Operator
good morning ladies and gentlemen and a warm welcome to home to go's investor and analyst call following the publication of the financial year figures of 2025. i'm delighted to welcome the ceo dr patrick andre and ceo sebastian gielski who will speak in a moment and after the presentation we will move on with the q a session in which you will be able to ask your questions directly to management so let's drive dive safe into the presentation so patrick the stage is yours thank you and good morning everyone and thank you for joining home to go's full year 2025 earnings call i am pleased to welcome you as we present our audited financial results for 2025
alongside our 26 strategy roadmap and financial guidance as you have seen in our report published this morning 2025 was a very successful and transformative year for home to go we achieved record revenues of over 255 million euros and significantly outperformed our profitability guidance on both a statutory and a performer basis today we will walk you through these strong results which underscore the successful execution of our strategic pivot towards a b2b centric powerhouse and we are also excited to share our 26 roadmap outlining how we intend to scale to over 400 million euros in revenue while more than tripling our adjusted ever to more than 40 45 million to give you a structured view of our transformation our call today is divided into three main sections i will begin with a high level summary of our record-breaking 2025 and and the key takeaways from our performance. Sebastian, our CFO, will then provide a deep dive into the statutory and pro forma financials. To close, I will return to detail our 26 strategy development, and Sebastian will briefly outline our financial guidance for the remainder of the year. And then we will open the floor for your questions. So let's dive straight into the first chapter. This first section provides a snapshot of why we consider 2025 a landmark year for home to go. it was a year in which we delivered on our promises first and foremost we are proud to have exceeded our profitability targets across both reporting metrics on a statutory basis our adjusted ebitda reached 13.2 million euro outperforming our guidance by 20 percent on a performer basis we reached 42 million beating expectations by five percent this profitability was built on a realized scale transformation. So our statutory revenues grew by over 20% to 255.5 million euro, while our pro forma revenues reached 394 million And a critical driver for that was the integration of Interhome, which is progressing ahead of schedule with significant synergies already realized. To strengthen our position as Europe's leading vacation rental group we have defined five key strategic priorities for the 26th financial year first we will capture initial inter-home cost synergies not yet realized second we will target strategic m&a within home to go pro third we will harmonize our group-wide brands to enhance global visibility fourth we will drive operational excellence in the marketplace where we focus on expanding margins And fifth, we will maintain our AI leadership with high pace of innovation. This comprehensive roadmap directly fuels our financial ambitions for the remainder of this year. Therefore, we enter 2026 with high confidence and a guidance that targets a massive step change, aiming for over 400 million euros in revenue while more than tripling our adjusted EBITDA. Now let's move on to our business highlights of 2025. I will walk you through the operational milestones that underpinned this record performance. Let's start by briefly visiting the strategic framework we introduced in October last year. This serves as the fundamental foundation for our 2026 initiatives. First, the acquisition of Interhome was a deliberate step in our evolution into a vertically integrated B2B-focused group. Second, as a result, Home2Go Pro is now established center of gravity it provides us with recurring predictable revenues and is the primary driver of our profit growth allowing us to deploy capital with high returns at low risk third we maintain a disciplined focus for our b2c marketplace our strategy explicitly prioritizes profit over top line growth the marketplace operates as a resilient capital generating segment that fuels the expansion of our high return b2b businesses fourth we continue to leverage the powerful flywheel effects across our group creating a unique competitive competitive advantage through tangible synergies between our segments and fifth our growth follows a clear two prone strategy organic growth with a strict prioritization of profitability and a targeted b2b rollout m and a strategy to capitalize on the fragmented property management and software market this long-term strategy basically forms the baseline for everything we do but now let's look at each pillar in more detail um to give you some more insights our transformation into a b2b led powerhouse is the result of a consistent multi-year evolution as you know our journey began in 2020 uh 2015 as a pure meta search engine by 2017 we had built what is now known as the marketplace with the world's largest selection of vacation rentals this b2b success was never the end goal but rather the essential springboard it gave us the scale and the unparalleled insights into traveler demand that we needed for our next strategic move so in 2020 we made our first decisive entry into the b2b market by launching software solutions in december 23 we officially introduced home to go pro as a separate b2b segment of our business however the true inflection point the moment our center of gravity fundamentally shifted occurred in 24 and 25. this is when we added tech enabled property management to the acquisition of of Kraussa and most notably Interhome last year. Through these acquisitions, we didn't just add volume. We added a whole new dimension of value to our group. As a result, Home2Go Pro has now become our primary engine of growth and profit. As you can see on the right, the split has fundamentally flipped. 63% of our IFRS revenues now come from our B2B business, while the marketplace contributes a highly profitable 37%. But beyond just the segment split, I want to highlight the quality of our revenue model. Today, more than 70% of our revenues are recurring or repeat, driven by software as a service, SaaS, and sticky property management fees. This is a massive structural improvement, and it proves that our pivot is not a short-term reaction to market trends, but the successful execution of a long-term strategy that has fundamentally de-risked our business and created a much more predictable and resilient financial profile second as i have emphasized b2b is now our center of gravity on the left you can see the massive step change we have achieved in our top line scale we concluded 25 with pro forma ifs revenues of 394 million euros to put this into perspective this represents a nearly 150 increase compared to our standalone revenues of 162 million euros in 2023 so Effectively, we have more than doubled the scale of our entire business in a very, very short time frame. Even more significant is the fundamental strategic shift shown on the right. If you look at Home2Go on a standalone basis, B2B accounted for only about 35% of our business. However, with a successful integration of InterHome, this ratio has completely flipped on a performer basis. So Home2Go Pro is now our primary business segment, and representing 63% of our total group revenues. This transition confirms how well we have expanded beyond our marketplace roots into a vertically integrated B2B powerhouse with a highly resilient and predictable revenue base. Now, as we move on to the home to go marketplace, here our objective is crystal clear. We prioritize growing profits over increasing top line. So if you look at the left side, you can see the strategy in action. While our IFRS revenues remained essentially stable at 151.7 million euros, despite a significant decrease in marketing expenditures, our adjusted EBITDA reached a major inflection point. We more than quintupled our earnings in this segment, jumping from 2.9 million to a staggering 15.8 million euros. This resulted in a strong double-digit margin of 10.4% up from just 1.9% in 2024. This massive profitability boost is driven by our rigorous focus on marketing efficiency, shown on the right. Since 2019, we have transformed our cost structure, reducing marketing and sales expenditures as percentage of revenue by a staggering 43 percentage points reaching a record low of 57 percent in 2025 by being more disciplined with our b2c spend we are able to proactively reallocate capital in our home to go pro businesses where we've seen more attractive risk adjusted returns and long-term growth potential on the b2b side as we look ahead to 26 we will maintain this discipline this will mean lower marketing investments and a deliberate resetting of the marketplace revenue base as you already know but we also will ensure that this segment remains a highly efficient cash generator for the entire group if we now take a closer look at the health of our marketplace specifically our regional booking mix and the evolution of our basket size we see the following starting with a regional booking mix on the left slightly up from 2024 that remains our undisputed stronghold accounting for 56 percent of our our booking revenues on the marketplace. Rest of Europe share remains stable year over year, accounting for nearly one quarter of total marketplace booking revenues. North America now accounts for 20%. If we now look at the basket size evolution on the right, you see overall our marketplace basket size grew by a robust 6% year over year to 1,025 euros. this growth is driven by our european core so in the dark region the average basket size searched by 10 to 1262 euro if we exclude the shorter business the rest of europe followed a similar trajectory with basket sizes climbing nine percent to over 1200 euro turning to our fourth strategic pillar the tangible value creation from the interim acquisition so when we close this deal we set an initial target of 10 million euro in annual cost synergies to be realized within 12 to 18 months today i'm very pleased to reiterate that we are still ahead of schedule as communicated alongside our preliminary numbers in february we have already realized 5 million euro of these cost synergies on an annualized basis this was achieved for the rapid migration of interhomes front-end websites onto our home to go white label technology combined with personnel cost optimizations and the successful exit of the first transitional service agreements with a former owner. The remaining 5 million euro in initial cost energies are well within our sights as we exit the next wave of TSAs and continue to drive operational efficiencies across the integrated organization. But what makes this acquisition truly transformative is what you see in the middle of the chart. We have identified an additional 20 million euro in midterm value creation upside. This upside is driven by two key factors. First, margin internalization. So by sourcing more inter-home bookings directly through our own home-to-go marketplace, we keep the full distribution margin within the group. And this effect also highlights the significant synergies which exist between our traveler-focused marketplace segment and our owner-focused B2B segment. And second, tech-driven growth. We are applying our advanced data AI and revenue management solution to Interhome's inventory to optimize pricing, occupancy, and marketing efficiency. So combined, we are looking at a total synergy and value creation potential of approximately 30 million euro in the midterm. This clearly demonstrates that Interhome is not just a scale play, but a significant driver of high margin profitability for the entire group. And finally, let's turn to our fifth strategic pillar, leveraging our proven M&A track record within its highly fragmented market if you look at the left side the opportunity for the vacation mental management market in europe alone is huge we see a serviceable addressable market of approximately 900 000 vacation homes in rural areas and despite our recent growth the top three players combined including us hold only about a 10 market share so the remaining 90 is characterized by a massive long tail of hyperlocal agencies and small management companies, many with fewer than 100 properties. This fragmentation provides us with a unique and highly attractive consolidation landscape with very limited competition. Our advantage here is our secret sauce for M&A, shown on the right. Since 2018, we have successfully completed 16 acquisitions. Our approach is notably low risk when look at these companies 100 of our targets were already business partners within our network before we acquired them we don't buy strangers we buy proven performers whose data and quality quality we already knew intimately by applying our standardized integration process we minimize execution risk while capturing immediate synergies between our marketplace and the b2b operations so moving into the remainder of 2026 we will continue this disciplined very value generated M&A strategy to further strengthen our position as the leading powerhouse in the industry this concludes the first part of our presentation on the strategic and business highlights for 2025. as you've seen our transformation into a b2b led powerhouse is not just division it is already delivering tangible results to give you a more granular look at how this strategic shift is translating into our financial performance and the segment dynamics behind i will now hand over to our cfo sebastian sebastian the floor is yours thank you very much patrick and a warm welcome to everybody also from my side i'm very pleased to walk you through our financial results for the full year and the fourth quarter of 2025 it was a truly record-breaking year characterized by a massive step change in our scale and more importantly
a significant over performance and gains our profitability guidance let's dive straight into the financial year 25. We'll begin with a quick recap of our key highlights for the fourth quarter and the full year 2025. Let's first look at our record-breaking IFRS revenues. We achieved record full-year IFRS revenues of 255.5 million, which represent a strong 20.3% year-on-year growth. We set a new fourth-quarter record with 54.2 million, which was a surge of 52.4% year-on-year. This performance was primarily driven by our significant group expansion and also the successful and rapid integration of Interhome. Secondly, we significantly outperformed our guidance for adjusted EBITDA. We clearly exceeded our profitability targets on both levels. On the statutory adjusted EBITDA, we reached 13.2 million and beat our guidance by 20%. On the proforma adjusted EBITDA, we grew substantially to 42 million, which was a 5% beat against guidance and also a 27.7 year-on-year increase. Third, we substantially scaled our home-to-go pro segment. Our B2B segment has solidified its role as a massive growth engine. IFRS revenues for this segment climbed 64.1% year-on-year to 114.9 million for the full year and Q4 performance was even more dynamic with a staggering almost 175% year-on-year growth. Fourth, we successfully turned around performance in the marketplace. Our strategic pivot to priorities profitability over top-line growth has proven highly successful. For the full year 25, adjusted EBITDA more than quintupled to almost 16 million euros. Q4 marked a decisive earnings turnaround with a positive 5.8 million in adjusted EBITDA for the marketplace. Now moving to a detailed look at our statutory financials for the fourth quarter and the full year 2025. Starting with booking revenues. We massively accelerated in Q4. The booking revenues surged by 114% year-on-year to reach almost 107 million euros. For the full year, we grew by 28% year-on-year to 333.6 million, which was a big jump versus the 260 million which we saw in the last year. This step change was heavily driven by the first-time consolidation effect of Interhome, very obviously. On IFRS revenues, we set a new Q4 record, where revenues increased by 56% year-on-year to over 54 million euros. On the full year, we crossed the quarter billion mark and reached 255.5 million, which was a robust 20% year-on-year increase. This strong momentum in the fourth quarter underscored the power of our expanded B2B-led group structure, including the Inter-Home acquisition. For the adjusted EBITDA, for Q4, the statutory adjusted EBITDA was negative 8.8 million. While the seasonal Q4 loss increased compared to the previous year, it is important to note that this was mainly driven by the timing of the closing of the Inter-Home acquisition and the seasonality profile of Interhome, where Q4 is always a quarter with weak revenue and profitability. So what happened in the last year is we were unfortunately not able to include the very highly profitable first nine months of Interhome, but only the unprofitable fourth quarter. For the full year profitability, we grew by 3% compared to 2024 to reach 13.2 million. this 13.2 million represented a guidance beat where we overachieved versus the guidance of 20 percent now let's also take a closer look at the composition of our booking revenues ifrs revenues and adjusted EBITDA by segments for the full year 2025 again on a statutory basis starting with the booking revenues on the group level we increased by 28 percent year on year to 333 million for home to go pro we clearly established the segment as our primary growth engine volume-based revenues in the segment searched by 126 percent to almost 130 million euros driven by the first time inclusion of interhome in the fourth quarter subscriptions also showed very solid growth of almost 20 percent and reached more than 26 million euros for the marketplace again the result reflects our strategic focus on quality over quantity while the on-site bookings grew by 8% to almost 125 million euros the advertising revenues declined by 10% to 66 million this was a very deliberate result of reduced marketing spend but also our ongoing push which we have started a couple of years ago already to replace the advertising revenue with higher value and higher retention on-site revenue now moving to the ifrs revenues on the group level we saw strong growth of 20 percent to reach almost 256 million euros in revenues for home to go we saw a jump in the volume based ifrs revenues essentially they doubled jumping over 100 percent to almost 89 million euros and for the marketplace the IFRS revenues remained broadly stable. The 5% growth in booking revenues, which is the on-site revenues, successfully offset the managed decline in our advertising business. Looking then at the adjusted EBITDA, on the group level it improved to 13.2 billion for Home2Go Pro. The reported adjusted EBITDA of negative 2.6 reflects again the timing of the closing of the inter-home transaction. As I said before we were unfortunately only able to include the fourth quarter of inter-home which was unprofitable but not the highly profitable first nine months. As we will see in the pro forma view the underlying profitability of this segment is already significantly higher once inter-home is fully consolidated for a whole year. On the marketplace we can see the ultimate proof point for our strategy. The adjusted EBITDA more than quintupled, surging 445% year-on-year to almost 16 million euros. This was powered by strict cost discipline and a massive leap in marketing efficiency. Let's now zoom in on our booking revenues, IFRS revenues and adjusted EBITDA specifically for the fourth quarter of 2025, again on a statutory basis. This was a quarter defined by triple digit top-line growth and a significant earnings turnaround in our marketplace segment for the booking revenues we saw outstanding acceleration on the group level with growth of over a hundred percent to almost 107 million euros for home to go pro we again see that it is the undistributed growth engine of the quarter for us the volume based revenues exploded by more than 400 percent reach more than 68 million euros and it was obviously the first time where we could also show the full impact of the internal consolidation or statutory numbers and the subscriptions also maintain strong momentum of more than 32% growth to more than 7 million euros the marketplace side the strategic execution was fully in line with our focus on high quality on-site growth so the on-site bookings grew strongly by 30 percent to more than 28 million euros the advertising business decreased by 26 million to 8 million as we continue to prioritize marketing efficiency and on-site conversion so again we can see the continuation of the trend to replace the advertising business with a much higher value on-site business for the ifrs revenues on the group level they search by 56 percent year-on-year to more than 52 million which is a new q4 record for our group home to go pro show exceptional performance across the board the volume-based revenues jumped by 374 percent to more than 31 million and subscriptions grew by 21 percent to almost 7 million showing the continued resilience of our saas business on the marketplace side bookings revenue so the on-site business grew by 21% to more than 17 million effectively mitigating the managed 18% decline in our advertising business looking at adjusted EBITDA for the group we reported a seasonal a seasonally normal EBITDA of negative 8.8 million euros the marketplace showed an inflection point this is really a highlight of the quarter you can see the decisive earnings turnaround with a positive result of almost 6 million euros this proves that our strategy of prioritizing efficiency delivered immediate bottom line results in the marketplace for home to go pro the adjusted EBITDA was negative 14.6 million again as previously noted this primarily reflects the winter seasonality of interhome's business model and the first time inclusion of interhome into our statutory Q4 results. Now let's also look at the Proforma view where we have included Interhome as if we had already owned it starting with the January of 2023 to show you a true like for like comparison of the business that we now own. You can see for the Proforma IFRS revenues that revenues reached 394.3 million for the full year of 2025 this represented a very healthy 10% CAGR of the last three financial years and even more important than top-line growth is the quality of our bottom line development so when you look at the pro forma adjusted EBITDA you can see that profitability has grown significantly faster than revenue achieving a CAGR of 30% This also means that the EBITDA margin expanded in every single year since 2023. The adjusted EBITDA reached 42 million in 2025, which represented a 27% increase compared to the previous year. Key takeaway when you look at this development is the fact that adjusted EBITDA growth is outpacing revenue growth. And that highlights the scalability of our combined cost base. it also demonstrates the very powerful operating leverage we are beginning to realize within the new home to go with its core being the b2b side of our business and into home being the single biggest business within the group now it's time to get a little bit nerdy we have received a lot of questions from analysts and investors relating to items which are below adjusted EBITDA in the P&L and I would like to give some background and provide transparency and clarity. So for everybody who is not that interested in the finer points of IFRS and how we account for share-based payments, now will be a good time to go grab a cup of coffee and maybe come back in five minutes when Patrick will talk about more important strategic issues. So I'll start with the share-based payments. You can see that the non-cash expense was 13.2 million in the last year this was primarily driven by grant of new share based awards to members of the management board so obviously i joined as a new member but also the other three members of the management board renewed their contracts and in that context also received new grants we had one of items below EBITDA of 11.2 million which was relatively stable versus last year the main drivers were the inter-home acquisition with cost of 4.7 million so for M&A cost and also subsequent integration costs of about 3.6 million. Then moving further down in the P&L to depreciation and amortization. Amortization amounted to 19.2 million. This includes about 4.2 million for capitalized software and also 14 million for M&A related intangibles from previous acquisitions. We also had a relatively large impairment charge in this year which impacted our net result after tax. So we had a significant non-cash item this year totaling 61.4 million. This mainly composed a 54.3 million goodwill impairment for the marketplace segment and also a 5.6 million impairment related to the e-domicile restructuring. So for all of these items that I named until now we also have slides and I will go into more detail. Then quickly looking at the net financial result it decreased to 5.3 million this reflects mainly the interest expense associated with the 75 million bank loan which we took out in relation to the acquisition of Interhome and then lastly also looking at taxes you can see a positive tax income of 3.2 million which obviously looks weird because it looks like the tax authorities is you know giving us money which unfortunately is not the case so this was due to the recognition of deferred taxes the actual cash outflow for income taxes in the last year was about 5.3 million so then let's take a more granular look at the one-off adjustment items as I said before the total one-offs for the last year amounted to 11.2 million which remained relatively stable versus the 2.6 million in the previous years. The biggest single item was in relation to expenses for M&A activity. This includes legal fees, transaction advisory, due diligence cost and was obviously primarily driven by the inter-home acquisition. Then we had 3.6 million in relation to reorganization and restructuring. These These are non-recurring costs mainly for severance and personnel related restructuring and last year this item mainly relates to the strategic decision to close the eDOMICIL offices and integrate the eDOMICIL business operations into the existing inter-home structure. So this is one item that is actually a big part of the 5 million of the cost synergies that we have already realized and that Patrick talked about earlier. Then we had about 700,000 in relation to legacy tax risks. This relates to a tax risk that we have identified regarding potentially incorrect historical treatment of VAT at one of the subsidiaries which we had acquired in previous years. and then the last bigger point is the amortization of fair value step down of 1.2 million this is a very very technical ifrs accounting point and it relates to the purchase price allocation back when we acquired the getaway group and it covers the fair value step down on vouchers and advanced payments that getaway had received so really important to remember all of these items are non-recurring and non-operational. They do not reflect the underlying day-to-day performance. And this is also why we adjust for them to show you an EBITDA that really, truly reflects in the most, from our perspective, accurate way the underlying operational profitability of our business. Now let's address the large non-cash impairment loss that we had to record in the last financial year so our statutory net loss for the last year was significantly impacted by that one-time non-cash impairment loss of 61.3 million the biggest part of that being 55 54.3 million relates to a goodwill write down which we recorded for the marketplace business and this is a direct accounting consequence of the strategic decision that we announced in October 2025 to reallocate capital away from the marketplace and into our home to go pro business the goodwill which was impaired importantly originated from the D spec slash business combination transaction through which home to go listed on the stock exchange it does not relate to any of the businesses or bolt-on acquisitions we have made since the D-Spec. So it's really truly an accounting technical adjustment that we're doing here. Then there is also the 5.6 million impairment relating to e-domitial. So as I said this was a part of the cost synergies which we captured last year already. We closed down and merged the e-domitial business and following that transaction we also had to write down or impair the M&A-related transaction intangibles that were created when we originally acquired ETO and SEAL. Really important, and I want to emphasize this again, these impairments are entirely non-cash, and they are one time in nature, and they also have no impact on the group's very, very strong liquidity position. Moving into the second topic where I would like to provide a little bit more clarity and transparency and this is the depreciation and amortization charges so again you can see for the last year we had the big impairment charge so I will not go into detail on that again but rather focus on the ongoing amortization and depreciation charges you can see that the depreciation for PP&E so things like desks laptops and so forth is relatively stable it's not a big part of our cost base also the amortization for general intangibles like software licenses that we acquire is pretty low so there is two remaining points which are big so the first one is the amortization of internally generated software so we capitalize about 11 million per year in software which we develop internally and this has to be then amortized over the following years but the biggest single item and that is the dark blue box on this chart relates to M&A related intangibles so when we acquire a business and as Patrick has outlined we are serial acquirers of business so since 2018 we have bought a business at least one business every single year and we have to go through an accounting exercise called the purchase price allocation PPA where we look at at the different assets that we acquired and we have to um put into our balance sheet um intangibles for things like brand or customer lists or software and we then have to um amortize these over a potentially quite long period of time right so brands for example we have to impair or amortize over a long time so these charges they're all non-cash right so the biggest single point in the DNA is really all that stuff that is M&A related and which accounted for 40 million in the last year. Then also another point where we get a lot of questions from investors and analysts and this is the share-based compensation charge. We try to again disentangle this a little bit to provide more clarity and transparency um so a couple of things i want to note so the first one is that there were certain share-based compensation programs which actually predated the ipo of the company so these were given to employees and managers when the business was still private and you can see that over the last couple of years this was actually a pretty large part of the share-based compensation this is now has walked its way through so the point nine million that we recorded in the last year is the last bit that you will see from that so these pre IPO programs there they're now there they're done they are terminated discontinued and you will also not see any reflection of that in the P&L anymore the two things that you will see on an ongoing basis is the cost from the LTI program in relation to virtual stock options and also in relation to restricted stock units you can see that the stock options accounted for 8.9 million last year and the RSU restricted stock units accounted for 3.9 million the biggest point to note here is that of the 8.9 million about 44 percent is due to appointments and reappointments of members of the management board all four of us actually opted to take the maximum amount that we can in the form of stock options so all of us at home to go have the ability to choose a mix of rsus and stock options we as senior managers all opted to take as much as we can stock options and that reflects really the belief that we see a lot of upside in this business and that this upside should also in the future reflect into the share price so the options are obviously the higher risk so i will come to that later at the moment unfortunately all of our options are out of the money but again we expect to be rewarded for taking that risk once the share price hopefully appreciates in the future if you have talked to me in one-on-ones before you probably heard me rant about the IFRS accounting treatment of share-based compensation and how I have a personal belief that it is the opposite of giving a fair and true view and that it's also a quirk in the sense of that it is probably the one area where IFRS is for some reason not following a mark to market logic so I would like to walk you through again how this actually all works so a couple of things to note firstly all of our share-based compensation is entirely equity settled so meaning no cash transfer occurs right so all of us we will actually eventually receive shares and that is for both the RSUs as well as for the virtual stock options. The structure of the LTI program is as such that we as participants can split our annual award between restricted stock units and virtual stock options with a minimum allocation of 30% to each instrument. So for example personally I have chosen to have 30% in RSUs and then 70% in virtual stock options. The vesting usually occurs over two to three years in quarterly tranches and once a tranche is vested we have a three-year window to exercise the instruments before the expire. For people who join the company new for example myself there is also a one-year cliff so if I would leave the company within the first 12 months actually all of my RSUs and options will be forfeited unfortunately the P&L recognition does not follow the logic of our program so the way IFRS and the very wise people living somewhere in the ivory tower writing these accounting guidelines have thought and saw fit to make us do this is that the fair value of all the granted units is determined exactly once at the time of the grant and it is not remeasured that's what I mean it is really a break with mark-to-market logic under IFRS the value is then also recognized in our P&L digressively and this results in a front-loaded cost distribution so I've given you an example on this slide and you can see that under a three-year vesting schedule 61% of the total cost is recognized in year one and then only 28% in year two and then 11% in year three and this in my personal view nonsensical treatment is made even worse by the fact that again there is a cliff so i'm a new joiner so 61 of the cost of my options is recognized in the first year even though if i would leave in the first year i will get exactly nothing so key takeaway for you here this front loading explains why new grants like the recent management board re-appointments and appointments create a temporary spike in P&L expenses even though the actual investing period is much much longer. Then to conclude our deep dive into share-based compensation let's look at the accounting recognition versus the actual intrinsic economic value of both the RSUs and the virtual club options. Again there is a strong disconnect between IFRS and market-to-market logic here. IFRS does not follow a mark-to-market approach for these equity settled grants. The cost recognized in our P&L is fixed at the time of the grant and remains unchanged for subsequent years regardless of share price performance. This has an impact on the RSUs. They obviously retain some value, but if you were to mark-to-market them again, the actual economic value is lower now. So that means that the fixed accounting cost shown in the P&L are significantly overstated compared to the actual intrinsic value held for the employees who have RSUs. That is made even worse for the VSOs. So we have about 34.1 million virtual stock options outstanding. And as of close yesterday, our closing share price was 1.38 euro. cents. We have given you a chart with the strike prices. So the lowest strike price any of us actually has at the moment is 1 euro and 42 cents. So not a single virtual stock option is actually currently in the money. Also not a single stock option has ever been executed and exercised in the last couple of years. So all of these 34.1 million stock options have strike prices above the current market value, meaning that exactly zero of these options would be exercised today. Then when you look at the price at the pie chart you can also see that a significant portion of our options have relatively high strike prices, even 21% of them above 3 euros. These are the oldest virtual stock options so they have the shortest remaining tenor and they will likely unfortunately expire on exercise so key message here for shareholders is the dilution which you should expect from our option programs is much much much much lower than what you think from the cost that was recognized in the P&L so So this concludes my very public rant about, in my personal opinion, the stupidity of IFRS accounting principles when it comes to share-based compensation. And I will now hand back to Patrick to talk about much more important things.
Thank you, Sebastian. So I will now walk you through our strategic roadmap for this year, so 2026. As I've already shared, the home-to-go group will focus on five strategic priorities for the remainder of this year, which will further strengthen our position as Europe's leading vacation rental group. As a reminder, first, we will capture the inter-home cost synergies, not yet realized, aiming to fully achieve the targeted 10 million euro in annualized short-term savings. as of the end of 2025 we had already realized 5 million euro in annualized cost synergies and we plan to capture the remaining 5 million euro over the course of 2026 these additional cost synergies will come from exiting further tsa so these transitional service agreements we talked about and additional operational efficiency gains second we will target strategic m&a within the home to go pro within the home to go pro segment leveraging our strengthened balance sheet and the 200 million euro bond framework to pursue value accretive acquisitions in the property management and b2b software space we will focus our m&a activities on three specific areas a acquisitions of small local property management agencies through asset deals at very low single of digit EBITDA multiples. Integration of these bold on acquisitions is straightforward, leveraging our existing geographic footprint and into home software platform. B, larger scale acquisitions in the vacation rental property management space to enter new local geographies in Europe or to strengthen supply in adjacent business segments like luxury villas. And C, B2B software applications for the vacation rental industry that enhance our service offering for property managers and hosts third we will harmonize our group-wide brand architecture to enhance global visibility which will be led by the continued role of our home to go originals umbrella brand for our property managing businesses this initiative will streamline our ecosystem making it easier for partners and guests to navigate our b2b and b2c offering we aim to leverage the significant strength of the home to go brand beyond our consumer business. So therefore, after a successful introduction at ITB earlier this month, we will begin implementing the home to go originals umbrella, for instance, across various businesses units throughout 2026 in the property management area. Fourth, we will drive operational excellence in our marketplace. Our focus will be on expanding margins to optimize marketing efficiency and continued discipline capital reallocation. We will continue to stay extremely focused on cost discipline, for instance, by using AI at every opportunity. In fact, if we look at the daily operational work we do, we've adopted a very clear rule for hiring. Before we add any headcount, we ask ourselves if the job can be done by AI instead. This aligns perfectly with the strategy we shared back in October. We have already started to scale back marketing spend, as you heard earlier, in the marketplace. And we expect this to drive a significant increase in ROI throughout the year. The first month of 2026 have already looked very promising in that regard and underlined that our pursuit strategy works. And fifth, we will maintain our AI leadership, sustaining a high pace of innovation to remain the leading AI power travel platform in our industry. We were the first to embrace this technology, already launching AI tools for our customers back in 2023, well before it became a global trend. And as you know, we have a history of machine learning basically since the beginning of Home2Go. Most recently, we launched Dash, the next generation of our AI companion. Dash is already making an impact, cutting customer escalations to human agents by 85% compared to our previous third-party solutions. To stay at the forefront of AI, we are also implementing new protocols like MCP. This ensures that our inventory is directly accessible to the world's most advanced large language models. And by doing this, we're ensuring that as new AI agents emerge, they can seamlessly access our supply, positioning Home2Go as the essential partner for the next generation of AI-driven commerce. So this comprehensive roadmap directly fuels into our financial ambitions for next year. And throughout the year, we will give you more information and report on what we have achieved on our strategic roadmap. And with that, I hand over to Sebastian for the guidance for 2026.
We're entering really a new growth chapter for Home2Go with the year 2026. And that year will be characterized by a massive step change in both scale and also most importantly, our bottom line results. so for 2026 we're targeting IFRS revenues of between 400 and 410 million euros which represent more than 55% year-on-year growth and we're targeting adjusted EBITDA of 45 to 47 million which is more than 240% year-on-year growth compared to 2026 there is a couple of things I want to note on our guidance. As we unfortunately all have seen over the last two weeks, there is significant macroeconomic uncertainty arising from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. While for us as Home2Go the direct impact of this is very very low, we don't really have bookings in the Middle East it's not a holiday region for us. What is unclear for us is the indirect effects, especially from a prolonged war and the transformation that could come into the broader economic environment from a sustained higher level of oil prices and gas prices. So that is just something that creates significant macroeconomic uncertainty, not just for us, not just for the travel industry, but really for everybody in the world at the moment. With the acquisition of into home, we are now also to some degree or an increased degree exposed to foreign exchange volatility, particularly regarding the Swiss franc to euro pair. And what we have seen also in these times of uncertainty is a flight to safety in currencies. And that flight to safety means that there is a lot of capital going into Switzerland, which meant that the value of the Swiss franc has increased quite a lot. So again, this is uncertain. I think a lot of that is also tied to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and how that will follow through. And this again is something that is outside of our control. What is inside of our control is the strategic capital reallocation from the b2c marketplace to b2b segment which patrick has outlined and which we have also introduced already in october of last year just one thing to remember when you look at our top line guidance that capital reoccasion away from b2c to b2b results in a one-off step change down for the marketplace segment which is reflected in our top line guidance and with that i'm handing back to patrick for some closing remarks so to wrap up the three key takeaways from today first 2025 was a landmark year for whom to go it marked the decisive turning
point where we not only realized a massive scale transformation but also proved our ability to generate profit achieved record statutory ifs revenues and significantly exceeded our profitability targets. Second, our strategic pivot is now fully operational. Following our business update in October, we have successfully shifted our center of gravity towards the high-margin home-to-go pro B2B segment. In 2026, we are driving this evolution forward through our five key strategic initiatives from capturing the further inter-home synergies to maintaining our leadership in AI. And third, we are scaling to new financial heights. We ended the current year with record visibility and a strengthened capital structure that gives us the firepower we need. Our guidance for financial year 26 is clear. We are targeting IFRS revenues of 400 million to 410 million euro, representing over 55% year-over-year growth, and an adjusted EBITDA of 45 to 47 million euro, which effectively means more than tripling our profits with over 240% year-over-year growth. And with that, I thank you very, very much for your attention today and we will now open the floor for your questions.
Operator
Thank you very much for your presentation. So ladies and gentlemen, we're happy to take your questions now and for an engaging conversation, we kindly request to ask your questions in person via the audio line. To do so, just raise your virtual hand.
And if you have dialed in via phone, you can raise your hand by pressing star key nine. and additionally you can also place your questions in our chat and in the meantime we have received the first question from Tim Kruse via the audio line so please go ahead with your questions yes good morning gentlemen thank you very much for that very comprehensive presentation a couple of questions from my side first will probably be to Sebastian on the EBITDA guidance if I remember correctly the pro forma 42 million for 2025 does not include any cost synergies right is that correct yes that's correct so the synergies were really captured um in in november and december so the implementation was in november and december so only a a pretty small portion is in in the last year okay then then help me sort of because you said on a full year basis you have five million cost synergies realized at the end of 2025, and then you are very well on track in realizing the 10 million on a full year basis throughout this coming year. So what am I missing on that when I look at then the guidance of 45 to 47 in terms of cost effect?
Is that these currency uncertainties or other cost effect that we have to think of sort of counter yeah yeah moving against those those synergies you mentioned yeah exactly i mean broadly right so um the five million that we had already implemented at the end of last year will be then fully in the 2026 numbers right um the five million on an annualized basis that we are still generating this year will only be partially in the numbers for this year so depending exactly when we can get that realized and there is a couple of operational initiatives which will probably be a little bit back and loaded for this year so the the the kind of like the bridge that you're looking for is is really what we laid out on the guidance slide in terms of what we said with macroeconomic uncertainty right so we see effects in the travel industry already so SAS the airline has cancelled 10% of their flights in April yesterday because they see kerosene prices go up by over 100% in the last two weeks and New Zealand has cancelled 10% of their flights globally we see a lot of just things happening in real time at the moment right so we also obviously have a strong belief that we could be a net beneficiary right so we can also see for example that very wealthy people are changing their holiday bookings from Dubai to Mallorca but not quite our target audience like we are kind of like middle-class families more our target audience so there's just different things happening in real time and it's very very hard for us to get a read on it so we just want to take effect of these things that are unfortunately outside of our control so we're continuing to work very very hard on all of these operational initiatives and getting the synergies in which is something that we absolutely have control over But we also just want to be very open and transparent that there could be, you know, wind coming from into our face that is outside of our control.
Understood. Understood. Yeah, I was wondering on sort of the net effect of the of the current situation. Would you would you concur that on the one hand, as you say, travel patterns could maybe like in Corona sort of move more to the local vacation? On the other hand, you have the sort of the discretionary spend or the household income being affected by higher energy prices.
That's exactly right. So I think the benefit will be that I think families are a lot less likely to fly to Egypt or Turkey this year. And so a lot of these families may actually choose to take their summer holidays in Europe, potentially in a holiday house. right it's that thing that we talk a lot about instead of going to club met in in egypt um with kind of like everything included and you drive your car to italy rent a house and you cook yourself right so this is definitely something that we expect um however if and that is a scenario right if oil prices go even higher right and we saw um oil prices spike by almost 10 percent yesterday alone right and they stay maybe at over 120 dollars for a prolonged period of time right we will see or we're worried about an inflationary impact that you will see coming from the supply side and we're also worried about what that will do with the mindset of the consumer right and so these are just things that are too early to call at the moment and so as a management team we just want to take a cautionary stance at the moment and not over promise on something that we may not be able to deliver on because it is just outside of our control okay then just one final on the on the sort of the midterm guidance the 20 million additional synergies can you give some some kind of timeline and then maybe the final question for for Patrick in terms
of AI leadership how do you define that and what are you experiencing in the customer journeys um and i was wondering i saw that home um that booking has a chat gpt app um already available and how you think about that can we expect the home to go app in in other lln models as a sort of direct integration that would be helpful thank you yeah so very quickly on on the midterm um 20 billion upside uh we've always said um that will three to five years after closing of the transaction so we may see the first part of that maybe next year 2027 but really I think 2028 onwards Patrick AI yeah so
I think like the interesting thing we can talk about this Sebastian said about noting about IFS we can note about AI also for a longer time maybe we do a separate session on this but like generally and what we see right like we we've always been at home to go like a leveraging technology not for the sake of the technology but to make either operational business better or obviously like in the end which counts most like make something better for the customer and so like when we when we started home to go we were leveraging long before people were talking about AI machine learning for various topics right like consolidating our inventory and and so on and so on which in the end is nothing also the large elements are nothing else than machine learning yeah but like obviously with a with a new advantages that came with AI we could like leverage them on the existing pipelines and what we did for prior with I would say normal machine learning um and um we could also utilize this uh then for various like things that you see in our um product today right like not only starting with the things early and having now dash which is the companion that that can go uh that can on the marketplace like support you through the whole booking um at fennel but you also get from dash like information about summarizing reviews and these things that you might also know from amazon we had it way before them and and these these types of things um for the customer and it also means what you just asked right like that um so uh we have this mcp actually running in the first version already for home to go so like um lms can access um a home to go via that we anyway have um as you um might know our integration um with google with the google vacation rental finder um where we also um have a um a partnership with Google where we will also with where this will also be utilized in the AI mode and in the AI topics and the same is also we are speaking obviously also to open AI and you will also see us being active there with our app and all these types of things yeah so in the end the interesting thing is for us that and we see a huge advantage how our business model is structured with a with a rise of um uh yeah this new era of ai and um so this is for us definitely a net positive how we look at it today though yeah and no one can tell you where ai and how far it will go um but especially as you know as a reminder with the last mile we have um to the inventory via software, but even more so via the inter-home business, we have the best mode in this kind of industry with this direct connection to the inventory.
Okay, thank you. All the best. Thanks.
Operator
Thank you for your questions, Tim.
And ladies and gentlemen, before we move on with the questions from Bharat Nagaraj, let me tell you shortly, as we're a bit over the time, but we want to cover all your questions. questions so um yeah we have some questions in our chat as well so now Bharat we are happy to take your questions thank you um just a couple from me then in the interest of time uh with regards to the synergies of 20 million that you've talked about additional synergies shouldn't that be a percentage of let's say your revenue in the future because for every booking that you now make using other otas you can potentially internalize that with the home to go marketplace so just wondering what is that 20 million based or is that based of today's revenues or anything else
that's that's the first question and how should we think about the split between marketplace and and home to go pro in terms of the guidance for 2026 and uh just just to sneak in one more free cash flow expectations for 2026 yes so uh starting with a 20 million in um in value creation upside um so the the biggest bucket of that is actually the internalization of the distribution margin And how you can think about that is that Interhome has about 400 million euros booking volume at the moment, of which about 25 percent go through their own channels and also through home to go channels and about 75 percent go through a third party channel. So you can book inter-home inventory through Airbnb, through Booking.com and Expedia. And if that happens, we have to pay them about 13% on average margin for the distribution. So what we're intending to do is to increase the percentage of the bookings we receive from about 25% at the moment to 50%. So that means capturing another 100 million euros booking volume for inter-home and then saving 13% on that. so that's 13 million of that 20 million um the reason why we think that it's possible is that for another acquisition that we did called causa so we acquired that uh two or three years ago when we bought the business um that portion of the internal bookings was about 30 and we actually got it to 70 at the moment so um it is something where we have shown in the past that we can implement that in order to implement it there is a whole lot of small levers that you need to that you need to pull a lot of them require changes in the way that customers can book given the timing of the inter-home acquisition closing we were not able to implement that for the booking season of this year so we're working on that we may be able to implement some of that already for next year but again this is like a hard slog right there's a thousand little things that you need to do so really i would only expect that to to to be relevant 2028 going forward and then the rest the 7 million to to get to the 20 million is really about growth in the um in the inter-home business and that is especially growing the number of properties that we have under management um so we have put in a big push on sales um also how for example how the inter-home sales team is being able to be incentivized. So under Migros, for example, it was illegal internally to give salespeople any bonus. So you can imagine how easy it was, quote unquote, to run a sales team for the internal management team where you're not able to give boney to them. So we've obviously changed that. We're also again rolling up smaller players as a source of growth. So yeah, 30 million of that is internalization and 7 million is really growing the inventory on the split for the marketplace versus pro I think you can look at the performer numbers and take that as a as a split so I would invite you to look at the performer numbers and take that as a pretty good starting point for modeling on free cash flow we have decided not to give guidance on free cash flow for this year there is a couple of reasons for that so free cash flow in 2026 will be subject to significant technical noise right as we complete the first four-year cycle of the inter-home integration so there's just stuff that we need to learn unlike our marketplace business inter-homes managed portfolio involves also complex payment cycles between guests and individual homeowners so we also need to just really figure out how that works with networking capital and as outlined in our strategic roadmap and we're also actively looking at M&A so we don't want to put out a free cash flow guidance which may restrict us in you know going after very good you know M&A opportunities at low multiples with high expected synergies and again also looking at macro right it's it's hard to see how that works through so we expect as a business to be cash flow positive obviously and also significantly cash flow positive but we do not want to guide at the moment towards a specific number yeah make make sense thank you
for the detailed answer just if I may just ask a quick follow-up because you based your 13 million of the internalization of the margins of the 400 million euro of booking currently so if that if those bookings grow that could grow as well right is what I was trying to get at yes absolutely so the way that you look at these like synergies or value creation potential is always you pick a point in time right yeah so it is a static view but like you're absolutely right right if we were able to to grow the inter-home business that could potentially grow as well absolutely thank you very much fashion cheers congrats thanks thank you so much and then let's move on with the further
questions from our chat box and there we received a couple and one from mr johansen who already answered um with tim's question so we move on with the next one please remind us on the currency split on revenue and cost given your fx comment yeah look the as I said before the the euro the euro Swiss franc is the the most important currency pair that we have I would also invite you to look into our annual report where you can see like a sensitivity analysis on on that it's in note 36 of the annual report so you can see how that actually works mathematically strictly speaking our exposure is bigger on the revenue side than on the cost side so we do have operations in Switzerland with Interhome but it is it is higher on the revenue side than on the other side thank you so much and the next question do you believe the greater marketing efficiency and improvement profitability in marketplace is sustainable um yes from from everything that we can see like the answer is a an absolute yes so as patrick has also mentioned um we had a a very very good start into the year with the marketplace business um the
return on advertising spend that we that we see this year is really stunningly better than last year so all of the operational improvements that we started to do in the last quarter of last year they have really paid off in in the start of this year so we're really really really happy with the marketing efficiency in the marketplace business and it also shows like the strength of our organic share of the marketplace business right like because if you scale back marketing on the paid side this is obviously the interesting part and it shows that brand and retention so recurring customers are really working in the way that we wanted it to see
thank you and the last question from mr johansen what is the normalized dna level you expect ahead i mean like number one there is like my my question back would be what what exactly is meant with normalized dna so we like that's not a metric that that we have um so we obviously wanted to give you know much more clarity and transparency on dna um so that investors and analysts can can form their opinion about that um most importantly we do not expect an impairment in charge again in 2026 so that like 61 million you you can take out um the m a related amortization will continue and will continue for a couple of years still right so this is something that will stay with us um so all of that basically except for the 61 million is what you could call quote unquote normalized dna um and you can see how it has developed over the last couple of years and i think the trends that you can see especially over the last two years is something that you could also expect to continue all right thank you so much and then we have another virtual hand so we received it from Benjamin Bailey so Benjamin you should be able to unmute yourself and ask your questions thank you you mentioned in the last earnings call that you see yourself as a tech company but
you're trading at the forward EV EBITDA ratio of six which is significantly lower than competition, booking trading at a multiple of 12, Airbnb even higher, and share price performance was very poor against any benchmark over the last 12 months. So with that in mind, are you planning for the next six months any measures to increase shareholder value through share buybacks?
No, we do not plan any share buybacks.
Operator
Thank you so much. So just a quick question.
And then we have further questions in our chat so from mr friedman can you please split the sales guidance for 2026 into marketplace and pro um yeah so we do not give guidance on a segment level uh but again the same that i also said to barath i think when you look at the pro forma numbers for 2025 and you look at the split between marketplace and b2b for the pro forma numbers for 2025 that is a good guide that you could use for 2026 thank you so much and then the last question from mr friedman as we received another question from mr hinkle but you already answered this question so mr hinkle you can take a look on the annual report note 36 for further information so the last question by now is what kind of organic growth and pro can we expect it in the can we expect in the years to come um look i think the the answer that we've given to that question in the in the past kind of stays true right like and and this is something looking through um economic cycles and things like the middle east right um but uh what we what we've said before is that we can see um you know like double digit growth in the b2b segment um the growth will be a little bit lower than that for the property management side of the business. We expect it to be a little bit higher for the software side of the business. Again, we can see really good growth in the software business that we've also pulled out by it, especially with our SaaS revenues growing very strongly this year. So on a blended basis, we would expect double digit growth over the next couple of years. Okay, so I think that was it. I'm not hearing any more questions. In case you do have more questions um we're happy to answer them and please contact us especially carsten from our investor relations team or easy from our pr team um thanks very much for taking the time today and i know we we talked long and i think also longer than we expected to talk um i hope it was useful thank you very much for your interest in our company um and yeah have a very nice day i hope it is as sunny wherever you are as it is in berlin at the moment goodbye thank you goodbye
