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Scout24 Se
3/25/2021
Welcome everyone to Scout24's 2020 Final Results Call. My name is Ursula Caret and I am Head of Investor Relations at Scout24. I have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO, and Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, with me on this call. You can find today's presentation slides on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. There you can also find our 2020 Annual Report and our Sustainability Report, which were both published today under the common theme Focus on What Matters. If you are using the web link we provided beforehand, you can see the presentation slides live. This session will be recorded and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please be aware of the safe harbor statements on page two. And let's have a look at today's agenda on page three. Tobias will kick off the presentation in a second, talking about how we are delivering on our strategy. Dirk will then cover the 2020 financials, our capital return roadmap, and dividend proposition. Together, they will conclude the presentation with a look into 2021. As usual, we will then have time for your questions. Tobi, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. Let me start on page five with a recap of 2020. Business-wise, after a strong Q1 and two quarters quite shaken by COVID-19, Q4 2020 turned out very positively, a testament to our resilient business model. Actually, Q4 was the strongest revenue quarter ever in the history of Immoscout24. This was achieved on the back of a real estate market activity that has quickly adapted to the pandemic situation. As of today, we are seeing quite normalized listings and traffic data, at least on the residential real estate side. And while we are still in a so-called lockdown situation in Germany, we remain optimistic that in age two, we will return to more normal business and private lives. We have also based our 2021 outlook on this assumption. But more importantly, our outlook is based on the progress we made in terms of strategy in 2020. Throughout the year, we delivered on our ecosystem strategy and made significant progress with key product and market initiatives. while we did the right thing for our customers. Concerning the agents on this slide, let me highlight three things on which I will elaborate further later in the presentation. Our enhanced mandate acquisition offer to agents, the improved subscription packages and the accelerated migration path, and the proactive integration of FlowFact into our agent product world. For homeowners, The rental journey is getting more and more digitized, which is very useful in the current situation. Since we implemented it in March last year, this private user group profits from our free to list offer. At the same time, we are generating additional seller leads. With Immo4Cuff24, we are nurturing certain leads until they are qualified to be passed on to an agent. The last user group in our three-sided marketplace, the Seekers, saw improvements in our consumer products Tenant Plus and Buyer Plus in 2020. We are also serving them with improved digital features like online viewings and a reworked price atlas. All in all, we used 2020, the first year with a sole focus on ImmoScout24, to innovate and accelerate product rollouts in a market asking for greater digitization and convenience. And we made a big step forward in our goal to move closer to the transaction, but more on that later. Let me first run through our key performance metrics for 2020 on page six. These numbers show that despite unprecedented challenges from COVID-19, our company and the German real estate market have proven to be resilient. Our group revenues increased by 1.2%, with our ordinary operating EBITDA margin slightly increasing to 60%. Without the Immo4Kauf24 acquisition, we would have shown stable revenues year on year, and the margin would have been slightly higher. We are very pleased with the 5% customer growth and the 2.5% residential partner ARPU increase. The latter reflects both some list price increases, which we resumed in Q4, and an additional value proposition such as the realtor lead engine. On listings, we are down by 4% versus 2019. As I explained on several occasions before, besides COVID-19, this is mainly due to a general trend of a declining number of sales transactions. Another effect was the reduced standing time of listings. 13.8 million unique users per month on average for 2020, growing at 2%, underscores our highly relevant supply of listings on our marketplace, even during COVID-19 times. According to our analysis, this growth would even be higher if the data collection wasn't influenced by the recent updates on cookie content. Sessions grew by 7% year on year to 101.4 million visits per month. Here, the same data collection issue applies. In summary, all numbers on this slide underpin our distinct and intact market leadership position in Germany. Let us now take a closer look at the very solid agent and ARPU development on page seven. Already in Q3, we had cracked the 20,000 total customers mark. The number of residential real estate partners grew by 5.3% year on year to 17,213 partners at the end of 2020. ARPU for the fourth quarter was at 717 euros back at the Q4 2019 level, but not yet at the high level of 729 euros we had achieved in Q1 2020. Looking at the 12-month period, residential real estate ARPU increased by 2.5% to 716 euros. the number of business real estate partners increased slightly by 1% to 2,800 as of December 31, 2020. The business partner ARPU for the fourth quarter was at 1,801 euros and 1,754 for the full-year perspective. Here, we are seeing a stronger COVID-19 impact. Both numbers were slightly below previous year's levels. The most important takeaway here is We came out of 2020 with a strengthened relationship with our professional customers. We supported them promptly when the effects of COVID-19 came to light, and we demonstrated that they are most important to a functioning ecosystem with our fall marketing campaign. Speaking of the real estate ecosystem, let's turn to page 8. Most of the revenue we generate with our agent customers is included in the orange portion of the graph. This represents the recurring subscription business with them with a main focus on objects marketing and thus listings. Adding the pay-per-add business to that brings revenues which are directly linked to listings to about 74%. Five years ago, this proportion was still much higher at 85%. At that time, as a pure classifieds player, we were also fully monetizing private listings. Nowadays, the balance are other ecosystem revenues coming from high growth complementary products, which allows us to monetize consumers or leads. This clearly moves us closer to the real estate transaction, get more data, generate more transparency. This, in turn, is used to develop additional products and features as part of our monetization strategy. The development of leads revenues depicted in amber in this slide is clearly driven by our realtor lead engine product, the revenues of which increased by 67% year on year. Another example for a high growth product is the tenant plus consumer subscription. Revenues profited from the free to list initiative and grew by 30% year on year. With this slide, we wanted to show you that our transition towards full transaction monetization is well underway. At the same time, our revenue structure is gaining both in quality and continuity, and we are doing our homework to foster deeper relationships with our customers. Let's now take a look at the market applicable to our ecosystem strategy described on page 9. As mentioned before, while we are experiencing a decreasing number of real estate transactions, the transaction value in Germany continues to increase. For 2020, it is estimated at 280 billion euros. Out of that, the residential real estate market alone accounts for up to 215 billion euros. Real estate agents operating in this growing market generate their revenues from commissions. The commission pool is estimated at approximately 8.5 billion euros or even higher as this number relates to 2017. According to a survey we conducted in 2019, we assume that 12% of an agent's revenue is spent on marketing. This brings us to roughly 1 billion euros, of which an increasing proportion, we currently assume around 700 million, is used for online marketing. With agents more and more recognizing the needs and advantages of digital farming, we now assume a 55-45 split between objects marketing and mandate acquisition, resulting in an addressable market of 400 million euros and 300 million euros respectively. Let us first take a look at how we navigate the objects marketing piece with our core agent subscription business. Then I would like to talk about how we are increasing our share of wallet within the mandate acquisition time while at the same time helping our customers to improve their business. Talking about business improvements, I will quickly touch on our FlowFact CRM offering for agents. Last but not least, I will come to the brand journey and additional revenue streams resulting from our consumer products here. As you know, we introduced our new membership product world in 2019. The aim is to offer our residential sale agent population optimal and flexible solutions to market their inventory. The higher membership translates into a more visible listing and increases the agents brands. The acquisition edition offers the greatest acquisition power. Page 10 clearly illustrates how we are progressing in migrating our agents to the new memberships. While in October 2019, all customers were still in a legacy product world, one year later, in October 2020, 35% had already migrated into the new world. In December 2020, we already stood at 45%, and now, as of the end of February, we have migrated over 60%. The acceleration stems from auto migrations, which we started in December. As previously shared, we plan to have completed the migration at the end of H1. Also, the upgrades have taken up speed again. More and more customers are moving up the ladder into the image and acquisition edition. And with this new mix, the blended ARPU over all memberships is increasing. Please note, that we are only talking memberships ARPU here without on top of product and without real the lead engine. This blended ARPU increase is due to the COVID-19 situation and related discount schemes stemming from 2020 with 3% quite moderate and therefore leaves us with a comfortable headroom for further ARPU rises. This membership model represents an important pillar of our growth strategy. With the corresponding rate card system, which we plan to publish at the end of 2021, we provide a fair and transparent price product system for our core customers. Moving on to page 11, let's get to the mandate acquisition piece of our addressable market. Our goal to move closer to the real estate transaction is at the heart of our ecosystem strategy. Over the last years, we have invested a significant amount of money into making this goal happen. The development of the homeowner hub and the recent acquisition of Immo4Kauf24 are good examples of this strategy. They enable us to develop a direct and meaningful relationship with homeowners. We assume that there's a total of around 19 million private homeowners in Germany, around 1 million of which visit our marketplace every month. Half a million homeowners have already registered to our homeowner hub as of the end of December 2020. This is the most important source for our lead engine product, which allows agents to source mandates digitally. With this, we want to be perceived as a business partner rather than a cost center by the agent. We help them as a partner to conduct future business successfully. This is a very meaningful shift from a few years ago where the discussion used to be around the pricing for listings on our platform. And this is at the heart of our strategy. Last year, we helped more partners than ever before at an unprecedented level to generate more business than ever before. Let me repeat that. In the toughest year, we delivered the highest value add to our customers. Let's have a look at the numbers. In 2020, we handed over approximately 73,000 leads to our agents, generating 17.5 million euro of lead engine revenues. 900 of these leads were commission share leads. This gives you an idea of what we mean by moving closer to the transaction. And when considering the total sale transaction number of 626,000 per year in Germany, you also get an idea of the growth potential, which is still ahead of us. Moving to page 12. An efficient CRM tool also supports the successful business of an agent. As consumers and the industry become more digitized, the agent's ability to conduct their business in a more digitized and personalized way becomes mission critical. With a powerful CRM tool as part of our offering, we will be able to increase our customers' business effectiveness. This will help drive customer stickiness and our recurring revenue base. In addition, we can push digital sales. Therefore, we decided to further invest into our software company FlowFact and to consider it key to our ecosystem strategy. With its new cloud-based product world, FlowFact now offers the most modern SaaS CRM solution in the German market. As of today, already 23% of all FlowFact seats have migrated into the cloud solution from the legacy on-premise solution. And the migration is continuing as we speak. As a next step, we are now planning to replace the Scout Manager uploading system by FlowFact, which would then create a significant critical mass. Currently, around 44% of ImmoScout listings are uploaded by the Scout Manager and 10% by FlowFact. Combining these would bring us to about 54% of uploads handled by FlowFact. This alone would make FlowFact the clear number one. As already explained during the analyst day, we will use FlowFact like a wedge. Owning this CRM tool has various strategic advantages. Let's now move from the sale journey to the rent journey. On page 13, I want to show you how, in addition to the agents' time, we are managing to move deeper into the consumer time. We assume around 3.2 million rent transactions are happening in Germany every year. This number would probably be much higher if it wasn't for the lack of supply, especially in the top German cities. At the end of February, we saw 166,500 rent listings on ImmoScout24 platform. This is only a snapshot at a specific moment. Some listings are removed from the platform within minutes due to the constrained market situation. Those listings could be viewed and searched by 117,500 tenant plus members at that point in time. Rent seekers have booked the product for a duration of two, six or 12 months respectively. With our free to list offer introduced last year, we saw a significant uptake of consumer subscriptions as the first 48 hours of the free listings are exclusively shared with tenant plus subscribers. We generated total revenues of 39 million euros with this high growth product in 2020. This represents an increase of 30% year on year. With these meaningful revenue growth numbers resulting from a clear strategic approach, I would now like to hand it over to Dirk.
Thank you, Tobi, and a warm welcome also from my side. Let's move to page 15. Tobi already showed you our key financials at group level. This slide presents the segment view. The residential real estate segment has been the most resilient in the COVID-19 crisis with a year-on-year revenue increase of 3.5% corresponding to 253.4 million euros. This growth was mainly driven by the revenues from our professional customers, most of which are recurring revenues. They were up by a strong 6.4% and include €4.3 million of ImmoVacauf24 revenues, which are allocated to the Realtor Lead Engine revenues. Revenues from consumers decreased by 2.7% in 2020. This decline is due to foregone revenues resulting from the free listing offer. A large part of these could be compensated by the strongly growing consumer subscription revenues. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the residential real estate segment remains stable at 63.2%. The business real estate segment revenue of 69.1 million euros in 2020 came in roughly at previous year's level on the back of a softer macro environment. The business real estate margin increased to 71.2%. The media and other segment revenues decreased by 12.1% to 31 million euros. The segment was mainly impacted by an overall decreasing ad sales market, which was accelerated by COVID-19. FlowFact recorded declining revenues due to the ongoing migration to the cloud-based product world. ImmoScout24 Austria showed above average growth of more than 11% despite the COVID-19 crisis. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the media and other segment decreased slightly to 38.7%. All segments combined, we achieved a revenue growth of 1.1% to €353.5 million and thus fully met our annual guidance. Q4 turned out as the strongest revenue quarter ever in the history of ImmoScout24 with €91.1 million of revenue. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin for all segments combined reached 62.6% in line with our guidance and slightly exceeded the previous year's level. The Q4 ImmoScout ordinary operating margin was at 61.7%. Turning to page 16, let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting our margin development. Own work capitalized increased significantly by 57.1% year-on-year to 21.9 million euros. This is due to our various and accelerated product innovation initiatives Tobi has mentioned before. The remaining ordinary operating effects rose by 5.9% year-on-year to 163.5 million euros in 2020, outpacing revenue. This was largely driven by increased IT cost and other operating costs. The growth in IT cost by 20.9% is mainly due to the continued deployment of cloud-based platform and software solutions. License costs now make up more than 50% of that. The 18.6% increase in other operating costs is on the one hand due to the increased external labor for the product development. On the other hand, this stems from higher selling cost in connection with the increased marketing of the consumer products and the realtor lead engine. COVID-19 related bad debt provision also contributed slightly to the rising other operating expenses. Marketing expenses increased by 2.2%. This reflects the marketing campaign carried out in the third quarter and increased performance marketing activities in half year two 2020. While the operating effects have increased overall, we saved costs where possible short term with COVID-19 and additionally leveraged structural cost efficiencies. This brings us to the ordinary operating EBITDA of €212.3 million for the financial year 2020. This EBITDA level at a margin of 60% reflects our refocus on ImmoScout24 and a more diversified revenue base with a stronger focus on high-growth consumer and lead products. On page 17, you see the items below the ordinary operating EBITDA line. Non-operating costs decreased sharply by 69.1% to €14 million in 2020. Main reasons for this were lower share-based compensation, lower M&A cost and the lower reorganization cost after the successful completion of the AutoScout transaction. The strong reduction in share-based compensation is on the one hand due to the Scout share price performance with a lower 2020 share price increase compared to 2019. On the other hand, the number of long-term incentive program shares has decreased in 2020 as a result of the completion of the AutoScout24 transaction. As a result, the reported EBITDA increased by 21.1% to 198.3 million euros in 2020. Worth mentioning, with the items below, the reported EBITDA is the financial result, which was improved by 68%. This was driven by lower interest expenses after debt repayments and by positive effects from investments in special funds. The net income amounted to 102.4 million euros, an increase of 61.3% versus 2019. This translates into a basic EPS of one euro, which is calculated with an average number of 102.1 million shares without treasury shares. The 2020 adjusted earnings per share, which you can see on the next slide 18, include three months of AutoScout24 corresponding to the closing of the transaction in Q1 2020. The adjustments mainly relate to non-operating effects and special effects in connection with the AutoScout24 transaction, such as the finance income from the Special Securities Fund, which we have set up to invest excess cash. The adjusted net income builds the basis for our 2020 dividend proposal. Putting ourselves at the 50% payout ratio, which is at the upper end of the dividend policy range, leads us to a dividend per share of €0.70. This corresponds to a total payout of 68.5 million euros that the Supervisory Board and the Management Board will be proposing at this year's Annual General Meeting. Please be aware that the precise amount of the dividend per share depends on the planned capital reduction and share buybacks effected before the Annual General Meeting. Those form part of our capital return roadmap, which we have communicated in connection with the AutoScout24 transaction to our shareholders. The key pillar of our capital return roadmap is the up to 1 billion euro capital decrease transaction, which, now that we have closed our 2020 accounts, is right around the corner. You are already familiar with the next slide 19, which we have recently shown on several occasions. There we have communicated that the capital decrease transaction will happen after the publication of our fiscal year 2020 results and before our 2021 annual general meeting. Assuming that U.S. investors are on this call, I regret that I cannot discuss the transaction further here, reason being that the offer will only be made in accordance with German law and will not be made in the United States or by any U.S. jurisdictional means. To non-U.S. investors, I recommend our investor relations website, where we inform you about the transaction and have included some frequently asked questions and answers under repurchase offer 2021. After completion of the transaction, the next milestone of our capital return roadmap will be an additional up to €200 million share buyback and, as mentioned before, our 2020 dividend payment. Before I hand it back to Tobi, let me give you a short update on how we have been trading so far in 2021. Listings at €390,000 are up 1% versus end of December and slightly down versus prior year. This decrease is probably a result of three effects. First, COVID-19, which has only started in March 2020. Second, transition to the newly enacted Bestellerprinzip. And third, the general market trend of reduced transactions in Germany. However, this listing effect does not result in a financial effect. Revenues and earnings for the first two months of the year are even slightly above our expectations. We therefore feel comfortable with a group outlook for the year of a mid-single-digit percentage revenue growth and a near-stable ordinary operating EBITDA margin. Now let's have a look at traffic KPIs, monthly users and sessions in February. We see them almost at the level of last year, which was still pre-corona. And considering the data collection impact Toby mentioned earlier, our data suggests a significantly higher demand year on year. This is very positive news despite the recent COVID-19 third wave discussions and despite the uncertain development of the commercial real estate market. The group revenue outlook I just gave you confirms the segment forecast made at the analyst day in December and which you can see again on page 21. For our largest segment, residential real estate, we assume a mid- to high single-digit percentage growth, mainly on the back of continued customer growth and ARPU increases, as well as a strongly growing realtor lead and consumer business. Although we have several promising product initiatives underway in the business real estate segment, this needs to be put into perspective against a market environment torn by COVID-19. We therefore only expect a slight growth for this segment, The media and other segment is forecasted to decline or remain flat. The third-party advertising business is still suffering due to COVID-19, and we are actively reducing advertising inventory in line with our shift towards an in-house agency. FlowFact will see decreasing revenues due to the cloud migration of its customers, while ImmoScout24 Austria is expected to continue its strong growth despite COVID-19. I would now hand it back to Tobi for some concluding remarks.
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