The Platform Group AG (TPG.F) Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of The Platform Group AG following the publication of the Q3 financial figures of 2025. 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 presentation, with an estimated duration of about 20 to 25 minutes. Please note that there will be a short Q&A session in this call in which you will be allowed to place your questions to the management. And having said this, we are looking forward to the presentation. Mr. Benner, please. The stage is yours.

Thank you, Ingmar. Thank you for the introduction and a warm welcome from our side on the Management Board. So let's start with our financial figures and the current financial year. So right now, you see the overview of the development over the last years and also the development in the current year, including our guidance for 2025 and 2026. For those who don't know that, we always publish our midterm forecast and midterm means the next year. And so you can see our financial figures with a strong growth rate and also with a very good development on the profit side. So let's start with our presentation today. Today, we have Bjoern Minnier as the CFO. You can see also Nathalie Richert, our Head of Investor Relations, and you can see me as CEO of the Board, and we would like to welcome you to our earnings call. So coming back to where we started from 2012 was the initial point where I took over the family business, which was founded 140 years ago. And we transformed it to an e-commerce business based on software and the software that we developed in the last years is the backbone and the basis on how we run now more than 36 platforms with more than 50,700 merchants across Europe. And I think this is a very strong development. And we also want to establish a much more increasing growth rate in the next years. So one of the aspects here is that we will publish this year, a vision for next year. So here's just a short teaser for that. And we expect to announce this in the next weeks for the financial goals for the next 5 years and also for the profit goals for the next 5 years. So our overall goal is that we want to become the #1 platform group in Europe, and this is a very strong goal that we have. We mentioned and presented this goal 4 years ago. And I think we are on a pretty good track to achieve that. We almost have 16,000 partners running on our platform. This is quite big. We have very good balanced organic and inorganic growth rates and every year, we enter new industries with our software and our platforms. The backbone besides the software is the operational holding. Some of the people always ask us why do you have so many people in your holding? And the reason is very simple. So when we enter a new industry, we always have scale effects with that because we have a lot of people in the operational departments like marketing, software, marketplace and design and so on. And we have centralized departments like the AI Academy, talent and training, legal, HR and finance. And when we take over a company and enter a new industry, we always can reduce costs with that and we reduce it in a significant way. And we can always ramp up the revenue and make sure that the new business model which is running on a platform basis is increasing the revenue basis. And with these two sites operational and centralized departments, I think we have a pretty good track record now for many years, and that's why we can integrate companies in a good way and can increase their profitability. You already know our software architecture. In our next Capital Markets Day, we will give you an update on that. What are our latest developments on that and how we can improve the scalability because software allows us to enter very fast into new markets, into new industries, and that is the best way for us to grow in a very good way and to make sure that we cover new industries in less than 4 or 5 months. Nathalie?

Yes. Hello, everybody. And let's take a look at our share price development. We have positive development since the start of December 2020, where we acquired stake in former fashionette. And actually, we have a share price of more than EUR 8. We are listed in the scale segment. That's a growth segment and have a market cap from EUR 160 million. And you see we have a research that comes from 6 retail houses with a target price of more than EUR 90. And when we look at the next slide, we see our trading volumes. And what we see there, we see a positive development depending since last year in September, we see international trading is up to more than 50% and we have an increase in trading volume more than 4x. I think that are really good steps. And yes, in the next weeks, we are in Munich. We are in Frankfurt. We are in Amsterdam, in Zurich and North America to meet you all. And now I hand over to Dominik.

All right. So here you can see the overview of our 28 different industries, which are covered. You can see that we also have now our fifth segment, it is called Optics & Hearing. So here, we have our online platform, which is called MyGlasses, and we have our local stores covering Germany, the central hubs and so it's a really good combined strategy, what we do there. But we will come to the figures of the segments later. So here you see the first chart. These are the nonfinancial KPIs. So in the first 9 months, we increased the number of partners by more than 23%. So this is a quite good growth rate. And actually, we expect the rate between 15% and 20%. So we can be very happy about this development, and it is really bringing us towards the next level. The active customers, they also grew in a large number. So we had an increase of 49% to EUR 6.7 million. And the most important thing is when you have more partners, you get more products. And when you have more products, you attract more customers. So it's always a cycle between the partners, the products and the customers. Correlating with the number of customers, we also have much higher order numbers. So we had an increase of 49% there. And also the order value, the average order value has increased a little bit to EUR 125. The number of employees is much higher compared to last year. So this is just because we have consolidated new companies and hired more people for software development. And on the right side, you can see also our increase in our revenue. So we had a huge increase of the growth rate of the revenue. And so we can be quite happy on that. But Bjoern, our CFO, will give you more details on that in the next slides. Let me just cover 2 or 3 things in our different segments. So 1 thing was the entry of the Optics & Hearing segment. So we announced it by June this year. And I think we had a pretty good start with that. So in the first part, we just opened our platform, MyGlasses, and we acquired stores here in Germany. Now we expand to more stores. You will see that in the next 6 months that we acquire more and more stores to cover really all relevant regions. And the third part is that we want to connect more and more opticians to our platform. And this is the most important development for us because when you make glasses, you always have to combine local business with e-commerce with platforms. Otherwise, it will not work. Also here, you can see our market development with the German optical market, though this is just a market where only 6% has an online penetration. So it is really not an online market. That's the reason why we combine online and offline activities here. And it's still very fragmented. So 55% are fragmented local small opticians, and there's a huge potential of further M&A activities if we want to do that. Most important is the M&A, the EBITDA margin. So we have more than 25% margin in the sector, at least for the companies which we acquire. So we are quite happy with that. And we have a clear growth road map of totally 60 to 70 stores, and we will achieve that until next year. Here, you can see also our luxury portfolio. This is part of our Consumer Goods segment, and the luxury portfolio is developing quite successfully. First, as you know, 2 years ago, we acquired fashionette. Fashionette was at this day, when we acquired it, it was a pure e-commerce player. So just with a big warehouse and try to sell the product on the front end. And when we acquired it, we said, well, we have to make a dramatic change towards platform business. So we changed the business model of fashionette. We changed it towards platform. And now we have several hundreds of local boutiques in the luxury sector. Now we are covering a lot of luxury fashion. We have more than 40,000 products there and the number of products is growing every month. Additionally, and a lot of you know that maybe is Chronext, we acquired them 9 months ago. It is a company focusing on luxury watches like Rolex or Patek and so on. And this is a very good combination to our existing luxury portfolio, which you can see also here with Winkelstraat and Brandfield. And on the bottom line, you see Joli Closet. This is a vintage luxury platform based in Paris and in France, and this is a really growing market. On the right side, we showed you how this market for secondhand luxury is growing. It is 3x faster growing than the first-hand market for luxury. So this is really an attractive market, and we are in a quite good position to cover this and to grow with this development. All right. Let's come to the financials. I hand over to Bjoern.

So thank you, Dominik, and thank you, Nathalie. And also from my side, a warm welcome to our viewers. As Dominik has given us the overview, I'm now going to break down into the details. So if you look at our guidance, this year, we are working on the acquisition of -- 11 acquisition targets. And if you look at it, you will quickly realize 11 targets means nearly one per month. So this is about the max we can do. If you look into the future, we continue to see excellent conditions for our M&A acquisitions, and we do not see that the relatively low multiples are going to change anyway in the near future. And if you look at the organic growth, then the enabler for all of that, of course, is our TPG One platform, which enables us to connect all of our partners so quickly that we are able to do 11 acquisitions in 1 year. And in total, our 5 segments, which we now have continued to grow, and this enabled us to increase our guidance already twice this year. And you see I skipped the two lines regarding profitability. The reason is because I will go into detail on the next page. And we are very happy to report that overall TPG has successfully continued its growth story. The already strong results that we have been seeing in the first two quarters have been further improved. So what does that mean in detail? It means in detail, our GMV is now at EUR 902 million, and that is an increase of over 48%. Our net revenue is now at EUR 531.6 million and that is an increase of over 43%. At the same time, we were able to increase our EBITDA margin by 1.3 percentage points and is now is at EUR 36.7 million. If you look at the costs, you see that we were able to reduce our marketing costs by approximately 9% in regard to the comparing 9 months of the previous period. And I believe that this is one of the best KPIs you will be able to see in the industry. And the drivers are centralization, its AI tools that we use to generating content, such as text and photos and also to automate our internal transactional processes. If you look at the distribution costs, we get them stable and the HR costs, we also were able to strengthen slightly, and that is due to the successful integration of all latest acquisitions. So all of this together leads to an EBITDA adjusted of EUR 45.8 million, and that is a plus of 86%. And the reported EBITDA is EUR 59.4 million. And if you look at the margins, the adjusted margin is at 8.4% and the reported is at 11.2%. So if we look at the net profit, the net profit in the previous period was EUR 25.5 million and is now EUR 41.7 million and that again is an increase of 64%. If you see the minorities, they have doubled, but on a relatively low level. And the earnings per share are now EUR 2.03. A question that we are often asked by investors and potential investors is how does your organic growth develop? And my answer usually is a very general assumption. It is around 50-50. So if you look at it closer, then we can see that in 2024, the organic growth was about -- the organic share was about 54% and 46% was the acquisition growth, and we have increased this now to 64% in the current period. So this increase is an increase by 18%. And what are the reasons? How do we achieve organic growth? So organic growth can be achieved quite easily in our structure by adding new partners. And we had several initiatives to add more partners, and this is why the number of partners now is close to 16,000, this comes with a high number of products, which is up about 23% and more products, of course, attract more consumers. And the growth we see, we see it especially in two of our segments. One is the segment, the consumer goods. I mean this is a segment we started with, and this is the largest segment, and this is where we are very strong. And we also see a strong growth in the freight goods sector and that is large machines and furnitures, especially. And of course, we always work on retention on the customer side for our platform. So these are now stand-alone the Q3 figures. Before I was showing the 9 months figure this is Q3 stand-alone. I keep it relatively short. So the GMV is now EUR 250 million in this period. The net revenue was EUR 188 million. If you look at the gross margin, we were able to increase the gross margin further compared to the relative segment previous year. And if you look at the marketing cost, you can also see the reduction I just explained. Distribution costs overall were reduced. And the only thing which slightly increased in this comparison quarter-by-quarter are the HR costs. And the reason is the acquisition of the Optics and they come with slightly higher personnel than we are usually used in our online businesses, pure online businesses. So all in all, the adjusted EBITDA is EUR 12.5 million, which is equivalent to a margin of 6.7% and the reported EBITDA is EUR 50.7 million, which is equivalent to a margin of 8.3% and the net profit is EUR 8.4 million. If you look at the cash flow, then you can see that we have a very strong cash flow coming from operating activities. But what you also can see is that we spend it nearly all on our investing activities and taking into account that, of course, we have to pay certain interest, overall, we have a negative cash flow in this period. And this is why our cash reserves, which you had at the beginning of EUR 22 million were reduced by nearly EUR 7 million to now EUR 15.2 million. If you take this EUR 15.2 million and look now at the debt situation and then we look at our bank loans, which remained in the same range as they were last year. Then the only thing that has significantly changed is the bond. We tapped the bond by another EUR 20 million. So it went from EUR 50 million up to EUR 70 million now. And this increased our net debt now to EUR 122 million. And if we put this in relation to the last 12-month EBITDA, then we come out with a leverage of 2.23x which is still within our defined -- self-defined borders, but we are now on the upper side of that. So to those of you who are new, when I showed you the chart two pages before, where we saw that the EBITDA adjusted is actually smaller than the EBITDA reported, you might have asked yourself whether we just confused the columns. No, we didn't. The reason why this is so we do not necessarily like it, but we are required to state it this way. And due to Paragraph 34, to the IFRS 3, we need to recognize our gains from bargain purchases as a profit. So what we're talking about here is our PPAs and since we, in general, managed to acquire our acquisitions at a relatively good price, we have to put this gain into our P&L. But since it is a one-off effect, we do not want to show it actually in the EBITDA adjusted. And this is why we are very transparent here. This is why we reduce it. And as you see, the main part of it is the PPA corrections in the amount of EUR 12.6 million. And this is why we are one of the few companies where actually the EBITDA adjusted is actually lower than the EBITDA reported.

All right. Thank you for that. And here you can see our development over the last 3 years for the 9 months period. As you can see here, we have a pretty strong development not only on the revenue line but also on the margin development. And this is quite important for us because when we acquired the fashionette Group in 2023, fashionette had almost 0 profit or had 0 profit. And so the combined entity had lower margins. Now we develop each year towards higher margins and we can be quite optimistic that we also achieve in this margin and increase for next year. Let's have a look on the segment report. So we start with the Consumer Goods segment. So consumer goods segment typically are fashion, shoes, watches, whatever. So all kind of stuff with usual packaging sizes, and which is attracting our customer base. So here, we saw an increase in the GMV of more than 51% and the revenue grew by 60% because we had a very high organic growth rate and also our number of orders increased by huge number. Secondly, we saw that the EBITDA also increased by more than the same proportion. So the EBITDA adjusted was increasing by more than 104% to EUR 31 million. And we also had a look on our cost structure because we really have to make sure that in e-commerce, it really counts that you do not hire too many people, that you do not spend too much money from marketing and I think we have a good year and a very successful year here in 2025. And you can see the 9.5%. It is the best margin from the last years. So we can be quite happy about this development. From the number of employees, the increase was just because we acquired some companies like Herbertz this year, Chronext, by December and so on. So these are all companies which came up into the segment. And so this is the result of the acquisition. The same for the freight goods segment. Here, we see only a slight increase in the employees by a little bit more than 30 people. But you can see that the net revenue and the GMV grew by 13% and 24%. So it was also very good organic growth. So we had nonorganic activities here and also the AOV increased by more than 3%. Very important, the EBITDA also grew by 19% because the sales just grew in this amount, and we also had a very good cost efficiency in this segment. The segments with the lowest margins, and it was always a kind of difficult segment for us in the last years, but it's now performing very good. So we see a really good comeback of the machine trade business. So as you know, our platform GINDUMAC, it is one of the leading platforms worldwide for machines -- for used machines. They have a very good track record this year. And as you can see here, we have an EBITDA margin of 4.9%. So it is really growing compared to last year. And you can also see our revenue is growing and our GMV is growing in almost the same amount. On the service and retail goods segment, you see the same growth rate, so 17% to 23%. There was one acquisition. It was a Fintus Group. And this also contributed a lot to our EBITDA. So you can see the jump in the EBITDA of almost EUR 2 million or 65%. And we see a very good development that we will continue that next year. Also here, AI, Artificial Intelligence is a really key driver and efficiency driver here. So with this AI layers and AI developments, we can reduce our software staff for next year. And we can also make sure that our costs are decreasing in our software development and in the marketing spending because a lot of all these manual things, what you do in the marketing, we can automate it and we have really good significant improvements here. Last report, and this is something special that is our [indiscernible] segment. It is new. Though the segment started by July 2025. So it is our smaller segment. It is only for 3 months here. So only 3 months figures are here. And the latest acquisitions, which we announced, they were closed by October, though they are not included in these numbers. But you can see here our first acquisitions, and they were quite good. So in these 3 months, they had a revenue of almost EUR 5 million. And the EBITDA margin was 26%. So it was a little bit more of what we have internally expected and we can also confirm that we grow there in a very good path and performance. And next year, we will see here numbers between EUR 55 million and EUR 60 million revenue and the EBITDA margin will be at least 25%. And last but not least, our M&A pipeline is quite strong there. So we see a lot of profitable targets, and we want to expand with our MyGlasses platform and connect to a lot of opticians next year. So this is really right now a small segment when you see only the numbers, but it will be 1 of the best segments which we have in our company. All right. Let's come to the outlook. You see our guidance 2025. So we want to achieve a revenue between EUR 715 million and EUR 735 million and an EBITDA of EUR 54 million to EUR 58 million. The debt leverage is unchanged and also the GMV was EUR 1.3 billion. It is unchanged. And we raised already this guidance 2 times this year. And so today, we confirm this increased guidance, and we are quite optimistic to achieve it until the end of this year. Because we are very optimistic, and we see a very good development in this fourth quarter, so in the month of November and also October, we think that we are on a good track to have a good development in 2026. So this year, we also increased our midterm guidance for next year. So we expect a revenue of more than EUR 1 billion and an EBITDA of EUR 70 million to EUR 80 million at least next year. And as you know, we are always conservative in our planning tools. And we think that this is quite good, but very conservative planning what we have for next year. From the strategic dimensions, I think we have 4 important things. So first, as you know, 1 of our big disadvantages is that we are too much focusing on the DACH region, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. So these are our core markets Additionally, we are also strong in France and Italy, but none of the other EU countries and not really in the U.S. and Asia region. So this is one big topic that we have to expand. We are getting better, but we are still at the beginning of this expansion. The next thing is our TPG One software. With AI, we can much better scale it. We can much better develop it, and we can develop it with lower costs. So this is really one of the biggest advantages and biggest improvements with AI, what we can see here besides marketing that our software development is getting cheaper in the future, and it's getting much more efficient. On the right side, you see our M&A path, so we still continue with that. We will buy new companies also next year, and we will connect them with our TPG One system. On the bottom, on the right side, you see that our next segments, which we will also invest is Optics & Hearing again and we will also buy maybe the one other company in the pharma sector. Nathalie?

Yes. You see our finance calendar. We will update it for the first quarter 2026 in the next weeks. We are this month in Munich for MKK and at the Deutsche Börse and Capital Forum also end of November. But please, if you are interested to speak to us, reach out. You see the contact address here, we're happy to speak with you.

Meet us there.

Thank you very much. All right. So this was it from our side. So we're happy to start with our Q&A session.

Yes. And we move to the announced Q&A session now. [Operator Instructions] We already received questions in the chat. I'll read it out to you. How much sales and adjusted EBITDA contributions from the new segments, Optics & Hearing and Pharma is baked into the full year '25 guidance?

All right. So I see a lot of questions from this person. So thank you very much. So first answer regarding the segments, Optics & Hearing. We showed you our Q3 figures, so 3 months for the segment. And this was not including all companies which we acquired because we had some closings by October. So this year, I think, realistically, we should expect between EUR 12 million and EUR 50 million revenue with the 25% to 26% margin. I think these are realistic numbers. From the pharma segment, we cannot answer you that because we don't know when the closing will be. So it really depends on the closing, and we have some regulatory issues on that. So we cannot answer you this right now. Next question was the full year guidance implies 5% adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4 compared to 8.6% in the first 9 months. Well, yes, we are always conservative in the fourth quarter. But actually, as you know, always, the fourth quarter has the highest revenues, but the lowest margins. So we are always very restrictive on that, and we think that this will also happen this year that we will see lower margins compared to the previous quarters, but with a much higher revenue. So there will be no change in this aspect. The next question was initiatives about TPG One. And the key drivers for the strong organic growth. Yes, I think at the next Capital Markets Day or in the next conference when you can meet us, we can give you a much more detailed perspective on that. And I think this is the best way to answer your question here. There was also a question about the organic growth from you. So this is just to mention the organic growth rate, take it from the revenue. And when you count how much was the increase there, it was a 26% increase. And on the other slide, what you can see here we just compared the growth rate to the growth rate this year. So this is a difference. Maybe it's good that you asked us this question to clarify that. And TPG Pay was your last question. So we published our track how we want to go there and how we want to proceed there. And we have our live status already done for some internal platforms. We expanded at the beginning of next year to external partners, though we are in line with this development. Next question. How do you keep corporate income tax so low? What is the future expectation in this regard? So as you might know, we have some loss carryforwards from acquired companies. And that is the reason why we have, compared to other companies, low taxes here. But of course, they will increase in the next years. So when you see our forecast from our analysts, you can see that they also estimate some increase there. M&A contribution was around EUR 36 million in the first 9 months, if I'm not wrong. I don't know what is the question here, to be honest. Maybe you can specify what's your question. I do not understand the question here. The next question was about the antitrust side for the pharma acquisitions. So we cannot give you an update here. We have to wait for the further progress here. And so we wait until we have closing announcements here. The next question was about cash conversion this year, last year. You don't think that we have provided the cash flow figures for 9 months. We did it for 9 months. So maybe -- we also want to inform you that these numbers are for this year. Yes, you are right. Last year, we did not communicate this cash flow figures, but the analysts asked us to communicate them. And so we started to communicate it each quarter this year. So this is implemented for this year. The next question was about the growth and the net income for the company. I mean, if we do not grow, I think this has no effect on our net profit because actually, when we have a growth rate of 0%, we have the same EBITDA margin. So there is no correlation that we do not grow and then the margin is going down. There is some correlation. So actually, we see no difference there. And your next question was about Optics revenue developing in 2026. So we announced it already. The revenue, which we expect is EUR 55 million to EUR 60 million. And for 2027, we have no forecast so far. So our overall forecast is for next year, not for 2027. On cost item, the increase in other operating expense stands out, what are the reasons for this increase? Well, basically, there are all the rest figures. So when you cover HR marketing and distribution, you always have some other costs like software and so on, cars, whatever and so this is basically the same level which we see last year in a percentage of the revenue. So there's not a real increase. So I think we are quite good on track with that. The next question was about our partners. So we added 150 new partners, which was the lowest number for some time. Actually, this is not true because we did not acquire companies with big numbers for partners. So for example, last year, we acquired a company HOOD. And only with HOOD we gained 4,000 partners in 1 quarter. And this was outstanding, but this is not the standard or the average. So basically, we are quite happy and we have the goal to increase it to 16,500 by end of this year and we are very optimistic that we will achieve it. So this is not the lowest number because some previous numbers were influenced by the acquisitions. Next question was for Nathalie. It looked September had a big reduction in revenues from the slide that Nathalie showed, is that correct, seasonality? But -- I think this question is about the volume of share trading. Nathalie, can you give us an update here why September is lower?

Yes. We see here a lower volume then that's right. But it's like in July. I think the August was more trading volume. And -- but that's a good question. I will come to you back. But it's in line with the other months with June, July and August, the trading volume was a little bit higher. That's right.

All right. Next question was about the gross margin has been from selling more via your own channels or own accounts versus other channels? If not, what has improved or how has increased. Well, the answer here is very simple. We see a growth rate on all the channels because the reason why we grow is that we have more partners and with more partners, we have more products. And these products, we will list on several platforms. And so we see also an increase in the revenues from third-party platforms as well as on our own platforms, So it's not really different on that. So next question was about the organic growth rate. The person says that this is impressive. But isn't there at a certain point a kind of cannibalization because newly added partners and so on? Yes, you are right with that question. Of course, when you double the amount of shoe sellers, for example, you cannot double the revenue for all of them. It's not possible. Absolutely, you are right. Though a lot of partners have stagnating, but very high revenues with us. But this is pretty fair. I mean, you cannot grow as a partner every year even if you stagnate or have a small increase in your revenue, this is quite a good revenue for you because it is additional revenue to your local business. It is additional profit to your local business. And so yes, we do not worry about this. I think we are on a very good track with that. Next question is about our stock. Why isn't it moving? Why is the trend downwards even if the results seem strong? What should I give you as an answer, I don't know. Now we can only speculate on that. But as you see as a CEO and shareholder, I buy shares, I did it also this year, and I will continue to buy shares also next year. So I think also here from Bjoern as the CFO, he also bought shares this year. We are quite optimistic on our own company. And we believe in the story and we believe in our figures that they are good and that they also will be even better next year. Next question is about the Optics & Hearing. What is the firepower to acquire more optic stores? Do you have to consider to pay for these acquisitions? Yes. So I think in the next month, you will see some announcements regarding the sector, the segment and we will buy additional companies. The firepower for that is a double-digit million investment, what we do there. And we think that this segment is so attractive, and we have such good margins there compared to other peers that we will invest even more in the sector and grow in the sector. So we will invest more money there. Next question. This is a long question. It's a question about the EBITDA development. To be honest, it is -- I think it's a little bit complicated to answer it here. because the EBITDA grew rate or growth rate and the revenue growth rate, as you can see, the EBITDA growth rate is much, much better than the sales growth rate. So I'm not sure if this is the right question. So maybe you can ask us this in the personal meeting. This question is maybe too long for this around here. Next question from you was about the U.S. and Asia expansion plans. Absolutely. So we started making small steps there. And also, we have some companies to have a look at with due diligence and so on. So we are active there, but we are on a very small amount and a small level there with some activity. And this is a thing that we have to change there next year. But we always have to be risk averse, so we cannot spend whatever, EUR 100 million and see how it is going. We have to be very risk averse to do that. Don't waste money, don't burn money. And make step after step. And this is our philosophy here. And so we make it in small steps, and we have no blueprint for that. We just take our platform strategy here. do it in a very similar way in the United States and ramp it up there, but we do it in small steps. Next question was about the opticians, how many can be connected. Is 1,000 opticians optimistic or realistic? Well, yes, it is definitely realistic here. And I mean, we don't connect them in 6 months. This is not possible. But this is a project for at least 2 years, how we can connect so many partners here. But on the other way, there is no competitor. So there is no platform for opticians in the market. So we think that we can get a lot of opticians here and connect them to our platform. Next question was about the EUR 39 million or EUR 40 million, expenses for acquisitions include the pharmacy targets yet? No. It's not including the pharma targets yet because these pharma targets are not included in our 9-month figures, and though they are not part of this 9-month report here. Why has the Optic segment such high margins, even so scale is relatively small compared to market leader Fielmann? Well, I'm not an expert with Fielmann, but Fielmann has almost very good margins like we have it. Fielmann has currently 22% EBITDA margin, but Fielmann is in the low price sector. So the average order value of Fielmann is, I think 55% of what we achieve here. So we are really in the premium segment. And in the premium segment, you always have higher margins compared to the low segment. But Fielmann is really making a great job. So I don't want to compare with them because the strategy is completely different. But overall, their margins are not far away from our margins. All right. Do we have any additional questions?

Well, thank you very much for cruising through the questions and answering them all. We are done, in fact. So there are no more questions and dear participants. We will come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for your shown interest in the platform group and have a lovely remaining week. If there are upcoming questions, please contact the IR department. And for some final remarks, I hand over to you guys again. Goodbye for now.

Thank you very much. Have a good day, and we will see you at the next conference. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. If you have any questions, don't hesitate and come back to Nathalie and me or Dominik. Bye-bye.