eDreams ODIGEO S.A. (EDR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today for our First Half Fiscal Year 2025 Results Presentation for the 6 Months ending 30th of September 2024. I'm David de la Roz, the Director of Investor Relations at eDreams ODIGEO. As always, you can find the results materials, including the presentation and our results report on the Investor Relations section of our website. I would like to inform you that this presentation is shorter than usual, and we will not be doing a strategy update. We have our Capital Markets Day coming up on the 31st of January, in which we will be going into great detail on eDO's significant potential opportunity to grow with our unique platform. I will now pass you over to Dana Dunne, our CEO, who will take you through the first part of the presentation.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. eDO continues to show very strong growth in the Prime subscribers and cash marginal profit margin continues to build as the maturity of Prime members increases. In fact, cash marginal profit margin was up 9 percentage points over the last year to 44%. In addition, we added 303,000 subscribers in the second quarter of FY '25 and are on target to meet our self-set targets for this fiscal year. Today, we'll take you through the key points of our strong performance. This will include, firstly, the eDO results highlights. And then second, we'll move on to reviewing our strong first half of the year results in which the Prime model continues to drive very strong growth, and we'll conclude today's presentation with some closing remarks about our long-term fundamental growth potential well beyond FY '25. Please turn to Slide 4, which is a summary of our performance for the first half of fiscal year 2025. As mentioned, our profit margin has increased significantly due to the strength of our Prime model and the increasing maturity of Prime members. This has resulted in cash EBITDA growing 28% year-on-year. Some of the key highlights for today's presentation are: first, in the first half of this fiscal year, the strength of the Prime model drove significant growth and has guided improvements in profitability. The Prime members grew 28% year-on-year, which is in line with our guidance and reached 6.5 million members with net adds at 303,000. Overall, we're on track to reach our 3.5-year old self-imposed FY '25 target of 7.25 million members. I'd like to remind you, as highlighted in the past that we expect some volatility on quarterly net adds. Also cash marginal profit was EUR 131 million, and that's up 20% year-on-year, and the margin had a 6 percentage point improvement, reaching 36.2%. That's in line with our guidance. Cash EBITDA was EUR 81 million, that's up 28% year-on-year, and the cash EBITDA margin improved 5 percentage points over the last year. More importantly, our free cash flow, excluding non-Prime working capital, grew even more and was EUR 42 million versus just EUR 26 million in the first half of FY '24. This is a EUR 16 million improvement year-on-year, a remarkable increase of 61%. Second set of highlights is that the Prime model continues to drive very strong growth. The growth in Prime more than offset the anticipated declines in the non-Prime side of the business and results in significant improvement in profitability. Prime revenue margin grew by 18%, following the strong growth in members and as guided, partially offset by a lower ARPU. Prime cash margin grew 45% and the margin had a 9 percentage point improvement year-on-year. Prime cash EBITDA grew even more as we start to leverage a more stable fixed cost base. Together with strong top line growth, the Prime cash EBITDA grew 53%, and the margin expanded 8 percentage points. Third highlight is about our outlook. eDO is on track to meet the EUR 180 million cash EBITDA target. Prime member target is in excess of 7.25 million members, and we will achieve it as well as we'll achieve to generate the free cash flow, excluding non-Prime working capital of over EUR 90 million, and that's more than double the free cash flow that we generated in FY '24. All of this growth has been delivered despite the many industry headwinds over the past 3 years. As guided in the first quarter of FY '25, it's important to highlight that we expect to see better year-on-year comparatives in the second half of the fiscal year as our member base continues to increase and the maturity of our Prime members grows. Year-on-year comparatives for the remaining of FY '25 are expected to be as follows: Prime members in the second half of the fiscal year are expected to grow around 24% versus March 2024 and cash marginal profit margins are expected to be around 42% to 43% in the second half. This results in around 40% cash marginal profit margin for the group for the full year of FY '25. Furthermore, after the successful completion of the 13th of September of the share buyback, eDO has enough treasury shares to fund its LTIP deliveries until FY '27. And up to September, we have invested EUR 36 million in repurchasing the shares. In addition, the Board of Directors has approved, given the undervaluation of our shares, a new share buyback program, which will start in the coming week. This share buyback -- this new share buyback program has a double purpose. First is to acquire the company's shares necessary to fulfill its obligations arising for the company from the existing incentive plans in shares. And the second purpose is to reduce the capital stock by redeeming the remaining shares acquired, subject to the approval of the General Shareholders' Meeting. The maximum monetary amount of the buyback program is authorized up to EUR 50 million. And the maximum number of shares to be acquired is 7.8 million, of which 3.4 million shares will be used to fulfill the company's obligations under the FY '28 LTIP program, and the remaining shares will be redeemed. Looking into the future, we've been building a long-term sustainable proposition and eDO has strong fundamental growth potential beyond FY '25. Prime is significantly under-penetrated in main markets and can expand into new markets as well. In sum, Prime's proven model continues to drive very strong growth and profit growth, and it has delivered significant uplift in profit margins. We believe we have the right model, the right people, the right structure to seize and deliver on the exciting shareholder value creation opportunities ahead of us. With that, now let me pass it over to David Elizaga, who will take you through some of the KPIs of our Prime model and the strong growth and significant profit improvements in the first half of FY '25.

Thank you, Dana. If you could all please turn to Slide 6 of the presentation, I will take you through Prime model. The profitability of eDreams was up significantly due to strong growth of Prime numbers in year 2 plus and cash marginal profit margin for the Prime segment reached 44%. Cash EBITDA also rose significantly. In the second quarter of fiscal '25, our last 12 months Prime cash marginal profit margin continued to advance. It increased from 36% in the second quarter of fiscal '24 to 44%, which is a 9 percentage points improvement. Group cash EBITDA last 12 months also improved substantially. In the second quarter of fiscal '25, we reached 20% margins on a last 12-month basis versus 17% on a last 12-month basis a year ago, and that is an improvement of 3 percentage points. If you please turn to Slide 7, and let me remind you, and this is applicable to the previous slide as well as this slide, that when looking at Prime versus non-Prime, we still think it makes more sense to look at our business on a last 12-month basis. Prime is an annual subscription business and the non-Prime part is quite influenced by seasonality patterns. Our KPIs reported today show a strong growth and a significant uplift in marginal profit. Cash marginal profit was up 20% over the last 12 months as we have more year 2 plus members of Prime. Also Prime store growth more than offset the anticipated and planned decline in the non-Prime side of the business as we focus on Prime. We continue to be selective on how we spend marketing, and we put more focus on Prime products versus developing products and services for the non-Prime side of the business. EDO is fundamentally a subscription business focused on travel. Over the last 12 months, Prime has delivered 66% share of group cash revenue margin and 83% share of group cash marginal profit versus 54% and 64% just a year ago. There should be no dispute now that we are a subscription-based business and should be valued as such. As we now have a much larger proportion of our Prime members who have renewed their subscription for a second year, third, fourth, et cetera, the level of profitability of Prime continuously improves. Now if you could all please turn to Slide 8, I will take you through the financial results in more detail. In the first half of fiscal '25, we delivered a strong growth in cash EBITDA and substantial improvements in margin as the maturity of the Prime member increases. In the first half '25, the cash revenue margin was 2% higher than the first half '24. Cash marginal profit and cash EBITDA improved 20% and 28%, respectively, between this first semester and the previous first semester of the year '24. Over the past year, our subscribers have grown by 28% to EUR 6.5 million, and our ARPU has been reduced by EUR 4.2. As guided in the first quarter, we have given more discounts to our Prime members as our algorithms indicate it is better for lifetime value. As a result of all the above, ARPU is expected to continue at around mid-70s for the remainder of the year. While speaking about our revenues, you will notice in the breakdown by type of revenue that gradual revenue is increasing while transaction date revenue is decreasing. There are 3 drivers behind this. The most important already mentioned, is higher Prime discounts. But additionally, we are experimenting with higher tiers of Prime that include services previously sold as ancillaries. And therefore, we're moving former transaction date revenue to gradual revenue. And lastly, it's important to note that our access to Ryanair content continues to be intermittent. We have been dealing with the intermittent access to Ryanair content now for over 12 months, and our results already reflect all of that for a full year. We have the strength of our subscription business model continuing to deliver on material cash EBITDA and cash flow growth. I would like to emphasize strongly that Prime renewals have remained unaffected as eDO and Prime continue to deliver exceptional value across nearly 700 airlines, millions of accommodation options and thousands of car rental providers. However, we acknowledge that customers solely interested in Ryanair flights are less likely to join Prime. Overall, it's fair to say that excluding this headwind, we would have materially exceeded our target for fiscal '25 Prime members. Coming back to our first half P&L, 68% of our cash revenue margin and 87% of cash marginal profit in the first half of '25 are now from Prime members. These numbers are for the first 6 months. The previous numbers 2 slides ago were for last 12-month basis. As guided, the profitability of our company has been up significantly due to the strong growth of Prime members in year 2 plus. Cash marginal profit margin had a 6 percentage point improvement. Cash EBITDA margin in the first semester achieved very substantial improvement and stood at 22% versus 18% in the first quarter of fiscal '24. Cash EBITDA stood at EUR 81.1 million in the first half of fiscal '25, and that is an increase of 28% year-on-year. Please turn to Slide 9 of the presentation. Revenue margin, excluding adjusted revenue items, was maintained in line with last year. The strong growth of the Prime revenue margin, which grew by 17%, following the strong growth in members was partially offset as guided by a lower ARPU. The strong growth in Prime revenue margin was partly offset by the non-Prime revenue margin, which decreased 21% versus the first half of fiscal '24, following the switch of our customers from non-Prime to Prime and more generally due to the focus on the Prime side of the business. Variable costs decreased by 6% in the first semester despite the higher revenue margin as the increase in maturity of Prime members reduces acquisition costs. Fixed costs increased by EUR 4.3 million, driven by higher personnel costs and to a lesser extent, higher IT costs. Now that we have reached our recruiting targets, fixed costs will grow less quickly than they did over the last 2 years. And as a result, we will see more leverage of our fixed cost for the rest of the fiscal year. As a result of all of my previous comments, adjusted EBITDA was EUR 47.8 million from EUR 36.1 million in the first half of '24. Adjusted net income stood at EUR 8.1 million in the first semester. Turning now to Slide 10, I will take you through the cash flow statement. We closed the first half with positive net cash from operating activities of EUR 27 million as a result of the successful expansion of the Prime member base. In the first half of fiscal '25, we had a working capital outflow of EUR 19.4 million compared to an inflow of EUR 31.7 million in the first half of '24. This has been mainly driven by a meaningful reduction in the average basket value between June and September '24 and a seasonal reduction in the payables due to hoteliers, partially compensated by an increase in volumes between June and September of '24. Should we see similar performance of the average basket value in the second half of '25 to the way it was in fiscal '24, this will result in neutral non-Prime working capital in fiscal '25 for the aggregate of fiscal '25. We have ample liquidity and headroom to deliver our plans, a consequence of our strong business model, cash generation and active management. At the end of September, the liquidity position was strong at EUR 187 million. We have continued to invest in the business to capture future growth with EUR 27.5 million spent in the first semester. That's an increase of EUR 4.5 million as we capitalized more software. Cash used in financing amounted to EUR 49.3 million compared to EUR 16.7 million in the first half of '24. The variation of EUR 32.6 million in financing activities mainly relates to the acquisition of treasury shares for EUR 36.2 million during the first half of '25, offset by the payment done in '24 of the government-sponsored loan for EUR 3.8 million. I will now turn the presentation back to Dana to do some closing remarks.

Thanks, David. Please turn to Slide 11 of the presentation. Overall, we're very confident that we will meet our self-imposed FY '25 targets, which, as you remember, is 7.25 million Prime members and cash EBITDA in excess of EUR 180 million. Overall, eDO has huge potential and is delivering superior returns for shareholders and customers while transforming and revolutionizing the industry. Furthermore, we're confident in the growth and profitability outlined in our guidance and also believe the company's worth continues to be unrecognized and undervalued. As a result of this and due to our strong liquidity and balance sheet, the Board has approved a new daily repurchase program with a maximum monetary amount of up to EUR 50 million. We will consider subsequent share buybacks as we continue to generate free cash flow on an ongoing basis. I'd like to conclude today by highlighting the strong fundamental growth potential we have beyond FY '25. When we announced our self-imposed targets for FY '25, that was back in November of 2022, there were a lot of macroeconomic events that were not forecasted at the time. No additional waves of COVID such as Omicron, no macroeconomic concerns of 2022 and 2023, resulting in high inflation and significant economic uncertainty, and travel was expected to be back at pre-COVID levels much sooner than what actually happened. Yet despite these headwinds and some others, we have grown our business very strongly in terms of Prime members, in terms of profitability and in terms of actual quantum of profits. Underlying all of this is our relentless focus on building a great platform, great customer experience. We believe we have growth potential far beyond FY '25 with a proposition and business model that is successful and will continue to thrive. We would be delighted to have you join us at our Capital Markets Day on the 31st of January, where we will take you on a journey through eDO's transformation into one of the leading subscription-led tech companies in Europe, a company that is among the leaders in the world in AI and reshaping the global travel industry. And we look forward to discussing this in more detail and about our future.

Thank you, Dana. With that, we would now like to take your questions. We will answer the questions sent to us in writing in the webcast. We will take questions on a first come first serve and we'll also try to group questions of similar nature. Should we not have time to respond to questions, all of them, the Investor Relations team will make sure those are answered afterwards. So I'm looking at the questions right here. The first question comes from Carlos Trevino from Banco Santander. It's two questions, actually. Could you elaborate in the reasons behind the working capital cash outflow in the second quarter of '25? How do you expect working capital to evolve in the next 2 quarters? Well, repeating what I said during the prepared remarks and maybe expanding just a little bit, there are three factors that are affecting here. Two of them negative, one of them positive that partially compensates the two negatives. The two negatives, the first one is that the basket size has been lower in September versus June. And that is something that we don't control, right? Customers go on the website and make their own travel options. And if on average, they choose to travel for either places closer to home or for a lower number of people or for less nights, then the basket size would be lower. It's one of the things that has happened in this quarter. The second factor, and this is maybe newer, and I'm going to spend just slightly more time on it, is the seasonality of the hotel payables. We're selling more and more hotels gradually, and they have more importance in the working capital position as well. And hotels has different mechanics of cash flow than the flights. On the flights, like you very well know, if customer base are booking on a certain day, we collect the cash on that day. On an average, we pass that over to the airlines 2 weeks later. In the case of the bookings of hotels, it's different. We collect the cash today and we pass on the cash to the hotelier after the check-in of the customer. So on quarters where you have more check-ins because there's seasonality high in terms of when the customer actually stays at the hotel, then you have more outflow and vice versa is you have a quarter closing in which is not in a period in which there are a lot of stays in hotels, then the payable is higher. September quarter includes the check-ins of August and September, whereas the quarter ended June is the opposite. It doesn't have as many check-ins. So therefore, seasonally speaking, the quarter ended September is an outflow for the hotel side of the business. The factor that is partially compensating the two negatives is that we've had more bookings, more volumes in the September quarter than in the June quarter, and that helps to compensate partially. The second part of your question, how do we expect the working capital to evolve in the next 2 quarters? Let me talk first about the year as a whole. On the year as a whole, if we have normal seasonality for basket size from here to the end of the year and normally, there is a higher basket size in quarter ended March than in the quarter ended September, then we should have a neutral working capital, therefore, implying that if we've had minus EUR 20 million in the first semester, you would see plus EUR 20 million for a balance of approximately 0 for the aggregate of the second half. But that will have 2 parts, of course. The quarter ended December is always an outflow and the quarter ended March will be an inflow. The next set of questions come from Guilherme Sampaio from CaixaBank. I'm going to take them one by one because there are several. The first one says, could you provide more details regarding the decrease in average basket value this quarter? I've talked about that already. There's a second part of the question that says, was that specific to any region in particular? And the answer is no, it's not specific of any region in particular. The next question says, how do you plan to compensate for this impact to reach your free cash flow target for this year? So to be clear, our target of free cash flow is free cash flow, excluding the non-Prime working capital. So it is cash EBITDA, less taxes, less CapEx, less interest. That is the definition of free cash flow that we use because the non-Prime working capital is not something that we totally control, whereas the other 4 we do. Having said that, and as I said on the question from the analyst of Banco Santander, we do expect that the non-Prime working capital, if seasonality is the one that normally happens between September and March, that will be neutral for the aggregate of the year. The third and last question from Guilherme Sampaio says, how should we think about the modeling of change in Prime deferred revenue in fiscal Q3 and fiscal Q4? So like we always recommend you should arrive to the cash EBITDA directly, to the cash revenues directly by multiplying the average number of Prime members times the output. That's what gets you to the cash revenue margin and then you subtract the cost to get to the cash EBITDA. So the projection of what can be the deferred revenue should be used only to get to the IFRS revenue or to the IFRS EBITDA. We do expect that for the second semester, you potentially would have a deferred revenue slightly lower than you had in the first semester, probably in order of magnitude of about [ 15 ]. The next set of questions come from Beatriz Rodriguez from Bestinver. The first one says, in terms of ARPU, what evolution can we expect for the second half of the year? And here, it is a continuation of the trend that we said we're going to have during this year, which is around mid-70s. That's what you should expect. There is a second question that says, how is the situation with Ryanair at the moment? Dana?

Yes. I'll take that, David. Well, first of all, in the presentation, we already shared an update with you. And so just to be frank with you, we have nothing else to announce in that regard. What we are is we're really focused on driving growth and delivering lasting values for our customers, and in turn for our shareholders and for eDO as a whole. That is what really matters to us. That's what drives us and with our -- the FY '25 self-set targets. Look, we're now well within reach of them, and we're very proud to be on track to deliver what we set out to do in November, 3 years ago in an incredibly different market set of conditions. David?

Yes. The next set of question comes from Bharath Nagaraj from Cantor Fitzgerald. The first one is, what would be your Plan B during the second half if the subscriber renewals are not tracking in line with your expectations? How are renewals tracking so far? Look, we have been -- I'll take this. We have been offering a subscription model for 7 years. So we have a long experience in renewals. We have seen our percentage of renewal is slightly increasing. And you can see as well because we share and they're public actually, the very high levels of customer satisfaction that we have. So we're very confident in our level of renewals given the track record that we have across now many geographies. The second question is, please, could you help us understand how come you have kept a similar level of marketing costs in France in the first half of '24 as last year, but decreased in other regions? Any particular trends in France that you want to highlight? We actually do not disclose marketing spend in isolation. You're probably looking at total variable costs. And the change you see might also be driven by different changes in variable costs. You could have, for instance, higher investments on a particular region in terms of customer service, right? You could have higher or lower variation of either the IT expenses, which is driven by the number of searches that customers do, you could have changes in the merchant costs as well. So I'm afraid I'm not going to comment on differences of marketing costs across regions. The third question says, how should we read the reduction in average basket value year-on-year? Could you separate out the effects for Prime versus non-Prime? Look, the effects overall of the basket size, I've already commented on. You have a lot more of that drop in non-Prime, which is a much more, let's say, opportunistic type of customer for us than you have in the Prime. In Prime, you have a lot more stability. And the last one is what has 3A, 3B. It says, how was the volume of bookings in Prime evolved? And how was the dollar value of bookings in Prime evolved? Look, we don't give bookings of Prime, and it's been now more than a year, then we don't give bookings in Prime. The number of bookings does not drive neither the revenues or the profitability of the business. It is the renewals of those Prime members. We don't make more money from a Prime member that does 4 bookings in a year versus a Prime member that makes 3 or 2 bookings in a year. And that was a conscious decision to not distract people from it. Now the dollar part, you're talking about the basket size again, so this is a repetitive question really. The next set of questions come from Julian Cook of ATKA Capital. First one says, on Page 65, 2.2, cash revenue margin for the 6 months 2024 is EUR 327 million, which is nearly identical to the 6 months of '23, which was equal to EUR 327 million. Please explain why this is flat. Look, like I've said in the prepared remarks, you have -- within that number, you have 2 very different segments. You have the Prime segment growing at close to 20%, and you have the non-Prime segment declining at 21%. That is expected, and that is something that we have been anticipating and guiding the market about. There's a portion of the growth in Prime, which is customers that used to be transactional customers of us that become Prime members. And it's also an area of the business that we don't really focus on. There are no specific product or services, which are being done for the non-Prime side of the business. It's all done for the Prime side of the business. In occasions, you could have some product that is common to both of the 2, but there's no product which exists only on the non-Prime side of the business. The second question is, it seems the improvement in margin is due to the reduction in marketing cost. Can you comment on this? Yes. This is something that we have explained for a very long time now. The margin of a second year Prime member, it is around 50% margin as revenue less all of the variable costs, whereas in the first year of a Prime member, the margin is about 17%. The main difference between the 2 is that from the second year onwards, the customer comes to us direct, therefore, not generating the marketing cost expense, therefore, increasing the margins. So it is what we repeat time and again. The 2 fundamental things to look at in our business is the growth in the Prime members, and it is also the maturity of those Prime members, i.e., how many are in second year and subsequent. On Page 68 -- this is the third question. On Page 68, 4.1, free cash flow before financing. This is -- sorry, there's -- I think there's -- free cash flow before financing minus EUR 830,000. I think that what the investor is getting a little bit wrong here is that -- and the main difference in the free cash flow before financing. So therefore, operating cash flow less investment cash flow, you have a lot of growth in the EBITDA. You have some growth in the CapEx, but a lot less than the growth in the EBITDA. And therefore, that is a very growing number, excluding the swing in the non-Prime working capital, which we have explained already a few times. The next question comes from Hicham Talebali of David Capital Partners Europe, says, could you disclose the percentage of year 2 plus members currently? That is not a number that we have actually ever disclosed because disclosing the members would make it clear what is the level of renewal, i.e., the level of churn. What we have disclosed on occasion, and we do this maybe once a year, sometimes in the past, twice a year maximum was the percentage of revenues coming from year 2 plus members. The last time we did it, and I'm speaking from memory here, it was in excess of 60%, maybe it was 65%, 66%. Since then, it has continued to increase, and it has increased by several percentage points. And that is the main driver of the increase of the margins of cash marginal profit by 9 percentage points over the last 12 months. At this moment, we have no more questions. So thank you, everybody, for joining us in the webcast today. Before we conclude the call, I would like to inform you that on Friday, the 31st of January, we will be hosting our Capital Markets Day. And should you wish to join, please contact our Investor Relations team. A bit later than that, on Thursday, the 20th of February, we will be hosting the conference call for the third quarter of fiscal '25 results presentation that is for the 9 months ended on the 31st of December 2024. In the meantime, we will be happy to receive your questions via the Investor Relations team or the investor e-mail address, which is [email protected]. Thank you very much. Have a very nice day.