Catena Media, Q2 2025, Summary

Good morning, good evening everyone. Welcome to Katten Media's Q2 interim report. I am Manuel StahN and today I'm joined by our Chief Financial Officer Mike Gero. Today we will be speaking to our Q2 interim report, related financials and our strategy and outlook going forward. Q2 overview. We will start today's presentation with a high-level summary of the most important developments in the quarter. Revenue in the second quarter was broadly stable for the third consecutive quarter at 9.6 million euros, a 2% decline from Q1 and 25% decline year-on-year. Adjusted for the weaker US dollar, our primary invoicing currency, revenue increased by 6% from Q1. The adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 14% in Q2. During the quarter, we continued to focus on operational efficiency, which resulted in a year-on-year cost decrease of 33%, including headcount reduction of 25% in May, which is estimated to generate annual cost savings of €4.5-5 million, and tax stack consolidation, including the migration from Google to Microsoft Stack, which is estimated to reduce annual cost by €0.8 million. The focus on revenue diversification continued as we have seen growth in performance marketing channels like paid media, CRM and sub-affiliation. The senior bond was repaid in June. The group is now in a net cash position excluding the hybrid capital security. Moving on to the financial summary. Q2 revenue from continuing operations was €9.6 million, representing a 25% year-on-year decline and a 2% quarter-on-quarter decline. Adjusted for FX, quarter-on-quarter revenue was up 6%. This represents our strongest quarter-on-quarter performance for Q2 for several years. Adjusted EBIT was €1.4 million, up 9 percentage points from the same period previous year. This was an encouraging step up, driven by the operational changes implemented in recent quarters. North America contributed 90% of the group revenue, marginally up from 88% the previous year. From segment perspective, sports decreased 37% to €1.7 million, while the pool performance remains the chief reason. Tough yearly comparables, including market launches and media partnerships, also play a significant role in the yearly decline. North American casino revenue decreased 21% year-on-year, however recorded a quarter-on-quarter increase of 3%, which adjusted for FX fluctuation was 12% quarter-on-quarter growth. Despite seasonality typically causing Q2 to be a weaker quarter, casino revenue grew 12% from previous quarter when adjusted for FX. Mike will go into further details regarding the geographical and segment split later in the presentation. In Q3 last year, we started showcasing our average ranking score for the 70+ most important keywords across Catena Media's owned and operated products. The core of the keywords remain mostly unchanged, but factors like seasonality, new segments or new markets may result in changes to the list. The keyword list, criteria and logic had a major update in Q3 and will include an extended set of keywords and improved logic going forward. The logic will be applied retroactively to continue to show the movements over the last few quarters. Looking at Q2, it was a challenging quarter from ranking perspective with the highest volatility level and pressure on Conti's rankings. The major Google algo update, which took place in early July, has been more favorable to our rankings and confirmed our focus on good quality content and SEO practices. I will now hand off to Mike for an in-depth update to our financial performance. Thank you, Manu, and good day. Moving into our financial analysis from a geographical split perspective, we concluded the quarter at €8.7 million in revenue in North America, down 1% from last quarter, but when adjusted to USD, the currency that we invoice most of our customers in, our quarter on quarter revenue increased by 7% in North America. Revenue was down 23% versus the corresponding quarter last year. As a reminder, Q2 2024 was our last quarter in which loss making media partnerships were still active. So this had a sizable impact on the revenue decreases this year. North America amounted 90% of group revenue in the quarter, an increase of two percentage points from last year. Looking further into our North American segments, sports normally declines from Q1 to Q2, and this year it was down 18% versus Q1 2025. this decline decreases to 10% once adjusted for foreign exchange rate fluctuations. Our North America sports business was down 32% versus last year, reflecting continued struggles and the impact of ending loss-making media partnerships in Q3 of 2024. While some seasonal decrease was expected during the NFL and college season breaks, we're still not satisfied with the sports performance during this quarter. Our North America casino revenue increased by 3% versus Q1 2025. Adjusted for foreign exchange fluctuations, the quarterly growth increased to a respectable 12%. Compared with Q2 2024, our casino revenue decreased by 21%, again decreasing to 16% when accounting for the FX fluctuations. As mentioned earlier this year, media partnerships also played a role in the year-on-year casino revenue decline, as these were not adversely affected by the Google algorithm until the latter half of Q2 2024. The North American adjusted EBITDA rose to $3.5 million. This change is attributed primarily to cost management measures, along with the transition from geographic to product-led organizational structure. Looking at the rest of the world, this non-core geographic segment accounted for 10% of revenue and contains our APAC and remaining European businesses. We saw revenue of €900,000 in the quarter, which is a decrease of 44% versus last year and a decrease of 11% versus Q1 2025. This was driven primarily by negative market trends in Japan. We divested our largest esports assets in June of 2025, but due to the low materiality and limited effect on the group statements, we have not disclosed this as discontinued operations. Adjusted EBIT decreased by 29% versus last year due to the dropping revenue, but the rest of world business still has a healthy margin of 52% versus 46% for the same period last year. Moving on to our full company segment performance, we saw continued decline in our sports revenue to €1.7 million versus €2.2 million for Q1 2025, a decrease of 21%. Our sports revenue declined by 37% versus Q2 2024, which benefited from the mid-March 2024 launch of sports betting in North Carolina. NDCs also decreased by 43% versus last year. This was driven by the previously mentioned SEO ranking challenges through Q2 on our primary sports websites and media partnerships. We achieved marginal positive adjusted EBIT in our sports segment in Q2 2025. This was the first time since the state launches really started slowing down in Q1 2023. While this is a step in the right direction, we'll continue to invest adequately in this segment to return to profitable growth. The casino segment accounted for 82% of group revenue. Revenue increased by 3% versus Q1 2025, however decreased by 22% versus Q2 2024, which had very active media partnerships through most of the quarter. Our North America casino revenue adjusted for foreign exchange fluctuations versus Q1 2025 increased to a respectable 12%. Adjusted EBITDA in the casino segment decreased by 52% versus the same quarter in 2024. This is reflective of lower revenues and our drive to increase financial transparency between our regions and segments following the reclassifications that were provided with our Q1 2025 report. Continuing on to our cost development, We further decreased our cost base in Q2 2025 by the announced personnel reductions that were effective for less than half of the quarter. Our adjusted cost base decreased by 33% versus Q2 2024 and 8% versus Q1 2025. Our adjusted EBITDA margin for Q2 2025 landed at 14%, increasing from 5% in Q2 2024 and 9% in Q1 2025. Our direct costs increased by 42% versus Q1 2025. This reflects our positive momentum in diversifying our revenue to include a larger mix of performance marketing channels, including paid media, CRM, and sub-affiliation. Total items affecting comparability were €800,000 in the quarter. the vast majority of these are associated with the sale of the Esports assets being netted off by some of the redundancy costs associated with the workforce reductions. Moving on to our financial position. We had a large volume of cash movement during the quarter. The proceeds of previously divested assets were received on time, and we used them in our net cash position to repay our senior bond in early June. As mentioned in a press release before the Q1 report, we do not intend to redeem the hybrid capital security in the short term, and we have deferred making interest payments on this instrument. The early July interest payment was the first one deferred, and we do not have a plan to resume payments in the near term. The balance of deferred interest payments will be available starting with our Q3 report since none were due as of 30th of June. Excluding the hybrid capital security, we are in a net cash position of €6.6 million with no active short-term or long-term debt instruments at this time. Our total operating cash flow from continuing operations closed at €1.0 million during the quarter. I will now hand back over to Manu to give us an update on the strategy and outlook. Thank you, Mike. We will now have a look into the strategy and outlook for the next few quarters. Moving on to launches in North America. Status quo in terms of new market openings. Overall market penetration remains at approximately 50% for online sports betting and only 16% for online casino, indicating a remaining sizable future opportunity. Missouri is the only North American state that will launch in 2025 with a target market launch date of December 1st. Alberta's iGaming bill was approved in May and the province is expected to go live in the first half of 2026. There is at this time no concrete launch date for Alberta. Alberta will follow a model similar to Ontario, including both online sports betting and online casino. Moving on to our strategic focus areas. As laid out in the previous reports, our current strategy is focused on three key pillars: people, product, and profit. From a people perspective, the key initiatives in the quarter included right-sizing the organization by eliminating more than 50 roles, flattening the organization by fully removing a senior management layer, focusing on building our hubs with our Malta hub now hosting approximately 50% of our workforce and hybrid office presence, which is planned for the second part of H2. From product perspective, the key initiatives included performance marketing verticals such as paid media sub-affiliation and CRM, which contributed to revenue mix diversification and helped offset the SEO pressure. The sub-affiliation and CRM verticals have reached new all-time highs during the quarter, further proving the high quality of our products and the ongoing tech consolidation work, which includes bringing all products to a central platform. The products that have benefited from this work during the quarter have already shown encouraging performance improvements. Our third and last strategic pillar profit. We are pleased to see our adjusted EBIT margin more than doubled from previous quarter and corresponding quarter the previous year. As we move into Q3, we're expecting to see the full effect of the headcount reduction measures that took place in Q2. Between the personnel cost and tax stack consolidation, we're expecting annualized cost savings between 5.3 and 5.8 million euros where the midpoint of the range representing approximately €1.4 million quarterly savings. Lastly, June recorded the strongest earnings performance in recent years with significant improved profitability. Moving to the key takeaways from the quarter: Revenue stable for the third consecutive quarter, showing signs of stabilization. Adjusted for FX, revenue increased 6% from the previous quarter. Adjusted EBIT more than doubled to 14% as our cost optimization efforts gained traction. The senior bond was repaid in June. The group is now in net cash position, excluding the hybrid capital securities. While SEO rankings have been challenging during the quarter, the latest Google update which took place in early July, has shown good results for our products. The focus on revenue diversification paid dividends during the quarter with our performance marketing channels, paid media, sub-affiliation and CRM, all showing good progress during the quarter. The organization went through a right-sizing process, which eliminated 25% of the headcount and further streamlined the operations by removing certain management layers. Between the workforce reduction and tax consolidation, the annual cost savings expected are in the 5.3 to 5.8 million euro range. Thank you very much for listening. I will now hand over back to Mike to move on to the Q&A section of our report and open up for questions. Thanks Manu. I'll now open it up for questions. All right, the first caller we have in is Oscar from ABG. And so Oscar just wants to see if you have any questions for us this time around. Perfect, thank you. Hi guys. So my first question would be on the revenue development. Obviously it seems to stabilize quite a bit and looking at the currency adjusted sales, we have a pretty solid development in Q2, just looking sequentially. Do you have, in spite of the rankings dropping a little bit in Q2, would you say that this is mainly driven by the sub-affiliation part and or what is it mainly driven of given the soft rankings development in Q2? Thank you, Oscar. As we said in the presentation, our performance marketing channels, which we define as CRM, sub-affiliation and paid media, have been the ones that helped us offset some of the challenges that we've had during the quarter on ranking. So I wouldn't single out the sub-affiliation on its own. We also don't report separately the number for sub-affiliation in this stage. But overall, the performance marketing channels have all of them helped us. And as we said in the presentation, both sub-affiliates and CRM have reached all-time highs during the quarter. Perfect, thanks. And also, if you could have a little bit of comments on the early start of Q3, a little bit more than one month of development here, can you say anything about the start? Are you moving in the right direction towards the Q3 numbers? I think I can comment on two things. One is, as we said already in the presentation, the Google major algo that took place in early July, basically the first two weeks of July had positive impact on our rankings. So we're pleased to see that we have seen a positive movement in the rankings in the last month or so. And secondly, as we commented in the presentation, we haven't seen the full impact of the tax stack consolidation and personal expenses in Q2. June was the first month where we started seeing most of the month with the impact coming fully from those. Moving on to July and Q3 onwards, we expect to see the full impact from those or close to full impact from tech consolidation. So those are the two things I would highlight at this stage. Great, perfect. My next question was actually on the cost development. So personnel costs or the adjusted personnel costs were down quite much. And as you said, I mean, it's only one month of the personnel reductions, right? So we still have the majority left going into Q3 and then the tech stack development or the tech stack migration. Would we have a full run rate of that already in Q3 or is that more tilted towards Q4? So the personnel cost we should have the full rate already from Q3 as it is the entire quarter. Tech stack consolidation, it's a sequential movement throughout the year. So probably not the full impact in Q3, but towards Q4. We still see the majority of that, but as contracts are coming to an end or as we're terminating different tools and different softwares that will continue to improve throughout the year. So I think we should be close to the maximum impact in Q3, but we should see the absolute maximum impact into Q4. Great, thank you. And lastly, just on direct costs up quite a bit and I guess it's a function of the stronger sub or performance marketing development. Do you expect that this should be a pretty good run rate or do you expect to accelerate this further going into the second half of the year? I think if we continue to reach all-time highs every month on all those three three channels, paid media, CRM and sub-affiliation then that number should continue to grow as it's a direct result of the performance, the revenue. So I'm hoping that that number will go up. All right, perfect. That was all. Thank you very much. Thank you, Oscar. Thank you, Oscar. I believe that's all the calls we had come in on the line. So, Marta, I'm going to move over to some questions that came in, other people submitted by text. So I'll just move to that now. So the first question that came in was, will you completely leave other markets than the US? Well, can you repeat, please, Mike? Oh, sorry. I think there's a door closing in my office area. Yeah. So will you completely leave other markets other than the United States? So as we previously discussed, obviously our main focus is North America, not just US, but also the rest of North America. And as we discussed in previous quarters, we tried to use our bonus.com product into other geographies such as Mexico and Brazil. They require obviously any new market penetration, any new market entry requires effort and requires investment. And we have not seen those markets being hugely successful for us yet. So I don't think that we will leave the other markets, but North America remains our number one focus. And as you can see, we increased even further from 88% of our revenues coming from North America up to 90% in Q2 this year. I think we'll continue to see North America somewhere in the 90% range. I don't expect that number to move in either direction in the next quarters. All right, thanks Manu. And another question that came in is, what can you tell us about the other product sales completed recently? I think that's in addition to the esports assets. Right, thanks Mike. So both the esports sale as well as other smaller assets that we have sold in the recent months are part of our effort to focus on our core for products that represent, in our opinion, the highest opportunity to generate long-term ROI. That's what happened with esports products and that's what happened with other smaller products that we divested in the recent months. These are transactions that are in line with our strategy to focus our investment and operational effort on the brands and markets where we believe that we have the strongest long-term potential. All right. And then one more question that came in, I think that's good for you to answer is, NDCs fell more than revenue. Does this mean you are earning more per player? Not necessarily that the biggest impact there is due to the mix of customers, the channels that we're getting the customers from, sorry, the products that we're getting the channels from. I think a couple of examples are we've talked about the improvement in regulated casino during Q2. The CPAs generally from regulated casino are higher than other verticals. And also, if we're looking at a year on year comparison, Q2 last year we still had the tail end of the North Carolina launch, for example. So a higher number of sports players would generally come at the lower CPA. So more than the actual CPAs being different is more in the nature of the mix of products where the customers are coming from. Obviously, seasonal effects when it comes to the different product split. All right. Thanks, Manu. And there's a couple of questions that look like they're aimed at my direction, so I'll answer these ones. So the first one is that we report a gain of sale of €1.4 million for the sale of the esports business. Is that the cash flow effect? So yes, there's the quick answer on that. If you look at within the report, we have 800,000 net positive of items affecting comparability. The 1.4 million is the gain on the asset value that we had in the books for the esports business. And then the other side of that is that we had the redundancy payments and a few other payments that went out as part of the restructuring. And that's what nets it off to the 800,000 in the items affecting comparability. Another question that came in, there's actually two about the hybrids. So one was how long will you defer the payments? And for that one, I can say that we have not set a fixed timeline here. The ideal goal is to resume the payments once we're in a stronger financial position. The terms of the hybrids allow us to defer these indefinitely, but our aim is to return to healthy growth. and generate as much cash as possible. And when it's a responsible time to continue those, then we'll evaluate that at that time. And then there's a related question on that, which is what are the consequences or are there consequences deferring these? And yes, there are consequences deferring our hybrid capital instruments. For one thing, there's an interest on the deferred interest. So there's a tangible cash cost and interest cost on that that we have. And then also, while the payments are deferred, we cannot pay dividends, we cannot repurchase shares, and we can't make distributions to subordinated debt holders. We don't have any of those right now as we've closed the senior loan, which was not subordinate to begin with. But even if we went to look into those, we would be able to do that in the future. And so with that, Manu, that's the end of the questions. So I guess I'll hand it over to you for any closing remarks. Thank you, Mike. I will wrap up with some closing remarks. First and most importantly, revenue in Q2 was stable for a third consecutive quarter, showing signs of stabilization and adjusted for FX, the revenue increased 6% from previous quarter. Similarly, adjusted EBIT more than doubled to 14% as our cost optimization efforts gained traction. As Mike mentioned, the senior bond was repaid in June and the group is now in a net cash position, excluding the hybrid capital securities. While SEO rankings have been challenging during the quarter, the latest Google update, which took place in early July, as we said, has shown good results for our products. The focus on revenue diversification paid dividends during the quarter with our performance marketing channels Again, paid media, sub-affiliation and CRM showing great progress. The organization went through a right-sizing process, which eliminated 25% of the headcount and further streamlined the operations by removing certain layers. The tech consolidation continued with an estimated annual savings of 800,000 euros. Between the workforce reduction and the tech consolidation, the annual cost savings expected are in the 5.3-5.8 million range. Thank you all for joining today's call. Looking forward to hosting you to the Q3 report on November 4th. Thank you very much, everybody.

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