Better Collective A/S

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our Q2 webcast. My name is Mikkel Munk-Jakobsgaard, and I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations Group Strategy and Corporate Communications here at Better Collective. And as always, I'm joined by our co-founder and CEO, Jesper Søgaard, and CFO, Flemming Pedersen, who will help me walk you through our Q2 performance. Please follow me to the next slide. We ask you to pay attention to this slide where we display our disclaimer regarding any forward-looking statements in today's webcast. Please turn to the next slide. Here you see today's agenda. Jesper will start by taking you through the highlights of Q2. Hereafter, Flemming will take you through the financial performance before handing the work back to Jesper for a business review. And then we, of course, end the call with a Q&A session. Let's get going. Please turn to the next page as I hand over the work to Jesper.

Thanks a lot, Emil. I want to start out by expressing my gratitude to the entire Better Collective group. Your relentless efforts play a vital role in our growth and the successes we have celebrated are testaments to your hard work. Specifically for this quarter, our group has come together to deliver great results in a time with changing market conditions in the search landscape. We've managed to navigate big changes and come out on top with continued strong performance in our global media partnership business, as well as improved rankings from our owned and operated sports media network and increasing interest in our paid media business. I'm very proud of our team. Our existing business is back to organic growth despite the exceptional performance during the first half of 2023 and the addition of significant new revenue growth from two major acquisitions. On the back of that, we delivered a considerable increase in recurring revenue stemming from both organic and acquired growth while continuing our North American transition to revenue share. The three major acquisitions of PlayMaker Capital, PlayMaker HQ, and Azots have substantially enriched our group and provided us with a much stronger foundation for the future. Despite the delay in performance from PlayMaker HQ, something I'll come back to, we have negotiated a much better deal, generated a fast turnaround, and have yet to harvest all the synergies. Overall, a deal that makes me very pleased as a large shareholder myself. While making large strategic acquisitions and investing in our business, we have still maintained a low debt ratio and improved our capital reserves, remaining a robust financial position with a significant level of preparedness compared to the start of the year. Furthermore, we have made significant investments in establishing our in-house ad tech platform advantage and secured proof of concept and first operational success along with AI technology investments, while also establishing a commercial organization focusing on non-endemic sales. We continue our projected path and will now delve into these developments in greater detail. Please turn to the next page where Flemming will dive into the financials.

Thank you, Jesper, and good morning all. Please follow me to the next slide where we'll dive deeper into the group's financial performance during Q2. During the second quarter, we saw a strong revenue growth development of 27%, with organic growth of 5%. This organic growth came on top of exceptional growth last year, where we as a reminder saw 29% organic growth. In the light of this, we really believe that the performance is highly satisfactory. The expected flat development in EBITDA is the result of last year's exceptional performance as well as the recent acquisitions of PlayMaker Capital and PlayMaker HQ that have only limited contribution to the Q2 earnings and are of course margin dilutive in percentages. We can see that the acquisitions are performing well now and we expect to have the best yet to come. As Jesper mentioned, we have for some time been investing in new technologies such as Advantage, both tech and commercial, and AI. Just noting that, as usual, we are taking the conservative approach by charging all of these costs to the P&L with no capitalization. Please follow me to the next slide. Our recurring revenue grew by 26% to 62 million euros, which was driven by good growth in recurring revenue share income, as well as advertising revenue from Playmaker Capital. Recurring revenue growth is a key metric for us, and as it signals, another quarter with revenue and earnings of higher quality. Recurring revenue made up 62% of total group revenue. Really an impressive performance for Better Collective's sustainable future growth. Please follow me to the next slide. As announced with the Q1 report, we lifted our 2024 financial targets following the ASOT acquisition in the beginning of Q2. Recent acquisitions like Playmaker Capital, ASOT, and Playmaker HQ have significantly enriched our group's foundation, and while doing this, I am pleased to note that we have still managed to maintain a debt ratio below our guidance, currently sitting at two times net debt to EBITDA. Furthermore, after the close of Q2, we re-established our three-year financing agreement, a club bank deal with a total committed facility of €319 million, and adding a new €100 million accordion option. Please turn to the next page as I hand back the word to Jesper for our Q2 business update.