more opportunity for engagement and, you know, opportunity.
And so when investors think about the revenue growth profile-
Yeah
... of business, there's industry growth-
Yeah
both rest of world and the U.S. There's capturing additional customers, I imagine, but maybe you already serve virtually everybody. And then there's cross-sell. So when we put all those together, what is the... I know you've given guidance. Maybe you can tell everybody what, how you think about your revenue guidance, both near term and long- term, thinking about those components.
Yeah, in terms of the business scaling over time and the market scaling over time, I think you've hit most of them. The, from a Sportradar point of view, the way we think about it is we start with content. We look at the data pool that we have, and most recently, we added the NBA, and we added ATP.
Yep.
What that means out of the gate, I've just added a new layer of standalone revenue specific to those franchises. But in addition, what I've also added, and this, this, for anybody that deals with any portfolio theory, I've just given my ability to cross-sell and uplift pricing across not just the tennis product I have, the basketball product, but also into combining it with cricket, combining it with pickleball, table tennis, you name it. And that's the one thing that Sportradar has been very good at historically, is that, you know, for every year we come into a year, the first thing I should have said foundationally, there's a level of contractual increase and what I would say, market rate increase that you can bring into the following year.
The next thing you say to your client is, "Hey, guys, we've come up with new packages, new algorithms, new offerings that we can deliver to you based on the new content we have in the portfolio," and you upsell, and you cross-sell. That's sort of when I think about 2024, the ATP, NBA, and that foundational, what I call recurring, increase that we, we see every year, is going to be the main driver of the, the base level of growth that we're talking about, you know, growing to at least 20% top and bottom.
Added to that, to make sure we get there, is enhancement of our existing product offering, leveraging technology, bringing in, I would say, some of the initial products that we want to layer into the ATP and the NBA relationships, to give us more opportunities to uplift the value for our sports betting clients and also into media clients. So that collective, they're the what I would say the main levers. Longer term, and to a certain extent in 2024, you also have geographic expansion. The U.S. next year is. It's not a headline year for state openings. There's four states opening, and they're reasonably small, so less than 5% of the CAGR, or sorry, the GGR, excuse me. But when we look forward, there's still some major states to come.
There's also just dealing with what we talked about already, but well, let's throw it out since I'm focusing on the U.S. There's also the evolution from 30%-35% of in-play up to 80%. That's going to be over time. Again, as I say, we're patient with that. We'll be looking to drive that. The sports federations themselves are looking to drive that, and so will the betting operators. It's an interesting one for them because I think they've got a really good model today, the incumbents here in the U.S. with the way they operate. But I think adding that in-play is just going to give them a lot more opportunity to grow their businesses over the long- term. Geographically, there's also some interesting things going on. Brazil is another market that could be really interesting.
It has to go through its process, like most places, when they're regulating right now. You know, you've got the Brazilian government trying to figure out how to do that. There's a lot of interest in sports betting there. A lot of the international players do it today, but they do it offshore. And what the Brazilian government wants to do is get it back onshore so they can get their take and regulate it. So I think from that perspective, that's just an example of where we see geographic expansion longer term, not in 2024, beyond 2024. And also, you know, we will continue to add clients. As you said, and I said, we have captured what I say, the critical mass, but there's still the opportunity to add more clients on the MTS side.
You know, this year we added the Taiwanese lottery. We have 12 national lotteries today. We'll probably run out of countries, but there's still more lotteries we can bring to the table. And so from our perspective, you know, it's funny, when you look at the company and it originally said, you know, its long-term ambition was to grow at least 20% per annum. It's been doing that.
Yeah.
The track record so far has delivered that, getting to 25%-30% EBITDA margins. We're at 18%-19% now. Given the position and the profile of the company going into 2024, we're expecting, you know, the base case is flat margins. But if you look at it, we're unlocking 4-5 points of margin expansion from all other variable costs. It's offsetting the ATP and NBA pickup. But if we keep that profile from a management point of view, you're going to have a more stable sports rights base going into 2025, which means less of an uptick, so that you're looking at most likely all of my line items enabling margin expansion.
Which is, you know, again, there's a lot of execution against it, but it puts us in a good place to grow.
So there's about a thousand places I could jump off with all that. That was super helpful.
That's the Irish way.
One of the first things that you referenced, I just want to clarify, was that there's embedded growth, right? There's contractual-
Yep
... agreements. Is that? But then you said in the beginning that many of these are a percentage of GGR in some cases or NGR in some cases. So is there a combination of both, and is it more prevalent in, you know, the rest of the world versus the U.S.?
Yeah, that's a good clarification. The contracts we have here in the States are more rev share, and there has been abilities to step up the economics. The main example recently is with the lock-in of the NBA rights. We locked in with all of our major operators here in the States the next eight years for premium pricing on that deal. The bigger part of our business, again, is rest- of- world, and that's where those contracts are primarily rate- card and it's recurring business. But again, where we're able to build in rate increases on an annual basis.
Got it. And then from a contract standpoint, when you have these new... And you kind of alluded to this, that next year you assume that margins are going to be flat, but there's a headwind embedded within that because of some of the new sports that are coming on. Just remind us what the cadence is typically of a contract from the beginning to the end, and maybe we'll start there.
Well, yeah, no, from a—at least from a lender's point of view, a lot of these contracts can be short. They can be annual, three or five years. The bigger ones, like the NBA and ATP, we're talking eight, nine years. And the thing about the economics, unfortunately, accounting gets in the way. We amortize the actual license straight line over the period of the deal, and then the revenue will come in based on the evolution of the monetization with our clients. So it grows over time.
Right.
So when you look at the contract, or if you're looking at the lifetime of the deal, I'll use the NBA as the simplest example. The lifetime of that deal, it's roughly north of a $1 billion revenue deal over its life. The early years, you're talking, you know, margins in the teens, and then growing over the life of the contract as fixed amortization, growing revenues, you're into the 35 and 40s. So it's great for, you know, 1`/3 to, let's say, the last 2/3 of the deal. But when you're in year one, you're taking the pickup of the full hit for a year, and you're looking at a lower revenue contribution, so it puts pressure on the P&L.
The good news is you evolve through it. It helps with margin accretion. Now, in order for that to fully flow- through, and be as beneficial as it should be, you need to be managing all the other variable aspects of the business, so which I talked to a few seconds ago.
This upcoming year, you have ATP.
Yep.
It's one of them. Remind me, I guess, what's the competition look like when these bigger deals come up? Who else is at the table? What differentiates you versus your peers?
Yeah, generally speaking, and we've seen this even with deals that we didn't do this year, you're going to have a variety of private players, not people that you'd normally know. There's only two public peers in this space, and you know, it's.
Quasi third one, kind of.
Kind of, yeah. Okay, there's a division of another-
Yeah
public company. That,
You were related to one of those deals.
Yeah, yeah. IMG ARENA obviously was the incumbent with ATP, and we had the ITF. We won the ATP deal, and the ATP and NBA were very similar in nature, is that yes, the economics from a license point of view were material, but what was important to both those organizations is how can we work together to drive? For them, what they're looking to do is they want the economics of the license, but they also want to see how we can partner to drive fan engagement and really drive the next level of fan engagement within their sport. That was very much for a focus for the ATP from a tennis point of view, and the same for the NBA.
So I think that played very much into why should I give up an incumbent and move across to somebody new? And, you know, so that was the situation with ourselves and, you know, the competition with IMG ARENA. I think for any major sport right coming up in the future, I think it's going to be the same. I-
Right.
You know, just because you have the right doesn't necessarily mean, excuse me, you're going to hold on to it. But it does help to be the incumbent. But from our point of view, what we believe we bring to the table is the scale of the company, where we are the largest player in this space. We are the leader. We have the depth and breadth of technology and experience to deliver really meaningful value to our clients, which is primarily the sports operators and the media companies, but also to the partner. And I think that's important as the federations look forward. If they're just looking for a check, it's a fairly easy bake-off. It's who's given me the largest check?
I don't believe we were the largest check in the last deal. You know, from our perspective, those deeper relationships enable us to think about, in the case of tennis, okay, embedding this technology in the arenas, working very closely with the ATP to build the next generation of fan engagement, which we can then use and leverage that technology and know-how and data to help our betting operators be smarter as they're looking to drive their tennis business.
Right. I would imagine a five-year contract or a seven-year contract, or a 10-year contract can become longer because when you come to the end of it, you're effectively ingrained within the organization somehow.
Yeah, and the other thing, and again, this is a data point. I can't say it's going to play out this way. There's always concern around, you know, the... It's always up and to the right for sports rights, but we just saw with the broadcast rights for the Premier League, you know, that was a, that was a big deal, and the headline price was, was, was large. But when you actually look and dissect it, it was a win for the Premier League because they've secured the future of funding for the, for the teams in the Premier League-
Yeah
-for however many years the deal was, I can't remember. But also when you looked at the economics for Sky B and TNT, the actual economics per game delivered, 'cause they got a larger portfolio, is lower.
Yeah.
So I think that was a smart commercial play by both sides. It wasn't all about, you know, let's just, you know, get the next 20% out of you. I'm not saying that's going to play out everywhere, but there definitely is a friction point where you get to, you know, how far more can you just put a fixed fee on somebody to where it becomes unbearable? I think the federations, at least of what we see, there's a lot more conversation around how can we create incremental value outside of just a check.
Remind us, are there any big leagues or federations that are coming due that either you currently have or others have, that we should be on the lookout for, that you could potentially go after?
Yeah. If you look at the bigger sports, the obvious one in football is the Premier League. The broadcast rights have been taken care of, and now they'll be focusing in on the data rights, and so that will be up for renewal. And, subject to the economics of it, absolutely, we'll take a look. And then within our own portfolio, the only major rights that's coming up on the radar is in October next year, is the Major League Baseball.
Okay. And maybe turning to margins, you did announce a headcount reduction. Walk us through perhaps the thought process behind it. Obviously, you've been able to take a fresh look at the organization-
Yeah
So give us some context there as you came in.
Yeah, it's something that as a company, we've been working on for at least seven months in my tenure, and before that, because there was a lot of conversation I had with Carsten before I joined the team. You know, the company has been successful at driving revenue over the last 20 years. But as you looked at the actual operating leverage, it wasn't there. You know, we're in the high teens, which actually puts us best in class in our peer group, but that's not best in class from where we should be. We should be 25%-30%.
Right.
You know, you can say it's all about the sports rights, but when you actually dissected it, you looked at the compounded growth in people cost over the last two to three years, was over 30%. When you're growing revenue in the high- 20s, it's still the math don't work.
Yeah.
And we approached it very simply. We looked at the organization and said: Are we fit for growth? It's a, it's a phrase that Ulrich, who's our Chief Strategy Officer and was interim CFO, you know, I remember when I first met Ulrich and said, "You know, we're really focused on, are we fit for growth?" And what that means is, are we, from a product point of view, from an organizational point of view, are we, are we ready to take on that next 20% and again, the 20% beyond that? And the answer was yes, but not as effective as we could be. So we really looked at, you know, can we simplify the organization? Can we, can we put some more oxygen in the organization? In certain areas, there was probably too many layers.
In some areas, there wasn't enough focus on key opportunities for the future, but probably too much focus on and resources against things that potentially were just peripheral. So in simple terms, we looked at our product portfolio. We have over 85 products. We streamlined some of them, and some of them we cut, that we said aren't really, they're not really what our client needs for the future, 'cause we need to invest in some others. So that drove a good level of efficiency in our engineering and product divisions, which is the largest catchment of people in the company. We did the old-fashioned thing as well. We just looked at structures and said: How do we reduce span of control? How do we get, you know, decision-making to be simpler?
Even at Carsten's lab, and Carsten, over the last few years, has simplified his management structure, which has meant decision-making and the agility of the organization is better. And the culmination of all those efforts did one thing. It definitely shrunk our run rates coming out of 2023, but as important, it reduced the ambition to spend more in 2024 and 2025. And, you know, after doing this for over, you know, 30+ years, cost-cutting is hard, and it's not nice 'cause you're actually dealing with real human beings, and you have to take people out of the organization. It's a victimless crime to actually be smarter on how you invest for the future, and it really drives the ability to not just deal with.
It's not just dealing with the situation in 2024, where the good news is we have that ability to manage the operating leverage to a neutral point, as opposed to going backwards because of the step-up in sports rights. But it also positions the company, as long as we maintain the focus on, you know, the efficiency of the organization to really unlock leverage. Because, again, you can never predict the future, but this company has. Listen, we've proven that we can drive revenue. And now we've got to demonstrate to our shareholders that we can drive operating leverage, 'cause for me, and that will translate into better cash flow as well, as it's all linked. When, you know, when people ask me, what do I bring to the table at Sportradar?
You know, it's operating leverage, operating leverage, and operating leverage, and a little bit of Irish humor, but most people don't understand that. So I, I'll, I'll let Jim down there deal with making sure I don't do too much of that.
Stepping back, I guess, but looking at the cost structure, just remind us, you know, you referenced some of the big buckets, but maybe quantify some of that. So what percentage is in, you know, sales folks, versus engineering, versus finance, and product technology?
The largest—I won't, I won't go deep on percentages-
Yeah
... but the, the majority, the largest, percentage of our, our people costs are in, engineering, both, you know, product development and, product support. That's like developing new products, maintaining existing products, and, the technology and the platform. So we have we have actually two large groups, and, then the next group will be content, 'cause, you know, content aggregation-
Yep
... and managing the content portfolio. The smaller groups in the business, you know, if you look at them on a percentage basis, they're very small percentages, like finance, HR. That's not... Our issue isn't we've grown clunky corporate groups. I think as a company, we did reduce the overall footprint we have in those groups. But by the same token, they were never large as a percentage at least compared to my experience in my previous companies. But where the real critical mass in our company is, it's engineering and data and analytics, and they're very critical to us, but the reality is, we just had overinvested in those areas.
was that... I mean, you referenced growing 30%-40%. Was that because of onboarding or, you know, differences in product for every single league? Or is there something where you say, "Look, this, we have specific products. This should be scalable across different types of-
Part of it, part of it was like any company that, you know, evolved over time. An element of it was acquisition, so we brought teams in.
Yeah.
You know, when you actually look at it over a lifetime, and you say, "Okay, are they actually driving the level of leverage that would make sure they're accretive from a margin point of view?" And the answer in some cases, no.
Mm.
You know, we've all experienced COVID, and we've experienced going through that period of time. You know, we continued to bring people in during that period of time, and I think I won't blame COVID for it. But, you know, I think the one thing that's very common in Zynga, my previous company, and in Sportradar is... And it's, I think it's because it's driven off data and technology, a lot of smart people.
Yeah.
But they've layered in a lot of projects over the years that I don't think... You know, I come from a farming background. You need to weed out some stuff as well. You can't just keep putting more stuff in there, and I think it was a realization over the last year that we need to be doing that. There needs to be a continual focus on: Is everything fit for growth? Are we focusing on the right priorities? Are we investing in the right areas? 'Cause historically, you know, I think you would've seen a situation, new project idea comes in, "Okay, let's get another pod together. Let's put some people on it.
Mm.
Okay, where are we getting them from? Well, actually, let's go hire them," as opposed to, "Can we bring somebody off something that's not as important?" I sort of use an approach that I use with my children, even though my children are now 19 and 22, you know, if you've five things on your list that you have, and you want one more, which of the five comes off? You can't have six. There's only five fingers, and so figure out what you want to do. I think that seems simplistic, but if you do that, you build a mentality of operating, you know, leverage, and you build a mentality of focusing your investments in the right areas. Yeah, so far, you know, it, it's. The reduction in force was a hard decision to make.
It was the right decision to make. It's even harder for a company that's being built organically, like Sportradar has. So, you know, you had individuals that were affected by this that had been with the company a long time.
Yeah.
But you have to, you know. The thing I keep saying to myself and to the leadership team is, we needed to build that oxygen back into the company because the opportunity ahead of Sportradar and all of us in this industry is immense. But what you don't want to be do is lumbering towards it. And, you know, the bigger you get, you can lose some of the agility. And are you going to market quick, or are you investing in the right ideas? And that's one of the reasons we did what we did. It wasn't. It was interesting when we did the earnings call, the only part I wasn't really happy about is people went straight to the word restructuring. There's something wrong. The company is going out of business. Oh, my God, they're cutting costs.
The answer is yes, we're—we were taking care of business, but it was for a positive reason, not because, you know, there's something dramatically wrong with the company other than, you know, we could be more efficient. And the other thing I would say is, we'll continue to do that. We won't have press releases every quarter saying, "Hey, we're doing a reduction in force," but we will continue to make sure that we're focused on operating priorities. And I think that's viscerally part of what ... Carsten is probably, in my opinion, he's one of the best in the business. He in terms of understanding this industry and understanding, you know, where it's going. And, you know, when he looks at his management team, he said, "Guys, we need to keep the basic fundamentals in check.
It's great to, you know, think about the next five years, but we have to absolutely drive a better performance through the middle of the P&L. Because, as you know, as a financial expert, it's great that you got top-line vanity, but if you don't have the flow-through, it's bottom-line insanity, and we don't want to be there.
So one follow-up to that is just on a cash basis. So is there anything else that we should be thinking about in terms of other cash costs, maybe not with any of the, or cash conversion, how that should trend over time?
Well, our ambition, our cash conversion, I think through the end of Q3, I know we don't pre-present the metric anymore 'cause we took it out for, you know, public reporting reasons, was in the 43% range. Our ambition is to get that into the 50s. And so over time, our ambition is to improve the cash conversion. How far above 50 we can get? TBD, but that's the... I would call that the short- to medium-term goal.
That's great. We have about a minute left. I've got a lightning round set of questions on my end that we're supposed to be asking everybody, so I'll fire those off. One is, do you think about industry demand over the next year? Do you generally anticipate acceleration, steady state, deceleration, and any reasons why?
No. Well, we expect obviously an increase in demand. I think there's a variety of ways where sports betting is getting even more interesting. A simple soundbite is, you know, if you think about the 2023 season for women's basketball, the best viewership ever, but also double the sports betting in the game. That's just a small example, but, you know, we continue to see innovation in the space. And, you know, this country, in terms of this market, I think you're going to see an evolution. I think it's going to be a steady evolution. There's obviously an anticipation for more state openings, but in 2024, it's probably four small ones, but the larger ones coming later.
There is absolutely an expansion of business going on internationally. I think one of the things I want to make clear is, when we look at growth next year, there's a lot of focus on the U.S. because percentage-wise, it's a nice growth rate, but the actual growth rate out of the rest of world is more powerful from a-
Mm
... from a flow-through point of view.
The second was around margins, but you kind of answered that, next year being flat.
Base case, yeah.
Then an inflection thereafter.
Yeah.
The third question is really around capital allocation. So as you hit this profit inflection, you know, maybe it's in not only next year, but the year out, but how do you think about the right use of cash?
Yeah, we're obviously well positioned if there was opportunities to bring, you know, technology or talent into the company from an acquisition point of view, but that's not our primary focus. My primary focus from, actually from a markets point of view, is we still have a very large internal shareholder base. You know, I think 85% is in the founder and the early investors, which means our liquidity is very low, so have to figure that out. It's a multifaceted problem because you need to make sure the fundamentals get rewarded, and right now we don't believe that's the case.
Yeah.
I am looking at, you know, other areas to address the fact that we have, you know, over EUR 500 million in liquidity, and one of those would be a buyback, so TBD. I don't think we're in the business of doing dividends at this point. I think that, that's not really high on, on the agenda. But probably the biggest focus that Jim and I and a few others will be focused on, is how do we get that, that, that trading volume to be, a little bit bigger? Because right now, it's, yeah, it's very low compared to, you know, other companies in, in, in, in, in, on the Nasdaq.
Well, that's great. Thank you, Gerard. Thank you to Sportradar. Thanks, everyone, for joining us.
Thanks a lot. Thanks.