Azerion Group N.V. ($AZRN)

I am Umut Akpinar, CEO of Azerion. I'm here with my colleague, Sebastiaan Moesman, Chief Strategy Officer. We would like to welcome you to today's webinar to present Azerion's Q1 2026 Interim Results. Before we start, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the disclaimer and our forward-looking statements. [Presentation]

Thank you. Let's please move on to the presentation. I will give you a summary of this quarter, and then I will let Sebastiaan dive deeper in the numbers and the business. All in all, I'm really proud to report on our first quarter 2026 results. We achieved another record quarter. I think I've said this more than 15 times now in a call like this, but it's true, it has been another best Q1 in our company history. Compared to last year Q1, the platform revenue remained stable, while adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA have grown significantly. And the results are also showing impressive increase in the bottom line, operating and net profit. And so despite divesting from WHOW Games last year and therefore losing their significant contribution to EBITDA, still our overall profitability actually went up. Basically, by focusing on cost and increasing our business output with a leaner tech-enabled workforce, of course, also using AI, we are proving our ability to do more with less in the advertising business. And we expect this to continue this year because OpEx, interest cost and depreciations have all come down structurally. And we are confident that we can work with our partners in the industry to generate revenues in the rest of the year that drive our platform up and forward. This might sound a bit strange because of everything that is going on in the world. But the stress on the European digital advertising market is also opening doors to new partnerships. Publishers in Europe, they need a strong partner. Agencies and ad networks need a smart partner to run highly efficient campaigns with less people working on them and resellers that have small businesses as customers needing sn increasingly AI-enabled platform to sell and execute their advertising campaigns. In the end, digital advertising in Europe can only grow when partners get together. And that is why we also stick to our guidance of 10% revenue growth. We are using this month to talk and strike deals with our partners, and we expect that revenue to drive our performance in the second half of the year. So let me hand over to Sebastiaan to give you more detail on our Q1 results.

Yes. Thanks, Umut, and hello, everyone. As you know by now, if you joined these calls before, I'll remind everybody quickly about who we are and what we do and especially what we did in Q1 and how that then translates into our financials. And then I'll talk a little bit about our 2026 strategy, and we'll conclude with our outlook for the year. So let's start with a quick refresher on Azerion. Azerion operates in the digital marketing industry, an industry that is full of opportunity because of the constant increase of both the online population and their consumption of digital content. And on top of that, the ongoing digitization of media channels such as radio, out-of-home, retail media and TV. You can remember the outdoor bus station ads, they used to be almost painted by people with fixed ads, but nowadays, they're all going to go digital. Next slide, please. In that market, Azerion connects advertisers with consumers using a wide network of publishers and content owners to display advertisements. Our people in local offices around Europe help the advertisers from the concept phase to distribution of the ad, and we track and trace the effect that those ads have on people so we can do better every time. AI is an increasingly important tool there to help us deliver ads not just to big audiences around the globe, but also to make sure that we only show ads to the right audiences for our clients and that every person in every location gets a message that's appropriate to that specific time, place, and person. This means that, for instance, supermarket chains show different campaigns around every one of their 2,000 shops or so. Taxi services only advertise close to subway stations when the weather is bad and the traffic is congested. And for instance, for Audi, we run campaigns around 83 dealerships with different audio ads that appear on Spotify for every dealer. In Q1, we used AI to launch tools to generate personas in minutes and automate troubleshooting on SSP deals, both historically very time-consuming manual tasks. And personas, what are those? Personas are like archetypes or templates for people based on their behavior and characteristics. These themes like, I don't know, Dubai lovers, for instance, they need to be translated into data points like high income, interested in expensive cars or those kinds of things. And these mappings and research, they used to take hours or days sometimes to get this persona live and the AI now really helped to do this in seconds. We integrated further with our partners, Acxiom, Lotame, and GDR to ingest more privacy-safe data into our auctions, making the targeting more precise while still preserving privacy. And we executed many omnichannel campaigns hyper-localized for clients like Intermarche, Audi and the Italian Winter Olympics. On the supply side, we partnered with an additional 80 new publishers, and we struck an exclusive partnership with Bauer Media in France. Then we also welcomed new clients in our multi-cloud business like PlayWorks, 11880, and Car & Classic. And on the gaming side, we expanded our white label footprint with Coreo, and we grew our AAA game distribution further through releases like Resident Evil Requiem. All right. Then all the activity, of course, led to another record quarter, like Umut already mentioned. So let's dive a little bit deeper into those results and the finances. We've been growing our top line modestly, as you can see here, and our adjusted EBITDA for many quarters in a row now. But as we increasingly focus on the advertising platform and we clean up historical positions, also the operating and net profit are improving significantly, and those will be the focus of 2026. Our adjusted EBITDA grew with 12% and EBITDA with 43%. Adjustments are predominantly due to integrations of previous acquisitions, and those are nearing completion, hence, the decreasing adjustment numbers and the additional EBITDA as projected synergies from last year turn into real money this year. Below EBITDA, both operating profit and net income also improved due to the decreasing depreciations, amortizations and interest burden on the refinanced bonds. And those are not just one-off improvements in Q1. They will improve our results every quarter this year and the next. Growth from a top-line perspective is small, as you can see, around 2%. First quarters are always seasonally slow in advertising, and our focus has been on making sure we solidify the elements that create sustainable improvements on the bottom line. You can see here how over time, that bottom line is improving, and this will continue throughout the year. So now that we know our operational costs are under control and the organization is ready for future, we will be focusing on revenue growth. And our guidance at around 10% growth is therefore going to materialize towards the end of the year as we expect some of the larger deals that we're working on right now to complete in this quarter and then have their results in Q3 and Q4. I'll talk about those a little bit later. First, back to bottom-line improvements. Those are largely due to our focus on integration and efficiencies over the last couple of years. Acquisitions bring cost and people, but also duplicate costs and roles. So when we integrate those businesses, our aim is to keep the revenues while starting to lower the cost immediately. You can see in the blue line here that we've consistently been able to reduce the headcount over time. And not all of that is just by acquisitions. AI is also helping us to further optimize our delivery of services and that keeps the momentum going also in the first quarter and onwards in 2026. Compared to a couple of years back, revenue per FTE doubled. So I'm very pleased with the ongoing focus and the results of the cost control and efficiency there. This image you'll probably recognize if you've been with us for a couple of these earnings calls, and we've included the LTM here for Q1 to show that the ongoing improvements in our OpEx versus revenues is still going. Then just highlighting some past events that are important for the financial framework. Of course, we refinanced the bonds longer period, 4 years now, lower principal at EUR 225 million and a lower interest rate. They all reduce our monthly interest burden and our refinancing and redemption costs over time. If you have a 3-year bond, then every 2 years, you need to start refinancing and that comes with a heavy cost, EUR 10.8 million last year. So if you don't have to do that for several years in a row, then that saves a lot of money. And we also, as you can see on the right-hand side, settled the majority of the Principion loan. We re-contracted the remaining amount in a similar fashion. And we also completely settled the Llama Group case. And this, in the end, turned out to be a residual EUR 5.2 million settlement, which we paid in 4.4 million shares earlier in the year as we announced already last year. These events are not trivial. They really contribute heavily to the bottom-line improvements. I want to say this because just on bond-related and one-off finance costs, we will save close to EUR 20 million this year, which is on its own more than 1/3 of the total losses of 2025. So I'm really happy to see the progress we're making in this area as well as on the -- in the business itself. And if you add to that approximately EUR 40 million a year, we will book this year in depreciation and amortization, you can see how operational and financial savings together creates already a very positive 2026 for us. So that's the summary on finance, and it wraps up Q1. Now let's look toward the rest of the year. Umut already said it, but Europe is -- let's go to the next slide, please. Europe is -- and its market for digital advertising is really under pressure. The big tech from the U.S. is often taking 70% to 80% market share of the spend. Think about how much people are spending on YouTube or TikTok or Facebook, right? So that's a big share of the total available digital advertising budgets. AI is also dominated by players outside of the EU mostly. They're taking big chunks out of publisher businesses. I think you'll recognize this. A lot of us are already asking chats for certain questions and the answer is given by the AI and you're no longer sent to the original website or app as Google used to do, you get the answer on the spot. So all the traffic is missing from the publishers, and all that traffic generated their advertising income. So they're also under pressure. Maybe counterintuitive, but EU regulations, they basically favor the big giants. If you think about privacy, for instance, as an example, it's easier to provide that privacy if you own everything, if you own the ad platform and you own YouTube, et cetera, then all of the data and the information stays within that company, of course. So you never have to worry about privacy and how to manage people's privacy with cookie consent, et cetera. It's not there. Only if you're smaller and you need to work together within the network, then you also need to implement massive compliance and structures to be able to show that you're compliant. So weirdly enough, where Europe is very much about making sure that the rules are there, all those rules are often working against the European companies. Then everywhere in the world, there is, of course, the macro turbulence of wars and inflation. And then lastly, there's, of course, not much a small local company in Europe can do about it. I've seen the U.S. delegation to China. And in the background, there was like 5 CEOs of the biggest tech companies in the world. So these guys are so big that they're basically on that world stage also influencing the policies. And if we're a small, let's say, Belgian or Austrian publisher, then, of course, we are nowhere near that level. So in the end, it's a story that I often repeat, but scale is everything. Next slide, please. With scale -- yes, thank you. With scale, you can distribute development costs, you can distribute cost and energy of compliance, you can distribute HR and hosting costs across a wider revenue range. Scale is important. And in Europe, that means working together is crucial. You can have a lot of these companies on this slide that need to go between the advertiser and the publisher. But all of them have people working for them. All of them have rules to comply to. All of them have a finance department and a technology partner. So all of these costs are always duplicated. And yes, working together is basically for European companies, the only way to go. Our strategy as a platform has always been to consolidate Europe. And increasingly, we do not do this by acquiring companies completely anymore, but by partnering with them and providing them with tools to be more competitive and more profitable in their markets. And in return, we get their business and the volumes that keep our scale up. So in the next slide, this is why this year, we will increasingly work with media agencies, media resellers, publishers and the SME resellers also like Umut said before, to provide them the Azerion platform, which we have been scaling and has become better and better in the background, while they service their clients in the foreground. You can expect several announcements in the upcoming months around these 4 enterprise pillars, if you want, because we really believe this is a great time to partner up in Europe to create a network of skills that help the participants perform. And this is why -- last slide, please. Even if markets are unsure and geopolitical unrest is there, wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, AI is getting more and more traction. Yes, we still remain optimistic and guided to the 10% revenue growth year-on-year. The platform is ready. We've been working on it. And we've been discussing in the last couple of months new partnerships around Europe with real industry partners, and we are confident that we are going to close multiple of them that will grow the top line in the second half of the year, getting us to the 10% overall growth for the full year 2026. So yes, that's the last slide, I think, operator.

[Operator Instructions] We will now move into our Q&A session. I will now hand over to Sebastiaan Moesman for written questions.

Yes. Thank you, operator. Let's go through some of the questions here. One is on, I think many of you would expect that on AI. We do a lot of investor calls. AI is always an important one. As you can see in the numbers today, AI reduces the OpEx significantly and the headcount because we have basically virtual employees walking around now. But what is in it for us as clients is the question here. And I think I explained a little bit, but if you think about an advertising campaign, normally, the ad agency creates an ad, let's say, for the supermarket Intermarche, they have a nice ad. They show it throughout France on television, for instance, please come shop with us. This is a classic campaign. Now with the AI, what we can do is we can make the ad itself different for every single shop that they have. So Intermarche in France has about 1,800 different outlets. And so if you are close to a shop in Marseille, you will now get a different ad than the one that you get if you're in Paris, for instance. So the AI also helps the advertiser to basically do much more with the same advertising budget as he did in the past. Also, we can target the campaigns much better and the AI helps to run hundreds of campaigns in parallel, which used to take a lot of setups. Setting up one of these campaigns in our tech systems cost a human probably 1 or 2 hours. So we would never set up 2,000 of them for one client, but now we can. So it is really also on the client's side that the campaigns are becoming more and more effective and efficient. The next one. Retail media, that's always a big question in the markets. A lot of big U.S. partners are very loud in the market about retail media. What does Azerion actually do to get it? I think the biggest issue in retail media now is defining what it is. I think there's basically 2 ways to look at it. You have big e-commerce websites. So think about, say, online shops like groceries or eBay-like kinds, putting your ad there and integrating the advertising in the sales channel of those shops is part of retail media. And then you have the -- you could say the real retail media, so the actual brick-and-mortar shops where in the shop, there's screens and there's also point-of-sale advertising. We do this mostly on the -- well, actually, everybody can do this on the first part. So being a partner for a publisher to show ads in their shop is part of what we do. But in the real media, we see a lot of opportunities as well. So we are focusing heavily on digital out-of-home because digital out-of-home sounds like something different. But actually, if you're walking in the street, if you're in public transportation or in a shopping mall or in someone's actual shop, then for us, that's basically what we call digital out-of-home. That's what we are heavily investing in. So we're actually targeting the retail media ourselves pretty heavily, but mostly within the context of digital out-of-home. Let me see synergy and synergies of acquisitions is another question. I think what you see in this year is that our adjustments compared to last year are going down. So last year, I think we adjusted almost EUR 30 million, EUR 3-0 million out of -- because of restructuring and integrations. This year, it's probably going to be a little bit lower than half of that. But it means that the gap there is the wind down of previous integrations. So we're actually seeing those adjustments of last year turn into the EBITDA of this year. And so -- yes, that's what the synergies of coming together mean for us, and we can see this happening every year. Okay. Yes. I think I covered this a little bit, but indeed, the growth on the top line in Q1 is 1%. So if you think about our full year target of 10%, that sounds like low. But we are really confident that we are able to compensate this in the rest of the year because we see this coming from these big enterprise partnerships in the European industry where we really find media agencies, big resellers, publishers and SME resellers interested in working with us to capitalize on our whole platform infrastructure. So we're really confident that we are going to get to that number in the end anyway. Someone asks, can we show the last slide once more because it disappeared quickly. I think that was the one, yes, exactly. Thank you very much. Other question. Let me see Yes, there's a few questions about pricing. I think in the -- so there's 2 things to say about pricing. We basically take a percentage of whatever price is struck in the auctions. And so if prices go down, then our take rate on that in absolute sense, of course, also goes down a little bit. But the main pricing differences are in the formats. So if you have less web advertising with a low CPM and it moves into a high CPM or priced outdoor advertising, then those are the more meaningful shifts that are happening. We don't really see necessarily a massive price decrease. If you look at our total number of ads sold, it has increased in Q1, while the revenue remains stable. So you could argue it's a reduction of price, but it's more about a previous acquisition called Madvertise that got onboarded on the platform and that now also has its own impressions sold being counted. So we don't really see a lot of price erosion. It's more the shifting between formats that we keep a close eye on. Equity, yes, equity is indeed close to 0. Of course, Q1 is the worst of the quarters, and we're looking at that very closely to making sure that throughout the rest of the year, we're making sure that this goes in the right direction again. This -- I mean, the capital increase there, I think, could be, but we're not going to say anything specific about that here. What we want to do basically is make sure that the company is healthy and makes money. And then in the end, of course, equity also increases. So I think that should be the main focus, first getting profitable and then increasing the revenue so that we can enjoy the positives of that. The liabilities related to Targetspot, I think I covered because that was the full wind-down. So there's no more liability there, and we have extinguished it by paying them in shares in February, as I mentioned. Yes, on the cash position, I think it's interesting for everybody to know that we do run EUR 40 million a year depreciation, which on the net equity side, we're working on and should be bend the other way. But if you think about it, that is not a cash out. So if you look at our numbers, then if you take that out and you also take into account the reduction of the finance and interest cost of EUR 20 million, then on the cash level, we're going to be doing pretty nicely this year. Right, and that sort of sums up the questions that we had in the platform. So yes, thanks for all those questions. I hope all this gave you a little bit of better insight in Q1. And we're looking forward to speaking to you again at the end of the Q2 numbers. And then we'll do this again, and we'll see each other, I think it's end of August, yes. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.