Sportradar Group AG

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to Sport Radar Group's fourth quarter earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed in to today's call, please press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. I will now hand the conference over to Jim Bombasi, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Sport Radar's earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year of 2025. 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 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 analysts and investors. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to 1 question and 1 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 and Form 6K filed with the SEC, 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 IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures and operating metrics. Additional disclosures regarding these measures and metrics, 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 relations website. We may also discuss certain forward-looking non-IFRS financial measures that cannot be reconciled to the most directly comparable IFRS financial measure without unreasonable efforts. Joining me today are Karsten Kurl, our CEO, and Craig Fallenstein, our CFO. And now I'll turn the call over to Karsten.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. In 2025, we delivered strong financial results while generating continued momentum across our business as we took important steps to further scale our business and enhance our industry leading position. This progress builds on the strong results we delivered over the last several years and sets us up for sustained long-term success. Early in 2025, at our investor day, we outlined our strategy and key growth pillars. Over the course of 2025, we delivered on this strategy, both operationally and financially. As we scaled the business in key areas, including our sports coverage, video streaming and visualizations, managed trading services, and our marketing and media businesses. We also completed our acquisition of IMG, demonstrating our financial discipline, as well as our ability to integrate strategic sport rights and monetize them like no one else can given our experience and scale. Importantly, this operational success underpinned our strong financial performance for the year. Greg will cover our financial results in a moment, but in 2025, we performed ahead of the expectations we laid out at our investor day early in the year, achieving record revenue and adjusted EBITDA, while delivering significant margin expansion. Adjusted EBITDA margins have expanded approximately 400 basis points in the past two years, and we see a long runway ahead. for further expansion. We also continue to deliver increasing levels of free cash flow as we expand the free cash flow conversion to 56% on an annual basis. This cash flow further strengthen our balance sheet and given the disconnect between our share price and the fundamental strength of our business, we use the opportunity to buy back a significant amount of stock over the last four months. To continue to capitalize on this disconnect, our board of directors has approved a significant increase in our share repurchase authorization, raising the total plan capacity from 300 million US dollars to a total of 1 billion US dollars. With this expanded authorization, we will continue to aggressively repurchase shares as the market provides an opportunity given the long-term value creation we see across our business. We have the balance sheet, strengths, and free cash flow generation to take advantage of the current valuation gap without compromising our ability to invest in further growth initiatives. Turning to our key highlights in 2025, we closed the IMG acquisition in November. Thanks to our detailed pre-closing planning, we hit the ground running, immediately making IMG content available to our client base, enabling us to unlock significant revenue synergies. Leveraging our global scale and distribution network across hundreds of operators, we generated immediate financial uplift in the quarter. The customer response has been strong with the majority of our clients, including all of the Tier 1 partners, having already signed on the IMG data odds and AV products. This early and significant progress puts us firmly on track to unlock anticipated revenue synergies of 25% for IMG in 2026. On the product side, we have successfully integrated IMG content into our core product suite and are on track to expand it into our next-gen offerings, including foresight, micro-markets, player props, and the virtual live match tracker over the course of the year. This rapid integration and uptake validates our flywheel. We can monetize this content across more customers and products to unlock significant accretive revenue growth. In terms of our sports coverage, we are unmatched in quality and depth. We cover more than 1 million matches annually, and the scale of betting content and data powers more odds generation, helps scale our video streams, and grows our MTS trading liquidity. In addition to acquire over 70 sport rights in IMG acquisition, During 2025, we also renewed our partnership with MLB, which provides for both expanded territories and media rights. The first season of our new MLB deal performed strongly, tracking ahead of plan. And we recently strengthened our soccer rights by successfully renewing IMG's German DFB Cup rights through 2032. We also continue to make great strides engaging sport fans and we lead the shift toward more personalized and interactive experience. We know sport fans and their behavior better than anybody thanks to our unique data points that we collect and we are continually looking for new ways to engage them and enhance the experience. That's why we recently upgraded our Foresight streaming product to deliver deeper storytelling and contextual data-rich visualizations. Last quarter, we talked about one of the most exciting recent AI breakthroughs, the development of a generative foundation model for basketball, a first of its kind in sports. The model is based on a large transformer architecture, which trained using billions of 3D body pose data points from thousands of NBA games, allowing the model to understand player movements, decision making, and game flow at an unprecedented level of detail. This foundation model powers predictive insights in real time, and we are using it to enhance our Foresight streaming product, bringing richer, more interactive visualizations to live broadcasts. We have plans to expand this foundation model to additional sports, including in soccer for the World Cup and tennis later this year. These innovations and the deeper engagement these products foster, combined with our increased sport coverage, are boosting our streaming activity. Last year, we streamed over 525,000 matches, which is 100,000 more than we streamed just two years ago. And in 2026, we anticipate to stream over 700,000 matches across our global footprint. Switching to our managed trading services, we continue to scale this business in related markets around the globe and we see continued strong momentum ahead. Turnover for 2025 was up 26% year over year to $52 billion, making us our top bookmaker globally. Our proven AI-driven trading and risk management capabilities combined with the diversity of sports on our MTNS platform enabled us to achieve a margin of nearly 11% for our clients in 2025. Turning to our media and marketing segment, our ads business delivered strong record volumes on our DSP for both the fourth quarter and the full year. In 2025, DSP volume grew 35% year over year, reflecting increased demand for our data-driven advertising solutions. We saw robust performance across multiple channels, which underscores both the strong ROI of our campaigns and the scalability of our platform based on our propriety software development. At our global media business, we continue to see strong demand as sports viewership transitions from linear to digital and mobile streaming. Last quarter, we announced a partnership with NBC to develop a customized version of Foresight for NBA basketball for Peacock's performance field. This product has drawn rave reviews from sport fans, given them real-time stats, that break down the game including where a player is most likely to score from next. And we recently announced a partnership with NBC's regional sports networks to enhance their fan NBA viewing experience. By leveraging our AI capabilities, we are transforming live NBA player tracking data into on-air graphics, animated replays, and customized athletics to enhance the live game coverage and experience. Gen AI companies are turning to our data and media APIs to power their sports experiences. We have secured agreements with a number of the Gen AI leaders to provide their users with deeper insights and real-time updates. As these platforms increasingly look to engage their audiences by integrating live sports data and insights, demand for our content and capabilities continues to grow. Now turning to prediction markets. This is a rapidly developing opportunity in the US and one where we are uniquely positioned to capitalize as the B2B leader in our industry. with our premium sport rights portfolio and unmatched product suite. The prediction markets expand the sports term by opening up the US market and is naturally high growth extension for our core business. Our focus is to monetize this opportunity while delivering the accuracy, integrity, and scale that the exchanges and market makers need to grow responsibly. We have been working with the NHL, MLS, UFC and other league partners to establish clear safeguards and standards that we will look to implement as part of any sport prediction market agreement. We are uniquely positioned to unlock meaningful commercial value. We have the ability to power this market end to end with our low latency official data AI driven technology. to predict pricing and liquidity, fan engagement solutions, marketing services, and our industry-leading integrity services. We are already seeing strong demand from our marketing services from both major exchanges and our OSB clients as they look to us to help them to acquire customers. Prediction markets are an exciting new avenue of growth for our company and we are currently in detailed commercial discussions with the key players and expect to announce more on this front soon. Now looking into 2026, we see continued strong momentum in our business as we execute on our growth strategy and as we leverage IMG's content across our larger customer base and product suite to realize significant revenue synergies. The 2026 FIFA World Cup in June will be a meaningful opportunity for the betting industry and for our company. There are nearly double the teams compared to the last World Cup and over 100 matches. With 200 live markets, 200 pre-match markets, and as well as player props and micro markets, volumes should easily exceed US$35 billion of turnover in the last World Cup. And with new avenues for growth emerging, including prediction markets, we expect to continue to generate robust growth in 2026 and continue to deliver on our long-term growth strategy and guidance. We are relentlessly about creating value for our partners and customers. And the uptake of our product and services is a clear demonstration that our investment in content, technology, and product innovation are paying off. Our unique position as a supplier and innovator is unmatched, and we couldn't be more excited about the future. Thank you. I will now turn over to Greg, who will discuss our financial results in greater detail. Thanks, Carsten.