Welcome to all of you joining us from Europe as well. My name is Ingo Middelmene, Head of Investor Relations at WERF Group. I'm pleased to welcome you to our Q2 2026 earnings call. As usual, our call format allows private investors to join the session live in listen-only mode. Institutional investors and analysts will have the opportunity to ask questions live during the Q&A session later on. To join the queue, simply click the blue live Q&A button at any time. Well, Q2 was certainly not an easy quarter for us. Nevertheless, as the figures show, we held our ground against the backdrop of a challenging market environment and continued to grow our business. We have prepared a presentation to give some additional insights to our performance and provide further transparency after the presentation we will of course take the time to answer your questions please note that the entire call including the Q&A session will be recorded and made publicly available on our website after the call if you already have a question in mind feel free to queue up at any time during the call by clicking the blue live Q&A button with that i'm pleased to hand you over to our ceo remco vesterman who will guide you through
the first part of today's call remco over to you thank you ingo yeah i would also like to welcome you to verse earning school for the second quarter of 2026. as usual i will start with presenting the headlines and the latest developments followed by christian our cfo who will present the financials. Thereafter, I'll do the closing and hand over to the moderator with Q&A. We grew our Q2 revenues first last year. Our unified technology platform is performing significantly better than one year ago and provides a stronger basis for future growth. We also saw many positive signals from our growth drivers. Our existing client base was loyal and furthermore showed in high retention rate. The spend, however, was below last year. While we also had clients that drew their revenues and while we also onboarded a lot of new clients, we saw several client segments as well as individual clients that reduced or postponed budgets. The advertising spent in parts of the open internet was weighed down by amongst others macroeconomic headwinds in tariffs and elevated oil prices. We saw negative effects especially in key advertising categories such as travel, CPGs, automotive as well as parts of large tech. overall organic growth was up 3.5 percent versus last year which is however below our expectations our overall revenue grew to 152.3 million euro for the quarter with underlying 3.5 organic growth 4.6 m&a based growth and a negative currency effect of 1.7 percent we onboarded several new clients and had a strong retention rate of 99 percent our gross margin was at a similar high level as previous quarter, showing the positive effect of our platform unification and the use of AI. Our EBITDA was slightly above last year, with a stable EBITDA margin reflecting the investments in our business as previously announced. Our cash position remained strong also in the weekend period of the year. We reaffirm our guidance for full year 2026. While organic growth was lower than anticipated, the first half of 2026 was already designed as a front-loaded investment phase we are seeing efficiency uplift from ai and organizational optimizations and have developed strong growth drivers which we expect to be supported by the usual seasonality via our ad intelligence platform we connect advertisers with publishers being mobile first we have developed a strong position as one of the leading companies in the space mobile represents 90 of our revenues out of that in-app represents the vast majority we remain heavily north america and especially us focused which is the largest advertising market in the world north america represents 75 of our weapons being among the top 15 attack companies in the us we have built a lot of substance with well over 1100 large software clients which are clients with over a hundred thousand dollars of revenues per year with over sixty five thousand integrations and reaching over two and a half billion consumers and having served 1.2 trillion ads in the last 12 months now I'm getting to the headline overview of our revenue gross margin and EBITDA development well I've covered the headlines Christian will in finance section section cover more details net revenue increased year in the year by 6.5 percent reaching 152.3 million euros in q2 2026. this development was driven against the backdrop of the market headwinds as mentioned and alongside the execution of technology and inventory optimizations our gross profit margin has structurally improved based on optimizations ai and improvements following our platform unification in addition and as mentioned earlier the company continued to pursue internal optimization measures in technology and inventory. We also focused on strategic partnerships which have based on rebates and bid lower margins, however expected to generate structural long-term revenues for the future. Our adjusted EBITDA was up first the first quarter of 2026 and slightly up compared to Q2 last year. While we on one hand increased our cost base based on our investments such as sales team build-up and investment into retail media we on the other hand are making good progress with cost savings based on AI optimizations and increased focus in growth areas I would like to now cover the development of our main KPIs the number of ad impressions decreased this was due to our continued focus on higher margin and higher quality inventory less volume more margin and better quality our ad impressions as a result of that decreased by 10 percent first due to last year our net dollar retention rate the graph on the left bottom side increased to 95 percent while this is above previous quarter and also last year it is still under 100 showing that the existing customer base spend has decreased versus last year our revenue growth resulted mainly from adding new customers similar as in the previous quarters. While the large over $100,000 per year client number was up 21.5% here a year, we were able to increase our total number of customers even stronger by 36%. And while clients spent less than last year, they were loyal, with 99% to continue to have a very high retention rate showing the satisfaction of our clients. I'm now going in more detail with regards to what drives the commercial side of our business first of all i'm very happy that we unified our platform after last year's issues with unification the platform is stable the focus is now on optimizing margin management data and ai based targeting effectiveness as well as proving less efficient and lower margin supply if you look at the overall market we see several developments we are furthermore seeing a gap between wall garden revenues and the open internet the wolf gardens are outpacing almost all of the attack players in the open internet especially the web ad focused publishers are under pressure based on the elements and based on market pressure we see advertisers focusing more on this and more of the spend on players that can generate measurable outcomes we have further doubling down on growing our sales force and expanding our sector focus as mentioned earlier we continued our investment in growth we continue to grow our sales team which allows us to address more agencies and clients even though ramp up takes time we are seeing positive results from this strategy the same counts for our sector focus we have within a short period of time established the largest retail media network in Germany but getting media budgets for a new solution takes time we now start seeing first positive results with top brands starting tests and some of them already giving first larger budget commits looking at our customer segments we see a heterogeneous development of the segments with macroeconomic pressure creating uncertainty we saw different developments of sectors but also individual partners while gaming and entertainment advertising performed well we saw weakness in travel cpg automotive and also large tech the fifa world cup did not provide a broad market catalyst instead its impact felt primarily in highly selective areas such as prediction markets in which we are not active we continue our focus on making our proposition better based on our strong mobile in-app position with our own SDK we double down on the advertising intelligence of our platform focus on improving the various modules of the platform including the AI and data parts this requires a lot of testing and efforts also AI based product development supports targeting and efficiency these are mostly internal efforts and therefore it's great to see that with achieving the adweek tech stack award these great efforts are also seen externally next our focus on improving our offerings and increasing our customer base we also continue our focus on efficiency in q2 we make changes in our organization structure to sharpen our strategic focus and optimize our cost base. We substantially reduced our workforce and, amongst others, closed our Berlin office. Overall, we expect from these measures efficiency gains of 8 million euros per year, and the optimization led to a 4.2 million one-half cost in Q2. Beyond our operational efficiency measures, relocating our property to Ireland is a key strategic move. It aligns us more closely with our peer group and primary market, strengthening our capital market positioning for the long term, while technically enable us potential future direct listings in the US. Overall, we continue building and growing our company. In Q2, we further focused on outcome measurements, AI, retail media, and also expanding our sales capacity. With that, directly addressing where advertising demand is moving. While we don't see our improvements fully reflected in our growth in Q2, we are confident that our strategic direction remains right on point. And now getting to our opportunity for long-term sustainable growth. We do not have a strong supply base such as Google, Meta or Amazon, the so-called World Gardens. We unite the supply from thousands of apps and publishers, the so-called internet. Looking at some market numbers, it becomes clear that the World Gardens capture a appropriate share of the budget and are able to monetize their ad views much better. Whereas only one-third of consumer time is spent within the World Gardens, they attract 80% of the advertisers spend. And they are able to get 14 cents per ad spend per hour, per user hour, while the open internet only gets half of that. The strong position of the World Gardens are based on measurable outcomes at scale. And that's what VRV is building. In the past years we have been building scale With over 65,000 apps, 1.2 trillion ads served in the last 12 months, we are one of the largest players in the open internet. In the past years, we have also built our intelligence platform. We acquired several stacks and unified them, building a technology platform that includes demand side, supply side, and data technology. With AI, we have, and are further building the intelligence of the platform, matching the advertisers' wish to reach the right audiences and measure results, with the wish of the publisher to have the best in class return for their ads. And we have built one of the best and deepest data sets in the market. While we started with strong focus on idealist targeting in line with market development, we added ID-based data. Also, we have added a strong position in intent-based data, where we started with search intent and polling data and now lately also added LLM data. The combination of what we have now enables us to target and measure at scale. that's what we have built so far this is great and brought us to where we are however we want to go further we want to do this more sector specific a bit more differentiation one of the largest advertising categories are cbgs which the media has become a big growing part of the advertising market but this ad market has issues first of all most digital focus goes into online stores and online shopping but over 95 of all shopping takes place in physical stores so that's the place where most purchase decisions are taken secondly even though there are screens and other digital advertising possibilities in stores it's very scattered landscape and it requires a lot of effort to run a cross-retailer campaign as almost every retailer is selling its own inventory and thirdly measuring outcomes is almost impossible due to the fragmentation the funnel for most retail campaigns is broken there is no full funnel connection between awareness and measured outcome first saw this gap and is now working on solving it we started in germany one of the most competitive retail markets in the world while we already have a substantial part of our business focusing on digital online retail part for example add to cart solutions we now put strong focus on the physical space we were less than a year able to build the largest multi-chain in-store regional media network in Germany now including over 17,000 stores and reaching over 46 million shoppers per week in the stores we are able to show ads on screens we are able to measure at the point of sale and we are able to generate strong data about consumer behavior we combine this with our actual wallet technology our intent data and our mobile reach the result is a closed loop that includes targeting and measuring we are seeing very strong results with several cpgs we have run test campaigns and we showed our strength in improving market shares by increasing sales as retailers are seeing a clear uplift of their sales they are also happy with us cooperating with them as you can see here with our extensive digitalized in-store retail media network we are able to show cpg advertisers where they are winning respectively losing market share and measure the results of their advertising based on knowing what consumers buy and how they react to ads on their mobile but also in-store we can help advertisers build their branded network and increase their market positions we see the cpg advertisers as our partners and can, together with them, work on analyzing and influencing buy-in behavior. And even though we know that it takes time to get and scale head budgets of CGPGs with new solutions, we see very promising first results. We have now also started preparations for our US in-store retail media rollout. This brings me to the end of my part and I'm now handing over to Christian for the financials.
Christian. Thank you very much Remco. The headlines for the financial performance for Q2. Our number one revenues continue to grow at a solid pace, 6.5% year-on-year. Our growth profit margin is strong at 40 percentage points and continues to prove out the structural lift versus last year. And we delivered an adjusted EBITDA, which is up to versus last year to 30.1 million. So the fundamentals of supporting a scalable business are in place, however it is also clear that with more supported mark conditions in this quarter we could have delivered a significantly stronger performance on both revenue growth and on EBITDA than we did. I now turn to some of the details of Q2 performance. Here on the left hand side you see our revenues and adjusted EBITDA depicted in the bars. We generated a hundred and fifty two point three million in revenues for Q2, which should be compared with 143.1 million like-for-like basis last year. That yields 6.5 percentage points growth on a like-for-like revenue basis. We had three and a half percent growth from organic activities and we had a contribution of 4.6 percentage points from acquisitive businesses. We continue to have some headwind from the currency and the US dollar but in much much more moderate part than we've seen the previous quarters and the headwind this quarter was one minus 1.7 percentage points. That all means that both our core existing business is growing as well as our the businesses that we have bought. If I now turn to To adjusted EBITDA, we came in at 30.1 million in Q2, up from 29.5 million in the same period last year. That's a 2.2 percentage point lift, roughly 600,000, and we land on a margin of 19.8 percentage points. In line with our messaging in our Q1 call, we continue the sales team ramp up and our expansion. and that is weighing on first half margins for first half. We expect that to reverse in the second half of this year. This is on an adjusted EBITDA basis also a quarter where we adjust we exhibited quite some items affecting comparability all in all 9.3 million. We had personal expenses from mostly related to severances from the restructuring of 4.2 million and we had legal and advisory costs, for instance, associated with the relocation to Ireland and also the restructuring of 1.5 million and other non-recurring one-off expenses of 3.6 million. There's of course a future payoff behind some of these larger structural changes in the organization and while we incurred the severance payments and one-off expensive of 4.2 million in the quarter, we expect those changes to generate at least 8 million annualized savings, comparing to our current run rate. And those savings should start to become visible in Q3 and Q4. I then turn to one of the highlights of the quarter, which is our gross profit margin here depicted on the left hand side. We're very pleased that we generated at 40.0 in gross profit margin. It's a strong uplift versus same period prior year of 6.9 percentage points. The main reasons are largely the same as we have talked about in previous calls and in Q1 call, i.e. it's the margin optimization that we are now able to do on our improved unified platform. It's our optimization of our publisher ad request And it's also our ways of working with optimizing our cloud cost. Especially this quarter, our cloud cost was, of course, also helped by the fact that we had lower impression volumes. You'll see a one percentage point decline from previous quarter. And that is mostly or is influenced by a stronger focus on strategic partnerships where we, through investments and rebate programs, incentivize to take a bigger share of their business. Looking now at operating cash flow on an LTM basis here depicted on the left hand side, you see that we have an LTM basis had 105.3 million in operating cash flow before net working capital. we had 99 million in operating capital after networking capital. These two bars are roughly balanced with only a minimal investment in working capital and this is a very positive thing and also addresses the disparity that we saw second half of last year, 2025, where there was an imbalance between the two bars. If I now turn to the right hand side on an outlook for our capex development we estimate that we will have a capex investment this year between 74 to 79 million comprising of two parts one is maintenance and expansion capex in the level of 40 to 45 million and the other part is acquisition capex we are well on plan for our expansion and maintenance capex trending towards the lower level of the 40 to 45 million range it's important to note here that it consists of two parts so one being the nine million we have in maintenance capex so this is capex we need to do every year to keep our platform running off and well oiled and then we have 33 million in expansion capex and this is essentially investments we're doing that we can turn up and down as as we want and is also a flexibility we have in the face of potential structural challenges in the market. We have for this year 34 million of acquisitive CapEx. These are four acquisitions that we have already done including June Group and Captify and we have a deferred trench remaining for this year of 9.9 million which is scheduled for october uh this year now turning to our cash position and the movement in our cash position we came in at 132 million 0.4 for our cash position end of q2 that's 14.8 million down from our ending cash position in q1 you'll see here the major contributors and uses of cash we had 16.1 million of cash generated from operations which is very solid it's actually up versus q1 where we had 11.5 million we had a minimal investment in networking capital of 6.1 million then 8.7 million goes to investment activities this is mainly building our capitalized investments in development and cash flow from financing activities of 16.4 million which are mainly interest costs. I think it's worthwhile noting that we had two extraordinary expenses or uses of cash this quarter. We had a 8.5 million one-off settlement of taxes on a tax audit of Germany from 2011 to 2019. This is a one-off and therefore, had we not had that, our operating cash flow for the quarter would have been 8.5 million higher. We also used 2.7 million for selective buyback of bonds. We had the possibility to buy back bonds at a very favorable terms and given we have such strong cash position we saw it advantageous to do so our security circulation facility is close to fully utilized or drawn at the 100 million euros and now moving to balance sheet structure here on the left hand side our adjusted leverage ratio. We had 462 million in net interest bearing debt, up from 448 million last quarter. The movement is mainly due to the lower cash position and it takes our leverage ratio up to 3.3 times, up from 3.1. Our interest coverage ratio ends at 4.4 times and is largely unchanged compared here. That ends the introduction and I will now hand back to Renko for the guidance.
Thank you Christian. Based on H1 performance and the anticipated gross acceleration in H2, as well as current trading in Q3, VERF reaffirms its full year guidance communicated at the beginning of the year. We guide for revenues in a range between 680 and 730 million euros and an EBITDA in the range between 145 and 175 million euros. Q2 and Q1 are the seasonably lower quarters of the year and quarters that we used to invest in our future growth and profitability. The first half of 2026 was from the beginning designed as a front-loaded investment phase. Although Q2 was additionally affected by less favorable market conditions, leading to our advertising partners scaling their ad spend slower than anticipated, we expect a strong end of the year based on seasonality, but especially our growth investments starting to pay off. I'm now getting to the last phase of the presentation. In the last quarters, we have been building the foundations for the next phase of scalable growth, with focus on more differentiation versus competition and addressing the need of advertisers for more measurable outcomes at scale. Here I want to summarize in more detail what we are building. we have as shown earlier in the presentation in the past year's build scale with a strong mobile in-app focus over 65 000 apps 1.2 trillion ads served in the last 12 months a unified ad intelligence platform that includes demand side supply side and data technology and with ai we have now further building the intelligence of the platform and we have built one of the best and deepest data sets in the market with idealist and id-based data and a strong position in intent-based and LLM data. As further elaborated before, we are now working on building strong outcome measurement solutions based on closed loops and providing outcomes. We are expanding our retail media network in Germany and rolling it out to the US, building scale, ensuring that we can measure the results, and getting advertising agencies to spend on our network so we can ramp up revenues. And we continue to focus on operational efficiency, including amongst others optimized focus and cost and with ai we are working on streamlining our work processes another important focus point is our corporate ireland relocation getting leaner and u.s ready fur has shown strong growth in the past years with revenue and ebitda kegas consistently over 30 percent but with our fast consistent growth path we have also in the last year seen that our growth growth is not a straight line with our strength and base our strong position our investments in growth and further disciplines and focus on cost efficiencies we
are confident that we will show strong further profitable growth in the second half of this year as well as in the coming years i would like to thank all our investors employees and other partners for their trust and i'm now handing over to the moderator for questions great thank you both for your presentations we will now move on to the q a and it looks like we will have to do some improvisation as our system provider seems to have problems with the q a button so i already received some questions via email if you don't see the q a button in this call then please just send me an email at um ingo.middleman.com and i will read those out to you The first question comes from our analyst from Canaccord, Matthew Bebber. First question, I wanted to ask about the second half. The full-year outlook implies a pretty meaningful step up from the first half run rate. And you've pointed to a few drivers, the expanded sales team becoming more productive, as well as the continued build of closed-loop solutions and retail media. Could you help us size those relative to one another? Then with the second half, does the Outlook contemplate budgets that were displayed in Q2 being deployed in H2?
Shall I take the first one? First of all, thank you, Matthew. Yeah, let's say we are geared for growth and you are exactly hit the right points. i mean we are increasing sales that means we're onboarding more customers as you saw in our numbers we're working on better results that means scaling the customers that we have so scaling the the share of wallet and we are starting with let's say new pockets basically because we were not strongly active in germany and the redonating media network there is really a strong proposition that we have um the one that you were missing is for the technical optimization in the platform AI is a strong, how to say, generator for further, how to say, better matching the advertised demand with the publisher's supply. So that's another point that we're working on. And those things together, and yeah, we give guidance, but we don't go in every detail of the guidance. But those things together are showing results, and we expect to show stronger results, further results. Plus on top of it, we get to normal seasonality. and one thing one factor maybe that's a special factor for this year there is the midterm elections in the us uh elections in the us normally give big budgets also media we're not especially geared or focused on it but it's still let's say also grunts through our platform and it will overall in the market increase demand and with that also prices so if you take those factors together um where let's say the the smaller one or the more difficult one to predict is the midterm election thing which is always also smaller by the way than the full zone elections but uh with all those and seeing let's say to start two three and where we're moving within two three we are confident to be within the guidance great thanks ramco next question also from answer the second
question that was posed by okay i think there was a question around whether we would see a increase from displaced budgets in the first half of the year and you can say in many ways we are seeing we are seeing budgets from travel cpg automotive being more moderate than we would have expected and what the market projected and those are typically industries where you can stop you can stop or you can moderate your spend for some time but they're typically also industries where you do need to come back as a major brand owner to advertise. So yes, we do see some of the displaced budgets come back in second half a year. We're also seeing right now in the last weeks quite good traction and we can see good momentum.
Great, thanks Christian. So second question from Matthew is on the supply side of the platform, you noted a deliberate decision to step back from non-premium inventory, alongside the greater focus on strategic partnerships. Could you talk about how far through that shift you are and how we should think about the trade-off between impression volume and revenue per impression from here? Yeah, I'm just noting it out.
Yeah, I can take that question. Thank you very much, also Matthew, for that one. The supply side, indeed, we have connections to a lot of publishers, but also connections to other platforms especially that latter part is part that you not always fully control and where we especially in the second quarter have worked on let's say more severe methodologies to look at who's bringing good traffic not such good traffic all in line with our mission make media better we want to deliver really valuable traffic and not vagus traffic if I may call it that way so in that sense we see let's say in the reduction in views, or let's say in ad views, as you have seen, 10% versus last year, and even stronger versus last quarter. But that's really, it's often very low quality, it's also low CPM, and that brings me to the second part of your question. The pricing for those parts of advertising are often also much lower, and that's the reason that we are reducing there. Might also have had a bit of an impact on our overall revenue, or let's say lesser growth on the organic, but it's something that we want to go through in our past towards the future to really be standing here as a strong party that makes media better. We have disconnected some partners. We have taken, let's say, reduced volume for certain partners. So that's, let's say, what you see the effect in the ad views. And to your question, I think most of that now is done in Q2. And we're now more into ramping up, let's say, the good ones, which we also did, of course, in Q2 earlier once. But the biggest part of sorting this out has been done. There you go, you take it.
Sorry, I wasn't unmuted yet. So next questions come from our analyst from Cantor, Bharat. Question number one for H2, what assumptions are you making with regards to the macro and advertising spend improving?
And could you quantify the other contributors apart from seasonality to the H2 revenue bridge uh to get to your guidance yeah i assume that the question was about h2 and not h1 h2 yes correct yeah so what's happening h2 um us is our largest market 75 so that's the one that i'll concentrate on with my answer um micro is let's say not great in the us on the other hand us is pretty resilient if you look at consumer happiness at the moment there's a big split between the ones that have money and are more well off and let's say the ones that don't have so much money and there you see also different changes in spend you see also that the credit card borrowings are at an almost all-time high how to say the interest for houses etc is at a high point so the situation for the consumer in the US is not a super easy one and with the war continuing in the Middle East it's also not likely that all prices shortly will come down so in that sense we further expect that there will be some pressure from the market side but that having said as I mentioned before the US market has always been prudent to be very resilient and as Christian also said before advertising is the thing that you can stop temporarily or you can postpone it but it doesn't make sense to stop the long term because you use sustainable position and that's a part that we have seen that some budgets that were we thought stopped or at least what people said they are postponed and you never know when they come back we see them partly or majority wise even coming back now in future so looking at the market yes the market is not in a perfect condition but we are still let's say we're still a small party so it's we have the ability to grow we have very good products we have very good propositions we have an increased sales team and we see as mentioned some budgets coming back from the months that we're postponing too so i'm confident that we will show strong growth and you mentioned it already yourself
the seasonality also will come in but i think that's also coming back to the answer that i to make this question before yeah and i think also question two is uh on that point so do you see a trend improved in july august but i think you you flag that this is the case yeah we see a positive trend line in q3 great uh then question number three gross margin trajectory q2 gross margin step down 100 bits q on q to 40 percent due to strategic partnerships is this the new run rate or should we expect further pressure what's the h2 exit rate you're targeting okay yeah I can take that question yeah gross
margin we have structurally improved it by platform unification by efficiency also by pruning let's say lower quality volumes and let's say it will not be a flat line so it's not a flat 40 percent or 39 or like that with let's say more volume we will get into a bit more efficiency with let's say more added value in our ads we will get to a higher margin and on the other hand with a bit more partnering we reduce a bit or we give a bit back on rebates and things like that so in that sense I would say the range we are in now you can consider let's say for for the rest of the year as well that's what we striving at plus minus percent or so if I look more longer term and with more size and more added value and more differentiation I would rather expect that we can do further increases.
Thanks Marco. Next questions come from Benedikt Engbretsen from ABG.
I think the first question has been answered already next question is Walt Gardens what gives you confidence that weaker customer spending reflects postponed budgets rather than a structural shift from the open internets to work towards walled gardens good question and thanks for that Benedict and what gives the confidence the confidence is that this market is very big and there's a big part outside of the world gardens and as I've shown in one of the slides there's much more time spent outside of the world gardens but the wolf gardens let's say have their acts very well together they have great measuring great outcomes all these things so it's up to us and our let's say peers in the market to really make sure that we can handle the scale that we have let's say an efficient platform that we have the data to do the right targeting and that we can show the outcomes with that and that's what we and i hope that came out clearly in the presentation that's what we are working on is really further making sure that we are better in showing the outcomes and retail media is a good example of that because we're showing the outcomes you can show that you are outperforming the world gardens and that is what it's about and yes to your question there might be some budgets that went to the world gardens if you look at the numbers from Google for example they had been strong growth on their world garden their YouTube revenues and they had actually a decline on their open market revenues so there is a bit of of shift happening there but the market outsiders mentioned especially the the ad views and the consumers that are there the potential is there we have to do it so that's i hope that answers the question next question from bendick is on retail media how material is retail media currently and does the 2026 guidance assume a meaningful contribution before advertisers allocate their 2027 budgets yeah let me also take that one thanks for the for that question as well um the retail media let's say we did the arcado acquisition last year so that is bringing a bit of substance in there but it's not a huge revenue um but we see structural growth there but if you look at the total percentage of revenues and we have not uh let's say given that number out but the total percentage of revenue of which we're doing in germany is still small So seeing, however, that let's say we had to use the first time to build a network, and that we are now with tests, with brands and with retailers really showing extremely good results and also already getting the first kind of budgets booked on us and also larger budgets. Because when we took over Arcado, they were typically getting 5,000, 10,000, maybe a bit larger budgets per campaign. And we're now getting first budgets in with 100,000 and more per campaign. So we're doing something right there. We're showing it. Brands that we're working with are enthusiastic about it. And yeah, we expect it to really ramp up in, let's say, the further rest of the year. And already saw some of that in Q3. But the bigger jump we expect next year, because a lot of, how to say, brand budgets are really allocated in the fourth quarter for the last quarter of the fourth quarter for the next year. So, if you do well this year, we see nice revenue jump already there, but the bigger jump should come next year. Thank you.
The next couple of questions come from our analyst from Indorus, Christopher Janel. In the Q1 deck, full year 25, like-for-like revenue was 602 million euros.
In this report, it's 637 million euros. what drove this change in q1 given the remaining unification steps for example ctv concluded during 2026 will the base move again maybe I can take that question so we still have certain parts that we are unifying it's we are very very far on the web unification and we have one remaining part which is ctv which is roughly half migrated and that means that the there will be a further effect also in q3 where the remainder of the ctv will be migrated what we try to do and why you see the numbers shift is we try to the best we can to provide a like-for-like growth and that means we when we for instance measure now revenues in q2 we compare it to what would the revenues have been in previous time periods had we had that level of unification so we try to make this as best as a like-for-like comparison and that is the reason for the shift in the number thanks christian next questions are on securitization your securitization program is similar to as in q1 almost fully drawn have you now fully onboarded the new two entities to the program and where are you in the process in terms of increasing the program's capacity what should we expect going forward okay that's clearly a question for me as well let me start with the second part we are right now making the final um documents on an expansion of the Securitization Program. I expect that to be signed within the next couple of weeks. I don't want to give out too much detail. Those are still being negotiated, but it will be a marked expansion of the program. And thus, we have the ability to draw more on the Securitization Program than we do now, which is capped at 100 million. Sorry, there was a second part of the question. If you could repeat, Ingo.
And where are you in the process in terms of increasing the program's capacity, what should we expect going forward? And maybe add on also, what capacity would we need at a level of 1 billion euros in revenue?
Well, on a 1 billion of revenue, we would surely need a much, much bigger size. we would be targeting at least somewhere between 150 to 200 million in size. I think there was also another part of the question around Vivento and Ocado and Captify, which are other businesses that are on the securitization program now. So we are actually structurally, we have added extra businesses the two operating entities on top of the program with there are still some let's say business processes that we're working on fine-tuning but largely they are now on the big on the program okay thanks i think next question goes to remco why did chief revenue officer dave simon leave after four months and what does that do to the sales productivity ramp up thank you for the question.
Our Chief Revenue Officer Dave Simon who joined indeed left after half a year, we mutually agreed about him leaving. There is a confidentiality agreement in place so I'm not able to give any reasons for it. We are professionalizing the company, we're growing the company and that's, let's say, it is important that we have good people at positions. I had a relation with Dave yeah I'm kind of as always in those things yes the sad I and maybe let's say there's an opportunity else and we have promoted Alessandro Giuliani who was managing and part of the exchanges they did demand side exchanges to be responsible for the full exchanges so including the marketplace he's doing that since a few weeks and I'm very happy with him doing that he's longer with the company already we know him very well he's done great things before we're confident that he will further also scale the marketplace in a good way thanks next question is from johannes joffers from poor investors in the press release you mentioned the preparation of a listing in the u.s during the call you did not mention anything about this can you give some more details about it was what is the timeline after the move to Ireland yeah I can take that one I maybe I'm mumbled too much but it was meant to be said and I think I said it so sorry for that we said it just not that publicly no we are further looking into US listing we have also spoken about it earlier and to be able to do a direct listing and not get into ADRs we need to be let's say let's say the choice was to go to Ireland to have that possibility and that will happen now October 1st or and we're looking actually at that we don't have too much trading day or trading time as an outage so it might be that it's one or two days later than that but that's the timing that we're looking now for relocation to Ireland and after that we have the possibility to do the listing technically our IFRS upgrade has been prepared to do that so we're basically ready for that we have working internal control systems all the things but then there is more factors to take into account and that's how the market develops in the US how let's say the overall sector develops things like that but we basically would be ready from the end of this year onwards to do a listing in the US it has not formally been decided to also make that very clear but it makes a lot of sense our peers are there um let's say it's it's yeah where people know the sector much more we really are basically the only one in europe um that is really uh yeah let's say and that costs a lot of how to say the effort to to convince institutionals and analysts if you're the only company in the sector so in that sense uh super happy and looking forward and there's one other point sorry that i forgot to mention that is uh reporting in dollars um in the first quarter of this year we had a very strong negative headwind around eight percent of the u.s dollar first euro now in the second quarter we had 1.7 percent it's always we always need to start explaining and let's say if you have a negative headwind you need to already make that up in euros sorry in growth to to be flat in euros so that sense that's another point that we're looking into is really reporting in dollars and that's yeah probably most also coming up pretty soon I should maybe mention exactly on the reporting in the U.S. dollars, we expect that we can do that from January in the next year.
Great, thanks. Next questions come from Alice Eklund from Perth Berlin. You deliberately reduced lower quality non-premium inventory during Q2. What triggered that decision? how much did it weigh on impressions and revenue growth and is the cleanup now largely complete or should we expect another drag in q3 what should the trade-off ultimately look like between lower volumes cpms and gross margin it was partly answered but something else yeah it was partly answered but i'll take the headlines here so it was done on purpose um because we really want to go So, yeah, make media better, that's a repetition of what I said before.
So we did it deliberately to really start cleaning up and get, let's say, lower quality. The effect on revenue is not as big as on the number of ad views because it's lower priced inventory also. So in that sense, it had a quite low effect on the revenue, but it had a substantial effect, as you saw, on the impressions. And I mentioned it already before, we're largely done with it. It's a continuous process, you always do things like that, but the heavy change that we did in Q2 is, let's say, is done.
Next question is on the guidance. Given the softer than expected Q2 organic growth and more cautious market backdrop, has the mix of outcomes with the 680 to 730 million euros revenue range changed? Does current trading still support the midpoint or should we now think about the lower half of the range as the more realistic planning case?
I can take a shot at that and answer it. If we would be certain that we would end up at a certain part of the range, we would have, let's say, reduced the size of the range. So in the sense of, in line with what I said before, we see a very good ramp up also like I said before growth is very difficult to have a linear line of growth because I mean some growth goes faster some a bit less where we saw weaker Q2 and we have as mentioned already said it's let's say we had a front-loaded from the investment phase in the budget and we had a pretty big range also but we still are confident that we will be in the range and it can be on the lower side but it can as well be on the higher side there's a lot possible we see good momentum and yeah it's difficult to give and i think it's also not meant to do
but we stick with rage please also keep in mind two things first the general seasonality of h2 versus h1 which can be shifted a bit this year because we have seen more moderate market growth in the first half of the year that goes back to the discussion of whether when you lower when when certain sectors lower their advertising spend will it then come back is there a pent-up need for second half that's number one number two is we have been investing heavily in sales and sales force in both back in last year but also this year and we expect outcome of that
in line with what we said that it normally takes somewhere between 9 and 15 months for a salesperson to deliver so that will also benefit us in the second half of the year Thanks Christian I think the next question is also for you again from Christopher from Inderis the CEO letter puts the quarter's one-off costs at 4.2 million euros but items affecting comparability were 9.3 million euros can you reconcile those and tell us what the 3.6 million euros in other expenses in the reconciliation table is and is the 8 million of annual savings
measured against 4.2 million or 9.3 million let me start with the second part so the 8 million in savings that we estimate from the structuring are are are basically connected to the 4.2 million in severance and restructuring costs. That was one question. In the other one-off non-recurring expenses, we had quite some expenses to certain positions in our organization where we had to take interim management for a shorter time, and this was to basically cover off some some positions that are critical but we needed to fill quickly to keep momentum in the business that's largely the explanation there are also other factors but the behind the 3.6 million yeah maybe to uh say to add something to that um it's a lot of that has to do also with the relocation to ireland which brought extra cost in um the preparation
for the U.S. dollar reporting those things where we had additional cost. Sorry, Christian, but I think that was important to mention.
Okay, and the second question from Christopher is on our midterm perspective we once put out. The 25 to 30% revenue CAGR and 30 to 35% EBITDA margin perspective were reconfirmed on the Q1 2025 call and has since been described as a perspective not a target nor a guidance how do you think investors should view this development are these figures no longer something you want to be held accountable for I can answer that as it was not a guidance or not a hard number it is in think what we think that we are able to do with this company and I hold myself accountable for it but an investor shouldn't hold this
accountable for it. I think this company should most of all grow, and also there's a lot of other things that we need to keep in mind, which is leverage, where we need to work on, which is how to say risks that are in the business, etc. We have shown in the past years that we are able to grow 25-30%. I'm confident that this company can do it, but as I also mentioned and answered before, it's not really a steady line. I mean, there will be always some fluctuations in this growth but the market has the potential we have built a strong position and with the things that we are now working on salespeople, retail media etc etc there is so much growth potential that we have that I'm confident that this company really can grow with that speed but it's not a hard guidance to make that very clear. Thanks.
Next questions come from our analyst from Bernburg Andreas Wolf. Number one has been partially answered. Could you talk about capital allocation and your aim to lower financial leverage? At what securitization is work currently running?
Yeah, so I think I answered that the securitization question we are running at 100 million euros. The second part is we do see with the scaling of an acceleration of our revenues and especially EBITDA in the second half of the year that we will be going down in net leverage ratio for the second half of the year towards the end of the year. I will not put out a specific number that we will end at at the end of the year because it all depends on how the development is, but we see that when we model it out it will have a material effect on our net leverage ratio and go down.
Thanks. Second question from Andreas is how do you measure sales efficiency on the demand side and what is the average revenue per sales person you are seeing for H2?
Good question. That's exactly what we're doing. Let's say we are measuring sales people very exact and that starts with measuring how many reach outs they do, how many meetings they have, how the results are, how many things we can make an offer for. There's often RFPs that are in the market. So those are first parts that, of course, we look into. And then we start looking, of course, into what's the revenue per head, what's the profitability per head. Those are competitive figures, and we don't give them out. But those are super important KPIs for us internally to, of course, measure. And as mentioned, we are hiring new sellers. and for those also it's important that they start basically after 12 months at least covering their own salaries and that we get positive return on that after it and if they're not covering their own salaries and that's by far the minimum that they should then of course yeah they have to be replaced thanks and the third third question from andreas is what level of ebitda adjustments shall we expect for h2 so we normally have somewhere between three to four million a quarter so for h2 i would also say that it would be roughly eight million in uh if adjustments this quarter was
unusual which i also stated clearly it was a very unusual quarter because we had such big structural changes um that we implemented and we of course do that because we can see that it will have a positive effect in the longer term. Thanks.
Next question comes from Felix Elman, our analyst from MPCM. You've always been successful in financing. What is your plan with refinancing of the company? Are you planning to solve this issue even well before maturity date?
Yeah, I can answer that. Depends on your definition of a well before maturity date we have in the past always refined before maturity date and we usually do that let's say 9-12 months ahead of maturity it all depends on the market at that given time and where we see it most advantageous but you should expect that we would we would refinance ahead of the maturity date and we are now with a combined bond portfolio of 550 million we may change slightly when we come to that time in terms of how many which markets we go to because we are a substantial
bond even in a Nordic context now thanks and before I come to the currently last question again the reminder there seems to be an issue with the live Q&A a button from the side of our service provider so please if you have a question just send me a quick email to ingo.middleman at birth.com and I will read it out here. Next question comes from Gustav Nordenloef. Your bonds are trading at around 90% of par. Are you looking to buying back bonds to decrease your interest costs and if not why?
Shall I answer it or you'll answer it? Christian I can answer it yeah it's it's let's say it's it's topic between finance and commerce of course no they are trading at around 90 percent and we have been as Christian showed in his presentation been lately buying back bonds we have a lot we have substantial cash and if bonds are trading that low it's it's financially an attractive thing because it brings down our interest costs and of course you buy it cheaper than it was issued and if let's say the market values at the moment at this 90% it's an opportunity for us to do it so selectively we have been buying backbones and we will most likely continue great thanks Remco so it seems there are no
no further questions let me check my phone if somebody sent me here no okay then I think we've reached the end of today's call and there are no further questions from your side but should you have any additional questions that come to your mind later please do not hesitate to contact me at investor relations again I think you heard my email address now quite often during this call but you can always also give me a phone call so with that we reach the end of today's call. Thank you for joining us. Have a productive rest of the week and we look forward to speaking with you again soon. Bye-bye.
