Sportradar Group AG

Good day and thank you for standing by and welcome to the Sport Radar's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. And please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rima Haider, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Liyue. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us for Sport Radar's earnings call for the second quarter of 2023. Please note that the slides we will reference during this presentation can be accessed via the webcast on our website at investors.sportradar.com. and the slides will be posted on our website at the conclusion of this call. A replay of today's call will also be available on our website. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions from investors. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question plus one follow-up. Please note that some of the information you will hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue and future business outlook. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 20F filed with the SEC in March and the Form 6K furnished with the SEC today along with the associated earnings release. we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. Also during today's call, we will present both IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-IFRS measures, including a reconciliation of IFRS to non-IFRS measures, are included in the earnings release, supplemental slides, and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to our investor website. Joining me today are Karsten Krull, our Chief Executive Officer, and Ger Griffin, our Chief Financial Officer. And now, let me turn the discussion over to Karsten.

Thank you, Rima, and good morning and good afternoon to everyone. I'm very pleased with our strong performance in the first half year, driven by innovation, quality revenue execution, and improved operating leverage. For the first half of 2023, we delivered revenues of 424 million euros, up 23% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA of 77 million euros, up 42% year-over-year, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18%, up 238%. basis points. The primary drivers of these results, thanks to the strong performance of our content, sales, and operation team, are an increase in sales for our higher margin products, such as MTS and LiveWatts, ongoing expansion of the US market, and an implementation of measures to improve cost discipline, resulting in enhanced operating leverage. These measures include optimizing our portfolio with a focus on products that will give us a higher margin, setting new standards such as HR development and fail-fast mentality, and new product innovation and streaming our overhead to drive stronger operating leverage. We always have a strong focus on value creation for our clients and the company, moving our clients up the value chain and more embedded full-scale higher value solutions, as well as building innovative and profitable solutions. We will continue to drive this client-centric approach as we execute our priorities. As stated earlier in the year, our priorities for 2023 are to grow our core bedding products and services, continue our expansion in the US, establish a strong foothold in emerging markets, and invest in content and technology for the future. I'm happy with the progress we are making and all aspects of our growth strategy as we continue to execute for today and invest for the future. Today we are reaffirming our full year guidance for 2023 with the company on track to deliver the highest revenue in company's history as well as strong EBITDA growth and margin expansion. We believe our scale, technology, and leadership in the market positions us to sustainable growth in the years ahead. Our end-to-end offering, integrated technology, and global footprint is deeply embedded across the sports ecosystem. We are an important partner for over 900 betting operators, over 350 sport leagues, and over 500 media companies globally. We lead on breadth and events coverage for sport data and odds and offer the largest volume of data in the world across our peers. Leveraging our global network to collect and process sport information to grow both the life and deepen our historical content. To put that in a context, in 2022, we collected live data events from almost 900,000 sport matches generated over 10 billion live and pre-match odds changes, collected over 5 billion betting tickets, and processed over 40 billion odds changes for betting operators. The data we collect, curate, and distribute holds significant value and is derived from three main data pools. First, we cover the greatest number of sports, close to 70 with deep historical coverage. Second, we have access to deep, mostly player-related data thanks to our partnership with sport leagues such as the NBA, NHL, and ATP. And we continue to increase this data exponentially. The player tracking data is valuable in determining how each player is contributing to the game. The monetization of this data has great opportunities for us and our clients. And third, With our MSS platform as product and the media clients, we have access to rich sport fan and better data that we can process, analyze, and monetize. These rich data pools are some of the most extensive and deep data pools in the industry. When we layer on AI to connect them in real time, it optimizes our higher value products such as live bots, MTS, and that's even further. We believe that we are in a unique position to leverage this platform, given our scale and our worldwide presence. This data pool and the new opportunities with AI to analyze, connect and learn with them will drive further future innovation on our products and create value for our clients. With that, I will turn the call over to Jer to discuss the financial results in more detail.