Online trading company Plus500 Ltd (LON:PLUS) today issued a trading update for the six months ended 30 June 2023.
Revenue for the period was $368.5 million, comprising of $346.2 million in trading income and $22.3 million in interest income, which is also included within EBITDA for the period, including revenue of $160.6m in Q2 2023 (Q2 2022: $240.5m).
Customer Income, a key measure of the Group’s underlying performance, was $304.3m in H1 2023 (H2 2022: $299.8m), including $146.5m in Q2 2023 (Q2 2022: $151.8m), with Customer Trading Performance of $41.9m in H1 2023 (H2 2022: $21.4m), including $(8.2m) in Q2 2023 (Q2 2022: $88.7m).
The Group successfully onboarded 50,449 New Customers during H1 2023 (H2 2022: 49,274), including 22,248 in Q2 2023 (Q2 2022: 23,535). The Group’s base of Active Customers was 175,762 during H1 2023 (H2 2022: 177,946), including 122,833 in Q2 2023 (Q2 2022: 145,506).
Excellent traction was made during the period in the substantial US futures market where the Group is targeting a number of major growth opportunities.
The Group continued to develop its strategic position in the US as a market infrastructure provider, supporting institutional clients with brokerage-execution and clearing services. This B2B offering will continue to be driven by the Group’s robust financial position, its highly differentiated technological capabilities, ongoing operational investment and its position as a full clearing member of the CME Group exchanges and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX). The Group is currently in the process of obtaining clearing memberships from additional exchanges.
To leverage the significant US retail trading opportunity, and following the launch of ‘TradeSniper’ in Q3 2022, Plus500 recently launched ‘Plus500 Futures’, a new intuitive proprietary futures trading platform specifically tailored for the sizeable US retail trading market, both on iOS and Android. This new offering will enable the Group to further benefit from the continued demand for and increase in accessibility to the futures market for the US retail trading community.
The launch of ‘Plus500 Futures’ follows the launch of another new offering, ‘event-based contracts’, now available on TradeSniper’s iOS and Android applications. This new offering allows trading in sizable contracts tailored for the retail community over the world’s most trusted benchmark equity indices, commodities, and foreign currency futures markets. This represents an innovative trading solution which Plus500 has introduced to customers in the growing futures retail market.
A new licence in the UAE market was obtained during the period, further expanding Plus500’s geographic footprint. The Group’s operation in the UAE is already fully functioning.
Plus500 made further progress in broadening the Group’s geographic footprint within the substantial Japanese trading market through the development and the expected upcoming launch of its new proprietary trading platform tailored specially for the Japanese market.
Plus500 recognises Japan as one of its key strategic markets and will apply there the Group’s financial and technological strength to scale and develop its local position. Accordingly, the Group intends to allocate substantial financial and personnel resources on an on-going basis, in order to maximise these opportunities in the medium term.
In line with the Company’s capital allocation and shareholder returns policy, out of the 11,485,961 shares repurchased during the period, 7,327,605 shares were acquired by the Company on 13 June 2023, representing approximately 8.2% of the Company’s issued share capital as at such date (excluding treasury shares, which are not entitled to dividends and have no voting rights at the Company’s general meetings), for a total cash consideration of $127.5m.
The Board remains highly confident about the Group’s performance for FY 2023, and therefore anticipates that Plus500’s revenue and EBITDA for the current financial year will be in line with current market expectations.
David Zruia, Chief Executive Officer, commented:
“Plus500 continued to perform strongly in the first half of 2023, building on the positive momentum achieved in recent years, leveraging our differentiated, market-leading, proprietary technology and benefiting from our increasingly diversified revenue streams, broadened product offering, deep customer relationships and the structural growth drivers in our end markets. We made significant progress in optimising our growth opportunities in the US and Japan, where we continue to make substantial investments to take advantage of the opportunities ahead. Earlier this year the Group obtained a license in the United Arab Emirates, demonstrating further progress in diversifying our geographic footprint across high growth markets.
“In addition, we continued to deliver outstanding levels of returns to our shareholders during the period, through $214.1m in share repurchases and the $29.9m dividend payment due tomorrow, on 11 July 2023, which emphasise the Board’s view of the current value of the Company’s shares. Our cash generative earnings model, combined with our continued strategic, operational and financial position, means that Plus500 is well placed to deliver sustainable growth in the medium to long term, enabling the Group to deliver further shareholder value in the future.”
