SMG Swiss Marketplace Group AG/ADR (SMGSY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

computer to work because i thought what but yeah no i'm here sorry about that no no worries um i don't know if you saw in the post i did you were going to basically take over as the podium up because there isn't a podium up yeah and the key one is just when they start their question remove them from the list and then just kind of if you work on renaming when they start and then yeah as there's raised hands add them to the list and just pay attention to whatever happens and if lenius sounds like he dies any point you can take over as moderator and i'll take over his podium um fingers crossed lenius that doesn't happen else that anyone can think of any questions any ways to make things better anything that i might have missed on this one sorry it's difficult because it's not actually my event but i think we're in a good place from where we are now um so james you said in case they prefer us to share slides I would need to help them sharing right um I don't think they'll need us to share slides uh because they want to it's just in case something goes wrong but if that happens I think Dan might be the better one to do it um I don't know how how intensive is monitoring everything with the new set of them got it okay I have the slides downloaded and uh is it possible for you to um grab the Q&A slide and share it in a PNG format if possible when you uh we'll do in a minute but the client has just arrived so are we okay to stop sharing slides brox yeah let me do that and then i'll let the client in oh stop sharing you can see them so you should be able to see them in the zoom room as well

but that's exactly how they see them in the webinar and on the webcast too ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the smg swiss marketplace group half year 2026 webcast for analysts, investors, and media representatives. Today's call will be hosted by Christoph Tonini, CEO, and Boris Gussen, CFO of SMG. I will now hand over to Christoph to begin today's webcast.

Thanks a lot. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we start, I'd like to briefly draw your attention to the disclaimer on page two of our presentation. My name is Christoph Tonini. I'm the CEO of Swiss Marketplace Group, and I'm sitting here in Zurich together with our CFO Boris Gussen. I'm flipping to page four, and before we move to our half-year performance, I would like to briefly address an important leadership development we announced this morning. I have been discussing my long-term plans with the board for some time now. A few months ago, I informed them that I felt 27 would be the right time to transition out of the CEO role. After almost four years as CEO and having led SMG through an important period of transformation and its successful IPO, I believe it is the right time to hand over the operational leadership of the company. Following a structured succession process, the board announced this morning the appointment of Alberto Sanz de Lama as next CEO of SMG, effective 1st January 27th. This enables a structured handover as well as a continuity in both strategy and execution. Alberto has been a key member of our executive leadership team since 2003 and has played an important role in shaping our strategy and the key decisions we have taken as a group. He has over 20 years of digital marketplace experience and is an experienced leader. More importantly, he knows our business, our markets, our people and our strategic priority extremely well, making him well-placed to preserve strategic continuity and execute SMG's established strategy. We also announced this morning that Euron Nikolai has decided not to seek re-election at the next AGM. He will step down as chairman immediately, but remain a member of the board until the next AGM. Jörn has been part of SMG's journey since the merger in 2021, and I would like to thank him for his contribution to the company's development over the last years, and particularly for guiding the organization through the IPO. As I transition out of the operational leadership of SMG, the board has proposed that I succeed here as a chairman subject to shareholder approval at the AGM in April 2027. I'm very pleased to continue contributing to SMG in this new role and to support the company's next phase of growth. Until then Pietro Zoppino, currently vice chairman of the board, will assume the chairmanship on an interim basis. I have great confidence in Alberto and in the strength of our leadership team. Over the coming months, we will work closely together to ensure a smooth transition ahead of his appointment as CEO on January 1st. In the meantime, Alberto will remain fully focused on leading the automotive division until the transition, while we work on an ordinary succession to ensure continuity for the automotive business. You will hear from him in his new capacity in the new year. As ever, we look forward to continuing our close engagement with the capital markets throughout. I'm now moving to page 5, which provides an executive summary of our first half performance. Sustainable double-digit growth and expanding margins through operating leverage are the cornerstones of our equity story. H1 provides further evidence that our strategy is delivering on both fronts. Group revenue grew 11.3% to 179.8 million Swiss francs, while growth was broad-based with double-digit growth across all core verticals. Adjusted ABDA increased by 15.8% to 101.5 million Swiss francs. The adjusted ABDA margin increased by 2.2 percentage point to 56.5%, and cost ratios declined along the expectations we set out at IPO. In real estate, we delivered the first net agent growth in three years while maintaining strong double-digit ARPA growth in the core packages. On the AI front, we are successfully scaling several initiatives while the ongoing rollout is being funded within our current CapEx envelope. Overall, we are growing, expanding margins, broadening the real estate customer base, deploying AI pragmatically and increasing visibility for the full year. This combination gives us confidence in both our full year 26 outlook and our medium term valuation value creation path. As a result, we are narrowing our full year 26 revenue guidance from 10 to 12 percent to 11 to 12 percent. We confirm our adjusted EBDA margin at 56 to 58 percent and improve and narrow the CapEx guidance at 7.5 to 8.5 percent of revenue. On the next slide I'd like to highlight a few operational achievements from the first half. Starting with real estate we successfully relaunched our package portfolio in h1 the new offering has been well received by customers is already translating into stronger upselling and has contributed to strong arpa growth in the core packages on top of that we delivered on a strategic priority that we had clearly set out at the time of the ipo we we report first year on year net agent growth in three years This is the result of successful winbacks of small customers, customer retention, as well as the strong adoption of our recently introduced flags package. We have underserved smallest clients previously, and with the flags offer, we are bringing them back and retaining them in our ecosystem. Another standout was our Seeker subscription business, which delivered 190% year-on-year growth in Seeker subscribers. This demonstrates clear willingness to pay for premium access to listings in the supply-constrained rental market and our capability to monetize the secret size of our real estate marketplace. Turning to automotive, product innovation and product-led value capture remained key priorities. During the first half, we launched a range of product enhancement, including AI-driven features and a unified, integrated private seller journey that allows private sellers to seamlessly switch between classifieds and auction formats. We also continue to convert product value into revenue, delivering another period of strong RPD growth supported by an increasing adoption of premium packages. finally ricardo maintained its strong operational momentum continued product improvements high user engagement and healthy marketplace dynamics translated into another period of strong gmv growth and an exceptional year-on-year performance overall these achievements demonstrate the consistency of our execution and make us confident going into the second half of the year I'm turning to page 7 now. Across our marketplaces, SMG remains the clear market leader with a strong traffic advantage supported by brands deeply embedded in the daily lives of Swiss consumers. Importantly, this position has not changed. Contrary to the disruption narrative, we see no evidence that AI is taking our traffic. LLM-driven traffic remains below 1% across our core verticals and broadly stable even as adoption of ai tools continue to rise among swiss consumers we also continue to benefit from attractive underlying market dynamics switzerland remains a stable and resilient market with monetization levels in real estate and automotive being below our european marketplace peers this gives us confidence that we still have significant headroom to grow on the long term to continue product innovation and enhance customer value. I'm flipping to page eight now. AI becomes powerful when it has access to trusted inventory, rich marketplace data and strong customer relationships. These are exactly the assets that SMG has built over many years across real estate automotive and general marketplaces. Across the group, our strategic logic is to scale AI initiatives that improve discovery, workflows and marketplace intelligence and further strengthen our competitive mode. On the demand side, with AI we enable users to do better search, receive better recommendations and get more support in making decisions. This makes our demand mode even stronger by deepening engagement relevance and direct usage of our platforms on the supply side we are making listings simpler and more efficient while increasingly integrating into our customers daily workflows ai allows us to automate time consuming tasks and provide agents dealers and sellers with smarter tools to run their business on the data side we are building on our unique marketplace data and propriety intelligence to enable better recommendations better matchmaking and to enable our customers to make better day-to-day decisions across our platforms we will see even more real-time context and intent signals in the future we will see even better pricing and valuation data and we will see that trust and safety signals will matter even more to sum it up ai is strengthening our competitive modes on top of that our replatforming and cloud migration were fully completed last year providing a great technological foundation that allows us to scale ai initiatives without fundamental investments let me now turn to the next slide which showcases concrete ai power products and features that we have launched over the last few months or roll out as we speak and directly support the strategic outlined earlier. Conversational search is now live across all our core platforms. Going forward, it will increasingly help users find what they are looking for in a more natural way. Other AI-powered tools such as decluttering and virtual staging and real estate make listings more engaging and more comparable. I mentioned earlier that we expect AI to make workflows more efficient and to integrate us even deeper into the processes of our professional customers. A few examples here. Automated background removal and virtual staging helps automotive dealers create higher quality listings in less time in gdm we launched ai supported bulk listings making it very easy to list multiple items on ricardo while ai is writing descriptions and providing pricing suggestions in real estate we are currently testing and rolling out ai replies on flatfox reducing manual work while improving responsiveness just to give you an idea of the scale in the first half of 2026 flatfox advertisers manually generated approximately 240 000 messages per month on average these are practical examples of how we use ai to increase customer productivity and improve the return on investment they achieve through our products and marketplaces. Finally, we are increasingly turning our propriety data into propriety intelligence. In automotive, our new Optimizer Pro provides expected time-to-market insights, helping dealers manage their car inventory, while a new recommendation engine improved conversions. In real estate, we now predict B2B package performance to promote upselling. In general marketplaces, LLM-supported tagging has improved discoverability, leading to better search results and higher conversion rates. In addition, we continue to invest in AI-driven fraud detection, helping us to increase trust while reducing off-platform transactions. I want to emphasize that this slide represents only the AI component of our innovation roadmap. AI is an important lever, but it is only one of several levers we are pulling. Let me use AutoScout24 as an example. Given our recently introduced product updates, dealers can now integrate PDF documents directly into their listing, such as service histories or inspection reports giving prospective buyers more transparency and greater confidence in their purchase decision. We have also introduced video integration enabling dealers to present vehicles in a more engaging and realistic way. These are exactly the type of product enhancements buyer expect and dealers want to offer and they create value without relying on AI. The broader point I want to make is that as a relatively young company, SMG still sees substantial untapped potential to improve products, customer workflows and monetization across our marketplaces. AI helps on this journey but it is only one part of a much broader product-led growth agenda. With that I hand over to Boris who will take you through our financial performance in more detail. Please, Boris.

Thank you, Christophe, and welcome everyone on the call, also from my side. Let me start with our group financial performance on slide 10. Group revenue increased to $179.8 million, representing year-on-year growth of 11.3%. This strong performance was broad-based with double-digit growth across all our core segments. When comparing this with the 14.4 growth reported in the first half of 25, it is important to remember that the prior period benefited from a 2.3 percentage point contribution from M&A and recall the shipping label revenues. On a like-for-like basis, H125 revenue growth was 12.1%, highlighting the consistency of our underlying growth trajectory. Adjusted EBTA increased by 15.8% year-on-year to 101.5 million. As a result of operating leverage, our adjusted EBTA margin expanded by 2.2 percentage points to 56.5%, corresponding to a strong drop-through rate of 75.8%. percent. This reported margin absorbed several dilutive effects, including the growing contribution from Eucardo shipping labels and CDB in automotive, as well as the annualization of incremental costs associated with being a listed company. Moving to the right side of the slide, EPS doubled year and year from 29 Rappen to 57 Rappen. As you might recall, last year's result included elevated IPO related costs, including related share-based compensation. These costs are now at typical levels and combined with our strong operational performance, translated into significant EGS growth. Finally, we continue to operate from a position of financial strength. Our leverage ratio stood at 0.7 times adjusted ATA, providing us with a strong balance sheet and a continued financial flexibility. Let us now take a deep dive into the core business units starting with real estate on slide 11. Real estate delivered a very good half year demonstrating both the resilience of our market position and the continued strength of our monetization strategy. Revenues grew 11.5 percent to 88.5 million. The underlying real estate market in Switzerland remains characterized by strong demand and limited supply. Following that, we observed a continuous increase in property prices and single-digit decline in active inventory. The attractiveness of our platforms remained unchanged with both traffic and lead generation growing year on year. This underscores the strength of our market position and the value we continue to create for both property seekers and professional customers. Our professional classifieds revenue increased by 9.7%, driven by the relaunch of our core package portfolio, which supported pricing adjustments and an increased adoption of our premium offerings. We also achieved an important strategic milestone we set out at IPO, a year-on-year net increase in agent numbers to 4,027 customers. The key driver here was the strong adoption of our stock flex package. As a reminder, Flex is a hybrid subscription package, and we designed it as a deliberate entry product for smaller agencies that were previously underserved, had churned, or might have left the platform. We piloted the product last year, rolled it out fully this year, with more than 300 customers by the end of June. Those flex customers have an ARPA below 300 francs, which is significantly lower compared to our core package. This targeted addition of smaller customers and a significantly lower ARPA creates a natural mix effect, including the flex mix effect reported ARPA grew 5.4%. However, the underlying core monetization engine remains firmly intact and upper growth in the core packages, excluding the flex offer, was 13.7%. We expect to see this mixed effect in H2 as well, as we continue to acquire and win back smaller customers but gradually normalize into 27. On the private customer side, momentum remained particularly strong. Other classifieds' revenue increased by 19.1%, supported by the continued scaling of our Seeker subscription business. Subscription volumes increased by approximately 190% year-on-year, providing strong evidence of the attractiveness of our offering and Seeker's willingness to pay premium access to the news listings. In addition, services and other operating revenue continue to grow, supported by the strong performance of our FlatFox SaaS business. Finally, profitability also continue to improve. Adjusted EBTA margin expanded by 3.2 percentage points to 69.9%, reflecting the operating leverage inherent in our marketplace model and our continued focus on cost management. Next is automotive on page 12. Our automotive segment delivered another strong first half, with revenue increasing by 12.2%, demonstrating the resilience of our marketplace despite a softer automotive market. Overall, the Swiss automotive market stayed soft. We see weaker demand with traffic declining year over year, stagnating new car registrations and new car sales, while inventory from professionals and leads delivered by our platform stayed broadly stable compared to previous year. Professional classifieds revenue grew by 14.4%, driven by continued growth of average revenue per dealer, growing 13.8% year over year. Our dealer rates increased slightly, while we are also seeing continued adoption of premium packages. Slightly more than 35% of our dealer customers are now on one of the three tiered packages, professional, professional plus, and premium, while the rest are with the basic package. Two years ago, the percentage was roughly at 28%. On the one hand, this demonstrates that we're driving the adoption of premium packages, but it also crystallizes more potential for growth and monetization. Other classifieds revenue representing more private or paper-ed revenue declined 1.4% year-over-year, reflecting softer listing volumes largely of targeted product and pricing initiatives, including the introduction of value-based pricing tiers. Another important strategic priority is the continued expansion of our CDB business, Autoscout Direct. The number of cars transacted increased by 48.7%, while 9.8 million revenue growth year-by-year helps us offset the impact of low private listing volumes. As CDB carries a lower margin than our traditional classifieds business, its growing contribution has a modest dilutive effect on the segment margin. However, it creates an additional revenue stream as the market evolves and also shows how we adapt to the needs of private sellers for more convenience and a faster selling process. Profitability also continued to improve. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 0.9 percentage points to 68.4%. Moving on to page 13. General marketplace delivered a strong first half with revenue increasing by 13% year on year. This was supported by continued GMV growth of 13.1%, reaching 309.1 million francs. The biggest growth contribution was from Transactional Revenue, or Ricardo, which increased by 11.9%. What is particularly encouraging is the momentum was broad based across the marketplace, with growth in visiting accounts up to 8%, unique buyers and sellers both up 11%, and posted articles up 4%, reflecting healthy marketplace dynamics across both demand and supply. growth also benefited from favorable market dynamics in selected categories such as coins and collectibles in addition efficient marketing execution continued to support buyer and seller activity we expect second half growth to normalize against stronger prior year comparator and for the underlying marketplace momentum to remain healthy we also made good progress with the rollout of Ricardo Plus, our new offer for sellers. More than 65% of eligible users have now been onboarded and the program is supporting volume expansion and deeper customer engagement. At the same time, targeted seller discounts helped drive additional activity. These volume driving measures, together with a higher share of above cap orders, had a modest impact on the take rate, which declined by 0.1 percentage points year on year to 9.1%. We view this as a balanced trade-off as the initiative supports GMV growth and long-term marketplaces health. The classifieds part of the business also continue to evolve with revenue increasing by 17.2%. Growth was supported by targeted monetization initiatives including the introduction of listing fees for cars as well as the integration of shipping possibilities, which improved convenience for users. Finally, adjusted EBDA margin increased by 2.5 percentage points to 48.8 percent, reflecting discipline cost control, while still allowing us to invest in marketing and product development to support long-term GMV growth. We continue on page 14 and moving now to the cost base. as you have heard across the individual segment reviews we saw profitability improving important supported by revenue growth and the operating leverage inherent in our marketplace model this slide brings the dynamic together at group level looking at the adjusted total operating expenses the opposite the absolute cost base increased only modestly from 88.2 million to 91.4 million this reflects continued investment in the competitive positioning over platforms alongside variable expense components such as cost of services that naturally scale with revenue as revenue grew significantly faster than costs adjusted total operating expenses as a percentage of revenue declined from 54.6 percent to 50.9 percent the same pattern is visible in personnel expenses. Adjusted personnel expenses increased only marginally from 56.5 million to 57 million, while the ratio to revenue declined from 35% to 31.7%. Apart from operating leverage, this also results from the continued increase of our nearshore and offshore ratio being 39.4% as of June 26. The key takeaway is that we're able to support continued growth without a proportional increase of headcount or personnel costs on capex we also saw a very healthy development capex decreased from 16.4 million to 14 million as a potential percentage of revenue declined from 10.2 percent to 7.8 percent this underlines our ability to drive meaningful product innovation and adoption with current talent and resources and within the current capex envelope turning to guidance page 50. as a result of our stroke first half performance have first half performance and the good visibility we currently have for the remainder of the year we're narrowing our full year revenue guidance to 11 to 12 percent growth which is the upper end of the previously committed communicated range one important point of context is that our first half performance was driven by several factors we have already highlighted particularly ricardo's strong performance while we expect the second half to be solid we do not expect this to be a huge sub change beyond what was delivered in h1 for ricardo specifically we expect the market-based momentum to continue throughout h2 but with growth rates normalizing against the stronger prior year comparison and higher baseline on margins we are confirming our adjusted abd guidance at 56 to 58 the current range captures continuous operating leverage while enabling investment in growth increased marketing spend in h2 and certain one-time expenses such such as increased consulting and education expenses we're also improving and narrowing our capex guidance as we expect capex to land between 7.5 and 8.5 percent of revenue finally our midterm outlook remains unchanged our first half performance puts us firmly on track and strengthens our confidence in delivering against those commitments over time so to wrap it up strong h1 good visibility for the rest of the year allowing us to narrow our full year 26 revenue growth guidance and continued confidence in our midterm outlook. And with that, I hand over to Christophe for some final words.

Thank you, Boris. I'm switching to the final slide. To conclude, we announced a planned leadership transition this morning designed to ensure continuity in terms of strategy and execution. Alberto was appointed new CEO, effective January 1st, 27. He knows our business and strategy extremely well, and I have full confidence in him and our leadership team. I look forward to supporting a smooth transition and continuing to contribute to SMG in my future role as a chairman subject to shareholder approval. In the first half of 26, we delivered broad-based double-digit revenue growth, expanded margins through operating leverage and cost discipline, and continued to execute well on our strategic priorities. We are also making good progress with AI, and AI-driven innovation is strengthening our product offering and competitive position while developed under our existing investment framework. We have narrowed our full-year revenue growth guidance and remain committed to our mid-term targets. Overall, the results underline the strength of our platforms, the great execution by our teams and the resilience of our models as we continue to create value for customers, partners and shareholders. Thank you to our employees, customers, partners and shareholders for their continued commitment, trust and support. with that let's move to Q&A and I will hand over to the moderator.

Thank you. We will now begin our audio Q&A session. Please let me share some introductory remarks. If you have a question please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your zoom screen to be added to the queue. Once your name has been announced you can unmute and ask your question. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question. If you have a follow-up, please rejoin the queue and we will come back to you as time permits. If you wish to withdraw your question, you can lower your hand using the raise hand function. Thank you. And a moment for the first question, please. Our first question comes from Yulia Kezekovtseva at UBS. Please unmute your line.

Yes, good morning and thank you for taking my questions. This is Yulia from UBS.

I actually have one question um about the excess cash usage so at the moment it seems that your net leverage reduced to around 0.7 times so could you please elaborate on your capital allocation priorities going forward and as i said how do you plan to use your excess cash thank you so i think we announced initially that we would increase our dividends along adjusted EAT and that's still the plan for the time being we're expecting a considerable a considerable increase in our dividends last year it was 80.5 million and we're looking now in line with adjusted EAT at a much higher number other than that But there are no concrete plans regarding share buybacks or M&A that we could communicate at this point of time.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Andrew Ross at Barclays. Please unmute your line.

My question is on autos. There was a bit of noise in the press on the back of the pricing adjustments you made in May around a few dealers planning. Can you talk a bit about pushback, how many dealers have threatened to drop off or actually dropped off the platform since then and any impact that has for H2 numbers, if any? And I guess the follow up to that is whether there have been any further conversations on the auto side with either the PSAL of ComCo on the back of that noise or otherwise for us to be aware of over the period fence.

Yeah, thank you. So I think that was definitely a competitor-driven noise trial in the press. We have seen that, obviously, as in the past years, reactions of our customers were… So nobody was clapping in the hands with the adjusted prices, but we have seen zero churn, and that's the most important. So no churn at all. This gives us great confidence that, after all, our customers appreciate the services and the performance we are delivering with our products. And therefore also definitely no impact, a rather positive one in H2 out of professional packages. When it comes to Comco, there is nothing going on with automotive and price surveillance we haven't heard. There is a long time back for some questions, but this is more than two years back. So that was really press noise, but nothing in the market as such.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Marcus Diebel at JPM. Please unmute your line.

Hi, everyone. Boris, I wanted to follow up on the strong performance in GM. I think you mentioned it's really driven by volumes. Could you just explain a little bit more next to the slide that we've seen already, sort of like what is sort of like happening? Is it that individuals just post more, given it's now much easier? Have you acquired a lot more customers? I just wanted to have a sense of sort of like the reasons for the strong development in GM. And if we should sort of like extrapolate this also in the next few quarters.

So, GMV was up 13.1% compared to the previous year. we have saw a strong performance across all key metrics visiting accounts were up eight percent unique buyers and sellers were up both 11 posted articles was up four percent average selling price was considerably up as a result also of one-offs we saw for instance uh the coins the gold coins category or the panini stickers uh bringing that up considerably so we saw um you know a healthy development across all um all um basically health indicators and that will continue throughout um the take rate was uh was down by 0.1 percentage points we talked about the rebates the discounts And we also said last time we believed that that would grow volumes and it actually happened. So the take rate is not affected much at this point of time. So for H2, I think we said it already. The last year, I think we saw a 20 percent growth in H2, 25. and that clearly has also an effect on the year-over-year growth. And so we remain cautious for H2. All health indicators remain positive, but I would see the H2 growth around mid-single-digit numbers. But still, full year would then, of course, be very positive also compared to what we said initially.

Maybe just to add, I think what was really very successfully done was the rollout of Riccardo Plus for sellers. They were, in the Riccardo Plus, sellers have certain items as a benefit and this was an acceptance up to 65% of sellers using now the Riccardo plus and this is driving then what in the forward part we mentioned as money guard we have more transaction concluded with this escrow payment where we have on the amount paid in the escrow a certain split for us and it's also driving the label usage where we have also a margin on it so Ricardo Plus that was a real success and it will help to continue also the growth as Boris mentioned in the second half year and next year.

Well perfect and mid single digit numbers just to clarify it means mid single digit percentage growth in H2. Yes yes correct okay super thank you.

Thank you Your next question comes from Mark Birgi at Finance & Wirtschaft. Please unmute your line. Mark, your line is now open. Please unmute.

We haven't heard you. Can you hear me now? Yes. Can you hear me now? Okay, great. Thank you. So my question is regarding your cooperation with LLMs.

Could you maybe outline how you're working together with LLMs and how you try to make sure that yes that that this integrated into your business model yeah so first of all uh it's that uh our strategy is to remain llm agnostic uh both on on the seeker presence but also in development of our products, that means that we are working on visibility on all the LLM players, that our products are visible if a certain search is started on an LLM, but at the same time that we also make sure that our propriety data, which we think is unique, going to remain protected and is not going out to the LLM. And as I said, on the development side, we are using all kinds of LLM models. And we also want always to have the possibility to switch the model and therefore also to have no anchor when it comes to costs which could raise up on the token side. So that we're always looking, can we also switch a certain application, a certain process to next generation open source models? And this works quite well. And that's why also, yes, we're going to see an increase in token costs, but this is absolutely manageable. And we see even, as Boris mentioned, we're going to start an AI project because we see clearly potential also of efficiency gains with including AI in all our processes. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature. Once you've been invited to ask a question, please unmute and ask your question. If you've dialed in, please use star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Our next question comes from Chiara Di Giammaria at Berenberg. Please unmute your line.

Yes, good morning. Thanks for the presentation. I have two questions, if I may. The first one is a follow-up on AI. I appreciate it's early stage, but can you give us an indication on the token cost and the potential net effect with the savings from AI that you expect? And then the second question is on adjustments. Can we expect a similar level for full year based on H1, at least for the share base compensation or any indications here? Thank you.

Okay, so on the LLM costs, I mean, we have just seen some price adjustments on their side, effective July. The costs are, in the grand scheme of our total costs, neglectable at this point of time. We said that already before. We will see an increase of token or consumption-based costs over the next years that is modeled into our midterm plans, into our guidance. It will come along with savings at the same time when you think about potential increases in headcount that we don't see, for instance. So we knew that already a long time ago that this would happen and we can control that in a well manner and we can cover that in our existing guidance throughout the next years. And then there was another question on H2 performance and you said share-based compensation. Is that right? So we will not see an uptick in share-based compensation at all. It is fully recognized at this point of time. And as you may know, last year we had our IPO. We had a major chunk of share-based compensation IPO incentives there. And then we said this number would considerably go down now over the next year. And this all happens in exactly as expected. Our adjustments as a whole are significantly down. You see that also reflected in the EPS. And it remains a single millions number for the full year of 26 and also throughout the next years.

Thanks a lot. thank you for our final question of today we're going back to andrew ross at barclays please unmute your line hi guys sorry i thought i'd sneak back in the queue if that's okay um i just wanted to follow up on the cpc line in autos because it's a bit soft in h1 just give us a bit more color as to why that was and then i think you spoke about some value-based pricing tiers that have gone in so we'd be curious to understand a bit more detail as to how that's to work drive an acceleration and growth i mean since i'm on the line maybe i can just ask you a bit about what you've learned about putting on conversational search um in different verticals

and any kpis you can share with us about how people are engaging um without whether there's any differences by vertical and how you present the conversational search on the home page etc etc would be interesting to understand yeah maybe starting with the second one so as we As we just started to roll this out, I would say data points are not yet there where we can give a very precise answer to this question if the usage is different. I think it's clear that the engagement will increase as soon as people see that there is a real additional value. So I would say we started really with the 1.0 conversational search now and continuously, and that's the beauty in our business, continuously now improving also these functionalities. The most advanced is at GM, where we see already the positive impact of engagement and better usage and better answers. But in real estate and also in automotive, it's too early now because people are sometimes just not realizing that. But to give you a concrete example, they are using conversational search, typing in BMW X3, which is nothing else than they would have said as a filter before. So this is increasing now, the adoption, but it's too early. I think we can, with the full-year figure, give much more concrete data points how much on-site has increased and how much also the performance has increased with such uses. when it comes to uh to the first question we have seen internationally the weakening of uh of b2c in automotive it's not a unique situation in switzerland and there are probably several reasons not one single one there is definitely still a corona impact where we have seen a shortage in in uh on the supply chain which has a certain impact now also on on a second hand uh cars there is the ev impact so for us most important is uh the the trend is already coming back we still have a bit of softening but it's uh in low in terms of volume in low single digits and with better monetization we can already offset this trend and we hope that uh we we're gonna see uh increase uh again uh from next year on also as as we always said the the auto scout direct which there will be now also a campaign uh in in the second half uh because we really want that Swiss people know that they don't have to just trade in their car at the dealer's place. They really can have this offer with AutoScout Direct. This has to be known. And if we are successful and we have good reasons to believe this is going to be successful, we will bring new volume, additional volume also to our platforms.

Thank you.

Thank you.

With this last question, we conclude today's webinar. Thank you, everyone, for joining and have a great day.

Thanks a lot. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Thank you.