11/11/2020

speaker
Ursula Keret
Head of Investor Relations, Scout24

Welcome everyone to Scout24's Q3 2020 earnings call. I am Ursula Keret, Head of Investor Relations at Scout24. I have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO, and Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, with me on this call. Tobias will talk about the key events for Scout24 in the third quarter, including an update on the current COVID-19 situation in Germany. Dirk will then cover our nine-month and Q3 financial performance in more detail. After the presentation, we are available for your questions. The presentation slides are available for you on our website, and you can follow us live if you use the web link. I hand it now over to Tobias.

speaker
Tobias Hartmann
Chief Executive Officer, Scout24

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. I'm speaking to you today from our Berlin office. While Germany is currently going through a so-called lockdown light phase, business activities are ongoing. After a careful review of our office rules and protective measures at Scout24, we concluded that they are in line with the government regulations. Therefore, we continue to offer our employees the possibility to voluntarily work from home or the office. By the way, This is one of the last meetings we are holding in this specific office building here in Berlin as we are in the process of moving into a brand new building right next to Berlin's main train station. This is a good and life example that despite COVID-19 and some resulting slowdowns, our company as well as the real estate market are functioning and intact. Looking at our Q3 performance, I'm reiterating what I said in Q2. The Scout24 Group's business model is proving to be resilient and robust during the COVID-19 pandemic. Q3 accumulated nine-month revenues increased by 1% year-on-year. And this despite the fact that the free-to-list initiative for private listers was maintained in the third quarter and the third-party media business continued to decline. We are therefore well on track to achieve our forecast of almost stable full-year 2020 revenues, which we published in August. In parallel to slightly growing our revenues in Q3, we stepped up investments in our strategy again. For example, we launched a very meaningful marketing campaign, which we had originally planned for Q2. This multi-channel campaign is fully in line with our strategic objectives and emphasizes the importance of all our three stakeholder groups. By encouraging selling homeowners to sell their property with a real estate agent, we further promote digital farming, i.e. help agents to find their next mandate digitally through our platform. Of course, this marketing campaign comes at a price reflected in a slightly lower Q3 ordinary operating EBITDA margin than last year. For the nine-month period, however, the margin has slightly increased to 60%, which is like for revenues in line with our annual forecast. Q3 is the first quarter where we included Immo4Kauf24 in our financials. The integration of the acquired business is progressing well, and we are successfully expanding our homeowner platform. The revenues of Immo4Kauf24 are included in the residential real estate segment as part of the realtor lead engine revenues. Innovation remains at the heart of our strategy. In Q3, again, we significantly invested into our existing product suite while also launching new products. Product enhancements include our home seller hub, the agent directory, and our native app. Examples for new products are the digital rental contract with digital signature, the landlord subscription, as well as new membership additions for property managers and developers. These are excellent examples for our continued investment into the growth of our platform. While we are navigating through these challenging times and closely monitoring the short to mid-term effects on our ecosystem, we are seizing every opportunity to further consolidate our leadership position. As for the nine-month period, In a challenging environment, we have delivered a resilient performance and are taking the positive momentum into the rest of the year. Let me walk you through our key performance metrics on page four. As already mentioned, our nine-month revenues grew by 1%, reaching 263 million euros. Our group ordinary operating EBITDA margin increased by 0.8 percentage points to 60%. This is mainly due to the successful implementation of cost efficiency measures as well as COVID-19 cost savings in Q2. I am very pleased that from a nine-month perspective, we also managed to grow our ARPUs. Residential real estate ARPU grew by 2.1%, business real estate ARPU increased by 0.5%. Even more impressive, in Q3, again, we were able to grow our agent base by 5.5%. With 20,005 core agents subscribing to our product, we have now officially cracked the 20,000 mark. On listings, we are down by 4% versus the nine month in 2019. As I explained already in Q2, this is due to several effects. A general trend of a declining number of sales transactions while the transaction value increases. a decreasing relocation activity leading to a lower turnover of houses and apartments, reduced standing times of listings, especially in the top seven cities with the highest volume, and not to forget a still significant gray market. 14.5 million unique visitors per month on average for the nine-month period, growing at 8%, underscores our distinct leadership position in traffic and the highly relevant supply of listings on our marketplace, even during COVID-19 times. Sessions grew by 11.5% year on year to circa 107 million visits or sessions per month. You might have noticed that the growth slowed down a bit compared to the numbers we showed in Q2. This is mainly due to technical changes in the collection of data following recent updates on cookie content. Let's turn to page five where we show you some print advertising examples of our ongoing marketing campaign. For obvious reasons, we did not go live with this campaign in Q2. But mid of September, we were ready for it. We launched a multi-channel marketing campaign that circles around the topic, sell better with an agent. For the first time in six years, it also included extensive TV advertising. With this campaign, we are addressing the needs of our three user groups. We are staging our professional customers, the real estate agents, as key to a successful sale journey. We are doing this because we want to strengthen our partnership with the real estate agents, as we have also demonstrated with our COVID-19 support program. At the same time, we want to become the number one point of contact for home sellers to enhance our leads business. Hence, the acquisition of Immo4Kauf24, the further development of the Home Seller Hub, additional performance marketing activities, just to name a few initiatives. And lastly, we want to show consumers who spend more and more time on our marketplace how we can make life easier for them, helping them for a life-changing decision with maximum transparency and a personalized home search journey. Now let's move to page six. You're already very familiar with this triangle summarizing our three key user groups. Today, I want to show you how we've enhanced our digital offering for each of these groups in Q3. Let me pick some examples from this slide. For agents, with our new three membership additions, we have a very comprehensive product set in place. Since the launch in November last year, and despite COVID-19, we managed to migrate already 30% of the targeted customer base into the new memberships by end of Q3. Just for your reference, at the end of June, we stood at 20%. we are planning to reach the 100% migration target by mid of next year. For property managers, who we count as agents focusing on rent transactions, we also launched a new membership edition in Q3. The products and services included cater for the specific needs of those professional customers in the rental journey. Last but not least, in September, our agent software company FlowFact presented its latest product world for real estate agents. This consists of three different packages depending on customer size. Customers who are also ImmoScout24 customers benefit from several advantages, both in terms of price and due to specially designed interfaces. For the benefit of consumers, we introduced several native app improvements catering for better user experience. Like in Q2, with an ongoing free listings initiative, we are seeing an increasing number of consumer subscriptions. The plus 74% year-on-year for the METO Plus products speak for themselves. For the recently introduced KUIFER Plus product, we already counted more than 6,000 subscribers at the end of Q3. We also added the option of a digital signature to the digital rental contract, which makes life easier for both consumers and homeowners. This brings me to our third user group. I already mentioned that we have continued the free listing initiative in Q3, which attracts more homeowners to our platform. It works like a free trial offer valid for a period of maximum two weeks. At the same time, the number of contact requests is fenced. If the advertiser needs additional services, costs will be incurred, which will result in additional revenues for Immoscout24. By the way, While placing the free ad on our marketplace, we make the users aware that calling on an agent might be advantageous to them. This ultimately fuels our leads business, which gets an additional focus with the acquisition of Immo4Kauf24. With the integration of this business, we are growing further along the home selling journey, thus enhancing our leading position in homeowner-related traffic and leads. In Q3, we have connected more than six homeowners with agents and therefore provided 36% more leads than in Q2. Adding the leads from Immo4Kauf24 on top of that brings us to over 14,000 leads in Q3. This clearly demonstrates our strengthened homeowner base, which allows us to tap into the mandated acquisition market even faster. Before I continue, let me summarize this page as follows. The pandemic came completely unexpected. And I'm afraid it will keep us busy for some time. How long? We cannot say here and now. What we do know, despite the prevailing uncertainty, is that the digitization of the German real estate ecosystem is accelerating. And we are playing an important role here with the continuous enhancement of our digital offering. What is the current pandemic situation in Germany and how does this affect our users and business? Let's take a look at page seven. Germany is currently in a so-called lockdown light mode. It started on November 2nd and is so far expected to last until the end of the month. The government will evaluate the infection numbers and decide whether an extension or any other measures are deemed necessary. We expect to have a first review by next week. The current contact restrictions in place mainly apply to the social life, which means a maximum of 10 people from two households can meet. Restaurants, bars, entertainment facilities are closed. Schools and kindergartens remain open and most corporate business activities like those of agents and notaries are continued. As I mentioned in the beginning, where possible, home office should be allowed. During this phase, we continue to stay close to our customers. We inform and educate our agent customers on the current situation through a dedicated website and through our customer care teams. As an example, we train residential real estate agents how to perform digital viewings in a most effective way. Because even if individual viewings are still possible, home seekers might be more reluctant to physically meet with an agent. In the business real estate arena, there is more pressure from a macro perspective. While we are still seeing increasing prices in residential real estate, a proof that rental and purchase transactions continue to take place, the commercial real estate market is hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic, both short and medium term. Having said that, so far, we only see minor impact on the outlook for the current financial year. Talking about minor impacts, our listing and traffic analysis after one week of lockdown light mode does not yet show any meaningful negative effect. Other than in the March lockdown, we see an almost stable development of users, listings, and sessions in the first week of the lockdown light period, while email inquiries in reaction to listings even went slightly up. Let me summarize. COVID-19 continues to cause various challenges for our user groups in our own operations. Over the last month, we have demonstrated that we have a responsive and agile organization in place. While continuing our strategic path, we reacted to the crisis with the right products and support measures. Our nine-month results prove that we have a resilient business model and our growth drivers are intact. With that, I hand it over to Dirk to guide you through our financial performance.

speaker
Dirk Schmelzer
Chief Financial Officer, Scout24

Thank you, Tobi, and welcome, everybody. On slide eight, we summarized our nine-month and Q3 financial performance. With 262.6 million euros group revenues, we achieved a growth of 1% versus the nine-month period in 2019. This is a result of a strong Q1 with 5.6% revenue growth, a Q2 hit by COVID-19 with a revenue decline of 3.5%, and the third quarter, where we saw a slight increase in revenues again. Q3 revenues were at 89.6 million euros, 1% up year on year. This includes the revenues of Immo4Kauf24. We are very pleased to have been able to demonstrate growth in Q3, despite the ongoing pandemic, despite maintaining the free-to-list initiative for private listers, and despite the continuous softness in the third-party advertising business. The beginning of the year marked a strong momentum where the first success of our membership migration became visible and our B2C business showed significant growth. The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic materialized towards the end of Q1. In Q2, our COVID-19 support program kicked in. While contractual agent revenues grew due to spillover effects, we focused on customer retention and paused price increase discussions. Consumer subscriptions even showed accelerated growth with an increased number of listings due to the free-to-list initiative. We have continued this initiative in Q3 and in view of the very positive effects on consumer subscriptions, we will continue to do so going forward. Particularly because of the short-term cost cutting measures introduced in Q2, The group's ordinary operating EBITDA rose by 2.4% to 157.6 million euros in a nine-month comparison, outpacing revenues. Accordingly, the nine-month ordinary operating EBITDA margin was up 0.8 percentage points year-on-year at 60%. In Q3, mainly due to higher marketing expenses, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin decreased slightly by 0.5 percentage points to 58.2%, while the absolute group ordinary operating EBITDA amount remained almost stable at around 52 million euros. As you can see on page 9, the quarterly ordinary operating EBITDA margin of ImmoScout24, it asked all three segments combined came out at 61% in Q3 2020 versus 63% in Q3 2019. The decline of two percentage points is also a result of recurring dis-synergies following the sale of AutoScout24. I will come to the operating expenses later. The residential real estate segment showed a strong year-on-year growth with revenues up 3.3% to 64.9 million euros. This was mainly due to contractually secured revenues from professional customers like agents, finance customers and property managers during the COVID-19 crisis. These revenues were up by a strong 5.7%. They include the revenues of ImmoVerkauf24, which are allocated to the Realtor Lead Engine revenues. Revenues from consumers decreased by 1.6% in Q3. This decline is due to foregone revenues resulting from the free listing offer for private listers. As I mentioned before, part of these could be compensated by strongly growing consumer subscription revenues, which increased by more than 30% in Q3. While growing on a nine month basis, the margin decreased by two percentage points to 61.4 in Q3. The decline was a result of our free listing offer and increased marketing spend on growth initiatives. The Immofacauf24 activities also impacted that margin. On the background of a tougher macro situation, the business real estate segment revenues slightly decreased by 1.5% to 17.1 million euros in Q3. Revenues with project developers were soft due to a lower number of projects and the partial booking of lower priced packages by project developers. This was partially offset by an uptick in contractually secured revenues with business real estate agents. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the business real estate segment remained almost stable quarter on quarter, coming out a bit below 70%. The media and other segment, which contributed only 8% to the total group revenue in Q3, was mainly impacted by an overall decreasing ad sales market, which is accelerated by COVID-19. Revenues from third-party advertising alone accounted for only 2% of total revenues in the third quarter after a year-on-year decline of over 30%. The subsidiary FlowFact recorded declining revenues due to the ongoing change from licensed payment models to a software-as-a-service model. ImmoScout24 Austria showed above average growth despite COVID-19 with a revenue increase of 5.5% in Q3. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the media and other segments fell by 8 percentage points year on year to 38.6%. Let us now take a closer look at the very solid customer and APO development. As Tobi mentioned before, we have cracked the 20,000 customer mark. The number of residential real estate partners grew by 6.5% year on year to 17,216 partners at the end of Q3. APU for the third quarter was at 703 euros, 2.1% lower than the previous year, but 1.9% higher than the previous quarter, which was more heavily impacted by COVID-19. Over the nine-month period, residential real estate APU increased by 2.1% to 709 euros. The number of business real estate partners fell slightly by 12 partners year on year to 2,789 as of September 30, 2020. APU for the third quarter was at 1,715 euros, 2.6% lower than in the previous year. This decrease is primarily due to lower revenues with project developers. On a nine-month perspective, the business real estate APU increased by 0.5%. Turning to page 11. Let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting the margin development. Own work capitalized has increased significantly by 34% in Q3 and 64% in the nine month period. This is due to our various innovation initiatives. Toby has mentioned before that we strongly invested into our existing product suite while also launching new products. Personal cost decreased by 3% for the 9 months and 1% for Q3, mainly due to efficiency improvements, although Q3 includes the personal expenses of Immofacauf24. This line does not include share-based compensation, which is considered a non-operating effect. Marketing expenses show an over-proportionate increase by 7.2% in Q3. This is due on the one hand to the multi-channel marketing campaign postponed to this quarter and on the other hand to the resumption of performance marketing activities, for example, for the Realtor Lead Engine product and consumer products. This figure also includes the online marketing activities of Immofacauf24. In a nine-month comparison, marketing expenses fell by 4.7%. The increase in IT expenses slowed down in the third quarter of 2020 as the migration of our data center to cloud-based solutions is largely complete. Nevertheless, the use of cloud solutions suggests that costs will continue to rise as business volume increases. Other operating costs include other selling costs, consulting, and for Q2, bad debt provisions relating to Liquidity+. Adding the own work capitalized to the revenues and deducting the operating cost brings us to the ordinary operating EBITDA, which amounted to 52.2 million euros in Q3 and 157.6 million euros for the nine-month period. On page 12, you see the items below the ordinary operating EBITDA line. Non-operating costs decreased strongly by 53.1% for the nine-month period and by 2.1% in Q3. This includes a lower share-based compensation in Q1 and Q2, which then increased in Q3. In addition, M&A-related costs were lower year on year. As a result, the reported EBITDA increased by 19.8% in a nine-month comparison and by 0.7% in a Q3 comparison. Regarding the key items below reported EBITDA, I will concentrate on Q3. Depreciation and amortization decreased by 9.3% due to lower IT equipment depreciation and PPA amortization. The financial result improved by 63.5% to minus 1.4 million euros due to lower interest expenses after debt repayments and to positive effects from investments in special funds. Tax expenses at 10 million euros were a bit above previous year's level. Net income amounted to 20.5 million euros, an increase of 21.3% versus Q3 2019. This translates into a basic EPS of 20 euro cents. This is calculated with an average number of 101.5 million shares. It is without treasury shares. By the way, the nine-month EPS shown in the table does not consider the after-tax result from the discontinued operations, which would include the capital gain from the AutoScout transaction. Talking about the AutoScout transaction, let us now turn to page 13. Since the transaction, we reduced our debt balance by a total of 680 million euros, which brings us to a current loan volume of 252 million euros. As per end of September, we have settled share buybacks in cash with a total amount of 317 million euros. As you will see on the next slide, this cash settlement does not account for the total value of repurchased shares at this point. Deducting M&A costs, the May dividend payment in taxes and adding the Q2 and Q3 operating cash flows, the performance of the special fund and other non-recurring items, brings us to 1.888 billion euros of available funds at the end of Q3. This includes cash invested in money market and special funds. Such investments are based on clearly defined guidelines to reflect liquidity needs and control risk exposure. Moving on to page 14, this one starts with the available funds position of 1.888 billion euros I just mentioned. We have then outlined the key pillars of the top 1.69 billion euro capital return roadmap, which we have initiated following the sale of AutoScout24. The up to 490 million euro share buyback program, which we commenced in April 2020, forms the first pillar of this. As per end of September, we have successfully repurchased shares with a total volume of circa 330 million euros, which has further increased to circa 404 million euros at the end of October. following the repurchase of the outstanding up to 160 million euros under the first share buyback we intend to launch an additional up to 200 million euro share buyback in 2021 in order to comply with existing regulations we will redeem shares to ensure that our treasury share position does not exceed 10 of our prevailing share capital in addition to the 2020 dividend payment The up to 1 billion capital decrease via buyback tender in the first half of 2021 represents the key pillar of our capital return roadmap, which we will cover in detail on the following slide. On page 15, you can see the key terms of our announced buyback tender, for which we have already received shareholder approval in our last annual general meeting. As mentioned previously, we have opted for this route as it is the most effective and efficient way to return capital to our shareholders. In order to deliver on our path towards our target capital structure, we will repurchase up to 27.88% of our current share capital at a fixed share price via a public tender offer. We will announce the resulting tender ratio and offer price before the launch of the buyback tender. The most important feature of this buyback will be tradable tender rights which shareholders will receive pro rata to their existing shareholding. These tender rights offer our shareholders a high level of flexibility as they can either exercise their rights, acquire additional rights or sell rights depending on whether they want to keep, increase or decrease their shareholding. The tender rights ensure an equal treatment of all shareholders and provide shareholders certainty on the tender acceptance while at the same time avoiding a share overhang. In terms of timing, we plan to execute the buyback tender following the publication of our full year 2020 results and before our 2021 AGM. Now moving to page 16. As Tobi already indicated in his opening remarks, our nine-month performance shows that we are well on track towards our full year guidance formulated in the half-year report on August 13, 2020. The month of October developed largely according to plan two. Therefore, despite the strong resurgence in COVID-19 infection numbers and the lockdown light measures announced by the German government from November, we confirm our outlook for the full year 2020. In line with that, we expect group revenue for the full year to be around previous year's level and the group's ordinary operating EBITDA margin to reach around 60%. With respect to segment revenues, we expect our residential real estate revenues to be stable or slightly up. The further rise in residential real estate prices in the third quarter shows that rental and purchase transactions continue to take place in this market. And agents and consumers are increasingly using our digital products. The commercial real estate market is hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic, both short and medium term. Having said that, we expect this to have only minor impacts on the business real estate outlook for this year. We therefore see business real estate revenues to be stable or slightly decreasing. And lastly, we expect media and other segment revenues to decrease in the low teens percentage area, mostly driven by decreasing advertising revenues. The aggregate EBITDA margin for the three segments is expected to come in at around 62%. Of course, this guidance is based on the assumption that the currently known lockdown light measures will not have a significant impact on our business with customers and users in November and December. And with this, I hand back to the operator to open the queue for questions.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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