Yesterday after market close, ZEAL has raised its FY’25 guidance. Here’s our take:

As flagged before (see update from 8th May 2025), ZEAL has increased its guidance. FY'25 sales are now expected between € 205-215m (prev.: EUR 195-205m), which is in line with our estimate (eNuW: € 212m). Also, FY'25 EBITDA is guided between € 63-68m (prev.: € 55-60m) and is now ahead of our old estimate (eNuW old: € 61m), likely because we overestimated the ramp-up in personnel. The reason behind the guidance hike should stem from strong demand at “Traumhausverlosung” as well as a higher lottery gross margin.

This week on Monday, the raffle for a “Dream House” at a popular beach vacation spot (St. Peter-Ording) took place, which likely experienced higher demand than initially expected. To put this into perspective, ZEAL has now raffled 4 houses thus far and has disclosed KPIs for the first three houses. The three houses have generated total billings of € 26m. After deducting lottery tax (12% of billings or € 3.1m), payments for charities (21% of billings or € 5.4m) and prizes (eNuW: currently 19% of billings or € 4.8m), this should have left a sales effect of € 12.6m (or 48% of billings = current gross margin of “Traumhausverlosung”). The data highlights the strong impact on sales from this new product type. Regarding the fourth raffle from last Monday, it seems like ZEAL has hit a sweet spot and found a perfect house that was desired by a lot of users. Supported by strong performance marketing campaigns over the last weeks leading up to the raffle, we expect strong MAUs and consequently strong billings of more than € 11m, thus triggering sales of more than € 5.5m for ZEAL from the fourth house raffle (vs. € 4.2m on average at the first three raffles).

Moreover, Q3 experiences a modest lottery environment, until today, where the Eurojackpot peaks at € 120m. During the phase leading up to and during the peak jackpots, user activity (and spending) already starts to build up and nearly doubles. More importantly, with higher activity, the product mix also improves towards higher margin products like “lottery pools” or “team player”. Consequently, ZEAL already sees a strong gross margin improvement at lotteries (partially also boosted by the strong gross margin from “Traumhausverlosung”), as written in yesterday’s release. Mind you, the price increases from mid-2024 are now falling out of the comparable base (as of Q3’25), thus not serving as a growth driver anymore, supporting our view of a product-mix driven gross margin improvement. Should today’s Eurojackpot not be hit and develop into a streak during the remainder of the year (as seen in Q4’24), a further guidance hike might also be in the cards, in our view.

Against this backdrop, we reiterate our BUY recommendation with a slightly raised PT of € 65.00 (old: € 64.00), based on DCF.