Let's speak a bit about Gaming Realms’ Q2 results; revenue from brand licensing increased 222%. What was the reason for such a large increase?
The brand licensing is a bit more lumpy, I would say, due to IFRS and accounting. But we'd signed a couple of brand deals in the period where we've had to account for the revenues with MRGs (minimum revenue guarentees) up front essentially. So those are not necessarily the type of thing you'll see recurring in every period. Even though they are big numbers, the one we always sort of push towards – that is the main focus – is on the content licensing side, which is just steadily growing.
Revenue for social dipped by 2%. How are you planning on turning that back into a positive this time around?
Yes, we're hoping for a slightly better second half. We spent some marketing in that first period, so hopefully we'll start seeing an uptick from that. It's really rounding differences; if you round both of them up, they both come to 1.8%, so it just so happens to be shown as 2%, so I'd probably say it's flat. But we can't report that obviously.
Speaking of positives, total revenue and adjusted EBITDA increased overall 26% and 37% respectively; how do you plan on keeping that momentum going into the next quarter?
Essentially we have quite a scalable model now, as we launch with more partners and more markets, and we have now hit our operational leverage. Therefore, our revenue is growing quicker than our costs. So as we grow, our revenue should drop a lot down to the bottom line and also, it should probably add into cash, not fully, because we do invest in new products and games, but we are cash generative as well, which is nice.
In 2023, Gaming Realms has partnered with 25 companies so far. What is 2024 looking like? Do you plan on partnering with some more companies or slowing that aspect down?
No, no! We want to keep up the same cadence as always with it all. For example, we've just gone live in Portugal with just one partner; so we've got more of that market to go live with. We've got plans to hopefully obtain a licence to go live in Greece, in South Africa and lots of other places to do exactly that. So we should hopefully be adding more and more partners.
We've got plans to hopefully obtain a licence to go live in Greece, in South Africa and lots of other places to do exactly that
You've recently partnered with bet365 in the UK as well, haven't you? How's that partnership going for you? What's that done for you so far?
It's been really good. It's been during this period, so it's not had the full effect yet. And like with all partners, we start with a game or two, to show that our product is actually very popular with the players and then we grow it slowly, with more and more games as we work through the schedule. So we expect, like all of them, to continue to grow.
So far you've made five games this year. Next year, do you want to make more than five/keep to that same range? What's the goal?
Our aim is to release 12 unique slingo games a year. I think we may be just between 10 and 12 this year; it just depends on the schedule. We've got some really exciting ones, we licensed Tetris, so we have a Tetris game coming out and also Space Invaders.
So Space Invaders will be the next release and then into 2024; again, it will be 12 games. But, with the investments we’re making now, we're hoping to add a few other types of games leveraging our slingo IP as well. So hopefully we'll be able to release more and more.
Lastly, what areas are you looking to improve in 2024? And what do you plan to achieve in the next financial year?
Good question. We're expecting or hoping that we'll continue our growth definitely on the revenue side. We are working closer with our partners as well, with how we use data and how we can work with promoting the games etc. So we expect to be launching new partners, which will add revenue and add to the bottom line, doing more with the existing partners; the same.
As I was saying, touching on the games, if we can be releasing more games and more unique games, maybe we'll touch slightly different types of products as well. We'd be more pure slingo, but using that slingo IP and other games should be interesting.
We just launched a game at the end of August, which was a bit of a crossover. It was more of a single staking slingo game using that IP, which is a bit different to our other games, and we'll hopefully be able to expand and do more of those into the next year.
