ZEAL Network SE

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to SEAL's Earnings Call presentation for the first half year of 2026. I'm Andrea Behrend, the CFO of SEAL, and I'm joined today with our CEO, Stefan Tvaresa. The presentation is available on our investor section and our website. And with that, I will guide you through the agenda. Like always, we will start with the highlights of the first six months of the year. Then I will take you through the financial and operational performance before we give you an update on our strategic progress and the 2026 guidance. We will close with the key takeaways and then open up for a Q&A session. And with that, I hand over to Stefan.

Good morning from my side as well, everybody. Thanks for joining our call. I'm happy to report that the first half of 2026 has delivered a record in revenue, very profitable growth, and we've been able to continue our strategic diversification. To give you a couple of more details, we delivered the strongest first half year in Zeal's history, achieving record number of revenues alongside double digit growth in both EBITDA and profit. This demonstrates that our strong top line momentum continues to translate into very profitable bottom line growth. We've also reached record levels of new customer acquisition, further strengthening the foundation for future growth. Through our social lotteries, we continue to support prominent charitable organizations in total, and we are very proud of this. We have already contributed around 240 million euros to public welfare in 2026. And from a strategic perspective, we successfully launched Traumautoverlosing in Germany, expanding our product portfolio beyond traditional lotteries and we have concluded the acquisition of Seven Canyon in the UK, which represents another important step in our continued diversification. So overall, the first half of 2026 combined record financial performance, strong operational execution and meaningful strategic progress. I'll hand back to Andrea to dive into the numbers for you guys.

Thanks, Stefan. So like always, let's put our results into context for the jackpot environment in Germany. The jackpot environment improved in the second quarter of this year, particularly in Lotto 6 out of 49. Lotto 6 out of 49 reached its 50 million euro maximum for the first time ever and remained for this in 10 consecutive draws in Q2 and continues until today. So let's see what is happening today. Its average jackpot increased to 27 million euros compared to 8 million euros in the prior year period. Euro jackpot reached its 120 million euro maximum in May and remained there for two draws. The average level was 43 million euros and is slightly below last year's numbers. Overall, the extended Lotto 6049 rollover sequence more than offsets the slightly lower average jackpot, Euro jackpot levels. And we added an additional slide this time in, because it's the first time we had a 50 million lotto jackpot on 50 million, and we wanted to illustrate how this jackpot drives custom activity and billings, and how this also compares to Euro jackpot here. And that's not only for SEAL, but for the overall market. So for Lotto 6 out 49, the 50 million euro jackpot remains in place with a wide range of draws, as I told you already. And compared to low jackpot reference draws, the billings increased by 33%, with a strong uplift in Wednesdays with 45% and on Saturdays with 26%. On the other hand, we have Eurojackpot. And if the Eurojackpot reaches its top maximum at 120 million, we see that billings increase by 149% in the market above the normal minimum jackpot reference. And this translated in Tuesday numbers of 171% and Friday's numbers of 134%. In summary, it's really important to see that both jackpots drive significant growth, but relatively increased the Euro jackpot is over four times higher than Lotto 6 out of 49. This is just that we wanted to share with you because it's for the first time happening and I think it's important to put that in context for our results and also for Q3 results. Now let's turn into our P&L. So I want to share my highlights with you here. Of course, revenue grows by 20%, a great number. Lotteries grew by 20% and games by 17%. On the other hand, the operating expenses increased, but with deliberate investment decisions that we are taking into growth. Mainly, the increase comes from our marketing expenses that rose by 37%, that we really put the pressure on our customer acquisition and increased here significantly. The personal expense increase comes with the investments into our new business areas, especially. But despite these investments, EBITDA grow by 10% to 39 million euros. And we achieved an EBITDA margin in the first half year of 31.9%, well above our guided 30% target. The key message here is that we deliver strong top-line growth and increase absolute profitability while we still continue significantly investing in our future. Now let's see on the underlying operational KPIs that drive this growth. So first of all, our lottery billings for H1. Lottery billings increased by 13%, and the main driver here is the larger and more active customer base. Average monthly active users increased by 9%, and as expected in such a jackpot environment, the average billings per user increased by 4%. Based on the billings growth of 13% and in combination with the improved gross margin, our revenue increased by 20% year over year. Our gross margin improved from 17.3% to 18.2%. And this margin improvement comes based on favorable product mix due to the jackpot environment, as we have seen it in Q2. And of course, the impact of our diversification strategy in our product portfolio. So overall, really great product margins in the lottery business and the strong top line growth. The long-term growth driver is our customer acquisition. So we really focus on this and we reach new record levels for NH1 in SEAL. We acquired 659,000 new customers, 32% more than first half year of last year. And this is a huge success. I really want to point this out. It is achieved considering our clear boundary conditions that we set our teams for the marketing investments. You see how this translates in the cost per lead. They increased only by 7% despite this much higher volume in customer acquisition that we put in, despite rising media costs and all the tests that we are doing to target new audiences and also to support our diversification strategy. So, yeah, a real success. If you compare the core brokerage business CPLs, I think that's important. We saw in CPL of 44.86 euros. And like I say, that demonstrates really a strong discipline on our side to invest in unique economics that are scalable and really generate significant growth for the future. Now to the other operations segment in Germany, and that's games. Our games business continues to grow and we are broadening our games portfolio and our product features. And that really resonates with our customers, as you see in these numbers. Monthly active users grow by 34%. As expected, through that strong growth of monthly active users, this resulted in a more diversified player mix and we see that the high roller have a smaller proportion now and therefore the ARPU slightly declines. Overall, this increase of active users is our goal and drives the revenue growth of 17%. And with that, I hand over to Stefan for some great updates on our own lottery products.