HomeToGo SE ($HTG)

So dear investors, welcome to today's Platform Summit, where 4 leading European players will be presenting: HomeToGo, Verve, Shelly and JDC. For years, platform companies have been among the most resilient and attractive business models. They grow not despite economic uncertainty, but often precisely because of their architecture, network effects, scalable technology and data-driven processes to create a stability that traditional models can hardly match. What investors particularly value can be summarized in 3 points: Resilience in volatile markets, scalability without costs increasing linearly and deep market integration that makes platforms indispensable infrastructure. Especially in challenging times, it becomes clear, platform companies are stable anchors in a dynamic environment, and that is precisely why they are focused of European capital markets. With that, we now start with the first company. Therefore, I hand over to the HomeToGo CFO, Sebastian Bielski. Sebastian, the stage is yours.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation. Thanks to all the participants for being here. I will spend maybe 10, 15 minutes going through a high-level introductory presentation, and then I invite everybody to ask as many questions as you like. So I'll spend a little bit less time presenting, so we have more time for Q&A. Who is HomeToGo and what are we all about? In one sentence, we are the backbone of vacation rentals in Europe. And we are all about houses, vacation houses, like you can see on this beautiful picture. Maybe one of you are in a happy position to be the lucky owner of such a house, and you probably take your summer vacations in such a house together with your family. So it is a very emotional thing for you. But given that you are also interested in shares and investing, I assume that you don't just see it as an emotional thing but also something that is there to make some money for you. And that is exactly where we come in and we can help you. So you may spend 2, 3 weeks per year in that house, but it's actually empty most of the time. So you probably want to utilize that house for making money for you. And so you're looking for travelers to rent a house. So we can help you find them. We have a marketplace where you can advertise your house and where travelers can find you. You need to write invoices or manage a booking calendar, so your house is not, by accident, double-booked. We have a mini SAP that can do all of that for you. You may have 20 houses and not just one house, so you're very, very lucky. We have then for you an enterprise-grade software to manage all of these. And if you're a very, very busy person and you don't want to look after your home, you just want to hand it over to somebody to really do everything for you, then we have an offering, a full-service property management offering where we look for travelers. We hand out the keys. We do all of the communication. We fix the broken faucet. We do the laundry. We look at the garden and everything. And for you, it is just up to receive some money for you from us. Okay. Good. So as I said before, we are the backbone of vacation rentals in Europe. And we have 2 segments within our group. One is looking after the owners of those houses, which we call the supply side of our business. And then the other one is looking after the travelers who are looking to rent those houses. And we call that the demand side of the -- of our business. So the demand side, we also call B2C, so business to consumer, because the travelers are really consumers. We do not deal with business travelers. We're all about mainly the big summer holiday. And that part of our business makes up around 37% of our revenue. And you can think of us as a very specialized, very European, very focused Airbnb or Booking.com. So we are an OTA, so an online travel agency, and you can book, if you're a traveler, a vacation house or a vacation apartment through us. Then on the supply side, which is the much bigger part of our business, so that makes up about 63% of our business. We have 2 offerings. So we have the all-inclusive service offering where we act as a property manager for vacation rentals, where we do everything for you, as I said, from taking care of the house to the communications, to bookings management, to pricing, so all of that. And we also have software offerings for vacation rental homeowners who want to do some part of the servicing themselves. Many, many investors ask us, so why do you have actually both of these parts of your business? Why are you vertically integrated? And why should we, as investors, care about you being vertically integrated? And the answer is there are a number of very interesting synergies between the 2 sides of our business, the B2B side and the B2C side. So the first one is that having the B2C side, having the marketplace gives us real -- deep real-time market insight at any given moment. We have about 20 million offerings in our marketplace. We only have about 50,000 homes under management on the B2B side. They're obviously all also bookable through the marketplace, but the vast majority of the inventory that we have on the marketplace is not our own inventory. But having this third-party inventory means that we can really see at any given moment which regions are in favor at the moment for travelers, where is maybe something that's going out of favor a little bit. So that gives us a lot of insight also into how we can boost bookings and how we can run pricing on the B2B side of our business. Why is this important? This, for example, was very, very important for us, about 6 or 7 weeks ago when the war in Iran started, and all of a sudden, there was a big disruption in European travel. So a lot of people who actually wanted to take their holiday in a hotel in Turkey or in a Club Med in Egypt, they didn't want to travel there anymore because they thought, "Well, these places are a little bit too close to Iran. This sounds all insecure. Maybe flights are not going anymore." So a lot of people changed what they were looking for, for their summer holiday, and we could actually see that in real time. So what I'm always saying is like Baltic Sea is all of a sudden really cool again for especially German travelers. And so we can see that the demand for these type of properties increase overnight very dramatically. And that means we can also ask for different prices, right? And so it helps us really manage on the B2B side of our business. The B2C side also acts as a technology incubator for our B2B products. For example, we obviously have payment infrastructure on the B2C side and really at scale industrial-grade payment infrastructure. So we can also use that on the B2B side, be it in our full-service property management offering or also in our smaller software offerings. The B2C side also acts as a lead-generation channel and as an M&A channel for our B2B businesses. So again, we have 20 million offerings on our website, so we really know which are the good properties. Good properties are generally those which are having a lot of 5-star reviews, which get rebooked by the same travelers again, which have a high rate of occupancy. And so we can target these offerings and -- or host and say like, "Look, hey, we have already a business relationship with you on the B2C side. Do you not just want to come over to the B2B side as well? We take over for the full-service offering." Or if smaller agencies come on to the market, especially property vacation rental agencies, we normally have worked with them for years on the marketplace, so we can really see how they're running their business, and it really helps us in understanding these businesses and have an advantage in M&A. We also are able to internalize the distribution margin. So if we have a property in the vacation rental property management, we try to get it booked over our own channels, but also, we use third-party channels like a Booking, like an Airbnb. But obviously, if we can get the booking through our own channels, we can keep the distribution margin and don't have to pay Booking or Airbnb 13%. And that's really something that is quite valuable for us. Last point being about brand. So HomeToGo is a consumer brand, so it's relatively well-known, and that also helps us, especially on the vacation rental property management side. How do we make money? What is our revenue model? On the B2C side, it's very, very simple. It's really a classic commission-based model. So we get about 13% of the revenue for any booking that we broker on the B2C side. On the B2B side, we have 2 different revenue models. One is volume-based. So we get a share of the booking value for our vacation rental property management. It is between 20% and 48%. So really depending what kind of service package you choose as the owner. In the software side, it's about 15% of the bookings that we capture. And then we also have a relatively small but really, really attractive software business called Smoobu, which has a SaaS model. On average, people spend about EUR 60 per month to manage their vacation rentals through Smoobu. One thing to really note about our revenue is the stickiness of our revenue. So about 70% of our revenue is repeat in nature. That is especially the case on the vacation rental property management side, where there is more than 90% of the revenue repeat in nature. Interestingly, this has also increased over the last 3 years, so going from 90% to 93% between 2023 and 2025. And that is during a time where we've been also growing overall revenue. The reason for that is that we have really low churn, especially amongst our partners on the property management side. So on average, we have customer relationships, which have an average tenure of 10 years. So the 2 leading causes why people leave us is death or sale of the house. We're very deeply integrated with our hosts. So there is -- there are certain switching costs as well to changing providers. We have a very diversified partner base. I'll talk about that a little bit in a moment. And we also have a lot of focus on product innovation, be it pricing, being the types of bookings, flexibility, downside protection, all of that, we always try to innovate on the type of products that we offer as well. As I said before, we have a very diversified customer base. On the B2B side, there isn't a single customer which makes up even 1% of our revenue. On the B2C side, we have 2 larger partners, which are Expedia and Booking.com, but even those 2 large partners only make up about 9% of overall group revenue. We are a very acquisitive business. The business has been founded in 2014. We already made the first M&A transaction in 2018. And since 2018, for every single year, we've acquired at least one business. That goes from very small businesses, which we can acquire for a couple of hundred thousand euros up to really, really large transactions like, for example, the acquisition of Interhome, which we did last year, and I'll talk about Interhome a little bit more because it was very, very transformational for us as a business. So when I say transformational, I'll put some numbers behind that. The acquisition of Interhome meant that we almost doubled our revenue from EUR 212 million to almost EUR 400 million, and we more than tripled our EBITDA from EUR 13 million to EUR 42 million. So Interhome in itself is now the largest part of our business. As I said before, the B2B side of our business, making up about 2/3 of our revenue within B2B. Interhome is by far the biggest business. As I said before, it was a large transaction. So the total purchase price was about EUR 250 million, which represented about 8x EBITDA. When we announced the acquisition of Interhome, we set certain targets for ourselves. The first one was that we said that we would generate about EUR 10 million in cost base, purely cost base, synergies within 12 to 18 months from closing the transaction. And then we also identified additional value creation upside of about EUR 20 million, which we said we would capture between 3 to 5 years following the closing of the transaction. So at the moment, we're very focused on the cost base synergies. At the beginning of the year, we had already implemented about half of those, so more than EUR 5 million in actual cost base synergies on an annualized basis, of course, were already in the books. So we had to let go certain personnel. We closed down certain parts of the business. We closed down some offices. We exited some transitional service agreements, and we're also working on getting the other EUR 5 million in the course of 2026. So we're really well ahead, well on track with the integration of Interhome and also with the generation of the cost base synergies. Looking at the midterm potential for the value creation upside the EUR 20 million, EUR 13 million, so EUR 1-3 million, of that is just internalization of the distribution margin, and I'll explain this a little bit more in detail. So Interhome makes about EUR 400 million of booking volume at the moment. And only about 25%, so EUR 100 million, of that is going through own channels. So it is booked in the Interhome offices or at the Interhome website or at a different HomeToGo website. So there is about EUR 300 million, which is booked through third-party channels like an Airbnb or a Booking.com, and we actually pay them for that. So there is about, again, 1-3, 13% on average that we pay to get the booking. If we're able to increase the share of the bookings through our own channel, which at the moment is 25%, to 50%, then we capture another EUR 100 million in booking volume and 13% of the EUR 100 million is EUR 13 million that we save. And so that is just immediate EBITDA upside if we can generate that. Why do we think that this is very doable? We bought a smaller vacation rental property manager called Casa a couple of years before we acquired Interhome. When we bought it, the share of internal bookings stood at 30%, and it's 70% right now. So we have a proven track record of actually capturing this kind of upside. A quick look at the financials for HomeToGo. This is presented on a pro forma basis. So as if we had already owned Interhome on the 1st of January 2023. So these are on a like-for-like basis without any distortions through such a large M&A transaction. And you can see that on average, we were able to grow revenue with 10% but EBITDA with 30%. So it shows how scalable the platform is and what kind of fixed cost degression effects you can also get at these type of businesses. For this year, our guidance stands at EUR 400 million to EUR 410 million of IFRS revenue. This compares on a pro forma basis to EUR 394 million for the last year. On a statutory basis, last year was EUR 256 million. And for the adjusted EBITDA, we have a guidance of between EUR 45 million and EUR 47 million, which compares to about EUR 42 million on a pro forma basis for last year and EUR 13 million on a statutory basis. Lastly, let me conclude with 5 reasons why I think if you aren't invested yet in HomeToGo, you should invest. The first one is that we are Europe's leading vacation rental platform. We are vertically integrated. We're very, very special. We have a very strong market position in a growing, highly fragmented market with lots and lots of upside still ahead of us. It's a unique platform that we operate with attractive synergies between B2B and B2C. There is a high share of recurring and repeat revenue. We have a highly diversified customer base, and we also have a proven execution track record over the last couple of years. So with that, I want to conclude my presentation, and I'm really looking forward to your questions.

Yes. Thank you very much, Sebastian. Ladies and gentlemen, we're opening the Q&A session now. [Operator Instructions] There are no risen hands so far, and our chat has not received any questions yet. [Operator Instructions] And with that said, I think Mr. [ Lehmann ] has a question. He has not asked yet. Mr. [ Lehmann ], you can also raise your hand if you can speak freely.

Maybe Mr. [ Lehmann ] just wanted to say hello.

No, there's -- the question of Mr. [ Lehmann ] just popped in. He's asking all that's important is for bondholders, the FCF.

That is correct. So the bondholders are obviously cash flow lenders. Our cash flow was also quite good. I don't know, Mr. [ Lehmann ], if you were a bondholder already during the -- what we looking for this year roughly? Okay. So roughly how it works is the following. So let's take the EUR 45 million to EUR 47 million in EBITDA you have to deduct EUR 10 million to EUR 11 million CapEx for capitalized software. You have to deduct around EUR 3 million in CapEx for PP&E. For Interhome, we have a network of 210 offices, so we have to spend a little bit of PP&E on that. You have to deduct about, I think, EUR 5 million to EUR 6 million for leasing. So this is principal and interest. And you can probably deduct small single-digit numbers for taxes that we have to pay. We, obviously, have a profitable business in Switzerland, so we have to pay taxes there. Then you have to add the increase in cash that comes from movements in net working capital. So last year, we had a really, really good year on a pro forma basis with the inflow in net working capital. So we had a EUR 20 million cash inflow from that. A little bit hard to forecast for this year, but I would expect at least EUR 5 million to EUR 7 million in positive cash flow contribution from the change in net working capital.

Thank you so much, and thank you also for your question, Mr. [ Lehmann ]. We have not received any questions anymore and no risen hands as I can see. So Sebastian, what would you say? I guess, with no further questions -- Mr. [ Lehmann ] has a follow-up question, and he's asking, okay, thanks. So you cover interest by roughly 2x?

I'm not good with my math in my head, but if that's what it is, then so there is about EUR 10 million in interest. So you can do the math, yes.

All right. Perfect. Thank you so much. I guess with no further questions, we have come to the end of today's call. Thank you very much for your interest in HomeToGo SE, and a big thank you also to you, Mr. Bielski, for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. I wish you all a successful day, and I'm handing over to you, Mr. Bielski, once again, for your closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everybody. We don't just have a bit bond, by the way, we also have a share. So look at that, look at both. If there is more questions, contact Investor Relations. Carsten Fricke, always happy to answer questions. Otherwise, we are at a lot of conferences as well, also at the Montega conference in the fall. So also looking forward to meeting all of you. Thank you. Bye-bye.