Auto1 Group U/Adr

Hello, good afternoon and good morning or good evening to our international participants. Welcome to the Autobahn Group's first quarter 2026 news presentation. I'm Philip Rikersdorfer, Group Treasurer. I'm joined today as Augusta Christian-Bertman, our co-founder and CEO, as well as Christian Valentine, our new CFO on his first full earnings call. We will start with the presentation followed by a questions and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise it by the usual Zoom Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. We will then call on you to ask a question directly after the presentation. Also, as a quick reminder, before we start, our AGM portal will open our IR webpage this Friday, May 15, 2026, and you can submit your votes. If you or your governance teams have questions or comments on any agenda point, please feel free to contact Maria or myself. Before I hand over, I must make you aware of the safe harbor provisions at the beginning of the presentation here. These will apply to any forward-looking statements made by management today. And now over to you, Christian.

Hi, everyone. Thank you, Philip. Welcome to the All-in-One Group first quarter 26 earnings call. Q1 was a record quarter. We sold 249,000 group units across the retail and merchant segment, a new company record. growing 22% year-on-year. Total gross profit reached also a new high of €289 million, up 22% year-on-year. We achieved adjusted EVTA of €60 million for the quarter. This is €2 million more than in Q1 of last year and €15 million more quarter-on-quarter. Group GPU was slightly up year-on-year, a result of the higher Autohero unit share. The results overall are a testament to our value-first strategy, the excellent work of our teams, and the structural advantages of our vertically integrated business model. In Q01, we realized operating leverage from the investments into additional capacity executed in Q4. Primarily driven by higher utilization for the newly added capacity, Total OPEX per unit reduced by €82 quarter-on-quarter to €923, the best OPEX per unit value we have realized for the last four quarters. Together with a slightly increased group GPU, we also reached the best adjusted EVDA per unit of the last four quarters with €241. Against the background of our strongly scaling retail business, which traditionally carries bigger absolute OPEX per unit than merchants, This is a particularly strong outcome. Let's dive into the merchant segments performance. We made excellent progress in our merchant business in the first quarter. We sold record 216,000 units to our partner dealers, crossing the 200,000 quarterly units sold mark in merchant for the first time. This is an increase of 19% year-on-year. Merchant cost profits grew to 207 million euro, in Europe for the quarter, a slight reduction of around 3% compared with Q1-25, a result of the already discussed severe weather impact in January. Our network of active buying partners across Europe grew to 36,200 partners. This is 6,800 more compared to Q1 of last year and an increase of 23%. Our merchant offering continues to be in strong demand, driven by the superior value of our selection, paired with highly attractive financing options. The average quarterly basket slightly reduced year-on-year as we currently prioritize dealer market share over basket development. Ottawa merchant financing continues to be an important growth driver for us. In Q1, we financed a total of €330 million of merchant sales This is an increase of 22% compared to the previous year. The number of units financed grew by 19% year-on-year to 35,800 units in Q1. Our portfolio balance grew from €258 million in Q1 of last year to a new high of €322 million this year. This is an increase of 25% compared to Q1 last year. We are continuing the rollout of our financing products to additional markets and partners with Italy next in line and expect it to launch in Q2. Let's switch to retail. Taking a look back since launching Autohero in 2020, we have seen remarkable growth across the business for both units sold and gross profit. In parallel, we have realized constantly improving unit economics. We are really excited about the long-term opportunity in Autohero changing the way people buy and finance cars. Driven by the advantages of our unique, vertically integrated business model, we will be offering an even bigger, high-quality selection of used cars at great prices, paired with the most convenient customer journey in the used car market. Many of these structural advantages have started to kick in over the last couple of quarters, but we're barely scratching the surface at the moment when we compare with their long-term potential at critical mass. In Q1, Autohero's growth rate surged to 48% year-on-year, delivering 32,500 units, a new quarterly record. Resell cost profit reached €82 million, a 47% increase year-on-year. Retail GPU was €2,555 for the first quarter. We are pleased to see that we can maintain a stable retail GPU year on year while we accelerate our growth rates further to a new high. While we're focused on scaling quickly right now, we remain fully committed to growing retail GPU over the long term. Aided brand awareness reached 35% across all markets at the end of Tier 1, up 9 percentage points year on year, and 2 points higher than at the end of 25. We're currently launching brand ambassador campaigns with well-known public personalities in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. to ensure even more customers discover the highly differentiated and exceptional AutoHero customer experience. We also see a major opportunity to accelerate AutoHero's growth by leveraging our established B2B purchasing brands and setting the stage for an integrated, trusted customer journey. That's why we're introducing Buy AutoHero co-branding at branches that now serve as purchasing drop-off and retail pickup locations. With this approach, we are able to deliver a seamless trade-in experience, bringing together the best of both worlds for our selling and buying customers. At the end of Q1, we had 82 co-branded locations and 77 Aussie-Europe pickup locations across Europe. Let's close with a look at our long-term goals. By leveraging our proprietary pricing technology, our unmatched physical infrastructure, and our outstanding trading capabilities, we continue to create the best products and solutions in the industry. Our products deliver outstanding value for our merchant partners and consumers alike as we offer them better prices, lower costs, more choice, greater convenience, highly motivated staff, increased trust, fast delivery, and competitive financing. All of those elements together create the superiority of our vertically integrated business model. the engine behind our growth and profitability track record. We accelerated our market share growth, reaching a record 3.1% market share in Europe at the end of 2025, which was a 50 basis point increase in a key step towards our 10% long-term target. We increased our adjusted EBITDA margin to 2.5% in Q1, a 40 basis point increase compared to Q4 of 2025. We continue to be thrilled by the immense long-term opportunity in both merchant and retail given the 700 billion euro size of the European Lusca market. In other news, five years after our IPO, we will host our first Capital Markets event on Wednesday, June 17th at 3 p.m. Central European Time, which is 9 a.m. Eastern Time. We invite you to join us for a live webcast in which we will present historic segment financials and lay out long-term targets for both our merchant and retail businesses. We're excited to provide you with a deeper understanding of each segment, and we very much look forward to welcoming you. The registration link to the event will be available in the RR section of our Audubon Group website right after this call. With that, let me hand over to Christian for a detailed financial update. Thank you, Christian, and hi, everyone. Q1 was a record quarter. The group sales and gross profit grew by 22%. Adjusted EBITDA was at 60 million, up 50 million over Q4. We grew merchant units with 19%, and we had record growth in retail units of 48%. We believe that this is a testament to our strong customer offering, driving strong growth throughout both our segments. In Q1, we drove greater operational efficiency compared to Q4, which achieved 17% quarter-over-quarter growth in adjusted EBITDA per unit. We did this by increasing payroll utilization and also managing per-unit marketing investments. These results highlight the operating leverage as we grow the business going forward. Our strong unit sales and operating leverage drove Q1 results with adjusted EBITDA growth of 32% compared with Q4. The group grossed profit by roughly 33 million in the quarter. As discussed in February's Q4 call, severe weather in January temporarily lowered merchants' GPU by 3% for the quarter. As Christian noted, we prioritized retail unit growth during the quarter to reach critical mass faster in the business while sustaining our retail GPU. Operationally, we increased utilization and actively managed core OPEX. reducing the per-unit marketing investment versus Q4 substantially, as we kept absolute marketing spend stable. Finally, higher unit volumes drove up internal logistics, while increased payroll reflects ongoing investments in key growth areas. Our balance sheet and cap position remain very strong. We ended the quarter with 652 million in total cash, an increase of 48 million from year-end, and zero corporate debt. We had inventory stable over the quarter. This highlights our faster trading speed as we successfully grew in sales. On the financing side, captive finance assets increased by almost 19 million. We utilized committed securitization lines to refinance 71 million of these additions. As a result, our captive finance cash outflow was around 19 million. In Q2, we expect normal working capital patterns to reverse some of Q1's overall 48 million strong cash inflow. Now, looking ahead, we are confirming our guidance previously communicated. So for the full year, we expect the total units sold to reach between 940,000 units and 1 million group units, consisting of 815,000 to 865,000 merchant units. and 125,000 to 135,000 HL units. We expect an absolute adjusted EBITDA of 250 to 265 million and a gross profit of 1.1 to 1.2 billion. Given our Q1 performance and loan rate, especially in units, we are targeting the top end of our guidance range. While early data indicates a potential low to hero volumes to exceed the current guidance range, We're striving to best balance unit growth and profitability going forward. To wrap up the formal presentation, Q1 was a record quarter. Our vertically integrated business model enabled us to deliver a highly differentiated custom offering, which continues to drive outsized market share gains in both our retail and merchant segments. And this quarter marked another important step towards a long-term financial model of 10% market share at 5% to 9% adjusted EBITDA margin. As highlighted by Christian, we look very much forward to diving into the details of our segments, their historical performance, and long-term targets with you at our Captain Marvel event on June 17th. With that, I'd like to open up for questions.

Before we begin the Q&A portion of the call, I'd like to go over a few brief technical points. If you haven't already, please feel free to submit your question using the Q&A tool located at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Edith will call on participant interns. Once your name is announced, I will unmute your line and hand the floor over to you. Kindly ensure that your microphone is enabled and that you are ready to speak when prompted. Thank you.