Frank Ng
Analyst · Derek Soderberg with Colliers Securities. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Lasse, and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. During the second quarter, we continue to operate in an extremely challenging and uncertain operating environments arising from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The shelter-in-place orders that began in mid-March across most of the United States as well as nearly all of our markets around the globe extended for essentially the entire second quarter. This resulted in the temporary shutdown of the in-person pillar of our business strategy, which negatively affected our second quarter financial performance. Given this reality, we quickly shifted our strategic focus to the multi-platform content and interactive pillars to mitigate the impact of the pandemic of our business and to continue to serve our loyal communities while strengthening Allied Esports for the future. Overall, I'm pleased with our employee's steadfast dedication and commitment, as well as the team's ability to rapidly pivot and manage through this pandemic. We believe the strategic shift was successful for both our esports and poker businesses. Looking first at Esports beginning March 14th, we moved all of our U.S. tournament operations and production services online. As one of the few forms of competitive sports entertainment that continues to operate and produce competitive content during the pandemic, we believe the Esports industry has filled the void left by the unprecedented suspension of traditional sports. This led to a tremendous surge in both active gameplay and viewership, with Nielsen recently, reporting that 82% of global consumers played video games and loss video game content during the heights of the pandemic lockdown. Most notably since the onset of the pandemic, traditional media broadcasters and sports betting platforms have turned to esports during this time to fill the channels and platforms with competitive content, which had accelerate this awareness and acceptance of esports amount of mainstream audiences and the interest level for traditional brands engaged in esports. As an example of this, Allied Esports Saturday night's peak weight Mario Kart tournament at hyperworks esports arena, recently had a clip that was picked up by and shared by ESPN esports on Twitter and garnered nearly 0.5 million views on the platform in one day. The clip is currently the fourth most watched Mario Kart clip of all time on Twitch and Riot Team. Over the longer term, we believe that's the pandemic we accelerate the growth trajectory of the esports industry and our business. With the cancellations of in-person, World Poker Tour events around the globe due to the pandemic. We also moved our WPT events online and continued to leverage interactive pillar, including the subscription based online platform ClubWPT. Recent business highlights from the online shift include a significant increase in new subscribers on our ClubWPT platform, which I will discuss later in my remarks. Based on the success of the online production services and tournaments for Esports and WPT, we expect to continue these activities going forward. With that as a backdrop, let's shift gears and review our second quarter results. Total revenues for the quarter are 4.6 million declined from 7.3 million in the prior year period. While we generated solid growth in revenues from interactive services, this was more than offset by reduce levels of revenue from imports and experiences a multi-platform content related to the pandemic that persists for the entire second quarter. Due to the reduced level of businesses activity that resulted from the shuttering up of the in-person experiences pillar, we took significant actions to reduce our expenses and minimize the negative impact on our financial position. These actions include salary reductions across the board as well as other cost saving measures. In total, we successfully reduced our general and administrative and selling and the marketing expenses by 1.3 million this quarter versus the same period last year. Importantly, we also successfully refinance the Company's outstanding short-term debt, which significantly improved the liquidity, position and financial instability going forward. Tony Hung, our CFO will discuss this in more detail in his remarks. While it is clear that the pandemic adversely impacted our second quarter financial results, we remain confident in our ability to capitalize on the valuable positions we created in esports, which has gained in popularity as a result of the shelter-in-place orders. Additionally, WPT continues to steadily build this business and has a very promising outlook. As we have explained previously, our goal is to maximize the potential of these complimentary businesses through a model built around three strategic pillars, namely in-person experiences, multi-platform content, and interactive services. With that, let's turn to the highlights of our second quarter results, as well as an update on the previously announced strategic partnerships. Like everyone in the live entertainment and event industry, as and as noted earlier, we temporarily suspended our in-person first bullet activities during the second quarter. As a result of the hard work and dedication of our team, we placed a heightened focus on interactive services and multi-platform content to help carry us through these unprecedented times and simultaneously to strengthen the pipeline of new fans to funnel to our live events as circumstances begin to normal life. In particular, the shift to holding events online led to a significant boost to all interactive services pillars. Looking for us at the interactive pillar, in total, Allied Esports produced 78 online events in the second quarter, with 16 proprietary online events and 18 third-party productions, across our North American and European business units. We believe our emphasis on this pillar helped grow our customer base at a time when the in-person pillar of our model was not available. We have also launched a new form of monetization for all events through sports betting, and recently announced the VIE.gg CS:GO Legend Series, which is a two week program designed to provide sports betting operated with a robust pipeline of authentic competitive daily content. The program will kick off in late August in partnership with esports and gaming group and their sports betting platform VIE.gg. The Legend Series is one of our longest running and most successful original tournament brands, and we are thrilled to work with Esports Entertainment Group and their VIE.gg platform to add the wagering component to our content model that will simultaneously introduce Allied Esports to new consumers and elevate the brand even further. While the interactive services platform for the esports business continues to mature, the platform we have built to host online Esports tournaments represents an important fundamental building block. Longer term, we envision further developing the platform as an always on subscription based online service where Esports players and fans can watch, play and win with other members of the Esports community and with top Esports personalities and influencers. This online platform will be closely integrated with offline experiences to create a comprehensive and authentic Esports tournament experiences for fans. Turning to WPT, we also shifted events that were previously held in-person to the online environment. In May, WPT hosted his first mentor event online on partypoker. This event set the record for the largest WPT Main Event in 18 seasons, with 2,130 entries. The WPT Online Series Festival also features the largest WPTDeepStacks event ever was 3,554 entries, and the second most attended WPT500 event was 4,820 entries. The overall WPT online festival attracted more than 111,000 entries on partypoker. In June, the first ever WPT online poker open on the partypoker U.S. Network became the first WPT real money online gaming events to take place in the United States since the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was adopted in 2006. The events set the record for the largest prize pool in partypoker U.S. Network's history. In addition to the online events, the successful World Poker Tour interactive services strategy includes the ClubWPT, its online membership platform that offers a subscription based poker club with no purchase necessary. During the second quarter, ClubWPT launched is 100,000 clubs WPT diamond championship, which has proven to be a very popular amount of players. These qualifiers, which run from June through October, will result in a 100,000 prize pool event in November, which will constitute the largest single day tournament prize pool in club history, with the first place taking home $25,000. On June 1st, we also launched the new premium level of ClubWPT membership ClubWPT Diamond, early adoption of the new subscription level exceeded our expectations. Thanks in part to these activities, ClubWPT registration accelerated during the second quarter an increased an impressive 127% from the prior year period. This is on top off to 40% year-over-year increase in registrants we generated in the first quarter. Importantly, second quarter ClubWPT subscription revenue increased 50% over the same period last year. The next pillar of our business model is multiplatform content, where we generate content for consumption on a 24/7 basis. This could be from content that is live streamed, hosts produced or packaged, where we retain optionality and monetization of content via direct distribution and sponsorship, use of third party distributors, or other various hybrid solutions. World Poker Tour has a long track record of success and has effectively executed this business model for many years. Overall, demand for alternative sports during the crisis continues to increase interest for our poker television product. Second quarter highlights include the distribution of WPT Seasons 12 and 13 in 77%, of the syndication marketplace for linear TV in the U.S. In addition, this should put WPT in the position of selling national ad buys in 2021, potentially increasing future ad sales revenues. This allows us the opportunity to access markets that we would otherwise not have reached previously. In fact, linear household penetration in the second quarter was up 105% year-over-year, while linear viewership also grew 43% over the prior year period. In addition, WPT partners with Budweiser and Wall Central Kitchen to produce the King's Celebrity Poker challenge on ClubWPT, featuring guest celebrities including Jose Andres, Jason Alexander and Jon Hamm among others. This event aired on FS1 and OTT platforms to an audience of more than 1 million nationwide viewers. And finally, with many live events canceled, ClubWPT provided an opportunity for WPT to pivot online by leveraging the Company's assets, including live Twitch streams on WPT talent play on ClubWPT in a regular series of online tournament, which has promoted the ClubWPT product in front of thousands of weekly viewers. On the Esports side of the business, the move from the in-person pillar I discussed earlier in my remarks continues to generate significant content that we are streaming. During the second quarter, we launched multiple programming offerings including proprietary and with partners, including the production of HyperX Game Spotlight, a deep dive episodic program focused on game developers, telling the stories behind the inspiration and evolutions of their games, and Esportstudio, which brings traditional sports athletes together, to compete in the video game versus of their sport. In addition to live streaming on Twitch, Esports studio also air live on Germany's sportdeutschland.tv OTT platform. We also launched the 12th edition of our proprietary Legend Series program featuring VALORANT by Riot Games, the biggest Esports launch of the year. Importantly, the focus on content and online tournament participation dramatically increased social media interaction across Allied Esports Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts versus the same time period immediately before the closure of the HyperX Esports Arena. Now, I would like to provide an update on our strategic relationship with Simon Property and Brookfield Property Partners. We are working with these important partners to deliver esports experiences through integrated gaming venues and production facilities as select Simon and Brookfield Property. Earlier in this year, Simon's Mall of Georgia located in the Atlanta Metro area was selected as the location for an Allied Esports Venue. While the Simon project is currently halted due to the pandemic, Simon remains keen on Esports concepts and we have extended the milestone under our partnership agreement until the COVID-19 crisis has ended. We also announced a similar strategic relationship with Brookfield. We plan to expand the on mall venue concept to an existing Brookfield retail location in the Northwest Part of the United States with opening currently slated for mid 2021. Although, the pandemic has deleted our timeline with expansion to malls, we remain confident in the prospects of this business initiative, and we'll continue to update you on our progress in future calls. Before turning it over to Tony, I would also like to provide an update on our flagship HyperX Esports Arena Las Vegas at the Luxor Hotel and Casino. While we continue to make progress on the further developments of our indirect pillar, we remain committed to the live in-person segment of our business and without recovery already begun. We believe there is an exciting opportunity for long-term growth in the live in-person esports business. The facilities actually we opened on June 25th, with certain restrictions and a modified schedule for daily play and weekly tournament. We are motivated by the early demand we have seen for our weekly tournaments and continued to expand those, our live weekly in-person and online tournament offerings. As the health and safety, our guests and team members remain our top priority. HyperX Esports Arena has implemented extensive sanitization protocols throughout the venue. Furthermore, reduced operating hours and forced physical distancing remain in effect, lowering customer capacity by approximately 35% of pre-pandemic level. Food and beverage service is also limited. That said, we are seeing encouraging demand for our in arena events thus far and have earned the trust of our customers to provide a safe place to play with all enhance safety and sanitization protocol. Looking forward we continue to focus on online events and production services, as the recovery of live in-person events carries on. With that I would like to turn the call over to Tony Hung, our CFO for more detailed updates, and on our second quarter financial results. Hey, Tony?