Azerion Group N.V. (AZRN) Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Umut Akpinar, CEO of Azerion. I am here with my colleagues, Julie Ferat, our Chief Financial Officer; and Sebastiaan Moesman, Chief Strategy Officer. We would like to welcome you to today's webinar to present Azerion's Q4 and full year 2025 interim results. Before we start, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the disclaimer. And our forward-looking statements. Thank you. Let's please move to the presentation. I'm very happy with our fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. We achieved our highest ever quarterly revenue and adjusted EBITDA in our platform business. This is all thanks to our people. They work hard and deliver real results to our clients every single day. In the end, our advertisers need to see that their advertising is really working and our people are helping them with this and build the tools for them to be successful. Our own results keep getting better, and that makes me very proud. For years, we have worked hard to make our company more focused, efficient and more profitable. In 2025, we took more steps to do that. We sold the last significant part of our premium games segment, and we also made our balance sheet much stronger. We successfully refinanced our bonds. We now have a larger framework, a lower principal debt, more time and a much better interest rate. Looking ahead to 2026, we see a lot of opportunities for growth. Publishers need a strong partner to weather the effects of capitalize of the opportunities of AI. Advertisers need a smart partner to run highly efficient campaigns. And the whole industry needs a trusted independent partner to provide scalable infrastructure that is future-proof. I trust our team will make sure our clients and publishers can rely on us to achieve their results in 2026, and I'm looking forward to the next 12 months. Now I will leave it to Julie and Sebastiaan to dive a little bit deeper into our results and our finances.

Thank you, Umut. Yes, as you know -- next slide, please. As you know, but maybe as a short refresher, Azerion operates as an advertising platform, and we're connecting advertisers to consumers through content and publishers. Our technology allows for high-precision targeting of those audiences, including very specific local areas. We serve over 400,000 advertisers, connecting over 300,000 publishers to reach over 0.5 billion people every month, and we manage the biggest advertising accounts through our local people in over 30 offices in 16 countries. In 2025, we worked hard on all the aspects of the P&L from the top to the bottom. At the top, we expanded our relationship with our network and introduced new tools for different smaller advertisers to self-serve through our AI platform. The commercialization of our cloud business is also getting traction. And all the while, we've been building tools and solutions to deliver our services cheaper and more effectively. We finalized many of our acquisitions and integrations and wrapped up the discontinuation of our premium games segment through the divestment of Whow Games to free up capital and focus to the platform. And lastly, we refinanced our bonds, as we mentioned, at more favorable conditions. I'll talk about that in a little bit. So all in all, work on all the levels of financials. And to give you a bit more specific examples, I want to call out the achievements on this page. We delivered a campaign for Maison&Objet, a conference trade show where we needed to hyper target people on just the trade floor in a very specific location and using such precise geographic location and then running an omnichannel campaign on screens, phones, billboards, et cetera, around that venue made a big impact at a relatively low cost. We also landed the Intermarché account in France, the big supermarket, and we help them to run basically 800 concurrent campaigns throughout the country that all target specific locations and types of audiences. Intermarché is one supermarket, but they have a lot of shops. And so every shop basically got their own campaign. Our AI agent assists in the setup monitoring and optimization of each, and that's something that wouldn't have been possible manually or at least would have cost us weeks to set up and to control and monitor. We also won some great publisher deals like HBO Max in Austria, giving us access to high-quality connected TV inventory. And those publisher relationships are crucial to make sure our advertisers can place their ads in high premium attractive environments. On a technology level, we've released a few innovations that allow us to remain relevant and important in both mobile and cookie-less environments where we need to strike a careful balance between privacy and our ability to target specific people. The multi-cloud business attracted great accounts like FlightRadar and Willhaben. And in our AAA game distribution unit, we had a record performance and drove massive volume for top-tier releases like The Last of Us and Stellar Blade. In the platform, the average digital ads sold per month is an important metric to gauge the density basically of traffic on our systems. Of course, there's a lot of different types of ads like TV, radio or outdoor advertising. They all have different pricing and sizes and mechanics. But overall, this KPI shows how we consistently increase the size of our platform and our business. It's seasonal because the advertising business is. And you can see that we are steadily growing in our number of transacted ads. And these transacted ads themselves are the result of all of the hundreds of thousands of real-time auctions we do every second. So you can imagine the volume on the systems. Next to the machine volumes and efficiency, There's, of course, our people and their work and efficiency. Can we go to the next slide, please? And maybe, Julie, you want to take the next few slides?

Yes, of course. Indeed, in 2025, we kept our discipline and maintain our continuous focus on our operations. Basically, this chart visualize our actions that lead to the realized efficiencies over the last 4 years and highlight Q4 over Q4 last year. Here in the light blue line, it represents our total full-time employees. And on the black line, it represents our group revenue per FTE. As mentioned, we are really focused on supporting our people to work smarter and more efficiently. This resulted in increasing our revenue per employee ratio last year by 17%, jumping from EUR 160,000 in Q4 '24 to EUR 196,000 in Q4 '25. This result clearly shows our capacity to optimize our organization while successfully scaling up our top line. So the growth and the focus on cost controls translate into this picture, too.

Next slide, please.

Thanks. Indeed, since most of our components are services and materials and personnel expenses, this gives us a highly variable cost structure. That means we have the flexibility to reduce costs rapidly if needed. Naturally, our cost of service and materials grow as a function of our revenue. However, over the years, we integrated our past acquisitions and with Azerion AI, we were able to optimize our teams even further. You can clearly see it into 2 positive trends on this chart. The pink line shows our steady revenue growth. And more importantly, if we look at the orange line, we can see that our OpEx are actively shrinking as a percentage of that total revenue, dropping to 20%, sorry, in '25.

All right. Next slide, please. So yes, Umut said, three big topics. We discussed the platform now, the achievements and the constant drive for increased performance there. And then there are two more topics to discuss on '25 in the last quarter. And then the first one is, of course, the divestment of Whow. That's not an isolated case. We've divested from Premium Games unit before in 2023 with Governor of Poker. And together, these two divestments generate EUR 131 million cash and by divesting in the majority of those premium games, we also decided to discontinue the entire segment and focus fully on the advertising platform. We expect the last pieces of the segment to be divested from this year. These divestments don't just create significant proceeds, as you can see here, they also show our ability to acquire and then grow these companies to super successful businesses on their own, repeatedly even and the divestments are also a testament to our strategy to focus on the longer-term promise of the scalable advertising platform. Even though these businesses are successful on their own, we believe the advertising platform has the future, and therefore, we use the capital to lower our debt position, and we free up our teams to focus on building and accelerating the platform. Next slide, please. Then the third part that really made a big difference last year is the bond financing. A little bit more information here around those bonds. As you can see, our bonds go back to, well, even before 2020, where it starts here, and we've been able to secure increasingly favorable conditions every time that we refinance them. And even though the size goes up sometimes, the annualized interest we pay indicative in the top right chart here, the dark parts is lower than it has been since 2021, even though the bond size is lower -- was lower back then than our current EUR 225 million now. And not just the total ticket size -- sorry, can you go back up? Not just the ticket size, but our latest bonds also have the benefit of a longer run time, which means we don't have to refinance and incur the cost of the refinancing in the next couple of years. That's important because even just in '25, our finance cost increased with over EUR 10 million just because of the refinancing and the early redemption. So not having that in the next couple of years will make a big difference on our P&L. Lastly, because of these continuous improvements, while our revenue is increasing, that gray line on the top right shows you that the interest we pay as a percentage of the total revenue is declining fast. Julie, let me hand it back to you again for some more financial highlights.

Yes. Thank you, Seb. So Umut talked about our new focus. And yes, clearly, our focus on the platform is our biggest milestone. We've built a solid foundation, and we continue to deliver. In the fourth quarter, our platform revenue grew by 11%. It reached EUR 170 million. This is the highest revenue ever achieved in the quarter. This results from strong commercial wins across all regions and also our growth in programmatic formats such as audio, connected TV and digital out-of-home. Our platform Q4 adjusted EBITDA grew even faster. It went up 13% to EUR 29 million. This strength continues for the full year. Full year revenue is up by 9% to EUR 541 million and full year adjusted EBITDA is up by 14% to EUR 67. This again shows our focus and our ability to increase profitability, which is reflected in the EBITDA. Indeed, it grew from EUR 9 million to EUR 38 million for the year.

Yes. And I think it also shows very well, Julie, that we -- when we focus on, let's say, the profitability of the company, it's like a pyramid. You see the revenue growing, but the adjusted EBITDA growing faster and the EBITDA growing even faster. So we're really focusing on making the platform profitable. Next slide, please.

Yes, indeed. Our 4 year trends show great progress. We are doing more with less. We enter '26 with a cleaner structure. We have lower debt and our platform is ready to scale. And when we scale, as you said, we get more efficient. New revenue turns directly into profits. We saw this clearly in '25. If we look at our Q4 EBITDA last year, as said, we had EUR 3 million loss. This quarter, we made EUR 14 million. Our past integration adjustments are really getting behind us and our system upgrades are paying off. We are turning our revenue growth into strong bottom line profits.

Next slide, please.

Now let us look at the total group for 2025. So our total group revenue reached EUR 570 million, and our group adjusted EBITDA reached EUR 73 million. I know it's not easy sometimes to read between continuing and discontinued, but basically, group revenue is the same of EUR 541 million on the continuing operation and EUR 29 million coming from discontinuing. The group EBITDA is the EUR 67 million on the continuing and the EUR 6 million on the discontinue. Looking at our 2025 cash flow, we had three main drivers. First, a net positive inflow from operating activities of around EUR 12 million. Secondly, a net inflow from investing activities of roughly circa EUR 14 million. This came mostly from the selling of our game business. And third, a net outflow from financing activities of EUR 57 million reflects -- this reflects our bond refinancing to lower the debt. Thus as a consequence, our net interest-bearing debt dropped significantly and is now down to EUR 177 million. Now Umut, would you close up with the outlook?

Yes, of course. We have a track record of growing faster than the market and looking ahead to 2026. We expect to outpace the market again because European companies are looking for strong consolidation partners, and we can help them. Because of our AI-enhanced buying platform, we can support an increasing variation and number of customers running their advertising campaigns. And because our cloud and AI business in Azerion Intelligence is growing and becoming more relevant and important to our partners. Therefore, we expect our revenue to grow by about 10%. Also, we are also repeating our promises for the future. We aim to hold a strong medium-term profit margin between 14% and 16%. As said, we are very excited about the year ahead. We are confident we will drive these better results for the sixth year in a row, and I want to thank you very much for joining us today. With that, I would like to hand over to our operator for the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Sebastiaan Moesman for written questions.

We have, of course, a few questions coming in. So let me go through them. All right. One of the questions we get were several actually are about the adjusted EBITDA, which is a nice metric, but investors care about real bottom line profit, of course. When will we see a real profit? Well, of course, we cannot guide to when. But Julie, do you want to answer that?

Yes. Basically, I would say that you are already seeing it because if you look at our EBITDA, it surged from EUR 9 million to almost EUR 38 million for the full year. So that is a massive jump in real operational profits. So in 2025 also, our bottom line net results still carried heavy one-off costs. So we paid, for example, for the restructuring of our team for the refinancing of our bonds and for selling the game of business. 2026, those one-off costs are gone. Furthermore, our interest payments are now significantly lower. And because of this, our strong adjusted EBITDA will now translate directly into much stronger net profit and real free cash flow in '26.

Right. Thank you. Maybe immediately after that to you, Julie, because we divested the game business, but discontinued operations still is part of the group revenue. How does that look in '26?

Yes, basically because we own the games business for part of 2025 before the sale was finalized because of the accounting rules, it require us to report for partially for the year contribution. So this is why it still sit in our 2025 group total under discontinued operation, and this creates a bit of complexity, I can imagine. In '26, our financials will reflect the ongoing performance of our core business platform. But again, for accounting rules, we need to keep the distinctions between continuing and discontinuing to give clarity on our performance.

All right. Thanks. Okay. Another question. We have made massive improvements in the cost base, the efficiency, but is this a one-off or structural? So let me answer that. Part of the savings come from completing integrations and simplifying the business, but the majority is structural. Over the past years, we've built a more scalable platform. We automated more processes and supported our teams with better tools. So you can see that in the numbers as well. The revenue per FTE went up to 17% year-over-year, and OpEx as a percentage of the revenue is now down to 20%. So those improvements don't disappear. They're the result of a leaner, more focused organization, which we basically can continue to scale efficiently. Does and can management steer on the KPI to reduce cost of services and materials? Yes is the answer, but the cost of services is the percentage of the money we pay out to the publishers, which is always, yes, an existing contractual relationship and at the same time, also a negotiation between how badly do we want to work with that publisher and how badly do they want to work with us. So we are always working on that top line margin because it has a big impact on the profitability as well. So yes, we are always looking at that, and there's people worried about that day and night, you could say. Another question is on the Azerion and Principion have an outstanding loan agreement. Any plans for this in the future? Well, actually, at this point because we are now we have released the numbers and we're out of our closed period. So today, Azerion settled 12 -- I'm rounding it a little bit, EUR 12 million out of the total EUR 20 million of that call option through exercising a share call. Azerion will receive 10.5 million shares valued at a price of EUR 1.14, which is a calculation has been set forth in the loan settlement agreement across a number of days in the past. And the remaining loan amount from Azerion to Principion is now EUR 8 million and all the terms and conditions of the loan settlement, including the maturity of the 31st of March this year, still apply on the remaining amount. All right. The next question. How sustainable is the growth you're seeing in CTV, audio and digital out-of-home? Well, these formats are growing for two reasons. First, the market itself is expanding, especially in CTV and digital out-of-home. And second, our own execution is getting stronger. We secured premium publisher relationship, like I mentioned, with HBO Max in Austria. And our AI tools are improving how we target and optimize campaigns across all the channels. So we're not just benefiting from the market, we're improving our ability to monetize it as well. And that gives us confidence that this growth is sustainable and certainly not over yet. There's questions about a high-level financials for Azerion Intelligence. We don't currently share those numbers. So we're not going to start with it here. And it's also mainly because that unit is still starting. So once it reaches a certain critical mass, we're going to be more specific about it, but it's not right now. Let me see then. How does management rank and prioritize reaching profitability as priority? I think you can see in our '25 numbers that we are all about profitability. We've been divesting from the premium games. We've been optimizing the platform constantly. So it is really all about profitability and getting ready for scale because that's the next step. And I think we're close to that point where, as Julie already mentioned, if we add EUR 100 of revenue now, then it comes at almost no additional OpEx. So a large part of that will translate into net profit. So all the work we did in the last year was about creating the profitability itself. And now the question is how fast can we add scale to it. And as Umut said, we have a lot of reasons to believe that we can start growing relatively fast in the near future. A few more. Let me see. How competitive is your AI self-serve platform compared to the global players? Well, first, we're not trying to replicate what very large global platforms are trying to do with AI. Our strength is precision, local relevance and omnichannel execution and our tools help advertisers to run hundreds of campaigns at once with automated setup and optimization. And then our local teams in 60 countries give us a level of regional depth that global platforms don't offer. So with over 400,000 advertisers and publishers on the platform, the traction already shows that our approach is competitive and valued. We have questions left. How sensitive is your business to macro advertising cycles going into '26? This is always an interesting question, like looking into the glass ball, of course. But like any advertising business, we're exposed to macro cycles. So we've taken significant steps to increase resilience. Cost structure is highly variable, which allows us to adjust quickly. Our refinancing lowered the interest burden and extended our maturity profile and our advertiser publisher base is extremely diversified, hundreds of thousands of them across many regions and formats. So combined with efficiency gains we delivered, we believe we're well positioned to outpace the market even in a mixed macro environment. Last one, what's the long-term vision for your cloud business? Well, our cloud business and the capabilities are really a strategic part of our existing platform, and they help us run our own AI models efficiently, scale our infrastructure and then with that, also support enterprise clients. We're already seeing traction with accounts like FlightRadar and Willhaben. And over time, we expect the cloud business to support both our internal efficiency and our external revenue opportunities. It's not a stand-alone hyperscale strategy that competes with the Amazons or something, but it's a layer that strengthens the entire platform. Okay. Most of the other questions are somewhere in the line of what we already extended. One more question on to what extent will AI applications further drive down service costs and improve margins? Well, I think that's actually what we've shown already. So as a very simple example, you enter our tool, you can have a conversation with the AI asking, can you help me build a campaign to reach my targets? It will completely answer you and also set up the campaign in the system and also monitor and evaluate it for you, including the creation of the ads themselves. So this is a massive efficiency gain, and that's also the reason why in the Intermarché example I gave, the supermarket didn't just run a campaign of, yes, come to our supermarket. No, they launched 800 campaigns in parallel, which normally would take days to operate in the system like we're running and immediately created 800 parallel, very specific and highly targeted campaigns. So it's on the one hand, a cost saver in the processes, but you can also see that it then suddenly opens up a whole new type of clients and advertising campaign because you suddenly don't have the limitations anymore of the people in between. So it's going to be a massive cost saver and a massive also expansion of capabilities in the future. All right. Those were quite a lot of questions actually this time, but thank you very much for all those. And also, thank you very much for listening in today. We will surely be back in a few months to update you on the next quarter. Thank you very much.