Lottomatica Grp Spa U/Adr

Good morning, this is the course call conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Lottomatica Group's H1-2026 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Mirko Senezi, Head of IR of Lottomatica. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to Lottomatica Q2 2026 results presentation. I'm here today with our CEO, Guglielmo Angelozzi, and our CFO, Lorenzo Vallanca. Now the floor directly to Guglielmo for the presentation. Guglielmo, please.

Thanks Mirko and good morning to everybody. Let's go up page two of the deck, another very good quarter and another very good semester. We increased EBITDA 14% reported, 17% on a normalized basis in the quarter, which means 10% for the semester on a reported basis recovering chunk of the payout issue that the market had in Q1, and 20% increase on a normalized basis for the entire semester. Even better for the online, of course, which is growing 21% in the semester at a reported level, and 24% for the quarter and 25% at a normalized level. So very strong results in terms of EBITDA. even more so in terms of margins, which increase two points in the semester at group level from 37% to 39%, and mainly driven by the consistent increase in the online profitability from 54% to 58%. Page number three of the presentation. What are the drivers of this growth? The same which we've had in the last 10 years, basically. Strong market growth, 12% in overall online. June peaks at 19%. Of course, very strong iGaming performance, but also sports has been very strong on the bets because the market has suffered in Q1 for the payout. We continue to increase market share when you look at the trend line, both on a year-to-year comparison and on a quarter-to-quarter comparison in iSports, iGaming, and overall online. So let's try to draw a conclusion out of these strong results. A conclusion on the results. There is a consistency of growth in adjusted EBITDA. We have a page four of the presentation. We've been growing every quarter over the same quarter of the previous year, every single quarter in the last 10 years, of course, except during the COVID restrictions. so consistently looks like an appropriate word for this page number five consistency again in results we've consistently grown in margins this company started a little more than 10 years ago with 12 percent margin we have transformed this company in a 39% margin. Mix, efficiencies, you know, all sorts of levers that you can use in this type of cases. And, of course, the online also has been a key driver, not only in terms of mix, but also in terms of internal efficiencies, because the very first profitability of online was 21% back in 2017, and today is 58%. Also, when you look at the latest quarters that you can see on the graph on the right, you can see that notwithstanding the fact that we have consolidated assets with a much lower structure, lower profitability like PWO, And we've offset that. So we've been able to fully integrate these assets. This is the example of PwO, but there are others also within the business model of the group and consistently recover the profitability and bring that to the level of the group. So this was about consistency of results, which has been driven by the consistency of the drivers underlying these results. Page number six, the first driver and the most important of all, of course, is the market. The market, the online market, has been growing consistently in the last 10 years, and after COVID is a pretty stable in the mid double-digit range. At the same time, on a competitive basis, we've been increasing our market share. There have been periods where the market share has been growing faster, others where it has been growing slightly slower, but the trend line is very clear. In a mix of organic growth and M&A, we've gone from a marginal operator to the dominant to the largest operator in the market. This is also true as you see in page number seven in the latest quarters when you reduce the granularity and look at it on a month or quarterly basis, so on a smaller, on a shorter period. You can see, of course, ups and downs, glitches, especially in sports, where you also have the payout, which is impacting the market share depending on the brand and on the business model, but the trend line is also very clear. Page number 8, an update on PwO. It continues to go the direction we've mentioned in the previous quarter. Sport is not only recovered, but is above the previous levels before migration. And we're doing, we also continue to work on the iGaming. The important point is that we've been focusing on a proper balance between market share and growth and profitability. Market share has to be sustainable. We've cleaned up part of our customer base, limiting abuses, optimizing the bonuses, shutting down unprofitable bonuses campaigns. And that's why we basically doubled the companies. The brand is very healthy. has done a good journey from the migration and it's doing double the EBITDA. That's pretty much the story. When we go to the other important trend of these last couple of years, page number nine, the consolidation of the tails, this continues. It continues on an organic basis and it continues because we consolidate some of the smaller operators, but this happens also because we offer a very compelling environment for them to continue to grow as entrepreneurs more than they would do on a stand-alone basis. Last but not least, page number 10, the recap of how this all works. Now, this is all about compounding returns. We have yield of our free cash flow, which if you measure that basically from IPO to today, has been on average 8%. on top of these the company has been growing so the growth rate of these levered free cash flow has been in same period 26% CAG talking about CAG so basically you get an excess of well in excess of 30% of total returns on average CAG in that 30% sorry in that period of time How did we also use that 8%? We gave it back to our shareholders through distributions. Even more than that 8%, you can see the example of the last year. On average, we have generated 8%, but we've given back in the last year more than 10% between dividends and buybacks because we could do more buyback because of the 26% growth, which gave us incremental leverage capacity. Strong compounding returns and use of the returns to provide enhanced distributions to our shareholders. Now I'll leave the floor to Laurence for the second part of the presentation. Thank you.