Scout24 Se

hello everybody great to see so many of you at our office here thank you for being with us and thank you also for all of you who are dialed in remotely again as philip pointed out we'll do our best to make sure that you feel almost like being in the room so let's get started with the full year results 2023 you saw the results but we'd like to provide more context and more color around it and It's a simply stated summary. 2023 was a very successful year for Scout24. And you see a couple of points and let me grab a few and comment on those. First of all, the company turned 25 years old last year. 25 years is a lot. to celebrate. But the main thing we'd like to put context around is it's 25 years of uninterrupted growth. It's 25 years of expertise in real estate. It's 25 years of just thinking about real estate digitization in Germany and also Austria. The second point I'd like to make is that we delivered a third year of double digit revenue growth. albeit some of you have argued in the past that this would be impossible, given the market environment and the significant market changes that had occurred in the German market. The third point I'd like to make is that It's also a special year, 2023, because we have surpassed the 500 million euro revenue mark. And we've also surpassed the 300 million euro EBITDA mark, which is a significant milestone. And it shows that we've delivered against two earnings upgrades within the year. and closed out when EBITDA growth at the very high end of our latest upgrade. And the last point, since it was already a busy year, we also closed a highly strategic acquisition, which is part of our playbook. It's part of our playbook of keeping investing and making sure that we have the right foundation in place to take this company to the next level, which we'll talk about later this afternoon and we have the capability to get into the next stage of we would say the three-sided interconnected marketplace that we'll talk about as a theme this afternoon so we've delivered in a very challenging macro environment we have shown growth continued growth with our agent base which is the core of the company you see that not only have we added new customers, we were also able to deliver growth in ARPU that shows the significant relevance of our company in these challenging and changing market environments. The second point is our unique private subscription business, which again, some of you may have questioned in the past why we would do that, has shown continued growth and relevance in these markets. which we believe we're the only one offering such service and such product suite. And we also believe that only as a market leader, you can offer such service convincingly. Our adjusted EPS turned out to be €2.52, which is growing 32%, which is over two times the revenue growth for the full year 2023. And as Philip pointed out, and as you may expect, we will provide the guidance for 2024 as part of this afternoon session of the CMD. So let's start with a quick review of Q4 before we get into the full year. The good news is that when we look at the last quarter, we saw a 15% growth in quarter reaching 132.5 million, which shows a very steady, healthy growth. So it was a continuation of what we had delivered throughout the first nine months of the year. The core membership continued to grow. You look at the customer base by 2%. So yes, we are actually in a position to add new customers. And we fell short of the 22,000 mark, but we know it's already there. And so that's the next milestone we'd like to realize. Our ARPU also grew by 12%, and it grew by a combination of continued migration that we showed, as well as the strong trajectory, which we also saw with the different product mixes for people upgrading and booking additional services and products. And then obviously in our tenant plus, in our subscription business on the private side, we continued to show a customer base increase of 18% to almost 380,000 subscribers. Also, we were able to show over-proportionate revenue growth of about 20%, which shows that we're doing the right thing between customer growth and monetization and CLV optimization. So all in all, We're very pleased, and this goes out as a huge thank you to all the Scout 24 families and teams that have delivered a very, very strong operational execution in a tough environment with lots of uncertainty. Moving to the full year, we put this in context so you can do the math, but we closed it out with 509 million euros in revenue. which again is a great milestone for scout we also closed it out with about 304 million euro in ebta which is again at the upper end of the range that we had upgraded twice throughout the year with a 21 increase and again to put things in context on the professional side We showed a very, very solid and healthy growth of subscription revenue with 12.4%, which is, again, a mix of the customer growth at a slightly slow of 22,000 and also the ARPU growth. with our professional customers with an incoming of 1,114 euros. On the private side, again, we're very proud of that. We were able to convince a lot of new customers to join our offering in this heated market, but heated now a little bit upside down with the rental market obviously very red hot with 20%. increase in subscription revenue and almost 18% private customer growth. And with that, I would like to hand it over to Dirk to provide more color on the financials. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Tobi. Good afternoon and also welcome from my side. Now, after the beginning remarks of Tobi, I would like you to take a look at our performance on the respective segments. What we are particularly proud of in this environment of 2023 was that we managed to grow our revenues in all segments while growing margin and profitability. With that meaning, we improved our operating leverage. Particularly outstanding was, of course, the growth in the professional margin, where we added around 300 base points. A testament to, once, a very favorable mix in revenues, and second, an increased relevance of our membership products, and thirdly, a very tight cost management. On the private side, we slowly but very consistently improved margins while growing in the high teens and adding relevance quarter on quarter. While on a lower scale, but nonetheless remarkable, we saw growth in the media and other segment. And that was due to three elements. First of all, the colleagues in Austria, that have grown a fantastic business once again in the mid teens. Secondly, it was due to our CRM businesses, FlowFact and PropStack, where we have seen a finalization of a migration of all our customers to the cloud. So we now have around 4,000 customers completely cloud-based on our market-leading CRM systems. And as you recall from the past, we are executing on our media strategy, which means more of our inventory is going to our professional customers, less of our inventory is going to advertisers, but nonetheless, with less inventory, our media teams managed to improve revenue and also margin. And all of that led to more than 500 million, half a billion of revenues. and a year-on-year EBITDA margin of 59.7%, a year-on-year improvement of the EBITDA margin of 21%, while growing revenues 13.8%. Now, let me dive a little bit deeper into two segments, which is one, the professional segment. What have we seen here? We've seen an overall annual growth of 12.3% and we've seen a quarterly growth of 15.9%. And that wasn't a mere pricing issue. That was the fact that we managed to add customers to our base. So you saw a 3% customer increase year on year. we managed to add features which add more and more relevance to our customer base, the agents, and we managed to convince more and more agents to move into higher membership packages, adding more relevance to them. And that led to an ARPU increase, as Toby just outlined, which we saw at 12% in the fourth quarter and 8.7% overall year on year. So there was, of course, a much lower performance on the lead businesses where we have seen transactions going down roughly 30% year on year. And nonetheless, our performance was going down 13% in revenues on the lead businesses, which tells you that also in that tough market environment that we've seen in Germany, we've been able to grow market share. On the other hand, if you see here, a seller leads growth of 38% or 4% year on year in their full year and 38% in the fourth quarter, that is merely a technical effect that you see from the inclusion of Sprengnetter, which we report under this revenue line. The PPA business in total was down 4% year on year and 19% in quarter four. Now, That is not bad news, because what we are doing is we're taking PPA customers, so pay-per-add customers, and migrate them into our membership. So a lot of those customers that have formerly relied on Scout once a year, twice a year, four or five times a year, they are now relying on Scout month on month, and they are consuming the full product suite. Now let me move to the private segment. Tobi has already outlined So a very good performance with our private customer base. And of course, as we have seen interest rates going up over the year 2022 and then finally in 2023, a lot of consumers have decided to move from the decision to buy an object into the decision to rent out an object because they couldn't afford it anymore. So what we have seen was a huge demand for rental objects. And a huge demand for rental objects for us translated into a huge demand for our tenant plus product. So on the average of the fourth quarter, you saw 378,000 customers on the platform consuming our product and taking up the ability to be the first in line, to be pre-informed about new apartments, new units coming up on our platform, to have a credit check and to have a digital application map. And that led to an overall growth across the year of roughly 19% in revenues. We added 20% of subscriptions. We slightly improved the average subscription time And we improved the average revenue per user in the full year by 2%, in the fourth quarter also roughly by 2%. On the listing side, we saw similar development. than we saw on the PPA side on the professional segment. Now, why is it a similar development? The listing in the private segment is mirrored by the listing in the professional segment. In Germany, as you have seen from one of our publications, more and more sellers are relying on agents to sell their object. So what we have seen was a growth in our PPA uh product that was 18 year on year but slightly went down to six percent year on year in the fourth quarter as i said not necessarily bad news because the listing comes to our pro to our platform anyway let it be via a private listing or with the help of an agent that can use our product suite so in total what you've seen year on year was an over proportionate EBITDA grows, we've been growing 20%, roughly 19.5%, the private EBITDA, while revenues have been growing roughly 19%. So the margin has seen a slight decrease overall in the fourth quarter. But across the year, if we look at the full year 2023, we've been growing margin by 0.3 percentage points. Now that adds up to an overall picture on our group performance. As you've read now, 13.8% revenue growth. I don't think I need to continuously repeat that number, but what is of particularly importance is acceleration of revenue growth in the fourth quarter where we've seen 15% growth. As we announced our strategy to peak our investment in 2022, Accordingly, what we saw was a slight decrease in own work capitalized throughout the year from roughly 29 million to 23 million and throughout the fourth quarter from 7 million to 5 million. As I said in the beginning, we also saw a huge operating leverage, which was due on the one hand to a favorable product mix, but on the other hand, also due to measures we undertook throughout the year in order to make the business scaling and more efficient. So you see that our personal cost slightly increased, which is due to the inclusion of Sprengnetter. If you just look at the fourth quarter, there was an increase of 9%. We added around 200 full-time equivalents with the acquisition of Sprengnetter. But across the year, personal cost just increased by 4%. Marketing spend, we've seen a decrease from 51 million to 48 million, although we saw a significant uplift in revenue growth. That means we spent four and a half percent less on marketing year on year than we did the previous year. IT cost, I think of particular importance for us because we've been managing to drive down cost through negotiating prices on the one hand, But we've also been managing to drive down usage of the cloud platforms we are engaging with by optimizing the architecture. So what you see was a growing business with shrinking IT cost. And then you saw selling cost up roughly 20%, absolutely 100% corresponding to what we've seen on growth on the private subscription side, as you recall. For a private subscriber, we also offer what we call a credit check. And that credit check we pay to a third party provider. So those selling costs obviously increased in line with the customer increase. Other operating costs, we saw a slight better performance than in the previous year. So 10% down on other operating costs, which led us to an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of roughly 60%, 59.7% year on year, and 59.9% in the fourth quarter. But more importantly, that dropped down to reported EBITDA, which was growing in the same number. So here you see the non-operating effects, which led us to a reported EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 76 million. In the full year, 279 million. We slightly went down on D&A due to the purchase price allocation that we had with ImmoScout, which went down in 2022 already. Improving our EBIT by 29% year on year. The financial result has been positively impacted by the full allocation of our AutoScout proceeds with share buyback. Because in the previous year, we still had parts of the AutoScout proceeds in a fund, which in the fourth quarter was loss making. So we profited from that. So earnings per share on a non-adjusted basis, earnings before tax, sorry, were growing 40% and 19% in the fourth quarter. Our net income on a non-adjusted basis was growing 19% in the fourth quarter and 45% year on year. And what is of particular importance, and Toby mentioned it already, so we managed to drop down the operating leverage we created on the top line to our adjusted EPS, which came out 32% above the year 2022. The measure which helped in that was, of course, our share buyback you've probably seen the average number of shares that we had out decreased to 75 million in the fourth quarter, compared to 78 million on the average at the end of the financial year 2022. So with that, I would like to remind you once again to our value creation building blocks, which are a strong revenue growth through organic revenue and M&A, creating operating leverage and hence growing our earnings before tax and interest, net income accretion, growing our dividend while maintaining our overall dividend guidance of 30% to 50% of the net adjusted income, and capital allocation with share buybacks. Usually at this point, you will see my financial guidance for the ongoing financial year and the years to come. But as Philip and Toby outlined, we would like you to stick with us for a while, explain our product strategy, attend our CMD, and then we dive into Q&As. Thank you very much.