SMG Swiss Marketplace Group Holding AG (SMG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the SMG Swiss Marketplace Group Half Year 2026 Webcast for analysts, investors and media representatives. Today's call will be hosted by Christoph Tonini, CEO; and Boris Gussen, CFO of SMG. I will now hand over to Christoph to begin today's webcast.

Thanks a lot. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we start, I'd like to briefly draw your attention to the disclaimer on Page 2 of our presentation. My name is Christoph Tonini, I'm the CEO of Swiss Marketplace Group, and I'm sitting here in Zurich together with our CFO, Boris Gussen. Flipping to Page 4. And before we move to our half year performance, I would like to briefly address an important leadership development we announced this morning. I have been discussing my longer-term plans with the Board for some time now. A few months ago, I informed them that I felt '27 will be the right time to transition out of the CEO role. After almost 4 years as CEO and having led SMG through an important period of transformation and its successful IPO, I believe it is the right time to hand over the operational leadership of the company. Following a structured succession process, the Board announced this morning the appointment of Alberto Sanz de Lama as next CEO of SMG, effective 1st January '27. This enables a structured handover as well as a continuity in both strategy and execution. Alberto has been a key member of our executive leadership team since '23 and has played an important role in shaping our strategy and the key decisions we have taken as a group. He has over 20 years of digital marketplace experience and is an experienced leader. More importantly, he knows our business, our market, our people and our strategic priority extremely well, making him well placed to preserve strategic continuity and execute SMG's established strategy. We also announced this morning that Jorn Nikolay has decided not to seek reelection at the next AGM. He will step down as Chairman immediately but remain a member of the Board until the next AGM. Jorn has been part of SMG's journey since the merger in '21. And I would like to thank him for his contribution to the company's development over the last years, in particular, for guiding the organization through the IPO. As I transition out of the operational leadership of SMG, the Board has proposed that I succeed Jorn as a Chairman, subject to shareholder approval at the AGM in April 2027. I'm very pleased to continue contributing to SMG in this new role and to support the company's next phase of growth. Until then, Pietro Supino, currently Vice Chairman of the Board, will assume the Chairmanship on an interim basis. I have great confidence in Alberto and in the strength of our leadership team. Over the coming months, we will work closely together to ensure a smooth transition ahead of his appointment as CEO on January 1. In the meantime, Alberto will remain fully focused on leading the Automotive division until the transition, while we work on an ordinarily succession to ensure continuity for the automotive business. You will hear from him in his new capacity in the new year. As ever, we look forward to continuing our close engagement with the capital markets throughout. I'm now moving to Page 5, which provides an executive summary of our first half performance. Sustainable double-digit growth and expanding margins through operating leverage are the cornerstones of our equity story. H1 provides further evidence that our strategy is delivering on both fronts. Group revenue grew 11.3% to CHF 179.8 million, while growth was broad-based with double-digit growth across all core verticals. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 15.8% to CHF 101.5 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 2.2 percentage points to 56.5% and cost ratios declined along the expectations we set out at IPO. In real estate, we delivered the first net agent growth in 3 years while maintaining strong double-digit ARPA growth in the core packages. On the AI front, we are successfully scaling several initiatives while the ongoing rollout is being funded within our current CapEx envelope. Overall, we are growing, expanding margins, broadening the real estate customer base, deploying AI pragmatically and increasing visibility for the full year. This combination gives us confidence in both our full year '26 outlook and our medium-term value creation path. As a result, we are narrowing our full year '26 revenue guidance from 10% to 12% to 11% to 12%. We confirm our adjusted EBITDA margin at 56% to 58% and improve and narrow the CapEx guidance at 7.5% to 8.5% of revenue. On the next slide, I'd like to highlight a few operational achievements from the first half. Starting with real estate, we successfully relaunched our package portfolio in H1. The new offering has been well received by customers, is already translating into stronger upselling and has contributed to strong ARPA growth in the core packages. On top of that, we delivered on a strategic priority that we had clearly set out at the time of the IPO. We report first year-on-year net agent growth in 3 years. This is the result of successful win backs of small customers, customer retention as well as the strong adoption of our recently introduced Flex package. We have underserved smallest clients previously. And with the Flex offer, we are bringing them back and retaining them in our ecosystem. Another standout was our Seeker subscription business, which delivered 190% year-on-year growth in Seeker subscribers. This demonstrates clear willingness to pay for premium access to listing in the supply constrained rental market and our capability to monetize the seeker size of our real estate marketplace. Turning to automotive. Product innovation and product-led value capture remains key priorities. During the first half, we launched a range of product enhancements, including AI-driven features and a unified integrated private seller journey that allows private sellers to seamlessly switch between classifieds and auction formats. We also continue to convert product value into revenue, delivering another period of strong RPD growth supported by an increasing adoption of premium packages. Finally, Ricardo maintained its strong operational momentum. Continued product improvements, high user engagement and healthy marketplace dynamics translated into another period of strong GMV growth and an exceptional year-on-year performance. Overall, these achievements demonstrate the consistency of our execution and make us confident going into the second half of the year. I'm turning to Page 7 now. Across our marketplaces, SMG remains the clear market leader with a strong traffic advantage supported by the brand deeply embedded in the daily lives of Swiss consumers. Importantly, this position has not changed. Contrary to the disruption narrative, we see no evidence that AI is taking our traffic. LLM-driven traffic remains below 1% across our core verticals and broadly stable even as adoption of AI tools continue to rise among Swiss consumers. We also continue to benefit from attractive underlying market dynamics. Switzerland remains a stable and resilient market with monetization levels in real estate and automotive being below our European marketplace peers. This gives us confidence that we still have significant headroom to grow on the long term through continued product innovation and enhanced customer value. Flipping to Page 8 now. AI becomes powerful when it has access to trusted inventory, rich marketplace data and strong customer relationships. These are exactly the assets that SMG has built over many years across real estate, automotive and general marketplaces. Across the group, our strategic logic is to scale AI initiatives that improve discovery, workforce and marketplace intelligence and further strengthen our competitive moat. On the demand side, with AI, we enable users to do better search, receive better recommendation and get more support in making decisions. This makes our demand moat even stronger by deepening engagement, relevance and direct usage of our platforms. On the supply side, we are making listings simpler and more efficient while increasingly integrating into our customers' daily workflows. AI allows us to automate time-consuming tasks and provide agents, dealers and sellers with smarter tools to run their business. On the data side, we are building on our unique marketplace data and proprietary intelligence to enable better recommendations, better matchmaking and to enable our customers to make better day-to-day decisions. Across our platforms, we will see even more real-time context and intent signals in the future. We will see even better pricing and valuation data, and we will see that trust and safety signals will matter even more. To sum it up, AI is strengthening our competitive moats. On top of that, our replatforming and cloud migration were fully completed last year, providing a great technological foundation that allows us to scale AI initiatives without fundamental investments. Let me now turn to the next slide, which showcases concrete AI-powered products and features that we have launched over the last few months or roll out as we speak that directly support the strategic outlined earlier. Conversational search is now live across all our core platforms. Going forward, it will increasingly help users find what they are looking for in a more natural way. Other AI-powered tools such as decluttering and virtual staging in real estate make listings more engaging and more comparable. I mentioned earlier that we expect AI to make workflows more efficient and to integrate us even deeper into the processes of our professional customers. A few examples here. Automated background removal and virtual staging helps automotive dealers create higher quality listings in less time. In GDM, we launched AI-supported bulk listings, making it very easy to list multiple items on Ricardo while AI is writing descriptions and providing pricing suggestions. In real estate, we are currently testing and rolling out AI replies on Flatfox, reducing manual work while improving responsiveness. Just to give you an idea of the scale, in the first half of 2026, Flatfox advertisers manually generated approximately 240,000 messages per month on average. These are practical examples of how we use AI to increase customer productivity and improve the return on investment they achieve through our products and marketplaces. Finally, we are increasingly turning our proprietary data into proprietary intelligence. In automotive, our new Optimizer Pro provides expected time-to-market insights, helping dealers manage their car inventory, while a new recommendation engine improved conversions. In real estate, we now predict B2B package performance to promote upselling. In general marketplaces, LLM-supported tagging has improved discoverability, leading to better search results and higher conversion rates. In addition, we continue to invest in AI-driven fraud detection, helping us to increase trust while reducing off-platform transactions. I want to emphasize that this slide represents only the AI component of our innovation road map. AI is an important lever, but it is only one of several levers we are pulling. Let me use AutoScout24 as an example. Given our recently introduced product updates, dealers can now integrate PDF documents directly into their listing, such as service histories or inspection reports, giving prospective buyers more transparency and greater confidence in their purchase decision. We have also introduced video integration, enabling dealers to present vehicles in a more engaging and realistic way. These are exactly the type of product enhancements buyers expect and dealers want to offer, and they create value without relying on AI. The broader point I want to make is that as a relatively young company, SMG still see substantial untapped potential to improve products, customer workflows and monetization across our marketplaces. AI helps on this journey, but it is only one part of a much broader product-led growth agenda. With that, I hand over to Boris, who will take you through our financial performance in more detail. Please, Boris.

Thank you, Christoph, and welcome, everyone, on the call also from my side. Let me start with our group financial performance on Slide 10. Group revenue increased to CHF 179.8 million, representing year-on-year growth of 11.3%. This strong performance was broad-based with double-digit growth across all our core segments. When comparing this with the 14.4% growth reported in the first half of '25, it is important to remember that the prior year period benefited from a 2.3 percentage point contribution from M&A and Ricardo Shipping Label revenues. On a like-for-like basis, H1 '25 revenue growth was 12.1%, highlighting the consistency of our underlying growth trajectory. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 15.8% year-on-year to CHF 101.5 million. As a result of operating leverage, our adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by 2.2 percentage points to 56.5%, corresponding to a strong drop-through rate of 75.8%. This reported margin absorbed several dilutive effects, including the growing contribution from Ricardo Shipping Labels and C2B in Automotive as well as the annualization of incremental costs associated with being a listed company. Moving to the right side of the slide, EPS doubled year-on-year from CHF 0.29 to CHF 0.57. As you might recall, last year's result included elevated IPO-related costs, including related share-based compensation. These costs are now at typical levels and combined with our strong operational performance translated into significant EPS growth. Finally, we continue to operate from a position of financial strength. Our leverage ratio stood at 0.7x adjusted EBITDA, providing us with a strong balance sheet and a continued financial flexibility. Let us now take up -- take a deep dive into the core business units, starting with real estate on Slide 11. Real Estate delivered a very good half year, demonstrating both the resilience of our market position and the continued strength of our monetization strategy. Revenues grew 11.5% to CHF 88.5 million. The underlying real estate market in Switzerland remains characterized by strong demand and limited supply. Following that, we observed a continuous increase in property prices and single-digit decline in active inventory. The attractiveness of our platforms remained unchanged with both traffic and lead generation growing year-on-year. This underscores the strength of our market position and the value we continue to create for both property seekers and professional customers. Our professional classified revenue increased by 9.7%, driven by the relaunch of our core package portfolio, which both supported pricing adjustments and an increased adoption of our premium offerings. We also achieved an important strategic milestone we set out at IPO, a year-on-year net increase in agent numbers to 4,027 customers. The key driver here was the strong adoption of our Flex package. As a reminder, Flex is a hybrid subscription package, and we designed it as a deliberate entry product for smaller agencies that were previously underserved had churned or might have left the platform. We piloted the product last year, rolled it out fully this year with more than 300 customers by the end of June. Those Flex customers have an ARPA below CHF 300, which is significantly lower compared to our core package. This targeted addition of smaller customers and a significantly lower ARPA creates a natural mix effect. Including the Flex mix effect, reported ARPA grew 5.4%. However, the underlying core monetization engine remains firmly intact and ARPA growth in the core packages, excluding the Flex offer, was 13.7%. We expect to see this mix effect in H2 as well as we continue to acquire and win back smaller customers but gradually normalize into '27. On the private customer side, momentum remained particularly strong. Other classifieds revenue increased by 19.1%, supported by the continued scaling of our Seeker subscription business. Subscription volumes increased by approximately 190% year-on-year, providing strong evidence of the effectiveness of our offering and Seeker's willingness to pay premium access to the new listings. In addition, services and other operating revenue continued to grow, supported by the strong performance of our Flatfox SaaS business. Finally, profitability also continued to improve. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by 3.2 percentage points to 69.9%, reflecting the operating leverage inherent in our marketplace model and our continued focus on cost management. Next, Automotive on Page 12. Our Automotive segment delivered another strong first half with revenue increasing by 12.2%, demonstrating the resilience of our marketplace despite a softer automotive market. Overall, the Swiss automotive market stayed soft. We see weaker demand with traffic declining year-over-year, stagnating new car registrations and used car sales, while inventory from professionals and leads delivered by our platform stayed broadly stable compared to previous year. Professional classifieds revenue grew by 14.4%, driven by continued growth of average revenue per dealer, growing 13.8% year-over-year. Our dealer base increased slightly while we are also seeing continued adoption of premium packages. Slightly more than 35% of our dealer customers are now on 1 of the 3 tier packages, Professional, Professional Plus and Premium, while the rest are with the basic package. Two years ago, the percentage was roughly at 28%. On the one hand, this demonstrates that we're driving the adoption of premium packages, but it also crystallizes more potential for growth and monetization. Other classifieds revenue representing our private or pay per-ad revenue declined 1.4% year-over-year, reflecting softer listing volumes, largely offset by targeted product and pricing initiatives, including the introduction of value-based pricing tiers. Another important strategic priority is the continued expansion of our C2B business, AutoScout Direct. The number of cars transacted increased by 48.7% or CHF 0.8 million revenue growth year-over-year helps us offset the impact of lower private listing volumes. As C2B carries a lower margin than our traditional classifieds business, its growing contribution has a modest dilutive effect on the segment margin. However, it creates an additional revenue stream as the market evolves and also shows how we adapt to the needs of private sellers for more convenience and a faster selling process. Profitability also continued to improve. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 0.9 percentage points to 68.4%. Moving on to Page 13. General Marketplace delivered a strong first half with revenue increasing by 13% year-on-year. This was supported by continued GMV growth of 13.1%, reaching CHF 309.1 million. The biggest growth contribution was from transactional revenue or Ricardo, which increased by 11.9%. What is particularly encouraging is the momentum was broad-based across the marketplace with growth in visiting accounts up to 8%, unique buyers and sellers, both up 11% and posted articles up 4%, reflecting healthy marketplace dynamics across both demand and supply. Growth also benefited from favorable market dynamics in selected categories such as coins and collectibles. In addition, efficient marketing execution continued to support buyer and seller activity. We expect second half growth to normalize against stronger prior year comparator and for the underlying marketplace momentum to remain healthy. We also made good progress with the rollout of Ricardo Plus, our new offer for sellers. More than 65% of eligible users have now been onboarded and the program is supporting volume expansion and deeper customer engagement. At the same time, targeted seller discounts helped drive additional activity. These volume-driving measures, together with a higher share of above cap orders had a modest impact on the take rate, which declined by 0.1 percentage points year-on-year to 9.1%. We view this as a balanced trade-off as the initiatives support GMV growth and long-term marketplace health. The classifieds part of the business also continued to evolve with revenue increasing by 17.2%. Growth was supported by targeted monetization initiatives, including the introduction of listing fees for cars as well as the integration of shipping possibilities, which improved convenience for users. Finally, adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 2.5 percentage points to 48.8%, reflecting disciplined cost control while still allowing us to invest in marketing and product development to support long-term GMV growth. We continue on Page 14 and moving now to the cost base. I see that further across the individual segment reviews, we saw profitability improving, supported by revenue growth and the operating leverage inherent in our marketplace model. This slide brings the dynamic together at group level. Looking at the adjusted total operating expenses, the absolute cost base increased only modestly from CHF 88.2 million to CHF 91.4 million. This reflects continued investment in the competitive positioning of our platforms alongside variable expense components such as cost of services that naturally scale with revenue. As revenue grew significantly faster than costs, adjusted total operating expenses as a percentage of revenue declined from 54.6% to 50.9%. The same pattern is visible in personnel expenses. Adjusted personnel expenses increased only marginally from CHF 56.5 million to CHF 57 million, while the ratio to revenue declined from 35% to 31.7%. Apart from operating leverage, this also results from the continued increase of our nearshore and offshore ratio being 39.4% as of June '26. The key takeaway is that we're able to support continued growth without a proportional increase of headcount or personnel costs. On CapEx, we also saw a very healthy development. CapEx decreased from CHF 16.4 million to CHF 14 million as a percentage of revenue declined from 10.2% to 7.8%. This underlines our ability to drive meaningful product innovation and adoption with current talent and resources and within the current CapEx envelope. Turning to guidance, Page 15. As a result of our strong first half performance and the good visibility we currently have for the remainder of the year, we're narrowing our full year revenue guidance to 11% to 12% growth, which is the upper end of the previously communicated range. One important point of context is that our first half performance was driven by several factors we have already highlighted, particularly Ricardo's strong performance. While we expect the second half to be solid, we do not expect this to be a huge step change beyond what was delivered in H1. For Ricardo specifically, we expect the market-based momentum to continue throughout H2, but with growth rates normalizing against the stronger prior year comparison and higher baseline. On margins, we are confirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance at 56% to 58%. The current range captures continuous operating leverage while enabling investment in growth, increased marketing spend in H2 and certain onetime expenses such as increased consulting and education expenses. We're also improving and narrowing our CapEx guidance as we expect CapEx to land between 7.5% and 8.5% of revenue. Finally, our midterm outlook remains unchanged. Our first half performance puts us firmly on track and strengthens our confidence in delivering against those commitments over time. So to wrap it up, strong H1, good visibility for the rest of the year, allowing us to narrow our full year '26 revenue growth guidance and continued confidence in our midterm outlook. And with that, I hand over to Christoph for some final words.

Thank you, Boris. Switching to the final slide. To conclude, we announced a planned leadership transition this morning designed to ensure continuity in terms of strategy and execution. Alberto was appointed new CEO effective January 1, '27. He knows our business and strategy extremely well, and I have full confidence in him and our leadership team. I look forward to supporting a smooth transition and continuing to contribute to SMG in my future role as the Chairman, subject to shareholder approval. In the first half of '26, we delivered broad-based double-digit revenue growth, expanded margins through operating leverage and cost discipline and continued to execute well on our strategic priorities. We are also making good progress with AI and AI-driven innovation is strengthening our product offering and competitive position while developed under our existing investment framework. We have narrowed our full year revenue growth guidance and remain committed to our midterm targets. Overall, the results underline the strength of our platforms, the great execution by our teams and the resilience of our models as we continue to create value for customers, partners and shareholders. Thank you to our employees, customers, partners and shareholders for their continued commitment, trust and support. With that, let's move to Q&A, and I will hand over to the moderator.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Yulia Kazakovtseva at UBS.

I actually have one question about the excess cash usage. So at the moment, it seems that your net leverage reduced around 0.7x. So could you please elaborate on your capital allocation priorities going forward? And as I said, how do you plan to use your excess cash?

So I think we announced initially that we would increase our dividends along adjusted EAT and that's still the plan for the time being. We're expecting a considerable increase in our dividends. Last year, it was CHF 80.5 million, and we're looking now in line with adjusted EAT at a much higher number. Other than that, there are no concrete plans regarding share buybacks or M&A that we could communicate at this point of time.

Our next question comes from Andrew Ross at Barclays.

My question is on auto. So there was a bit of noise in the press on the back of the pricing adjustments you made in May around the few dealers. Can you talk a bit about that pushback? How many dealers have either threatened to drop off or actually dropped off the platform since then and any impact that has H2 numbers, if any? And I guess a follow-up to that is whether there have been any further conversations on the auto side with either the piece out COMCO on the back of that noise or otherwise for us to be aware of over the period?

Yes. Thank you. So I think there was definitely a competitor-driven noise trial in the press. We have seen that, obviously, as in the past years, reaction of our customers were -- so nobody was clapping in the hands with the adjusted prices, but we have seen 0 churn, and that's the most important. So no churn at all. This gives us great confidence that after all, our customers appreciate the services and the performance we are delivering with our product and therefore, also definitely no impact, a rather positive one in H2 out of professional packages. When it comes to COMCO, there is nothing going on with automotive and price variance. We haven't heard. There is a long time back was some questions, but it is more than 2 years back. So that was really press noise, but nothing in the market as such.

Our next question comes from Marcus Diebel at JPM.

I wanted to follow up on the strong performance in GM. I think you mentioned it's really driven by volumes. Could you just explain a little bit more also next to the slide that we've seen already sort of like what is sort of like happening? Is it that individuals just post more given it's now much easier? Do you -- have you acquired a lot more customers? I just wanted to have a sense of sort of like the reasons for the strong development in GM and if we should sort of like extrapolate this also in the next few quarters?

All right. So GMV was up 13.1% compared to the previous year. We saw a strong performance across all key metrics. Visiting accounts were up 8%. Unique buyers and sellers were up both 11%. Posted articles was up 4%. Average selling price was considerably up as a result also of one-offs. We saw, for instance, the coins -- the gold coins category or the Panini stickers bringing that up considerably. So we saw a healthy development across all basically health indicators. And that will continue throughout. The take rates was down by 0.1 percentage points. We talked about the rebates, the discounts. And we also said last time, we believed that, that would grow volumes, and it actually happened. So the take rate is not affected much at this point of time. So for H2, I think we said it already. The last year, I think we saw a 20% growth in H2 '25. And that clearly has also an effect on the year-over-year growth. And so we remain cautious for H2. All health indicators remain positive, but I would see the H2 growth around mid-single-digit numbers. But still full year would then, of course, be very positive also compared to what we said initially.

And maybe just to add, I think what was really very successfully done was the rollout of Ricardo Plus for sellers. There were -- in the Ricardo Plus sellers have certain items as a benefit. And this was an acceptance up to 65% of sellers using now the Ricardo Plus. And this is driving then what in the former part, we mentioned as MoneyGuard we have more transaction concluded with this escrow payment where we have on the amount paid in the escrow a certain split for us and it's also driving the label usage where we have also a margin on it. So Ricardo Plus, that was a real success, and it will help to continue also the growth, as Boris mentioned, in the second half year and next year.

Perfect. And mid-single-digit numbers, just to clarify, it means mid-single-digit percentage growth in H2?

Yes. Yes, that's correct.