Aspire Global - Intervju

Förra veckan kom Kvalitetsaktiepodden att intervjua Aspire Globals VD, Tsachi Maimon. Jag hade tidigare hört talas om bolaget, men aldrig läst på om det. Två dagar senare publicerade Magnus Andersson, aka. Fundamentalanalys, en analys på tradingportalen, vilken verkligen fick mig att bli intresserad av bolaget. Efter att ha läst, analyserat och reflekterat hade jag ett par frågor som jag önskade få svar på. Således valde jag att ta kontakt med Mr. Maimon och redan fem minuter(!) efter att jag hade mailat fick jag svar. Efter ett par mail fram och tillbaka fick Mr. Maimon slutligen tid att under onsdagen, den 27/2, besvara de fåtal frågor som jag hade. 

När detta inlägg publiceras äger jag inte några aktier i nämnda bolag och jag kommer inte att köpa några inom de närmaste 48 timmarna (räknat från måndag, den 4/3).

Aspire Globals VD - Tsachi Maimon

1. Thank you for taking the time with this interview. As there is already much to read about Aspire Global, this interview will try to include and include things that have not previously been discussed. Can you briefly tell about yourself and your story? Where did you grow up, where have you studied, jobs before you started Aspire Global et cetera.

Sure, I am an Israeli guy, married with 2 kids. Till I moved to Malta with the family 6 years ago, I used to live in Tel Aviv. As a kid, I used to play professional tennis, a sport I like very much. I took my first degree in the university of Jeruslaem and did my masters in the college of management. Before Aspire Global I used to work for playtech (also a gaming company listed in the London stock exchange).

What do you see as your biggest competitors and why? How are you going to do that not only to keep pace but also overcome them? 

There are several platform providers out there that can be considered as our competition, but not a lot are actually supplying what we specialized in, which is platform + additional services (also called full turnkey solution). What we do in order to keep pace is investing more in our platform in order to have it certified for more local jurisdictions than others. Add to this that we want to have several gaming verticals in our offering (currently casino + bingo + sport and maybe more in the future). In addition, we have our own 200 proprietary games that we developed so they are unique to those partners operators that chose to operate on our platform.

You grow very quickly and strongly in a strictly organic view and have said that you also want to/want to acquire, but that you wait for the "perfect" object. How long can you wait and how do you reason about the alternative cost (ie having this money lying down while your competitors both acquire and grow)?

We are proud to grow organically. It makes us less stress to acquire only to deliver revenue growth. We are looking to strength our B2B arm by acquiring games companies and additional technologies that will strength our in the gaming value chain. and in addition we are in the look for an operator which we will feel comfortable to take onwards. We see that not all operator’s acquisitions did well in the sector and want ours to be better. The reason we took the bond last year and didn’t use it yet is because we had an acquisition in hand and close to be completed but decided not to. I prefer having this money lying down then acquiring something that will cost us much more and not proof itself.

Which geographical markets do you consider to be your most important and which will have your greatest focus within the next year? Why? You have earlier said that USA isn’t you biggest priority, while Kindred, Kambi, Evolution Gaming, Catena Media, Net Ent etc. are saying that USA is the “dark horse” - why not this focus on USA? 

We still have room to grow in Europe, But are looking outside of Europe as well (not USA). We don’t want to be in the first wave for USA as it has a long way till it will stabilized and matured.

Your profit is the same as in 2015 while the profit margin has fallen - what is this due to and is it a coincidence (picture below)? What can investors expect in the coming years and is it something special that you want them to be prepared and extra observant on? 

In order to understand better our performance, I recommend reading page 72 in our prospectus - http://www.aspireglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Aspire-Global-Prospectus.pdf . What we mention there is our income from a discontinued operation. In 2015 alone it was around 4.5m euro straight to the bottom line. In addition, we closed at the end of 2017 the Australian market (8% of aspire revenue back then). So the performance in 2018 is much higher when we take those into consideration.

Källa: Börsdata

On twitter, there are several who finds Aspire Global as a very interesting company to invest in, but also those who thinks the opposite. Earlier this week a profile posted this and my question is what would would like to repsond? 

The answer to this is simple as I said above :) . we had an acquisition closed to be finalized and this is why we wanted to have the bond in hand.  

Would you please like to tell us a little bit about your third future business unit, and current or potential customer’s interest in buying your games/products on a stand-alone basis?

The 3^rd future business is our proprietary games. Portfolio of more than 200 games. Currently most of the income into those games comes from partners (operators) working on our platform. We are working on a business framework (trigger) that will allow us to distribute them without defocusing the core business lines we have. We had interest from outside operators for a long time to take this content but we didn’t do so as want the structure for this business model to be in a great shape.