HomeToGo SE (HTG.DE) Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to HomeToGo's Investor and Analyst Call following the publication of the Q3 financial figures of 2025. I'm delighted to welcome the CFO, Sebastian Bielski, who will speak in a moment. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be able to ask your questions directly to the management. Well, let's dive straight into the presentation. Mr. Bielski, the stage is yours.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining HomeToGo's Q3 2025 Earnings Call. I am pleased to welcome you as we present the results for our third quarter of this year. As you will see, this quarter clearly demonstrates the successful execution of our new B2B led strategy, delivering record revenues and our highest ever quarterly adjusted EBITDA. We're excited to walk you through these strong results. Given Patrick, Valentin and I had already given you a pretty comprehensive update on our strategy and the Interhome transaction about 3 weeks ago, I will today focus on the numbers rather than talking in depth again about strategy and operations. Let's start with a recap of our key highlights for the third quarter of this year. The first one is our IFRS revenue, which surged by about 24% to hit EUR 108 million. This is the best quarter we ever had as a group. Secondly, we had a really strong adjusted EBITDA. We reached an all-time record of about EUR 43 million for a quarter, which represents about 20% growth year-on-year. Looking at the 9 months numbers, growth was even stronger at almost 31% year-on-year. The third point to highlight is the development of our HomeToGo_PRO segment, which represents our B2B business. We have clearly established this business and segment as our new core for the revenue that we generate, for the growth that we generate and also for the profits. IFRS revenue climbed by more than 83% year-on-year to almost EUR 51 million and profitability also scaled massively with adjusted EBITDA more than doubling to about EUR 13 million. Fourth, the development in our Marketplace segment. As we have talked about in our last presentation and also in the Q2 presentation already, we have executed a shift in our strategy for the Marketplace segment where we now focus on profitability over incremental top line growth. And as you can see in the results for Q3, we have successfully executed and implemented this strategic shift. The execution of our strategy resulted in about 60% year-on-year increase in adjusted EBITDA for the first 9 months with results reaching EUR 10 million. This was especially driven by increased marketing efficiency and also a very good development of our take rate. Lastly, the successful closing of the Interhome transaction and the very strong start of the integration process. As you all know, we closed the transaction on the 28th of August and the progress on the integration is fully on track. We have already achieved a number of key milestones, some of them even ahead of schedule, including the successful migration of the Interhome B2C channel and front end to HomeToGo's core technology platform. Let's now take a closer look at our key financials for Q3 and the first 9 months of this year. I will start with booking revenue. Growth in booking revenues has accelerated significantly in the third quarter with booking revenues growing by about 17% year-on-year to EUR 73 million. This strong quarter also helped to lift our 9-month performance to almost EUR 227 million, which represents an 8% year-on-year growth. Looking at IFRS revenues, we achieved a new quarterly record with revenues surging 24% year-on-year to more than EUR 108 million in the third quarter. As you can also see from this slide, IFRS revenues grew even stronger than booking revenues for both the third quarter and also the 9-month period. For the first 9 months, IFRS revenue crossed the EUR 200 million milestone now reaching EUR 201.2 million, which represents a growth of about 14%. Lastly, looking at the adjusted EBITDA. We had a very strong Q3 performance and we reached an all-time high of EUR 43 million in adjusted EBITDA, up 20% year-on-year. We maintained a very strong margin of almost 40%. In terms of the first 9 months performance, profitability improved even faster than revenues growing 31% year-on-year to EUR 22 million. Overall, for the first 9 months, this resulted in a margin expansion to almost 11% for the 9-month period. The development of the adjusted EBITDA highlights the scalability of our business where we couple tight cost control with growing revenues and that leads to expanding margins. Now let's take a closer look at the composition of our booking revenues, IFRS revenues and adjusted EBITDA divided by segments for the first 9 months of 2025. The group overall is up 8% year-on-year, as I said before, to almost EUR 227 million. HomeToGo_PRO is clearly our growth driver. The volume-based revenues surged by about 40% to almost EUR 61 million driven by very good organic strength and also a 1-month contribution from Interhome following the closing on the 28th of August. Subscriptions also showed very solid double-digit growth of about 14%. Looking at the Marketplace, again the results reflect our focus on quality over quantity. Onsite bookings grew slightly by about 2% while advertising actually declined by 7%. This was due to reduced marketing spend as well as an ongoing push to replace advertising revenue with higher value onsite revenue. You may remember in the second quarter results, we had also talked a little bit about this and as an example, I want to highlight again that we moved Expedia and Vrbo, which is one of our 2 big partners in the advertising side, to onsite for most of the business we do with them. Now looking at IFRS revenues. Again very strong growth for the group of 14% to over EUR 200 million. HomeToGo_PRO, the volume-based IFRS revenues jumped by about 64% to almost EUR 62 million. And lastly, Marketplace remained broadly stable with onsite booking up 2% offsetting the managed decline in advertising. Again the decline in the advertising revenue is one of the strategic choices that we made for the Marketplace business. Lastly, looking at the adjusted EBITDA for the group. Significant improvement of 31% year-on-year to EUR 22 million, which confirms our strong commitment to sustainable and profitable growth. Looking at HomeToGo_PRO, it continues to deliver profitable growth with adjusted EBITDA up 14% to EUR 12 million while we continue to invest into scaling this business. Lastly, the Marketplace. I think looking at the adjusted EBITDA is really the strongest proof point for the strategy and where you can see it really yielding results. The adjusted EBITDA surged 60% year-on-year to EUR 10 million driven again by very strict cost discipline and higher marketing efficiency. We will now zoom in at booking revenues, IFRS revenues and adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter. Starting with the booking revenues. Growth for the group accelerated to 17% year-on-year or about EUR 73 million in booking revenues. For HomeToGo_PRO, again you can see that it's the clear growth engine of our business. Volume-based revenues nearly doubled surging 92% year-on-year to almost EUR 28 million, which was obviously also partially driven by the inclusion of Interhome for 1 month. But also the subscriptions saw very, very strong growth momentum and are up about 28%, which is purely organic. Looking at the Marketplace, results are in line with our strategy and also our expectations. Advertising revenue declined due to the intentional reduction in marketing spend and moving partners from offsite to onsite and you can see that the onsite bookings actually remained resilient growing by about 6%. Looking at the IFRS revenues. Again, group revenues surged by 24% to over EUR 108 million. We saw outstanding performance at HomeToGo_PRO. Volume-based revenues jumped 97% to over EUR 44 million, almost doubling year-on-year. Subscriptions grew 28% to about EUR 7 million benefiting from super, super strong Smoobu performance with growth of 41% year-on-year in the third quarter. So again Smoobu, one of our really beautiful businesses. Lastly, Marketplace onsite grew by 6%, which helped to offset the managed decline in advertising resulting from the strategic measures that we took for that part of the business. Lastly, adjusted EBITDA, very strong growth of 20% for the group reaching EUR 43 million. Also, please do remember that the third quarter is always our strongest quarter. So while we would love to see EUR 43 million in each and every quarter, I think that may take 1 or 2 years to get there. I'm kidding. It will probably take longer than 1 or 2 years. HomeToGo_PRO adjusted EBITDA more than doubled 109% year-on-year growth to EUR 13 million and remember that this only included Interhome for 1 month. If we had owned Interhome for the full quarter, this number would actually have been around EUR 70 million higher. So you can see again the really strong earnings and EBITDA contribution that will come from EBITDA. Lastly, the Marketplace remains the largest absolute contributor for this quarter on a statutory basis at least with EUR 30 million, which is 1% growth, and it maintained the high profitability despite the top line calibration. Short look at the development of the onsite take rate for the Marketplace business. Our onsite Marketplace continues to generate high quality demand. which our partners highly value. Our attractive value proposition continues to translate into further growth of our onsite take rate. We reached 13.5% in the third quarter, up from 13% in the same quarter of last year. This marks a very solid 0.5 percent point increase year-on-year, which highlights our ability to drive monetization and value from our existing user base on the Marketplace side of our business. Then also a quick look at the development of our regional booking mix again for the Marketplace business and our average basket size. On the left-hand side, you can see our regional booking mix and you can see that the DACH market; so Germany, Austria and Switzerland; remains our by far most important market, which accounts for about 70% of the booking revenue for the Marketplace business. It actually has also increased by about 6 percentage points year-on-year while the rest of Europe and North America are slightly lower in terms of the share. Now looking at the basket size evolution. Overall, our group basket size grew by about 2% to EUR 917. When we then zoom into the DACH market, you can see that the average DACH basket size increased by 4% to about EUR 810. If you exclude the short-term business, the DACH basket size grew even faster at about 6% to EUR 1,158. The reason why I wanted to talk a little bit about this is that many investors ask us if we see an impact from consumer spending weakness in our numbers and at least for our core DACH markets, which again represents 70% of our Marketplace business, this is really not the case. I believe that the best indicator to look at would be the basket size and they should decline from travelers shortening their holidays or trading down to cheaper properties and we currently really don't see that. What we do see is some weakness in the North American markets where basket size declined by about 8%. So we see some strain on the consumer on the other side of the Atlantic, but this market only accounts for 10% of our Marketplace business. We also had some investors asking us if the, so to say, flight restrictions due to the government shutdown in the U.S. had any impact on our business. Again travelers from the U.S. vacationing in Europe and using vacation homes is a very marginal part of our business. So we really did not see any impact from these flight restrictions. Slide 8 shows the evolution of our cost base, which is crucial for understanding our profitability and the impact of the Interhome consolidation. Let's focus on the Q3 numbers where you can see really the impact most clearly. When you look through the different cost items, you can see that cost of revenues shows actually an increase when it comes to the percentage of revenue which it represents from 1.2% in 2024 in the third quarter to 9.9% in the third quarter of this year. There is 2 drivers of this development. The first one, which is the much smaller one, is that we are continuing to scale our payments business on the Marketplace. You may remember that we talked about that in depth in the second quarter results. And then the much bigger impact is the 1-month consolidation of Interhome. Interhome also provides cleaning services and janitorial services to the properties which they manage and that is included in the cost of revenue and thus, the share of cost of revenue has increased because it is a relatively material part of their business. However, when you look at the more fixed cost blocks in our P&L, especially product development and admin expenses, you can actually see that even with 1 month of Interhome already included, we improved those costs as a percentage of revenue. We have included a chart in the back of the presentation in the appendix where we have dissected the third quarter into the organic growth and the impact of Interhome. And you can see when you look at the organic development for HomeToGo alone that for all of these costs are actually even on an absolute number lower in the third quarter of this year than in the third quarter of last year, which again highlights the very, very strong cost discipline and focus on costs that we have in the business. Lastly, a quick update on the progress of the integration of Interhome. Overall, we are very happy with it and I'm very pleased to report that we are fully on track. We're executing against a clear 18-month carve-out plan to transition Interhome to full operational independence from its former parent companies. We have already achieved a number of key milestones, many ahead of schedule. Number one will be the technology migration. As of November 5, we successfully launched the Interhome B2C channel on the HomeToGo core technology platform. This is a crucial step that immediately enables faster product development, greater flexibility, ensures the future scalability of the Interhome brand and also, by the way, generates a little bit of cost savings because Interhome is now running on the same tech platform for the front end at least as HomeToGo is already. Secondly, the rapid integration. Operationally, we have successfully exited the first transitional service agreements ahead of schedule, which reduces our dependency and also at least to a small degree has some cost savings attached to it. Unfortunately, the biggest cost savings come from transitional service agreements, which we will exit next year or at the beginning of 2027. Third, technology leadership. We have onboarded a dedicated Interhome CTO, who will drive the integration and future innovation of this business. We are clearly a tech company and we see a lot of value creation potential at Interhome to become a much more tech-driven business. And so we're super happy that we have found a very, very good CTO for this business. Fourth, we've taken over marketing from Interhome. This includes the consumer marketing, but also marketing for finding new hosts. We are leveraging our group's advanced data and technology solutions and again are also starting to generate some small cost savings because our existing marketing team at HomeToGo has taken that over without needing to scale its employee base. Let's also turn to our full year guidance for this year, which we had updated a couple of weeks ago and which we are confirming today. This slide presents 2 views of our guidance. The pro forma view, which reflects the true economic status quo and the statutory view, which reflects the accounting impact of the actual closing of the Interhome acquisition, which again only took place on the 28th of August. In our view, the pro forma guidance is most helpful for valuing our company today and also for modeling the next year. On this basis, we include Interhome as if we had owned it from January 1 of this year and we expect to generate IFRS revenues of about EUR 400 million, adjusted EBITDA of about EUR 40 million and a positive free cash flow for the full year. The key numbers here is the 22% year-on-year growth on our pro forma adjusted EBITDA, which clearly shows again the underlying profitability and operating leverage of the combined group. Lastly, the statutory guidance. This will allow you to benchmark us against numbers, which will be in our audited report for this year. But this view is distorted by the late consolidation of Interhome, which again was on the 28th of August. On that basis, we expect IFRS revenues of more than EUR 260 million, adjusted EBITDA of more than EUR 11 million and a negative free cash flow. I will not go through the bullet points again at the end of this slide. We also talked through them pretty much in depth 3 weeks ago. If there is any questions, I'm happy to take them at the end of this presentation. So lastly, to wrap it up. Our strategy is yielding strong results. Q3 has been a pivotal quarter. It provided the first clear proof point that our transformation and focus on B2B is working. HomeToGo_PRO is now our largest segment and is driving scalable growth in terms of revenues and EBITDA. The Marketplace has successfully shifted and delivered higher profitability, which was exactly what we intended for this part of our business. Second, the Interhome integration is on track. We have progressed swiftly and have already hit key milestones ahead of schedule as we have successfully, for example, completed the B2C channel migration to our HomeToGo tech platform. And lastly, we confirm our financial guidance based on the strong strategic execution and our robust 9 months. We are confident that we will hit our guidance. Again, we believe that the pro forma guidance is a good measure for the business as it stands right now and we expect about EUR 400 million in pro forma IFRS revenue and EUR 40 million in pro forma adjusted EBITDA.

Thank you very much for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session for an engaging conversation. We kindly request to ask your questions in person via the audio line. To do so, please click on the raise your hand button. If you're not able to speak freely today, you can also place your questions in our chat. Mrs. Cuneo. She actually asked the question in the chat box so I will just read them out loud for you. On marketing spend relocation; given the strategic focus towards the B2B-led HomeToGo_PRO segment, could you elaborate on the current stage of marketing spend reallocation between the Marketplace and HomeToGo_PRO segments and what further shifts we can expect, for example, in terms of marketing costs as a percentage of revenue? And secondly, on typical gross profit margin in large business, considering the significant increase in cost of revenues due to Interhome, what would be a typical gross profit?

Okay. So I'll start with the marketing and just to clarify, we are not reallocating marketing euros between B2C and B2B, but we are reallocating capital. So what we're doing is we are reducing marketing spending in the B2C side of our business so the Marketplace and we're reallocating that capital to the B2B side. But that doesn't mean that it will end up in the B2B side in the form of marketing. It can also be or it will actually be not majorly marketing. It will rather be sales, it will be tech and product development and it will also be M&A. So just to clarify that there is no misunderstanding there. As we've also outlined a couple of weeks ago, we're about or we're in the process of putting together our budget for next year. So we're expecting a relatively material drawdown in the marketing for next year, but we're not in a position at the moment to guide on any specific numbers. In terms of the gross profit margin, I think the best way to look at it is in the back of this presentation, you can see the pro forma numbers that we have prepared and also shown to the market in the last presentation that we gave 3 weeks ago, which on a pro forma basis includes Interhome. So you can see the gross margin there, which is very indicative also how we would see it going forward.

There are actually 2 more questions by Ms. Cuneo. The first one is on a typical gross profit margin in large business considering the significant increase in cost of revenues due to Interhome, what would be a typical gross profit margin we should expect for the enlarged group on a full year basis after accounting for seasonality? And secondly, within subscriptions revenue streams, you called out Smoobu. Can you please remind us of how much that represents of the mix and what trends have you observed in other products? Perhaps you could talk about subscribers' trends versus.

Yes. Maybe we can jump to the slide in the back of the presentation where we have shown the pro forma numbers on a quarterly basis. So this slide shows the pro forma view so that is Interhome together with HomeToGo. I think the easiest way for you to model is to just look at it on an LTM basis. So if you take the sum of the quarter 4 2024 up to and including the third quarter of this year, that gives you a full 12-month view, which is not distorted by any seasonality trends and that should be very indicative of the gross profit margin that you can assume. Can you repeat the Smoobu question maybe?

Yes. The second question was within subscription revenue streams, you called out Smoobu. Can you please remind us of how much that represents of the mix and what trends have you observed in other products? Perhaps you could talk about subscribers' trends versus.

So the subscription revenue, the biggest part comes from Smoobu. So Smoobu in itself is almost purely subscription. So we have another software or we have 2 other software businesses within the group. But in terms of the subscription revenue that we break out, most of it comes from Smoobu. The churn development that we're seeing at Smoobu is in line with historic trends and is very, very good. So we have relatively short payback periods for onboarding new customers and it is a very nicely scalable business.

All right. Thank you so much for your questions, Ms. Cuneo. We do have another risen hand from Mr. Nagaraj.

You have several brands now within the B2B side of things, multiple SaaS software businesses and some other brands as well. My question is when it comes to capital allocation given that you're now more focused on B2B, how do you plan to drive each of these brands or do you plan to like kind of consolidate the brands or what's your plan there? That's the first question. The second one is around the on-site take rate. It's improved, as you said, to 13.5% now. What's the kind of upper limit here and what's driving the current improvement? And then lastly, on the carve-out plan by March 2027, what does that actually mean in practice in terms of the improvements to the costs or anything else that you would expect perhaps from the upside to the margins from internalizing some of the OTA spend that you had historically. Sorry, when I say you, I mean Interhome had historically.

So I'll start with the first one, which was your question in relation to the brands. So we will consolidate the branding on the B2B side. So the term HomeToGo will always visible. So we will likely start with a co-branding exercise. So it will, for example, be Interhome, the HomeToGo originals. So we want to make it obvious to our customers on the B2B side that they are part of the HomeToGo ecosystem and we also want to make it easier for our customers there to transition between different parts of our business. So for example, Smoobu is targeted at owners with a small property portfolio so say kind of like 1 to 10 properties. If you keep buying properties, then probably SECRA is the better solution for you. And with co-branding, we also want to make that very obvious for you so that if you're looking for another solution, that you can move to SECRA or even to InterHome. So co-branding and we'll start that work in 2026. So in terms of the take rate, the good development that we're seeing is there's really not a single factor that I could call out. So we're constantly renegotiating our take rates with a host of partners. So that's really a daily occurrence. And overall, we do see that the added weight that we have in the market also coming from the Interhome transaction. So we're really a big player now, helps us to renegotiate take rates upwards. I don't want to give a numerical guidance on an upper end there to be honest. But it's a daily task for us to always look to improve our margins. And then lastly, your question in relation to the end of the TSAs in 2017. So step by step we will replace the TSAs with internal solutions. All of that is part of not just the plan to transition Interhome to stand-alone business, but also the plan to generate synergies. So we had given a couple of times some very specific guidance on the synergies and we had said that within the first 12 to 24 months after closing of the transaction, we expect to see EUR 10 million of synergies mainly coming from the cost side and getting off the relatively expensive services that the former owner had provided to the business and replacing them with cheaper internal services is an important part of that program. And I would invite you to just have another look at the presentation that we gave 3 weeks ago. We have a slide in there with the synergies and you can also see how the EUR 10 million synergies break up into the different buckets.

May I just quickly ask a quick follow-up. I know you probably don't want to make too many comments on this particular question, but just trying to see if there's any color you can provide at all that's to do with the organic kind of growth rate that we should be thinking about for the pro forma business going forward. I note the 4% growth that you have said on a pro forma basis for this year, but just wondering if any further color on that at this point in time.

I mean I don't, at this point in time, want to give any specific numerical guidance. But I think it should be clear to investors that the B2B part of our business is by far our biggest part now. So it represents about 64% of revenues. So any revenue growth will come from that side of the business. We have businesses within the B2B group, which grow at different rates. So we have businesses like Smoobu, as I said during the presentation, which had an outstanding Q3 with growth of 41%, but it's a smaller part. Then we obviously have Interhome. You can see how Interhome has developed over the last couple of years. So we would expect, unfortunately, not quite 41% growth there, but maybe high single-digit or low double-digit growth there. And for the Marketplace, as we have said 3 weeks ago, we're resetting that business in 2026 through lowering the capital allocation into marketing there, which should most likely lead to a negative growth for a single year so '25 to '26. And we then afterwards expect also the Marketplace business to go into growth mode again, probably growing in line with the overall market.

We have another risen in hand from [indiscernible].

I just have a question. You also announced that you are considering a placement of a bond of up to EUR 150 million. I was a little bit surprised of that since you already have the financing at hand and I would think that a bond would probably, all costs included, be a little bit more expensive than the bank liabilities. So should I see this step as a clear indication that you have other deals on the table and want to be ready for that or how should we see this potential bond placement?

So yes, you're right. So we have made an ad hoc announcement last night that we have engaged banks; which is Pareto, ABG and UniCredit to explore a potential bond offering for us in the Nordic bond format of up to EUR 150 million with a duration of 5 years. We expect to start the marketing in the next couple of days. So the purpose of this bond is to: number one, refinance the existing debt. So of the EUR 150 million, EUR 75 million will be used to refinance the existing debt that we have from UniCredit and KfW. We would then also, so to say, prefund the first 2 payments of the deferred purchase price, which adds up to EUR 22 million, which then leaves about EUR 50 million for M&A. So your assumption that we have a deal pipeline that we want to execute is absolutely correct. So we have been a serial acquirer of businesses in the past. We have a long track record going back all the way to 2017. We've acquired many, many businesses. As we stated a couple of weeks ago, we do see M&A as absolutely a part of our growth strategy. We intend to acquire businesses on the B2B side so that is software businesses and then also agency businesses. We have a very active deal pipeline of more than 10 companies that we actually currently are in discussion with, all of them on the B2B side, and there is some very actionable targets on that list. And as I said, EUR 50 million of the Nordic bond would be to fund that M&A. In terms of more expensive, actually our loan at the moment is also not cheap. So we have an interest rate with a base rate of 3-month Euribor and a margin of 5.75%. We expect the Nordic bond to be relatively similarly priced so with a 5% handle in front of it. So it could even be maybe a little bit cheaper than the financing that we have in place right now and much, much, much more flexible.

We do have another question in our chat box by [indiscernible]. He's asking please compare adjusted EBITDA with EBITDA quarter-by-quarter for the last 12 months.

Look, I think I would invite you to call our Investor Relations people so Carsten and Sebastian, I think this is more a data request. So we're very happy to give you that. You actually can also find that information in the quarterly reports where we always have a very detailed schedule showing differences between EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA, but we're happy to walk you through it again. But I think this is more a data request. So happy to answer it through our Investor Relations people.

We have another risen hand by Mr. Huber.

On the pro forma base, you're showing the only stand-alone for HomeToGo. Can you give an indication how much is the PRO business in there, the growth for the last quarter if you want?

So the Interhome business is fully included in our PRO business. So there is no part of Interhome included in our PRO business if that's your question.

We do have another question in our chat box by [indiscernible]. He's asking do significant marketing savings in the B2C sector pose a long-term threat to traffic and thus to the number of bookings. Can you give please more color on this?

No, we don't think so. So what we're pulling back from is a fight about market share on the B2C side, right? So the B2C market has a certain growth and if you are trying to grow faster than that, you will have to go into hand-to-hand combat with people like Booking and Airbnb and Expedia. So they are unfortunately all big organizations. And what our strategic thinking behind that is we do not want to fight about market share on the B2C side anymore with these people. We see them as partners especially on the B2B side. So all of our properties are also available through Booking.com and so forth and we don't want to be in competition with them anymore on the B2C side. So we're happy to grow with the market. We're happy to see our marketing spending yielding even better results than it shows right now, but we don't see this as a long-term threat to that side of the business.

We have not received any risen hands or questions so far. There's nothing in the chat box. So please, ladies and gentlemen, if you have any further questions, please ask them now into our chat or raise your hand. We have not received anything anymore. So I would say we have come to the end of today's earnings call. You will find the presentation on HomeToGo's website and also at the Airtime platform by clicking into today's event. Dear participants, thank you for joining and your interest in HomeToGo. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. Thanks once again and have a nice day and goodbye.