Meridian Holdings

Thank you. And good morning, everyone. Welcome to Golden Matrix Group's Q2 2025 earnings call. We appreciate you joining us today. On today's call are Brian Goodman, CEO of Golden Matrix Group, Duran Milosevic, CEO of Meridian Bet, Rich Christensen, CFO of Golden Matrix Group. At the conclusion of this call, the recording and supporting resources will be available on Golden Matrix Group's IR website. As a reminder, today's call will contain forward-looking statements. Certain statements made on this conference call, including our responses to questions, may constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are based on various assumptions about future events, including market and economic conditions, business prospects, technological developments, and regulatory changes. While we believe these assumptions are reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties. that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a complete discussion of these factors, please refer to our most recent 10-K filing and other public disclosures. Non-GAAP measures will be discussed, and reconciliation of these numbers can also be found in our recently filed 10-K and earnings press release available on our website. I will now hand it over to Brian Goodman, CEO of Golden Matrix Group.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review Golden Matrix Group's second quarter fiscal 2025 results. Q2 was a challenging quarter with revenue growth of only 10% year over year, below our expectation of roughly double that rate. The shortfall was driven by unusual customer-friendly sports outcomes in our European business, where favourite teams won more often than historical averages. Excluding this temporary impact, we would have remained on track to meet our full-year revenue guidance. Our analysis, supported by July's strong performance, confirms that this volatility is random and not indicative of underlying trends. With slower quarterly revenue growth coupled with continued investment to grow our active user base, our earnings declined. The operating leverage we had previously enjoyed worked against us during the quarter. While we were able to identify and eliminate costs that will reduce our operating expenses by roughly $500,000 per quarter, it was not in time to benefit this quarter. We have recently built and deployed new state-of-the-art systems to support our raffle ticket businesses, and the implementation of this new technology is already showing excellent results. Our largest raffle ticket business, Arkings Competitions, delivered several standout milestones this quarter, setting a new all-time daily revenue high, of over $315,000, surpassing the next best day of $281,000. And more recently, last week on the 1st of August, posted a remarkable all-time record in daily sales of over $440,000 for the day, which was driven by over 30,000 orders in one day. Additionally, gross profit in the month of July for Arkings was over 26%. This performance underscores the resilience, strong engagement, growing monetization potential of our raffle ticket businesses and the massive potential that these businesses provide. I'll now hand you over to our CFO, Rich Christensen, to walk you through the financial performance for the quarter.

Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. I'll provide a summary of our second quarter of 2025's performance and then turn the call over to Zorin to discuss our operational highlights from MeridianBet. Please note that all income statement measures discussed except for non-GAAP-adjusted EBITDA are on a GAAP basis. First, let's start with revenue. Total revenue for the second quarter was $43.2 million, representing a 9.6% growth over last year. Foreign exchange was a benefit of 4.5%. This was roughly 10% weaker than what we'd anticipated and was primarily due to the impact of customer-friendly outcomes within our European sports betting business. As Brian mentioned, we see this as an anomaly and have since seen July return to our expected growth trends. If we were to exclude the impact of our prior year acquisition of Classics for a Cause and were to remove the 4.5% positive impact of foreign exchange, revenue was flat for 2024. Moving to gross profit, gross profit reached $24.4 million in the second quarter of 2025, reflecting a gross margin of approximately 56%. This is 135 basis point improvement over the prior year. Our Meridian Bets segment, gross margin of 70% was lower by 270 basis points compared to last year, primarily due to additional taxes assessed on gaming in Serbia. With the transition of our core operations to Atlas, our fifth generation sports betting and iGaming platform, and releasing the second generation of Sports Recommender, we are now realizing meaningful economies of scale. This migration has markedly enhanced operational efficiency unlocked greater scalability and elevated the user experience, delivering a seamless, intuitive and increasingly personalized journey for our players across markets. Turning to the other two segments, GMAG improved 444 basis points due to improved supplier terms and product mix. And our raffle ticket businesses, which include Our Kings and Classics for a Cause, had a gross margin improvement of 546 basis points from the acquisition of Classics for a Cause, which carries a higher gross profit. Turning to operating expenses, operating expenses grew $5.1 million to $26.7 million in the second quarter of 2025. This included $1 million from the Classics for a Cause acquisition and $1 million in foreign currency from a weakening U.S. dollar. The remaining $3.1 million was primarily tied to our Meridian Vets segments and reflects strategic investments to expand geographically, grow market share, and enhance gaming technology, specifically They include first, startup expenses for our Brazilian launch. Second, marketing spend, including social media campaigns and team sponsorship aimed at player acquisition and retention. Third, regulatory cost increases from higher minimum wages and taxes, primarily in Serbia. And finally, depreciation on our Atlas platform, which was deployed late last year. Additionally, we've made cost reductions that will reduce our operating expense burden by roughly $500,000 a quarter, starting in the third quarter of 2025. We had a net loss of $3.6 million, or $0.03 a share. This was the decline of $3.6 million and $0.03 a share from prior year, and this was due to the increase in interest expense of $1.5 million driven by our debt prepayment, which accelerated the amortization of debt discounts, as well as accrued interest. This, in addition to our operating costs growing by $2.4 million more than the incremental gross profit generated in the quarter gave rise to this loss. Excluding the additional interest expense, adjusted even a decline by $2 million, or 37%, to $3.4 million. Turning to liquidity, at quarter end, we had $22 million in cash and cash equivalents, and our net debt leverage ratio continues to improve, now under 1.5 turns. Now I'll hand it over to Zoran Milosevic, our CEO of MeridianBet, to discuss operational highlights.