ZEAL Network SE

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the quarterly statement as of 31st of March 2020 of Zeal Networks SE. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to Dr. Helmut Becker and Jonas Madsen. Management Board of Zeal Networks SE. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much and welcome to this conference call and thank you very much for your interest and for joining the call. This is indeed an interesting time for all of us and we now have our second virtual earnings call and I hope you can hear me loud and clear. I hope you also have access to the presentation, which should have been distributed to you this morning. But if not, it's also available on the SEAL website investor relations section. Moving on to slide two, you will find this presentation highlighting the main areas that I will cover before giving you the opportunity to ask questions. We will start off with a summary for the first three months of 2020. and then a financial update for the same period followed by our guidance for this year before we're finishing off with the key takeaways. On slide three, you will find a quote that I was taking from our Q1 release and allow me reading it out. We are in a good way to reach our goals. even if some steps of the transition such as the complete technical integration of LOT24 are still pending. I believe it's a fair summary. We have had a very promising start and we now taking the final step of the full integration that we have ahead of us. Helmut will talk about that integration in just a few moments. So let's now go into the summary which you will find on slide 5. And then I will also hand over to our CEO, Helmut Becker, that will take you through next slide.

Thank you, Jonas. Good morning, everybody. My name is Helmut Becker. Let me summarize what we've achieved in the first quarter 2020. We have had a promising start to the year 2020. We've seen a good development of billings. We have improved the gross margin, that's the revenue margin, of our German business. We have acquired a high number of new customers. Towards the end of Q1, we've launched a new social lottery called Freiheit Plus, thereby expanding our product portfolio. And we have continued to be focused on type cost control, and have realized the majority of the planned cost savings. And last but not least, we continue to make good progress with our integration process, post-merger integration process between Ziel and Lotto24. In addition, we have reorganized our reporting segments to create full transparency on the business that we focus on, which is the German core business. So going forward, we are differentiating between Germany and others. We have reiterated and are reiterating our guidance and dividend policy. And we have recently received news that ZIL has been readmitted to the Aztecs. With that, I'll hand back over back to Jonas.