Prosiebensat1 Media U/Adr

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the full year 2023 result conference call of ProSiebenSat1 Media SE. This conference is being recorded. Today's call is hosted by Mr. Jörg Verlander. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ProSiebenSat1's full year 2023 investor and analyst conference call, also from my side. Our CEO, Bert Harvitz, and CFO, Martin Milner, will be hosting today's call. Bert will begin the presenting by presenting the operational and financial highlights of 2023. Martin will then provide detailed commentary on our financial performance and the dividend proposal for the financial year 2023. Following this, Bert will discuss the operational developments in last financial year and present the full outlook for 2024. As always, the presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. With that, I would now like to hand over the call to Bert.

Welcome everyone and thanks for joining our full year results call today. Today we want to look back on the past with you. We want to share our expectations for 2024 and beyond, and we want to show you how to strengthen our business for the coming years, thus shaping the future of entertainment. 2023 was a year of major change for our company. We put our new strategy in place and we are well on track with its execution today. Entertainment is now at the core of our business. We work on expanding our digital business. We put our streaming platform JOIN at the center of everything we do. We want to focus on the freely accessible and ad finance part of JOIN. With this, We strengthen JOIN's position as an AVOD offering in the market. This opens new monetization opportunities for us. We can now offer our advertising customers more digital and smart advertising products on JOIN. And this creates new revenue streams. We also link JOIN closer to our channels. This is also reflected in the positive development of all our key performance indicators. Another digital business model with strong growth is our audio business. We have increased our advertising revenues in our podcasting business in the full year 2023, and we are ready to expand here even more. Streaming and podcasting are just two examples of how our industry is changing. To withstand international streaming players, we will have to cooperate even more closely in the industry. Facing increasing competition, we need to form partnerships to leverage synergies. We will cooperate with competitors where it makes sense and where legally allowed. Only through cooperation, we will be successful in the future as an industry. our North Star must always be how can we make our offerings more attractive for our users and for our partners. In the past month, we also increased our reach and monetization with selected partnerships. Just recently, we announced a pioneering innovative ad tech collaboration with RTL Germany. Furthermore, we made join available on Deutsche Telekom's Magenta TV and extended our distribution deal with Vodafone. And our Studio 71 is partnering with RTL2 for their sales on YouTube. More on some of these examples a bit later. While entertainment is at the center of our strategy, commerce and ventures contributed meaningfully to our revenues in the past year. The segment posted double digit percent growth in 2023. We drove operational performance of our assets. We maximized their media synergies and we refined and optimized our portfolio. Specifically, we saw very positive developments and financial performance at Verivox and Flaconi. With the adoption of our strategy, Two clear priorities emerged for our group. We fully integrated JOIN and its employees into our company. JOIN is now part of our structures and processes. We work hand in hand every day on how and where to develop our entertainment segment in the future. With this integration, we also restructured our group. We increased cost efficiency and streamlined our processes. This new organizational setup is now in place since November 1st. We now work in a leaner, more efficient setup throughout the whole organization. The savings that we achieved will take full effect in 2024. Let me now give you a quick overview of our financial development. Martin will go into details later. In 2023, our group revenues amounted to 3.85 billion euros. This was in line with the financial targets that we had updated in November. The implied organic decline of 4% was attributable to the challenging macroeconomic environment. On the other hand, We saw an improvement in our advertising business throughout the year, as well as strong growth at our commerce and venture segments. This partially compensated the negative developments. Our entertainment advertising DAGN revenues were below the prior year level. Even though they developed stable towards the year end, We posted significant growth in our digital and smart advertising revenues. This was especially driven by JOIN's strong operational performance. Our digital platforms and commerce business posted strong growth in revenues and adjusted EBDA. The dating and video segment was still impacted by lower consumer spending, by regulatory headwinds and strong competition in the US market. Our net financial debt reduced to 1,546,000,000 euros at the end of 2023. Our financial leverage was at 2.7x and hence within the targeted range. As expected, Q4 2023 strongly contributed to net debt reduction. We saw strong cash generation at the end of the year. For 2024, we assume a slight increase in group revenues to 3.95 billion euros with a variance of 150 million euros. We expect an adjusted EBDA of 575 million euros with a variance of 50 million. This takes into account a positive development of our entertainment advertising DAG revenues. Let me now hand over to Martin, who will go into more details of our financial development.