IONOS Group SE ($IOS)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the IONOS Group SE publication of the Full Year Results 2025 Webinar. I am Mira, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Stephan Gramkow. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the IONOS Analyst Investor Call for FY 2025. Thank you for taking the time today to join us. My name is Stephan Gramkow, and I'm responsible for Investor Relations at IONOS. Let's have a look at today's agenda. Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS, will provide an update on the overall business and important strategic topics. Patrik Heider, CFO of IONOS, will then take you through the financial details of 2025 and Q4 in particular. Patrik will then also talk about our outlook for 2026 and mid-term targets. Achim and Patrik will then be happy to answer any open questions after the presentation. I would now like to hand it over to Achim. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Stephan. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our conference call. I'm Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS. The headline from 2025 is customer growth. We nearly doubled net new customer additions from 160,000 in 2024 to 310,000 in 2025, lifting our total base to 6.63 million customers. For 2026, we anticipate even further acceleration in our new customer growth. The quality of customers remains excellent. We grew revenue across all relevant product lines, from Webhosting to communication, back office and domains. On the right-hand chart, you can see the rising share of AI in Web Presence & Productivity revenue. In 2025, AI accounted for approximately 20% of additional revenue. We expect that to reach about 50% this year, further growing to 80% by 2028. Momentum will be a significant contributor. The more AI we embed, the higher the revenue per customer, combining volume growth with product mix improvements. AI is now embedded across our entire product ecosystem. In Web Presence & Productivity, we are enhancing our core offerings, whether as a feature in onboarding and administration or as a stand-alone product like the AI phone receptionist. From Domains and Webhosting to E-commerce and back-office solutions, all products now include intelligent features. In Cloud Solutions, we are delivering sovereign, trusted European infrastructure to both SMBs and enterprise clients. Our portfolio extends from public and private cloud to specialized AI infrastructure, including the AI Model Hub, GPU Service and Model Fine Tuning and App Integration such as n8n on VPS. In November, we launched IONOS Momentum, which is a full stack ecosystem for SMBs to run digital operations end-to-end. As part of Momentum, we introduced the AI Phone Receptionist in Germany and the U.S. at the end of last year. It's essentially a virtual employee. It answers and manages business calls in natural speech across more than 20 languages, trained on the customer's own website and knowledge base. It handles inquiries, books appointments, captures leads around the clock and delivers structured call transcripts to the business owner. With almost no marketing investments, we have generated approximately 3,300 orders. 80% of these customers have completed the setup and are actively live ahead of our internal targets. In the early experience survey, 50% of respondents rated their satisfaction at an average of 4.5 out of 5. Here's an example. One of our German customers is a mid-sized office planning consultancy, around 15 people. The consultants spent most of the time in on-site meetings, and nobody was able or available to answer incoming calls. Leads were lost, follow-ups delayed. With the AI Phone Receptionists, all calls are now handled around the clock. The AI captures the caller's intent, schedules appointments where needed and sends structured summaries by email. The team focuses on their core work and follows up efficiently. We see similar adoption in consulting and IT, shops and stores and building services segments where phone availability is business critical, but often conflicts with the actual work. Across our early user base, customers report easy onboarding, 24/7 reachability and time savings of up to 10 hours per week on average. They particularly value the natural professional quality of the conversations and the structural call summaries that make every interaction immediately actionable. These are early results from a newly introduced product with very limited marketing. The adoption curve and feedback confirm we are solving real problems. AI phone receptionist is the first product within the broader vision. IONOS Momentum is a fully integrated modular ecosystem. Each product connects to the next. At the front sits the AI Frontdesk, the first point of contact between an SMB and its customers. It handles inbound communication across voice, chat, email and messaging apps. It manages appointments, prioritizes requests, and it generates data and feeds it into the rest of the system. The data flows into the Smart AI CRM, which captures and classifies leads, stores interaction history, analyzes intent and sentiment and suggests next best actions. The AI Presence Suite turns customer knowledge outward, automating content creation, managing online presence and handling marketing, reputation, including legal and security matters. The Sovereign AI Chatbot runs out the ecosystem, a fully EU-hosted, GDPR-native AI front end running on sovereign European models. It offers enterprise-grade AI at cost-efficient price points, a credible alternative to ChatGPT or Gemini with the data sovereignty our customers require. What ties everything together is the AI Knowledge Hub at the base, a shared intelligence layer, combining company data from the website, customer documents and interaction data enriched over time. Each product feeds the other. The more a customer uses Momentum, the more the system learns. This creates a platform embedded in daily operations, driving retention, expanding revenue per customer and building switching costs over time. So what does the road map look like? Following the AI Phone Receptionist launch, we are rolling it out across additional countries and brands where we already have a customer base, the incremental investment is low. In parallel, we are expanding the feature set. Key additions include AI Knowledge Hub, further integrations, dedicated workflows with multiple agents and multichannel capabilities covering voice, email and chat. The website remains the single most important digital asset, and SMB owns their own channel, their brand, their customer interface. With AI, this becomes even more critical. Large language models pull information from the web just as search engines always have. An SMB without a well-maintained authoritative website will not exist in AI-driven search and discovery. The website is no longer just a marketing tool, it's infrastructure. SMB also want to own their customer relationship directly, not via third-party platforms or search engines. A website combined with a professional domain gives them exactly that. And IONOS delivers this as a complete integrated package, domains, hosting, e-commerce, email, security and support from day 1. This foundation creates a natural upsell path. We see strong demand for high-value, high-margin AI-powered services on top of the Web Presence stack: GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, as a successor of SEO; Agentic AI tools; MCP services and more. At the same time, AI is lowering the barrier of entry. Our prompt to website capabilities bring customers directly into higher-value products, moving them from basic shared hosting to my website and beyond, which drives ARPU at scale. As we embed more AI into onboarding, editing and daily workflows, product usage deepens and retention improves. IONOS sits at the intersection of necessity and opportunity. Websites are becoming more strategic for SMBs, and AI drives enhanced revenue opportunities on top. Let me address AI-powered website creation directly, Vibe coding. Generating a website, an app or digital presence by describing what you want in plain language is a real and accelerating trend. We are fully embracing it. Distinction is this, stand-alone AI builders generate a website. Our customers get that, plus a domain, hosting, e-commerce, email, security and personal support, all connected from day 1. This drives higher attach rates and higher ARPU from the first interaction. For my website, we launched Vibe onboarding in February. A customer describes their business in natural language, and our AI generates a complete ready-to-use website connected to their domain and email styled, structured and live. In Q2, we will add further prompt-to-editor capabilities so customers can continue refining their site through conversation. For WordPress, we have taken a slightly different approach. Our WordPress customers tend to be more sophisticated, operating larger digital presences. Our WordPress AI Assistant combines the extensibility of the world's leading CMS with AI-powered content generation enhancing design controls and integrated site management. It makes WordPress more accessible and more powerful the shift toward AI-powered website creation accelerating our business. We embed these capabilities into our platform and capture the value of everything that follows. We are building IONOS into an AI-first business on 2 dimensions. You have seen the external side, AI embedded across our products and deeply integrated in how our customers operate, but there's also an internal dimension. We are using AI to drive operational efficiency, automating workflows, reducing overhead and making our teams more effective. This has a direct impact on margins. Our core customers, solo entrepreneurs and SMBs, representing over 90% of our revenue, want AI that is simple, affordable and delivers tangible results without a technical team. We are not selling AI for its own sake. We are selling outcomes, more customers, lower costs, faster operations. And we have a structural advantage that is hard to replicate, proprietary European cloud infrastructure with GDPR-native guarantees built on a decade of trust. AI strengthens our competitive position, expands the addressable market and drives higher ARPU. The European cloud market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of roughly 15% in the coming years, driven by SaaS adoption, hybrid cloud solutions, AI integration and increasing demand for digital sovereign infrastructure. Our aim is to accelerate revenue growth, particularly in SME, mid-market and public sector. We are expanding our product portfolio with GPU service and enhanced private cloud features. We are also growing our partner network, adding new partners and leveraging existing global relationships. And our contract with ITZBund completed a successful ramp-up phase in 2025 and is now in continuous operation, confirming our capability to deliver sovereign cloud at the highest governmental levels. So at this point, I would like to hand over to Patrik to walk you through our financials before we open for Q&A.

Thank you, Achim, and good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be with you for my first results presentation as CFO of IONOS. As a brief reminder, following the reclassification of our AdTech business as discontinued operations in November 2025, it is no longer reflected in our reporting structure. This allows us for a clear focus on our core business areas. Looking at the structure, we generated EUR 1.3 billion in revenue in 2025. Web Presence & Productivity remains our cornerstone, accounting for 83% for nearly EUR 1.1 billion, while Cloud Solutions contributed 14%, reaching EUR 187 million. On the bottom line, we delivered EUR 485 million in adjusted EBITDA, representing a 36.8% margin. This significant step-up clearly demonstrates the operating leverage embedded into the IONOS platform. We are converting revenue into profit more efficiently than ever before in our history. This is the strong baseline we are building upon. Let's dive into the details. Let's look at the financial performance for the full year 2025. Revenue amounted to EUR 1.317 billion. This represents a year-over-year growth of 5.5% or 6.1% in constant currency. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 18.5% to EUR 485.2 million. This corresponds to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 36.8%, a significant expansion of 4 percentage points compared to the previous year. It clearly demonstrates the massive operating leverage of our platform and our discipline in converting revenue into profit. Marketing investments has been higher than last year. As a reminder, we are differentiating between brand investments and performance marketing. While brand investments will stay at a level of around EUR 65 million to EUR 70 million, we expect performance marketing to grow in line with revenue. Looking at the fourth quarter, revenue increased to EUR 336.7 million. This represents a growth of 3.6%. On a constant currency basis, revenue grew 5.2%. Turning to profitability, we see a very strong development. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 11.9% to EUR 116.8 million. This results in adjusted EBITDA margin of 34.7% compared to 32.1% last year. This margin expansion is even stronger when you consider the phasing of marketing investments. In Q4 of the previous year, marketing spend was comparatively low. This phasing effect resulted in approximately EUR 3 million higher marketing expenses compared to last year. Adjusted for the different phasing, EBITDA would have been around EUR 120 million and an implied EBITDA growth of around 15% year-over-year. The key takeaway is clear. We are able to invest in our growth via brand while simultaneously expanding our margins significantly. This is a definition of a scalable business model. Turning to the operational development of our business in the fourth quarter. In Web Presence & Productivity, revenue increased to EUR 274.3 million, representing a reported growth of 3.8%. Adjusted for currency effects, the underlying growth stood at 5.4%. Turning to Cloud Solutions. Revenue came in at EUR 51 million, representing a currency-adjusted growth of 6%. External revenue, including Web Presence & Productivity and Cloud Solutions grew by 3.8% year-over-year or 5.5% at constant currency. Looking at the fourth quarter, we achieved a record intake of 100,000 net new customers. This brings us to the total net additions for the full year of 2025 to 310,000. To put this into a context, and as Achim already mentioned, we have nearly doubled our customer growth compared to the previous year. This confirms that our product portfolio is resonating strongly in the market and that the marketing investment I mentioned earlier are successfully converting. After the dip in Q3, which was also driven by the dilution from the strong customer growth, our ARPU increased sequentially to EUR 16.50 in the fourth quarter. Our monthly churn rate remained stable at around 1% per month. Looking ahead, we see no signs of this momentum slowing down. The combination of strong customer acquisition and increasing ARPU dynamics provides a powerful engine for 2026. Let me now move to Cloud Solutions. Revenue in the fourth quarter came in at EUR 51 million, up to -- up from EUR 49 million last year. Currency adjusted, this returns rates into a growth rate of 6%. For the full year, we generated EUR 187 million in revenue compared to EUR 177 million in 2024. Our public cloud business remains our biggest growth driver, growing 11% year-over-year. Important to mention that we recognized less revenue from ITZBund in Q4 compared to the previous year, creating a small headwind for the fourth quarter 2025. As Achim already pointed out, the project is on track, and we expect to see higher revenue contributions throughout the year. Turning into our capital expenditure. The figures for 2025 demonstrate the high efficiency of our well-invested platform. Total CapEx for the full year came in at EUR 65.2 million. This corresponds to a CapEx ratio of 5% of revenue compared to 6.2% in the previous year. Breaking it down, maintenance CapEx accounted for the majority of around EUR 49.8 million or 3.8% of the revenue. This level remains low and predictable, confirming that our core infrastructure is robust and does not require heavy sustaining investments. Gross CapEx stood at around EUR 15.4 million or 1.2% of revenue. As of -- as you would expect, the vast majority of this growth investment was directed towards our Cloud Solutions segment to support the public cloud expansions and sovereign offerings. We are investing exactly where the future value lies. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect total CapEx to be in the range of EUR 75 million to EUR 85 million, which would bring us back to a ratio of approximately 6% of revenue. This remains a very healthy level that supports innovation and growth without compromising our strong cash generation. Let's walk through our cash flow bridge on the next page. This slide demonstrates the cash-generative power of our business model. We start with our adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations of EUR 485 million. From this base, we deduct EUR 21 million in adjustments, primarily related to long-term incentive programs and the billing carve-out. Now, we need to add back the EBITDA contribution from the AdTech business, which amounts to EUR 31 million. Even though it is classified as discontinued for reporting purposes, it is generating cash flow in our accounts. Moving to the outflows. CapEx was EUR 65 million and taxes accounted for EUR 81 million, reflecting higher earnings. Working capital was still slightly negative, but improved from the previous quarter. In the longer run, working capital should be neutral. This results in a free cash flow before leasing of EUR 327 million. After deducting EUR 90 million for lease payments, our free cash flow after leases stands at EUR 308 million compared to EUR 296 million in 2024. Finally, we paid EUR 49 million in interest, a decrease compared to the previous year, thanks to our deleveraging efforts. And most importantly, we also returned capital to our shareholders, executing share buybacks totaling EUR 57 million throughout the year. One metric worth highlighting for EBITDA to cash conversion is well above 80%, underpinning the strong cash generation for our businesses. The strong free cash flow generation translates directly into rapid deleveraging. At the end of 2025, net debt stood at EUR 697 million. This figure includes only external bank debt as shareholder loan from United Internet was fully repaid in 2025. The weighted average annual interest rate has improved accordingly to 4.7%. While AdTech itself did not carry significant financial liability, its EBITDA is included in the leverage calculation. Including AdTech EBITDA, our leverage ratio stands at 1.3x net debt to adjusted EBITDA. Excluding AdTech, reflecting the future structure of the business, the leverage ratio is 1.4x at the end of the year. This improved debt profile, combined with the elimination of refinancing risk throughout fixed interest debt, continue to support our financial stability and provides us with flexibility for the future. Let me now turn to our outlook. At the top line, we are guiding for revenue growth of approximately 7% on a constant currency basis, an acceleration from the 6.1% we delivered in 2025. Within that, Web Presence & Productivity is expected to grow at 7% to 8%, reflecting the continued momentum in customer additions, cross-selling and upselling, prices increasing, resulting in a successful ARPU expansion. Cloud Solution is expected to accelerate to approximately 10%. Our public cloud business is the primary driver here, and we are increasingly confident in the growth path as the ITZBund contract moves into full operations. We expect intercompany revenues in approximately EUR 30 million to EUR 40 million in 2026. So the underlying external revenue growth is actually slightly stronger than the headline figure suggests growing at approximately 8%. On profitability, we are guiding for an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 530 million, leading to 37% to 38% EBITDA margin, a further step from the 36.8% we have delivered in 2025. This continued margin expansion reflects 2 things: the natural operating leverage of the platform as revenue scales and our disciplined approach to cost management. We are investing in growth via strong marketing conversion, AI product development and cloud business expansion while expanding margins. The bottom right chart is worth a moment of attention. It shows the expected quarterly phasing of revenue growth throughout 2026 with revenue growth accelerating throughout the year as the ramp of customer additions from 2025 is feeding through into revenue over the course of the year. As new customers typically have a 6- to 12-month discount period and given that the net customer growth nearly doubled in 2025, there is an increasing contribution from these new customers. Important to keep in mind that this will result in revenue growth accelerating throughout the year, which is consistent with what we have already communicated. Let me once again point out that the initial contribution from Momentum is not part of our guidance, and it is, therefore, on top. To summarize the guidance, 8% external revenue growth, approximately EUR 530 million adjusted EBITDA, leading to 37% to 38% adjusted EBITDA margin. Before we move to Q&A, let me close with a look beyond 2026 because I want to leave you with a clear picture of where our business is heading over the medium term. We are reaffirming our mid-term targets. We are targeting double-digit revenue growth of 10% -- above the 10% on a group level. That acceleration from where we are today reflects 2 converging forces, an acceleration of our Web Presence & Productivity business, strongly driven by AI and Cloud Solutions delivering higher than 20% of growth. On Web Presence & Productivity specifically, we are targeting high single-digit growth. That step-up from our current growth rate is underpinned by 3 things: continued customer additions, ARPU expansion as AI-powered products drive higher value per customer, including the progressive revenue contribution from Momentum. On Cloud Solutions, the 20% CAGR targets reflect our conviction in the structural growth of the European server and cloud market, combined with the product investments we are making today. On profitability, we are targeting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40% at the mid-term, a further step up from the 37% to 38% we are guiding in 2026. This is not margin expansion for its own sake. It is a natural outcome of a platform business where revenue scales faster than the cost base and where AI is increasingly doing work that previously required human effort or manual processes. On CapEx side, we are comfortable at approximately 6% of revenue. That concludes our presentation for today. Achim and I are now happy to take your questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

Achim and Patrik, I've got a few questions, please. And I guess, firstly, welcome to you from my side, Patrik. We've met in the past, and it's nice to be in a position to speak with you again as we go forward. And maybe that is my first question as well. I've kind of been curious on your impressions as you move into this IONOS seat. In particular, are there any areas or internal processes you're looking to sharpen around? Secondly, maybe one for you, Achim, talking to those new customer acquisition additions, very strong in 2025. You mentioned expecting that momentum to continue in 2026. What's been driving that from your perspective? We can obviously look at the brand marketing spend, and it was only slightly higher than 2024 in 2025. And to what extent has your partnership with Lovable been a driver in that mix? And then just lastly, on the cloud business, the CapEx tick up for 2026 to EUR 75 million to EUR 85 million. To what extent is that number incorporating some of the memory price inflation that's happening in the market?

So I might start with the question. So first of all, thank you. It's also a pleasure to work with you in the future again together. As I came in as the CFO last December, I do see obviously a high potential business being together with an AI winner, but internal processes also became large. So what the mid-term guidance of 40% already is translating that there's huge potential also from an internal perspective to bring AI into the business. That's what I saw as well. And those are areas, obviously, me as a CFO working very hard on that. So those are the areas driving the margin expansion, but same time, reallocation of business to drive more revenue because I do believe that IONOS needs to push on revenue. And I have a certain formula, as you might know from my past that you need to drive EBITDA growth is bigger than revenue growth, but own revenue growth needs to be bigger than market growth. And this is what I, together with Achim, obviously driving from my copilot seat. Thank you very much, and then, hand over to Achim.

Yes. Your question about customer inflow. I mean, we had a strong -- why do we grow even faster this year than last year? It's the AI Momentum on one side, more products and all the AI-driven enhancements we have in existing products. We have the brand, which is paying out more and more over the years now. Now, we started brand investment, I think, in 2023. And we always said this is a long-term endeavor and the results will not come in the first year, but now, we're not in the first year anymore, so the results are coming in. So brand is getting stronger, and brand is now really paying off in additional customer flowing in. And then we have the random -- not random, but a lot of different improvements on over there. So daily business improving the business, you're taking down the churn rate, improving existing customer base and features and so on and so forth. So the combination of that is driving more and more customers towards us. And then, of course, the product fit, the Momentum, like we tried to explain, is a real business fit, is really solving needs of our customers. And so that is a big driver. And then, you asked about Lovable. We don't have a direct partnership with Lovable. We do some of their domain registrations through a different partner, though. But -- so it's not like we are building -- we're using the website builder or anything like that. We have our own product lines for this. Is that helpful?

And maybe on the last one, on the CapEx side, the price increases in hardware, we already integrated that in our perspective of the guidance. So we are already working on mitigation on different things, and we are already considered within the guidance.

That's great. And maybe, Achim, if I could just come back on the kind of AI agent topic. Could you talk a little bit about how -- you talked about very high scores in terms of early customer feedback, are customers -- is the average SMB understanding the AI Receptionist out of the box? Or is there a certain way you're having to market it to help them understand what it's offering and how they implement it in their business?

Yes. Well, I mean, you have everything from 2, right? So -- and a lot of customers directly understand it because it's integrated well. It's very easy to set up and use, and it's taking the data from your website. You don't have to really do much for this part. If you want to have a deeper integration, we help you. We have teams in our support that really do the onboarding, help you, sit down with you, configure maybe the prompt or something to make it more specialized on your specific needs. So we have a robust wire -- we have a broad selection. And as I said, it's a very early entry now and very successful already. And we now, of course, like we do all -- with all the other products, we keep on improving that, learning from customer responses and so forth -- and so on and so forth. But it's extremely encouraging, and it's really nice to see that we really solve a new class of -- solve to or help to solve new class of problems, which we never tackled in the past, which was not possible, kind of virtual employees. And the Receptionist is just the first one. And so that's why we are so confident and why we are so happy to see these new technologies coming along and in combination with the web page and all the other data. So we are a hosting company that does not mean we only host domains and the web page. Many customers have a lot of additional data on their hosting platform, in applications. Many customers use PHP on the service side. You only need that if you have additional stuff, additional services, and that's coupled with data in most cases. And so we have all -- we have a lot of information already to make these AI things work much better than any stand-alone application out there. We have the email communication and so on. So moving that all together, really, we can build employees, virtual employees, which are a fraction of the cost of a real employee. They are there 24/7. They speak all the languages. They never be sick. They can scale any time. And so this is -- that's why we're so excited about this.

The next question comes from the line of Dhruva Shah from UBS.

Nice to meet virtually, Patrik. I have 3, if that's okay. First is on capital allocation. So with leverage now close to being less than 1x, how do you think about capital allocation? What would you say is your target leverage range? And what are your priorities? Historically, the company have talked about M&A in the European WP&P space being a priority. If that's still the case, are you seeing any opportunities here? If not, would you consider shareholder returns? And within that, do you have a preference for dividends or buybacks? And any indication of potential timing there? Second question is on WP&P. And so the customer equation looks very promising. But then, if I look at ARPUs, yes, there's a pickup quarter-on-quarter. But if I look year-on-year, ARPUs are actually declining. So can you talk through some of the impacts? We can see the FX impact, but then how much of this year-on-year decline is driven by the higher customer acquisition? Could you give us any color on the quantum of how much of a drag that is with customers coming in at lower prices? And is there anything else to consider? And the final question I had was actually on cloud. And if you could give us any color, firstly, on the phasing of ITZBund revenues expected over 2026, but also separately. If I rewind a couple of quarters ago, yourselves and a number of peers were talking up how digital sovereignty is leading to a higher number of inquiries, but also that it was taking longer to monetize these contracts. So any update on that would be great. And maybe just anything you could give in terms of confidence of reiterating your 20% mid-term guidance? Because from memory, that was also issued at the time of the spin-off, and some could argue that now is mid-term, but obviously, cloud isn't yet growing at 20%. So any color on those 3 would be great.

Okay. Thank you very much for the question. From the capital allocation side perspective, we are considering all options. You could either grow into organic growth, so investing what we're already doing into AI in our Cloud business. Also, from an inorganic perspective, we are considering different M&A options, obviously, mainly to our core business, mainly into technology investments, and we are already scanning a huge pipeline of different options. And from a shareholder perspective, obviously, buybacks as we already executed in 2025, we would consider also to continue this year program. We would be ready from a shareholder perspective or from a Board approval perspective to execute. And that would be -- we would prefer in order before we're paying dividends. On an ARPU side, I mean, we see already an improvement in Q4. We had a structural topic in Q3 reported, but that came out of the strong net adds from customer side, first of all, and also from a currency adjusted -- from a currency impact. So already with the guidance of 5% over the year, we are well on track. You also see in Web Presence & Productivity. Also, from a pricing perspective, we phased in pricing in the first half year, which then also normalized during the year. So that also had an impact. But we are not seeing any critical points for further ARPU development, even the opposite. We do see with AI also an acceleration in the ARPUs. Pricing is completely different, and we do see huge potential also for the future. For the Cloud business, as we do not guide on the ITZBund on a single contract, but we obviously -- with the small headwind we had in quarter 4 2025, we have a small, let's say, tailwind in 2026. So that continues. We are -- they are very happy with us with the performance. We will continue. Achim already talked about that. And during the year, we will face that around 10% in growth for the Cloud business. And maybe, Achim, you could help me for the last question.

I thought the cloud was the last question.

The sovereignty. Maybe you can repeat the question again on the sovereignty part.

Yes, sure, sure. It was just around a couple of quarters ago, you were talking about digital sovereignty leading to a higher number of inquiries for cloud, but not necessarily flowing into the financials just yet because it was taking longer to monetize these contracts. So just an update there as we are 2 quarters ahead now. Are you starting to see that flow into financials? Is that leading to some confidence in both this year's guidance and long term?

Absolutely. That's the point why we now have -- when we just showed the numbers, said, okay, above 20% in growth in the public cloud and that that's exactly the result of the last quarter's onboarding these customers and building up the cloud and the sovereignty discussions we had all over the place. So that's why we are 100% confident to be well above -- actually, well above 20% in growth in the public cloud. May work for M&A as well because you asked, we always mentioned that there are some European players coming to market. We believe that. All the signals we hear is that there is a bunch of opportunities coming along more or less this year. Of course, we cannot force them to sell, but we are looking into it as soon as it gets more tangible. But from everything we hear, there's opportunities like we said. And then, from timing, it's perfect. Leverage is very low, and targets are coming up, which are noteworthy from a sizing perspective. We don't want to -- like we always said, we don't want to buy a small webhosting company with legacy technology, 50,000 customers or something. So the integration effort would be too high. Although with AI, it's getting more manageable, but still we're looking for larger targets. And the ARPU, maybe one last sentence. If you look at the web page, the AI-based products, the Receptionist has a very different price point and does not have 12 months free. In the Webhosting industry, it was becoming common that you had a 6 to 12 months very low price points, but this is not happening in the AI space. And so we see there's maybe 1 or maybe 2 months of a reduced price or onboarding phase or something, but not the 12 months we are used to from webhosting and domains and everything. And so -- and the price points are much higher, as you can really see it on the web page. So you can expect the ARPU growing stronger since that customer base is increasing, more and more new customers, like we showed also 50% already taking some form of AI. And with the whole momentum coming along, that share will increase.

The next question comes from the line of Sarah Roberts from Barclays.

Three from me, if that's okay. So firstly, just on the entry partnership. I think before you mentioned that customers are coming in with a domain via entry that you own, but you spoke before about opportunities to cross and upsell these customers coming in, which could be accretive over time. Just wanted to see -- I appreciate it's early days, but of those customers that are coming in through that partnership, are you seeing any opportunity to upsell other IONOS products? Secondly, just a clarification point on the cloud mid-term growth. You've obviously reiterated the mid-term target of 20%. You printed mid-single digits in '25. You're guiding to 10% in '26. I understand your comments on your expectations for data sovereignty and the market. But how much visibility do you have beyond this year into the cloud pipeline that gives you that confidence? And can you confirm how you're defining mid-term, please? Because that obviously implies a significant acceleration beyond FY '26 in cloud. And then finally, on AdTech, sorry, do you have any update on how those sale conversations are going? When do you expect to announce potentially selling that business? And if you could give us any color around how AdTech performed in '25 on both revenue and EBITDA, that would be really helpful?

Maybe I'll start. Entry, yes, of course, these are our customers first. This is just a partner directing traffic to us and customers, and we do upsell and cross-sell. And it really depends on the partner. The entry has partners doing all kinds of businesses. And we are using these customers to upsell to products, which they -- these partners don't have, and we're using this actively. So part of our customer growth is coming -- or ARPU growth is coming from these new customers plus then the other cross-sell. So this is happening. That's just normal business for us right now. So there's no -- nothing special on it. And for the cloud confidence, yes, we are absolutely confident because, firstly, the digitalization discussion will not -- sorry, the sovereignty discussion will not go away anytime soon. I think we all agree in Europe, this will get more and more and stronger and stronger over the years now. With all happening in geopolitics, there's no sign whatsoever that this discussion or this demand will decrease anytime soon. So the product is there, expanding the product lines, adding features, new data centers or expanding the data centers we have of co-locations with the demand getting GPU service, all these kind of things, which are on demand into the cloud. And we see customer base is strong and growing by itself, more data coming in. So all the customers basically grow in itself in themselves and new customer pipeline is nice, and we get lots of opportunity in. So I'm absolutely confident that 20-plus percent is going to keep -- is going to stay, and I predict even to accelerate this over time. And then, maybe you want to add for the third one.

Yes. For the AdTech business, I can confirm that we are in deep discussions with potential buyers of the business. And you might expect in Q2 a message from us on that one that we are going to inform you about that one. Second, you asked for the performance in 2025. As already indicated, there was an EBITDA contribution of EUR 31 million over the year. Obviously, there was a change in business model in Q3. This is exactly why we announced IFRS 5 and put it on to discontinued operations. And obviously, this from a performance revenue, we contributed EUR 25 million in Q4. And this is the actual situation we are, and this is the overall performance. And we were going to inform you then in Q2, most probably.

The next question comes from the line of Ines Mao from BNP Paribas.

Congrats for the strong print. I just have 3 questions actually. So the first one is about AI monetization. Can you elaborate on how the new agents will be priced and packaged notably for existing customers? Shall we expect a usage-based model or kind of a hybrid model, particularly for agents that might have to run continuously? The second question is about Sovereign Cloud. So it kind of makes sense that there's an uptick in inquiries, but it's potentially going to impact private cloud, hence, the demand for dedicated service. So from a CapEx and infrastructure level, wouldn't IONOS have to increase CapEx for this dedicated service? And my last question is only from a product perspective. One of your slides cites n8n, so a partnership for -- in the cloud business. Can you talk us more about what it entails exactly?

Okay. I'm not sure if I understood everything correctly because we had a little -- what do you say, sound quality wasn't so good. So I think the first question was about AI pricing. And well, I think that's just look at the web page we have right now, but we're doing a lot of A/B testing. So if you hit the web page 5 times, you might get 3 different offers. And that's our normal business. We're trying to -- or we're finding out what's the elasticity on the market, what price points are people willing to pay. The whole product improves and so on. So this is our daily business optimizing price points, price versus sales and so on. But what's pretty clear is it's way more expensive in the end. The ARPU is much higher than on a web page because web page is essential for company. But the prices are -- it's not like super -- how do I say, it's just a commodity -- not a commodity these days, but everybody can have a web page very easily somewhere. And the AI is very different because that's very -- much more technology and especially it has a much higher value for the customer, perceived at least in sense of I can save 10 hours. You cannot go without the web page because that will -- if you have a shop or whatever, that will completely ruin your revenue. But for perception from customers is I can save 10 hours, how much do I pay for 10 hours usually? And if that AI costs only EUR 29, this is such a bargain so that the price elasticity is so much higher. And now, it's our job like always to find out what's the sweet spot between take-up rates and price points. So it's a constant optimization now, and the products get better and better, so we can charge more. So this will be -- there will be no fixed price for now. This is in flux right now to understand market and demand and curves and stuff. And about the second question, you had the CapEx and dedicated service. I'm not quite sure what that -- what exact question was?

Yes. I was just wondering how does Sovereign Cloud translate from an infrastructure perspective? Because to me, it means dedicated servers. So naturally, IONOS would have to increase CapEx to this. Or can you expand more on what does that entail from an infra perspective?

Yes. The sovereign cloud, I mean, is really -- the dedicated service is one product offering. We call it BMC in the meantime, it's Bare Metal Cloud, the old stuff. It's the dedicated, which is really a bare metal -- it's really a server without more or less nothing. And then, we have the BMC line of products, which is Bare Metal Cloud. So you have features in sense of software-defined networking, but still it's bare metal, and then, everything else is cloud. So if you talk about sovereignty, most customers are these days tending rather to a full cloud setup because there's many, many more features than just a bare metal, and you don't have to administer it yourself. Cloud is everything taken care for you. The Infrastructure as a Service layer, we manage everything, the platform layers and so on. And you have unlimited scalability and pay by the minute. So people are -- if they talk about sovereign workloads moving into the cloud, they usually take a -- the real IONOS cloud -- public cloud offering. Dedicated has some special purposes. If you have the highest performance, you need to go down to the operating system level, do some stuff here. It has a purpose, and it has some demand. But if you talk about the sovereignty, it's rather the Cloud business.

And if I might, Achim, from a CapEx perspective, we are feeling confident with the 6% of revenues for the future, also sustainable moving forward, what Achim said.

Exactly. So we -- in our CapEx budget, it's all included. This -- and we have -- there's a big discussion of the big price increase in hardware these days. We source a lot of them and have contracts in place for much of the year for a set price. Then n8n, this is a service, it's actually open source for private use, not so much for commercial use. So we have a partnership with them. n8n is a product where you can build workflows with AI-based steps in between. So you can really automate a lot of things very easily, and that's just one of the products we have.

The next question comes from the line of Steph Beyazian from ODDO BHF.

My first question is regarding the guidance and the mid-term guidance. I was just wondering if you could remind me the starting base of that guidance, if that's still the same mid-term or when is the mid-term and what is the starting base? I mean, I guess what I'm trying to understand is to what extent AI is really incremental since you are reaffirming the guidance. But now, you're expecting 80% of revenue growth by 2028 to be coming from AI. So I'm just trying to separate what is new and incremental versus what you were planning before the launch of AI agents. That would be my first question.

So as Achim indicated on one of his first slides, the value add of new generated revenues via AI is increasingly tremendously in the next years. So you're asking for the guidance of this year, and I talked about in my last slide about the mid-term guidance. I would say the discrepancy is not as high as I would not propose it already coming in from the year of 2027. We are not yet here for giving a guidance of 2027, but we feel, obviously, there's not a big difference. I mean, we accelerated year-on-year in our core segment, which is Web Presence & Productivity. We are doing on the right track in the Cloud business. We're having the AI. We're having the ARPU increases, et cetera, et cetera. So that's my opinion on this one.

And you get a feeling of -- Patrik showed a slide where he said he's driving to 10% growth. The difference between where we are today and the 10% is probably mostly AI driven.

Yes.

And so the starting year for that mid-term guidance, can you remind me which year is the starting base?

For the current guidance?

I need to because I wasn't there, but it was obviously given in 2024.

Yes, must be 2024, sorry, yes.

Yes. Does that help?

Yes. Yes, I think it does. And I've got an additional question, which is regarding promotions. I mean, I could notice also that there are quite some promotions to take customers at EUR 1 and to try, I guess, to push volume. Wouldn't you be expecting that to have a little bit of a dilutive impact into 2026 on ARPUs?

Well, that's -- first of all, this EUR 1, that's the industry standards for, I'd say, 15 years now. You have these campaign pricings, which are very, very much discounted. And then, that's going forward. And that's what Patrik tried to explain a little bit. The more customers we make, the more dilutive it is in the first year for the overall ARPU because these customers weight more, coming in more and more of these customers weighing more in the average with a very low price point for the first year. So this is one of the factors. But then, the second year, these customers or these cohorts are pricing -- are priced fully normal pricing and will increase the ARPU again. So we have always a little -- the first -- basically, every time we grow more than in the previous year, we have that little impact on the ARPU one time.

And that said, the 2025 cohort is translating into revenue in 2026. And that was the most successful year in net adds in customer, and this is why we are confident scaling the revenues throughout the years, wider quarters.

The next question comes from the line of Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank.

Great. I hope you can hear me. I have 3 remaining questions as well. The first one, could you remind us, Achim and Patrik, the exposure IONOS has to energy costs? And what would the impact be if prices go up? And have you accounted for that in the guidance that you've given us for 2026? And second, thank you for the color on the AI virtual assistance. My question is the companies that you're working with that are using them now, have you seen them churn off? Or are they very happy with the product so they keep using it? Just trying to get an understanding as to how valuable it is real-time to these customers that you're already working with. Some color on the churn dynamics would be great. And my last question, the 7% to 8% Web Presence & Productivity growth for 2026. If you could split that between customer growth versus ARPU growth to give us some color on how to think of those 2 dynamics for next year, that would be great.

Yes. As I might start with the energy costs, the 2026 -- the good news is 2026 prices for energy are almost locked in. So we have a minimal impact on 2026 guidance. You would add doing the last one.

The phone assistant or the AI agent part of the momentum, the first -- the batch of customers we have, there's basically not much churn so far because, first, it's pretty new, and we said 80% are activating the product already. I mean, there's a very high activation rate in the first weeks already. And what the conclusion is, once you have a product and it's activated and it's working well for you, you don't churn. So we don't really have reliable churn numbers specifically for these products yet. It's just too early. We can -- next quarter, we can probably see or have more reliable data than today because basically, today it's no churn.

And then the last one for Web Presence & Productivity, where does the mixture of revenue comes from? We keep on going with the story of 1/3 is coming from net customer adds, 1/3 is coming from cross and upselling and 1/3 is coming from pricing. This is exactly the same story for 2026. As a reminder as well, that was a question as well, churn remains very clear best industry standard. So we're returning or we are having around the 1% per month, and that is also from that perspective very healthy.

The next question is from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

I just had 1 small follow-up to the extent you can comment. Just with regard to the EUR 800 million or so of debt that comes up to maturity in December, do you have any kind of early thoughts on how you'll go about refinancing that on a strategy or structuring or maybe even the rate versus the fixed 4.7% you're on today?

Yes, of course, we have early thoughts, but we can't communicate yet, but we will do that in time, most probably to mid- to half-year. And you're absolutely right, that needs to be -- there needs to be a message because it ends in December, but not yet.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from Dhruva Shah from UBS.

Just a technical follow-up on the reported to adjusted EBITDA bridge. This -- in '25, I think you saw another EUR 17 million of costs related to the establishment of IONOS as an independent group. But obviously, we're now 3 years on from being part of the group. So just -- yes, I wanted to get an update in terms of what that should look like going forward? Should it drop out relatively soon?

Therefore, I think will be significantly lower in 2027. But for -- I'm honest here, I need to give -- jump into that detail. I can afterwards inform you about that.

We have a follow-up from Steph Beyazian from ODDO BHF.

Yes. I've got 2 actually around AI agents, if that's possible. The first one is how many AI agents do you expect to have? Obviously, it will change over time. But right now, how many do you think you will have? And which ones are the most exciting to you, if you can release some color about that? And my second question is just regarding the margin. Can you just come back on the economics? And what sort of margins are you expecting on those products? I can see that you're more or less billing a call at around EUR 1. And I was just wondering what is the cost attached to that?

So about the product roadmap, out of my head, how many agents do we going -- are we going to have? I mean, of course, it depends on the time scale we're looking at. If you think about this year, we have a bunch of different product lines and agents specified. Out of my head, I'd say probably in the -- agents has a big definition as well. It could be some small helping agent in some of the product lines all the way to a full-blown like the Receptionist, which does a lot of things and has a lot of additional features on it. And I'd say maybe 10 on a rough calculation or rough out of my head across all the product lines in this definition, being like real stand-alone agents. And like we said, the momentum is an ecosystem in the end. You have the base with all the knowledges in there and the knowledge agents. Is that the separate agents or not? So it's a bit hard to do the definition here. But in the end, from the product lines, we had dozens of products over the next 2 to 3 -- 1 to 2 years, we'll add dozens of different features and products, if you want to call them agents or not. Yes.

And from a margin perspective, we obviously have a great contribution coming via increased ARPU and increased top line. There is no specifics on the bottom line on the cost structure. It depends, obviously, if we are working also with partners or having our own IP and own development. But from a general mixture, there is a nice contribution from that perspective as well.

And one of the advantages we have is it's all -- many of these agents or AI models are hosted in our own environment. So we have -- in the cloud, we have Model Hub, we have these GPU cards and everything. So the cost for us is much lower than for someone who has to buy it at Amazon. So for us, I think we have the highest margin possibilities out there.

And if I come back to the first question, could you tell us 1 or 2 agents that you also think will have a big -- could have a big market potential such as the Receptionist?

Yes. Please understand, I don't want to read too much into it because our competitors are listening to this call as well, I assume. Yes. So I don't want to tip them off in what is going to be the next one. But on the slides, we said a few things like, for example, the CRM is the natural extension. And CRM is not just a CRM on the web, it's also agent-based, of course. Agents are doing the work on the CRM in the end. And these are things which we believe has very strong demand because we noticed already from the customers we have, it's one of their most requested features is now we need the next agent back there. We need the CRM, which is human readable one thing, but AI readable on the other thing. So the AI starts doing much more on a customer base, starting interactions and marketing and all these things, callbacks, whatsoever. So these are -- that would be one, which is really soon. The other ones I would try not to be too explicit right now to not tip off our competitors. If that's okay for you, maybe we can do it in a close call.

That's fair enough. In a close call, any time, obviously.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Stephan Gramkow for any closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you, operator, for moderating the call today, and thank you all for joining today's call. Please feel free to reach out for any follow-up questions. Have a great day. Stay safe, and goodbye.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Thank you very much.