3/1/2022

speaker
Ursula Keret
Head of Investor Relations and Treasury

Welcome, everyone, to Scout24's preliminary 2021 results call. My name is Ursula Keret, and I am head of investor relations and treasury at Scout24. As usual, we have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO, on this call. Toby will kick off the presentation. Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, will present our Q4 and full-year financials. We will conclude the call with a Q&A session. Please note that all numbers presented here today are preliminary and still under review by our auditors. The final numbers with audit certificate will be published with the annual report on 24 March. The new segment numbers for 2021 and 2020 are for information only and will remain unaudited. We tried to be as transparent as possible and included a detailed table in the appendix of the presentation. The official start of the new segment reporting is Q1 2022. You can find today's presentation on our website under financial reports and presentations. If you are using the web link we provided beforehand, you can also follow the presentation live. This session will be recorded and the replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Let us now turn to page three where I hand it over to Toby.

speaker
Tobias Hartmann
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. This morning, we published our preliminary results with a slightly higher than expected full-year revenue number of €389 million and an ordinary operating EBITDA of €223 million. This results in a margin of 57.3% which is fully in line with the guidance range of 57 to 58%. We are very pleased with the strong Q4 momentum, not only in terms of growth, but also in terms of proof points for our next level strategy. I will come to that on the next slide. The growth rates on this page speak for themselves. While our revenue grew by 10% and our ordinary operating EBITDA by 5% year on year, we saw 12% and 6% growth for revenue and ordinary operating EBITDA in Q4 respectively. The growth momentum in the year 2021 and Q4 in particular clearly evidence the potential of our next level growth roadmap, which we shared in detail during our CMD in December 2021. On page 4, we break down our 2021 revenue growth by the main drivers under the new segment structure. Now let's start with our core business. Memberships with both residential and commercial agents. Although the commercial business still affected by COVID-19 only remains stable, the total membership revenue grew by 4.8% year-on-year with an acceleration in Q4 on the back of various upselling and pricing initiatives for our residential customers. Now, let me remind you that membership upgrades and pricing represent the first of five value drivers we shared at the CMD. We told you in December that we expect a CAGR of 4% to 6% for the respective professional membership revenues in the next years, so 2021 was already on target in that respect. The core membership business is complemented by our well-established seller leads business. We presented this as value driver number two at our CMD. While the 88% year-on-year revenue growth is impacted by inorganic effects, the Q4 growth rate of 46% is purely organic. Hence, clear evidence for the significant growth opportunity of the seller leads business and reason why we are, as communicated at the CMD, directing increased investments into this. In total, we sold over 100,000 seller leads to agents through our RLE product in 2021, resulting in an average revenue per lead of €210. On top of that, we participated in the conclusion of around 1,500 real estate sale transactions in Germany at an average revenue per transaction of over 7,000 euros through our Immo4Kauf24 product. The third element on the right-hand side of this slide and value driver number four is our plus product business. At the end of 2021, we stood at almost 250,000 plus subscribers and hence doubled the number of METOplus and Koi4Plus customers within one year. Since the CMD, we have received several questions about the growth recipe behind this specific value driver. The answer is, besides the longer duration and hence customer lifetime of these products, we invested in more traffic and increased the paywall and conversion efficiency of the products. The depiction on page 5 should be familiar to you. We have used it for some time now, to show how we are diversifying our revenue base towards transaction-based revenue streams. So while the core, our value driver number one, remains strong, listing PPA revenues are increasingly replaced by leads and private subscription revenues. These represented already nearly 30% of total revenues in 2021 versus 18% and 23% in 2019 and 2020, respectively. As I said before, Q4 added additional momentum to our full-year performance and consequently also to this revenue mix shift. With the growth strategy presented at the CMD, we estimate that by 2026, about 50% of our revenues will come from the products behind value drivers 2 to 5, meaning transaction-based and private subscription revenues. Let us now take a closer look at the key performance metrics in Q4 on page 6. Our group revenue grew by 11.7% to 101.9 million euros when comparing Q4 2021 with Q4 2020. The main growth driver was our residential real estate segment with a revenue increase of 16.6%. The ordinary operating EBITDA segment increased by 6.3% to 58.1 million euros. This under-proportionate growth compared to revenue is in line with our guidance. It reflects the higher cost base, which temporarily comes with the next level implementation of our transaction-based strategy. So just like with the revenue acceleration proof points, I showed you two slides before, the OOEBDA Development is evidence of our growth roadmap gaining momentum. By the way, without the strategic bolt-on acquisitions such as ImmoVerkauf24 and Vermietet DE, our OO EBITDA would have grown by almost 9%. Due to the strong demand for the realtor lead engine and the membership upselling and pricing measures I mentioned before, the ARPU of the residential real estate partners increased by 8.4% to €777 in Q4. This is all the more impressive considering that listing numbers were decreasing in a very tight market with a significant shortage of supply. Separately, once again, we were able to grow our professional customer base by 3.5% to 20,711 customers. Concerning traffic, we continue to see clear shift from desktop to app usage supported by our respective app download campaigns. So while the desktop traffic declined by 11% in Q4, we saw a strong increase in monthly app users by 38% to 4.5 million users. Let me sum it up with page number seven. We are delivering on our next level growth roadmap. Our core membership business representing Value Driver One increased by 4.8% and 5% in a full year and quarterly comparison respectively. This is exactly in line with our CMD growth outlook of what we are expecting in the next couple of years. Tick in the box, on track. On top of that, there are network effects from our seller leads business, Value Driver 2. The pure organic Q4 growth of 46% is well above the targeted average growth rate with a range of 30 to 40%. Tick, on track. We also ticked the mortgage box, i.e. Value Driver 3. In Q4, we managed to improve the lead quality and lead generation so that we deliver 30% growth with the MLE business alone, compared to 13% for the full year. On top of that, will come first revenues from our new mortgage transaction business this year. Value driver four, increase plus subscribers. Within one year, we managed to double the number of plus subscribers to reach circa 250,000 at the end of 2021. Hence, we already made a large step towards the goal of 400,000 subscribers, which we want to reach by 2026. Tick in the box for Value Driver 4. On track. Total private subscription revenues, including a small portion coming from permitted DA in 2021, grew by 54.6% and 76% for the full year and Q4, respectively. The full year absolute number of 39.4 million euros is therefore the basis for the expected CAGR of 26 to 28% until 2026, which includes value drivers 4 and 5. We hope this helps you better contextualize the CMD strategy. I now leave it to Dirk to dive deeper into what we delivered financially in 2021. Dirk, over to you.

speaker
Dirk Schmelzer
Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Thank you, Toby, and welcome.

Disclaimer

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