ZEAL Network SE

Good morning and welcome to SEALs Earnings Call. I hope you all have access to the presentation. And if you do not have it, it is also accessible on our homepage under the Investor Relations section. If you go to the content slide, you will find today's agenda. And we will start off with a summary of the last year, followed by a business update. I will then take you through the important work that we have carried out regarding ESG. We will continue with the financial update section. And after that, we'll move on to our guidance and plan dividend for the year before we are finishing off with the key takeaways. After this presentation, we will give you the opportunity, as always, to ask questions. But I will now hand over to our CEO, Helmut Becker.

Thanks, Jonas. Good morning.

2021 was a good year. especially considering the jackpot environment. Let me quickly explain how jackpot levels influence our business in two ways. High jackpots and peak jackpots in particular drive billings with our existing customer base as well as acquisition volumes of new customers. In 2021, we had three peak jackpots, all of those in Euro jackpot. and no peak jackpot in six out of 49. That compares with 10 peak jackpots that we would have expected statistically and 11 peak jackpots that we had in 2020. In such an environment, we've kept our business stable and strongly improved our profitability in 2021. The post-merger synergies and the optimization work of the last 24 months have become fully transparent in 2021. We've also made our customers happy with record numbers in customer satisfaction overall, and one customer happy in particular who won the highest price payout ever at Veal, almost 50 million euros. 2021 also was a transition year. We prepared ourselves to expand not only our core brokerage business, but invested into additional future growth opportunities. We launched our second charity lottery, the Dreamhouse Lottery. We applied for a games license. We launched our first B2B deal with the state lottery in Germany, a partnership, for instance, games with Lotto Hessen. We successfully renegotiated our contract and deepened our relationship with our Spanish partner, ONCE. And by the way, we made all the necessary adjustments to the new state treaty in 2021. That was a big effort, and it is now out of the way.