Hilbert Group AB (publ)

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to report that the first quarter has been a period of significant progress for HILDE Group. In fact, it was the best quarter yet since inception, income-wise, with big improvements quarter on quarter and year on year. The bear market is now behind us and we are extremely excited about the Group's prospects in 2024 and beyond. It is my hope that this presentation will provide you with a good understanding of that optimism and where the company is heading business-wise. The agenda is as follows. We will start by going through some of the financial highlights from the quarter. After that, we will talk about the prospects for asset management. Then we will explain why we are convinced that the valuation of Coin360 alone will exceed the current market cap of Hewlett Group come this autumn. Lastly, we will give you our outlook on the digital asset market environment and our business as a whole, recapping some of the major points we want to bring home. Financials and headline numbers. What you see here is an excerpt from the condensed consolidated statement of income for Q1 2024 and Q4 2023 with year-on-year comparisons together with a breakdown of the revenue streams. These can be found on page 18 and page 35 in the quarterly report respectively. In order for you to orient yourself a bit easier, I will spend a bit explaining what these numbers are and what comprises our revenue. you can see on the top line here that the revenue doubled year on year and it increased with almost 60 percent quarter on quarter but what does revenue mean the bottom of the page you see a breakdown of the revenue streams these are three first of all you have the fund management fees which is income from managing external client money in our funds and separately managed accounts. This includes both a fixed management fee and a variable performance fee. We also have advertising income. These are basically fees that we charge clients for advertising on the Coin360 website. And then we have sales of cryptocurrency, which is really turnover of crypto traded in our prop portfolio. So essentially volume traded, and this is not directly related to income. So effectively, we as a company, we care only about two of these three streams. We care about fund management income and advertising income. The early founding investors were enticed with a so-called 110 fee structure, which means a fixed 1% management fee per annum, and 10% performance fee. So for example, if we have a client investing 100 million SEK with us and we generate a return of 10% for that client, then we will charge a fixed 1 million SEK, that's the management fee, and then we will charge A 10% fee of the performance. The performance in this case since the return was 10% is 10 million. We will charge 10% of that which is 1 million. So in total we will charge a fee of 2 million for this client. However, those were the early investors, the founding investors in our fund products. Investors entering now are predominantly entering at the 220 level, which is double the fee level the early investors enjoyed. If we then move back up here to these numbers, the first thing to note is, if we look at the bottom line, is that our loss is greatly reduced quarter on quarter with almost 15 million. This is mainly due to the increased income, but also due to foreign exchange effects on the Euro denominated convertible bond and receivables from group companies denominated in dollars. Second thing to note is that if we go back to the fund management fees again, is that the income from fund management in the first quarter of 2024 is 155% of the entire income for the full year in 2023. And this represents a 300% increase quarter on quarter. This is mainly due to two factors. a the fact that somewhere in the middle of q1 2024 we were again at a stage where we received performance fees across fund products and b we have more assets under management now than the end of last year third thing to note is that advertising income in q1 2024 for coin360 came in at 40 of the full year income in 2023 and that represents a 153% increase versus the fourth quarter in 2024. This is a sign that markets have recovered and we are seeing an increasing willingness now to spend on advertising versus the very challenging bear market that's persisted almost for two years. If one wants to bootstrap some kind of burn rate from this, one could have a look at other external expenses, personal expenses, and other operating income and expenses. If one adds those up, that totals to about 11 million SEK over the quarter, or about $330,000 per month. Now, that burn number is overstated in that other external expenses and personal expenses include one-off costs related to setting up fund structures, concessions to strategically important investors, and commission costs, the latter of which will increase when the fund income increases. Something that is not visible in this quarter is the phasing out of our most expensive service provider by far, Aspia, who is doing the accounting. Their accounting service has costed us more than $500,000 per annum. And this quarter, as a first step in that cost reduction, we brought the parent accounting in-house and will bring the consolidation in-house in the second quarter. And we estimate that this, together with additional streamlining of service providers, will take us down to a burn of around $250,000 per month by Q3. As has been mentioned before, we have a large bench of very experienced people with irrelevant backgrounds, and this costs money. A credible bench is required to attract institutional investors. Poor guys in a room does not hack it anymore. Most of us have been in traditional asset management for most of our working life. Our goal is to manage billions of dollars, and to get there, we need a solid bench of experienced people and we are prepared to pay for that during the build-up phase. We are convinced we're on the right track, as we have been adding a large number of institutional investors compared to most of our competitors. With the investor pipeline and commitments we have in place, we estimate to be break-even on management fees alone by the end of 2024. There will of course also be performance fee income contributing over time, but being breakeven by management fees alone means the company is in a very comfortable position of being self-sustainable even when there is no performance, which inevitably will happen from time to time. Now moving to asset management. To begin, a word on Q1 2024 strategy performances. As can be seen in this slide, all three fund products, so V1, V30 and V100, had strong first quarter performances as the overall crypto market has turned positive. This, as was mentioned before, has now put our funds above high watermark, which is great for Hilbert's income, as almost all our investors across all products are now paying performance fees again. Additionally, we now have two strategies live on Coinbase SMA, BTC Momentum and ETH Momentum strategies. To remind you, Hilbert is one of the first approved and activated managers on Coinbase SMA platform. We are pleased with the Q1 performances of these two single asset strategies, both of which outperform the underlying spot assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum, by 17% and 6%, respectively. There are several exciting developments on the business front. First, a quick update on client and assets under management acquisition. As of end of Q1, Hilbert Capital had 15 institutions as investors and several more in the pipeline for the rest of 2024. Some have already approved investment and others are still completing the due diligence process. The capital to be allocated by the investors in the DD pipeline, as indicated to us by these clients, is more than three times larger than at the same time last year. Again, a proof of the changing environment. Hilbert has been selected as partner by two of the leading SMA platforms in the space, Coinbase and 3iQ. Hilbert was selected out of 100 hedge funds, that both these institutions vetted in their due diligence process. We received the first allocation from 3iq in May 2024, while Coinbase SMA is expected to launch in short order, though a definite date is not announced yet. And I would like to emphasize that both of these platforms are one year or have been so far one year delayed. This is as it is in asset management, in the market, there are legal considerations and so on. But now 3iq has launched and Coinbase will launch very soon. So despite the delays in launch, both these partnerships have meaningfully contributed to strengthening Hilbert's brand. We have especially seen material advantages due to the Coinbase endorsement in the ongoing due diligence process of other large institutional investors, US and otherwise. We have also benefited from other potential investor introductions by both Coinbase as well as 3iq. On the team front, we hired Banali Biswal as the new CIO for Hilbert Capital. Banali was at Goldman Sachs in London for 14 years as managing director, running its European high yield credit trading business. For the last three years, Banali was chief investment officer of Atitlan, the quantitative multi-manager crypto hedge fund. Banali brings a wealth of experience across TradFi and digital assets. She is a thought leader in the digital asset industry and her insights and connectivity will further elevate Hilbert's core quantitative training approach and will enhance our ability to manage scalable investment solutions for our institutional client base. I am now convinced that we have a, if not the strongest, hedge fund team in the industry. And while we have the right set of people, we also have a very complete menu of investment solutions for investors in the space as listed on the slide. Recently, we have seen a lot of investor interest in the new momentum strategies since it can be used to stack Bitcoin or to stack Ethereum. Finally, we also have several strategic initiatives with respect to the asset management business. We're looking at the number of potential M&A deals and we are working on ways to leverage decentralized finance and stablecoins as a way to raise more AUM for our products. Let's move over to Coin360. So what is Coin360 and why do we believe that its valuation will exceed the current market cap of Hilbert Group by this autumn? In short, Coin360 is an analytics website that currently shows price aggregation, historical data and exchange statistics, all with a visual mindset and all focused on crypto. We use a lot of tools and analytics in our trading on the asset management side, and the idea is to provide these in simplified format to the broad retail base, as well as more sophisticated tools for institutions. Typically, you have to switch between 10 sites or more to get all the info you want. The overall objective for Coin360 is to provide a one-stop shop. Now, Coin360 has remained profitable and self-funded throughout the crypto winter due to its advertising income. But there is a much more profitable revenue stream to be added. Also, recently we have been receiving bids for the site. That never happened in the past two years and it is a sign that the market has recovered. Let's just dive into some of the numbers and the plan for Coin360. start with the kpis in the past quarter coin360 had 28 million page views comprising 7.7 million sessions split across 4.2 million visits where of 1.6 million in april alone we have 15 000 verified users that have registered in the past two months Those are big numbers by any account. The vast majority of websites do not even come close to that kind of traffic. As an example, Misari, which is a high quality crypto analytics competitor, they have 600k visits per month compared to Coin360's 1.6 million. Misari raised capital at a 300 million dollar valuation in the midst of the bear market in the autumn of 2022. Coin360 is currently weaker on content, which we are going to remedy with a completely revamped site by October this year. We will convert the large traffic numbers we have into paying subscribers. Historically, we have seen that user numbers and visits to the website correlates quite strongly with crypto markets. business decreased during bear markets and increased during bull markets. In that sense, the trend has just turned around and is now turning bullish. Looking at the marketing channels, a lot of it is direct traffic, 77%. What this means is that we have a loyal following that are typing in the domain name directly. 19% is organic search, which we are beginning to increase due to the SEO work that has been done on the site. Organic search means that new visitors are finding Coin360 by searching on keywords associated with the site. There is a lot also to be done on the social media front, as you can see, at a low percentage. We have a good geographical spread, with many of the top countries being rich countries in quotes, where users easily can pay $20 a month for subscriptions. UK and France are the smallest countries on that top list, population-wise, at about 70 million each. There is a lot of scope for Coin360 growth in all of those countries. As was mentioned, we will add features to become a one-stop shop for crypto analytics. We have already prototyped a broad set of tools to be added. We'll also enable the community as content creators. That will enable rapid development of new tools, which will be ranked and moderated by the community itself. Artificial intelligence has changed everything for many, not only people in crypto, and currently most almost all of the images and a lot of the content is ai generated and we are working on bringing in native ai functionality into the site such as data analysis by prompting we will also introduce a tiered subscription layer with let's say 10 to 20 dollars a month for retail and 100 plus for institutions in order to achieve this and also on the timeline running up to October. We are working in close partnership with a number of expert service providers. The expertise ranges from content generation, community building, Web3 crypto product development and SEO. We're also looking at the possibility of issuing a token for the Coin360 ecosystem. Content generators will then be incentivized by earning this token that will be tradable on crypto exchanges with a market capitalization. The new version of Coin360 will be completed by October this year. We are going to wrap this up by giving our outlook and a recap. The Hilbert brand is strong in asset management. It is strong because we are investable. And what does it mean to be investable? It means having the right people with the right experience, the right internal processes and risk management, the right operational setup and the right corporate governance. For institutional investors, it's all about safety and transparency, much more so than having the best returns. Investors need to feel safe placing their capital with us. It is a testament to our quality as an asset manager that a large number of institutions invested in our products during a very tough time in the market, when almost every other asset manager were losing investors. We are now coming out of that tough period with a very solid investor base. Another sign that the environment is changing is that we are getting more investors reaching out to us as opposed to the other way around. There are investors we have not heard of now contacting us wanting to know more about our investment solutions. These investors have a good geographical spread during the past two years. We have been particularly active in the US and Europe, but now we're also getting requests from Asia, South Africa, Middle East and so on. We are ramping up Coin360, we have stellar traffic numbers and a strong and loyal community of users that can be monetized, and we are on a tight schedule. There are new revenue streams to be implemented, new functionality to be built by October this year, and we have expert service providers helping us with all this. Perhaps the most important point to make, the one that will have the most impact on the overall state of crypto, is the regulatory tailwinds. In the EU, we have a comprehensive framework, MICA, markets in crypto assets, that will be rolled out almost in full by the end of this year. More importantly is the development that we are seeing in the US at the moment. In January, the SEC reluctantly approved the spot Bitcoin ETF, and at the time, no one thought they would approve a spot Ethereum ETF anytime soon. And then last week it happened. The US House also strongly voted in favor of the FIT21 Bill, Financial Innovation and Technology Bill. This bill sets the foundation for a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets in the US, as well as setting clear boundaries between the SEC's and the CFTC's jurisdictions as far as crypto markets go. The FIT21 is a bill that has been pushed by Republicans but also now has strong support among Democrats. Trump has gone out and said that he will fully support innovation in crypto and want the US to be a leader in that industry as opposed to chasing entrepreneurs abroad. There has been a complete shift in very little time. The convergence of traditional assets and crypto assets are here. What has happened with BlackRock's $20 billion ETF and others is that more and more institutions are looking to allocate to crypto assets and hedge fund products such as ours. We are seeing this happening right now.