ZEAL Network SE

Thank you so much and good morning and welcome to SEAL Learnings calls. I have to start to say that we are extremely sorry for this delay but it was due to technical problems for our service providers to admitting participants to the call and even now there are one or two investors or participants waiting but we felt like it's better to start now and then we will catch up with them later. So let's start. I hope you have the presentation And if it's not, it's accessible on our homepage under the investor relations section, as we always publish the reports. On the content slide, you will find today's agenda, and we will start off with a summary of the first six months, followed by a financial update. After that, we'll move on to our guidance before we're finishing off with the key takeaways. After the presentation, we'll give you the opportunity, as we always do, to ask questions.

I will now hand over to our CEO, Helmut Becker. Good morning, everybody.

Welcome to our first six months earnings call. So, let me summarize what's happened in the first half of this year. We've reached an important milestone. Lotter24 received a new permission for lottery brokerage in Germany. It is valid for seven years until June, 2029. And it is our first permit under the new gambling state treaty. We've also successfully grown our business year on year. Our business model once more turned out to be very stable based on the loyalty of our customers and the unbroken popularity of online lotteries. Unlike many other e-commerce and consumer businesses, we have so far not seen major negative impacts from inflation and reduced consumer confidence. In the first half year, we were able to grow our billings by 8%. The jackpot situation, always a big influence on our business, during that time was average, but better than last year's jackpot situation. In May, Lotto24 brokered the biggest jackpot win in German history. It was 110 million euros won by a Lotto24 lottery club from North Rhine-Westphalia. That lottery club or these kinds of lottery clubs are one of our unique home-built products. They allow customers to buy a fraction of a large number of lottery tickets. We've also raised our level of profitability significantly. We grew our EBITDA by more than 50% compared to last year. And the protection of our players and the prevention of gambling addiction is a top priority for us. We therefore entered into a cooperation with a Danish company, Mindway AI, and with a Hamburg-based startup called NECT to make gambling even safer in the future. As part of the cooperation, artificial intelligence will be used to identify potentially addictive gambling behavior. Finally, in the proceedings, pending before the Federal Fiscal Court, the Bundesfinanzhof, by the Hannover Tax Office against myLotto24 Ltd. regarding a possible VAT claim, the oral proceedings took place on August the 3rd. A decision by the Federal Fiscal Court is not yet available, but we expect it to come shortly.