Sto SE & Co. KGaA

Dear analysts, thank you for participating in our early call on the publication of our Q3 and 9-month figures. As you know, we had planned a virtual CMD with focus on out-of-home and digital out-of-home for today. Immediately following this call, in the light of last week's announcement of the acquisition of RBL Media, we have decided to postpone this and do it in combination with our preliminary results or final results for 2024. We've been quite busy in finalizing the deal for our core business in the last six weeks and currently focus on a swift integration to optimize our plan for 2025. It simply makes more sense to make our projections going forward, including RBL Media and i.e. the digitization of the underlying contracts. We are ultimately a small team, so our resources are limited, so there is no other option. agenda or meaning behind the postponed CMD, just to be clear. However, I would like to take up topics in the following that are not directly affected by the acquisition, such as technical features, bookability and targeting, in order to provide a deeper understanding of our growth drivers at the moment. Henning will then comment on the developments and effects of our Q3 figures in more detail. This will be followed by remarks on what we expect for the fourth quarter and the full year. As always, we are looking forward to your questions after our presentation. With that, we start the call with a short overview of Q3 2024 and the nine months market dynamics. Let's put our performance into the context of direct and indirect peers in Germany. You're probably familiar with this chart. And as always, the numbers in the two middle columns are based on Nielsen, which reports gross revenue, which is inflated by roughly six to seven points versus net numbers, which you have on the right and left of the chart for us and global platforms. In line with the development in previous quarters and comparing like for like, The realistic net numbers, out-of-home is outperforming the overall ad market and STRÖR is outperforming the ad market as well as its out-of-home peers. The driver within out-of-home is consistently digital out-of-home and our public video business was again beyond the growth rates of the global ad platforms like Google, Alphabet or YouTube and far beyond any local German media owner. After the outstanding high driven in parts by the European Football Championship in the second quarter, The German advertising market grew in gross numbers by only 4% compared to 9% in Q2. As in the previous quarters, out-of-home was the decisive growth driver here, with an increase of around 10% outperforming TV and print, significantly by 4 and 9 percentage points, respectively. And this is particularly noteworthy, outgrew desktop mobile, which was down by 3%. Let's look at how these consistently strong developments are reflected in the figures for the first nine months that also level out the phasing effects between Q2 and Q3, given the impact of the sports event in the second quarter. In total, revenues were up by 8% reported or by 7.8% on an organic basis from 1.3 to 1.5 billion. These numbers reflect on the one hand continuous and strong business development, but on the other hand also the strong comms from the prior year quarter. Henning will talk about this in the development of Azam in China in more detail in the financial section, particularly on the developments in the third quarter. Most importantly, despite the softer ad market and negative phasing effects coming from Q2, our organic out-of-home growth was again double-digit. Looking at the other key figures on this page, they are developing exactly as we expected and explained in the last call. EBITDA adjusted is growing faster than revenue. EBITDA adjusted and net profit adjusted are growing almost twice as fast as EBITDA adjusted, reflecting easing cost pressure as well as declining inflation, and in particular, the sustained operational leverage of our core out-of-home segment. EBITDA growth of 12% compared to 8% revenue growth is a perfect proof point for this. In total, EBITDA was up from €375 million to €420 million. EBIT improved from €158 million to €192 million, also due to comparably stable IFRS effects, a development that we also see for the coming years as described in previous calls. Net income increased in line with EBIT from 79 million euro to 96 million euro or also 22%. Free cash flow is probably the strongest statement in the first nine months of 2024. It increased by almost 100 million euro from minus 19 million to plus 78 million euro. In addition to the positive business development, lower capital expenditure and tax expenses compared to the previous year as well as stable IFRS 16 repayments contributed to this encouraging development. At €62 million, CAPEX for the first nine months was 37% below the previous year's figure of around €98 million and reflects the continued back to normal and the objective to further optimize and improve the fill rate of our digital out-of-home portfolio. We develop our infrastructure more demand-oriented and focus on leveraging existing strong networks. you have seen this chart for the first time in the last call and we have added the q3 numbers to once again put the current momentum into a broader context especially the dynamics of digital out of home which is the key value driver for our group you see both quarterly digital out of home revenue as well as the last 12 months numbers for the last almost six years The pandemic with the various lockdowns pushed the last 12 months revenue of our sub-segment down by roughly 35%, although the digital out-of-home business had fully recovered with the end of the last lockdown in 2021. The following six quarters were strong but still impacted by the war in the Ukraine, massive cost inflation as well as the ad market crisis and the tobacco ad ban for out-of-home advertising. But since almost 18 months, we see an acceleration of digital out-of-home and the LTM for digital out-of-home revenue has doubled over the last 12 quarters. In addition, and this is particularly evident in the LTM analysis, Digital out-of-home growth is stabilizing clearly above 20%, which makes clear that even our digital out-of-home product with its short-term bookability is not a business that necessarily responds to short-term shocks or market cycles, but on the contrary shows a comparatively robust development. And according to the available forecasts for our core business from industry bodies like IDOO or consultancies like PwC, the current trend is a recurring and sustainable one for the coming years in line with our expectations. More than 80% of the out of home segment growth is coming from digital out of home. And more than 60% of that digital out-of-home growth is fueled by programmatic demand, automated trading, and the seamless integration of digital out-of-home into the broader digital marketing ecosystem. It's worth mentioning that we still see low single-digit momentum for classic out-of-home going forward, based on our strong local and regional sales force and the opportunities of exactly those customer groups shifting budgets away from print media, i.e. newspapers and freebie weeklies. But the largest potential clearly lies in the linear TV market, still between 40 and 45% of the legacy media landscape today. Long-term TV audience development for the total population has only one direction and the loss of reach in younger target group segments has become massive since the end of the pandemic. At the same time, global platforms already have a high share and focus more on the lower advertising funnel, while advertisers predominantly need to find alternatives in the upper funnel to strengthen their brand presence. And that's where our investments in digitizing our infrastructure in the last years fully pays off. With in total over 46,000 screens across all touchpoints and in over 200 cities, our audience penetration on a weekly and monthly level can more than compete with television and is an inevitable and complementary medium to compensate the shortfall in audience of historic TV-heavy media plans. Similar to primetime and daytime in television, The variety of our formats and screen sizes give brands a broad range of choices from maximum reach at lowest possible costs to maximum brand visibility and cut through with spectacular solutions. And we are the only media category that is able to focus both on niche audiences, just as broadcasting brand messages to the whole country. Over the last years, we have been working closely with all relevant DSPs and trading desks from the digital programmatic world to connect our infrastructure to their systems. Google DB 360 was the last bigger one that opened up their internet-based logics to our alternate to digital out-of-home. But the pure connection doesn't immediately generate revenue. It takes a while until clients and agencies actively allocate budgets via that channel. And we see over time more and more momentum via demand sources like AdForm, The Trade Desk, or Xandr. Starting originally as a DMP, a data management platform, joint venture with the Otto Group. We have been working continuously over the last five years to build partnership models with various data providers like Deutsche Post or Payback and analytics companies like Axiom to maximize the available sources for audience profiles for all of our media, both online and digital out of home. Mass mobility data of telco companies like Deutsche Telekom or Telefonica enable us to better understand the geospatial structure of the various target group clusters. So how does audience targeting for digital out of home work? How do we know which screens we need to activate in what moment for which creative to reach the right audience to optimize advertiser ROI for brands? Basically, three steps ensure that we know exactly which locations have the right target group concentrations for campaigns. First of all, based on the data sources and their information described before, we know who has small kids, who is interested in cars, who is looking for the latest fashion trend, or is only a light viewer of television. That data is connected with a zip code of people's homes or their mobile ID. So we know their profiles and where they are generally. The second step is the projection of movement data. Data from apps give us the geolocation of target groups or, that's the second methodology, we use the radio cells of the telco providers. So, for example, for an average hour of an average day, you know the concentration of individual target group segments in front of our screens. The third and last stage, the audience segment projections are delivered to our play out systems to activate the right screen in the right moment for the right message to the right target group. And every day we are connecting more data, optimize the projection processes, get advertiser ROI feedback and improve our underlying model. We have developed the screen infrastructure to cover the country and reach the majority of the population. We have connected the inventory via our SSP to demand side and their automated trading systems. And we enrich our inventory with smart data to enable the trading desks to precisely get the eyeballs for the audiences they need to address. But ultimately, that's the technical process behind the delivery. The underlying propositions are concrete solutions for dedicated marketing tasks of advertisers. We have highlighted a couple of them here and will show exemplary three use cases. Video, audience and retail solutions. What's the advertiser challenge behind our video solution? We reach target groups that TV can't cover anymore. We close TV coverage gaps by leveraging TV viewer data and extending TV campaigns via digital out-of-home locations where TV reach falls below a specific threshold. A best-in-class case was developed for and together with Bayer for their product PRIORINE to demonstrate the improved effectiveness for the overall campaign. Measured results were showing 11 percentage points uplift for ad recall versus TV only, supported brand awareness going up 23 percentage points and 7 percentage points improvement within the relevant set of the core target group. The German TV market is roughly 16.5 billion Euro in gross revenue and all advertisers have the same challenge. shortfall in more and more audience classes and the decline of roughly 7% in only the last three years. Especially the top TV spenders like P&G or Ferrero have an historically low out-of-home share. On the back of references like Bayer, we are working on extending the video solution volume with clients like Vodafone, Racket or Henkel. One percentage point of the TV market is equivalent to plus 50% for our public video business. The addressable market as well as the client needs are huge over the coming years. What's the advertiser challenge behind our audience solution? The growth of online advertising in the last 20 years is driven apart from changing media consumption by its strength of precisely identifying and addressing specific target audiences. Legacy media, including traditional out-of-home, have limitations here. At the same time, online media often lack the broadcasting power of classic media channels. Our audience solution covers both, as reflected in a showcase for the Unilever brand Ben & Jerry's. Based on our DMP audience profiles, we have activated our public video network in areas with a particularly high concentration of the vegan and vegetarian audiences for a new flavor of the brand. And the outcome was as expected, an audience uplift of 2.7x versus linear television, which is simply too broad for an audience segment that only represents 13% of the population. Where's the future potential? The FMCG advertisers spend in total almost 7 billion Euro per year. Our market share with FMCG clients, including classic out of home, is 2.5% at the moment versus 9.5% across all advertisers. Using, for instance, our audience solutions for the very concrete challenges of the FMCG sector and just doubling our market share there to 5%, share would be worth 140 million euro. What's the advertiser challenge behind our retail solution? Given the growth of e-commerce and changing shopping behaviors of the broader population, it becomes key for classic retailers to guide customers to the point of sale and deliver targeted ads directly where you influence people's positions. The case for a food discounter we cannot name here was based on the football analysis over a couple of weeks followed by a one-month campaign on our digital roadside network optimized for the local customer potential of the stores and their commuting routines. Store visits showed a significant uplift in the defined regions and trackable incremental visits between 5,000 and 6,000 people per store based on the client's internal marketing attribution model. The retail sector in Germany is worth over 5 billion euro of ad spend and our overall market share, classic and digital out of home, is with 4.5% less than half of what we achieve across the total ad market according to Nielsen. Just one percentage point of their spend is worth 50 million euro or 15% of our total public video business. We already have strong growth in that sector with increasing budgets from Lidl, Aldi, Rewe, Edeka, but also Amazon on the digital retail front. But we are coming from such a low level and have such strong arguments that the addressable market also in that segment is still huge. The advertising fill rate for digital out of home is still low in the mid 30s. Tech and data enable us to deliver solutions from advertisers on a completely new level. We have a clear plan how we improve advertisers ROI and more and more use cases and proof of concepts. Not every quarter will be perfect and it won't be a linear process, but the mid-term potential for digital out of home is massive and we are still at a very early stage of that development. That's the key message here. Let me now make some comments on the newest addition to the STOER family, RBL Media, which we acquired end of last month, as you all know. This deal is a consequent and logical step in expanding our portfolio in total, but especially our high reach digital portfolio. With the acquisition, we can integrate attractive cities in which we were already active, but not yet to our full potential, but especially cities that complement our existing portfolios. Cities like Dortmund, Essen, Leipzig and Erfurt offer us high short-term digitization potential, since RBL Media not only has the relevant city contracts, but also the building permits. This means that RBL Media was small enough for us to buy from a regulatory point of view, but on the other hand, it has much potential that the business will make an earnings contribution of around 17 million euro in the mid-term by 2027, once we've built all potential inventory. Let's now take a look at the major cities in Germany with more than 300,000 inhabitants and which we already cover with our portfolio. Our out-of-home segment in total is based on roughly 20,000 individual advertising possessions, highly diversified and across private landlords, enterprises and municipalities. On a city level, we never depend on individual contracts, and our infrastructure is based on a combination of the various long-term contracts. Nevertheless, communal advertising rights, i.e. in the top cities, are an important backbone of our business. On this slide, you see the enormous stability over the last 10 years of our municipality contract portfolio in the largest cities, and we have highlighted where RBL will strengthen and extend our footprint, especially in street furniture. Based on a digitization level of only 4%, there is a substantial upside for the acquired portfolio. So while we are working on the fill rate of our portfolio, the underlying infrastructure and its concessions are extremely robust, thanks to a highly consolidated market with high market entry barriers. So far on my remarks and with that, over to Henning.

Thank you, Christian, and a very good morning to everybody from my side. Overall, we have seen a pretty strong quarter in particular fueled by a good underlying revenue and cashflow performance of our core advertising businesses. Against the high prior year base from last year's strong Q3 that turned in a growth of 11% at the time, sales now were up 3% for the quarter and organic growth came in at 3.3%. When adjusting for ASAM's strong growth last year and the decline this year, States were up 9% followed by now 5% for this year's Q3 to put things a little bit into perspective. With an increase of 6%, we were able to improve adjusted EBITDA for the past quarter from 147 million euro to 156 million euro. The exceptional items for the quarter were minus 3.6 million, somewhat higher than in the previous year's figure of 0.3 million plus. This was mainly due to some restructuring and reorganization expenses as Statista as well as costs from exiting some of our French door-to-door activities. Accordingly, reported EBITDA came in at €153 million, up 3% compared to the prior year quarter. Depreciation amortization for the quarter was only slightly up, following more or less the trend of the first six months. With that, the reported EBIT for the quarter improved by 4% to €72 million. The financial result came in around minus 18 million euro compared to minus 20 million euro in Q3 2023. The development reflects slightly lower interest rates as well as reduced net debt. The 54 million euro EBT for the quarter was some 9% higher compared to 49 million euro in the previous year's quarter. The tax rate for the quarter remained at around 30% and thus in line with the first two quarters. Including the developments described above, net income adjusted came in at around 41 million euro or 8% above the prior year levels. Let us now switch over to the cash flow. Altogether, the group continued to show improving cash flow dynamics for Q3, even ahead of our own expectations. Q3 cash flow improved basically across all line items, improving EBITDA, Lower cash out for interest and taxes, as well as working capital, led to an increase in the operating cash flow of 38 million euro. Lower investments and lower lease liability repayments contributed to an adjusted free cash flow of 57 million euro after minus 3 million euro last year. Taxes and lease liability repayments are characterized by phasing effects that will to some extent reverse in Q4. For the cumulative period, our adjusted free cash flow came in at 78 million euros, so almost on the level of our free cash flow for the entire year of 2023. For the fourth quarter, we are expecting strong free cash flow generation. However, please bear in mind that we had a substantial work in capital improvement in last year's Q4 that we do not forecast to reach the same level again. Also, we should see some reversal of the phasing effects that I mentioned earlier on taxes and lease liability repayment. Let me come to the net debt development. In the sequential view from the end of Q2 to the end of Q3, net debt was down by roughly €50 million, including the adjusted free cash flow for the third quarter of plus €57 million, plus €2.5 million cash in from exercise stock options, a change in liabilities from dividends of minority shareholders, here in particular at ASAM of minus €11 million, and some M&A expenses of €1 million. With that, our leverage ratio decreased further to now 2.1 times and thus providing sufficient headroom for the acquisition of RBL Media. Including the acquisition and based on our expectations for Q4, we anticipate a leverage ratio by the end of this year of well below our target level of 2.5 times. Let me now discuss the performance of the individual operating segments. Starting with our core segment, out-of-home media. Against quite tough comms, our core business, out-of-home media, continued to deliver a strong performance, and we increased Q3 revenues from 217 to 237 million euro. Organic growth for the quarter came in at 10%, just in line with our expectations for the quarter. From a nine-month perspective, organic growth was 16%. Our digital out-of-home business in particular contributed to this strong performance, growing by 24% to 93 million euro in Q3. In the period from January to September, growth was even stronger, also driven by the UEFA football tournament in the second quarter, and increased by 27%. Our classic out-of-home business shows a comparable development cycle. This product, Agra, grew by around 3% to €131 million in the third quarter. For the six-month period, classic out-of-home also benefited from the European Championships and posted a double-digit increase. Among the top performers by industry, we had FMCG, retail, and telcos, all together growing by more than 35% in the quarter, while some of the lagging were clients from the consumer electronics, sports leisure, and automotive industries. The development in out-of-home services was still characterized by the disposal of a smaller, non-core activity. EBITDA adjusted for the quarter increased from 102 to 115 million euros. Alongside the strong revenue development, just described, the moderating cost inflation compared to the previous year's quarter led to an improvement of the EBITDA margin by 200 basis points year over year and 250 basis points in the first nine months. Excluding the effects from IFRS 16, accounting the margin improvement for the same period amounted to more than 400 basis points and thus underlines the strong operational leverage. In digital and dialogue, revenue in the third quarter increased by slightly more than 2%. Within digital, programmatic continued to be the growth driver, with total digital revenues up by 6% to 112 million euros. Our content publishing business, and here our flagship S&T Online, delivered broadly stable sales and earnings. In our dialogue business, increasing sales at our contact centers almost compensated for sales decline in our door-to-door business. Altogether, earnings here were stable. In total, the segment delivered in EBITDA adjusted of €37 million, up to €38 million in Q3 2023. Please bear in mind that earnings in digital are still affected by a technical effect from the loss of the Bauer contract that I mentioned in the previous calls. The effect on EBITDA adjusted from this for the quarter was around €2 million. There is and will be no effect on sales, EBIT and net cash flow due to the compensation of business volume through newly acquired business mandates at the beginning of the year. Last but not least, some comments on our data as a service and e-commerce segment with Statista and Azam. Revenue development showed a differentiated picture, both in the third quarter as well as from a nine-month perspective. Data as a service revenue development accelerated further and returned to double-digit growth as expected. Sales rose from 36 to 41 million euro or 13% respectively. On a nine-month basis, revenues came in at 121 million euro, While Statista delivered the expected acceleration in sales, Asam's business development was still impaired by reduced trading and wholesale distribution in China, which last year delivered very strong growth. In contrast, Asam's core online activities continued to deliver good growth. Reflecting the impaired performance at Asam regarding China and increased marketing intensity, EBITDA adjusted for the segment was down from 15 million euros to 11 million euros. With that, let me hand you over back to Christian for the outlook and some closing remarks.

Before ending the presentation, let me just have some comments on the outlook for Q4 and the full year as well as our financial calendar. For the fourth quarter 2024, we expect revenue for out-of-home up in a high single-digit percentage range driven by ongoing strong digital out-of-home momentum. Digital and dialogue should increase in a mid-single percentage range. DAS and e-commerce should accelerate, driven by Statista. Our full year guidance remains unchanged, and you've seen in our nine months numbers, EBIT grows three times faster than revenue, and EBITDA margin is substantially a prior year. We have a strong cash conversion, so we also feel comfortable with the current market consensus. Let me close the presentation with a short look into our financial calendar for 2024-25. Our next agenda topic will be the publication of our preliminary figures for the 2024 financial calendar on March 6, 2025. The annual report for 2024, including the mandatory publications on CSRD sustainability reporting for the first time, will be published later in March. I mentioned the CMD throughout Q1 early in the presentation. On May 8, our Q1 numbers will be released. The half-year figures will be presented on August 13, and Q3 figures will be published on November 11. As always, updates, reports, and roadshow presentations can be found on our investor relations website. Thank you, everyone, and we are now happy to take your questions.

Our first question comes from Annick Maas in Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Good morning. My first question is, is your out-of-home guidance for the fourth quarter including RBL Media? And if so, what would the out-of-home growth been guided for if it would be excluded? And the second one is, could you just tell us, you know, you said that the segment should grow because of the Pista in Q4. Can you tell us what you're expecting for Azam? And also, that's the third question, what Azam did last in Germany versus the rest of the world over the last quarter, and how much the rest of the world is now making up of the mix of Azzam. Thank you.

Hi, Annick. Thanks for your questions. Maybe starting with the first one before I hand over to Henning regarding Azzam. RBL Media, I think we've just started the transition, so I think the impact that we see for Q4 might be around 3 million euro, maybe half a million more, difficult to be precise. So I think that's equivalent to, I would say, roughly one percentage point of out-of-home revenue in Q4. So I think last year's basis was like 280, 285, I think roughly. So as you mentioned it, I think we haven't really thought about it precisely. Plus minus one percentage point. I think it wouldn't, won't substantially move the needle for Q4.

On Azzam, Annika, I think first of all, once again, to remind us, we had a spectacular 23 in Azzam with the performance that we've seen from selling a very specific non-core product into China. We generated a sales level of altogether in 2023 of something like 33, 34 million euro. Basically now this growth that we've seen last year is falling apart and it's explaining the performance to a very large extent. The underlying performance here in particular, the online performance in our German core business was quite positive. In the third quarter, we have seen a little bit of phasing effects with regard to our deliveries to retailers. But in terms of the underlying business, we are very confident and we don't see any sort of structural change, excluding China.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Craig Abbott and Kepler Sovro. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi, good morning. Yeah, I just wanted to come back, please, to our RBL media. I just wondered if you could give us, you know, at least some kind of indication on acquisition price. You gave us an indication on the, an absolute number on the EBITDA outlook by the time you get up to 27. I just wondered if there are any more metrics you could give us. I appreciate you gave us a leverage target by year end, and we can probably later go out and go back and work through that. But any indications you could give us here would be very useful. Thank you.

Well, Craig, the preliminary purchase price of RBL we have disclosed in the quality report. It is around 106 million euro. We talked about a long-term, a mid-term expectation in terms of earnings, including synergies of around 17 million. That would be before, let's say, the inflationary effects of IRP16, so it's the cash IBTA contribution that we expect over time. And if you relate purchase price to that earnings quality, I think is a reasonable evaluation. With regards to the leverage, I said our target leverage always is 2.5 times. But our expectation is that even including RBL, we will be quite a bit below the 2.5 times by the end of this year, assuming we reach our forecast as we have mapped it out now in the call. So we are quite confident there. sufficient hand room in terms of financing, even including the acquisition. And as we all know, Q4 is always a very strong and cash-generative quarter for us in absolute terms.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, and just, I hope that's the user question, but still, I mean, any updates on your strategic thoughts over the next year or two in terms of your two non-core assets? Thank you.

No, I think as we've said in the past, we are committed to make disposals. I think in the case of Statista, it's a little bit further down the road. I think in the case of ASAM, we are well prepared and have our eyes open. I think after Q4, we will be through that special China effect and have a cleaner view on the underlying DOC development over the last couple of years. I think Henning, just reference to that. And we'll see what the next couple of months will bring in the market. We depend a little bit on the M&A sentiment out there. But the commitment and the willingness, and in the case of Azzam, being in general ready to go, that hasn't changed.

Okay. Thank you.

We continue with a question from Julian Rock in Barclays. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. My first question is on RBL Media again. So 17 million EBITDA in 2027. Could we get some idea of the revenue then and maybe the contribution in 2025, both revenue and EBITDA? And then if you can throw in EBIT on top, so we have an idea of the depreciation. So that's the first question. The second question on digital out of home, you had quite a lengthy remark on that, which I suppose you prepared for the investor day. But that targeting of knowing where people are with their mobile, it sounds very good. But what about privacy law? To what level can you do that kind of targeting in Germany?

uh and then uh finally uh third question is um for the first nine months could you give us the revenue of public video thank you hi julian uh maybe back on rbl i think just conceptually the the company had one uh two tenders in the last 12 months that are currently ramp ramped up and that will still be ramped up That's why I think realistically the 17 million cash EBITDA that Henning mentioned or the fair number based on everything we've acquired is fully in place. I think the underlying revenue contribution by then is probably in the mid to high 30s revenue wise. And I think the company is roughly as it's It's just on the way to execute one contract. It's probably halfway there. And I think that's why we've made the remarks on the CMD. We currently work on the integration of the asset because, as you could expect, there's a lot of duplicated structures. And we just want to make sure that we leverage also the synergy potential that moves their underlying current performance already on a different level next year.

And on the question of what is the depreciation for RBL to be expected, I mean, first of all, as Christian said, the portfolio is largely in place, so there's not much further capex to be put in place. At this point in time, to be very open, I cannot give you a depreciation number. We are just starting the purchase price allocation model for the first-time consolidation, and I guess we will have some further detail on that in our prelim results. Sorry, Julian.

On digital out of home, I think the whole GDPR topic is less of a problem here because we are working with anonymous data and we then aggregate potential individual data again to target group segments. And I think that's a big difference between traditional online media where the medium ultimately is delivered on a one by one basis where you have one concrete IP address behind. think in our case it's always out of home is and will always be one to many medium so we only talk about concentration of target groups that we measure on the basis of aggregated individual data so the way the whole setup is designed and i think the fact that for instance deutsche telekom or telefonica are delivering mass mobility data and they are ultra sensitive on gdpr topics just shows it demonstrates that there is no underlying issue nevertheless just just keeping it in mind we will never address an individual person via public video i think our use case and the big benefit that we have is that while tv or other traditional media or broadcasting with limited targeting optionalities more or less to everyone. I think we can on an individual side just and the specific time zones we can be by far precise regarding the concentration of target groups and especially versus where out of home comes from like 10 years ago where you had one ad for 7 or 10 days on one site and that was it. Now we have hundreds of thousands of ads that we can show in that period of time. But GDPR is something we constantly have in mind, but it's no structural underlying problems.

And Julian, I read your question in a way that you want to have the programmatic public video sales volume, and you know it's not part of our regular reporting schedule, but I think we've always been pretty clear that the consolidation position in sales is a fairly good indication for the programmatic public video turnover. So you can, it was around, I would say, 37, 38 million Euro for the quarter programmatic public video again. And for the nine months period, probably a level of, let me check, of something like 87, 88 million Euro, right? But again, looking at the consolidation position is always a good indicator for, as we dub it internally, PPP, right?

the total the total digital out-of-home business includes also smaller digital out-of-home volumes outside of germany in poland and the blow-up business especially netherlands and also uh in in in this in the ambient sector which are technically not part of the normal infrastructure but just to put the number in context

Very good. And just to follow up on RVL, you said they won one or two tender in the last 12 months. What tender did they win and from whom?

Dortmund, for instance, has won at Leipzig. So they were both from JCD Corp. They won one lot from us in Essen. But more or less 95% of what they're doing is street furniture contract at the moment.

Okay. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Simon Keller with HAIB. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my two questions. Firstly, on the broader ad market, we see that it is generally decelerating right now in Germany. And I see that you are yet guiding for sequentially stable out-of-home growth in Q4 of high single digits. Do you think the broader ad market is also stabilizing in Q4? And how should we think about out-of-home for Q1 next year? Could you share any insights maybe from your order book in this regard? then secondly on statista it's great to see uh growth rebounding um could you share any insights on of where this growth is coming from in particular relatively uh the pricing and the volume effect um and then i'm wondering whether ai is now fully integrated or what's your progress here and whether this is also one of the triggers that's yet

up your sleeve for maybe next year in terms of pricing thank you uh hi simon um i think broader ad market at the moment is a bit difficult to predict because i think we just had an outstanding summer with the sports events I think at the moment there's a lot of discussions around politics in Germany. So I think the perceived environment is probably definitely not better than it used to be in the last months. And I think if you look at the Nielsen numbers, they have been down from Q2 to Q3. So I think it's fair to say that at the moment the overall ad market has less momentum than it had, especially in the second quarter and maybe also the first quarter given lower comms from prior year. But I think the overall trends that we see for out of home haven't really changed. We have broadly diversified across different sales channels from local to national across all industries. So I think we do not depend on individual developments like for instance at the moment if you see discussions around the automotive sector yes we have clients there but it's still a small part of our revenue so that's why i would say we focus on our business and there's probably tougher cons than in q2 That's reflected in our guidance. The broader market is probably a bit tougher than it used to be three or six months ago. But I think there is enough space for us at the moment to maneuver. Good news is we have only nine and a half percentage points of the legacy media market and maybe four to five percent of everything, including the global platforms. So I think there is 91% or 95% depends on where you think the total addressable market lies and enough space for us to maneuver at the moment.

And Simon, on Statista, I think we see increasing traction throughout the year, I think, across all relevant channels. I think obviously the most important one being the platform. And then also in our ranking business, we have seen a tick up. as expected in the third quarter and the good thing is also that we see earnings now follow through so there's a clear visibility on a margin improvement we're quite optimistic also for q4 as we've been sharing on on the question of where they're coming from is it like additional customers and i say the pricing i would say it's both the team is doing i think a pretty good job in getting more clients clients on the on the product and also you know up trading existing clients from cheaper accounts into more comprehensive accounts. As you've probably followed, we have been adjusting our price entry point quite a bit earlier this year for the price entry with a positive effect on the overall top line.

Maybe one comment. I think the difference also versus like last year and first half of the year, I think we had management changes from the founders to a new CEO. I think we had another great 2023 and that already started in 2022. And I think the company has gone through many structural changes, management changes and a couple of strategic adjustments. I think it was just something you need to do from time to time, especially after 12, 13, 14 years with the founder team. And I think we have gone through like 80, 90% of the things we wanted to change and had to change. And you see that the company is now concentrating again completely on operations and not so much on internal topics. And I think that is the underlying change. As Henning said, you see the result and the impact of that throughout all criteria. Great.

Thank you very much. The next question comes from James Tate in Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you, and good morning, everyone. I've got two questions, please, I think. Firstly, just related to the RBL media acquisition, are there any potential other out-of-home assets in Germany that you might be interested in acquiring or sort of RBL media, sort of the main one you're looking at? And secondly, you've guided to digital and dialogue to grow mid-single digit in Q4. Could you help provide some color on the mix of growth between the digital and the dialogue business? Thank you.

On on our BL and potential other assets yet to be honest James I think given the the level of marked consolidation, I think It's not about this massive Range of targets or assets out there that would massively change our business and think we constantly track the market also to see if there's anything we haven't seen yet if anything changes in the market dynamics also in specific sub segments you know there's been a lot of discussions around retail media smaller digital out-of-home format so we are I think we also we are quite big we try to be always hyper nervous about what competition does. We know that market consolidation is an important driver of our business and that is not granted and doesn't come for free. So I think being very clear about what competitors do is part of our job. But I think over the next one or two years, at least given what we know today, I don't see anything else of a similar size or importance. That said, I think the regulatory limitations are at the moment at around 17.5 million revenue in the last full year. So there are limitations to that. So I would not expect anything of a size of RBL, but you never know how things change. We track the market, but it would be probably rather smaller, less mentionable, bolt-on execution.

On our expectations for Q4 and digital and dialogue, James, I think to some extent that is interlinked with the outlook that we have given on out-of-home when it comes to programmatic sales. So I think we expect here good performance. On the dialogue side, I would say we're quite optimistic that call centers will show good, reasonable sales increase in Q4. In the door-to-door activities, I think it remains to be seen. We have some headwinds here in terms of getting enough scorers on the ground, selling contracts. But net-net, I would say probably like growth in call centers, liquidity, strong growth has come from the digital part of the segment.

Okay.

The next question comes from Christopher Yonen, NHSBC. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Apologies if there has been a comment in the prepared remarks on this. I'm just getting back to Statista, please, about Q4. If you remember at the beginning of the year, the story was that we would see a gradual reacceleration pretty much quarter after quarter, and if I'm not mistaken, that implied as much as 20% growth in the fourth quarter. Now, the third quarter came in a little bit below, I would say, the initial guidance. So how should we think about the fourth quarter in terms of the further acceleration on the top line? Thank you.

Well, I would say we're quite optimistic about the outlook for Statista. We saw also, or we see increasingly also interest from the side of a large language model operators. We're always desperately looking for training data for their for their software models. I think I would leave it there. So I think we will see clearly growth above 20% for Q4. And basically with that, also the statistical development in this year will be very much in line with our initial expectations since the beginning of the year.

Perfect. And one follow up, if I may, on profitability during the quarter. Again, if you touched upon this in the remarks, apologies. If I look at the impact that Azam probably had on the segment, that would imply that the profitability for Statista was kind of through the roof. Am I wrong? Is my math correct? Or are we at sort of all-time high margins for Statista at the moment? Is there any color you can give? Thank you.

In percentage terms, I would join your comments through the roof, but we're talking still very small, absolute numbers. But I think you're directionally understanding the developments

And I think that's part of a little bit of the reorganization. I think until the end of 2022, and I would also say until the end of very low interest rates, we've been focusing on growth only. And I think part of reorganizing the company was also getting back to historic growth numbers, but with a different profitability focus and profile. And I think in both areas, we are moving in the right direction.

If I understand that, I take the basis small, point taken. But if the business, I mean, if you say that there is, well, I'm implying that you don't suggest that there is anything one-off in the current quarter, then should we prepare for 30 plus percent margins not just next quarter, but going in 2025 as well. Am I interpreting that right?

What we should expect for the full year is a margin improvement. I would leave it there for the time being. In terms of the exceptionals, I mentioned in the speech, obviously, that we had some exceptions and statistics that I excluded from the results for the reorganizational topics that Christian talked about, you know, and having a new management in place. So I think, again, we would confirm, let's say, the outlook for Q4 and also for the full year for a clearly improved margin. But we would definitely not see a margin of 30% or so for the full year. That is still the midterm target. It probably takes still a couple of years to get there. But we see now that this is reachable. I think we're more confident about this than probably 12 months ago. Understood. Thank you very much.

We have a follow-up question from Craig Cabot with Kepler's World. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi again. Just real quick, please. I'm sorry, but to get back to RBL Media real quick. I mean, basically, you gave us an indication earlier that with these new contracts, you expect them to basically double their top line. But what I wanted to understand was how did a small player, what was it that enabled them to win these tenders, the two against the co and the one against yourselves? Thank you.

Well, I think the founder is a smart guy and he originally came from the hardware side of the business. And I think he somehow extended that kind of business model into the media space. And I think street furniture contracts, for instance, were not high up in the priority list of us. And I think in the case of Deco, they've been also trying to optimize margins. And I think the company is working in that area since 10 years. And we talk about three, four, five contracts now. So it's not huge. But I think it's a good company. It's a good team. Dirk has made an excellent job, I think, in developing it. And sometimes it's fair to say that even no one was able to get there for like 15 20 years he was a guy that did an excellent job and i think our feeling was and also his that probably being part of our group just gives more opportunities for the business but sometimes it's it's just fair to say that the others simply do a good good job especially if It's bigger ones maybe are not ultra cautious here and there. But, you know, if I look at the last 10 years, there is one example who could get there and it's the guy. And I think he came from another direction and did an excellent job. So well done, Jack.

Thank you. And that draws me into another question. Has he been locked in with some kind of earn out agreement that would in a couple of years come potentially on top of the acquisition price that you gave us this morning?

No, we're acquiring 100%, so there's no earners whatsoever.

But will he be staying on board?

Not in that media team. I think we'll work closely together on the hardware and production side, because that's where his core company is. I think, as always, sometimes in acquisitions, you build personal partnerships. So I think he will be part of our broader universe in the future. But I think for the concrete media business, it will become an integral part of our business. I think he's an entrepreneur. But I think they've also done a very good job on the hardware side, building street furniture in a factory in Belgium, also developing more digital products now. So I think there's also some upside potential going forward in a closer collaboration. on hardware and especially also digital products. We're currently discussing it with him. So I would say it's an acquisition in our core business with a broader spectrum of calibration ultimately over time.

That's also a strong strategic angle here for us because in the last years we produced most of our hardware in China. And for sustainability reasons, etc., we want to move some stuff back to Europe. And the factory of Epsilon is just one and a half hours away from the headquarter in Cologne. So this is also part of the deal that we develop a strategic partnership on the other side with Epsilon, which is another company here at AVL Media.

Okay, very interesting. Okay, thank you very much.

Thanks, Frank. All right, I think we're through all the questions.

Perfect. Then many thanks for your time, especially as it was a bit early today. Hope you have a good remaining week and see you soon. Take care. Bye bye. All the best.

Bye.