StubHub Holdings, Inc. Class A

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to StubHub's fourth quarter and year-end 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will take your questions. If you have a question, please put star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference call is being recorded today, March 4th, 2026. I will now turn the call over to Clinton Hooks with StubHub. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. And thank you for joining us to discuss StubHub's fourth quarter and year-end 2025 results. For reference, our fourth quarter and year-end 2025 earnings release, shareholder letter, and presentation are available under the quarterly results section of our investor relations website at investors.stubhub.com. Before we begin our formal remarks, we need to remind everyone that the discussion today will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by use of words such as will, expect, anticipate, should, or other similar phrases are not guarantees of future performance. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect, and therefore, you should exercise caution when interpreting and relying on them. Although the company believes the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can make no assurance related to its expectations. Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, unless otherwise required by law. We refer all of you to our recent SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial condition. We encourage investors to review our regulatory filings, including the annual report on form 10 K. For the year ended December 31st, 2025 when it is filed with the SEC. During today's call, we will also be discussing non gap financial measures. Which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's financial performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings release, shareholder letter, and investor presentation, as applicable, available on the StubHub Investor Relations website. Please note that unless otherwise noted, our profitability and EBITDA discussions today refer to non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. Joining me today are Eric Baker, our Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Connie James, our Chief Financial Officer. They will provide opening remarks, then take questions. With that, I'll turn it over to Eric.

Good afternoon, everyone. and thank you for joining us today. 2025 was a pivotal year for StubHub. We grew our marketplace, further strengthened our competitive position, transformed our balance sheet, and became a public company. As we enter 2026, StubHub remains a leading global ticketing marketplace for live events with durable advantages, scale and liquidity, structurally strong financial fundamentals, and a diversified global footprint. These fundamentals are built on our core strengths, which continue to drive our competitive advantage. First, our leading marketplace position with a category defining brand and approximately 50% share of the secondary ticketing market in North America. Second, our proven network effects that create durable competitive advantages. As we attract more buyers through our leading distribution and global reach, sellers add more inventory and selection to our platform, which in turn draws more buyers and further expands our distribution. Third, our asset-light online marketplace model, which delivers consistent take rates, over 80% adjusted gross margins, and strong free cash flow conversion. As an online marketplace, we generally do not take inventory risk and incur limited variable costs with each transaction, allowing us to reach large global audiences and generate substantial revenue with modest ongoing capital requirements. Fourth, our extensive data set across millions of global events. Our data on supply, demand, pricing, and user behavior enables differentiated product innovation, marketing optimization, and pricing intelligence that reinforce our market leadership. Fifth, scale is the defining advantage in our category. As the scale leader in secondary ticketing, our superior liquidity, trusted brand, and operational excellence create sustainable, competitive advantages. And finally, an exceptional team with leadership experience built through decades of building and operating our business. I'm grateful to work alongside a group of high caliber employees who show up every day for our customers, improving the product, strengthening trust, and delivering operational excellence at scale. We're also fortunate to have a deeply experienced management team, leaders who helped build this company from the ground up, raising the bar for SubHub year after year. Together, these strengths position us to capitalize on the expanding live event industry. We sit in a unique position at the intersection of technology and live events as we pursue our vision to be the global destination for fans to access live entertainment. We remain relentlessly focused on improving every part of the StubHub experience, from discovery and pricing transparency to fulfillment and support, because a better fan experience strengthens trust, drives conversion, and reinforces the marketplace flywheel. Before I touch on longer-term initiatives, I want to be clear about what is driving our business today. Our results and outlook are driven by our resale marketplace, which constitutes the vast majority of our revenue. In 2025, we delivered $9.2 billion of GMS, continued to grow, gain share, and strengthened our competitive position. We expect that in 2026, StubHub's financial performance will continue to be driven by this core resale marketplace. Building on this foundation, our first several months as a public company have provided valuable perspective on our strategy to unlock new market opportunities. We believe direct issuance, non-exclusive, open distribution of originally issued tickets remains a transformational long-term opportunity for StubHub and the broader live event ecosystem. We have made progress through business development with marquee content rights holders across sports and music in multiple geographies, and we believe demand for this distribution model has been validated. Our experience is reinforced that the largest market potential will come from making direct issuance frictionless to adopt across a much broader range of rights holders. That requires reducing operational friction for partners with varying levels of technological sophistication and advances in artificial intelligence are materially expanding what is now practical to build on the supply side. By leveraging these advancements, we believe we can bring capabilities to market that would have been difficult to deliver even a year ago, including AI-assisted tools that automate workflows and simplify inventory management. For 2026, we are prioritizing building the product foundation required to scale direct issuance broadly. Accordingly, we are shifting from a primarily business development-led strategy to a more product-led strategy, building an AI-enabled, technology-driven ecosystem that enables inventory to be contributed and managed with minimal operational burden. Development is underway to bring these supply side products to market. We believe this approach positions direct issuance to become a durable growth engine when the self-serve capability is in place. This strategy shift means we will not be optimizing for immediate revenue growth, but for maximizing our revenue opportunity over the long term. Similarly, Our efforts to build our advertising business are showing promising early results as we leverage our unique advantages. Early partnerships have helped validate the opportunity and are helping inform how we will scale advertising in a way that is truly additive by enhancing relevance and utility for customers. Our advertising business is generating modest revenue today, and we are continuing to iterate toward a model that enhances the seller and buyer experience. We are taking a disciplined approach to both initiatives, prioritizing scalable execution. This measured path forward reflects our commitment to maintaining the marketplace experience that defines our competitive advantage while compounding shareholder value over the long term. Finally, a quick note on the regulatory environment. We continue to operate within a generally favorable status quo that supports open functioning resale markets across jurisdictions. That said, public discussion around ticketing has increased in recent months, and we want to be clear about why we believe the secondary ticketing market and StubHub as a scale leader are defensible and durable over the long term. The secondary market solves durable ecosystem needs across a broad diversity of live event content. It is not dependent on any single event type or narrow set of behaviors. A liquid resale market supports the ecosystem in foundational ways by, one, improving the category experience for consumers through trusted, fraud-protected ways to buy and sell tickets with ease and providing flexibility when plans change. Two, improving sell-through and pricing confidence in the primary market as consumers are more willing to buy earlier when they know they have a trusted option to resell. Three, enabling risk and cash flow management for content rights holders, teams, promoters, and event organizers. by providing liquidity and a pathway for inventory to be redistributed through power sellers and season ticket holders. And lastly, improving attendance, utilization, and venue economics by helping ensure tickets end up with someone who will attend, driving meaningful ancillary revenue through concessions, parking, merchandise, and a better in-venue experience. Even if well-intentioned, We believe altering this vital link in the live event value chain ultimately harms the fan experience and the live event ecosystem overall. Regulatory change in live events is inherently complex. The live events ecosystem is a vast global surface of content and demand profiles, spanning everything from lower demand community events, small club shows, to global music tours and the world's largest sporting moments across countless jurisdictions and market structures. Any framework that seeks to broadly reshape the resale market would need to account for a wide range of event types, seller profiles, consumer use cases, and enforcement realities, and would need to be implemented across many jurisdictions where live events occur. With that context, we believe public discussion tends to focus on a certain subset of the resale market. We sellers that list large quantities of inventory and marketplaces for very high demand concerts at high prices significantly above the original sale price. Based on our internal data, we estimate that approximately 10% of our in 2025 was attributable to these types of high demand concert ticket sales by resellers importantly. We believe that StubHub's durability is reinforced by our diversification and lack of concentration across sellers, content rights holders, buyers, event types, and geographies, providing a level of insulation from potential regulatory changes that may affect any single subset of the market or any single jurisdiction. Finally, We have a responsibility to continue educating policymakers on the consumer protections and structural benefits that our marketplace provides and are continuing to bolster our government relations efforts to support this. We intend to engage constructively while operating responsibly to best serve fans around the globe. We are entering 2026 with a scaled resilient core resale business, an improved competitive position that supports growth and scaling margins and a transformed balance sheet. We're also continuing to progress toward longer-term upside opportunities. Our commitment is straightforward, set expectations we can deliver upon and execute consistently. We intend to deliver results that reflect the strength and durability of the business. With that, I'll turn the call over to Connie to discuss our financial results and guidance.