Genius Sports Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Genius Sport Q1 Results 2021 conference call. Throughout the call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterward, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the Q&A, press star followed by one. Today, I am pleased to present Mark Locke, CEO, and Nick Taylor, CFO. Please go ahead with your call.

Good morning, everyone. Before we begin, we'd like to remind you that certain statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements that are subject to risks that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our historical results or from our forecast. We assume no responsibility for updating forward-looking statements. Any such statements should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements in our earnings release and risk factor discussions in our filings with the SEC, including our last annual report on Form 20F. During the call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP measures that we believe may be useful in evaluating Genius' operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for Genius' financial results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measures is available in our earnings press release and earnings presentation, which can be found on our website at investors.geniusforce.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mark Locke.

Good morning. Thank you for joining and welcome to our first earnings call as a public company. I want to start by extending my gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this moment. To our clients, customers, advisors, investors, and of course, our employees, we thank you. You all believe in our core mission of being the official data technology partner that powers the global ecosystem that connects sports, betting, and media. You have enabled us to get to this point, and I'm looking forward to using these quarterly earnings to update you on our business activities and progress towards our long-term targets. And to new potential investors, welcome, and thank you for joining us today. Before diving into the results, I'd like to start with a brief overview of our business and the opportunity ahead of us. Genius is uniquely positioned at the heart of the sports ecosystem that connects sports, betting, and media. Over our long history, we've built a proprietary technology platform that our partners depend on to streamline data collection and distribution, engage audiences, and ultimately, monetize sports fans. By partnering with hundreds of sports leagues and federations, sports book operators and media brands across the globe, we are well positioned to capitalise on the growth in the sports betting market. While our fast-growing sports betting market presents the best opportunity to monetise sports fans today, our vision stems far beyond the boundaries of sports betting alone. As the world of sports, betting, and media converge over the long term, we're focused on building a tech platform that enables our partners to monetize their audience in a multitude of ways tomorrow, whether through betting, ticketing, merchandising, or others. Our deeply integrated technology and data partnerships puts us in the best position to expand our value-added services and solutions and continue to grow as the industry evolves. Before we move onto the quarter, we would like to reiterate our long-term financial targets. We are adding more value to our customers than ever before, and we are on a strong march towards our long-term revenue target of 5% of industry gaming revenue. And we continue to target a long-term EBITDA margin of 40%, reflecting the strong underlying unit economics of our model. With that, we are proud to share with you the fantastic momentum behind us at the moment and the significant steps that we have taken in the quarter to accelerate growth and capitalise on the enormous opportunity ahead of us. I'll quickly touch on the six key takeaways from the quarter before we dive into performance in more detail later on the call. In the first quarter of 2021, Year over year, we grew our revenues by 52% to nearly $54 million, and our adjusted EBITDA by over 400% to $9.3 million. We are very pleased to have announced an exclusive six-year strategic partnership with the NFL that is completely innovative in its structure and revolutionary in its potential. This agreement combines our leading capabilities across sports, betting and media for the preeminent league in the world sports and is a major statement of intent for our entire industry. We also acquired two complementary and highly innovative technology companies, Second Spectrum and FanHub. These strategic acquisitions will both strengthen our core offering and benefit from our scale and distribution. Given the strong performance of the underlying business and following the aforementioned key transactions, we are revising our full-year 2021 revenue guidance to a range of $250 million to $260 million, up roughly 30% to 35% from where we guided the market to previously. Lastly, we're thrilled to have welcomed David Levy as our new chairman. During his 30-year tenure at Turner, he oversaw its leading portfolio of premium content. With his incredible track record working with many of the biggest names in sports and media, David's appointment is another strong statement of our ambition and position. So far, 2021 has been all about continuing to execute on our long-held strategy. One of our most important differentiating factors is our steadfast commitment to official data. For those of you who are new to the space, this is the source of live sports information and facts that has been directly approved and sanctioned by the relevant sports league or federation. As more and more sports proactively engage with the betting industry, official data is becoming increasingly valuable. Additionally, the rapid growth of live betting in regulated markets worldwide means that Sportsbook operators place tremendous value on the speed and accuracy of official data. The scale of our portfolio, built up over more than a decade, puts us at the very forefront of this data trend. We've grown our portfolio by 25% year-on-year to 185,000 events under official rights. of which 112,000 of them are exclusive. This has included adding premium content such as MLB and a series of rapidly growing and thrilling events from Major League Rugby to top-tier Japanese basketball, amongst others. This number does not include the NFL, which was added to our portfolio after the reporting period. As many of you know, our approach is unique in that we acquire a large proportion of our rights through contra partnerships with sports leagues and federations. We have supported sports at every level with our leading data technology solutions that help them to create new revenues, drive fan engagement, and increase efficiencies. In the first quarter, we demonstrated the value of our technology. Our LiveStats technology was courtside every March Madness game, capturing advanced team and player statistics that powered the NCAA's broadcasts, their websites, and more. You may have seen our Genius Sports logo at the end of every broadcast throughout the tournament. We also launched our Ice Hockey LiveStats solution. providing a valuable tool that will greatly strengthen our hand in negotiations with leagues across this sport. Our media operations also continue to accelerate. Our unique understanding of the sports and sports betting audience, coupled with our exclusive ownership and control of live sports data and the ad tech platform, enables us to offer personalized suite of solutions for our entire ecosystem. During the first quarter, we announced a new marketing partnership with Fangio to run personalized targeted ads in states where they operate. We are also expanding our partnership with the MLB to continue using our digital marketing solutions to drive ticket sales for the leagues and its clubs. Our NFL partnership is huge for supercharging our media operations as we will represent their sports betting advertising inventory across all NFL-owned and operated digital platforms. And through the quarter, we continue to grow our sports betting presence globally, winning new deals with clients, including Winbet, Talienti, Parimatch, Snye, and Microgame. We're proud of our execution to date and a better position than ever to capitalize on the rapidly expanding legalized US betting market. We've established a long-term exclusive partnership with the NFL, building off our existing agreements with the NBA, MLB, NASCAR, and more. This allows us to provide premium official content on the most popular competitions. The business model we have in place allows us to participate in the upside of the US market. As the US market's revenues from gaming grow, our revenue also grows, regardless of which B2C player wins share. We're currently permitted to supply data in 13 US states and three tribal jurisdictions and have a proactive U.S. license strategy, ensuring that there is no market in the U.S. where we will not be able to operate. Lastly, our data-driven fan engagement and advertising solutions allow us to monetize the significant marketing spend that sportsbooks are devoting to acquire customers in the United States. Genius uses its unique access to official live sports data and combines that with audience data, our technology platform, and a comprehensive understanding of global betting behavior to offer advertising and fan engagement solutions that no one else can. Genius has a unique understanding of fans, live sports events, and the sportsbook market, enabling us to offer large-scale targeted advertising campaigns, which are delivered through cost-effective, data-driven, real-time bidding for publishing space. As an example, our proprietary technology uses a combination of data sources to influence campaign pacing and target criteria in real time. This allows us to deliver personalized content to the right audience at the right time on behalf of our sportsbook partners, which optimizes their customer acquisition costs. Genius also develops fan engagement widgets for sportsbooks and digital publishers, featuring live game statistics and betting-related content that drives key operator retention KPIs. These are just a few examples of the many media and fan engagement solutions which we offer our customers. In all cases, Genius is compensated through a performance-based model which fully aligns our interests with that of our partners. In the next few slides, I will go into more detail about the strategic transactions I previously mentioned, starting with the NFL partnerships. This year, we signed an exclusive six-year partnership with the NFL, a partnership that, as I said earlier, is completely innovative in its structure and revolutionary in its potential. So I'd like to take a moment to explain the core components of this agreement and why we're so excited about the value that it unlocks for Genius Sports. It is crucial to understand that this is a true technology partnership which will drive the global convergence of official data, betting, streaming and digital media. Our partnership falls under four categories. First, we will be the exclusive distributor of official data for sports betting for the NFL. Using official data is the only way for sportsbooks to guarantee low latency, accurate and secure data for their betting products. and now that the data for the NFL events can only be obtained through Genius. This gives us tremendous ability to increase our utilization rates across all of our content, since the contractor structures as a package deal that typically include a variety of content and services. Second, Genius will be the NFL's exclusive distributor of official data for the media markets. This manifests itself as innovative, data-driven, NFL-specific product to support media partners to increase their audience engagement and drive monetization opportunities. Thirdly, we will be the exclusive distributor of live streaming for the international sports betting market. Our streaming operations have grown rapidly over the last 18 months, and adding such premium content will help us to achieve new integrations with sportsbooks in the US and worldwide. These integrations allow us to offer our rapidly expanding portfolio of streaming events across multiple sports. And lastly, as mentioned previously, Genius is now the NFL's exclusive sports betting and iGaming advertising partner. So we are the exclusive provider of the NFL sports betting and iGaming advertising inventory in regulated states across the world. These exclusive rights to the NFL audience, live data, And proprietary ad tech optimizes customer acquisition and retention and positions as well to take a significant piece of the marketing gold rush. It is important for me to reiterate that this partnership is much more than a betting rights deal. The NFL has not just swapped out the incumbent for Genius Sports. This is a major partnership that, through Genius and the NFL's Joint Innovation Technology Center, we will develop the next generation of products and services for the NFL. Genius has the unique capability to work with media partners to create engaging content by bringing data to life, integrate sportsbook brands across media platforms, addressing the right audience at the right time, provide sportsbooks with data and technology to deliver a quality betting product to their end users. And finally, it allows us to unlock the true value of the NFL's official data. Genius is unique in its ability to take full advantage of its strategic partnership with the NFL. We expect new and existing customers to appreciate the step-changing value of our official data rights portfolio, as well as allowing us to showcase our unique and broad value-added services. Our suite of products and services are sold as a package, so the addition of the NFL massively increases the overall value of our offering. Our deal with the English Premier League in 2019 allowed us to sell more to our Sportsbook customers, increase our pricing, and take a greater share of wallet. We expect the NFL deal to do this and more. In particular, our exclusive advertising relationship puts Genius in a unique position to acquire customers in the US in a differentiated and cost-effective manner through the NFL season. which is the single largest customer acquisition driver in the US. This allows Genius to earn marketing spend by accessing this area. Concurrently, Genius will work with the NFL to develop the next generation of products to engage fans in both media and betting through its exclusive access to data and proprietary technology. Genius is unique in its ability to maximize the value of the NFL partnership through the wide range of services we offer. This makes the NFL data deal more valuable to us than it would be to anyone else because of the multitude of unique ways that we can monetize it. As I mentioned at the start of this call, our mission is to provide the entire sports, betting, and media ecosystem We can only do this if we continue to innovate and provide new levels of data, content, and technology services to our partners. This has been central to our recent acquisition of Second Spectrum and FanHub, two highly complementary and innovative technology businesses. I'd like to take a few minutes to give you a short overview of both these acquisitions and how they accelerate the pathway to our long-term targets, starting with Second Spectrum. Second Spectrum is the world's most advanced data tracking technology provider, with official partnerships with the NBA, English Premier League, and MLS. They provide highly innovative tracking, analytics, and data video augmentation solutions that will help us create an end-to-end data offering for our sports, betting, and media partners. Second Spectrum has also established partnerships with several major broadcasters and media companies, including ESPN, BT Sport and Bally Sports. The acquisition accelerates our plans to converge sports, betting and media to power the fan experiences of the future. Their best-in-class artificial intelligence technology team, computer vision, and machine learning products will help bring together our data, betting, streaming, marketing, and fan engagement solutions into one. Our relationships with hundreds of leagues worldwide and proven track record of delivering major technology products will unlock significant future growth at Second Spectrum. This acquisition aligns with each of our key strategic goals and expands our long-term addressable market. I'll now turn to FanHub. In the first quarter, we were also thrilled to announce the acquisition of FanHub, a leading provider of free-to-play games and digital fan engagement solutions. Like Second Spectrum, FanHub will enhance our offering across our entire sports, betting, and media ecosystem. Fan hubs leading free-to-play solutions will be fully integrated and create greater engagement, which in turn will create new monetization opportunities. Free-to-play has become essential for increasing fan engagement across second and third screens, allowing partners to deliver sponsorable digital assets that their fans love and derive demonstrable value for sponsors. As part of the push towards deepening its relevance and value to clients, Genius Sports identified an opportunity to acquire the market leader, gaining an early mover advantage and a pre-existing technology suite with a tier one client set and a highly engaged user base in their millions. FanHub already works in partnership with some of the largest companies across Genius Sports ecosystem, including the NFL, MLB, MLS, Betway, and Pointsbet. Direct fan engagement is a high priority for customers, clients, sponsors, and media partners. And our distribution network will generate significant growth opportunities and revenue synergies for FanHub's services. FanHub and Second Spectrum are excellent examples of our disciplined acquisition strategy, and we look forward to updating you further on their progress as we integrate them into our product offering. With that, I will turn it over to Nick to walk us through the quarterly financials and revised guidance.

Thanks, Mark, and thank you all for joining us on our first earnings call. We're delighted to start life as a public company with such great momentum across the business. Quarter one group revenue increased 52% year-on-year to $53.7 million, with each segment of our business increasing significantly. The company delivered well-balanced performance across all segmental areas and all growth levers. Firstly, our betting technology content and services revenue increased 42% year-on-year to $39 million. This growth was driven by a combination of underlying growth in the betting market, new customer acquisition, price escalators in existing contracts, as well as increasing our share of wallet through additional services to sportsbooks. The media technology content and services revenue more than doubled year-on-year, growing to $9.4 million in Q1. This increase was driven by continued growth in advertising spend in the US and Europe from sportsbooks looking to acquire and reactivate customers. Lastly, the sports technology and services revenue increased 42% to $5.4 million, primarily driven by expanded services provided to existing sports league and federation customers across all tiers of sports. Group adjusted EBITDA also grew over 400% year over year to $9.3 million, the result of our inherently strong operating leverage and disciplined cost control, which allows our robust revenue growth to drop through to adjusted EBITDA. On the back of our strong underlying business performance and recent announcements, we are delighted to increase our full year 2021 revenue guidance from the $190 million communicated to you at the time of our D-SPAC to a new range of $250 to $260 million. The key drivers for this increase are our underlying strong Q1 performance with the well-balanced revenue across all segments, as well as our continued growth in our official rights portfolio. As of March 31st, we have more than 185,000 events under official rights, of which over 112,000 are exclusive. Together with the acquisition of the exclusive global NFL rights, this continues to drive our mission-critical position in the global sports betting industry and media ecosystem. These factors have led to a significant organic growth, and the underlying business is steaming ahead to an expected revenue range of $240 to $245 million for the year. Drivers that will determine whether we're at the high or low end of this range will depend on the pace of continued growth in the US and the rest of the world, as well as our NFL go-to-market strategy. As a reminder, our updated guidance reflects our view of the 2021 calendar year, which includes only the first four months of the NFL season. We expect NFL-related gaming revenue to carry over into the first quarter of 2022, which is not included in our current calendar year outlook. As Mark mentioned, we are thrilled to welcome FunHub and Second Spectrum to the Genius family. For these acquisitions, both of which are expected to close in Q2, we estimate a 2021 revenue contribution in the range of $10 to $15 million. On a standalone annualized basis, we estimate the acquisitions to contribute to revenue approximately $7 million for FanHub and $20 to $25 million for Second Spectrum. And this is before any revenue synergies which we will expect to generate predominantly from 2022 onwards. We are also updating our EBITDA forecast from when we last communicated guidance during the DSPAC. The EBITDA from our underlying business continues to be strong, as we've just discussed with our Q1 performance. And we anticipate our organic underlying business to generate adjusted EBITDA in the range of $35 to $45 million this year. This compares to our previous guidance of $35 million. Our updated EBITDA guidance also includes a number of new items. Firstly, in relation to the acquisitions, as you can see, we are expecting both FunHub and Second Spectrum to be marginally profitable at an adjusted EBITDA level in 2021. As you will be aware, our previous guidance excluded the incremental costs of being a US public company, which we estimate to have a $10 million impact in 2021, the main items of which are principally legal, professional, and governance costs. A significant advantage of our D-SPAC is our new balance sheet strength and flexibility to support opportunistic investments. As part of this, we anticipate discretionary investments of $15 million in 2021, principally towards capturing long-term streaming rights in order to strengthen our market-leading portfolio. This capital strength following the close of the D-SPAC allows us to invest ahead of the revenue curve where we feel it is appropriate, and these investments will drive meaningful revenue contribution and strong payback over the next three to five years. Our increased growth capital puts us in a much better position to take advantage of these opportunities. We've called this out separately as it was not included in our original DSPAC guidance. and therefore wanted to provide visibility so you can compare the underlying business performance on a like-for-like basis. These types of discretionary investments are something we will do from time to time when the opportunity arises and where we believe there is significant shareholder return. Following the close of our business combination and two recent acquisitions, Our pro forma net cash position at March the 31st is approximately $41 million. I want to quickly touch on the financial impact of the NFL partnership, particularly as it impacts our quarterly position. To start, we want to reiterate that we will reflect the financial effects of our NFL partnership in our organic numbers. as this type of all encompassing partnership is at the very heart of our core business. That said, we are in the very early stages of discussions with our customers in relation to the NFL, and it does seem likely that our revenues will become more seasonal than they have traditionally been due to the NFL's fixtures running from September through January. Looking at this on a quarterly basis, I am anticipating that our group's Q2 revenue position will be in line with that of Q1 this year, predominantly because Q2 is a quieter quarter for U.S. sport. Q1 has contained both the Super Bowl and March Madness, which has had a significant impact, particularly on our media revenues in Q1. We then anticipate continued quarterly growth in Q3 and Q4. On the cost side, we continue to finalize the various accounting aspects of our six-year NFL deal. We currently anticipate recognizing the cash element of the consideration paid to the NFL during the NFL season only. And therefore, we'll start to recognize this from September through to January each year, mirroring the seasonality of the revenues. In addition to the cash cost element of the agreement, we will also incur a non-cash charge as it relates to the NFL's equity ownership in Genius. For accounting purposes, we will recognize these warrants issued to the NFL over their vesting period as a share-based payment. With that, we conclude the prepared remarks of our Q1 2021 earnings presentation. Mark and I will be joined by Chief Commercial Officer Jack Davidson and Commercial Director of Meteoring Engagement Josh Lindforth to answer any questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing star followed by 2 to cancel. There will be a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question comes from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions, and congratulations on getting to your first earnings call. So I guess, Mark, just touching on the NFL, because that seems to be where a lot of the focus is. And one thing that's been interesting is since your deal, the NFL has signed sponsorships with three major sportsbooks, and they've also – given the rights holders a lot of flexibility on their streaming rights. So can you talk about how you can benefit, how Genius benefits from more content going streaming and some of the, you know, I think we've seen with Amazon potentially in two years could put a betting cast on some of their Thursday night rights. So can you talk about how you're leveraging the streaming opportunity with the NFL?

Sure. So, I mean, I'll talk more generally. Our view is very much that the world of streaming and sports betting and frankly fan engagement are all converging over time. So, you know, part of the logic around the second spectrum acquisition was really to sort of take a long-term view on how this works and how this comes together. When we look at our streaming strategies, as you know, we've built up a reasonably large portfolio of streaming rights. And as the industry continues to evolve and continues to grow, we're looking at putting those streaming rights together with a lot of the product innovations that are coming through on the betting side to offer that technology service and that to the sports betting operators on a long-term basis. The other part of it is really around customer acquisition, fan engagement, whereby the convergence of this allows us access to a lot of the data. That means that we can put targeted offerings in front of them and really drive value for the sports that way.

And as a follow-up, I guess, just on the back of the FanDuel Access, do you eventually see more of your media opportunity around connected TV, OTT, advertising? or is there going to be more in performance marketing?

Yeah, I mean, look, when we think about all of the different platforms, what we're really thinking about is the underlying data that sort of sits underneath it all. We're looking and thinking about audience data. We're thinking about how can we better target using the various different platforms platforms that are out there. So as a business, you know, we very much think about providing technology services that analyze and optimize the use of the underlying data. And as the industry evolves, as different platforms sort of emerge, you know, we'll be focused on serving those platforms, you know, again, using sort of, you know, intelligent processing of the underlying data.

Yeah. Just one thing. Hi, Jim. Yeah, hi, Jed. Sorry, it's Jack Davidson, who's the chief commercial officer. I just thought it was worth jumping in. Let's talk specifically about the NFL stuff, really. Like, your question about Amazon and the kind of that convergence going forward is a really good one because, you know, although we're clearly not a right holder of that content, what we are as part of the innovation hub with the NFL is kind of a an enabler of that convergence. And that's something which will come as the future and as the NFL's other partners think about that convergence and what they're doing, we are intending to be part of that. And our innovation hub with NFL is really about joining the dots from a technology point of view to kind of further enable that convergence. Even with the sports betting partnerships that the NFL announced, We are an enabler of that. We're providing technology to the NFL to really help those partnerships flourish, to help them succeed. So we're already doing that in some ways. But when you think about the likes of Amazon and what they're thinking about and the direction that could go, that's really the future and really one of the key drivers of the partnership. So does that make sense?

Yes, it does. Very helpful. And then I guess just one more for me. It's more for Nick. Nick, can you help us how we should think of your cost of revenue growing relative to your cash operating expenses for your EBITDA range? And then on the revenue you gave from the acquisitions, was that on a full year run rate basis or is that what they're expected to contribute going forward starting at 2Q?

Yeah, hey, Jed, let me take the sort of reverse way around and talk about acquisitions first, and then I'll touch on the operating leverage that we have. So in the deck that we've given in the guidance where we've guided to a $10 million to $15 million acquisition position, that is their contribution to our 2021 perspective and not their annualized position. We're expecting both acquisitions to close in quarter two, although they haven't as yet closed. In terms of an annualized basis, in the previous comments, I said that second spectrum, we're expecting on a standalone basis, pre-ending revenue synergies to contribute $20 to $25 million worth of revenues and FunHub to contribute circa around $7 million worth of revenues. On a cost question, Jed, that you have, I guess to look at it two ways. Obviously, we've given a – you can see our 2021 EBITDA margin is obviously given as part of our guidance that we've gone forward with. Sorry, I'm not sure. Can you still hear me, Jed? Yep, can hear you fine. Yeah, sorry, we had some strange music at this end, so apologies for being put off there. So we've obviously got our EBITDA margin on the 2021 numbers you can see from our updated guidance. And clearly the rights are playing a big impact on that and they'll have a direct impact on our gross margin perspective. We're not giving guidance for 2022 just yet, as you'd anticipate, but what I can say is that we are reaffirming our long-term position of a 40% EBITDA margin at a mature steady-state position. and therefore we would anticipate, I think in the deck of our DSPAC deck, I gave a view of what sort of rights, direct costs, and net staff costs in SG&A are likely to be as a position to reach that 40% position, and that hasn't changed yet on a long-term steady state position.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Ryan with Craig Island Capital Group. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Congrats on the results and business trends and awards. First, thank you for the detailed guidance reconciliation. That is very helpful how you broke that out. Within the, or I guess on the NFL deal, Which line is that included in within the EBITDA guidance reconciliation? Is it the underlying business or is there some element within the investments there?

Yeah, hey, Ryan. Yeah, just to be absolutely clear, the NFL is in our core numbers in our underlying business. So it's part of the $50 million to $55 million upgrade on the revenue and part of the $0 million to $10 million on the adjusted EBITDA position. Those investments that I've called out separately are, frankly, because of our New Balance Street strengths, and our flexibility because of it, we are going to take the opportunity. And they're principally around streaming rights, so nothing to do with the NFL, that we're going to take an opportunistic ability to invest really ahead of the curve. so we're going to get the cost, but they'll make a meaningful revenue contribution and payback over the next three to five years, but won't be contributing significantly in 2021. The reason why we've called them out separately is obviously they weren't part of our DSPAC guidance at the 190 and the 35, so we wanted to give you an ability to compare on a like-for-like basis.

Helpful. And then on the the guy and you can talk directionally I know it's hard to kind of bifurcate the two out but are you able to talk so EBITDA on the underlying business raised X the NFL and then the inclusion of the NFL I guess what I'm asking is is the NFL expected to be positive contributor this year.

Yeah, hi, Ryan. Well, as you know, first of all, that's not how we go to market. And secondly, obviously, for commercial sensitivity reasons, I'm not going to give too much details on the NFL. What I can say to you is that on a cash basis, we anticipate the NFL to be breakeven in 2021 and cash generating thereafter. And indeed, across the life of the contract, we anticipate it to be profitable.

Excellent. Competitor Sport Radar, which lost the NFL deal, they have said publicly to their customers that they plan to still distribute publicly available NFL data to their clients. I guess, how do you parse out what is exclusive versus what others can do? And then how are those conversations with the key sports folks going kind of relative to switching over to you guys?

Yeah, I mean, look, the conversations we're having with the sports books are in early days. I mean, I can let Jack give you a bit of a flavor for how some of the conversations are going on, if you like.

Yeah. Hi, Ryan. So, as Mark said, we're quite early on in that. We've always anticipated that Sportradar will, and others, I guess, will be offering an unofficial product from the NFL. That's something we expect. I think that the market is such that there's a real demand for operators to work with your official data wherever they can. In fact, the NFL's the three partners that have been named to actually have an obligation to use the official data as part of that. But I think it's worth going back a bit of a step on this stuff where, you know, we are on a commercial level. We're not going to sportsbook operators and saying, do you want to buy some official data from us? What we're talking to them about is really helping them with their entire kind of customer journey of buying how they engage their players with the NFL. And that starts from how do they acquire a player using the NFL assets? How do they re-engage with that player? How do we use things like free-to-play in order to drive their engagement and drive their retention metrics, as well as use the streaming in there for their international markets? as well as the kind of core thing, which is, I guess, what you're getting at about using official data to drive their betting market. So from our point of view, we're quite early on in those conversations, but the response has been fantastic. So, you know, for us, this isn't really about worrying about whether other parties in the market are going to offer an unofficial product because there's so much more to what we're able to offer an operator as part of the deal that's really we tried to highlight on this call so i hope that i hope that makes sense

Is it useful for us to go slightly more granular on exactly what the deal with the NFL is as well? Because we've heard lots of different reports about what's included in it, and a lot of people have reported that it's almost a direct swap for the incumbent. But actually, if you break down what we've actually done with the NFL, it really sort of falls into four buckets. I mean, the first is simply everyone very clearly understands the inclusion of the official game data. The second is official data for media purposes. It gives us the ability to build our products around the media space. The third is around international streamings for betting, so for the rights to do that. But the important part of this deal, which is unique and is something that we work very hard with the NFL to create a structure, create a deal that added a lot of value to the NFL, but also worked very well with the products and the services that we offer as a business, is really around the ad tech space. And what we have there is effectively an additional pot and an additional revenue. So when we're going to market, as Nick alluded to earlier and Jack's just said, again, we're not going with just a sort of sale of NFL data. The conversations don't work like that. We go to our sportsbook partners and we say, look, we can add value with the NFL in lots of different ways, but we can also add value across other sports. But on top of that, you know, what we can do is we can help them reach their customers better. We can engage with them on the marketing side. So we're looking at, you know, forgive the word, but we're looking for much more sort of holistic deals with our sportsbook partners that really allow us to access different pots. of budget within each of those operators, hopefully driving a lot more value for them in return for doing so and having much larger relationships. So it's a very different type of deal than I think is sort of more widely reported, but it does give us an access to a sort of much larger revenue pot.

Very helpful. Just as a follow-up on that, Mark, any way to bifurcate the expected revenue across each of those four buckets, or said differently, which of those are the most valuable? I know the sports betting has historically been the biggest part of your revenue mix, but how do you think about this deal specifically?

I'm sure it will be no surprise that I don't want to go into too much detail about that because it's fairly commercially sensitive. And again, I don't think I'm giving away too much by sort of saying, look, I think from a revenue point of view, sports betting is clearly very important, but so is the advertising, the ad tech market. As you'll have heard on the earnings earlier, that business is growing incredibly well. The acquisitions we've made help support that growth, and we're adding a lot of value to our customers in that way. So I think that's probably where I'll leave it on that.

Great. Nice job, guys. Good luck.

The next question comes from Mark Hickey with Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Hey, Mark, Nick, Brandon, congrats, guys. Awesome job on the quarter, first quarter, and congrats on the NFL deal. You touched on it, but I guess it was sort of a big surprise, at least for us, that you got this deal. You know, sport radar was sort of the incumbent. It seemed like they were pretty tight. There was some equity involved. So just sort of curious, and I know you've sort of hit on this, but what was it that really got you to win this deal and And how sticky is it now with you moving forward? I realize it's a six-year deal, but maybe it's four fixed with a couple year, one-year option. So just curious the longevity of the deal. And then I have a follow-up. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, look, we work very hard with the NFL to create a structure that allowed us, as I said before, to utilize a lot of the technology assets that we have as a business. But I think really where I think the NFL and us had a very similar vision about what the future looked like, what the requirements for products in the future are. I mean, again, you'll know from the work you've done already that we're very focused on product. We're very focused on, you know, delivering value to our customers and our partners. And really, I think the NFL, you know, when they were evaluating that, they did an awful lot of work on it, you know, realized the amount of opportunity and the fact that our visions, I guess, you know, were very much aligned. So I think that... The technology innovation center is an incredibly exciting and important part of this partnership. It gives us the ability to build out new and exciting cutting-edge next-generation technology, help the NFL to access that next generation of fan and to engage them, and really gives us a platform for what we're expecting to be an extremely long-term partnership. We believe that this is a foundational deal. It's transformational. It's not been done before in the market. And really it's giving us that opportunity to build that very long-term partnership with the NFL, you know, through providing those technology services and providing that partnership.

Nice. Glad to hear that you sort of reiterated on your long-term financial goals. I'm just curious how the NFL deal sort of accelerates maybe the bridge to that long-term view. And, you know, part of the puzzle was originally your assumption, 40% share of events powered by Genius. Is that the same assumption? Has that changed? And I guess, you know, does the NFL accelerate that? your opportunity to that long-term goal.

Yeah, look, that's exactly right. We believe it does accelerate our journey to that long-term goal. I'll steal your words. And really, as you know, our business is about being able to you know, provide multiple services to our partners. It's about leverage. It's about having that availability for our customers. So, yeah, we have reaffirmed our long-term financials, and we believe that this does accelerate us towards them. It provides us with, you know, that platform for that growth, yeah.

Nice. Last question from me. You have your, I think, a 10-year exclusive at the NCAA. Just sort of any – thoughts around the possibilities of them sort of endorsing data for sports betting? Obviously there's, you know, a lot of betting already happening around collegiate sports, but do you think that relationship with the NCAA can evolve to official data endorsement from them? Thank you.

Look, I mean, it's probably no surprise. I can't comment on what the NCAA's view on betting is on a long-term basis. Suffice to say that we do have a very close relationship with them. We're providing a lot of services. We've rolled out our live stats with data collection technology in huge numbers of their events. And, you know, I think I mentioned it in the call that, you know, you'll see the Genius Sports logo on the back of the CBS broadcasts from the NCAA. So, you know, I think we're feeling like we have a good relationship. We've got that technology partnership in place. We've rolled out our technology. And, you know, again, how the NCAA chooses on the betting space isn't for me to comment on.

All right. Thanks, guys. Best of luck.

The next question comes from Stefan Grambling with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hey, it's Steven. Thanks for taking the questions. I'm going to throw one more on the NFL in there. As you look at some of the past marquee league signings you've had, perhaps in Europe, how do these contracts typically translate or ramp as you look at the revenue and cash ramp over the contract terms? And what might make the NFL similar or different than that roadmap in other markets?

Yeah, look, I mean, hi. The way that we have structured our partnerships on, I guess, outside of the US has always been generally around technology partnerships with sports leagues. So our core business model is about swapping or contouring technology in exchange for the right to collect data. And we provide those services on a very, very, very wide-ranging basis to many global sports leagues. You know, the NFL is, you know, while the quantum is different, the theory behind our partnerships and the relationships remain the same. You know, we as a business look to partner with sport. We look to take those services and products and provide them to our partners in exchange for the right. Now, clearly there's some cash elements and obviously equity involved in the NFL, but we believe that this deal is, You know, on a cash basis, you know, it's breakeven in 21. It's going to be profitable over the life of the contract. And as a result of the type of relationship that we have, we believe it accelerates our sort of global growth. So, you know, we see it very much in the same vein. We see most of our sports partnerships.

Yeah, I guess what I was trying to get at without trying to get too specific with guidance was just as you look at these other signings, I imagine that you have a conversation with customers. There's both the opportunity for having more events within the contract that you have and then also adjusting your existing contracts and having the new services that are attached with it. So I was just trying to think through how quickly we can start seeing those. It sounds like You know, you'll be having those conversations in advance of this upcoming NFL season. But perhaps is it normally like a one to two year, three year ramp up? Or could this just be faster because it's either larger or just the way it's structured?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I totally follow the question, but if you're asking how we see the ramp, I mean, you know, our revenues are related to the growth in the market as well. I mean, our business model is, you know, consists of sort of two different pots. One is a fixed pot, you know, which is for the provision of the services. And then we also, as I'm sure you're aware, take a slice of the gaming revenue. So we sort of see the ramp as, you know, to achieve the 5% that we've stated to the market, really coming as a result of increased partnerships, increased provision of content, increased utilization, and obviously an increase in the size of the market as well.

Yeah. Hi, Stephen. It's Nick. And the other important thing to know is that in every contract with our Sportsbook customers, we have upside levers. regardless of what the nature of that contract looks like, whether that's on a variable basis or whether that's on a sort of fixed basis, we have the ability to go back to sportsbooks where we acquire material assets like the NFL. And therefore, we will expect to be monetizing the NFL immediately in season one. But as Mark says, and then ultimately, obviously, the TAM will grow as the natural U.S.-focused TAM grows across the six years.

That's helpful. And one other one that's maybe a longer-term question. You talked about the long-term EBITDA targets. I guess, what is the long-term cash conversion from EBITDA look like? Effectively, I know that you've got limited CapEx requirements, but do you generally think about software investment as being relatively fixed as well in that long-term assumption?

Yeah, that's right. We capitalize a certain level of internally generated software. I think it was around about, off my head, around about $10 to $15 million in 2020. And going forward, it's not going to ramp in any way linear to any revenue or EBITDA performance. It'll stay at a relative absolute number as we continue to develop new products. So the cash conversion on any EBITDA perspective will be pretty strong.

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. Thank you for your attention. The conference is now concluded and you may now disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.