XLMedia’s strategy of US growth and acquisitions has boosted its financial performance in the first six months of the year, with the new vertical providing an uplift to its H1 results.
Providing a trading update before posting official H1 results in September, XLMedia posted expectations of full-group revenues of $44.5m, up 37% on H1 2021 results of $32m.
XLMedia US sports headlines H1 results
The group’s sports division headlined the corporate performance, growing 191% in revenues year-over-year, with a topline of $34m for the first six months of 2022.
This was catalyzed by XLMedia’s M+A strategy in North America, which has seen the acquisitions of Sports Betting Dime and Saturday Football Inc businesses to its media publishing network.
Moreover, further North American positives have seen the firm sign new media partnerships in order to ‘capitalize on the full US sports calendar’, including the Super Bowl. This helped the US Sports business reach revenues of $30.2m, up significantly from the $5.9m revenue generated in H1 of 2021.
US Sports’ performed even better when positioned next to the group’s European sports business, revenues of which were reported to be just $3.8m.
“The company has traded well across the first six months of the current financial year, buoyed by its newest vertical, US Sports, which produced a strong performance in the period and accounted for 68% of the Group’s revenue, $30.2m,” an XLMedia statement read.
Gaming revenues fall
Elsewhere in the business, the casino and bingo vertical remains in line with targets, creating provisional revenues of $8.4m during H1.
Despite this, gaming revenues are ‘expected to trade below historic levels’, therefore, XLMedia has ‘reduced its cost base’ to reflect such drop-offs.
XLMedia’s corporate restructure
Meanwhile, H1 of this year saw the group welcome a new Chair and CFO, whilst David King joined as CEO on July 1.
It comes amid a new organizational design aiming to cut costs, and XLMedia notified stakeholders that the new structure will generate cost savings of $5-6m per year.
Finally, the firm’s cash balance for the end of H1 stood at $17.7m, down from $36.9m one year ago, and the group announced that it expects to make deferred consideration payments of around $7.7m in H2.
