Carsten Koerl
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Your line is open
Thank you, Christin and thank you all for joining us today and welcome to Sportradar’s Q3 earnings call. We are pleased to report a very strong quarter with strong revenue growth as well as an expansion of profitability and cash conversion, showcasing our sustainability scale and operating leverage of our business model. Now, I am touching on the operational goals. We are proud of these results. And we remain focused on our core operational objectives, expanding our high margin rest of the book business based on our up-sell and cross-sell strategy to move customers up the value chain; second, leveraging our significant investment into people, technology and weak relationships in the U.S. market, that is to say we expect to grow our revenue base and underlying market growth, which is further accelerating by the growth share in in-play betting; number three, drive efficiency across the organization by leveraging our global footprint, streamlining processes and optimizing our resources; and last one, continue to make investments into strengthening our market position and expanding our addressable markets. The execution against these objectives has resulted in solid operational performance and financial results through the first 9 months of this year’s was exceeded our expectations. For our third quarter, we delivered strong year-over-year revenue growth of 31%. We delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20% this quarter compared to 15% in the third quarter last year and 16% in the second quarter 2022, 400 basis percentage points uplift. Let me remind you that these strong results have been achieved beside significant adverse market conditions in some of the regions that we serve as well as the potential of global recessions. We further managed to generate strong operational cash flow with a conversion rate of 93%. Why this cash conversion has been favorable impacted by foreign exchange rates this quarter, we continue to generate cash to invest into organic and inorganic growth opportunities. This remains one of our business priorities and has enabled us to prepay $200 million of our bank debts this quarter. Our revenue growth was predominantly driven by rest of the world betting business where we continue to expand our business with existing customers. This is reflective in our 117% net retention rate this quarter compared to the same period last year, strongly driven by our ability to move customers up the value chain. Managed betting service is our highest value service in the data value chain grew 84% compared to last year attributed to cross-selling new products into existing customer base. Our advertising business, which is relatively new product in our portfolio, grew by 62% versus last year. During the quarter, our managed trading service generated an annualized betting turnover of €19 billion run-rate. To put this into perspective, this compares to approximately £11 billion in stakes that FanDuel accepted in the first 6 months of 2022, the second strong growth contributor in our U.S. business, which reached profitability in the third quarter 2022 for the first time ever. Our CFO will go into more details, but I am very excited to report the first positive adjusted EBITDA margin of 11% for our U.S. business segment in this quarter, the first time since we became a public company. Based on the continuous growth in the U.S. betting, the number of states will have regulated betting as well as the good adoption of in-play betting, we see that our early investment into people, product, technology and sport rights are paying off. The positive adjusted EBITDA results further demonstrate that Sportradar business model of generating profits in growing markets because of operational leverage and increasing share of in-play betting also works very well for the U.S. marketplace. Revenue in the whole U.S. segment grew by 61% compared to last year’s quarter. This remains largely a result of the growth of the underlying betting volume as we are participating in the NGR of our customers. However, when we look at the rest of the world business, we see the biggest growth driver for Sportradar’s revenue is in-play betting. More than 90% of our rest of the world revenues are driven by in-play, we believe we can see similar success in the U.S. with this segment. The U.S. market is still in a very early inning of the in-play betting and the real time shares of GGR between 15% and 35% depending on the sport compared to an in-play share of 80% in the European markets. With the development of live betting products for U.S. sports and the growing customer acceptance, we strongly believe that the in-play betting will become the biggest future growth driver for the U.S. betting market and Sportradar’s revenues in the United States. Continuing with the U.S., I want to highlight a few of our successes and recent developments. Last month, we signed a landmark deal with our partners at FanDuel, an early extension of our existing relationships as the preferred data and supplier throughout the 2030-2031 NBA season. The early extension of this is a testimony of how long-term league deals provide us with the ability to expand the relationship with our customers and move them from a pure content distributor to an embedded technology provider. Under the new contract, we will work closely together with FanDuel to develop products leveraging the NBA state-of-the-art player tracking technology to create new opportunities for same game parlays and in-play betting highlighting Sportradar’s strength in live betting. We will also provide our live channel trading and content distribution platform providing video streaming 8 seconds faster than a TV broadcast. This broadening our relationship with FanDuel fully aligns with our U.S. strategy to leverage our long-term league relationships to support our key U.S. customers with their product development and creating exciting user experiences. Another innovative relationship we announced is tennis data innovations. We expand the distribution of ATP Tour official data to betting operators. The partnership is creating new secondary feed directly from the umpire chair to provide the fastest, most reliable and most accurate data in in-play betting markets and enhanced fan experience. We also announced our largest rest of the world paid social advertising deal with Kindred, our large international online gaming operator. Kindred will use Sportradar’s AI and machine learning technology to engage more efficiently with sport fans and betters across the major platforms of Facebook and Instagram. Last, we are pleased to mention that we have won the American Gambling award for Data Supplier of the Year. This award is presented by Gambling.com and recognizes excellence in data service delivery, a true statement to the service we provide to our customers and the successful year we had so far in 2022. The American Gambling Awards are highly competitive and we are excited to receive our exclusive Golden Eagle trophy. On the previous earning call, we mentioned the reorganization of our management team. From January 2023 onwards, Sportradar will globally organize content creation and acquisition, product development and commercial execution while retaining a dedicated go-to-market approach for the United States. This new structure will lead to a streamlined organization allowing a more efficient process, faster decision-making and the ability to serve our global customers even more efficiently. Finally, after having spent the better part of October meeting with investors and analysts, I want to address a key concern many of you, the possibility – have told us the possibility of a recession and the impact on Sportradar. To address that, I would like to spend a few minutes on Sportradar’s growth model, which is based on four levers. Number one, Sportradar serves a global betting market that is expected to grow 11% annually throughout 2027. Historically, the global betting markets have grown throughout all crisises with the only exception being in 2020, when due to the pandemic, a large number of sports competition were suspended. Second, Sportradar consistently managed to grow almost 3x faster than the underlying market due to our ability to up and cross-sell customers, moving them higher up the value chain and expanding into new regulated markets, our model enabling us to grow 6% in 2020, despite the underlying betting market contracting by around about 11%. Number three, based on the growing revenues, we can expand our margin by leveraging significant scale in our business model with a streamlined organization for global content acquisition, global product development and global technology and infrastructure. And lastly, our profitability generates significant growing cash flow that we invest into our future, expanding our product portfolio, geographical reach and increasing our addressable markets. We have built this model over the last 20 years and while the question about impacting of a potential recession looms in investor minds, it is also on top of the mind of Sportradar’s management team. I want to leave you with some of the history as you think about our Q4 and beyond despite various economic recessions in the past, including the pandemic events. Since inspection, this company, Sportradar has always had a positive growth year-over-year further despite the turbulent market under economic conditions we exceed our expectations for the first three quarters of this year. Because of this foundation and our continued innovation as a market leader, we believe there are many reasons to be optimistic about our future for continued profitable growth. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Ulrich Harmuth, our Interim CFO. Ulri, has been working very closely with me at Sportradar over the last 10 years. Ulri was previously responsible for corporate development and M&A and was instrumental in driving all aspects of our IPO last September. Ulri has a deep understanding of the company and its financials and I have no doubt that he will lead the financial organization to achieve greater success in the months to come. Over to you, Ulri.