The Platform Group AG (TPG.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's update call of The Platform Group AG. We are delighted to welcome the CEO, Dr. Dominik Benner; and CFO, Bjoern Minnier, who will speak in a moment and guide us through the updates. Following the presentation, the floor will be opened for all upcoming questions via the chat box. We are looking forward to some news. And having said this, Mr. Benner, please, the stage is yours.

Thank you, Ingmar, and also a warm welcome from our side. So we start with a quick introduction and updates from the Platform Group. Bjoern Minnier as CFO, and me, we will present the company and the update in this call today. So first of all, as you know, we are a platform group operating in currently 28 industries. And we have 15,000 partners where we work for. That means for 15,000 retailers, sellers and manufacturers, we make the e-commerce, and we do it on more than 30 platforms and have more than 5 million customers. What was our latest development? I would hand over to Bjoern.

So first of all, a very warm welcome to all of you from my side as well. I am Bjoern Minnier, and I'm the CFO of the Platform Group. And at the same time, I'm heading our M&A department. And since I'm new in my previous role, I was the MD of a retail holding company of a large German PE investor with 14 portfolio companies. And I'm very much looking forward to support Dominik and the entire TPG to continue its successful growth path. So -- but time is precious, so let's jump right into the facts. Our latest acquisition is a B2B platform for construction businesses. And if you wonder, yes, there are a few solutions already around, but they are all B2C and B2B is new. So what does we connect work do? Just to give you an example, if you run a construction company and you have a large contract and for whatever reason, you find yourself in need for, let's say, a new forming or 3 new brick layers, then we connect work might be your [indiscernible]. And that's what it's all about. And since we have entered this vertical, we wouldn't be TPG, we also plan to expand this new business. And this is why right now, we are already working to build a platform that's offering construction materials. So that's our first new segment. The second addition to our portfolio we made is Joli Closet. And this, again, is one of our classics. It's a B2C platform, and it's all about high-quality fashion. The USP is it is a platform for vintage luxury goods, pre-owned, you could also say. The focus of this platform is France, Italy, it's the Netherlands and the U.S. And of course, it will be rolled out to Germany as well. The biggest immediate advantage is that it brings 220,000 new vintage products to our platform. And I just realized new vintage products, there might be a contradiction, but it's going to be the only one in this presentation today. And all major and fancy brands are on Board, such as Hermes, Dior and Rolex. And of course, we do expect synergies from our existing platforms such as Fashionette, Winkelstraat and Brandfield for example. And then I would say we move on to an entire new segment. So we successfully managed our entry into the Optics and Hearing market. It's a hybrid approach. So it's an online platform, which is called -- my Glasses. Right now for the start, we also have acquired 30 new local stores. The focus for this endeavor is the DACH region. And our goal is to achieve EUR 55 million to EUR 60 million in revenues right from the start. So that is in 2026. And this segment has a real sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the margin. And it's very high for prescription glasses, and it's even higher for hearing aids. So it's a very, very attractive segment. And this is why we expect an EBITDA margin of 25% in this new segment. So what are our next steps? Next steps are, well, of course, like always, we expand -- MyGlasses that was just started, and we also plan to acquire additional local stores. So for 2026, we expect to see 60 to 70 local stores at the end of the year.

All right. So we continue. We also informed the public that we opened an own fulfillment center. This has two reasons. So first one is that we also want to offer our partners a fulfillment process. That means if they want to put their inventory, not in their own inventory hub, we can make it in a very affordable price level. We have a very high service level agreement for our partners, and they can make everything there from delivery to return processes. We do really all the process for them. Additionally, we also have 3 subsidiaries, for example, Lyra Pet and for example, Herbertz. They also use this inventory hub for their own inventory. And that was the reason why we combine these different inventories now to one big inventory hub, and it is located in Gladbeck, so not far away from our headquarter. And the next update was our legal structure as we already announced by May 2025. We planned a new legal structure, and this will be the SA& Co. KGaA structure. And as you can see here, we have a long-term shareholder with Benner Holding. They own around 70% and a free float of around 30% managed in this company. And if you have further questions on this, maybe the AGM is a perfect day to discuss it. And also our advisory for this project, Heuking will be also on Board with that. So coming back to our strategy, what do we plan for this year and what is the outlook? So first of all, as you know, our strategy is very clear. We want to become the #1 platform group in Europe. There are different platforms in Europe, but most of them are focusing always on one niche. For example, there's a platform for bikes or there's a platform for fashion. But our intention is that we want to become really the biggest platform group with the most partners in Europe, and I think we are on a pretty good track with that. Our strategic goal is that we want to grow above the organic growth rate of the market, and we also want to have a balanced organic and inorganic growth rate because the history of our company is that we always had an organic growth. And only in the last 4 years, we focused more on inorganic acquisitions because the price levels, the purchase price levels are pretty attractive right now, and we can use this current phase in the market. And as you can see on the right side, we want to expand to 30 industries by end of this year. Right now, we have already covered 28 industries. So we are on a good track to achieve this goal. And this is also very important to mention, some of you in this call already know the circle. It's our growth circle because people always ask us, how can you grow faster than the market? And the answer is very simple because our development is not directly correlating to the market. So for example, take the bike market. The bike market had a crisis in the last 2 years because they have a lot of overstock. But 4 years ago, it was a great experience to be in this market. But for us, it was exactly the opposite. So 4 years ago, when the market was like this, we had a big problem in this industry because the number of partners was declining because they had no inventory. The inventory was declining. The partners had no inventory for our platforms. But now as it comes back to normality, we are on a very good track. And that means if we have more partners, we get more products. And with more products, we get more customers. And as a consequence, our GMV and revenue is rising. Next point is about the number of partners. So as you know, our number of partners is our growth driver. It is also relating to the number of products. And we show you the comparison. This year, we will grow to more than 16,500 partners. That's our expectation. By July '25, we already reached 15,640. So we are on a pretty good track. And this leads to more products. And if you have more products in the e-commerce, you know that you attract more customers on these platforms. All right. So now we come to the financial outlook and statements. I would hand over to Bjoern.

Okay. Let's do some numbers. So as you can see, Q2 was a good quarter, in line with our expectations, and we continued to see a positive momentum in basically all our key areas. So the GMV increased by 87% and now is EUR 356 million. In line go our net revenues, which are up, as you see, by almost 50% to EUR 160.8 million. And very relevant, of course, is the gross margin. This slightly deteriorated by 2.9 percentage points to 34.8% and this has a reason and the reason basically is our own success through the acquisition of HOOD and Avocadostore. We acquired two companies that have a very high revenue, but with an overall slightly lower margin, and this impacts then the total gross margin. But the gross margin is only a percentage value. Most important is though what it all adds up to at the bottom line. And since we strongly boosted our sales, the adjusted EBITDA in euro, and that's what you see in your cash box at the end of the year, that increased from EUR 8.5 million to EUR 15.9 million. So that is an increase of 87%, and this outperformed actually even our own expectations. And same goes for the net profit. From the continued operations, here we can see a development from EUR 12.9 million to EUR 18.2 million. So we are up EUR 5.3 million or even 41%. So if we go to the next page, here we are. Just to make this one short. Most important for you probably are the earnings per share for the continued operations. And as you can see, they increased from EUR 0.65 as we expected to now EUR 0.90. And also very important from your perspective as far as the cash at the end of the period. And this is also expected to increase, and we expect to have EUR 21.3 million of cash at the end of the period.

So besides the financial numbers, we also have the figures for the Q1. We already presented it. I just want to mention the balance between nonorganic and organic growth. So in the first quarter, we had a nonorganic growth of 41%. So we also say that we expect a better balance on the second half year, and we will have at least 55% of organic growth this second half year. So what was the background for the first half year? As you know, we will present our first half year figures by end of August before our AGM, but we already want to mention some of the developments, which are relevant and essential for our guidance and the increased guidance, which we announced yesterday. So one thing was we already acquired 7 successful targets by 2025. So we expect another 2 to 4 upcoming targets in the second half year. And we have a very strong post-merger team, which is managing these M&A processes and the integration of these companies. Our profitability is increasing. And this is the reason because we did a very strong cost efficiency program last year, and this affected a lot of our processes and a lot of our corporate structures. And within this, we can also increase a little bit our EBITDA margin and have a good scalable cost structure. The biggest challenge for us to be honest was always the increasing distribution costs because we had 8 quarters in a row where the distribution cost ratio was not good. It was rising. And the last quarter was the first one where we had a stable distribution cost ratio. And there, you can see that our actions which we've taken are working and that we have a stabilized basis now and that we can work with that. We also see excellent conditions for new M&A acquisitions and for pretty fair values. So when we look at targets, we pay between 3x, 5x, 6x EBITDA, and this is a very attractive level where we can work with. Also, we increased the scalability of our TPG 1 software. At the last Capital Markets Day, we explained in a very detailed way with our COO, Christoph Wilhelmy, how our software was built in the last years, what features and layers we have. And I think we are on a very good track to now start in new industries. As Bjoern mentioned, we started the industry now with construction and expanded to construction materials. And it is very successful that we can do it with less than 4 months to enter a new industry. And last but not least, our 4 segments are growing. And that means, for example, the industrial goods segment, which always had historically very low margins. These margins are increasing. So we can be happy about this development. And as Bjoern mentioned, we also established a new segment. It is called Optics and Hearing. And this segment starts by July 2025, and it has a very high potential because we buy more and more local partners and connected to our platform, and we expect an EBITDA margin of 25%. So overall, we had a very positive development in H1, and we decided as a Board to increase the guidance for the full year 2025.

And with the tailwind from the numbers we just presented to you, it is actually necessary that we need to increase our guidance for this year and actually also for next year. And we expect the revenues to be in a bracket between EUR 715 million and EUR 735 million. The EBITDA is going to be in the high EUR 50 million. The GMV will remain basically around EUR 1.3 billion. It will grow. But since we are talking billions here, you do not really see it in the numbers. And the EBITDA leverage ratio will remain unchanged, and it will be somewhere in between 1.5x and 2.3x factor depending on what M&A acquisitions we still do this year. And last but not least, we will onboard around 500 additional partners in then in total, 30 industries. If you compare our development just for the previous 2 years actually, then you can already see that TPG has come a long way. We have almost doubled our GMV, and we more than doubled our EBITDA. And actually, this went up by a factor of 2.4%. And as already said before, we expect an EBITDA in between EUR 54 million and EUR 58 million and thereof EUR 47 million are minorities. Thanks to our strong M&A and operational performance, we have been able to significantly improve our initial forecast, the one from January over April to July. And I have already been commenting all these figures. So TPG continues growing against the trend. I don't think we need more details. Everything has been said. This leads us to our new guidance. This is the guidance now for 2026, is next year. So the revenue, we expect to be around EUR 860 million now. Our old guidance was EUR 820 million. So we are up EUR 40 million here. The adjusted EBITDA margin, we expect it to be in between 7.5% and 10%. So we increased the first number from 7.0% to 7.5% now. GMV is going to be in the same area. It's about EUR 1.6 billion. Leverage will remain about the same. Number of partners, that's our core business. We work very hard on increasing this number every day. It will go up to 18,000. And of course, we will also try to number -- to increase the number of industries we are represented in. So we expect to be in 35 different industries by next year. So this chart, again, just points out the long way we have come. The numbers I have already presented, it's EUR 1.6 billion in GMV and EUR 860 million in revenues. So that's what we will see by the end of next year. And here it's important to see our new EBITDA figure. So the margin I just described of 7.5% will be an equivalent EUR 65 million here. And that's what we are working on to achieve.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Bjoern, for the information about the financials. And now we come to some additional information, which we would like to add to you as our investors or interesting parties in our company. So we try to find out what kind of questions reached us within the last 3 months, and we especially focus on debt, capital and cash, and we want to give you a more transparent perspective on that. So first of all, we give you an update on our debt situation. You can see the debt situation by last year. And you can see on the right side, the debt situation of this year. So we made a forecast and the forecast has not changed. So we expect the same cash and debt by end of this year. So there will be a forecasted net debt of around EUR 106 million. And we expect, according to our latest forecast, an EBITDA of EUR 54 million to EUR 58 million.This leads to a leverage of 2.0x. So this is lower than we forecasted it. So we expect a better leverage ratio compared to our previous forecast. And also important to underline is that we also want to achieve a very high return on equity and a very good return on capital employed, the ROCE figure. And as you can see here, in the last 2 years, we always reached 20% or more on both of these figures. And we also want to make sure that we will achieve these good numbers. So that means above 20% at least in this full year. So when we go through the numbers for the full year 2025 for next year, you will see that we also increased the good ratios regarding the return on equity and the ROCE figures. Additionally, we also want to give you a better understanding on how our company is structured. So for example, when you have a look on this chart here, you see on the top line, the Platform Group AG, which is the stock listed holding. Very important to give you the understanding is that this is no operational function. It is not an operational holding. That means it is only focusing and working on a real holding basis, so no people, no operative business and so on. The people and the employees are primarily on the subsidiaries below. Then on the second level, you see the operational holdings and the holdco of all our subsidiaries. So starting with The Platform Group, [ GmbH & Co. KG ]. This is the most important operational holding what we have here. So they have a bunch of people and workforces all over Germany. And this company is located in Wiesbaden. And this is also included into our cash food strategy of the full TPG Group. In the middle, you see the Fashionette GmbH. This is a former Fashionette AG. The people changed to this legal entity. And this entity was built up last year. And so it is the second part of our holding. And the third one is on the right side, it is Brandfield and Fastylo in the Netherlands. This is a company which was acquired by 2021 from the former Fashionette AG, and this is also a separate part in our subholding structure. And below that, you see that all our operational subsidiaries, you can find are directly under the platform group [ GmbH & Co. KG ]. What does it mean for our cash pooling? So here, you can get a better understanding on how we make our cash pooling and how we manage it on these different levels. So first of all, you see on the right side that we have a cash pooling and liquidity framework between the TPG AG, KG and all the others below. That means if we work together with the TPG AG on the top line and the KG on the second line, we have a direct agreement with all the cash pooling and the liquidity framework of these legal entities. Saying this, it also means that always around 90% or more of the average cash is never in the holding and the AG, it is always on the level below. And that is the reason because The Platform Group AG, GmbH & Co., it is the operational holding. That means they make operative business, they hold the cash and they make all the cash management also for the majority of our subsidiaries below. And just to mention that, The Platform Group AG, they always have access to this, and we have all the legal settings for this cash pooling and for this liquidity framework. You can see it here with the legal guidelines, so especially the [indiscernible] in Germany and [indiscernible]. They are the legal guidelines to manage it in a legal correct way and to make sure that this is always in line with our liquidity forecast and all the legal standards, which are relevant for that. In the last month, we also received feedback that we should make more transparency, and we think that this is a good idea. So first of all, we also want to publish the annual financial statement of the TPG [indiscernible]. We will publish it at the AGM and also show you it in a public way there. Additionally, we also want to give you an overview on the cash status for the half year, and we can also give you an overview of the cash planning for the second half year so that you have a better overview on how we manage our cash structure in the second half year and also update our forecast there. Very important to understand when we publish our half year figures, you also see our cash flow statement. And within the cash flow statement, you see how much operational cash flow we had, how much invested, how much was invested into new M&A activities, and there will also be forecasts for the cash flow for the full year. So this is a thing what we never did before, but I think it's a good way to give you a better feeling and understanding on how we make cash planning in our finance department and how we plan our cash by end of this year. Additionally, we will also make a Q&A session with our shareholders by August, so that we make another round for make more detailed Q&A sessions because this call is pretty much focused on the latest figures and the updated guidance for 2025, but we will make an additional Q&A session by August with much more detailed questions and answers for you that we have a better insight perspective for you. Saying that, we also have a look on the financial calendar with Bjoern.

We are coming to the end of today's presentation, and this is why I would like to draw your attention to our upcoming events and already today invite you to join us. So this chart is from bottom to top. So our next milestone is the Publication of our Half Yearly Financial Statements, which some of you might await already. That's on August 22, so in roughly 3 weeks from today. And in the same week is our Annual General Meeting in Düsseldorf on August 25. And then we have the Fall Conference in September. We have the German Equity Forum in November and our next quarterly statement will be presented, the one for Q3 on November 14. So you might want to note that pencil in that into your calendars.

All right. If you have any further questions, you can always contact Bjoern and me directly with [email protected].