Acroud on Thursday said its interim third quarter results show the company is “on the right track,” as revenue, profit and numbers of new depositing customers all grew year over year.
The Sweden-based company is a developer and operator of some 30 comparison and news sites in the poker, sports betting and casino space, and it offers SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to the online gaming affiliate industry.
In the quarter ending September 30, the company said it had 39,632 new depositing customers (NDC), up 646% from the 5,312 NDC it recorded in the same quarter one year earlier.
Acroud said its Q3 2021 revenue was €6.4m (US$7.3m), up 172% from the corresponding quarter, with organic growth up 0.3%.
EBITDA for the recently completed quarter was €1.2m, while profit was €593,000.
For the first 9 months of this year, Acroud’s revenue was up 100% to €18.2m, EBITDA was €3.8m, and profit after tax was €1.07m.
NDC for the first three quarters of 2021 was 100,867, up 303% from the same period one year earlier.
CEO Robert Andersson said in a statement the return of live events helped Acroud in “strengthening its position as the bridge between land-based gaming and affiliation to create opportunities to connect operators with the player communities while also producing high-quality content to grow its digital flagship products, such as Pokerlistings.com.”
“I am happy to see that we continue to increase sales quarter on quarter,” Andersson said. “The new depositing customers number has shown large quarter-on-quarter growth, which clearly shows that we are on the right track. YoY the growth figures regarding NDCs are more than tenfold compared to last year.”
According to Andersson, Acroud has actively continued to invest in new growth initiatives for the future at the expense of short-term profitability, such as a new SEO strategy and development of sites.
“It would be wrong to say that we are satisfied with the EBITDA level, however internally we are sure of our progress and underlying KPIs are showing strong trends which will bear fruit going forward,” he declared. “We are getting closer to taking the big leap forward. A proof of this is that we have seen a break-through in early Q4 and our additional SEO efforts have started to make a difference.”
Acroud has leveraged one of its relatively new sites to become one of its larger assets in terms of both traffic and NDCs, Andersson said, adding the company’s strategy is to work predominantly with hybrid and revenue share deals, which is why it takes a while before the increases in NDC has a direct impact on the bottom line.
“We are currently replicating our new way of working on multiple sites, and we are already starting to see positive effects even if ramp-up periods can be expected,” Andersson explained. “Consequently, I am very positive that we will see solid organic growth in our core affiliate business, where we operate with high margins, as well as restarting our growth in the US going forward during 2022.”
Acroud employs more than 90 people in its offices in Malta, Denmark and Sweden.
