Earnings Labs

Genius Sports Limited (GENI)

Q2 2021 Earnings Call· Wed, Sep 8, 2021

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Genius Sports Q2 Results Call 2021. Throughout the call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode and afterwards there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please go ahead with your meeting.

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining. Before we begin, we'd like to remind you that certain statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements that are subject to risks that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our historical results or from our forecasts. We assume no responsibility for updating forward-looking statements. Any such statements should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements in our earnings release and risk factor discussions in our filings with the SEC, including our last annual report on Form 20-F filed on April 30. During the call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP measures that we believe may be useful in evaluating Genius's operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for Genius's financial results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable U.S GAAP measures is available in our earnings press release and earnings presentation, which can be found on our website at investor.geniussports.com. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mark Locke.

Mark Locke

Analyst

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. As we mentioned last quarter, we continue to be incredibly excited about the market opportunity ahead. We are better positioned than ever before to capitalize on the growth in the global sports betting market due to the strength of our partnerships with hundreds of sports leagues and federations, sportsbook operators and media brands across the globe. Our strong performance this quarter demonstrates how Genius is woven into the fabric of the ecosystem and that the unique value that we continue to provide to our partners including best-in-class technology and services that allow sports leagues to monetize their data, deepen fan engagement in sports business operations, breadths and depths of the venue coverage, reliability of the key services and integrated relationships with sportsbooks, and the deep long-term relationships rooted in the scalable provisions, mission critical data and technology that's fundamental to our partners' success. Our position at the heart of the industry is vital to its successful operation as a whole. We are confident in the value that our products and services bring to the entire sports ecosystem and believe that our service quality and innovative technologies secure our placement in the long-term and protect our business from potential disintermediation risk. We believe that the operations of both leagues and sportsbooks would be significantly challenged without the key services that Genius provides. For instance, we possess best-in-class, real-time data collection technology that we deploy at our sporting events every day around the globe. However, it is not the data alone that makes our service valuable. It is the software we wrap around that data that turns it into odds or lines that is vital for sportsbooks. Leagues lap this technology and the resources to continuously in effect [ph] to keep up with…

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Thank you, Mark. And thanks to everyone again for joining today’s call. As Mark mentioned, we are continue to execute on our plan and the business is carrying on its momentum from the prior quarter. Second quarter group revenue moved year-on-year to $55.8 million with each segment of our business once again growing at a phenomenal pace. While last year's second quarter was plagued by disruptive sports calendar, we’ve continued to grow the business well ahead of pre-COVID levels. To start, our betting technology content and services revenue more than doubled year-on-year to $40.7 million. This growth has been driven by our increased market share, higher share of wallet through additional services to sportsbooks and also new customer wins, as well as by annualized growth in the overall global betting market. The major technology content and services revenue have increased 62% year-on-year growing to $8 million in Q2. This increase was driven by increased advertising spend in both the U.S. and Europe alongside the customer wins. And lastly, the sports technology and services revenue increased to $7.2 million. The main drivers for the sports technology increase is the inclusion of the acquisitions of Sportzcast, acquired in December 2020, as well as Second Spectrum acquired in June 2021. Within the sports technology line it's worth pointing out that there are a number of small revenue streams included here, being firstly those Sportzcast and Second Spectrum revenues which contributed $2.0 million in the quarter. Also, ancillary services to sports leagues such as the NBA and the PGA being $1.7 billion in the quarter. And lastly, non-cash revenue relating to our contra strategy for the rights being $3.5 million. It’s worth reiterating in relation to those non-cash revenue stream, this has no margin impact with cost of sales grossed up by an identical…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions].The first question is from the line of Stephen Grambling from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Stephen Grambling

Analyst

Hey, thanks for taking the question. It’s Stephen Grambling. So you announced a number of partnerships with different operators throughout the quarter. I'm just kind of trying to think through how do these typically ramp? How should we think through the contribution from some of these expected? This is the first question.

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Hi, Steven, this is Nick. So yes, I mean, obviously, we've been announcing quite a lot over the course of the last couple of weeks and clearly that has been built into our material uplifting guide that we did in Q1 to the $250 million to $260 million. What we've seen really over the course of the year, we've been doing these deals is they're almost exactly in line with what we're anticipating and therefore that's why we have stacked our guidance to $255 million to $260 million. Clearly, they ramp on a long-term basis over the life of the NFL contracts and as the U.S. market liberalizes. But they're also as you've seen from the announcements, strong contributors. And the important thing for us is they are not just the data deals, and as we told you, it's about execution. It's also about the media deals, streaming deals, and indeed pre-match as well.

Stephen Grambling

Analyst

And I guess we'll follow up on that, so on the Ad Tech side of that is there any way you can help us think about the economics of that business? I think you gave the example of buying ad space, I guess, how are you being paid? How are you making money? And how do you see the margins on that, versus kind of the core software kind of line setting business?

Mark Locke

Analyst

Hi, there it’s Mark. I mean the Ad Tech deals that we envisaged are coming through very, very nicely, I mean, as you've seen the advertising business grow very, very satisfactory over the period. Well, the way that those deals work is, we get commitments from sportsbooks on their marketing spend and what we do is we then spend those marketing dollars on behalf of those sportsbooks in order to acquire new customers for them and there's other things that we can do in the future in terms of reactivation and retargeting. But at the moment, the main focus, especially around the start of the season is around customer acquisition. So we have the deals that we're doing and the ones that we're announcing that include the marketing spend, are really about getting a long-term commitment from the sportsbooks on those marketing dollars. And that gives us really good long-term visibility about the revenues. Again, it helps us to be very confident in the numbers that we are, that we're putting out into the market and it really gives us the ability to sort of to forecast that sort of growth very, very well.

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Yes and Stephen this is Nick, it's worth just pointing out in terms of the blend of our revenues for the rest of the year, I think media is running at around about 15% of our revenues. Given the deals that we've been doing, I'm expecting that to increase as a proportion, probably near around about the 20% of our revenues by the time we get to the end of the year. And then that will probably likely to increase proportionately in 2022 as well.

Stephen Grambling

Analyst

And maybe one more, and then I'll yield to the floor, on the official rights strategy, you're referencing that it's kind of playing out and a big part of that seems like it's the NFL. I think one of the pieces of pushback that we get from investors is, hey, has it really been as relevant in Europe, and in particularly the UK, where it's a more mature market relative to the U.S.? So I'm curious, are you seeing any change in behavior from the operators in Europe as well as it relates to the official rights?

Mark Locke

Analyst

I think it's a great question. I'm delighted you asked it actually. We -- I mean, we are seeing a change and it's definitely going in exactly the direction that we said it would. So it was a couple of years ago, if you recall the story, we really started to enforce the rights that we had after spending a very long time building a portfolio. And what we saw in Europe is, we saw a very aggressive adoption of that. And I think within maybe the sort of first six to 12 months of us starting to enforce our rights, over 70% of our customers have signed up in one way or another to what we -- to committing to taking official data where it's available and clearly that was the majority of operators and a huge proportion of that was UK and European operators. What we've seen throughout the deal with the NFL, again and you'll see through the announcements that we've been making is a continued embracement of that official rights strategy, the contracts that we're doing obligate sportsbooks to work with us on official data where we hold the rights. And again, the rights portfolio as I've said, during the initial part of this call, have grown very, very nicely. So overall, the official data strategy is working exactly as we expect it to, exactly as planned and we're incredibly pleased with how well and that's dropping through in terms of the contracts, the revenues that we're seeing in the business.

Stephen Grambling

Analyst

Awesome, thanks so much for all the details and I’m back in the queue.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Jed Kelly

Analyst

Thank you. Great, thanks for taking my questions. On the NFL profitability, can you just kind of dive into some of the key drivers, is it going to be more driven by the live ads from in-game betting or leveraging your unique data, can you just answer some of the questions around profitability because it seems to be what investors are kind of most interested in?

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Hi Jed, this is Nick. I'll just take the sort of the -- I guess the numbers side of that, and then I'll hand over to Mark, who can talk a little bit about the drivers. And I just want to reiterate, we said that I think at the end of Q1, was that again, is that, yes on a cash basis, and it's going to be broadly breakeven, we're anticipating it to be broadly breakeven in 2021, and then cash generative from 2022 onwards. And also, if we look at the contract as a whole, we're expecting it to be profitable as a whole contract, if we look out to the end of the six-year period, but I'll let Mark take the driver piece.

Mark Locke

Analyst

Yes, that's right. And really, if you recall, with our go-to-market strategy, it makes it very difficult, as I said in the opening part of this call, very difficult, I think Nick said actually, to break out the ROI of the NFL or indeed any particular sport on its own basis. But because of the way that we sell it, as a business we tend to look to add services on a much broader basis to our customers. So that will include the NFL data, but it will also include other official data, we have other rights partnerships. It will also include provision of odds services, it will also include the provision of obviously the marketing service. The combination of all of those things and is the basis upon which the deals that we're doing, and the renewals of the contracts and the update of the contracts are being done. And as I said, when I was speaking to Stephen a second ago, they're going very, very well. And in terms of, the sort of, some of the metrics we're seeing large proportions of our customers taking more than one or two products and increasing the number of products that we're seeing. And again, I said this before, our business is about adding value added services to our sportsbook partners, but there's also a fair degree of business, it's about leveraging, and having the NFL allows us to increase the amount of products and services that we're able to provide to our sportsbook partners and really sort of help drive their growth.

Jed Kelly

Analyst

Got it. That's helpful. And then on the media content, we're still in early days. however, revenues did decline sequentially. I mean, would you expect your revenue, your media tech to outgrow normal seasonality trends in advertising? And, how should we think about the long-term growth in that business?

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Yes, I mean, let's be clear, it grew 63% year-on-year as well Jed, so but I think we said at the time, the end of Q1 announcement, we had such a strong year, strong quarter in Q1, 2021. And that's principally from the U.S. sporting events, with both March Madness and the Super Bowl off the back of our FanDuel announcement that we announced back in the, I think it was January 2021. So we were fully anticipating it to be marginally back quarter, when you look at it on quarter-on-quarter. What I'm anticipating really is now with the coming back of U.S. sports and indeed coming back of European soccer as well, the season is that I’m anticipating the major business to grow significantly in the next couple of quarters. And as I say, actually, I think proportionately, I think I just said to Stephen is that I'm expecting media to be in around about the 20% proportion of our revenues by the end of the year. I don't see that business slowing down. If I were to look a little bit more long-term, particularly given on the back of the deals that we're now announcing on the NFL, and therefore I see it continue to and proportionally grows our business. I mean, it will never be the majority of our business by any stretch, but it will be a more significant minority if we look through a crystal ball to the next two or three years.

Jed Kelly

Analyst

Got it and just a follow up before I get back in queue. Where are you taking advertising share from? Is it from the traditional programmatic players or is this just a new category for the sportsbooks?

Mark Locke

Analyst

So, I'll take that and sort of give a bit of a high level and then I'll pass it across to Josh who runs that business to give you a bit more detail on the specifics. So one of the things that I think it's worth just reiterating, yes, I've done it before, but is the fact that when we're talking about these advertising dollars, it's really worth making, again just making it really, really clear that we're talking about a new TAM for Genius. We've -- Nick and I've talked ad infinitum, I'm sure you're sick of hearing us talk about the TAM that we're targeting our 40% of revenue, 5% of gaming revenue, 40% long-term margins, when we're talking about these advertising dollars and this advertising revenue that's coming into the business, this is a brand new TAM for us. We've never quoted. So we're not trying to effectively squeeze advertising revenue into the original figures. We still believe that we can get to those numbers that we've stated of through that original TAM. The new TAM that we're talking about is really those advertising dollars that the sportsbooks are spending to acquire and ultimately reactivate and we engage their customers. But Josh, give a brief overview of how the deals are structured, if you like.

Josh Linforth

Analyst

Hi, there. Yes, just add to that, where the marketing spend is essentially coming from is two avenues. One is we're winning marketing budgets off the sort of traditional agencies and we're also working with operators to help them understand the efficiencies of their various marketing channels in-house. And some of that involves them moving budgets from other channels into the services that Genius offers. So that's essentially the two main areas where we're securing budgets from.

Jed Kelly

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Bernie McTernan from Needham and Co. Please go ahead.

Bernie McTernan

Analyst

Great, thanks for taking the question. Maybe it's a follow up to that last one. You mentioned audience profiles before in media, what do you, what exactly do you know about the consumers that you're hitting with ads? Where do you get the data from? And how differentiated is that relative to a traditional agency or others that are directing advertising spend that you're competing with?

Josh Linforth

Analyst

Hi, there. Josh again. Yes, so where we get the audience data from essentially all the different points that we're distributing our sports data, and we have totally unique views of those fans of how they're engaging with our consumption habits of how often they're reading a sports article. What teams do they follow, checking team rosters, watching video highlights. We essentially aggregate all of those data points to create an individual view of each fan and when -- we then feed that into our Ad Tech business, and we essentially assign a fan score to value that fan so that we can highlight into the advertising campaigns. But it's totally unique to Genius just through our Genius relationship with the sports bodies and our place in the ecosystem.

Bernie McTernan

Analyst

Thanks for that. And then do you have a census in terms of how big the programmatic budgets are for sportsbooks relative to other advertising means? And then maybe what your share is inside of that and where you expect it to go over time?

Mark Locke

Analyst

Yes, I mean, we are working on providing at some point in the coming period some information on the TAM that we're working for. Programmatic budgets typically don’t form the majority of these sports budget by any means. I mean, it is definitely a minority. But one of the things that comes from this is a highly efficient return that you get and then you get very targeted advertising and very high returns, which is why this programmatic part of our business is being so successful. So I think over time, we will release more information about the TAM. There's also other ways that we're looking at accessing those marketing dollars, and other drivers that are going to give us more access to the marketing dollars that are available.

Bernie McTernan

Analyst

Great. And then maybe lastly Mark, you mentioned earlier in the call, U.S. 40% to 50% of that being is in-game. That's still below Europe, I think that's closer to about 70%. But can you remind us on how quickly you think the U.S. can reach European levels? And is Europe for in-game penetration the ceiling we should be thinking about or do you think it can go even higher in the U.S.?

Mark Locke

Analyst

Yes, look, I think in the UK, I mean, we -- I think we often quote, I think it was that 365 or is it 79% of that of their wages were made during the game. And again, there's the 40% to 50% was an anecdote from one of the sportsbooks. We believe, and we're seeing evidence that the amount of in-play wagering is increasing rapidly. But the thing I guess that's worth thinking about here is that you know, the rates at which it will increase and again, to answer sort of final part of your question, how much of the market can re-engage is getting -- is really going to come to and the quality of the products that you're putting out into the market and the way that you engage those fans. So as a business, we invested money in our own tech stack that's providing all of the data and they also have the line services, but also acquisitions such as Second Spectrum, FanHub, Spirable, all of the businesses that we're acquiring and bring in really help us focus on our product development. And it's that product development in the way that that product is presented to the sports fan or sportsbook customers, alongside the targeted advertising and the targeted offers that you're going to put in front of these guys, that’s the thing that's going to drive that growth. So do I think there's a ceiling? I think there's a -- there is, I don’t think 100% of all bets are going to be placed live or during the game, but I do think that if you -- if we get the product right, and if we deploy all the services that we've got at our fingertips over time we will end up taking the very vast proportion, and I could definitely see that being in excess of the 79% of that 365 quote, yes.

Bernie McTernan

Analyst

Great, thanks for taking the questions.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Ryan Sigdahl from Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.

Ryan Sigdahl

Analyst

Great, thanks for taking our questions. I'm curious, if you can quantify the number of sportsbooks that have signed up for official NFL data with Genius? And then secondly, along those lines, you alluded to FanDuel MGM points that box that ones you haven't officially announced, but can you talk through those negotiations, are those, do you have contracts there or still actively discussing?

Mark Locke

Analyst

Look, I think the way that we're approaching this is, we're looking for long-term, wide ranging partnerships with the sportsbook partners. And again, we're announcing the partnerships as they go. Clearly, we as a business are focused on being a good partner. We've got long-term relationships with a lot of the sportsbooks, and we look -- we're looking to make sure that we're not putting them in difficult situations at the beginning of the season, but we are very focused and having a lot of success in getting the right deals, for us in the business going forwards. In terms of the sort of the NFL, the NFL has obviously announced seven partnerships with various sportsbooks, and there's an obligation, a positive obligation on all of those partners to buy official NFL data from Genius Sports. So, I think things overall are going extremely well. I mean, we are very, very much on track from where we thought we would be. And again, that's allowed us to narrow the guidance and give us a huge amount of confidence for where we're going to come out at the end of the year.

Ryan Sigdahl

Analyst

And then for the ones you have announced, DraftKings, Caesars, Wynn, et cetera, so NFL English Premier League, several other soccer leagues, was this an extension or an expansion of leagues or were those, I guess, incrementally events outside of the NFL or were you previously providing those and this is just an extension multiyear expansion, et cetera?

Mark Locke

Analyst

Hi, Ryan, I'm just going to introduce Jack Davison. Jack is our Chief Commercial, so he's going to give you a bit of an update on that.

Jack Davison

Analyst

Hi, Ryan. Good, thanks for the question. And really with each of these deals, obviously, most of these operators we have relationships with in some shape, or form and have done as you know, for a long period of time. In each of these deals that we're announcing, none of them are the same, but all of them are focusing on more than one product, I would say. So that ability to how we think about this stuff is the NFL data is obviously a big part of it. But all of the other assets that we're able to bring as part of our NFL relationship, the digital marketing stuff, but also all of the other content and official data that we have. So I'm not going to talk about specific deals there, but all of those deals that we're doing are very much on strategy in terms of moving operators spend from unofficial products onto official products, for example, and that is moving spend from making sure we get the largest share of wallet in those conversations. So without going specific on each deal, and they're not all the same and our level of maturity with each customer is slightly different in terms of where we are, but all of them are moving us forward on that strategy to make sure the operators that we work with don't just work with us on the products that they, that the NFL, but also work with us and all of our assets, all of our official data assets, so and hopefully that answers your question.

Ryan Sigdahl

Analyst

Yes, helpful. Thanks, Jack, Mark, Nick. That’s it from me. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Next question is from the line of Robin Farley from UBS. Please go ahead.

Robin Farley

Analyst

It's Robin Farley. I've heard your comments about the NFL and maybe I'll try to ask it in a slightly different way. I wonder if you could give us a sense of just ballpark how much of the revenue, you know the return expectation you have for the NFL deal is from just deals related to the NFL data directly versus other sports rights data or other sports data and advertising that are sort of tied or packaged in, if you could, and if there's a ballpark way to give us a sense of how you're expecting that return? Thanks.

Mark Locke

Analyst

Yes and I'm going to unfortunately not be very helpful to you. But the reason I can't be help with you, it's not how, it's not how we sell our products. We package things together, we -- it's almost unheard of that we would that a sportsbook would only choose to buy just the NFL data from us. So we don't break this out like that and it's not how our business model works. I'm sorry to be unhelpful, but we just can't do that.

Robin Farley

Analyst

Okay, I guess I'm just thinking about those that didn't buy some other sports from you that will now buy those other sports from you and package it. And even if you couldn't break out the sort of revenue differential, is there a way to think about kind of what percent of your customers have switched other sports to you in an NFL package deal?

Mark Locke

Analyst

Sure. I'll pass to Josh again.

Josh Linforth

Analyst

Yes, hi Robin. I think without being a bit more, I think we should refer to the previous answer, but look, when we do any deals with any customer, we're very clear all the way through that we have an efficient data strategy that's the strategy of the business and that's the thing. So what you've got to think about like this, we really want to find operators, partners who buy into that strategy top to bottom. So we're not really interested in doing having operating partnerships that pick and choose if you'd like. So I think that answers your question, really, but all customer conversations we're having are always about all of our official exclusive data without fail, there are any that don't include that stuff. So, they're all slightly different in terms of their makeup and how they fit together and all the different packages, and how we work with them on an international basis as well as in the U.S. because a lot of these customers are long standing customers of Genius for many years. But they're all slightly different in that way. But the strategy of the business is one that's based around all customers backing our official data strategy and those are the customers we want. Well, we're not really interested in others. So that doesn't give you specifics or percentages, but it's certainly from a commercial point of view that is a primary focus of all discussions that we have with all customers.

Robin Farley

Analyst

Okay. And one other, in terms of your revenue guidance, does that include any further acquisitions that have not yet been announced or that we don't know about or would any incremental M&A at this point would add to your guidance? In other words, hitting your guidance does not require any acquisitions that you haven't already announced as of now, is that right?

Nicholas Taylor

Analyst

Yes, that's exactly right, Robin it’s Nick. Yes it includes a obviously, the two transactions that closed in June will contribute and I think we're talking about to continue around about $15 million to $20 million of revenue in the year. Spirable we announced is frankly sort of inconsequential really from a revenue perspective, but no, there's nothing else built into what was already announced.

Robin Farley

Analyst

Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And at this time, we have to stop the Q&A session. If you have any leftover questions, please direct them to Genius Sports. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.