ZEAL Network SE

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of the Zia Network SE following the publication of the financial year figures of 2024 earlier this morning. I'm delighted to welcome the CEO, Dr. Helmut Becker, the current CFO, Sebastian Jelsky, and the new CFO per April, Andrea Behrendt, who will guide us through the presentation shortly. But before I hand over to the management board, let me kindly remind you that every participant is in a listen-only mode. But after the presentation, we will have a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly via audio line to them. Questions via chat cannot be asked today. So and having said this, Mr. Bielski, the stage is yours.

Thank you very much and good morning to everybody and welcome to the earnings call for the full year results for 2024 for Zeal Network. I hope that you can all see the presentation, but if not, you can also exit it through the investor relations section on our homepage. Today is actually a very special day. earnings call for me, not just because we are able to present record results for 2024, but also because it is my last earnings call as CFO of Zeal. I would like to thank all of you, especially our shareholders, for putting your trust into Zeal, and I've very much enjoyed working with you. This call is also special because it's not just Helmut and I who present to you, but today we also have Andrea Behrendt joining us. It makes me incredibly happy that Andrea is succeeding me as CFO of Zeal, and I cannot think of anybody who would be better placed for this job. Andrea knows Zeal for 13 years, and over the last two years, I have seen every day how awesome she has been in every aspect of her job. The agenda for today's call is as follows. Helmut will give a brief summary, then we'll talk about the business, give you some update on the strategic progress. give you an outlook on the business and guidance for 2025, talk about our dividend proposal, and Helmut will end with some key takeaways. So Helmut, over to you. Thank you, Sebastian, and good morning, everybody.

2024 was a strong year. We achieved record numbers in customer acquisition, billings, revenue, and EBITDA. For the first time, we saw more than a billion euros in lottery billings. Our EBITDA almost doubled. And we completed the squeeze-out at Lotto24. We also launched a new charity lottery and product innovation and outperformed with that our already high ambitions. Next page, yes, we also outperformed our strategic goals for 2024. This is a slide that you've seen many times before. We achieved more than 15% billings margin in the second half of 2020. Our marketing was highly successful. We made good use of the peak jackpot situations. We saw that our marketing mix is effective. And we grew our lottery clubs business as well as our play with friends billings. By the way, we've rebranded that play with friends now into team player. We do see positive trends in our games business. By the end of 2024, we had almost 300 games live. Some of these games show improved traction and retention with our customer base, even in slow jackpot environments. Finally, we launched a highly successful new product, the Traumhaus Verlosung, in the second half of 2024. It generated already more than 5 million euros in revenue in 2024. It also helps us grow our market as it addresses younger and more female players compared to our more traditional lottery products. With that, I hand back to Sebastian.