Hilbert Group AB (publ)

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. So although the second quarter was a very bad quarter for crypto markets, it's not an overstatement to say that the work we did in the second quarter laid the foundation for what the firm is going through currently. A phase that is absolutely transformational for Hilbert and I will elaborate on exactly what that means in a bit. It is my hope that this presentation will extreme excitement for the future and where the company is heading. The agenda is as follows. First, I will talk about the recently announced Xapo partnership in particular and asset management in general. I will also update you on the current status of Coinbase SMA. Thereafter, I will address the M&A opportunities we see in the near term After that, I will talk about the current status of Coin360, the crypto analytics platform, and then I will finish with the financial highlights of quarter two, followed by an outlook and a recap of the most salient points in this presentation. All in all, there are five slides, one for each item on this agenda. Let me start this slide by pointing out that the specific performance of Hilbert funds during the second quarter will be presented under financial highlights later in this presentation. Now, a couple of days ago, we entered into a partnership with Sappo Bank, where Hilbert Capital will be the investment manager for a Bitcoin denominated fund with initial investment capital in excess of $200 million. I want to emphasize that this is one of the largest, if not the largest, crypto hedge fund launch in history and you will struggle to find larger launches even in the world of traditional finance. Xapo Bank is a global leading crypto bank that is highly regarded and very well run. Testament to this is that Sapo Bank earlier this month secured a UK banking license, something that is very difficult to achieve unless the operation is of a very high quality, in particular if you are a crypto related company. The launch of the new fund will make Hilbert Capital one of the largest digital asset managers in the world and we see many synergies and have many ideas and look forward to working with SAP on product development and other business development related activities in the years to come. Hilbert is now firmly on track to surpass the earlier stated target of $300 million of assets under management by the end of 2024. A few words on Bitcoin denominated funds. This is a product class for which there is currently strong demand and easy to understand use case. There are many institutions, family offices and individuals that currently sit on a big balance sheet of Bitcoins. And these parties are looking for ways to earn an extra yield on that balance sheet. In simple terms, it means they want to increase their pile of Bitcoins. One way to achieve this is to turn to Bitcoin denominated hedge funds. The majority of crypto money is stored in Bitcoin and the bulk of institutional crypto holdings consists of Bitcoin. Hilbert has invested 50 million dollars so far in the business since inception. This has gone to high quality staff building a high level legal and operational infrastructure as well as being a Nasdaq listed company. We have pursued what we call a big band strategy. The reason for this is, and we have seen this many times in our previous careers in traditional finance, is that if you want to attract big institutional tickets, you need to have an experienced broad based team of high quality and also high quality infrastructure. It cannot be done the other way around where one will receive big tickets whilst developing the quality of the organization. Four guys in a room and a Bloomberg terminal does not hack it anymore. These are high barriers to entry and makes it difficult for emerging managers because it is very costly to achieve. Our multi-year investment in our big bench strategy is now beginning to pay off and we feel confident that our strategy is the right one. Our organization is ready to scale and manage substantially more AOM without having to increase headcount. Our ambition is to be a highly profitable asset manager in 2025 and to be a multi-billion dollar manager by 2026. In terms of Coinbase, they are finalizing the regulatory slash legal setup with anticipation of making Coinbase SMA fully available to its global client base in Q4 2024, i.e. both onshore and offshore. We have been working closely with Coinbase for almost two years during which time they have promoted Hilbert in various contexts and also made a number of very important introductions. Delays happen and we have no doubt that Coinbase SMA will be a big source of assets under management for Hilbert Strategies once Coinbase goes global. We work closely with our partners and next up is a promotional event in Singapore during the Token 2049 conference. This conference is the world's largest crypto event and in a couple of weeks time, Hilbert will co-host a dinner and presentation together with Sappo and Coinbase and present the new Bitcoin hedge fund to a curated group of 15 Asian institutions. This is just the start and there will be many such events going forward. It has been mentioned before, but we have in the past, let's say 12 months, vetted a relatively large number of interesting M&A opportunities. As always, it's always a matter of timing. It's a matter of also having a decent Hilbert stock price But we sort of crystallized down the requirements to a few, let's say, headline necessities. And so, first of all, the company should have complementary scalable strategies. It's very important that the strategies can scale. If they cannot, you can't really build a big business out of it. should also be complementary so the strategy should be very different or significantly different from the strategies that we run and they should also have a decent amount of AUM let's say the order of magnitude a hundred million dollars we have an advantage we're coming out of out of a very tough period a lot of asset managers have shutdown in digital asset space and we've come out where we have a good bench we have a good reputation we have a decent size we have the right infrastructural setup we are a trusted public company and we also have solid distribution capacity so there are many funds who are lacking in one or more of these that's typically the case when you're smaller and hence it's also attractive for some other companies to be part of a bigger company and then have access to all these functions we will only consider deals that are so-called accretive to shareholders What it means is that the earnings per share of the combined company will be higher than before the deal was done. And in terms of multiples it means that for example that the PE ratio of Hilbert is higher than the PE ratio of the company that we acquire. And as a final point here, I would like to mention that I would say it's likely that we will do at least one of these M&A deals this side of the year. So Coin360 is an analytic site that is majority owned by Hilbert Group, 60%. It's currently showing prices, data on exchanges, and giving some top lists on VPNs and basic stuff. It has a lot of traffic. It's always had decent amount of traffic by any standards, but is still underdeveloped. So the big project that we've been working on for the past nine, 10 months or so is to make a complete revamp of the website and it's on track for October 2024 launch. The basic idea already from the beginning was that we will take a lot of the analytical tools that we have on the asset management side. This could be portfolio analysis tools or very simple tools of understanding leverage, how do you combine different crypto assets and how would it look in terms of drawdown profile what would be the risk etc etc and adapt all those tools in a retail format but also offer more sophisticated tools and we've done that now and the complete revamp will start off with a whole range of new tools there will be fully customizable dashboards and a lot of funky stuff and we are very avid users of a lot of our competitors tools. So we think we have a very good view of what the average user would like to see. And that's what we built. In terms of the KPIs, right, year to date, we've had 40 million page views. We had 1.6 million visits in June, increasing to 2.0 million visits in July. Part of this is that we started the marketing push, and that's something we're going to work harder and harder on as we get closer to the launch and another big project that we have planned for the website later this year, even later than October. The site has 1.5 million users, unique users currently. We've registered users in the past five months and we now have 16,000 registered users and 21,500 newsletter subscribers. if we look at the top countries by user share something interesting at the bottom of this table here you can see Vietnam you can see Australia and you can see the big green numbers and those big increases are a result of a very recent marketing push where we are reaching out to influencers in those countries but also enabling and this seems to be very popular enabling every price not only to be in dollar but also in the local currency um ai inevitably is gonna play a big part an ever bigger part of this this platform so since inception it's been the only revenue stream on coin360 has been advertising so we have various companies who would like to advertise because we have a big user base and that has been a decent income but we can scale this up several orders of magnitude by now adding a lot of content so that a subscription model makes sense we've seen this in many of our competitors some of them have much a smaller user base but they have more content and they have been attracting you know valuations 200 300 400 million dollars and so on and we're convinced we can reach those kind of valuations and that gap that content that functionality gap is what we've closed in the new revamp of coin360 It's very simple the way one should think about the subscription model. So right now we have 1.5 million users. We have contracted with two marketing firms, or part of what they do is marketing. That's Stockholm-based 4Plus Ventures and Hong Kong-based Singer Labs. and we've done a thorough market analysis and think it's very reasonable that we should be able to attract six million users by 2025. In fact even in the earlier more primitive days during the bull market we were much closer to six million than we are today but now we have the content and we have a real marketing machinery going so that a very reasonable target next year is six million users if you now assume again a very reasonable one percent conversion i.e meaning that out of those six million users one percent will actually convert and become subscribers and we have an average 15 dollar price monthly for their subscription so one percent of six million that's sixty thousand sixty thousand times fifteen dollars that's nine hundred thousand in gross monthly revenue from subscriptions alone and there are different models you can have here and we are actually going to have a three tiered subscription meaning that you have a basic you have a pro and then you have what most people call an enterprise version and there's different strategies some of these let's say competitors they are very sophisticated they have a small number of subscribers but they charge a lot and there are others on the other side of the spectrum that have very basic tools they have a lot of subscribers but they charge a little and we've opted for a model since it's analytics and data where we can provide basically across the range so simpler tools for retail and then all across to very sophisticated tools that actually could be used by other hedge funds um and yeah so there will be more news coming um later on this year about Coin360 and the next stop is of course the launch in October 2024. The second quarter was a very difficult quarter in the market. There was a sell-off across the board. It was the very opposite to the first quarter which was the best quarter inception to date for Hilbert Funds. it was particularly let's say damaging for the assets that we are trading so we like assets that have high volatility and low correlation we call these ripe coins and this cohort of coins got sold off basically much more than the standard or big market cappers so typically ripe coins are mid cap, mid market cap or small market cap. So for example, Bitcoin sold off 12% in the second quarter, whereas the average RIPE coin sold off 50%. So in terms of the gross returns, Hilbert V1 down 6%, Hilbert V30 down 15.9% and Hilbert V100 down 37.5%. and these are ordered in risk level as you see them here and what that meant in terms of income is that there was zero performance fee produced in the second quarter and that's why you will see a rather big difference quarter on quarter and also if you compare the second quarter with the full year 2023 so if we go down in the table here which you will find In the quarterly report we have fund management fees and that's how it should be read right so this is management fee plus performance fee but as I said in the second quarter there was no performance fee so it's actually the fees from fund management it's not fund management fees and if we look at that top line and compare it to the full year 2023 it actually works out to 27 percent of the full year result and in a quarter that that's okay right that's sort of on par but we have more assets now and it was a really bad month but it's it's good to see the progression so even if it was very bad month we're still on an annualized basis at par with what happened last year but the interesting comparison is if you compare this income in the second quarter versus the income in the first quarter you see that this it's just one sixth so roughly 16 percent of what we earned and that difference that big difference is made up by performance fees being paid in the first quarter Advertising income to some extent is correlated with the crypto market as well because when crypto is going well there are more users on the website and advertisers are more willing to spend money on advertising but we can see here that basically the advertising income was half in the second quarter compared to what it was in the first quarter and if you look at this compared to the full year 2023 this is roughly 20% of the full year result in 2023. There's also been a big difference in revenue it's the label we use here is sale of cryptocurrency but it's actually both buying and selling and there's been a big let's say turnover or revenue ramp up if you compare this second quarter with the earlier quarters we're talking about several hundred percent and the reason for that is that we're actually moving towards a more high frequency trading which is beneficial a more high frequency trading in our proprietary portfolio basically in terms of income it is what it is and we expect and we've seen this many times before that the ripe coins they are the most elastic coins they move around the most but they also have big moves upwards once the market recovers and of course the reason we trade them is that we've calibrated the model so that across the cycle we are confident that that's the right coin selection. Okay so an outlook and recap. So first of all we're very excited about our partnership with Sappo Bank. we will launch the Bitcoin denominated hedge fund together with them in September, and it will have an initial capital in excess of 200 million. And as was mentioned, this is one of the largest crypto hedge fund launches in history. These partnerships are very important to us. Xapo Bank, Coinbase, 3iQ, And we're now reached a position where we can have sizable and mutually beneficial partnerships with big blue chip institutions. Coin360, major upgrade on track for October 2024. It's all about bringing more functionality. We already have the user base and We are currently doing a hard marketing push to even get to a bigger monthly user number. And we are convinced that if we can do that, then Coin360 will command the kind of valuations that we have seen of some of our pairs. and it will also generate a meaningful income, as was talked about earlier in this presentation, on a monthly basis, based on subscriptions alone. In terms of M&A opportunities, as always, it's a matter of timing, it's a matter of where the Hilvers stock price is, but we've vetted a large number of candidates over the past year, and we have a few now that fits the bill. And I would say it's somewhat likely that you will see some activity on the M&A front this side of the year. Thank you for listening.