Gambling.com Group Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 20, 2025

There are 10 speakers on the call.

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to Gambling.com Group Fourth 20 20 4 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

Operator

It is now my pleasure to introduce Peter McGrath, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Capital Markets. Thank you. You may begin.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Gambling.com's fourth quarter 20 20 4 results call. I am Peter Magoff, Senior VP of Investor Relations and Capital Markets, and I'm joined by Charles Gillespie, Gambling dot com's Group's Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer and Elias Mart, Chief Financial Officer. The call is being webcast live through the Investor Relations section of our website at gambling.com/corporate/investors and the downloadable version of the presentation is available there as well. A webcast replay will also be available on the website after the conclusion of this call.

Speaker 1

You may also contact Investor Relations support by emailing investorsgdcgroup dot com. I would like to remind you that the information contained in this conference call, including any financial and related guidance to be provided, consists of forward looking statements as defined by securities laws. These statements are based on information currently available to us and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual future results, performance and business prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these statements. Some important factors that could cause such differences are discussed in the Risk Factors section of Gambling.comGroup's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward looking statements speak only as of the date the statements are made, and the company assumes no obligation to update forward looking statements to reflect actual results, changes in assumptions or changes in other factors affecting forward looking information except to the extent required by applicable securities laws.

Speaker 1

During the call, there will also be a discussion of non IFRS financial measures. The description of these non IFRS financial measures is included in the press release issued earlier this morning and reconciliations of these non IFRS financial measures to their most directly comparable IFRS measures are included in the appendix to the presentation and press release, both of which are available in the Investors tab of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Charles.

Speaker 2

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. YAMA.com Group had a tremendous fourth quarter with revenue of $35,300,000 adjusted EBITDA of $14,700,000 and free cash flow of $13,200,000 finishing 2024 in style with record quarterly and full year financial performance. Full year 2024 revenue and adjusted EBITDA rose 1733% respectively driven by global iGaming growth and the highly accretive acquisition of Freebets.com. This outperformance reflects our relentless focus on execution and our diversified market exposure with a prioritization of iGaming revenue. As strong as our execution was last year, we expect to accelerate our growth in 2025.

Speaker 2

With our biggest and most talented team ever, a greater ability to drive high intent traffic to our online gambling operator clients, higher global penetration and an expanded product portfolio that now includes OBS data solutions for consumers and our operator clients, we are positioned for full year revenue growth of 35% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 40% as indicated by the midpoints of our initial guidance for the year. As we hit our targets for the year, our performance will demonstrate that we continue to close in on our goal of generating $100,000,000 in annual adjusted EBITDA, a goal I introduced in May when we only had $37,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA during the preceding twelve months. As we work toward our goal of $100,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA, the midpoint of this year's guidance of $68,000,000 implies that we will be more than halfway there already in 2025. Our most exciting growth driver for this year will come from our expanded product offering following the January acquisition of OzJam and OptiGods. This acquisition expanded our footprint in the online gambling ecosystem, providing another strong growth catalyst, while increasing the overall proportion of our consumer and enterprise recurring subscription revenue.

Speaker 2

Like Freevest.com, this acquisition demonstrates once again that we can put forth a clear framework and vision for M and A and then precisely deliver within those parameters. These acquisitions have created immediate value for our shareholders while strategically positioning us for the long term. Over the first nearly eighty days of owning our new OBS businesses, we have been very pleased with the integration and are very excited by the expertise and capabilities of our 40 new colleagues. We remain confident in our ability to grow incremental adjusted EBITDA from these businesses by at least 20% this year. And we are excited about the growth trajectory of the business' current products and services and the long term future prospects of new businesses we can launch with this one of a kind and highly valuable platform.

Speaker 2

On the consumer product side, Ofgem's current subscriber base is highly profitable and we are confident we can grow this base while maintaining margins. We are also very optimistic about the opportunity to leverage our 500 plus operator relationships to grow Opticod's nascent enterprise subscription revenue. While OZGEM is the larger business today and continues to grow, we believe the growth opportunity for Opticods is substantially larger still. Opticods is starting from a smaller base and has a very attractive business profile, which involves long term high value contracts as a result of playing a key role in solving a critical risk management problem for operators globally. Together with the rotor wired subscription business, we are pacing for recurring subscription revenue to account for more than 20% of total group revenue this year.

Speaker 2

While the whole GAM team is very excited about our shiny new toys with OBS Jam and Octagon, it should not overshadow the continued strength of our core affiliate business, which just had its best quarter in our nineteen year history. IGaming revenue grew in 2024 across all of our operating regions and will continue to do so this year, driven by continued strong organic growth as well as a full year benefit from our acquisition of Freebets.com. That tactical acquisition further strengthened our UK and Ireland market performance, while also providing a strong tailwind for our activities across other European markets. And in North America, we continue to grow our market share and benefit from improving iGaming pricing trends. Throughout 2025, we are confident that our ability to monetize the full benefits of our showcase brands, such as gambling.com and the growing performance of casinos.com along with the optimization we've achieved now for freebets.com will continue to further differentiate us from our competitors and drive record iGaming performance this year.

Speaker 2

Longer term, we expect additional states to approve iGaming as they seek to address budget issues and get players what they want. Given our unmatched industry experience and footprint, the expansion of iGaming in The U. S. Would result in significant top line and cash flow growth. Another growth driver this year will be organic growth from sports betting.

Speaker 2

Last year had challenging sports betting comparables due to the lower state launch activity in The U. S. And the blowout performance of ESPN bet in Q4 twenty twenty three. We expect a return to growth in our North American sports business this year and that's before the anticipated launch of sports betting in Missouri towards the end of this year and which per our policy will not be included in our guidance until the launch date is confirmed. Following our record 2024 performance with these growth drivers and our team's ability to consistently execute, our confidence in our near and long term outlook has never been higher.

Speaker 2

And that starts with this year as we are on track to generate another year of record revenue, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow on our past $100,000,000 in annual adjusted EBITDA. Now let me turn the call over to Elias for a review of the fourth quarter and full year financial highlights and details on our 2025 outlook.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Charles. Record Q4 revenues of $35,300,000 was ahead of expectations and we delivered over 145,000 MDCs to our customers. This 9% year over year revenue increase was driven by growth in casino revenue across all regions, which more than offset the decline in North American sports revenue. The 9% NDC decline reflects the previously discussed impact from no new state launch activity compared to the launch of sports betting in Kentucky and ESPN Bets 17 state launch in Q4 of twenty twenty three as well as significantly lower media partnership activity in the quarter. Revenue in The UK and Ireland, other Europe and rest of the world continued to see very strong growth driven by our core brands and our acquisition in April of freebest.com and related assets.

Speaker 3

Gross profit increased 21% year over year to $33,100,000 Cost of sales was $2,200,000 down 57 year over year as a result of the lower media partnership revenue. Gross margin increased from 84% in the tenth last year's fourth quarter to 94% in Q4 twenty twenty four. Total operating expenses increased 21% to 23,300,000.0, reflecting increased headcounts and increased amortization expenses related to the Freebust.com acquisition. Operating expenses were slightly above our expectations in the fourth quarter due to higher bonus accruals linked to outperformance. Adjusted EBITDA increased 39% year over year to another all time record of 14,700,000 compared to $10,600,000 a year ago.

Speaker 3

Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin was 42%, up from 32% in the year ago period. Adjusted net income for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four rose 41% to 12,200,000 while adjusted diluted net income per share increased 59% to $0.35 from $0.22 per share in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three. During the quarter, we revised the way we define adjusted net income to more closely align with adjustments we make to adjusted EBITDA to improve the like for like comparability between periods. Free cash flow was also a fourth quarter record, SEK 13 point 2 million dollars compared to $6,500,000 in the fourth quarter of last year as a result of the growth in adjusted EBITDA. For the full year 2024, revenue increased 17% to a record $127,200,000 dollars as we delivered more than four seventy six thousand NDCs, an increase of 9% over 2023.

Speaker 3

The revenue increase reflects year over year growth of 25% in The UK and Ireland, One Hundred And Four Percent for other Europe and 81% for the rest of the world, which more than offset the 9% decline in North American revenue resulting from less launch activity and lower Media Partnership revenue. Strong growth in casino across all our geographical regions more than offset the decline in North American sports. In 2025, we expect revenue to grow in all geographical regions where we operate, including a return to year over year growth in North America. Full year adjusted EBITDA increased 33% year over year to a record $48,700,000 Full year adjusted EBITDA margin was 38%, up from 34% in 2023. Free cash flow for 2024 was 41,600,000 compared to $23,000,000 in 2023 as a result of the growth in adjusted EBITDA.

Speaker 3

85% of our full year adjusted EBITDA was converted to free cash flow. During 2024, we repurchased approximately 3,000,000 shares at an average price of just about $9.06 In aggregate, we have repurchased 3,300,000.0 shares, representing almost 9% of the total outstanding shares at an average price of $9.12 As of December 31, we had total cash of $13,700,000 and we had 23,000,000 drawn on our credit facility. On January 1, we made a payment of 70,000,000 in cash and 10,000,000 in stock or approximately 708,000 shares for the OZ Holdings acquisition. As a result, we have now drawn down a total of 87,000,000 on our credit facility and we have approximately 36,000,000 fully diluted shares outstanding. At the February, we expanded our credit facility from $100,000,000 to $165,000,000 and also extended the maturity date with a new syndicate of six lenders.

Speaker 3

This gives us increased flexibility and headroom to continue to pursue both strategic acquisitions when the right opportunities arise and to optimize our capital structure in our pursuit of maximizing shareholder value. Our revenue guidance for 2025 is $170,000,000 to $174,000,000 with a midpoint representing 35% year over year growth. A midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA range of $67,000,000 to $69,000,000 represents 40% year over year growth. The midpoint of our ranges imply an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39.5%. As Charles and I have both highlighted, for 2025, we expect a resumption of growth in North America, further global market share gains, over 20% of revenue to come from subscriptions and strong momentum as we exit 2025.

Speaker 3

Finally, our guidance does not include contributions from any new acquisitions or any new market launches. While we do expect Midori to launch Sportsbetting in the second half of this year, as per our policy, we will not include it in guidance until the launch date is confirmed. We expect full year incremental adjusted EBITDA of about $14,500,000 from odd solvens, And our guidance assumes an average euro to UST exchange rate of $1.07 for the year. Operator, we can now turn the call over for questions.

Operator

Thank you. Our first question is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed.

Speaker 4

Hey, good day, Charles, Elias, Pete. I hate to beat a dead horse here every quarter, but it's a recurring theme that I do want to start with as you guys continue to put up really, really exceptional results across the board, outperform a lot of opportunities, etcetera. And then we listen to your peers and everyone else and the houses are on fire and etcetera. What are you hearing from your customers? I know iGaming is better than sports from a customer acquisition standpoint, high intent users remain the focus.

Speaker 4

But I guess, are you hearing anything different in your negotiations, in your commercial contracts, in your price discussions, etcetera, just to try and reset kind of how you guys are doing relative to the industry?

Speaker 2

Hey, Ryan. I think it's a dead horse we're happy to keep on beating. Look, with these businesses, it's really about supply of traffic. That's kind of the big driver of these businesses. Selling the traffic, you can be some companies are better at selling it than others for sure.

Speaker 2

But by and large, the operators are going to buy the traffic and pay a reasonable price if you have the traffic in the first place. But it's so when I think about the competitors and the difference in 2024, entering 2024, we tried to telegraph very clearly in advance that it was going to be a challenging year for sports betting in North America, given the launch driven performance in 2023. I think the competitors just didn't necessarily fully appreciate that as much as we did. And because we saw that coming, it gave us conviction to focus elsewhere during the year and that opened the door for us and maybe other competitors weren't thinking along these lines that it opened the door for us to do the FreeBets.com deal, which of course has been hugely accretive for shareholders and a big success. With that deal where we bolstered our already industry market position in The UK for a casino, added on meaningful European sports betting revenue and supercharged our casino business in the rest of Europe.

Speaker 2

The other headwinds for the industry have been, there's been a couple of kind of basket case markets recently. The one that certainly comes to mind first is Brazil. A lot of affiliates have built or have built very successful lucrative businesses in Brazil. But it was all pre regulation. When the market actually regulates, the rules change, people start paying taxes.

Speaker 2

It's Brazil, so there's quite a few taxes. It's not just gaining duty, but they want you to run it through a Brazilian entity or pay withholding tax. So the taxes add up quickly. And we run this business for free cash flow generation. We focus and we talk a lot about adjusted EBITDA, but our ability to convert adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow is incredible.

Speaker 2

And Brazil just never had the market dynamics that we thought were particularly attractive and we are very pleased with our deliberate wait and see approach to Brazil. I think Brazil will be fine in time, but if you had a big Brazil business, you've now got some really hard comps that you need to work through. And in the long run, it will all be absolutely fine. But it's certainly a short medium term headwind for some affiliates.

Speaker 4

Very helpful. Thanks, Charles. For my follow-up question, just you mentioned Optic Odds, the B2B opportunity within Odds Holdings in the prepared remarks. But curious what you're hearing from a feedback from your sportsbook customers and then kind of specifically U. S.

Speaker 4

Versus international there and where you're maybe gaining a little more traction?

Speaker 2

Sure. So on the OpTic outside, the founders of the business, the team, they're based in The States, right? So they initially sold it to U. S. Operators and focused on U.

Speaker 2

S. Sports. And the kind of big thesis here is, okay, we can we've got this long list of international operators that we can sell this to, let's take this thing into Europe and further afield, kind of joking with them that there's more operators within a block of our office in Malta than there probably is in all of The United States. It's we're well on the way, but it's only been eighty, ninety days since we closed the deal, but the top brass at Opticods are on the ground in Malta right now, working out of our flagship office there and running through our list of clients. So, it's not going to all happen overnight, but we are, as we had said, extremely positive about the combination of our international operator relationships in their product, which solves such an obvious and clear problem for operators.

Speaker 2

On the off the outside, the use case is really risk management. If you're going to go trade bonds on Wall Street, you're going to have a Bloomberg terminal and you're not going to trade bonds unless you understand where the market's at. Otherwise, you're going to get taken to the cleaners and it's no different for sports betting companies. If they are going to offer a market in any given thing, they need to know where the peers are at and to just do basic risk management and that's what they get with this optical edge product.

Speaker 4

Excellent. Thanks guys. Good luck.

Operator

Our next question is from Jeff Stantel with Stifel. Please proceed.

Speaker 5

Hey, good morning, Charles. Thanks for taking our questions. Maybe starting out on guidance, can you just help us think about some of the nuances to growth by region that see into that consolidated number? I think you called out a reversion back to growth in North America, but if you kind of strip out OZJam, I would assume that that market shows the lowest growth. But just anything on sort of the relative growth by region that's embedded in the guidance?

Speaker 5

And then from a quarterly cadence perspective, how should we think about seasonality this year given the M and A, given the increasing U. S. Weighting and some of the residual state expansion comps that you called out earlier in the prepared remarks? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Hey, Jeff. So following the acquisition of Oxygen and OpticUDE, the product mix for 2025 is kind of a little bit different and that obviously has a lot to do with growth. So we expect to have over 20% of our revenue to come from consumer and enterprise subscriptions, including Rotowire. And that will, of course, drive growth primarily in North America.

Speaker 3

In terms

Speaker 2

of the rest of the business, the marketing business, we will build upon a very successful 2024 in our international markets and globally within iGaming as we expect to see that international growth continue and we expect to see a return to growth in North American sports betting. The North American sports betting affiliate plus all the odds businesses plus growth with RotorWire, we expect that North America will be the fastest growing region overall this year. But one thing to kind of bear in mind when you look at the full year guidance and try to understand how the growth dynamics are playing out is that an important driver of the business this year will be a change in traffic source mix, okay, because we're going to have substantially lower amounts of traffic from media partnerships. That is a headwind to overall revenue growth, but it results in a much higher gross margin much higher gross margins flowing through to adjusted EBITDA and ultimately free cash flow. So it puts us in a substantially healthier position overall.

Speaker 2

We expect the marketing business to be fueled by more traffic and more MDCs and our model assumptions for this year is assume essentially flat pricing dynamics. So as usual, the growth is driven by more traffic, more MDCs.

Speaker 5

That's great. Thanks for that, Charles. And then for my follow-up turning over to capital allocation, I'm curious just how you're thinking about the relative return on repurchases at these levels given the stock has round tripped a bit here over the past month or so. The AusJAM acquisition relative to starting to pay down something that you said $87,000,000 on the revolver. Just anything on sort of how you're weighing capital allocation and the return on repurchases at current levels would be great.

Speaker 5

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. So those of you out there that have read every line of our SEC filings might have noticed that in the credit facility agreement it does or it did prohibit us from doing buybacks during 2025. We signed that credit facility agreement and then the markets kind of immediately dislocated. So we're happy to get that signed and closed. But we've gone back to the lending syndicate with a request to waive that provision so that we can be in the market this year with buybacks if we want to.

Speaker 2

And we have received consent for that. So we have an existing $10,000,000 buyback authorization already in place from the Board and we will continue to be smart and tactical about it. It's not a means to return capital to shareholders, but when we think that the stock is completely mispriced and not showing signs of improving, we will be happy to intervene.

Speaker 5

That's great. Thanks very much.

Operator

Our next question is from Barry Jonas with Truist Securities. Please proceed.

Speaker 3

Hi. This is Jeremy on for Barry. Thanks for taking our questions. Any updated thoughts in terms of sweepstakes as a potential opportunity? And care to comment if you see predictive markets as an opportunity as well?

Speaker 2

Yes. Sweets is a funny one. It's not exactly the most mainstream products, but it's a product which consumers really want. And it's a product which at least in some states seems to have a fairly clear legal standing. So those the operators of suites casinos are very aggressive.

Speaker 2

They're very happy to buy traffic and they do a lot of them. So it does drive up the pricing somewhat. But we continue to take a very kind of cautious approach to the entire category. It's interesting. It is growing, but we tend to focus on regulated markets and doing everything by the book.

Speaker 2

So we look forward to more clarity on how those products are regarded. In terms of prediction markets, this is an even newer kind of segment and it's super exciting, right? I mean, this is a clear strong positive for us, I think, for multiple reasons. The CFTC regulation with the production market is not clear, but it is again a product which people want and it's basically new competition for state gaming regulators. There hasn't been any sort of federal framework for any gaming related products, but this kind of is it.

Speaker 2

And to the extent that this regulation gets clarified in a way that this can grow quickly, I think it certainly will. There's a lot of interesting companies, big name companies with big balance sheets that are looking to enter this or already have, and we are talking to all of them. It's an obvious way for us to expand and grow the business. So we look forward to seeing how that develops this year.

Speaker 3

Great. And then as a follow-up with multiple states considering higher taxes, what could the potential impact be to Gambling.com? And can you share if you've seen any impact from Illinois thus far? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. If they raise taxes, it affects everybody in the ecosystem because its other value comes down. Some of these states have tiered those taxes, so it only tend it most affects the Tier one operators and affects the Tier two and three operators less. Our best clients are the Tier two and Tier three operators. So, there hasn't been any tangible impact from Illinois and we'll continue to advocate for sensible taxes.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Clark Lambton with BTIG. Please proceed.

Speaker 7

Thanks. Good morning, guys. I have two, please. First question, I wanted to follow-up on the question that Jeff posed around growth trends. I don't know if this is for Charles or Elias, maybe if you I guess both want to weigh in here.

Speaker 7

If we were to sort of look at it even a little bit more simplistically, we've got a lot to sift through this year in terms of M and A state launches and media partnerships. If you distill it down even a little bit more, what do you think your underlying sort of organic growth rates are going to be in '25 and maybe in '26, if you want to touch on it enterprise level or geographically? And then the second question somewhat related to organic growth. I'm curious if we end up in a situation in The U. S.

Speaker 7

Where the macro environment starts to degrade a little bit, I'm curious, Charles, when you think about the twenty years that you've been twenty years or so, I guess, that you've been building this business, what have you seen historically in tougher environments in terms of your customer behavior, their player spending and the way that that impacts your business? Does it tend to be more durable and inelastic or do you see periods of significant gyration? Any commentary you could offer there, I think would be helpful. Thank you guys.

Speaker 2

I'll tackle the first one and then Elliot can talk about organic growth. With the economy in this growth industry, it's never really had much correlation at all to be honest. One, it's a high growth industry, so the industry is just kind of growing through all the economic cycles it's ever seen. But practically speaking, it's not a major purchase, right? If you're going to buy a car or not, interest rates really matter, it's a user and you either buy the car or you don't.

Speaker 2

But if you bet, if you spend $100 a month betting on sports and things get a bit tight, okay, we spend $80 a month betting on sports, but you still bet on sports. You still can participate in the activity, you just dial it back a bit. So, historically, the industry has been incredibly resilient in the face of any sort of economic distress and I can't imagine it will be any different this time. Yes. If we move over

Speaker 3

to the organic growth profile, if you look at our guidance in aggregate, we're guiding towards 35% top line growth. Obviously, a large proportion of that will come from Apsion. We've said that we expect about 14,500,000 of incremental EBITDA from that acquisition. I think we told The Street at the time of acquisition that we have we expect contribution margins in around the 50% mark from that. So that you can then disaggregate that about €29,000,000 30 million euros of that revenue would come from the old soldering businesses.

Speaker 3

The remainder growth will come from our marketing business, and that would indicate organic growth in the low teens. That consists of pretty strong growth or very strong growth from our owned and operated websites, partly offset by a decline in our traffic from lower margin media publishers. Thank you very much.

Operator

Our next question is from Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please proceed.

Speaker 8

Hi, good morning, Charles and Elias. Nice quarter and happy March Madness. Wanted to start with just AI as a broader theme. I guess as a pro and a con, can you kind of talk about internally what you guys are doing with AI to improve your performance marketing offering to help create a bigger moat, bigger business? And then from a competition standpoint, have you seen anything in the past couple months, whether it's competition or maybe something that we talked about earlier in 2024 with some of the Google changes, maybe some other items that could pose as a threat?

Speaker 8

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Hey, Chad. Sincere apologies for scheduling the earnings call right now, the first batch of games. We'll try to schedule it a little better next year and good luck with other bets. In terms of artificial intelligence internally, it has been a boon across the organization and it is our theme for 2025. We've got a two day AI only hackathon coming up and the best ideas coming that are going to be investigated on that are really amazing.

Speaker 2

My background as a technologist and that's been instrumental here is I've set the culture of the company to be an early adopter of these new tools. It's benefiting us in a ton of different ways, not just the obvious areas like technology architecture and software development. And it really touches the whole business from content to I mean even finance and HR see gains with this. And fundamentally it's increased our capacity and our throughput on everything, which has given us a license to be more ambitious across the organization in terms of the number of new projects, new products that we want to develop. If you think about artificial intelligence from an external perspective, as you can see from our numbers, our core marketing business, which is powered by natural search traffic, continues to grow and just had a record quarter.

Speaker 2

Furthermore, if you look at Google's revenue and the number of search queries that are still going to Google also never higher. So it's a pretty clear sign that this that the next wave of engagement on these AI powered experiences is fundamentally incremental to search and not a replacement. But at the same time, I'm sure everybody has examples of how, they've moved some use cases away from Google to these AI tools and LLS. But from our perspective, the high intent search traffic, the most valuable commercial search traffic has kind of been the least affected by these AI powered experiences. And we're not getting traffic from these AI powered experiences.

Speaker 2

We get referrals from all of them. It's small, but it's growing rapidly. The chart is beautiful. And the users of these AI experiences are highly qualified. They're pre sold.

Speaker 2

They've done a lot of work. They've taken the time to engage an LLM to talk about something complex. So by the time they get to our site, they're ready to go. And what we're seeing, again, small numbers, but what we're seeing is that these people are even more valuable than the high intent search traffic coming off of Google. You know, when you get when we get traffic from an LOM, it's usually it's a citation.

Speaker 2

Right? You know? So they they put some information, then we publish them to the answer, and then they cite us. But they only ever cite one or two sites. It's not like Google where there's 10.

Speaker 2

So that really plays to our advantage as the owners of the biggest brands in the space. And I think it's going to be really hard for the small affiliates and the kind of long tail affiliates. There's not going to be or as you could maybe make a little bit of money in position eight or nine on Google, like that's already hard now and I think that's getting harder. So it gives us a lot of confidence that we'll be positioned as a winner in this new future of incremental AI use by consumers online. That's great.

Speaker 2

Thanks for that.

Speaker 8

And then just a quick clarification. I know sports is a smaller percentage of your overall business. But in Q4, in the items that you talked about in terms of why the revenues were down year over year, you didn't mention anything around hold. So just wanted to kind of circle back on how hold affects your business. It doesn't sound like you're going to see swings either way.

Speaker 8

I guess in the fourth quarter, it was a slight negative for some of your partners, but it's certainly something that they're focusing on in 2025 to increase hold. So can you just remind us how that kind of feeds into some of the rev share deals and if that impacted Q4 and then more importantly in 2025 if that could help the sports line? Thank you.

Speaker 2

So those whole percentages naturally they only affect revenue share revenue and we our proportion of revenue share revenue has been going up. Went up meaningfully when we did the Freebust.com acquisition. But the amount of revenue share revenue we have in sports betting, a lot of it's casino, right? And so the amount we have in sports betting is not huge and it's not spread out between Europe and The U. S.

Speaker 2

So if you have kind of negative operator hold dynamics in one, you usually don't have it on like a global basis. You might have it in Europe or The U. S, but it typically doesn't have it in both at the same time. Thank you very much guys.

Operator

Our next question is from Mike Kehhee with The Benchmark Company. Please proceed.

Speaker 9

Hey Charles Elias here. Congrats guys on '24. Nice to see the strong '25 guide and great to hear you can buy back stock here. I guess Charles on your odds holdings, congratulations. I don't think we've talked live on it.

Speaker 9

Just curious how the integration is proceeding for you guys. Obviously, I think the team there is strong, and sort of the synergies, I guess, that you see. And specifically, if you can share some of your ideas on how you plan to monetize the ODDZDATA engine would be great. And I have a follow-up,

Speaker 2

guys. Hey Mike, welcome to your first GaN earnings call. So as I said, we're only about ninety days in at this point. It's still early days, but they have an incredible team and a fantastic platform. We've integrated their OZ data into a number of our existing sports betting products across our owned and operated websites.

Speaker 2

We've got OZ widgets, you know, OV driven content all over the place, right? And now that we own the company that has the single best OV data in the world, obviously, we're going to use that to power those internal tools. So that's obviously been very, very positive. It's also helped us accelerate the development of some new features and tools for our owned and operated websites, stuff like same game parlay content, which we were doing pre odd holdings, but with their knowledge, data, everything else that they're bringing in, we can certainly do that faster. So these are growth businesses and you'd of course expect to see the number of clients and the number of subscribers grow on a year to year basis and that's obviously what's happening.

Speaker 2

But what has been interesting that we've seen just here in the very beginning is that the average revenue per user on both the B2C, Osgen business and the average revenue per client on the Opticod's B2B side is also up year on year.

Speaker 9

Nice. Sounds good. The thanks Charles. The I guess on Missouri, not in your guidance, so you're sort of baking in upside there, which is nice. Can you help sort of much as you can help us sort of size that opportunity there?

Speaker 9

If not, I understand, but it would be great to sort of better understand the growth that you think could come from Missouri given obviously we don't know when it's exactly going to go live, but I think we're getting a better idea. And then as you sort of think you probably get this question all the time, but you think medium term in The U. S. And iGaming regulation, it just seems like we came into this year with a lot of hope and confidence that we'd have a tailwind here legalization and it seems like it's sort of just been grinding away here. I don't know if we're in a better place or worse at this point, but sort of curious your enthusiasm when we start to look at '26 and beyond in terms of iGaming legalization in The U.

Speaker 9

S. And if you think there's some big unlocks for you that are sort of believable, I guess, in the medium term? Thanks, guys.

Speaker 2

Yes. The activity thus far this year has been mixed. I think we will get a handful of things still. The legislative sessions are not over and there's still some big opportunities out there in play. I think there's an organic build filed in the last twenty four hours.

Speaker 2

So we remain optimistic that we'll get something this year. In terms of Missouri, we reading the tea leaves, I think they'll probably get it live by football season. That's certainly the hope and that obviously makes a difference for everyone, including the tax revenue that they're going to get. So fingers crossed for that. And as we said 10 times today, it will only go into guidance once we have clarity on that date.

Speaker 9

All right, guys. Thank you. Good luck.

Operator

Our next question is from David Katz with Jefferies. Please proceed.

Speaker 6

Hi, morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to go back to a couple of things that you talked about earlier, Charles. One is the prediction markets. I wanted to you were pretty definitive about it and I wanted to ask if you sort of view that as incremental to the TAM, cannibalizing to the TAM.

Speaker 6

You seem to have sort of a, I guess, affirming view on those. And I'm curious how you sort of see them in the landscape of your current set of operator clients?

Speaker 2

Hi, David. Yes, I think it's net incremental to the TAM, right? I mean, it could cut into the traditional local state based regulated sports betting operations, but I think it will be bigger than it will grow the market more than it will impact them. Obviously, different completely different taxation profile. So when you think about money at the end of the day, more of it could flow through these CFTC markets versus very highly regulated, very heavily taxed state gaming revenue.

Speaker 2

And I think the big operators in The United States, they understand that, right? Why would they not put it through that channel if they could and then it's legal, right? So I think this is going to be a fascinating space to watch. I think competition from a regulatory perspective is good and I'm positive about it, but it's we're at the beginning of this whole thing.

Speaker 6

Understood. And then second, just taking a lot of your commentary about AI, a number of the operators obviously spend time talking about responsible gaming and AI as a tool in that regard. Is there potentially a role for you to play in aiding operators from that perspective as well?

Speaker 2

Great question. Most of we don't tend to get obviously we don't have as much player data as the operators do, right? They're not our customers and in many cases we're just sending traffic in and we don't know anything about that traffic. So we're not as well positioned to identify problem gambling with the operators. But we are certainly here to help if they think there's any data points in our ecosystem that could be added into their machine learning model and recognize those patterns of problem gambling behavior and intervene more quickly with those players.

Speaker 6

Okey doke. Thanks. Congrats on your quarter.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to management for closing comments.

Speaker 2

Thanks everybody for joining us today. Please enjoy March Madness and we'll catch up with you in May.

Operator

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.

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Earnings Conference Call
Gambling.com Group Q4 2024
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